August 22, 2006

The Five Billion, Updated

I pointed out last summer that almost five billion people (4,976,000,000) live in countries with lower per capita GDPs (purchasing power parity) than Mexico. That has implications for immigration that almost nobody is thinking about as of yet.

In the long run, the OTM (Other-than Mexican) immigration problem will dwarf the Mexican immigration problem.

I reran the numbers using the latest figures on the CIA World Factbook, and this year the total population of people living in countries poorer than Mexico is up to 5,043,000,000. That's 77% of the world's 6,525,000,000 population.

Almost three billion people (2,965,000,000), or 45% of the world, live in countries with less than half of Mexico's $10,000 per capita GDP.

An extraordinary 85% of the world's children ages 0-14 live in countries poorer than Mexico (1,528,000,000 out of 1,789,000).

Compared to Mexico's 33 million children ages 0-14, countries poorer than Mexico have 47 times as many children.

India has ten times as many children, China eight times as many, and Pakistan three times as many. Indonesia has almost twice as many children, Nigeria 1.7 times as many, and Bangladesh and Brazil 1.7 times as many. Ethiopia, the Congo, and the Philippines have almost exactly the same number as Mexico.

It's likely that you have to be fairly close to as rich as Mexico to get a big flow of illegal immigrants going, as Brazil has begun recently. Of course, if the Senate's guest worker program passes, we'll start seeing a big influx from places like Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, followed by illegal immigrants coming to stay with their legal relatives.


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

You can always count on the New York Sun

The money-hemorrhaging neocon newspaper runs an editorial on the Andrew Young brouhaha (the subject of my VDARE column) that trots out just about every conceivable neocon obsession of the moment: Young's meeting with the PLO 27 years ago, Joe Lieberman's defeat, the war in Lebanon, Mearsheimer & Walt's paper on the Israel Lobby, Natan Sharansky, the wonderfulness of immigrant entrepreneurs, and on and on. I'm hoping that the end of Israel's war in Lebanon will eventually cool the hysteria that has swept the punditariat over the last 6 weeks, but I haven't seen much evidence of that yet.


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

In Israel, however, the analysis is less hysterical:

Edward N. Luttwak writes in the Jerusalem Post that the Israeli performance wasn't as bad as it seemed because Hezbollah wasn't much of a threat:

There was a fully developed plan, of course, in the contingency folders - a sophisticated blend of amphibious, airborne and ground penetrations to swiftly reach deep behind the front, before rolling back, so as to destroy Hizbullah positions one by one from the rear, all the way to the Israeli border.

That plan was not implemented because of the lack of casualties among Israeli civilians. It had been a fair assumption that thousands of Hizbullah rockets fired in concentrated barrages would kill many civilians, perhaps hundreds of them each day. Barrages cancel out the inaccuracy of unguided rockets, and powerfully compound blast effects. That would make a large-scale offensive by more than 45,000 soldiers a compelling necessity, politically justifying the hundreds of casualties that it would certainly have cost.

Hizbullah, however, distributed its rockets to village militias that were very good at hiding them from air attacks, sheltering them from artillery and from probing Israeli unmanned air vehicles, but quite incapable of launching them effectively, in simultaneous launches against the same targets.

Instead of hundreds of dead civilians, the Israelis were therefore losing one or two a day, and even after three weeks, the grand total was less than in some one-man suicide bombings.

That made it politically unacceptable to launch the planned offensive that would kill young soldiers and family men, while not eradicating Hizbullah anyway, because it is a political movement in arms, and not just an army or a bunch of gunmen.

For that very reason, the outcome of the war is likely to be more satisfactory than many now seem to believe. Hassan Nasrallah is not another Yasser Arafat, who was fighting for eternal Palestine and not for actually living Palestinians, whose prosperity and safety he was always willing to sacrifice for the cause.

Nasrallah has a political constituency, and it happens to be centered in southern Lebanon. Implicitly accepting responsibility for having started the war, Nasrallah has directed his Hizbullah to focus on rapid reconstruction in villages and towns, right up to the Israeli border.

He cannot start another round of fighting that would quickly destroy everything again. Yet another unexpected result of the war is that Nasrallah's power-base in southern Lebanon is more than ever a hostage for Hizbullah's good behavior.


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

Old fogeys sound off about radio

Mickey Kaus laments:


Why does the music they play in clothing stores sound so much better than the music they play on the radio? My guess: Clothing store music is designed to put you in a good mood so you'll buy stuff. In practice, this monolithic, insidious commercial motive translates into simply playing good music. ... The song you hear on the radio, in contrast is likely to be something some record company promoter has bugged (or bribed) the station to play. It will probably be an artist with current commercial potential--not a one-hit wonder, or singer who's died or quit the business, but an "act" of non-trivial potential future earning power. ... Or it will be someone who knows someone who knows the DJ. ... And it likely won't be a two-year-old song of proven appeal, but an iffy new song from whatever CD is about to come out. (Let's give this struggling new singer-songwriter a break!) Or it will be an older song from a band that's appearing in town that week. (Perhaps the station happens to have tickets to give away!) ... Or it will be an act the station is trying to "break," in order to get bragging rights within the industry (the way LA's KCRW boasts about breaking Norah Jones). ... All of these hidden, ulterior motives corrupt the simple goal of playing music you will enjoy hearing. Give me honest clothing store songs any day.


Music you haven't invested your hopes in often sounds better. Low expectations for overheard music mean everything you hear that you like is a pure plus, while if you choose a radio station you are investing some of your self-image in it, so you start thinking self-critical things like, "Man, I'm waaaaay too old to listen to KROQ" or "I can't believe I like the 1980s synth-pop songs on Jack FM" or whatever.

The same thing happens with going to a movie: You have to use your advertising and critic reading skills to pick out one you think you'll like, then convince your wife that she'll like it too, then pay money to see it. So you wind up with a lot riding on it emotionally, and it's easy to be disappointed. In contrast, there's flipping through the dials and pausing on some unknown film to listen to a few lines of dialogue:


Walter Sobchak: You want a toe? I can get you a toe, believe me. There are ways, Dude. You don't wanna know about it, believe me.
The Dude: Yeah, but Walter...
Walter Sobchak: Hell, I can get you a toe by 3 o'clock this afternoon... with nail polish.


Now, that's pure gravy.

Another issue is one you see on classical music stations with the difference between 18th and 19th century music. The Chicago classical station specializes in heavy 19th Century masterpieces, while the more commercial LA classical station KMZT (it even has a morning man who tells classical music jokes -- and, no, they don't involve Beethoven sitting up in his grave and saying, "Can't you see I'm decomposing!") focuses on sprightly 18th Century works. Most 18th century music, whether Baroque or early Classical was probably originally presented with the introduction, "Here's a little something to brighten your day, Archduke," while most 19th century music comes with the message, "Take a spiritual journey deep into the profundities of my soul."

Well, sounds swell, but can you give me a raincheck on the spiritual journey because I've had kind of a rough day, so maybe you could play a little Vivaldi for me?


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

August 21, 2006

The other iSteve has a blog, too

I particularly liked this posting in which that other iSteve discusses a private meeting with Jerry York, a member of the Apple Board of Directors, following the revelation of the backdating options scandal:

He sits for a while more, saying nothing, tapping his foot on the table. Then he goes, Kid, you keep your passport up to date? You must, right? With all the traveling you do. Sure, I say, I keep it up to date. And you keep it with you? he says. I go, Yeah, most of the time. Or my assistant has it. Huh, he says, your assistant. Huh. See, me, I keep it right in my briefcase, always with me, never let it out of my sight. You know what else I do? I keep about a million in cash with me too. Right on my jet, in a safe. And I spread some money around the world, different places, like Switzerland, and South Africa. Places like that. Just cash money. Money I can get my hands on. A few million here and there. Rainy day money is what I call it. And nobody knows about it, not even my family. And I got friends in those places, lot of old friends that I stay in touch with. And some friends in D.C., too, guys I grew up with, the kind of guys who don't tell you where they work. Guys like that come in handy at some point. You see where I'm going with all this, kid?

I'm like, Jerry, dude, I have no idea where you're going. Are you going to South Africa? Or Switzerland or something? Why are you being all weird and mysterious? [More]

Later, after mulling over Mr. York's advice, he posts:

For various reasons that aren't worth going into, the folks at Apple are looking around for a few people who could step into my shoes at various events. For example, if for some reason I want to be on vacation, but I also need to give a keynote speech or open a retail store or something, my stand-in could take my place. Provided we give him some decent training on the voice and so forth. Frankly I was not very happy with the skinny dude we hired for the WWDC. Too thin, too gray, and the vocal energy just wasn't there. Now we're battling off all these bloggers who are bombarding our PR department, thinking I'm frigin sick. Who can blame them? The guy looked like crap. Dudes, I'm not sick. I swear. I was in friggin Polynesia, okay? Obtain a clue.

Anyway, we think it might be cool to get a bunch of Steves so we could field me out to multiple appointments at the same time. Or have some stand-ins to take some dangerous duty, like Saddam used to do. Or to throw people off the trail if I ever need to get lost, as a certain member of my board of directors has suggested.

Having more than one also might help create a little bit of confusion, like at the end of V for Vendetta where there's like thousands of people all wearing that same freako goofball mask and the cops don't know which one to shoot. We'll set loose a handful of "Steves" in black mock turtlenecks and wireless round glasses in the hallways at Apple. Hell, we could get a hundred people and put them in Jobs masks.

The goal is to buy the real El Jobso a little extra time. Hours are everything in these situations. Trust me, I ain't gonna pull an OJ, heading for Mexico in a friggin white Bronco with a wig and fake mustache on the back seat and some moron steroid case behind the wheel. When I disappear, believe me, you won't even know I'm gone.

Like a lot of guys who have led a pretty blameless life, I'm still fascinated by the mechanics of how to make a break for the border. That was the source of my frustration with "Thelma & Louise:" Susan Sarandon shoots a man in Arkansas, so she and Geena Davis light out for the Mexican border, but they do it so incompetently that they end up falling into the Grand Canyon. I mean, that's like 1500 miles out of their way. Clearly, women just aren't serious about this hugely important topic.


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

The War Nerd is crowing that his July 23rd column about how Hezbollah was winning was right. Here are some lessons Gary Brecher draws in his new column:

The IDF hasn't been a real underdog for a long time. Amateurs look at the map of the Middle East, see poor li'l Israel in the middle of all that Arab real estate and think the IDF is still the underdog. Nope--Israel was set up by a bunch of smart, educated Europeans, and when you match an army of those guys, backed by billions in US military aid, against peasant conscripts, only a fool bets on the peasants. Doesn't matter how much real estate they have, peasants in uniform are useless in conventional warfare against smart, motivated Western troops.

Till now -- till Hezbollah. Hezbollah chose when and where and how they were going to fight Israel. Here are the lessons they learned. Read'em and weep, because they work just as good against US armed forces and tactics as they do against the IDF:

First, most important lesson: take the defense tactically, the offense strategically. This ought to be a familiar doctrine to any American war buff because it was the policy behind most of our great victories, like Bunker Hill, New Orleans, and it's what kept Lee's Army of Northern Virginia on top against bigger and better-equipped Federal forces until Gettysburg -- and the only reason Lee lost there was because he abandoned the policy like a fool. Hezbollah took the offensive strategically by prepping the ground, Southern Lebanon, with a network of underground bunkers, then picking its moment to attack Israel while the IDF was busy kicking ass down in Gaza. The IDF, already under pressure for not rescuing that soldier kidnapped by Hamas in Gaza, charged over the border right into the trap.

Once they'd provoked the massive attack they hoped for, Hezbollah assumed the defensive, sticking to their bunkers and launching an incredible number of guided and unguided missiles against the Israelis. The most devastating weapon they have is the Rocket Propelled Grenade 29, the newest Russian version of our old friend the RPG 7. The RPG 29 seems to be able to knock out the IDF's main battle tank, the Merkava 4. That's a big, big blow to the IDF, because the newer Merkavas are supposed to be invulnerable to anything but huge shaped charges laid as mines... By sticking to their bunkers, where they could fire from safety at the Merkavas, the Hezbollah antitank teams destroyed the Merkava 4's rep in a few weeks.

At sea Hezbollah used the same strategy: use guided missiles against high-value targets. Israel has been used to having control of the Mediterranean, and using its navy as low-cost, mobile artillery to blast enemy positions (and picnics). Hezbollah served notice that them days are over by hitting an Israeli gunboat with a guided weapon of some kind...

Second Lesson: When you're fighting a force that depends on firepower and air power, DIG IN. Hezbollah has been tunneling out Southern Lebanon like those Caddyshack gophers from the first day the IDF vacated the area. They built reinforced bunkers, some with AC, designed to withstand air strikes and be used as firing positions for those new-generation anti-tank weapons. Just think for a second and you'll see that if you don't need to move, and stay underground like the Cong in Cu Chi, airpower can't touch you. The IDF kept waiting for Hezbollah to move aboveground but got nowhere, because the Hezzies had what the Germans call "fire discipline," the special kind of guts you need to stay still and not fire till the enemy's real close. The hotheads in Hamas have the more obvious kind of guts, attacking the IDF with small arms and old RPGs from the back of a pickup, but that kind of courage don't cut it no more.

Remember, in military terms, courage changes with the technology. When the Greeks fought one-on-one, courage was Achilles strutting up and saying, "I'll take the best guy you punks got." When the phalanx came into its own, courage meant NOT jumping out of formation on your lonesome but keeping rank, with your shield protecting your neighbor (or your bayonet, if you're talking the Redcoats' squares at Culloden in 1745). To fight and win the way Hezbollah did, courage is waiting...waiting...waiting for that Merkava to roll into the kill zone, not jumping up and firing your AK at Chobham armor.

And speaking of AKs, another lesson of this war is that the era of the automatic rifle as basic small arm may be ending. We may be heading back to some kind of shoulder-fired cannon (just like Champlain's!). Most of the IDF casualties in this war were inflicted by RPGs, just like most of our casualties in Iraq. The Chechen guerrillas have gone to a new formation, with three-man teams consisting of two RPG gunners with one AK man whose only job is to protect the RPGers. That may be the wave of the future.

Of course all these moves would've been wasted if the Israelis had caught on to what Hezbollah was up to, which leads to another lesson, one I'm always preaching: in asymmetrical warfare, Intelligence is everything. Or in this case, counterintelligence. Israeli intel, Shin Bet and Mossad, has been the real strength of the IDF for a long time. They're the best and most ruthless intelligence agencies since the USSR went bankrupt. But they had no idea what was waiting for them over the border. That's incredible, the most shocking news of all.

Remember, the IDF has instant access to all US military satellite intel, so this means that our tech intel was just as ineffective as Mossad's more traditional infiltration methods. That means Hezbollah, a huge organization with branches in every street in South Beirut and South Lebanon, has a scary effective counterintelligence branch. We all know the CIA is useless, but when Mossad and Shin Beth can't even penetrate the lower levels of a mass movement like Hezbollah, then the world has turned upside down.

And it has, folks. That's why this is such a huge, huge war. No matter what the waterheads on CNN try to tell you, the IDF lost totally, and every force configured like it -- such as, oh, the US Army or Air Force -- lost too. ...

It's hard to say who gains in the long run. Short term, sure, Hezbollah wins big. But in the long run, maybe what's happened is that the day when genocide replaces the farce called "CI Warfare" just got a lot closer. [More]

That of course is the distant but grave danger -- that more and more influential Americans are slowly giving themselves over to the hysterical logic of pre-emptive nuclear genocide, even though America is in little danger. It would be a horrific irony if America's identification with Israel due to Jewish victimization in the Holocaust leads America to nuke 6 million (or 60 million) Muslims to protect Israel.


There's a simpler solution -- if you can't uproot a popular insurgency that is well dug-in, you go home.


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

The War Nerd is crowing

that his July 23rd column about how Hezbollah was winning was right. Here are some lessons Gary Brecher draws in his new column:

The IDF hasn't been a real underdog for a long time. Amateurs look at the map of the Middle East, see poor li'l Israel in the middle of all that Arab real estate and think the IDF is still the underdog. Nope--Israel was set up by a bunch of smart, educated Europeans, and when you match an army of those guys, backed by billions in US military aid, against peasant conscripts, only a fool bets on the peasants. Doesn't matter how much real estate they have, peasants in uniform are useless in conventional warfare against smart, motivated Western troops.

Till now -- till Hezbollah. Hezbollah chose when and where and how they were going to fight Israel. Here are the lessons they learned. Read'em and weep, because they work just as good against US armed forces and tactics as they do against the IDF:

First, most important lesson: take the defense tactically, the offense strategically. This ought to be a familiar doctrine to any American war buff because it was the policy behind most of our great victories, like Bunker Hill, New Orleans, and it's what kept Lee's Army of Northern Virginia on top against bigger and better-equipped Federal forces until Gettysburg -- and the only reason Lee lost there was because he abandoned the policy like a fool. Hezbollah took the offensive strategically by prepping the ground, Southern Lebanon, with a network of underground bunkers, then picking its moment to attack Israel while the IDF was busy kicking ass down in Gaza. The IDF, already under pressure for not rescuing that soldier kidnapped by Hamas in Gaza, charged over the border right into the trap.

Once they'd provoked the massive attack they hoped for, Hezbollah assumed the defensive, sticking to their bunkers and launching an incredible number of guided and unguided missiles against the Israelis. The most devastating weapon they have is the Rocket Propelled Grenade 29, the newest Russian version of our old friend the RPG 7. The RPG 29 seems to be able to knock out the IDF's main battle tank, the Merkava 4. That's a big, big blow to the IDF, because the newer Merkavas are supposed to be invulnerable to anything but huge shaped charges laid as mines... By sticking to their bunkers, where they could fire from safety at the Merkavas, the Hezbollah antitank teams destroyed the Merkava 4's rep in a few weeks.

At sea Hezbollah used the same strategy: use guided missiles against high-value targets. Israel has been used to having control of the Mediterranean, and using its navy as low-cost, mobile artillery to blast enemy positions (and picnics). Hezbollah served notice that them days are over by hitting an Israeli gunboat with a guided weapon of some kind...

Second Lesson: When you're fighting a force that depends on firepower and air power, DIG IN. Hezbollah has been tunneling out Southern Lebanon like those Caddyshack gophers from the first day the IDF vacated the area. They built reinforced bunkers, some with AC, designed to withstand air strikes and be used as firing positions for those new-generation anti-tank weapons. Just think for a second and you'll see that if you don't need to move, and stay underground like the Cong in Cu Chi, airpower can't touch you. The IDF kept waiting for Hezbollah to move aboveground but got nowhere, because the Hezzies had what the Germans call "fire discipline," the special kind of guts you need to stay still and not fire till the enemy's real close. The hotheads in Hamas have the more obvious kind of guts, attacking the IDF with small arms and old RPGs from the back of a pickup, but that kind of courage don't cut it no more.

Remember, in military terms, courage changes with the technology. When the Greeks fought one-on-one, courage was Achilles strutting up and saying, "I'll take the best guy you punks got." When the phalanx came into its own, courage meant NOT jumping out of formation on your lonesome but keeping rank, with your shield protecting your neighbor (or your bayonet, if you're talking the Redcoats' squares at Culloden in 1745). To fight and win the way Hezbollah did, courage is waiting...waiting...waiting for that Merkava to roll into the kill zone, not jumping up and firing your AK at Chobham armor.

And speaking of AKs, another lesson of this war is that the era of the automatic rifle as basic small arm may be ending. We may be heading back to some kind of shoulder-fired cannon (just like Champlain's!). Most of the IDF casualties in this war were inflicted by RPGs, just like most of our casualties in Iraq. The Chechen guerrillas have gone to a new formation, with three-man teams consisting of two RPG gunners with one AK man whose only job is to protect the RPGers. That may be the wave of the future.

Of course all these moves would've been wasted if the Israelis had caught on to what Hezbollah was up to, which leads to another lesson, one I'm always preaching: in asymmetrical warfare, Intelligence is everything. Or in this case, counterintelligence. Israeli intel, Shin Bet and Mossad, has been the real strength of the IDF for a long time. They're the best and most ruthless intelligence agencies since the USSR went bankrupt. But they had no idea what was waiting for them over the border. That's incredible, the most shocking news of all.

Remember, the IDF has instant access to all US military satellite intel, so this means that our tech intel was just as ineffective as Mossad's more traditional infiltration methods. That means Hezbollah, a huge organization with branches in every street in South Beirut and South Lebanon, has a scary effective counterintelligence branch. We all know the CIA is useless, but when Mossad and Shin Beth can't even penetrate the lower levels of a mass movement like Hezbollah, then the world has turned upside down.

And it has, folks. That's why this is such a huge, huge war. No matter what the waterheads on CNN try to tell you, the IDF lost totally, and every force configured like it -- such as, oh, the US Army or Air Force -- lost too. ...

It's hard to say who gains in the long run. Short term, sure, Hezbollah wins big. But in the long run, maybe what's happened is that the day when genocide replaces the farce called "CI Warfare" just got a lot closer. [More]

That of course is the great danger -- that more and more influential Americans are slowly accommodating themselves to the hysterical logic of pre-emptive nuclear genocide, even though America is in little danger. It would be a horrific irony if America's identification with Israel due to Jewish victimization in the Holocaust leads America to nuke 6 or 60 million Muslims to protect Israel.


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

August 20, 2006

The Kurdish "state-within-a-state"

Daniel Larison points out the ironic contradiction between the enthusiastic American support for Israel's failed attempt to crush the Hezbollah "state-within-a-state" in Lebanon and the long-term American support for the Kurdish "state-within-a-state" in northern Iraq, which engages in border provocations with its neighbors Turkey and Iran. He quotes first from The Guardian, then offers his own comment:


"Although fighting between Turkish security forces and PKK militants is nowhere near the scale of the 1980s and 90s - which accounted for the loss of more than 30,000 mostly Turkish Kurdish lives- at least 15 Turkish police officers have died in clashes. The PKK’s sister party in Iran, the Kurdistan Free Life Party (Pejak), has stepped up activities against security targets in Kurdish regions. Yesterday, Kurdish media said eight Iranian troops were killed...

"Frustrated by the reluctance of the US and the government in Baghdad to crack down on the PKK bases inside Iraq, Turkish generals have hinted they are considering a large-scale military operation across the border. They are said to be sharing intelligence about Kurdish rebel movements with their Iranian counterparts. “We would not hesitate to take every kind of measures when our security is at stake,” Abdullah Gul, the Turkish foreign minister, said last week."
~The Guardian


I assume that we will be bombarded by numerous articles and television appearances by pundits declaring Turkey and Iran’s right to defend themselves against terrorism and we will hear a lot of complaints about the “Kurdish state within a state,” right? Isn’t it obvious that their war is our war? In fact, I think we might be on the verge of WWVI against the united forces of “Kurdish fascism.” We certainly have to keep an eye on the Kurds’ state sponsors and the forces occupying Iraq. What choice will Iran have but to bombard Baghdad for allowing this sort of thing to go on in their own country? I mean, the Iraqis even have a Kurdish president, so that must mean Iraq is responsible for everything that is happening. Really, if you think about it, this is a golden opportunity for the region.


The Kurdish state-within-a-state is, in some ways, more dangerous to Turkey and, to a lesser extent, Iran, than Hezbollah is to Israel because there are about 14 million Kurds in Turkey and 5 million in Iran while there are very few Shi'ites in Israel. If the Iraqi Kurds were to wind up with oil fields of northern Iraq, they could finance a lot of trouble in Turkey or Iran. After all, even without oil money, the Kurdish rebellion of the 1980s and 1990s in Turkey killed dozens of times more than the recent Israel-Lebanon war.

With 12 aircraft carrier battle groups, submarine-launched cruise missiles, stealth technology, and so forth, the U.S. has little to fear from aggression by states, because they all have "return addresses" that we can blast to smithereens. Thus we could quickly drive the Taliban regime from power in Afghanistan for their crimes of negligence in hosting Osama bin Laden, providing a salutary lesson to the other 200 states in the world.

What countries with air supremacy like America and Israel have trouble with, however, are organizations that do not have return addresses. The hard core of the Taliban are now living in caves in the mountains, and we aren't making much progress against them. On the other hand, how important is that? That guerillas can hole up among civilians who support them and we can't do much about it without slaughtering civilians in vast numbers (the Soviets killed at least a million Afghans from 1979-1988 without achieving final victory) is a rough form of democracy. When we run into a situation where we can't eradicate popular guerillas, well, that's God's way of telling us to go home and find something better to do with our young men's lives.

Similarly, Hezbollah is, literally, a "low overhead" state-within-a-state. Even with a budget of apparently no more than $400 million for both its military and its social welfare programs, Hezbollah can get a lot of bang for its buck because its top operatives are content to live in holes in the ground or to shuttle from one safe house to another each night. If they were to start erecting above-ground monuments to their own majesty, they'd have a return address.

The good news is that these kind of organizations have virtually no offensive capabilities for seizing territory outside of areas where they are supported by the civilian population. Hezbollah can't fire up its chain of bunkers and send them rolling into Israel the way Israel can fire up its tanks and send them into Lebanon. What it can fire offensively are rockets, but they aren't all that dangerous without weapons-of-mass-destruction warheads. But the use of WMD missiles would set off a massive counterstrike with WMD by Israel, so deterrence should continue to work.

Now, many would argue that Hezbollah is completely irrational, with the implication being that we (whether "we" is Israel or America or both is usually kept vague) must commit genocide against them before they commit genocide against us. But if Hezbollah's leadership has looked crazy over the last 6 weeks, it's crazy like a fox, as they've outsmarted the Israelis.


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

Colby Cosh wants to know

Who is the tallest man to be famous in a profession where height is mostly irrelevant?

The most extreme profession would appear to be left-of-center economists with John Kenneth Galbraith at 6'9", John Maynard Keynes at 6'6", and Robert Reich at 4'10.5".


Among current pundits, Jim Pinkerton is 6'9" and Karl Zinsmeister is just a little shorter.


Perhaps the shortest famous man ever was the Rococo architect Cuvillies, designer of the Amalienburg, who got his start as a court dwarf.

I think the tallest world-historical figure was Czar Peter the Great at 6'7". Charles DeGaulle was approaching 6'6".


The tallest pretender to a throne is King Leka. Eric Margolis wrote in 1997:


"Last week, the majestic, 7 ft tall King Leka, Pretender to the crown of Albania, announced he was ready to return in 24 hours. I once spent enjoyable hours with Leka, who is also an arms dealer, planning an invasion of Albania. I urged Leka, as I also later did Serbia's Pretender, Crown Prince Alexander, to land on the coast at the head of royalist fighters, draw his sword, and march on the capital. This is what Balkan people understand."


Jerry Pournelle also told me that Leka, son of King Zog, was 7 feet tall.


Jerry should know because back in 1967, Jerry, Stefan Possony, and then-Crown Prince in Exile Leka (or Laika) organized an invasion of Albania by exiles to overthrow Communist dictator Enver Hoxha. King Hussein of Jordan agreed to provide air cover to wipe out the small Albanian air force to allow the invaders to cross the channel from Corfu, where they were training in the King Constantine of Greece's palace. Jerry spent a lot of time in Jordan training their pilots on how to pull off a sneak attack and wipe out the Albanian planes on the ground. Then, in June 1967, the Israelis pulled off their own sneak attack and wiped out the Jordanian air force on the ground, so the liberation of Albania had to be called off.

Decades later, Jerry met the President of Israel, Ezer Weizman, who had been in charge of the Israeli Air Force in 1967. Jerry explained how Weizman had wrecked his invasion of Albania. Weizman exclaimed to the effect that You were that foreigner who was training the Jordanians how to pull of a sneak attack? We thought you were a Russian training the Jordanians to attack us!

When is Jerry going to write his autobiography?


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

August 18, 2006

GOP Presidential Hopeful Parental Trivia

Virginia Sen. George Allen and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney are the sons of famous men (a great NFL coach and the governor of Michigan, respectively), but there is more to their parentage than that. According to Wikipedia, Sen. Allen's

mother, Henrietta Lumbroso, was a Jewish immigrant of Tunisian/Italian/French background... Allen's mother immigrated from French Tunisia, and was "Italian, French and a little Spanish" and according to Allen, was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. According to Allen's sister Jennifer, their mother "prided herself for being un-American. ... She was ashamed that she had given up her French citizenship to become a citizen of a country she deemed infantile."

Also, according to the ever reliable Wikipedia, Gov. Mitt Romney's father, a frontrunner in the early-going for the GOP Presidential nomination in 1968 and former head of American Motors, had an interesting family background:

Romney, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was born in an expatriate colony in the Mexican state of Chihuahua comprised of exiles from Utah who rejected the Mormon Church's decrees against polygamy. His family was forced to flee to the United States in 1912 because of the Mexican Revolution, lived for a time in Oakley, Idaho and finally ending up in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Time reported in 1959:

From his birth, Romney had little choice but to become a missionary of one kind or another. The grandson of a Mormon who sired 30 children by four wives, he was born into a monogamous family in Colonia Dublan, Mexico, where Mormons from the Southwest had settled 20 years earlier. When George was five, Pancho Villa drove the U.S.-born Mormons out of Mexico, and the family went to Los Angeles.


His Mexican birth has raised some questions about Romney’s constitutional qualifications for the presidency. Article Two of the Constitution specifies that only a “natural-born citizen” is eligible. Some legal authorities say that this means only those born on U.S. soil. But a law enacted by the first Congress in 1790 stipulated that children born of U.S. citizens beyond the boundaries of the country “shall be considered as natural-born citizens of the U.S.”

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

Is Doug Feith consulting for Israel these days?

With the shooting apparently over in Lebanon, it looks safe to say that the Israeli government's decision to turn Hezbollah's latest border provocation stunt into a small to medium sized war was, in Talleyrand's words, "worse than a crime -- a mistake!"

With the exception of the 1973 war, Israel has typically chosen the time and place when endemic threats and skirmishes turn into full-scale war, rather than let its opponents choose the beginning of the war at their own convenience. Up until now, Israel has generally chosen intelligently when to start its wars, so intelligently in fact that in the wake of its many triumphs, many American pundits have come to believe that Israel has never been the one to first escalate to full-scale war, but was instead always the victim of Pearl Harbor-style sneak attacks -- a popular romantic delusion among Americans. When you win, you don't get asked hard questions because, as Gen. Patton said, "Americans love a winner."

This time, however, Israel has mostly succeeded in pounding heck out of a hornet's nest, an outcome that should have been predictable from the similar problems the American military, despite enjoying similar air supremacy, has had in putting down a more poorly organized guerilla insurgency in Iraq, but which the Israelis were too arrogant to learn from.

I've sometimes joked that we would be better off simply outsourcing our foreign policy to Israel rather than to hand it over to pseudo-Sabra wannabe neocons who lack the seriousness and competence of the actual Israelis. Yet, the conduct of this latest war suggests that the Israelis are succumbing to the same lack of realism as the neocons. Israel's key strategic psychological assumption -- that bombing non-Hezbollah targets in Lebanon would make the non-Hezbollah Lebanese unite against Hezbollah, rather than unite behind Hezbollah against Israel -- was particularly far-fetched, more worthy of Doug let's-bomb-Paraguay-to-catch-the-terrorists-off-guard Feith.

A more sensible Israeli long-term strategy for dealing with Hezbollah would have been carrot and stick-based. Israel could have used its vastly wealthy friends in New York and Moscow to build up the strength and amiability of the government of Lebanon and its army by quietly cutting in on profitable business deals the various ruling clans of Lebanon, including non-homicidal Shi'ite power brokers, all on the requirement of continuing good behavior.

The annual Iranian subsidy to Hezbollah is typically estimated at around $100 million per year, which is a pittance compared to what Israel's friends just on the Forbes 400 alone could muster. The net worth of the Forbes 400 is about one trillion, and somewhere around one-fifth to one-quarter of that is in the hands of Jewish billionaires. So, one-tenth of one percent of their net worth annually would be equal to twice the Iranian subsidy to Hezbollah.

Israel has typically preferred instead for America to bribe its neighbors, such as Egypt and Jordan, for it, while dunning Diaspora Jews for the direct benefit of Israel. Yet, as libertarian theory suggests, I suspect motivated private money would do a more effective job than the largesse of the American taxpayer.

But all this is just academic theorizing today because Israel has blown its chance for a decade or so to build up constructive relationships with the more responsible Lebanese elements.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

August 17, 2006

Great Moments in Paraguayan History

From the NYT:

Paraguay was an underpopulated backwater the size of California, with a penchant for wars that would swallow its male population in battles of dubious, if operatic, purpose. Among the worst was a disastrous war Paraguay waged simultaneously against Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil from 1865 to 1870, which shrank its population from 525,000 to 221,000 and left the nation with only 28,000 men.

But, looking on the bright side, as Jan and Dean would have sung if they were 19th Century Paraguayans (and weren't dead):

193,000 girls for every 28,000 boys

The obituary continues:

The 1930’s and 40’s were a period of turmoil for Paraguay, which suffered 100,000 dead between 1932 and 1935 in a war with Bolivia over the desolate Chaco region, a swampland that ultimately had none of the mineral resources the two sides imagined were there.

Perhaps the last time Paraguay was in the news was when it was revealed that Doug Feith's initial response to 9/11 was proposing that instead of bombing Afghanistan, we should bomb Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil instead to catch the terrorists off guard. MSNBC reported;

Days after 9/11, a senior Pentagon official lamented the lack of good targets in Afghanistan and proposed instead U.S. military attacks in South America or Southeast Asia as "a surprise to the terrorists," according to a footnote in the recent 9/11 Commission Report. The unsigned top-secret memo, which the panel's report said appears to have been written by Defense Under Secretary Douglas Feith, is one of several Pentagon documents uncovered by the commission which advance unorthodox ideas for the war on terror. The memo suggested "hitting targets outside the Middle East in the initial offensive" or a "non-Al Qaeda target like Iraq," the panel's report states. U.S. attacks in Latin America and Southeast Asia were portrayed as a way to catch the terrorists off guard when they were expecting an assault on Afghanistan.

The memo's content, NEWSWEEK has learned, was in part the product of ideas from a two-man secret Pentagon intelligence unit appointed by Feith after 9/11: veteran defense analyst Michael Maloof and Mideast expert David Wurmser, now a top foreign-policy aide to Dick Cheney. Maloof and Wurmser saw links between international terror groups that the CIA and other intelligence agencies dismissed. They argued that an attack on terrorists in South America—for example, a remote region on the border of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil where intelligence reports said Iranian-backed Hizbullah had a presence—would have ripple effects on other terrorist operations. The proposals were floated to top foreign-policy advisers. But White House officials stress they were regarded warily and never adopted.


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

Management Techniques of the Generalissimos

From the NYT's obituary for Alfredo Stroessner, dictator of Paraguay from 1954 to 1989, who just died at 93:

One former American ambassador to Paraguay, Robert E. White, remembered General Stroessner as darkly brilliant at profiting from others’ mistakes. Once, Mr. White recalled, the Paraguayan ambassador to Argentina had gambled away the embassy’s entire budget. The ambassador was immediately summoned to Asunción and was handed a confession to sign. General Stroessner then promoted him to foreign minister. “He could never have an independent thought or deed after that,” Mr. White explained.


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

August 16, 2006

Why the American government wants to elect a new people

One of the more extraordinary documents relating to immigration is an essay for the Center for Immigration Studies by the unusual figure Fredo Arias-King, a Harvard MBA, a Sovietologist, and an advisor to Vicente Fox during his 2000 Presidential campaign. He was the first to point out to me that the mother of Fox's first Foreign Secretary, Jorge G. Castaneda, and wife to a previous Mexican Foreign Secretary, was a Soviet woman working a the UN and might have been a Soviet spy.

Working for Fox, Arias-King met with 80 members of the U.S. Congress , and discussed immigration in detail with 50. Of those, 90% were enthusiastic about boosting immigration from Mexico.


Immigration and Usurpation: Elites, Power, and the People’s Will

Fredo Arias-King


The familiar reasons usually discussed by the critics were there: Democrats wanted increased immigration because Latin American immigrants tend to vote Democrat once naturalized (we did not meet a single Democrat that was openly against mass immigration); and Republicans like immigration because their sponsors (businesses and churches) do. But there were other, more nuanced reasons that we came upon, usually not discussed by the critics, and probably more difficult to detect without the type of access that we, as a Mexican delegation, had.

Their "Natural Progress" Of a handful of motivations, one of the main ones (even if unconscious) of many of these legislators can be found in what the U.S. Founding Fathers called "usurpation." Madison, Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and others devised a system and embedded the Constitution with mechanisms to thwart the "natural" tendency of the political class to usurp power—to become a permanent elite lording over pauperized subjects, as was the norm in Europe at the time. However, the Founding Fathers seem to have based the logic of their entire model on the independent character of the American folk. After reviewing the different mechanisms and how they would work in theory, they wrote in the Federalist Papers that in the end, "If it be asked, what is to restrain the House of Representatives from making legal discriminations in favor of themselves and a particular class of the society? I answer: the genius of the whole system; the nature of just and constitutional laws; and above all, the vigilant and manly spirit which actuates the people of America …"4 With all his emphasis on reason and civic virtue as the basis of a functioning and decentralized democratic polity, Jefferson speculated whether Latin American societies could be governed thus.5

While Democratic legislators we spoke with welcomed the Latino vote, they seemed more interested in those immigrants and their offspring as a tool to increase the role of the government in society and the economy. Several of them tended to see Latin American immigrants and even Latino constituents as both more dependent on and accepting of active government programs and the political class guaranteeing those programs, a point they emphasized more than the voting per se. Moreover, they saw Latinos as more loyal and "dependable" in supporting a patron-client system and in building reliable patronage networks to circumvent the exigencies of political life as devised by the Founding Fathers and expected daily by the average American.

Republican lawmakers we spoke with knew that naturalized Latin American immigrants and their offspring vote mostly for the Democratic Party, but still most of them (all except five) were unambiguously in favor of amnesty and of continued mass immigration (at least from Mexico). This seemed paradoxical, and explaining their motivations was more challenging. However, while acknowledging that they may not now receive their votes, they believed that these immigrants are more malleable than the existing American: That with enough care, convincing, and "teaching," they could be converted, be grateful, and become dependent on them. Republicans seemed to idealize the patron-client relation with Hispanics as much as their Democratic competitors did. Curiously, three out of the five lawmakers that declared their opposition to amnesty and increased immigration (all Republicans), were from border states.

Also curiously, the Republican enthusiasm for increased immigration also was not so much about voting in the end, even with "converted" Latinos. Instead, these legislators seemingly believed that they could weaken the restraining and frustrating straightjacket devised by the Founding Fathers and abetted by American norms. In that idealized "new" United States, political uncertainty, demanding constituents, difficult elections, and accountability in general would "go away" after tinkering with the People, who have given lawmakers their privileges but who, like a Sword of Damocles, can also "unfairly" take them away. Hispanics would acquiesce and assist in the "natural progress" of these legislators to remain in power and increase the scope of that power. In this sense, Republicans and Democrats were similar.

While I can recall many accolades for the Mexican immigrants and for Mexican-Americans (one white congressman even gave me a "high five" when recalling that Californian Hispanics were headed for majority status), I remember few instances when a legislator spoke well of his or her white constituents. One even called them "rednecks," and apologized to us on their behalf for their incorrect attitude on immigration. Most of them seemed to advocate changing the ethnic composition of the United States as an end in itself. Jefferson and Madison would have perhaps understood why this is so—enthusiasm for mass immigration seems to be correlated with examples of undermining the "just and constitutional laws" they devised.

What could be motivating U.S. legislators to do the opposite, that is, to see their constituents—already politically mature and proven as responsible and civic-minded—as an obstacle needing replacement? In other words, why would they want to replace a nation that works remarkably well (that Sarmiento was hoping to emulate), with another that has trouble forming stable, normal countries? Mexicans are kind and hardworking, with a legendary hospitality, and unlike some European nations, harbor little popular ambitions to impose models or ideologies on others. However, Mexicans are seemingly unable to produce anything but corrupt and tyrannical rulers, oftentimes even accepting them as the norm, unaffected by allegations of graft or abuse.8 Mexico, and Latin American societies in general, seem to suffer from what an observer called "moral relativism," accepting the "natural progress" of the political class rather than challenging it, and also appearing more susceptible to "miracle solutions" and demagogic political appeals. Mexican intellectuals speak of the corrosive effects of Mexican culture on the institutions needed to make democracy work, and surveys reveal that most of the population accepts and expects corruption from the political class.9

A sociological study conducted throughout the region found that Latin Americans are indeed highly susceptible to clientelismo, or partaking in patron-client relations, and that Mexico was high even by regional standards.10 In a Latin environment, there are fewer costs to behaving "like a knave," which explains the relative failure of most Spanish-speaking countries in the Hemisphere: Pauperized populations with rich and entrenched knaves. Montesquieu’s separation-of-powers model breaks down in Latin America (though essentially all constitutions are based on it) since elites do not take their responsibilities seriously and easily reach extra-legal "understandings" with their colleagues across the branches of government, oftentimes willingly making the judicial and legislative powers subservient to a generous executive, and giving the population little recourse and little choice but to challenge the system in its entirety....

During the 18 months when I aided Fox’s foreign relations, in those meetings with what became the new Mexican elite I do not recall so many discussions about "what can we do to make tough decisions to reform Mexico," but rather more "how can we get more concessions from the United States." Indeed, Fox largely continued governing the country as his predecessors did, even appointing as head of the federal police agency an Echeverría loyalist who was allegedly involved in a deadly extortion attempt against a museum owner in 1972. According to several leading world rankings on corruption, quality of government, development, and competitiveness, Mexico actually worsened during Fox’s presidency.14 Lacking internal or external pressure, the Mexican elites have taken the path of least resistance, which is not the best outcome for the country. Paradoxically, as happens in co-dependent relations, a firm but polite defense of American interests by Washington would force the Mexican elites to act and in the end (surely after a brief period of acrimonious recriminations) would be beneficial for Mexico, much as the European Union’s tough accession laws force elites in lesser-developed aspiring members (Spain in the 1980s and Central European countries in the 1990s) to adopt painful and otherwise politically unfeasible reforms that affect special interests but that benefit average citizens. After all, the gap between elite and popular aspirations in these countries is wider than in the United States, and on a broader range of issues.

...This co-dependence is perhaps nowhere more evident than the personal relations of the political classes of Mexico and the United States. When speaking to these congressmen, we noticed an affinity toward the corrupt party we were attempting to overthrow in Mexico. Several had visited Mexico and apparently enjoyed lavish treatment from their hosts, even mentioning how some of the things they enjoyed in Mexico would not be possible at home.

Even though the Mexican political class is notoriously corrupt, they can often count on stronger support in Washington than can several more worthy world leaders who are genuinely attempting to reform and improve their countries. The history of the Bush family is symptomatic.

While snubbing pro-American reformers in the newly liberated Eastern Europe, George H.W. Bush did go out of his way to accommodate Mexico and its leader Carlos Salinas. Then-vice president and presidential candidate Bush openly endorsed Salinas after the latter’s fraudulent election in 1988, a favor that Salinas returned four years later when he met only with Bush and snubbed his Democratic rival, Bill Clinton.

In April 2000, candidate George W. Bush followed in his father’s footsteps when he tacitly but unambiguously endorsed the candidate of Salinas’s ruling party against a then little-known opposition figure named Vicente Fox, perhaps believing that the official-party candidate, the former secret-police chief Francisco Labastida, would engage in a quid pro quo as president. Labastida himself could not receive the honor in person on April 7, 2000, since he had been fingered by the U.S. press as a possible target of the Drug Enforcement Administration because of his record as governor. Instead, he sent his wife to meet with Bush. Florida governor Jeb Bush knew for many years and apparently also received lavish treatment from Salinas’s brother Raúl, before Raúl was arrested on corruption and murder charges and spent the next decade in a Mexican high-security prison. Bush Sr. had a long friendship and business relations with Jorge Díaz Serrano, then director of the Mexican oil monopoly pemex, before he was also arrested in a power struggle and accused of embezzling over $50 million. The long-time politicos of the Hank Rhon family, who were suspected of laundering drug money and who continue to win elections in Mexico, were also reported to have contributed money to the gubernatorial campaigns of George W. Bush from a Texas bank they own.15 To their credit, no overtly illegal practice has been proven against the Bush family in their dealings with Mexico, but the appearance of admiration toward its ruling classes cannot be easily discounted. [See my 2001 UPI article on the Bush family's ties to the Mexican ruling class.]

Though similar stories involving lesser politicians do not make headlines, several lawmakers we met also had a special, giddy mystique of Mexico as a place where moneyed leaders coexist with tame, grateful citizens. It would seem that the American political class has a special affinity for their colleagues south of the border. The appeal of their lavishness and impunity seems to strike a positive chord in the American politicians, who perhaps resent being held accountable by their citizens, who cannot become wealthy from politics, and who may be removed from power "unfairly" and without warning.


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

August 15, 2006

The black-white IQ gap -- has it narrowed?

Over at GNXP, Darth Quixote has a good graph responding to the claim in the Flynn - Dickens paper arguing for a recent 4 to 7 point closure of the notorious 15 point white-black IQ gap. His graph shows that all the closure has been in tests of children rather than of adults, as I suggested earlier on iSteve. This leaves unanswered the question of whether adult black IQ can be expected to rise as these children go up, or does black IQ tend to fall during adulthood?

I asked them to create another plot with average birth year of the sample along the horizontal axis. The blue line tracks average scores of black children, which are now up around 89. The red line for teens, now at 87, the green line for young adults, now at 85, down a few points from earlier, and the pink adult line flat at 85.

The black-white IQ gap -- has it narrowed? Over at GNXP, Darth Quixote has a good graph responding to the claim in the Flynn - Dickens paper arguing for a recent 4 to 7 point closure of the notorious 15 point white-black IQ gap. His graph shows that all the closure has been in tests of children rather than of adults, as I suggested earlier on iSteve. This leaves unanswered the question of whether adult black IQ can be expected to rise as these children go up, or does black IQ tend to fall during adulthood?

I asked them to create another plot with average birth year of the sample along the horizontal axis. The blue line tracks average scores of black children, which are now up around 89. The red line for teens, now at 87, the green line for young adults, now at 85, down a few points from earlier, and the pink adult line flat at 85.

This seems to show that blacks born in the years roughly 1955 to 1975 saw rising IQ scores. That's not too surprising. Those were prosperous years with black life improving in many ways. I would guess that a shortage of calories for pregnant black women stopped being a problem for them. I wouldn't be surprised if average height grew quickly during those years too. Since then, the results are more ambiguous.

This seems to show that blacks born in the years roughly 1955 to 1975 saw rising IQ scores. That's not too surprising. Those were prosperous years with black life improving in many ways. I would guess that a shortage of calories for pregnant black women stopped being a problem for them. I wouldn't be surprised if average height grew quickly during those years too. Since then, the results are more ambiguous.


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

Our (very, very high-pitched) vibrant culture

I don't like linking to videos because it always seems as if you're required to first download the new Release 17 or whatever of the player to see them, but this short segment from an Oakland news station starring Mr. Bubb Rubb and Ms. Roxanne Bruns is worth it. Lots of iSteve.com themes are on display, along with bad driving.

The good news is that this is a few years old and the "whistle tip" fad has apparently been stomped out.


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

Five years after 9/11, a hint of sanity in Britain

From the Times of London on Tuesday:

Muslims face extra checks in new travel crackdown
By Ben Webster, Transport Correspondent

THE Government is discussing with airport operators plans to introduce a screening system that allows security staff to focus on those passengers who pose the greatest risk.

The passenger-profiling technique involves selecting people who are behaving suspiciously, have an unusual travel pattern or, most controversially, have a certain ethnic or religious background.

The system would be much more sophisticated than simply picking out young men of Asian appearance. But it would cause outrage in the Muslim community because its members would be far more likely to be selected for extra checks.

Officials at the Department for Transport (DfT) have discussed the practicalities of introducing such a system with airport operators, including BAA. They believe that it would be more effective at identifying potential terrorists than the existing random searches.

They also say that it would greatly reduce queues at secur-ity gates, which caused lengthy delays at London airports yesterday for the fifth day running. Heathrow and Gatwick were worst affected, cancelling 69 and 27 flights respectively. BAA gave warning yesterday that the disruption would continue for the rest of the week.

Passengers are now allowed to take one small piece of hand luggage on board but security staff are still having to search 50 per cent of travellers. Airports have also been ordered to search twice as many hand luggage items as a week ago...

The new measures, which include a ban on taking any liquids through checkpoints, are expected to remain in place for months. A DfT source said it was difficult to see how the restrictions could be relaxed if terrorists now had the capabil-ity to make liquid bombs.

The DfT has been considering passenger profiling for a year but, until last week, the disadvantages were thought to outweigh the advantages. A senior aviation industry source said: “The DfT is ultra-sensitive about this and won’t say anything publicly because of political concerns about being accused of racial stereotyping.”

Three days before last week’s arrests, the highest-ranking Muslim police officer in Britain gave warning that profiling techniques based on physical appearance were already causing anger and mistrust among young Muslims. Tarique Ghaffur, an assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, said: “We must think long and hard about the causal factors of anger and resentment.

“There is a very real danger that the counter-terrorism label is also being used by other law-enforcement agencies to the effect that there is a real risk of criminalising minority communities.”

Sir Rod Eddington, former chief executive of British Airways, criticised the random nature of security searches. He said that it was irrational to subject a 75-year-old grandmother to the same checks as a 25-year-old man who had just paid for his ticket with cash.


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

"Quinceañera:"

From my review in the upcoming edition of The American Conservative:

The massive May Day marches by illegal immigrants appear to have made film critics finally notice that the American entertainment industry has largely ignored the 28 million people of Mexican origin in this country. In compensation, reviewers are now praising extravagantly "Quinceañera," a modest but lively and fairly likeable $400,000 drama about an American-born Mexican girl's bumpy ride to her traditionally lavish 15th birthday party, or quinceañera....

Young Magdalena lives in Los Angeles's Echo Park, which the press gingerly describes as "vibrant." That euphemism means shopkeepers, fearful of local gangs, lower the metal bars over their store windows at 6pm, leaving the commercial streets desolate after dark.

Still, Echo Park is superbly located in hills overlooking the skyscrapers of downtown LA. So, an influx from trendy Silver Lake of white homosexual men, the standard shock troops of gentrification because they are less vulnerable to crime than male-female couples, has begun slowly economically cleansing Chicanos from Echo Park's quaint but dilapidated clapboard cottages.


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