April 18, 2009

Let's ransom my Ricci article!

I think if readers contribute just a little more to VDARE.com's emergency fundraising drive, they'll turn the lights back on and post my long (but interesting!) article on the New Haven firemen's reverse discrimination lawsuit that will be the most important Supreme Court case of the year.

So, please chip in.

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

Long LA Times article on Greg Cochran

Here's Karen Kaplan's profile in the Los Angeles Times of Gregory Cochran: "Jewish Legacy Inscribed on the Genes." (It's now the most emailed article on the LA Times website and the second most heavily viewed article.)
Gregory Cochran has always been drawn to puzzles. This one had been gnawing at him for several years: Why are European Jews prone to so many deadly genetic diseases?

Tay-Sachs disease. Canavan disease. More than a dozen more.

It offended Cochran's sense of logic. Natural selection, the self-taught genetics buff knew, should flush dangerous DNA from the gene pool. Perhaps the mutations causing these diseases had some other, beneficial purpose. But what?

At 3:17 one morning, after a long night searching a database of scientific journals from his disheveled home office in Albuquerque, Cochran fired off an e-mail to his collaborator Henry Harpending, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

"I've figured it out, I think," Cochran typed. "Pardon my crazed excitement."

The "faulty" genes, Cochran concluded, make Jews smarter.

That provocative -- some would say inflammatory -- hypothesis has landed Cochran and Harpending in the middle of a charged debate about the link between IQ and DNA.

They have been sneered at by colleagues and excoriated on Internet forums. They have been welcomed to speak at a synagogue and a Jewish medical society. They were asked to write a book; that effort, "The 10,000 Year Explosion," was published early this year.

Scientists are increasingly finding that propensities for human behaviors -- for addiction, aggression, risk-taking and more -- are written in our genes. But the idea that some groups of people are inherently smarter is troubling to many. Some scientists say it has such racist implications it's unworthy of consideration.

"What are their theories about those on the opposite end of the spectrum?" asked Neil Risch, director of the Institute for Human Genetics at UC San Francisco, who finds the matter so offensive he can barely discuss it without raising his voice. "Do they have genetic theories about why Latinos and African Americans perform worse academically?"

The biological basis for intelligence can be a thankless arena of inquiry. The authors of "The Bell Curve" were vilified 15 years ago for suggesting genes played a role in IQ differences among racial groups.

And here's Karen Kaplan's LA Times' article on John Hawks back in February.

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

"Spengler" outs himself

Speaking of interesting but overconfident Internet pundits, a few years ago a reader pointed out to me that "Spengler" was very likely David P. Goldman, a former high-ranking member of the Lyndon LaRouche cult.

I posted on October 27, 2006:
I won't explain the persuasive evidence for his long-ago Lyndon LaRouche connection, since that would necessitate revealing his real name, which might hurt him in his day job. But I'm 95% persuaded of a reader's suggestion that many years ago the individual who is now the extremely self-confident columnist "Spengler" of the Asia Times was a close colleague of the crackpot perennial Presidential candidate.


That reminds me that adventuring in the Middle East seems to appeal most to two sets of people:


- The not very bright sorts who get Iraq and Iran and Saddam and Osama confused.

- And the extremely bright but not quite stable sorts who can convince themselves of anything.


LaRouche and Goldman had cowritten a book together in 1980, The Ugly Truth about Milton Friedman.

Now, Spengler/Goldman, who is an editor at First Things, has come out with a column in Asia Times doing the opposite of what I did: revealing his name, but not his old Larouche connection.

Now, just because somebody belonged to a cult doesn't mean that we shouldn't take them seriously. For example, Alan Greenspan was part of the inner circle of Ayn Rand's cult well into his forties (going so far as to sign the notoriously loony Stalin-like manifesto denouncing Rand's ex-boyfriend Nathaniel Branden when he was 42). And then Greenspan became the most powerful unelected official in the world, and look how swell that worked out.

Oh, wait ... never mind. I guess I need to find a new example of an ex-cultist making good. Let me get back to you on this one ...

As for Spengler's opinions of me, he recently posted this on one of his discussion pages:
"I think Sailer is a racist SOB who sees the data through a distorted lens. Not all of what he says is wrong, though. There is a problem with illegitimacy. But I don't think Hispanics are stupid as he argues."

"Sailer is deeply misguided. A lot of the Hispanics coming to the US are in fact Asians -- southern Mexican or central American Indians with very poor education, nutrition, etc. Their first generation is pretty disastrous, but so were the Irish, Italians and Slavs. The Catholic Church in America wrote off a whole generation, maybe two, of Irish men. Can they assimilate? Sure. But I ought to point out that American kids of European ancestry aren't doing so well at the moment, either."

This is a classic example of the East Coast intellectual's ruling mental framework for thinking about illegal immigration: it's always all about Ellis Island. It's not about 2009, it's about bragging rights over 1909.

And, besides, nobody around here ever noticed any Mexicans around until 1997. So, their future must be a complete blank slate! Anything could happen. They have no track record whatsoever!

By the way, in case you were wondering (and, admit it, you were), Lyndon LaRouche is one of those folks, like Hugh Hefner, whom many people just assume are Jewish, but aren't.

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

April 17, 2009

The Subprime Bubble in Living Color


We've been reading about the subprime mortgage crisis for a couple of years, but I'd never seen a graph of subprime mortgage originations by ethnicity showing exactly who got the subprime home purchase dollars.

So, I decided to create some graphs myself. After all, my tax dollars pay for the massive federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act database (Table 11-3, to be precise). The government runs this system to make sure that minorities get enough mortgage money. I guess we can say:

Mission Accomplished!

Unfortunately, before 2004 the HMDA didn't break out subprime loans (which it cryptically calls "Reported Pricing Data"). But presumably the subprime dollars originating were much lower before 2004. We can more or less date the beginning of the subprime explosion to President Bush's October 15, 2002 White House Conference on Minority Homeownership, in which he gave a big wink to the mortgage industry to put the pedal to the metal on zero down and zero doc loans in the name of Bush's goal of adding 5.5 million minority homeowners.

Of course, plenty of white deadbeats got subprimes, too. This racial-equality-in-access-to-the-American-Dream stuff was just a cover story for debauching credit standards.

But, you've got to admit, invoking the sacred war against racist redlining was one hell of an effective cover story ... Who was going to be so racist as to publicly say that we shouldn't expand homeownership for minorities? Who would say that minorities didn't have equal creditworthiness?

It was such a fantastic cover story, that here it is, almost the middle of 2009, and you are just now seeing a graph of who got the money, even though the 2006 numbers have been available for free on the Web since September 2007!

We still don't know the subprime default rates nationally by ethnicity, but the recent Boston Fed study found that the default rates on black and Hispanic subprime loans in Massachusetts were about twice the rate of white subprime borrowers.

If that holds true for the whole country, then minorities appear to account for roughly two-thirds of defaulted subprime dollars.

Why haven't we been hearing this in the press? Well, it's just not the kind of thing that is talked about in polite society. I mean, really, we can spend all day going back and forth over who loaned whom hundreds of billions of dollars and who didn't it pay it back, but, in the final analysis, shouldn't we be proactively focusing upon hope and change? And the American Dream? And vibrancy? Never forget vibrancy.

To recap:

- In 2002, Bush, who was hoping to turn Hispanics into Republican voters by making them homeowners, stumped for eliminating down payments on home purchases and pesky paperwork on mortgages in order to close the racial gap between the white homeownership rate and the lower black and Hispanic rates.

- 2003 was the ramping-up year.

- In 2004, subprime lending exploded, with minorities getting 51% of the home purchase mortgages (not counting the negligible streams of FHA and VA money). All this new demand for homes from people who hadn't been able to qualify for loans previously drove home prices through the roof in some parts of the country.

- In 2005, subprime lending reached a bizarrely high plateau, with minorities getting 57% of the subprime money handed out that year.

- In 2006, subprime lending stayed high, but the mortgage industry was scraping even farther down to the bottom of the barrel to find all the people who couldn't qualify for a subprime loan even in 2005. Minorities got 58% of 2006's new subprime money.

- In 2007, the air started coming out of the bubble as our financial geniuses began to realize that the kind of people who got subprime loans in 2005 and especially in 2006 weren't terribly likely to ever earn enough to pay them back. Total subprime lending dropped, as did minority share (down to 50%).

Minorities also got about 44% of subprime refinancing and home improvement loans in 2006, although those had less effect on driving home prices up and tended to have not quite as insane Loan-to-Value numbers.

Interestingly, minorities averaged larger subprime home purchase mortgages in 2006 than white subprime borrowers got. The average white subprime loan originated in 2006 was $183,000, while the typical black subprime loan averaged $191k, Hispanic $242k, and Asian $326k. Presumably, this is because quite a few whites live in low cost rural areas, while blacks are concentrated in metropolitan areas, and Hispanics and Asians are most numerous in super-bubblicious California.

In California, where a majority of the country's defaulted mortgage money (prime and subprime) has been lost, minorities got a much higher percentage of subprime lending. In the five counties of Greater Los Angeles (LA, Orange, Ventura, San Bernardino, and Riverside), minorities got 79% of subprime dollars in 2006:

California's bubble pretty much drove the bubble in the adjoining states of Arizona and Nevada, which with Florida, covers the great majority of foreclosed upon mortgages when measured in dollars.

In Ground Zero of the Foreclosure Crisis, Southern California's Inland Empire of San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, home purchase lending to Hispanics increased from 1999 to 2006 by 782%.

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

"Who do you have to sleep with in this town to get your blog compared to Montaigne's Essays in The Economist?"

Now we may have a clue to the answer to that old question in Johann Hari's bedazzled tongue-bath of Andrew Sullivan, the Barry Bonds of bloggers.

If anybody is interested in why Sullivan is so super-confident in his judgment despite so often being wrong in public (as his mercurial changes of view demonstrate), he explained why in the NY Times Magazine way back in 2000: He had revitalized his flagging career in the late 1990s by getting a prescription for synthetic testosterone.
"Because the testosterone is injected every two weeks, and it quickly leaves the bloodstream, I can actually feel its power on almost a daily basis. Within hours, and at most a day, I feel a deep surge of energy. It is less edgy than a double espresso, but just as powerful. My attention span shortens. In the two or three days after my shot, I find it harder to concentrate on writing and feel the need to exercise more. My wit is quicker, my mind faster, but my judgment is more impulsive. ...

And then after a few days, as the testosterone peaks and starts to decline, the feeling alters a little. I find myself less reserved than usual, and more garrulous. The same energy is there, but it seems less directed toward action than toward interaction, less toward pride than toward lust.

We'll skip over the details of Andrew's Lust Phase and get to his next mood swing:
... "Then there's anger. I have always tended to bury or redirect my rage. I once thought this an inescapable part of my personality. It turns out I was wrong. ... That was an extreme example, but other, milder ones come to mind: losing my temper in a petty argument; innumerable traffic confrontations; even the occasional slightly too prickly column or e-mail flame-out."

Personally, I don't like competing with a chemically pumped-up pundit anymore than I suspect that pitcher Greg Maddux liked competing with Roger Clemens over the last decade or so of their careers. But the bigger point is that the Atlantic Monthly should put a label on Sullivan's blog that says:
Warning: Don't take anything Andrew Sullivan says seriously. Remember that what you see here is the product not of careful thought and proven good judgment, but just of whatever phase of his hormone therapy Andrew happens to be in at the moment.

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

April 16, 2009

The Language Gap

One element of the conventional wisdom about racial achievement gaps that has become particularly popular in recent years is the idea that the gap is caused by the fact that the parents of poor children tend to have small vocabularies and generally don't engage their children in mentally stimulating discussions. Much of this tracks back to a project several decades ago by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, who recorded 1300 hours of 42 families during various in-home sessions over 2.5 years, and then tabulated every word they said.

Not surprisingly, they found that professional class parents spoke to their children with larger vocabularies, had more interesting things to say, and tended to speak more encouragingly to their children along the lines of "Why, that's a very interesting observation, honey; why do you think that is?" In contrast, the welfare moms' tended to more often interact with their children in the "Shut yo' mouth" mode.

Hart and Risley write:
Before children can take charge of their own experience and begin to spend time with peers in social groups outside the home, almost everything they learn comes from their families, to whom society has assigned the task of socializing children.

I remember when I got the memo from Society informing me that my wife and I had been assigned the task of socializing our children. It came as quite a shock, let me tell you.
We were not surprised to see the 42 children turn out to be like their parents; we had not fully realized, however, the implications of those similarities for the children's futures.

So, the conventional wisdom insists, what we must do is take poor children away from their homes each day from age one upward and put them in day care staffed by college trained professionals from age one onward, who will mentally stimulate them by speaking with large vocabularies.

But, is it really true that "almost everything they learn comes from their families?" Well, no. Among other sources, a lot of what children learn comes from the media.

For example, I've heard about this brightly colored cartoon show about the adventures of a ten-year-old boy and his wacky family, and each episode features the carefully concentrated cognitive liveliness of about a dozen of the most mentally effervescent Harvard graduates of recent years. And it's on free TV twice a day in most cities!

You might have heard of it, too: it's called The Simpsons.

Each of the 450 or so episodes of The Simpsons is a lot more mentally stimulating than listening to your parents or to your daycare worker talk. (Okay, well, some of the episodes from this decade might not live up to that standard, but there are still a couple of hundred good ones.)

By the way, I haven't been able to find anything on Google about the Nielsen Ratings of The Simpsons in black households. It probably doesn't help the shows' rating among blacks that the writers are clearly completely terrified of poking fun at blacks, so the show is kind of boring for black audiences.

Thus, out of the huge cast of recurring characters, the only black ones are Dr. Hibbert and his wife, who go back to the show's ancient rivalry with The Cosby Show, and one each of two interchangeable white-black pairs: Homer's coworkers Lenny and Carl and the cop partners Eddie and Lou. After 20 years, I still can't tell you which one are the black guys and which ones are the white guy. Presumably, the interchangeability of the two white-black pairs is an in-joke from the writers about how afraid they are of touching anything black-related.

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

Crucial VDARE.com fundraising drive continuing

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

Israel to deport 100,000 illegal aliens

From YNet News:

Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz recently instructed ministry officials to develop a comprehensive plan for deporting 100,000 illegal foreign workers from Israel within a year.

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

Newsweek: "Sex, Race And IQ: Off Limits?"

Here's a hilariously low-IQ article by Newsweek's Sharon Begley, the doyenne of clueless human sciences reporters:
Sex, Race And IQ: Off Limits?

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

DHS: Who's the bigger threat? Canadians or conservatives?

Recently, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that she was going to crack down on the border ... the Canadian border. Now, her Department has circulated to law enforcement agencies nationwide an intelligence report telling them to be on the lookout for conservatives:
The report also said a push for new immigration legislation that would grant residency or citizenship to people who entered the country illegally could fuel anger among groups fearing competition for jobs.

The Department of Homeland Security has yet to follow this logic out to its inevitable conclusion and home in on the obvious real threat: Canadian conservatives.

Perhaps we'll soon see a campaign coordinated amongst the Obama Administration, the SPLC, and the New York Times editorial board about the looming menace to the American Dream posed by I, Ectomorph.

April 15, 2009

NYT: "I.Q. Harmed by Epilepsy Drug in Utero"

The New York Times reports on an apparent nasty side effect of an epilepsy drug, with this lead-in from the NYTimes.com home page: "Lower I.Q. in Children Linked to Mother’s Use of Epilepsy Drug:"

Three-year-olds whose mothers had taken valproate during pregnancy had I.Q. scores that were nine points lower on average than children whose mothers had taken a different antiseizure medication, lamotrigine. The I.Q. scores of toddlers whose mothers took valproate were also lower than scores of children whose mothers took two other antiseizure medications, phenytoin and carbamazepine. ...

Cognitive assessments were conducted in 258 2- and 3-year-olds born to 252 mothers, of whom 53 had taken valproate.

Over all, children’s I.Q. scores were strongly related to mothers’ I.Q. scores, except among the children of mothers treated with valproate [generic name Depakote], the study found.

At age 3, children exposed to valproate in utero had a mean I.Q. of 92, compared to 101 for children exposed to lamotrigine, 99 for those exposed to phenytoin, and 98 for those exposed to carbamazepine, the study found.

Have you ever noticed how in the New York Times' universe, IQ is unquestionably valid and terribly, terribly important in the Health section of the newspaper? (See, for example, the NYT's recurrent coverage of the effects of the exposure to lead in reducing I.Q.)

In this Health section article, for example, the Times is getting worked up over an IQ test given to 2-3 year olds, which is pushing the age limits of IQ testing. And the sample size is only 53. And yet, there's absolutely zero quibbling about the usefulness of IQ testing in this article. It's simply assumed that, of course, everybody knows that a difference in average IQ scores of about eight points is a big deal.

Yet, in the Education section of the Times, where you might think IQ would be even more relevant, it rarely comes up. And when it does put in an unwelcome appearance, it is often dismissed as discredited.

And here's the headline in the Washington Post, "Epilepsy Drug in Pregnancy May Lower Child's IQ," which links to the AP's article by Mike Stobbe. It too simply assumes that IQ is a valid and important thing.

What Obama hasn't figured out yet: "Better Teachers" means "_____er Teachers"

These days, everybody is in favor of having Better Teachers in our public schools: Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, the whole gang. Everybody is in favor of hiring Better Teachers and easing out Worse Teachers.

Heck, I'm in favor of Better Teachers.

But guess what Obama et al haven't figured out yet about Better Teachers? It's something that James S. Coleman figure out in working on his 1966 Coleman Report.

I'm reading Race and Education: 1954-2007 by U. of Delaware historian Raymond Wolters. It's an academic study that's well-written enough to appeal to a mass audience. It's unusual in that it covers both the well-trodden ground of Supreme Court decisions about race and public schools, from Brown v. Board of Education onward, while at the same time recounting exactly the unintended consequences of what those august deliberations did to real children in the classrooms and hallways and lavatories.

A major figure in the book is quantitative sociologist James S. Coleman, who was given $1 million by the 1964 Civil Rights Act to study how much blacks were shortchanged by the public schools. But his 1966 Coleman report proved disappointing to LBJ Administration. Wolters writes:
The achievement gap troubled Coleman. As a sociologist he was inclined to ascribe the differences in black and white test scores to the influence of the social environment, and he also knew that attributing even part of the difference to racial inheritance would place him outside the pale of his profession and render him ineligible for future frants. For Coleman and for many other educators and sociologist who studied his report, the key variables were family background and neighborhood. There was no correlation between test scores and per-pupil spending, age of textbooks, and a host of other measures. But there was a correlation with family background, the education and occupations of parents, and the number of books in the home. ...

For Coleman, these findings were unwelcome. Personally, he favored more spending for education. And Coleman's dismay was compounded by another correlation that emerged from the data. Both black and white children seemed to do better on tests if their teachers had one well on a standard test of vocabulary. This was especially problematical because black teachers were "on the whole less well prepared, less qualified, with lower verbal skills, than their white counterparts." This led to "the conjecture that [students] would do less well on average under black teachers than under white teachers." If so, "a major source of inequality of educational opportunity for black students was the fact they were being taught by black teachers." Yet this possibility was so heterodox that the Coleman report did not pursue the matter. In 1991 Coleman expressed regret over the decision "not to ask the crucial question." "A dispassionate researcher," he wrote, "would have gone on to ask the question we did not ask." ...

Poring over the statistics, he noted that African American teachers, on average, had slightly more years of formal education than their white counterparts. But the black teachers lagged behind whites in vocabulary and reading comprehension.

In other words, what Obama hasn't figured out yet, although James S. Coleman figured it out back in 1966, is that Better Teachers means Whiter Teachers.

When it finally dawns on Obama that if we actually start firing worse teachers and hiring better teachers, we'll be, on net, firing blacks and hiring whites, you can expect this whole effort to get buried so far under affirmative action that nothing good comes of it.






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

Breaking News: Your genes didn't evolve to kill you

Genetic reporter Nicholas Wade, who has been on book break, is back with an NY Times front page story "Genes Show Limited Value in Predicting Diseases:

"The era of personal genomic medicine may have to wait. The genetic analysis of common disease is turning out to be a lot more complex than expected.

Since the human genome was decoded in 2003, researchers have been developing a powerful method for comparing the genomes of patients and healthy people, with the hope of pinpointing the DNA changes responsible for common diseases.

This method, called a genomewide association study, has proved technically successful despite many skeptics’ initial doubts. But it has been disappointing in that the kind of genetic variation it detects has turned out to explain surprisingly little of the genetic links to most diseases.

As Matt Ridley has said, no matter what you might think from reading the Health & Science section of your newspaper, your genes didn't evolve in order to kill you. So, this hunt for Killer Genes was always a little dubious, as I've been pointing out all decade.

Instead, your genes evolved to help you survive and reproduce. So, these expensive genome studies have so far proven better at finding the causes of differences in capabilities between individuals and between extended families (a.k.a., racial groups).

Dr. Goldstein argues that the genetic burden of common diseases must be mostly carried by large numbers of rare variants. In this theory, schizophrenia, say, would be caused by combinations of 1,000 rare genetic variants, not of 10 common genetic variants.

This would be bleak news for those who argue that the common variants detected so far, even if they explain only a small percentage of the risk, will nonetheless identify the biological pathways through which a disease emerges, and hence point to drugs that may correct the errant pathways. If hundreds of rare variants are involved in a disease, they may implicate too much of the body’s biochemistry to be useful.

An alternative theory, proposed by Greg Cochran and Paul Ewald in the 1990s is that more diseases are caused by infections than we currently assume. (Here's the 1999 Atlantic Monthly cover story on them.) Of course, genes and germs are not mutually exclusive causes. It could be that, say, you'll only get Disease X if you are both exposed to Germ Y and your immune system lacks Gene Variant Z.

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

Obama has a dream

Here's the penultimate paragraph from the President's speech on the economy:
There is no doubt that times are still tough. By no means are we out of the woods just yet. But from where we stand, for the very first time, we are beginning to see glimmers of hope. And beyond that, way off in the distance, we can see a vision of an America’s future that is far different than our troubled economic past. It’s an America teeming with new industry and commerce; humming with new energy and discoveries that light the world once more. A place where anyone from anywhere with a good idea or the will to work can live the dream they’ve heard so much about.

Read that last sentence again: "A place where anyone from anywhere with a good idea or the will to work can live the dream they’ve heard so much about."

Obama is an ex-law school teacher, so when he's verbally ambiguous, it's with a purpose. You could read "anyone from anywhere" as meaning anyone with an ancestry from anywhere. But the more straightforward reading is pure Open Borders sentimentality: anyone of Obama's teeming relatives, or any of the other six billion people, should be able to move to America whenever they feel like it as long as they have "the will to work."

It's a useful rule of thumb that any politician who refers to The American Dream is up to no good.

The President is a rich man with an income of several million dollars per year from his books. Why in hell shouldn't he pay to send his illegal immigrant aunt home to Kenya?

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

"Personality decided at birth, say scientists"

That won't come as any surprise to anybody with more than one kid, but the relationship to brain anatomy is interesting. Steve Connor reports:

Personality types are linked with structural differences in the brain - which could explain why one child grows up to be impulsive and outgoing while another becomes diligent and introspective.

Anatomical differences between the brains of 85 people have been measured and linked with the four main categories of personality types as defined by psychiatrists using a clinically recognised system of character evaluation....

Brain scans that measure differences in volume down to an accuracy of less than one cubic millimetre found, for instance, that people defined as novelty-seeking personalities had a structurally bigger area of the brain above the eye sockets, known as the inferior part of the frontal lobe.

If this holds up (and I'm singularly unable to judge -- owing to my lack of 3-d processing power, I never been able to make head nor tail of any article referring to a region in the brain. No doubt my brain region that contributes to 3-d thinking is vanishingly small.)

I’ve long felt we are programmed by evolution to have kids with different personalities as a form of what financial economists like Edward M. Miller call “portfolio diversity:” you don’t want to put all your assets into one basket, such as mortgage backed securities. For example, Genghis Khan’s aggressive personality worked out fine from a Darwinian standpoint (his personal genetic signature appears in a huge number of people across a giant swath of Eurasia), but it probably got lots of other guys with similar personalities killed early. So, you wouldn’t want to have three sons each with Genghis Khan’s personality. They'd just end up skewering each other.

But my more scientist friends roll their eyes when I advocate portfolio diversity and say that’s “group selectionism,” which has been thoroughly exploded.

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

New Jersey's Next

From the Pew Hispanic Center report on illegal immigrants, the five states with "Largest Share of Unauthorized Immigrants in the Labor Force, 2008:"

1. Nevada - 12.2%
2. California - 9.9%
3. Arizona - 9.8%
4. New Jersey - 9.2%
5. Florida - 8.2%

Hmmhmm ... the four Sand States where 7/8ths or so of the mortgage money has been lost, and New Jersey. If I owned a lot of mortgages in New Jersey, I wouldn't be feeling too good about collecting on them right now.

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

My article on the most important Supreme Court case

I've written for VDARE.com a massive article (about 2,800 words) that I think is one of my more interesting ones yet. The topic is the most important Supreme Court case of the year, Ricci, the New Haven firemen's reverse discrimination lawsuit. No fireman in New Haven has been promoted in the last five years because the city threw out the results of the 2003 promotion exam because the politicians didn't like the results by race.

Ricci provides a valuable window into what affirmative action imposes upon American organizations. Typically, the contortions our institutions go through to avoid federal discrimination lawsuits are hidden from public view, but Ricci exposes the bizarre, convoluted, and inane way the game is played.

I've been reading about white firemen's reverse discrimination cases for decades, but I didn't really understand the topic until I did extensive research for this article, and the pieces finally fell into place.

White firemen are exceptional in that they tend to fight more than just about any other occupation. And, strikingly, firemen often win.

Why do firemen fight the government, the media, and the conventional wisdom so often? There are a lot of reasons, but one is clear: firemen are brave.

I look forward to you reading this article.

But you can't read the article now because we're broke. VDARE.com lost a longtime big donor, and so we have to beg for money like a PBS station during a pledge drive until we raise enough from readers like you to to stay in business.

If you look at the my blogroll on the right, you'll see a lot of people who are about as good at what I do as I am. Yet, why do they only post 500 or 1000 words per week, while I post 5000 or 10,000? Because they have real jobs. They have to make the 7am flight to Dallas.

Through VDARE.com and other sources, all ultimately supported by the generosity of people like you, I'm able to scrounge together enough money to do things that, now that I think about it, sound pretty ridiculous. If I want to think about what it's like to be a fireman for three days, I think about what it's like to be a fireman. I have the time to follow threads from the small to the large.

Moreover, VDARE.com gives me the freedom to pick my topics, my length, and my approach. All truths are connected to each other, so it doesn't particularly matter where you start as long as you have the freedom to follow the chain to the end -- a freedom that 99.9% of all paying outlets don't provide.

So, please go to VDARE.com now and make a contribution. I know that times are hard, but there are reasons times are hard, reasons you won't read anywhere else.

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

Tierney: "Single Female Seeking Same-Race Male"

John Tierney blogs in the New York Times about a study of "speed-dating" Columbia University:
There’s also a clear gender divide, as the researchers note: “Women of all races exhibit strong same race preferences, while men of no race exhibit a statistically significant same race preference.”

That part about men having no preference sounds a bit like an artifact of doing the study at an Ivy League school where men have to be on their guard for ideological deviancy. Ivy League women, in contrast, would just slough off charges of racism with Ivy League feminist-quality logic: "I can't be a racist because I'm a feminist!"

Here are the study's results for women:

African-American women said yes about 30 percent less often to Hispanic men; about 45 percent less often to white men; about 65 percent less often to Asian men.

White women said yes about 30 percent less often to black or Hispanic men, and about 65 percent less often to Asian men.

Hispanic women said yes about 20 percent less often to black or white men, and 50 percent less often to Asian men.

Asian women didn’t discriminate much by race (except for showing a very slight preference for Asian men over black or Hispanic men).

And now you know why the Bitter Asian Men are so bitter.

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