November 3, 2008

Wiki proofing new version of AHBP: "Acknowledgments"

This is a comment thread for "Acknowledgments" in the revised version of Steve Sailer's America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance" that was posted online 11/3/08:

In the comments below, feel free to list typos, errors, and other comments.

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

Wiki proofing new version of AHBP: "Timeline"

This is a comment thread for "Timeline" in the revised version of Steve Sailer's America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance" that was posted online 11/3/08:

In the comments below, feel free to list typos, errors, and other comments.

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

Wiki proofing new version of AHBP: Chapter 1. "Introduction"

This is a comment thread for Chapter 1. "Introduction" in the revised version of Steve Sailer's America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance" that was posted online 11/3/08:

In the comments below, feel free to list typos, errors, and other comments.

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

Wiki proofing new version of AHBP: Chapter 2. "Stanley Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro"

This is a comment thread for Chapter 2. "Stanley Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro" in the revised version of Steve Sailer's America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance" that was posted online 11/3/08:

In the comments below, feel free to list typos, errors, and other comments.

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

Wiki proofing new version of AHBP: Chapter 3. "Nightmare of a Father"

This is a comment thread for Chapter 3. "Nightmare of a Father" in the revised version of Steve Sailer's America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance" that was posted online 11/3/08:

In the comments below, feel free to list typos, errors, and other comments.

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

Wiki proofing new version of AHBP: Chapter 4. "A Preppie in Paradise"

This is a comment thread for Chapter 4. "A Preppie in Paradise" in the revised version of Steve Sailer's America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance" that was posted online 11/3/08:

In the comments below, feel free to list typos, errors, and other comments.

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

Wiki proofing new version of AHBP: Chapter 5. "Obama as a Man of Letters"

This is a comment thread for Chapter 5. "Obama as a Man of Letters" in the revised version of Steve Sailer's America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance" that was posted online 11/3/08:

In the comments below, feel free to list typos, errors, and other comments.

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

Wiki proofing new version of AHBP: Chapter 6. "The Lost Years"

This is a comment thread for Chapter 6. "The Lost Years" in the revised version of Steve Sailer's America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance" that was posted online 11/3/08:

In the comments below, feel free to list typos, errors, and other comments.

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

Wiki proofing new version of AHBP: Chapter 7. "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers"

This is a comment thread for Chapter 7. "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers" in the revised version of Steve Sailer's America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance" that was posted online 11/3/08:

In the comments below, feel free to list typos, errors, and other comments.

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

Wiki proofing new version of AHBP: Chapter 8. "Making a Religion Out of Race"

This is a comment thread for Chapter 8. "Making a Religion Out of Race" in the revised version of Steve Sailer's America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance" that was posted online 11/3/08:

In the comments below, feel free to list typos, errors, and other comments.

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

Wiki proofing new version of AHBP: Chapter 9. "Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr."

This is a comment thread for Chapter 9. "Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr." in the revised version of Steve Sailer's America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance" that was posted online 11/3/08:

In the comments below, feel free to list typos, errors, and other comments.

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

Wiki proofing new version of AHBP: Chapter 10. "Mrs. All That"

This is a comment thread for Chapter 10. "Mrs. All That" in the revised version of Steve Sailer's America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance" that was posted online 11/3/08:

In the comments below, feel free to list typos, errors, and other comments.

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

Wiki proofing new version of AHBP: Chapter 11. Kenyan Climax

This is a comment thread for Chapter 11. Kenyan Climax in America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance."

Feel free to list typos, errors, and make other comments.

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

Wiki proofing new version of AHBP: Chapter 12 President Obama?

This is a comment thread for chapters in America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance."

This is reserved for the final chapter:

12. President Obama?

Feel free to list typos, errors, and other comments.

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

Wiki proofing AHBP: Index

This is a comment thread for chapters in America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance."

The Index is pretty messy compared to the rest of the book. If you're and expert on indexing in MS Word (I have 2007) feel free to comment on how to solve the glaring problems. Otherwise, though, don't bother proofing it.

Also, the absence of Barack Obama Jr. from the index is intentional. I hate indexes to biographies that are twice as long because there are ten pages of sub-entries under the title character.

Do feel free to look for the one infinite loop pair of joke entries modeled on Nabokov's index for Pale Fire.

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

Updated release of my new book: America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance"

Thanks to all your proofreading, we have a version of my book online with about 800 fixes of problems of the first version. (Although about 500 involved curly quotes, em dashes, and other things that are hard to notice on screen, but look bad in print.) A couple of hundred more involved one letter typos that are particularly hard to fix. But that still leaves about 100 lulus fixed, such as getting maternal and paternal grandparents confuses, which is kind of show stopper with Barack Obama.

You can read it online here.

I'll try to send up a system for wiki proofreading tonight.

We're sending it off to the printer tomorrow, so soon you'll be able to buy an actual physical book to give everybody you know (perhaps especially the people you don't want to know anymore).

By the way, the counter shows only the number of zip files downloaded (currently 2600+). I imagine most people prefer to read it online, so total readership is probably a few times higher.

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

November 2, 2008

The ultimate Mickey Kaus / Stuff White People Like convergence

Mickey writes:

Went to a Halloween party dressed as The Bradley Effect. The elemental conceptual simplicity of my costume somehow failed to terrify, even in a Dem heavy Hollywood crowd. ... This may be the first election where average Web-surfing, procrastinating liberal comedy writers know more about the last Insider Advantage poll in Pennsylvania than Howard Fineman does.... Unfortunately, they thought the photo of George Deukmejian on my costume** was Robert Rubin.

**--Pinned to the red half of the costume under a blue flap that--easier to show than tell--flopped over to obscure a photo of long-serving L.A. Mayor Tom Bradley, whom they mistook for an Asian man. They had been drinking. ...

As a summer job in 1981, I worked for a lady who worked for Mayor Tom. I shook the Mayor's hand once: A tall, impressive man with an unusual look to him. I thought he looked quite American Indian, much like basketball player Scottie Pippen does. Oddly enough, he also looked much like Anwar Sadat, who was half-Sudanese.

Meanwhile, Christian Lander blogs on Stuff White People Like:

Halloween is so important to white people because they have to wear a costume. It is a chance to literally show everyone how clever you are without having to say a word. ... For this reason any white Halloween Party is less of a celebration than it is a contest. And as with any contest, there are a lot of rules.

The first thing you need to know that white people are the only people on the planet who will dress up as a concept. So while your initial thoughts about a costume might be “cowboy,” “policeman,” or “Count Dracula,” white people are more likely to think “math,” “the economy,” or “Post-Modernism.”

Dressing up as a concept is always a major gamble. On one hand, there is the chance that you nail it just right and everyone in the room will recognize how you not only cleverly interpreted the idea but also executed it perfectly in physical form. If you get it wrong, you will be required to spend the entire night explaining yourself. Then again, it is a good way to get white people to talk to you.

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

What Obama's grandma thought of his Throw Grandma Under the Bus speech

Fr0m the Associated Press:

But it was another incident, one to which he was a party, that had a most profound effect on the biracial teenager.

Toot had asked her husband for a ride to work because a particularly aggressive panhandler had accosted her for money the day before. When Stanley refused, his grandson couldn’t understand why.

“She’s been bothered by men before,” his grandfather explained, according to the memoir. “Before you came in, she told me the fella was black. That’s the real reason why she’s bothered.”

Obama described the words as “like a fist in my stomach.” It was a life-changing moment for him.

“Never had they given me reason to doubt their love; I doubted if they ever would,” he writes. “And yet I knew that men who might easily have been my brothers could still inspire their rawest fears.”

Obama referred to the incident again this spring when racially charged comments by his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, forced him to make what many now consider a seminal speech on race relations in America.

“I can no more disown him,” he told an audience in Philadelphia in March, “than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

Charles Payne [retired assistant director of the U. of Chicago library] says his sister’s response to the reference was “like, ’Oh, well.”’ But his reaction was that Obama shouldn’t have shared that anecdote.

“She was really a very liberal person; liberal in politics and, I think, liberal in thinking,” says the brother, who has worked hard on his great-nephew’s campaign. “Frankly ... that story, when it was in the book, I felt didn’t need to be in there.”

It's bad enough that Obama wrote that in 1995. It's grotesque that Sen. Obama dragged up that absurd story about his dying grandmother in 2008 in order to justify his comparison of Rev. Wright to her.

A little background on Obama's maternal grandmother Madelyn's family.

Madelyn Payne came from a respectable, relatively well-off family with some brainpower. Her sister Margaret is a now-retired professor of statistics living in Chapel Hill, N.C. Her brother Charley was an engineer for awhile, then attended graduate school at the U. of Chicago, where he ended up working for the rest of his career, becoming the assistant director of the massive UC library, and played a role in introducing computer technology to libraries.

Obama claims that the Paynes ordered the University of Chicago's intellectually heavyweight Great Books series through the mail, perhaps the seed of the long U. of Chicago connection in the family, although that series didn't debut until 1952, a decade after his grandmother had given birth to his mother.

Uncle Charlie's U. of Chicago connection might have helped Madelyn's daughter Ann get accepted at age 15 by the U. of Chicago, which used to take smart 15-year-olds frequently, such as geneticist James D. Watson, political philosopher Allan Bloom, composer Philip Glass, and one of the Leopold & Loeb guys. (Ann eventually got her BA at the U. of Hawaii in math, then a Ph.D. in anthropology.)

Madelyn's big mistake in life was falling in love with an unsuitable salesman from a dubious background named Stan Dunham, much to her parents' regret. Madelyn paid for her rebellion with a lifetime of hard work. She didn't particularly want to be a feminist role model (her ambitions were more to be a genteel housewife with time for volunteer work and bridge), but her erratic husband didn't leave her much choice except to be one of the first women to climb the career ladder to executive rank in Honolulu's banking industry.

So, the Paynes were a family with a fair amount of analytical ability.

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