July 28, 2005

Is San Francisco really the 3rd best city for singles?

Forbes has presented a list of the "best cities for singles," which includes San Francisco as #3. It includes this endorsement of Frisco from "Carol Queen, 48, sexologist at Good Vibrations retail store:"

"San Franciscans are open-minded and sex-positive for the most part. They're interested in figuring out a lot of options here."

San Francisco's new motto could be:

"Our single men: sex- and HIV-positive -- a killer combination!"

My wife asks:

"San Francisco is 3rd best for what - staying single? Certainly not what straight women have in mind when they think of a great-for-singles place to live. Also I don't think most people think of gays as singles - perhaps because gay men don't identify being a couple and being single as mutually exclusive. Wonder how this data jives with your Affordable Family Formation theory?"

Good question, my dear.

Unsurprisingly, one of the factors in Forbes' ranking is "coolness," as defined by the egregious but well-compensated Richard Florida, who thinks that having lots of gays makes your city cool and thus economically successful. (In reality, the arrow of causality almost certainly points largely in the opposite direction: footloose gays follow the money generated by engineers and businessmen; the pocket protector boys don't follow the gays, as Florida assumes).

Equally unsurprisingly, the Forbes rankings doesn't even consider what's likely the #1 question single women have about a city: How quickly can they expect to become unsingle if they move there? It would take some effort, but I suspect the data is available to estimate that key number.

Anyway, here's the top 10 of the Forbes list, for whatever it's worth:

1. Denver-Boulder
2. Boston
3. San Francisco
4. Raleigh-Durham
5. Washington-Baltimore
6. Atlanta
7. Los Angeles
8. New York
9. Chicago
10. Seattle


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

July 27, 2005

The Competition: Bruce Kovner

Since I'm currently shaking you all down for spare change, I was struck by "George Soros's Right-Wing Twin," a profile in New York by Philip Weiss of financier Bruce Kovner, the Chairman of the American Enterprise Institute. Kovner is #106 on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans.

An interesting life story: Kovner grew up in an extended family that consisted mostly of Stalinists and/or gangsters, went to Harvard, became the student of the brilliant early neoconservative social scientist Edward Banfield (The Unheavenly City), who expected him to become as much of an academic star as his earlier student James Q. Wilson, but then he dropped out, drove a cab, got interested in commodity trading, made more money than God, and now spends it on the Lincoln Center and the American Enterprise Institute.

Since I'm in many ways an Old Neocon in the tradition of James Q. Wilson, Nathan Glazer, and Charles Murray, the AEI would once have been a natural place for me to turn for financial help, but my public criticism of the New Neocons of the invade-the-world-invite-the-world stripe makes it unlikely I'd be welcome there.

Weiss writes:

"Neoconservatism is a career," says Scott McConnell, editor of American Conservative. "One thing neocons have that both other factions of conservatives and liberals don't have is they can employ a lot of people. AEI provides a seat for the kind of mid-level intellectuals who can produce op-ed pieces. It's 50 to 100 people with decent prose styles, or Ph.D.'s, and they form a critical mass. They help create the reality of being the dominant strain of conservatism."

Kovner's relationship to AEI is the same as his relationship to all his causes: lordly. He plays visionary and psychiatrist to the AEI board. "He's brilliant," says Perle. "He's intellectually rigorous, balanced, and thoughtful."...

James Q. Wilson, a member of the AEI board, says that Kovner has pushed AEI to build an endowment so that scholars are more independent, so they don't have to hunt up grants for their work. Kovner?s hedge fund manages the lion's share of the group's investments, which grew from $28 million to $40 million in 2003, the latest year collected by Guidestar.org.

The article about Kovner is a fascinating portrait of how neoconservatism has changed over the decades. Kovner started out as a social scientist under Edward Banfield, working alongside James Q. Wilson, then he went into commodities trading and now he runs the Ahmed Chalabi Fanclub, as the American Enterprise Institute has sadly become.

Why? This is perhaps the greatest mystery in modern American politics -- why did the neoconservatives started out as hard-headed skeptical social scientists but then lose most of their interest in domestic issues and become obsessed with Israel, just as Israel's security was becoming ever more rock-solid as its enemies grew weaker? Why did neocons become simultaneously softheaded (as their infatuation with the convicted conman Chalabi demonstrates) and bloodthirsty (as their manuevering us into the War in Error in Iraq to put Chalabi on the throne in Baghdad shows)? Was it just Kovner who went off the rails and his money bought everybody else's acquiescence in his new obsession with invade-the-world thinking? Or was it a broader malady that seduced a few dozen inter-connected individuals?

Any clues?

Michael Brendan has more.

It is perhaps the most intriguing political development of the last fifty years. Although the neo-cons were decidedly anti-Communist when they appeared on the scene they came at a time when this was de rigeur on the right. What was so novel and brilliant about them was their vivisection of L.B.J.'s Great Society liberalism- using the tools of social science against liberalism at a time when most eggheads on the right were still talking about tradition, theology and political history (as right-wing eggheads always do).

The great untold story of the neoconservatives is how they moved from that stance of looking at domestic questions, challenging liberal pieties about race, welfare, and big government to one focused so intensely on (in Adam Wolfson's parlance) a "hard Wilsonian" foreign policy. This second movement, neo-conservatives who went from opposing revolutionary and Soviet communism (as nearly all on the American right did) to pulling the Right along in opposing "Evil" generally (see An End to Evil by David Frum and Richard Perle)

Do read the article, or have an assistant read it to you. And dream like I did, that rich patrons would go back to funding the politics of prudence, cultivation and real conservatism.


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

Day 2 of the Second iSteve.com Panhandling Drive!


Click Here to PayLearn MoreAmazon Honor System

I'd like to thank everybody who was so generous during Day 1. The Panhandling Drive is off to a good start, with a much higher proportion of $50 donations this year than last year. Apparently, reading iSteve.com over the last year has made you significantly more prosperous! (Hey, this kind of post hoc ergo propter hoc logic with a 22 year lag, has made Steven Levitt the toast of the publishing industry, so why can't I use a similar argument?)

***


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

More on Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel

A Finnish reader writes:

Your VDare article about Jared Diamond reminded me why I started to question his premises after reading 'Guns, Germs and Steel'. It was those Russian fox breeding experiments in Siberia. Diamond pretty much states in that book that all the plants and animals it is possible to domesticate were domesticated a long time ago, and too bad for those people who weren't lucky enough to have any good candidates around.

Now most people would probably agree that while foxes bred for their fur are used by man, they are by no definitions tame. Yet the Russians created very tame foxes in only a few decades.

Young foxes, or kits, scamper in a cage in Siberia, Russia, where they are part of a 45-year research project to domesticate foxes. Each generation has been selectively bred for tameness—fearlessness and nonaggression toward humans. By now the foxes in the project behave like pet dogs, barking and wagging their tails at humans.

Also like pet dogs, the domesticated foxes can "read" human cues (pointing, for example) much better than their wild cousins or even tame chimpanzees, according to a new study published today in Current Biology. The study authors call such behavior social intelligence. They say its appearance in domesticated foxes may help us better understand how intelligence developed in humans and other animals.

If they could do that with foxes, it might very well be possible with most other animals too. As you said, ostriches are farmed now. And if the historical accounts of what the European wild cattle were like are at all accurate, they weren't any more 'tame' to start with that the African buffalo is, yet, as far as I remember, they are supposed to be what our placid cows were bred from.

The American Indians could have domesticated the horses and camels that were indigenous to the Americas when they arrived here from the Bering Strait, but, instead, they ate them all, at least according to Diamond.

I've seen the Mongolian wild horse, Przewalski's Horse, at the San Diego Zoo and it is a ferocious beast. Zebras aren't pussycats either, but they don't strike me as any wilder than Przewalski's Horse. It's hard to imagine how much courage must have been possessed by the first person thousands of years ago to catch wild horses and start domesticating them.


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

John Derbyshire in VDARE.com:

"Thinking About 7/7: Enoch Powell’s Revenge?" -- An excerpt:

There seems to be a fair consensus [among Tory intellectuals], therefore, that immigrants, especially Muslim immigrants, in the UK must assimilate to Britishness, and Britishness must be more firmly asserted by Britain, so that immigrants actually have something to assimilate to.

There is not the slightest prospect that anything like that will happen. A strong and confident assertion of Britishness would go against the entire socio-intellectual trend of the past 40 years—against all the apparatus of culture, education, and liberal-elite commentary, against everything two entire generations of Britons have been brought up to believe, against the entire zeitgeist.

I venture to say that there is no chance whatever that Britishness will confidently assert itself again, not in my lifetime.

Don't you know that Britain was an imperialist nation, that oppressed and exploited colored people in distant places? That invented the term "concentration camp"? That was beastly to the poor Irish for 800 years? That forced opium down the throats of the wretched Chinese? That sent little children underground to mine coal? That helped plant Israel on Arab land, dispossessing thousands of helpless fellaheen?

This stuff is taught in schools now, and absorbed early in life, so that it is difficult for British people to doubt or question it, or to understand it in any proper historical context. Why on earth would anyone wish to assimilate to such a nation, with such a history?

A confident assertion of national identity is hard to bring off unless you believe, as most British people probably did believe until 40 years ago, that your nation is better than other nations, that your people are better than their people. Lingering traces of this belief in national superiority remain, both in Britain and here, or did until recently. You can catch a glimpse of it in artifacts like the first Indiana Jones movie, where the mental, physical, and moral superiority of Americans is taken for granted.

Clear verbal expression of such a sentiment is, though, now completely prohibited. Our people are better than their people— Who on earth would dare say such a thing out loud now? How long would a person last in public life, having uttered such a thing?

I hear the voice of my father (b. 1899), speaking ex cathedra, i.e. from his armchair: "Foreigners? Bloody fools for all I can see... One Englishman is worth ten Frenchies..." etc., etc.

And here is a more sophisticated commentator, writing in 1940:

"[I]s a country necessarily inferior because it is one’s own? Why should not a fellow feel proud of things in which a just pride may be taken? I have lived in many countries, and talked in several languages: and found something to esteem in every country I have visited. But I have never seen any nation the equal of my own."

— "Frank Richards Replies," in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 1, p.538.


Of course, hardly anyone believes those things any more. But can you have a strong national identity if people don't believe them? [More]


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

$41 Billion?

"$41 Billion Cost [per year for five years] Projected To Remove Illegal Entrants" reads a Washington Post write-up of a press release by a liberal advocacy group. A friend responds:

What a farce. Actually the title of the study is the first joke "Deporting the Undocumented: A Cost Assessment". Sure, and rape is really just "unauthorized sex". Here is a summary and here is the study itself.

The study assumes that INS agents can only deport 10 illegals per year. Experience in Israel, Malaysia and the U.S. shows that immigration agents can bust at least one illegal a day. See for an article about how just 12 INS agents captured 450 illegals in a few days. Of course, Bush freaked out when the INS actually started doing its job and stopped them. Hey, wages might have gone up by a penny. Can't have that.

This is a crucial point because the study claims that apprehension accounts for 73.61% of the total cost of illegal removal. Using a more realistic 250 illegals per agent, per year, reduces the apprehension cost from $17,603 (the number in the "study") down to less than $1000 per deportation (actually $702.8). Of course, this results in an 70.67% reduction in the total cost of illegal expulsion.

If that weren't bad enough... The study also assumes that only 20% of the illegals would remove themselves faced with real law enforcement. Experience in the U.S. and other countries shows that at least 2/3 would get out rather than be arrested and deported. Providing incentives ("leave on your own with no penalty versus a lifetime ban if we have to do it" would be one approach) could raise this fraction materially.

Using a more realistic 66.7% voluntary exit rate yields another 58.34% cost reduction. Combining these two "minor adjustments" reduces that likely cost by 87.78%. What's being wrong by a factor of 10 among friends?

The authors also assume that mass deportation will have no effect on the number of illegals entering the U.S. Even they regard this as dubious but use this claim in their analysis. Their actual words:

"Although some of the future flow would likely subside if a massive deportation policy were adopted within the United States, this report assumes the demand at our border will remain unchanged over the five year period."

On a positive note, the claims that the future cost of enforcing the border is only $2.99 billion per year. Sounds cheap to me.

Overall, the study amounts to just another Open Borders screed and a bad one at that. To call the study "trite" would be an undeserved complement. The study repeats the long-refuted mantra about how cheap labor supposedly helps us all. Tell it to anyone who has actually lived in California for the last 30 years.

From my point of view, logically, the #1 priority, as usual, is: First, do no more harm.

It wouldn't be very sensible to try to round up massive numbers of current illegal immigrants while leaving the border largely open for their replacements. (Of course, we should be deporting right now criminal aliens, alcoholics, and the like.)

That means building a better fence along the Mexican border (by the way, we already have a fence along much of the border, but most of it is four feet high and can be gotten over or under rapidly by not very clever third-graders). What we need is an effective fence, like the Israelis have.

For those who get caught trying to sneak in, instead of just tossing them back over the border like we do now (or letting them go free in the U.S. if they are "other than Mexican"), we need to lock them up for 30 days for a first offense, six months for a second, and so forth.

Meanwhile, start applying pressure on employers. Make expensive examples of the most egregious, and start enforcing the 1996 laws on the rest.

Offer free one-way trips home, including shipping of all household goods, to anyone who turns himself in. Anyone who takes up the offer and gets caught back in America again would go to prison for five years.

Continuously up the pressure and a large fraction will self-deport. If that's not enough, then round 'em up.


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

July 26, 2005

"What’s Holding Black Kids Back?"

"What’s Holding Black Kids Back?" asks Kay S. Hymowitz in City Journal:

The difference between middle-class and low-income child rearing has been captured at its starkest—and most unsettling—by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley in their 1995 book Meaningful Differences. As War on Poverty foot soldiers with a special interest in language development, Hart and Risley were troubled by the mediocre results of the curriculum they had helped design at the Turner House Preschool in a poor black Kansas City neighborhood. Comparing their subjects with those at a lab school for the children of University of Kansas professors, Hart and Risley found to their dismay that not only did the university kids know more words than the Turner kids, but they learned faster. The gap between upper- and lower-income kids, they concluded, “seemed unalterable by intervention by the time the children were 4 years old.”

Trying to understand why, their team set out to observe parents and children in their homes doing the things they ordinarily did—hanging out, talking, eating dinner, watching television. The results were mind-boggling: in the first years of life, the average number of words heard per hour was 2,150 for professors’ kids, 1,250 for working-class children, and 620 for children in welfare families.

But the problem went further. Welfare parents in the study didn’t just talk less; their talk was meaner and more distracted...

In middle-class families, the child’s development -- emotional, social, and (these days, above all) cognitiv -- takes center stage. It is the family’s raison d’ĂȘtre, its state religion. It’s the reason for that Mozart or Rafi tape in the morning and that bedtime story at night, for finding out all you can about a teacher in the fall and for Little League in the spring, for all the books, crib mobiles, trips to the museum, and limits on TV. It’s the reason, even, for careful family planning; fewer children, properly spaced, allow parents to focus ample attention on each one. Just about everything that defines middle-class parenting—talking to a child, asking questions, reasoning rather than spanking—consciously aims at education or child development.


But, of course, the current obsessiveness with managing their children's lives that affluent white parents display is a recent development. They sure weren't brought up that way. During the Baby Boom, their parents averaged four kids and didn't have time to drive them all over town. That's what bikes were for.

Moreover, parents may not have been as child-centric in aggregate either. My impression is that adults back then went to more cocktail parties, played more bridge, bowled more, and the like. In the seven years of playing baseball in local park leagues, I don't believe either of my parents ever went to one of my games. (They did that out of principle, objecting to parents who put too much pressure on their kids in sports.) Today, it's typical for both parents to go to every game.

Yet, the Baby Boom kids of well-to-do parents generally didn't turn out to be illiterate crack dealers. I wonder why ...

Perhaps the modern style will turn out to be better for kids. Or perhaps it will rob them of initiative. We shall see.


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

"Abuse stories 'isolating African communities'"

"Abuse stories 'isolating African communities'" worries the lefty Guardian:

The government was yesterday urged to ensure that African communities in the UK are not stigmatised over claims of ritualistic child abuse. At a summit called by ministers amid concerns over abuse linked to rituals such as exorcism, there were calls for a focus on a wider range of immigrant communities in the UK, some of which are seen as hard to reach by social services and other authorities.

Ministers from the Department for Education and Skills and the Home Office, meeting representatives of the police, local government, faith and community groups, were also warned that ritualistic abuse - the extent of which is little-researched - should be examined in the context of wider issues of child abuse in communities new to the UK.

The summit, hosted by the children's minister, Beverley Hughes, follows a high-profile court case earlier this month in which three adults were jailed for their involvement in the abuse of an eight-year-old girl from Angola who they accused of being a witch. The Old Bailey heard that the child, brought to Britain from Angola by her aunt, had been beaten, cut and had chilli peppers rubbed in her eyes. Sita Kisanga and her brother Sebastian Pinto were convicted of aiding and abetting child cruelty, along with the child's aunt, found guilty of cruelty.

Ministers were also prompted to act following a leaked report for the Metropolitan police which identified a belief among some members of an African community that children were being abused during exorcism rituals at Pentecostal churches, and another police study indicating high numbers of African boys going missing from school records.

However, African church leaders and campaigners against child abuse within African communities have warned that some media coverage - including claims of child sacrifice in London churches - risks isolating hard-to-reach groups.

A reader responds:

Here is a perfect example of how the pro-immigration multi-culturalist socialworker/engineers sabotage Western culture.

Recently, three African adults were arrested in Britain for torturing a small child in strange exorcism ceremonies. They beat her, cut her and rubbed hot chilli peppers in her eyes over a period of days. Initial news reports said this was a growing problem and was due to religious beliefs of African "protestant fundamentalist churches". It has not happened in a vacuum. (and don't get me started on "muti", the magic practiced by Africans that requires body parts like hearts, livers, fingers and eyes taken from another living human being.)

After a mere two weeks (see the link above), the British sensitivity establishment has already shifted its attention from African exorcisms, torture and death of small children to the dangers of stigmatizing the African community itself.

They call the African neighborhoods and people who either torture children (or defend the torturers and marginalize the torture) as "hard to reach" and fear that the general public's shock and outrage by these religious practices will "isolate African communities".

This is a classic social engineer's maneuver. The socialworker/engineer assumes the mantle of managing everyone's feelings and interrelationships. It is their job to properly gauge the responses of each group and control the level and intensity of feeling. Naturally, they have the goal of bringing African aboriginals into the 21st Century as fast as possible (while preserving their quaint customs and endearing folkways). They also have the job of reengineering the English People to accommodate some of the more bizarre (but harmless) aspects of aboriginal life.

What they refuse to accept is that their way is not the only way, and that the English people may have their own solution to the problem that does not require accommodation or being re-engineered on the part of the English People: increased English shock and outrage until the Africans (I will not say African "communities") either leave; or abase themselves; admit that their savage and barbarian practices are just that: savage and barbarian; admit their sin; beg forgiveness for their savagery; and swear never to do it again.

To reduce English anger, the socialworker/engineer are trying to implant the same memes they use for every other conflict involving savage communities versus civilized communities: persuade the public that the problem isn't "African ritual violence against children" (of which only the Africans partake, and which Africans can only stop by snitching on each other, reporting their own offenders, and changing their morality and religion), but the greater problem of "violence in society" {sample: "It requires us all to proceed sensitively and constructively, and not stigmatise any one community." another sample: "We can't separate it from the issue of wider abuse of children, especially children who are being privately fostered,".

In short, the social workers are unable to address the problem except by gentle persuasion, AND it can work only if the English People agree to not notice what Africans are doing, AND (I fear) only if The Guardian stops writing about such torture and killing, or if it does, that it stop mentioning the fact that torture/killers are African. In short: we must either avert our gaze, go blind, or stick our head in the sand.

It equates the beating a child gets when an English father comes home drunk, with organized religious activities of many Africans out of a deeply-held aboriginal belief in evil spirits and other mumbo-jumbo.

As it is, the Brit socialworker/engineers have already given up the high ground of telling the Africans their behavior is just plain wrong and that what they call their religion is completely unacceptable to England.

As an aside, note the careful way the social workers have already tried to implicate the English in these African crimes. They have called the African religion "protestant fundamentalism" to suggest English guilt as colonialists. They expect us to forget that the missionaries taught the savages a religion of peace, and that it was the Africans alone that engrafted syncretistic native child abuse and torture on that religion. I would no more call the witch-hunting religion of the African child abusers "protestant fundamentalism" than I would call Haitian voodoo "catholicism".

As a final aside, do you think for a moment that the socialworker/engineer women would ever stop blaming men for all domestic violence? That they would drop their male-stigmatizing political reeducation courses they present for judges and policemen as male-bashing and "stigmatizing" a male "community"? Of course they wouldn't. The question is, "Why not?" Find the answer to that, and I think you will have found the nut of the "Church of Liberalism and Multiculturalism".

***


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

Second iSteve.com Panhandling Drive!

Second iSteve.com Panhandling Drive!

Click Here to PayLearn More Amazon Honor System

The Internet Age is a reader's dream, but it can also be a writer's nightmare because it is so hard to get paid in an age when everybody expects "content" to magically appear for free. Moreover, my blogging and more formal articles are never going to support a lucrative amount of advertising since my natural audience is quite elite. (As Fry explained on Futurama, the economics of mass media are: "Clever things make people feel stupid and unexpected things make them feel scared.") Nor are the big money boys enthusiastic about supporting an independent thinker who isn't a team player.

I don't just provide opinionizing. Over the last year, I broke the following stories that required extensive statistical analysis:

- Despite all the talk about how smart John F. Kerry was, he scored slightly worse on his military officer qualification exam than did George W. Bush, whose no brainiac himself.

- The enormously popular table showing that Kerry-voting blue states have much higher IQs than Bush-voting red states was a hoax.

- That the exit poll claiming that Bush won 44% of the Hispanic vote was wrong.

That the Hispanic vote totaled only 6.0%, not the 9% that Michael Barone speculated it would be, and that ten times more of Bush's incremental votes came from whites than from Hispanics.

- That the engine underlying why red states are red and blues states are blue is affordable family formation.

- That the most celebrated theory in the big bestseller Freakonomics -- that abortion cut crime -- didn't come close to meeting the burden of proof.

As well, there are book reviews that go far deeper than what you'll see anywhere else, film reviews different from anyone else's, and a lively blog.

So, I'm coming to you, my friends, hat in hand. Please don't make me have to get another real job! Corporate America might not survive a second go-round with me.

The Amazon donation buttons above provide you with an instant opportunity to become a patron of the arts and letters (a.k.a., to give me money). Donating to this pixel stained wretch is fast and easy. Your credit card is secure, and your privacy is protected at Amazon.com -- i.e., your name doesn't appear on donations that go through Amazon. [So I won't be be able to thank you personally.) Foreign currencies are accepted.

I'll add a Paypal button later.


Or you can
E-mail me, and I'll give you my address, and then you can send me a check or cash.

Y
ou might be interested in how big a cut Amazon takes. It's quite reasonable: 2.9% of the total and a 30 cents fixed fee per donation. This has some implications that are fascinating (well, to me). For example, if you donate $1.00, then Amazon keeps almost one-third of it, or 32.9 cents. I only get 67.1 cents. Well, that would be pretty pointless, wouldn't it? I mean, you aren't feeling generous toward Amazon, now are you? Yet, if you kick in only a buck, they keep a hulking third of it.

A much more efficient solution is to (drumroll, please) give me more money. If, for instance, you donate $50.00, then I get to keep a full $48.25. That's a lot better!


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

Why the First Bush Administration Refused to Protect Our Borders:

A former INS official named Mark Reed testified to Congress in May that back during the Bush the Elder's Administration:

I was present at a high level strategy meeting between representatives of Federal Law Enforcement, DOD [Department of Defense], and the State Department regarding the urgency of sealing the Mexican border to stop drug smuggling. When DOD stated that they were capable of detecting and interdicting any intrusion, but could not distinguish between groups of migrants from drug smugglers until interdiction, the dialogue became difficult. When DOD refused to entertain the idea that they should only detain drug smugglers upon interdiction, the meeting was abruptly terminated. The safety valve that illegal immigration provided toward the stability of Mexico seemed to be a more compelling national security priority than drug smuggling.

That's certainly interesting now that word has come from the LA Times that the latest Bush administration is dunning corporations to build a war chest to "marginalize" conservative talk radio and other pillars of the GOP for opposing the President's amnesty & open borders immigration plan.

It's not surprising that the Bushes look out for the interests of the Mexican ruling class, since the Bush family has had ties of financial and friendship ties with the Mexican kleptocrats going back decades. I first wrote about this little-covered connection for UPI back in February 2001, and then in more depth for VDARE in January 2004:

Some of the First Dynasty's favorites have been criminals on a scale so extravagant as to scandalize even the long-suffering citizenry of Mexico.

Take Jorge Diaz Serrano. Jonathan Kwitny reported in a long exposé in Barron's ("The Mexican Connection of George Bush," September 19, 1988, requires Dow Jones' subscription to access):

"Without breathing a word to shareholders in his Houston oil-drilling company, Zapata Off-Shore Co., George Bush in 1960 helped set up another drilling operation employing Mexican front men and seemingly circumventing Mexican law. And he did so in association with Jorge Diaz Serrano, a now-convicted felon who has become a symbol of political corruption in a country with no shortage of contestants for that dubious distinction. In helping to launch … Permargo, Bush and his associates at Zapata teamed up with Diaz Serrano and a Mexican associate in camouflaging the 50% American ownership of Permargo."

George H.W. stood by his old partner:

"’I have high regard for Jorge,’ Bush was quoted as saying in People magazine in 1981. ‘I consider him a friend.’"

Diaz went on to bigger, if not better, things.

"Eventually, Diaz Serrano would take control of Permargo, before moving on to head Pemex, Mexico's government oil monopoly. Shortly after his five-year stint at Pemex, he would begin a five-year stint in jail, having defrauded the Mexican government of $58 million it is still trying to get back…"

Yet, today, Serrano seems like a quaint figure from Mexico's more innocent past. He was a public servant who merely feathered his own nest. Worse was to come.

The big difference between the nice clean corruption of the 1970s and today is the new pervasiveness of drug money, and its accompanying violence, among the Mexican elite...

The Bush family's most important Mexican friendship was with the Salinas family, whose scion Carlos ruled Mexico from 1988 and 1994, before fleeing to exile in Ireland to avoid being lynched by his furious countrymen. (For the lurid details on this depraved brood, see my article "Mexico's Corrupt White Elite.")

Julie Reynolds of El Andar noted,

"Bush Sr. met Carlos Salinas’s father, RaĂșl Salinas Lozano, back when the latter was Mexico’s commerce secretary. The families’ friendship has continued through the years. RaĂșl Salinas, the president’s brother, has told investigators that Jeb and Columba Bush joined him three times for vacations at his hacienda Las Mendocinas."


Jeb's host Raul, who was known as "Mr. 10%" in Mexico for demanding the Salinas family cut on all government contracts, is currently serving 27 years in the slammer for the assassination of PRI chairman Francisco Ruiz Massieu, his ex-brother-in-law. Raul's wife was arrested in Switzerland while attempting to withdraw $94 million in cash from their Swiss bank's safe deposit box.

Dubya's amigos in Texas, however, are not exactly migrant farm workers. As Julie Reynolds, assisted by Victor AlmazĂĄn and Ana Leonor Rojo, wrote in El Andar:


"It was during those campaign years [of Bush the Elder] that George Junior bonded with many of his Latino allies in the state [of Texas] and made the friends he would later lean on when his political ambitions got into gear. By and large, the Latino alliances Bush touts so loudly these days are not social workers or school teachers, and they are certainly not working-class. Like most in W’s circle, they are Texas heavy-hitters who got rich from their astute blending of business and politics."


In a long, complex El Andar article entitled “LOS AMIGOS DE BUSH: The disturbing ties of some of George W. Bush’s Latino advisors," Reynolds amassed evidence to back her allegation that two of Bush's top Mexican-American backers in Texas are palsy-walsy with individuals linked to Mexico's feared Gulf narco cartel.

As George W. said numerous times in response to questions about illegal aliens, "Family values don't stop at the Rio Grande." (America, of course, does.) Here's one touching example of his assisting an undocumented worker in his struggle with the uncaring INS, as reported in El Andar by Reynolds and Eduardo Valle of Mexico City's El Universal newspaper:


"In the fall of 1991, George W. Bush asked his father, the President, to 'help out' on behalf of Enrique Fuentes LeĂłn. … Fuentes LeĂłn was living in the United States on a tourist visa that was about to expire."


What "family values" had brought this lawyer north of the Rio Grande?


"He had fled Mexico in 1989, after a highly-publicized case in which he was charged with bribing two judges in order to free a wealthy Acapulco businessman convicted of the rape and murder of a young child…"

"He remained free in the U.S. for three more years on an expired tourist visa, even though the Mexican government made an official extradition request on October 21, 1991. … By 1994, he had purchased more than $6 million in San Antonio real estate, and together with Texas publisher Tino DurĂĄn made moves to purchase the now-defunct San Antonio Light newspaper…"


When the INS was pestering Fuentes Leon in the early 90s, Duran, who calls himself "a friend and supporter of the Bush family," set up a meeting between the notorious fugitive and the future President of the United States to get him to intercede with the current President of the United States. Duran said:


"'I had sent him [George W.] a letter so he would know what it was all about, so he could decide if he wanted to help," DurĂĄn said. ‘And he called me and said, 'Sure, come on down and let’s talk about it.' ‘Enrique and I went down to his office and he called the President." George W. Bush asked President Bush if he could help DurĂĄn and 'his friend here.’ DurĂĄn says President Bush then asked DurĂĄn to send him a letter and said he would direct the information to the State Department."


What happened next?


"Fuentes LeĂłn … was finally extradited to Mexico after a 1994 arrest for allegedly attempting to bribe an INS agent with $30,000… A courthouse employee said that Fuentes LeĂłn showed up every day in a $200,000 car, followed by 'around 25' other vehicles…"


How could he afford that? Fuentes LeĂłn is alleged by El Andar to be the "consigliero" of the Gulf narco cartel.


"Today, Fuentes LeĂłn is again imprisoned in Mexico. This time it’s for a case in which he is charged in relation to the kidnapping and death of Nellie Campobello, 85, a famous former ballerina whose 13 year-old grave was found last year. The title to Campobello’s house has mysteriously appeared under the name of Fuentes LeĂłn’s wife."

[More]

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

July 25, 2005

Who is Duane "Dewey" Clarridge?

The current scandal in Washington remains boringly focused on what Karl Rove said to whom when, because the Democrats conceive of Rove as the evil genius who has cost them election after election (when a more balanced assessment suggests that Rove, while energetic and ruthless, is far from infallible or irreplaceable). The more interesting questions revolve around who was responsible for the operations building up the fraudulent case for the Iraq War that later needed covering up.

For whatever it's worth, one reader has tossed out the name of Duane "Dewey" Clarridge (a.k.a., Dax P. LeBaron), a retired CIA deputy director who was pardoned by George H.W. Bush in 1992 after being indicted for lying to Congress during Iran-Contra.

Clarridge has since done consulting work for Ahmed Chalabi, and helped draw up the 1998 plan for 5,000 "crack soldiers" from Chalabi's INC to invade Iraq with U.S. support, a scheme that Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni derided as the "Bay of Goats."

The LA Times reported 13 months ago that Clarridge was in Iraq, advising Chalabi.

Does anybody know anything more about Clarridge?


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

Does Vicente Fox have something on George W. Bush?

When I described to my wife the LA Times article reporting on how the President is building a war chest to launch a civil war within the GOP to drive out his own conservative base for opposing Bush's amnesty/open borders plan, she said, "I've always figured Fox has something on Bush. Like, maybe, after one of Bush's lost weekends in Matamoras, a hooker's body was found floating in the bay, an 11-year old transvestite hooker. And Fox might have bought the police file, figuring it might come in handy some day."

"That's raw, irresponsible, baseless speculation!" I responded. "But I kinda like it."


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

July 24, 2005

Terry McMillan Loses Her Groove

In 1997, I wrote in "Is Love Colorblind?"

Despite these opportunities to meet white men, so many middle-class black women have trouble landing satisfactory husbands that they have made Terry (Waiting to Exhale) McMillan, author of novels specifically about and for them, into a best-selling brand name. Probably the most popular romance advice regularly offered to affluent black women of a certain age is to find true love in the brawny arms of a younger black man. Both Miss McMillan's 1996 best-seller How Stella Got Her Groove Back and the most celebrated of all books by black women, Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, are romance novels about well-to-do older women and somewhat dangerous younger men. Of course, as Miss Hurston herself later learned at age 49, when she (briefly) married a 23-year-old gym coach, that seldom works out in real life.

McMillan is currently divorcing the 23-year-younger Jamaican gentleman who inspired Stella. Newsweek interviews her.

Q. Are you disillusioned with marriage?

A. As everyone knows, I am currently going though a divorce.

Q.That must be very difficult. I'm sorry.

A.That's why my novel was late. He kept me distracted in hopes he could break me down. That was until the night I said, "Why don't you tell the truth about something for a change?" And he said, "You couldn't handle it." And I said, "Try me." And he said, "I'm confused about my sexuality." And I said, "What!" And he said, "I think I might be gay. No, I am gay. I am gay." I had a halogen lamp right near the chair where I read, and I said, "I would like to take this lamp and whop your face. But you know what, I'm not going to because you finally told the truth about something. And look what it turned out to be."

Q. Wow. That sounds like a passage right out of one of your novels.

A. He's a sociopath, a covetous sociopath. Think of Scott Peterson without the murder. That is how sociopaths are. They woo you, and they can convince you of anything. I couldn't put a finger on what he was doing. He cheated, lied and betrayed me. And when I complain about this, he calls me a homophobe.

Q. And yet your new book has a surprisingly hopeful view of long-term marriage. Why?

A. The book was finished before all this happened. By the time it was in the catalog, I was so sapped and so pissed off, I didn't know what to do. My credit cards were maxed out. I almost went bankrupt. I was supporting him in his dog-grooming business. I was miserable, but he was happy as a lark. Now he's got his citizenship, he's coming after me for my money and he's writing a tell-all to capitalize on my fame.

Q. But you had a prenuptial agreement, didn't you?

A. I was a multimillionaire. I married a 21-year-old who hadn't finished college. Of course I had a prenup. I wouldn't marry Eddie Murphy without a prenup. My lawyers are on Madison Avenue. I'm not stupid. I'm not paying him a dime. I'll go to jail first. I have a valid prenup. He's out of the closet. He's committed a crime. His citizenship should be revoked.

Q. What do you think of authors who've suggested that gay black men lead double lives because there is so little support for homosexuality in the African-American community?

A. That's bull---t. They have an excuse for everything. It's difficult for them to come out but it's easy to lie, cheat and put my life at risk? They sneak around, hide behind a woman, in some cases women with children. I'm HIV-negative, but I get tested every month. Sometimes they just like sneaking around. It's cowardly. They shouldn't hide behind a woman.

Q. You sound angry and heartbroken. Are you?

A. My heart was broken and not just because of the gay thing. It was the betrayal. The fact that he was doing this all along. All those years he was acting. It's an awkward situation to be in. Everyone asks, "Couldn't she see?" But they don't know how he behaved around me all those years. He spun a web that was so dense I couldn't see through it.


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

"Jared Diamond: The New King of All Media"

"Jared Diamond: The New King of All Media" is my new VDARE.com column. I think it's the fairest assessment of the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel yet. Here's an excerpt:

Still, his 2005 environmentalist bestseller Collapse can be valuable, especially if you look for the parts where Diamond shows more courage than is normal for him these days.

A close reading demonstrates that Diamond is quite unenthusiastic about mass immigration. For instance, in his chapter about the ecological fragility of Australia, he relays this optimistic hope for better policy in the future:

"Contrary to their government and business leaders, 70 percent of Australians say they want less rather than more immigration."

Diamond also points out that the quality of immigrants matters. In an interesting chapter comparing the two countries that share the island of Hispaniola, the mediocre but livable Dominican Republic and dreadful Haiti, he notes that one reason the Dominican Republic is now both more prosperous and less deforested and eroded than tragic Haiti is the difference in their people:

"… the Dominican Republic, with its Spanish-speaking population of predominantly European ancestry, was both more receptive and more attractive to European immigrants and investors than was Haiti with its Creole-speaking population composed overwhelmingly of black former slaves."

Ironically, when I left the "Collapse" exhibit, with its generic warnings about overpopulation, at Los Angeles's Natural History museum, I turned out of the parking lot onto Martin Luther King Boulevard, where the billboards were in Spanish. In LA, the African Americans have been pushed off even MLK Blvd. by Latin American immigrants.

Diamond writes:

"I have seen how Southern California has changed over the last 39 years, mostly in ways that make it less appealing… The complaints voiced by virtually everybody in Los Angeles are those directly related to our growing and already high population… While there are optimists who explain in the abstract why increased population will be good and how the world can accommodate it, I have never met an Angeleno … who personally expressed a desire for increased population in the area where he or she personally lived... California's population growth is accelerating, due almost entirely to immigration and to the large average family sizes of the immigrants after their arrival."

Unfortunately, Diamond's bravery then breaks down again. Rather than call for doing something about immigration, such as enforcement of the laws against illegal immigration, he merely laments, "The border between California and Mexico is long and impossible to patrol effectively …"

No, it's not. Israel, with two percent of America's population, is successfully fencing off its West Bank border, which is ten percent as long.

In another important section, Diamond illustrates how ethnic diversity makes environmental cooperation more difficult. He praises the Dutch as the most cooperative nation on earth and attributes their awareness of and willingness to tackle problems to their shared memory of the 1953 flood that drowned 2,000 Netherlanders living below sea level. (Unfortunately, he doesn't mention whether Holland's rapidly growing immigrant Muslim population remembers when the dikes failed 52 years ago.)

Diamond notes that there are three possible solutions to what Garrett Hardin called "the tragedy of the commons," or the tendency for individuals to over-consume resources and under-invest in responsibilities held in common, leading to ecological collapse.

  • Government diktat.

  • Privatization and property rights -- but that's impractical with some resources, such as fish.

  • "The remaining solution to the tragedy of the commons is for the consumers to recognize their common interests and to design, obey, and enforce prudent harvesting quotas themselves. That is likely to happen only if a whole series of conditions is met: the consumers form a homogenous group; they have learned to trust and communicate with each other; they expect to share a common future and to pass on the resource to their heirs; they are capable of and permitted to organize and police themselves; and the boundaries of the resource and of its pool of consumers are well defined." (My emphasis)

Wow! [More]


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

Have Rove and Bush gone nuts?

The news that the Bush Administration is launching a massive campaign, in conjunction with Democratic politicos and funded by big corporations like Microsoft and Wal-Mart, to demonize the sizable majority of the Republican Party that objects to illegal immigration suggests that the pressures of the Washington scandals have gotten to Karl Rove and George W. Bush.

It's extraordinarily difficult to come up with a rational reason why the Bush Administration is planning to go to war against conservative talk radio:

Tancredo succeeded in dominating the debate, Holt and Armey said, because of an echo chamber of conservative talk radio and other advocates for limiting the influx of Mexicans across the border.

Ironically, one of the designated leaders of Bush's campaign to "marginalize" GOP conservatives who oppose illegal immigration is former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, who in 2002 on "Hardball" called for the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from the West Bank. It's good to see Mr. Armey has his priorities straight.


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

Luke Ford Interviews Ronald Bailey

Luke Ford interviews Ronald Bailey, Reason Magazine's science writer on his new book Liberation Biology, here. I don't believe I've ever expressed an opinion on the stem cell controversy -- it sounds complicated to think through and everybody else has an opinion already so I don't think I could add any value. I'm not so optimistic about biotechnology as Bailey, but he's a solid guy, not just a libertarian ideologue.

Mickey Kaus called Luke the "human Echelon Project, for the prodigious amount of interviewing and transcribing he does of who's saying what around LA. Luke even interviewed me. But the bonus reason for reading Luke's blog is so you can then read the libelously hilarious "Luke Ford Fan Blog."


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

Bush announces his Suicide of the GOP initiative

(This is not an Onion parody, sadly): From the LA Times:

Worried that the tone of the immigration debate is pushing Latinos away from the Republican Party, the White House is working with political strategists to ...

quietly bury his divisive, unpopular 2004 Open Borders plan, right?

Wrong! Bush now wants to go to war against his conservative base over immigration, fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with Democrats. Here's more from "Immigration Rising on Bush's To-Do List:"

... create a broad coalition of business groups and immigrant advocates to back a plan President Bush could promote in Congress and to minority voters in the 2006 elections.

The strategists say Bush is planning to make immigration a top priority as soon as this fall, once the focus on a Supreme Court vacancy has passed. The push is being planned to coincide with next year's campaigns for the House and Senate, in which Latino voters could be crucial in several states. It is part of a broader White House strategy to forge a long-lasting majority by drawing more minority voters.

Aiming for an air of bipartisanship, the White House-backed coalition, to be called Americans for Border and Economic Security, will be led by former U.S. Reps. Cal Dooley (D-Hanford) and Dick Armey (R-Texas). The chief organizer is one of the capital's most important White House allies: former Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie, who has hosted preliminary meetings at his Washington lobbying firm just blocks from the White House and has been advising the RNC on minority outreach.

The effort is designed to help Bush take control of an increasingly contentious debate that has threatened to split the Republican Party and undermine its outreach to Latino voters. Although the White House has not laid out details for a plan, in January 2004 Bush proposed a guest-worker program that would be open to many illegal immigrants already in the U.S. and to prospective workers abroad.

A guest-worker program is favored by many Latinos and by businesses, many of them major GOP donors that depend on a steady flow of workers from Mexico and other countries. The White House effort is aimed at satisfying these groups while promoting tougher border security enforcement. The latter focus is an attempt to mollify a vocal bloc of cultural conservatives in the GOP — some in the House leadership — who argue that undocumented workers present a security threat and take some jobs that could be filled by Americans.

Some Republican strategists worry that the more extreme voices in this camp are alienating Latino voters with anti-immigrant language, and one goal of the new coalition is to marginalize those voices. Organizers said the coalition could help the GOP avoid the kind of political damage caused in the early 1990s by the anti-immigration campaign in California backed by then-Gov. Pete Wilson.

The issue has presented a quandary for Bush, who backed off his earlier calls for immigration changes after conservatives rebelled. Now, the White House hopes to reinvigorate the drive for new immigration laws — but this time it wants to work in advance to ensure that the president is backed by a broad alliance of business and advocacy groups.

There are signs, however, that the administration effort is running into problems even as it begins: Several key business groups are hesitant to join the new coalition, questioning whether the administration can separate itself from the anti-immigration wing of the GOP that is promoting restrictive policies. And the party's leading voices favoring stricter limits on immigration, such as Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), remain undaunted — pledging to intensify their efforts.

Coalition organizers say that makes their work all the more timely.

"The politics of the Republican Party isn't going to change by itself. It needs help," said Terry Holt, a spokesman for Bush's 2004 reelection campaign, who works with Gillespie and is recruiting members for the new coalition. "Immigration needs advocates. And if those advocates engage, they can have a profound impact on the issue."

Referring to the Latino vote, which turned out in larger numbers last year for Bush than in his 2000 campaign, Holt added: "There are great opportunities for Republicans, and also dangers if we don't handle this properly."

Holt and Armey, who as House majority leader from 1995 to 2002 unsuccessfully challenged some of his fellow conservatives to soften their opposition to immigration, said the new group's message would seek to isolate players such as Tancredo, who leads a House caucus that backs stiff border restrictions.

Tancredo succeeded in dominating the debate, Holt and Armey said, because of an echo chamber of conservative talk radio and other advocates for limiting the influx of Mexicans across the border.

"There's two voices right now, and the noisy one is what I call the slam-the-borders crowd," Armey said. "The voice we want to speak with — and the one that will be in unison with President Bush — is the voice that echoes those marvelous words on the Statue of Liberty."

"To me, the Tancredo wing appeals to the more prurient character of our nature," Armey added. "We want to talk to the better angels of our nature."

Organizers say the new coalition is patterned after groups formed to press for Bush's overhaul of Social Security and his successful 2003 push for a Medicare prescription drug program — a new aspect of Republican strategy in which corporations and other interest groups are tapped to help move public opinion in favor of a policy initiative.

Corporations and advocacy groups with a direct interest in immigration — including those who need skilled high-tech workers, farm laborers and university teaching assistants — are being aggressively targeted for membership. Those being courted include Microsoft Corp., Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and groups representing academic institutions, restaurants, hotels, landscaping firms, hospitals and nurses.

Organizers say this is the first time an effort has been made to bring these disparate groups together to focus on immigration issues.

Admission into the new coalition costs between $50,000 and $250,000. The proceeds are expected to pay for a political-style campaign for an approach to immigration that combines heightened border security with a guest-worker program of some sort, creating an environment that the White House believes will be more favorable for Bush to step back into the fray.

Tancredo accused the administration of forging an alliance with business executives who view migrants as a path to greater profits.

"They know this has nothing to do with Hispanic votes," he said. "They're trying to cover what their real motive is, which is to supply [business] with cheap labor, to not close the spigot of cheap labor…. But they've lost in Congress. They've lost the public. And now they're in damage control."

Tancredo asserted that Bush was in a bad spot politically, caught between public opinion favoring restrictive immigration policies and corporate interests that want looser policies. He said the apparent plans being laid by the new coalition seem to contrast with the message Bush gave to House leaders during a recent White House meeting: that the borders must be secured.

"I think he is trying to figure out a way to triangulate here," Tancredo said. [More]


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

Austin Bramwell on "Evolutionary Conservatives"

The youngest member of National Review's five-man Board of Trustees writes in the new August 15th issue of The American Conservative:

Second, a loose network of what John O’Sullivan has called “evolutionary” conservatives attempts to understand politics in light of genetic science. Unlike many conservatives, evolutionary conservatives remain undaunted by the apoplectic reaction of liberals to Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve and Dinesh D’Souza’s The End of Racism. Steve Sailer, for example, the most talented evolutionary conservative, writes with rigor and imagination on such scabrous topics as race, IQ, voting patterns, and national identity. Though other writers treat these ideas as taboo, perhaps because they seem to undermine American ideals of equality and self-reliance, evolutionary conservatives pride themselves on preferring truth to wishful thinking.

This attitude enables them to understand affirmative action and identity politics in a way that others cannot. More timid conservatives believe that if only we embraced the American Creed with sufficient fervor, we would become a color-blind society at last. As Thomas Sowell observes, however, every country that has racial or ethnic groups of differing economic achievement has adopted a system of preferences. Race relations seem to have an irreducibly tragic dimension; identity politics may well be a permanent feature of all multi-ethnic societies, often, as in Bosnia, Rwanda or Sri Lanka (and, perhaps, Iraq) with calamitous results. Human biodiversity is important; we owe to ourselves to try to understand it.


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