Not quite clear on the concept of the Sailer Scheme

During the French riots, I proposed paying legally resident Muslims to leave Europe. Readers have kindly sent me multiple examples showing that many countries already have rudimentary programs in place to do something like that, demonstrating that European democracies have few philosophical objections to the Sailer Scheme. But they are definitely having trouble getting the details right, as tThe Times of London reports:

ASYLUM-SEEKERS and illegal immigrants are to be offered a £3,000 bounty to leave Britain voluntarily as part of the Government’s efforts to increase the number who are returning home. The handouts will be paid to people who agree to leave the country in the next six months and could mean a family of four receiving £8,000 in cash plus a further £4,000 in job training and education.

It is the first time that asylum-seekers and illegal migrants have been offered cash to leave the country and could cost £6.2 million if the predicted 3,000 people take the offer. In addition the Government will pay their travel costs. The move comes after the Home Office admitted that it has failed to meet the Prime Minister’s pledge that by the end of last year the number of asylum-seekers removed would be more than the number arriving each month.

A Home Office spokesman said that those departing would not be given “wads of £20 notes” as they left the country.Cash would be paid in instalments over the next 12 months in a scheme administered by the International Office of Migration, he said.

The spokesman added that most people who left under the scheme tended to be single males. Of the 2,783 who left voluntarily under the scheme in 2004-05, only 244 were under 18.

Last year Sir John Gieve, the outgoing Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, warned MPs that increasing the payment might encourage people to come to Britain. He said: “If the worst thing that is going to happen to you if you come and claim asylum when you are not due asylum in Britain is that someone gives you a few thousand pounds to send you home, that may not look like a very big downside.”

The point of the Sailer Scheme is to buy out legal residents from trouble-making backgrounds, not illegal aliens. If you don't shut down illegal immigration, you're just giving an incentive to more illegals coming in.

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

Canadian-government-sponsored report calls for legalizing polygamy: Dean Beeby reports on Yahoo News:

Taxpayer-funded study recommends repealing law that bans polygamy in Canada

A new study for the federal Justice Department says Canada should get rid of its law banning polygamy, and change other legislation to help women and children living in such multiple-spouse relationships.

"Criminalization does not address the harms associated with valid foreign polygamous marriages and plural unions, in particular the harms to women," says the report, obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act. "The report therefore recommends that this provision be repealed."

The research paper is part of a controversial $150,000 polygamy project, launched a year ago and paid for by the Justice Department and Status of Women Canada.

The paper by three law professors at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., argues that Sec. 293 of the Criminal Code banning polygamy serves no useful purpose and in any case is rarely prosecuted. Instead, Canadian laws should be changed to better accommodate the problems of women in polygamous marriages, providing them clearer spousal support and inheritance rights...

But the project was also intended to provide the Liberal government with ammunition to help defend its same-sex marriage bill last spring. Opponents claimed the bill, now law, was a slippery slope that would open the door to polygamy and even bestiality.

The combination of Canada's commitment to gay marriage, immigration, and multiculturalism means that the logic of legalizing polygamy will be difficult to resist.

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

Was Ariel Sharon the victim of malpractice?

Health Day News reported:

The blood thinner given to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon after his mini-stroke in December may have backfired.

In Sharon's case, the medication might have contributed to the massive stroke he suffered on Wednesday, in what experts say is a classic illustration of this seeming paradox in stroke treatment.

After Sharon was stricken when a small clot traveled from his heart to his brain on Dec. 18, doctors immediately put him on blood thinners, which may have been a factor in the far more devastating "bleeding" stroke he suffered on Wednesday.

When King Hussein of Jordan died of lymphoma in 1999 after being treated at the Mayo Clinic, I asked my oncologist, who had (knock on wood) cured me of lymphoma in 1997 and was one of the top lymphatic cancer men in the country, about the King's treatment. He shook his head in disgust, then said he wasn't going to publicly comment on something that would give Arabs another reason to be angry at America.

Meanwhile, Diana Moon asks why almost no one has mentioned "Sharon's serious problems with corruption. These are major, state-related issues which, in a normal state, would at least merit a mention." She wonders whether Jack Abramoff had any contact with the Sharon family. I haven't heard of any links, but it would hardly be implausible since Abramoff was a big financial supporter of hardline settlers in the West Bank, funding, for instance, a sniper school to train them in shooting Palestineans.

One close historical analog to Sharon is the Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, the most brilliant cavalry commander of his generation, a man dogged by allegations of massacres of prisoners, and one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan after the war.

Although I've criticized Sharon, I must say that by the end of his career, his views had moved a long ways in the direction of mine: that Israel should secure its own safety by buying Jewish settlers out of the occupied territories and fencing off Palestinian land. Of course, I'm sure that I will be denounced as an anti-Semite by the Podhoretzes for holding similar views to those of Ariel Sharon, but that's a burden I will have to put up with.

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

Bad Fad

I started taking the anti-cholesterol drug Lipitor nine years ago. I also went to a low carb Atkin's-style caveman diet at the same time, and between the Lipitor and the low carbs, it improved my bad cholesterol counts terrifically. On the other hand, Lipitor appears to hurt my short-term memory, making me more scatterbrained about daily errands. (The long-term memory I need to write seems fine, although how could I really remember if it had gone bad?) Also, ever since I started Lipitor, if I try to finish a second alcoholic drink, I get muscle aches.

So, I've been on the lookout for a a new "statin" anti-cholesterol drug. Because Lipitor is the world's #1 drug, with over $10 billion in annual sales, I figured lots of competition would be bringing forth lots of new statins. But the only one to reach the market in the last decade has been Crestor.

Gregory Cochran sends along a Wall Street Journal article that explains this slowdown in new drug development was not a fluke:

Drug firms, scientists go back to nature

By PETER LANDERS, The Wall Street Journal Tuesday, January 10, 2006 1:11 AM PST

TOKYO -- It took two years and thousands of moldy broths for Akira Endo to find something that reduces cholesterol. His breakthrough, drawn from a mold like one that grows on oranges, turned out to be the first in a class of medicines that today bring $25 billion a year to pharmaceutical companies.

Dr. Endo's 1973 discovery of the first anticholesterol statin has been relegated to obscurity. Yet the feat spotlights a long-denigrated craft now experiencing a revival: the discovery of drugs from nature's treasure chest.

The fungal byproduct that Dr. Endo originally discovered shares the same basic chemical structure as three of the biggest-selling anticholesterol drugs: Zocor, Pravachol and Mevacor. Millions of people have taken these drugs to lower their heart-attack risk.

"Whenever we have started with the natural molecule, we have been building on three billion years of natural selection," says Sir James Black, who developed the first beta blocker for heart conditions and the antiulcer drug Tagamet at British pharmaceutical companies in the 1960s and 1970s.

For much of the past 15 years, the pharmaceutical industry was "in no mood to be sympathetic to these views," says Sir James, who is 81 and still active in drug discovery. Companies jumped on trendy areas such as synthesizing and testing thousands of artificial chemicals unknown in nature. More recently, they have tried to use the decoding of the human genome to figure out the root causes of diseases and discover cures.

For the most part, those efforts have yet to pan out. Just 20 new drugs were approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2005. Several top drug companies are facing flat revenue and declining profits, including Pfizer Inc. and Merck & Co., the two companies that have profited most from statins.

Many drug companies scaled down or eliminated divisions focusing on natural products starting in the 1990s. In 2001, Merck closed its natural-products drug discovery department, though it still does some research in the area. In early 2003, Eli Lilly & Co. transferred its library of natural products to a small company in Albany, New York.

But now, in some corners, natural products are returning to fashion.

Cochran comments:

This problem - drug researchers growing bored with natural products - never gets discussed, mainly because it fits into no common ideological category. It's just a bad scientific fad, like Freudianism, but it has really damaged drug development (half the rate of the 1970s with oodles more money).

And this article played a role in a new idea which I had about 20 minutes ago - a very big idea. Bigger than worlds.

Well, I don't know what his new idea is, but when Greg says he's got a Big Idea, watch out ...

By the way, the WSJ article describes all the troubles Dr. Endo had in getting anyone in Japan to pay attention to his discovery of a class of drug that now generates $25 billion annually:

The scientific successes were followed by dissension among Dr. Endo and his colleagues. As he tells it, Sankyo's brass was unenthusiastic about his discovery because there was no precedent for it. They preferred to develop refinements of then-existing cholesterol drugs, he says.

I've often noticed that the truest believers in the stereotype that the Japanese aren't really creative, that they are just good at refining the big breakthroughs of others, are the Japanese themselves. I wonder how creative they'd be if they just developed some confidence in their own creativity.

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

Yglesias's bit of IQ realism tossed down the Memory Hole at Tapped

Glaivester points out that Matt Yglesias's posting on IQ on TAPPED, the bl*g of The American Prospect, has been disappeared. As Kevin Drum quoted Yglesias, in response to the news that due to the Iraq War-caused recruiting difficulties, the share of new recruits inducted by the military who score at or below the 30th percentile in IQ has gone from 1% to 12%

Matt Yglesias comments:

I tend to doubt, however, that this line of criticism will gain any traction, since making the argument requires you to say that IQ tests (which is all the AFQT really is) are an important measurement and most liberals prefer to shy away from the topic.

But, now it's gone! Apparently, most liberals prefer to shy away from the topic so much they don't even want to be reminded that they prefer to shy away from the topic.

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

What they don't teach you at MBA school

A reader writes:

A few years ago, I worked for a "crisis management" security company which sent some of us to Watsonville, California, the "strawberry capital" of the world. Our function was to keep two mutually antagonistic groups of Mexican migrant pickers from killing each other. The groups were from and represented two different areas of Mexico.

After awhile we figured what it was all about. A group of young MBA types had worked out a business plan of taking over the strawberry business, and perhaps the other produce businesses in the area. First they bought the largest strawberry ranch. They willingly called in the UFW to organize their pickers. Why? Because they were going to "give" them all kinds of benefits such as healthcare, retirement, etc.. This would cause all the pickers working for the small mom and pop ranches in the area to succumb to the UFW organizing efforts, and hence drive the small ranches out of business because of the benefit costs. Then the bright young guys would swoop in and buy them all out for a song, and create a semi-monopoly in the strawberry business.

One group of pickers wanted this, and one wanted to keep the old system of a company union which offered no benefits, but fairly steady work. The two groups' originating regionalism played a big part. As fate would have it, for the second year in a row the latter group prevailed in the state supervised elections. When I left the hotshot guys and the UFW were outfoxed by a bunch of poor campesinos.

Having gotten an MBA a long long time ago, this just reminds me of all the things they don't teach you. B-school is great for learning about how to calculate a stock's beta, but not for this kind of thing.

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

Steve Gilliard, Angry Black Liberal IQ Maven

One of the more original voices on the web is Steve Gilliard who runs The News Blog. He's a black guy, hates Bush and all Republicans, but the interesting thing is that he writes more about Armed Forces Qualifying Test issues than anybody else. The military has been giving IQ tests to would-be recruits since 1917 and has an enormous amount of data on how people of different IQs perform on average in various jobs. Yet, almost nobody in the media even knows this exists. But Gilliard does.

Here's his response to Fred Kaplan's "GI Schmo" article in Slate on the rate of new recruits being accepted in "Category IV" (below the 30th percentile in IQ) rising from 1% to 12%:

"Degrading competence" are nice words. " My Lai" isn't so nice.

The soldiers who murdered the residents of My Lai 4 were drafted under Project 100,000. The Americal (23rd) Division was the last division formed in Vietnam and had last call on soldiers. The better units, like the 1st Cav and the Airborne, had their pick of the better recruits. But the Americal was troubled during it's entire stay in Vietnam. Part of that was due to the low caliber of soldier in the the ranks.

What was Project 100,000?

On 10-1-66, McNamara launched P/100000 in response to Pres Johnson's War on Poverty. Under this program, DoD began accepting men, as volunteers or draftees, who would not qualify for military service under previous aptitude and medical standards. The Office of the SecDefense outlined 3 main purposes for the project: > Greater equity in spreading the opportunities and obligations of military service;

> Recognition of the unique capability of the military training establishment to produce fully satisfactory servicemen among culturally disadvantaged men who had previously been deferred;

> Foresighted military manpower planning. The manpower goal of P/100000 was to accept 40,000 men under relaxed standards during the 1st year and 100,000 per year thereafter. Approximately 91% of these "New Standards Men," as they were called, came in under lowered aptitude/education standards, and 9% entered under lowered physical standards (i.e., with readily remediated physical defects). This testimony "focuses only on the L/A group.

Under P/100000, aptitude standards were relaxed, but not eliminated. Men with AFQT scores in CatV [below 10th percentile] were still not eligible. The P/100000 men were a subset of those accessions who had AFQT scores in CatIV [10th to 30th percentile]. That is, some CatIV men who were high school grads were eligible under previous standards, because aptitude requirements are less stringent for grads than for non-grads. In addition, some CatIV non-grads had high enough scores on other tests used for job assignment, such as the Army Qualification Battery, that they also were eligible under preexisting standards. Therefore, not all CatIV accessions were New Standards Men [NSM].

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

It's a white white white white world at the top

Awhile back I tried to explain to Jared Taylor that his white ethnocentrism wouldn't fly in the U.S. for the paradoxical reason that whites remain so dominant in many of the more desirable industries that no sense of white solidarity could emerge because the top people see themselves as engaged in clawing their way to the top over other whites, and they look upon minorities merely as tokens or as props they can use to engage in a little moral oneupmanship over their white rivals.

Steve Gilliard points us toward an article in the New York Observer by Lizzy Ratner called "Vanilla Ceiling" on the editorial and writing staffs of New York glossy magazines:

Still, the results of the survey revealed a world that looks little like the streets of New York, where nearly 65 percent of the population identified itself as nonwhite in the 2000 census.

Of the 203 staffers and contributors listed on the Vanity Fair masthead, six—or less than 3 percent—are people of color.

At Condé Nast Traveler, the swank travel monthly, 11 of the 85 staffers and contributors listed on the masthead are people of color. Of those 11 staffers, three hold editing positions and two are contributing editors, while six hold lower-masthead positions as researchers and assistant editors.

The New Yorker doesn’t publish a masthead, but based on conversations with sources and available published information, the magazine has a pool of some 130 editors, critics, copy editors, fact checkers, editorial assistants and outside contributors—of whom 11 are people of color.

At Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone, four members of the magazine’s 73-person editorial staff are people of color. Six members of New York magazine’s 90-person team of editors, writers, contributors and editorial assistants are not white. ... At Forbes, an estimated seven people out of a pool of 116 editors, writers, reporters, editorial assistants, copy editors and bureau correspondents are people of color.

And the non-glossy Nation lists eight people of color among its 99 writers, editors, editorial-board members and Nation Institute fellows.

You can see why immigration has been such a non-issue for most of the media. The concept that immigration could be lowering anybody's wages seems bizarre to them because in their professional worlds, nonwhites of any kind, much less immigrants, are basically a non-factor.

Of course, some media outlets, especially big city newspapers, have strict affirmative action plans. This means that their staffs instantly become hostage to the minority editors and reporters if they even dream about deviating from the line of political correctness.

It's a fascinating two-state system, both of them disastrous for having an honest discussion of immigration. Without a quota, most press organs will be almost all white, so immigration seems irrelevant and unimportant to the staff. Or, the ownership impose a quota which means the staff then can't say much that's critical about immigration because the Hispanics would threaten to quit, which would wreck the managers' performance ratings for meeting the quota.

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

Skandar Keynes

A reader points out that the child actor Skand Keynes who plays Edmund in "Narnia" is the great-great-great grandson of Charles Darwin. The "Keynes" in his name comes from the same distinguished family as his great-great uncle John Maynard Keynes, although the economist himself was not the reproductive type.

The English Liberal intellectual families sure intermarried a lot. For example, novelist Aldous and biologist Julian Huxley were not only the grandson's of Darwin's bulldog TH Huxley, but the great nephews of poet Matthew Arnold. Their lesser known half-brother Andrew, was a 1963 Nobel Laureate in physiology. (He married a Wedgwood, just like Darwin and Darwin's father did.)

Also, I also just opened up the golf magazine I get for free and it includes an article entitled "Darwin's Gift." In golf magazines, "Darwin" doesn't refer to Charles Darwin, but to his grandson, the minor genius Bernard Darwin, who remains considered the greatest of all writers on golf. (Bernard's prose style bears comparison to P.G. Wodehouse's.) Little Bernard was raised at his grandfather's house in Down and the charming tyke was the delight of Charles' old age.

It's easy to see where Darwin's half-cousin Francis Galton (they were both grandsons of the polymath Erasmus Darwin) got his theory of "hereditary genius."

A reader adds:

I see that composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, no less, is also in the Darwin-Wedgwood-Keynes family tree:

Ralph Vaughan Williams's maternal grandmother, Caroline Sarah Darwin, was Charles Darwin's older sister, and his maternal grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood III, was the older brother of Darwin's wife Emma. [Charles Darwin married his first cousin.]

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

Tim Carvell and Steve Martin

When I mentioned that the amusing parody of the literary scandals around James Frey and JT Leroy by Time Carvell reminded me of something, a reader responded:

An essay by Steve Martin, entitled "Preface to My Autobiography", appeared in the November 15th, 1999 issue of The New Yorker. It is definitely in the same spirit as Carvell's admission, including such phrases as "Other fictionalized accounts, related not to fool the reader but to illustrate various aspects of my character, include the single-handed asphalting of a two-mile stretch of Sunset Boulevard, the shunning of the Nobel Prize for my work in gene therapy, and the impregnation of fertile housewives with the tacit approval of their grateful husbands" and "I wish to thank the Greek poet Homer, for without his Iliad I would have been at a loss to put into words certain of my exploits during Desert Storm." Is this, perhaps, what you had in mind?

By the way, although Frey's A Million Little Pieces is Steven D. "Freakonomics" Levitt's new favorite book, it's definitely not John Dolan's favorite. Here's his 2003 review from The eXile:

But then Frey is no expert observer, as he proves in one of the funniest scenes from his nature walks, when he meets a "fat otter": "There is an island among the rot, a large, round Pile with monstrous protrusions like the arms of a Witch. There is chatter beneath the pile and a fat brown otter with a flat, armored tail climbs atop and he stares at me."

Now, can anyone tell me what a "fat otter with a flat, armored tail" actually is? That's right: a beaver! Now, can anyone guess what the "large, round Pile with monstrous protrusions like the arms of a Witch" would be? Yes indeed: a beaver dam! [To be precise, Canadian experts inform me, a beaver lodge.]

Any kindergartner would know that, and anyone with a flicker of life would be delighted to see a beaver and its home. But for Frey, a very stupid and very vain man, the "fat otter" is nothing but another mirror in which to adore his Terrible Fate. He engages the beaver in the most dismal of adolescent rhetorical interrogations:

"Hey, Fat Otter.

He stares at me.

You want what I got?

He stares at me.

I'll give you everything.

Stares at me...."

And so on, for another half-page. You want to slap the sulking spoiled brat. The Fat Otter should've slapped him with its "flat, armored tail" and then chewed his leg off and used it to fortify its "Pile with monstrous protrusions."

Reading Levitt's praise of "A Million Little Pieces," I've finally figured out the secret to Levitt's success as a bestselling author. It's not that he understands the common mind (of the book buying public) as that he has the common mind.

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

Unbelievable authors

The recent revelations that James Frey's huge bestselling "autobiography" of his drug rehab, A Million Little Pieces, is tremendously exaggerated and that acclaimed writer JT Leroy doesn't, technically, exist inspired Tim Carvell to come clean too:

IT is with great sorrow, and no small amount of embarrassment, that I must confess to some inadvertent errors, omissions and elisions in my best-selling memoir, "A Brief History of Tim." ...

I am not, in fact, black.

Nor am I, to the best of my knowledge, a woman. Anything in my book that suggests otherwise is the result of a typographical error. That this error was compounded by my decision to pose for my author photo and bookstore appearances in drag and blackface is, I will acknowledge, unfortunate.

The portions of my book dealing with Depression-era Ireland are, I have been reliably informed, copied verbatim from Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes." I can only conclude that I accidentally confused my manuscript with my notes for my memoir in which I copied large portions of other writers' works, just to see how they were structured. In hindsight, the fact that I was born 40 years after the Depression should have been a tip-off.

However, Frey does have at least one fellow bestselling author as a defender. See how quickly you can guess who wrote this on his blog:

Hats off to Oprah

I don’t care what ... The Smoking Gun website say ... , I am a huge fan of James Frey’s book anyway.

I saw the book “A Million Little Pieces” by James Frey at a bookstore the other day. I had never heard of it, except that it is the Oprah Book Club pick. I figured I would hate it (Anna Karenina is not my thing, for instance), but quickly glanced at the inside flap to see what it was about. ...That was enticing enough to get me to buy the book. It has radically exceeded my expectations. It provides an amazing window into the ravages of addiction. I half felt like I was a recovering addict reading it. I can’t recommend it highly enough...

It reads like fiction anyway. So unlike Freakonomics, I’m not sure it matters whether it is true or not. Others may disagree.

Steven D. Levitt

Perhaps Levitt can enlist Clifford Irving as his co-chair in a "Truth Schmuth Club to Defend James Frey."

Not surprisingly, Levitt and Dubner's column in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine "Hoodwinked" was an admission that much of their Freakonomics chapter "How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents?" was phony :

"The greatest discrepancy is that many of the adventures that [Stetson] Kennedy described as autobiographical in fact seem to have been based on the efforts of a different man, a [Ku Klux] Klan informant named John Brown."

It's not terribly important, except as yet more evidence of Levitt's credibility. This whole KKK section of Freakonomics was blatantly irrelevant. It was completely non-quantitative and ancient history. Nor did it have anything to do with the chapter's subject of information asymmetries. Real estate agents have an advantage over buyers and sellers because they access to information other people don't. In contrast, the KKK had an advantage because they use violence, which, despite all their other sins, real estate agents don't.

I would guess that this phony KKK story got shoved in the book because the authors wanted to protect themselves against charges of other sections of the book being anti-black, and maybe Dubner had some unused notes from an abortive article about Stetson Kennedy laying around.

Levitt hasn't gotten around to admitting yet in his NYT column that his most popular theory -- that legalizing abortion lowered crime -- was based on two technical errors he made in his calculations.

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

Was Margaret Mead's debunker a little too tightly wound?

Derek Freeman's 1983 takedown of Margaret Mead's 1928 bestseller on the malleability of human nature, Coming of Age in Samoa, was a gratifying puncture in the hot air balloon of the dominant Boasian school of anthropology.

But I've long been uneasy about Freeman's contention that, contra Mead, the Samoans were actually paragons of premarital sexual restraint. I don't know anything in particular about Samoans (and, judging by the size of the typical Samoan lad, it's probably not a good idea to risk giving him the impression you are interested in learning whether his sister puts out), but judging by other Pacific Islanders, that seems not wholly plausible.

Now Australian scholar Hiram Caton, no Boasian himself, says his old colleague Freeman wasn't always the most stable of individuals. Unfortunately, he doesn't shed much new light on the Samoan controversy, other than that if you get into a debate over it, you shouldn't completely tie yourself to Freeman's credibility.

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

Real estate investing tip

Seaside golf courses such as Pebble Beach can be some of the most valuable real estate in the world. The world is still full of spectacular undeveloped seacliffs and seaside linkslands where what's prevented golf course development has been lack of fresh water. Baja California is the most obvious example.

Now, however, the paspalum variety of grass has been developed, which can be watered with seawater straight out of the ocean. It's such a good grass for golf courses that a number of existing seaside courses are converting to it. This opens up an extraordinary amount of seaside to be the next Pebble Beach. (This also implies: don't overpay for existing oceanside resort golf courses, since the supply, especially in Mexico and the Caribbean, is likely to boom in coming decades.)

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

Alito Infinito

Is it just me or does it seem like Samuel Alito has been a Supreme Court nominee under consideration by the Senate for most of this millennium? Is this the most boring big story? Or is it "What will Howard Stern be like uncensored?"

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

So, who is this Henry Darger guy and why is he showing up in my Google Ads?

One of the oddities of having Google Ads is that you aren't allowed to click on the ads on your own site, because if you do, in the manner of John Goodman in "The Big Lebowski," "Son, you've just entered a world of pain."

I think the Henry Darger PBS documentary ad keeps showing up because I listed "Junebug" in my favorite movies of 2005, and one of the characters is trying to sign up an "outsider artist" (i.e., mentally ill rural nobody painter) to exhibit at her gallery.

I once visited the Art Brut museum in Lausanne, Switzerland. It sounded pretty cool -- deranged artists! -- but it turned out that people locked up in insane asylums have a whole lot of time on their hands, and their artworks reflect it -- e.g., a model of the Eiffel Tower made out of 50,000 toothpicks. But Mr. Darger could be more interesting.

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

It's me and Chas's fault!

Kevin Drum, the popular Washington Monthly bl*gger, writes:

COGNITIVE ABILITIES....Fred Kaplan writes in Slate that the Army has responded to its recruiting woes by dramatically lowering its standards:

The bad news is twofold. First, the number of Category IV recruits is starting to skyrocket. Second, a new study compellingly demonstrates that, in all realms of military activity, intelligence does matter. Smarter soldiers and units perform their tasks better; dumber ones do theirs worse.

"Category IV" is the Army's term for recruits who score in the bottom third of the Armed Forces Qualifying Test. Matt Yglesias comments:

I tend to doubt, however, that this line of criticism will gain any traction, since making the argument requires you to say that IQ tests (which is all the AFQT really is) are an important measurement and most liberals prefer to shy away from the topic.

If that's true, it's too bad for a community that likes to think of itself as reality based. Like it or not, all the PC handwaving in the world won't change the fact that (a) IQ tests are a pretty good measure of the cognitive ability normally referred to as "intelligence" and (b) intelligence is an important trait for a wide variety of modern day tasks. Kaplan reviews the evidence that intelligence matters for military tasks in his Slate piece.

Of course, we all know what the real problem is here: in contemporary discourse intelligence is inextricably bound up with race, which is why it's almost impossible to talk honestly about it. For that we mainly have conservative race demagogues like Charles Murray and Steve Sailer to blame — even though liberals themselves haven't been entirely blameless either when it comes to demagoging IQ.

[More]

[Comment Here]

Actually, it's quite easy to talk honestly about IQ. Charles Murray and I do it every time we write about IQ. All that it takes to be honest about IQ is to be willing to put up with demagogic smears from the likes of Kevin Drum.

The way to talk honestly about IQ is to resolve to talk honestly everything, because all truths are interconnected.

A reader sends me $100 and responds that I should thank Kevin Drum:

I'd been meaning to PayPal you some funds for your day-in, day-out kickass blogging but hadn't gotten around to doing it. Then I read where Kevin Drum, WHO OBVIOUSLY HAS EXACTLY THE SAME VIEWS ON RACE AND INTELLIGENCE AS YOU DO, called you a "race demagogue" on his site, and I thought, "OK, that's it, I'm sending Sailer $100". So please take your wife out to dinner with it, and drink a toast to Kevin Drum!

Working in the media as I do, I can't say what you say, even though I believe it. But I can send you money, which feels almost as good! Keep up the good, *important* work.

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

Slate almost mentions the dread letters "IQ"

Fred Kaplan has another good column on the news I pointed out on Dec. 12th: that new Army recruits scoring below the 30th percentile on the Armed Forces Qualification Test (the IQ test that provided the data for the backbone of The Bell Curve), after a dozen years of being held to no more than 1% skyrocketed to 12% in October. Of course, he leaves out the letters IQ or any mention of The Bell Curve. The headline, "GI Schmo," given by Slate shows the contempt in which liberals hold their 90 million fellow Americans who have IQs below the 30th percentile.

GI Schmo
How low can Army recruiters go?
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Monday, Jan. 9, 2006, at 5:06 PM ET

Three months ago, I wrote that the war in Iraq was wrecking the U.S. Army, and since then the evidence has only mounted, steeply. Faced with repeated failures to meet its recruitment targets, the Army has had to lower its standards dramatically. First it relaxed restrictions against high-school drop-outs. Then it started letting in more applicants who score in the lowest third on the armed forces aptitude test—a group, known as Category IV recruits, who have been kept to exceedingly small numbers, as a matter of firm policy, for the past 20 years. (There is also a Category V—those who score in the lowest 10^th percentile. They have always been ineligible for service in the armed forces and, presumably, always will be.)

The bad news is twofold. First, the number of Category IV recruits is starting to skyrocket. Second, a new study compellingly demonstrates that, in all realms of military activity, intelligence does matter. Smarter soldiers and units perform their tasks better; dumber ones do theirs worse.

Until just last year, the Army had no trouble attracting recruits and therefore no need to dip into the dregs. As late as 2004, fully 92 percent of new Army recruits had graduated high school and just 0.6 percent scored Category IV on the military aptitude test.

Then came the spiraling casualties in Iraq, the diminishing popularity of the war itself, and the subsequent crisis in recruitment.

In response to the tightening trends, on Sept. 20, 2005, the Defense Department released DoD Instruction 1145.01, which allows 4 percent of each year's recruits to be Category IV applicants—up from the 2 percent limit that had been in place since the mid-1980s. Even so, in October, the Army had such a hard time filling its slots that the floodgates had to be opened; 12 percent of that month's active-duty recruits were Category IV. November was another disastrous month; Army officials won't even say how many Cat IV applicants they took in, except to acknowledge that the percentage was in "double digits." ...

Some may wonder: So what? Can't someone who scores low on an aptitude test, even very low, go on to become a fine, competent soldier, especially after going through boot camp and training? No question. Some college drop-outs also end up doing very well in business and other professions. But in general, in the military no less than in the civilian world, the norm turns out to be otherwise....

In a RAND Corp. report commissioned by the office of the secretary of defense and published in 2005, military analyst Jennifer Cavanagh reviewed a spate of recent statistical studies on the various factors that determine military performance—experience, training, aptitude, and so forth—and concluded that aptitude is key. A force "made up of personnel with high AFQT [armed forces aptitude test] scores," Cavanagh writes, "contributes to a more effective and accurate team performance."

The evidence is overwhelming. Take tank gunners. You wouldn't think intelligence would have much effect on the ability to shoot straight, but apparently it does. Replacing a gunner who'd scored Category IV on the aptitude test (ranking in the 10-30 percentile) with one who'd scored Category IIIA (50-64 percentile) improved the chances of hitting targets by 34 percent. (For more on the meaning of the test scores, click here.)

In another study cited by the RAND report, 84 three-man teams from the Army's active-duty signal battalions were given the task of making a communications system operational. Teams consisting of Category IIIA personnel had a 67 percent chance of succeeding. Those consisting of Category IIIB (who'd ranked in the 31-49 percentile on the aptitude test) had a 47 percent chance. Those with Category IV personnel had only a 29 percent chance.

The same study of signal battalions took soldiers who had just taken advanced individual training courses and asked them to troubleshoot a faulty piece of communications gear. They passed if they were able to identify at least two technical problems. Smarts trumped training. Among those who had scored Category I on the aptitude test (in the 93-99 percentile), 97 percent passed. Among those who'd scored Category II (in the 65-92 percentile), 78 percent passed. Category IIIA: 60 percent passed. Category IIIB: 43 percent passed. Category IV: a mere 25 percent passed.

The pattern is clear: The higher the score on the aptitude test, the better the performance in the field. This is true for individual soldiers and for units. Moreover, the study showed that adding one high-scoring soldier to a three-man signals team boosted its chance of success by 8 percent (meaning that adding one low-scoring soldier boosts its chance of failure by a similar margin).

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

"Isaac Newton, one of Trinity College's most distinguished alumni"

I'm reading a biography of Sir Francis Galton, who attended Trinity College at Cambridge University. I found amusing the biographer's cautious reference to Sir Isaac Newton as "one of Trinity College's most distinguished alumni." Wouldn't Newton rank as the most distinguished alumni? After all, what other Englishman is as distinguished as Newton (besides Shakespeare, and he didn't go to college). Newton was calculated to be the most eminent figure in the sciences in human history in Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment.

Still, when I looked up on Wikipedia the list of alumni of Trinity, I could see why the writer didn't want to commit himself. Here are some other Trinity alumni: Francis Bacon, Niels Bohr, John Dryden, Thomas Babington Macaulay, James Clerk Maxwell, Vladimir Nabokov, Bertrand Russell, Ernest Rutherford, and William Makepeace Thackeray! And that's leaving out worthies of the caliber of Arthur Balfour, G. H. Hardy, A. A. Milne, Jawaharlal Nehru, John Maynard Smith, Lytton Strachey, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Boy, would diversity activist Jaebadiah Gardner be sore if he had to attend Trinity instead of merely the U. of Washington in Seattle, where he still feels oppressed by the statues of Dead White European Males on campus.

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