January 19, 2009

Canada's Half-Blood Prince

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

Barack Obama’s inaugural day is upon us…and Obamamania has reached such comic dimensions that I can’t bring myself to think seriously about it.

So let’s step back and consider Obamamania’s closest analog: the extravagant “Trudeaumania” that propelled an obscure law professor to the prime ministership of Canada in the fateful year 1968.

Pierre Elliott Trudeau had only three years’ experience in Parliament. But, much as Obama introduced himself to the public in his 2004 Democratic convention keynote address with 380 words about how he was the offspring of a mixed-race marriage, Trudeau was famously the son of a Francophone father and an Anglophone mother, making him accent-free in both languages.

As Time Magazine burbled in "Man of Tomorrow" on July 5, 1968:

He seemed a man neither of the left nor of the right, but a man for the future. His campaign was based on the simple, unequivocal proposition: ‘One Canada.’ As a bilingual French Canadian, he appears to be the right man to bring the French-and English-speaking peoples closer together.

Trudeau was Canada’s half-blood prince. J.K. Rowling made this term famous in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, but this concept out of fantasy has long had a shadowy salience in politics. In the Foreword to my book, America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s "Story of Race and Inheritance," the Editor of VDARE.COM, Peter Brimelow, defines a “half-blood prince” as:

An archetypal ambiguous figure in whom the various parts of a deeply-divided society can jointly invest their contradictory hopes. Such figures spring up regularly in conflicted polities.
Of course, under Trudeau, the French and English-speaking peoples of Canada only mod farther apart. But that wasn’t the point of Trudeau’s policy, it was merely the effect.

Trudeaumania didn’t last, but Trudeau did, clinging to power for a decade and a half. In that time, Trudeau fundamentally remade Canada in his own bilingual image—imposing French on English-speaking Canada and allowing Quebec effectively to ban English in French-speaking Canada—and driving the country permanently to the left.

[More]

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

Neocons eyeing Obama

From the Wall Street Journal's editorial page:

Will Obama Bring Home the Neocons?
On immigration, the family, even defense, there is common ground.

by Gabriel Schoenfeld

"Neoconservative" and "neocon" have become terms of abuse, denoting right-wing extremism. But the original neoconservatives began mostly as left-leaning intellectuals who only deserted the Democratic Party after it fell under the influence of the counterculture during the Vietnam War. With Barack Obama about to become president, is there any chance neoconservatives will finally return to the roost?...

Don't let the doorknob hit you on the way out.

Now that seething hostility toward immigrants and the heartless work-place roundups of illegal aliens carried out by the Bush administration have brought the GOP low, neoconservative intellectuals will find little common ground with those Republicans who helped drive away Hispanic voters and marched their party off the electoral cliff. If Mr. Obama pushes for immigration reform that balances humaneness with respect for the rule of law, he will almost certainly draw in some neoconservatives.

Oh, so that's why the co-author of the McCain-Kennedy amnesty bill lost!

It is too early to say which way Mr. Obama will really swing in foreign affairs. But if it is toward resolve in the war against Islamic terrorism -- with an occasional humanitarian intervention thrown in -- he may well garner waves of support from quarters that were avidly tearing him down right up until Nov. 4.

"Waves" is putting it grandly -- Republican-voting Jews must have accounted for less than half a percent of the vote in 2008.

On the other hand, if he extends an olive branch to the neoconservatives ... he might pick up some surprising allies. He might also fracture the opposition's idea machine and help turn the Republicans back into the stupid party for years to come.

Yeah, without neocon brainpower, the poor dumb bastards won't come up with any more great ideas like starting a needless land war in Asia.

As a convenience for all the neocons out there, here's the District of Columbia form you have to fill in to change your party registration from Republican to Democrat.

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

Influence peddling

The NYT reported today:

The New York Times Company said Monday it had reached an agreement with the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim HelĂș for a $250 million loan intended to help the newspaper company finance its businesses. ...

The deal comes as the Times Company looks to raise money amid flagging advertising sales and approaching deadlines to pay back $1.1 billion in debt in the next few years. ...

Mr. Slim will receive no representation on the company’s board or any shares with special voting rights like those of the Sulzberger family, which controls the company. Nonetheless, when Mr. Slim exercises the warrants, he will be among the largest single shareholders in the Times Company, owning up to 17 percent of the common shares outstanding.

The Sulzberger family members own about 19 percent of company and control it with a special class of voting shares.

Mr. Slim, one of the wealthiest people in the world, controls phone companies and has major investments in retailing, construction, banking, insurance, railroads and mining. In March, Forbes magazine estimated his fortune at $60 billion.

Mr. Slim first approached the Times Company in November, people briefed on the discussions said.

The net present value of the New York Times' expected future cash flows isn't worth all that much, but, if you already have tens of billions of dollars, it sure could come in handy to have the NYT on your side.

The future of the media business looks a lot like its past. In the 18th Century, writers didn't have good ways to get reliable cash streams from their intellectual nonproperty, so they were constantly working to get rich people as patrons.

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

January 18, 2009

Average Credit Ratings by State

According to CreditReport.com website, the top ten states with the highest average consumer credit ratings are found among the people of:

South Dakota 710
Minnesota 707
North Dakota 706
Vermont 706
Massachusetts 703
New Hampshire 703
Montana 701
Iowa 700
Wisconsin 699
Maine 699

In contrast, the ten populations with the worst average consumer credit scores are:

Texas 651
Nevada 655
Arizona 659
New Mexico 663
Louisiana 663
South Carolina 665
Oklahoma 666
North Carolina 667
Arkansas 668
Mississippi 668

California (672) and Florida (673) are closer to the bottom than than the top.

Texas largely escaped the mortgage meltdown due to low land prices and high oil prices, but this suggests there might be trouble in Texas ahead if oil stays around $40 per barrel.

What does it all mean? As George Will coyly hinted in his obituary for Daniel Patrick Moynihan:
"The Senate's Sisyphus, Moynihan was forever pushing uphill a boulder of inconvenient data. A social scientist trained to distinguish correlation from causation , and a wit, Moynihan puckishly said that a crucial determinant of the quality of American schools is proximity to the Canadian border. ... [S]tates trying to improve their students' test scores should move closer to Canada."
Indeed.

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

Carlos Slim to bailout the NY Times?

The New York Times is the most influential journalistic institution in the world. The NYT decides, in the more marginal cases, for the rest of the news media what is and isn't national news. Obviously, if a jetliner lands in the Hudson River, everybody knows it's news. On the other hand, if a drunken stripper makes incoherent accusations against Duke lacrosse players, it's only news if the NYT decides to run two dozen stories about it, which lets everybody else in the media know that it's Real News Symbolic of Major Social Problems and thus they can sanctimoniously splash this salacious tripe.

The NYT, at present and probably for the future as well, is a big money pit. No doubt it will have to downsize itself tremendously. But likely so will its major competitors, so the NYT's relative influence over the rest of the media is unlikely to decline much.

Meanwhile, as the federal government takes over control of ever more of the decreasing amount of wealth in America, the long term relative value of having a stake in the most powerful news arbiter should be increasing. The NYT is, more than anything else, the chokepoint on political discussion in America, so as politics determines ever more of who gets his hands on America's wealth, the value of the NYT should go up.

The market disagrees, but Mexican telephone monopolist, Carlos Slim, who didn't get to be more or less the richest man in the world by passing up a chance to influence the government, is, not surprisingly, in talks to help bailout the New York Times. Once you've gotten the Mexican government eating out of your hand, the logical next step is the American government.

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

Other 46 states start to notice Sand States caused mortgage meltdown

From the Associated Press:

Foreclosure aid likely to help 4 states most

By Alan Zibel

WASHINGTON — The nation's foreclosure crisis is centered in four states. But taxpayers across the country will feel the pain of bailing them out.

California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona generated about half of all foreclosure filings nationwide last year, according to RealtyTrac, even though residents in those states hold just a quarter of U.S. mortgages. Since mid-2007, skyrocketing foreclosures in those states have been magnifying the national rate.

As I reported last September, even though the four Sand States (which have 21% of the country's population) accounted for about half the foreclosures, they must have accounted for an even higher proportion of the defaulted dollars, which is the key variable in setting off the world financial crisis. That's because median home prices in California were almost triple that in the rest of the country at the peak of the bubble.
As lawmakers prepare to spend up to $100 billion in financial bailout money on a sweeping foreclosure prevention plan pushed by President-elect Barack Obama, the discrepancy is adding another layer to a problem already confounding economists, politicians and homeowners....

The Sunbelt states now in trouble are the same ones that for decades have taken jobs and residents from states in colder climates. Plus, states like California were also breeding grounds for toxic home loans.

Plus, the Sand States have really, really nice weather this time of the year (e.g., it's been sunny and 75 in LA for the past week), which doesn't decrease resentment, let me tell you. So bailout programs mean that fraudulent Sand State homebuyers can continue to sunbathe this winter in their foreclosed backyards, while taxpayers in the rest of the country huddle indoors and pay for them.
... To be sure, not all foreclosures are in the four states dominating the numbers. And not all borrowers acted irresponsibly. Consumer groups say legions of borrowers were duped into loans that they didn't understand, and deserve assistance.

To be sure, importing millions of people with grade school educations into the Sand States didn't boost the local average level of financial literacy.

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

"Crimestop"

From 1984:

... the speculations which might possibly induce a sceptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early acquired inner discipline. The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.

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

January 16, 2009

The Captain and the Magician

With the world celebrating the calm heroism of Capt. Chelsey Sullenberger who piloted his powerless jetliner into a safe landing in the Hudson River near Times Square, I wanted to recall the 1991 story of a less admirable captain of a sinking ship and the magician who took command after he fled. From People:

On Saturday evening, Aug. 3, [1991] as a 50-mph gale buffeted their ship, passengers aboard the Greek cruise liner Oceanos gamely made their way to the main lounge for the evening's entertainment. No sooner had they settled in than the lights went out. The 492-foot ship, suddenly without power, tossed in high seas off South Africa's aptly named Wild Coast. For 361 weekend tourists, one of the most harrowing nights of their lives had just begun. The Oceanos was sinking.

Disgracefully, many of the 184 crew members clambered aboard the lifeboats ahead of some of the passengers and paddled to the safety of tankers and trawlers that had drawn nearby. At daybreak on Sunday, South African Air Force helicopters joined the rescue operation. But to the astonishment and anger of the 217 passengers still aboard, Capt. Yannis Avranias grabbed the second chopper off the ship. With no one clearly in charge, an unlikely hero emerged among the remaining crew: Robin Boltman, 31, the ship's magician.

Giving the performance of his career, Boltman entertained and calmed passengers throughout the pitch-black night. In the morning he ascended to the bridge and maintained radio contact with rescuers. Finally, at 11:30 A.M., after all other passengers and crew had been removed to safety, Boltman was lifted from the ship by a helicopter. At 1:45 P.M. the luxury liner nosed into the Indian Ocean and disappeared under the waves. [More]

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

Why don't they call them "venereal diseases" anymore?

A professor at the Yale Medical School named Sydney Spiesel writes in Slate:

About this time every year, the CDC issues its annual statistical report about sexually transmitted diseases in the United States. The surveillance report for 2007 has just come out (it takes about a year to compile and process the statistics). It is long—almost 170 pages—and, as usual, disquieting. Our uncomfortable feelings about sexuality have caused STDs to be stigmatizing ...

Now, I'm not a doctor, but it's my impression that rather than our "uncomfortable feelings about sexuality" that "have caused STDs to be stigmatizing," it's more the oozing sores.

Later on the good doctor notes, without specifying any facts, "the very different case rates between ethnic groups." He doesn't explain what those differences are, but looking in the government report, I find that it looks like STD rates are quite similar to crime rates in their racial ratios. For example, the CDC says: "In 2007, the gonorrhea rate among black men was 26 times higher than that in white men," although that is anomalously high -- the usual black-white ratio for the various diseases is more like 8 to 1, with the Hispanic to white ratio typically in the 2 or 3 to 1 range, and Asians the same or healthier than whites.

In Slate, Spiesel asks plaintively:

Are the germs really ethnically and geographically prejudiced?

Haven't the germs heard about Obama yet? We live in an era of post-racial transcendence. Get with the times, germs!

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

"MetaGroup"

The news about CitiGroup losing a wazillion dollars reminds me that "MetaGroup" would be a good name for an evil multinational conglomerate in a Hollywood thriller.

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

Newspeak, updated

Across Difficult Country coins a useful addition to the Orwellian vocabulary:

The deranged babblings of an SPLC apparatchik inspired me to coin the word hatefact. Hatefacts are unquestionable facts about immigrants, blacks, women, homosexualists, et al., that the SPLC and those sharing its ideological inclinations deem “hate” or “hateful” to mention.

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

January 15, 2009

How to increase exports

Our gigantic trade deficit must, obviously, fall. It would be a lot nicer if part of the decrease consisted of America exporting more rather than just importing less. How can the government help? Well, one way is for the U.S. to stop being the Dudley Do-Right of international business. From an article by Don Lee in the Los Angeles Times:

When Pasadena-based Avery Dennison wanted to build its road and traffic business in China a few years ago, it hired people like Lily Tang. The Beijing homemaker had an asset the company craved: political connections.

Tang's husband, Chen Qi, is a senior official at the China Communications and Transportation Assn., a quasi-governmental group led by former ministers. That connection, said current and former Avery managers in China, helped the company win contracts for thousands of dollars' worth of government projects.

In one case, according to interviews and a copy of a signed contract reviewed by The Times, Avery received an order to supply $375,000 worth of reflective safety products for highway jobs in Tianjin, east of Beijing, and paid a commission of about 8% to an enterprise operated by a friend of Chen's.

Chen's friend, Guo Longjun of Beijing, said he had passed the money on to "experts," whom he wouldn't identify.

Such payments may be part of an ongoing federal investigation into whether Avery violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits U.S. businesses from bribing foreign officials.

Avery reported possible violations on its own in 2005. It characterized them as relatively minor and said it had taken corrective measures. Though it is by no means the only U.S. company involved in a corruption investigation of its business dealings in China, its experience provides a case study of the pitfalls American firms face as they try to capture a piece of the Chinese market.

Justice Department officials say enforcement of the FCPA is second only to fighting terrorism in terms of priority. Currently, at least 91 cases are open, triple the number four years ago, according to a report issued last month by Shearman & Sterling, a New York-based law firm that tracks FCPA cases.

China is getting more attention. Of 25 criminal prosecutions under the law in the last two years, six involved activities in China -- the largest number after Iraq and Nigeria. Among the companies involved were Lucent Technologies, which agreed to pay a $1-million penalty for supplying about 315 trips to the U.S. by Chinese officials.The company recorded some of them as "factory inspections," but they were in fact visits to places such as Disneyland, Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon, the Justice Department said.

The trips, plus educational expenses for a Chinese government employee, were valued in the millions of dollars, federal officials said. At stake were contracts worth at least $2 billion.

I'm sorry, but this kind of nit-picky stuff should be up to the Chinese to police. If they want to shoot minor Chinese officials for going to Disneyland on an American vendor's dime, that's fine with me, but I think it's counter-productive for the U.S. Justice Dept. to worry about whether a trip to Disneyland was a bribe or a legitimate business entertainment expense. It should be up to the customer to regulate its purchasing officials' behavior in the manner it sees fit.

The two most impressive companies I called upon in my corporate career were Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble. Wal-Mart had a fanatical policy about never letting anybody trying to sell anything to Wal-Mart spend a dime on a Wal-Mart employee. Wal-Mart felt that most retailers had been corrupted by vendors with NFL skyboxes and the like. So, you were not allowed to see Wal-Mart employees in restaurants (which is why the finest restaurant in Bentonville in 1991 was a Ponderosa steakhouse filled with world-class salesmen in $1500 suits and great haircuts, sitting alone, morosely chewing their $3.95 chicken-fried steaks). All negotiations were conducted in windowless interrogation cells. After a few hours of relentlessly being hammered by Wal-Mart employees, not only would you be willing to lower your price to Wal-Mart by 20 percent, but you'd leap at a chance to sign a confession that you were part of a Trotskyite wrecker cell attempting to assasinate Comrade Stalin if only they'd promised to make it all stop.

In contrast, dealing with P&G was civilized. You took them out to nice restaurants. But, much as you tried to ply them with Italian cuisine and fine wine, they never took their eye off the ball.

... U.S. firms are widely considered to operate with higher ethics than Chinese and Western competitors -- in large part because of stringent laws such as the FCPA, which took effect in 1977, and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.

Still, in the last couple of years, Chinese state-run media and court records have identified such U.S. business icons as IBM, McDonald's and Whirlpool as companies connected to bribery cases in China.

Like Avery, more American companies are reporting possible FCPA violations by their own employees. In October, cosmetics company Avon Products Inc. said it had begun an internal investigation to determine whether its China operations had incurred illegal travel, entertainment and other expenses.

Intermediaries

Faced with the choice between bribing officials and losing business, some U.S. firms have turned to middlemen, often from Hong Kong or Taiwan, to grease the wheels for them. And they often set aggressive targets for their Chinese employees without making it clear that certain behavior is prohibited in reaching those goals, said Amy Sommers, a Shanghai-based attorney for Squire, Sanders & Dempsey who has advised clients and conducted workshops on the FCPA. ...

In China, it isn't unusual for a government agency to own profit-generating companies to raise money for research and other efforts. But their legal structures, finances and relationship with government officials are murky. "They are in a gray area and very likely breed corruption," said Hu Xingdou, an economics professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology.

And the fact that much of Chinese business is organized in such a way that incentives aren't aligned with proper behavior is the U.S. Justice Department's problem ... how?

The U.S. needs to export more, especially to China, since they are going to be an ever larger part of the world marketplace. The Chinese like doing business based on "relationships" forged over a lot of expensive food, drink, and whatever. The U.S. government could get out of the way of American business reducing the trade deficit just by cutting the funding for investigating Federal Corrupt Practices Act violations.

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

Obama's stimulus bill

Like I’ve been saying all along, exciting mass transit infrastructure projects have proven to be largely incompatible with the notion of “stimulus.”

Most of the stimulus spending is going toward bailing out state and local governments, spending which I’ve long suggested be renamed “human infrastructure” to make it sound sexier and obscure the fact that Obama’s whole “infrastructure stimulus” idea has turned out to be largely a flop. Liberals have spent the last forty years making it excruciatingly slow to bulldoze anything big in the Blue States. They made their beds and now they are lying in them.

Now that progressives have gotten a bitter taste of the delays inherent in environmental regulation, it's time for the Obama administration to call for a major review of how those regulations can be made less onerous and time-consuming. Don't junk environmentalism, but make it more efficient. Mend it, don't end it!

This review should extend to how can we get the hand of government off the throats of our export industries. We desperately need ways to stimulate our exports to pay for our enormous imports from China and oil producers. We should look at ways to make our exporters more globally competitive by reducing upon them the burdens imposed by environmental, affirmative action, and disability regulations. You can keep forcing domestic industries to subsidize lots of politically favored groups, but let's not indirectly tax exporters to the same degree.

Also, we should probably lift the American ban on American firms bribing overseas customers, that goes back to when the prime minister of Japan shook down Lockheed for a kickback on aircraft purchases, and the U.S. Congress went into a tizzy about how evil Lockheed was. Let the foreigners police themselves. If they want to arrest American salesmen who are paying kickbacks to get contracts, good for them. But why is it our duty?

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

I'll be on Ron Smith Show right now

I'll be interviewed on the Ron Smith show in Baltimore (WBAL 1090) today, Thursday, from about 4:15 EST to 5:00 EST. You can listen in here, click on "Listen Live" in the upper left corner.

My book, America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance," can be ordered here.

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

Tony Dungy retires

The Indianapolis Colts football coach Tony Dungy has retired at age 53, after setting the NFL record for making the playoffs 10 years in a row with the Colts and Tampa Bay Bucs.

You have to imagine a lot of political operatives are asking right now, "What's his party? What's his home state?"

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

January 14, 2009

"A lot of black women fell for Barack Obama the moment they saw his wife."

Vanessa Williams writes in the Washington Post's "Root" magazine (I'm guessing the author is a different Vanessa Williams than this former Miss America, singer, and actress):

“Hey, dark ‘n lovely!”

Gotta love the brothers who show their affection for the dark-skinned girls, even if they are hollering out the window of a passing car.

Gotta love it even more when the brother is the president, and the object of his affection is front and center for the world to see.

It’s true: A lot of black women fell for Barack Obama the moment they saw his wife.

If a black president represents change, a dark-skinned first lady is straight-up revolutionary.

I won’t apologize for taking note of Michelle Obama’s physical appearance. Plenty has already been said about how she, with her double Ivy degrees, six-figure salaries and two adorable daughters, is crushing the image of the struggling black single mother. She is a real life Clair Huxtable! But the true breakthrough here is that sisters who look like Michelle Obama seldom become cultural icons, aesthetic trendsetters—a proxy for the all-American woman.

And don’t roll your eyes and ask why we have to go there; we haven’t completely gotten over our prejudices about skin tone and hair texture. Despite years of scholarly, literary and popular debate—from Dr. Kenneth Clark’s baby-doll tests, to Toni Morrison’s tragic characters in The Bluest Eye, to the showdown between [racial term that doesn't appear in iSteve] in Spike Lee’s School Daze—too many of us continue to accept a standard of beauty that does not favor ebony-hued skin, woolly hair and full lips (and not those surgically enhanced smackers, either).

I know from first-hand experience. I remember being taunted and shunned by some people who didn’t believe that old saying about the blacker the berry. Back when we were Negroes, the word “black” was used to describe the dark-skinned among us, usually not with affection. My mama assured me that I was a pretty black girl, but it was the brothers on the streets, cooing such compliments as dark ‘n lovely, chocolate drop, brown sugar, who convinced me.

I'm not sure how to break the news to this writer, but being a good enough-looking woman to have black guys shout stuff at you while you walk by is a pretty low hurdle...

But consider the complexions of most of the black women who smile or stare seductively at the world from the covers of celebrity and beauty magazines—cream, cafĂ© au lait, golden honey. Gorgeous sisters, yes, but we come in other good flavors, too. The failure to showcase dark-skinned beauties feeds the notion that pretty black girls are an exception. Not so much dark and lovely as dark but lovely.

The light-skinned, long-hair aesthetic reigns.

I think of India.Arie’s song from a few years back.

"I’m not the average girl from your video
And I ain’t built like a supermodel
But I’ve learned to love myself unconditionally
Because I am a queen.”

An empowering anthem,

Indeed

but even Arie acknowledges that many of us who don’t look like Barbie dolls—even chocolate-coated Barbie dolls—are not convinced of our beauty.

“I don’t know if young women necessarily think that certain women they see on TV are beautiful, but they do see that certain women are financially rewarded by looking a certain way and therefore that image is reinforced,” Arie told me via e-mail. She thinks that Michelle Obama’s presence on the national stage will “jump-start the challenge of those long-held beliefs. Not only is she naturally and uniquely beautiful, but she demonstrates a great deal of poise, class and style, which I think has and will continue to help capture the nation’s attention in a positive way.”

As much as we’d like to think that everyone will be instantly enlightened, the truth is it might not have much of an immediate or noticeable impact.

Really? Ya think?

A huge amount of female journalism consists of demands that society must be reorganized so that the author is considered more sexually attractive. (This is hardly the most egregious specimen of this vast genre.)

I've always thought that Mrs. Obama was a handsome woman, who spends a lot on her four sessions with her personal trainer each week. Still, there are those expressions .... You'll definitely want to check out the expression on Mrs. Obama's face in the picture that The Root chose to illustrate Michelle's loveliness. Let's just say that when a husband sees his wife staring up at him with that expression, he knows he's in for a world of trouble.

Barack Obama's autobiography ends with his wedding to Michelle. The last line in this self-pitying book is:

"And for that moment, at least, I felt like the luckiest man alive."

The Luckiest Man Alive would seem like a pretty realistic self-description, but, judging from That Look she's apparently giving him in this picture, maybe he's not ...

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

What can Obama do to help the U.S. export more?

Basically, we're broke because for the whole decade we've been buying more stuff from abroad than they've been buying from us. So, what can a President do to help us sell more stuff overseas?

Screwing in lightbulbs and filling potholes won't do it. But what will?

The most obvious ways the government can quickly help business become more productive at making stuff that foreigners want to buy is by easing environmental and affirmative action regulations that add to the cost of everything we produce.

Similarly, the easiest way for the states and localities to save money on social services is for the federal government to pay for unemployed illegal immigrants to go home.

Funny, though, simple ideas like that don't seem to come up much.

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