November 4, 2008

Tomorrow's conventional wisdom debunked yesterday

From yesterday's VDARE.com column (which is where you can find all the documenting links):
We’re going to hear all over again about how crucial the Hispanic vote was to Obama’s win. It’s bunk.

You know—how the GOP killed itself by not favoring open borders abjectly enough, and so forth and so on. Hysterical pundits will announce that the Hispanic tidal wave accounted for 8 or 9 or even 10 percent of the vote!

Then, a year from now, the Census Bureau will quietly announce the results of its huge post-election survey of voting, the gold standard of ethnic voting shares. It will show that the Hispanic share of the vote, which was 5.4 percent in 2000 and 6.0 percent in 2004 actually was only 6.9 percent in 2008, or whatever.

And nobody will pay any attention at all because the fallacious conventional wisdom (10 percent!!!) will already be carved into everybody’s brains.

Moreover, you’ll hear all about how the GOP share of the Hispanic vote dropped from 44 percent in 2004 to, say, 30 percent on Tuesday.

First, as I’ve shown repeatedly, it wasn’t 44 percent in 2004. The exit poll company admitted the mistake several months later. It was about 40 percent.

Second, the reason the GOP even got 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004 was because Bush and Rove bought the Hispanic vote via the Great Hispanic Housing Bubble. In part due to Bush’s jihad against down payments on home loans, mortgage dollars borrowed for home purchases by Hispanics increased an insane 691 percent from 1999 to 2006. In 1999, less than 7 percent of first time buyers in California, the black hole of the Bubble, put no money down. By 2004, it was 33 percent, by 2006 a ludicrous 41 percent.

Democrats appealed to Hispanics by being the Tax and Spend party. Bush and Rove resolved that Republicans would win Hispanics over by being the Borrow and Spend party.

And debauching credit standards for Hispanics debauched them for everybody. So there was a huge amount of unneeded construction and remodeling, carried out in large part by Hispanics workers, making Hispanics unusually pleased with the Republican incumbent in 2004.

In 2008, though, as made clear by a recent LA Times article on how Hispanic voters in Las Vegas are trending toward Obama because so many have defaulted on their mortgages, the firehose of Other People’s Money has finally been turned off. And Latinos are returning to their natural political home. [Economic strife drives Latino vote, By Marjorie Miller, October 26, 2008]

The Mortgage Minority Meltdown. The Diversity Recession. And landslide losses anyway. How did the Bush-Rove experiment work out for the GOP—let alone America?

(Cheerful footnote: To combat all this confused thinking, I’ve written a new book about Obama’s life story. As the two parts of the title imply, it contrasts the recent Axelrodian hagiography of Obama as the biracial transcender with the man’s own evasively written but ultimately quite clear autobiography. Thus I call it, in tribute to the upcoming Harry Potter movie, America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s "Story of Race and Inheritance."

If McCain loses (and I'm writing before any of the polls close), the main demographic reason will be that his share of the non-Hispanic white vote (which will make up 3/4ths or more of the total vote) will have fallen versus the GOP's 58 percent in 2004. Bush lost the overall popular vote in 2000 because he only got 54% of the white vote. He won the overall popular vote in 2004 fairly easily because he got 58% of the white vote.

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

Another request

It would be useful to have a list for every single word in the English language of its comprehensibility, its grade level.

For example, I kicked around the title "The Protean Prince" but rejected it on grounds that nobody would understand it orally (they'd ask, "Why isn't it called 'The Carbohydrate Prince'?"); and not many would understand it on paper either. "Protean" is just too rare a word.

It would be nice to be able to have your concordance of words used matched up against the percent of the population that understand each word.

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

My book's new promotional video is up!

The video promoting the name of my new book is only 1:41, but the production values are quite high.

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

Question

One of the problems of scale in writing a book is that you can't keep track of how often you use unusual words. For example, "perpetual" is a good word. I like to use it now and then in articles, but I try not to use it more than once in an article. If I read over an article enough times before submitting it, I'll likely notice I've used "perpetual" too often and fix it. Likewise, I have some favorite words, like "Indeed" (which I got long ago from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) and have a tendency to badly overuse.

But, there's no way you can do that at book scale. Therefore, I'm wondering if there are reliable software programs out there for building "concordances." A concordance is a list of all the words used in, say, the Bible or in Shakespeare. I'd like to be able to get a list of each word used in my book and its frequency of appearance. Then I could sort the words in order of frequency. I'd ignore the simple word like "the" at the top of the list and I'd ignore the one-time use words at the bottom of the list. I'd look for things like "strikingly" appears 14 times in the book. That's too often.

So, doesn't anybody a way to make a concordance out of an MS Word document?

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

November 3, 2008

My New VDARE Column: What the GOP Should Have Done

Here's my new pre-election VDARE.com column. An excerpt:

Mostly, he just talked about what a hero he is.

Okay, he was for offshore oil drilling. And then there’s … uh … nuclear power plants! And, well, some other stuff, no doubt.

The problem is that the things McCain really cares about, like Invading the World and Inviting the World, are death on the campaign trail in 2008.

The Republicans’ winning issue this year could have been mass immigration, both illegal and legal. But they somehow wound up with the author of the 2006 McCain-Kennedy amnesty bill as their candidate!

Imagine if Obama’s illegal alien aunt had surfaced after the GOP candidate had spent the fall defining the immigration issue in the American mind. It would have been the coup de grace. As it was, McCain operative Mark Salter threw the issue away, saying "It’s a family matter"—as if the laws of the United States are an Obama "family matter". (Maybe they will be, but not just yet).

And what was McCain against?

Well, he was against socialism, redistribution of wealth, and unrepentant terrorist William Ayers!

Yes, but what does Ayers have to do with Obama? Well, they worked together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.

But wasn’t Walter Annenberg the biggest Republican donor of his day?

Okay, now, you know and I know that Old Man Annenberg got taken to the cleaners by some slick leftists who didn’t do a darn thing for the test scores of Chicago public school students, but who built their brand names in the tax-and-grant consuming sectors of Chicago’s leftist fringe by handing out Annenberg’s millions to all their friends and allies. But do the voters?

Maybe there is more of a connection between Obama and Ayers than opportunism. But if McCain was going to use Ayers as his trump card, he should have hired private detectives in Chicago five months ago to document the Obama-Ayers relationship and then leak the findings to the National Enquirer. Heck, anthropologist Stanley Kurtz has singlehandedly done a better job of tracking down the Obama-Ayers links than the entire McCain campaign.

(Don’t you have the feeling that nobody in the McCain brain trust ever got around to buying Rev. Wright’s DVDs?)

In contrast to Obama’s murky dealings with Ayers, the Democratic candidate has long boasted of Wright’s mentorship, devoting most of pp. 274-295 of his first book, Dreams From My Father, to Wright, and borrowing the title of his second, The Audacity of Hope, from Wright’s sermon about how "white folks’ greed runs a world in need".

Let’s be clear: the reason McCain has gone on and on about Bill Ayers but hasn’t mentioned in six months Jeremiah Wright is because Ayers is white and Wright is black. McCain is terrified that if he mentions Wright, Republicans will be smeared as racists.

Well, guess what? Republicans are being smeared as racists anyway. Heck, Obama smeared Bill Clinton as racist. Of course, the Obama forces were going to do it to the GOP.

The question for Republicans was never whether or not they are going to get smeared as racists. The question was always whether they were going to wind up a smeared loser—or a smeared winner.

McCain chose to be a smeared loser.

If you don’t allow yourself to bring up race, you simply cannot run against the real Barack Obama. You wind up running against the fantasy made up by his strategist David Axelrod, credulously summed up last week by the New York Times’ Brian Stelter as Obama’s "refusal to be defined by his race and his aspirations to bridge the partisan divide".

Why can’t you run against the real Obama without talking about race? Because the real Barack is all about race.

Look, Obama wrote a 460-page memoir about his successful struggle to define himself as a black man, which he helpfully subtitled A Story of Race and Inheritance.

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

Wiki proofing new version of AHBP: "Foreword by Peter Brimelow"

This is a comment thread for "Foreword by Peter Brimelow" 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.

The idea with all these web postings is that if, as you are reading my book, you would like to call my attention to something, you can add it as a comment under the appropriate chapter's posting. You can also scan to see if somebody else has already caught it.

This is not a request that you participate in the next round of proofing. I think the book is in pretty good shape now. It's just if you'd like to register any kind of point related to the text, this long series of postings makes it easy to do in an organized fashion.

By the way, if you can't tell which version you are looking at, you can distinguish this revised version by the date on the second page: it says October 24, 2008, while the first says October 23, 2008.

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

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