March 7, 2006

Is there a post-Housing Bubble illegal immigrant crime wave coming?

The Financial Times reports:

US illegal migrants up almost 500,000 a year
By Edward Alden in Washington

The number of illegal immigrants in the US has continued to grow by nearly half a million each year in spite of US efforts to increase security at the country’s borders, according to a survey released on Tuesday.

The study, by the Pew Hispanic Center, said that the population of unauthorised migrants reached between 11.5m and 12m last year, accounting for nearly a third of the foreign-born population in the US. That number is up from roughly 8.4m in 2000...

In reality, that number could be even higher. The Pew Hispanic Center has a liberal bias (although it is admirably more honest than most institutions on immigration issues).

The Pew survey underscored the substantial presence of illegal workers in the US labour market. It estimated about 4.9 per cent of the US labour force, or 7.2m workers, was composed of unauthorised migrants.

So, about 40% of "undocumented workers" aren't workers. Interesting. And that's not counting "the 3.1 million children who are U.S. citizens by birth living in families in which the head of the family or a spouse was unauthorized," who get turned into automatic American citizens by the current (but dubious) interpretation of the 14th Amendment.

Nearly a third of those work in service occupations, 19 per cent in construction and 15 per cent in production, installation and repair jobs.

Since only 49% of illegal immigrants are adult males, according to Pew, that would suggest that three-eighths of male illegal immigrant workers are in construction, which is perhaps the most boom-and-bust sensitive sector of the economy. In this decade, very low interest rates and very high home housing prices have driven a construction boom.

But what happens when the Housing Bubble inevitably deflates?

A reader writes:

"Here’s something to contemplate – something I have not seen mentioned. It is perhaps not widely appreciated that when a recession hits the residential construction industry, the layoffs are not just 10 or 20% of the labor force, but more like 80%. ... What will the laid off illegal immigrants do? Go home? Probably not. They will not be able to get jobs in the U.S. There is really only one option: crime."

I'm not sure. The linkage between periods of unemployment and high crime rates is uncertain. But I'm definitely not reassured.


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

It all ends in tears

In response to the SF Chronicle article "Gays brokenhearted over 'Brokeback' loss; S.F. crowd gets quiet, some cry as 'Crash' wins Oscar," Mean Mr. Mustard adds:

Remember when suggesting that women and men might have divergent biologies giving rise to different mental and behavioral predispositions was liable to cause certain hardy feminist academics to faint in a Victorian stereotype of female fragility?

Well, a number of gays were apparently pulling for "Brokeback Mountain" to win the Best Picture award. That support seemed to stem from the movie's message, implicitly asserting that homosexuality is an otherwise meaningless personal trait equally likely to exist among stoic, hypermasculine, strong-and-silent rustics as it is in emotive devotees of musical theatre.

The fact that the Academy voters seemed to have not bought entirely into the notion that gays aren't any more effeminate or less masculine than the average man immediately caused them to collapse in paroxysms of hysterical grief.


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

Sally Satel and Virginia Postrel

Psychiatrist Sally Satel, author of PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine and other books, has had such severe kidney trouble that she needed a kidney transplant.

Virginia Postrel, author of The Future and its Enemies, wrote on her Dynamist blog:

Last fall, my friend Sally Satel wrote about the issue in general and her own search for a kidney donor. Between the time she wrote the article and the time it appeared in the NYT, I heard about her situation and volunteered as a donor. Our tissues turned out to be unusually compatible for nonrelatives and, when her Internet donor dropped out, I moved from backup to actual donor. We have our surgeries tomorrow morning.

Now, Virginia writes:

My operation went extremely smoothly. Hers took longer than expected, because a little bit of the kidney was spasming, making it hard for the surgeons to attach the blood vessels. Worse, a couple hours after surgery she started hemorrhaging and had to go back into surgery--an unusual and dangerous complication. Fortunately, she came through OK and is gradually recovering.

I am now out of the hospital and doing fine, recuperating at a friend's nice DC crash pad. I'm a bit weak and not as mobile as usual, but I'm off pain medication and more normal than not.


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

Supreme Court defers to military again

The Supreme Court unanimously upholds a law cutting federal funds to universities that, in the name of gay rights, ban military recruiting on campus. Mean Mr. Mustard explains the general pattern:

Indeed, the military seems to be one of the last few areas of national life on which the Court has exercised real restraint in making pronouncements. I'd guess that this bespeaks something of a realization on their part that their judgments about social and political issues traditionally left to less distant and more easily checked authorities really are just as ill-considered and liable to muck up the works as critics have been saying for years.

And so it seems they're perfectly content to, say, wreck the economy by disallowing consideration of general intelligence for hiring purposes or contribute dramatically to the likelihood of racially motivated riots, murder and rape in prison by telling state officials that they're not allowed to segregate prisoners by race (and any suggestion that imprisoned racial groups will disproportionately fight amongst themselves is just ignorant prejudice on the part of these guards and administrators who, after all, only have decades of experience working in prisons). A pretty good non-legal, layman's diagnosis of the Court's biggest and most consistent flaw would probably be something like, "They stick their nose in where it doesn't belong."

However, despite all that energetic and poorly-informed meddling, the Court has been unusually conscientious about not making similarly ideological and unrealistic diktats with regards to the military, an organization that, for instance, relies heavily on IQ-like tests to accept or reject enlistees and to classify them for occupations. Why is this?

It seems to me that they're aware of the fact that it's the military's long tradition of having to deal with the ugliest and uncomfortable realities of life that protects and sustains the ability to hold on to the social and intellectual niceties and fictions that top-tier law academics and Supreme Court jutices believe (because, darn it, it would just be so nice if they were true).

Fictions such as: men and women are the same; all groups of people have the same average predilections and capabilities as any other; IQ and the tests used to measure it are meaningless. All of these statements are taken as a matter of course in the classroom at any top law school. All of them are also demonstrably wrong. The Supreme Court has set policy and precedent based on the truth of these statements throughout American life, but not in the military.

America, not least through its military power, has created something of a nice cushion for itself from the brutal realities of the outside world that would so quickly shatter those shibboleths mentioned above. It gives us the ability to banish from our minds (or at least from most public and much of private discourse) the certain unpleasant facts with which Nature, that hideous bitch goddess, has left us.

A reader adds:

I believe that the basic principal at work is the famous phrase of Justice Robert Jackson. “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.” Without the military to defend the Constitution it is a worthless scrap of paper...

The US Army by its very nature cannot operate within the constitution and the bill of rights. Base commanders have powers over speech that no civilian authority would dare exercise. I experienced this first hand as a junior officer. I watched the military police rip political bumpers stickers off soldiers’ vehicles at the order of the commander. These were civilian cars owned by soldiers and parked on the base. They were mostly enlisted men. Most officers would not have dared. Keeping active duty soldiers out of politics has been a long standing Army practice with reasons too obvious to mention. A couple of local ACLU lawyers tried to put up a fuss but no judge would support them.

By the way, a similar but somewhat weaker attitude exists toward civil police powers. The famous or infamous Miranda ruling created a false impression. A careful study shows that even the Warren court tended to defer to the police. For a while in the 1970’s and 1980’s the lower courts forgot this principal, but the rising crime rate brought most of them back to reality. Even judges have children and like to walk the streets safely.


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

New York Times finally catches up to iSteve.com on the HapMap:

Just before Christmas, an important study came out by Robert Moyzis, Eric Wang, et al. entitled "Global landscape of recent inferred Darwinian selection for Homo sapiens" [PDF]. It lists 1,800 genes that have been under varying selection pressure in Africa, Europe, or East Asia over no more than the last 50,000 years. It was based on the revolutionary HapMap study of genetic differences among Yoruban Nigerians, Utah whites, and Japanese & Chinese East Asians. I wrote it up on my blog and in VDARE.com, but because the indispensable Nicholas Wade didn't cover it in the NY Times (I'm guessing he was on Christmas vacation), almost nobody else in the American media paid it much attention, other than a small number of bloggers in my Links list.

Fortunately, Wade is now splashing in the NYT a new study by a different team using HapMap data:


Still Evolving, Human Genes Tell New Story
By NICHOLAS WADE

Providing the strongest evidence yet that humans are still evolving, researchers have detected some 700 regions of the human genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection, a principal force of evolution, within the last 5,000 to 15,000 years.

The genes that show this evolutionary change include some responsible for the senses of taste and smell, digestion, bone structure, skin color and brain function.

Many of these instances of selection may reflect the pressures that came to bear as people abandoned their hunting and gathering way of life for settlement and agriculture, a transition well under way in Europe and East Asia some 5,000 years ago.

Under natural selection, beneficial genes become more common in a population as their owners have more progeny.

Three populations were studied, Africans, East Asians and Europeans. In each, a mostly different set of genes had been favored by natural selection. The selected genes, which affect skin color, hair texture and bone structure, may underlie the present-day differences in racial appearance.

The study of selected genes may help reconstruct many crucial events in the human past. It may also help physical anthropologists explain why people over the world have such a variety of distinctive appearances, even though their genes are on the whole similar, said Dr. Spencer Wells, director of the Genographic Project of the National Geographic Society.

The finding adds substantially to the evidence that human evolution did not grind to a halt in the distant past, as is tacitly assumed by many social scientists. Even evolutionary psychologists, who interpret human behavior in terms of what the brain evolved to do, hold that the work of natural selection in shaping the human mind was completed in the pre-agricultural past, more than 10,000 years ago.

"There is ample evidence that selection has been a major driving point in our evolution during the last 10,000 years, and there is no reason to suppose that it has stopped," said Jonathan Pritchard, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago who headed the study.

Dr. Pritchard and his colleagues, Benjamin Voight, Sridhar Kudaravalli and Xiaoquan Wen, report their findings in today's issue of PLOS-Biology.

Their data is based on DNA changes in three populations gathered by the HapMap project, which built on the decoding of the human genome in 2003. The data, though collected to help identify variant genes that contribute to disease, also give evidence of evolutionary change.

The fingerprints of natural selection in DNA are hard to recognize. Just a handful of recently selected genes have previously been identified, like those that confer resistance to malaria or the ability to digest lactose in adulthood, an adaptation common in Northern Europeans whose ancestors thrived on cattle milk.

But the authors of the HapMap study released last October found many other regions where selection seemed to have occurred, as did an analysis published in December by Robert K. Moysis of the University of California, Irvine. [More]


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

Not from The Onion, amusingly enough:

Gays brokenhearted over 'Brokeback' loss; S.F. crowd gets quiet, some cry as 'Crash' wins Oscar - Wyatt Buchanan, SF Chronicle

The single-word title of the film that won best picture at the Academy Awards Sunday night, beating "Brokeback Mountain," could perhaps best describe the mood at the end of San Francisco's premier Oscar night party. Moments before, when "Brokeback's" Ang Lee won for best director, the packed house at the Academy of Friends AIDS fundraising gala at the Concourse Exhibition Center erupted in wild cheering.

But as Jack Nicholson announced the best picture award for "Crash," a film that received nowhere near the media attention of the cowboy love story, the crowd went quiet. Some booed, and others cried. This was supposed to have been the big "gay" year at the Oscars, with "Brokeback," "Capote" and "Transamerica" all vying for major awards. Many saw "Brokeback" as a kind of great gay hope for best picture.

"I felt like 'Brokeback Mountain' was a film that brought Americans together over issues of homophobia," said Grant Colfax, who hugged and wept with his partner, Rod Rogers [is that his real name?], as the final award of the night went to a movie that instead explored issues of race. Although Colfax said he liked "Crash," he called it a safe choice.

Others were less diplomatic. "I think that's an absolute horror," said Brad Bruner, who is a leader in the Golden State Gay Rodeo Association. "It's an outright sign of homophobia in our country. ('Crash') won no awards before this. It makes me sick."

Overall, the films with gay themes and characters fared moderately. No actors won Oscars for performances in "Brokeback Mountain," and Felicity Huffman did not win for her portrayal of a transgender female in "Transamerica," but Philip Seymour Hoffman did score with his performance in "Capote," a film based on the life of gay writer Truman Capote.

That win meant Hoffman beat out Heath Ledger's character in "Brokeback Mountain," although many people at the event, which raised $500,000 for HIV and AIDS community services, said Hoffman deserved the honor.

Despite the lack of success for "Brokeback Mountain," which won just three of the eight awards for which it was nominated, cowboy hats and western wear were high fashion at the party. A movie poster signed by the actors and director sold for just over $2,800 in a silent auction, though the listed value was "priceless."

Gala attendees, who paid at least $200 a ticket, could get their picture taken with Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhall look-alikes in front of a mountain backdrop.

Caralee Schmitt, who attended the event with her husband, marveled at the cowboy couture on display Sunday, which she had never seen growing up in Bozeman, Mont. "My father was a cowboy, but not at all like these kind of cowboys," said Schmitt, who lives in South San Francisco.

Indeed.


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

March 6, 2006

"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

American Muslim fertility

A reader writes:

"After reading your VDARE article, I was curious how high the total fertility rate (number of babies per woman) among American Muslims is. The General Social Survey gives a small Muslim sample: they average 4.8 children."

Why am I not reassured by this news?

(That sounds higher than I'd expect, though -- perhaps the small sample size makes it unreliable?)


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

My new VDARE.com column:

"The Return of Patriarchy:"

Philip Longman, a nice liberal affiliated with the nice liberal New America Foundation, has written a politically incorrect article that's getting a lot of deserved attention: The Return of Patriarchy in the March-April edition of Foreign Policy magazine. It endorses, without mentioning it by name, much of Pat Buchanan's 2001 book on falling birthrates, The Death of the West.

Longman's thesis is:

"Across the globe, people are choosing to have fewer children or none at all. Governments are desperate to halt the trend, but their influence seems to stop at the bedroom door. Are some societies destined to become extinct? Hardly. It’s more likely that conservatives will inherit the Earth. Like it or not, a growing proportion of the next generation will be born into families who believe that father knows best." ...

Longman rightly points out that religious and ideological differences affect fertility. But the arrow of causality also runs in the opposite direction—people who get married and have several children tend to become more socially and politically conservative for the sake of their children. ...

So Longman shouldn't ignore the impact of economics on marriage and fertility—what I call "Affordable Family Formation." There's more the government can (and should) do about the cost of housing and the cost of good schools than about religious beliefs.

My theory that affordable family formation drives marriage and fertility was anticipated in 1751 by Benjamin Franklin in his landmark Observations concerning The Increase of Mankind:

"For People increase in Proportion to the Number of Marriages, and that is greater in Proportion to the Ease and Convenience of supporting a Family. When Families can be easily supported, more Persons marry, and earlier in Life."

A quarter of a millennium ago, Franklin explained the virtuous cycle connecting low land prices, high wages, marriage, and children:

"Europe is generally full settled with Husbandmen, Manufacturers, &c. and therefore cannot now much increase in People… Land being thus plenty in America, and so cheap as that a labouring Man, that understands Husbandry, can in a short Time save Money enough to purchase a Piece of new Land sufficient for a Plantation, whereon he may subsist a Family; such are not afraid to marry;… Hence Marriages in America are more general, and more generally early, than in Europe."

As Ben might have expected, I found that:

"Bush carried the 20 states with the cheapest housing costs, while Kerry won the 9 states with the most expensive… The Mortgage Gap has been growing. Bush was victorious in the 26 states with the least home price inflation since 1980. Kerry triumphed in the 14 states with the most (according to the invaluable Laboratory of the States website)."

So, what can Republican government do to help preserve the traditional American patrimony of high wages and affordable land prices (and, in turn, help itself by creating new family values voters?) Franklin offered a sensible answer, which is even more logical now. Restrict immigration. As old Ben asked:

"[W]hy should the Palatine Boors [Germans] be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours?"

Good question. [MORE]


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

Here's the CIA World Factbook's

ranked list of babies per woman by country. It's depressing reading. At the top of the list are Niger (7.55 babies per woman), Mali (7.47), Somalia (6.84), Afghanistan (6.75), Uganda (6.75), Yemen (6.67), Burundi (6.63), and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (6.54). Do you notice a pattern here -- like you wouldn't want to live in any of those countries? (For an alternative view from a man who liked what he saw, blurrily, in Africa -- see the article "Soused Africa" in Modern Drunkard Magazine.)

In contrast, the nationalities that have contributed the most per capita to world civilization are mostly toward the bottom of the list, like Japan (1.39) and Italy (1.28).

Does this portend well for the future?

The world average is 2.60, half a baby above the replacement rate.


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

"Soused Africa" from Modern Drunkard Magazine

When I was a kid, Africa was in. He-men loved it for the safari big game hunting, and liberals were sure it was going to be a huge success as soon as it decolonized. Now, everybody in the West just finds it depressing and tries not to think about it. So nobody here knows anything anymore about important topics like African family structures and the fact that women do most of the work in Africa, even though African ways of life obviously keep popping up to a noticeable degree among African Americans. But nobody in America is supposed to notice any connection between African American culture and African culture (the black blank slate theory -- African Americans suddenly emerged tabula rasa in 1619.)

Fortunately, here's a sober on-the-spot account of daily life for some men in Southern Africa. P.J. Tobia reports from Malawi:

At first blush, this place seems gripped in pandemic suffering. A closer look reveals the true nature of southern Africa: It is a drinker’s paradise. Hundreds of miles of beaches with names like Monkey Bay and Candy Beach line the eastern coast of Mozambique and the enormous Lake Malawi, providing the perfect setting for canoeing, fishing, and drinking the hot days away. Homemade liquors and bottled beers are available at almost every roadside shack, some conveniently attached to rest houses where one can sleep off a particularly frightening bender in a cheap, clean bed. Pocket change will buy a round for the entire bar and, of course, the police have never, and I mean never, heard of a Breathalyzer.

Women do almost all the daily work in southern Africa: cooking, finding food, raising children, and tidying up around the hut, which leaves men free to spend the day pursuing more amiable interests, like drinking until they can barely stand or form sentences.

And because the possibility of finding a job is laughable and property ownership largely hereditary, there is no expectation that the people of this region become clock-punching cubicle drones or slaves to a mortgage. While they lack the amenities we Westerners couldn’t imagine living without—such as hot, clean water, electricity, or a life expectancy greater than 35 years—they do have the luxury of being able to relax with good friends and a few dozen drinks every single day of the year.

And, boy, do they drink. From the rooster’s first call to the hour when night descends—or until they collapse from drinking in the sun, which in that part of the world can burn like a death ray—Africa’s heaviest drinkers have it pretty good in both lifestyle and beverage selection...

No matter what you call it or how you make it, these home-brewed liquors are the respite of Joe Africa, not only allowing escape from the crushing poverty that defines his existence, but adding an opulence unheard of in the so-called modern world—the ability to consume alcohol guilt free, all day, every day.

This is not to say that everybody in the region is a dedicated boozehound. I met a lot of folks who never touch the stuff. Nice girls aren’t found in bars, and there are plenty of Muslims in Africa. But in some of the rural areas there is a multi-faceted culture of drinking that underscores life...

The best part about all of this is that these guys are able to sit around long enough to get drunk on a drink [millet beer] that has almost no alcohol content. For one thing, their wives know exactly where they are, whom they are with, and what they are doing, and don’t have a big problem with it...

In short, the drinkers of Africa have it made. Sure, they have no healthcare, the literacy rate is among the lowest in the world, and December through March is the “famine season,” but they can drink and hang with their friends pretty much all day... What rural African regions lack in material wealth, infrastructure, and modern conveniences, they more than make up for in drunken leisure time. Even in places where basic human rights are a fairly new concept, a culture of drinking prevails, bringing happiness to a long-suffering people...

Throughout southern Africa, people are able to lead the kind of lives that we in the West can only imagine. They drink as much as they like, as often as they like, and no one—save for the odd azungu [white] missionary—will say a word to object. Sure, they need more food and medicine, but we have both those things in abundance, and how happy are we?

Africa is not perfect. But to the drinking man, it comes pretty damn close.

My vague impression is that most parts of black Africa had access to some kind of alcohol going back several thousand years, so most blacks have evolved at least some resistance to the kind of catastrophic alcoholism that afflicts American Indians, Eskimos, Australian Aborigines, and other peoples whose ancestors had no experience with alcohol until the last dozen generations or so. I suspect, most blacks are similar to Northern Europeans in ability to handle liquor -- not as well adapted by natural selection as Mediterranean peoples who have been drinking wine for 10,000 years, but not as ill-suited as most New Worlders and Islanders.


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

The incisive Udolpho on my latest fundraising drive

He kindly writes:

Steve Sailer is asking for donations. Unlike Andrew Sullivan, who duns his readers for money so that he can enjoy comfortable, month-long vacations in Massachusetts with his boyfriend, Sailer actually produces something worthwhile, namely a steady stream of cogent, well-written articles and essays, and none of them evidently composed under the influence of steroids.

Good writers of an independent turn of mind can usually find remunerative employment – as long as they remember not to deal in certain subjects or challenge certain postulates, and as long as they remember never to violate the vicious collegiality of the pundit class by asking embarrassing questions (or rather questions with embarrassing answers) of their peers.

Sailer's detractors have worked hard to portray him as a disreputable person, by which they mean someone who cannot be counted on to reach the same smug conclusions. Do you ever wonder why certain subjects – education, immigration, group differences, and other thorny matters – always evoke the same unthinking, feel-good pap from our pundit overlords? Why the range of viewpoints considered decent is not only very small but also very inadequate to describing the world or forming workable solutions to the problems of the age?

You know what to think about immigration, for example: America is a melting pot! Bring us your rejected refuse! They're doing the work that Americans won't do! These childish slogans are seriously intended to answer all objections you might pose – they are all the proof that is needed that lax enforcement of immigration law has given us the best of all possible worlds; and if these "reasons" are not good enough for you, well, who are you, Archie Bunker?

Of course there is also the matter of Sailer's realistic views on race, his willingness to accept the premise that races (which Sailer defines as "partly inbred extended families") differ in important ways based on the influence of natural selection, selective breeding, and the subsequent cultural traditions that developed in discrete geographical regions.

You know what to think about race. It doesn't exist! It is just skin color! Diversity is America's greatest strength! And other slogans suitable for second grade construction paper banners. Yes, you are asked to celebrate distinctions based on false concepts all the time – that is how dumb you are asked to be. You are told that any differences that appear are merely the products of oppression** or completely arbitrary cultural influences, and that while diversity is an unquestionable virtue it is too dangerous to consider what it really is beyond a feel-good visual panoply.

Discussion of group differences is plagued by the moral impulse, in practice an atavistic reflex no more thoughtful than superstition or taboo, and one especially difficult for reason to act positively on. As with religion, it is here that the mind triumphs powerfully over observation and logic. Hence we have not a dispassionate discussion of ideas governed by standards of reasonableness, but a fragmented, frequently idiotic series of outbursts, pronouncements, and demagogic slogans in which the imperative is to label an idea good or bad, rather than accurate or unsupported. This labeling is the actual goal: if, at the end of the exercise, we are left none the wiser about the actual diversity of man, so much the better – even though the fact of diversity is our central claim.

Naturally, this moral impulse carries over to the discussants, who take a childish pleasure in the finding someone worse than them. Yes, we love it when our enemies are not incorrect or misguided but immoral and sinister. It is much less work to find reasons to disparage them, and without evil enemies how can one discharge the moral impulse? How can one ostracize and punish others? It seems impossible. Such are the pleasures we choose to comfort ourselves with in our all-too-short lifespans.

A correspondent once asked me, how can I link approvingly to Sailer's site? It is so plainly racist! My reasons are that I share his curiosity about group differences and that he writes incisively, two qualities that so often earn ritual punishment for failure to comply with inscrutable PC dogma. (Even people who strive for compliance with its confusing strictures regularly find themselves accused of some greater or lesser heresy.)

Judge for yourself how plainly racist Sailer's writing is. I cannot see a trace of it – in my view he is more genuinely, openly curious about the characteristics of and problems facing blacks as a group than anyone who has disparaged him or his ideas has shown themselves to be. How can someone interested in human differences not share such curiosity? How can somone moved to ponder today's social problems not strive to look unblinkingly at man as he actually is? But interest and concern are not as pleasing as sanctimony and outrage, so it is unsurprising that we habitually confuse them with each other.

I despise the practice of casually advising people what to do with their money; it seems to be an outgrowth of egoism. I merely note that I have contributed money to Sailer in the past because I find his work worthwhile and there is too little of its kind out there.

Well, thanks! 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

"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