Obama's Mom

Update: If you are interested in understanding how Obama's mother, not his father, made him the man he grew up to be, my new book on Obama is now finished (and even proofread!). You can read it free online (or soon order a copy). Chapter 2 is devoted to her, and it offers the freshest and most powerful explanation of why Obama called his life (in the subtitle of his autobiography) "A Story of Race and Inheritance."

The PDF of my book is 1.8 meg and you can read it here.

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Here's my original blog post:

Now, that it's the dead of winter again, reporters are digging once more into Obama's upbringing, mandating additional expense-account research trips to Honolulu.

Here's a long article from the Chicago Tribune "Obama's Mom: Not Just a Girl from Kansas," which reveals a few things of minor interest about the Senator's late mother, whom he likes to stereotype in speeches as rooted deep in the heartland of America in order to balance off the exoticism of his name.

Her first name was ... Stanley. Her father, Stanley, who sounds like a goof, wanted a boy so much that he named her Stanley Ann. She appears to have gone through high school using the name "Stanley," as part of her "Juno"-esque striving for attention as a nonconformist, and only later switched to "Ann."

Obama makes a big deal about her being from Kansas, but she spent her adolescence in the Seattle suburbs. Her parents dropped out of their Protestant church and started attending Unitarian services. She was a high school atheist, leftist and feminist. But soon after her father moved her to Hawaii, much to the surprise of her high school friends, she got pregnant and quickly married the father, just like so many other more conventional teenage girls during the Baby Boom.

Of course, the new husband was a bit of an attention-getter. And there was the problem of his already having a wife back in Kenya, although that's not mentioned.

The descriptions of her sitting around having rap sessions with Obama Sr. and the other developing nations students at the U. of Hawaii are exactly like the equivalent passages in John Updike's 1978 novel The Coup in which the future dictator of Kush sits around at McCarthy College in Franchise, WI from 1955-1959 shooting the bull with the tiny number of nonwhite students plus his white girlfriend, who he will bigamously marry after a pregnancy scare.

One of the themes of Obama's autobiography is his being weirded out by his youngish mom being sexually attracted to dark men. And there's an undercurrent of Obama being freaked out by the realization that his mother pretty much wrecked her life through her attraction to unreliable Third World men and unreliable Third World countries, but, if she had been more sensible, where would he be? This is the kind of thing that leaves Obama sighing deeply over the tragic conundrums of fate, while less self-absorbed people would have a laugh.

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

Unfortunate Sons

USA Today reports:

The U.S. population will soar to 438 million by 2050 and the Hispanic population will triple, according to projections released Monday by the Pew Research Center. The latest projections by the non-partisan research group are higher than government estimates to date and paint a portrait of an America dramatically different from today's.

The projected growth in the U.S. population — 303 million today — will be driven primarily by immigration among all groups except the elderly.

"We're assuming that the rate of immigration will stay roughly constant," says Jeffrey Passel, co-author of the report.

Even if immigration is limited, Hispanics' share of the population will increase because they have higher birth rates than the overall population. That's largely because Hispanic immigrants are younger than the nation's aging baby boom population. By 2030, all 79 million boomers will be at least 65 and the elderly will grow faster than any other age group.

The projections show that by 2050:

•Nearly one in five Americans will have been born outside the USA vs. one in eight in 2005. Sometime between 2020 and 2025, the percentage of foreign-born will surpass the historic peak reached a century ago during the last big immigration wave. New immigrants and their children and grandchildren born in the USA will account for 82% of the population increase from 2005 to 2050.

•Whites who are not Hispanic, now two-thirds of the population, will become a minority when their share drops to 47%. They made up 85% of the population in 1960.

•Hispanics, already the largest minority group, will more than double their share of the population to 29%.

•Blacks will remain 13% of the population. Asians will go to 9% from 5%.

Nobody ever, never, ever thinks about this, but how is affirmative action going to work when the beneficiaries outnumber the benefactors? It's exactly like the social security problems down the road as the retiree to worker ratio rises, but we've all seen millions of words about that and practically nothing about the analogous affirmative action problem.

As John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater sang in "Fortunate Son:"

And when you ask them, how much should we give?
Ooh, they only answer more! more! more!

P.S. Well, I've thought about it -- here's one of my articles crunching the numbers. And here's another that explains why black leaders almost never criticize affirmative action privileges for brand new immigrants who just got off the plane.

The crazy thing is that everybody just wants to argue -- pro or con -- over affirmative action for blacks. Critics of quotas want to attack preferences exactly where the argument in favor of them is strongest -- that America owes something to the descendants of slaves. In contrast, nobody would claim with a straight face that we owe anything to Argentineans who have just got off the jumbo jet from Buenos Aires, and yet they benefit from quotas too! But the future will be dominated numerically by quota-eligible Hispanics, not by quota-eligible blacks.

It's also worth pondering what proportion of those 438 million people in 2050 will have been born to unmarried women. Just from 2005 to 2006, the number of babies born to married white women fell 0.4% while the number of babies born to unmarried Latinas grew 9.6%! The Hispanic illegitimacy rate is now up to 50%. What will it be in 2050? What does this portend for law-abidingness, education, social capital, technological innovation and a host of other good things that are correlated with intact families?

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

Where's Obama's paper trail?

Sen. Obama is a highly gifted writer who has published two large books. We can assume that the first, his 1995 autobiography, wasn't ghost-written because, although it's very well-written, it's also quite boring due to his monomaniacal focus on the topic of "race and inheritance." A professional hack would have insisted on punching it up with more funny stories to make it more entertaining.

So, here's a man with a major talent for expressing himself in writing, and who has been obsessed with social change and politics for his entire life. Yet, where are the articles commenting on current affairs written by Obama before his focus-tested emergence on the national stage a few years ago?

Maybe there are bunch of them out there, but I sure haven't heard of any.

Consider that for eight years, Obama held the job of "Lecturer" at the University of Chicago Law School, the same title as his colleague, federal judge Richard A. Posner. During that period, Posner published, roughly, one quadrillion articles. But Obama, so far as I can tell, doesn't seem to have published anything.

Sure, Obama was busy being a state legislator, but Posner was busy being the top judge of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, and writing more decisions than any other judge in America.

Now, it's often been said that the reason Posner isn't on the Supreme Court is because he has such a lengthy paper trail, which the Democrats would howl over if a Republican President ever nominated him for the Supreme Court.

My impression is that Obama has played his cards very close to his vest from a very early age in order to preserve his viability as a Senate or even Presidential candidate, or as a Supreme Court nominee.

That shows a striking level of self-disciplined ambitiousness, which could seem reassuring or scary, depending on how you look at it.

It also suggests that his personal political views during this long period before he assembled a team of focus-testers were not of the happy-clappy "bring us together" ilk that he's pushing today. After all, what would be the long-term harm of writing a few articles urging bipartisan understanding if that's what he really believed in during the 1980s and 1990s?

Instead, this logic suggests that he realized all along that expressing his personal political views distinctly on paper could come back to haunt him in his drive for national power.

Can anybody do a Lexis-Nexis search for the 1980s and 1990s? He did a lot of interviews around 1991 when he was elected president of the Harvard Law Review, but he's awfully good at playing interviewers. (Amusingly, actor Blair Underwood spent some time with Obama around then to do research for his character on "LA Law.") So, did he write letters to editors or anything like that?

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

Would McCain Go to the Mat with Obama?

Here's the opening of my new VDARE.com column on the election:

Will McCain Go to the Mat with Obama?

By Steve Sailer

The collapse of long-time frontrunner Rudy Giuliani allowed rival invade-the-world invite-the-world candidate Sen. John McCain to squeeze out plurality wins in winner-take-all primaries, while his hapless foes were winning races where delegates were allotted proportionally. The Mainstream Media (MSM) has now anointed McCain as the presumptive Republican nominee.

Yet Republicans clearly aren't happy about McCain's flukish luck. That was shown by his dismal performance on Saturday, February 9th, the first election day after Super Tuesday. Even with only Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul left in the race, Senator McMentum received just 42 percent of the vote in Louisiana, 26 percent in Washington and 24 percent in Kansas.

The odds still favor McCain scraping across the line, due to his early windfall of delegates. But I would guesstimate that, even without a Huckabee miracle comeback, there's about a 5%-15% chance that McCain won't actually be running for President when Election Day finally grinds around—nine long months from now.

Does anybody have a contingency plan? One may be needed, because McCain is 71 years old. He has twice been struck by cancer—in 1993 and in 2000, when he underwent a 9-hour operation.

And McCain doesn't have the most placid, reticent of personalities in an era that has made crucifying white males for "gaffes" into a national spectator sport (James Watson, Don Imus, Trent Lott, etc. etc. etc.)

At this point, responsible immigration-restrictionist opinion-molders, such as John O'Sullivan, Mickey Kaus, and Randall Parker, tend to favor a Democratic victory as the least awful outcome, especially a win by the uninspiring Hillary Clinton rather than by the dangerously charismatic Barack Obama. They argue that McCain would muffle GOP Congressional resistance to a revived Amnesty/ Immigration Surge bill. They think a Democratic president would galvanize Republican opposition, as did Bill Clinton when he defeated George I, leading to a GOP Congressional victory in 1994.

But I'm in no mood to be responsible. I'm looking for only one thing from Election 2008: entertainment. I want to see mud slung everywhere.

Obama currently leads McCain in head-to-head polls by 7-8 points. So I'm going to offer McCain a little unsolicited advice on what he'd have to do to win.

I don't, however, expect McCain to take my suggestions. I expect him to choose to lose, in the politically correct manner that will preserve his image in the eyes of his Main Stream Media acolytes, rather than to do what it takes to get elected President.

[More]

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

Affordability of Family Formation

The February 11 issue of The American Conservative, the one with John McCain and his crypto-slogan "Invade the World / Invite the World" on the cover, features my long article "Value Voters," which sums up my theory of how the affordability of family formation drives the Red State -Blue State divide. I've published it in bits and pieces over the years in AmCon, VDARE, and my blog, but I finally had the space to lay it out fully. It's not online.

Here's the opening:

No matter who wins the 2008 presidential election, pundits will afterwards hypothesize feverishly about why the country is so divided into vast inland expanses of Red (Republican) regions versus thin coastal strips of Blue (Democratic) metropolises. Yet, judging from 2000 and 2004, few will stumble upon the engine driving this partisan pattern, even though the statistical correlations are among the highest in the history of the social sciences.

The Republicans lost the popular vote in 2000 while advocating a "humble" foreign policy, and won in 2004 while defending a foreign policy that Napoleon might have found bombastic. Yet, all that happened from 2000 to 2004 was that virtually every part of the country moved a few points toward the Republicans. The relative stability of this Red-Blue geographic split suggests that more fundamental forces are at work than just the transient issues of the day.

Neither Jane Austen nor Benjamin Franklin, however, would have found the question of what drives the Red-Blue divide so baffling. Unlike today's intellectuals, they both thought intensely about the web tying together wealth, property, marriage, and children. Thus, they probably would not have been surprised that a state's voting proclivities are now dominated by the relative presence or absence of what I call "affordable family formation."

First-time readers of Pride and Prejudice frequently remark that Austen's romance novels are, by American standards, not terribly romantic. She possessed a hard-headed understanding of how in traditional English society, wedlock was a luxury that some would never be able to afford, an assumption that often shocks us in our more sentimental 21^st century.

Economic historian Gregory Clark's recent book, A Farewell to Alms, quantified the Malthusian reality under the social structure acerbically depicted in Austen's books. The English in the 1200-1800 era imposed upon themselves the sexual self-restraint that pioneering economist Thomas Malthus famously (but belatedly) suggested they follow in 1798. By practicing population control, the English largely avoided the cycles of rapid growth followed by cataclysmic famines that plagued China, where women married universally and young. The English postponed marriage and children until a man and woman could afford the accouterments suitable for a respectable married couple of their class.

In the six centuries up through Austen's lifetime, Clark found, English women didn't marry on average until age 24 to 26, with poor women often having to wait until their 30s to wed. And 10 to 20 percent never married. Judging from the high fertility of married couples, contraceptive practices appear to have been almost unknown in England in this time, yet, merely three or four percent of all births were illegitimate, demonstrating that rigid pre-marital self-discipline was the norm.

Remarkably, a half century before Malthus's gloomy and Austen's witty reflections on life and love in crowded England, Ben Franklin had pointed out that in his lightly populated America, the human condition was more relaxed and happy. In his insightful 1751 essay, Observations concerning The Increase of Mankind, Franklin spelled out, with an 18^th Century surfeit of capitalization, the first, nonpartisan half of the theory of affordable family formation:

"For People increase in Proportion to the Number of Marriages, and that is greater in Proportion to the Ease and Convenience of supporting a Family. When Families can be easily supported, more Persons marry, and earlier in Life."

He outlined the virtuous cycle connecting the Colonies' limited population, low land prices, high wages, early marriage, and abundant children:

"Europe is generally full settled with Husbandmen, Manufacturers, &c. and therefore cannot now much increase in People… Land being thus plenty in America, and so cheap as that a labouring Man, that understands Husbandry, can in a short Time save Money enough to purchase a Piece of new Land sufficient for a Plantation, whereon he may subsist a Family; such are not afraid to marry …"

Franklin concluded: "Hence Marriages in America are more general, and more generally early, than in Europe."

The Industrial Revolution broke the tyranny of the Malthusian Trap over food, but the supply of and demand for land never ceased to influence decisions to marry and have children. As America's coastal regions filled up, affordability of family formation began to differ sharply from state to state (disparities partially masked over the last few years by subprime mortgages and other financial gambits). CNN reported in 2006:

"More than 90 percent of homes in [Indianapolis] were affordable to families earning the median income for the area of about $65,100. In Los Angeles, the least affordable big metro area, only 1.9 percent of the homes sold were within the reach of families earning a median income for the city of $56,200."

When I lived in the Midwest, from age 24 to 34 I attended numerous weddings, but as my social circle matured, the invitations naturally dried up. Yet, when I moved back to my native, but now much more expensive, Los Angeles in 2000, I suddenly started being invited to weddings again. Like male characters in a Jane Austen novel, four of my seven closest friends from my high school class of 1976 got married and bought houses for the first time in their early forties.

Similarly, the cost of childrearing varies more across the country than ever before. A study of Census data by the New York Times found that "Manhattan’s 35,000 or so white non-Hispanic toddlers are being raised by parents whose median income was $284,208 a year in 2005."

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

Pakistani First Cousin Marriage in Britain

From the Times of London:

A government minister has warned that inbreeding among immigrants is causing a surge in birth defects - comments likely to spark a new row over the place of Muslims in British society.

Phil Woolas, an environment minister, said the culture of arranged marriages between first cousins was the “elephant in the room”. Woolas, a former race relations minister, said: “If you have a child with your cousin the likelihood is there’ll be a genetic problem.”

The minister, whose views were supported by medical experts this weekend, said: “The issue we need to debate is first cousin marriages, whereby a lot of arranged marriages are with first cousins, and that produces lots of genetic problems in terms of disability [in children].”

Woolas emphasised the practice did not extend to all Muslim communities but was confined mainly to families originating from rural Pakistan. However, up to half of all marriages within these communities are estimated to involve first cousins.

Medical research suggests that while British Pakistanis are responsible for 3% of all births, they account for one in three British children born with genetic illnesses.

Arranged first cousin marriages are also a vehicle for immigration fraud -- they are a way to bring in more family members.

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

Larison moves to AmConMag.com

Daniel Larison is now blogging for The American Conservative website here.

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

10 Million Pages Served

Something of a milestone occurred today for the iSteve family of webpages -- the ten millionth Page View, as recorded by Site Meter since I installed it just over four years ago. Of course, that's not counting visits to my articles on VDARE.com AmConMag.com, and so forth.

By the way, remember how every McDonald's restaurants used to have a big sign that said "70 Billion Hamburgers Served," and then "80 Billion Hamburgers Served," and then "90 Billion Hamburgers Served"? They were on track to reach 100 billion in the mid-1990s, and I was looking forward to watching President Bill Clinton eat the ceremonial 100 billionth McDonald's hamburger. As an American, having Clinton as head of state was pretty embarrassing most of the time, but here, finally, the man and the moment were about to come together in historic harmony.

And then ... nothing. No McDonald's sign ever read "100 Billion Hamburgers Served." Some of them switched to "Billions and Billions Served," and then the signs disappeared.

What's the story behind the Great American Anticlimax?

I promise you, my fellow Americans, that I won't let you down like McDonald's did. When it's time for the 100 billionth iSteve page to be served, I will make sure there's a grand ceremony and Hereditary President Prescott Rodham Walker Bush-Clinton IV will telepathically download it personally.

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

The Darwinian Sweet Spot: 3rd Cousin Marriages?

It's long been understood theoretically that there must exist a Darwinian fitness trade-off between too much inbreeding and too much outbreeding, but nobody knew where that was. If you marry your first cousin, you are likely to suffer a 30% higher infant mortality rate. But if you marry somebody too genetically dissimilar, you can start running into various reproductive problems as well.

Now, deCODE Genetics of Iceland, who foisted upon the world the most likely fallacious claim that James D. Watson is 25% nonwhite, is claiming that the Darwinian fitness sweetspot is 3rd cousin marriage:

In a paper published today deCODE scientists establish a substantial and consistent positive correlation between the kinship of couples and the number of children and grandchildren they have. The study, which analyzes more than 200 years of deCODE’s comprehensive genalogical data on the population of Iceland, shows that couples related at the level of third cousins have the greatest number of offspring. For example, for women born between 1800 and 1824, those with a mate related at the level of a third cousin had an average of 4.04 children and 9.17 grandchildren, while those related to their mates as eighth cousins or more distantly had 3.34 children and 7.31 grandchildren. For women born in the period 1925-1949 with mates related at the degree of third cousins, the average number of children and grandchildren were 3.27 and 6.64, compared to 2.45 and 4.86 for those with mates who were eighth cousins or more distantly related.

The findings hold for every 25-year interval studied, beginning with those born in the year 1800 up to the present day. Because of the strength and consistency of the association, even between couples with very subtle differences in kinship, the authors conclude that the effect very likely has a biological basis, one which has yet to be elucidated. The paper, ‘An association between the kinship and fertility of human couples,’ is published online in Science magazine at www.sciencemag.org .

deCODE has access to the amazing Icelandic national family tree, in which most Icelanders who ever lived over the last 1000+ years are enrolled. Genealogy is easier in Iceland because there hasn't been much immigration for the last 1000 years, and because of the surname system: for example, the PR lady who wrote this press release is named Berglind Olafsdottir -- i.e., she is "Olaf's daughter."

Icelanders are of Scandinavian and Celtic descent.

The odds of genetic problems due to inheriting two deleterious recessive genes falls off pretty fast as you move from first cousin outward. I believe at the third cousin marriage level, it's only 1/16th as high as at the first cousin marriage level, but don't quote me when proposing marriage to somebody you met at Great Aunt Meg's 90th birthday party. Still, I'm not sure how much faith I should put in these findings.

I could imagine some non-biochemical reasons for this, such as that 3rd cousins might have tended to marry at younger ages -- in early modern England, as Gregory Clark pointed out in A Farewell to Alms, age of marriage is the main determinant of fertility. Or perhaps healthy people tended to quickly find spouses within their social circles, who tended to be related to them, while sickly people had to wander further afield to find somebody who would marry them.

John Hawks notes an even likelier reason: people who are descended from highly fertile people will have more third cousins to marry. That could be biological or cultural or both.

Some of it could be purely mathematical -- the chance of falling in love with your third cousin depends in part on the number of third cousins you have.

And the number of cousins of any type you have is wildly dependent upon typical family size in your family tree. To simplify genealogical calculations, assume that every person in Family Tree A for the last four generations has had only one child, every person in Family Tree B has had exactly two children, and so forth. Here's what you would face in terms of number of relatives of your own generation:

kids/family	Siblings	1st Cousins	2nd Cousins	3rd Cousins
1	0	0	0	0
2	1	4	16	64
3	2	12	72	432
4	2	24	196	1536
5	4	40	400	4000

Thus, if everybody has had exactly one child for the last four generations, you would have no siblings, no cousins, no 2nd cousins, and no 3rd cousins. At your family reunion, you'd be assured of getting a big slice of the pie, but you'd be pretty lonely.

But if your ancestors had have a nice stable two surviving/breeding children per person, then you would have 1 sibling, 4 cousins, 16 2nd cousins, and 64 3rd cousins.

Yet, if your ancestors averaged five children surviving to reproduce, you'd have 4,000 third cousins!

Of course, humans do not breed in an evolutionarily stable manner. We've taken over this planet by having more than two children each. So, most people are descended, on average, from people who had more surviving children than the average.

It rural Iceland, if you came from "good stock," it might have been hard to avoid marrying your third cousin.

Anyway, I haven't seen the paper yet, so I can't tell if the the deCODE people have been able to deal with these objections. They certainly have a lot of data to work with.

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

Mickey Kaus asks ...

On Slate, Mickey writes:

"Remind me again, what is the evidence--in terms of policies, not affect or attitude or negotiating strategy--that Obama is not an unreconstructed lefty (on the American spectrum--a paleoliberal or a bit further left)? For example, would he roll back welfare reform if he could?"

Well, his voting record in the Senate is not extremely far left -- in 2007 he was the most liberal Senator, but the two previous years he was only a little more liberal than Hillary.

His record in the Illinois legislature was fairly technocratic, with him picking and choosing issues on which he could make a consensus with technocratic Republicans.

But, what do we know about what he'll do when he finally gets the top job? For example, who will he nominate to the Supreme Court?

As of the writing of his 1995 book, Obama appears to have been further to the left than about 95% of the public. For example, his concerns in the late 1980s (and repeated with a straight face in his autobiography) about the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.'s church was whether it was not radical enough. Similarly, in Obama's book, there's virtually no criticism of welfare. Indeed, Obama's mission in life when he was a racial activist and then when he became a discrimination lawyer was to get more money out of whites for blacks.

Many people assume that because Obama likes to show that he understands their arguments by paraphrasing them back to them, often better than they made them themselves, that he therefore must agree with them. But it's just conservative egomania to assume that the problem with people who disagree with you is that they don't understand your arguments, and therefore anybody who is smart enough to understand you, like Obama is, must agree with you and have your best interests at heart.

Sorry, it doesn't work that way.

For example, when Charles De Gaulle visited embattled French Algeria in 1958, the first thing he told a vast crowd of worried pied noirs was, "I have understood you." The French-speakers cried in relief because, finally, France had a leader who understood their plight. De Gaulle then proceeded to give their country to their mortal enemies. He understood the French Algerians just fine, as well as they understood themselves. He just didn't care about them as much as they cared about themselves.

Sen. Obama has written a 442 page autobiography in which he took great pains to indicate that A. He cares about his own feelings a vast amount. B. He cares about one segment of the population far more than he cares about the rest.

I could well believe that Obama moderated his feelings at some point since 1995 (perhaps when black voters rejected him for Bobby Rush in 2000). But I would feel a lot more confident about my guess if the media would stop pretending that Dreams from My Father doesn't exist and somebody would sit down with him on camera and say: "According to your autobiography, you were way, way out in left field as recently as 1995. (And if you try to deny that, I'll quote your memoirs page by page.) Have you changed since then? How so? When? Why? How can you prove it?"

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

Most important Americans

So, who should be the most famous Americans?

The most disinterested and careful attempt to measure the scholarly consensus regarding the most important individuals in history in the arts and sciences is Charles Murray's 2003 book Human Accomplishment. His methodology is described in my review in The American Conservative and in my interview with Murray, but basically he's measuring how much attention is paid each name in the leading scholarly reference works in each field.

There's an obvious high culture / academic orientation to the lists, but what scholars are basically interested in is how much somebody influenced subsequent major figures in his field.

To be eligible, you have to have been born by 1910 or died by 1950. Everybody is ranked relative to the immortal who ranks highest in his field. Murray stays away from ranking political and religious figures.

Murray kindly sent me a copy of his database. (And, no, I won't post it on the web without his permission.) I'll put up the most important Americans in science, math, and technology another day. (Briefly, the most impressive American figures in the lists are Thomas Edison, who ties with James Watt for the top ranking in Technology, and Benjamin Franklin, who is the only American on three lists: he's a major figure in Physics and Technology, and a minor eminence in Western Literature.)

I will start with the softer side and come back later to the sciences. Here are the top American names in each category:

Western Literature (Shakespeare = 100)

Name	Birth	Index
Poe, Edgar	1809	25
Whitman, Walt	1819	23
Faulkner, William	1897	15
Hemingway, Ernest	1898	15
Melville, Herman	1819	14
Twain, Mark (Clemens)	1835	12
Pound, Ezra	1885	12
Emerson, Ralph	1803	12
Hawthorne, Nathaniel	1804	10
Dreiser, Theodore	1871	10
Dos Passos, John	1896	8
Cooper, James	1789	8
O’Neill, Eugene	1888	8
Auden, W.H.	1907	6
Longfellow, Henry	1807	6
Irving, Washington	1783	6
Dickinson, Emily	1830	6
Steinbeck, John	1902	6
Thoreau, Henry	1817	6
Lewis, Sinclair	1885	6
Frost, Robert	1874	6

Americans account for 58 of the 835 writers who made the grade in Western Literature, or 7%.

Poe seems to be that rarity who reads better in translation (especially in French). Auden is classed as an American because he spent the majority of his career in America, while T.S. Eliot is grouped with the Brits.

Western Painting and Sculpture (Michelangelo = 100)

Name	Birth	Index
Rothko, Mark	1903	11
De Kooning, Willem	1904	10
Copley, John	1738	9
Newman, Barnett	1905	8
Ray, Man	1890	7
Calder, Alexander	1898	7
Smith, David	1906	7
Eakins, Thomas	1844	7
Gorky, Arshile	1904	6
Kline, Franz	1910	6
Cole, Thomas	1801	5
Bingham, George	1811	5
Homer, Winslow	1836	5
Muybridge, Eadweard	1830	5
Hopper, Edward	1882	5

Overall, Americans account for 29 of the 479 Western Artists, or 6%.

This list does not include architecture, so Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright are not eligible, nor decorative arts, so Louis Comfort Tiffany isn't either.

I suspect, in the long run, that Eakins will emerge at the top of American painters.

Western Classical Composers: (Mozart and Beethoven tied at 100)

Ives, Charles	1874	8
Copland, Aaron	1900	7
Gershwin, George	1898	6
Sessions, Roger	1896	4
Carter, Elliott	1908	4
Barber, Samuel	1910	4
Cowell, Henry	1897	4

Americans account for 21 of 522 Western Music composers, or 4%. I would imagine Americans do better in Murray's lists of writers than composers because there's not as much of a classical-pop division among writers, so Edgar Allan Poe could do very well in Murray's system, but Cole Porter can't.

Gershwin would no doubt rank in the top 10 popular composers as well.

Western Philosophers (Aristotle = 100)

James, William	1842	10
Dewey, John	1859	10
Pierce, Charles	1839	8
Quine, Willard	1908	2
Emerson, Ralph	1803	2
Santayana, George	1863	2

Americans account for 6 out of 155 Western philosophers, or 4%.

Americans aren't terribly philosophically inclined, but that's not a bad little bunch.

Overall, of the 115 Americans in these four categories, seven are women, with Emily Dickinson highest ranked. There are two blacks, Richard Wright and Duke Ellington.

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

Did Vicente Fox's foreign minister spy for Castro?

Former Mexican foreign minister Jorge G. Castañeda Gutman has been a long-time interest of mine. (Here's my 2001 VDARE.com article about this slippery fellow: "Mexico's Talleyrand").

In 2006, Fredo Arias-King pointed out to me that Castaneda's Soviet mother was an employee of Stalin's government when his father, Mexico's UN ambassador, met her in New York City in the early 1950s, where she was a translator for Stalin's delegation. Castaneda's chief advisor while he was Foreign Minister (2001-2003) was his older half-brother, Ambassador-at-Large Andres Rozental Gutman, who is his mother's son by a previous marriage. Rozental personally advised Mexico's immigration negotiators with the Bush administration.

On Monday, the Mexico City newspaper El Universal has accused Castaneda of spying for Castro's intelligence service on his father, who was Mexico's foreign minister in the late 1970s and early 1980s: "Castañeda espió a México y a su padre."

Even though Castaneda is a frequent commentator in the American press, the American media, according to a Google News search, ignored the story -- after all, it's only a story about America's next-door neighbor -- except for the LA Times on Wednesday, which headlined Castaneda's denial of a story that nobody in America had been told about.

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

Demographics of The Atlantic's 100 Most Influential Americans list

In The Atlantic's recent list of 100 most influential Americans, which was voted on mostly by historians who have written for The Atlantic, Ross Douthat does the math:

Still, certain patterns are evident. The list tells us, for instance, that though we may be a nation of immigrants, it’s the native-born who are likely to shake things up the most: just seven of the final 100 were born outside the continental United States. It tells us that the East Coast states have made the most of their head start: sixty-three of the 100 were born in the original thirteen colonies, and twenty-six in New England alone. It tells would-be influentials not to be afraid of family commitments: ninety-one of the 100 were married at least once, and two—Joseph Smith and Brigham Young—had more than fifty wives between them. The list also suggests that contemporaries are sometimes good judges of whose influence will last: nine of Time magazine’s “People of the Year” show up on the historians’ list.

A political career (or a legal one) is the surest ticket to a historical legacy (twenty-six of the 100 held a judgeship or high political office). Aspiring influentials might also consider trying to invent something (like the lightbulb, or the airplane, or the atomic bomb), or discover something (the polio vaccine, the double helix)—though Gordon S. Wood remarked, after the list was finished, “We put too much emphasis on inventors. Someone sooner or later would have come up with the cotton gin … the lure of profits was too great. The same was true with the airplane and the telephone.”

Founding a religion landed Joseph Smith and Brigham Young on the list, as well as Christian Science’s Mary Baker Eddy (86). Fomenting a revolution also leaves an impression, whether you succeed, as the Founders did, or fail, but with long-lasting repercussions, as Nat Turner and John Brown (78) did. And we at The Atlantic were pleased to see that twenty-one of the figures in the Top 100 are especially famous for their writing, from Walt Whitman (22) to Margaret Mead (81)—and that more than thirty (!) of the figures on the list have been published in this magazine.

The final 100 also suggests that men still rule, at least in many historians’ eyes—oh, and make that white men. Ten women are on the list (the highest-ranked is the feminist pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton, at No. 30), and eight African Americans, but the Top 100 is heavily WASPish. Martin Luther King Jr. (8) was among the top vote getters, but there isn’t another African American on the list until Jackie Robinson (35). And there are no Hispanics, Asian Americans, or Native Americans.

“It’s fun and challenging,” Ellen Fitzpatrick said of the exercise, but she called the rank order “an exercise in absurdity.” Noting that Walt Disney (26) finished ahead of Stanton in the balloting, she wondered: “Does a cartoonist deserve a place above someone who most powerfully advanced the case that half the people deserved equality before the law?” [Yes.] Or again, “Are we to conclude that not a single Native American Indian influenced our past?”

By the way, James D. Watson was #68 on the list, which didn't keep him from getting Watsoned for heresy.

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

Heroes of accomplishment v. heroes of suffering

Greg Cochran points out a profound change in American culture: from celebrating and promoting heroes of accomplishment to doing the same for heroes of suffering. Consider two war heroes-turned politicians. Dwight Eisenhower got the 1952 GOP nomination because of his accomplishments even though he didn't suffer much for them -- he was never in combat in his life. But organizing D-Day and managing the Anglo-American coalition suggested he had what it takes to perform well the day-to-day work of the Presidency during a particularly scary part of the Cold War. In contrast, John McCain is likely to get the 2008 GOP nomination in large measure because of his tremendous suffering during the Vietnam War, although he never accomplished all that much in the military.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are granted Honorary Heroes of Suffering status because of their being non-white males. Moreover, Hillary attained Presidential Timberhood by suffering through her husband's public infidelity.

Similarly, Obama's autobiography is pure emo rock: Yes, I know, sitting on the beach in Hawaii smoking dope may sound like a pretty soft life to you, but it was hell to me because of my"story of race and inheritance." The drugs were just “something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind . . .”

So, he had to go Suffer with His People on the South Side of Chicago for four years. Sure, he didn't accomplish anything in those four years, other than once helping Mau-Mau the all-black Chicago Housing Authority into removing some asbestos from a housing project, but that's not the point. The point is that he suffered.

In contrast, Mitt Romney, who, among other accomplishments (none of them D-Day scale, of course), saved the 2002 Winter Olympics (which by the way, were much better run than the embarrassing 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta), proved so unpopular that he dropped out today.

Perhaps the turning point was John F. Kennedy, whose main wartime feat of command was the almost unique one of getting his PT boat sliced in half by a Japanese warship.

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

The 15% and 50% rule of black politicians

A reader writes in regards to Obama's performance:

The late Alan Baron used to have the "15 and 50% rule" for cities. If a city was at least 50% black, it would almost certainly have a black mayor (Detroit, DC, Atlanta, etc.). If a city was less than 15% black, it MIGHT have a black mayor because a small minority wouldn't create all that much tension. (LA [where Tom Bradley won five elections from 1973 onward] and Seattle fit this mold).

On the other hand, if a city was between 16 and 49% black, they probably would NOT have a black mayor. The reasons were simple: at say, 30% black, the community was big to stir up a backlash, but not strong enough to win a majority. New York is the classic example of this at 30% black. David Dinkins has been their first and only black mayor. [Similarly, Harold Washington, who died 20 years ago, was Chicago's first and last black mayor.]

Obama is winning the white voters in states where no one is scared of blacks (North Dakota!). He's also winning the Deep South states where black Democrats outnumber white Democrats. But in the big states where blacks are mixed in competition with Catholic labor voters, Asians and Hispanics, he's struggling.

Alan Baron would have predicted this!

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

The Jena 6: The gift that keeps on giving blog-worthy material

From The Smoking Gun:

One of the "Jena Six" defendants was arrested yesterday for allegedly assaulting a fellow student at a Texas high school. Bryant Purvis, 19, was busted on the misdemeanor charge following an 8:30 AM altercation at Hebron High School in Carrollton, where his family relocated from Louisiana. According to the below arrest warrant affidavit, Purvis assaulted a male student he apparently suspected of vandalizing his auto. Along with choking the 18-year-old victim, the 6' 6" Purvis allegedly slammed the teenager's head on a table.

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

A more cynical interpretation

I pointed out earlier that, according to the LA Times, Obama's pandering to the illegal alien vote flopped in California because ... illegal aliens can't vote.

A reader demurs:

As regards the notion that Obama's direct advocacy of driver's licenses for illegal aliens 'flopped', you are right in every detail, but missed the big picture.

Obama was not aiming at 'hispanics'. Obama was aiming at the elites who lust after cheap labor over all other things. And it paid off big time. Money and favorable corporate press coverage is raining down on Obama, and Hilary is starting to run out of resources...

Why do you think the big money fell over itself to bring McCain back from the dead? Because McAmnesty will keep labor cheap.

Follow the money. The balance of supply and demand for labor is the dominant factor in setting wages and profits. I think Obama just outsmarted Hilary.

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

Harriet Tubmania!

Vanishing American pointed me toward this USA Today story:

Here's a quiz: Get a pencil and paper and jot down the 10 most famous Americans in history. No presidents or first ladies allowed.

Who tops your list?

Ask teenagers, and they overwhelmingly choose African-Americans and women, a study shows. It suggests that the "cultural curriculum" that most kids — and by extension, their parents — experience in school increasingly emphasizes the stories of Americans who are not necessarily dead, white or male.

Researchers gave blank paper and pencils to a diverse group of 2,000 high school juniors and seniors in all 50 states and told them: "Starting from Columbus to the present day, jot down the names of the most famous Americans in history."

Topping the list: the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman. Three of the top five — and six of the top 10 — are women.

Sam Wineburg, the Stanford University education and history professor who led the study along with Chauncey Monte-Sano of the University of Maryland, says the prominence of black Americans signals "a profound change" in how we see history.

"Over the course of about 44 years, we've had a revolution in the people who we come to think about to represent the American story," Wineburg says.

"There's a kind of shift going on, from the narrative of the founders, which is the national mythic narrative, to the narrative of expanding rights," he says.

Yes, but how does he explain No. 7: Oprah Winfrey?

She has "a kind of symbolic status similar to Benjamin Franklin," Wineburg says. "These are people who have a kind of popularity and recognition because they're distinguished in so many venues."

Indeed. After all, both Ben Franklin and Oprah Winfrey were the world's leading physicists for a decade or so in the middle of their careers. And while Oprah hasn't yet carried out the most important diplomatic mission in America's history, maybe President Obama will appoint her Secretary of State.

Here's the list chosen by 2000 juniors and seniors, no Presidents allowed:

1. Martin Luther King Jr.: 67%

2. Rosa Parks: 60%

3. Harriet Tubman: 44%

4. Susan B. Anthony: 34%

5.Benjamin Franklin: 29%

6. Amelia Earhart: 25%

7. Oprah Winfrey: 22%

8. Marilyn Monroe: 19%

9. Thomas Edison: 18%

10. Albert Einstein: 16%

All I have to say is that Sojourner Truth must be feeling pretty ripped off not to make the list.

Seriously, the absence of Jackie Robinson on this list shows how feminized schools have gotten, which explains a lot about the much higher dropout rate among boys.

This list also might explain a bit about why Hispanics and Asians aren't getting excited over Obama's candidacy. They must be asking, "Black this and black that. Why aren't we getting our fair share of our own pseudo-heroes pounded into the brains of children?"

About 20 years ago, E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy survey revealed that more high school students could identify Harriet Tubman than Stalin or Churchill. I recall William F. Buckley wondering who in the world Harriet Tubman could be. If she was more important than Stalin, how could he have gone his whole life without ever hearing of her? And if she wasn't important, why was she famous?

How naive we all were back then!

I first heard about Harriet Tubman in my elementary school reader around 1969 or 1970. I was fascinated by the concept of her Underground Railroad and couldn't wait for the part where the slaves tunnel their way from the South to Canada, although, as I recall, the story turned out to be disappointingly lacking in detail about how they built the locomotives and laid the track.

In contrast, here's The Atlantic Monthly's recent list of "100 Most Influential Americans," as chosen by various experts in a survey overseen, I believe, by Ross Douthat. The top Americans who weren't Presidents on The Atlantic's list were:

5 Alexander Hamilton
6 Benjamin Franklin
7 John Marshall
8 Martin Luther King Jr.
9 Thomas Edison
11 John D. Rockefeller
14 Henry Ford
16 Mark Twain
19 Thomas Paine
20 Andrew Carnegie

So, three overlaps (Ben, MLK, and Thomas Alva) in the top 10 but only 2 more (Einstein and Susan B. Dollar) of the students' list showed up anywhere on The Atlantic's top 100.

On The Atlantic's list, there were 8 blacks and 10 women, but no black women, in contrast to the 3 in the high school students' top 10. White males fill 82 of the top 100 slots, and 28 of the top 29.

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