January 17, 2007

An illuminating map

Econobrowser posts a map created by Jeffrey Sachs and two other economists of world gross domestic product density (GDP per capita times population density). In the U.S., this is quite proportional to population density, with the largest swath of maximum GDP density found the mid-Atlantic megaloplex from Boston to D.C., and the lowest in Alaska and the Great Basin.

Elsewhere, the map is more interesting, with Java and the Nile Delta surprisingly standing out for high GDP density, due to extremely intensive farming. India looks to be about the same average color as the U.S., if you include Alaska, which indicates about the same median (although not mean) GDP density per square mile. (Of course, Manhattan alone probably has the same total GDP as a sizable Indian state, but that won't show up well on the map.)

Still, what jumps out at you is that there really are still just two parts of the world where there are huge swaths of high GDP density: Northeast Asia (Japan, South Korea, and the lower Yellow River basin of China) and Central Western Europe (from Italy running northwestward through England, centering around the Rhine).

This really hasn't changed in a long time -- back in the late 1940s, an early Cold War strategist (George Kennan, I believe) argued that these were the two areas in the world that really mattered (along with Persian Gulf oil). The Central Western European axis of accomplishment also shows up in Charles Murray's "Human Accomplishment," where a tremendous fraction of the eminent artists and scientists in history lived fairly close to a line running from Naples to Edinburgh.


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

The Individualist:

I just discovered an enormous scholarly website, The Individualist, dedicated to the human sciences, including many of the more controversial issues.


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

Thank God an NFL player is not a famous role model like a college lacrosse player

Last April, I asked in VDARE.com why the New York Times was running endless stories about the Duke lacrosse team when A.) The rape charges were pretty obviously all a hoax; and B.) Lacrosse is tiny sport, while America's biggest sport, football, sees well-known players arrested for violence all the time. As I pointed out, just that week the quarterback at Utah St. and the backup quarter at glamorous USC had been charged with rape, while star Chicago Bears cornerback Ricky Manning had attacked some poor nerd working on his laptop at Denny's at 3am. Could it possibly have to do with the Duke lacrosse team being 98% white, while the three football players were minorities?

Now that Manning will be in the NFC championship game this weekend, the NYT today gets all warm and fuzzy over him:


After Wrong Turn, Bears’ Manning Retools His Life
by Karen Crouse

That reversal of fortune mirrored what has happened in Manning’s life over the past 10 months. Last April, within days of receiving a contract offer from the Bears, Manning was arrested and charged with assault after an incident at a Denny’s restaurant in Los Angeles. Manning has acknowledged getting into an argument with a customer and pushing him in the head before leaving. After the news of his latest arrest became public, the Carolina Panthers declined to match the Bears’ five-year, $21 million offer for Manning, who was a restricted free agent.

The 25-year-old Manning already was on probation from a previous assault in Los Angeles, and if his case had gone to trial he faced the possibility of a prison sentence. “I wasn’t willing to take that risk,” he said. Intent on putting his past behind him, Manning pleaded no contest to a felony assault in the fall and was sentenced to three years probation, one year of anger-management counseling and 100 hours of community service. He was suspended for one game by the N.F.L. for violation of its code of personal conduct, causing him to miss the Bears’ 17-13 loss at New England on Nov. 26. ...

What happened at the Denny’s in Los Angeles, not far from the U.C.L.A. campus where Manning attended college, was avoidable. He can see that clearly now.

For starters, he did not need to be out with a friend at 3 a.m. “Me being out at 3 o’clock at night and partying and being around people that can take advantage of me is just not a good situation,” he said. “Initially I reacted to getting disrespected when I thought I shouldn’t have been,” he added. “O.K., I shouldn’t have done that. But I thought I had done the right thing by walking away, by leaving.”

But he was arrested nonetheless and his public image took a brutal hit. “It was tough, knowing that what happened gives people a misconception of me,” Manning said. He added, “It took for that to happen for me to learn.”

Since April, Manning has joined the Bears’ family and created a family of his own. He keeps his relatives closer, having come to the conclusion that they are the best company because they will not lead him astray. He flew in some cousins for the game Sunday, some of whom had never traveled by airplane before. Roughly 90 minutes after the game, Manning headed toward the exit, following the wedge created by his wife, Tosha, and his cousins. In his arms, he was cradling his sleeping son.


Awwwwww, isn't that sweet? Funny, how the NYT left out NBC's report:


Early on a Sunday morning last April, at a Denny's in Westwood, near the UCLA campus, a Swedish citizen of Persian descent named Soroush Sabzi was minding his own business when, according to court documents, he found himself the target of insults. Sabzi, a student with an avid interest in computers, now 26, was called a "faggot," according to a Los Angeles County probation department report unsealed Tuesday. He was also called either a "f------ Jew" or an "ugly f------ Jew," according to the report. He was told, "You look gay," and called "geeky," the report says.

Sabzi tried to signal for help. Instead, he was slapped. A few moments later, he was on the ground and, the probation report says, citing a Los Angeles police department account, he was hit some more and fell into a bathroom at the restaurant.

Ricky Manning Jr., a Chicago Bears cornerback who played college football at UCLA, pleaded no contest Tuesday in Los Angeles Superior Court to a single count of felony assault in connection with his role in the incident. ...

Moreover, the probation report suggests that Manning has "reportedly aligned himself with gang values and gang ties" and has been "implicated as the shooter of a rival gang member." Those allegations are unsubstantiated; the report contains no further details or explanation. The deputy probation officer who wrote the report did not return a call seeking comment.


Manning claims he only hit the victim in the head and didn't call him anything: "My agent is Jewish, my ex-fiancee is half-Jewish and black, my two lawyers are Jewish, and so it was kind of not funny to me," Manning said. "But it was hurtful for him to say that, to make me seem like I would say some things like that which definitely wouldn't happen."


Phil Mushnick wrote in the NY Post on Oct. 1, 2006:


But imagine - and by now most of us can - the fallout if Manning and his pals, African-Americans, had been white, and their victim had been black. And imagine if the victim's claim in the police report read that, instead of being cursed as a Jew and a homosexual, he'd been called a "f - - - ing n - - - - r."

Then take it from there - the no contest felony plea, followed by a specious insistence of innocence, followed by the Bears' "disappointment with Ricky," followed by the NFL's position that "it's under review."

Imagine the outrage from the news media, the sports media, politicians and, yes, Chicago's own Rev. Jesse ("Hymietown") Jackson.

Just imagine.


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

January 16, 2007

Men with deep voices and gold chains

I've been writing a lot this month about how the big immigration trend in Los Angeles these days is whites from the ex-Soviet Union and Middle East. The LA Times today has a story on the quintuple kidnapping-murder trial of two Russian immigrant "businessmen" (whom the Times incorrectly headlines "emigres," presumably to avoid offending immigrants) that sounds like a scenario the Coen Bros. and Quentin Tarantino would come up with while on a bender:


Emigres' murder case goes to jury
Organized crime and money laundering are linked to a kidnapping scheme that left five dead, prosecutors say.
By Jill Leovy,

He was a glasnost entrepreneur trying to forge a new future out of the ruins of post-Soviet Russia. Now, the Russian immigrant to the San Fernando Valley is trying to convince a federal jury that his resourceful style of communist-busting capitalism did not turn into a kidnap-for-ransom murder scheme that ended with five bodies in a Sierra lake.

The jury is expected to begin deliberating today whether Iouri Mikhel and co-defendant Jurijus Kadamovas were responsible for the deaths of the five victims, who were strangled with flexible ties or smothered with plastic bags, their heads bound with duct tape, their bodies tossed into a remote Northern California reservoir in the dead of night. Mikhel, 42, and Kadamovas, 40, face possible death sentences for their alleged roles in what prosecutors say was a grisly conspiracy carried out partly in a posh Tudor home in a hillside neighborhood of Encino.

The alleged plot links international money launderers and local muscle-for-hire, Russian organized crime and Valley real estate barons, a phony front man named "Raul" and a temptress dubbed "Natalya from Moscow." For ill-gotten gains that included mink coats, a Mercedes-Benz and a pair of purebred Dobermans, prosecutors say, Mikhel and Kadamovas planned an elaborate set of crimes carried out against members of the Valley's close-knit Russian emigre community. After they were arrested, they allegedly hatched an equally elaborate plot to escape from the federal jail in downtown Los Angeles, going so far as to pull a hydraulic pump up to their cells on a string.


Unfortunately, the article doesn't explain how, precisely, these enterprising gents were going to use the hydraulic pump to escape from jail. It does make their first kidnapping sound like the botched crime in the Coen's "Blood Simple:"


Their first victim was Meyer Muscatel, a Valley real estate developer whom the pair targeted because of his financial success.


"Meyer Muscatel?" C'mon ... The Coens wouldn't even use that.


Using cellphones obtained under false names, they lured Muscatel to Mikhel's hillside Encino home by suggesting that they wanted to talk to him about a real estate deal. Then they stopped at Home Depot and bought what prosecutors called a "kidnapping kit": red duct tape, two kinds of gloves, plastic ties and gauzy boot covers, purchased with Mikhel's credit card.

When Muscatel walked in the front door, the kidnappers jumped on him. They kept him in a room and tried to take money out of his bank accounts. But the plan was foiled when the bank demanded an in-person visit. So they tackled Muscatel on the floor of the garage, wrapping duct tape around his head and sitting on him. Then, according to the testimony of Altmanis, Mikhel twisted a bag around his head until he suffocated.

Afterward, the plotters gathered in the kitchen to scrutinize a map of the state. They spotted a remote Northern California reservoir, the New Melones Reservoir near Sonora, north of Yosemite. A long drive, which prosecutors chronicled by means of traced cellphone calls, took them to a high narrow bridge across the remote reservoir. The body of Muscatel, whose blood was found on the bridge, was thrown in and later floated to the surface, to be discovered by a local boater.


Since that went so well, they decided to try it again:


Similar strategies were used with their next four victims: a financial consultant named Rita Pekler, whom they hoped to use to lure a wealthy client into their clutches. But it didn't work. So they killed her, prosecutors said, and made another trip to the reservoir. [More]


Finland has a 1340 mile-long border with Russia, but I bet it doesn't have to put up with these kind of folks. Why not? Because the government of Finland won't let them in.


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

X are from Email, Y are from Blog

The New York Times lists of most emailed and most blogged articles of the day always offer an amusing contrast. Today is unusual in that the same article is on the top of both lists, but otherwise the blog-email dichotomy is amusingly stark.

Emailers are forwarding articles about marriage, real estate, shopping, fitness, global warming, and pets.

51% of Women Are Now Living Without Spouse
Buyers Scarce, Many Condos Are for Rent
The Warming of Greenland
Findings: The Voices in My Head Say ‘Buy It!’ Why Argue?
Modern Love: What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage
Ink: Labradors Still No. 1, but Yorkies, Dahling, Move Into Second Place
Questions Couples Should Ask (Or Wish They Had) Before Marrying
Netflix to Deliver Movies to the PC
Blazing a Paper Trail in China
Fitness: When It’s O.K. to Run Hurt

Meanwhile, bloggers are linking to articles about hangings (two different news stories, guns, talk radio, blogging, war, politics, and business:


51% of Women Are Now Living Without Spouse
A Rifle in Every Pot
U.S. and Iraqis Are Wrangling Over War Plans
Bloggers Take on Talk Radio Hosts In This Turn at the Top,
Democrats Seek the Middle on Social Issues
Two Hussein Allies Are Hanged, Iraqi Official Says
Anywhere the Eye Can See, It's Now Likely to See an Ad
24-Hour Newspaper People
Cheney Defends Efforts to Obtain Financial Records
Second Hanging Also Went Awry, Iraq Tape Shows


So, have you guessed the underlying reason why these are so different?

To generalize, men like to broadcast their thoughts to the world, for which a blog is useful, while women like to narrowcast to individuals, for which email is a blessing.

Articles typically fall off these charts in one or two days (it is a newspaper, after all), yet the venerable #5 most emailed article, Modern Love: What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage, about how to get your husband to obey using techniques for training killer whales at Sea World (reward him with sardines when he puts the toilet seat down?), was published last June 25th and is back on the charts again.

Looking at the lists, it strikes me that women are just a lot more practical minded than men. What do hangings in Iraq have to do with the typical male blogger's real life? Not much.

Still, there is a sense in which the female-oriented media cater to the self-destructive tendency among the typical woman who would rather, if she doesn't practice self-discipline, talk about her life than have a life. but the #7 emailed article, Questions Couples Should Ask (Or Wish They Had) Before Marrying, is an oldie-but-goodie from December 17th. I suspect that any couple who sits down with this list and attempts to methodically work through it (e.g., #12. "What does my family do that annoys you?") is unlikely to ever reach the altar. But, the would-have-been bride will be left with lots and lots of material to discuss with her fellow spinster girlfriends, which seems to be the point of many articles aimed at women.


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

Charles Murray on the Lake Wobegon Fallacy

From the WSJ: First in a three part series:


Extra
BY CHARLES MURRAY
Half of all children are below average in intelligence, and teachers can do only so much for them.

... Some say that the public schools are so awful that there is huge room for improvement in academic performance just by improving education. There are two problems with that position. The first is that the numbers used to indict the public schools are missing a crucial component. For example, in the 2005 round of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 36% of all fourth-graders were below the NAEP's "basic achievement" score in reading. It sounds like a terrible record. But we know from the mathematics of the normal distribution that 36% of fourth-graders also have IQs lower than 95.

What IQ is necessary to give a child a reasonable chance to meet the NAEP's basic achievement score? Remarkably, it appears that no one has tried to answer that question. We only know for sure that if the bar for basic achievement is meaningfully defined, some substantial proportion of students will be unable to meet it no matter how well they are taught. As it happens, the NAEP's definition of basic achievement is said to be on the tough side. That substantial proportion of fourth-graders who cannot reasonably be expected to meet it could well be close to 36%.

The second problem with the argument that education can be vastly improved is the false assumption that educators already know how to educate everyone and that they just need to try harder--the assumption that prompted No Child Left Behind. We have never known how to educate everyone. The widely held image of a golden age of American education when teachers brooked no nonsense and all the children learned their three Rs is a myth. If we confine the discussion to children in the lower half of the intelligence distribution (education of the gifted is another story), the overall trend of the 20th century was one of slow, hard-won improvement.


We can do a better job of schooling, but not until we start talking honestly about differences in intelligence. Our schools and legislatures are constantly coming up with policies that are based on the Lake Wobegon Assumption, and the left half of the bell curve pays the price.

For example, in California, the state wants all students to have a shot at qualifying to attend the prestigious University of California campuses. So, public high schools are compensated based on how many students they have enrolled in rigorous UC-qualifying college preparatory courses (the "A-G" courses). So, it's common for 9th graders to be dumped into Algebra I even though they are still struggling with fractions, because the high schools get more money the more students they have in college prep courses, even though they are complete waste of time. Thus, in some schools, students can't start taking the remedial math courses they desperately need until tenth grade.

It should be mandatory for all principals, school district officials, and legislators to read The Bell Curve. Of course, the opposite is closer to the truth -- it's a career-damager to read it and talk about it.


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

January 15, 2007

Idiocracy now out on DVD

I've seen it three times now and my wife has watched it four times. If Fox had promoted "Idiocracy" the way they promoted "Borat," courting controversy, they would have had a "Borat"-sized hit.

Unfortunately, when watching it at home on DVD, you miss experiencing the horrifying Charlton-Heston-and-the-Statue-of-Liberty moment when "Idiocracy" is over and you emerge from the theatre into the mall full of shiny logos and sniggering pedestrians and you realize that reality today looks just like 2505 does in the movie. (Unless your home looks like Frito's apartment, which, now that I think about it, mine kind of does.)


From the Washington Times:


Puzzling fate of a film satire
By Kelly Jane Torrance

... Steve Sailer, a film critic for the American Conservative magazine, points out that Fox didn't tell Moviefone the film's name, so it was called simply "Untitled Mike Judge Comedy" on the listings site.

"Idiocracy" finally gets a nationwide release this week with its appearance on DVD, but Fox is still making little effort to promote the film.

Fox didn't respond to a request for comment, and Mr. Judge isn't talking, either. So we may never know exactly why the film was spiked, although there are plenty of theories. ...

Of course, one target of the film's satire is a division of the studio's parent company. In Mr. Judge's vision of the future, Fox News Channel anchors are bodybuilders and strippers, although barely more sensationalistic than they are today. Perhaps News Corp. head Rupert Murdoch doesn't have a sense of humor -- or maybe his executives fear he doesn't.

Mr. Sailer is one who thinks it's more about content than conflict. " 'Idiocracy's' extraordinary political incorrectness seems the most likely explanation," he says.

"Judge's obsessions have been consistent throughout 'B & B,' 'King of the Hill,' 'Office Space' and 'Idiocracy': IQ, class, masculinity and their complex interplay in America," says Mr. Sailer, who often writes about such issues. "Judge's admirable Hank Hill shows that you don't have to have a high IQ to be a good man and valuable citizen, as Luke Wilson's slack-off, 100-IQ Pvt. Joe Bauers learns by the end of 'Idiocracy.' But you need some traditional values, which Beavis and Butt-Head, whose single mothers let them be raised by MTV, never absorbed."

Such deep themes may make "Idiocracy" a tougher sell than the white-collar workplace satire "Office Space," whose subject was so much more universal. "This is more of a 'Sleeper'-esque Woody Allen smart-dumb comedy," Mr. Knowles [of Ain't It Cool News] says.

He believes that Mr. Judge's "edgy" creativity needs a "patron." "When Kevin Smith had crazy studio trouble with 'Mallrats,' he ended up taking up a shingle with [then-Miramax chief Harvey] Weinstein and has been happily making movies ever since," he says.

"He's one of the funniest men alive. He definitely understands how to make an audience laugh," Mr. Knowles says. "I'm not really worried about Mike Judge."

Mr. Sailer calls the director "one of the more interesting, insightful, and misunderstood figures in all of American popular culture."

But as Esquire's Brian Raftery asked, before Fox even spiked the film, "If the guy who made 'Office Space' has to kowtow to his ... boss, what hope is there for the rest of us?" [More]


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

Joseph Wambaugh's "Hollywood Station"

My new VDARE.com column:


Wambaugh’s Sharp Eye For PC, Immigration Trends
By Steve Sailer

One of the richest veins of American popular culture has been the Los Angeles crime novel. Perhaps its leading exponent since Raymond Chandler is a former Los Angeles Police Department detective sergeant named Joseph Wambaugh. In the early 1970s, Wambaugh began writing bestselling cop novels such as The New Centurions and The Choirboys and true crime tales such as The Onion Field. The 2Blowhards blog explains Wambaugh's cultural importance as:


"In writing-history terms, he took the Ed McBain-style police procedural and filled it to bursting with irreverence, heart and despair." ...


Accordingly, it's a noteworthy event when—at the suggestion of James Ellroy (LA Confidential), one of the many novelists influenced by him—Wambaugh returns to his classic LAPD stomping grounds for the first time in 23 years. In Hollywood Station, the old master has collected a new trove of war stories from 54 cops, making this 340-page novel about the mid-watch shift at the Hollywood police station in June 2006 a terrific read.

LA is the world's most absurd large city, and Hollywood is its funniest neighborhood. After each shift, the cops swap stories to determine who was called out on the evening's most memorable BHI (Bizarre Hollywood Incident). Example: being summoned to the famous courtyard of Grauman's Chinese Theatre, where street people garbed in movie legend costumes pose for tourists' cameras, by an ersatz Marilyn Monroe (6'-3" and with a five-o'clock shadow), who witnessed, in a dispute over tourist-hustling turf, Batman cold-cocking Spiderman. While they're at it, the cops also haul in on cocaine charges Tickle Me Elmo.

Wambaugh's cop-heroes aren't saints. When bored one night, two aging surfer dude officers drive down to an apartment building full of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang members to play "pit bull polo." The Salvadoran gang-bangers let their vicious dogs run wild, terrorizing all the children in the neighborhood. So the partners cruise slowly around the building a few times until the beasts are in a frenzy. Then they play a few chukkers of pit bull polo, leaning out the police car windows and swinging their batons like mallets.

Hollywood Station is mellower, less despairing than Wambaugh’s early masterpieces. As he reflects: "Doing good police work is the most fun these cops will ever have in their entire lives." And he's finally learned to appreciate the female half of the human race.

Still, Hollywood Station has a serious, even angry side. [More]


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

January 14, 2007

Reflections on MLK Day

From my VDARE article a couple of years ago:

Martin Luther King Day is the least popular federal holiday—only 29 percent of employers give their workers the day off. Not many non-blacks care.

This upsets many African-Americans. Black comedian Chris Rock says, "You gotta be pretty racist to not want a day off from work."

The dead of winter, however, after Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year, is the stupidest possible time to offer another holiday. To fix this, we should move Martin Luther King Day to the Friday before Labor Day to commemorate his "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963 … and, to give Americans a summer-ending four-day weekend. (It's not as if a lot of business gets done on that day anyway.)

Then even the Grand Kleagle would be demanding Martin Luther King Day off from his foreman down at the hog-rendering plant.

And who was the genius who chose February for Black History Month? First you have the MLK Day frenzy in mid-January, and then two weeks later, boom, it starts all over again. I bet that, by February 2nd, even Al Sharpton is sick of Black History Month.

I can picture the Rev. Al easing into his Barcalounger and flipping on his plasma screen:

"Let's see if there's anything good on television … Oh boy, another Harriet Tubman documentary [CLICK] … Uh oh, a panel discussion on W.E.B. Dubois [CLICK] … Hey, it's that groundhog, Pungobungy Pete, or whatever they call him … and he can see his shadow! Now, that's great TV!"

The raw cultural muscle of liberalism is awesome to behold. Getting rid of Jim Crow was about the last good thing liberals accomplished … and they will never ever let us forget it, no matter how badly they must bore us with their smug reminiscences.

Despite the ho-hum attitude of most American grown-ups toward Martin Luther King Day, children are furiously indoctrinated into the cult in the schools. MLK Day is a bigger deal than [furtive look, whisper] "Christmas." For example, my son was just ordered to write a letter to Martin Luther King. This elementary schooler had to describe to the late Rev. two things he [the kid] had done that he was especially proud of. Merging Martin Luther King worship with self-esteem boosting—a classic California-style educational timewaster.


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

Nicholas Stix's definitive account of the Duke Rape Hoax

Over on VDARE.com, Stix has a 10,500 word article on who real crime victims are in this imploding frame-up.


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

January 13, 2007

Flailing

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

Wrong and Rich

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

Old movie notes

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

January 12, 2007

Black NFL quarterback update

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

January 11, 2007

Must be iSteve.com readers

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

Asian Caucasians?

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

January 10, 2007

iPhone & iSteve

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

Does Ethnic Diversity = Innovative Thinking?

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