July 24, 2007

Study: "Night People" More Anti-Social

Well, all I can say is that we night people would be a lot more cheerful and well-rested if society would stop waking us up with early afternoon phone calls.

Here's the Reuter's article.


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

Who has "the greatest computer set-up of all time?"

according to Reihan Salam's accurate assessment on American Scene?

Click here to find out. Unfortunately, the non-energy-draining part of this Apple aficionado's office resembles mine, just with a vaster footprint (both physical and carbon-emitting).


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

Mexican Machismo

In 1979, I took a tour boat around Acapulco. The guide, a local lady, pointed at a house on top of the cliff overlooking the ocean and proudly announced: "The home of movie estar Yon Wen!"

After about five minutes, I finally figured out that "Yon Wen" was John Wayne.

The great cowboy actor was probably the most prominent Mexicophilic American of the 20th Century. All three of the Duke's wives were from Latin America (Panama, Mexico, and Peru), and he loved making cowboy moves in Durango in Mexico, which looked a lot more like the Old West than anyplace in modern America. The movie closest to his heart, 1960's "The Alamo" (which he produced and directed in an era when movie stars seldom did either), was highly sympathetic to the Mexicans.

As I mentioned in "Sunday in the Park with Jorge," I'm ambivalent about Mexican machismo. I admire it in some ways, but not as much as John Wayne did.

One of the oddities of mass immigration from Mexico, however, is that, when praising the magic of diversity, almost nobody in liberal white America ever expresses any John Wayne-like appreciation for the stark Mexican sex role divide. The whole concept that Latin culture exaggerates natural sex differences just doesn't seem to register in the mainstream media. Diversity is supposed to overcome stereotypes, not reinforce them, so bringing in more Mexicans must be a victory for feminists.

What's even weirder is that the diversicrats are right on the political impact of this. Mass immigration from Mexico ultimately pushes power into the hands of the nanny state and the feminist establishment because Mexican immigrant dysfunction justifies huge numbers of government and foundation jobs for social workers. Further, macho Mexican-American politicians and activists find their white allies on the feminist-aligned left. For example, LA's strutting mayor Antonio Villaraigosa long worked for the ACLU and has one of those silly gender-equal surnames combining his last name (Villar) with his long-suffering wife's (Raigosa).

By the way, a reader writes:

I've spent a lot of time working with Mexicans and spent a lot of time in Mexico. Your observations are right on the mark. I've always thought that the Mexican practice of the "Pinata" at kids birthday parties was typically "mexican" and particularly dangerous to boot. A blinfolded kid wildy swinging a baseball bat at a paper mache' donkey filled with candy while a whole bunch of kids wait just feet away to rush in and capture the candy........That is if the kid swinging the bat stops swinging the bat when the candy starts to fall out of the Pinata. I'm sure there has been plenty of cracked skulls and concussions as a result of that mexican funfest. But, hey!, que lastima! pobrecito! Traiga la nina al cuarto emergencia donde hay muchos gringos medicos. Todo es libre, tambien! (What a pity poor thing. Just take him to the emergency room where there are lots of American doctors. It's all free too!)


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

July 22, 2007

My new VDARE.com column

Sunday in the Park with Jorge

At the big Hansen Dam Recreation Center in the northeast San Fernando Valley last Sunday afternoon, a couple of thousand people were gathered to picnic. This was no special occasion, just a normal Sunday.

The crowd was virtually 100% Latino -- before I arrived with my family, a friendly African-American guy selling funnel cakes was the sole non-Hispanic. While we are constantly lectured about the wonders of "diversity," Mexicans seem to prefer ethnic homogeneity and monoculturalism. Indeed, the scene was identical to ones taking place a thousand miles to the south, and the picnickers couldn't be happier about that....

Neoconservative commentators frequently assume that Mexican immigrants will automatically assimilate into American culture because our way of life is just so much more wonderful. In reality, however, Mexican culture is mature, stable, deeply rooted, and highly appealing to Mexicans. ...

The idea that Mexican immigrants will gladly give up Mexican culture wouldn't make much sense to the people in Hansen Dam park. They were having a lot more fun than gringos would have.

About a dozen small bands were blaring mariachi music, creating a festive (if clashing) sound track. Horseback riders wove in and out among toddlers. Vendors sold South-of-the-Border specialties such as watermelon chunks covered with hot sauce.

Of course, the reason for much of the fun at Hansen Dam was that the LAPD has apparently given up trying, under sheer weight of numbers, to enforce any of those maricon American laws.

I'm not even talking about immigration laws, but about the kind of health, safety, and environment rules that are the pride of American liberalism. In contrast, Fred Reed, the curmudgeonly columnist who recently moved to Mexico because America has gotten too regulated for his rugged individualist tastes, would have had a great time.

One of the conundrums of modern politics is that lax immigration enforcement is importing a vast class of people who hold many of the proudest accomplishments of modern American liberals in contempt, on those rare occasions when the illegal immigrants even notice them. Mexicans bring with them a macho culture, which has its strengths and weaknesses, but they aren't strengths that liberals admire when found in white Americans.

... Say you're sitting around in the park with your brand new cowboy hat on, pounding back a few cervezas, and it occurs to you that since you have got the hat, you should get the horse to go with it. What could make more sense than going for a horseback ride through a crowded park full of tiny children?

Well, at Hansen Dam, you're in luck!

In the American part of America, renting a horse has gotten expensive and time-consuming because liability insurance is so steep -- riding is quite dangerous, as the sad fates of Christopher Reeve and Cole Porter attest.

But at Hansen Dam on weekends, there are horse-owners around everywhere who will rent you a horse, few questions asked. They don't have signs advertising their business because what they are doing is illegal, so you have to ask (in Spanish, of course).

If one of the many toddlers about happens to stumble under the hooves of your mount and get trampled, well, that's tragic, but who could have foreseen such bad luck?

About 50 feet from where we were sitting, two young men started punching each other as hard as their state of inebriation would allow. Their friends swarmed in and separated them, trying to get the hotheads to calm down. But every few minutes, one would slip free from the restraining hands and attack his rival again. This was quite entertaining, but the fourth time the fight flared up, I got concerned that eventually somebody might pull out a gun.

So, we took off, gingerly dodging the drunk drivers in the parking lot. ...

In summary, there's much about Mexican culture I like. Ultimately, though, while Mexico is a nice place to visit, I wouldn't want to live there.

I shouldn't have to. That's what having separate countries is for. [More]



I shouldn't have to. That's what having separate countries is for. [More]


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

Sarkozy's new government advises the French to think less

In the NYT, Elaine Sciolino explains "New Leaders Say Pensive French Think Too Much." "Pensive" isn't the right word, since it implies the French have unexpressed thoughts, but it is pretty funny:


In proposing a tax-cut law last week, Finance Minister Christine Lagarde bluntly advised the French people to abandon their “old national habit.”

France is a country that thinks,” she told the National Assembly. “There is hardly an ideology that we haven’t turned into a theory. We have in our libraries enough to talk about for centuries to come. This is why I would like to tell you: Enough thinking, already. Roll up your sleeves.”


To graduate from college in France, you have to pass a test that consists of writing a three hour essay on a philosophical topic such as "Being or nothingness: which is more ineffable?" I may have a few details wrong about this, but the general point is that the ability to philosophize fluently off the top of one's head at great length is a status marker that shows you are a college graduate and thus important to cafe flirtation. Michael Blowhard explained:


Hard though it is for an American to believe, the French wake up in the morning and look forward to a full day's-worth of Being French. ...French philosophy is, IMHO, best understood as a cross between a hyperrefined entertainment form, and an industry for the supplying of fodder for cafe-and-flirtation chatter. Take French philosophy straight and you're likely to wind up doing something stupid like destroying a department of English, or maybe even ruining your own life. The French would never make such a mistake; after all, nothing -- not even philosophy -- can distract them from the pursuit of Being French. In fact, part of Being French is enjoying philosophical chitchat, the more fashionable the better. We may not have much patience with it, but the French love the spectacle of radical posturing. We tend to engage with the substance of a radical position. For the French, this kind of attitudinizing is enjoyed. It adds spice to life; it's sexy intellectual titillation... French philosophy? Well, it gives the French something sophisticated-seeming to say (and to gab about) as they go about the genuinely serious business of Being French.


The NYT continues:


Citing Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” she said the French should work harder, earn more and be rewarded with lower taxes if they get rich.


Ms. Lagarde knows well the Horatio Alger story of making money through hard work. She looked west to make her fortune, spending much of her career as a lawyer at the firm of Baker & McKenzie, based in the American city identified by its broad shoulders and work ethic: Chicago. She rose to become the first woman to head the firm’s executive committee and was named one of the world’s most powerful women by Forbes magazine.

So now, two years back in France, she is a natural to promote the program of Mr. Sarkozy, whose driving force is doing rather than musing, and whose mantra is “work more to earn more.”

Certainly, the new president himself has cultivated his image as a nonintellectual. “I am not a theoretician,” he told a television interviewer last month. “I am not an ideologue. Oh, I am not an intellectual! I am someone concrete!”

But the disdain for reflection may be going a bit too far. It certainly has set the French intellectual class on edge.

“How absurd to say we should think less!” said Alain Finkielkraut, the philosopher, writer, professor and radio show host. “If you have the chance to consecrate your life to thinking, you work all the time, even in your sleep. Thinking requires setbacks, suffering, a lot of sweat.”


Indeed, sweat is pouring from my brow as I try to think up something smarter to say about this than "Indeed."


Bernard-Henri Lévy, the much more splashy philosopher-journalist who wrote a book retracing Tocqueville’s 19th-century travels throughout the United States, is similarly appalled by Ms. Lagarde’s comments.

“This is the sort of thing you can hear in cafe conversations from morons who drink too much,” said Mr. Lévy, who is so well-known in French that he is known simply by his initials B.H.L. “To my knowledge this is the first time in modern French history that a minister dares to utter such phrases. I’m pro-American and pro-market, so I could have voted for Nicolas Sarkozy, but this anti-intellectual tendency is one of the reasons that I did not.”

Mr. Lévy, who ultimately endorsed Mr. Sarkozy’s Socialist rival, Ségolène Royal, said that Ms. Lagarde was much too selective in quoting Tocqueville and suggested that she read his complete works. In her leisure time. ...


Here's Garrison Keillor's well-known review of BHL's insufferable American Vertigo.


Indeed, the idea of admitting one’s wealth, once considered déclassé, is becoming more acceptable. A cover story in the popular weekly magazine VSD this month included revelations that just a few years ago would have been unthinkable: the 2006 income of leading French personalities ($18 million for soccer star Zinedine Zidane, $12.1 million for rock star Johnny Hallyday, $334,000 for Prime Minister François Fillon, $109,000 for Mr. Sarkozy).


Johnny Hallyday is 64 years old. How do you make $12 million per year when you are 64 as a rock star, especially one who is utterly unknown in the English-speaking world? I guess maybe the reason is that M. Hallyday is the only French rock star. Perhaps an emphasis on rationalism prevents the French from developing rock stars more often than once every 40 years?

And do you want to guess that Mr. Sarkozy lived a little better than $109,000-worth?

Still, the French devotion to Cartesian rationality has served the French fairly well. The French don't score any higher in IQ than Americans or other Europeans, but they sometimes seem to think things through better than others do, as in nuclear power or health care. Unlike the Marines, the French tend to believe that there are two ways to do anything: the wrong way and the right way, which should be the French way.


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

Making the San Fernando Valley more vibrant

The eastern half of the San Fernando Valley has had a big influx in just the last few years of people from a big swath of the planet running from, roughly Moscow to Yemen. Lots of them are good eggs, but a few have definitely made the place more, uh, colorful. For example, there was this gang who kidnapped and murdered five fellow ex-Soviet immigrants from a luxurious house in the hills of Encino.

And now, from the LA Times:

Yana Kovalevsky made a colorful entrance. Not long out of the hospital, she hobbled into her neighborhood Starbucks for an interview on a purple-and-pink-striped cane. A blond-and-brown-streaked wig roosted on her head.

Under the wig, her scalp was a patchy landscape. A traumatic shedding had left the locks that once cascaded to her elbows struggling to regrow.

She needed the cane because a nerve-pinging disorder that somehow combined pain and numbness had turned her legs to rubber.

Last February, during a visit to their native Russia, Kovalevsky, a 27-year-old North Hollywood social worker, and her physician mother became critically ill from the effects of thallium. Their ordeal made worldwide headlines because thallium is a rare poison usually associated with political assassins and murderous inheritance seekers, not with the likes of Yana and Dr. Marina Kovalevsky.

It remains unknown how they came to ingest the tiny but potentially lethal amounts of the heavy metal. Among the other unanswered questions is who targeted them and why — if the poisoning was intentional, as mother, daughter and their doctors now believe. ...

A decade and a half before they were poisoned, the Kovalevskys had been an unheralded part of another international story — the emigration of Soviet Jews. They had followed Marina's brother Dr. Leon Peck, a fellow physician, to the United States. Peck had been a refusenik for 10 years before he received a visa to leave Russia in 1988. The Kovalevskys got out in 1991, settling in Los Angeles and then moving to Louisiana, where Marina, 50, completed a medical residency. They returned to California, where Marina established a family practice out of a West Hollywood storefront.

She is now back at work and has declined to be interviewed, pleading for privacy. Yana said her mother's reticence hardened after FBI agents investigating the poisoning queried her about the Russian American medical community, which has been a focus of insurance fraud inquiries.


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

July 21, 2007

Barry Bonds

With the San Francisco Giants slugger now only two homers away from Hank Aaron's career record of 755, much to the embarrassment of Major League Baseball, it's worth reviewing a few points:

- Bonds didn't start baseball's steroid problem. We now know from inside sources that Bonds did not use steroids for his first 13 years in the league, 1986 through 1998.

- Bonds was clearly the greatest player of the 1990s, despite being clean for all but 1999. From 1990 through 1998, he led the National League in park-adjusted OPS+ four times, was second three times, and third twice. That's slightly better than his godfather Willie Mays' best nine year stretch.

- Bonds started taking steroids in 1999 because he was jealous of the credulous admiration paid to Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa for hitting all those homers in 1998. You kept hearing silly stuff like "McGwire and Sosa have returned the innocence to the game!" McGwire was caught with a steroid precursor in his locker in late 1998 and it still didn't instill many doubts. This drove Bonds crazy.

- Once Bonds got good at cheating with drugs in 2001, hitting a record 73 homers in 2001, he put up three seasons better than Babe Ruth's best (as measured by park-adjusted OPS+) at the ridiculously old ages of 36, 37, and 39.

- The reason Bonds was so much better than the other cheaters was because he'd been the best player in the game when he was clean. Bonds' normal talent + steroids = ludicrous ability.

- It was obvious that Bonds was cheating from 2001-2004. Nobody puts up those kinds of numbers at those ages. From 1986-1998, his career followed a normal arc (just at a much higher level than normal), with a peak at 27-28.

- Baseball stat guru Bill James was shamefully quiet during the many years while the steroid scourge distorted individual statistics, and he's not doing his reputation any favors by digging himself a deeper hole by still talking about Bonds' new wonder bat and other rationalizations.

- Bonds' late father Bobby was an extraordinary athlete who put up numbers that deserve Hall of Fame consideration, but teams had a hard time figuring out what to with him. And he smoked and drank heavily, which shortened his career to 15 years. Barry carefully avoided every mistake his father made.

- Barry was a nasty piece of work before he started on steroids, and they didn't improve his disposition.

- One reason steroid users tend to self-righteously deny accusations of steroid use is because they feel justified in their advantages because of all the weightlifting work they did. Steroids help your body recover from weightlifting faster, so users can work out a lot more.

- Steroid use in football appears to go back to the 1960s (quarterback John Hadl says his San Diego Charger teammates were popping steroids in 1966), but we don't have much evidence of it in baseball (a more lackadaisical game) before Jose Canseco arrived in 1986. (Here's my AmCon article on the history of steroids in baseball.)

- President Bush says he signed off on all Texas Rangers trades, which means he approved the 1992 trade that brought from the Oakland As to the Rangers Canseco, who had been accused of steroid use by Tom Boswell in the Washington Post back in 1988. Canseco's major accomplishment as a Ranger was having a fly ball bounce off his increasingly block-like head and over the fence for a homer.

- In general, I believe, California, perhaps because of the local Muscle Beach weightlifting culture, tended to be where steroids first had an impact on the various big-time sports.

- The popular governor of Bonds' state of California is muscle man Arnold Schwarzenegger, who began using steroids in Austria at around age 17 in 1964. I would imagine that Schwarzenegger used muscle-building drugs to get in shape for his comeback role in Terminator 3 in 2003, which helped launch his gubernatorial campaign.


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

July 19, 2007


IQ for economists: After trying hard for half a decade to completely ignore the data set on average national IQs in Lynn & Vanhanen's IQ and the Wealth of Nations, economists are now starting to attack it, albeit with embarrassing results.

For the next generation of economists who might be looking around for something important but vastly underexploited to analyze, let me review a key point. The nature vs. nurture arguments about IQ can be a distraction because they aren't all that relevant for your purposes. What is important for economists is the stability of national and group average IQ scores. If they have zoomed all over the place relative to each other, they don't have much explanatory power about how we've gotten to where we are. And if they are likely to change quickly and unpredictably over the next few years, why bother worrying about them?

For better or worse, however, we can be confident that differences in average group IQ are going to be around for a long time.

The relative gaps among groups have been fairly stable for several generations. East Asians may have picked up a few points on everybody else over the last 40 or 50 years, and Maoris in New Zealand may have done the same (although New Zealanders tell me that may just be mixed race people reclassifying themselves to get affirmative action benefits), but otherwise, remarkable relative stability is the norm.

One of Lynn's recent books, for instance, lists 620 IQ studies of different groups going back, in a few cases, to the first quarter of the 20th Century. I've created a graph showing that there has been no overlap of average scores among Japanese (23 studies in red), Hispanics in America (17 studies in green), and Australian Aborigines (17 studies in blue).


The Japanese have consistently scored somewhere around 105 on a scale where white American are pegged at 100, Hispanics in the U.S. at about 90 (which, by the way, is roughly the world average), and Australian Aborigines at very low levels.

I don't know what causes differences in average IQ, but the evidence is overwhelming that they were stable enough over the 1950-2000 era to be used in studies, and, with almost as much assurance, that they will be stable enough over, say, the 2000-2030 era to be important to study for the future.

If a gap between two groups suddenly disappeared in all the babies being born tomorrow for some magic reason, the gap among the workforce wouldn't begin to shrink until 2025 and wouldn't disappear until 2072.

So, the current realities demand far more study than they've gotten from the economics profession.


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

The New Big Three

When we look back on 2007, what will we get nostalgic over? For what will 2007 go down in the history books?

My bet is that thirty years from now, we'll be telling the young people, "Yeah, you punks think you've got out-of-control attentionaholic moron starlets these days? Well, they're nothing, nothing I tell you, compared to what Lindsey Lohan, Paris Hilton, and Britney Spears were doing back in '07. Those three were like Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill at Yalta in 1945: the world conquerors of bimbohood, they were."


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

July 18, 2007

How economists think:

Tyler Cowen blogs:


IQ and the Wealth of Nations

How many more times will someone suggest this book in the comments section of this blog? I like this book and I think it offers a real contribution. Nonetheless I feel no need to suggest it in the comments sections of other peoples' blogs.

I do not treat this book as foundational because of personal experience. I've spent much time in one rural Mexican village, San Agustin Oapan, and spent much time chatting with the people there. They are extremely smart, have an excellent sense of humor, and are never boring. And that's in their second language, Spanish.

I'm also sure they if you gave them an IQ test, they would do miserably. In fact I can't think of any written test -- no matter how simple -- they could pass. They simply don't have experience with that kind of exercise.

When it comes to understanding the properties of different corn varieties, catching fish in the river, mending torn amate paper, sketching a landscape from memory, or gossiping about the neighbors, they are awesome.

Some of us like to think that intelligence is mostly one-dimensional, but at best this is true only within well-defined peer groups of broadly similar people. If you gave Juan Camilo a test on predicting rainfall he would crush me like a bug.

OK, maybe I hang out with a select group within the village. But still, there you have it. Terrible IQ scores (if they could even take the test), real smarts.

So why should I think this book is the key to understanding economic underdevelopment?


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

James Blake

James Blake: Arthur Ashe, who won the U.S. Open tennis tournament in 1968, was a representative figure of the hopeful side of the 1960s: a gentlemanly black who succeeded in a country club sport and engaged in much mild social activism, such as teaming up with a similar symbol of the nicer Sixties, Harry Belafonte, to bring pressure on apartheid South Africa.

It was a decade when black athletes were breaking through in a number of nontraditional sports, with Pete Brown and Charlie Sifford winning PGA golf tournaments and Wendell Scott winning a NASCAR race in 1963.

It was widely assumed at the time by all respectable people that Ashe was a harbinger, that men's tennis would continue to become more integrated, that black men would eventually make up 1/8th (but no more) of all professional tennis champions, but that didn't really happen. MaliVai Washington made it to the Wimbledon final in 1996, but there wasn't much follow-up.

Four decades after Ashe, the top African-American male tennis player is James Blake, who is ranked #9 in the world, and is the second best American after Andy Roddick. Blake dropped out of Harvard to play professionally, had some success, but then broke his neck a few years ago crashing into a net-post. He's made a heartwarming recovery.

As you might guess, Blake's mother is white.

African-American women have done better in tennis, but the pattern with African-American males who, unlike Blake, don't have a non-black parent seems to have become that they will either dominate a sport (basketball and football) or not play it seriously. This would have come as a shock to Civil Rights-era white liberals, but there doesn't seem to be a stable midpoint anymore where African-American men will long accept being a minority in an integrated sport.

This wasn't true in the past. For example, in golf, five different blacks won 23 PGA tournaments from 1964-1986 (an average of one per year, or a little over 2% of all tournaments), and these first couple of generations of black touring pros continued to be a small but solid presence on the Senior (Champions) Tour for years more. Since 1986, though, Tiger Woods is the only African-American to make even a splash on the PGA tour, and he's more a representative of this new mulatto elite that makes up an increasing share of African-American participation in white-dominated fields than of the general African-American community.

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

July 17, 2007

My wife does it again

From the Washington Post:

SunRocket, an Internet phone provider, abruptly ceased operations Monday and is looking to sell its assets, after two rounds of layoffs and the departures of top executives.

My wife is the world's most ruthless phone service shopper. She finds the prices that are so low they're crazy! Nobody could stay in business with these nutty low prices.

And they don't. SunRocket -- $199 per year (no taxes) for unlimited long distance and local calling, free wireless telephones, free voice mail, etc. -- is the third phone provider we've had that has gone under from charging too little.

Any Wall Street shortsellers out there who want to hire my wife to find the next phone company that will go under, just call!

Oh, wait, better send a letter.


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

July 16, 2007

John Edwards' latest brilliant campaign issue: busing!

From Politico:


Sen. John Edwards plans to warn later this week that the nation’s schools have become segregated by race and income, and he will propose measures to diversify both inner-city and middle-class schools. ...

As explained by people who have been consulted about the program, Edwards wants to set aside $100 million to help school districts implement economic integration programs. The money will help finance buses and other resources for schools that enroll additional low-income children.


How clueless do you have to be to try to run for President -- as a purported populist -- as the Busing Candidate?

This isn't just a personal failing of Edwards -- it reflects how out of touch our ruling class has become. It's not merely how rich they are -- the Roosevelts, after all, were extremely rich -- but how political correctness has dumbed them down.

It's widely assumed that political correctness is just polite hypocrisy and that the big shots understand what's really going on even though they aren't allowed to mention it in public -- after all, the Clintons sure didn't send Chelsea to the local public school for 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. -- but that's naive. What happens is that political correctness severs the mental connection between private and public thinking.

Everybody knows that they, personally, don't want a whole bunch of inner city kids bused into their kid's school, but nobody is allowed to articulate publicly the reasons why everybody feels that way. Partly, it's self-discipline -- if a public figure ever happened to candidly mention exactly why he sends his daughter to Sweet Briar Country Day School instead of to Malcolm X. H.S., he's toast. So, it's best if he never mentions it in private, either. It could leak out. In fact, it's even better if he never thinks it inside his own head. He might slip up.

So, concepts that can't be articulated publicly aren't, after awhile, even thought anymore.


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

The NYT promotes a North American Union

My new VDARE.com column is about a little-noticed Fourth of July op-ed in the New York Times arguing that going down the path of integrating America, Canada, and Mexico would be good for America.


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

July 15, 2007

The Virtue of Procrastination

For a couple of months, I'd been guiltily telling myself that I was eventually going to have to look up who Presidential candidate Jim Gilmore was and what party he belonged to. But, today, we learned that he is withdrawing from the race, so I now don't have to.


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

How to score higher on the SAT

A reader writes:

On the SAT (at least when I was coaching it in the late 1980s for The Princeton Review), there were six reading comprehension passages. One of these was the "diversity" passage -- always about a woman or minority. Without even reading the passage itself, a smart person who understood how the test is designed and understood that the answers would never suggest anything derogatory about women/minorities, could get most of the questions correct. I used to amuse my father and older brothers by demonstrating how this worked. The principles I learned at TPR work, more or less, on any standardized college/professional school entrance test.


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

The double standard on the "Is Obama Black Enough" question

A long article in Newsweek enthusiastically explains that Obama has repeatedly been challenged and repeatedly passed with flying colors on the "Is Barack Black Enough?" question. This won't come as a surprise to readers of my "Obama's Identity Crisis," where I pointed out that the predominant theme of his autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Tale of Race and Inheritance, is his struggle to overcome these doubts and to make himself black enough.


Across the Divide


Cornel West was on fire. Bobbing in his chair, his hands sweeping across the stage, the brilliant and bombastic scholar was lambasting Barack Obama's campaign. Before a black audience, at an event outside Atlanta called the State of the Black Union, West was questioning why Obama was 600 miles away, announcing his bid for the White House in Springfield, Ill. Did he really care about black voters? What did that say about his willingness to stand up for what he believes?

"He's got large numbers of white brothers and sisters who have fears and anxieties and concerns, and he's got to speak to them in such a way that he holds us at arm's length," West said, pushing his hand out for emphasis. "So he's walking this tightrope." West challenged the candidate to answer a stark set of questions: "I want to know how deep is your love for the people, what kind of courage have you manifested in the stances that you have and what are you willing to sacrifice for. That's the fundamental question. I don't care what color you are. You see, you can't take black people for granted just 'cause you're black."

A few days later, West was sitting in his Princeton office after class when the phone rang. It was Barack Obama. "I want to clarify some things," the candidate calmly told the professor of religion and African-American studies. Over the next two hours, Obama explained his Illinois state Senate record on criminal justice and affordable health care. West asked Obama how he understood the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and interrogated him about a single phrase in Obama's 2004 Democratic-convention speech: that America was "a magical place" for his Kenyan father. "That's a Christopher Columbus experience," West said. "It's hard for someone who came out of slavery and Jim Crow to call it a magical place. You have to be true to yourself, but I have to be true to myself as well." A few weeks later, the two men met in a downtown Washington, D.C., hotel to chat about Obama's campaign staff. Just a month after ripping into him onstage, West endorsed Obama and signed up as an unpaid adviser.


Terrific! He's convinced Cornel West that he's black enough. Well, I'm reassured!


West may have come around, but he raised one of the most potent—and controversial—questions facing the candidate: is he black enough? It's one that has long dogged Barack Obama's career, though he says he settled his own struggle with racial identity (as the son of an African father and white, Kansan mother) in his late teens. ...

Obama himself dismisses the idea. At the end of a NEWSWEEK interview in his Senate office, Obama offered an unprompted statement about "post-racial" politics: "That term I reject because it implies that somehow my campaign represents an easy shortcut to racial reconciliation. I just want to be very clear on this so there's no confusion. We're going to have a lot of work to do to overcome the long legacy of Jim Crow and slavery. It can't be purchased on the cheap." Obama was dismayed by the Supreme Court's recent decision against public schools that pursue diversity by taking account of students' race.


The preppie from paradise had to prove to his future wife that he was ideologically black enough to get her to marry him:


When the two first met at the law firm, Michelle was his reluctant mentor for the summer. She remembers rave reports that circulated around the office before she joined him for lunch the first time. "Yeah, he's probably a black guy who can talk straight," she recalls saying to herself. "This is a black guy who's biracial who grew up in Hawaii? He's got to be weird." Afterward, she realized she may have misjudged Obama. But it was only later that summer, when he took her to a church basement on the South Side, that she fell for him. He gave an inspiring speech about "the world as it is, and the world as it should be." Three years later, they married. Michelle had to work through her early misperceptions about him; now, she says, the nation needs to do the same. " ...


A black legislator in Springfield challenged Obama:


"He was questioning Senator Obama's toughness and, frankly, his blackness, as to whether Barack really understood what it was like to be a teenage African-American standing on a street corner in Chicago and being harassed by police officers," recalls Dillard. Obama stood his ground, evoking his childhood in tough neighborhoods of Honolulu ..."


No comment.


"Sometimes, the middle ground doesn't hold between black and white, and Obama's innate sense of caution and compromise can look like weakness. Just before his big announcement outside the old state capitol in Springfield—where Lincoln delivered his "house divided" speech—Obama abruptly changed plans and asked his pastor not to deliver the invocation prayer. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright is the man who gave Obama not just spiritual direction, but also his signature phrase, which became the title of one of his books, "The Audacity of Hope." But in the days before Obama officially launched his campaign, Wright was also caricatured as a "radical" for his Afrocentrism and his focus on black issues—a strange criticism, perhaps, of a preacher on the South Side. (The Reverend Wright is considered mainstream among African-American church leaders; Ebony magazine once named him one of the top 15 black preachers in America.)"


The Rev. Wright may be considered mainstream among African-American church leaders, but he's not mainstream among Americans. As he said recently, "When [Obama's] enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli [in Libya]" to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, Mr. Wright recalled, "with [Black Muslim leader Louis] Farrakhan, a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell."

It's a commonplace in history for somebody of a mixed or marginal ethnic background to try to be more ethnocentric than thou, whether out of compensation or genuine enthusiasm: Napoleon, Eamon de Valera, and Stalin (from 1941 onward) are obvious examples. Similarly, Obama wrote a 442 page book about how his not being all that African-American by heredity and upbringing made him self-obsessed with being black.

To the Man from Mars, this article would make sense if Obama was running to succeed Jesse Jackson as the Uncrowned King of Black America. But, last I checked, he's running to be President of the United States. To the average American voter, the news that Obama has relentlessly managed to prove to black activists such as Dr. West, the Rev. Wright, and Mrs. Obama that he's black enough for them via his staunch political commitment to their cause might not be as reassuring as the article assumes.

But you won't see that in Newsweek.


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

Malcolm Gladwell appears to have given up blogging

He hasn't posted anything on his blog since January 4, 2007. (He also hasn't published any articles in The New Yorker since the January 8, 2007 issue. I would guess he's working on his third book.)

Blogging wasn't a good use of his time. Besides the opportunity cost of writing for free, it was too emotionally stressful for him. Gladwell's strong suit is finding obscure but interesting ideas invented by other people and making them comprehensible to the public. One reason that he is so good at this is that he falls in love with these ideas he finds. The downside of his warmly emotional intellect, though, is that he seldom questions the objects of his infatuation. So he gets snookered a lot and thus passes a lot of dumb ideas onto the public. When less credulous folks point out flaws in his heroes' notions, he gets hurt and angry.

So, he was wise to give up blogging.

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