January 4, 2006

Marion Barry and me: Great minds think alike

Having argued for years that mid-January was a dumb time for the Martin Luther King holiday, I was pleased to see support for my view from former Washington D.C. mayor Marion Barry, who was definitely one of the most fun mayors this country has had (assuming you didn't have to live in his city), and he knows that the dead of winter is not a fun time for MLK day. The Washington Post reports:

A committee appointed by D.C. Council member Marion Barry has moved the District's annual Martin Luther King Jr. parade from its traditional date near King's birthday in wintry January to the warmer month of April, when the civil rights leader was assassinated. This year, according to Barry's office, the parade will be held April 1 -- April Fool's Day...

Chuck Bowens, a member of the parade committee, said the group voted unanimously last month to postpone the parade because the members were worried about subjecting children and "senior VIPs" such as Wilhelmina Rolark and Barry himself to January's often frigid weather. Last year, days after Barry was hospitalized for flulike symptoms, the parade was canceled at the last minute because of plunging temperatures.

At a meeting just before Christmas, Bowens said, the parade committee began discussing last year's cancellation and "started talking about, 'What's the rain date?' And someone said, 'What about the date of King's death? That's in warm weather.' And it was kind of like a veil being lifted, and the whole discussion turned toward that."...

Reaction to the change has been fast and, mostly, furious... Aside from the disrespectful symbolism of remembering King on April Fool's Day, Pannell said, it makes no sense to hold a parade that marks King's murder. "If you want to commemorate an assassination, that should be something that is done with some solemnity," Pannell said. "You don't commemorate a person's assassination with marching bands."

Well, that's why I've suggested moving it to August, a month crying out for a holiday, which could commemorate Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech on August 28, 1963.


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

January 2, 2006

Feminist Corruption

Early in 2005, I wrote in The American Conservative about the financial conflicts of interest and web of backscratching among Harvard President Larry Summers's most enraged feminist critics. After reviewing MIT professor Nancy Hopkins's conflict of interest, I turned to a second case that wasn't mentioned anywhere else in the voluminous commentary on Summers's remarks on why science and engineering departments at Harvard are heavily male:

Similarly, Denice D. Denton was celebrated for standing up to Summers to, in her words, "speak truth to power." This heroic tableau of the humble, no-doubt-discriminated-against woman engineering professor daring to defy the mighty male university president lost some luster when it emerged that Denton was UC Santa Cruz's chancellor-designate at $275,000 annually. One college supremo attempting to intimidate another one into not mentioning inconvenient facts is not what most people visualize as speaking truth to power.

A few days later, Tanya Schevitz reported in the San Francisco Chronicle on how Denton plays the game. The headline read, "UC hires partner of chancellor: creates $192,000 post for Santa Cruz chief's lesbian lover." ...

But Denton had a powerful defender in the woman scientist who had formerly headed UC Santa Cruz. M.R.C. Greenwood praised UCSC's two-for-the-price-of-three deal for the lesbian academics as the cost of gender diversity: UCSC "should be commended for attracting and hiring two very qualified female engineers."

Greenwood herself had just moved up to provost of the UC system, at $380,000 per year, almost $100,000 more than the man she replaced. Moreover, she had quietly brought with her a female scientist friend from Santa Cruz to fill the novel post of "Executive Faculty Associate to the Provost."

Are you noticing a pattern here?

Schevitz now reports on the latest on Greenwood:

The University of California's former No. 2 official, who resigned under a cloud last month, violated conflict-of-interest rules by helping to create a management job for a friend with whom she owned rental property, a UC investigation concluded Wednesday.

In addition, UC investigators found that a subordinate for the former official, ex-Provost M.R.C. Greenwood, had improperly helped create an internship for Greenwood's son, though they couldn't find evidence he had done so at Greenwood's direction...

UC said it started the investigation after The Chronicle asked about Greenwood's role in the hiring of two people: her friend and business partner, Lynda Goff, for a job at UC's headquarters, and Greenwood's son, James Greenwood, for a midcareer internship at UC Merced.

But UC won't take any action against Greenwood, 62, as a result of the investigation. In fact, a separation agreement that Greenwood and UC agreed to in November, a month before the investigation was completed, grants the former No. 2 official a 15-month leave at $301,840 a year. The money is a combination of the salary she earned as provost and in her previous job as UC Santa Cruz chancellor.

UC also promised Greenwood the right to return after her leave to UC Davis, where she worked years earlier, as a tenured professor of nutrition and internal medicine earning $163,800. In addition, UC agreed to give her $100,000 in research funding.

Sheldon Steinbach, vice president and general counsel with the American Council on Education in Washington, D.C., said it was "highly unusual" for the university not to have waited until the investigation was complete before deciding the terms of Greenwood's departure.

"This would seem indeed peculiar when you have mounting evidence of potential violations of university regulations to conclude a settlement prior to a determination of a full investigation," Steinbach said. "It seems at variance with common practice." ...

The latest revelations come on the heels of reports in The Chronicle that UC gave employees hundreds of millions of dollars in hidden pay and perks in addition to salaries and overtime. The state Legislature, which oversees a significant portion of UC's funding, is planning to hold hearings early next year into the university's compensation practices.

In the report released Wednesday, UC's general counsel said Greenwood should have recused herself from helping to promote Goff, 56, a UC Santa Cruz administrator who owned rental property with Greenwood in Davis.

Two months after Greenwood started as provost in April 2004, she hired Goff as an executive faculty associate. Then in August 2004, she hired Goff for a yearlong position in academic affairs with a $192,100 salary, a $44,300 raise from her pay at Santa Cruz.

In addition, the offer included a faculty relocation allowance of $50,000 and a low-interest housing loan if Goff were to take a permanent appointment in UC's academic affairs office. She eventually did so.

This past August, Greenwood offered Goff a permanent position as director of UC's new Science and Math Initiative, reporting to her. Goff took the job.

"Given their business relationship, Dr. Greenwood should not have participated in any way in decisions respecting Dr. Goff's employment," the UC report said.

Did there joint ownership of property reflect merely a business relationship?

In the Santa Cruz Sentinel, one Conn Hallinan, lecturer in journalism at UC Santa Cruz, was not pleased:

'Integrity in hiring? UC? An oxymoron. What happened with Goff and Greenwood is part of a pattern I call "academic corruption." The rationale is that these people could make so much more money working for some private university or private industry. I don't see either beating a path to their doors.

They have well-paid jobs in the nicest state in the union, and we have to give them $70,000 to move 72 miles? We have to invent jobs for their kids or friends? We give them low-interest loans while students burden themselves with crushing debt at high interest in overcrowded classes that make it almost impossible to graduate in four years? We cut programs and services so some kid of a vice provost can get a made-up internship that cost $5,000 less than our entire journalism program? ...

The corruption is not only at the level of the President's Office, it is part of the structure of the university, and the Regents are no better. The only reason they are annoyed is they got sidelined on all of this. But letting the Regents investigate this all is like recruiting the foxes to find out who has been pinching chickens. This was stealing taxpayers' money, plain and simple. You restore integrity by ending the skull-and-bones style of running a great public university and give it back to the people who send their children there.'

Of course, Larry Summers quickly backed down under pressure from these women, and promised $50 million to fund additional feminist corruption.


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

Have yourself a Chalabi little Christmas

with the emphasis on "little:" MSNBC reports:

Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi appears to have suffered a humiliating defeat at the recent Iraq polls, according to the uncertified preliminary results.

The news comes just a month after Chalabi had conducted a tour of Washington in an effort to patch up his tattered image in America. Paperwork shows that in November Chalabi’s Washington representative hired a powerful D.C. lobbying firm.

The election results in Iraq may present Chalabi’s ardent U.S. supporters with a quandary: Chalabi, as well as other losing candidates, is alleging fraud in the election, even though the Bush administration hailed the vote as a historic step for democracy in Iraq...

Preliminary results in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad indicate that Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress scored a minuscule 0.36 percent of the votes.

Out of almost 2.5 million voters in Baghdad, only 8,645 voted for Chalabi.

In the Shiite city of Basra, the results indicate he had an equally dismal showing of 0.34 percent of the vote.

During the election, Chalabi’s campaign posters proclaimed, "We Liberated Iraq."

Via Glaivester.


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

My review of Tim Harford's book The Undercover Economist

appeared in the New York Post on Christmas Day. It is online -- you can find it here. (You'll have to do the free registration thing to read it in full.)


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

A reader writes:

Just wanted to say Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and thank for your writings for the last year. I watched a FIFTEEN minute segment on Fox Friday on what happens in the brain that makes shopping so pleasurable, and I kept saying out loud, "What about gender differences?". But they never touched this obvious question, and by the end I was shouting and finally said, "Thank God for Steve."

That reminds me of a Chicago Tribune article from the mid-1980s about a tradition in the western half of Michigan: on the first day of deer season, the husbands go hunting, while their wives travel to Chicago, check into hotels, and go shopping on Michigan Avenue. The article, to its credit, was all about sex differences, but I was frustrated that the term "hunters and gatherers" never appeared in it. The more things change, the more they stay the same...


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

Sorry to see WaPo op-edster William Raspberry go

He's retiring after 39 years, and he'll be missed in a roster of columnists who shot their own reputations in the foot over the Iraq Attaq. Raspberry has been a gentleman and a voice of sanity.


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

Does having daughters make you vote left?

The Times of London reports:

Andrew Oswald, from Warwick University, and Nattavudh Powdthavee, of the Institute of Education at London University, have discovered that how parents vote is linked to the gender of their children. The more daughters there are in a household, the more likely the parents are to vote Labour or Liberal Democrat. In an unpublished paper that has been submitted to an economics journal, the pair declare: “This paper provides evidence that daughters make people more left wing. Having sons, by contrast, makes them more right wing.” ...

Professor Oswald and Dr Powdthavee drew their data from the British Household Panel Survey, which has monitored 10,000 adults in 5,500 households each year since 1991 and is regarded as an accurate tracker of social and economic change. Among parents with two children who voted for the Left (Labour or Lib Dem), the mean number of daughters was higher than the mean number of sons. The same applied to parents with three or four children. Of those parents with three sons and no daughters, 67 per cent voted Left. In households with three daughters and no sons, the figure was 77 per cent.

But it was the “switchers” who provided the most compelling evidence. By examining declared voting preferences for the period 1991 to 2004, Professor Oswald and Dr Powdthavee found that 539 people switched from Left to Right, and 802 switched from Right to Left. The most significant difference between these two groups of switchers? The voters who swung from Right to Left had borne, on average, more daughters.

Professor Oswald, the father of two daughters, sat on the results for three months. He decided to release them this week, after finding the same pattern in German households. For every daughter a German has, he is 2.5 per cent more likely to vote for the SPD, the largest party of the Left. The link holds true even when parental age, income and education are taken into account, and Professor Oswald is certain it is causal. Since voting patterns cannot determine the gender of children, he says, the children’s gender must be influencing parental voting pattern.

But how and why? He frames his theory in utilitarian terms: because women tend to be more group-oriented, and to be paid less, we may expect them to favour a political system that taxes heavily and spends the taxes on communal improvements, such as crèches or police patrols. Women benefit from such policies without bearing a high tax burden because they are on low incomes. Parents of daughters are subconsciously aware that such policies favour women, and thus feel more inclined towards them.

Has anybody seen data like this for the U.S.? It sounds plausible here too. I think it's one reason why states where white people have more children are so much more likely to be red states than blue states. Feminism makes the most sense to people who don't have sons, and the more kids you have, the more likely you are to have sons. Roughly speaking, half of people with one child have no son, versus only 1/8th of people with three kids.


A reader writes:

"I looked at the General Social Survey and compared the answers given by 56
respondents who have three sons and no daughters with 59 people who have
three daughters and no sons. Twenty-three percent of the first group said
they were liberal, while only 16 percent of the second group described
themselves as liberal. So, there is no evidence here that having daughters
liberalizes parents. In my own experience, having a daughter makes me
think about the threat posed by criminals, so if there is any influence it
would be in a conservative direction."

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

Looking for a worthy place to make a tax deductible contribution this week?

Don't forget VDARE! The immigration restriction movement has made enormous progress since VDARE.com's founding in late 1999, when the movement was utterly dead in the water. With VDARE playing the role as the intellectual avant-garde, immigration skepticism has come a tremendous distance. (Further, VDARE has provided me with a platform for many of my most important works on a huge variety of subjects.)

Yet, the powerful and wealthy interest groups are still arrayed overwhelmingly in favor of the current system, or a worse replacement, and it will still take one helluva fight for the good guys to win. The glory and the curse of this movement are that few special interests support immigration reform. The financial survival of the movement is largely dependent on the generosity of individual patriots like yourself.

And don't forget to write my name in somewhere, and those of your other favorite VDARE writers, to alert the editors of your preferences.

  • You can donate by check or credit card—and you can do it monthly if you prefer. ALSO: you can now fax your credit card info! Donations are tax-deductible.

  • We are delighted see donations of any size—$10, 100, $1,000, $10,000. But we do feel especially good about the larger ones!

  • Special to 2005! President Bush signed the Katrina Emergency Tax Relief Act, which effectively permits an individual to deduct cash contributions up to 100 percent of Adjusted Gross Income. THIS IS THE YEAR TO GIVE BIG! (Email donate@vdare.com for details)

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

Calling Nicholas Wade

The indispensable role of the New York Times' genetics reporter in the global intellectual ecosystem has been underscored, in the absence of anything from Wade, by the remarkable lack of attention given Eric Wang, Bob Moyzis, et al's hugely important paper listing 1,800 genes that have been under different Darwinian selection pressures in different parts of the world over the last 50,000 or fewer years, according to the HapMap of the DNA of blacks in West Africa, whites in Europe, and East Asians in China and Japan. In other words, race isn't just skin deep.

By any objective standard, this paper is big news, but, according to Google News, the only English-language newspaper in the world that appears to have carried any mention of the study so far is New Kerala in southwest India.

In the vaunted blogosphere, mention of the significance of the paper was largely restricted to what I sometimes unhumbly think of as the Steveosphere. Outside of sites in my Links (near the top of the left column), there are only a handful of comments, mostly to the (boring) effect that this paper sticks one in the eye of Intelligent Design.

Granted, it's Christmas, but still, it shows, despite all the self-adulation about the freedom of thought made possible by the Internet, just how PC-whipped most supposed intellectuals are, and just how much we are dependent on a few crucial individuals having the financial wherewithal to be able to carry on their careers.


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

Monotheism as punching bag

The uptick in killing in the many decades long civil war in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon, south of India) reminds me of how often you hear how monotheistic religions cause so much violence. For example, Peter Watson, the author of Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, From Fire to Freud, when asked to name history's worst idea, responded in the New York Times:

"Without question, ethical monotheism. The idea of one true god. The idea that our life and ethical conduct on earth determines how we will go in the next world. This has been responsible for most of the wars and bigotry in history."

Maybe Mr. Watson will tell us how Genghis Khan was actually a closet monotheist. (Although this Unitarian-Universalist tract "Genghis Khan as a Religious Liberal?" makes the Mighty Man-Slayer sound like a precursor of Unitarianism.)

Here's the War Nerd on the Sri Lanka civil war:

"The players here are the Sinhalese, who are maybe two-thirds of the population, and the Tamils, who are the other third. The Sinhalese hang out in the South and West of the island and the Tamils stick to the northeast. The Sinhalese are Buddhists, the Tamils are Hindus... That's 20 years of war. Something like 60,000 dead and a lot more hurt, blinded or maimed."


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

"It's a Wonderful Live"

Christmas wasn't always a time for slow movies -- I've sat through a lot of looooong, dragged out films over the last week as Hollywood releases its serious films, but one Christmas-season picture showed awesome energy almost to the point of mania: "It's a Wonderful Life." My wife and I caught the last 15 minutes of Frank Capra's 1946 classic on Christmas Eve, and what a freight train of a flick. The prolificacy of invention is astonishing. You might think Capra would slow down to let the emotions sink in, but he keeps redoubling the speed, and he had my wife and me bawling within ten minutes.


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

They've already got their tuxedoes

Last summer, a reader wrote to say he'd had a dream about the Academy Awards coming up in couple of months. He dreamt that Sean Penn and Steven Spielberg and all the usual suspects kept losing to ... penguins, lots and lots of penguins coming up on stage to accept all the Oscars.

I laughed then, but now I'm wondering. I'm far from convinced that "March of the Penguins" was the Best Picture of 2005, but I suspect I could make a better case for "Penguins" as Best Picture than for anything else released in 2005.


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

Shooting fish in a barrel

Now that common sense about immigration appears to be finally breaking out on Capitol Hill, Wall Street Journal editorials are verging on apoplexy. Punching holes in them is getting too easy. Here's the WSJ's latest:


Tom Tancredo's Wall


The Colorado Congressman tries to make America the world's biggest gated community.

... Tom Tancredo has done everyone a favor by stating plainly the immigration rejectionists' endgame--turn the United States into the world's largest gated community.


Great argument! Who in the world would want to live in a "gated community?"

Uh, except for Wall Street Journal subscribers, who are far more likely to live in gated communities than subscribers to any other newspaper.

And what proportion of Wall Street Journal editors live in apartment buildings with doormen who keep a baseball bat close at hand to keep out illegal entrants? Why shouldn't the average American citizen similarly enjoy living in a gated country?

By the way, this editorial is a perfect example of one of my recurrent themes: the utter disconnect between public discourse and private behavior regarding real estate.


A reader writes:


Yeah, of course our elites are all for illegal immigration since they have enough money to shield themselves from its consequences. On my way up to New York City last Friday, I sat a couple seats over from [the WSJ's favorite "expert" on immigration] Tamar Jacoby on the Business Class Acela train. Lots of room, no riffraff and screaming kids like you get on the regular train. It was quite a metaphor, I felt: Tamar doesn't even want to take the train with the common folk, yet she wants to...well, you know.


Another reader writes:


The funniest thing about the editorial was their use of the phrase “smears the law-abiding aliens with the lawbreakers.” The absence of the word illegal before aliens jumps off the page. A complete non sequiter. How about “the small but vocal constituency” which I believe is 70% of the American people opposed to illegal immigration. It is getting really hard to take anything they say seriously.

In Jeffrey Hart’s column on American Conservatism he stated that “ideology is always wrong because it edits reality and paralyzes thought.” It is hard to find a clearer example of this than the WSJ and open immigration.


On the WSJ site, readers tee off on the WSJ's editorial here.


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

"Casanova"

"Casanova" stars Heath Ledger as the legendary lover. With all the downer serious movies out now, this low-brow but high-spirited costume farce set in Venice in 1753 is a welcome relief. Ledger, the star of "Bareback Mounting," plays Casanova in the withering, clench-jawed style of George Sanders, one of my all time favorites (best known today for "All About Eve," where Sanders portrayed the corrupt drama critic Addison DeWitt squiring the young Marilyn Monroe, whom he introduces as "a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art").

In the opening scene, the Inquisition accuses Casanova of sneaking into a convent and fornicating with a novice. "Well, I'd hardly call her a novice," Ledger mutters dryly in classic Sanders style. Ledger looks bored with and contemptuous of the proceedings, which was Sanders's trademark.

It says a lot about the conservatism of contemporary sexual mores that this 2005 version of "Casanova" devotes only the first five minutes to his amorous career and the rest of the movie to the indefatigable one discovering the joys of monogamy. (The movie is a soft R, closer to PG-13.)

Unfortunately, Sienna Miller is dull in an awful role as the anachronistic butt-kicking babe and proto-feminist nag for whom Casanova implausibly forswears all other women in the world. All the critics complain that there are no good roles for women these days, but nobody has the guts to blame the lack of sexy leading roles on feminism. Unless you have a major fetish for women-with-weapons (which a lot of nerds seem to have these days), it's hard even to notice actresses these days. (Check out how uninspiring the front-runners for the Best Actress nomination are here.)

The ending is borrowed from "Cat Ballou," but when you set anything in Venice, even when you've seen it all before, there's still plenty to look at.

The sweetest thing about "Casanova" is how it handles the "Ralph Bellamy role." Like Bill Pullman in the 1990s, Ralph Bellamy specialized in roles in romantic comedies as the unsexy fiancée who loses the leading lady to the leading man, most famously being humiliated in the incredibly funny but cruel "His Girl Friday," as he loses Rosalind Russell to Cary Grant.

In "Casanova," young Sienna Miller is betrothed to her late father's cousin's son, a rich merchant of Genoa. Her still sexy mother, played by aging bombshell Lena Olin, who is bored with being a widow, sympathizes with her daughter's reluctance to marry a man she has never met, but points out that that her own arranged marriage to her enormously fat father was rapturously happy.

Sienna's fiancé, the Lard King of Genoa, finally arrives on his barge, He is played by 45-year-old Oliver Platt at what looks like about 350 pounds, and it appears that this movie is going to treat him even worse than Cary Grant treated Ralph Bellamy.

But something funny happened in my showing. The audience took a real liking to the Lard King and started rooting for him. The most popular of the many plot twists came when this kindly middle-aged fat man and the leading lady's well-preserved mom fall for each other at first sight, freeing the disagreeable daughter to marry Casanova.

The plots of romantic comedies are inevitably formulaic, so I'd like it if screenwriters would make it standard practice to routinely add a subplot pairing off the thwarted Ralph Bellamy character with somebody more suitable than the leading lady. Ralph's never going to get Rosalind because he's not Cary. But then, who is? So, why should he be abused for not being Cary Grant? Help him find some happiness too.


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

Why the Iraq Attaq?

In The Assassins' Gate, former liberal hawk George Packer writes:

"Why did the United States invade Iraq? It still isn't possible to be sure -- and this remains the most remarkable thing about the Iraq War."

One particularly dumb rationale of the American neoconservatives like Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, who wrote the "Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, was the "everybody move over one theory:"

"Israel would annex the occupied territories, the Palestinians would get Jordan, and the Jordanian Hashemites would be restored to the throne of Iraq."

The notion that the Jordanian royal family would want to leave semi-civilized Jordan for barbaric Iraq, where their relatives were torn limb from limb in 1958, beggars the imagination. But Wurmser, who in September 2003 was appointed Dick Cheney's Middle East adviser and whose Israeli-born wife is founder of MEMRI, had it all worked out in his 1996 strategy paper for Netanyahu:

"Instead of retreating from occupied lands in exchange for dubious promises of peace, Wurmser wrote, Israel should take the fight to the Palestinians and their Arab backers and create a realignment of forces in the Middle East that would guarantee Israel's security. Iraq played a central, if utterly fanciful, role in this scenario. The paper dreamed of restoring the Hashemite family of Jordan (deposed from the Iraqi throne in 1958, the year of the republican coup and Chalabi's departure) to rule in Baghdad. The monarchy, in turn, despite being Sunni Muslim, would win over Iraq's Shia because 'the Shia venerate foremost the Prophet's family, the direct descendant of which -- in whose veins the blood of the Prophet flows -- is King Hussein.' With Shiite support, the newly enthroned Hashemites 'could use their influence over Najaf to help Israel wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria.' Then the Palestinians, isolated and alone, would have to accept Israeli demands." ...

Netanyahu, who has to live in the real Middle East, apparently paid little attention to the neocons' Rube Goldberg scheme. In general, the actual Likudists in Israel, as opposed to their auxiliary in Washington, never cared all that much about Iraq. Their attention was focused on Syria and Iran instead.

But that rebuff didn't stop the Washington neocons:

"Wurmser elaborated the theory in his 1999 book Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein, published by the American Enterprise Institute, the right-wing think tank where he was a scholar. The overthrow of Saddam would destabilize both Syria and Iran, isolate Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah, and realign the entire Middle East so that -- although this was never spelled out, as if the author feared making himself too clear -- Israel would no longer need to negotiate with the Palestinians over the occupied territories. Tyranny's Ally, with an introduction by Richard Perle and acknowledgments to Perle, Chalabi, Feith, [Bernard] Lewis, and several other intellectuals of the Iraq War, is a strange and revealing book. It reads as if a graduate student were feverishly trying to apply half-digested concepts he'd learned in a class with Leo Strauss to subject matter he'd learned in a class with Bernard Lewis. ... Wurmser wanted to return Iraq to traditional values, especially to Shiite religious tradition (about which he knew almost nothing)."

Why is Wurmser still employed in Cheney's office? Doesn't America deserve less ludicrous foreign policy advisors than these guys? Well, perhaps we just get the quality of advice we deserve, but do we have to get it quite so good and hard?


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

What readers are really interested in.

Slate.com lists its Top 10 most read articles of 2005. My eyes are glazing over just glancing at the titles.

During 2005, Slate covered the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and the future of the Supreme Court, but our most popular stories were, for the most part, about dogs, beer, celebrities, and naked ladies. Below you'll find a list of the 10 pieces that attracted the most readers this year.


1) Dog Day Afternoon
When summer fashions go bad.

2) When Tush Comes to Dove
Real women. Real curves. Really smart ad campaign.


3) Crazy for You
How Michael Jackson got off.


4) Do Dogs Think?
Owners assume their pet's brain works like their own. That's a big mistake.


5) Top Dog
Why Americans love Labrador retrievers.


6) Kate Moss
The ironies of her downfall.


7) The Murder of Emmett Till
The 49-year-old story of the crime and how it came to be told.

8) Rachael Ray
Why food snobs should quit picking on her.


9) Welcome to Miller Time, Loser
The great American beer crisis.


10) Pity the Poor Prince
Charles is atoning for the sins of rich, middle-aged men everywhere.

I presume that Slate, like almost all journals with a public affairs orientation, has a majority male readership, but its female readers apparently flock to the fluff, thus this dismal list of most popular articles.

Have I mentioned lately that women readers are the bane of serious journalism? Especially because women are more desirable targets for advertisers because men in this country transfer about one trillion dollars per year of their earnings to women to spend?


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

What a long strange trip

it's been for Robert Trivers, who during the early 1970s was one of the most brilliant evolutionary theorists ever. Now, I'm happy to see he's back with a magisterial tome Genes in Conflict: The Biology of Selfish Genetic Elements, co-written with Austin Burt. "Selfish genetic elements" are bits of DN that don't raise the Darwinian fitness of the organism as a whole, just of their own kind, often at the expense of the overall creature.

As a crude analogy for what Trivers and Burt are describing, think of the Enron Corporation. Traditional economic theory, which bears many resemblances to traditional evolutionary theory, would conceive of Enron as a single entity that competes against other firms for the good of its shareholders. Unfortunately, old fashioned economics did not prove an adequate guide to Enron's behavior because the firm was infested with "selfish managerial elements," executives who were looting the firm for their own selfish benefit.

Just as firms have evolved various carrots to to align individual managers' self-interests with the interests of the stockholders ( such as stock options) and sticks to prevent embezzlement (such as audits), organisms evolve responses to selfish genetic elements.

Of course, developing a better understanding of Enron-like situations does not "refute" economics, just adds to its sophistication. Similarly, Trivers and Burt are adding to the explanatory power of Darwinism.

One quibble. I realize that this horse long ago left the barn, but Richard Dawkins' term "selfish gene" has caused a lot of misunderstanding among the public over the years. A better term might be "dynastic gene."

Thus, my Enron analogy can be misleading because what the "selfish genetic elements" are doing is not making themselves rich, per se, but contriving for copies of themselves to proliferate. The closest business analogy instead might be a firm damaged by nepotism, such as Wang Computer in the 1980s, where managers appoints their relatives to important positions at the expense of the company as a whole.


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

Good blood, good bone

The vicious struggle within the field of anthropology in the second half of the last century, in which cultural anthropologists inspired by Franz Boas largely succeeded in anathematizing the formerly dominant physical anthropologists, had a striking ethnic aspect (as documented in Milford Wolpoff's book Race and Human Evolution). Much of the animus directed by the insurgent cultural anthropologists at the physical anthropologists stemmed from the fact that many of the leading experts on bones were princelings of the old WASP Ascendancy. Here, for example, is today's NYT obituary for the top expert on human skulls, who sounds like the epitome of the Protestant aristocrat's theory of "good blood, good bone:"


William W. Howells, a leading physical anthropologist who focused on the origins of humans and the evolution of races, died on Dec. 20 at his home in Kittery Point, Me. He was 97...

William White Howells was born in Manhattan on Nov. 27, 1908. His father was the architect John Mead Howells, and his grandfathers were Horace White, the journalist, and William Dean Howells, the novelist and literary critic.


That's what they used to call a "good family!" William Dean Howells was a close friend of Mark Twain and one of America's foremost men of letters. Newspaper editor Horace White was a close friend of Abraham Lincoln and accompanied him on the Lincoln-Douglas Debates tour in 1858. Later, he was a close friend of Andrew Carnegie. John Mead Howells co-designed the Chicago Tribune Tower and many other big buildings, and no doubt was the close friend of somebody really famous.


He attended St. Paul's School and graduated from Harvard in 1930... Professor Howells's wife, Muriel Gurdon Seabury, died in 2002 after 73 years of marriage.


Dr. and Mrs. Howells were married for 73 years!

(No word was available on whether he was related to the long-missing billionaire Thurston Howell III.)

Not surprisingly, these products of the Old Boys Network elicited much resentment from younger anthropologists from less privileged backgrounds. Ironically, the new meritocrats turned out, on the whole, to be lousier scientists than the old aristocrats, leading to the dismal status of anthropology today. Not long ago at Stanford, for example, the Anthropology department had become so ideologized that it split into two departments, Cultural Anthropology for the Frankfurt School-types and Anthropological Sciences for the bone and DNA scientists.


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

You can't keep a bad man down!

Earlier this week came the news that Ahmad Chalabi's party did so horrendously in the latest election that it might not get a single seat in the new legislature, perhaps forcing Chalabi out of office. But, never bet against Ahmad-the-Thief! Today comes word that, election or no election, Chalabi has taken over the Oil Ministry.

As I wrote in The American Conservative last year:

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


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

A potential project for population geneticists

One of the most influential American books of the late 20th Century was historian David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed, which outlines four different population streams out of Britain before 1776 -- from north to south in the U.S.: Puritan, Quaker, Scots-Irish, and Southern English -- and their profound influences on modern America.

The technology of DNA research is approaching the point where it would be feasible to test Fischer's model on living Americans and their distant kin in the British Isles. Look for genetic markers indicating Puritans or Scots-Irish or whatever in people with closely documented genealogies, then examine their proportions in regions across the country.

Considering the large amounts of money devoted to genealogy in this country and abroad, this project could be both exciting and lucrative.


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

New Year's Eve

VDARE's Lexington Research Institute has finally worked out all the details of how you can deduct from your taxable 2005 income any contributions you make via credit card or check today, Saturday, 12/31/2005, to support an important educational project I will be heavily involved with, as described below. We will be extraordinarily grateful to anyone who can be generous.

You can make credit card contributions here; or fax credit card details here; you can snail checks here. (Please write in on fax or checks “Biodiversity/ National Project" on the memo line in the lower left corner of check.)

(New postings for Saturday farther below.)

***

Important news from Peter Brimelow at VDARE.com:

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT FOR STEVE SAILER FANS: Our regular Sunday night columnist Steve Sailer is one of the jewels of contemporary science journalism and it’s a mystery to me (and to him) why he’s not been stolen from VDARE.COM by the Mainstream Media. Well, actually, it’s not a mystery. Steve pushes the envelope too much. That’s why we’re here at VDARE.COM—and why we have to develop our own funding sources a.k.a you.

We want to commission Steve to begin a major project, separate from his columns, the results of which will be published in longer pieces, working towards a possible book. The topic: the implications of modern discoveries in the human biodiversity area for the survival and success of the American nation. Donations to this project will be tax-deductible. You can make credit card contributions here; or fax credit card details here; you can snail mail checks made out to "Lexington Research Institute" and marked on the memo line (lower left corner) “Biodiversity/ National Project” to the usual address:

Lexington Research Institute
P.O. Box 1195
Washington CT 06793


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

Dangerous Ideas of 2006:

John Brockman, the leading literary agent for science writers, runs an interesting website to promote his stable called Edge.org. Each year, he asks a question and posts scores of responses from scientists and authors. This year's question is:

The Edge Annual Question — 2006

WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

[Thanks to Steven Pinker for suggesting the Edge Annual Question — 2006.]

Here are Pinker's and Gregory Cochran's responses:

STEVEN PINKER
Psychologist, Harvard University; Author, The Blank Slate

Groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments

The year 2005 saw several public appearances of what will I predict will become the dangerous idea of the next decade: that groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments.

  • In January, Harvard president Larry Summers caused a firestorm when he cited research showing that women and men have non-identical statistical distributions of cognitive abilities and life priorities.

  • In March, developmental biologist Armand Leroi published an op-ed in the New York Times rebutting the conventional wisdom that race does not exist. (The conventional wisdom is coming to be known as Lewontin's Fallacy: that because most genes may be found in all human groups, the groups don't differ at all. But patterns of correlation among genes do differ between groups, and different clusters of correlated genes correspond well to the major races labeled by common sense. )

  • In June, the Times reported a forthcoming study by physicist Greg Cochran, anthropologist Jason Hardy, and population geneticist Henry Harpending proposing that Ashkenazi Jews have been biologically selected for high intelligence, and that their well-documented genetic diseases are a by-product of this evolutionary history.

  • In September, political scientist Charles Murray published an article in Commentary reiterating his argument from The Bell Curve that average racial differences in intelligence are intractable and partly genetic.

Whether or not these hypotheses hold up (the evidence for gender differences is reasonably good, for ethnic and racial differences much less so), they are widely perceived to be dangerous. Summers was subjected to months of vilification, and proponents of ethnic and racial differences in the past have been targets of censorship, violence, and comparisons to Nazis. Large swaths of the intellectual landscape have been reengineered to try to rule these hypotheses out a priori (race does not exist, intelligence does not exist, the mind is a blank slate inscribed by parents). The underlying fear, that reports of group differences will fuel bigotry, is not, of course, groundless.

The intellectual tools to defuse the danger are available. "Is" does not imply "ought. " Group differences, when they exist, pertain to the average or variance of a statistical distribution, rather than to individual men and women. Political equality is a commitment to universal human rights, and to policies that treat people as individuals rather than representatives of groups; it is not an empirical claim that all groups are indistinguishable. Yet many commentators seem unwilling to grasp these points, to say nothing of the wider world community.

Advances in genetics and genomics will soon provide the ability to test hypotheses about group differences rigorously. Perhaps geneticists will forbear performing these tests, but one shouldn't count on it. The tests could very well emerge as by-products of research in biomedicine, genealogy, and deep history which no one wants to stop.

The human genomic revolution has spawned an enormous amount of commentary about the possible perils of cloning and human genetic enhancement. I suspect that these are red herrings. When people realize that cloning is just forgoing a genetically mixed child for a twin of one parent, and is not the resurrection of the soul or a source of replacement organs, no one will want to do it. Likewise, when they realize that most genes have costs as well as benefits (they may raise a child's IQ but also predispose him to genetic disease), "designer babies" will lose whatever appeal they have. But the prospect of genetic tests of group differences in psychological traits is both more likely and more incendiary, and is one that the current intellectual community is ill-equipped to deal with.

GREGORY COCHRAN
Consultant in adaptive optics and an adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Utah
And you expect me to believe _that_?

There is something new under the sun — us

Thucydides said that human nature was unchanging and thus predictable — but he was probably wrong. If you consider natural selection operating in fast-changing human environments, such stasis is most unlikely. We know of a number of cases in which there has been rapid adaptive change in humans; for example, most of the malaria-defense mutations such as sickle cell are recent, just a few thousand years old. The lactase mutation that lets most adult Europeans digest ice cream is not much older.

There is no magic principle that restricts human evolutionary change to disease defenses and dietary adaptations: everything is up for grabs. Genes affecting personality, reproductive strategies, cognition, are all able to change significantly over few-millennia time scales if the environment favors such change — and this includes the new environments we have made for ourselves, things like new ways of making a living and new social structures. I would be astonished if the mix of personality types favored among hunter-gatherers is "exactly" the same as that favored among peasant farmers ruled by a Pharaoh. In fact they might be fairly different.

There is evidence that such change has occurred. Henry Harpending and I have, we think, made a strong case that natural selection changed the Ashkenazi Jews over a thousand years or so, favoring certain kinds of cognitive abilities and generating genetic diseases as a side effect. Bruce Lahn's team has found new variants of brain-development genes: one, ASPM, appears to have risen to high frequency in Europe and the Middle East in about six thousand years. We don't yet know what this new variant does, but it certainly could affect the human psyche — and if it does, Thucydides was wrong. We may not be doomed to repeat the Sicilian expedition: on the other hand, since we don't understand much yet about the changes that have occurred, we might be even more doomed. But at any rate, we have almost certainly changed. There is something new under the sun — us.

This concept opens strange doors. If true, it means that the people of Sumeria and Egypt's Old Kingdom were probably fundamentally different from us: human nature has changed — some, anyhow — over recorded history. Julian Jaynes, in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, argued that there was something qualitatively different about the human mind in ancient civilization. On first reading, Breakdown seemed one of the craziest books ever written, but Jaynes may have been on to something.

If people a few thousand years ago thought and acted differently because of biological differences, history is never going to be the same.


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

American Gunfight by Stephen Hunter and J.S. Bainbridge

Novelist and Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter, who is the only movie critic since Roger Ebert in 1975 to win a Pulitzer for his movie reviews, sent me his new nonfiction book American Gunfight: The Plot to Kill Harry Truman--and the Shoot-out that Stopped It. I'm about 100 pages into it and it's a humdinger if you like guns, true crime, and Secret Service agents, and have a sneaking sympathy for the apparently lost cause of Puerto Rican independence. From the opening page:

On November 1, 1950, two Puerto Rican Nationalists named Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola pulled German automatic pistols and attempted to storm Blair House, at 1651 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C., where the president of the United States, Harry S. Truman, was at that moment -- 2:20 P.M. on an abnormally hot Wednesday -- taking a nap in his underwear.

They were opposed by a Secret Service security detail ... In the brief exchange -- under forty seconds -- between twenty-nine and thirty-one shots were fired in an area about ninety feet by twenty feet, though the exchange broke into two actions at either end of the property, where the ranges were much shorter. When it was over one man was dead, another was dying, and two more were seriously injured.

The story was of course gigantic news -- for about a week. What's remarkable about it is not how big a story it was but how quickly it went away. Today, few Americans even remember it, or if they do, they have it mixed up with a later event. In 1954, four Puerto Rican Nationalists pulled guns and shot up Congress. Soon enough the two stories melded in the U.S. folk imagination under the rubric of stereotype: hot-tempered Latin revolutionaries, undisciplined, crazy even, pursuing a dream that made no sense at all, Puerto Rican independence.

Even those few North Americans who could distinguish between the two events couldn't prevent the actual thing itself from eroding, losing its detail and meaning and settling sooner rather than later into a kind of comforting folk narrative. For Americans, it always encompassed the following points:

The grievances Oscar and Griselio were expressing were fundamentally absurd: Puerto Rico had been given the gift of United States culture and political traditions and was rapidly becoming Americanized, as it should be. What was wrong with these two that they didn't understand how benevolently they had been treated?

Americans believed they were a little crazy. The evidence is clear: the assault was thrown together on the run by these two men of no consequence and no meaningful cause... They were upset by newspaper reports of what was going on in Puerto Rico, where an equally silly group of men were attempting a coup, like they do down there all the time, something equally stupid and futile.

The dumb one was an unemployed salesman, a ladies' man, an abject failure in life. Nothing at all is known about this fellow, but why should it be, since he is so predictable: like so many disgruntled would-be assassins, this was his chance to count in a world that had denied his existence. They had no plan and no understanding of tactics.

In the actual fight itself, the Secret Service and the White House policemen essentially brushed them aside.

The two never came close to getting into Blair House. And even if they had, it would have made no difference, as an agent with a tommy gun was waiting just inside the door.

Harry Truman was never in any mortal danger.

In the end, many Americans concluded, it was more a joke, a farce, an opera buffa, than anything else.

There is only one trouble with assigning these meanings to the 38.5 desperate, violent seconds of November 1, 1950.

Every single one of them is wrong.


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

Economist on Evolution

My New VDARE.com column:

 The Economist On Evolution: Survival Of The Unfit To Print

By Steve Sailer

The centerpiece of The Economist magazine’s year-end double issue (Dec. 24, 2005 to Jan. 6, 2006) is a 12 page survey entitled "The story of man." The cover cartoon depicts human evolution from the knuckle-dragging ape to the apparent ultimate in human perfection—which the magazine's artist seems to conceive of as starlet Scarlett Johanson in a little black New Year's Eve party dress holding a champagne flute. (I can't say I disagree…)

But when he turns to race in his otherwise well-done essay, The Economist's science editor Geoffrey Carr can't keep his story straight even on the same page.

Thus at the bottom of p. 11 of the survey, Carr commends the theory of how the high average intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews might have evolved over just the last millennium, which was published in 2005 by Gregory Cochran (Carr compares him to Darwin!) and Henry Harpending.

Carr explains:

"Until a century or two ago, the Ashkenazim—the Jews of Europe—were often restricted by local laws to professions such as banking, which happened to require high intelligence. This is the sort of culturally created pressure that might drive one of Dr. [Terrence] Deacon's feedback loops for mental abilities … If Ashkenazi Jews need to be more intelligent than others, such genes will spread, even if they sometimes cause disease."

(Bear in mind that this theory hasn't been proven—Cochran and Harpending have proposed an empirical test for it, but it hasn't been carried out yet. Scientifically, though, it's at least possible for important traits like intelligence to evolve that fast, as the celebrated Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has recently acknowledged.)

Yet, earlier on the same page, Carr enunciates one of the sillier versions of the “Race Is Only Skin Deep” smokescreen that I've seen recently:

"… geneticists have failed to find anything in humans that would pass muster as geographical races in any other species….The only ‘racial’ difference that has a well-established function is skin color. … As to other physical differences, they may be the result of founder effects [i.e., caused by random variation among the handful of progenitors of a group] or possibly of sexual selection, which can sometimes pick up and amplify arbitrary features.”

It’s obviously contradictory for Carr to write both that

  • During just 1,200 years, natural selection may well have brought about higher mean IQs among Jews than among their gentile neighbors in Central Europe.

  • But during more than 50,000 years, natural selection probably didn't lead to any differences, other than in skin color, among races of different continents!

And it’s also simply not true, as John Goodrum's "Race FAQ" has exhaustively shown.

You would think that some editor would notice this glaring conflict and ask his writer to resolve it. But the topic of race routinely induces Brain Shutdown Mode even among smart journalists.
[More]


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

Some good movies from 2005

Not a Top Ten List, but just an informal recollection of movies worth seeing from last year:

"Head-On" -- Deracinated Turkish immigrants in Germany re-enact "Sid and Nancy."

"Junebug" -- A semi-comedy ensemble effort in which a Chicago yuppie takes his cosmopolitan bride to visit his downscale family in North Carolina. Insightful and surprisingly sympathetic to all sides.

"Millions" -- Snazzy little family movie about a very religious little boy who finds a duffel bag full of cash.

"The Squid and the Whale" -- It's past time for Jeff Daniels, as egomaniacal novelist Jonathan Baumbach, to get his first Oscar nomination.

"2046" -- Probably my favorite movie of the year, with sexy, glamorous performances from Tony Leung and Zhang Ziyi, gorgeous cinematography by Christopher Doyle ("Hero"), and a terrific soundtrack assembled by director Wong Kar-Wai.

"Kiss Kiss Bang Bang"

"Yes" -- Yes, "Yes" is in rhyming iambic pentameter couplets.

"Crash" -- Too contrived to be a great movie, but a contrivance of a high order. And if Matt Dillon doesn't win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar ...

"The March of the Penguins"


Honorable mention:

"Capote" -- for some reasonPhillip Seymour Hoffman has never gotten an Oscar nomination.

"3-Iron"
-- Inexplicable but nifty South Korean parable about a guy who breaks into people's houses and does their laundry for them. Is he a criminal? A saint? A performance artist? A ghost? A golfer?

"Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" -- Amusing documentary.

"Look at Me" -- French comedy.

"Walk on Water" -- Israeli comedy-drama about a Mossad agent who has to pretend to be a tour guide for a New Agey German tourist so he can locate and murder the tourist's 100 year old Nazi grandfather.

"Cinderella Man" -- Solid uplifting boxing drama with Russell Crowe doing another amazing impersonation of a nice guy.

"Jarhead" -- There's no plot and the main character is a jerk, but if you watch it as if it was a documentary, it's hilarious and informative.

"Grizzly Man"

"Munich"

"The Producers"

"Constantine"

"Good Night, and Good Luck" -- The subject matter -- Edward R. Murrow's late hit on a Joe McCarthy already on the way down -- seemed trivial, and Murrow appears to have been a pompous bore, but I liked the camera work a lot. As a director, George Clooney has some chops.

"Eros" -- Just Soderbergh's unerotic but funny segment in this trilogy, with Robert Downey Jr. as a 1955 Madison Avenue executive and Alan Arkin as his psychiatrist. Together they invent the snooze alarm. There's no point in seeing Wong Kar Wai's segment unless you've seen "2046" and "In the Mood for Love." And the less said about the nonagerian Antonioni's nudie flick contribution the better.


Overrated movies of 2005:

"A History of Violence"

"The Constant Gardener"

"Hustle and Flow"

"Syriana"

"Revenge of the Sith"

"King Kong"


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