May 2, 2007

May Day Illegal Immigrant Rallies a Bust

From the LA Times:


About 35,000 people turned out at two Los Angeles rallies, far fewer than the combined 115,000 that organizers had anticipated and greatly fewer than the roughly 650,000 who turned out at rallies last year.

Turnouts were light across the country compared to last year, when millions of marchers in 150 cities took to the streets.

Chicago — home of the original May 1 International Workers' Day more than a century ago — drew the largest crowd with 150,000, while New York's rally drew only hundreds.


But a good time was still had by some:


In Los Angeles, after police tried to disperse demonstrators who had moved off the sidewalk onto Alvarado Street about 6 p.m., some of the few thousand participants still in the park started throwing plastic bottles and rocks at officers.


As the failure of these demonstrations show, the notion that the illegal alien cause represents an irresistible political tidal wave is one of the more derisible peddled by the media:

- First, illegal immigrants aren't supposed to vote.

- Second, they aren't very good at self-organizing and they aren't very interested in public affairs. They tend to be much more wrapped up in the complicated dramas of their private lives.

= Third, Hispanic citizens, who can vote, have quite ambivalent feelings about illegal immigration.

- Fourth, illegal immigrants lack talented leaders, as do Latinos in general. Indeed, despite all the moral failings of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Louis Farrakhan, you have to grant them that they are good at their jobs. They rouse rabbles with the best of them. You can't say the same about the various self-appointed Hispanic leaders, none of whose names come to mind at the moment.

At some point in the future, all this might change. But when America's elites tell you that illegal immigrants are too powerful a political force for anything to be done about illegal immigration, they are lying. The reality is that they don't want to do anything about illegal immigration.


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

The real Obama

Lots of white people keep telling themselves that electing Sen. Barack Obama President will convince black people that the only thing that is holding them back is their own lack of self-discipline. Surely, somebody as smart as Obama, they assume, must understand that the ostensible purpose of most of his career -- getting more government money for blacks -- is exactly what has most damaged blacks morally.

That, however, is not exactly what Sen. Obama is telling blacks. For example, on the 15th anniversary of the most shameful event in recent African-American history, Obama played the black self-pity card in demanding more handouts for the inner city. From the LA Times:


Obama appeals to blacks in L.A. remarks
By Scott Martelle, Times Staff Writer

Invoking images of Los Angeles in flames, Sen. Barack Obama argued Sunday — the 15th anniversary of the nation's most violent modern civil uprising — that little had been done to fix the chronic social and economic conditions that gave rise to a three-day rampage that killed at least 53 people.

And although the riots occurred in L.A., the conditions that spawned them persist across the nation, Obama told an overflow crowd at South-Central's First AME Church. The Illinois Democrat is seeking his party's presidential nomination.

"There wasn't anything going on in Los Angeles that was unique to Los Angeles," Obama said. "If you traveled to Chicago, you would see the same young men on street corners without hope, without prospects, and without a sense of any destiny other than ending up in prison or in a casket."

Obama drew a sustained ovation when he rebuked the Bush administration for, as Obama put it, funding the war in Iraq instead of impoverished Americans — particularly those in minority neighborhoods. "We have now spent half a trillion dollars on a war that should have never been authorized, and should have never been waged," Obama said. "We could have invested that money in SouthCentral Los Angeles, or the South Side of Chicago, in jobs and infrastructure and hospitals and schools. Why is it we can find the money in a second for a war that doesn't make any sense?" ...

Obama did not offer specific proposals to solve the problems he described. His approach has more often relied on lofty rhetoric than real-world prescriptions. ...


There's a widespread assumption that the vagueness of Obama's platform stems from his lack of experience, but it seems equally plausible that he's just hoping to keep secret what he really favors.


Speaking in a church that has a stained-glass window depicting the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Kennedy and his brother Robert, Obama recalled a news article he read at the time of the riots about a young pregnant woman shot in the abdomen, the bullet lodging in the soft tissue of her fetus' arm. After surgery, the mother and baby were fine, although the infant was left with a scar.

Obama made the infant — and the bullet — symbols for L.A. after the riots.

"Even in the midst of violence and despair, there's always something to be hopeful for. That baby represents the rising up of hope out of darkness and despair," he said.

"It made me think about us in this country 15 years later, how not only do we still have scars from that riot, but in many American cities we haven't even taken the bullet out," he said. "We still haven't stitched up the patient."

The problems were exposed again with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, he said, when countless poor people had no way to leave their neighborhoods ahead of the floodwaters. Many perished, or were left stranded on rooftops for days.

"The tragedy struck New Orleans long before the hurricane hit," Obama said, citing lowperforming schools and high levels of violence and poverty. "There's a reason why the planning to evacuate them was ineffective — because the folks who were making the planning assumed that people had cars."

The parallels to Los Angeles in the years since the riots are clear, he said: At neither time has there been sustained public interest in correcting underlying problems.

"We go from shock to trance," Obama said. "We wake up and we're surprised that there's poverty in our midst, and that people are frustrated and angry."

He mocked the creation of investigative panels to divine the causes of problems.

"There's a little bit of money that folks piece together to send it into the community to make sure that folks are quiet and go back to the status quo, but we never take the bullet out of the arm," Obama said. "We don't need panels and reports and commissions. We need some surgery on the indifference to poverty in this country."
scott.martelle@latimes.com


By the way, here is my UPI article on the 10th anniversary of the South Central Riot.


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

The origin of Rice's and Rumsfeld's "Werewolves" theory: Back in August 2003, National Security Advisor Condi Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced that we shouldn't worry about armed guerilla resistance in Iraq, because we had to deal with the same thing in Germany in 1945-47, and look how well that turned out. Condi told the VFW:


There is an understandable tendency to look back on America's experience in post-War Germany and see only the successes. But as some of you here today surely remember, the road we traveled was very difficult. 1945 through 1947 was an especially challenging period. Germany was not immediately stable or prosperous. SS officers -- called "werewolves" -- engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating with them -- much like today's Baathist and Fedayeen remnants.


And Rummy elaborated:


One group of those dead-enders was known as "werewolves." They and other Nazi regime remnants targeted Allied soldiers, and they targeted Germans who cooperated with the Allied forces. Mayors were assassinated including the American-appointed mayor of Aachen, the first major German city to be liberated. Children as young as 10 were used as snipers, radio broadcasts, and leaflets warned Germans not to collaborate with the Allies. They plotted sabotage of factories, power plants, rail lines. They blew up police stations and government buildings, and they destroyed stocks of art and antiques that were stored by the Berlin Museum. Does this sound familiar?


Well, the Aachen assassination took place more than a month before the German surrender, so it doesn't count. Otherwise, remarkably little happened after VE day. A bomb went off in Hamburg after the war was over, but it might have been one of the gazillion bombs the British and American air forces dropped on that city. And there were a few killings, but sex conflicts were a likely cause for a good number of them.

(There might have been more anti-American violence, but the Germans were grateful that we weren't raping and ethnic cleansing them, like the Russians were doing in Eastern Europe, with the post-VE Day German death total being two million or maybe higher.)

So, where did the speechwriters of the Bush Administration luminaries come up with this idea? Apparently, they misread a lame pro-war fictitious satire written on July 28, 2003 by Rand Simberg as being real! Simberg blogged:


Administration In Crisis Over Burgeoning Quagmire
August 12, 1945

WASHINGTON DC (Routers) President Truman, just a few months into his young presidency, is coming under increasing fire from some Congressional Republicans for what appears to be a deteriorating security situation in occupied Germany, with some calling for his removal from office.

Over three months after a formal declaration of an end to hostilities, the occupation is bogged down. Fanatical elements of the former Nazi regime who, in their zeal to liberate their nation from the foreign occupiers, call themselves members of the Werwolf (werewolves) continue to commit almost-daily acts of sabotage against Germany's already-ravaged infrastructure, and attack American troops. They have been laying road mines, poisoning food and water supplies, and setting various traps, often lethal, for the occupying forces ...

For many, marching in the streets with signs of "No Blood For Soviet Socialism," and "It's All About The Coal," this merely confirmed that the administration had other agendas than its stated one, and that the war was unjustified and unjustifiable.


It was then published by FoxNews.com on July 30, 2003.

Simberg later wrote:


To indicate clearly that it was satire, I attributed it, as usual, to the mythical WW II news agency, "Routers," and I incorporated my own 2003 copyright at the bottom. Subsequently, it was picked up by emailers, the copyright was stripped, "Routers" was misspelled to correspond to a more familiar (and actual) wire service, and it quickly found its way across cyberspace.


We don't know for sure that this influenced Rice and Rumsfeld, but it's the likeliest source I've heard of.

Now, Rice is supposed to be an academic expert on the Soviet Union, so the history of Central Europe in 1945-47 shouldn't be such terra incognita to her. (And Rumsfeld, who was born in 1932, is old enough to know better.) So, why were they so credulous (besides, of course, wanting this to be true to make their policy look less disastrous)?

As usual, I see an aversion to politically incorrect generalizing about ethnicities as a source of ignorance among decision-makers. One of the basic generalizations that anybody who looks around at the real world with open eyes quickly comes up with is the reverse correlation between organized violence and disorganized violence. Groups that are competent at organized violence in wartime, such as the Germans and Japanese, tend to be orderly during peacetime. And groups that tend to be anarchic during peacetime also tend to be incompetent at organized violence during wartime, with the Iraqis being perhaps the most notorious example of this.

There are many exceptions to this, but it's still one of the most obvious patterns in 20th Century history. However, if you are morally opposed to noticing patterns, as all the most respectable people are today, you'll be a sucker for idiocy.


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

May 1, 2007

What if Sen. Harry Reid is right and senile?

What if Sen. Harry Reid is right and senile? The 77-year-old Washington Post columnist David Broder has been widely denounced as senile for calling 67-year-old Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) a "bumbling" "embarrassment" for his recent anti-war remarks.

But what if Broder is wrong about the war, but right about Reid? A person who knows most of the Senators, but, as far as I could tell, doesn't have strong partisan biases, told me that Reid appears pretty ga-ga. Reid, who was once an amateur boxer, is, I'm told, very dependent on his aides to keep him on track and feed him his lines. My source thought it was time for somebody to mention in public that Reid seems more senile than anybody else in the Senate.

Now, I just have one source for this, and I don't know (or care) enough about political personalities to be able to evaluate this claim, so don't take this too seriously ... unless more evidence turns up. Perhaps, I'm wrong and I'm baselessly slandering this poor man. On the other hand, Reid is the Senate Majority Leader and, in exchange for his enormous power, he can put up with with some perhaps overly-skeptical inquiry.

If true, this would mostly be an issue for the Democrats to worry about, not the public at large. Originally, I had incorrectly assumed that Reid, as Senate Majority Leader, is third in line behind Cheney and Pelosi to succeed to the Presidency, so this would be an issue for the whole country. But, I was wrong. Instead, the succession falls upon the Senate's President Pro Tempore, who, by custom, is the senior senator in the majority party. So, third in the chain of succession is 89-year-old Robert C. Byrd, who, I'm told, is quite sharp compared to Reid.

This ends my rare attempt at reporting/gossip-mongering. Back to my regularly scheduled sourceless opinionizing...

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

April 30, 2007

"Libertarianism is applied autism"

As usual, Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution illustrates Across Difficult Country's aphorism. Alex says:


I understand individual rights and I understand counting everyone equally but I see less value in counting some in and some out based on arbitrary characteristics like which side of the border the actors fall on.


The difference is quite obvious if you remove the libertarian economists' assume-we-have-a-can-opener blinders. We live in a world where violence -- perpetrating it and preventing it -- is the fundamental fact that social and political organization must deal with.

Thus, all property rights come out of the barrel of a gun.

Once you realize that, the reason why we prefer the welfare of our fellow citizens to that of non-citizens is (to get all reductionist):

They are the ones who would fight on your side.


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

My prediction about Obama press coverage turning out correct:

Over on VDARE.com's blog, I have an entry, "The Predictable Press," about how I forecast that as winter turned to spring, the locus of investigative journalism into Barack Obama's past would shift from Hawaii to Chicago. Sure enough, it's 73 in Chicago today, and the NYT has a big article on Obama's black radical spiritual advisor. [More]

Meanwhile, Kevin Drum has a graph from the Pew Research Center showing that registered voters believe Obama is less liberal than Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, or Al Gore. Clearly, Obama has both been misleading the public and there are an awful lot of people who want to be misled by him.


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

Are African-American cultural interests narrowing or expanding?

Something that everybody in about 1975 knew was inevitable was that African-Americans would expand into a much wider variety of pursuits as greater opportunity became open to them.

But, has that happened? Or are blacks increasingly focused on a handful of black-dominated areas? We've had enormous amounts of various kinds of affirmative action -- both quotas and additional recruitment and training -- aimed at getting blacks into more careers. And yet, they seem to want to move into narrower ruts.

I'm not talking just about, say, theoretical physics, but also about fields like tennis. After Althea Gibson won five Grand Slam singles titles in 1956-1958, and Arthur Ashe won three from 1968-1975, it seemed inevitable that such famous role models would lead to an infusion of numerous blacks into professional tennis. And, yet, ... with the exception of the Williams sisters, who are closer to the exception that proves the rule (their strong-willed father pretty much bred them with the goal of physically outdoing white women in tennis), blacks haven't made much of a mark in tennis since. Half-black Frenchman Yannick Noah won the French Open in 1983, but his son is now a college basketball player at Florida (granted Joakim Noah is around 9 feet tall so it only makes sense for him to play basketball, but still ...)

Now, part of what is going on is that tennis today requires more childhood training than in the old days. Most tennis pros of this decade were sent away by their parents to live at tennis academies as adolescents. So, it costs more to raise a tennis star than in Gibson and Ashe's day, so that works against blacks.

One possibility is that while middle class black adults are reasonably culturally open-minded, black youths are more ethnocentric than before, are more into keepin' it real and not acting white. For example, I've played golf over the years in foursomes with dozens of black guys (and over the last decade I've finally started to see black women playing golf), but none that I can recall under age 25. Golf isn't as youth-dominated as tennis, and you can have a fairly normal upbringing and become a professional golfer, but you still almost always have to start playing as a teenager. That of course is expensive, but you also have to want to be a golfer when you are a teen. I suspect that is much rarer among black teens.

So, are blacks avoiding non-traditional careers? It's hard to say for sure.

In contrast to tennis, there has been a slow but pretty steady movement of blacks into, say, film directing, including directing films with non-black casts. F. Gary Gray did a good job with "The Italian Job" in 2002, and Antoine Fuqua has directed a number of conventional Hollywood films, like "Shooter" and "King Arthur," although his best remains "Training Day," which won Denzel Washington an Oscar.

So, please help me out. Can you think of more non-traditional careers, such as movie directing, in which blacks have been doing better and better? Alternatively, can you think of careers where there aren't significant IQ barriers to success, such as tennis, but blacks just don't seem to be choosing to enter?


Urban v. Suburban Travel: Diversity in ownership v. diversity in employment

It's often remarked that the commercial environment that the business traveler in America confronts is remarkably uniform: all across this vast land of ours, he'll find the same rental-car companies at every airport, the same hotel and restaurant chains off every interstate. Moreover, these firms strive to deliver a uniformity of service - every contingency is anticipated in a binder and the response pre-programmed.

In contrast, in certain big cities, typically ones with huge immigrant populations, there are far more unique restaurants, hotels, and shops. This is frequently extolled as a shining benefit of diversity and perhaps it is.

But let me ask a question of all the nice liberals that I haven't heard mentioned before: As you travel, look at the workers you come into contact with and ask: On the whole, where do African-Americans find employment? In boring old corporate chains or in funky diverse one-of-a-kind establishments?

The answer appears to be titled heavily toward the Amerisuites and Alamo rental cars and Ruby Tuesdays. Just as African-Americans have long done relatively well in the peaceful, clerical side of the U.S. Army, where everything is spelled out in endless detail ahead of time, they tend to thrive better on the job in big chains with cookie-cutter manuals, and bureaucratic hiring procedures.

In contrast, unique urban establishments tend to have fewer blacks working for them relative to the size of the nearby black population. Immigrant owned businesses tend to hire other people, especially relatives, from their immigrant groups and white business owners tend to find they're more comfortable bossing around immigrants, even black African immigrants, than African-Americans.


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

April 29, 2007

Kevin Drum finally reads Obama's autobiography and finds it "florid and overwrought" and inexplicable.

But he knows one thing for sure: I can't possibly be right about it!

The Washington Monthly's blogger Kevin Drum loyally tries to stand up for his employer's much-snickered over story by young Alexander Konetski about his brief tenure as a copy editor at The American Conservative and how he heroically resigned because the editors wouldn't spike my Obama story, Obama's Identity Crisis, on his say-so.

Of course, there's also the possibility that Drum is subtly sticking it to his employer by quoting a particularly amusing part of the self-important Konetski's screed:


Even before I read the piece I knew I wouldn't like it. TAC's editor, who was pleased with Sailer's work, had told me as much. But I found the piece so offensive when I first read it that I jumped out of my chair and rushed into the managing editor's office to try to kill it on the spot. She and the editor promptly dismissed my objections. The piece is provocative, they said — it's edgy. It's racist, I said — and the magazine will be regarded as such for publishing it. ....The weekend after Kara and Scott dismissed my objections to Sailer's essay, I read Dreams From My Father.


In other words, Konetski jumped to a conclusion with no idea what he was talking about, then scrambled to find evidence for it.

Ironically, the Washington Monthly did an abysmal job of fact-checking an article accusing The American Conservative of poor fact-checking. Konetski, who had been hired in November, tries to give the impression that he was a Major Player at the magazine while implying that I was some obscure figure who had "submitted" an article on Obama (instead, it was commissioned) that for some inexplicable but no doubt vile reason the editors chose to believe me over a Big Wheel like him.

In reality, the editors trusted me rather than him because I had a track record of approximately 100 pieces published in TAC going back to its first issue in 2002. As they well know, I've frequently been smeared by more formidable figures than Alexander Konetski, but have always ended up with the facts on my side.

Drum's item is most interesting for his somewhat philistine but reasonable characterization of Obama's Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance:


None of which is to say that Obama wasn't confused and uncomfortable with his racial identity for much of his first three decades. In fact, that's the whole point of the book. What's more — and this is the part of Dreams I found most peculiar — it's never really clear why. In language that's often florid and overwrought, but also oddly artificial, he tells us how he feels, but the circumstances of his life are never drawn starkly enough to make it clear why he feels the way he does.


In other words, Drum implies that Obama's emotions about race weren't objectively justified by the rather pleasant life he has lived. Which is certainly true.

But after that brief foray into honesty, Drum goes back to beating the, uh, drum over my sins. Unfortunately, all he can come up with is naked assertion:


... Sailer wants us to believe that this act of black identification automatically suggests a rejection of Obama's white heritage. Unfortunately, this says more about Sailer's state of mind than Obama's. There's simply nothing in the book to seriously back it up."


Well, no, it's not true that black identification "automatically" suggests a rejection of Obama's white heritage. For example, Obama's half-white half-brother Mark, a Stanford physics student who had grown up in Kenya, refused to reject his white heritage, which caused Obama break off contact with him.

But it is true in Obama's specific case, as voluminously documented in his long autobiography, that identification with the black race involved emotional rejection of the white race. (At least, if his book is to be believed, which is a big if -- he didn't actually reject the many the privileges granted to him by such white-founded institutions as Punahou Prep, Occidental College, Columbia University, and the Harvard Law School.

At this point, all I can say is, "Please read the book." It's better-written than Drum claims, and not so puzzling as Drum found it ... if you don't make the a priori assumption that I just have to be wrong about it.


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

April 28, 2007

Kevin Drum finally reads Obama's autobiography and finds it "florid and overwrought" and inexplicable.

But he knows one thing for sure: I can't possibly be right about it!

The Washington Monthly's blogger Kevin Drum loyally tries to stand up for his employer's much-snickered over story by young Alexander Konetski about his brief tenure as a copy editor at The American Conservative and how he heroically resigned because the editors wouldn't spike my Obama story, Obama's Identity Crisis, on his say-so.

Of course, there's also the possibility that Drum is subtly sticking it to his employer by quoting a particularly amusing part of the self-important Konetski's screed:


Even before I read the piece I knew I wouldn't like it. TAC's editor, who was pleased with Sailer's work, had told me as much. But I found the piece so offensive when I first read it that I jumped out of my chair and rushed into the managing editor's office to try to kill it on the spot. She and the editor promptly dismissed my objections. The piece is provocative, they said — it's edgy. It's racist, I said — and the magazine will be regarded as such for publishing it. ....The weekend after Kara and Scott dismissed my objections to Sailer's essay, I read Dreams From My Father.


In other words, Konetski jumped to a conclusion with no idea what he was talking about, then scrambled to find evidence for it.

Ironically, the Washington Monthly did an abysmal job of fact-checking an article accusing The American Conservative of poor fact-checking. Konetski, who had been hired in November, tries to give the impression that he was a Major Player at the magazine while implying that I was some obscure figure who had "submitted" an article on Obama (instead, it was commissioned) that for some inexplicable but no doubt vile reason the editors chose to believe me over a Big Wheel like him.

In reality, the editors trusted me rather than him because I had a track record of approximately 100 pieces published in TAC going back to its first issue in 2002. Konetski obviously knew this but he withheld it from his readers. As they well know, I've frequently been smeared by more formidable figures than Alexander Konetski, but have always ended up with the facts on my side.

Drum's item is most interesting for his somewhat philistine but reasonable characterization of Obama's Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance:


None of which is to say that Obama wasn't confused and uncomfortable with his racial identity for much of his first three decades. In fact, that's the whole point of the book. What's more — and this is the part of Dreams I found most peculiar — it's never really clear why. In language that's often florid and overwrought, but also oddly artificial, he tells us how he feels, but the circumstances of his life are never drawn starkly enough to make it clear why he feels the way he does.


In other words, Drum implies that Obama's emotions about race weren't objectively justified by the rather pleasant life he has lived. Which is certainly true.


But after that brief foray into honesty, Drum goes back to beating the, uh, drum over my sins. Unfortunately, all he can come up with is naked assertion:


... Sailer wants us to believe that this act of black identification automatically suggests a rejection of Obama's white heritage. Unfortunately, this says more about Sailer's state of mind than Obama's. There's simply nothing in the book to seriously back it up."


Well, no, it's not true that black identification "automatically" suggests a rejection of Obama's white heritage. For example, Obama's half-white half-brother Mark, a Stanford physics student who had grown up in Kenya, refused to reject his white heritage, which caused Obama break off contact with him.

But it is true in Obama's specific case, as voluminously documented in his long autobiography, that identification with the black race involved emotional rejection of the white race. (At least, if his book is to be believed, which is a big if -- he didn't actually reject the many the privileges granted to him by such white-founded institutions as Punahou Prep, Occidental College, Columbia University, and the Harvard Law School.

At this point, all I can say is, "Please read the book." It's better-written than Drum claims, and not so puzzling as Drum found it ... if you don't make the a priori assumption that I just have to be wrong about it.


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

April 26, 2007

Rudy Giuliani's 1073 SAT score

A reader writes:


Rudy enrolled at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School in 1957, an exclusive Catholic prep school. They accepted two kids from each parish.

From "Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani" by Wayne Barrett on page 34:


"After seven semesters at Bishop Loughlin, Rudy's grade average of 84.8 earned him a ranking of 130, putting him in the class's second quintile. His report cards for those years show columns of mostly B's and C's, a few A's and one D. He scored a 65 in chemistry, a 74 in Latin and a 92 in American history. His combined College Board scores, 569 in verbal and 504 in math, were twenty-seven points shy of 1100, and quite ordinary."


Wayne Barrett is a writer at the Village Voice and professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, if you want to check with the source.


Here's his academic history: "He attended Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School, Manhattan College in the Bronx, and New York University Law School, graduating magna cum laude."

In comparison, George W. Bush scored 1206 and Al Gore 1330 on the SAT. All these scores are under the tougher pre-1995 scoring system. Add 70 or 80 points to get the equivalent under the current scores. Does anybody know what John McCain scored to get into Annapolis as the son and grandson of admirals?

It's striking that more than a few men considered Presidential Timber wouldn't have gotten a callback if they had applied to join, say, the Navy SEALs. It's not that a fairly high IQ is so utterly crucial to being a good SEAL, but it does improve the odds. There are many men who want to be SEALs, and plenty of them have reasonably high IQs, so it's no-brainer for the Navy to weigh IQ in the mix of qualifications.

Being Presdient, in contrast, does not generally require the physical ability to infiltrate an enemy harbor and silently kill sentries, so one might expect that IQ would be even more important in the Chief Executive job than in being a scuba commando.

Certainly, "intangibles" can make up for a modest IQ in a President, but are we so sure we are good at evaluating the intangibles of politicians? How good a job did we do with George W. Bush? And he wasn't some nobody from nowhere. He was the son of a President. Many important people had met him during the twelve years his father had held the two highest offices in the land, and few had thought him a worthy successor. We knew that his own parents considered him inferior to his own brother Jeb. And yet, the Republican Establishment got behind him in 1999, drinking Karl Rove's Kool-Aid that his intangibles would somehow make up for Bush's tangible deficiencies.


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

The Messiah of the Midway and Me

Although I wasn't the first journalist to notice the contradiction between Barack Obama's recent campaign image that implies that he is the living embodiment of racial reconciliation versus his racial-animus infused autobiography, I suspect that one of the less obvious reasons I was able to read it for what it is was because, not being a political horserace junkie, I came to the book with fresh eyes. I had never seen his famous 2004 Democratic Convention speech until after I'd read the book, and still haven't watched his 2007 campaign kickoff stemwinder. Life is too short to spend much of it watching politicians orate. So, most other journalists simply assumed that the 1995 book must have supported Obama's carefully honed image of 2004 onward, and, in the rare cases where they actually started reading it and noticed that it didn't, they simply assumed that it must document a massive change of heart by the end of Obama's endless pages of self-obsessed prose, which they, of course, being bigshot journalists, never quite had time to reach.


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

St. Barack and his moneybags

Sen. Obama's hometown Chicago Sun-Times has been running investigative reports into the closer-than-realized ties between that knight without reproach and his sleazy slumlord patron Tony Rezko, who seems to have sent a lot of money Obama's way over the years: First, Second, Third, and a commentary. Does this mean that the idea of all that is pure and holy being embodied in a Chicago politician was ridiculous from the beginning?

Why, yes, it does mean that ...


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

I don't get suites


Practically every new lodging facility built in this decade appears to have standardized on offering long suites rather than just bedrooms. But, they forget to put a wall and a door between the two rooms, leaving them a studio apartment rendering them largely useless for two people to engage in serious sleeping and working simultaneously. Why not put up a door and turn them into small one bedroom apartments? In general, people tend to find large spaces, such as lofts, cool on first impression -- What a great place for a party! -- but lousy to actually live in.


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

Persian Jews or Jewish Persians?

Beverly Hills has become increasingly Persian (Iranian immigrant) over the last 30 years (40% of public school students in this ritziest of all suburbs are Persians), while remaining highly Jewish. How? Because a large fraction of the Persian immigrants are Jews, which seems highly contradictory to most of us, but apparently doesn't to the Jewish Persians. I was talking recently to a witty man standing outside a snazzy Jewish wedding presided over by a rabbi. He had stepped out to calm his colicky infant daughter, and had lots of amusing jokes to make about "Persian weddings," which indeed do look a bit like that instantly-famous "South Park" parody of "300," in which the patrons of the Les Bos bar fight to defend their lesbian bar from being acquired and turned into a Persian nightclub by designer sunglasses-wearing Persians armed with gold curtain rods and other stuff "only a Persian would think was cool."

I was struck that they self-identified as Persians rather than Jews, even though there are lots of advantages in Southern California to being considered Jewish rather than Iranian.


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

April 24, 2007

The male-female looks gap:

Typically, in Western cultures where women put a lot of effort into their looks (e.g., Italy), men do too. Italian men don't spend as much time shopping and grooming themselves as Italian women do, but they spend more time than, say, Norwegian men do, just as Norwegian women spend less time on their nails and such as do Italian women. So, there tends to be a correlation between male and female cosmetic investments.

In the U.S. over the last decade or so, however, this pattern has broken down (with the exception of the tiny number of metrosexuals ... who, so far as I can tell, barely exist outside of Manhattan -- I sure don't see them in LA, and if they aren't in LA, where are they?). At the higher end of the social scale, young women seem to be investing steadily more in their looks, with plastic surgery increasing steadily. On the other hand, have American males ever invested less effort in how they dress? They can't be bothered to tuck in their t-shirts.

I'm not sure if this is terribly liberating -- it may just mean that young women are more attracted to innate alpha maleness than before, since they don't have many other clues other than, say, dominant body language.

On the other hand, lower down the social scale, men aren't as prone to obesity as women, so this trend reverses itself.

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

April 22, 2007

Cho wasn't the only violence-obsessed hack writer in his classroom

From my new VDARE.com column:


Ever since South Korean immigrant Cho Seung-hui gunned down 32 people at Virginia Tech, there has been much comment that the university should have realized just from his two hate-filled and inept plays that the senior English major was a dangerous creep who needed to be taken away.

For a playwrighting class, Cho penned Mr. Brownstone and Richard McBeef (which, despite the Macbethian title, is a Hamlet-knock off about a young hero's lethal conflict with the new stepfather who murdered his real father). Richard McBeef includes such sterling dialogue as:


"I hate him. Must kill Dick. Must kill Dick. Dick must die. Kill Dick."


Many have asked: "How could the English Department not recognize the horrific implications of these works?"

That might seem like a puzzling question, however, to someone familiar with the poetic oeuvre of one of Cho's own teachers, Virginia Tech's "Univerity Distinguished Professor" of English and Black Studies, Nikki Giovanni.

Among the most celebrated figures of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and recipient of 21 honorary degrees, Giovanni has published poems strikingly similar to Cho's plays in both vileness and incompetence. For example:


The True Import of Present Dialog, Black vs. Negro
by Nikki Giovanni

Ni**er
Can you kill
Can you kill
Can a ni**er kill
Can a ni**er kill a honkie
Can a ni**er kill the Man
Can you kill ni**er
Huh? Ni**er can you
kill
Do you know how to draw blood
Can you poison
Can you stab-a-Jew
Can you kill huh? Ni**er
Can you kill
Can you run a protestant down with your
‘68 El Dorado
(that’s all they’re good for anyway)
Can you kill
Can you piss on a blond head
Can you cut it off
Can you kill
A ni**er can die
We ain’t got to prove we can die
We got to prove we can kill
[More]


Ironically, the author of these lines was asked to deliver the closing remarks at Virginia Tech's convocation memorializing the 32 slaughtered by Cho. For some reason, Giovanni didn't read aloud The True Import.

[More]


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

Yezidis slaughtered in Iraq: For years, to illustrate how little Americans know about the Iraq we've chosen to meddle in, I've been forecasting since 2003 that we'll all be learning more about, for example, the Yezidis: a religious group left over from the ancient Cult of the Angels that worships seven archangels, including Lucifer, whom they believe is just the victim of bad PR. And for years I've been wrong.

But, in the Middle East, all bad things come to he who waits:


In the northern Iraq attack, armed men stopped the bus as it was carrying workers from a textile factory in Mosul to their hometown of Bashika, which has a mixed population of Christians and Yazidis - a primarily Kurdish sect that worships an angel figure considered to be the devil by some Muslims and Christians.

The gunmen checked the passengers' identification cards, then asked all Christians to get off the bus, police Brig. Mohammed al-Wagga said. With the Yazidis still inside, the gunmen drove them to eastern Mosul, where they were lined up along a wall and shot to death, al-Wagga said.

After the killings, hundreds of angry chanting Yazidis took to the streets of Bashika in protest. Shops were shuttered and many Muslim residents closed themselves in their homes, fearing reprisal attacks. Police set up additional checkpoints across the city.

Bashika is about 80 percent Yazidi, 15 percent Christian and five percent Muslim.

Abdul-Karim Khalaf, a police spokesman for Ninevah province, said the executions were in response to the killing two weeks ago of a Yazidi woman who had recently converted to Islam after she fell in love with a Muslim and ran off with him. Her relatives had disapproved of the match and dragged her back to Bashika, where she was stoned to death, he said.


Do you ever get the impression that Americans and Iraqis aren't really on the same wavelength? That maybe we didn't exactly know what we were doing when we invaded Iraq to turn it into MacArthur's Japan?


On the other hand, some have argued that a bargain with Lucifer might offer the simplest explanation of George W. Bush's Presidency. Still, as Thrasymachus points out, conclusive physical evidence for such a theory is lacking. In The American Conservative, Gregory Cochran offers a more down-to-earth explanation.



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