March 6, 2006

"Brokeback Mountain" wins Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay

There seemed to be a bit of a brokebacklash against the gay cowboy movie for being overhyped, but it still won a couple of big awards it hardly deserved.

A reader who knows a lot more about movies than I do, however, one who used to attend regularly Henri Langlois's Cinematheque Francaise in Paris in the early 1950s when Truffaut and Godard were always camped out in the front row chainsmoking while they worshipped John Ford and Howard Hawks, takes issue with my dismissal of "Brokeback:"

Have always admired and enjoyed your work, so was a trifle saddened to see your, well, kind of innocent/naive, comments if you'll forgive my language, on the odds of a couple of fellows as depicted by Ledger and Gyllenhaal in "Brokeback Mountain" coming together in love or passion.

Let me just cite some Hollywood gay gentlemen who kept their sexual orientation strictly in the closet: Rock Hudson (didn't he play a cowboy in "Giant" come to think of it?), Tab Hunter (just came out this year in an autobiography), and that longtime couple of Cary Grant and that stalwart hero of so many Westerns Rudolph Scott. The great American public never knew, and few out of a tight little world in Hollywood did either. It only came to light long after the two gentlemen in question had passed on.

One of these days I need to write about the maturation of Cary Grant's sexual orientation, which was always a little vague and undersexed, from, perhaps, primarily homosexual to primarily heterosexual as his private insecurity and narcissism slowly developed into a self-confidence and sense of humor to match that of his screen persona. (That's not supposed to be possible, although I imagine it helps straighten a man out if he is surrounded on the job by women like Sophia Loren, for whom the mature Cary cherished an unrequited passion of many years, one that broke up the third of his five marriages.)

But let's focus on his onetime roommate, cowboy actor Randolph Scott. Scott's best roles, such as "Ride the High Country," came late in life in rugged little films his own company produced. I have no idea what, if anything, went on between them, but Scott was clearly an impressive man, who was also highly successful outside of acting. For example, Scott, a former football player, was the only movie star admitted to the extremely anti-Hollywood Los Angeles Country Club before Ronald Reagan in 1989. (For example, Bing Crosby, who was probably the most prominent recreational golfer in America, couldn't get into LACC even though he lived on its 13th fairway.) To get in, Scott had to prove to the LACC that he'd made a separate fortune as an investor in the oil industry.


Now, I could buy the analogy of Heath Ledger's macho cowboy to Randolph Scott. But what I can't then buy is Jake Gyllenhaal as Cary Grant, especially in this role, where he's whiny and looks rather like Alfred E. Neuman.

... As for the film, I thought it much more a study of loneliness than anything to do with homosexuality. Somehow that kind of blind, spiritual desolation, particularly common or so it seems to me, is especially American. I found it a terribly sad film and one most moving as well on those grounds.

*

On the other hand:


"It's not like ["Brokeback Mountain"] was written by somebody with any sense of what goes on in gay life, be it rural or urban," says David Ehrenstein, author of the book "Open Secret: Gay Hollywood, 1928-2000," of the E. Annie Proulx-written short story that was the basis for "Brokeback." "I just didn't buy it. But the thing about it that's a surprise for some people is the idea of this being a serious relationship that the film takes seriously."

Ehrenstein found such films as "Mysterious Skin" and "The Dying Gaul" more authentic last year, but acknowledges that their much stronger homosexual content limited their audience - and their appeal to Oscar voters.

*

I'm not a big fan of "Capote" (although I'm a huge fan of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who won Best Actor), but I'm impressed the filmmakers resisted the temptation to butch Capote up a little to make it more politically correct by "undermining stereotypes about homosexuals," a la "Brokeback Mountain." Of course, that would have been hard to get away with for anybody over 40 or so. With all his talkshow appearances, Capote was, along with Paul "The Joker" Lynde and Jim "Gomer Pyle" Nabors, one of the triumvirate of flamers who were on TV almost nonstop during my childhood.

(By the way, what was the deal with Jim Nabors always singing the National Anthem at LA Rams NFL games in the early 1970s? Was some guy on the Rams' PR staff his boyfriend, or what? Or didn't anybody in all of pro football notice there was anything swishy about Nabors?)


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

"Crash" wins Best Picture Oscar

"Crash" reminds me of the 1986 comedy "Soul Man," in which rich white jerk C. Thomas Howell paints his skin black to qualify for an affirmative action scholarship to Harvard Law School. The first half of "Soul Man" was a wonderfully irresponsible satire on race, while the boring, preachy second half said, "Just kidding! We take it all back. Race is nothing to joke about. Do you hear me? Nothing! Why can't we all just get along?"

To call "Crash" an unfunny "Soul Man" seems like faint praise indeed, but it was still my favorite of the five Best Picture nominees, which says a lot about what kind of year it was.

Of "Crash," Ross Douthat said it was "like 'Triumph of the Will' for Unitarians."


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

George Clooney wins Best Supporting Actor Oscar for packing on 30 extra pounds and growing a beard.

Hey, I did that years ago.


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

Academy Award for Best Song goes to "You Know It's Hard Out There for a Pimp."

No, it's not.

Look, if white liberal Americans really want to improve the lives of blacks, the absolute minimum they need to do is to stop rewarding black men for putting on this kind of modern minstrel show for the white folk about what bad mo-fos they are.

The movie "Hustle & Flow" was a bit of a bust at the box office, taking in only $22 million, but Hollywood's white elite loved it to death, giving Terrence Howard a Best Actor nomination as well as the Best Song Award. I called "Hustle & Flow" the

"purportedly uplifting story -- "Everybody gotta have a dream" -- of a pimp striving to find redemption by becoming a gangsta rapper. Perhaps we will next be treated to a heartwarming movie about a Gestapo agent aspiring to qualify for the Death's Head SS. If, as the hype claims, "Hustle & Flow" is the new "Rocky," well, then "Jeff Gannon" should be pitching Hollywood on his rise, such as it was, from militaristic manwhore to Bush Administration shill.

A certain moral distinction is being overlooked by the critics. Sure, Rocky starts out as hired muscle for a loan shark, but after he goes 15 rounds with Apollo Creed, he doesn't boast that his resilience is due to all the exercise he got breaking deadbeats' thumbs. In contrast, the breakout songs by this new film's protagonist, "Whoop that Trick" and "You Know It's Hard Out There for a Pimp," glamorize whoremongering with the conventional hip-hop blend of chest-pounding machismo and self-pity.


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

March 5, 2006

Grabbing the Oscar nominees by the lapels

Here are all the Oscar nominees that I wrote something about, with links to my reviews or blog postings:


BATMAN BEGINS
* Achievement in Cinematography

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN & as slash fiction & why Ennis isn't Latino like he is in the original short story
* Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role
* Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role
* Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role
* Achievement in Cinematography
* Achievement in Directing
* Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Score)
* Best Motion Picture of the Year
* Adapted Screenplay

CAPOTE
* Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role
* Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role
* Achievement in Directing
* Best Motion Picture of the Year
* Adapted Screenplay

CINDERELLA MAN
* Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role
* Achievement in Film Editing
* Achievement in Makeup

THE CONSTANT GARDENER
* Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role
* Achievement in Film Editing
* Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Score)
* Adapted Screenplay

CRASH
* Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role
* Achievement in Directing
* Achievement in Film Editing
* Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Song)
* Best Motion Picture of the Year
* Original Screenplay

GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK
* Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role
* Achievement in Art Direction
* Achievement in Cinematography
* Achievement in Directing
* Best Motion Picture of the Year
* Original Screenplay

HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE
* Achievement in Art Direction

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
* Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role
* Adapted Screenplay

HUSTLE & FLOW
* Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role
* Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Song)

JUNEBUG
* Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role

KING KONG
* Achievement in Art Direction
* Achievement in Sound Editing
* Achievement in Sound Mixing
* Achievement in Visual Effects

MARCH OF THE PENGUINS
* Best Documentary Feature

MATCH POINT
* Original Screenplay

MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA
* Achievement in Art Direction
* Achievement in Cinematography
* Achievement in Costume Design
* Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Score)
* Achievement in Sound Mixing
* Achievement in Sound Editing

MUNICH
* Achievement in Directing
* Achievement in Film Editing
* Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Score)
* Best Motion Picture of the Year
* Adapted Screenplay

THE NEW WORLD
* Achievement in Cinematography

NORTH COUNTRY
* Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role
* Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role


THE SQUID AND THE WHALE
* Original Screenplay

STAR WARS: EPISODE III REVENGE OF THE SITH
* Achievement in Makeup

WALK THE LINE - Why Heath Ledger would have been better than Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash
* Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role
* Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role
* Achievement in Costume Design
* Achievement in Film Editing
* Achievement in Sound Mixing

WAR OF THE WORLDS
* Achievement in Sound Editing
* Achievement in Sound Mixing
* Achievement in Visual Effects


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

"Giving the lie to five Oscar pics"

Matt Welch, who now works for the LA Times, has put together a nifty Oscar package, five short articles debunking the realism of the five Best Picture nominees: "The truths that each of the best-picture nominees left on the cutting-room floor."

-- Like I pointed out in my AmCon review, Nicholas Goldberg notes that "Munich" leaves out the Lillehammer Fiasco: in 1973 a team of supposedly crack Mossad assassins were supposed to kill a Palestinian mastermind of the Munich Olympic terrorism, but instead they murdered a Moroccan waiter in Norway who was walking home from the movies with his pregnant wife.

-- Like I noted in my review, Andrew Gumbel shows that "Capote" is unfair to Truman Capote. In the movie, Capote didn't learn that Perry Smith had killed anyone until long after he had stopped helping them with their Supreme Court appeals because their execution would provide a good ending to his book. In reality, both jailbirds portrayed in Capote's "In Cold Blood" had confessed soon after their arrest to premeditated murder, so there was no large way in which Capote even could have betrayed them to the hangman.

Of course, the two murderers, who had decided days before their crime to slaughter all witnesses they encountered during their home invasion deserved to hang. If we don't reserve a higher punishment for witness-murderers, then we'll get more witness-murdering. But such heretical pro-death penalty logic never dawned on "Capote screenwriter Dan Futterrman, or just about any other reviewers.

Something that neither Gumbel nor I mentioned was that the essential phoniness of "Capote" is that the movie isn't really about Truman Capote. Instead, Futterman was inspired by Janet Malcolm's book "The Journalist and the Murderer," which tells the tale of how reporter Joe McGinnis started writing a book with the imprisoned Jeffrey MacDonald to prove that MacDonald was innocent of murdering his family. But as he researched the case, McGinnis became convinced that MacDonald really was a murderer, so that's what he said in his book, much to MacDonald's anger. Malcolm famously concluded:

"Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible," Malcolm wrote in The Journalist and the Murderer. "He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse."

Ironically, that's even more true of screenwriters, with Futterman as an example. Instead of making a movie of Malcolm's book about McGinnis and MacDonald, Futterman decided to rewrite Capote's life story to make it fit Malcolm's theory.

In reality, Capote's writing of "In Cold Blood" was a heroic feat.

Still, while "Capote" the movie is fundamentally bogus, Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal of Capote remains amazing.

-- Jack Shafer notes that George Clooney's "Good Night, and Good Luck" is falsely overdramatized. CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow's attack on Joe McCarthy didn't come until March 1954, when McCarthy was already doomed. As Paul Johnson says in Modern Times, President Eisenhower had long been sick of McCarthy, but knew that the real problem was the long, ugly Korean War. Once America was no longer at war, the public would get sick of McCarthy too. Eisenhower achieved a ceasefire in Korea in 1953, and then worked behind the scenes to bring McCarthy down. When McCarthy attached the U.S. Army, he doomed himself. Murrow's role was peripheral at best.

Something else I would add is that the noble newscaster characters in Clooney's movie are much duller than the characters on McCarthy's side, such as the drunken, self-destructive McCarthy himself, the lisping machiavel Roy Cohn, McCarthy's ruthless staffer Bobby Kennedy, and his would-be spokesman William F. Buckley. But they aren't portrayed in the movie, except in documentary footage or dialogue.

Yet, despite how thin the material is in "Good Night," Clooney shows real potential as a director. He's got looks, charm, money, fame ... and artistic talent. It's just not fair!

-- Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez points out that in Annie Proulx's short-story version of "Brokeback Mountain," Ennis Del Mar is a Latino. She complains: " the lack of Latinos in a movie about Latinos is inexcusable, and it speaks to how far Hollywood has to go."

So, why did they cast Heath Ledger from Australia in the role instead of, say, Freddie Prinze Jr.? Uh, maybe, because Ledger was better than anybody else they could have got?

Dave Weigel offers some speculation on the missing Latino question, and in his Comments below it, I explain the difference between North American and Latin conceptions of homosexuality, and how Hollywood wouldn't want to touch that politically incorrect tar baby.

Still, Ms. Valdes-Rodriguez is correct in pointing out the lack of political clout of Hispanics in the entertainment business, especially relative to the less numerous but vastly more powerful African-American bloc. This was brought home four years ago when the half-blonde Halle Berry successfully campaigned for the Academy to award her the Best Actress Oscar as reparations to earlier black actresses. Meanwhile, Jennifer Connelly won the Supporting Actress Oscar for playing crazy math genius John Nash's long-suffering wife in "A Beautiful Mind." In reality, Alicia Nash is from an upper class family in El Salvador. A few days after the Oscars, the LA Times mentioned that some La Raza activists were sore about the role going to the "Anglo" Connelly, but, it didn't matter because Hispanics don't count much in Hollywood.

-- Matt Welch reserves for himself criticizing "Crash" for a lack of realism, which is like shooting ducks in a barrel. He makes most of the same criticisms I made of this highly contrived screenplay in my review, but I see the "Crash" glass as half full as well as half empty. In "Crash," unlike the last 14 years of "Law and Order," the violent urban criminals turn out to be ... black. (Screenwriter-director Paul Haggis was carjacked in the early 1990s by two black guys who stuck .38's the faces of himself and his wife.) The end of the movie gets pretty soppy, but it did include some of the bravest scenes of 2005. As I wrote:

As two African-American men emerge from an expensive restaurant, one (played well by rapper Ludacris) entertainingly rants about how their waitress gave them poor service just because they are black. While his sidekick points out that she was black, too, they pass L.A.'s district attorney (Brendan Fraser of "The Mummy") and his Brentwood socialite wife (Sandra Bullock of "Speed"). Although heavily Botoxed, she visibly flinches at the sight of black guys just walking past her. This blatant racism enrages Ludacris, so he chooses the DA's Lincoln Navigator as tonight's vehicle to car-jack.

Afterwards, the DA groans, "Why'd they have to be black?" Calculating that the news is going to cost him either the black vote or the "law-and-order vote," he immediately instructs his aides to find some black to publicly promote.

Meanwhile, a black LAPD detective (Don Cheadle of "Hotel Rwanda") is investigating a road rage incident in which a white undercover policeman shot an out-of-control off-duty black cop. The DA's oily Irish-American fixer (character actor William Fichtner) lets Cheadle know the boss wants to prosecute the white cop to appease black voters, so he's not happy when Cheadle reveals the dead black officer had $300,000 in his trunk. (This is based on a 1997 LAPD scandal.)

The politico blurts out his frustration at how the tidy deals he engineers are constantly undermined by black malfeasance. "Why do blacks get themselves thrown in prison eight times more often per capita than whites?" he demands of Cheadle, who has no answer. Cheadle finally agrees to frame the innocent white cop in exchange for a promotion and the dropping of felony charges against his younger brother (who turns out to be one of the car-jackers).

Sounds like Haggis read the original 1999 version of Jared Taylor's "The Color of Crime!"

By the way, at the local discount movie house where I saw "Crash," the heavily black audience seemed to enjoy it intensely. "Crash" (which was made for only $6.5 million) had some of the best "legs" of any movie of 2005. It opened in 1800 theatres and took in a modest 9 million its first weekend, but it then hung around long enough to earn a total of $53 million, for almost 6 times its opening weekend haul, which is highly unusual for a May release these days.

Yet, "Crash" doesn't really seem like a Best Picture-worthy film -- more like a successful experiment. Of course, none of the other nominees seem Best Picture worthy.

The problem with the 2005 pictures was not so much in the quality of the art films that got nominated for Best Picture, but in the lack of good filmmaking in the hits that made over $100 million.

As recently as 2002, you had quite a number of movies making over $100 that were also pretty good: e.g., "Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers," "Spiderman," "Chicago," "Catch Me If You Can," "Lilo & Stitch," "Minority Report," "Bourne Identity," "Sum of All Fears," "8 Mile," and "Road to Perdition." Or, in 2003, the following films made at least $90 million: "LOTR: Return of the King," "Finding Nemo," "Elf," "Seabiscuit," "Last Samurai," "Italian Job," "Cold Mountain," "Master and Commander," and "Mystic River." Not all of them to my taste, but a lot better selection of popular movies than 2005 produced. Hopefully, 2004 and 2005 have been just a slump, not a trend.


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

March 3, 2006

The new March 27th issue

of The American Conservative is now available to electronic subscribers. I particularly liked Diana Moon's Taki-esque article on the decline of the Winter Olympics from Jean-Claude Killy to the Flying Tomato, even though she has much better taste than I do. (Hey, I think snowboardcross is, like, gnarly, dog [dawg?]).

Ex-CIA man Philip Giraldi's always interesting "Deep Background" gossip column for spies has a paragraph on something that readers have been bringing up in emails to me:

"There is increasing speculation that tension between the United States and Iran, ostensibly based on concerns about nuclear weapons, might actually be fueled by Iran's campaign to exert pressure on the U.S. Dollar. Iran intends to open an oil-trading bourse on March 20, which would compete with the existing bourses in New York and London, where nearly all oil is traded. The existing arrangement is denominated in dollars, which forces Europeans and nearly all other purchasers of oil to maintain large dollar reserves. The Iranian bourse will be denominated in euros and will make it possible for many central banks around the world to get rid of their dollars, possibly lead to a sharp drop in the currency's value."

I must confess that even when I was majoring in economics, international currency economics struck me as Black Magic that I would never ever truly understand. So, I've consoled myself since by assuming that questions like what currency oil is traded in are purely "nominal" and the magic of the market would have already adjusted for the underlying values, so shifts from one currency as the denominator to another would be immaterial. But, maybe I'm kidding myself? If you understand this stuff, please let me know what's going on.


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

Malcolm in the Muddle

Another classic Gladwell brainstorm from his latest interview on ESPN:

There's a famous experiment done by a wonderful psychologist at Columbia University named Dan Goldstein. He goes to a class of American college students and asks them which city they think is bigger -- San Antonio or San Diego. The students are divided. Then he goes to an equivalent class of German college students and asks the same question. This time the class votes overwhelmingly for San Diego. The right answer? San Diego. So the Germans are smarter, at least on this question, than the American kids. But that's not because they know more about American geography. It's because they know less. They've never heard of San Antonio. But they've heard of San Diego and using only that rule of thumb, they figure San Diego must be bigger. The American students know way more. They know all about San Antonio. They know it's in Texas and that Texas is booming. They know it has a pro basketball team, so it must be a pretty big market. Some of them may have been in San Antonio and taken forever to drive from one side of town to another -- and that, and a thousand other stray facts about Texas and San Antonio, have the effect of muddling their judgment and preventing them from getting the right answer.

Okay, but what if Dr. Goldstein had asked which city is bigger -- San Jose or San Francisco? The German students may never heard of San Jose, but San Francisco is world famous, so it has to be bigger, right?

Except, it's not:

San Jose, California (pop 900,443)

San Francisco, California (pop 764,049)

Anyway, that the American students know that San Diego (pop 1,259,532) and San Antonio (pop 1,194,222) are quite similar in size is more valuable in the long run for most purposes than the Germans knowing which one is larger but not knowing how similar they are.


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

Elite tastes: depressing entertainment, schmaltzy science

In a survey of the public's taste in books, happy endings were hugely preferred:

"Young people were most likely to prefer books with a sad ending - 8.6% of under 16s. Those aged 41-65, however, a group with more personal experience of sadness, dislike sad endings, with only 1.1% preferring books that end this way."

Economist-aesthete Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution commented:

"You must know by now, of course, that I prefer most of my endings tragic, or ambiguous, with a few happy tales thrown in to make the tragedies a surprise when they come. (Is it the dirty little secret of elite culture that we would be bored if in fact we had everything our way?) In fact all of you unwashed-masses-happy-endings-loving viewers subsidize me. You support so much feel-good slop that when something meaty does come along, I am genuinely shocked and delighted."

When I interviewed Steven Pinker, author of The Blank Slate, he made an astute comment about the paradox of modern elite tastes:

"Q: Aren't we all better off if people believe that we are not constrained by our biology and so can achieve any future we choose?"

"A: People are surely better off with the truth. Oddly enough, everyone agrees with this when it comes to the arts. Sophisticated people sneer at feel-good comedies and saccharine romances in which everyone lives happily ever after. But when it comes to science, these same people say, "Give us schmaltz!" They expect the science of human beings to be a source of emotional uplift and inspirational sermonizing."

Personally, I like honesty in science and (more than most critics) happy endings in art, because, as Nabokov pointed out, art is artifice, not realism. So why shouldn't the artist whip up an artificially satisfying ending, just as he's expected to make his work more beautiful or more intense or more interesting than real life? My favorite happy ending is in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, where the great satirist contrives to give every single character exactly what they wanted (and give it to them good and hard).

Generally, novels with sad endings are not particularly depressing because the hero gets to do a lot of living before something bad happens to him. Nobody is much depressed that Rhett Butler leaves Scarlett O'Hara at the end of Gone With the Wind because she's enjoyed 1,000 pages of memorable adventures before then.

What are incredibly depressing, however, are contemporary literary short stories, which always end with the protagonist having some disillusioning "epiphany." The problem is that you don't get to see the character do much living before then, so the endings are just bleak. That explains a lot about why nobody pays to read short stories anymore.


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

I Believe that Children Are Our Future Dept.

Email of the Day from America's Youth: I get a lot of emails from students requesting help with their high school projects. Here's the latest (and all-time greatest):

hey steve my name is gus, i am doing a project at school in a group. i need some info on whale sailers in the 1700 please help me man i have to find out the requirements to be one or what their lives were like

thanks man

I'd love to write your report for you, Gus, but, tragically, the Sailers are descended from Swiss ropemakers ("seilers"), not whale sailors.

(By the way, the switch in spelling from "Seiler" to "Sailer" came a few hundred years ago when an ancestor was elected mayor of the village of Wil and decided to change the name to show off the family's high-falutin' new status, just like an Englishman changing his name from "Smith" to "Smythe.")

Another email has just arrived:

yo steve since your helping that other guy with his whale sailer project..... could you help me with a school report on stevedores?

Like what they do, how much they make, etc?

This of course is why I'm qualified to comment on the Dubai Ports controversy, and, say, David Brooks is not. His expertise is in floods, fishing, and fighting giants.


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

The Persistence of the Steve Sailer Panhandling Drive:

I want to thank everybody who was so generous during Day 1 of my first keep-me-writing fundraising drive of 2006. It really makes me feel appreciated. We're still a long way from the goal, but I'm feeling a lot more optimistic than just 24 hours ago thanks to you all.


So, let me review the four ways to contribute:

[1.] Peter Brimelow writes:

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

Now, if tax deductibility isn't relevant to you (e.g., you live outside the U.S.), you might find it simpler to donate directly to me through [2.] Paypal or [3.] Amazon, or [4.] just email me and I'll email back my Post Office Box address.

Click Here to PayLearn MoreAmazon Honor SystemYou don't need to have a PayPal or Amazon account already to donate, just a credit card. (Or you can E-mail me and I'll send you my P.O. Box number.)

Paypal and Amazon charge $0.30 per transaction and 2.9% of the total, so I only get to keep 41% of a $1 donation, but 96.8% of a $100 donation!


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

Stephen Jay Gould's widow has filed a malpractice suit

against the doctor who once saved his life in 1982. The AP reports:

"Gould had a long-standing relationship with Mayer dating to 1982, when Gould was diagnosed with another form of cancer, peritoneal mesothelioma [which is frequently caused by asbestos, leading to lots of litigation], according to the lawsuit. Gould was cured of that illness and saw Mayer a number of times a year for cancer screenings, the lawsuit said.

"Although Gould's original cancer was unrelated to the lung cancer that ultimately killed him, because of Gould's cancer history, doctors "would have a heightened duty to look for lung cancers," [lawyer] MacDonald said. Gould's cancer history "was a literal flashing red light warning," according to the lawsuit. "That warning was inexplicably, negligently and ... grossly negligently ignored by the three defendants...

"The lawsuit does not specify the damages being sought, but says that Dr. Gould earned $300,000 a year from speaking engagements alone, that "a seven-figure income was his norm" and that when he died he was about to enter into a book contract for more than $2 million."

Gould was very brave to survive mesothelioma in 1982, when he was only given 8 months to live after his diagnosis. Here's the essay he wrote about his cancer, which I found encouraging when I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma in 1996.


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

March 2, 2006

Malcolm Gladwell says I was right

Yesterday, I compared the quality of Gladwell's prose in The New Yorker to the stuff he posts on his own www.Gladwell.com and I suggested he benefited from the New Yorker support staff system. Today, a reader sends me a new interview that Bill Simmons of ESPN conducted with Gladwell, where he admits it:

"I write for the New Yorker, so I have an entire army of high-IQ fact checkers, and editors and copy editors working with me. To stretch the quarterback analogy here, I'm Jake Plummer [a normally mediocre quarterback who had a fine season this year due to his brilliant coaching staff]: I work in an offensive system designed to make me look way better than I actually am."

Then, to prove it, we get this exchange:

Simmons: "Can you explain the Contract Year phenomenon for me? What is it about the mentality of professional athletes where they sign huge contracts, then they either mail in the rest of their careers, or it takes them the requisite, "All right, I just made a crapload of money, maybe I don't have to try as hard" year before they bounce back in the second year? ... And why does this happen mostly in the NBA, and almost always with tall centers?" ...

Gladwell: This is one of my favorite topics. Let's do Erick Dampier. In his contract year at Golden State, he essentially doubles his rebounds and increases his scoring by 50 percent. Then, after he signs with Dallas, he goes back to the player he was before. What can we conclude from this? The obvious answer is that effort plays a much larger role in athletic performance than we care to admit. When he tries, Dampier is one of the top centers in the league. When he doesn't try, he's mediocre. So a big part of talent is effort. The second obvious answer is that performance (at least in centers) is incredibly variable. The same person can be a mediocre center one year and a top 10 center the next just based on how motivated he is. So is Dampier a top 10 player or a mediocre player? There is no way to answer that. It depends. He's not inherently good or bad. He's both. The third obvious answer is that coaching matters. If you are a coach who can get Dampier to try, you can turn a mediocre center into a top 10 center. And you, the coach, will be enormously valuable. (This is why Phil Jackson is worth millions of dollars a year.) If you are a coach who can't get Dampier to try, then you're not that useful. (You may want to insert the name Doc Rivers at this point.)

In the context of sports, none of us have any problem with any of these conclusions. But now let's think about it in the context of education. An inner city high school student fails his classes and does abysmally on his SATs. No college will take him, and he's basically locked out of the best part of the job market. Why? Because we think that grades and SATs tell us something fundamental about that kid's talent and ability -- or, in this case, lack of it.

But wait: what are the lessons of the contract year? A big part of talent is effort. Maybe this kid is plenty smart enough, and he's just not trying. More to the point, how can we say he isn't smart. If talent doesn't really mean that much in the case of Dampier -- if basketball ability is incredibly variable -- why don't we think of ability in the case of this kid as being incredibly variable? And finally, what does the kid need? In the NBA, we'd say he needed Phil Jackson or Hubie Brown or maybe just a short-term contract. We'd think that we could play a really important role in getting Dampier to play harder. So why don't we think that in the case of the kid? I realize I'm being a bit of a sloppy liberal here. But one of the fascinating things about sports, it seems to me, is that when it comes the way we think about professional athletes, we're all liberals (without meaning to be, of course). We give people lots of chances. (Think Jeff George). We go to extraordinary lengths to help players reach their potential. We're forgiving of mistakes. When the big man needs help with his footwork, we ship him off to Pete Newell for the summer. We hold players accountable for their actions. But we also believe, as a matter of principle, that players need supportive environments in order to flourish. It would be nice if we were as generous and as patient with the rest of society's underachievers.

Oh boy ...Where to begin?

Okay, so why do basketball teams often believe that seven foot centers have basketball potential if only they would stop dogging it, whereas society tends to assume that typical high school students with bad grades and bad test scores don't have any more academic potential than they've displayed? Let me think ... wait a minute ... I've almost got it ... Oh, yeah:

Because the seven foot centers are seven feet tall.

Now, if the high school student with the bad grades and bad test scores was reading Rawls' A Theory of Justice and Dennett's Consciousness Explained for his own amusement, we'd probably reassess our evaluations, too.

Obviously, the real reason seven footers in the NBA have worse work ethics than six footers in the NBA is because to make it in the NBA at six feet tall, you have to have everything other than height, including a great work ethic. But if you are seven feet tall, you don't need the whole package, because there are so few seven footers for NBA teams to select among. You're way out at the far right edge of the Height Bell Curve where there's not much competition. So, you can be lazy and get by, whereas a lazy six-footer in the NBA is history.

When I was at UCLA in 1980-82, out of 35,000 students, there were only two seven footers on campus: the basketball team's starting center Stuart Gray and the backup center Mark Eaton. Eaton was a campus joke, an awkward 25-year-old former auto mechanic who moved like he was better suited to a career of loading suitcases onto airplanes rather than being a high level athlete.

But he was 7'-3" and 275 pounds of solid muscle, a genuine giant. One day in 1981, I was standing in front of UCLA's Royce Hall, when I noticed two young men walking toward me across the huge open grassy quad. "Hey!" I said to myself. "There's something you don't see very often at UCLA. That tiny fellow talking to the normal-sized guy is a genuine midget." Then, another young man walked up to the pair. "Wow! Now there's two midgets with that regular guy," I thought. "What are the odds of that?"

Highly unlikely, I suddenly realized, as I underwent one of those gestalt snaps, like where the vase in the picture suddenly becomes two faces in profile. Now that there were three people, it became clear to me that the two "midgets" were six-footers and the "normal-sized guy" was Eaton.

So the Denver Nuggets took a chance on him as a "project" and Eaton evolved into a two-time NBA Defensive Player of the Year (although he was always a terrible scorer and only an above average rebounder).

Let's think about Gladwell's statement:

"But one of the fascinating things about sports, it seems to me, is that when it comes the way we think about professional athletes, we're all liberals (without meaning to be, of course). We give people lots of chances. (Think Jeff George). We go to extraordinary lengths to help players reach their potential. We're forgiving of mistakes. When the big man needs help with his footwork, we ship him off to Pete Newell for the summer."

I'll grant Gladwell that almost all sportswriters are liberals and claim to be true believers in nurture over nature, but surely the most spectacularly obvious fact about the NBA is that nature, especially height, matters hugely more than nurture. Eaton is one of the all time strongest examples of the power of nurture to improve a basketball player, but the overwhelming fact about him is still that he was 7'-3"!

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

The Return of the Steve Sailer Panhandling Drive

It's been awhile since I last hit you all up hard for money, but my cash flow has turned sharply negative again, so please, please pony up now.

Over the last couple of years, I've burned through a sizable fraction of my savings trying to stay in the writing business. Maybe I'm being megalomaniacal, but I think the question of whether or not I can survive in this profession has ramifications beyond just my family's welfare. If I have to give up writing, it will send a malign message to a lot of other people with potential:

"Kid, don't wind up like Sailer. He had the talent, but he just had one fatal flaw -- he couldn't stop himself from telling the truth. And nobody will pay for that."

Silencing me is the goal of huckster extraordinaire Morris Dees of the mercenary Southern Poverty Law Center, richly-funded tattle-tale David Brock of Media Matters, and the charming John Podhoretz of NRO. If I lose, they win.

You'll notice that my detractors don't argue with what I say (because they can't think of any facts and logic to refute it). All they ever do is list my heresies as self-evidently beyond what's allowed in polite society; nobody should be allowed to say such things in public, so I must be made an example of.

As you are doing your taxes, you might find yourself worrying,

"Man, my taxable income income is too high! How can I lower it in 2006 so I don't have to pay so much in taxes?"

Well, trust me, I'm not worrying about that. So, if you are, do we ever have a deal for you! Peter Brimelow writes:

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

Now, if tax deductibility isn't relevant to you (e.g., you live outside the U.S.), you might find it simpler to donate directly to me through Paypal or Amazon, or just email me and I'll email back my Post Office Box address.

You don't need to have a PayPal or Amazon account already to donate, just a credit card. (Or you can E-mail me and I'll send you my P.O. Box number.)

Click Here to PayLearn MoreAmazon Honor SystemPaypal and Amazon charge $0.30 per transaction and 2.9% of the total, so I only get to keep 41% of a $1 donation, but 96.8% of a $100 donation!

What have I done to earn your support?

While the rest of the media was telling you not to believe your lying eyes, I gave you the straight story about the New Orleans Nightmare. For that, I had to put up with denunciations from far and wide.

I don't just provide opinionizing. I've broken the following stories that required extensive statistical analysis:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some of the things I've either A. accurately predicted; B. calculated or otherwise discovered by myself; or C. scooped the rest of the press about:

- That Cesar Chavez was the first anti-illegal immigration Minuteman.

- Mexico's terrorist attacks on America under the genocidal Plan of San Diego.

- That at least 1,800 different human genes have been under varying selection pressures on different continents.

- Proposed a practical yet humane push-pull plan for saving Europe by persuading large numbers of its Muslims to leave.

- That before the War on Christmas, American Jews had helped make the American Christmas the rich celebration it is today

- That "Citizenism" offers an attractive moral philosophy that can help us regain control of our borders.

- A feasible plan to help the 30% of the youth who might benefit from the discipline of military training, but whose IQs are too low to be accepted under recent recruitment guidelines.

- That the spread of demeaning jobs as roadside Human Signs reflects the cheap labor / expensive land economy promoted by mass immigration.

- In December 1992, even before Bill Clinton was inaugurated, I wrote "A Specter Is Haunting the Clinton Presidency," predicting that sexual harassment charges by an Arkansas state employee could endanger Clinton's tenure in office.

- The gender gap in Olympic running reached its narrowest point back in 1988, and that it's been larger ever since due to better steroid testing. (In general, I was on top of the steroid story early.)

- In "Is Love Colorblind?" I showed there are striking skews among interracial married couples, with black men and Asian women in greater demand; Asian men and black women aren't happy about it.

- Lesbians and gays have remarkably few behavioral tendencies in common ("Why Lesbians Aren't Gay").

- The fundamental problem underlying the corruption and discord of the Muslim Middle East is an extraordinarily high rate of cousin marriage. Inbreeding turns each extended family into a clan, pursuing its own welfare at the expense of the nation.

- The biggest reason whites and blacks get along better in the military than in the rest of society is because the military won't take low IQ applicants, so black and white average IQ scores are fairly similar in the military.

- Sexual selection (rich dark men marrying fair women) keeps whites on top in Latin America after almost 500 years of interracial marriage ("How Latino Intermarriage Breeds Racial Inequality")

- The most useful definition of a racial group is "a partly inbred extended family" ("It's All Relative: Putting Race in it's Proper Perspective").

- There are practical ways to "Help the Left Half of the Bell Curve."

- In 2000, Bush carried the 19 states with the highest white fertility rate.

- Contrary to all Karl Rove's hype, in 2000 I explained that "The GOP's Future Depends on White Vote."

- That blacks tend to have better improvisatory cognitive skills than whites do in areas that IQ tests can't measure ("Great Black Hopes")

- That immigration increases inequality.

- That white liberals have lower birthrates than white conservatives ("Will Liberals Become Extinct")

- "Immigration Is Retarding the Spread of Interracial Marriage" -- In California, native-born Americans are three times as likely as immigrants to have a spouse from a different race.

- From 2000, "Will Vicente Fox Be Bush's Yeltsin?"

- When the Human Genome Project honchos told us they had proved race doesn't exist, they were just yanking our chains.

- George H.W. Bush was wise not to push on to conquer Baghdad in 1991.

- The Bush family has had decades of close contacts with corrupt Mexican politicos.

- Blacks are imprisoned 9.1 times more than whites and Hispanics 3.7 times more.

- On the evening of 9/11, I wrote "Bush Called for Laxer Airport Security," pointing out that, in pursuit of the Arab / Muslim vote in 2000, Bush had promised to eliminate ethnic profiling of Arab airline passengers and get rid of the use of secret evidence in terrorism prosecutions.

- In late September 2001, before the Afghan war began, I wrote a long essay on "The Man Who Would Be King" to demonstrate that the U.S. would win easily in Afghanistan but then find nation-building extremely difficult.

- The problem with polygamy that everyone forgets about is that for every man with four wives there are three bachelors left over.

- African Americans are 17-18% white and Mexicans are about 5% black.

- Mass immigration makes affirmative action more costly to individual whites by lowering the "racial ratio" of those damaged by quotas to those benefited.

- "1986 Amnesty Set off a Baby Boom among Ex-Illegals"

- The Bush Administration's briefs (as rewritten by Alberto Gonzales) would signal Justice O'Connor to vote for endorsing racial quotas in the U. of Michigan case.

- Genghis Khan was the world's greatest lover.

- Annika Sorenstam would miss the cut in her men's tournament by four strokes.

- In February 2003, I predicted that the woman golfer most likely to be competitive with top men golfers would not be Annika Sorenstam, but instead a 13-year-old named Michelle Wie.

- A week into the 2003 Iraq invasion, I asked, "Why no dancing in the streets of Iraq?"

- Jews and Muslims each make up 0.3%, and atheists 0.1% of the U.S. Armed Forces, according to dog tag markings of each soldier's religion.

- The number of black pro golfers has declined sharply over the last two decades because of the decline in the number of black caddies.

- The exit poll aggregation software crashed on Election Night 2002, so nobody knew what the demographics of the midterm elections were until I purchased the raw data and crunched it in a series of articles.

- I coined the phrase "Invade the World! Invite the World!" to describe the Bush Administration's contradictory foreign and immigration policies.

- The War Nerd.

- Oscar winners give 40 times more money to Democrats than to Republicans.

- Dynasticism is on the rebound around the world (2000 version) and (2003 version)

- The NAEP test score gap for American-born Hispanics versus whites is 2/3rds as large as the notoriously troublesome black-white gap.

- That micronutrient fortification would be a cost-effective way to raise Third World IQs.

- Regarding the Larry Summers brouhaha, the percent of female Nobel Laureates in the hard sciences has dropped from 2.5% in 1901-1964 to 2.3% in 1965-2004.

- That the fundamental problem of African-American culture (low paternal investment in children) also is the fundamental problem of African culture.

So, please give generously. I thank you for it.


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

Hesperophobia, or rightful resentment of American interference?

A reader writes in reply to my VDARE.com column endorsing John Derbyshire's "Hesperophobia" theory:

"Derbyshire is full of it. The west is hated in the Islamic world for its actions; the long history of invasion and meddling (starting with the Brits), support for “friendly” dictatorships like the Saudis, and above all, one-sided support for Israel..."

Okay, but how many times as the US recently intervened to help Muslims?

Afghanistan versus Soviet invaders 1980-1988
Kuwait versus Saddam 1991
Somalia versus starvation 1992
Bosnia versus Serbs 1995
Kosovo versus Serbs 1999

And look how much appreciation that has earned us in the Muslim world!

It's our being powerful enough to do favors for pitiful Muslims that makes them hate us -- for being so much more powerful than them. As Ben Franklin pointed out, to get somebody to like you, don't do them a favor -- because that just makes them resent that you can. Instead, have them do you a favor, and then they will want to do you more favors.

For example, the French loved us for more than a century after they beat Britain for us in 1781, giving us the Statue of Liberty as a token of their affection. But after we repaid them in 1917 ("Lafayette, we are here!") and 1944, they've come to resent us for being able to rescue them.

(Consider in contrast how the whole world has forgiven or forgotten Italian aggression in the 1930s and 1940s [e.g., Mussolini's attempting, but failing, to conquer Greece] because it was so endearingly incompetent. In contrast, the hypercompetent German aggression of that era is obsessively rehashed in the media everyday.)

Unfortunately, there aren't that many favors Muslims can do us these days (although we shouldn't forget that the Saudis did us a huge favor in 1986 by driving the price of oil way down at our request, helping to destroy the Soviet economy for us). So, the best course at present is to try to have as little to do with them as we can. Obviously, there are limits to a policy of benign neglect -- we must, for example, continue to guarantee the security of the small Gulf oil states from 1990-type conquests -- but our military dominance is now so great that we can do this without maintaining a huge footprint on the ground in the area.


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

France, that ultimate "Proposition Nation"

A historian comments:

You belled the cat quite well with your post on Fukuyama. The point you've made on a few occasions about France being the kind of "proposition nation" that the neocons claim America should be is also worth reiterating.

In "Americans First," I asked:

Finally, there’s an insidiously Jacobin implication to propositionism. If believing in neoconservative theories should make anyone in the world eligible for immigration, what should disbelieving in them make thought criminals like you and me? Candidates for deportation? For the guillotine?

My reader continues:

Paul Johnson notes in Modern Times that France has been split since 1789 between the proposition-based "Patriotic France" and the "Nationalist France" defined both against the principles of 1789 and by loyalty to place. Others have noted this tension, and part of it is implicit in having a "proposition nation." What happens to those who don't accept the proposition?

Massacre. Simon Schama essentially confirmed the old Catholic Royalist accounts by Guillaume Bertier de Sauvigny and others in his book Citizens, which describes both the Paris terror that eventually felled Robespierre and the less well-know story of massacres in the Vendee. This civil war of massacre and resistance among the French left an open wound that even De Gaulle couldn't wholly mend, and whichever side has the upper hand at any given time sticks it to the other as hard as it can. World War I and the Gaullist era mark partial exceptions, that underline the general rule. Nationalist France remains below the surface waiting to lash back, unless its rulers solve their problem by electing a new people.

If Mexico and Brazil offer a cautionary tale about social divisions reinforced by race, France shows the bitter fruit that "proposition nations" bring. But then Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom didn't mention that in their theory courses.

Examples of French v. French violence in the 20th Century include the right wing oppression during the Vichy Regime, the leftist reprisals in 1944-46, and the White Terror propagated by pied noir French Algerians and their Army supporters after De Gaulle sold them out in the early 1960s. The Dreyfus Affair at the beginning of the 20th Century led to unbelievable bitterness within French society, but fortunately stopped just short of civil war. The leftist May 1968 riots were so strong that De Gaulle, thinking the jig was up, fled to West Germany to take refuge with French soldiers there under his protégé General Massou. Pompidou and Massou had to talk him into going home and taking a stand by splitting the Communist workers from the student New Leftists by promising big wage hikes.

French anti-Americanism, especially Gaullist anti-Americanism, is, in large part, an attempt to unify the fractious French by finding a foreign country for Frenchmen to resent rather than each other. De Gaulle was a great, great patriot -- and, because of that, a complete pain in the butt to us "Anglo-Saxons," but we could afford to, and usually did, put up with his calculated offensiveness.

The neocons' touchiness about French touchiness is another example of their amusingly (but deleteriously) French-like childishness. The U.S. is so much stronger than any other single country on Earth that it's in our interest to respond phlegmatically toward minor rudenesses from lesser countries like France. Instead, the neocons act like Peter Sellers's Inspector Clouseau whenever his hauteur was trifled with.


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

My review of "Night Watch" in the upcoming American Conservative

Here's an excerpt:

Russia's triumphant rise from cultural backwater to dazzling center of creativity and profundity during the century before the Bolshevik Revolution was mirrored by its sad decline under Communism. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 might have been expected to unshackle Russian artistry, but over the last decade and a half, little has emerged that has caught the attention of the West.

Still, hope for a Russian aesthetic revival endures, so when the film "Night Watch," the first of a planned trilogy that has set box office records in Russia, finally reached America, the Saturday evening crowd at an art house cinema in West Los Angeles solemnly took it in as if it were the second coming of Crime and Punishment.

In reality, "Night Watch" is a clever and entertaining (if confusing and not at all scary) commercial fantasy film about supernatural undercover cops who arrest vampires. While reminiscent of the great Mikhail Bulgakov's long-banned 1930s novel about the Devil's visit to Stalin's Moscow, The Master and Margarita, it's actually closer to the TV show "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and last year's Keanu Reeves theological thriller "Constantine."

"Night Watch" is built on the current Hollywood economic model. It's a special effects-encrusted and lavishly advertised blockbuster that has spawned a franchise. Of course, the financial scale is tiny by comparison: "Night Watch" cost all of $4 million to make and reaped $16 million at the Russian box office. Fortunately, a dollar goes a lot farther in Russia, and "Night Watch" looks terrific. The computer-generated imagery is professional, and Moscow's grubbiness has never been depicted so slickly. While "Night Watch" is a pastiche of American hits, there's a distinct Russian flavor and a crucial anti-abortion plot twist that Hollywood wouldn't touch.


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

Does Malcolm Gladwell really belong in iSteve.com's "Smart Enough to Know Better Hall of Shame?"

You may have noticed that the guys who get on my nerves the most are the smart enough to know better intellectuals who instead choose to mislead the public for personal or political gain: Stephen Jay Gould, Jared Diamond, Steven D. Levitt, Michael Barone, Karl Rove, Nicholas Lemann, The Economist magazine staff, Charles Krauthammer, Michael Ledeen, Francis Fukuyama, Christopher Hitchens, and so forth, along with less objectionable characters who still have their moments of moral weakness, like the great population geneticist L.L. Cavalli-Sforza, Richard Dawkins, Victor Davis Hanson, Mark Steyn, and the Thernstroms.

I'd long considered Malcolm Gladwell a prime member of the "Smart Enough to Know Better" gang ... until I discovered his personal website www.Gladwell.com. There, Gladwell publishes his thoughts without benefit of The New Yorker's expert fact-checkers and editors, and it's not a pretty sight. Instead, you get howlers like:

"Sailer and Poser [sic] have a very low opinion of car salesmen."

and

"If you look, in fact, at emergency room statistics, you'll see that more people are admitted every year for non-dog bites than dog-bites--which is to say that when you see a Pit Bull, you should worry as much about being bitten by the person holding the leash than the dog on the other end."

Now, Gladwell isn't being paid to say idiotic things like this, which raises the horrifying possibility that he actually believes them. So, maybe I've gotten Gladwell all wrong. Maybe Gladwell isn't the Machiavellian mercenary spin-meister I'd assumed. Maybe he's more the Chauncey Gardiner of millionaire sales convention speakers.

My apologies to him.


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