April 5, 2006

"Jerusalem Syndrome"

Every year, a number of tourists visiting Jerusalem go bonkers, declaring themselves to be the messiah or suffering other psychotic episodes. Less well known, but more important, is the deranging effect that the Holy Land has on the rest of the world, day in and day out.

The impact of Holy Land-Related Derangement Syndrome on the Muslim world is well-known, but here are four examples of Jerusalem Syndrome playing out in America.

1. Haaretz reports:


New Christian pro-Israel lobby aims to be stronger than AIPAC
By Shlomo Shamir

NEW YORK - Televangelist John Hagee told Jewish community leaders over the weekend that the 40 million evangelical Christians in the United States support Israel and that he plans to utilize this power to help Israel by launching a Christian pro-Israel lobby.

The lobby is slated to launch in July, during a Washington conference in which hundreds of American evangelicals are slated to participate, Hagee said at a meeting of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, which represents 52 national Jewish groups. He also discussed the lobby with Israel's consul general in New York, Aryeh Mekel.

Hagee said his group would be a Christian - and more powerful - version of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a large pro-Israel lobby, and would target senators and congressmen on Capitol Hill. A quarter of congressmen are evangelicals, and many American legislators represent regions that include a large evangelical population, he said.

Hagee - the founder and senior pastor of the evangelical Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, that claims an active membership of more than 18,000 - said the lobby's activities would be a "political earthquake."


To be more powerful than AIPAC would be powerful indeed. I once interviewed spokesmen for various lobbies -- the Arab, Muslim, Armenian, and Turkish -- and they all said that they fashion themselves on the lines pioneered by AIPAC, that AIPAC was their professional role model as the 800 pound gorilla of foreign lobbies, and they all dreamed of someday having as much clout as AIPAC. Exactly how much need there is for a second AIPAC is less than crystal clear, since the first one seems to be doing fine. As Dana Milbank wrote in the Washington Post last year:


How much clout does AIPAC have?

Well, consider that during the pro-Israel lobby's annual conference yesterday, a fleet of police cars, sirens wailing, blocked intersections and formed a motorcade to escort buses carrying its conventioneers -- to lunch.

The annual meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has long produced a massive show of bipartisan pandering, as lawmakers praise the well-financed and well-connected group. But this has been a rough year for AIPAC -- it has dismissed its policy director and another employee while the FBI examines whether they passed classified U.S. information to Israel -- and the organization is eager to show how big it is...

Another fact sheet announced that this is the "largest ever" conference, with its 5,000 participants attending "the largest annual seated dinner in Washington" joined by "more members of Congress than almost any other event, except for a joint session of Congress or a State of the Union address." The group added that its membership "has nearly doubled" over four years to 100,000 and that the National Journal calls it "one of the top four most effective lobbying organizations."


The Rev. Hagee didn't mention whether his organization would facilitate treasonous espionage against the United States, like AIPAC did in the Larry Franklin affair.

Of course, a big part of what drives the Christian fundamentalists'' obsession with Israel is that wacky Left Behind eschatology that believes that the fulfillment of Likud's plans will set off the Rapture. Granted, it will be tough toast for the Christ-rejecting Jews when Israeli dominance triggers the Apocalypse, but until then, the Book of Revelation-worshippers are all for Israel kicking ass.

In the world of politics, can something be too stupid to be true? I guess not.

2. But sometimes the Jerusalem Syndrome doesn't even have to have anything to do with actual Jews. If you are as deranged as appears to be Utah Congressman Chris Cannon, President Bush's point man in the House on pushing through Open Borders, well, even Mexicans qualify as the Lost Tribes of Israel. The Denver Post reports:


Utah is the most Republican state in the country. But the state's more than 95,000 undocumented immigrants can legally drive with a "driving privilege card" created last year. They can go to any public university or community college and pay in-state tuition.

Many of the state's otherwise conservative lawmakers are major players nationally in pushing for a more open immigration policy. In 2003, no less a conservative stalwart than Sen. Orrin Hatch sponsored the Dream Act, a bill that would have removed federal penalties for states that want to give illegal immigrants a college tuition break...

Political observers seeking to explain the state's unusual embrace of immigrants point to a variety of factors, many involving the state's dominant faith.

Over the past several decades, the Mormon Church has sent thousands of Utahns to Latin America on two-year missions to preach and proselytize, creating strong links between the region and people who went on to become some of the state's top policymakers. Utah Republican Rep. Chris Cannon went on a mission in Guatemala in the 1970s...

But one of the strongest influences, experts say, is embedded in the central doctrine of the Mormon faith, a force with enormous influence over both politics and society here. The Book of Mormon teaches that a lost tribe of Israelites known as the Lamanites landed on the American continent in 600 B.C. and they are the forefathers of the native peoples of Mexico and Central and South America.

Many Mormons see the tens of thousands of Latin American immigrants who have arrived in the seat of the church as guided by the hand of God in order to be converted, critical players in an unfolding religious tale of biblical proportions.

"Mormons have the Book of Mormon, and the Latin American, aboriginal ancestry is relevant to their views. Those notions, if sometimes misunderstood, are at least widely held," said Cannon, a four-term congressman and member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

"The Mormon Church has taken a position that is pretty clear. They are a proselytizing church, and they view the people coming to Utah as a great group of people to convert," Cannon said.

That faith has helped fire actions on the issue from Salt Lake to Washington. Cannon is in many ways the mirror image of Colorado's Tom Tancredo, the Littleton Republican who has crusaded for a federal immigration crackdown. The Utah lawmaker was the architect in 2003 of AgJobs, an unsuccessful bill in Congress that would have legalized 500,000 farm workers nationwide.


It's hard to tell from this if Rep. Cannon really believes Joseph's Smith's sci-fi anthropology, or whether he's just cynically playing coy to persuade Mormons to back the agenda of the Low Wages Lobby.

3. Meanwhile, in the real Holy Land, they recently had an election, as you might have heard if you didn't spend last week in a cave. Israeli elections seem to get more coverage in the American national press than any American state election not involving Arnold Schwarzenegger.

If I was an Israeli citizen, I would have voted for the winning Kadima Party organized by Ariel Sharon before his collapse, but I'm not, so I don't spend a lot of time thinking about Israeli politics. It's a country with a population only two-thirds of Los Angeles County's, and it's just not that important.

It's safe to say that in recent years, Sharon arrived at sensible conclusions such as the need for a border fence to keep out terrorists, and for evacuation of the more useless Israeli settlements on Palestinian territory. The defeat of Likud by the Israeli voters was a real thumb in the eye to the American neocons, and it couldn't have happened to a nicer set.

Here, however, is one interesting aspect to the election that hasn't gotten much coverage:

American traitor Jonathan Pollard's old handler is a new political power in Israel's Knesset. Dave in Boca, who has a lot of inside sources on this kind of thing, reports:


The Pensioners' Party has come out of nowhere to win seven seats to the Knesset under the leadership of Rafi Eitan, a well-known figure in Israel's turbulent history, who at 79 years old is playing his third act in a lifetime full of skullduggery.

Eitan was the mastermind of the kidnapping of Adolph Eichmann from Argentina, resulting in that Nazi war criminal's trial and execution for war crimes during the Second World War.

Then, in a less glorious episode, Eitan set up Jonathon Pollard as a spy who stole US secrets which informed observers say Israel subsequently traded to the USSR for spy info on its enemies in the Middle East. This was the reason that recently-deceased Caspar Weinberger reportedly gave for ordering Pollard to be kept in a maximum-security facility for life with no hope of parole or early release.

Reports that Rafi Eitan has a document that Israel never handed over to the Americans after Pollard's conviction is not likely to lead to Pollard's release, say these sources. The case for keeping Pollard in prison lies not only on his extensive spying for Israel, but also on the allegations that

Pollard's information led to revealing the identity of American spies operating in the Soviet Union.

There are reports that other information that the Israelis handed the USSR was also harmful to American foreign policy interests and that the harm done has led to the US's tough stance on Pollard's imprisonment.


Do you think anybody ever mentioned any of this to the Rev. Hagee's congregation?

4. Speaking of bizarre religious obsessions, the "debate" over immigration has been notable for the lack of debate as the arguments put forward by immigration restrictionists are ignored and their proponents demonized as "angry" "rabble-rousing" "haters.". The pro-illegal immigration supporters, on the other hand, are driven largely by a wholly emotional irrationality.

From whence does this hatred of facts and logic about immigration spring? When reading economist Paul Krugman's 3/27 NYT column "North of the Board," an admirable mea culpa on his part for all the hatred he has spewed at immigration restrictionists over the years, one of the prime answers became clear. Krugman wrote:


"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free," wrote Emma Lazarus, in a poem that still puts a lump in my throat. I'm proud of America's immigrant history, and grateful that the door was open when my grandparents fled Russia.

In other words, I'm instinctively, emotionally pro-immigration. But a review of serious, nonpartisan research reveals some uncomfortable facts about the economics of modern immigration, and immigration from Mexico in particular. If people like me are going to respond effectively to anti-immigrant demagogues, we have to acknowledge those facts.

First, the net benefits to the U.S. economy from immigration, aside from the large gains to the immigrants themselves, are small.... Second, while immigration may have raised overall income slightly, many of the worst-off native-born Americans are hurt by immigration — especially immigration from Mexico.


From my experience of dealing with Krugman via email, he's a nasty son-of-a-gun, but I have to compliment him on finally developing the intellectual honesty to admit that his overwhelming urge to vomit abuse at immigration restrictionists has little basis in facts.

So, where, does this mindless passion that has been so prevalent in the media over the last week originate?

To be frank, much of what we see in the press appear to be examples of Jewish-American ancestor worship, a bizarre religious urge to make Ellis Island into a sacred site. Other groups, such as the Italian and Irish, share this to some extent, but Jews with their vast talent at nostalgic myth-making seem much more taken in by their own concoction than are Catholic ethnics, who are, sensibly, more focused on the future than the past. On the right, the main cheerleaders among journalists for massive immigration have been Jewish neocons like William Kristol, John Podhoretz, Tamar Jacoby, Michael Barone, and James Taranto.

Is unchecked immigration good for the Jews? Of course not. It will bring in more anti-Semites and terrorists, like Egyptian immigrant Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, who murdered two Jews at the Israeli El Al Airline counter of LAX on the July 4, 2002. Nor does it make sense for America to hold open the gates to the whole world just in case anything happened, God forbid, to Israel. If it did, Israeli Jews would immediately get a special deal as refugees, not as ordinary immigrants, like Cubans did. Granted, Jews suffer less from economic competition with illegal immigrants than any other ethnic group due to their high average IQs and educational levels, but, rationally, security concerns should be high on their priority list.

No, the ferocious resistance of so many Jews in the media to thinking sensibly about immigration (there are, of course, numerous honorable exceptions such as Robert Samuelson, Dan Stein, and Steven Steinlight) is rooted in nostalgia.

Now, nostalgia is a pleasant luxury, but can Jews, even in America, really afford to give up thinking "Is it good for the Jews?" in favor of "Was it good for the Jews?"

UPDATE: 5. Hasidic riot last night in Brooklyn: WNBC reports:


Claiming police had mistreated a 75-year-old man after a routine traffic stop, hundreds of residents stormed the streets and set fires as officers in riot gear fanned out to clear the crowd.


Images: Hasidim Protest Man's Arrest


Police denied mistreating the man, Arthur Schick, after he was pulled over Tuesday night in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn for talking on his cell phone while driving. Police said he resisted the officers during the stop, which occurred around 6:30 p.m., and was arrested with two other people who meddled in the incident.

Protesters set small fires and blocked streets in the Orthodox Jewish neighborhood while Schick's car sat parked in front of the bakery bearing his family's name.

Dozens of young Orthodox Jews in traditional black suits and hats gathered on street corners in the neighborhood, which sees very little crime. Charred garbage pockmarked the streets.

Police officers herded away onlookers, who yelled back angrily. The crowd had mostly dispersed by late Tuesday night.


Reader Comments:


As a recently apostate/quit/on-hiatus evangelical Christian, the fate of the Jews in general and Israeli ones in particular, during a Left Behind-style Rapture often takes one of these forms:

1) They are all genetically exempt from judgement through Yahweh's original covenant with their ancestors.

2) A whole bunch of them will become Christians/Messianic or "Completed" Jews as in the greatest hopes of the Jews for Jesus ministry. This is sometimes caused by a world-wide wave of anti-Jewish persecution.

3) Most of them in Israel are done for though 144,000, (probably all men as specified in the Book of Revelation) are delivered from whatever tribulation the anti-Christ doles out on Israel.

That advantage from Hagee's perspective of his proposed Evangelicals for Israel group is more cash and an Israel lobby that is overtly pro-Christian. I've never looked into it, but I'd imagine AIPAC is kind of uneasy about Christians who may be obsessed with converting Jews.

*


Steve, some of us have been working for years to get Chris Cannon out of office.

Most of us who have been doing that believe in Joseph Smith's "sci-fi anthropology". Not surprising--Cannon's district is over 80% Mormon.

Your question presents two answers that are not mutually exclusive: having talked to Cannon several times, I believe he both accepts Mormon theology AND cynically applies it to justify his pro-amnesty position.

Some of us think his justification is both politically and theologically wrong. We oppose amnesties, unlimited immigration generally, illegal immigration specifically, etc etc. In other words, sir, there are (or were) a whole lot of Mormons on YOUR side of the issue.

Republican Mormons in Utah who oppose amnesty have already been betrayed by our party and our Congresscritters. It isn't any fun to also be stabbed in the back and insulted by someone we thought was an ally.

*


I'm an evangelical Christian myself, but in the old-fashioned sense--one who believes that God still expects us to spread the good news among the nations. The oddest thing about the fiercely pro-Israel evangelical Christians is their treatment of Jews as the one group not in need of conversion to be saved. I hope that this is due to a certain theological reading of Revelation, leading them to believe that the Jews will be saved by God's grace somehow in the end. I'm not a biblical scholar myself, but there seems to be disagreement among theologians on this point.

But to be fair to the evangelicals who strongly support the secular state of Israel, I think there is more to it than "end times" tunnel vision. I've heard a number of sermons in evangelical churches on the Christian duty to look after the welfare of the Jews in general, in part because of past persecution. Many evangelical churches try to model themselves after the 1st century church, which was strongly Jewish in tradition. I suspect that feeling an emotional tie to the Jews of today is like reaching back into the past for them. I see the sin of pride lurking, though, in believing that the God of the Old Testament, the deliverer of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, etc. needs Americans to protect his people above all others.

*

Most of my relatives are Mormon and are instinctively pro-immigration. Hispanics are among those most inclined to convert to Mormonism, so Mormons have positive feelings about them. Many Mormons in the mountain states are farmers who enjoy the cheap labor too. Mormons like to see the these new little congregations of Hispanic Mormons spreading rapidly through their neighborhoods. Eveidently, the American Catholic Church has a similar attitude: it favors open borders in order to fill the pews. But Mormons' immigration feelings are not that difficult to change. All I have to do is share a few facts from VDARE, and their natural conservatism does the rest. Just tell them they join the church just as fast in Mexico. All I have to do with my Dad, for example, is to remind him how 90% of the inmates housed at the county jail where he works are Mexican.

*


You underrate the evangelicals, I think. An evangelical pro-Israel lobby needn't be predicated on radical eschatology...

What this actually is, is an evangelical anti-Islamic lobby. Can't call it that, of course - too "intolerant", and folks would far rather be "for" something than "against" something else. So...let's get together and be "for" whatever Moslems hate most - which is the state of Israel.


As a bonus, philo-semitism is a public contradiction of left-wing stereotypes about evangelicals, and critics are hard-pressed to come up with arguments they can make in public against...supporting Jews. Let the liberals find out what it's like to be aligned against a minority immune to criticism.

I think it's brilliant, personally.

*


Lots of readers have written in to say they are sure that Michael Barone is Catholic by upbringing. I haven't been able to find anything on Google on the question, one way or another. Can you? Remember, being Italian is not absolute proof of Catholicism.

NYC mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, for example, was an Episcopalian with an Italian father and Jewish mother. No wonder he was such a political powerhouse in NYC!

Here is Barone discussing his ancestors and schooling in detail. He mentions his Irish Catholic grandmother, but not the religion of his Sicilian ancestors. He attended a public school and elite (i.e., non-parochial) private schools.


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

The new issue of The American Conservative is semi-online:

Subscribe here.

April 10, 2006 Issue



Iran: The Logic of Deterrence
By Christopher Layne
Tehran’s quest for nuclear weapons is a rational response to a real threat, which makes diplomacy a more prudent option than regime change.



Minding Our Manners
By Theodore Dalrymple
Militant egalitarians make rudeness a virtue.


What Victory Lost

By Wayne Merry
After three years, it’s more clear than ever that we would have been better off not to have invaded Iraq.

Red-Ink Rebellion
By W. James Antle III
House conservatives mount a challenge to Republican spending practices.

How to Handle Hamas
By Leon Hadar
Hamas’s voters did not reject the peace process.

Madness of Crowds
By Glenn Greenwald
Loyalty to Bush is the criterion for conservatism.

Remember Kosovo?
By Doug Bandow
The Kosovo War was no nation-building success.



Lighting Up the Screen
By Steve Sailer
Aaron Eckhart in “Thank You for Smoking”

California Dreamin’
By Roger D. McGrath
Coast of Dreams: California on the Edge, 1990-2003 by Kevin Starr

The American Conservative

An Empire Built of Paper
By Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.
Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis
by William Bonner and Addison Wiggin

Counterfeit Conservative
By Doug Bandow
Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy
by Bruce Bartlett



Are We Up to the Empire Game?
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Bush discredits Arab democracy.

Ugly Americans on the March
By Taki
Why I cheered for Finland



Fourteen Days: National Review Purges Buckley; Do the Troops Support the Troops?; Free Speech Hits Its Limit in Austria

Deep Background: Suicide Bomber University; Abandoning Abbas; Iran Bombs the Dollar


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

April 4, 2006

A compromise on immigration is a surrender on immigration

Randall Parker at Parapundit responds to a compromise amnesty plus enforcement plan put forward by Senators Mel Martinez and Chuck Hagel:

The US Congress has had decades of opportunities to show that it will seriously enforce immigration laws and has failed to do so. The Congress has passed bills that purported to toughen immigration law enforcement and then proceeded to gut enforcement by pressuring agencies of the US government to hold back from doing vigorous enforcement. Any time the employer fines or round-ups of illegals began to scale up to a level that would make a difference Congressional committees applied pressure to gut the enforcement initiatives.

In a nutshell: Congress can't be trusted. Unless Congress does enforcement first any supposed compromise that purports to combine an amnesty with enforcement will inevitably become an amnesty only. When Senators like Martinzez and Hagel try to tell us differently they are just flat out lying. I feel insulted by the brazenness of their lying.

We were cheated in 1986: Congress passed a law giving amnesty to current illegals and imposing employer sanctions to eliminate the incentive for new illegals to enter the country, but, as Randall notes, the sanctions were gutted by Congressmen calling the INS and warning them off.

The cheap labor lobby wants to do it all over again: legalize the current illegals and then invite in another ten million new illegals. Well, fool me once, shame on on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

The absolute essential first step to dealing with illegal immigration is to stop letting in any more. Any discussion of any kind of amnesty for current illegals must be off the table until a large and permanent reduction in new illegal entry is evident.

And the only way to ensure the reduction is permanent is to build a fence. Only a fence is forever. Trying to cut back illegal entries with employer sanctions alone is just inviting Congressmen to gut the sanctions as soon as they get their amnesty.

And here is John O'Sullivan saying the same thing more elegantly.


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

Math is racist

Here's an informative article from the Hampton Roads Pilot about how the federal Justice Dept. is forcing the city of Virginia Beach to change its qualifications for entering the police academy because, you'll be shocked to learn, whites do better than Hispanics and blacks on the math test:

The city has reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department to resolve allegations that it discriminated against black and Hispanic police recruits. Under a consent decree filed Monday in federal court in Norfolk, the city will change the way it scores the police entrance exam.

The Justice Department had complained that the math portion of the exam had an adverse effect on minority applicants and unfairly excluded them from being hired. The city will offer to let 124 black and Hispanic former applicants resume the hiring process. Those recruits failed the math test between 2002 and 2005 but would have passed under the new standards. The city also will create a $160,000 fund to compensate those applicants.

In the 27-page settlement, the Justice Department states that the city did not intentionally discriminate against blacks and Hispanics...

After an 18-month investigation, the Justice Department found that the police force did not reflect the diversity of the city’s population because of how the math test was graded...

From 2002 to mid-2005, about 85 percent of white applicants passed the math exam, compared with 59 percent of blacks and 66 percent of Hispanics... Under the new standard, an applicant must score at least 70 percent on the reading and grammar parts of the test and score an average of at least 60 percent on all three parts of the exam.

The city will give 124 applicants a chance to resume participation in the hiring process. Of that number, the city has committed to hiring at least 15 – three Hispanics and 12 blacks – who complete the application process

In other words, the Justice Dept. is forcing the local police department to impose an explicit racial quota on itself. Isn't that, technically, a violation of the 2003 Grutter decision of the Supreme Court?

Now, it's widely believed that the existence of racial quotas stems from a nefarious perversion of the sainted 1964 Civil Rights Act, but the truth is that institutions end up imposing hiring quotas upon themselves to avoid these kind of brouhahas, which grow directly out of the 1964 Act itself. As long as the federal government is mandated to ignore the IQ difference between the races, you will end up with this kind of imposition of quotas.


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

Anti-Sailerism at FireDogLake

Anti-Sailerism's characteristic mode is to quote from me and then, rather than muster any facts or logic to dispute the truth of what I've just said, point and sputter, "Isn't that awful! He must be a horrible person to say such a thing." There's a classic example over at FireDogLake.com, where "Armando" appears to have gone out of his way to find particularly unobjectionable quotes from me, such as:


"Personally, I’ve long wanted more black quarterbacks in the NFL. Living in Southern California, I don’t have a team to root for. So I just watch the wrap-up shows to see amazing plays. And black quarterbacks provide more of them than whites, because they are generally faster and shiftier runners.. . .

Why do black quarterbacks tend to be better runners than white quarterbacks? For the same reasons that blacks tend to be better runners than whites in all sports. Perhaps the single most self-evident fact about American spectator sports is that blacks, on average, are faster than whites. No human being not of West African descent ever ran 100 meters in less than 10 seconds until this spring, when Patrick Johnson, finally broke that barrier, 35 years after the first Sub-Saharan African"


Another awful thing I wrote, according to FireDogLake, was:


Our political discourse is dominated not by a concern for the needs of the American people as a whole, but by the self-interest and unexamined assumptions of the verbally facile.


But, you see, my sounding well-informed, reasonable, and fair-minded is all just part of my sinister plot!

This denunciation would all be utterly boring except for the appearance in the Comments section of good old "Tacitus" -- a.k.a., Josh Trevino, the co-founder of the Republican group blog RedState and close friend of the disgraced Ben Domench -- to announce that he totally agrees that I'm a horrible person and has been denouncing me as an "evilcon" for years.

So, you see, I'm a unifier! I've brought together the Chimpy McHitlerBushton-haters at FireDogLake and Mr. RedState, Josh Trevino.

UPDATE: I was going to quote you what Ben's Buddy had to say about me, but the second time I went back, all that was left of his comment was:


EDITED BY SITE OWNER

Trevino you lost your ability to comment here the other night when you showed up and started insulting other commenters... Now you and your bigot bretheren [sic] can just get out of here, this isn’t LGF.


Oh, well, I guess there is just a little too much hatred sloshing around within the anti-Sailerists for even me to foster amity amongst them.


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

Did the invention of antibiotics liberate women from mandatory housewifery? Continued.

-- In response to an earlier item, John Derbyshire emails:

I am sure you are right. The parental terror of childhood infections still hung in the air during my own childhood (ca. 1950). I can still rattle off their names: diphtheria, scarlet fever, measles, German measles, whooping cough, mumps, & of course polio. Standards of household cleanliness in the English working class of that time were much higher than in the current American middle class. There was fierce gossip among my mother & her peers about so-and-so "not keeping a clean house." The adjective "houseproud" was in common use. It induced pathologies. The woman next door to us, whose son was my playmate, kept her front parlor so spotless, it was never allowed to be used. Peter & I sneaked in there once, but it was a great adventure. I mainly remember the gleaming brasses & smell of furniture polish. I never learned to swim as a child, & still can't swim well, because of the fear of catching polio at the public pools. In hospitals, where I spent considerable time as a child (& where my mother worked), everything was scrubbed down twice a day with carbolic (?) soap. The wards reeked of disinfectant and starch. Instruments were wheeled around in little trays of boiling water. There was a sort of fanaticism about it all--but probably well justified.

Another reader writes:

Along similar lines, I have come up with the idea that the success of the Great Migration of blacks from the South to the North was possible due to the concurrent discovery of vitamin D and the institution of the practice of food irradiation, which began in 1927. Were it not for food irradiation, black families would not have been able to raise healthy children in dark northern cities, and the population would not have been sustainable.

CBS news reports today in "Rickets Make a Comeback" that there may be need for more fortification with Vitamin D:

Government blood tests suggest a surprising number of Americans do not get currently recommended amounts, especially those with dark-pigmented skin that does not produce as much of the vitamin from sunlight.

Half of black women of childbearing age lack enough vitamin D in their blood during the winter and 30 percent in the summer, according to studies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That compares with 11 percent of white women in the winter and 2 percent in the summer. Levels among Hispanics fall in between.

The introduction of sulfas in in the 1930s and penicillin in 1944 also helped the Great Migration, which is often dated to the introduction of a mechanized cotton reaper in 1943. Before them, and, perhaps more importantly, before the introduction of modern sanitation, the life expectancy of blacks in northern cities was poor. As I wrote in VDARE in 2003:

Brandeis historian David Hackett Fischer pointed out in his famous Albion's Seed that these racial differences had an enormous impact on the history of America. He notes that the cold climate of colonial Massachusetts

"proved to be exceptionally dangerous to immigrants from tropical Africa, who suffered severely from pulmonary infections in New England winters. Black death rates in colonial Massachusetts were twice as high as whites' - a pattern very different from Virginia where mortality rates for the two races were not so far apart, and still more different from South Carolina where white death rates were higher than those of blacks. So high was mortality among African immigrants in New England that race slavery was not viable on a large scale, despite many attempts to introduce it. Slavery was not impossible in this region, but the human and material costs were higher than many wished to pay. A labor system which was fundamentally hostile to the Puritan ethos of New England was kept at bay partly by the climate."

Not surprisingly, in the 19th Century, Massachusetts became the home of abolitionism. South Carolina became the home of secession.


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

"The right to decide who lives amongst them

is one of the most profound rights of any nation of citizens."

Martin Kelly


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

Why crime has fallen sharply in New York City

Somehow, I don't think that in their debates over why crime has fallen so sharply in New York City, Malcolm Gladwell and Steven D. Levitt are going to get around to mentioning this new article in the New York Times, "New York City Losing Blacks, Census Shows:"

"Reversing a tide from the South who altered the complexion of the city earlier in the 20th century, the number of American-born blacks leaving the city has exceeded the number arriving since at least the late 1970's."

Most of the statistics in the article understate the relevant size of the outflow of African Americans because they talk about total blacks, not African Americans. Until recently, the outflow of high crime rate African-Americans from New York City was balanced off by an influx of lower crime rate black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean.

In 1997, according to a liberal advocacy group, the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, non-Hispanic blacks in New York state were imprisoned 12.8 times as often per capita as non-Hispanic whites.

From this, you can see one reason why the media elite in New York City is so rabidly pro-immigration. When foreign blacks and Mexicans squeeze African-Americans out of New York City, in what I call "economic ethnic cleansing," the NYC crime rate falls. The chance that David Brooks is going to get mugged goes down. However, these African-Americans aren't, as New York City pundits often seem to assume, being deported, they are just moving to fly-over country and bringing their problems with them.

Newhouse News reporter Jonathan Tilove has pointed out another reason that probably contributed to the exceptional crime decline in NYC, the striking shortage of black men: "There are 36 percent more black women than men in New York City." Some of the reasons are obvious: imprisonment, the huge number of murders during the crack years, AIDS, and the military. But there has also been some sex-selective immigration, as parents move to keep their sons off the streets. The article quotes a black lady from NYC who moved to a small town in North Carolina:

"I was divorced and moved here with my 11-year-old — I was afraid of the crime, and black boys don't fare too well in New York."

All this migration is relevant to the Levitt-Donohue theory that legalizing abortion cut crime because ever since I pointed out in my 1999 debate in Slate.com with Steven D. Levitt that his theory was based on insufficiently precise age groups (under 25 and over 25), and that when you look at age groups (e.g., 14-17) sufficiently precise enough to register the impact of abortion, then what you instantly see is that at the national level, the opposite of what they had predicted actually had happened. All Levitt could do was claim that his state-level data vindicated his theory. I didn't have the econometric skills to evaluate Levitt's claim, but when Boston Fed economists Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz worked through Levitt-Donohue's state level analysis in 2005, they found two fatal mistakes in it that wiped out the whole effect.

In response, Levitt and Donohue pulled out a whole new database of state-level abortion data and announced that this vindicated them. At the AEI conference on the topic last week, Levitt's co-author John J. Donohue indignantly kept saying that my national-level graphs showing the exact opposite happened didn't disprove his theory. Which is true, but I never claimed that it disproved it, just that journalists should have done some simple reality checks rather than accept Donohue and Levitt's claim on faith. Donohue made a hilarious effort to hand the burden of proof off to the skeptics, which is exactly where it does not belong. You can watch the video here.

This NYT article, however, illustrates many of the dangers of the Donohue-Levitt methodology of looking at state abortion rates and state crime rates with a lag of approximately two decades between them.

The obvious problem is that people move. If movement was just random, well, that wouldn't be a problem for the Donohue-Levitt theory because it would just reduce the effect size in their statistical analysis. But if interstate migration was not neutral to perceptions of local differences in crime rates and/or morality (which can correlate with the abortion rate), the whole point of their state-level analysis could be in big trouble.

And, of course, in the real world, crime and morality are highly important drivers of migration. People with kids move out of big cities, in part to escape crime and big city immorality, while well-educated young people flock to big cities with liberal morals to meet other young singles with liberal morals. Immigrants from cultures with close-knit extended family morals, making them partly immune to the temptations of the street, move to big cities and help drive socially laxer African-Americans out of town. Over the decades, these processes, which accelerated over the last few decades, have had an enormous cumulative effect on who lives where.

These biases thus render the Donohue-Levitt state-level analysis unreliable.


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

Adam Kleinheider, the Hard Right man,

has got a new, paying gig blogging about Tennessee and national politics for a Nashville station at http://volunteervoters.com/.


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

Keeping up with the Senate debate on immigration

Over at the VDARE.com blog, the lovely Bryanna Bevens is watching the Senate debate on immigration, so you don't have to. A sample:

Let me sum up the floor statement from Harry Reid, the Senator from Nevada:

Blah, blah, blah…we have a whole bunch of casinos…blah, blah,blah…they depend on undocumented immigrants to keep things running…casinos give me a lot of money…blah, blah, blah…we need a guest worker program.


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

April 3, 2006

Watership Down author participated in "A Bridge Too Far" battle of WWII

The talking rabbit epic Watership Down by Richard Adams is one of the biggest bestseller novels of all time. To me, its main theme seems pretty obvious: the moral and functional superiority during war of English culture. Watership Down expounds the notion often attributed to the Duke of Wellington (who is cited more than once in the book) that "the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton." The book is a hymn to improvised teamwork in the English public school tradition: Hazel, the Head Rabbit, is modest and self-sacrificing and his followers are loyal yet free to show initiative.

(By the way, although Watership Down is often praised for the natural history accuracy of its portrayal of rabbits, in my limited experience the male-male cooperation shown by Hazel's band is wildly anomalous. We own two neutered male bunnies, one for each son, and, believe me when I tell you this, nobody in Sicily hates anybody as much as these two cute little balls of fluff hate each other. We have to keep them locked up in separate parts of the house to prevent them from ripping each other's guts out with their strong hind claws. Denied a chance to kill each other, they've kept up a long cold war of pooping in front of each other's doors as a way of asserting the full extent of their territories. One rabbit is a pretty good pet, but two male rabbits, unless you can get them to bond together as infants, is a disaster.)

I wasn't surprised to hear from a reader that Captain Richard Adams fought in the Battle of Arnhem of September 1944, the glorious disaster of the book and movie "A Bridge Too Far," in which thousands of British and American paratroopers and glider-borne troops were dropped up to 60 miles behind German lines to seize bridges across the Rhine and end the war by Christmas, 1944. Adams was in the 1st Airborne Division which was dropped 8 miles behind the crucial bridge at Arnhem, the bridge too far. Unfortunately, by a fluke, two elite German SS Panzer Divisions happened to be stationed between the lightly armed infantry and their goal. They succeed in seizing and holding the northern end of the bridge pr several days but the main Allied army couldn't penetrate to the southern end.

Only 15% of the division, including Adams, escaped across the Rhine and then through 60 miles of German-occupied territory My reader writes:

"Parachuting behind enemy lines was the easy part. Getting back to his own lines was the hard part. He lived the rabbit story for about a week and never forgot it, apparently."

In 2004, the 84-year-old Adams attended the 60th anniversary commemoration of Operation Market Garden.

Adams has said, "In a sense.... the book is about my war. I must confess that it was the high point of my life, and the rest has been little more than an aftermath."

Update 2014: I think this post overstates Adams participation in the fighting. I don't think he ever claimed to be one of the paratroopers. I think he has said that he was an officer behind the front lines in a supply job, and Watership Down is based on the stories of friends who made the jump.

Law School Confidential

A reader writes:


I'm currently in a Federal Criminal Law class [at famous law school A] . My professors are 1) a current federal prosecutor and 2) a federal judge.

We spent several hours on the federal death penalty [FDP], and more than half of that time was used to talk about the racial disparities in the FDP. Blacks make up about 50% of FDP prosecutions, though I believe (this wasn't mentioned in the class) that they tend to have a lower proportion of actual death sentences than whites when measured against prosecution rate (the Great White Defendant effect among juries, maybe? In either case, it's a question for people more knowledgeable than me).

Rather than focusing on things more properly in the ambit of a law school course, such as the actual statutes or caselaw affecting the subject, the class discussion meandered widely and vaguely over this topic of race - about how "troubling" and "disturbing" it all as, how it pointed to inherent inequities in the justice system, etc. Notably, this went on and on without the professor ever actually coming out and saying with finality something like, "the system is racist."

The discussion turned to the actual question of causal factors only near the end. Which is in itself somewhat striking - the implication throughout had been that no evidence of causation was needed: the fact that the FDP results were racially disproportionate to population was taken as res ipsa loquitur ["the thing speaks for itself"] by everyone there. Anyway, after reviewing many common theories of how racism might have produced the skewed results, the professor tossed out the observation that, "And there's one guy who says blacks just commit more murders than anyone else. [laugh, shrug] Which I really just don't buy, frankly." There were the perfunctory snorts of laughter from most of the students as well.


According to the website of the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics "Blacks were 7 times more likely than whites to commit homicide in 2002." Blacks, who make up about 1/8th of the population, have committed about 52% of the homicides since 1976. Historian Roger Lane has demonstrated that the black-white murder gap has existed in Philadelphia all the way back through 1839.


Now, as a natural coward when it comes to social situations like this, I declined to mention anything as rude as the actual statistics. No matter how definitively I showed that reality was starkly at odds with their beliefs, I would have been a racist for saying so. I mean, really, why would I know such a thing unless I was a closet KKK-er looking for reasons to justify my obvious hatred of blacks?

It was an amazing thing to watch nonetheless. Here you had an elite educated cohort of individuals looking at an issue which will one day be within their professional ken and for which there were readily available and unambiguous statistics, and every one of them to the individual person was studiously looking away.


Something else that's characteristic is that this law school is located in an expensive inner suburb of a city with a notoriously dangerous black ghetto. Most of the law students in that class, when looking for housing, have personally thought long and hard about the tradeoff between the cheap rents available in the blacker parts of town versus the physical safety of living in the high rent whiter parts of town. Yet, there is zero connection in the minds of these high IQ people between their personal lives and this issue.

An awful lot of supposedly intellectual discourse in America is intended not at all to discover the truth, but to demonstrate status and to inculcate the proper status markers in young aspirants to the elite. This lengthy session at a top law school serves to demonstrate to future lawyers that the better sort of lawyer is too refined to mention the bleeding obvious. Only crass, unrefined people use Occam's Razor when thinking about social issues. Analogies to Victorian socialization of the upwardly mobile to never mention anything having to do with sex are obvious.


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

April 2, 2006

The real reason for an amnesty

From UPI:

Bloomberg: Illegal immigrants help golfers
NEW YORK, April 1 (UPI) -- New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg says golf fairways would suffer if illegal immigrants were returned to their native country.

"You and I are beneficiaries of these jobs," Bloomberg told his WABC-AM radio co-host, John Gambling. "You and I both play golf; who takes care of the greens and the fairways in your golf course?"

However, Robert Heaney, general manager of Deepdale Golf Club -- a Long Island course where Bloomberg often plays -- told The New York Daily News that no illegal immigrants work at the club.


Deepdale is "maybe the most reclusive club in America," and it "hosts maybe ten rounds per day," according to golf course architect Tom Doak in his indispensable Confidential Guide to Golf Courses. Thank God that billionaires like Bloomberg don't have to choose between paying groundskeepers a little more or putting up with fluffy lies in the fairway that make it harder to draw a 3-iron shot into Deepdale's notoriously rigorous 15th green.

My new VDARE.com column:

Four Immigration Myths and the Credulous Media

By Steve Sailer

Having written 292 VDARE.com columns over the last six years, I'm inundated by feelings of both satisfaction and frustration when reviewing this year's Congressional and media debates over illegal immigration.

To their credit, House Republicans and much of the blogosphere get it. (See, for example, postings by Untethered, Udolpho, Parapundit, Mickey Kaus, Glaivester, Your Lying Eyes, Pytheas, Chris Roach, Face Right, 2Blowhards, and Mean Mr. Mustard.)

And yet in the more insulated institutions, the Senate and the legacy media, ludicrous falsehoods long ago exploded on VDARE.com and elsewhere are still proffered as if they were indisputable fact.

The lack of accountability and integrity in the mainstream press is striking. A pundit, once established, can apparently propagate nonsense catastrophic to America for years without paying any career price for his incompetence or bad faith.

The appalling legislation approved in the Senate Judiciary Committee with the support of four foolish Republicans (and of all the Democrats, of course) is the unsurprising outcome of the risks I've long pointed out in the Bush-Rove strategy.

A Bush victory in 2004 was always going to hinge on turning out the non-Hispanic white majority in vast numbers. But that was too politically incorrect to explain to the media, so, it appears, the White House concocted a smokescreen operation bamboozling innumerate reporters into believing that the small Hispanic vote would, somehow, be the key to the GOP victory.

When the Administration finally revealed its open borders immigration plan in January 2004, it pointedly excluded previously illegal aliens and new guest workers from becoming citizens (i.e., voters), precisely because a majority were sure to vote Democratic.

Hilariously, Bush announced he was dead-set against "amnesty." He redefined the word "amnesty" so it no longer meant forgiving lawbreakers for their crimes and allowing them to continue to reap the benefits of their lawbreaking. Indeed, doing exactly that was an essential part of the Bush plan. In a special Humpty-Dumptian sense aimed solely at Republican Congressmen who don't want Democratic-leaning illegal immigrants to get the right to vote, Bush redefined "amnesty" to mean only "giving citizenship to illegals." ...

But as I wrote in February 2004 about the cynicism of Bush's plan to institutionalized a new class of disenfranchised helots:


"But Bush's new Machiavellianism automatically cedes the rhetorical high ground to the Democrats, who are already pushing for 'earned legalization' (i.e., giving illegals the vote). Bush is left contradictorily sputtering about how wonderful immigrants are and how we don't want them to become our fellow citizens."

One notorious problem with lying is that you start to believe your own lies. So, for the benefit of GOP Senators, let's review some of the most common myths about the political impact of immigration that are constantly retailed in the prestige press, even thought they were shot down years ago on VDARE.com: [More]


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

Watership Down

Watership Down -- My younger son has been insisting that I read Richard Adams's 1972 novel about talking rabbits. I finally broke down and started reading and ... holy cow, this has to be one of the best epic war-adventure stories ever. The tale of a band of male rabbits who flee their native warren, which is slated for extermination by human land developers, and set off across the English countryside to establish a safe new warren high up on Watership Down. (A "down," oddly enough, is a tall bluff. "Watership" probably originally meant "water sheep" or place where sheep could be watered). Then they raid a totalitarian warren to liberate lady rabbits, followed by the frightening General Woundwort's massive counterattack.

It's a fairly violent but still idealized picture of the English at war. Unlike their enemies, this squad of rabbits cooperate well with each other, with each showing initiative in contributing his individual talents. Hazel, the leader of the rabbits, is portrayed as the ideal young British officer. Adams wrote in his Introduction, "To Hazel I gave the qualities of an officer under whom I had served [in WWII]. He had the natural power of leadership. He was not only brave but modest and retiring, yet with excellent judgment." The brilliant Blackberry is Hazel's tactical planning staff officer, while the intuitive genius Fiver, a sort of nontragic Cassandra whose visions are acted upon by Hazel, serves as his strategic planning aide. Adams writes, "Bigwig was based upon another officer I knew, a tremendous fighter, who was at his best when he had been told exactly what he had to do."

Leaving aside the question of whether "Watership Down" is children's literature at all (the difficulty of vocabulary is at the same high level as a typical literary novel for adults), it's noteworthy what a large proportion of the classics of children's literature have been written by "environmentalist tories" like Adams and J.R.R. Tolkien, the kind of "crunchy cons" who, if they were American, would be derided by supposed mainstream conservatives like Jonah Goldberg and John Podhoretz. Adams, for example, was a civil servant in the Department of Environment until the sudden success of Watership Down in his mid-fifties (it has now sold something like 50 million copies) allowed him to turn to writing full-time.

An article entitled "Quidditch quaintness: The values that triumph in the Harry Potter books are those of a nostalgic, conservative Little Britain" from the leftwing Guardian by a different Richard Adams snidely points out J.K. Rowling's conservatism:

However, the Harry Potter fanclub extends well beyond Tory supporters, in part because the books have a visible element of diversity. The problem is that it is little more than a veneer. While women make up many of the main characters, they receive little attention. Even Harry's friend, Hermione Granger, is a well-worn stereotype: the middle-class "girly swot" who tries to talk Harry out of taking risks. It's no surprise to learn that her parents are dentists...

A careful racial inclusiveness includes obviously Asian and black characters as students. But cultural identities are heavily connected to social background, and these have been scrubbed out by Rowling. Hogwarts celebrates Christmas and Halloween, but there are no feasts for Rosh Hashanah or Diwali. This is not so much multiculturalism as naive monoculturalism.


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

What the movie "Titanic" doesn't tell you about the sinking of the Titanic

Christina Hoff Sommers writers in the Weekly Standard (via Luke Ford):

ONE OF THE LEAST VISITED memorials in Washington is a waterfront statue commemorating the men who died on the Titanic. Seventy-four percent of the women passengers survived the April 15, 1912, calamity, while 80 percent of the men perished. Why? Because the men followed the principle "women and children first."

The monument, an 18-foot granite male figure with arms outstretched to the side, was erected by "the women of America" in 1931 to show their gratitude. The inscription reads: "To the brave men who perished in the wreck of the Titanic. . . . They gave their lives that women and children might be saved."


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

A theory: Did the invention of antibiotics bring about Women's Lib?

One commonplace assumption today is that the strong societal pressure before the 1960s against married women having paid jobs outside the home was driven by mindless prejudice. Better informed commentators point out the sheer number of hours of labor that housework involved before the widespread availability of home appliances like driers and dishwashers. But, it also appears to me that expectations of cleanliness have declined as housework became more automated, which is the opposite of what you'd normally expect. If the amount of labor required to reach the desired goal drops in, say, half, you'd expect the desired goal to either remain stable or increase, not fall somewhat.

So, I'm wondering if the availability of sulfas in the 1930s and of penicillin from about 1944 kicked off a social revolution that only became visible about two decades later. My theory is that before antibiotics, household cleanliness was a life-or-death matter. Mothers did everything they could to prevent infections from starting in their children because they couldn't always stop them. (For example, in 1924, President Coolidge's 16-year-old son got a blister playing tennis, it became infected, and soon died.) After a generation of children grew up using antibiotics to cure infections, the obsession with household cleanliness decline.

So, is there any evidence for this theory?


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

The Flores Island Hobbits

Greg Cochran's got a new theory: they weren't Hobbits, they were ... well, you'll have to wait for the scientific paper, but if it pans out, it will be a huge story, like appearance on the Jay Leno Show-huge.


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