January 9, 2008

White tailback wrap-up

LSU won the BCS national championship in college football, defeating Ohio State 38-24, with a white runner as its primary ballcarrier. Is this the first time in the history of the BCS? Jacob Hester had a standard Jacob Hester game against #1 ranked Ohio St., rushing for 86 yards on 21 carriers, finishing with over 1100 yards for the season. LSU dominated the game because it converted on 12 of 19 third or fourth down attempts versus 5 of 16 for the Buckeyes.

This guy isn't going to dominate the NFL, but you'd be crazy not to want him on your team. How many other star tailbacks play on special teams? This is guy who rushed for almost 1600 yards as a junior in high school, then switched to fullback and didn't reach 900 as a senior because that's what the team, with future USC star John David Booty as QB, needed. Heck, he played nose guard for awhile in high school. Hester was only a two star recruit (out of five maximum) coming out college, so when he signed with mighty LSU, their average recruit ranking dropped. It took Hester four years to emerge as the main running back at LSU, but he played regularly in various roles for all four years. And he's done a good job keeping all the faster black backs on the Tigers, who aren't getting big stats because Hester gets the ball the most, reasonably happy and focused on supporting the team. Hester's wife cooks dinner for all the running backs at their place two nights before each game.

How many colleges and pro teams have shot themselves in the foot by assembling too many black chiefs and not enough white Indians? USC, for example, started the year ranked #1 in part because they had 10 running backs (all black, of course) who had been superstars in high school, but that's just asking for trouble among black players raised on gangsta rap, with its message of "Get Rich or Die Trying."

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

"The Truth about Jena"

The Atlantic Monthly sends Amy Waldman down to Jena, LA to uncover what was behind the vast civil rights brouhaha, and she comes up with the same thing I did back in September from my house: football.

The Truths About Jena:

Why America’s black-and-white narratives about race don’t reflect reality

In the fall of 2006, Mychal Bell was a football hero, and his hometown, Jena, Louisiana, loved him for it. As his high-school team posted its best season in six years, Bell scored 21 touchdowns, rushed for 1,006 yards, and was named player of the week three times by The Jena Times. The paper celebrated his triumphs in articles and photographs, including a dramatic one in which Bell, who’s black, stiff-arms a white defender by clutching his face guard. But within weeks after the season’s end, Bell was transformed into a villain, accused of knocking out a white student, Justin Barker, who was then beaten by a group of black students. The parish’s white district attorney charged Bell and five others with attempted second-degree murder. Six months later—after the DA had reduced the charges against Bell—a white jury convicted him, as an adult, of aggravated second-degree battery, a crime that carried a possible 22-year prison sentence. By then, he, along with his co-defendants, had been transformed yet again: together, they’d been dubbed the Jena Six and had become icons of a 21st-century civil-rights movement. [More]

As I wrote in The American Conservative:

Similarly, in September, when Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton led thousands of demonstrators in a march on the small town of Jena, Louisiana to protest supposed racism in the treatment of six black high-school students accused of beating unconscious then stomping the body of a white schoolmate, the assembled national media got the story almost 180 degrees backward. We weren’t witnessing a revival of the Emmett Till Era of lynchings, as the pundits insisted, but another example of the O.J. Simpson Age of stars athletes whose off-field misdeeds are excused until they finally go too far.

The Jena Six hadn’t been despised outcasts: they were the best football players in a gridiron-obsessed small town. Mychal Bell, the only one of the Six tried so far, was an All-State junior who scored 18 touchdowns in the 2006 season. A local minister, Eddie Thompson, explained, “For the most part, coaches and other adults have prevented them from being held accountable for the reign of terror they have presided over in Jena.” As Abbey Brown wrote in the Alexandria-Pineville Town Talk: “Bell was adjudicated—the juvenile equivalent to a conviction—of battery Sept. 2 [2006] and criminal damage to property Sept. 3. … A few days later, on Sept. 8, Bell rushed 12 times for 108 yards and scored three touchdowns.”

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

January 8, 2008

More Obama Family Mania

It's been a busy day here at the Institute for Advanced Obama Relations Studies.

After I discovered the identity of Obama's estranged half-American half-brother Mark earlier this evening, readers alerted me to the BBC story that the losing presidential candidate in the recent Kenyan elections, Raila Odinga, the Luo leader who has helped stir up so much violence (600 deaths) in the wake of his dubious defeat, today claimed he is Obama's first cousin!

Following a couple of calls from Obama, which Obama's spokesman acknowledged, Odinga asserted that he was Obama's father's sister's son.

There's certainly a striking contrast between Odinga and Obama's half-brother Mark, who has kept completely quiet about being the half-brother of one of the world's most famous men.

European monarchs were always related to each other across national boundaries, with lots of consequences. It would certainly make the future more, uh, interesting if the American and Kenyan elites were closely linked by blood.

I don't recall, however, any mention of Odinga in Obama's extended family-obsessed Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, but I haven't reviewed it thoroughly looking for him. I believe Odinga was still in prison for his part in a 1982 coup attempt when Obama first visited Kenya in 1987, so that might account for Obama not mentioning him.

Or Odinga might just be blowing smoke.

Odinga's father was the first vice-president of Kenya and then a leader of the opposition (the Luo have usually been out of luck in the ethnic struggle for power in Kenya). His name was Oginga Odinga.

The Kenyan candidate's website says that Raila Odinga's mother's name was Mary.

In Obama's book, there is a long narrative by Obama's "grandmother" (who was actually the third wife of Obama's polygamous grandfather -- his real grandmother, the second wife, ran off with another man and her two children were raised by the third wife). It mentions four children of the Senator's grandfather (by his three wives), none of whom were named Mary.

So, I don't see much evidence that Odinga is Obama's first cousin or half-first cousin.

But he might be a more distant relative. For instance, Obama's paternal grandfather was one of five children of one of his father's four wives -- that provides a lot of opportunities for Obama and Odinga to be second cousins or second half-cousins.

As Theodore Dalrymple has pointed out, Africans tend to have an elastic sense of relatedness, depending on how much somebody can do for you. The problem with being a Big Man in Africa, according to Dalrymple, is that the number of relatives you are socially obligated to subsidize keeps expanding as fast as your power. When Odinga spoke, shortly before the actual votes were counted in New Hampshire, his fellow Luo seemed headed assuredly for becoming the Biggest Big Man in the World, so Odinga might have been speaking a little expansively about the closeness of his relationship with Obama.

Perhaps Odinga is trying to boost his political standing within Kenya by getting people to believe that it's only a matter of time before he has his kinsman, the President of the United States, on his side in his struggle. It has become common for the losing side in disputed elections to reverse the decision by overthrowing the government with the backing of the U.S., as in Serbia and Ukraine, so creating the image of being backed by America can create a sense of inevitability.

A lot of people in Kenya assume that a President Obama would intervene to help his fellow Luo finally win the power that has so long been denied them in Kenyan politics. It would be helpful if Obama issued a categorical statement that if elected, he would not intervene in Kenyan affairs. This might persuade more Luo that rather than hope for ultimate victory through the deus ex machina of President Obama, that they are going to have to work things out with their fellow Kenyans.

Obama could also play a useful or detrimental role in a larger issue involving Kenya. The U.S. has been pouring military force into Northern Kenya, near the border with Somalia, which the Pentagon sees as a crucial front in the War on Terror, as Esquire and the NY Times Magazine have reported. The Pentagon plans to have two dozen U.S. forts in East Africa by 2012. We recently backed Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia. (I called this our Prester John strategy, since the Grand Strategy of post-Crusades Europe was to form an alliance with Priest John, king of Christian Abyssinia, to open a second front in Christendom's struggle with the Musselmen.)

Meanwhile, the NYT Magazine article by Joshua Hammer, The Africa Front, reports on a Kenyan legislative candidate who is raising money from American Jews for his campaign by portraying his opponent, a local Muslim, as a potential jihadist.

I hope that a President Obama, with his intimate knowledge of the corruption and disingenuousness of Kenya, would be less inclined to get America so involved in Northeast African politics. I would hope he's aware that we are much more likely to be manipulated by local power brokers into lining their pockets than we are to succeed at smiting terrorists. He should speak up about the folly of our overly interventionist East Africa policy.

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

I've uncovered the identity of Obama's estranged half-brother

Perhaps the most poignant and telling episode in Barack Obama's 1995 autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, is the story of his first and last meetings in Kenya two decades ago with his doppelganger, his half-white half-brother Mark, who was then a physics student at Stanford.

As any of the handful of people who have read all 442 superbly-written but humorlessly obsessive pages of Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance" can attest, extended family is central to the would-be President's psychology. Moreover, Obama has encouraged voters (for example, in the opening of his famous keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convetion) to make up fantasies about how his complex family background means that Obama holds whatever views on race that they do. Thus, we constantly hear all the chatter about how Obama "transcends race."

In reality, it is Mark who "transcends race," and Obama rejects him for doing so.

Like Obama, Mark is also a son of Barack Obama Sr. and a white American woman. But, as the excerpt from Obama's memoir below shows, Mark's realism, well-adjusted response to being of mixed racial background, and lack of ethnocentrism disturbed Obama because, while Mark looks much like him, Mark's values are different. After their lunch in Nairobi in the late 1980s, Obama cut off ties with Mark.

I've now figured out who Mark is. Here's his picture, with his eyes blanked out to preserve his privacy. [I've now taken his picture down -- enough people have seen it to know I have it, but leaving it up much longer would just allow somebody enterprising to try to track him down.] He has had a long career in high technology and other industry. He lives and works abroad, neither in America nor in Africa. I'm not going to reveal his surname. It's not "Obama." And I'm not going to tell you how I found him.

There's no evidence on the Internet that Mark has ever attempted to boost his career by calling attention to the fact that he's the half-brother of a potential President of the United States. This is in sharp contrast to Billy Carter (Billy Beer and a dubious loan from Col. Gadaffi) and Donald Nixon (Nixonburger and a dubious loan from Howard Hughes). So, I'm not going to drag him into the madness of the campaign.

Unlike Obama, who long dreamed of Kenya but knew little about it, Mark spent his summers off from his American studies in Kenya at his mother and step-father's pleasant Nairobi home, where Obama met him on his first trip to Africa in the late 1980s. Here's what Obama wrote about him (pp. 341-345):

"'So, Mark,' I said, turning to my brother, 'I hear you're at Berkeley.'

"'Stanford,' he corrected. His voice was deep, his accent perfectly American. 'I'm in my last year of the physics program there.'"

They meet once more, for lunch:

"I asked him how it felt being back for the summer.

"'Fine,' he said. 'It's nice to see my mom and dad, of course. … As for the rest of Kenya, I don't feel much of an attachment. Just another poor African country.'

"'You don't ever think about settling here?'

"Mark took a sip from his Coke. 'No,' he said. 'I mean, there's not much work for a physicist, is there, in a country where the average person doesn't have a telephone.'

"I should have stopped then, but something -- the certainty in this brother's voice, maybe, or our rough resemblance, like looking into a foggy mirror -- made me want to push harder. I asked, "Don't you ever feel like you might be losing something?'

"Mark put down his knife and fork, and for the first time that afternoon his eyes looked straight into mine.

"'I understand what you're getting at,' he said flatly. 'You think that somehow I'm cut off from my roots, that sort of thing.' He wiped his mouth and dropped the napkin onto his plate. 'Well, you're right. At a certain point, I made a decision not think about who my real father was. He was dead to me even when he was still alive. I knew that he was a drunk and showed no concern for his wife or children. That was enough.'

"'It made you mad.'

"'Not mad. Just numb.'

"'And that doesn't bother you? Being numb, I mean?'

"'Towards him, no. Other things move me. Beethoven's symphonies. Shakespeare's sonnets. I know -- it's not what an African is supposed to care about. But who's to tell me what I should and shouldn't care about? Understand, I'm not ashamed of being half Kenyan. I just don't ask myself a lot of questions about what it all means. About who I really am.' He shrugged. 'I don't know. Maybe I should. I can acknowledge the possibility that if I looked more carefully at myself, I would …'

"For the briefest moment I sensed Mark hesitate, like a rock climber losing his footing. Then, almost immediately, he regained his composure and waved for the check.

"'Who knows?' he said. 'What's certain is that I don't need the stress. Life's hard enough without all that excess baggage.'

"… Outside we exchanged addresses and promised to write, with a dishonesty that made my heart ache."


Notice that it's Obama's own dishonesty that is (supposedly) making his heart ache -- he can't know what's in Mark's heart as they exchange addresses, but Obama knows that he will not write to his own half-brother. The physics student is Obama's intellectual equal, but his realism about Kenya, his lack of an identity crisis, lack of black ethnocentrism, and lack of illusions about their mutual father leave Obama so uncomfortable that he doesn't want to hear from Mark anymore.


Their family tree, which is complicated by Kenya's traditional polygamy, looks like this: Barack Obama Sr.'s bigamous second marriage to the Presidential candidate's mother Ann dissolved when he chose to abandon his new family in Hawaii to take up a Harvard scholarship rather than the more generous New School of Social Research scholarship that would have paid enough for Ann and Barack Jr. to come with him to New York City. He then married Mark's white American mother Ruth and brought her to live in Kenya (where the Senator's polygamous pop introduced his surprised American bride to her co-wife Kezia, whom he had married at age 18).

Obama Sr. and his third wife had two sons, Mark and David, before their bitter divorce. Their American mother then married an affluent and genial man who had moved to Kenya from a different African country, had sons of their own, and all the boys were educated at a prestigious international school in Nairobi.

Mark absorbed his mother's values, but the younger boy, David, rebelled as a teenager against his mother's Western ways. Obama wrote: "He told her he was an African, and started calling himself Obama." David, who was Mark's full brother, ran away from home. Months later, the Senator's hard-drinking half-brother Roy (Obama Sr.'s first son by his Kenyan first wife -- Roy later took up the name Abongo when he became an Afrocentric teetotaling Muslim) happened to see David begging on the streets. Roy took him in.

One night, not long before Obama's 1987 visit to Kenya, Roy and young David went out drinking on Roy's motorcycle. Roy got into a drunken brawl and was jailed, so he lent the boy the key to his motorcycle. David crashed it and died.

Roy/Abongo's complicity in the death of Mark's full brother David left relations between Keiza's family and Ruth's family even frostier than before. Upon his visit in 1987, Obama spent almost all his time with Keiza's relations, such as his half-siblings Roy/Obongo and Auma.

The details about Mark in Obama's memoir all check out. Obama didn't include his last name, but he also didn't alter any details about Mark to protect his identity, so I can ascertain with virtually absolute certainty that the Mark pictured above is the Mark depicted in Obama's bestseller. For example, I've found a paper in a physics journal authored by Mark and others at Stanford. I've been able to determine that for the Mark shown above, his parents live in Nairobi; his youngest half-brother's first name is the same as that given in Dreams; and that his step-father's family comes from a different African country, the same one Obama reported.


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

New Hampshire exit polls

Here are the Democratic and Republican exit polls.

A reader points out that for the Democrats, the most obvious factor is that younger Democratic men really don't like Hillary. Otherwise, nothing much jumps out at you. They certainly don't seem to differ due to any issues.

The reader adds:

The Dem side was driven by who you are while the GOP was by what you believe. Note that the largest divergences between Romney and McCain were on Iraq, the economy and immigration. Under the surface, it appears Romney was the de facto surrogate for GWB.

My favorite stat: Among voters under 24, Ron Paul beat Hillary (different sets of course, but you get the point).

The Republicans could be called the Cancer Kids, since three of them are battling cancer -- McCain, Giuliani, and Thompson. Maybe that's the issue that will finally get Romney out of his second place rut -- "I'm probably cancer free!"

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

"Jerusalem square to be named after Pollard"

From the Jewish Telegraph Agency:

A Jerusalem square will be symbolically dedicated to Jonathan Pollard ahead of President Bush's visit to Israel.

Mina Fenton, a Jerusalem city councilwoman, announced this week that the capital's Paris Square will be symbolically renamed "Pollard Square" in a ceremony on Jan. 7, two days before George W. Bush begins his first visit as U.S. president to Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

The move is meant to help lobby Bush to pardon Pollard, a former U.S. Navy analyst who is serving a life prison sentence for spying for Israel. Bush leaves office in 2009.

Paris Square is located between the U.S. Consulate in west Jerusalem and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's official residence. Fenton said there are no plans to formally change the square's name.

On Monday, the Knesset State Control Committee decided to ask State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss to prepare a confidential special report on Israeli government efforts to secure the release of Johnathon Pollard.

Successive U.S. administrations have refused to grant clemency to Pollard, who is considered a Jewish hero by many Israelis.
Pollard was a cokehead who stole some of the crown jewels of our national security secrets -- information relating to the our nuclear missile submarine deterrent -- in return for money from the Israelis. (The Israeli government is widely believed to have then bartered the American secrets to the Soviets. I wouldn't know, but that's what I hear.)

Perhaps in response, Times Square in New York should be renamed "U.S.S. Liberty Square"?

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

Christopher Hitchens on Obama

In Slate, Hitch unloads on Obama. It's a lot of fun, but Hitchens totally misses how similar Obama is to Christopher Hitchens, Esq.

[By the way, I've discovered Obama's estranged half-brother, Mark, the Stanford physics graduate who is the son of Obama's polygamous father's other white American wife. According to the candidate's 1995 autobiography, Obama cut off ties with the one half-brother who is his intellectual equal because Mark's lack of ethnocentrism and his realism about Africa disturbed him.]

Back to Hitch, who writes:

Identity Crisis:
There's something pathetic and embarrassing about our obsession with Barack Obama's race.


To put it squarely and bluntly, is it because he is or is it because he isn't? To phrase it another way, is it because of what he says or what he doesn't say? Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois is the current beneficiary of a tsunami of drool. He sometimes claims credit on behalf of all Americans regardless of race, color, creed, blah blah blah, though his recent speeches appear also to claim a victory for blackness while his supporters—most especially the white ones—sob happily that at last we can have an African-American chief executive. Off to the side, snarling with barely concealed rage, are the Clinton machine-minders, who, having failed to ignite the same kind of identity excitement with an aging and resentful female, are perhaps wishing that they had made more of her errant husband having already been "our first black president."

Or perhaps not. Isn't there something pathetic and embarrassing about this emphasis on shade? And why is a man with a white mother considered to be "black," anyway? Is it for this that we fought so hard to get over Plessy v. Ferguson? Would we accept, if Obama's mother had also been Jewish, that he would therefore be the first Jewish president?

This is a a very odd thing for Christopher Hitchens to say. According to an old drinking buddy of Hitch's, he used to claim he was "the world's biggest anti-Semite," but then, Hitchens made the belated discovery that he is something like 1/8th or 1/16th Jewish through the maternal line. The famous atheist has taken to dropping in on synagogues as a gesture of ethnic solidarity and moved far in the neocon direction politically, much to the bemusement of his brother Peter Hitchens.

The simple reality is that identity politics really are important to people, including Obama and Christopher Hitchens.

The more that people claim Obama's mere identity to be a "breakthrough," the more they demonstrate that they have failed to emancipate themselves from the original categories of identity that acted as a fetter upon clear thought.

One can't exactly say that Sen. Obama himself panders to questions of skin color. One of the best chapters of his charming autobiography describes the moment when his black Republican opponent in the Illinois Senate race—Alan Keyes—accused him of possessing insufficient negritude because he wasn't the descendant of slaves! Obama's decision to be light-hearted—and perhaps light-skinned—about this was a milestone in itself.

Hitchens is referring to Obama's campaign autobiography, The Audacity of Hope (which is named after one of the sermons by Obama's spiritual advisor, Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.). He clearly hasn't read Obama's first autobiography, which he aptly subtitled A Story of Race and Inheritance.

Last week happened to be the week that the nation of Kenya—birthplace of Obama's father—was convulsed by a political war that contained ghastly overtones of violent and sadistic tribalism. It would sound as absurd to a Kenyan to hear praise for a black candidate as it would sound to most of my European readers to hear a recommendation of a "great white hope." A white visitor to Kenya might not be able to tell a Kikuyu from a Luo at a glance, but a Kenyan would have no such difficulty. The time is pretty much past, in our country, when a Polish-American would not vote for a candidate with a German name or when Sharks and Jets were at daggers drawn, but this is all because (to borrow from Ernest Renan's definition of a nation) people agreed to forget a lot of things as well as to remember a number of things. So, which are we doing presently?

Hitchens doesn't seem to be a aficionado of the musical -- the Sharks in West Side Story were, of course, visibly Puerto Ricans.

Sen. Obama is a congregant of a church in Chicago called Trinity United Church of Christ. I recommend that you take a brisk tour of its Web site. Run by the sort of character that the press often guardedly describes as "flamboyant"—a man calling himself the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.—this bizarre outfit describes itself as "Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian" and speaks of "a chosen people" whose nature we are allowed to assume is "Afrocentric." Trinity United sells creationist books and its home page includes a graphic link to a thing called Goodsearch—the name is surmounted with a halo in its logo—which announces cheerily that "Every time you search or shop online! Our Church earns money." Much or most of what Trinity United says is harmless and boring, rather like Gov. Mike Huckabee's idiotic belief that his own success in Iowa is comparable to the "miracle" of the loaves and fishes, and the site offers a volume called Bad Girls of the Bible: Exploring Women of Questionable Virtue, which I have added to my cart, but nobody who wants to be taken seriously can possibly be associated with such a substandard and shade-oriented place.

All this easy talk about being a "uniter" and not a "divider" is piffle if people are talking out of both sides of their mouths. I have been droning on for months about how Mitt Romney needs to answer questions about the flat-out racist background of his own church, and about how Huckabee has shown in public that he does not even understand the first thing about a theory—the crucial theory of evolution by natural selection—in which he claims not to believe. Many Democrats are with me on this, but they go completely quiet when Sen. Obama chooses to give his allegiance to a crackpot church with a decidedly ethnic character.

The unspoken agreement to concede the black community to the sway of the pulpit is itself a form of racist condescension. The sickly canonization of Martin Luther King Jr. has led to a crude rewriting of history that obliterates the great black and white secularists—Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph, Walter Reuther—who actually organized the March on Washington. It has also allowed a free pass to any demagogue who can manage to get the word reverend in front of his name. The white voters who subconsciously make the allowance that black folks sure love to hear their preachers are not only patronizing their black brothers and sisters but also helping to empower white ministers or deacons who make the same pitch, from Jimmy Carter to Mike Huckabee. The Iowa caucuses of 2008 were not the end of our long national nightmare about race, but another stage in our protracted national nightmare of piety, "uplift," and deceptive optimistic windbaggery.

If Hitchens ever read Obama's real autobiography, Dreams from My Father, he'd be reassured to learn that Obama's celebrated "conversion" to Christianity at his Afrocentrist Church had much less to do with faith in Jesus Christ than in the same kind of gesture of ethnic solidarity that motivates Hitchens' visits to synagogues.

By the way, I apologize for the ridiculous profusion of typefaces, point sizes, and leading in this post. Trying to format consistently my posts is the bane of my blogging career.

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

January 7, 2008

Sailer in VDARE: "Why Hasn't Crime Fallen Further?"

Here's an excerpt from my new VDARE.com column "Why Hasn't Crime Fallen Further?"

This 19-year-old idiot's criminal career (now on ice for a loooong time) reminded me that the real sociological mystery is not why the crime rate came down after its crack-driven peak in the early 1990s (when, for example, New York City alone experienced over 4,000 murders in just 1990-1991), but—why it hasn't fallen farther?

According to the FBI, the number of homicides dropped sharply from 1992-1999, but has gone up slightly since then.

It's traditionally said that crime doesn't pay. That's not necessarily true for organized criminals. But it's becoming ever truer for run-of-the-mill disorganized criminals.

Think how easy it was to steal stuff back when crime was just starting to boom in the mid-1960s. In those innocent days, many folks not only parked their cars unlocked in their driveways overnight, for example, but left their car keys in the ignition! You could pursue a lucrative career in auto theft just by climbing into random cars and driving them away.

One of my earliest memories of reading the news in the mid-1960s is of all the articles warning citizens to start taking their car keys with them. But even when that lesson sunk in, many people still didn't lock their cars. A common memory of my boyhood is my father and I seeing a parked car with its headlights left on, so he'd open the car door and switch them off before the battery drained down. In that trusting era, thieves merely had to hotwire the ignition.

And even if they got caught, punishment was light back in those naively liberal days. Indeed, the imprisonment rate was lower in 1975 than in 1960, although the murder rate had more than doubled.

In response, owners began to lock their cars. Since my childhood, I've tried a few dozen times to turn off the headlights of strangers' cars, but the last time the car turned out be open was 1972. And automakers began armor plating the ignition system, and then adding steering wheel locking systems.

As it became harder for crooks to steal cars in toto, they started smashing the windows and prying out the expensive new 8-Track stereos. This set off a defensive arms race to harden the target that is still going on. Ultimately, though, electronic in-dash gizmos got so cheap that these days it really isn't worth fighting past all the defenses just to sell the loot to a fence for a small fraction of its heavily discounted retail price. [More]


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

Is Sibel Edmonds trustworthy?

For years, I've been hearing the name "Sibel Edmonds," without being able to make sense out of her story, in part because the U.S. government has been blocking its publication under the State Secrets Act. Now, the London Times has run a long article, "For sale: West's deadly nuclear secrets," about the West Asian-born American citizen who worked for the FBI as a translator in 2001-2002. And it's hot stuff:

One of Edmonds’s main roles in the FBI was to translate thousands of hours of conversations by Turkish diplomatic and political targets that had been covertly recorded by the agency.

A backlog of tapes had built up, dating back to 1997, which were needed for an FBI investigation into links between the Turks and Pakistani, Israeli and US targets. Before she left the FBI in 2002 she heard evidence that pointed to money laundering, drug imports and attempts to acquire nuclear and conventional weapons technology.

“What I found was damning,” she said. “While the FBI was investigating, several arms of the government were shielding what was going on.”

The Turks and Israelis had planted “moles” in military and academic institutions which handled nuclear technology. Edmonds says there were several transactions of nuclear material every month, with the Pakistanis being among the eventual buyers. “The network appeared to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States,” she said.

They were helped, she says, by the high-ranking State Department official who provided some of their moles – mainly PhD students – with security clearance to work in sensitive nuclear research facilities. These included the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico, which is responsible for the security of the US nuclear deterrent.

In one conversation Edmonds heard the official arranging to pick up a $15,000 cash bribe. The package was to be dropped off at an agreed location by someone in the Turkish diplomatic community who was working for the network.

The Turks, she says, often acted as a conduit for the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s spy agency, because they were less likely to attract suspicion. Venues such as the American Turkish Council in Washington were used to drop off the cash, which was picked up by the official.

Edmonds said: “I heard at least three transactions like this over a period of 2½ years. There are almost certainly more.”

The Pakistani operation was led by General Mahmoud Ahmad, then the ISI chief.

Intercepted communications showed Ahmad and his colleagues stationed in Washington were in constant contact with attachés in the Turkish embassy.

Intelligence analysts say that members of the ISI were close to Al-Qaeda before and after 9/11. Indeed, Ahmad was accused of sanctioning a $100,000 wire payment to Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, immediately before the attacks.

The results of the espionage were almost certainly passed to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist.

Khan was close to Ahmad and the ISI. While running Pakistan’s nuclear programme, he became a millionaire by selling atomic secrets to Libya, Iran and North Korea. He also used a network of companies in America and Britain to obtain components for a nuclear programme.

Khan caused an alert among western intelligence agencies when his aides met Osama Bin Laden....

In researching this article, The Sunday Times has talked to two FBI officers (one serving, one former) and two former CIA sources who worked on nuclear proliferation. While none was aware of specific allegations against officials she names, they did provide overlapping corroboration of Edmonds’s story.

One of the CIA sources confirmed that the Turks had acquired nuclear secrets from the United States and shared the information with Pakistan and Israel. “We have no indication that Turkey has its own nuclear ambitions. But the Turks are traders. To my knowledge they became big players in the late 1990s,” the source said.

According to Google News, this story that appeared in a famous English newspaper on Sunday has not appeared in the American mainstream media yet as of late Monday. Am I breaking the law by quoting the London Times?

Justin Raimondo has lots more background here at Antiwar.com, including the claim that the crooked spy who was #3 in the State Department was Marc Grossman, who had been U.S. ambassador to Turkey in 1994-1997. Pakistan blew off its first nuclear bomb in May 1998, so the timing of his ambassadorship is interesting (but infinitely far from conclusive). Grossman is now vice-chairman of the Cohen Group lobbying-consulting firm, headed by former Clinton Defense Secretary William Cohen.

Something that finally dawned on me in in recent years is that a lot of the countries that Americans don't take seriously, such as Italy, Mexico, and Turkey, are actually very interesting places. We Americans think of Italy as populated by comic Mario Brothers characters, but to Italians today, and to anyone who has tried to make sense of the Niger Yellowcake Forgery, it's still almost as Machiavellian a place as it seemed to Shakespeare. As I wrote in 2005:
Most Americans feel a deep aversion toward conspiracy theories. To label something as a "conspiracy theory" is to dismiss it out of hand. Americans believe they believe in high-minded principles and believe their enemies believe in evil ideologies. Thus, when members of our government decided to respond to 9/11 by invading Iraq, lots of educated Americans suddenly decided that Osama and Saddam were united by their ideology of Islamofascism, thus justifying the Iraq Attaq. Nobody, including all the alleged Islamofascists, had ever heard of "Islamfofascism" before, but the term quickly became popular among certain classes of Americans. Suggestions that the various players in the Bush Administration were motivated by less principled reasons were denounced as conspiracy theories.

In Italy, in contrast, conspiracy theories are most people's preferred explanation for how the world works, for the simple reason that, in their part of the world, conspiracies are the main mechanism for actually getting anything done. The notion that political operators would favor something on principle seems laughable. The political is personal, in the sense that if you want to understand historical events, you need to understand the connections among the players.

Similarly, we think of Turkey as the Mexico of Europe (and we try to think of Mexico as little as possible), but Turkey turns out to be just as byzantine as you would expect the old Byzantine Empire to be.

For example, Turkey's foreign minister from 1997-2002, Ismail Cem, was a member of the Donmeh, a tiny, little-known, but powerful hereditary group of Salonikan crypto-Jewish followers of Sabbetai Zevi, the 17th Century false messiah and apostate. The strong ties between Israel and the Turkish state are helped by the ethnocultural affinities of a sizable fraction of the Turkish elite.

Does any of this make Sibel Edmonds' story true? No, but it's some background to consider when contemplating the Imperial Fun House.

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

January 5, 2008

How many gay male golfers are there?

I never made it out on a golf course in all of 2007, but I have been playing since 1971. Over the years, I've played in foursomes with hundreds of people, the majority of them strangers, and run into hundreds of others around the golf course or driving ranges in Chicago and LA. Not one has ever triggered my gaydar. A gay friend who is an intense sports fan and I went to several pro tournaments together, but I could never talk him into actually trying to play the game.

Sure, private country clubs would likely tend to discriminate against homosexuals, but 95+% of my rounds have been played at public courses where anybody who pays the greens fee can play. By way of comparison, my playing partners over the years include perhaps two dozen blacks, almost as many Latinos, and more Asians.

Golf isn't much of a team sport, so discrimination by teammates wouldn't be an issue as it is with gays and other sports.

Even stranger, golf doesn't seem particularly macho either. It's non-violent and there's no danger involved. There are some polite, upper class rituals involved in the game that would seem not uncongenial to gays.

So, it could be very informative to understand why golf appeals to some straight men but almost no gay men. But we don't really understand the appeal of golf yet. (I take my best guesses here in this 2005 American Conservative article.)

Since lots of celebrities are golfers and lots of celebrities are gay, for years I've been trying to falsify my hypothesis that gay men almost never find golf appealing by finding a bunch of gay golfing celebrities. But I haven't found any, other than maybe Danny Kaye, the amazingly talented comedian-actor-musician of a half century ago (Michael Richards's Kramer on "Seinfeld" channeled a little of Kaye's shtick), who was an avid golfer and baseball player/fan (he owned the Seattle Mariners). He was married for 47 years, but, at least in the years since his death in 1987, has been subject to rumors of bisexuality.

As you know, one of my favorite tricks is to take a list (The Top 100 Whatevers) and use it to investigate some question that never occurred to the people who created the list. That way, my question doesn't bias the data, which could happen if I made up the list myself. The list might not be particularly good at ranking the Top 100 Whatevers, but it provides a decent source of data unaffected by my preconceptions.

So, here is Golf Digest's 2007 list of "Hollywood's Top 100 Golfers," which lists actors/actresses, but not behind the camera talent. It's ranked in terms of handicap (the lower the better).

Soap opera star Jack Wagner is the only actor with a "plus" handicap (meaning, roughly, that he is expected to break par).

The list reveals what Billy Crudup, the New York actor with the superb diction, is doing besides voice-over commercials and turning down Hollywood roles: he's ranked #3. Recently it became possible to live in Manhattan and play a lot of quality golf with the opening of two super-expensive courses in New Jersey's industrial wastelands just across the Hudson River. Crudup plays to a 4.5 handicap at the new faux-Irish Bayonne Golf Club amidst the docks.

The biggest stars in the Top 20 are probably Dennis Quaid, Samuel L. Jackson, Bill Murray, and Hugh Grant.

I'm sure they are missing some people who should be on the list and some who shouldn't be on the list are making up handicaps. Generally, the players who list a handicap to a decimal point actually have played enough to have a handicap, although that might not be, technically, their current handicap. I'm a 16.9, for example (or that's what I was for one glorious week in 1990).

The ones who round it off to a whole number may be just blowing smoke entirely. For example, Sean Connery has dropped to a "22.0," but he definitely is a fanatical golfer. On other hand, while I'd like to believe that lovely Jessica Alba is a "22," it sounds too much like Cameron Diaz's male fantasy character in "There's Something About Mary" who hangs out at the driving range on her days off from healing sick children. (Cameron is a 34 on the list). Jessica has been photographed playing golf with her fiance, the world's luckiest man, but, somehow, I don't think she's quite as dedicated to the game as the old Scotsman.

Among actresses, Alba ranks second following the more plausible Cheryl Ladd (from the original "Charlie's Angels") at 18.

Anyway, this list mentions 92 men in a profession with an above average number of homosexuals, so there is a lot of data to work with. Quite a few of the actors are fairly obscure, like Richard Kind of "Spin City" and "Mad About You" (who is indeed kind -- he helped me look for a club I had lost at Robinson Ranch). But you can look up a lot of information about each one. For example, Kind is married and has three kids.

So, how many of the 92 are rumored to be gay?

There's Tom Cruise (#95). I have no opinion on all the rumors, but he's clearly not a very intense golfer, if somebody that coordinated is only a 32 handicap. And there's young Zac Efron of Disney's "High School Musical," who is #52 at a 14. He gets a lot of crap from the celebrity snarksites who are jealous of his girlfriend Vanessa Hudgens (e.g., "he's basically a dancing candy cane come to life"), but, who knows? (Getting totally off topic, here's a picture of her father that you have to see.)

I'm sure there are others on the list, but I think my old hypothesis is supported.

Update: Here's Golf Digest's list of the best 100 golfing singers and musicians. The only scratch golfers are Kenny G and Vince Gill. Bob Dylan is supposedly a decent 17 handicapper, while Neil Young is an 18.6. (When Young's band Buffalo Springfield signed their first contract, Young's last request of Ahmet Ertegun was: "I'm a golfer. Can you help get me in a country club out here?") The list has lots off country singers and lots of black singers and even a black country singer (Charley Pride).

And there's a black gay golfer in Johnny Mathis, who plays to a fine 10.5 handicap at mighty Riviera. I don't think it's all that secret that he's gay.

The only other gay on the list who jumps out at me is Lance Bass, who is in the "New to the Game" category with a 36 (the worst handicap allowed under USGA rules).

I'm sure more expert researchers might find a couple more, but far fewer than in a list of top 100 singers or musicians who don't play golf.

In summary, we have two lists with 185 men on it in two professions, acting and music, that are well know to feature an above average number of gays. If you exclude the men with handicaps over 30 as not very serious golfers, that leaves one obvious gay out of about 160 men, and, likely, several more discrete gays.

But if you took a random list of 160 prominent male musicians and Hollywood actors who aren't golfers, what percentage would be homosexual? Let's say 15%, just for sake of argument. So, at 15%, you'd expect 24 gays out of 160. Right now we've got Johnny Mathis, so we'd need to dig up 23 closet cases off the lists. I don't think that's going to happen.

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

ANC head adds a fourth wife

I hadn't been following the election of Jacob Zuma as president of the African National Congress, the ruling party of South Africa, other that this item from the genially witty I, Ectomorph:
Quote of the day:
"I am happy Zuma won because under his rule women will have fewer rights," said Johannesburg parking attendant Brilliant Khambule.

It just works on all levels.

But, Brilliant does seem to have a point. The Washington Post reports:
Zuma, 65, is a former guerrilla with no formal education and a personal theme song, "Bring Me My Machine Gun" [Zuma sing it to his supporters here], that evokes the party's history of armed struggle rather than its more recent emphasis on the unglamorous work of reconciliation.

As a polygamist with a reported 16 children -- as well as a former rape defendant acquitted in 2006 -- Zuma has alienated many South African women, and his personal life threatens to tarnish the party's image as a champion of gender equality. The wedding, scheduled for Saturday, would bring the number of his current wives to four, news reports say. ...

His ex-wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, is South Africa's foreign minister and, according to many reports, Mbeki's preferred successor as party leader before Zuma's election last month. Another wife, Kate Zuma, killed herself in 2000. In a scathing suicide note, published by a South African newspaper, she wrote that her married life was "hell."

Among Zuma's three current wives is his first, Sizakele Zuma, news reports here say. His marriage to Ntuli would make four.

Zuma's sexual encounter with a family friend infected with HIV also became public fodder after she accused him of rape. Zuma defeated those charges in court, but statements from the trial -- including his assertions that her knee-length skirt made clear her sexual intentions and that his culture compelled him to satisfy her -- outraged women's rights groups.

But many of his supporters reached a different conclusion about that trial, saying the rape charges came only after the family of the woman, who was not publicly named, tried but failed to have Zuma take her as a wife.

My Cameroonian friend always said he wanted four wives. He wasn't Muslim, but he agreed with them that four was enough.

He planned to add an additional wife each decade. Anthropologists call this "gerontocratic polygamy." One theory is that it tends to appeal to women in disease-ridden environments, like Africa. If a man survives to age 65, like Zuma, then he must have a good immune system, so his offspring would be more likely to inherit good immune system genes, thus making him a good father.

Incidentally, my friend had gotten married in Cameroon as a teenager and had a son. Then he went off to UCLA and kind of forgot about being married. Much to his surprise, about a half dozen years later, his wife showed up in LA one day, leaving their son behind with relatives. He wasn't sure he wanted a wife, but quickly came to enjoy having her around, and they had had another baby just before I met them.

A Ghanaian friend in Chicago told almost the exact same story about how his semi-forgotten wife had showed up one day. It's a happier variant on the one John Updike tells in The Coup, which matches the story of Barack Obama Sr. almost exactly: a married African student attends an American college and bigamously marries an American girl. (Updike has an African son-in-law and an African daughter-in-law, so he knows Africa far better than most Americans. Plus, he's John Updike, so he notices stuff.)

Update: Ben Trovato asks:

Why, in the name of God, won't someone bring Jacob Zuma his machine gun? I can no longer stand by and watch the man suffer like this. Has he not been through enough?

There is an organisation called the Friends of Jacob Zuma, and yet not one of its members is willing to do as he asks. Some friends.

Jacob Zuma has anywhere between two and five wives. But what good is that if none will go the extra mile? Who brings him his pint of Ijuba after another exhausting live concert outside the Pietermartizburg High Court? As a proud Zulu man, he cannot be expected to fetch his own sorghum beer and automatic weapon.

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

January 4, 2008

Marginal Decisionmaking

Are you ever in a situation, such as when shopping, where it's about time to finally make a decision, like between buying the GyroXdisk 6800 or the MutantBlaster 970, and so you announce, "I choose the ...," but then you are immediately surprised at what came out of your mouth? As the salesman is ringing up your new MutantBlaster 970, you're thinking, "How the heck did that happen? I was sure I was going to say 'GyroXdisk 6800.'"

But pretty soon the relief of having made a decision, any decision, even if you can't tell why you made it, overcomes your dismay, and soon you're home blasting mutants without a care in the world. It's not like you sputtered, "I'll buy that big bag of mulch over in the Gardening Dept. instead of one of these electronic gizmos. And I live in an apartment so mulch makes no sense at all." No, you knew you wanted some kind of gizmo and so you were standing in the gizmo aisle talking to the gizmo salesman, so which precise gizmo you wound up with is moderately random. But it's not at all random that you bought a gizmo instead of a bag of mulch.

This happens to me all the time. I'm probably just the world's worst decision maker and this never happens to you, but maybe it gives a hint of something important in understanding history.

I started thinking about this again because Freeman Dyson, who is one of the last surviving physicists to have done war work during WWII (although John Archibald Wheeler, who worked on the Manhattan Project at Hanford is now 97), says that he's changed his mind and now no longer believes that the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan didn't end the war:

1. Members of the Supreme Council, which customarily met with the Emperor to take important decisions, learned of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima on the morning of August 6, 1945. Although Foreign Minister Togo asked for a meeting, no meeting was held for three days.

2. A surviving diary records a conversation of Navy Minister Yonai, who was a member of the Supreme Council, with his deputy on August 8. The Hiroshima bombing is mentioned only incidentally. More attention is given to the fact that the rice ration in Tokyo is to be reduced by ten percent.

3. On the morning of August 9, Soviet troops invaded Manchuria. Six hours after hearing this news, the Supreme Council was in session. News of the Nagasaki bombing, which happened the same morning, only reached the Council after the session started.

4. The August 9 session of the Supreme Council resulted in the decision to surrender.

I don't see this timeline as undermining my long-held assumption that the 1-2-3 punch of Hiroshima, the Soviet entry into the war against Japan, and Nagasaki -- three cataclysms in four days -- was what finally broke the ferocious will of the Japanese militarists after endless arguing.

I don't know much about the Japanese decision-making process, but I can imagine what it would be like if I had been emperor on August 9, 1945. The Supreme War Council would turn to me and say they were hopelessly divided, "Your Divine Imperialness, we need you to break the deadlock. Shall we fight until we are all dead ... or surrender?"

They'd all look at me. I'd go, "Uh, uh, uh ... surrender!" And I'd immediately think, "Oh, crap, why did I say that? I meant 'Fight on!' Where'd that 'Surrender' come from? I'd better tell them I didn't mean it. ... But, that wouldn't look very divinely imperial -- now would it? -- to admit I just blurted out the most important decision in Japanese history at random. Maybe it's best just to keep my mouth shut and see what happens? In fact, yes, 'Surrender' is what I intended all along. It's becoming very clear to me now. Indeed, there was never really any doubt."

I'm sure it didn't actually happen that way (just that it would have happened that way if I was the Emperor of Japan).

Why did the Japanese surrender when they did? What weight did the two atomic bombs have in their decision? (Sure, surrender made all the sense in the world, but nothing the Japanese militarists had done since 1941 made much strategic sense.)

Who knows?

In contrast, nobody debates why Zanzibar surrendered 38 minutes into its 1896 war with the British Empire. Of course, they surrendered -- they were Zanzibar. What, they were going to do: beat the Royal Navy? It's just not very interesting because it's an obvious decision: Zanzibar was getting its butt kicked. Randomness didn't play much of a role.

My point is that the most interesting decisions in history, the ones that historians argue over endlessly about why they were made, are the virtually 50-50 tossups that could have gone either way. Those are the most interesting questions, but they are also the least likely to be fully explicated by historians.

The other decisions that are most argued over by historians are the ones that are the most over-determined.

That makes the Japanese decision of 1945 perhaps the ultimate in endless arguability. The Japanese leadership had many good reasons to surrender, each one perfectly adequate, and no reason to fight on other than to save their own necks from war crimes trials, but all the assassinations by the Army of non-insane statesmen before the war had bequeathed an atmosphere of militarist hysteria, so it was also a very close run thing -- overdetermined but also a toss-up.

This is relevant to the distinction between history and social science. I define social science (perhaps idiosyncratically) as fields where statistics are crucial.

Much of history is driven by unique personnel decisions that often didn't necessarily get a lot of reflection at the time -- e.g., the Bush dynasty is due to Ronald Reagan rejecting at the last moment at the 1980 GOP convention the popular idea of Gerald Ford for VP and picking George H.W. Bush. If something else had happened, George W. Bush never would have become President.

Now, Reagan probably put more thought into choosing a VP in 1980 than the average Iowa Caucus voter put into his or her choice, but the results are less random because thousands of semi-random individuals decisions were aggregated. So, the rise of the Bush Dynasty is the reserve of history, while elections are both history and political science.

Much the same is true about forecasting. The forecasts that interest us most are those where the chance of being wrong is highest. If you predict that NAM high school dropout rates will be higher than white and Asian drop outrates 30 years from now, nobody cares, even though it's clearly an important and highly plausible prediction, because it's boring and depressing. But tell me who is going to win the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament and I'm all ears, even though your chance of being wrong is probably at least 90%.

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

January 3, 2008

Another iSteve public service

Back on September 1, 2007, my lucky readers were the first to hear that Mike Huckabee would win the GOP nomination, when I revealed that:

Republican nominee Mike Huckabee will outpoll Democratic nominee Bill Richardson 51%-47% in the November 2008 Presidential election.

I meant Obama, not Richardson, of course. It was just a typo.

"What an idiot!" you say, "Don't you know that the Clintons will stop at nothing to get back to the White House? Richardson and Huckabee? You don't know anything about the election!" And you're right. I don't. I'm not even sure where Huckabee is from. I think it's that state, you know, the one you drive through to get to that other state.

Mere details ...

And I punctured the college football convention wisdom of the time:

Now, here are some more predictions. USC will not finish #1 in college football this season.

I had a strong hunch SC would lose to 41-point underdog Stanford. I guess I should have put that in my post, but I didn't want to bore you with a lot of trivia.

Instead, Rutgers will bring the national title home to Delaware. (Or maybe to Connecticut, depending on where, precisely, Rutgers is located. Assuming it's located somewhere. Maybe it's like the DeVry Institute and is located everywhere. But I digress.)

Rutgers did win, didn't they? Or maybe Cal won, they were off to that 6-0 start and ranked #2. Whatever happened to them? To be honest, I kind of lost track after Central Southern Florida reached #2. Maybe nobody won.

For lots more of my predictions, see here.

More seriously, in case you missed it, here's my 12/25/07 review in the Washington Times of Shelby Steele's book about Obama, The Bound Man, in which I write:

"Indeed, Mr. Obama has a plausible shot at riding strong early showings in virtually all-white Iowa and New Hampshire to the nomination."

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

Failing Upward

As Marcus Epstein notes on VDARE.com, William Kristol, recently fired as a columnist by Time, has now been hired as an op-ed columnist by the New York Times.

Yet, the NYT already had David Brooks as their invade the world / invite the world columnist, so it's hard to see what Kristol brings to the table that the more talented Brooks wasn't already supplying better. Granted, Brooks sometimes sounds like his calls for more war aren't really sincere, that he doesn't pay much attention to which foreigners to slaughter next, that he's just recycling stuff Kristol, Krauthammer and Ko. fed him. But, the pro forma nature of Brooks's bloodlust is a good thing.

I guess the neocon world view has been proven so valid over the last four and a half years that the NYT just had to double up. After all, the neocons are the only respectable voices of conservatism.

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

Not the Onion: "Congress bans incandescent bulbs"

Congress has banned traditional electric lights bulbs as of 2012-2014. Instead, we're supposed to use those squirrely CFL bulbs that cost six times as much, cast ugly flickering light, start up slow, burn out faster, don't fit in many lamp coverings, and can't be discarded in the trash because they contain poisonous mercury.

Seriously, about half of my twisty fluorescent bulbs burn out within a month. I'm told I'm using the light bulbs wrong. That I turn them on and off too much, and should just leave them on, which seems like it's defeating the purpose of saving electricity. Other people suggest my fixtures are causing them to overheat. Others have other suggestions.

Do I really need to complicate my life over light bulbs?

Is this technology really ready for federally-mandated prime time?

Wouldn't this technology advance faster if it had to compete with Thomas Alva Edison's proven invention instead of getting a federal monopoly?

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

Craptocracy is back

Since I refuse to read about Campaign 2008 except on C. Van Carter's Craptocracy blog, and he can go weeks without posting anything, I was kind of under the impression that they'd called this whole voting thing off due to lack of interest. But now, there are a bunch of new craptastic postings, so it appears that there will be an election this year after all. (Although Dennis Dale's future history series on Untethered recounting the Fall of 2008 raises questions about that assumption.)

Here's Craptocracy on Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank:

Dana Milbank is a neurotic paranoid. We know this because he wrote a bizarre essay about the genial Tom Tancredo in which he repeatedly describes the principled and soft-spoken former presidential candidate as “angry” without providing a single real example of Tancredo's supposed rage. ...

Milbank obviously believes any opposition to illegal aliens indicates a person is angry. I don’t think Milbank cares about actual illegal aliens because people in his position never do (if he’s ever had a conversation with one except to complain the bathroom wasn’t cleaned properly I’ll eat a sombrero). No, Milbank’s real concern isn’t illegal aliens at all, it’s preventing Nazis from taking little Dana Milbank and putting him in a concentration camp. In the diseased mind of Dana Milbank the only way to prevent a Fourth Reich from erupting on American soil is to flood the United States with non-whites. Because Milbank is gripped by this strange fantasy it causes him to lash out at a gentleman like Tom Tancredo. I hope the mentally unbalanced Milbank gets help; until he does the Washington Post should refrain from publishing his ravings.

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

Kenyan tribalism explains why Barack is so black

Democracy is working its magic in Kenya at the moment:

Kenya Torn by Tribal Rage: In a flash, ethnically integrated neighbors turn on one another ... -- Washington Post
Kenya Topples Into Post-Election Chaos -- NY Times

So, it's worth recounting the views of Barack Obama's Kenyan relatives, who belong to the Luo tribe, on the tribal situation in Kenya. The Presidential candidate writes in Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (p. 348):

Anyway, the divisions in Kenya didn't stop there [between Africans and Indian merchants]; there were always finer lines to draw. Between the country's forty black tribes, for example. They, too, were a fact of life. You didn't notice the tribalism so much among [half-sister] Auma's friends, younger university-educated Kenyans who had been schooled in the idea of nation and race; tribe was an issue with them only when they were considering a mate, or when they got older and saw it help or hinder careers. But they were the exceptions. Most Kenyans still worked with older maps of identity, more ancient loyalties. Even Jane or Zeituni could say things that surprised me. "The Luo are intelligent but lazy," they would say. Or "The Kikuyu are money-grubbing but industrious." Or "The Kalenjins -- well, you can see what's happened to the country since they took over."

Hearing my aunts traffic in such stereotypes, I would try to explain to them the error of their ways. [At this point, Obama has spent a little less than two weeks in his life in Africa.] "It's thinking like that that holds us back," I would say. "We're all part of one tribe. The black tribe. The human tribe. Look what tribalism has done to places like Nigeria or Liberia."

And Jane would say, "Ah, those West Africans are all crazy anyway. You know they used to be cannibals, don't you?"

And Zeituni would say, "You sound just like your father, Barry, he also had such ideas about people."

Meaning he , too, was naive; he, too, liked to argue with history. Look what happened to him ...

The reason Obama is just about as dark in skin tone as the average African-American even though he is nearly three times as white genetically is because the Luo are darker than most other Africans. Obama describes the crowd at a Nairobi nightclub (p. 364) as comprised of:

"... tall, ink-black Luos and short, brown Kikuyus, Kamba and Meru and Kalenjin..."

Obama's Luo tribe are one of the tall, thin, very dark "elongated Nilotic" groups who originated in the Southern Sudan. They are rather like their relatives, the famously tall Dinka and Nuer, only not quite as much. In contrast, most Africans today (and almost all African-Americans) are primarily descended from the "Bantu expansion" that originated in the Nigeria-Cameroon area of West Africa.

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

January 1, 2008

"What have you changed your mind about?"

Every New Year's Day, literary agent John Brockman promotes his stable of science writers by having them propound on a question of interest. This year's query is "What have you changed your mind about?"

MARK PAGEL
Evolutionary Biologist, Reading University, England

We Differ More Than We Thought

The last thirty to forty years of social science has brought an overbearing censorship to the way we are allowed to think and talk about the diversity of people on Earth. People of Siberian descent, New Guinean Highlanders, those from the Indian sub-continent, Caucasians, Australian aborigines, Polynesians, Africans — we are, officially, all the same: there are no races.

Flawed as the old ideas about race are, modern genomic studies reveal a surprising, compelling and different picture of human genetic diversity. We are on average about 99.5% similar to each other genetically. This is a new figure, down from the previous estimate of 99.9%. To put what may seem like miniscule differences in perspective, we are somewhere around 98.5% similar, maybe more, to chimpanzees, our nearest evolutionary relatives.

The new figure for us, then, is significant. It derives from among other things, many small genetic differences that have emerged from studies that compare human populations. Some confer the ability among adults to digest milk, others to withstand equatorial sun, others yet confer differences in body shape or size, resistance to particular diseases, tolerance to hot or cold, how many offspring a female might eventually produce, and even the production of endorphins — those internal opiate-like compounds.

We also differ by surprising amounts in the numbers of copies of some genes we have. Modern humans spread out of Africa only within the last 60-70,000 years, little more than the blink of an eye when stacked against the 6 million or so years that separate us from our Great Ape ancestors. The genetic differences amongst us reveal a species with a propensity to form small and relatively isolated groups on which natural selection has often acted strongly to promote genetic adaptations to particular environments.

We differ genetically more than we thought, but we should have expected this: how else but through isolation can we explain a single species that speaks at least 7,000 mutually unintelligible languages around the World?

What this all means is that, like it or not, there may be many genetic differences among human populations — including differences that may even correspond to old categories of 'race' — that are real differences in the sense of making one group better than another at responding to some particular environmental problem. This in no way says one group is in general 'superior' to another, or that one group should be preferred over another. But it warns us that we must be prepared to discuss genetic differences among human populations.

Arnold Kling has some highlights of other answers here.

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

My New VDARE.com Column: "The Real Dropout Rate"

Here's a short part of my new 3000 word VDARE.com column:

The Real Dropout Rate—And Why Some Students Should Drop Out of School

By Steve Sailer

January 01, 2008

In the grand tradition of Ebenezer Scrooge, economist James J. Heckman, a Nobel Laureate and 2002 Statistician of the Year, says "Bah! Humbug!" to the happy-clappy statistics the federal government has been feeding us on a key omen of America's future: high school dropout rates.

In an important paper with the bland title of The American High School Graduation Rate: Trends and Levels, [PDF] Heckman of the U. of Chicago and co-author Paul A. LaFontaine of the American Bar Association report:

"The true high school graduation rate is substantially lower than the official rate issued by the National Center for Educational Statistics."

The Department of Education's NCES claims that the graduation rate has been rising since back in the late 1960s, when it stood at 80 percent…

According to the feds, as cited by Heckman and LaFontaine:

"U.S. schools now graduate nearly 88 percent of students and black graduation rates have converged to those of non-Hispanic whites over the past four decades."

But in fact Heckman and LaFontaine's exhaustive study of the widest array of data sources consulted to date finds that the high school dropout rate isn't 12 percent, but about twice that. And the racial gaps have been steady since the early 1970s.

Moreover, although the high school dropout rate improved consistently through the middle of the 20th Century, falling from 75 percent in the early 1920s to 20 percent in the late 1960s, it has worsened, by up to one-fourth, since then.

Dropout rates have gotten slightly worse for all three big ethnic groups, but I estimate that the majority of the deterioration for the country as a whole is simply because Hispanics and blacks make up a larger share of the population than they did 35 years ago.

In contrast to the federal propaganda, H&L find that the dropout rate is around 35 percent for both African-Americans and for those more assimilated Hispanics who either were born in America or have been here at least a decade.

In fact, despite somewhat higher test scores than blacks, these Americanized Hispanics still appear to leave school early at a somewhat greater rate than blacks.

H&L report that the dropout rate for all Hispanics, including recent immigrants, is significantly worse because

"… almost half of Hispanics in this [18-24] age group immigrated within the last ten years. These recent Hispanic immigrants are primarily low-skilled Mexican workers … The migration of workers with low levels of education has increased substantially over the past 40 years.…"

One of H&L's crucial findings: the ethnic gaps are not getting better:

"In fact, we find no evidence of convergence in minority-majority graduation rates over the past 35 years."

… This intractability of racial differences is something that is constantly assumed away by popular pundits who demonize anyone who suggests that these gaps might have genetic origins. "All we have to do is change the environment!"

Perhaps. But, despite 35 years of rapid changes in the social environment, nothing has happened to the dropout disparities. The only difference is that there are now far more low-performing minorities than in 1972.

With racial gaps, this is a common pattern seen across many different measures. Relative quality differences among the races languish virtually unchanged from decade to decade. But, primarily through immigration policy, we allow relative quantity to change relentlessly—in inevitably unfavorable directions.

[More]

I go on to suggest a number of ways to improve the situation.

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

The future of the GOP

To prosper in the long run, the GOP needs to wean itself off its addiction to neocon money and media influence, which has been so disastrous in foreign policy. But that's hard to do because of, well, neocon money and media influence. (E.g., Krauthammer and Kristol get fired as columnists at Time, but Kristol pops up instantly at the NY Times).

It will be doubly hard for the GOP to wean itself off the neocons because anybody who points out the mere fact of neocon money and media influence is denounced as an anti-Semite. And most people in public life would rather let America blunder into more Middle Eastern wars than be denounced as anti-Semites.

Of course, neocon/neolib loyalty to the GOP is a lot less of a sure thing -- they are maneuvering to try to dominate the foreign policy of the next Democratic administration.

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