I haven't had much to say about Iraq lately because it just seems too hopeless and depressing. The Bush Administration is obviously just flailing around, trying to run out the clock.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
I haven't had much to say about Iraq lately because it just seems too hopeless and depressing. The Bush Administration is obviously just flailing around, trying to run out the clock.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Radar magazine lists five pundits (David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, Peter Beinart, Jeffrey Goldberg, and Fareed Zakaria), who helped push America into the Iraq nightmare and whose careers have only prospered since then. And Radar lists four pundits who were right (William S. Lind, Robert Scheer, Jonathan Schell, and Scott Ritter) and have seen few (if any) rewards other than being able to say "I told you so." Schell of notes: "There doesn't seem to be a rush to find the people who were right about Iraq and install them in the mainstream media."
Yet, life is only getting sweeter for the boys who helped get us into this war. For example:
"Before the war [Tom Friedman] was charging less than $40,000 to give a speech; these days it's a rumored $65,000. And afterward the audiences are encouraged to scoop up copies of the World is Flat, his paean to corporate globalism that has been on the Times best-seller list for 91 weeks. The royalties certainly help defray the costs of a $9.3 million mansion in Bethesda and a second home in Aspen that—if the local phone book and Google Earth are to be trusted—is a massive chateau with its own lake on the swanky northern side of town, where Prince Bandar has his monstrosity."
Friedman is married to a billionaire's daughter, so he doesn't have to earn his Starwood mansion with the sweat of his brow, but it looks like he could, if collecting $65k per speech requires any sweat. (By the way, Prince Bandar's ski chalet is 55,000 square feet with a 17,000 square foot guest cottage.)
This reminds me of something I don't really understand: why affluent people will pay unbelievable amounts of money to attend a lecture so they can bask in the (one would think) unedifying physical presence of somebody like Tom Friedman, whom they can see for free on television practically every week. For instance, this season the Los Angeles Music Center Speaker Series charges $50 on up (way up) per lecture by Zakaria, George Will, or Jim Lehrer, who are all regulars on the free tube.
A couple of years ago, the big highlight of the season was Dan Rather, who was so popular he was the only speaker to appear on both the A and B series. Personally, having seen hundreds of hours of Ol' Dan on TV, my urge to shell out 50 clams to see him as a dot-like life form as viewed from the second balcony of the cavernous Dorothy Chandler Pavilion was limited.
I guess, the point, though, is that having seen Rather up close and personal on the idiot box for free for all those years, a lot of wealthy people were excited about being allowed to proffer cash offerings so they can worship him in the flesh from afar.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Watching "Patton" with my son, I got to wondering whether there's ever been a bigger gap in acting quality between the star and just about everybody else in the movie. George C. Scott is as tremendous as in memory and legend, but the supporting cast members, even Karl Malden as Gen. Omar Bradley, are wooden, as stiff and phony-sounding as the players in a high school musical. Scott just sucks up all the charisma in every scene.
Only Michael Bates, who was an officer of a Gurkha regiment in Burma in WWII, shows flair as Field Marshall Montgomery (or, as Sam Goldwyn once introduced Monty at a formal dinner party in Hollywood, "Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Field Marshall Montgomery Ward" -- in the ensuing embarrassed silence, one wit piped up: "No, Sam, I think you meant to say 'Field Marshall Field.'")
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
One of the ironic side-effects of the vast 2003 brouhaha over Rush Limbaugh saying "the media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well" was that sporting press finally started to shut up about black quarterbacks just to prove Rush wrong.
There are still exceptions. For example, the New York Times ran an old-fashioned booster article before the college title game:
Acceptance Still Lags for Black Quarterbacks
By WILLIAM C. RHODEN
"Monday night’s national title game, the first time in B.C.S. history that black starting quarterbacks have met in a game involving the No. 1 and No. 2 teams, is a milestone that should be celebrated not shunned."
But that's rarer these days after Rush's "gaffe."
Not surprisingly, there has been little coverage lately as black QB performance in the NFL has tailed off.
2006 was another unimpressive year for black quarterbacks in the NFL. Veteran Steve McNair had another solid season, throwing for the 14th most yardage of any NFL quarterback (and was also 14th in passer efficiency), leading Baltimore to an impressive 13-3 record. Donovan McNabb started the season very well, but was hurt for the last six games of the season. He still finished 20th overall in passing yardage (and 4th in passer rating). (His replacement, the aged Jeff Garcia, did just as well in efficiency.)
Then came Michael Vick at #22 in yards passing, but he did set a new record for quarterbacks by rushing for over 1000 yards. Rookie Vince Young was 26th, but also ran well, and was coming on very strong in the second half of the season. David Garrard was 30th.
McNair was the only black among the 12 starting quarterbacks in the playoffs, although McNabb's Philadelphia made it, but the Eagles had a better record after Garcia took over as the starting quarterback.
So, it's looking like the black quarterback boom is petering out, as every hot idea does in the NFL, sooner or later, as opponents figure out how to adjust to innovations, such as quarterbacks who are better runners. Black quarterbacks will likely continue to be common in the NFL, but only in numbers somewhat disproportionately more represented than their share of the overall U.S. population, not the wildly disproportionate numbers of blacks found at tailback or cornerback.
Still, an awful lot of teams would surely like to have LSU's strong-armed 6-6 260 JaMarcus Russell.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
In the spirit of our recent discussion of singers' heights:
Man shot in argument over James Brown's height
Two Atmore men exchanged gunfire Monday, injuring one of them when the friends got into an argument about how tall the recently deceased soul singer James Brown was, police said.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
I haven't checked the statistics lately, but what I'm noticing in daily life is that the Latino surge into LA may have peaked, with ridiculously high home prices driving Mexicans to other states. Instead, Southern California is becoming more and more dominated by ... well, I don't know the term for them. They're typically white people from western Asia who have strong small business moneymaking chops, don't mind crowding an extended family into one house, and maybe aren't real enthusiastic about following government regulations and paying taxes: e.g., Iranians, Armenians, Israelis, Lebanese, Syrians, etc.
They often come from exotic ethnic minorities -- for example, my wife used to frequent a shop owned by the mother of Paula Abdul, the judge on American Idol, who is a Jewish Arab of Syrian origin. Other shopkeepers have prominently displayed pictures of the Virgin Mary with Arabic inscriptions. Many of the Iranians are Jewish.
The funny thing is that there isn't even a collective word for them: Asian Caucasians? Men with deep voices? The gold chain nestled in chest hair set? The second coming of the Ottoman Empire?
A reader writes:
"Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a politically correct synonym. I suspect it's because you're trying to aggregate groups who hate each other (Arabs vs. Israelis, Armenians vs. Turks), so there's no political pressure for a particular PC term to identify the group as a whole."
That makes sense. Even though the West Asian immigrants seem quite similar culturally to average Americans like me, back in the Old Country they hate each other too much to form umbrella organizations here. In contrast, the Nixon Administration could group Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans together because, while they didn't particularly like each other, they were too isolated from each other on different islands back home, and in different parts of America, to really hate each other So ambitious activists saw the advantages in political muscle for getting affirmative action handouts of claiming to represent a bigger synthetic umbrella category: Hispanics / Latinos.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Across Difficult Country is impressed with Apple's new iPhone and this age of wonders we live in:
"I saw footage of the Steve Jobs Apple iPhone demo, and one of the things you can do with iPhone is upload photos to it, then, by touching the screen, make them larger and smaller. Am I the only one reminded of the moon landing? Larger, smaller – by touching the screen. I'm thinking of how stout Cortez must have felt on that mountaintop. Larger. Smaller. By touching the screen."
By the way, if you were vastly rich Steve Jobs, wouldn't you make me an offer to buy my iSteve.com domain name, just to be tidy?
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
The Supreme Court endorsed racial preferences a few years ago, endorsing the popular belief that ethnic diversity stimulates intellectual life.
Similarly, back in 2004, The Economist opined:
"Even if there were a stark choice between diversity and social solidarity, it is not clear that the latter would be better. In 1856 Walter Bagehot, deprived of the diversity which the past century and a half has brought, railed against his tight-knit society, which he thought stifled excitement and innovative thinking. “You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius,” he wrote, “but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbour.”
Print journalists are always denouncing bloggers for posting without taking time to think, but do they bother doing reality checks themselves?
To test The Economist's theory, let's make up a list of British thinkers active in 1856:
Charles Darwin, James Clerk Maxwell, John Stuart Mill, Florence Nightingale, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Benjamin Disraeli, Francis Galton, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Robert Browning, Thomas Henry Huxley, William Makepeace Thackeray, Richard Burton, Anthony Trollope, Michael Faraday, Lewis Carroll, George Eliot…
In this company, even Walter Bagehot himself, an outstanding public intellectual and journalist, seems a little outclassed.
I suspect that it's more likely that ethnic diversity stifles innovative thinking by making political correctness more mandatory to keep the peace.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
National suicide via politeness. A TV commercial on YouTube.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
A reader writes:
The National Health Interview Survey measured the shoeless height of 33,531 American white men. These are the means by region:
Height in Inches
Midwest 70.26
South 70.15
West 69.96
Northeast 69.79
And the percent 6'1" or over:
South 19.8
Midwest 19.3
West 18.3
Northeast 13.6
The differences here are small, but this might be part of the reason for height differences between country and rock singers.
I wonder if the General Social Survey asks men in different regions how tall they are. Then we could find out which part of the country has the biggest liars.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
From my upcoming review in the American Conservative:
Broadway musical composers can't seem to come up with catchy tunes anymore, so Hollywood has turned instead to singers' biopics, such as recent Oscar-winners "Walk the Line" (Johnny Cash) and "Ray" (Ray Charles), so audiences can still leave the theatre humming the hits.
Unfortunately, musical career arcs generally lack fresh drama. The genre's standard plot sees the struggling young prodigy get a quick lesson in how to sell a song from a veteran Svengali, after which he ascends to superstardom during a montage. In Act II, the singer struggles with his "inner demons," which predictably turn out to be drugs or drink.
It doesn't help that filmmakers have been oddly averse to honesty about why we idolize outstanding singers. "Walk the Line," for example, implied that Cash became a legend because of the emotional trauma of his younger brother's death. Likewise, when Hollywood finally makes "The Shaquille O'Neal Story," we'll no doubt learn that Shaq grew up to be a 7'1" NBA center because his beloved pet dog got run over.
What made Cash unique, however, was that bass-baritone voice with which he would thrillingly rumble, "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash." Joaquin Phoenix, a fine actor but a mere baritone, couldn't match it.
In contrast, "Dreamgirls," the deservedly crowd-pleasing film version of the 1981 Broadway musical, demonstrates how making stuff up can be more truthful. A highly fictionalized account of Motown's Supremes (renamed the Dreams), it refreshingly puts conflicts over voices and looks at the center of this story of three Detroit high school friends who become the biggest American pop group of the 1960s.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
A reader writes:
I also have the impression that front men are often shorter than the rest of the band, as in RHCP, Dio, Genesis. There may be a correlation with short height and extroversion (maybe only on subracial level, as in Italians are shorter and more extrovert than Swedes)
Btw, I find your reasoning about rock stars' average height very interesting, but also noticed that many many people find this kind of reasoning boring/disturbing/weird. Why?
Good question. Anybody have any thoughts?
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Charles C. Mann wrote a article many years ago in the Atlantic Monthly pointing out that landowners have an incentive to quietly exterminate any endangered species they find on their land. A flock of sheep are particularly good for eradicating plant species.
Of course, it’s also true that many endangered species aren’t really endangered. It’s just that nobody bothered looking for them until a development was announced. At that point, opponents of the real estate development hire naturalists to find little known species on the property.
It’s often easier to find some supposedly rare species on a piece of land than for the developers to find that particular species in enough places elsewhere to show it isn’t rare. Although the public tends to visualize every endangered species as panda bears or whooping cranes, weeds are particularly useful to anti-developers, since their geographic spread is often poorly known because who cares about weeds?
Thus it’s easier to portray them as endangered. For example, the discovery of the San Fernando Spineflower, a tiny weed almost indistinguisable from the San Gabriel Spineflower, helped derail development of the billion dollar Ahmanson Ranch project outside of Los Angeles.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
A reader sends a fascinating message about the heights of rock stars vs. country stars.
The only rock star I've shaken hands with was the late Joey Ramone. He and his mom were standing on a street corner in Greenwich Village in 1982, eating ice cream cones. I'd say he was 6'-5" if he had good posture (which he didn't). I'm 6'4" and Joey looked taller than me. My impression, however, is that most rock band frontmen are bouncy little guys, and the shorter ones on the lists below are probably exaggerating their heights for written accounts by the usual 1-2 inches that is considered acceptable in America.
Randomly watching CMT this morning I started noticing just how big a lot of today's male country artists are compared to rock stars. There are some big galoots out there in country. So I decided to do a comparison.
It's hardly scientific, but as you can see there have been an awful lot of 6 footers on the country charts lately. It wasn't always so. As you move back in time the people like Willie Nelson and George Jones weren't particularly big. I couldn't get a height for Merle Haggard, but he's no monster either. Same for Marty Robbins, another one I couldn't find a height for. And it's not that rockers are particularly short. Most are average to above average and there are Billy Corgans, Chris Cornells, James Hetfields, and Rick Ocaseks out there too. It should be mentioned though that while some like Cornell and Helfield are relatively well-muscled, a lot of the taller rockers like Corgan and Ocasek are "rock star skinny."
Yes, it's interesting how skinny rock stars have traditionally been, like Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, or Ocasek of The Cars, who was supposed to be 6'-4" and 145 pounds. High cheekbones are important too -- that's why Johnny Depp reminds you more of a rock star than a movie star, and why it was so natural for him to play a pirate as if he was Keith Richards' great-grandfather.
In contrast, a lot of today's country stars aren't just tall, they're huge. 6'2 Johnny Cash and 6'0 Waylon Jennings would be on the small side compared to a lot of them. Possible reasons for the discrepancy: 1. Country is a more masculine genre. Though its hard to say its more masculine than metal and metalish hard rock which features an awful lot of people under 6 feet including Ozzy, Axl, Eddie Van Halen, Rob Halford, Bruce Dickenson, the Young Brothers etc. You have to say though that Country music is pretty comfortable with traditional masculinity.
Joe Strummer of The Clash wasn't too big, but he was so All-Guy that he wouldn't even write love songs, which, I suspect, he felt had cooties.
But, a lot of your glam rockers like Jagger, Bowie, Tyler, the hair metal bands of the 1980s, etc. try to put on an air of androgyny. I'm not sure why.
2. Country's star system. Country has something similar to an old Hollywood star system which emphasizes individuals looks. Lets face it tallness is a big part of a man's appeals. Rock stars have a lot of charisma, but let's face it white rockers are famous for being ugly. I would merely add that they are also short.
3. Division of labour. (Related to #2) Rockers almost always write their own material. Country singers often don't. I agree with the rough division between interpreters (singers, dancers, conductors etc.) and creators (composers, writers, painters etc.) and that the later requires a lot more g. Since rockers usually compose their own material they need more intelligence. This means that a rock performers probably have more nerdy tendencies than country singers like Tim McGraw who couldn't write a tune to save his life. But he doesn't have to. The whole Nashville songwriting machine is behind him. Of course some of Country's big galoots do write their own songs, not always to great effect I'm afraid.
A lot of the great country songs were written by somewhat shorter men like Merle Haggard, Willie, Kris Kristofferson. Toby Keith ain't up there.
4. Middlebrowness. (Related to both #1 and #2) Country has been aiming at comfortable suburbanites for quite while now. Its still got its hard partying aspect, but its still a fair ways from Willie smoking weed at the Armadillo. Its sexy male stars are thus more conventional, and conventional male attraciveness includes height. Rock goes for the innovative and its definition of sexiness sometimes crosses over into the downright weird. Short people are probably more welcome there.
Another thing is that rock stars bounce around on stage more than country singers. A lot of rockers jump in the air frequently. It's easier for a little man to get higher off the ground relative to his size than for a big man. And, it's a lot easier on the little man's knees when his 135 pounds comes down than when a 185 pounder lands. That's why drill instructors at Parris Island boot camp aren't the towering fellows like they are in the movies. They are mostly wiry little guys because DIs have to lead the recruits on long runs everyday, and only light men's knees can withstand that kind of pounding year after year.
And it could be that country likes deep-voiced men like Johnny Cash, while rock, especially metal, tends toward more exciting higher voices. There may be a slight correlation between height and length of vocal cords.
I've put the lists in very rough chronological order and I've stuck with white musicians as interracial comparisons might screw things up. I've also tended to avoid including Southern Rock, which well sounds an awful lot like todays country, and also might confuse things. I haven't looked at country music before the rock era.
Country:
Joe Nichols 6'2
Eddie Montgomery 6'2
Troy Gentry 6'3
Gary LeVox 6'0
Dierks Bentley 6'0
Trace Adkins 6'6
Brad Paisley 5'10
Kenny Chesney 5'6
Keith Urban 5'8
Toby Keith 6'3
Blake Shelton 6'5
Tim McGraw 6'0
Garth Brooks 6'1
Alan Jackson 6'4
Ronnie Dunn 6'4
Kix Brooks 6'2
Billy Ray Cyrus 6'0
John Michael Montgomery 6'2
Travis Tritt 5'7
Vince Gill 6'3
Clint Black 5'8
Lyle Lovett 6'0
Randy Travis 5'9
George Strait 5'10
Dwight Yoakam 6'0
Steve Earle 5'11
Randy Owen 6'0
Johnny Cash 6'2
Hank Williams Jr. 6'2
Waylon Jennings 6'0
Kris Kristofferson 5'10
George Jones 5'7
Willie Nelson 5'6
Hank Sr. was 6'0
Rock:
Brandon Flowers 5'9
Scott Weiland 5'10
Julian Casablancas 6'2
Thom Yorke 5'5
Damon Albarn 5'11
Liam Gallagher 5'10
Noel Gallagher 5'8
Billy Joe Armstrong 5'7
Kurt Cobain 5'9
Chris Cornell 6'2
Eddie Vedder 5'7
Billy Corgan 6'3
Layne Staley 6'0
Jerry Cantrell 6'1
Axl Rose 5'8
Slash 5'9
Izzy Stradlin 5'11
James Hetfield 6'1
Michael Stipe 5'9
Rick Ocasek 6'4
Rob Halford 5'11
Brian Johnson 5'5
Angus Young 5'2
Malcolm Young 5'3
Bruce Dickenson 5'6
David Lee Roth 6'0
Eddie Van Halen 5'8
Bono 5'7
The Edge 5'10
Sting 6'0
Elvis Costello 5'10
David Byrne 6'0
Joe Strummer 5'8
Mick Jones 5'10
John Lydon-Rotten 5'8
Joey Ramone 6'3
Johnny Ramone 5'9
Dee Dee Ramone 6'0
Roger Waters 6'3
David Gilmour 5'11
Steven Tyler 5'10
Joe Perry 5'9
Bruce Springsteen 5'10
David Bowie 5'10
Iggy Pop 5'7
Lou Reed 5'5
Tony Iommi 6'2
Ozzy Osbourne 5'10
Robbie Robertson 6'1
Neil Young 6'0
Jimmy Page 5'11
Robert Plant 6'1
David Crosby 5'10
Rod Stewart 5'10
Keith Richards 5'8
Mick Jagger 5'10
Roger Daltrey 5'7
Pete Townshend 6'0
Paul McCartney 5'10
John Lennon 5'10
Elvis was about 6'0
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
My long cover story in the January 15, 2007 issue of The American Conservative is now online. Here's an excerpt:
"In the presence of [ethnic] diversity, we hunker down. We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it's not just that we don't trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don't trust people who do look like us." -- Harvard professor Robert D. Putnam
It was one of the more irony-laden incidents in the history of celebrity social scientists.
While in Sweden to receive a $50,000 academic prize as political science professor of the year, Harvard's Robert D. Putnam, a former Carter administration official who made his reputation writing about the decline of social trust in America in his bestseller Bowling Alone, confessed to Financial Times columnist John Lloyd that his latest research discovery -- that ethnic diversity decreases trust and co-operation in communities -- was so explosive that for the last half decade he hadn't dared announce it "until he could develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity, saying it 'would have been irresponsible to publish without that.'"
In a column headlined "Harvard study paints bleak picture of ethnic diversity," Lloyd summarized the results of the largest study ever of "civic engagement," a survey of 26,200 people in 40 American communities: "When the data were adjusted for class, income and other factors, they showed that the more people of different races lived in the same community, the greater the loss of trust. 'They don't trust the local mayor, they don't trust the local paper, they don't trust other people and they don't trust institutions,' said Prof Putnam. 'The only thing there's more of is protest marches and TV watching.'"
Lloyd noted, "Prof Putnam found trust was lowest in Los Angeles, 'the most diverse human habitation in human history.'"
As if to prove his own point that diversity creates minefields of mistrust, Putnam later protested to the Harvard Crimson that the Financial Times essay left him feeling betrayed, calling it "by two degrees of magnitude, the worst experience I have ever had with the media." To Putnam's horror, hundreds of "racists and anti-immigrant activists" sent him e-mails congratulating him for finally coming clean about his findings.
Lloyd stoutly stood by his reporting, and Putnam couldn't cite any mistakes of fact, just a failure to accentuate the positive. It was "almost criminal," Putnam grumbled, that Lloyd had not sufficiently emphasized the spin that he had spent five years concocting...
But what primarily drove down L.A.'s rating in Putnam's 130-question survey were the high levels of distrust displayed by Hispanics. While no more than 12 percent of L.A.'s whites said they trusted other races "only a little or not at all," 37 percent of L.A.'s Latinos distrusted whites. And whites were the most reliable in Hispanic eyes. Forty percent of Latinos doubted Asians, 43 percent distrusted other Hispanics, and 54 percent were anxious about blacks. ...
The problems caused by diversity can be partly ameliorated, but the handful of techniques that actually work generally appall liberal intellectuals, so we hear about them only when they come under attack. ...
Another untold story is the beneficial effect on race relations of the growth of Christian fundamentalism. Among soldiers and college football players, for instance, co-operation between the races is up due to an increased emphasis on a common transracial identity as Christians.
According to military correspondent Robert D. Kaplan of The Atlantic, "The rise of Christian evangelicalism had helped stop the indiscipline of the Vietnam-era Army." And that has helped build bridges among the races. Military sociologists Charles C. Moskos and John Sibley Butler wrote in All That We Can Be: Black Leadership and Racial Integration the Army Way, "Perhaps the most vivid example of the 'blackening' of enlisted culture is seen in religion. Black Pentecostal congregations have also begun to influence the style of worship in mainstream Protestant services in post chapels. Sunday worship in the Army finds both the congregation and the spirit of the service racially integrated."
Similarly, it's now common to see college football coaches leading their teams in prayer. Fisher DeBerry, the outstanding coach of the Air Force Academy, who has led players with no hope of making the NFL to a record of 169-108-1, hung a banner in the locker room bearing the Fellowship of Christian Athletes' Competitor's Creed, which begins, "I am a Christian first and last." When the administration found out, he was asked to take it down.
Because policymakers almost certainly won't do what it would take to alleviate the harms caused by diversity -- indeed, they won't even talk honestly about what would have to be done -- it's crazy to exacerbate the problem through more mass immigration. As the issue of co-operation becomes ever more pressing, the quality of intellectual discourse on the topic declines -- as Putnam's self-censorship revealed -- precisely because of a lack of trust due to the mounting political power of "the diverse" to punish frank discussion. [More]
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
The pseudonymous La Griffe du Lion, whom I called the Zorro of statisticians, has a new essay:
Intelligence, Gender and Race
General intelligence, its form and how it is distributed in various populations are among the topics covered in this conversation with Prodigy. A new kind of meta-analysis is unveiled, and with it an assessment of the cognitive gender gap. All this and more when La Griffe du Lion interviews a celebrated whiz kid. Volume 9, Number 1, January 2007
Personally, I don't have an opinion on whether men or women have higher average IQs. Lynn, Rushton, and Nyborg say men have higher IQs by a few points. Jensen says they are the same. I asked Charles Murray who did better on the military's highly refined AFQT IQ test, and he found that women had scored a little higher in the 1997 re-standardization.
Whatever the averages really are, they're quite close to each other, so the psychometric issues tend to become highly technical.
At the far right edge of the bell curve, though, it's likely that there are more males, as Larry Summers notoriously pointed out.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Second: You can make a tax deductible contribution via VDARE by clicking here. (Paypal and credit cards accepted, including recurring "subscription" donations.) UPDATE: Don't try this at the moment.
Third: send money via the Paypal-like Google Wallet to my Gmail address (that's isteveslrATgmail.com -- replace the AT with a @). (Non-tax deductible.)
Here's the Google Wallet FAQ. From it: "You will need to have (or sign up for) Google Wallet to send or receive money. If you have ever purchased anything on Google Play, then you most likely already have a Google Wallet. If you do not yet have a Google Wallet, don’t worry, the process is simple: go to wallet.google.com and follow the steps." You probably already have a Google ID and password, which Google Wallet uses, so signing up Wallet is pretty painless.
You can put money into your Google Wallet Balance from your bank account and send it with no service fee.
Or you can send money via credit card (Visa, MasterCard, AmEx, Discover) with the industry-standard 2.9% fee. (You don't need to put money into your Google Wallet Balance to do this.)
Google Wallet works from both a website and a smartphone app (Android and iPhone -- the Google Wallet app is currently available only in the U.S., but the Google Wallet website can be used in 160 countries).
Or, once you sign up with Google Wallet, you can simply send money via credit card, bank transfer, or Wallet Balance as an attachment from Google's free Gmail email service. Here's how to do it.
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Fifth: if you have a Chase bank account (or, theoretically,other bank accounts), you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Chase QuickPay (FAQ). Just tell Chase QuickPay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address (steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). If Chase asks for the name on my account, it's Steven Sailer with an n at the end of Steven. (Non-tax deductible.)
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