June 1, 2005

I forget: Do we want democracy in Pakistan or not?

Here's a story from Reuters:

Six KFC Workers Burned To Death In Karachi Violence

Six employees of American fast-food franchise KFC were burned to death in Karachi during a riot that followed a suicide attack on a mosque in the southern Pakistani city, rescue workers said on Tuesday. Angry Shi'ites set fire to the restaurant after the mosque attack in which five people died on Monday night...

More than 100 people have been killed in tit-for-tat attacks by majority Sunni and Shi'ite militants in the past year. Most of the attacks have been blamed on Sunni militant groups with links to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network which have been angered by Pakistan's support for the war on terrorism.

Analysts say the Sunni militants have revived long standing sectarian rivalry as a means to destabilize President Pervez Musharraf's government.

Shi'ite mobs often target symbols of U.S. influence after sectarian attacks as they accuse the government of failing to act to prevent religious violence.

The attack on the KFC outlet came just minutes after attack on the Karachi mosque.

Let me see if I have this straight: To protest Pakistan's dictator's support for America, Sunnis blow up Shi'ite mosques. In revenge, the Shi'ites burn down Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets because they are symbols of America. Makes perfect sense, at least by the standards of the Islamic world.

Don't you get the feeling that the only thing that could possibly bring these people together enough to get along in a democracy would be their mutual loathing of America?


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

John Tierney vs. Maureen Dowd:

The NYT's new op-ed columnist John Tierney writes a column guaranteed to drive his feminist colleague Maureen Dowd nuts:

The Urge to Win:

For a quarter-century, women have outnumbered men at Scrabble clubs and tournaments in America, but a woman has won the national championship only once, and all the world champions have been men. Among the world's 50 top-ranked players, typically about 45 are men.

The top players, both male and female, point to a simple explanation for the disparity: more men are willing to do whatever it takes to reach the top. You need more than intelligence and a good vocabulary to become champion. You have to spend hours a day learning words like "khat," doing computerized drills and memorizing long lists of letter combinations, called alphagrams, that can form high-scoring seven-letter words.

Tierney goes on to offer some sensible evolutionary psychology explanations for why some men want to win this bad.

Of course, it's not hard to drive Maureen crazy, especially if the two of you were once an item, as Tierney and Dowd were a quarter of a century ago. Tierney is married now, but Dowd is an increasingly bitter spinster, whose taste for highly successful men has left her enraged at the male sex for not marrying her. She's also dated two-time Oscar-winner Michael Douglas, Carl Bernstein (of Woodward and Bernstein), and Aaron Sorkin (creator of "The West Wing".)


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

Laura Bush vs. Hillary Clinton in 2008? With talk mounting of the two First Ladies running against each other for President in 2008, one reader was inspired by my suggestion that an arranged marriage between dynastic heirs George P. Bush and Chelsea Clinton could meld our discordant red and blue into a royal purple. He updated Richmond's speech in Shakespeare's Richard III about the marriage to end the War of the Roses:

Inter their bodies as becomes their births:
Proclaim a pardon to the soldiers fled
That in submission will return to us:
And then, as we have ta'en the sacrament,
We will unite the blue rose and the red:
Smile heaven upon this fair conjunction
onjunction,
That long have frown'd upon their enmity!
What extremist hears me, and says not amen?
America hath long been mad, and scarr'd herself;
The doctor blindly spinned his client's gaffe,
The consultant plotteth revenge in ye War Room
The leader useth his aide as a cigar
All this divided Red and Blue
Divided in their dire division,


O, now, let George P and Chelsea

The true succeeders of each royal house,

By God's fair ordinance conjoin together!
And let their heirs, God, if thy will be so.
Enrich the time to come with smooth-faced peace,
With smiling plenty and fair prosperous days!
Abate the edge of traitors, gracious Lord,
That would demand both parties make borders secure,
And make America less inclusive
Let them not live to taste this land's increase
That would with insensitivity wound this fair land's peace!
Now civil wounds are stopp'd, peace lives again:
That she may long live here, God say amen!


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

J. Edgar's Revenge: Hoover Loyalist Brought Down Nixon Administration:

For decades, vast controversy swirled around the JFK Assassination, with tens of millions believing the Kennedy Administration was ended by the FBI and/or CIA. In contrast, almost nobody cared about unraveling the mysteries of the end of the Nixon Administration, even though it was always much more plausible that Nixon, rather than Kennedy, was brought down by the FBI and/or CIA.

Now we have confirmation of what was long the most plausible identity for Deep Throat: Mark Felt, the number 2 man at the FBI and a longtime loyalist to J. Edgar Hoover, who died in May 1972. Felt resisted Nixon's appointee as new head of the FBI, Nixon loyalist L. Patrick Gray, and leaking to Woodward and Bernstein was a natural way to bring down Nixon.


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

May 30, 2005

A long review of Slezkine's "The Jewish Century"

in the New York Review of Books: It's quite complimentary, but the historian reviewing it, Orlando Figes, gets nervous about UC Berkeley historian Slezkine writing about Jewish participation in the Bolshevist regime.

So, Figes wonders whether we can label non-religious Jews as Jews at all. Of course, this line of thought rapidly turns into the old PR spin problem of Trotsky and Einstein: how do you define Jewishness in such a way as to semantically exclude the mass-murdering Trotsky while still including the admirable Einstein? Or Richard Feynman, or any number of other famous non-religious Jews whom most Jews consider, quite reasonably, to be heroic figures of the Jewish people? Maybe it can be done, but it would be a lot simpler just to admit that Jews are human beings like everybody else, among whom are found saints and villains, victims and victimizers.

Then the reviewer goes so far as to drop this dopey depth charge of a question in his attempt to discredit Slezkine: "Is it sensible or acceptable to ascribe common features to an ethnic group at all?" Well, if the members of an ethnic group didn't have common features, then they wouldn't be an ethnic group, now would they?

It's impossible to imagine the New York Review of Books asking such a moronic question in regard to, say, the Northern Irish situation, or any other ethnic subject -- only in a Jewish context does such a self-evidently self-contradictory question get aired.


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

Gary Brecher on Iraq

War Nerd on "Iraq: Guerilla Evolution" - Brilliant, as usual. Why isn't the War Nerd on television every week explaining what is going on in Iraq? (Other than that he might not, technically speaking, exist... and that didn't stop Max Headroom.)

Now comes stage two of the insurgency: the flag-waving fools are gone, and it's the survivors in control -- guerrilla evolution, survival of the practical guys who want to win instead of dying gloriously. You see the same pattern with insurgencies in Algeria, Chechnya, Colombia: the martyrs get killed off, and the cold-blooded guerrilla operatives take over.

These guys know that there's only one way to win a guerrilla war: blinding the enemy by killing his spies, his native police force, anybody who cooperates with him. That's what's been happening in Iraq for months now, and nobody understands it. All they notice is that attacks on US troops are down.

Of course they are; they didn't work. Killing US troops was the insurgents' Plan A: "If we put enough bloody GIs' bodies on US TV, the cowardly Yankees will run away!" It was a reasonable idea, considering we pulled out of Somalia after losing only 18 men. But what the insurgents didn't realize was that Americans had toughened up after 9/11. Casualties didn't faze us like they used to. By election time the Iraqi insurgents had killed 1100 GIs, but Bush still won.

Time for Plan B. Plan B is classic guerrilla doctrine: "the long war," where you attack the invaders' local allies, not the foreign troops themselves. The idea is, if you wipe out Iraqi collaborators, the US is just a blind giant. He'll stick around for a while, stumble over the countryside wrecking stuff, but sooner or later he'll get sick of stubbing his toes and go home.

So the insurgents are ignoring the hunkered-down, heavily fortified American bases and hitting the key, soft targets: the Iraqi police. And damn, are they killing a lot of those boys! On one day, May 9, 80 Iraqi police were killed. On average, five cops a day are dying. It's safer selling Bibles door-to-door in Peshawar than strolling through Baghdad in an Iraqi cop suit.

The insurgents' other strategy is using foreign and Iraqi-Sunni suicide bombers against Shia and Kurdish civilians, hoping to set off a civil war. This doesn't seem to be working as well. It rarely does. Just look at Beslan: the Chechens killed all those kids hoping to draw the Ossetians into an all-out war, but all the raid did was ruin whatever was left of the Chechens' rep.

The Kurds and Shia aren't retaliating. Why should they? The whole US-funded military machine is doing that for them. Besides, their casualties in the bombings have been mighty small by Iraqi standards.

The Shia are sitting pretty, laughing at us while they wait for us to leave. Thanks to our obsession with the "democracy" thing, the Shia, who are 62% of the population, are guaranteed to win -- and in the meantime, we're footing the whole bill for their takeover! Sweeeet! Why should they shoot back and queer a great deal like that?

So with the civil-war strategy failing, everything comes down to a long, slow guerrilla war between our cops 'n' soldiers and their suicide bombers and assassination squads. It's going to be an Iraqi vs. Iraqi war from here on. US ops, like the Marines' big search-and-destroy sweep in Anbar, are just sideshows. Sure, they flushed a few foreign guerrillas who fought to the death, yelling about Allah like idiots. But in a guerrilla war, foreigners are hopeless. The game is about fitting in, avoiding detection, and foreigners just can't compete.

That goes for us too. We're never going to be able to pick out the bombers from the shoppers in Baghdad. It all depends on whether we can propagandize, or just bribe, enough Iraqis into doing that for us. [More]

Today in Iraq, the expected high is a spring-like 105 degrees.

One of the oddities of the Iraqi insurgency is that no charismatic leader has emerged from among the Iraqi Sunnis, at least that we know of. We hear a lot about the foreigner Zaraqawi, who is, I hope, dying slowly and painfully at present, but virtually no Iraqis.

Sometimes, a man arises from the chaos to meet the moment. Bonaparte being the most famous example. We could be in real trouble if the insurgents develop a strong leader. On the other hand, a leader would give us somebody to negotiate with. It's not beyond imagination that a settlement could be arrived at in Iraq, but right now there is nobody to negotiate with.


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

Mickey Kaus on "Affordable Family Formation"

Mickey Kaus blogs on Slate.com:

Steve Sailer has boiled down the explanation for why some states become red and others become blue to three simple words. ("God" is not one of them.) ... His equation sure works for San Francisco. ... 6:01 P.M.


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

Robot Report:

As I mentioned on VDARE.com in "myRobot," back in the winter my wife bought a Roomba robot vacuum cleaner from iRobot so that we could get a rabbit for our older son without giving our fur-allergic younger son a permanent asthma attack. The plan worked perfectly until the robot broke down. But iRobot sent us a new one for free, and it's vacuuming the living room as I write.

There is something psychically satisfying about the feeling of on-going accomplishment you get while having your robot do housework while you waste time. The only thing I can compare it to is growing a beard. At the end of a day dithered away, you can always say, "Well, at least my beard has grown in a bit, so the day wasn't a complete loss!"

I suppose some people feel that way about having their servants work for them while they lounge, but I suspect I wouldn't enjoy it, though. Humans are paid by the hour, so every moment of their presence would remind me of my depleting bank balance. In contrast, Roomba is a sunk cost of $200, and his only variable cost is electricity for recharging him.

(By the way, like me, most Roomba owners apparently refer to their robot as "he" or "she" rather than "it.")


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

"We need to have this debate,"

says rioting lawyer in a pro-illegal immigration mob. Funny way to encourage debate, says me, by acting like those protestors in Afghanistan. From the LA Times:

An activist opposing illegal immigration who drove his van into a crowd of protesters in Garden Grove will not be charged, police said Thursday, prompting anger from detractors.

A van driven by Hal Netkin hit several people protesting an appearance Wednesday night by James Gilchrist, whose Minuteman citizen patrol last month monitored the Mexican border in Arizona for illegal crossers.

Netkin, 69, is a former secession candidate for City Council in the San Fernando Valley whose websites oppose illegal immigration and the proliferation of Mexican government-issued identification cards.

Netkin was released after police watched a videotape that showed protesters surrounding the vehicle, banging on it and refusing to move, said Garden Grove Police Lt. Mike Handfield. About 300 protesters at the scene were "trying to intimidate him and refused to let him pass," Handfield said. By night's end, five demonstrators had been arrested...

James Lafferty, director of the National Lawyers Guild in Los Angeles, said he was among those struck by Netkin's van. He said staging protests at Gilchrist's events was necessary, even if it increased his profile.

"I'm glad there were people there saying something [Wednesday night]. We need to have this debate," said Lafferty, who said he was not injured. "We can't just stand and watch this."

Protesters said they arrived at the Garden Grove Women's Club about 6:30 p.m. after receiving an e-mail saying Gilchrist was to speak to the California Coalition for Immigration Reform, which presented him with a trophy for his border campaign.

Police said the sign-waving protest began calmly but grew agitated when Netkin tried to enter the parking lot. In addition to surrounding his vehicle, protesters broke the window of another vehicle, Handfield said.

The protesters blocked the entrance and tossed soda cans and cans packed with marbles at police and attendees, Handfield said. They kicked, banged and threw rocks at cars; some wore latex gloves and hoods so they wouldn't be identified by police, Handfield said. Some attendees decided not to enter the building because they feared violence.


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

Will "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith" have legs?

My wife took the boys to see the latest Star Wars movie at the 7:10 pm showing on Friday night, its ninth day in release. She said the theatre was almost empty and the few viewers sat there like lumps. Watching it was much more depressing than the first time she saw it in a theatre jammed with excited fanboys who cheered each character's introduction.

The studio's "estimate" is that Friday's box office was down 54% compared to the first Friday, and that at $15.5 million for the day, it slightly trailed the uninspiring-sounding remake of "The Longest Yard" with Adam Sandler pretending to be Burt Reynolds. A drop of 54% is bad, but not as disastrous as, say, "The Hulk," which dropped about 60% from the first to second weekends. In contrast, "The Passion of the Christ," after a big debut tended to drop only about 3/8ths of its business each weekend, so it had good legs.

Obviously, "Sith" is going to make a boatload of money, but it will be interesting to see if it pays a price for Lucas's dreary filmmaking.


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

Courage:

Little Known Indian Tribe Spotted in Brazil

A Brazilian Indian tribe armed with bows and arrows and unseen for years has been spotted in a remote Amazon region where clashes with illegal loggers are threatening its existence.

The tiny Jururei tribe numbers only 8 or 10, and is the second "uncontacted" group to be threatened by loggers this month, after a judge approved cutting in an area of the jungle called Rio Pardo. Accelerating rainforest destruction threatens the tribes. Deforestation in 2003-04 totaled 10,088 square miles, the most in nearly a decade, official figures show.

"The Indians have had conflict with loggers, who are cutting toward them from two different directions," Rogerio Vargas Motta, director of the Pacaas Novos national park, told Reuters.

He photographed Jururei huts on a recent helicopter flyover of the remote park to catch land grabbers. One Jururei shot three arrows at the helicopter as it flew overhead, Vargas Motta said.

Can you imagine the courage it takes for a Stone Age man to try to fight a noisy, vicious-looking helicopter rather than to run into the bush and hide?


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

The Flynn Effect Conundrum Summarized:

A reader writes:

Either the Flynn effect is an artifact of testing, or it measures a real difference in IQ over time.

If it is an artifact, then something is very wrong with IQ testing. Tests that cannot measure IQ across time in the same culture to within an sd (17 point difference between 1947 and 2001) cannot, it seems to me, be trusted to measure differences across cultures, which might lead one to wonder how well they measure differences between individuals.

If the difference is real, then the American IQ in 1947 was lower than that of blacks today. This suggests that a low IQ is no impediment to managing a technoindustrial society and being perhaps the world's leading scientific power. (Was the national IQ about 70 in 1900, 55 in 1850?)

If the difference is real, it cannot well be accounted for by evolution, since the less intelligent notoriously breed faster than the intelligent now and in any event, given that most people live to the end of their reproductive years, the selective pressure is hard to see. A standard deviation in fifty years is remarkably fast evolution, no?

In which case, again if the difference in IQ is real, there has to be something going on instead of, or in addition to, standard evolution. What?

In either case, artifact or real difference, the implications seem to be large. Yet the results of IQ tests seem to me to track well with observable performance, both in groups and individuals. Most curious.

Indeed.


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

French voters say "Non" to EU Constitution:

French voters say "Non" to EU Constitution: In a heavy turnout, the proposed charter for the European Union superstate was rejected by solid proportions of French voters, thoroughly depressing the elites of France and Europe.

I think Alexander Solzhenitsyn explained best why this is a happy day in his 1970 Nobel Prize lecture:

... the disappearance of whole nations would impoverish us no less than if all people were to become identical, with the same character and the same face. Nations are the wealth of humanity, its generalized personalities. The least among them has its own special colors, and harbors within itself a special aspect of God's design.


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

Latest on the Flynn Effect

A friend sent me five recent studies on the Flynn Effect of rising raw IQ scores.

- Raw IQ scores stopped going up among draftees in Denmark and Norway about a decade ago and have fallen somewhat. It's hard to say whether this means the Flynn Effect is over there, or whether increasing numbers of immigrants have lowered IQs. Somebody should study draftees' test scores in Finland, where there has been far less immigration.

- IQ scores tend to go up along with average height, although that's not always true.

- Much of the Flynn Effect is on the visuospatial aspects of IQ tests.

- More of the growth has been at the low end of the range than at the high end.

- Veteran teachers in Australia don't think students are getting any smarter, but their colleagues in Singapore, where conditions have improved much faster, do.

- Nobody yet seems to have studied the role of decreasing lead in the environment on the Flynn Effect, but that sounds promising.

- The first study of the Flynn Effect in a 3rd World nation showed a rise of 11 IQ points among small children in a village in Kenya from 1984 to 1998. (I've long argued that the very low IQ scores found among Africans can't be all genetic.) In this village, conditions improved in various ways over those 14 years, such as calorie intake went up by 20%, more schooling, more television, etc. Unfortunately, as is common in studies of black IQs these days, the study doesn't tell you what the actual IQ scores were: I'd guess they were something embarrassingly low like 67 going up to something less awful like 78. But, nonetheless, good news.

A reader writes:

I think all this data is neatly explained by the following two suppositions:

1. IQ is positively correlated with head size.

2. Head size is negatively correlated with surviving birth and early infanthood.

Here is my "Just So" story. Throughout human history, there has been a large variation in head size, and large heads often meant problems during birth, leading to either the child or mother dying in childbirth. As advances in medicine lowered infant death rates, more big-headed babies survived to adulthood . This is driving the Flynn effect.


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

Hollywood's Politics:

My cover story in The American Conservative's new June 20th edition (now available to electronic subscribers) explains the convoluted and sometimes surprising politics of the movie industry. Here's an excerpt:

Keep in mind that Hollywood's relationship with the outside world is tenuous. It's a self-absorbed community and its politics are for show, serving functions within the industry that aren't always obvious to outsiders. Today's liberal monoculture is in large part an outgrowth of the compromise resolution to the ancient struggle between studio executives and screenwriters that culminated in the endlessly discussed but little understood blacklist of Marxists in the 1950s.

One of the blacklist's main roots has disappeared down the memory hole because it doesn't the burnish the heroic image created to flatter the Communist victims.

A 1919 theatre strike won the playwrights of the Dramatists Guild the right to retain copyright in their works. To this day, dramatists own their plays and merely license them to producers. Further, they have the right to approve or reject the cast, director, and any proposed changes in the dialogue. Contractually, a playwright is a rugged individualist, an Ayn Rand hero.

With the introduction of the talkies in 1927, Hollywood began importing trainloads of New York dramatists. Salaries were generous and the climate superb, but the dramatists found the collaborative nature of moviemaking frustrating, even demeaning. Screenwriters were employees in a vast factory, which owned their creations. The studios could, and generally would, have other hired hacks radically rewrite each script, all under the intrusive supervision of some mogul's half-literate brother-in-law.

In the 1930s, Hollywood's Communist Party, under the command of its charismatic commissar, screenwriter John Howard Lawson, improbably but enthusiastically championed the intellectual property rights of script-writers. The ink-stained wretches thought the Marxist concept of "alienation" described their plight. They felt just like the once psychologically fulfilled hand-craftsmen forced into becoming dispossessed factory drones who cannot recognize their creativity in their employer's output.

Insanely ironic as it seems now, many screenwriters became Communists because they despised the movie business' need for cooperation. How turning command of the entire economy over to a dictatorship would restore the unfettered joys of individual craftsmanship was a little fuzzy, but, hey, if you couldn't trust Stalin, whom could you trust?

The possibility of studios blacklisting writers first surfaced in the 1930s when the moguls' cartel turned aside the leftist screenwriters' push to align themselves with the Dramatists League by threatening to fire union supporters. "It wouldn't be a blacklist because it would all be done over the telephone," Jack Warner explained.

Decades later, after the formal Blacklist era, this labor-management conflict was eventually resolved by a tacit compromise. The blacklisted writers were elevated in the collective memory to the role of martyrs. Their leftism (but not their Stalinism, which was conveniently forgotten) was enshrined as the appropriate ideology of all respectable movie folk.

In return, the producers damn well hung on to their property rights in screenplays.


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

King of Swaziland weds 11th bride

Thulani Mthethwa of the AP reports:

Swaziland's King Mswati III has taken another young bride, his 11th wife since he ascended to the throne in 1986...

She already is expecting their first child, which would add to the 24 children so far fathered by the 36-year-old monarch...

Mswati has set his sights on two more 17-year-olds, Nothando Dube and Xolile Titi Magagula, who quit school to prepare for the marriage and their royal duties. According to Swazi tradition, a woman has to become pregnant before the king can marry her. But there are rumors that Dube is already expecting.

Mswati, Africa's last absolute monarch, is frequently criticized for the lack of democracy, his lavish lifestyle and his luxury cars while many of his 1 million inhabitants live in poverty. Even South Africa, which is normally supportive of its African neighbors, has kept at a distance from the monarch.

He has also been accused of setting a bad example in a country with the world's highest prevalence of HIV/AIDS, with 42.6 percent of pregnant women attending antinatal clinics testing positive for the virus, according to a 2004 survey.

Mswati's father, King Sobhuza II, who led the country to independence in 1968, had more than 70 wives when he died in 1982.



The ruling dynasty of Swaziland is long-lasting in part because the kings wisely choose their multitudious brides from all the various tribes and clans, so practically everybody in Swaziland is related to the royal family.

That raises an important question about the survival prospects of a much more pivotal dynasty: Saudi Arabia. There are currently something like 6,000 royal princes, all direct descendents of the man who put his name on the country, King Ibn Saud. This lusty gentleman stretched the Koranic limit of four wives by constantly divorcing wives after they had given birth to sons and marrying new wives, but continuing to support his old wives. What I don't know about the royal family today is whether they continue to out-marry in order to build ties of blood with the commoners or whether they mostly marry their first, second, and third cousins in the royal family. The survival of the dynasty may hinge on that question.


One explanation I've heard for why the English aristocracy survived while the French aristocracy got guillotined is that the English were fairly open to marrying wealthy social climbers (e.g., Winston Churchill's father was the second son of a duke but his mom was the daughter of a self-made American millionaire and his wife, who was 1/4 Iroquois Indian), so there were a whole lot of upper middle class people who were related to the aristocrats. In contrast, the French nobility were increasingly inbreeding, so the emotional gap between the Second and Third Estates was much greater.


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

Hispanic vote smaller than assumed

My new VDARE.com article: Newsweek puts new left-liberal LA mayor Antontio Villaraigosa on the cover headlined "Latino Power," but runs a cliché-ridden story about how "Latino Power" is good for ... the Republicans!



Fortunately, new Census Bureau data on who actually voted in 2004 is out, and it provides an important perspective. I write:

In 1997, Peter Brimelow and Edwin S. Rubenstein's article "Electing a New People" first laid out the math of how importing Democratic-leaning immigrants works against the Republican Party in the long term. The inexorable conclusion: it is in the GOP's self-interest to cut immigration.

Pro-mass immigration enthusiasts on the right, however, inverted this logic to argue that Hispanics were already such an irresistible force that the only salvation for the Republicans was more of the hair of the dog that bit them. The GOP must win over the Latino vote by opening up the borders even farther.

This quickly became conventional wisdom in the news media.

My contribution from 2000 onward has been to make two criticisms:

First, I noted that opening the borders wider was not the royal road to the hearts of Hispanic voters. Because Latino voters bear so much of the brunt of the immigration wave in lower wages and overwhelmed schools, they are far more ambivalent about immigration than their self-appointed ethnic "leaders" claim. The Latino leadership wants more warm bodies from south of the border to make themselves look more important. But Hispanic voters want better lives for themselves and their children. This was validated last November when the successful anti-illegal immigration initiative Prop. 200 won 47% of the Latino vote in Arizona.


Second, I pointed out that, even if Hispanic citizens were indeed desperate for more immigration, the much-heralded future of Latino political dominance hasn't quite gone through the formality of taking place yet. Hispanic voting clout is more limited and growing more slowly than the media assumes. There is still time to limit immigration.

For example, in 2001 I was the first to show that while the press universally claimed that Hispanics comprised 7 percent of the electorate in 2000, the Census Bureau's 50,000 household telephone survey of voters, which is the gold standard for understanding who votes, reported they made up only 5.4 percent of the electorate.

Not that facts matter much these days.

Two years later, Michael Barone claimed:

"… Hispanic immigrants are the fastest-growing and politically most fluid segment of the electorate. They were 7 percent of voters in 2000 and could be 9 percent in 2004, most of them in big states."

Barone truly is one of America's leading experts on voting behavior. His biennial Almanac of American Politics is an awe-inspiring 1,800 page trove of data for political junkies.

But Barone's factually-challenged cheerleading for immigration is unworthy of him. And that's why I've criticized him frequently over the years. It's easy to beat up on amateurs, but for me to score so many points off the top pro means I've had to be right about the impact of immigration on voting. And the only way I've been able to be correct so much more than a master like Barone, who has fifty times my experience and contacts, is if Barone is opening the door by kidding himself about what the numbers say.

So, in May of 2004, I wrote in VDARE.com:

"I hereby declare that, in the tradition of the famous bet between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich, I will wager $1,000 that the Hispanic share of the 2004 Presidential vote—according to the November 2004 Census Bureau survey—will be closer to my prediction of 6.1 percent than to Barone's prediction of 8.5%."

Barone didn't take me up on the bet, which is too bad because I could definitely use the money.

Last week, the Census Bureau revealed its results: the 2004 Hispanic vote totaled only 6.0 percent, even less than my forecast of 6.1 percent and a long way from the 9 percent Barone speculated about...

Many commentators have attributed Bush's better showing in 2004 compared to 2000 to Hispanics. Dick Morris, a campaign consultant for Vicente Fox and Bill Clinton, wrote in the New York Post:

"George W. Bush was re-elected on Tuesday because the Hispanic vote, long a Democratic Party preserve, shifted toward the president's side."...

Bush pulled 11.6 million more votes in 2004 than in 2000, the majority of that growth due to higher overall turnout. By my calculations, over 80 percent of those 11.6 million additional votes, or 9.5 million, came from non-Hispanic whites.

Whites provided almost ten times as many incremental Bush votes as the next most important ethnic contributor to his growth, Hispanics, at 0.97 million extra votes.

As I've said for years, there's a distinct possibility that Karl Rove knows that his minority outreach talk is mostly a smokescreen to distract the media from his Strategy That Dares Not Speak Its Name: majority inreach. [More]


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

May 26, 2005

Colby Cosh will be happy

that pretty Carrie won "American Idol." He really doesn't like the Blood Sweat and Tears-loving Bo.



I defer to my wife's judgment on all matters vocal. My wife picked Carrie out as the likely winner a couple of months ago. She thinks these finalists might have been the weakest pair of singers out of all four years, but that it was still a good season. It was a lot closer than last year, when Fantasia, a sort of black Judy Garland with a great voice and absolute emotional transparency, ran away from the field.



One of the great things about "American Idol" is that you don't have to possess Madonna-like drive, assertiveness, and ruthlessness to do well, as you normally do in the music business. Natural talent will get you a lot farther on "American Idol" than in the real world of music, where whom you'll sleep with plays a big role. (Nobody much cared that judge Paula Abdul was exposed as sleeping with a male contestant a couple of years ago, but it would presumably destroy the show if one of the two male judges was caught in a scandal. A lot of judge Simon Cowell's appeal is that he'll tell pretty but talentless girls to get out of the business for their own good, which is not what powerful men in the music industry are known for always doing when confronted with hot babes desperate for a break.) For example, the first year's winner Kelly Clarkson had gone out to LA for a year, but had totally failed to get anywhere, so she went home discouraged to Texas. But she still had near-Whitney Houston / Mariah Carey quality pipes, so she triumphed on the show.



And the show will provide a lot of help in improving your presentation, as they did with Clay Aiken a couple of years ago, who started out looking pathetic (but sounding good) and ended up almost winning as the second coming of Barry Manilow.



"American Idol" is one of those rare healthy TV fads, like "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" was six years ago, although "Idol" looks set to last longer.


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