September 11, 2007

The Great White Trash Defendants

Several readers have pointed out that this story is likely to get more national coverage than similar local crime cases. I wonder why ...

Details emerge in W.Va. torture case

By JOHN RABY and TOM BREEN, Associated Press Writers 34 minutes ago

For at least a week, authorities say, a young black woman was held captive in a mobile home, forced to eat animal waste, stabbed, choked and repeatedly sexually abused — all while being peppered with a racial slur.

It wasn't until deputies acting on an anonymous tip drove to a ramshackle trailer deep in West Virginia's rural hills that she was found. Limping toward the door with her arms outstretched, she uttered, "Help me," the Logan County sheriff's office said.

Six people, all white, including a mother and son and a mother and daughter, have been arrested and could face federal hate crime charges in the suspected attack on 20-year-old Megan Williams, who remained hospitalized Tuesday with injuries that included four stab wounds in the leg, and black and blue eyes.

Damn. If only they were lacrosse players, or yachtsmen, or something else like all the bad guys on "Law & Order," then the New York Times would be all over this story. Heck, even Jayson Blair would have gotten off his couch and gone to West Virginia for real for that story.


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

Jim Manzi reviews the Levitt-Lott feud

In National Review, Jim Manzi reviews economist John R. Lott's Freedomomics and takes a look at Steven D. Levitt's Freakonomics as well:
"Levitt wrote that Roe is "like the proverbial butterfly that flaps its wings on one continent and eventually creates a hurricane on another." He ought to be more careful with his similes: Surely he knew that he was echoing meteorologist Edward Lorenz's famous evocation of a global climate system--one that had such a dense web of interconnected pathways of causation that it made long-term weather forecasting a fool's errand. The actual event that inspired this observation was that, one day in 1961, Lorenz entered .506 instead of .506127 for one parameter in a climate-forecasting model and discovered that it produced a wildly different long-term weather forecast. This is, of course, directly analogous to what we see in the abortion-crime debate: Tiny changes in the data set yield vastly different results. This is a telltale sign (as if another were needed) that human society is far too complicated to yield to the analytical tools that Lott and Levitt bring to bear. Nobody in this debate has any reliable, analytically derived idea of what impact abortion legalization has had on crime. "
I didn't know that about the famous "butterfly in Brazil" effect, but that is what I've been saying about Levitt's abortion-crime theory since 1999: it's beyond the power of contemporary social science to determine.

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

"The Year of the Dog"

Now out on DVD.

Here is my review from the May 7, 2007 issue of The American Conservative:

"The Year of the Dog," with Saturday Night Live veteran Molly Shannon as a spinster secretary looking for love, sounds like just another romantic comedy, such as "The Truth about Cats and Dogs" or "Must Love Dogs." Yet, this sympathetic portrayal of the making of an animal rights activist / pest turns out to be one of the odder and more memorable movies of the year so far.

In recent years, the typical Hollywood filmmaker's career path has been first to write screenplays for others, and then move on to directing. Not every verbalist, however, is an equally adept visualist. First time director Mike White, screenwriter of "School of Rock" and "The Good Girl," is so unimaginative with images -- he mostly just plunks his actors dead center in the frame and has them stare goggle-eyed into the camera -- that his little quasi-comedy stumbles into a neo-Egyptian monumentality.

Fortunately, White has a strong cast, anchored by the disconcertingly intense Shannon, the diva of discomfort. Her Peggy is Shannon's SNL signature character Mary Katharine Gallagher, the Catholic schoolgirl with Asperger's Syndrome, grown a quarter century older and sadder, but no wiser. Now 42, Shannon plays awkward Peggy without makeup, every wrinkle in her delicate Irish skin exposed by the fluorescent office lighting.

Peggy's only friend besides her beagle Pencil is her fellow secretary, the contrastingly outgoing Layla (a scene-stealing Regina King, who was Cuba Gooding Jr.'s wife in "Jerry Maguire"). While black-white masculine friendships are far more common in cop movies and commercials than in daily life, Peggy and Layla's closeness is realistic: pink-collar working women enjoy the warmest interracial bonds of any class. Her black pal is conducting a publicly passionate affair with the office lothario, while Peggy displays the traditional Hibernian uneasiness over sex.

"The Year of the Dog" then introduces two disparate men into her life to make the point, a bit formulaically, that sexual and social attraction are often at odds. The older and less hormone-driven we get, the harder it is to find somebody of the opposite sex who fits the rut we've dug for ourselves.

One night, Peggy's beloved beagle gets into her neighbor's yard, eats some snail poison, and dies. To cheer her up, the construction worker next door, played by the currently omnipresent regular guy character actor John C. Reilly (Will Ferrell's sidekick in "Talladega Nights"), invites her out to dinner. Layla is ecstatic that Peggy finally has a date. Unfortunately, he turns out to love hunting, which Peggy can't abide.

Then, a handsome but effeminate man from the animal shelter offers her a vicious German shepherd who is otherwise doomed to be put down. A vegan, he instructs Peggy in the horrors of factory farms, and soon she's in love. Peter Sarsgaard, who normally plays strong, silent types like the sniper in "Jarhead" and Chuck Lane, the long-suffering editor of Marty Peretz's New Republic, in "Shattered Glass," portrays the pet person as a little too obviously gay -- to everybody except Peggy, whose heart gets broken.

With men letting her down, she turns even more to dogs for consolation, becoming a strident PETA-style activist. Strikingly, the script shows her losing the arguments she starts. Peggy assumes, though, as most people do, that she gets out-debated not because she's wrong, but because she's not glib enough.

She forges her boss's signature on a check to a farm animal rescue charity, adopts 15 dogs off death row at the pound, and ruins the fur coats of her insufferable sister-in-law (Laura Dern). Peggy is on the path to being a crazy old lady with too many pets in her squalid house, but "The Year of the Dog" asks whether being an animal addict is worse than sane loneliness.

PETA fanatics are the one sort of progressive that everybody loves to look down upon. After Dutch immigration restrictionist Pim Fortuyn was gunned down in 2002, the European center-left establishment immediately proclaimed (wrongly, as it turned out) that their vilification of anti-immigrationists had nothing to do with Fortuyn's murder. The assassin was just some animal rights loony!

And yet, the animal rights cause is likely to triumph partially. As the world gets richer, the worst abuses of factory farming will become less tolerable. Moreover, while we deplore Koreans' taste for dog, hardheaded Paul Johnson has suggested that our descendents won't understand how we complacently devoured the comparably intelligent pig. Too bad they're so tasty …

Rated PG-13 for some suggestive references.

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

New jargon sighted: "glbttsqqi"

From a U. of Washington press release:

"David Kopay's generous gift to the Q Center is both an act of forgiveness and a clear directive to the UW regarding the health and well-being of its glbttsqqi [gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, two-spirit, queer, questioning and intersex] students, faculty, and staff ," says Jennifer Self, director of the Q Center.

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

More from 2Blowhards' Cochran interview

Here's an excerpt from the second part of Michael Blowhard's interview with Gregory Cochran:

2B: As far as Mideast policy goes, how could we do better than we do?

Cochran: I think we have little chance of running a practical Middle East policy. The political class is ignorant and / or crazy (and also lazy) and seems to enjoy being manipulated by groups whose interests are not closely aligned with those of the United States. For example, Bush Senior had Prince Bandar try to prepare Junior for the world stage. Why the hell would anyone pick a fat Saudi thief as a political science instructor? Why not someone on our side? And when Rudy has Norman Podhoretz as a foreign policy adviser -- Norman who wants to invade Arab countries that haven't even been discovered yet -- well, I tremble for my country.

2B: So what's the right general course of action for the US as the world's premier power?

Cochran: Do little. Stay strong -- although this can't possibly require the current high level of military expenditures. If I were picking an actor to represent the right policy, it'd be Jimmy Stewart -- a nice guy that you never, ever want to threaten. A mix of "It's a Wonderful Life" and "Winchester '73."

2B: What are some basic things that you wish more Americans understood about the mid-east, and about their own government?

Cochran: 1. Iraq is a Seinfeld war -- a war about nothing. 2. The Mideast isn't that important. 3. The people running the country have no idea what they're doing.


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

September 10, 2007

What to do about global warming

As you may have noticed, I don't write much about global warming. It's a complex subject that would take me a long time to master and I don't see much evidence that I would contribute anything novel and important if I ever did.

That said, I do have a suggestion for a straightforward way to lessen future harm caused by global warming that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere:

Bring down the birthrate in Bangladesh, fast.

The logic is this:

If global warming is happening severely enough to partially melt polar ice caps and thus raise sea levels, the most severely impacted country would likely be Bangladesh, which topographically resembles the Mississippi Delta that took such a hit from Katrina in 2005: low-lying land vulnerable to big storms off the ocean. The current population of Bangladesh is 150 million and the total fertility rate is 3.09 babies per woman. The U.S. Census Bureau forecasts that the population of Bangladesh will almost double between now and 2050, when it will reach 280 million, assuming half of them aren't washed out to see in a big cyclone.


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

Is this the gayest-looking graph ever?

Here's the ultimate graph from General Petraeus's long-awaited testimony about Iraq, and, just looking at it, aren't you ashamed to be an American?

I have no idea what it means (if anything), but all those little mincing stars with question marks ... Christ, almighty. This guy's a general? It's bad enough that Powerpoint seems to be more important than winning wars in determining who gets promoted in the Pentagon these days, but if we're going to have Powerpoint Warriors, can't they at least put together macho Powerpoints?

Somebody should do a Powerpoint version of Patton's speech in front of the huge American flag, like the Powerpoint version of the Gettysburg Address.

Graph via Kevin Drum.


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

My review of "The Hoax"

The Hoax

Reviewed by Steve Sailer for The American Conservative

April 23, 2007

In the 1970s, billionaire Howard Hughes's name was as omnipresent as Donald Trump's is today, even though the paranoid recluse was never seen. Since then, Hollywood has treated Hughes's legend well, with Martin Scorsese's masterful 2004 film "The Aviator" delivering an admiring look at the early life of the engineer and movie mogul. Jonathan Demme's "Melvin and Howard," which won a couple of Oscars in 1980, offered a gentle, oblique perspective on the national nuttiness that followed Hughes's death in 1976, such as the "discovery" of 40-odd purported wills.

Now, "The Hoax" rounds out cinematic Hughes lore with a comic biopic of novelist Clifford Irving, the scamster who brought the world's Howard Hughes obsession to a crescendo in 1971-72 when he extracted huge advances from the greedy and credulous New York publishing and magazine industries for The Autobiography of Howard Hughes. Irving claimed it was based on taped interviews with Hughes. In truth, Irving had never had any contact with Hughes (who in "The Hoax" appears only in documentary footage.)

"The Hoax" isn't in the same class as "The Aviator" and "Melvin and Howard," but it's significantly better than typical April releases. As Irving, Richard Gere ("Pretty Woman"), who normally competes with Bruce Willis for the title of Most Morose Star, revives much of the energy and charm that made him a delight in the underrated 1983 American remake of Godard's "Breathless." Now 57, Gere is still credible as the 40-year-old Irving. Indeed, in "The Hoax," Gere looks a lot like former leading man Alec Baldwin did at age 35, which might explain why Gere is still a name-above-title star, while Baldwin had merely a character role as a villain in "The Aviator,".

Irving purloined a copy of an unpublished manuscript by Hughes's business manager, Noah Dietrich. This provided his project with some minimal verisimilitude, which Irving embroidered with sheer effrontery. It's always fun watching a good actor like Gere play a con man who must improvise ever more barefaced concoctions to parry each challenge to his credibility.

It's even more entertaining to see an excellent actor like Alfred Molina, who was painter Diego Rivera in "Frida," portray an inept liar. In "The Hoax," Molina plays Irving's Sancho Panza, researcher Dick Susskind, a man more at home digging up facts than retailing fabrications. In meetings with McGraw-Hill brass suspicious of the duo's honesty, he stares bug-eyed and sweats as he tries not to forget the simple bit of business Irving assigned him, only to blurt out at the most disturbing moment, "Howard Hughes gave me a prune!"

Director Lasse Hallström ("Chocolat") and screenwriter William Wheeler have included in their press notes an unusually frank list of what's fictional in "The Hoax." What they don't reveal, however, is more interesting: how they've reworked Irving, the perfect 1970s anti-hero, to make him more sympathetic to 21st Century audiences.

Today's moviegoers admire marital stability, so "The Hoax" forgets to mention that Irving's wife Edith, who eventually went to jail for trying to cash the publisher's advance check to "H.R. Hughes" under the name "Helga R. Hughes," was his fourth. Contemporary Americans especially dislike adultery by parents, so Irving's two small children with Edith were written out of the picture. In the film, Irving cheats on Edith once with the folk singing Danish baroness and movie starlet Nina Van Pallandt and bitterly regrets his moral slip. The real Irving, however, was using his supposed meetings with Hughes abroad to cover frequent vacations with his mistress.

Exciting more controversy is the film's claim that Irving's fake autobiography helped inspire the Watergate break-in at the headquarters of Democratic National Committee chairman Larry O'Brien, who, possibly not coincidentally, had been Hughes' chief lobbyist.

While overstated, this is not wholly implausible. Nixon had several shady links to Hughes, such as the tycoon's unsecured $205,000 loan to his brother Donald's Nixonburger restaurant chain. Nixon believed the revelation of this dubious deal may have cost him the exceedingly close 1960 election. A decade later, according to his chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, Nixon was irrationally obsessed with plumbing the relationship between Hughes and O'Brien.

The truth is that we still don't really understand Watergate, mostly because, in sharp contrast to the JFK assassination, the media haven't been all that interested in finding out precisely what happened. The good guys won and bad guys lost, they reason, so why bother with details that might muddy the glorious memory?

Rated R for language and nudity.

(because I don't post my magazine reviews online until long after the films have come and gone)

iSteve.com archived articles

iSteve film reviews

email me


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

My review of "The Wind that Shakes the Barley"

The Wind that Shakes the Barley

Reviewed by Steve Sailer for The American Conservative

April 9, 2007

Neoconservatives who extol Winston Churchill's adamancy never mention that in 1921, after Britain suffered no more than 700 army and police deaths in Ireland, he played a key role in negotiations with insurgents that resulted in Britain suddenly cutting and running from southern Ireland after 700 years of occupation.

Why did the UK, which sent 20,000 Tommies to their deaths on the first day of the Battle of the Somme a half decade earlier, not stay the course in Ireland? Ken Loach's film about Irish Republican Army gunmen in 1920-22, "The Wind that Shakes the Barley," which won the top prize at the 2006 Cannes festival, graphically conveys why the English, a civilized people, went home. Defeating a guerrilla uprising broadly supported by the local populace requires a level of frightfulness that does not bear close inspection.

Loach, the 70-year-old English movie director, is an old-fashioned lefty of the didactic Marxist sort. His films include "A Contemporary Case for Common Ownership" and "Which Side Are You On?" Not surprisingly, these haven't made him a big name in America, but "Barley" is worth a watch. Loach is neither the most fluid of filmmakers nor the most historically trustworthy, but "Barley" is consistently informative about the Anglo-Irish War, if spectacularly wrong-headed about the subsequent Irish Civil War among the victors.

In recounting the history of a rebellion, with its endless alternations of terrorism and reprisal, you have to start the story at some particular incident, which inevitably biases your allocation of blame. Loach's sympathies are heavily with the IRA, the more radical the better, so he begins in 1920 when the Black and Tans (tough demobbed British WWI vets sent to Ireland to augment the police, but given little appropriate training) rough up some fine Irish lads enjoying a game of hurling, killing a boy for the crime of speaking only Gaelic.

If he wanted to be more even-handed, Loach could have commenced the previous year when the IRA began attacks on the Royal Irish Constabulary, necessitating the dispatching of the Black and Tans.

Or, then again, he could have begun with any date going back to 1167, when the first English soldiers arrived (at the invitation of an Irish king to assist his war with another local king). Compared to England, the Emerald Isle was smaller and rockier, so less populated. It was also more chaotic (no national king ever emerged), leaving at its well-organized neighbor's highly limited mercy until its sons could win her freedom.

"Barley" tells of two fictional County Cork brothers, Damien, a doctor (played by Cillian Murphy), and Teddy, a natural leader of fighting men (portrayed by Padraic Delaney), who withstands having his fingernails ripped out without spilling the IRA's secrets. (Unfortunately, the Cork accents are so impenetrable for the first half hour that I didn't realize until the end of the movie that they are brothers.)

The brothers roughly represent, transformed to merely a local scale, those initial partners and eventual enemies in Irish revolution, Éamon de Valera, the math professor and intellectual turned future president, and Michael Collins, the postman turned general. (In 1996's "Michael Collins," they were played by Alan Rickman and Liam Neeson, respectively).

Murphy, the dark-haired young actor from Cork with the alarming cheekbones and oddly pale blue eyes, is best known as the villain in "Batman Begins." His looks make him easy to pick out in a crowd of Irishmen, which is useful since Loach doesn't adequately distinguish between the supporting characters. When an IRA man tremulously announces after a firefight with the Black & Tans that "Gogan's dead!" it's not as moving as Loach intends because we had never gotten straight in our heads that Gogan was alive in the first place.

Murphy's skull-like head and intense eyes (he'd make an ideal Lenin) become more suited to the role of Doctor Damien as the healer turned killer, a Hibernian Che Guevara, grows ever more fanatically radical. He denounces his brother for supporting the compromise peace that Collins brokered with Churchill and David Lloyd George, and demands that the Irish guerillas, with their 3,500 rifles, fight the entire British Empire to the death in the name of socialism. (Loach's better dead than not red mindset perversely mischaracterizes the stance of the anti-Treaty fighters led by the deeply Catholic de Valera.)

In Loach's worldview, a resemblance to Lenin is to be cherished, but less bloodthirsty viewers will increasingly sympathize with Damien's brother Teddy, the man of violence who chooses peace for his people, but at a terrible price to his family.

Not rated, but would be R for language and torture.


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

My review of "Amazing Grace"

The Scourge of Slavery

Amazing Grace

Reviewed by Steve Sailer in The American Conservative
March 26, 2007


Since 1991, conservative film critic Michael Medved has been pointing out that R-rated films do worse at the box office on average than family fare, but Hollywood keeps making more R-rated films than financial logic would suggest.


Billionaire Philip F. Anschutz, a devout Presbyterian, has been placing large bets on the family-oriented film business recently, hitting it big with "Ray" and huge with "The Chronicles of Narnia." Anschutz's latest, "Amazing Grace," the biopic of the amiably saintly William Wilberforce, the evangelical Anglican Member of Parliament who battled for two decades to abolish the slave trade before finally succeeding two centuries ago in 1807, won't match their returns, but it's a worthy and intelligent (if not quite exceptional) effort.


It features a fine cast of British stage actors, including such high class hams as Albert Finney as Wilberforce's religious mentor John Newton, Michael Gambon as his Whig Parliamentary ally, the old sinner Charles James Fox, and Ciaran Hinds as Lord Tarleton, chief bribe-dispenser for the slave interests. Unfortunately, the three look rather alike, especially when wearing powdered wigs, exacerbating the difficulty of deciphering the subtle political maneuvering.

The budget for "Amazing Grace" was limited enough that not much of the horror of the slave trade could be shown. Instead, we watch Wilberforce talking about it, eloquently, with the abolitionists Thomas Clarkson and Oloudaqh Equiano, the Nigerian-born ex-slave who published a bestselling autobiography in 1789.

The film's historical accuracy is above average. One forgivable slip is that while Newton, a former slave trader who repented, did indeed pen the great hymn's words -- "I once was lost but now am found, Was blind, but now, I see" -- his verses weren't joined to the current melody of "Amazing Grace" until 1832.


Also understandable is casting handsome Welsh actor Ioan Gruffudd ("Fantastic Four") as Wilberforce, although he was actually only 5'-3" due to curvature of the spine, and almost blind to boot. Still, Gruffudd's looks sap the romantic tension, just as casting the exquisite Keira Knightley as the sensible Elizabeth Bennett in the most recent version of "Pride and Prejudice" undermined that famous story. "Amazing Grace" is organized around the night the 20-year-old Titian-haired beauty Barbara Spooner (Romola Garai) fell in love with the 37-year-old Wilberforce as he told her the story of the political struggle in which he'd ruined his health. On-screen, though, it seems inevitable that they'll marry, since they are the two most beautiful people in England.


Unfortunately, complex historical stories like this are better suited to the leisurely pace of the television mini-series because a two-hour film has to leave out much. For instance, "Amazing Grace" fails to mention that Wilberforce was a Tory or that his religious enthusiasm was quite unfashionable during the deistic Enlightenment.


Moreover, banning the slave trade in 1807 made the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in the 1830s relatively painless. The West Indian sugar planters had routinely worked their slaves to death and thus needed fresh slaves from Africa to prosper. In contrast, slaves multiplied on the less harsh tobacco and cotton plantations of America, so slave owners still thrived after Congress ended the trade in 1808.


Contemporary audiences so lack historical knowledge that veteran director Michael Apted ("Coal Miner's Daughter") and writer Steven Knight decided that there's no point in even trying to make clear who is whom in the film. For the first hour, for example, no effort is made to explain who Wilberforce's best friend Billie (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) is, or why in the world Billie thinks (correctly) that he can become Prime Minister at age 24. He's just some guy named Billie who is Prime Minister for two decades. Explaining that Billie's father, William Pitt the Elder, had been the dynamic war leader during the Seven Years War would only annoy the public, so why bother?


The Cheap Labor Lobby that plagued Wilberforce has hardly vanished. The government of the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. possession in the Pacific, paid disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff $9 million to persuade former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay not to let the House crack down on its guest worker program under which tens of thousands of Asian women were imported to toil in sweatshops within barbed wire enclosures. Some who became pregnant were forced to have abortions by their employers. Others were assigned to bordellos.


Now, the Bush Administration wants to create new guest worker programs for the American mainland.


But where is our Wilberforce?



Rated PG for thematic material involving slavery, and some mild language.


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

September 9, 2007

2Blowhards interviews Gregory Cochran on Iraq

As I've mentioned before, although I was highly skeptical of the Iraq Attaq in 2002, my big mistake was that I didn't trust my friend Greg Cochran's assessment that Iraq had no functioning nuclear weapons program. (Here's an email from Cochran that Jerry Pournelle posted on his website on October 14, 2002.)

Here on the one hand were the assembled ranks of the Great and the Good telling us that we had to worry intensely about the possibility of Saddam building the Bomb in his underground laboratories, and there on the other hand was Greg Cochran saying that a quick look at publicly available information shows that no way could Saddam afford to build a Bomb. Now, I reasoned, obviously, Greg is smarter than the average big shot in government and media. In fact, he might be smarter than anybody in government and media. But is he smarter than all of them put together?

As we know now, when it came to the great question upon which the history of this decade hinged, the answer was: Yes; yes he was.

Michael Blowhard of 2Blowhards thinks we ought to try to learn from how Cochran figured it out, and is conducting a two part interview with him. Here's an excerpt from the first part:

2B: When did you start to make sense of the current mess?

Cochran: I knew enough about nuclear weapons development to make my own estimate of what was going on in Iraq. It was obvious to me that Administration was full of shit back in late 2002, either lying and/or totally deluded.

2B: How did you know that?

Cochran: I looked at freely available evidence. For example, when the Feds started telling us that Iraq was a nuclear menace, I knew that the hardest step in making a bomb is obtaining fissionable materials, and I knew what the four ways of making those fissionable materials were (breeder reactors, gaseous diffusion plant, centrifuge, calutron), their costs and difficulty, and it seemed to me that none of them were possible (while remaining undetected) in Iraq, considering sanctions, inspections, aerial recon, negligible local talent, and being stony broke.

Since I read the paper every single day, I knew roughly how much oil Saddam was smuggling out by truck and how big a kickback he was getting on the oil-for-food exports. A horseback guess said that the whole Iraqi state was running on a billion dollars a year. Took about fifteen minutes of Googling to determine that. Not much to pay for an army, secret police, palaces out the wazoo, and an invisible, undetectable Manhattan project. Which was right on the money, as later laid out in reports by Duelfer and Paul Volcker.

I'm told that the CIA doesn't do this kind of capacity analysis, why, I dunno. I've also heard that they had only one guy in the entire agency who knew enough to do the technical-capacity analysis I just mentioned and that he was working on something else. They don't have a lot of physicists, partly because they pay peanuts, partly because it's a hateful place to work where you need a key to go to the bathroom. Sheesh, they don't even play "Secret Agent Man" in the elevator. There were plenty of people at DOE who could have done that kind of capacity analysis -- but the Administration refused to listen to the technical experts.

2B: What do you hear from your friends in the field?

Cochran: They tell me that there's not one political appointee in the government who could do that analysis. Likely true. That must always have been the case. However, the Bush people seem to pay no attention to technical expertise, ever. They don't believe in it. As far as I can tell, their position is that everything ever said by anybody is propaganda. Projection? Ad Hominem rules ok, there is no other argument. Steve Sailer calls it "marketing-major post-modernism."

2B: How did your reasoning proceed?

Cochran: When I began to hear people claiming that Iraq was a big backer of international terrorism, in particular, anti-American terror, I knew that every single article touching upon this subject in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal over the past twenty years said otherwise. When I checked later, official US-GOV statements did too, up until late 2001. The stories I remembered had Saddam down as the fourth-largest funder of the one of the main Palestinian organizations and, once upon a time, a backer of one of the less memorable factions in Lebanon, nobody you've ever heard of. Everything I'd ever heard said that the Mukhabarat spend most of its time looking to whack Iraqi exiles.

In other words, never a big player in that game, too busy with the Iran-Iraq war in the '80s, too broke in the '90s. Everybody knew that the Baathists had been a spent force, nothing that would attract any young and coming hothead, for at least thirty years.

When I heard people talk about how civilized and secular and educated Iraq was, I started out remembering how they'd torn the Hashemite royal family to bloody pieces in the streets back in '58. As I said, not a real middle East aficionado, but that incident is hard to forget. When Wolfowitz talked about literacy, I looked it up in the online CIA Factbook: 60% adult illiteracy, worse than any of their neighbors. When he said they didn't have pesky holy cities as in Saudi Arabia, I thought to myself "Karbala? " -- I guess I did remember something from those medieval histories.

And of course I noticed when the IAEA inspectors followed up about 30 of our tips and every one came up dry. I figured our entire case was wrong, a product of fantasy.

Judging from the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, I figured low-level guerrilla resistance in Iraq was more likely than not. Partly came to that conclusion because of recent examples in the Middle East, partly because of what I've read of the long-running story of nationalism and anti-colonialism over the last hundred years and more: books like Alistair Horne's "A Savage War of Peace," accounts of the Boer War, the Philippine Insurrection, Maximilian in Mexico, Portugal's endless colonial wars in Africa, and Vietnam of course.

2B: What are some of the reasons so many observers went so wrong?

Cochran: I think that most people writing about international politics don't have much useable history. They keep making the same two analogies (everything is either Munich or Vietnam) because they simply don't know any other history, not that they really know much about Vietnam or WWII either.

I also think that they have zero quantitative knowledge. Comparisons of Saddam's Iraq and Hitler's Germany used to bug me, since Germany had the second largest economy in the world and was a real contender, while Iraq had the fortieth largest GNP and didn't have a pot to piss in.

I once assumed people were deliberately lying, but now I think that they simply don't have any quantitative picture of the world at all. One, two, three -- many! In the same way, people who equate the dangers of jihadism with that of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union really don't know big from small, don't know anything about the roots of national power. I think most writers and columnists are innumerate, just like the average American. Perhaps more so. If they could count, why the hell would they have gone into opinion writing?

2B: Is everyone involved in the great game inept?

Cochran: I think that some of the Washington lifers know what they're doing, particularly in less-technical areas. There are plenty of people in DOE -- Los Alamos and Livermore and Sandia -- who know exactly what they're talking about. As for the generals, a mixed bag. Some knew what they were talking about, some were downright dense. I'd say that Tommy Franks was effectively stupid. So was Sanchez, so was Odierno, who is still there as #2. In different ways. I'm not sure that any commander we've tried is what you'd call smart, in the sense that Sherman, Grant, Nimitz and Spruance were smart. Since Bush wanted people who "believe in the mission," it was hard to get good execution, considering that mission is and always was stupid.

[More]


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

My new VDARE.com column:

Pierre Manent: Facing The National Question In France

By Steve Sailer

The French have so assiduously cultivated their knack for glib philosophizing that most Americans less credulous than professors of English literature have lost all interest in French intellectual life. They sense that the French are more interested in expounding novelties than truths.

This state of affairs is doubly unfortunate. That handful of contemporary French thinkers who are immune to the Parisian infatuation with fashion and fads are heirs to a grand tradition, including Montesquieu and Tocqueville. Moreover, the French language may be more conducive to lucid rationality than any other tongue.

Finally, as irritating as French arrogance can be, it's often rooted in a genuine and admirable national pride, a patriotism seldom found in other European countries in the 21st Century.

Among the most acute and sagacious French political philosophers of our era is Pierre Manent. He began his career as the assistant to Raymond Aron, the liberal intellectual who served during the 1960s as the tribune of common sense in a France in love with insane ideologies—epitomized by Aron’s École nationale d'administration classmate and life-long rival, the pro-Communist existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.

Over the last decade, Manent has turned from the study of the great thinkers of the past to grappling with new problems—above all the European grandees' attempt to suffocate national self-rule within the bureaucratic European Union.

Manent's forthcoming work from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute is a short (103 pp) and highly readable book entitled Democracy Without Nations: The Fate of Self-Government in Europe, translated by Paul Seaton. It’s of particular interest to VDARE.com readers and to anyone concerned with the National Question—whether the nation-state can survive as the political expression of a particular people.

Elite opposition to nations, and thus to self-government, is not confined merely to Europe. On September 11, 2001, the Melbourne Age reported on former President Bill Clinton's speech to an Australian confab:

"'[Clinton] discussed the immigration issue in Australia and he took a position on it,'" said Tom Hogan, president of Vignette Corporation, host of the exclusive forum. 'The president believes the world will be a better place if all borders are eliminated—from a trade perspective, from the viewpoint of economic development and in welcoming [the free movement of] people from other cultures and countries,' Mr. Hogan said. Mr. Clinton … said he supported the ultimate wisdom of a borderless world for people and for trade."["Open borders to all:" Clinton, By Garry Barker, Melbourne Age, September 11, 2001]

Manent's reaction to 9/11 was similar to that of VDARE.com—we cited a once-famous poem by Rudyard Kipling:

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return."

Manent writes:

"In my view, the most deeply troubling information conveyed by the event … was this: present-day humanity is marked by much more profound, much more intractable separations than we had thought. … Before that fateful day we spoke so glibly of ‘differences’ … [which] could only be light and superficial, easy to combine, easy to welcome and accommodate in a reconciled humanity whose dazzling appearance would be enlivened by these differences. This was such an aesthetic vision—a tourist's view of human things!"

The contrast between Manent's French clarity and the intentionally opaque and woozy ideas rationalizing the growing dominance of the EU can be striking. He continues:

"Today, all of us—at least in Europe—are moved and even carried away by … a passion for resemblance. It is no longer simply a matter of recognizing and respecting the humanity of each human being. We are required to see the other as the same as ourselves. And if we cannot stop ourselves from perceiving what is different about him, we reproach ourselves for doing so, as if it were a sin." [MORE]


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

Whatever happened to the federal civil service exam?

In its mid-20th Century prime, the federal government matched up reasonably well in efficiency and effectiveness against, say, Sears-Roebuck. Today, however, it's blown away by Wal-Mart's relentless improvements. From my American Conservative article:

For example, in June, while the Senate was blithely considering mandating a convoluted new immigration system for the federal bureaucracy to administer, the State Department's nearly century-old responsibility for issuing passports was melting down under the strain of merely a moderate increase in demand predictably caused by a law passed three years before. In an era of cheap networked computing, many Americans still had their summer travel plans ruined by federal incompetence. ...

Clearly, growing economic inequality leaves the civil service hard pressed to compete for the finest workers versus Goldman Sachs's bonuses and Google's stock options.

Ameliorating the pay gap would be expensive. Much cheaper, yet seemingly unthinkable in the current climate, would be for the federal government to do a better job of choosing among it job applicants by employing a tool used by both colleges and the military in picking whom to take: standardized testing.

In fact, the feds themselves once had an excellent test for entry-level job applicants. One of the last malignant relics of the Carter Administration is the enduring hash it made of civil servant hiring by abolishing the Professional and Administrative Career Examination (PACE) in January 1981.

That this disastrous step has disappeared down the memory hole exemplifies the reigning prejudice in modern America against publicly discussing how best to select people. In private, selection is increasingly an obsession, with the competition to win admission to elite colleges (and even, among the New York media class, elite preschools) ever-growing. Ironically, one of the most popular hobbies to emerge in recent decades has been "fantasy football," which is nothing but selection: fans draft players and then see whose "team" has the best statistics each Sunday.

Yet, nobody wonders about how to select better civil servants. ...

Testing has been shown to work well for selecting federal white-collar employees as well. A 1986 study by Frank L. Schmidt of the federal Office of Personnel Management found that hiring "on valid measures of cognitive ability, rather than on non-test procedures (mostly evaluations of education and experience), produces … a 9.7% increase in output among new hires." Indeed, problem-solving skills may be more useful in government than in private industry because having a salesman's personality is less important.

Compared to soldiers, testing for entry level hiring is perhaps even more crucial for civilians because civil servants are notoriously hard to fire. Moreover, the feds mostly promote from within, seldom headhunting for middle level managers from the private sector.

Hence, government workers are rather like students at the top universities, who are almost never flunked out. At Harvard, 98 percent of freshmen are allowed to graduate, which puts intense stress on Harvard's admission process to not let in clunkers. So, despite the SAT's infamous political incorrectness, Harvard demands high SAT scores, with incoming students averaging about 1500 out of a possible 1600. Whatever their other failings, their SAT scores ensure they have the smarts to make it through Harvard.

Similarly, the federal civil service once invested in increasingly sophisticated brainpower tests to identify young people who could prove competent senior managers in future decades. The Junior Management Assistant test debuted in 1948, followed by the Federal Service Entrance Examination (FSEE) in 1955, a test roughly comparable to the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) now required by grad schools.

In 1972, a lawsuit claimed that that the FSEE was biased because blacks and Hispanics didn't score as well as whites on average. So, the Nixon Administration deep-sixed it and introduced the sophisticated PACE, which was elaborately validated as predicting performance in 118 federal jobs. The PACE consisted of multiple subtests, which could be weighted differently for each post.

Frustratingly, despite PACE's impressive predictive power, blacks and Latinos continued to tally lower on it. In another federal discrimination case, the defeated Carter Administration signed a consent decree in January 1981 agreeing to abolish PACE. Workarounds were "temporarily" implemented until a non-discriminatory general test could be devised.

Twenty-six years later, the Luevano decree's makeshifts still control federal hiring procedures. (No such new test has proven feasible.) Federal hiring has devolved into a decentralized hodge-podge. There is some job-related testing, but most agencies emphasize credentials, and assess them in a mindlessly mechanical fashion to boot. ...

But, hey, nobody seems to mind. Evidently, it's good enough for government work.

Upcoming review: "In the Valley of Elah"

By the way, for some reason, Hollywood is releasing a few October-like movies in September, so my next review will be "In the Valley of Elah," a heavy-duty Iraq War aftermath drama from Paul Haggis of "Crash," with Tommy Lee Jones, Susan Sarandon, and Charlize Theron.


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

"Lawrence of Arabia" on DVD

Here's an excerpt from my review in the American Conservative magazine:


When your television dies, a trip to the home entertainment showroom, with its massed ranks of the latest monitors all displaying the same glorious nature documentary for convenient comparison shopping will quickly convince you that your initial plan of buying a modestly larger replacement tube for $299 was a naïve delusion. How could you ever be satisfied with a pathetic 32 inch CRT when the gazelles gamboling on the Serengeti are so luminous on a plasma screen, so detailed on an HDTV, and so humongous on a 56" screen?

But when you bring your visual technology breakthrough home, you notice that you seldom actually watch nature documentaries. You mostly just watch people talking, and the thousands of dollars you spent isn't making David Letterman's interview of Richard Simmons any less depressing.

To postpone disillusionment, TV buyers should also pick up a grand movie on DVD. And what better than the two-disk version of "Lawrence of Arabia?" Unlike just about every other film you might buy rather than rent, you could watch "Lawrence" a second time.

Approaching its 45th anniversary, "Lawrence's" place in the pantheon is secure. Director David Lean, cinematographer Freddie Young, and composer Maurice Jarre complement a tremendous cast, especially Alec Guinness as astute Prince Feisal, the future king of Iraq, and Anthony Quinn as choleric Auda, the prototypical Big Man.

Often extolled as the film that must be seen in the theatre, "Lawrence" is actually better from your couch, because you can then pause it to look up whether Medina is north of Mecca or vice versa. (Inexplicably, there are no maps in the 217-minute war movie). And (don't mention this to your cinephile friends) you can fast-forward through the second dozen times Peter O'Toole, as WWI archaeologist-warrior T.E. Lawrence, gallops his camel through the stark desert scenery he found so much more "clean" than damp and overgrown England. (Perhaps the British were better at empire than Americans have proven so far because it gave some of their best men the chance for fun in the sun that our West furnishes domestically?)

Movie critics today are obsessed with sniffing out the political implications of the latest releases, such as the suspicion that the sex comedy "Knocked Up" was insufficiently pro-abortion or that the Xbox mannerist Spartans of "300" were ancient Republicans.

Few attempt, however, to draw lessons from the handful of classic films that would reward serious analysis. Among its numerous virtues, "Lawrence" provides insight into America's quandary in Iraq by offering a vivid primer on what William S. Lind calls "asymmetrical" war.

By the way, I bought the $299 old-fashioned tube TV a couple of years ago, and am perfectly satisfied.


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

Back to School special

Oraculations has a posting for all you public school teachers out there:

After being interviewed by the school administration, the teaching prospect said, "Let me see if I've got this right: You want me to go into that room with all those kids, correct their disruptive behavior, observe them for signs of abuse, monitor their dress habits, censor their T-shirt messages, and instill in them a love for learning. You want me to check their backpacks for weapons, wage war on drugs and sexually transmitted diseases, and raise their sense of self esteem and personal pride. You want me to teach them patriotism and good citizenship, sportsmanship and fair play, and how to register to vote, balance a checkbook, and apply for a job. You want me to check their heads for lice, recognize signs of antisocial behavior, and make sure that they all pass the state exams.

You want me to provide them with an equal education regardless no matter their handicaps, and communicate regularly with their parents by letter, telephone, newsletter, and report card. You want me to do all this with a piece of chalk, a blackboard, a bulletin board, a few books, a big smile, and a starting salary that qualifies me for food stamps. You want me to do all this and then you tell me...


I CAN'T PRAY?"


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

September 4, 2007

My review of James R. Flynn's What Is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect

On VDARE.com I offer the first review of the new book on the Flynn Effect by Flynn himself:


Despite hysterical politically-motivated attacks on them that have sometimes turned violent, researchers into human intelligence have by now produced a coherent and compelling scientific picture, as explained in books such as the 1994 best-seller The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray.

With one exception.

For uncertain reasons, all over the world, raw IQ scores have been rising, on average at the rate of about 3 points per decade. Thus, a test performance that a half century ago would have ranked at the 84th percentile (a score of 115) now is only good enough for the 50th percentile (a score of 100).

When IQ test publishers revise and renormalize their exams every decade or two, they have to make scoring tougher to make the mean stay at 100.

This is very strange. One of the more dubious-sounding implications is that if you go far enough back into the past, the average person would have been a complete dolt, and the greatest genius of that earlier age would have been no smarter than George W. Bush or John Kerry.

Rising test scores were pointed out by Reed Tuddenham in 1948, when he compared the better performance on the U.S. military's IQ tests of the draftees of WWII compared to WWI.

In the early 1980s, James R. Flynn, an American-born political scientist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, began to call this phenomenon to academic and then public attention. In his honor, in The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray christened rising IQ scores the "Flynn Effect".
...

Mainstream IQ researchers, who are used to being demonized when they are not being ignored, admire Flynn, who is politically a man of the left, for his fairness, geniality, insight, and devotion to advancing knowledge. The Flynn Effect has often been seized upon to dismiss IQ testing in general, especially by race-deniers who assume that it will cause racial gaps in IQ to converge out of existence. Flynn himself, however, has never joined the mob in unfairly attacking psychometrics—or psychometricians.

Nevertheless, the Flynn Effect did leave Flynn skeptical about IQ tests. Ulric Neisser wrote in The American Scientist in 1997: "Flynn concludes that the tests do not measure intelligence but only a minor sort of 'abstract problem-solving ability' with little practical significance."

But Flynn has now written a book offering his considered explanation of the Flynn Effect: What is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect. (The Psychometrics Centre at Cambridge University has posted online a lecture by Flynn summarizing his book.)

Strikingly, Flynn has changed his mind. He now sees the Flynn Effect not as undermining IQ testing, but as validating it. After decades of reflection, Flynn believes people really are more intelligent in some ways today — just as their raw IQ scores suggest. The reason: we get more mental exercise now than in olden times. [More]


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

September 2, 2007

If this AP "news" article had been an online debate, Godwin's Law would have been invoked in the first 100 words.

The Associated Press reminded us on Saturday, September 1, the 68th Anniversary of Nazi Switzerland's invasion of
Poland, that the Swiss are still a bunch of Nazis. Let us never forget how the Swiss Nazi juggernaut steamrollered across Europe and is just waiting to pounce once again:


Swiss deportation policy draws criticism

By FRANK JORDANS, Associated Press Writer
Sat Sep 1,
8:17 AM ET

GENEVA - The campaign poster was blatant in its xenophobic symbolism: Three white sheep kicking out a black sheep over a caption that read "for more security." The message was not from a fringe force in Switzerland's political scene but from its largest party.

The nationalist Swiss People's Party is proposing a deportation policy that anti-racism campaigners say evokes Nazi-era practices. Under the plan, entire families would be expelled if their children are convicted of a violent crime, drug offenses or benefits fraud.

The party is trying to collect the 100,000 signatures needed to force a referendum on the issue. If approved in a referendum, the law would be the only one of its kind in
Europe.

"We believe that parents are responsible for bringing up their children. If they can't do it properly, they will have to bear the consequences," Ueli Maurer, president of the People's Party, told The Associated Press.

Ronnie Bernheim of the Swiss Foundation against Racism and Anti-Semitism said the proposal was similar to the Nazi practice of "Sippenhaft" — or kin liability — whereby relatives of criminals were held responsible for his or her crimes and punished equally.

Similar practices occurred during Stalin's purges in the early days of the
Soviet Union and the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution in China, when millions were persecuted for their alleged ideological failings.

"As soon as the first 10 families and their children have been expelled from the country, then things will get better at a stroke," said Maurer, whose party controls the Justice Ministry and shares power in an unwieldy coalition that includes all major parties.

He explained that his party has long campaigned to make deportation compulsory for convicted immigrants rather than an optional and rarely applied punishment.

The party claims foreigners — who make up about 20 percent of the population — are four times more likely to commit crimes than Swiss nationals.

Bernheim said the vast majority of
Switzerland's immigrants are law-abiding and warned against generalizations.

"If you don't treat a complicated issue with the necessary nuance and care, then you won't do it justice," he said.

Commentators have expressed horror over the symbolism used by the People's Party to make its point.

"This way of thinking shows an obvious blood-and-soil mentality," read one editorial in the
Zurich daily Tages-Anzeiger, calling for a broader public reaction against the campaign.

So far, however, there has been little popular backlash against the posters.

"We haven't had any complaints," said Maurer.

The city of
Geneva — home to Switzerland's humanitarian traditions as well as the European headquarters of the United Nations and the U.N. Refugee Agency, or UNHCR — said the campaign was likely to stir up intolerance.

The UNHCR said the law would run contrary to the U.N. refugee convention, of which
Switzerland is a signatory.

But observers say the People's Party's hardline stance on immigration could help it in the Oct. 21 national elections. In 2004, the party successfully campaigned for tighter immigration laws using the image of black hands reaching into a pot filled with Swiss passports.

"It's certainly no coincidence that the People's Party launched this initiative before the elections," said Oliver Geden, a political scientist at the Berlin Institute for International and Security Affairs.

He said provocative campaigns such as this had worked well for the party in the past.

"The symbol of the black sheep was clearly intended to have a double meaning. On the one hand there's the familiar idea of the black sheep, but a lot of voters are also going to associate it with the notion of dark-skinned drug dealers," said Geden.

The party also has put forward a proposal to ban the building of minaret towers alongside mosques. And one of its leading figures, Justice Minister Christoph Blocher, said he wants to soften anti-racism laws because they prevent freedom of speech.


Clearly, their support for freedom of speech proves that Nazi blood still runs thick in Swiss veins.


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