"3-Iron" - Korean, Kim Ki-Duk

Korean director Kim Ki-Duk, who directed last year's Buddhist monk import "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ... Spring" (here's my review), is back with another near-silent parable.

"3-Iron" appears to be inspired by the Rita Rudner (?) joke about how the law shouldn't declare people "criminally insane" for breaking into your house and raping and killing you. No, "criminally insane" should be reserved for the ones who break into your house and do your laundry. In "3-Iron," a young man, who bears a distracting resemblance to Speed Racer, breaks into empty homes in Seoul, does the laundry, fixes any appliances on the blink, then leaves. In one house he finds an abused wife. When her nasty husband comes home and tries to rough her up some more, the hero pelts him with golf balls driven with the hubby's own Callaway Steelhead 3-iron.

Is he a criminal? A saint? A performance artist? A ghost? A golfer?

I have no idea what it all means, but it's clever, cute, and short.

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

"The Interpreter" -- Sean Penn, Nicole Kidman, Sydney Pollack

An excerpt from my review in the May 23rd issue of The American Conservative, available to electronic subscribers tonight:

"The Interpreter," starring Sean Penn as a Secret Service agent charged with protecting a Robert Mugabe-style African dictator visiting the United Nations and Nicole Kidman as a translator who overhears a plot to assassinate the kleptocrat, received a rather warm welcome from critics and opening weekend audiences because 2005 has been so lacking in Hollywood movies for grown-ups. One suspenseful set-piece tracking a terrorist on a Brooklyn bus temporarily justifies the movie's thudding, screeching score, but, overall, this portentous, inane, and interminable film gives maturity a bad name.

Directors seldom ripen with age, and the septuagenarian Sydney Pollack, maker of "Three Days of the Condor" and "Out of Africa," is no exception. We like to imagine that directors are artists with profound insights into the human predicament, but they more resemble battlefield commanders relying upon the charismatic confidence and sleepless energy of the prime of life, not the wisdom of age, to make countless quick decisions.

Imagine that after months wheedling permission to be the first to film inside the UN, it's the day to shoot the crucial encounter between Penn, so florid and furrowed, and Kidman, so pale and smooth. But your leading lady shows up with a pimple, and all that your make-up artists can do is powder it down to a not-quite-subliminal blemish on her otherwise flawless complexion.

So, do you call Kofi Annan and beg to be allowed back in a week when Nicole's lip has healed? Or do you throw out your planned close-ups? Or maybe you could backlight her? Your 120 or so highly-paid crew members are looking to you for decisions.

Pollack, though, just tiredly plows ahead, making uninspired choices that fail to encourage suspension of disbelief in the frequently ludicrous plot.

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

Hobbits or Pygmy Negritos?

Japan Today reports:

Indonesian scientists have found a community of Pygmy people in the eastern island of Flores, near a village where Australian scientists discovered a dwarf-sized skeleton last year and declared it a new human species, a newspaper said Thursday.

Kompas daily reported the community had been found during an April 18-24 expedition in the village of Rampapasa, about 1 kilometer from the village of Liang Bua, where the species called Homo floresiensis was found in September. The newspaper quoted Koeshardjono, a biologist who discovered the village, as saying that in the expedition, 77 families had been found living in the village.

A reader writes:

There is a common aphorism in medicine, 'When you see hoof prints, think horses - not zebras.' Maybe some of our paleo-anthropologists need to think pygmies, not hobbits.

Curiouser and curiouser ...

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

Is Sharon Begley as Dim As She Sounds?

Or does feminist ideology just get in the way? From La Begley's "Science Journal" column "Evolutionary Psych May Not Help Explain Our Behavior After All" in the April 29 Wall Street Journal (online only for subscribers)

But as Prof. Buller, a professor of philosophy at Northern Illinois University, dug deeper, he concluded that the claims of evo psych are "wrong in almost every detail" because the data underlying them are deeply flawed. His book "Adapting Minds," from MIT Press, is the most persuasive critique of evo psych I have encountered...

On a lighter note, evolutionary psychology claims that men prefer fertile, nubile young women because men wired for this preference came out ahead in the contest for survival of the fittest. The key study here asked 10,047 people in 33 countries what age mate they would prefer. The men's answer: a 25-year-old.

But the men were, on average, in their late 20s. One of the most robust findings about human behavior is that people prefer a mate who matches them in education, class and religious background, ethnicity -- and age. The rule that "likes attract" is enough to explain why young men prefer young women. Besides, if you scrutinize the data, you find that 50-ish men prefer 40-something women, not 25-year-olds, undermining a core claim of evo psych.

So that's why 45 year old strippers make so much more money than 25 year old strippers!

No, Sharon, if you scrutinize the data, or just read People magazine, you'll find that rich older men are much more likely to marry much younger women than rich older women are likely to marry much younger men.

The argument that Stone Age women preferred good providers, and that today's women are therefore wired to see a big bankroll as the ultimate aphrodisiac, is also shaky. Among some hunter-gatherers today, young mothers receive more food from their mothers than from their husbands. That makes even the theoretical basis for the claim -- that women who sought good providers had an evolutionary edge -- problematic.

No, but the more food they receive from their husbands, the more ahead of the game they are. Anyway, grandmother-provisioning only can take the place of husband-provisioning where women can gather food year round (e.g., in the wet tropics), but not in cold climates where plant food disappears under the snow every winter or in an extremely seasonal desert like the Kalahari. In more difficult climates, men must hunt part of the year or everybody starves.

The big problem with evolutionary psychology is something that has never occurred to the Sharon Begleys: it is terrified of admitting the existence of human biodiversity.

The empirical basis is no better. On average, 25-year-old women say they prefer 28-year-old men, even though 50-year-old men have much more of the high status and resources that evo psych says they are wired to lust after. Again, likes attract more than "good providers" do.

They are also wired to lust after muscles that can protect them and their children from other men and catch game for them. Anyway, raise status and resources of the 50-year-old man high enough and see how he does with young women compared to a 50 year old woman with equal status and resources.

Begley's fundamental problems with thinking are starkest in her conclusion:

Evolutionary psychology has a more fundamental problem than the shakiness of its data and the fact that the data can be interpreted in more than one way. Why, if child abuse by stepfathers is such a great evolutionary strategy, do many more stepdads love and care for their stepchildren than abuse them? And why, if rape is "such an advantageous reproductive strategy, [is it that] there are so many more men who do not rape than who do," asks primatologist Frans de Waal of Emory University, Atlanta.

No, it's saying that life is very complicated, but that evolutionary psychologists have identified one set of influences that account for some limited but positive fraction of all behavior.

This kind of thinking is like saying that because the majority of males under 30 don't commit rape, that it isn't true to say that being male and under 30 makes one more likely to commit rape than being female or over 30. Or that because the majority of big league hitters aren't left-handers that being left handed couldn't give you an advantage at hitting a baseball (which it does).

I see the same kind of Begleyesque thinking all the time in people announcing that race can't possibly have any influence on human behavior because, according to Richard Lewontin, 85% of the human genetic variety is within racial groups and 15% between them.

No, that's like saying that human population genetics is like a casino where the roulette croupiers are either black or Native American, and 85% of the spins of the roulette wheel are random, but the other 15% of the time the ball winds up in the black when there is a black croupier and in the red when there is an Indian croupier. Kind of useful info, no?

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

Tony Blair Feared Being Tried as a War Criminal:

The Sunday Times of London has obtained the minutes of a secret meeting in July 2002 at which the British Prime Minister and his advisors tried to hash out a way to help Bush start a war without ending up in the dock at the International Criminal Court. Michael Smith writes:

AS a civil service briefing paper specifically prepared for the July meeting reveals, Blair had made his fundamental decision on Saddam when he met President George W Bush in Crawford, Texas, in April 2002.

“When the prime minister discussed Iraq with President Bush at Crawford in April,” states the paper, “he said that the UK would support military action to bring about regime change.”

Blair set certain conditions: that efforts were first made to try to eliminate Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) through weapons inspectors and to form a coalition and “shape” public opinion. But the bottom line was that he was signed up to ousting Saddam by force if other methods failed. The Americans just wanted to get rid of the brutal dictator, whether or not he posed an immediate threat.

This presented a problem because, as the secret briefing paper made clear, there were no clear legal grounds for war.

“US views of international law vary from that of the UK and the international community,” says the briefing paper. “Regime change per se is not a proper basis for military action under international law.”

To compound matters, the US was not a party to the International Criminal Court, while Britain was. The ICC, which came into force on 1 July, 2002, was set up to try international offences such as war crimes...

The man who opened the secret discussion of Blair’s war meeting was John Scarlett, chairman of the joint intelligence committee...

His assessment reveals that the primary impetus to action over Iraq was not the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction — as Blair later told the country — but the desire to overthrow Saddam. There was little talk of WMD at all.

The next contributor to the meeting, according to the minutes, was “C”, as the chief of MI6 is traditionally known.

Sir Richard Dearlove added nothing to what Scarlett had said about Iraq: his intelligence concerned his recent visit to Washington where he had held talks with George Tenet, director of the CIA.

“Military action was now seen as inevitable,” said Dearlove. “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.”

The Americans had been trying to link Saddam to the 9/11 attacks; but the British knew the evidence was flimsy or non-existent. Dearlove warned the meeting that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”.

It was clear from Dearlove’s brief visit that the US administration’s attitude would compound the legal difficulties for Britain. The US had no patience with the United Nations and little inclination to ensure an invasion was backed by the security council, he said.

Nor did the Americans seem very interested in what might happen in the aftermath of military action. Yet, as Boyce then reported, events were already moving swiftly...

At the least the US saw the use of British bases as “critical”, which posed immediate legal problems. And Hoon said the US had already begun “spikes of activity” to put pressure on the regime.

AMID all this talk of military might and invasion plans, one awkward voice spoke up. {Attorney General Jack] Straw warned that, though Bush had made up his mind on military action, the case for it was “thin”. He was not thinking in purely legal terms.

A few weeks later the government would paint Saddam as an imminent threat to the Middle East and the world. But that morning in private Straw said: “Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.”

It was a key point. If Saddam was not an immediate threat, could war be justified legally? The attorney-general made his position clear, telling the meeting that “the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action”.

Right from the outset, the minutes reveal, the government’s legal adviser had grave doubts about Blair’s plans; he would only finally conclude unequivocally that war was legal three days before the invasion, by which time tens of thousands of troops were already on the borders of Iraq.

There were three possible legal bases for military action, said Goldsmith. Self-defence, intervention to end an humanitarian crisis and a resolution from the UN Security Council.

Neither of the first two options was a possibility with Iraq; it had to be a UN resolution. But relying, as some hoped they could, on an existing UN resolution, would be “difficult”.

Despite voicing concerns, Straw was not standing in the way of war. It was he who suggested a solution: they should force Saddam into a corner where he would give them a clear reason for war.

“We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors,” he said.

If he refused, or the weapons inspectors found WMD, there would be good cause for war. “This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force,” said Straw.

From the minutes, it seems as if Blair seized on the idea as a way of reconciling the US drive towards invasion and Britain’s need for a legal excuse.

“The prime minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors,” record the minutes. “Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD . . . If the political context were right, people would support regime change.”

Blair would subsequently portray the key issue to parliament and the people as the threat of WMD; and weeks later he would produce the now notorious “sexed up” dossier detailing Iraq’s suspected nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programmes.

But in the meeting Blair said: “The two key issues are whether the military plan works and whether we have the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work.”...

The meeting concluded that they should plan for the UK taking part in any military action. Boyce would send Blair full details; Blair would come back with a decision about money; and Straw would send Blair the background on the UN inspectors and “discreetly work up the ultimatum to Saddam”.

The final note of the minutes, says: “We must not ignore the legal issues: the attorney-general would consider legal advice with (Foreign Office/Ministry of Defence) legal advisers.”

It was a prophetic warning.

Also seen by The Sunday Times is the Foreign Office opinion on the possible legal bases for war. Marked “Confidential”, it runs to eight pages and casts doubt on the possibility of reviving the authority to use force from earlier UN resolutions. “Reliance on it now would be unlikely to receive any support,” it says.

Foreign Office lawyers were consistently doubtful of the legality of war and one deputy legal director, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, ultimately resigned because she believed the conflict was a “crime of aggression”.

The Foreign Office briefing on the legal aspects was made available for the Downing Street meeting on July 23. Ten days ago, when Blair was interviewed by the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman, the prime minister was asked repeatedly whether he had seen that advice.

“No,” said Blair. “I had the attorney-general’s advice to guide me.”

But as the July 23 documents show, the attorney-general’s view was, until the last minute, also riven with doubts.

Three years on, it and the questionable legality of the war are still hanging round Blair’s neck like an albatross.

The legal problem for Blair would appear to be not the decision he made in this July 2002 meeting to push Saddam to readmit the UN weapons inspectors, which seems quite reasonable, but the subsequent one he made in early 2003 to be party to starting a war of aggression even though Saddam had admitted the UN inspectors and they had found nothing at all at any of the sites to which America's Chalabi and Curveball-concocted "intelligence" directed them. I'm no expert on international war crime law, but it would appear that the Prime Minister has a lot to worry about should he ever lose the immunity of office. Similarly, I suspect top Bush Administration officials will not spend their retirement years vacationing in countries that are signatories to the International Criminal Court.

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

"Feelings of Discrimination May Hurt the Heart"

This is the surprisingly insightful headline on an otherwise bogus health report:

Stress stemming from discrimination may be causing coronary artery calcification in black women, says a study by researchers at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. The investigators found that the more discrimination the women felt, the more likely they were to have coronary artery calcification, a buildup of calcium in blood vessels that's associated with atherosclerosis.

"We know from other studies in this area that stressful life experiences can have an effect on cardiovascular outcomes," Tene Lewis, a health psychologist in preventive medicine at Rush, said in a prepared statement. "Discrimination appears to be a stressor that has particular relevance for the health of African-American women."

The study included 181 middle-aged black women from the Chicago and Pittsburgh areas. The women completed a questionnaire that assessed their experiences of subtle discrimination, such as being ignored or treated with a lack of courtesy or respect.

"The women reported discrimination in the form of having poorer service in stores or restaurants, being treated as if they were less smart, or being treated as if they were dishonest," Lewis said.

She noted that discrimination today is more subtle than in the past.

"It's rare that someone would use blatantly racist language in public, but that doesn't mean that discrimination is no longer a problem," Lewis said.

The study found that coronary artery calcification was present in 59.6 percent of the women and the more discrimination they reported, the more likely they were to have any calcification.

It's a little hard to understand why some black women would be discriminated against more than other black women. I thought whites were accused of discriminating between races, not among

Of course, this survey isn't reporting anything objective at all about the actual occurrence of discrimination. It's simply reporting subjective perceptions.

Not surprisingly, what this report is really saying is that black women who are angrier at whites have more heart problems.

Anger is bad for your heart.

Further, this suggests that the media's relentless attempts to inculcate black anger at whites over perceptions of discrimination may be killing blacks. blacks.

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

"3-Iron"

Korean director Kim Ki-Duk, who directed last year's Buddhist monk import "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ... Spring" (here's my review), is back with another near-silent parable.

"3-Iron" appears to be inspired by the Rita Rudner joke about how the criminally insane aren't the people who break into your house and rape and kill you, they should be the ones who break into your house and do your laundry. A young man breaks into empty homes in Seoul, does the laundry, fixes any appliances on the blink, then leaves. In one he finds an abused wife. When her nasty husband comes home and tries to rough her up some more, the hero batters him with golf balls struck by the hubby's own Callaway Steelhead 3-iron.

I have no idea what it all means, but it's clever and cute.

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

"Eros" - Antonioni, Soderbergh, Wong

"Eros" -- This is a three part / three director art house trilogy movie is intended as a tribute to 92-year old legend Michaelangelo Antonioni.

The three segments can be seen as epitomizing contemporary Chinese, American, and European approaches to sex in cinema. The first segment, directed by Kar Wai Wong ("In the Mood for Love") about a Hong Kong courtesan with consumption, illustrates the current Chinese obsession with glamour. The basic concept is lifted from Greta Garbo's "Camille" (which uses the same Dumas fils source novel as Pucinni's "La Traviata") and the treatment is similar.

The second, directed by the estimable Steven Soderbergh (Ocean's 11 & 12) illustrates how uninterested current American moviemakers are in the erotic. It's a brilliant slice of comedy starring Robert Downey Jr. as NY ad man in 1955 and 70-year-old Alan Arkin as his bored psychiatrist. Together, they invent the snooze button on alarm clocks. Downey, despite all his troubles, remains the American actor I'd pay to hear read the phone book.

Antonioni's own segment conclusively proves that older is not better when it comes to directing naked lady movies. We do see once again how Europeans find pseudo-philosophical dialogue sexy, for reasons that aren't clear to me. In France, to get a college degree, you have to write off the top of your head in a few hours a glib essay on some philosophical topic, so the ability to generate metaphysical cafe chit-chat is a useful signal of one's academic credentials, but why do Italians fall for it too?

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

Chalabi Becomes Interim Oil Minister of Iraq:

Much less surprising news than the rediscovery of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, but also less joyous, is word that Ahmed-the-Thief has weaseled his way into control of Iraq's oil industry. (Here's a great photo showing how Chalabi feels about undertaking the burden of his new responsibilities.)

Last July, I wrote in The American Conservative:

What does Chalabi really want? The simplest guess is that he wants what too many ambitious Iraqis want these days: to be a trillionaire. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, "Iraq is estimated to hold 115 billion barrels of proven oil reserves." At $40 per barrel, Iraq's oil is worth $4.6 trillion. Sure, Iraq's last trillionaire, Saddam Hussein, ended up in a hole in the ground, but he had one helluva ride along the way.

In The New Yorker, Jane Mayer quoted Scott Ritter, the much-reviled but apparently truth-telling weapons inspector, as saying, "[Chalabi] told me [in 1998] that, if I played ball, when he became President he'd control all of the oil concessions, and he'd make sure I was well taken care of."

More generally, Chalabi successfully yanked the neocon chain because they refused to admit to themselves that the age of ideology, in which they usefully argued against communism, ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Thus, to provide ideological justification for their Iraq Attaq, the neocons resorted to neologisms like "Islamofacism," a purported dogma alleged to motivate even Muslims as mutually hostile as Saddam and Osama.

In reality, the end of ideology was not the "end of history," as Francis Fukuyama famously claimed. Instead, after two centuries of occasionally battling over what is the ideal form of government, the human race has reverted to its traditional pastime of brawling over who gets to run the government. In understanding affairs of state in the non-Western world today, neither Mein Kampf nor Das Kapital nor the Gettysburg Address is as insightful a guide as The Godfather.

We're actually better off in our new world where we need to worry more about organized crime clans than about great powers animated by radical ideologies. The Mafia, for all its sins, never targeted a thousand nuclear missiles upon America.

The Chalabi dynasty is old, rich, and unpopular. Nonetheless, Chalabi persuaded the Interim Governing Council to appoint him to the lucrative post of Finance Minister. He then used his influence to fill many of the other top positions with allies. Further, as William Beeman, director of Middle East Studies at Brown University noted, "Chalabi has created extra insurance by installing his relatives everywhere in the post-June 30th governmental structure, in true Middle Eastern fashion. They are the most loyal employees of all, and his potential successors. First and foremost among them are his nephews. The term "nepotism" comes from the Italian nepote -- 'nephew.' Mr. Chalabi has nephews galore." Nor is Chalabi overlooking the private sector. As Newsweek reported, "Today his extensive network of cousins and nephews runs almost every major bank." [More]

So, as you are filling up your gas tank in the future, you can pass the time by trying to estimate how many pennies for each gallon you are buying will wind up in the Chalabi Clan coffers.

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

Ivory-Billed Woodpecker sighted:

Ivory-Billed Woodpecker sighted: Thought to be extinct since the 1940s, this Holy Grail of American birdwatchers, a spectacular black and white beast with a 30" wingspan, has been sighted in a swampy forest preserve in Arkansas. (Here's James J. Audubon's painting.)

As a conservative, this triumph of conservation makes me deeply happy.

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

NFL Draft Correlations:

Correlations for 253 pro football draftees are up over at Mahalanobis' blog, and we find that smartness (as measured by the mandatory 12-minute Wonderlic IQ test) correlates with strength (benchpress), slowness (40 yard dash time), and lack of leaping ability (vertical leap in inches).

I guess wearing lead boots makes you smarter...

Smartest players by position are Tight Ends, Offensive Linemen, and Quarterbacks. Least smart are Defensive Linemen, Running Backs, Wide Receivers, and Cornerbacks.

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

Levitt on the waste caused by legalizing abortion:

The impact of legalizing abortion on the crime rate appears beyond the ability of contemporary social science reliably to tease out from the maelstrom of currents roiling American social life over the last 40 years. If you had started looking at the question in 1996, using crime statistics through 1994, the most likely conclusion would have been that legalizing abortion increased crime. Starting in 1999, using statistics from 1997 compared to 1985 (but ignoring the intervening years), Levitt was able to make the case for the opposite conclusion. Judging from data through 2002, however, Levitt's case is once again eroding as the murder rate for 25-34 year olds goes up as the post-legalization cohort enters that group.

My best guess is that legalization worsened crime, but that this effect faded after a number of years as society adjusted. But, that's just a guess.

Instead, the key fact, the under-appreciated take home lesson from this controversy, the observation that Levitt and I agree upon, is that legalizing abortion greatly increased the number of unwanted pregnancies.

Tim Harford writes in The Financial Times of London:

In fact, [Steven D.] Levitt now says that the research made him more pro-life. “I grew up in Minnesota. Very liberal,” he says. “I was just from birth taught to be pro-choice.” But when he discovered while writing the paper that after Roe v Wade the number of abortions rose to nearly 1.5 million a year, and that while the number of births fell, the number of conceptions rose, he thought again. “One in four of the pregnancies which took place were just because people were lazy,” he says. “That’s a lot. That’s a lot of abortions.”

Of course, that fact undermines the persuasiveness of Levitt's assumption that abortion cut crime by reducing the number of unwanted births. Because legalizing abortion caused tens of millions of conceptions that wouldn't have happened otherwise, the overall impact on who actually got born becomes extremely hard to model. Levitt's simplistic assumption that legalization improved the quality of parents and children, which is the key to the popularity of his argument, thus drops in plausibility from a sure-thing to a nobody-knows.

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

Thomas Sowell on "Black Rednecks and White Liberals"

Black Rednecks and White Liberals is the new book by Thomas Sowell. He provides a taste of it in the Wall Street Journal:

For most of the history of this country, differences between the black and the white population--whether in income, IQ, crime rates, or whatever--have been attributed to either race or racism. For much of the first half of the 20th century, these differences were attributed to race--that is, to an assumption that blacks just did not have it in their genes to do as well as white people. The tide began to turn in the second half of the 20th century, when the assumption developed that black-white differences were due to racism on the part of whites.

Three decades of my own research lead me to believe that neither of those explanations will stand up under scrutiny of the facts. As one small example, a study published last year indicated that most of the black alumni of Harvard were from either the West Indies or Africa, or were the children of West Indian or African immigrants. These people are the same race as American blacks, who greatly outnumber either or both.

If this disparity is not due to race, it is equally hard to explain by racism. To a racist, one black is pretty much the same as another. But, even if a racist somehow let his racism stop at the water's edge, how could he tell which student was the son or daughter of someone born in the West Indies or in Africa, especially since their American-born offspring probably do not even have a foreign accent?

What then could explain such large disparities in demographic "representation" among these three groups of blacks? Perhaps they have different patterns of behavior and different cultures and values behind their behavior...

While a third of the white population of the U.S. lived within the redneck culture, more than 90% of the black population did. Although that culture eroded away over the generations, it did so at different rates in different places and among different people. It eroded away much faster in Britain than in the U.S. and somewhat faster among Southern whites than among Southern blacks, who had fewer opportunities for education or for the rewards that came with escape from that counterproductive culture.

Nevertheless the process took a long time. As late as the First World War, white soldiers from Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky and Mississippi scored lower on mental tests than black soldiers from Ohio, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania. Again, neither race nor racism can explain that--and neither can slavery.

The redneck culture proved to be a major handicap for both whites and blacks who absorbed it. Today, the last remnants of that culture can still be found in the worst of the black ghettos, whether in the North or the South, for the ghettos of the North were settled by blacks from the South. The counterproductive and self-destructive culture of black rednecks in today's ghettos is regarded by many as the only "authentic" black culture--and, for that reason, something not to be tampered with. Their talk, their attitudes, and their behavior are regarded as sacrosanct.

The people who take this view may think of themselves as friends of blacks. But they are the kinds of friends who can do more harm than enemies.

Perhaps. Yet, when we talk of "redneck culture" today, such as country music and Nashville, we are largely talking of Scotch-Irish culture. And the Scotch-Irish generally stayed away from the blacks. They went to the Appalachian and Ozark highlands where disease was less of a problem for Europeans than in the lowland South. Moreover, the Scotch-Irish disliked having to compete with slave labor and tobacco and cotton slave plantations were uneconomical in the highlands. Today, the state with the least educated whites is the prototypical hillbilly state of West Virginia, which had so few slaveowners that it seceded from Virginia and joined the Union during the Civil War. Other Scotch-Irish redneck states like Tennessee and Oklahoma have limited black populations, too.

In reality, slaves tended to be owned mostly by big slaveowners in the Southern lowlands, who frequently had aristocratic pretensions. Lowland Southerners tended to be descended from Southern England's landowning and servant classes, not from the Scotch-Irish (who actually originated on both sides of the border between Scotland and England). I think it would make more sense for Sowell to point to blacks inheriting lowland Southern quasi-aristocratic prejudices, such as for grandiloquent multi-syllabic words (e.g., Jesse Jackson's style of speaking) and against manufacturing and shop keeping, as for them inheriting Scotch-Irish redneck populism, with which they had limited contact.

For example, free slaves who were sent to Liberia reproduced the Southern lowland social structure, just with themselves as the slaveowning aristocrats and the native blacks as the slaves.

Somewhat similarly, as a boy Sowell absorbed second-hand much from the upper class of New York City. I recently read Sowell's autobiography, and he makes the point that as a boy growing up in Harlem around 1940, he benefited from having two female relations who were maids on Park Avenue who brought home strong opinions about how high-quality folks behaved. (Sowell, by the way, was born in the South but raised in Fiorello La Guardia's NYC when its public schools and other government institutions were at their high point of morale and effectiveness. He disliked visiting the South during Jim Crow times. As an adult, he found himself happiest in California, where he lives now.)

If you look at imprisonment statistics, blacks tend to be better behaved in the South than elsewhere. Oddly enough, the most crime-prone blacks are in Iowa, of all places, where whites have traditionally been well-behaved. (Even though Iowa is very rural, it is so un-redneck in tastes that it voted for Al Gore in 2000.) Wisconsin and even Minnesota are similar. I don't think there has much black migration into these states for quite a few decades, but the local white culture is not rubbing off on the current black generations. My guess is that in those Old Northwest states, blacks get little competition from other groups for filling niches in the criminal economy, so more go into crime. In contrast, in states with more hell-raising whites, fewer blacks go into crime. But, that's just a first guess at this rather odd pattern.

Of course, the least-discussed cultural influence on African-Americans is also the most obvious: Africa. I call this tendency to ignore the African in African-American, to assume that they brought no culture with them from Africa, the Black Slate Theory. For example, when very young, Sowell's parents gave him to his great-aunt to raise (he didn't know he had several siblings until he was about 18). This kind of fostering out of the young is much more common among African-Americans than among whites. It's also much more common in Africa than in Europe, according to James Q. Wilson's book The Marriage Problem.

Perhaps the biggest social problem of African-Americans, as reflected in the very high illegitimacy rate, is that the culture they brought with them from Africa is one of low paternal investment. America's dominant culture had largely succeeded in inculcating monogamy and bring-home-the-bacon norms in blacks by about 1960, when it suddenly lost its self-confidence and began funding, via AFDC, the traditional African tendency toward mothers supporting their children without much support from their fathers.

One interesting sociological question that has been almost completely ignored in the U.S., with Zora Neale Hurston being the only exception I can think of, is the varying influence of different tribes in Africa. Hurston studied this in the West Indies, where tribes maintained more of a separate identity than in the U.S.

The most striking example is Barbados, whose citizens are renown for being the best educated and most civil of all the West Indians. Barbados was the richest and most easterly of the West Indies. According to the PBS series The Story of English, as the first stop for the slave ships coming from Africa, the wealthy slaveowners of Barbados had their pick, and they preferred to buy slaves from tribes they had found to be the most cooperative. Then they'd send the leftovers from the Bad Dude tribes on to be sold in Jamaica and the U.S. To this day, Barbados remains a more cooperative place than most other black communities in the Western Hemisphere.

Obviously, when Sowell points out that African and West Indian blacks outnumber African-Americans at Harvard, he's not mentioning the selection effect. Still, there are so few English-speaking West Indians in the world (maybe about five to seven million? -- there are only 2.7 million in Jamaica, compared to about 35 million African-Americans), their abundance at Harvard is of interest. I'd be particularly interested in seeing how the small number of Barbadians stacks up against African-Americans.

I suspect that the white colonial elite in Barbados and Trinidad did a better job of assimilating blacks into the white culture, without a generating a huge oppositional backlash, than did whites in the U.S. All this deserves closer study that I've ever seen it getting.

Every winter I volunteer to fly off to Barbados to investigate this crucial subject, but nobody has offered to fund my research project yet.

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

How many GOP gunslingers aren't gay?

Following the recent news that famed Republican attack dog political consultant Arthur Finkelstein "married" some guy in Massachusetts comes a long NY Times piece about a less famous gay Republican operative named R. Gregory Stevens who recently dropped dead from drugs in the bed he was platonically sharing with Carrie "Princess Leia" Fisher.

Of course, there are plenty of similar rumors about important White House political functionaries, which were reactivated by the bizarre story of the issuing of a White House security pass and press credential to male whore James Guckert / Jeff Gannon.

***

At least one. Congratulations to Grover Norquist. Earlier this month, the ultra-energetic 48-year-old activist got married to Samah Alrayyes. Norquist had been saying for a long time that he was going to slow down and start a family, but a lot of people thought he was too hard-charging. Good for him.

The Washington Post reported:

A friend of the bride and groom, Rabbi Daniel Lapin, presided and the reception featured a belly dancer. The always-quotable groom told us Friday: "This is fun! I'm wearing a ring and everything."

I presume the ceremony was nondenominational.

***

Love is in the air: The WaPo reports:

Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham, 40, is getting hitched to Washington businessman James V. Reyes, 42. They got engaged April 2 and plan a Catholic wedding in late May or early June. We hear the happy couple was introduced last year by their mutual friend Dave Pollin, nephew of developer Abe Pollin.

Laura was previously an item with Harvard President Larry Summers, which drove the liberal faculty crazy.

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

The iron fist in the velvet glove of "diversity:"

Many people assume that affirmative action only exists in college admissions, but that aspect of racial quotas is dwarfed by corporations imposing quotas upon themselves to prevent lawsuits like the Sodexho case. The Washington Post reports:

Sodexho Inc., the Gaithersburg-based food and facilities-management company, agreed Wednesday to pay $80 million to settle a lawsuit that claimed it systematically denied promotions to 3,400 black mid-level managers.

The company also agreed to widespread training and a more structured hiring process for its 106,000 employees throughout the country, in an effort to promote more minorities into higher corporate jobs. A panel appointed by the plaintiffs and the company will monitor Sodexho's compliance.

Sodexho officials said they have already implemented many of the remedies included in the settlement, such as tying bonuses for top executives to the company's progress toward workforce diversity goals...

In the years since the Sodexho lawsuit was filed, the proportion of blacks in management positions at the company has remained around 12 percent, Aun said. Currently, 1,921 of Sodexho's 15,532 managers are black.

In contrast, the plaintiffs maintained, only 2 percent of the company's upper management is black. About one-fourth of the company's total workforce is black.

The take home message to corporate executives is that it makes more sense to impose quotas on yourself now, than pay out 80 million and be forced to impose them later anyway. Most sizable companies long ago got the message and quietly put together these kind of programs to racially discriminate against their white employees.

The U.S. initiated racial quotas three dozen years ago when there were about seven whites for every black. The U.S. is a rich country and that ratio of payees to payers under affirmative action has proven affordable as the white to black ratio has been fairly stable over the decades.

But, in 1973, with almost no forethought, the federal bureaucracy added most immigrants to the ranks of quota beneficiaries, and the ratio of whites, who are expected to give up opportunities, to immigrants, who are aided by quotas, has been worsening ever since. As with the Social Security system, the affirmative action system's decline in the "racial ratio" of payer to payee foretells long term trouble, as I detailed here.

A reader writes:

Well, I think I know of the next company lead attorney [and white man] Kerry Alan Scanlon can target: his own law firm, Kaye Scholer, whose numbers are similar to Sodexho's! I just clicked on all their attorneys, about half of whom had pictures on their law fim web pages and half of whom did not. Of the 102 Kaye Scholer attorneys who have photos, guess how many are black? Answer: same as the number of 188 top jobs held at Sodexho, whom Kaye Scholer just successfully sued for their lack of African-Americans in top jobs. Zero.

Same numbers, yet one company is able to extract $80 million from the other. Hmmm.

I suppose the black plaintiffs hardly wanted to risk losing their big payouts by hiring minority attorneys who might only have their jobs due to affirmative action. With that much money at stake, who can afford diversity?

Maybe the Rev. Jesse Jackson could go shake down Kaye Scholer next?

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

Isn't it a logical inevitability that abortion reduces the crime rate?

While the historical evidence raises strong doubts about this popular theory, many people assume it must be true on simple logical grounds. A reader writes:

You began your "Pre-emptive Executions?" article by asking:

Did legalizing abortion in the early 70s reduce crime in the late 90s by allowing "pre-emptive capital punishment" of potential troublemakers?

Steve, the answer to the above question is obviously yes. If you abort a disproportionate number of the fetuses that would grow up to be criminals, you must reduce the crime rate. Of course there may be many other factors that effect the crime rate, as you point out, but these factors don't change the basic fact that elective abortion has reduced the crime rate. To argue otherwise is to make you come off as a doctrinaire conservative, rather than as a scientist.

This seems tautological, but keep in mind that in our country, educated people have a notorious history of misreading how not-so-educated people would react to changes in family structure incentives. For example, all the smart people in 1961 favored raising welfare payments to, say, $300 per month and giving it to unmarried mothers. Nobody they knew would have a baby out of wedlock just to get $300 per month.

Levitt assumes that legalizing abortion reduces the "unwantedness" of the babies who do get born. A close reading of Steven Levitt's book suggests that the reality, however, is not clear at all.

F irst, we certainly didn't see an increase in wantedness by the fathers of the unborn babies that managed to get born. Legalizing abortion reduced the moral pressure on impregnating boyfriends to marry their girlfriends.

The illegitimacy rate grew steadily from 1964 (which, counterintuitively, was the year The Pill was introduced, yet was also the inflection point in the great illegitimacy upswing), until it suddenly somewhat pleateaued in 1995, the year after the violence rate began dropping, and a few years after the abortion rate began dropping, perhaps not coincidentally.

Lots of people assume that illegitimacy and abortion must be inversely correlated, but the historical record in America shows that they are both high at the same time and low at the same time.

The simplest model appears to be that the Crack Era of the early 1990s was when a lot of the offshoots of the Liberal Ascendancy of 1964-1980 -- crime, illegitimacy, abortion, and venereal diseases such as AIDS -- were seen by many people as all coming home to roost, and a broad turn toward more traditional morality began in reaction to the horrors on the streets.

fter the legalization of abortion, there was not a major drop in unwanted births as Levitt assumed when he concocted his theory, and he still implies even though he knows the facts are otherwise. Instead, there was a major rise in unwanted pregnancies. According to Levitt's own words, " "Conceptions rose by nearly 30 percent, but births actually fell by 6 percent …" I know I reiterate this, but it's a stunning fact that you never hear in the abortion debate from either side, and it's a key to grasping what the impact of legalizing abortion was in reality, not theory.

Nor is it clear that this small decline in birthrate improved the quality of upbringing of the survivors.

Imagine a woman who started having unprotected sex because abortion was legalized. She gets pregnant, but then, for one reason or another, doesn't have an abortion.

Perhaps she hopes that having the baby will persuade the father to marry her. Perhaps when the father refuses to marry her she decides that if no man loves her, well, at least a baby would love her and cheer her up. Maybe all her girlfriends are having babies and it seems like the fashionable thing to do in her circle. Maybe it gets her out of having to go to high school and take a lot of boring classes she doesn't understand. Perhaps she finds she can get her own public housing project apartment and move out of her nagging mother's house if she becomes a mother herself, and then she can have sex with all the men she wants. Perhaps she keeps forgetting her appointment at the clinic because she's not too bright. Perhaps every time she gets the cash together for an abortion, she spends it on drugs first.

It's a statistical certainty that millions of babies were conceived because abortion was legalized but then were born for these kind of reasons. How many? I don't know.

But it's not at all impossible that legalizing abortion could have, on the whole, lowered the quality of parents and the upbringing they give their kids. In fact, it seems pretty likely that out of the tens of millions of women who had unwanted pregnancies due to legalizing abortion (tens of millions according to Levitt's own numbers), the ones who went ahead and had abortions tended to be the more ambitious, better organized women, while some the the ones didn't get around to having abortions were the more scatter-brained women.

This model fits what we all saw on the streets a lot better than Levitt's model. Urban black women had huge numbers of legal abortions from 1971 onward, far more than any other group. According to Levitt's logic, that should have improved the black male teenagers of the late 1980s through early 1990s.Yet, what evidence is there from, say, 1990 to 1994 that black males born in 1971-1979 were better behaved than the previous generation? The better behaved generation of black teens actually were the ones born in the early 1980s, yet the nonwhite abortion rate peaked back in 1977.

A reader writes:

Like Steven D Levitt, I am a published economist... I am so heart warmed to begin to see empirical data graphically presented, albeit in a critique of economic theory by your art critic, as to be tempted to forgive his sophomoric understanding of empirical social science. In the discipline's lingo, Levitt has relied upon something called ceteris paribus (all other things equal), an inference presumptively valid unless shown otherwise, to conclude abortion lowers crime.

In his critique, Steve Sailer shows that today's youth are more violent and depraved. But his post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning fails to prove is that abortion has made them so. Rather, in the absence of such proof, ceteris paribus tells us that crime would be worse had it not been "culled" [of] 'the children who stood the greatest chance of becoming criminals.'"

Leaving aside the condescension dripping from this, there are two logical issues here: ceteris paribus and upon whom the burden of proof rests.

I addressed ceteris paribus in my debate in 1999 with Levitt:

Admittedly, it's still theoretically possible that without abortion the black youth murder rate would have, say, sextupled instead of merely quintupling [from 1984 to 1993].

Logically, this is what Levitt must be arguing over these last six years. But you can instantly see why he never makes clear his case. There's two problems: the first is that saying this instantly raises the question of why Levitt refuses to investigate the at least equally interesting question of whether legalizing abortion first drove crime up. As I wrote then:

Still, there's a more interesting question: Why did the places with the highest abortion rates in the '70s (e.g., NYC and Washington D.C.) tend to suffer the worst crack-driven crime waves in the early '90s?

The other reason is the obvious dubiousness of what Levitt is claiming: He is implying that: Although my theory fails its single best test case in catastrophic fashion, I can still separate out the very subtle breeze of the effects of legalizing abortion from the hurricane of other simultaneous events, such as the rise and fall of the crack wars, vast increases in imprisonment, changes in police tactics, the decline in the abortion rate from 1992 onward, changes in the economy, increased sales of guns to law-abiding citizens, increased number of cops, the rise of rent-a-cops, the spread of alarms and video cameras, the rise of marijuana among the urban underclass, the spread of Depo-Provera contraceptive shots, etcetera etcetera...

Well, good luck...

And that brings us to the question of the burden of proof. Upon whom should it rest: Levitt or me?

Levitt is a sympathetic figure, perhaps a heroic one, considering the difficulty of the analytical burden he has undertaken.

I am a less appealing figure: the scoffer, the sniper, the naysayer. I do not offer a complete model of the causes of crime trends as Levitt claims to do. Nor do I feel competent to undertake one. I am merely poking holes in his big theory.

Yet, it's a wise maxim in the sciences that large assertions require large evidence. Levitt's abortion-cut-crime theory is one of the bigger social science assertions of recent times. The weight of the evidence, however, falls far short of the weight of the importance of his claim. So, by all traditions of science, the burden of proof lies upon him, and he has failed to meet it.

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

Crime Misery Index Feedback

A reader writes:

Good work with the crime misery index. I can think of two factors that would affect the index-- one on the imprisonment side and one on the homicide rate (as proxy for crime in general).

To take the homicide rate first, emergency medicine is WAY better than it was 40 years ago (apparently the experience of combat surgeons in Vietnam revolutionized the field). A lot of shooting victims are alive today who'd be murder statistics if they had been treated with 1960 medical technology. Doctors, nurses and paramedics have done more to keep the murder rate down than judges, lawyers and cops. A better comparison (and I wish I could remember where I first read this point) would be adding homicides and armed assaults for any given year. Over time, there would be fewer murders, but the number of armed assaults would stay about the same or go up (as would-be murderers are charged with armed assault).

I think that lousy medical care may explain the high homicide rate in the 1920s during a period of much lower imprisonment rates -- people died often from single bullets or knife wounds due to infections before the introduction of sulfas in the 1930s and the arrival of mass quantities of penicillin around 1944-45. Also, the first hospital blood bank in the U.S. was begun in Chicago in 1937.

On the other hand, criminals' firepower has gone up. Al Capone's gang was notorious for being able to afford automatic weapons ("tommy guns") but by the late 1980s every two bit punk could afford to spray his rivals from a passing car -- drive-by shootings didn't become terribly effective until crooks could just hose bullets in the general direction of their victims.

The good news is that the number of "serious violent crimes" reported by the public in the FBI's National Crime Victimization Survey (taken annually since 1973) is very much down. The total number of estimated serious violent crimes peaked at over four million in 1981 and again in 1993 and 1994, but has been under two million in 2001-2003.

Second, concerning the incarceration rate, let's not discount that before the 70's, cops dished out a lot more "street justice". Someone who gets the crap kicked out of him but isn't arrested (if only to avoid a judge seeing the beat up defendant) isn't counted in any arrest or incarceration statistics. It's unfortunate that race gets mixed up in the whole equation-- but even with a white suspect, cops today are much more careful about respecting the suspect's civil rights.

I think the rise of the crime rate is largely a result in the decline of street justice. When cops are, as they inevitably will be someday, wired with lipstick cameras to monitor their behavior with suspects, the problem will only get worse.

Along those lines, the creator of Deadwood (and co-creator of NYPD Blue), David Milch said something interesting last year:

"And the reason that cops only trust other cops is because they know that they've been hired to lie, they've been hired to beat the balls off people, and get them to confess so they can be excluded from society. That's the first part of their job. The second part of their job is to lie about what they did. And the third part of their job is to know that if they're caught, they're going to be put in jail. So for me, what every cop always told me was, 'Every time I see a guy in a suit, I'm afraid I'm gonna get locked up'."

I just saw a South Korean movie with scenes of how the police over there interrogate recalcitrant prisoners. Travel tip: When in Seoul, obey the law.

Torturing suspects seemed to be fairly routine in Cook County when I lived there.

But, in general, it appears we reduced police brutality in America, but wound up having to replace it with much more imprisonment (which includes brutalization of weaker prisoners by other prisoners -- unfortunately, the prisoner-on-prisoner brutalization is enjoyed by the stronger inmates, so that's the opposite of a deterrent for the most dangerous criminals).

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

Nietzsche on KICS: "Keep It Complicated, Smartie:"

A reader writes:

Nietzsche said: "It's a lie that what thinkers hate most is being misunderstood. They actually love that. They think 'I've spent 30 years trying to understand this; how dare you think you can figure it out in 10 minutes?'"

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