Morning vs. Night People

From the December Atlantic Monthly:

Being a morning person or a night owl doesn’t just determine when you start or end your workday; your internal clock may help define your psychology as well. A Spanish researcher found that our preference for engaging in activities earlier or later in the day shapes both our perceptions and our interactions. The author gave personality tests to 360 university students, whom he describes as a “proper sample,” noting that the circadian rhythms of students “are not much under the influence of time schedules and social patterns.” (Despite the occasional all-nighter, students presumably can follow their preferred sleep schedules more easily than working adults can.) His results offer new evidence that morning and evening types think differently. Early risers prefer to gather knowledge from concrete information. They reach conclusions through logic and analysis. Night owls are more imaginative and open to unconventional ideas, preferring the unknown and favoring intuitive leaps on their way to reaching conclusions. Social behavior diverges as well: Morning people are more likely to be self-controlled and exhibit “upstanding” conduct; they respect authority, are more formal, and take greater pains to make a good impression. (Earlier research also suggests that they are less likely to hold radical political opinions.) Evening people, by contrast, are “independent” and “nonconforming,” and more reluctant to listen to authority—which suggests that teachers may have several reasons to prefer those students who wake up in time for class.

—“Morning and Evening Types: Exploring Their Personality Styles,” Juan Francisco Díaz-Morales, Personality and Individual Differences

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

Acronym suggestions needed

The subprime meltdown, which, like so many problems is hitting blacks and Latinos harder than whites while Asians are least affected of all, reminds us that the old terms "whites" and "minorities" are increasingly out of date, since the former now often means in effect "Whites plus Asians" while the latter often means "minorities minus Asians." So, we need some new catchy acronyms. Yesterday, I used:

NAM - Non-Asian Minorities

WaA - Whites and Asians

But you can probably come up with something better in the Comments.

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

The Subprime Meltdown: The NYT finally gets a clue (sort of)

"End of the Housing Bubble: Minorities Hurt Most" reports the New York Times for the umpteenth time:

What's Behind the Race Gap?

Last year, blacks were 2.3 times more likely, and Hispanics twice as likely, to get high-cost loans as whites after adjusting for loan amounts and the income of the borrowers, according to an analysis of loans reported under the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. (Asians are somewhat less likely than whites to take out high-cost loans.)

Researchers and industry officials agree that there is probably no single explanation for the lending patterns, though the history of banks’ avoiding minority neighborhoods, the practice known as “redlining,” is a good place to start.

It's the Original Sin Theory of Race: any time, any where blacks or Hispanics mess up, white people have to be the original cause. Obviously, income is hardly the only factor in creditworthiness: expenditures relative to income and other sources of wealth, such as inheritances, play a role. (It's bizarre that we've become so brain dead from political correctness that nobody dares even point out that white people tend to have wealthier relatives than blacks and Latinos have.)

If you read between the lines of the article, however, you'll see that one cause of NAMs (Non-Asian Minorities) getting hit harder by ridiculous subprime mortgages was the government's long war against redlining:

The biggest home lenders in minority neighborhoods are mortgage companies that provide only subprime loans, not full-service banks that do a range of lending.

It may be that these borrowers do not have access to traditional banks, because there are no branches near them. The Community Reinvestment Act, enacted 30 years ago, was intended to address redlining by forcing banks to make loans in lower-income areas. But the law’s provisions do not apply to banks in neighborhoods where they have no branches.

“You could go into a middle-class area in Queens County that is white and there will be lots of banks on the shopping street,” said Alfred A. DelliBovi, president of the Federal Home Loan Bank of New York and a deputy secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the first Bush administration. “If you go to an area that is equal income and that is black, you won’t see many.”

Banks typically locate branches where they believe they will get the most deposits. A lower savings rate and a distrust of banks stemming from a legacy of redlining may help explain why there are fewer branches in minority neighborhoods, Mr. DelliBovi said.

Huh?

Let's put it in plain English: a big reason that legitimate banks stay away from NAM neighborhoods is because if they operate in NAM neighborhoods but don't hand out loans to NAMs at the same rate they provide loans to WaAs (Whites and Asians), the government will sue them for racial discrimination. So, they just stay far away, leaving NAM neighborhoods to high pressure boiler room operations.

Finally, toward the end of the article, the reporters toss in an undigested quote that hints at the real story, but still ignores the government's role:

“If we turn the clock back 30 years ago, we had redlining,” said Nicholas Retsinas, director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. “In the last few years, we have had the opposite — an overextension of credit by lenders and an overextension by borrowers.”

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

More subprime clues

The NYT prints a handy chart of the ten towns in America with the lowest ratio of subprime mortgages to total mortgages, and it ends up being rich San Francisco and nine classic college towns, such as Ithaca, NY, home to Cornell.

Besides the obvious (college professors are smarter than average), there's the construction boom on ritzy campuses these days, so even construction workers are doing well in college towns And there's typically no dirt shortage around college towns, such as Ames and Iowa City, home to the two big public Iowa universities, which tend to be located in the middle of nowhere in particular.

Contributing to reasonable home prices is the fact that many places on the list are economic oases, surrounded by areas where jobs are dwindling, which helps depress housing demand. Yet the college towns themselves are thriving: The peak years for American births since the baby boom were 1989 to 1993, and college enrollments are swelling as never before. Many communities on the list also have big medical centers or flourishing research operations.

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

Beyond satire

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

How to Read a Noose
by Troy Duster

Troy Duster is past president of the American Sociological Association and director of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge at New York University, where he is a professor of sociology. He is also a chancellor's professor at the University of California at Berkeley. His books include Backdoor to Eugenics (Routledge, 2003).

Now about those nooses. News media highlight events with dramatic, immediate, personal content because they are symbolic violence, evoking the long history of physical violence. But such coverage typically neglects more-fundamental acts that are much more consequential to the persistence of racial hierarchy in American society.

In June the recently appointed chief justice of the United States, John Roberts, presented a decision much more far-reaching than any symbolic noose. "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race," asserted Roberts, "is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." Roberts said this to justify his deciding vote in a 5-4 decision to revoke a plan to increase racial integration of the heavily segregated Louisville, Ky., school system. Dissenting from this reasoning, Justice Stephen Breyer discussed the tragic irony of Roberts's use of the language of colorblindness to overrule any practices or policies that limit the historic privilege of whites. Without using a noose, the Supreme Court's defenders of white privilege successfully appropriated rhetoric from the civil-rights movement, morphing the symbolic language to effectively sustain the old racial order. Both George Bushes no doubt approved.

Forget the nooses for a moment, and look at the rest of the front page. I find myself wondering, for instance, about the racial composition of Blackwater troops in Iraq. Those private-sector contractors are paid five and six times more than their heavily African-American and Latino public-sector counterparts. While the media have focused on the noose on the doorknob, one sees nary a word about what looks to me like the reincarnation of the white army of segregationist 1917, but now so much better compensated. And what might Justices Roberts, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas have to say about this development? Well, they're colorblind. Confronted with the Blackwater example, they might unanimously argue that private market forces are productively at work.

My point is that market forces and Supreme Court decisions are far more effective than symbolic nooses in maintaining structures of white privilege. But the day that Blackwater, say, is effectively pressured to integrate, don't be surprised if there's a front-page Times story about a noose on the door of a new African-American recruit.

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

"The Difference Myth"

From the Boston Globe:

The difference myth

We shouldn't believe the increasingly popular claims that boys and girls think differently, learn differently, and need to be treated differently

Here's my favorite line in the article:

Scientists have turned up some intriguing findings of anatomical differences between the sexes.

Who would have imagined it? It's amazing what science can accomplish!

Here's my favorite comment from Boston Globe reader Aging Cynic:

Anyone who goes within a mile of this subject in Boston is toast. Ask Larry Summers. If the "progressive" echo chamber wants me to nod my head, they can make me do it. (They can't make me like it, however). This issue is so over. I understand when people won't take "no" for an answer. Why won't they now take "yes"? Do I need to be REEEALLY sincere?

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

Frank Gehry's Toontown at MIT

From the AP:

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is suing renowned architect Frank Gehry, alleging there are serious design flaws in the Stata Center, a building celebrated for its unconventional walls and radical angles.

The school alleges the center, completed in spring 2004, has persistent leaks, drainage problems and mold growing on its brick exterior. It says accumulations of snow and ice have fallen dangerously from window boxes and other areas of its roofs, blocking emergency exits and causing damage.

Gehry, designer of the UFO crash Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, needs to lawyer up in a hurry. Disney might sue him for plagiarism, because his MIT building looks an awful lot like Roger Rabbit's Toontown at Disneyland, just silverier:


I love a joke as much as the next guy, but the reason we have new jokes is because jokes get old, fast. I'm sure that when MIT decided to spend $200 million (or whatever they budgeted before it ended up costing $300 million) on this, it must have seemed pretty funny at the time. But the problem with a $300 million dollar joke building is that it ought to last long enough to wear out the joke. Maybe that's Gehry's latest conceptual breakthrough: design it so badly that it will fall apart only a few years after it's not funny anymore.

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

Why is science no longer interesting to Westerners?

President Eisenhower brought physicist I.I. Rabi with him from his stint as president of Columbia U. and had Rabi bring in more scientific advisers for him, such as the prodigious John von Neumann. In contrast, President Bush's official science adviser is a Democrat, which shows the current administration's level of interest in science.

But disrespect for science is hardly a Republican failing these days, as the remarkable lack of defense for James Watson (a lifelong Democrat, by the way) showed.

In the 1950s, Americans respected scientists. Why? Probably because they had shown they could build a Really Big Bomb. I'm wondering if the lack of respect for science shown today in the Watson Brouhaha stems from the commercialization of the fruits of science. I mean, really, did Watson ever do an IPO? Is he a billionaire? He doesn't even own the land under the house he built at Cold Spring Harbor Lab.

The more science is seen as a prop in making the big bucks, the less respect there will be for honest scientists who tell unpopular truth, and the more money will be showered on lecturers like Malcolm Gladwell.

During the Watson Denunciations, a reader attended an event at the famously intellectual 92nd Street Y featuring the prototypical scientist-entrepreneur of our era, Craig Venter of the Human Genome Project:

I don’t know if Venter is really a giant of science, but they had him “interviewed” by some NPR ninny (at the 92^nd st y) who did 70% of the talking. Ridiculous. Not many questions, and those that were asked were asinine, like asking about when we will find the genes for consciousness...

It seems pretty clear that the average person’s knowledge of this field is pathetic. The crowd seemed to be most excited about how genetic engineering would solve … global warming. No kidding. And they say New Yorkers are intelligent.

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

Finally, something non-boring about Hillary Clinton

Even though she's the single person most likely to be elected President next year, I almost never write about Hillary Clinton because, frankly, after all these long tedious years of hearing about her, my eyes glaze over just reading her name. In fact, to write this, I had to go look up whether there was one L or two Ls in "Hillary." *

But, now I've finally heard (from Mickey Kaus) about Hillary's "body person," the ineffably lovely Huma Abedin. Is Hillary's Saudi-raised scheduler, who is of South Asian Muslim descent, a deep plant of the Saudi intelligence service sent undercover with Hillary? Who knows? Whatever, it's much more fun to make up stuff about Huma than to think about Hillary.

-----------

* To my surprise, I discovered that her name is spelled with just one L, but the L follows two consecutive Is. The second I is capitalized, however, so nobody previously ever noticed that it's spelled "HiIlary."

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

The Syrian Jews of Brooklyn

The recent NYT Magazine article by Zev Chafets on the rich and rapidly growing enclave of 75,000 Syrian Jews in Brooklyn is quite fascinating. Unlike some other Orthodox Jewish groups, they dress in modern clothes, which facilitates their making a huge amount of money as merchants. (Some had forged close business ties with the late Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart). Under an Edict put forward in 1935 and most recently reaffirmed by community leaders in 2006, they utterly ostracize anybody who marries a Gentile, along with their descendants.

“Never accept a convert or a child born of a convert,” Kassin told me by phone, summarizing the message. “Push them away with strong hands from our community. Why? Because we don’t want gentile characteristics.” ...

“It’s really a matter of statistics,” [Rabbi Elie Abadie ] explained to me. “Except for the Orthodox, the American Jewish community is shrinking, disappearing. In two generations, most of their grandchildren won’t even be Jews. But our community is growing. We have large families, five or six children. And only a tiny fraction of our kids leave. The Edict is what makes that true.”

Abadie and Kassin agree that the vast majority of SY youth abide by the strictures of the Edict. “Ninety-nine percent accept it,” Kassin said. “When someone doesn’t, it’s painful, but it’s better to lose a kid here and there and save the community. Families get sick over it, sure, but that’s how it is.”

Kassin knows this from personal experience. His sister Anna ran off with a gentile. Naturally it was a great scandal in the community, but the chief rabbi didn’t bend the rules for his daughter. “We cut her off,” Jakie Kassin told me. “We didn’t see her for 25 years. But we never stopped hoping she’d come back. Finally, after all these years, she made contact. We told her she was welcome to come back, but not with her husband or kids. She’s not here yet, but we do talk on the telephone.”

In addition to the strictures imposed by the Edict in instances of proposed intermarriage, any outsider who wants to marry into a Syrian family — even a fellow Jew — is subject to thorough genealogical investigation. That means producing proof, going back at least three generations and attested to by an Orthodox rabbi, of the candidates’ kosher bona fides. This disqualifies the vast majority of American Jews, who have no such proof. “We won’t take them — not even if we go back three or four generations — if someone in their line was married by a Reform or Conservative rabbi, because they don’t perform marriages according to Orthodox law,” Kassin said. Even Orthodox candidates are screened, to make sure there are no gentiles or converts lurking in the family tree. ...

The force of the Edict is lasting: the children of people who have been excluded under the terms of the Edict are themselves declared ineligible to marry into the community.

The Syrian Jews of Brooklyn differ from Ashkenazi Jews in many ways: their birthrate is very high; their intermarriage rate with gentiles is miniscule; they show no interest in science, the arts, or ideology; they don't pursue higher education; they don't become doctors or lawyers; they don't seem concerned about making the world in general a better place; and very few Syrian Jews become celebrities. Well-known half-Syrian Jews include Jerry Seinfeld and Paula Abdul, but Dan Hedaya (an actor best known for looking like Richard Nixon) is perhaps the most famous celebrity raised in a Syrian Jewish environment.

The other prominent Syrian Jews tend to be businessmen who get caught in scandals, such as Crazy Eddie, the tri-state area electronics hawker of a generation ago. (There's an amusing Wikipedia page detailing the depths of the Antar family's fraud. I spent a couple of weeks in Manhattan in 1982 looking for a job, and I came to the conclusion that New Yorkers believed that Crazy Eddie was the second most famous person in the world, behind only George Steinbrenner.)

In other words, the Syrian Jews of Brooklyn are very Middle Eastern. This article reminds me that Greg Cochran has been tentatively kicking around for some time the idea that Middle Eastern-style clannishness is the wave of the future for humanity, that from a Darwinian perspective the ideals underlying the great accomplishments of Western Civilization -- curiosity, fair play, rule of law, free speech, and so forth -- are turning out to be a demographic dead-end. Perhaps the future belongs not to the Einsteins but to the Crazy Eddies?

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

Stoppard

Tom Stoppard's latest play Rock 'n' Roll about a Pink Floyd-loving Czech in 1968 has opened in New York. (Here's the NYT review.)

Stoppard, as I've mentioned before, is the only major Western European or North American fiction author to devote a substantial portion of his career to criticizing Communism. In the arts, what happened to Eastern Europe between 1917-1991 has otherwise pretty much disappeared down the old memory hole.

It's always a good idea to read a Stoppard play before seeing it. Stoppard works hard to make his plays as entertaining and stageworthy as possible, but he'll sacrifice initial intelligibility to make them deeper and richer. (Here's the script of Rock 'n' Roll.)

On the other hand, he keeps rewriting plays until he gets them right, so the book version you can buy sometimes isn't what you'll see. This was most notoriously true with his nine hour trilogy about the intellectual roots of the Russian Revolution, The Coast of Utopia. I found the book version of the London staging to be rather dull. But, by all accounts, the recent New York City re-staging was a triumph. So, I'm glad to see that the NYC version of the trilogy has just been published.

A reader comments:

Woah woah WOAH.

First of all, your judgment of the original as dull calls your taste into serious question. As a devoted acolyte of yours, I don't say that lightly.

Second of all, the main differences I noticed from reading the original several times and seeing each play twice in New York were these:

1) dumbed down--
not necessarily a terrible thing but occasionally annoying, and at times pointless or counterproductive.

For example, when Turgenev meets the nihilist on the Isle of Wight or wherever all the expats are for their holiday, the original has the nihilist give his big spiel and then the scene ends with the stark line of T's: "I don’t know what to call you." The staging ludicrously has a loud sound effect grow over the nihilist's speech, as if they didn’t have the courage of the writing's conviction, and then in response to "I don’t know what to call you" the nihilist shouts, unintentionally comically, "CALL ME BAZAROV!" Later, we have the name Bazarov explicitly cited as T's nihilist antihero. So anyone in the Broadway audience too stupid to appreciate the Isle of Wight scene will understand, under the weight of sledgehammer, that the guy T met was the inspiration for his book.

2) sold out to the libs--
Drastic rewrite of the ending to reassure the liberal Broadway audience that conservatism is bad and, notwithstanding the previous nine hours, progressivism is good. Herzen gives a clunky, glaringly out of place speech in the last few seconds explaining that the proto-Bolsheviks we met towards the end are in fact "disappointed conservatives." The actor, O'Byrne, rushed thru the lines that attempt to explain this absurdity, a crappy delivery but the wisest thing to do with such garbage material.

The beautiful lines about history having no culmination and knocking on endless doors in the mist were cut: “But history has no culmination! There is always as much in front as behind. There is no libretto. History knocks at a thousand gates at every moment, and the gatekeeper is chance. We shout into the mist for this one or that one to be opened for us, but through every gate there are a thousand more. " All that, gone. Wouldn’t want to offend the audience’s religion.

The line near the end picking up on the Ginger Cat idea--"What kind of beast is it, this Ginger Cat with its insatiable appetite for human sacrifice? This Moloch who promises that everything will be beautiful after we’re dead?"--is cut, making the appearance of the Ginger Cat in the first play utterly pointless.

Herzen's final anguished lines. "I imagine myself the future custodian of a broken statue, a blank wall, a desecrated grave, telling everyone who passes by, ‘Yes—yes, all this was destroyed by the revolution," are switched to "I imagine THEM [the nihilists] the future custodianS..." thus robbing the line of any dramatic development, any personal recognition, and of course putting all responsibility on the "disappointed conservatives" and none on our heroic liberals.

A total disaster. The first time I saw it I told myself I was misremembering the real script. So I brought it the second time and confirmed it.

THERE ARE NO HEROES.

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

Jason Malloy on the politics of IQ

Deep in the comments to his impressive GNXP post "James Watson Tells the Inconvenient Truth," Jason Malloy states:

The political implications of genetic differences are far from obvious, and if negative political consequences DO end up stemming from these findings, you know what? The majority of the blame can lay squarely at the feet of the Jerry Coynes of the world who absurdly refused to predicate or defend their principles on anything less than (tacitly confessed) fairytale lies of total genetic human equality.

Jerry Coyne and the intellectual and scientific community always had the choice to argue "It is 100% irrelevant if there are genetic differences, social justice X and political policies Y and J are predicated on ethical values K and Q"

But they didn't choose to make this argument. Instead they systematically cried and hollered and silenced and lied for 50 years. Like Coyne they just sulked and quietly dreaded and accepted that genetic differences would (and should) lead to a less just world. And then, accordingly, they turned their backs on every principle they should represent as humanists and scientists to try and bury and prevent any inconvenient revelations of such differences.

Coyne and company will switch gears abruptly and entirely in arguing the value system I suggest above, I fully assure you, but they will do so only too late, and they will only look like disingenuous fools to everyone in doing so.

So when the big news comes, if the American people make some dumb and illiberal choices about what to do about it, why don't you lay a large portion of the blame at the feet of the intellectual classes who were too narrowly ideological and myopic to try and prepare the public (and themselves) for it ethically and intellectually?

Or you can just scapegoat the truth seekers and truth tellers for all our problems, like most people - right and left - in this profoundly anti-intellectual culture

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

This Sublunary Realm versus the Mountains of the Moon

In my new VDARE.com column, I answer a Hispanic reader's challenge of my defense of James Watson, then consider a recurrent detrimental tendency in the history of thought:

The near-universal hypocrisy in what Americans do in private versus what they say in public about schooling is not an isolated example. Instead, it reflects the currently widespread assumption that there should be two completely divorced realms of thought:

- In the lower sphere of private life, we figure out how to make mundane decisions like where we'll buy a house using all the information and intuition available to us, such as our awareness of racial differences in academic performance and crime rates.

- In the higher sphere of public discourse, however, where public policy is discussed, much of this useful knowledge is simply off-limits. As Larry Summers, then the president of Harvard, discovered, there is much in the human sciences of which we are never supposed to speak.

This bifurcated mental model is strikingly similar to the dysfunctional conceptual map Renaissance natural philosophers, such as Galileo, inherited from the Ancient Greeks. According to Aristotle's still-dominant cosmology, there was a fundamental divide between the grubby "sublunary sphere" where we humans dwelled, and the higher celestial realm -- where, by definition, perfection reigned.

The sun and the planets revolved around the Earth embedded in crystalline spheres, the circle being the most ideal of all shapes. To make the observed data fit the presumption of circularity, the Alexandrine astronomer Ptolemy elaborated a baffling system of "epicycles," with smaller spheres embedded within larger spheres.

The Ptolemaic system is strangely reminiscent of the various Rube Goldbergian explanations popular today to explain away the racial test score gap. One example: Claude Steele's theory of "Stereotype Threat." Steele hypothesizes that stereotypes make minorities so scared of scoring badly on tests that their discomfort makes them score exactly as badly as the stereotype predicted they would! It's almost as unfalsifiable a theory as Ptolemy's was for 1500 years.

In the conventional wisdom of 1600, the moon, like all heavenly bodies, had to be a perfect sphere. It just had to be, even though it looks imperfect to your lying eyes:

"The dark spots on the moon that been visible to man throughout the ages were explained away as parts of the moon that absorbed and emitted light differently than other parts -- the surface itself was perfectly smooth."

When Galileo pointed his new telescope at the moon in 1609, however, he observed changing shadows that could only be cast by mountains. He announced:

"The Moon certainly does not possess a smooth and polished surface, but one rough and uneven, and just like the face of the Earth itself, is everywhere full of vast protuberances, deep chasms, and sinuosities."

This, and much other new evidence discovered with his telescope, caused Galileo to doubt that the celestial and sublunary spheres were fundamentally different. Adopting the heliocentric theory of the solar system, Galileo began to develop a theory of mechanics (one eventually brought to near-perfection by Newton) that, unlike Aristotle's, would work for both the heavens and the earth. [More]

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

"Michael Clayton"

From my American Conservative review of the legal thriller starring George Clooney:

"Michael Clayton" churns out the same old plot about a murderous multinational rubbing out whoever gets in its carcinogenic way.

Tilda Swinton, so aristocratic and androgynous that she makes Cate Blanchett look like Angelina Jolie, plays the corporate counsel for UNorth, which peddles its cancer-causing herbicide in 62 countries. She pays Clooney's law firm tens of millions to fight weed-killer lawsuits, but then their lead defense attorney (Tom Wilkinson of "In the Bedroom") goes all Howard Beale of "Network," ranting about how working for UNorth has put blood on his hands while stripping naked during a deposition.

This sounds entertaining, but isn't, because auteur Tony Gilroy ignores even the ripest targets for satire, such as the plaintiffs' contingency fee attorneys, always a colorful subspecies (Homo avaricious vulgaris). Instead, he maintains a steady tone of doleful indignation.

Our common law doesn't work well with cases in which blame can only be assigned statistically. Say the defendant's herbicide raises the chance of cancer by 50 percent. So, one out of three customers who get cancer are victims of the company, while two out of three aren't; but science can't tell which is which. The contingency fee attorneys bring suits from everybody who might have been harmed, while the defense tries to insinuate to the jury that the plaintiff deserved to get cancer. It's an ugly but fascinating slice of modern Americana, but not one you'll hear anything about from the one-sided "Michael Clayton."

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

So now we know what the Iraq War was for -- a Green Card!

"It was a guy ["Curveball"] trying to get his green card essentially, in Germany, and playing the system for what it was worth" -- Tyler Drumheller, former CIA official quoted by CBS

The BBC Reports:

Iraq war source's name revealed

A US TV network has revealed the name of "Curveball" - an Iraqi man whose information was central to the US government's argument to invade Iraq.

The CBS show 60 Minutes identifies him as Iraqi defector Rafid Ahmed Alwan. The programme says he arrived in a German refugee centre in 1999 where he lied to win asylum and was not the chemical expert he said he was.

His claims of mobile bio-weapons labs in Saddam Hussein's Iraq were backed until well after the 2003 invasion.

The CBS 60 Minutes programme airs on Sunday but material released on its web site says Curveball was "not only a liar, but also a thief and a poor student instead of the chemical engineering whiz he claimed to be".

It also says it assumes Mr Alwan is now living in Germany under a different name.

The programme says he claimed to be a star chemical engineer at a plant that made mobile biological weapons in Djerf al-Nadaf. However, its investigation showed he received only low marks in chemical engineering at university and was the subject of an arrest warrant for alleged theft from a TV production company he worked for in Baghdad.

The programme also includes footage of his wedding in 1993 in the Iraqi capital.

It quotes former CIA senior official Tyler Drumheller as saying: "It was a guy trying to get his green card essentially, in Germany, and playing the system for what it was worth."

German intelligence agents warned the US in a letter that there was no way to verify Mr Alwan's claims. However, his information was used in a speech by then Secretary of State Colin Powell at the UN to back military action in Iraq.

The 60 Minutes report says the information was passed on by then CIA director George Tenet, who denies ever seeing the German intelligence letter. The programme says Mr Alwan's story unravelled once CIA agents finally confronted him with evidence contradicting his claims.

Back in November 2005, Col Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff to Mr Powell, told the BBC's Carolyn Quinn he was aware the Germans had said that they had told the CIA of the unreliability. "And then you begin to speculate, you begin to wonder was this intelligence spun; was it politicised; was it cherry-picked; did in fact the American people get fooled?," Col Wilkerson said.

A presidential intelligence commission into the matter found that Curveball was a liar and an alcoholic.

I can't wait to hear libertarian Open Borders advocates explain that this just shows that we wouldn't have to fight pointless wars based on misinformation if we just gave Green Cards to all the alcoholic liars in the world.

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

A Jewish Advantage

In Slate, William Saletan has a tussle with what he calls "Jewgenics:"

Are Jews a race? Is Jewish intelligence genetic?

If these notions make you cringe, you're not alone. Many non-Jews find them offensive. Actually, scratch that. I have no idea whether non-Jews find them offensive. But I imagine that they do, which is why Jews like me wince at any suggestion of Jewish genetic superiority. We don't even want to talk about it.

Actually, a bunch of us did talk about it, three days ago at a forum at the American Enterprise Institute. The main speaker was Jon Entine, an AEI fellow and author of a new book, Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People. He was joined by fellow AEI scholar Charles Murray and by Laurie Zoloth, a bioethicist at Northwestern University. Entine and Zoloth are Jewish. Murray isn't but talks as though he wishes he were. "One of my thesis advisers at MIT was a Sephardic Jew," he announced proudly, turning the old "some of my best friends" cliché upside down.

Saletan's assertion that Jews don't mention that they are a race out of politeness -- because gentiles would find the idea of Jews being a race offensive and Jews never want to cause offense -- is pretty funny. In reality, of course, gentiles seldom mention that Jews are, more or less, a hereditary racial group because they don't want to be denounced for it by hotly offended, verbally facile, high IQ, argumentatively tireless Jewish intellectuals.

My pet theory has long been that one important reason that Ashkenazi Jews are so suited to triumphing via argument in the modern world is because they developed for centuries in a largely unarmed shtetl culture where to argue aggressively didn't put your life at risk. Heinlein famously asserted that "An armed society is a polite society," but the inverse would seem also to be true: "An unarmed society is an argumentative society."

In contrast, gentlemen in England wore swords until some point in the 18th Century (and England was a fairly low violence society compared to the rest of Europe). Alexander Hamilton was removed from the gene pool in a duel in 1804, and a U.S. Senator was killed in a duel in San Francisco as late as 1859.

Argument is a two edged sword. Without arguing, you can't make as much progress as fast in understanding the world (as the enormous number of hard science Nobel Prizes won by Jews attests). But, you can also use your ardor for verbal combat to browbeat others who lack your love of endless argument into either acquiescence or silence, as shown by the long history of bad ideas such as Freudianism that Jewish advocates have verbally badgered much of the rest of the world into at least temporarily conceding.

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

Untethered on the Great Noose Mania of 2007

Quantitatively consistent blogging -- relentlessly feeding the beast -- tends to be the enemy of quality. There are a handful who can be prolific, steady, and still surprising over many years -- Michael Blowhard perhaps comes first to mind -- but many of the best bloggers are among the most erratic.

All of a sudden, Dennis Dale is back at Untethered with lots of good stuff, especially about the Noose Scourge sweeping our nation ever since the Jena Six story got all that media play:

CNN's Rick Sanchez, whose Hispanic surname seems to have made him the network's go-to guy on racial issues despite the fact that he is nearly as WASP-like in appearance and manner as Ted Knight's Judge Smails in Caddyshack, (or, for that matter, Knight's affable and clueless anchorman Ted Baxter of The Mary Tyler Moore Show), is valiantly traipsing into the dark heart of America, with his expedition of camera and make-up crew in tow, hunting the now legendary Great Noose Scourge of 2007.

My point here is not to pick on Rick, who evinces the same bemusing persona that Fred Willard periodically reprises in Christopher Guest's faux-documentaries: confident, cocksure and half-cocked--as enthusiastic as he is oblivious. He sees opportunity; he seizes it; he is no exception. But under his guidance the absurdity has moved beyond comic into surreal, and there will be no competing with real life now, my fellow amateur satirists. Soon we may find it difficult to delineate the boundaries between. Game over. It's time to simply shut-up and marvel.

Last night, on Halloween, Sanchez utilized a split-screen format to simultaneously deliver two reports, one from a private residence and one from a bar, each the subject of controversy because their elaborate Halloween displays featured corpses hanging from nooses. As the cameras tightened in on the offending figures to reassure us they weren't black (the report wasn't quite so thorough as to call in forensics to analyze one body, just bare decomposing flesh over a skeleton, which the homeowner assured Sanchez was "Caucasian"), also revealed was a fairly realistic upper torso (safely, reassuringly white), severed at the waist and hanging upside down from a meat-hook, unremarked upon.

I guess you had to be there, but the absurdity of it was riveting, delicious irony: this ghoulish, fetishistic fascination with gore, once a ritualistic, occasional transgression for days such as these, now as widespread and mundane as the dull safety of daily life it mocks, juxtaposed with the bizarre conceit of the segment and its cravenness (acting as a tie-in for CNN's upcoming, opportunistic report, "The Noose, An American Nightmare"), the real-life horrors of the war out of sight and mind; well, all I can say is genius. Pure, unadulterated, unintentional genius.

Bravo, Mr. Sanchez. Bravo, CNN.

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

Greenspan's bubble and hidden inequality

There is always a lot of arguing back and forth over income inequality, but expenditure inequality is little discussed, even though it's just the flip side of the standard of living inequality coin. The recent housing bubble created much inequality of lifestyle, much of it almost random in occurrence. Consider two couples who live side by side in one of the parts of the country with much housing inflation in this decade. The two 38 year olds at 106 Elm St. bought their house in 2000. Right now they are touring Tuscany. The two 32 year olds at 112 Elm St. bought the house next door in 2006. They are presently touring their local Aldi's supermarket looking for deals on canned beans so they they can keep paying their mortgage.

When the first family thinks of their good fortune, they are apt to chalk it up to their brilliant nose for the market. But they didn't exactly buy Wal-Mart stock in 1972. They just happened to reach the point in their lives when middle class American couples buy a house when it happened to be when all the smart money was going into Cisco Systems, not something boring like houses. So, houses were reasonably affordable. Their neighbors, those morons, reached that point six years later, when everybody knew that houses always rose in price so even if you overpaid you could always refinance.

It's interesting that their is almost no political outcry over this form of inequality. You might think that its randomness would make it seem more unfair, but randomness saps political salience. I noticed this years ago with diseases when I had non-Hodgkins lymphoma. An illness that hits a coherent group of people, such as AIDS, will get far more political attention and federal research money than one that hits people almost completely at random, such as lymphoma.

Similarly, while we hear constantly about past race discrimination, we almost never hear about past discrimination against lefthanders (e.g., Ronald Reagan, like many natural lefthanders of his generation, was forced to write right-handed. Nor do we ever hear about the heroic activists who changed social attitudes toward lefthanders. Why not? Lefties just are not a coherent group of people.

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