The manic-depressive conventional wisdom on New Orleans

I consistently argued at the time that having 100,000 people live through days of anarchy in New Orleans was a national disgrace, and that the breakdown of order caused people to drown and die of exposure due to violence paralyzing rescuers who feared for their own lives, partly due to exaggeration but partly due to reality. I never argued there was a mass slaughter going on. I also suggested that there would be a massive media cover up to convince us to forget what we saw with our lying eyes.

As I blogged way back on Labor Day, September 5th:

But, yes, sniping during rescue operations, as in the 1967 Detroit riot, is a complete calamity since it can send rescuers fleeing. Generally, the amount of actual sniping gets exaggerated while it's happening, but that reflects the terror and revulsion that any sniping at relief workers generates.

Whenever the talking heads on TV and their partners in print notice that they are showing mass evidence of blacks behaving badly, they are inspired into a paroxysm of lying about white racism to prevent the formation of "stereotypes" among viewers inclined to believe their own lying eyes.

Sure enough, in the last 48 hours, we've seen the national media suddenly decide that since New Orleans was not the Rape of Nanking with huge numbers murdered, then, hey, it wasn't so bad. In fact, it was just racist stereotypes that made us believe what we saw! Yeah, that's the ticket...

For example, Jonah Goldberg writes:

Race is obviously part of the equation, too. "If the dome and Convention Center had harbored large numbers of middle-class white people," Times Picayune editor Jim Amoss said, "it would not have been a fertile ground for this kind of rumor mongering." As with the cannibalism canard [which I scoffed at immediately], there seemed to be an eagerness on the part of many — on the Right and Left — to believe the very worst stories possible about poor African Americans.

Oh, come on, Jonah ... you know that that's absolutely the opposite of the truth about which stories the American media like to report, which are ones about whites being mean to blacks. The national press is acutely uncomfortable with reporting on black crime. Note, for instance, that the "Color of Crime" report has now been out for over two weeks, and, according to Google News, it has so far only been mentioned in two publications among the many hundreds covered by Google News: VDARE.com and David Horowitz's FrontPage.

We now know, thanks to valuable post-mortems by the Los Angeles Times and the New Orleans Times-Picayune, that a great deal of the "great reporting" was in fact great rumor mongering. The stories of rape and murder in the Superdome were all unfounded. Six people died in there, tragically. But nobody was murdered.

Whoa, hold your horses, Jonah. When civil control breaks down, so does official record-keeping, and this week's spate of revisionism is based on officials, typically self-interested ones, stating they have no records of bad things happening.. That doesn't mean none of them happened.

What we have been seeing recently is local newspapers across the country and in Britain and Australia publishing accounts of survivors from their regions that are much less politically correct than the national news media's accounts, which have been growing more constrained by their felt need to make all the news fit their pre-existing conceptual slots about white racism, black victimization etc.

For example, the following story about two survivors from the Boston area appeared today not in the Boston Globe but in the second-rank Boston Herald reported today:

Local witnesses haunted by murder at Superdome
By Theresa Freeman/ MetroWest Daily News Thursday, September 29, 2005 -
Updated: 03:12 AM EST

A Holliston woman and her Ashland friend are outraged officials are saying reports of atrocities after Hurricane Katrina were exaggerated, claiming they witnessed a deadly fight at the Superdome.

Adrienne Long of Holliston said she was ringside when two men wrangled over the last sip of Jack Daniel's whiskey and one beat and stabbed the other to death. Her friend William ``Teddy'' Nichols of Ashland was nearby and saw the bloody aftermath. Long was angry when she first heard of the exaggeration reports on television Tuesday.

``I was sitting here screaming at the TV. Did I imagine everything I saw?'' said Long. ``I just can't believe people would say this.''

Both say they are reluctant to contact authorities with information. They are both terrified by memories of what they said was a lawless city.

New Orleans Police Lt. Reginald Jacques said yesterday the city's homicide detectives are spread out because police headquarters was destroyed. He added they are not investigating Long's murder report.

Long had traveled to the Big Easy to drop off her son at Tulane University. He made it home safe long before she did.

A reader responds:

The Herald story is a truncated version of a longer report in the MetroWest Daily News, a suburban paper (and corporate cousin of the Boston Herald). I found the original Daily News story online, I read it closely, and I concluded based on the clues provided that this killer, who allegedly took his friend's life in a dispute over a whiskey bottle, is white.

To confirm my supposition, I emailed the reporter, Theresa Freeman, and she wrote me back. “The first draft of my story included that both men involved in the fight were white," she says, "but my editors removed the reference because it was not germane to the story.”

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

Somebody please invent this

What the world needs now is a television set that can only be powered by a home exercise machine. You want to watch some TV, you have to hop on your exercycle or stairclimber or whatever and generate the current yourself.

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

"Capote" and the death penalty

The biopic with the great character actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, the American Alec Guinness, as the fey author of the first modern true crime book, In Cold Blood, opens Friday, Sept. 30 in NYC and LA. Here are some brief excerpts from my review in the October 10th issue of The American Conservative (now on newsstands). The film recounts the visits Capote made to one of the two condemned murderers, Perry Miller, on Death Row:

In a sinister example of life imitating art, Miller was played in the 1967 movie version of "In Cold Blood" by actor Robert Blake, who was recently acquitted in his wife's murder...

"Capote" is rewarding, even though the film's criticism of the author is tendentious...

Capote helped the pair get a good lawyer to craft their first appeal against the death penalty. But after he'd completed most of his manuscript and realized how strong it was, his need for a dramatic ending (such as, say, their hangings) made him increasingly impatient with their endless appeals.

Screenwriter Dan Futterman attacks Capote for being a heartless monster who manipulated poor Miller into telling him his secrets even though Capote eventually hoped for his execution.

In reality, of course, the true monsters were the murderers, who had decided days before their home invasion to shotgun the whole family to eliminate all witnesses. With his conventional liberal bias against capital punishment, Futterman doesn't realize that without the death penalty, repeat offenders, who face long prison terms if convicted of robbery, would more often find it logical to kill their robbery victims to keep their identities secret.

The death penalty is a complicated issue, but a key point that I almost never hear brought up is how, in our era of long prison sentences for non-homicidal offences, having an ultimate punishment serves to deter criminals from killing their victims to eliminate the witnesses.

That's the flip side of the strongest argument against the death penalty: the fairly high proportion of mistaken convictions in homicide cases. The reason DNA evidence is has gotten a bunch of people off death row in recent years is because murder is inherently a tougher crime to acquire foolproof evidence about than, say, robbery, rape, or violent assault, precisely because the best witness -- the victim -- can't testify because he's been murdered.

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

What Hollywood could do for New Orleans

Simple. The great New Orleans comic novel A Confederacy of Dunces has been in Hollywood Development Hell since even before its official publication a quarter of a century ago. No novel since The Maltese Falcon has had more perfect movie dialogue already down on the page, yet the business has repeatedly failed to get its act together and make the damn movie.

In the wake of the flood, the movie industry should resolve that it will bring intense pressure on all the different players who own a piece of the property to get them to resolve their differences and to film the novel on location in New Orleans in 2007. And to film it right, too, with Philip Seymour Hoffman, not Will Ferrell, as Ignatius J. Reilly.

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

Two new articles by Charles Murray

One in Wall Street Journal on Katrina, "The Hallmark of the Underclass," and the other in the technical journal Statistical Science on "How to Accuse the Other Guy of Lying with Statistics" -- just the abstract available for free:

We’ve known how to lie with statistics for 50 years now. What we really need are theory and praxis for accusing someone else of lying with statistics. The author’s experience with the response to The Bell Curve has led him to suspect that such a formulation already exists, probably imparted during a secret initiation for professors in the social sciences. This article represents his best attempt to reconstruct what must be in it.

Here's an excerpt from the WSJ op-ed:

We in the better parts of town haven't had to deal with the underclass for many years, having successfully erected screens that keep them from troubling us. We no longer have to send our children to school with their children. Except in the most progressive cities, the homeless have been taken off the streets. And most importantly, we have dealt with crime. This has led to a curious paradox: falling crime and a growing underclass.

The underclass has been growing. The crime rate has been dropping for 13 years. But the proportion of young men who grow up unsocialized and who, given the opportunity, commit crimes, has not.

A rough operational measure of criminality is the percentage of the population under correctional supervision. This is less sensitive to changes in correctional fashion than imprisonment rates, since people convicted of a crime get some sort of correctional supervision regardless of the political climate. When Ronald Reagan took office, 0.9% of the population was under correctional supervision. That figure has continued to rise. When crime began to fall in 1992, it stood at 1.9%. In 2003 it was 2.4%. Crime has dropped, but criminality has continued to rise.

That's an important statistic I haven't thought about enough. Still, I'd like to delve into it more to see if the proportion of, say, 14-24 year old males under supervision is higher or lower than a decade ago. It's clear that the insane levels of murderousness we saw in 1990-1994 among teenage underclass black youths, with boys killing each other over entry-level crack dealer jobs that didn't pay any better than McDonalds jobs (as Steven Levitt pointed out in Freakonomics), was not carried on by the next cohort of teenage black youths, whose murder rate in 1995-2000 fell by over half. But does that reflect an increased level of black youths getting on the path to solid citizenship, or just a settling down of the gang wars into more stable cartels of criminals?

This doesn't matter to the middle and upper classes, because we figured out how to deal with it. Partly we created enclaves where criminals have a harder time getting at us, and instead must be content with preying on their own neighbors. But mainly we locked 'em up, a radical change from the 1960s and 1970s. Consider this statistic: The ratio of prisoners to crimes that prevailed when Ronald Reagan took office, applied to the number of crimes reported in 2003, corresponds to a prison population of 490,000. The actual prison population in 2003 was 2,086,000, a difference of 1.6 million. If you doubt that criminality has increased, imagine the crime rate tomorrow if today we released 1.6 million people from our jails and prisons.

Criminality is the most extreme manifestation of the unsocialized young male. Another is the proportion of young males who choose not to work. Among black males ages 20-24, for example, the percentage who were not working or looking for work when the first numbers were gathered in 1954 was 9%. That figure grew during the 1960s and 1970s, stabilizing at around 20% during the 1980s. The proportion rose again, reaching 30% in 1999, a year when employers were frantically seeking workers for every level of job. The dropout rate among young white males is lower, but has been increasing faster than among blacks.

Obviously, there's a chicken or egg issue involving the relationship between black fecklessness and illegal immigration. The more illegal immigrants pour in, the fewer people willing to hire poor blacks, so poor blacks don't get the discipline of holding a job, so they get even more feckless and unemployable.

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

Religion and Crime, Cont.:

I get lots of great emails that deserve to be posted, many more than I do post, and as I've pointed out, which one's I do post are a rather a random function of how I feel at the moment I read them. I do have a soft spot, though, for first-person accounts from people in the helping professions about their interactions with the underclass.

I do criminal defense work in ... a number of courtrooms. I should start by noting that one "constant" about the inmate population here and (I'm sure) everywhere else, that cuts across racial and ethnic boundaries, is that all inmates are innocent, and if you don't believe it, just ask them.

Due to a relatively low overall black population in XXX, the black inmate population is relatively low. If the overall black population is 10%, the black inmate population might be 30% or so ...

If the overall Hispanic population is about 30% or so, the Hispanic inmate population is probably about 60%. In the rural areas ... the Hispanic inmate population is probably closer to 90-100%, large numbers of whom require the services of an interpreter and/or are in the country illegally).

As you suggest, this generation of Hispanics - even Hispanic wrongdoers - is relatively passive, especially the illegal aliens, who would have preferred to avoid public exposure altogether.

The black inmates have far more "cheek" - often even more so than Hispanic gang members - and maybe a little more naiveté about consequences of their own anti-social behavior and about the passage of time - though this is certainly not universally the case. But they're more likely to question why the authorities have them in custody in the first place.

Why can't I get out of custody? All I had was a little bit of crack in my knapsack.

Yeah, but you were on felony probation for assault with a deadly weapon and this was a violation of the terms of your probation.

I never touched her and besides that was a YEAR AGO! When does that get off my record anyway?

I've had black inmates with records as long as my right arm ask me to ask the judge for a release on their own recognizance and express amazement and irritation when I tell them that it's never going to happen.

Their families are often enabling factors. No black underclass mother who ever lived is capable of concluding that her son has misbehaved - no matter how much weaponry and narcotics he was caught with, no matter how brutal the offense. And this is also especially the case if her son has brutalized other women. None of those witches are good enough for her baby anyway.

As far as religion goes, I think that it's like any other medicine. Great for what ails you if properly prescribed and taken in the proper doses but potentially harmful otherwise.

There's a punitive aspect to religion and also a merciful aspect to it, and there are clerics who neglect the utility and necessity of one aspect or another. I've seen clerics come in and vouch for the morals and character of a number of thugs. In today's touchy-feely feminized world, it's the merciful aspect of religion that tends to be over-emphasized in public life.

Clerics tend to be over-represented in the anti-death penalty movement, and during the heart of the Cold War, particularly during the Reagan years, when the Russians were playing the role of international thugs, clerics were over-represented in the appeasement/disarmament movement.

Interestingly enough, the anti-war Left doesn't seem to have nearly as many clerics playing a prominent role now that the enemy espouses a competing religion with worldwide popularity, rather than a secular humanist philosophy (i.e. Communism).

I think it's safe to say that many, if not most, people with religious convictions bend religious dogma to suit their own preconceived biases and preferences, instead of the other way around. There's no reason to suppose that criminals behave differently.

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

That Religion and Bad Behavior article

That Religion and Bad Behavior article: A reader writes:

I think the meme in this "Societies worse off 'when they have God on their side" article in the London Times that Drudge pushed yesterday - that religion is bad for society - is starting to "tip" which means that a well put together response by you might also have a chance to circulate.

I doubt it! Lies go halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on.

Newsgator highlighted this as the "top internet story of the day" today, with 127 blog links. I think it is pretty telling of journalistic biases that they would run with an article like this, and not with one about IQ.

The original article, Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies, appeared in the Journal of Religion & Society put out by the Rabbi Myer and Dorothy Kripke Center for the Study of Religion and Society at Creighton University. It's by Gregory S. Paul of Baltimore, MD, who doesn't list any academic qualifications (not that there's anything wrong with that!).

Paul's basic gimmick is an old chestnut, one I've seen dozens of times before: to make America look bad by comparing crime and other statistics for the entire American population, which is 27% black or Hispanic, to Europeans countries that are at least 90% white. That way you can prove that secularism or socialism or soccer or whatever you like about Europe is better for people than whatever you don't like about America.

This sleight of hand can be highly effective in duping readers into making apples to oranges comparisons between the U.S. and European countries. Why. Because we aren't allowed -- in polite society -- to write about how much higher the crime rates, abortion rates, STD rates and the like are for blacks and Hispanics than they are for whites or Asians,

But let's just put that key point about the racial make-up of the populations aside for the moment and look at some recent crime statistics for the overall American population, all races, versus various European populations. And America still comes out looking pretty good. Europe (not just Britain) has been undergoing a moral decline, at least as reflected in crime statistics, whereas the U.S. seems to have been on the moral upswing since a recent low point in the early 1990s.

Another reader scoffs at my initial objection to this article:

So the religious whites of the USA are less criminal
than in Britain. So what, you have one data point.
Whites in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Spain,
Portugal, France, Holland, Italy, Belgium, Finland,
Germany, and Nordic countries are all both less
religious and less violent than US whites...

Your theory fails.

Not so fast. That may (or may not) have once been true, but it's not true these days.

Here is the 2000 International Crime Victimization Survey report of the UN Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute. Figure 5 shows what % of respondents in 17 advanced countries said they were victims of "selected contact crimes" (robbery, sexual assault, or assault with force) in 1999.

The 17-country average was 2.4%. For the U.S., though only 1.9 % of the overall population had been victimized, putting the U.S. 13th out of 17 affluent countries in violent crime victimization prevalence. The most violent country in 1999 on this measure was Australia, at 4.1%, followed by England & Wales, Canada, Scotland, Poland, Finland, Northern Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, France, Switzerland, Netherlands, and then, finally, the USA (1.9%).

And, for American whites, that violent victimization prevalence figure would be significantly lower, perhaps down around, say, 1.2% -- because whites get victimized a lot less than blacks and Hispanics. (For example, the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics states, "Blacks were 6 times more likely than whites to be murdered in 2002." That's a consequence of the fact, according to BJS, that, "Blacks were 7 times more likely than whites to commit homicide in 2002." For homicide, the white victimization rate, which includes a lot of Hispanics, was 59% of the overall American homicide rate, so, 1.2% looks like a good guess.)

This suggests that for American whites, the chance of being violently victimized in a year would probably be below even Belgium, Catalan Spain, and Portugal. Japan, though, would still be off in its own nonviolent universe at only 0.4%.

Of course, what matters for the question of whether the greater religiousness of American whites makes them behave worse than European whites is not the chance of being violently victimized, but the chance of them violently victimizing someone else. Since a moderate fraction of the victimizations of American whites are committed by nonwhites, further research might show that as of the last few years, Americans might be the least violent whites on Earth.

There are other ways to measure crime rates, and I'd encourage you to look at the other graphs in this chapter of the UN report. The summary graph for prevalence of being a victim of any kind of crime, including property crimes, shows Americans (of all races) coming in only 11th worst out of 17. On the other hand, if you measure total reported incidents of victimizations, Americans come in about fifth or sixth overall, reflecting the high rate of victimizations of minorities (by other minorities, it ought to be needless to say, but it's not).

The brand new version of this UN crime victimization survey will be out shortly. The Times of London had a preview, which showed roughly the same results as in 1999.

Of course, probably the biggest reason for America's low crime rates these days is because we lock up vast numbers of bad guys while the Europeans let them out too quickly. The big crime surge started in America in the 1960s when we cut prison sentences. We finally got tough in the 1980s and a decade later we saw a payoff. The European crime surge started later than the American one, so they are still in the liberal wimp phase of response. (Also, having more guns, our worst criminals kill each other off at rates high enough, especially during the cracks years, to put a dent, I suspect, in the total crime rate.)

As for abortion rates, the pro-choice Alan Guttmacher think tank reports that in America the number of abortions per 1,000 non-Hispanic white women fell from 19 in 1991 to 11 by 1999. The African-American abortion rate was about 54 in 1999 (or close to five times higher) and the Hispanic rate about 30, making the overall national rate almost twice the white rate.

The most recent Alan Guttmacher Institute report says that non-Hispanic whites have only 40.9% of all abortions in the U.S.

The abortion rate in America (all races) is currently 20.9, compared to a global average of about 38 in "developed countries." The white American abortion rate of approximately 11 compares favorably to five of the seven advanced, mostly white countries broken out in the most AGI report: Australia 22.2, Sweden 18.7, Denmark 16.5, Canada 16.4, England & Wales 15.6. The U.S. white abortion rate, however, is worse than in Germany 7.6 and Holland 6.5.

So, the crime and abortion evidence suggests that religion has a good effect on the behavior of America's whites, although probably not as good an effect as long prison terms.

A Scandinavian reader comments:

I grew up in one of those low-crime, low-everything, nice Scandinavian countries. I spent my high-school years in an area with a substantial evangelical population and I can assure you that the evangelicals were quite simply better behaved than us secularists in just about every category imaginable. Was it their faith that guided them to less anti-social behavior?

Duh!

In summary, the popularity of this article is just another example of how the aversion to writing about racial differences in crime rates in America makes us stupider. This disingenuous essay about religion's effect on behavior comes along and lots of supposedly intelligent bloggers fall for it because they are clueless about racial differences in behavior.

And yet ... they aren't clueless at all when it comes to their own safety -- they don't buy a home for their family in a black underclass neighborhood, precisely because they know perfectly well how much more dangerous it is. They've just compartmentalized this knowledge into Facts I Live By and make sure it never contaminates the part of their brains where they fondle the Fantasies I Tell Other People to Live By.

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

Economists' infatuation with immigration

An economist writes:

In my view, economists have to be relatively favorable toward immigration, just as we have to be relatively favorable to free trade in general. It's our job to lean against xenophobia.

Thanks for clearing that up! Silly me, it had always been my impression that the job of economists was to tell the truth to the best of their abilities, but now I know better.

The funny thing is that you would think that economists, who are always extolling self-interest, would have observed the career of George Borjas and taken note that telling the truth about immigration, an underserved economic niche is there ever was one, can pay off big. In 1995, Borjas was hired away from UC San Diego (a nice locale but not the Ivy League) by Harvard precisely because he had made himself the leading expert on the economics of immigration, a subject of obvious national and international importance. Borjas now has an endowed chair at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Not too shabby, huh?

So, has there been a rush of studies of immigration by economists wanting to follow Borjas's path to the top of their profession? Nope. Economists will barely touch the subject, despite its massive centrality, except to issue fatuous obiter dicta about their feelings about how immigration just has to be wonderful.

Here's a ripe topic for an economist to study: what's wrong with the economics profession?

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

David Frum in the WSJ

The Frumster reviews The Right War? The Conservative Debate on Iraq. I sent OpinionJournal.com the following letter, but for some reason they didn't post it:

As a regular contributor to The American Conservative magazine, I'd like to point out that I strongly advocated America's war on the Taliban, but was highly skeptical of the ill-considered Iraq adventure that Mr. Frum whooped for so ferociously.

In contrast, Mr. Frum, during his brief tenure as a Presidential speechwriter, was responsible for concocting 2/3rds of the phrase "Axis of Evil" (Frum came up with "Axis of Hate"), a verbal invention so self-evidently stupid in its insincerity (claiming that long-term enemies Iraq and Iran and distant North Korea were allied!) that it proved the most globally alienating single phrase in American diplomatic history. At the beginning of 2002, after the conquest of the Taliban, America's prestige was never higher on the world stage, but Frum's idiotic phrase in the 2002 State of the Union address set off the long decline in America's position of leadership.

After doing as much damage to America as any speechwriter in decades, Frum still had the gall in the spring of 2003 to attack us conservatives who had displayed the traditional Burkean conservative virtue of prudence about his Iraq invasion as "unpatriotic."

Why does anyone still pay David Frum money for his opinions? How much harm can one man do to America, to the Republican Party, and to the conservative movement and still have people listen to him?

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

The latest installment in American journalism's longest running "Dog Bites Man" series

It seems like about once or twice a year throughout this decade, the New York Times runs an article on fashionable high schools in wealthy, liberal neighborhoods where the only problem is that the black (and/or Hispanic) students are not -- prepare to die of astonishment -- doing as well as the white (and/or Asian) students! The latest installment in "Occam's Butterknife" is today's "The Achievement Gap in Elite Schools" by Samuel G. Freedman:

AN uneasy amalgam of pride and discontent, Caroline Mitchell sat amid the balloons and beach chairs on the front lawn of Princeton High School, watching the Class of 2004 graduate. Her pride was for the seniors' average SAT score of 1237, third-highest in the state, and their admission to elite universities like Harvard, Yale and Duke. As president of the high school alumni association and community liaison for the school district, Ms. Mitchell deserved to bask in the tradition of public-education excellence.

Discontent, though, was what she felt about Blake, her own son. He was receiving his diploma on this June afternoon only after years of struggle - the failed English class in ninth grade, the science teacher who said he was capable only of C's, the assignment to a remedial "basic skills" class. Even at that, Ms. Mitchell realized, Blake had fared better than several friends who were nowhere to be seen in the procession of gowns and mortarboards. They were headed instead for summer school.

"I said to myself: 'Oh, no. Please, no,' " Ms. Mitchell recalled. "I was so hurt. These were bright kids. This shouldn't have been happening."

It did not escape Ms. Mitchell's perception that her son and most of those faltering classmates were black. They were the evidence of a prosperous, accomplished school district's dirty little secret, a racial achievement gap that has been observed, acknowledged and left uncorrected for decades. Now that pattern just may have to change under the pressure of the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Several months after Blake graduated, Princeton High School (and thus the district as a whole) ran afoul of the statute for the first time, based on the lagging scores of African-American students on a standardized English test given to 11th graders. Last month, the school was cited for the second year in a row, this time because 37 percent of black students failed to meet standards in English, and 55 percent of blacks and 40 percent of Hispanics failed in math.

One of the standard complaints about No Child Left Behind by its critics in public education is that it punishes urban schools that are chronically underfinanced and already contending with a concentration of poor, nonwhite, bilingual and special-education pupils. Princeton could hardly be more different. It is an Ivy League town with a minority population of slightly more than 10 percent and per-student spending well above the state average. The high school sends 94 percent of its graduates to four-year colleges and offers 29 different Advanced Placement courses. Over all, 98 percent of Princeton High School students exceed the math and English standards required by No Child Left Behind.

So is the problem with the district, or is the problem with the law?

Or just maybe the problem is with the black students?

TO be fair to Princeton, it is hardly the only community to include both a large number of superachieving students and a smaller but persistent number of low-income, nonwhite stragglers. Princeton, in fact, belongs to an organization of 25 similar school districts, the Minority Student Achievement Network, which includes Evanston, Ill.; Shaker Heights, Ohio; and Eugene, Ore., among others, that are working to find techniques to address the issue.

Princeton's superintendent, Judith Wilson, has accepted the challenge of reducing the achievement gap. As a newcomer to the district - she arrived last February from the working-class, half-minority district in Woodbury, N.J., near Camden - she sounds less beholden than some of her colleagues to Princeton's exalted sense of itself.

"If the gap can't be narrowed in Princeton," she said in an interview in her office last week, "then where can it be narrowed? There can't be a question here of resources, or of community support, or of quality of staff. So if we can't impact the students who are not born into privilege, then where can it happen?"

Good question.

One possibility I've kicked around is that this series of articles is planted by some IQ-realist mole within the New York Times.

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

NOLA '05 & Detroit '67

A reader writes:

Your notes about the emerging MSM "exaggerated reports" meme re: the Convention Center/Superdome anarchy yesterday, and then the quote from your 9/6 piece that “it's a key point borne out in many riots (such as Detroit in 1967), that violence, especially any level of sniping, has a paralyzing effect on rescue workers,” made me think a great deal about the respective blankets thrown over both cities’ breakdowns of authority.

My father was at the center of it all in Detroit in 1967—a surgical resident in the ER of an ‘inner-city’ hospital (and yes, he was shot at by a sniper when he went to the hospital roof during a break to get a view of the chaos)--and besides the many harrowing stories of those five days he told me, he imparted one lesson that has relevance beyond just that event, namely:

After-the-fact official reports of death and mayhem resulting from civil unrest always greatly understate the true toll.

To this day, the official death toll of the Detroit Riot of 1967 is 43 persons. My father stopped counting when he reached eighty bodies—and that was in just one of the temporary emergency morgues set up in Detroit during that crisis! There were at least two other morgues receiving the dead.

Now, the rationale behind post facto minimizations of death tolls is surely predictable and expected: city fathers want to sweep the true extent of the tragedy under the rug and declare the metropolis as back open for business, self-appointed leaders of the minority communities involved want to downplay the fact that their constituents largely victimized their own, etc. What is more interesting is the methodology by which the true numbers were obscured—in Detroit in 1967 my father found that this was being done by counting only people killed outright by gunshot as official riot deaths. If someone “fell” out of a 10th-story window in the riot zone—that was ruled an “accidental” death and not counted in the riot tally. Likewise, if someone was run over by a car—and said car then backed up over the person again and then forward over once more—well, that was to be counted as an “automobile accident”, and again, not part of the riot toll. Even gunshot victims were not counted if they died from complications after a decent interval had passed after the riot was declared to be officially “over”...

I strongly suspect that we will see the same dynamic at work in New Orleans in the coming weeks. The media will probably buy into the charade and amplify the conventional wisdom that, no, things in the Convention Center and Superdome really weren’t that bad, and hardly anyone was killed/raped/maimed in the violence. The authorities even have a ready-made excuse for explaining deaths that are uncovered—the storm itself! Sure, there’s evidence of blunt-force trauma all over this cadaver—but how do we know it wasn’t from a collapsing beam rather than a wielded tire iron? The question is whether the confluence of the blogosphere and available public data on the Internet can allow individuals with good analytical skills to let the truth out this time.

A reader sent me this article from a Nebraska newspaper:

Mortician surprised by New Orleans dead
By Josh Swartzlander / The Lincoln Journal Star

Mark Roper spent two weeks in St. Gabriel, La., this month, moving the bodies of Hurricane Katrina’s New Orleans victims into refrigerated trailers.

After watching the steady stream of corpses, Roper’s biggest surprise about the dead: almost all were elderly or homeless...

He was surprised by the number of homicides — people with gunshot wounds to their heads and backs.

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

More bad analysis

Drudge links to a Time of London article that claims:

Societies worse off 'when they have God on their side' By Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent

RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today...

The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society.

It compares the social peformance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution. Many conservative evangelicals in the US consider Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it inspires ..

The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports... “In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

“The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.”

Let's play Spot the Fallacies!

First, the Times should try reading the Times, which ran in its Sept. 18th edition an article entitled "Scotland tops world league for violent crime;"

According to the UN study, 3% of Scots had been victims of assault. The second highest figure was recorded in England and Wales at 2.8%, compared with 2% in America and 0.1% in Japan.

Second, American statistics look pretty good if you take out the 27% of the population that is black or Hispanic to make it more racially comparable to Britain's population. Blacks are incarcerated for violent crimes at 7.1 times the non-Hispanic white rate and Hispanics at 3.4 times the white rate. Similarly, blacks have about four times as many abortions and Hispanics about twice as many. All these other measures the article cites are worse among blacks and Hispanics as well.

When you do a direct apples to apples comparison of the white working classes in Britain and America, the Brits appear to be falling apart morally (e.g, drunkeness, assault, and burglary), while the Americans are holding their own. The single most plausible explanation, as I pointed out in VDARE.com earlier this year, is the stronger Christianity of the Americans.

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

Who Ya Gonna Believe?

The aptly-named "Lying Eyes" blog says it well about the latest Conventional Wisdom about the New Orleans Convention Center anarchy:

Reports That Conditions in NOLA Were Exaggerated are Exaggerated

An article from the Louisiana Times-Picayune (nola.com) has been circulating around (it was on Drudge) which claims that the horror stories from New Orleans were greatly exaggerated. This claim itself appears to be overstated. The article employs straw-man news reports to make its claim.

Strawman #1:
"I've got a report of 200 bodies in the Dome," Beron recalls the doctor saying. - Huh? I watched an awful lot of Katrina coverage, but never once heard anything like that - The real total was six, Beron said. - That's more like what I remember hearing - six deaths in the Dome.

Strawman #2
"I think 99 percent of it is bulls---," said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. "Don't get me wrong, bad things happened, but I didn't see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything.... Ninety-nine percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved." Well, ok, but reports of chaos and anarchy were not from the Dome, they were from the Convention Center.

Strawman #3
Four weeks after the storm, few of the widely reported atrocities have been backed with evidence. The piles of bodies never materialized [what piles of bodies?!], and soldiers, police officers and rescue personnel on the front lines say that although anarchy reigned at times and people suffered unimaginable indignities, most of the worst crimes reported at the time never happened. - get that - it was a f****** nightmare, but it wasn't a complete and total f****** nightmare, dammit!

The article then attempts to ridicule one of the demonstrably true reports that a guardsman was shot in the leg - it turns out the wound was self-inflicted. Why did the soldier shoot himself? "In the darkness, as he walked through about six inches of water, Watt was attacked with a metal rod..." - so he shot himself while trying to fight off a thug beating him with a metal rod! Silly soldier, shooting himself in the leg; silly media, exaggerating again!

The Convention Center is where all the controversy was, because this ended up being an impromptu shelter - thus there were no weapons searches, no authorities in place. The article makes a half-hearted effort to whitewash the situation: Inside the Convention Center, the rumors of widespread violence have proved hard to substantiate, as well, though the masses of evacuees endured terrifying and inhumane conditions. Yeah, sounds like a lovely time. Probably the best that can be said about conditions at the Convention Center is that there is only one substantiated murder, that there was likely only a handful of rapes, and that gunfire in the center may have been only intermittent, not continuous. There is no doubt about the voracious and destructive looting that occurred and the general lawlessness that prevailed.

This "exaggerated reports" meme is going to have some serious legs. Right now it's being promoted by Bush apologists as a way to rub away some of the stain Katrina has left on this administration. It will then be picked up in due course (after they've let all the witless Republicans do the heavy lifting for them) by leftists to promote their view of an oppressive society in league with a racist media. It will be this latter charge that will take hold - the collective memory of Bush incompetence will stick while the media will pound away on the race angle for years to come.

I'd add just a couple of things: (A) I predicted exactly three weeks ago on this iSteve.com blog that we'd be hearing this revisionism, and that it would have some basis in truth since during anarchic times, rumors always outrun reality. (B) But, any level of violence toward rescuers has a catastrophic effect. As I wrote on September 6th:

In fact, you should expect for there to be a lot of revisionism about how the level of violence wasn't really as bad as rumor said it was. Of course, as one resident told a TV crew, if somebody shot him and left him floating, his body would swell up and it's unlikely anybody would bother looking for bullets in him when his body was found. I suspect that there won't be a strong effort made to figure out the precise cause of death of all those swollen bodies fished out of the water.

But, it's a key point borne out in many riots (such as Detroit in 1967), that violence, especially any level of sniping, has a paralyzing effect on rescue workers. Sure, rumors outrun the reality, but think about what it would be like to be a cop or fireman who is supposed to go out in a boat and rescue people. You're putting your life vest on because there's a chance that some desperate survivor in the water might pull you in. But then your wife rushes in and says there are reports of snipers shooting at rescuers, and she insists you put on your bullet-proof vest instead. But that's heavy and would drag you right down to the bottom. So, you say, screw it, I'm calling in sick.

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

Forced to Be Fat

Olenka Frenkiel in the UK Spectator reports from Mauritania on something so bizarre it didn't even make the new War Nerd column on that Saharan country, "The Big Empty:"

RACE AND CULTURE: Forced to be fat

Mauritania

Strange place. And the strangest of missions. While the UN warns of famine, I am driving through the Sahara in search of fat ladies. I meet World Vision, a Christian relief agency, on the road and ask their project chief if she’s seen any.

‘Er, I don’t think so,’ she says with a withering look. ‘We’re in a stage three emergency here; that’s one step away from famine.’ Locusts have devoured harvests, rains have failed and as investigations go, this one feels absurd. Yet female obesity, not starvation, is what’s killing the women of Mauritania.

A doctor in the town of Kifa examines a woman in her thirties weighing in at 18 stone. ‘Most of the women here are obese,’ he says. ‘First they become less fertile. Then they get gallstones in their twenties, arthritis, diabetes and heart disease in their thirties and forties. By 50 and 60, if they survive that long, they can no longer walk. They are completely handicapped. They can do nothing.’ He wraps the woman’s arm in a giant blood-pressure sleeve. It is 160 over 120.

A younger woman in the obstetrics ward smiles in protest when Dr Sid Ahmed Ould Megeya, Mauritania’s surgeon general, explains that she has just lost her fourth consecutive baby in childbirth because of obesity. ‘I’m not fat,’ she says. ‘I’m just swollen because of heart disease.’ He smiles back and shakes his head.

‘You won’t see the really severe cases,’ he tells me. ‘They cannot get on to a camel or into a car. I have had women carried in on a blanket and rolled along the floor into my consulting room.’

What has brought this on? Not the junk foods that have fattened Westerners, though they are on their way and will compound the problem once Mauritania’s off-shore oil receipts start flowing this December. Here chronic obesity starts with the tradition of gavage — the force-feeding of girls from seven years old.

‘I was force-fed as a child,’ one woman tells me. ‘We all were. We thought it was good, that we would marry well. Now fashions have changed.’ Why do they do it? Force-feeding in this highly stratified, tribal, Islamic society comes from a mixture of cultural legacies which have conspired to fatten, immobilise and disable the women of Mauritania’s ruling tribes, the White Moors.

This is a country the size of France with fewer than three million people. Mostly desert, it’s where the Arabs once came to trade in the region’s most lucrative commodity: African slaves. Long after the rest of the world had banned the trade, Mauritania’s White Moors refused to give it up. It’s now been officially abolished at least three times, the last in 1980. Old habits die hard and although the word ‘slavery’ is now taboo, little black housemaids still grace many homes. For the women of the ruling tribes, to be fat is still a sign of being rich enough to be indolent and own slaves...

There’s a logic to it. It’s a society of camel breeders, so stocking up in times of plenty seems efficient. But add a little conservative Islam, which confines women to the home, plus the indolence that marks out the slave-traders from the traded, and you have a problem.

Like slavery, it’s all officially in the past, but one in ten Mauritanian girls are still force-fed according to independent estimates. Getting fat without Western food is long, hard work. A small child has to be forced to drink vast, unnatural quantities of milk — three or four litres of cow or camel milk — every night for years. The milk is mixed with couscous and water to swell the stomach. She is given marbles to play with to keep her still, she cannot play sports, ride a bike or run around, and older women supervise, ensuring the milk stays down. They clamp the child’s fingers and toes between sticks to stem the vomiting reflex by distracting the child with a little local pain. Often the girls vomit violently...

Women in the villages keep asking me for ‘cow-pills’, their name for steroids, which pharmacies sell illegally over the counter. I am sold a brand which is usually only for patients with terminal cancer.

‘You can always tell the ones on steroids,’ my driver says, his eyes twinkling. ‘They are large on top but their hips are small.’ ‘Acne and facial hair,’ adds the doctor to the list of symptoms. He isn’t smiling. He lost his own sister to steroid abuse. He looks at my stash of illegally bought drugs and shakes his head. ‘Did you really buy these here? They will kill you, the pharmacy should be shut down. He is a merchant of death. But it makes me sad,’ he says, ‘that a woman would risk her life just to be fat.’

Force Fed will be shown on BBC2 on 16 November at 7 p.m.

In case you're wondering who the White Moors are, here is Gary Brecher's explanation:

And that's the Mauritanian population today: "Moors" from the North [i.e. white Berbers forced out of the mountains of Northwest Africa and down into the Sahara] and "black Africans" from the South in about equal numbers, hating each other, wishing they were somewhere else. Just to make it more confusing, there are "white" Moors and "black" Moors. The black Moors used to be kept as slaves by the whites, but that only makes them even snobbier about their Moorishness. They have a real Moor-ier than thou attitude and go around sneering at the black non-Moors. Snobby slaves -- there's a lot of that going around.

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

Tom Piatak on Christopher Hitchens

The October 10th edition of The American Conservative, which should be on newsstands about now (subscribe here), is a good one with two pieces by me and Tom Piatak's demolition of Christopher Hitchens's career. An excerpt from Piatak's article:

So where does this lover of Trotsky and hater of God, this despiser of religion and tradition and devotee of “permanent revolution,” this anti-Catholic bigot and reviler of Reagan and John Paul, now find an ideological home? Among the neoconservatives, naturally. As Hitchens told Johann Hari in the same interview where he said “I don’t regret anything,” he admires Paul Wolfowitz, whom he described as a “real bleeding heart.” According to Hari, Hitchens sees neoconservatism as a “distinctively new strain of thought, preached by ex-leftists, who believed in using US power to spread democracy.” Hari also wrote that Hitchens believes that if neoconservatism “can become dominant within the Republican Party, it can turn US power into a revolutionary force.” Barry Didcock came to a similar conclusion in the June 5, 2005 Sunday Herald after interviewing Hitchens: “The way Hitchens tells it, he began to realize, as the 1990s wore on, that US force could and should be used to fight what he saw as the forces of fascism.” Hitchens still wants world revolution; the only difference is that now he sees us Americans as perfectly placed to do the fighting and the dying needed to achieve his Trotskyist dream.

As both the Hari and Didcock interviews make clear, Hitchens was able to overcome his past squeamishness about American military force, not because America is threatened, but because the threat now comes from men who believe in Allah rather than Marx. Didcock notes, “the origins of [Hitchens’s] position lie in his long-held distaste for religion,” and Hitchens told Hari, “The United States was attacked by theocratic fascists who represent all the most reactionary elements on earth. ... However bad the American Empire has been, it is not as bad as this.” Hitchens also wrote—in the same column in which he extolled the priest-killing potency of the French and Russian Revolutions—that “George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he—and the US armed forces—have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled.” [Although, in reality, we seemed to have replaced the secularist dictator of Iraq with the Grand Ayatollah's brother-in-law.] Hitchens’ entire politics is motivated by his hatred of religion and tradition; he’d be just as happy bombing St. Peter’s as the Taliban.

... The irony, of course, is that Hitchens has hardly cast his lot with the “Let A Hundred Flowers Bloom” school of conservatism. The neocons prattle on endlessly about “moral clarity” and display a fondness for ideological purges but have never been anything but indulgent toward Hitchens. They have not criticized his Bolshevism or his hatred of religion....

What the mutual embrace of Hitchens and the neocons tells us is that Hitchens’ assessment of neoconservatism is essentially correct: the regnant force in American conservatism today is warmed-over Trotskysim, which views America merely as the embodiment of the ideology of global revolution. This is, admittedly, a depressing conclusion. But there is hope. Hitchens spent the first half of his ideological career riding a dying horse. He may just have started riding another one.

To read the rest (and there's lots more good stuff), buy the magazine.

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

Catholic priests

In the wake of the boy-fondling scandals, the Vatican is following the common-sensical policy of the Boy Scouts in trying to ban male homosexuals from becoming leaders. However, this could set off a series of chain reactions that could eventually turn the Catholic Church in America into something resembling the evangelical Protestant megachurch model.

The Catholic Church relies on having a sizable number of priests, religious employees of fair-to-middling charisma, unlike the entrepreneurial megachurches, which are typically built by a single superstar preacher.

The glory days of the American Catholic Church in the first half of the 20th Century were built upon the masculine charisma of celibate Irish priests, who typically came from large families, when parents felt assured of getting lots of grandchildren out of their other kids. But in these days of two child families, parents aren't encouraging their sons to become celibate priests.

Banning gays only makes recruiting enough priests an even tougher task. In recent decades, the Catholic Church in America has relied on importing priests from the Third World to make up its existing shortfall, which has generally worsened the charisma problem since many of them don't speak English well. For example, the Vietnamese priest at our parish always tells a joke during each of his sermons. If you listen really hard, they turn out to be pretty funny jokes, but he has never, ever gotten a laugh because his accent is so thick that the parishioners just tune out as soon as he starts his homily.

Two often-recommended steps for the Catholic Church to take is to ordain women and to allow married priests. The first wouldn't work without the second, because if you opened up the priesthood to unmarried women, there would eventually be a large lesbian element among priests, and nobody (especially the straight males who pay a lot of the bills) wants to go to church to be harangued by resentful lesbians.

Lifting the 1,000-year-old requirement for priestly celibacy would make sense for several reasons, both in terms of broadening the pool of potential priests and lessening the chances for sex scandals. The celibacy rule made sense in medieval society as a way to fight nepotism in the Church when those were the best meritocratic positions available, but, today, there are lots of better jobs than in the Church so nepotism isn't much of a problem.

The snag in lifting the celibacy ban is economic: the American Catholic Church doesn't pay enough to support married people with children. New York magazine recently reported that a parish priest in NYC earns $18,000 per annum (although he often gets free housing). Catholics don't have a tradition of tithing 10% of their income.

The Protestant megachurch model is an example of the winner-take-all trend in our economy, where a single charismatic preacher can make a comfortable living for his family by recruiting a vast congregation.

So, it's likely that the Catholic Church will slowly gravitate in that direction, although the Church never does anything quickly.

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

Skinny fashion models on cocaine

A decade or so ago, journalist Toby Young talked Vanity Fair into anointing London as the city of the moment for its amazing new energy. When he got back to London to supervise the photo shoots of celebrities, he discovered where the energy had come from since he had left for New York a few years before: London's celebs were suddenly snorting cocaine as if they were at Studio 54 in 1979.

One moral advantage the U.S. now enjoys in our having movie stars at the top of the American celebrity food chain -- unlike the English, whose ranks are dominated by models like Kate Moss (recently camera-phoned while snorting vast amounts of cocaine), pop stars, and the like -- is that for them to remain movie stars, they have to stay insurable by the firms that insure film productions against delays or disasters ... such as the star being hauled off to the Betty Ford Clinic in the middle of principal photography. And the insurance companies are less naive today than they were during the Great Hollywood Snowstorm of roughly 1975-1985. While hardly foolproof, the insurance companies now provide a useful incentive for non-self destructive behavior among our our celebrity elite.

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

New Orleans v. Bombay

A reader writes:

Many have blamed the looting and violence in New Orleans on poverty, racism, and neglect.

Major recent flooding in the Indian city of Bombay (population about 18 million) lead to severe consequences for the city. Over 1000 people were killed, parts of the city were destroyed, and the government was unable to handle the situation effectively. It's interesting to note that according to the Bombay police, there were no reports of looting or violence. Personal accounts from city residents, foreign travelers, and media reporters also indicate there was no lawlessness - even with all the opportunities that existed in the chaotic situation. City residents actually worked together to provide humanitarian assistance, businessmen handed out free food, slum dwellers and even criminals rescued people, and some provided strangers with a place to stay.

By most measures (poverty, economic inequality, access to education and healthcare, discrimination [i.e., the caste system]) the average poor person in Bombay is vastly much worse off than the average poor person in New Olreans. Yet one city's residents acted like the Japanese and the other city's residents acted like Haitians. It seems to me that the exemplary behavior of the residents of Bombay should disprove the theory that poverty and discrimination lead to lawlessness.

Yahoo News reported:

In New Orleans there was shooting and looting when the floods came last week. When a similar inundation struck India's financial capital Mumbai a month earlier, there was no violence, just free wada-pav bread...

Mumbai police commissioner A.N. Roy confirmed there were no cases of looting, arson or violence when the floods hit. "Even stray cases of robbery were not heard or reported," he said.

Mumbai has nearly 20 million residents. New Orleans had about 500,000.

In case you are wondering, "Mumbai" is the new way to spell "Bombay" that was invented by The People in Charge of Confusing You.

A reader writes:

That account was absolutely accurate by the way. My sister lives in Bombay currently. And she could have corroborated the facts. She was actually quite shocked when she saw the footage of rioting in New Orleans and all the stories about rapes and looting.

Another reader writes:

The scale of the Great Katrina Cover-Up is just dawning on me. (I'm a little slow on the uptake. My mother always said so) ...

What a peculiar thing. Everybody seems to know all about this, yet the public culture is silent. See no black anarchy; hear no black anarchy; say no black anarchy. Amazing, amazing. A complete flight from reality.

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