Constance Holden, RIP

Constance Holden, 68, veteran writer for Science, America's top scientific journal, was riding her bicycle to the office on Monday, when she was killed by a big National Guard truck setting up to block off a street for the motorcade of dignitaries to Obama's stray nukes summit.

Constance was a consistent voice against the Williams Syndrome-like conventional wisdom on human nature. For example, her July 30, 2004 Science article in time for the Athens Olympics, Peering Under the Hood of Africa's Runners, is the best summary of the science of why men of West African descent dominate sprinting and East Africans standout in distance running.

At the blog of VDARE.com, Kevin Lamb has more on on how she spoke out for IQ realism over the decades.

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

Stevens' heresy

Ann Coulter's new column points out something that has been lost in all the tributes by the media to the retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. A long time ago, in the government contracting quota case Fullilove, he noted that quotas are essentially reparations, and asked why then are we giving reparations to voluntary immigrants from south of the border?

But on many other issues, such as race discrimination, Stevens swung so far to the left that his earlier opinions would be unrecognizable as having been written by the same man.

In 1978, Stevens was not only in the majority in University of California Regents v. Bakke, but he wrote the opinion holding that the school's race-based admissions program violated Title VII and ordering the university to admit Bakke.

In another case of government race-based classifications, Fullilove v. Klutznick (1980), Stevens ridiculed the idea of race-based "remedies" being applied to every ethnic group under the sun.

Adopting Justice William Rehnquist's view that the specific history of blacks in America makes their claims unique, Stevens wrote: "Quite obviously, the history of discrimination against black citizens in America cannot justify a grant of privileges to Eskimos or Indians." (Remember when you could use terms like "Eskimo" and "Indian" without being accused of a hate crime?)

Unlike blacks, who were "dragged to this country in chains to be sold in slavery," Stevens said "the 'Spanish-speaking' subclass came voluntarily, frequently without invitation, and the Indians, the Eskimos and the Aleuts had an opportunity to exploit America's resources before the ancestors of most American citizens arrived."

Now fast-forward to 2003, when the court considered the race-based admissions policy at the University of Michigan. The school automatically awarded 20 points -- one-fifth of the total points needed for admission -– to every minority, including not only blacks, but also Hispanics, Indians, Eskimos and Aleuts.

This time, affirmative action for Aleuts was just peachy with Stevens, who came up with a ludicrous procedural objection to the lawsuit, basically concluding that no one ever has standing to sue for race discrimination in college admissions. I guess he figured it was time somebody did something about the University of Michigan's long, shameful history of discriminating against Aleuts.

That's quite a change from the Justice Stevens of Fullilove, who compared government affirmative action programs to Nazi policies, saying if the government "is to make a serious effort to define racial classes by criteria that can be administered objectively, it must study precedents such as the First Regulation to the Reich's Citizenship Law of Nov. 14, 1935," translated in Volume 4 of "Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression."

Whatever you think of Stevens' newfound admiration for government racial preferences, it's preposterous to say, as Stevens did, "I really don't think I've changed all that much." 

Here's more from Stevens' 1980 dissent in Fullilove, when he was 60:

Even if we assume that each of the six racial subclasses has suffered its own special injury at some time in our history, [p538] surely it does not necessarily follow that each of those subclasses suffered harm of identical magnitude. Although "the Negro was dragged to this country in chains to be sold in slavery," Bakke, supra, at 387 (opinion of MARSHALL, J.), the "Spanish-speaking" subclass came voluntarily, frequently without invitation, and the Indians, the Eskimos and the Aleuts had an opportunity to exploit America's resources before the ancestors of most American citizens arrived. There is no reason to assume, and nothing in the legislative history suggests, much less demonstrates, that each of the subclasses is equally entitled to reparations from the United States Government. ^[n8]

 

At best, the statutory preference is a somewhat perverse form of reparation for the members of the injured classes. For those who are the most disadvantaged within each class are the least likely to receive any benefit from the special privilege even though they are the persons most likely still to be suffering the consequences of the past wrong. ^[n9] A random [p539] distribution to a favored few is a poor form of compensation for an injury shared by many.

My principal objection to the reparation justification for this legislation, however, cuts more deeply than my concern about its inequitable character. We can never either erase or ignore the history that MR. JUSTICE MARSHAL has recounted. But if that history can justify such a random distribution of benefits on racial lines as that embodied in this statutory scheme, it will serve not merely as a basis for remedial legislation, but rather as a permanent source of justification for grants of special privileges. For if there is no duty to attempt either to measure the recovery by the wrong or to distribute that recovery within the injured class in an evenhanded way, our history will adequately support a legislative preference for almost any ethnic, religious, or racial group with the political strength to negotiate "a piece of the action" for its members.

Although I do not dispute the validity of the assumption that each of the subclasses identified in the Act has suffered a severe wrong at some time in the past, I cannot accept this slapdash statute as a legitimate method of providing classwide relief.

Perhaps some Senator could ask Obama's upcoming nominee what he thinks of the sainted Stevens Fullilove opinion? And, then, when they demur to agree, ask why brand new immigrants should legally benefit from preferences from the moment they arrive, even if they arrived illegally?

And, then, ask was it just to the rest of Americans for immigrants from India to have been reclassified from white to Oriental in 1982 in response to lobbying by immigrant Indian businessmen for special breaks on government contracting.

That would be fun.

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

Professional Wrestling Demographics

Some commenters were struck by the fact that fans of professional wrestling (at least, the ones who admit it on a survey) voted heavily Democratic. I recall that Pat Buchanan's Reform Party campaign in 2000 spent some money on campaign spots on professional wrestling broadcasts, but didn't get much from them.

That reminded me that I've never posted an article I wrote about professional wrestling in 2001, at the apogee of its popularity: I took my sons to a sold out Staples Center in LA with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the front row to bless The Rock / Duane Johnson's launch into a movie career.

Then a bunch of setbacks came along to slow it down (the World Wildlife Fund's lawsuit that made it change its acronym from WWF to WWE, the distraction of Vince McMahon's ill-fated XFL professional football league, the rise of UFC, the defection of The Rock to the movies, and general ennui).

It's old, old stuff, but I'll put it up anyway:

LOS ANGELES, Calif. Aug. 10, 2001 (UPI) -- Los Angeles is a city so divided by complex ethnic suspicions that in June white Republicans allied with black Democrats to prevent the election of a Mexican-American mayor. Yet, this week sixteen thousand Southern Californians of all races and languages gathered peacefully in a multicultural celebration of an institution that finally unites rather than divides this most diverse of American cities: namely, the World Wrestling Federation's "Smackdown!"

The Smackdown! audience in the gleaming Staples Center offered almost a scale model of LA's ethnic composition: about half Hispanic, but with large numbers of whites, blacks, and Southeast Asians. The only groups not well represented were other Asians and Jews.

LA's most celebrated philosopher, Rodney King, once asked, "Why can't we all just get along?" At Smackdown!, everybody got along famously (except the wrestlers). The WWF fans were far better behaved than, say, the notoriously drunken and hostile mob at the 1999 Ryder Cup golf tournament at The Country Club in Brookline, Mass.

After the headlining match between Stone Cold Steve Austin and Kurt Angle had ended in chaos, I became frustrated with how slowly we were all filing out up the stairs. "Hey, can we get a move on up there?" I shouted. Only then did I notice that we were moving haltingly because the people in line ahead of me were politely waiting for a man with a crippled leg to haul himself along with his arms.

Tea Party Demographics

The New York Times gives its biggest headline to the astonishing news that:

Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated

Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, and are no more or less afraid of falling into a lower socioeconomic class, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. 

The 18 percent of Americans who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters tend to be Republican, white, male, married and older than 45. 

And I bet, on average, they are, relative to the general public, more into golf than professional wrestling.

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

Politics of Cable Network Audiences

Here's a graph from the marketing research firm National Media Research, Planning, and Placement of how the audiences of cable television networks skew in terms of party (Democrats to the left, Republicans to the right) and likelihood of voting (highest turnout at the top).

The cable network with the most Democratic-leaning audience is Soapnet, while the most Republican audience is that of Fox News. The network with the highest election turnout rates is the Golf Channel (just as golf fans have the highest turnout rates among fans of all sports, as shown in my latest Taki's Magazine column). VH1 viewers have the lowest turnout rates (this is among adults, in case you are wondering).

NMRPP also has created a graph at the top of p. 4 of this report that shows the political leanings across TV (cable and broadcast) of the audiences for various program formats (national news, documentaries, comedies, science fiction, sports, and so forth). When you include broadcast networks, most genres' television audiences skew more Democratic and more apathetic.

Update: TGGP has put up that television format graph here.

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

"The Politics of Sports Fans"

My new column at Taki's Magazine uses Tiger's loss to Phil at Augusta to introduce new data on The Politics of Sports Fans. It features a spectacular graph (which I found at statistician Andrew Gelman's blog) from a survey of 218,000 American adults' preferences in spectator sports, politics, and civic-participation. NASCAR fans are famously Republican, but which two sports have even more conservative fan bases? Which spectator sport has the most liberal fans? Which sport's fans are most likely to vote? Which least likely?

Old stereotypes are validated and new stereotypes are revealed, which is always fun.

Read it there and comment upon it here.

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

Not Clear on the Concept

Adam Liptak of the New York Times is confidently confused in the approved manner:

But Justice Stevens cuts a lone figure on the current court in one demographic category: He is the only Protestant.

His retirement, which was announced on Friday, makes possible something that would have been unimaginable a generation or two ago — a court without a single member of the nation’s majority religion.

“The practical reality of life in America is that religion plays much less of a role in everyday life than it did 50 or 100 years ago,” said Geoffrey R. Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago. Adding a Protestant to the court, he said, would not bring an important element to its discussions.

“These days,” said Lee Epstein, a law professor at Northwestern and an authority on the court, “we’ve moved to other sources of diversity,” including race, gender and ethnicity. ...

It is hard to imagine the court without a black justice, for instance, and it may well turn out that Justice Sonia Sotomayor is sitting in a new “Hispanic seat.” It would surprise no one if President Obama tried to increase the number of women on the court to three. Not so long ago, there was similar casual talk, but of a “Catholic seat” or a “Jewish seat” on the Supreme Court. Today, the court is made up of six Roman Catholics, two Jews and Justice Stevens.

It was not ever thus. Presidents once looked at two main factors in picking justices.

“Historically, religion was huge,” said Professor Epstein of Northwestern. “It was up there with geography as the key factor.”...

The short list of candidates to succeed Justice Stevens includes two Jews, Solicitor General Elena Kagan and Judge Merrick B. Garland of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and one Protestant, Judge Diane P. Wood of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago.

But it is unlikely that religious affiliation will play a meaningful role in the decision making. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said that society is past worrying about a nominee’s religious affiliations.

Is it really that hard to grasp that in this context, terms like "Catholic," "Jew," and "Protestant" are primarily ethnic terms, not religious ones?

Does Justice Ginsburg, for example, keep kosher? Is that what it takes to be religiously Jewish? Who knows?

What everybody does know is that she is ethnically Jewish.

Henry Ford and General Patton believed that they were reincarnated, but that didn't make them ethnically Hindu (at least not in this lifetime). Everybody considers them ethnically Protestant, and rightfully so.

That's not a difficult distinction to comprehend. Obviously, there can be a gray area between ethnicity and religion (they're fuzzy sets), but to ignore the very existence of the concept of ethnicity is to act in a fundamentally obtuse manner.

Once you recognize that "Protestant" is an ethnic category as well as a religious one, however, then a potential lack of Protestant representation on the Supreme Court could be recognized as a question of the Supreme Court's ethnic diversity and ethnic representativeness, issues that are highly fashionable these days.

Sonia Sotomayor, for example, was repeatedly lauded for adding ethnic diversity.

So, why shouldn't a potential lack of Protestant ethnics on the Court be considered a question of ethnic diversity?

Of course, when people use the word "diverse" they actually mean, as Orwell might say: But some nominees are more diverse than others. Ethnic diversity for me but not for thee. But, when talking about the Supreme Court, it's hard to come up with a validation for this bias that sounds just.

So, we see a lot of Liptak's type of strategic muddleheadedness to confuse onlookers. It's another version of the old "Einstein was Jewish / Trotsky wasn't Jewish" muddle in which Einstein, a good guy, is Jewish because he was ethnically Jewish, but Trotsky, a bad guy, wasn't Jewish because he wasn't religiously Jewish. It's logically okay to make either argument (although not both), but, obviously, you need to note the distinction between ethnicity and religion and grasp that others might have logical reasons for not agreeing with your categorizations.

Is this really that hard?

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

The cure for race realism discovered: Williams syndrome!

From Yahoo News, a summary of a paper in Current Biology:

Individuals with Rare Disorder Have No Racial Biases
Robin Nixon

Never has a human population been found that has no racial stereotypes. Not in other cultures or far-flung countries. Nor among tiny tots or people with various psychological conditions.

Until now.

Children with Williams syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that makes them lack normal social anxiety, have no racial biases.

Well, a lack of social anxiety is not the only characteristic of Williams syndrome. From Wikipedia:

The most common symptoms of Williams syndrome are mental retardation, heart defects, and unusual facial features. ... Individuals with Williams syndrome are highly verbal and overly sociable (having what had previously been described as a "cocktail party" type personality), but lack common sense ...

"Highly Verbal But Lack Common Sense" would pretty much describe most propounders of the conventional wisdom about race.

A 2007 NYT Magazine article on Williams syndrome reported:

These deficits generally erase about 35 points from whatever I.Q. the person would have inherited without the deletion. Since the average I.Q. is 100, this leaves most people with Williams with I.Q.’s in the 60s. Though some can hold simple jobs, they require assistance managing their lives....

The low I.Q., however, ignores two traits that define Williams more distinctly than do its deficits: an exuberant gregariousness and near-normal language skills.

Political correctness, in effect, demands that our intellectual discourse aspire towards Williams syndrome.

From the news report:

They do, however, traffic in gender stereotypes, said study researcher Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg of the University of Heidelberg in Germany.

Normally, children show clear preferences for their own ethnic group by the age of three, if not sooner, other research has shown.

Actually, the interesting thing is that toddlers tend to develop an insight into race that is generally lost by grown-up intellectuals when writing about race: race is about who your Mommy and Daddy are, topics that are deeply interesting to children (and to all humans), but aren't recognized in conventional discourse about race.

In Race in the Making, the liberal U. of Michigan anthropology professor Lawrence A. Hirschfeld sums up the finding of his research on children.

As comforting as this view may be, children, I will show in this book, are more than aware of diversity; they are driven by endogenous curiosity to uncover it. Children, I will also show, do not believe race to be a superficial quality of the world. Multicultural curricula aside, few people believe that race is only skin deep. Certainly few 3-year-olds do. They believe that race is an intrinsic, immutable, and essential aspect of a person's identity. Moreover, they seem to come to this conclusion on their own. They do not need to be taught that race is a deep property, they know it themselves already.

For example, if you show preschoolers drawings of people and ask them to match the children with their mommies, on average they will correctly tell you that the skinny white child belongs to the fat white mommy, while the fat black child belongs to the skinny black mommy (or vice-versa). They consider race a better predictor of family relationship than body shape.

From the news report:

And, indeed, the children in this study without Williams syndrome reliably assigned good traits, such as friendliness, to pictures of people the same race as themselves. When asked something negative, such as "which is the naughty boy," they overwhelmingly pointed to the other race.

Children with Williams syndrome, however, were equally likely to point to the white or black child as naughty or friendly.

While this study was done with white children, other research has shown that blacks and people of other races also think more highly of their own, Meyer-Lindenberg told LiveScience.

Williams syndrome is caused by a gene deletion known to affect the brain as well as other organs. As a result, people with Williams syndrome are "hypersocial," Meyer-Lindenberg told . They do not experience the jitters and inhibitions the rest of us feel.

"The whole concept [of social anxiety] would be foreign to them," he said.

They will put themselves at great peril to help someone and despite their skills at empathy, are unable to process social danger signals. As a result, they are at increased risk for rape and physical attack.

Indeed.

Nature or nurture?

While the first human population to demonstrate race-neutrality is missing critical genes, "we are not saying that this is all biologically-based and you can't do anything about it," Meyer-Lindenberg said.

"Just because there is a genetic way to knock the system out, does not mean the system itself is 100 percent genetic," he said.

The study does show, however, that racism requires social fear. "If social fear was culturally reduced, racial stereotypes could also be reduced," Meyer-Lindenberg said.

Despite their lack of racial bias, children with Williams syndrome hold gender stereotypes just as strongly as normal children, the study found. That is, 99 percent of the 40 children studied pointed to pictures of girls when asked who played with dolls and chose boys when asked, say, who likes toy cars.

The fact that Williams syndrome kids think of men and women differently, but not blacks and whites, shows that sex stereotypes are not caused by social anxiety, Meyer-Lindenberg said.

This may be because we learn about gender within "safe" home environments, while a different race is usually a sign of someone outside our immediate kin. (Studies to test this explanation, such as with racially-mixed families, have not yet been done.)

Racial biases are likely rooted in a general fear of others, while gender stereotypes may arise from sweeping generalizations, Meyer-Lindenberg said. "You watch mother make the meals, so you generalize this to everyone female."

Perhaps, but another explanation for why people with Williams syndrome would be unable to notice racial patterns is because they are mentally retarded.

Sex is simply more obvious than race. Very young children typically notice differences in sex before they begin to notice differences in race. People with Williams syndrome are typically verbally facile but oblivious to the obvious.

Here's a question I have about Williams syndrome. Say you would have had a 140 IQ without it, but you were born with genetic defect, so you have a 105 IQ and not a lick of sense. But you are really good at laying out a spiel of words. Is Williams syndrome just too all-around debilitating for you to ever amount to much in the world?

Or, could there be, say, a prominent media figure who suffers from Williams syndrome?

If so, who would your candidate be?

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

The Boredom of Barack

A recurrent theme in David Remnick's biography of Obama, The Bridge, is The Boredom of Barack: He was bored as president of the Harvard Law Review, bored as a civil rights lawyer, bored as a law school lecturer, bored as a state senator, and bored as a U.S. Senator. The one thing that really interests him is writing about himself. (Well, that and power and praise.)

Remnick quotes Obama's long-time Chicago political ally Valerie Jarrett recalling Obama's 1990s in Chicago (p. 274):

"... I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. ... So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that they had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy." Jarrett was quite sure that one of the few things that truly engaged him fully before going to the White House was writing Dreams from My Father. "He's been bored to death his whole life," she said.

Later, after Obama got elected to the U.S. Senate [p. 444]:

The truth was, David Axelrod told me, "Barack hated being a senator." Washington was a grander stage than Springfield, but the frustrations of being a rookie in a minority party were familiar. Obama could barely conceal his frustration with the torpid pace of the Senate. His aides could sense his frustration and so could his colleagues. "He was so bored being a senator," one Senate aide said. ...

His friend and law colleague Judd Miner said, "The reality was that during his first two years in the U.S. Senate, I think, he was struggling; it wasn't nearly as stimulating as he expected." ...

The one project that did engage Obama fully was work on The Audacity of Hope. He procrastinated for a long time and then, facing his deadline, wrote nearly a chapter a week.

His second book, a polemical memoir / campaign kickoff book, has nine chapters, an epilogue, and a prologue. So, apparently, Obama devoted about three months to writing the book while also serving as Senator. In comparison, his first book took several years, some of it full time.

In other words, it's safe to conclude that he had a lot of help from staffers and others on his second book. You can compare it to Sen. Jim Webb's recent book, A Time to Fight, which is much less polished than Obama's Audacity. Webb has a considerable track record as a novelist, but you get the sense that he felt the taxpayers were paying him to be a Senator, not a writer, so, in contrast to Obama, Webb didn't put his best efforts nor those of his staff into his book.

This was not your average senator writing a book," one aide said. "His whole soul went into it, so it meant that there was less of him to go around elsewhere. In the office, he was distracted. He wasn't thrilled to be living the life of a senator, even on the best of days. The job was too small for him -- because his mind was on systemic change, not on votes.

"So he was punching the clock during the day then coming alive at night to write the book," the aide went on. "The book was about a mortgage and cashing in on the success of the first book. And the book was a way to think through who he was what he stood for."

The funny thing, of course, is that for all of his acolytes' claims that Obama is bored because his mind is always on higher, intellectual things, he seems to spend a huge amount of time doing the same things George W. Bush did: watching ESPN SportsCenter, exercising, and playing golf.

There is very little evidence in his life of systematic grappling with ideas beyond developing the ability to restate each side's current position in an eloquent fashion so that people will shut up and not keep repeating themselves to him as if he doesn't get it or as if he'll change his mind.

Dreams is a literary work, with a sense of style but quite weak analytic content. Audacity is a polished but shallow positioning of himself for the 2008 election. He avoided debate with colleagues at the U. of Chicago. What else has he written? A few dozen op-ed columns for his local newspaper when he was a state senator.

The overall picture is of a facile, not particularly hard working egoist whose chief intellectual and aesthetic interest is himself.

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

Obama's Supreme Court choice

It's natural to assume that Barack Obama, former president of the Harvard Law Review and lecturer at the U. of Chicago Law School, must be obsessing over his opportunity to make another Supreme Court nomination.

Yet, he’s not really as interested in the courts as everybody expects him to be. According to David Remnick’s new biography of him, The Bridge, when he was president of the Harvard Law Review, he considered the Law Review, not unreasonably, kind of a joke -- why are students editing professors? And, he never published a law article in all the years he was employed by the U. of Chicago Law School.

To Obama, the judicial branch lacks the capabilities to administer the kind of things he wants done, so he doesn’t invest much political capital there.

As Obama explained in a radio talk in 2001, the judicial branch isn’t well organized to oversee wealth redistribution. To accomplish that requires executive and legislative power.

From Obama's 2001 radio transcript:

But the supreme court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of basic issues of political and economic justice in this society and to that extent as radical as people try to characterize the warren court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the constitution, at least as it has been interpreted and the warren court interpreted it generally in the same way that the constitution is a document of negative liberties-- says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal gov’t can’t do to you but it doesn’t say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted; and I think one of the tragedies of the civil rights movement was that the civil rights movement became so court-focused, I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and organizing activities on the ground that are able to bring about the coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change and in some ways we still suffer from that.” …

This interview shows Obama the law professor and politician saying that to bring redistribution of wealth, it’s less effective to be, say, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court than it is to be, say, President of the United States.

Obama’s statement seems perfectly plausible: he’s spent years studying and teaching Constitutional law, but he, personally, decided that his ambitions required elective rather than judicial power.

"You know, maybe I am showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a law professor, but you know I am not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. You know, the institution just isn't structured that way. Just look at very rare examples where during the desegregation era the court was willing to, for example, order, you know, changes that cost money to local school district and the court was very uncomfortable with it."

This is presumably a reference to Kansas City, where a judge ordered a billion dollars extra spending on heavily black schools. Not surprisingly, it didn’t do much for test scores.

"It was hard to manage. It was hard to figure out. You start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues. You know, in terms of the court monitoring or engaging in a process that is essentially is administrative and take a lot of time, the court is not very good at it and politically it is hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard. So I think that -- although you can craft theoretical justifications for it legally, you know I think any three of us sitting here could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts -- I think that as a practical matter that our institutions are just poorly equipped to do it. …"

So, Obama is saying that he is for “bringing about economic change through the courts” in theory, in practice the courts don’t have the administrative staff and power to do it. Instead, Obama’s goal of “redistribution of wealth” should be achieved through the legislative and executive branches.

"Typically, the court can be more or less generous in interpreting actions and initiatives taken, but in terms of funding of abortions and Medicare and Medicaid, the court it not initiating those funding streams. Essentially, what the court is saying is at some point this is a legitimate prohibition or this is not, and I think those are very important battles that need to be fought and I think they have a redistributive aspect to them."

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

Obama and Reparations

One of the more interesting anecdotes in David Remnick's interminable new biography of Barack Obama's "story of race and inheritance," The Bridge, comes from Obama’s class at the University of Chicago Law School on “Race, Racism, and the Law:”

“’But there was a moment when he let his guard down,’ one former student recalled. ‘He told us what he thought about reparations. He agreed entirely with the theory of reparations. But in practice he didn’t think it was really workable. … as the complexities emerged—who is black, how far back do you go, what about recent immigrants still feeling racism, do they have a claim—finally, he said, ‘That is why it’s unworkable.’’”

Of course, the exact same questions also apply to affirmative action—which Obama finds wonderfully “workable.”

Obama’s student recalled:

“You could tell that he thought he had let the cat out of the bag and felt uncomfortable. To agree with reparations in theory means we go past apology and say we can actually change the dynamics of the country …”

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

"The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama"

An excerpt from my new VDARE.com column:

Barack Obama is the most powerful man in America. And David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, is one of the most powerful figures in American journalism.

Not surprisingly, reviewers of Remnick’s new Presidential biography/doorstop, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, have generally prostrated themselves before Remnick with the same shamelessness as the editor has prostrated himself before the politician in these 656 pages of humorless hagiography.

A biography of Santa Claus would be more hard-hitting than The Bridge, which confirms in exhaustive detail that, yes, Obama's life is, indeed, "a story of race and inheritance." Remnick, who is certainly a bright fellow, just makes himself seem obtuse as he constantly offers the most insipid rationalizations available of the outsized role that race has played in Obama’s choices. Political correctness makes you stupid.

The Bridge stands as a self-emasculated monument to the insidious costs of Access Journalism. Yes, Remnick scored a lot of interviews. The Bridge, for examples, ends with Remnick reverently interviewing his subject in the Oval Office about the meaning of his being in the Oval Office.

Yet, for what shall it profit a writer, if he shall gain the whole world of access, and lose his own soul?

When you could speak truth to power, what does it say about you that you choose to speak spin for power? ...

Despite Obama’s hopeless struggle with being black enough relative to other black politicians, he was a natural at exploiting white people’s vast reservoir of good will toward blacks—and desire to feel superior over other whites—for his own personal advancement. He was the one they’d been waiting for. As Eric Zorn, the liberal Chicago Tribune columnist, said about Obama’s campaigning among whites in 2004:

“Obama was somehow all about validating you. … He was radiating the sense that ‘You’re the kind of guy who can accept a black guy as a senator.’ He made people feel better about themselves for liking him.”

Read the whole thing.

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

North American Union -- It's back!

From the Dallas Morning News:

Immigration reform is either right around the corner or may be postponed once again to next year by Congress and the White House, depending on whom you ask.

But one thing is clear for former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge G. Castañeda: It could prove to be a key factor in helping the U.S. move out of the current financial crisis.

"The U.S. is seeking a reorientation of its manufacturing base, and it's not easy to do without cheaper labor and the Mexican industrial base," he said Wednesday.

Castañeda will head to North Texas next week to talk at the University of Texas at Arlington about his latest book, Ex Mex: From Migrants to Immigrants, and about the mutual need in the U.S. and Mexico for immigration reform. He will deliver this year's Center for Mexican American Studies Distinguished Lecture at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday in the UTA library.

Castañeda remains bullish about the prospects of enacting immigration reform sometime during President Barack Obama's administration, despite all the heated and polarizing rhetoric surrounding the issue.

"I don't put much stock in those [anti-immigration] voices," he said. "Obama wouldn't have been elected and health care reform wouldn't have passed if they were the majority."

He believes immigration reform is a crucial component not only in reviving our economy, but also in creating a North American community, similar to the European Union.

It's not a new idea – former Mexican President Vicente Fox mentioned the idea of a free flow of labor and trade on a visit to Dallas in 2000. And the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations issued a trinational report in 2005 in which it proposed the creation of a North American community involving the U.S., Mexico and Canada for enhanced security and prosperity.

Castañeda's vision for this broader relationship goes beyond the North American Free Trade Agreement and involves a free flow of labor and energy, security provisions, integration of currencies, and greater social cohesion.

"NAFTA has run out of steam, and it is not generating jobs in Mexico," he said. "The U.S. and Mexico are further apart in economic development today, and the gap is getting bigger. We cannot leave it to the market alone to solve our issues."

The world's richest man lives in Mexico. Maybe, you Mexican officials should look into how exactly that happened.

The idea of a North American Union modeled on the European Union, with tariff walls around the continent, is something Mexico needs to take up with higher authority: i.e., Beijing. I don't think, however, that America's chief creditor will approve. Maybe it would have been a good idea two decades ago, but that horse left the barn a long time ago.

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

Noah Millman on "The Closing of the Conservative Mind"

Noah Millman writes:

... assuming one agrees (as I do) that the American right-wing is, these days, substantially more closed-minded than the American left-wing (as represented not so much by ordinary people as the intellectual, political and media leadership), why should we have come to this pass?

I'm not sure if that is true in the absolute sense, but it is true in the relativistic, opportunity cost sense. Because, for example, 92% of Hispanic elected officials are Democrats, the Democrats can't afford to have an intelligent debate on immigration. They just can't. The Republicans can, but the Republican Establishment (e.g., George Bush, Karl Rove, John McCain) has striven hard for the last decade against all intelligent discussion of immigration.

Noah goes on:

- Blame the money. Is there a major patron of conservative intellectuals who is a patron primarily because he or she wants to generate new ideas, insights, works of the spirit that do not already exist in the world, as opposed to advancing arguments for ideas that are already well-established in defense of interests that are well-entrenched? If there is, please let me know that person’s name. Ron Unz is the only person who comes immediately to mind, and honestly I don’t think he’s quite in the wealth category one would ideally want.

Nobody, of course, is just going to hand out money willy-nilly. But there is an enormous difference between bankrolling a person or organization because you like what they think, and bankrolling a person or organization because you like the way they think. If a multi-millionaire says: I am interested in education, and I believe that vouchers are the answer, so I’m going to give $100,000 per year to a think-tank to produce pro-vouchers research and advocate for vouchers, well, that’s not really intellectual patronage. If, on the other hand, that same multi-millionaire says: I am interested in education, and I am skeptical of the way the system works now, how we train teachers to how our schools are financed, and impressed with some of what’s been achieved following new models. I’m going to find the smartest, most informed, most independent-minded people I can, who are also skeptical of established practice, and give them money to do whatever research they want. If they can impress me with their independence and intelligence, then I want to know what they can learn with a bit of money to work with – and I want other people to know as well. That second millionaire might wind up funding Diane Ravitch – and getting a very different report than he or she expected. And why would that be so bad? If Diane Ravitch has lost faith in a certain kind of school reform, that’s a hugely important fact – her arguments are ones that any advocate of school reform needs to know and grapple with. Even if she doesn’t change her patron’s mind, he or she should be glad to have funded her work.

Ultimately, you can only have an intelligentsia if you have patrons who are interested in learning things they don’t already know. And so, if you want a conservative intelligentsia, you need patrons of a conservative temperament who want to learn things they don’t already know – things that may unsettle them. If all the patron wants is advocacy for established views in defense of established interests, then you don’t actually have intellectual patronage at all, and pretty soon you won’t have an intellectual establishment.

I have never been a movement conservative, and I’ve never worked for a conservative institution, so any impressions I have are from a considerable distance – second-hand impressions at best, generally third-hand. Having declared that caveat, I will say that my general impression is that the money going to purportedly intellectual conservative organs is vastly more interested in advocacy than in developing intellectual talent or generating new insights. If I’m right, then that is something that has to change if you want an open conservative mind.

But if I’m right, the question that must next be asked is: has this changed? Were things different in 1975, and if so – why? I think it would be highly instructive to see a study done on the sources of funding for conservative organs and see how these sources have changed over time – is the money coming more or less from individuals over time, from more or fewer sources, from the same or different industries, is the age of donors changing, has the place in American life of donors changed over time, etc. I don’t know much of this information is in the public domain, but if it is, it would be interesting to see if anything can be gleaned from this kind of aggregate data. But, you know, I’m an elitist. My own inclination is to think that single individuals who are determined to shape history can make an enormous impact if they have the wherewithal. You don’t need a whole generation of intellectually-minded plutocrats to sponsor a renaissance. If he’s rich enough, and clear-eyed and determined enough, you may only need one.

Noah continues:

- Blame David Frum. Just prior to the Iraq War, David Frum published a now-infamous essay expelling “unpatriotic conservatives” – that is to say, people who vociferously opposed the war – from . . . well, it’s not exactly clear from what, since he had no power to expel anybody from anything – let’s say from “conservative respectability.” And this endeavor on his part was, generally, applauded by the outlets of the organized American right. I don’t know that this was literally unprecedented, but it felt to me at the time – and more so since – like a crucial Rubicon had been crossed.

In previous defenestrations – Eisenhower’s turn against McCarthy, Buckley’s expulsion of the Birchers, the removal of Trent Lott from his leadership position – the organizations or individuals being expelled were extremists of the dominant tendency. If Republicans were generally anti-Communist, McCarthy took this to an unacceptable extreme; if Republicans were generally more friendly to a white Southern perspective on American history, Lott, in his remarks, took this to an unacceptable extreme. Frum was not expelling extremists, however; he was expelling dissenters.

The expulsion of dissenters is not something we generally associate with mainstream political movements; it is most memorable as a tic of the radical left, Stalinists expelling Trotskyites and so forth. Certainly, right-wing groups – anti-tax groups, anti-abortion groups, etc. – have tried to impose orthodoxy before, demanding pledges of allegiance in exchange for electoral support. But this is just interest-group politics; civil-rights groups, unions, and other left-wing organizations do that sort of thing all the time, with more or less effectiveness depending on the political circumstances. Expelling dissenters is something else again, and once the precedent has been set, it is very difficult to see how one may justify not applying it in more and more circumstances.

While I don’t think it’s fair to blame David Frum as an individual for very much (and poetic justice has already been served on him specifically anyhow), I do think it’s important for those who are concerned with the openness or closedness of the conservative mind to grapple with this particular event, and consider whether a formal repudiation might not do rather a bit of good, even at this late date.

A simple model would suggest that conservative intellectual productivity was at its peak in the 1970s and 1980s when neoconservatives were being welcomed to the movement with open arms, but once neoconservatives got the upper hand within the movement, they began purging their rivals, with an unsurprisingly deleterious impact on intellectual life.

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

The Derb's remarks to Penn's Black Law Students' Association

John Derbyshire gave a ten minute presentation to Black Law Students Association at the U. of Pennsylvania on "Should the government play a role in eliminating racial disparities in education and employment?" You can read it here.

My considered judgment is that we will pay the Slavery Tax forever, and that we can, more or less, afford it. What we can't afford is expanding disparate impact and other forms of racial preference to immigrant ethnic groups.

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

Just how senile was Justice Stevens?

Justice John Paul Stevens, who will turn 90 in ten days, finally announced his retirement from the Supreme Court.

How senile was he? Well, here's an excerpt from his 2005 opinion in a case striking down a California policy first instituted in 1979 that new prison inmates have only roommates of the same race for the first 60 days while the system checks on whether they have a history of racist gang violence. The 84-year-old Stevens scoffed at the testimony of a veteran prison official:

"One of these [California] officials, an associate warden, testified as follows:

'[W]ith the Asian population, the control sergeants have to be more careful than they do with Blacks, Whites, and Hispanics because, for example, you cannot house a Japanese inmate with a Chinese inmate. You cannot. They will kill each other. They won’t even tell you about it. They will just do it. The same with Laotians, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Filipinos. You have to be very careful about housing other Asians with other Asians. It’s very culturally heavy.

"Such musings inspire little confidence. Indeed, this comment supports the suspicion that the policy is based on racial stereotypes and outmoded fears about the dangers of racial integration. This Court should give no credence to such cynical, reflexive conclusions about race. ...

[I]ntegrated cells encourage inmates to gain valuable cross-racial experiences…"

Uh ... yeah ...

Obviously, Stevens sounds completely gaga here.

And, yet, he sounds no more senile than practically every other public figure in our society when it comes to writing about race.

Kinda hard to tell, isn't it?

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

Malcolm McLaren, RIP

Malcolm McLaren, the amusing and sticky-fingered (self-)promoter / idea man behind the Sex Pistols, has died at age 64.

I always liked best Malcolm's own 1983 minor hit single Buffalo Gals, which pointed out explicitly what I'd been saying since about 1979: rapping sounds an awful lot like that most uncool of all musical forms: square dance calling. McClaren took the 1840s minstrel show song Buffalo Gals, which had evolved into a square dance call, and had some some New York rappers back him up while he rapped it (this was back in the early days before the racial wall hardened, when white people, such as Blondie, Talking Heads, and the Clash, were allowed to rap because rap was just the latest fun fad, not the sacred keystone of African-American culture):

Buffalo Gals go round the outside,
Round the outside, round the outside
And dozey-do your partners

To make sure nobody missed his point, McLaren's Buffalo Gals video features footage of square dancing. (Here's an even better video of a Buffalo Gals square dance on the Lawrence Welk Show.)

I assumed in 1983 that after Malcolm's Buffalo Gals that the world would now get the joke: rap was descended from minstrel shows and the dorkiest of all white forms of music: square dance calling. What more could shame black people, after four years of hip-hop, into going back to something they do very well, singing? Perhaps popular music would finally climb out of the rut of rap, the novelty music gimmick that had refused to die?

I was wrong.

And that was one of Malcolm's better ideas.

Most of his other ideas tended to sound cool in his constant self-promoting interviews, but sputtered out in practice. For example, the whole punk rock ideology Malcolm dreamed up about musical competence meaning nothing was a bad joke. The Sex Pistols were a young but fairly talented band, as their one album, which is full of catchy stuff demonstrated. Then bassist Glen Matlock was thrown out and replaced with Sid Vicious who couldn't play at all. It sort of made sense when you heard Malcolm spin it, but it turned out to be a disaster for all concerned.

Malcolm made an entertaining 1980 movie starring the Sex Pistol's affable guitarist Steve Jones, The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, about how the Sex Pistols were just a plot he invented to rip off the record companies for his own bank account. Yet, the concert footage from before their disastrous American tour when they still had Matlock instead of Sid shows they were a very high potential act, that just needed to, you know, practice. Instead, they spent most of the time suing their manager for cheating them.

Malcolm's line of intellectualization about how the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen was built on the Situationist philosophy of French intellectuals from 1968 inspired critic Greil Marcus to write a ridiculously brilliant book about the Situationist roots of why the Sex Pistols hated the Queen. The autobiography of Johnny Rotten (John Lydon), No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, however, debunked all that. Johnny didn't care about Situationism. He hated the British monarchy for the same simple reason his mum and dad did and his grandparents had: Lydon was Irish.

Around 1980, McLaren came up with the good idea of building pop music on top of tribal rhythms from Burundi, first for Adam Ant, and then he took Ant's backing band away, including the prodigious drummer David Barbarossa, to form Bow Wow Wow. There was always speculation that Barbarossa's album tracks had to be multilayered in the studio, but when I saw Bow Wow Wow around 1981, he was moving his hands faster than any drummer I'd seen.

But Malcolm could never have too much controversy, so he hired a 14-year-old girl to be a lead singer and promoted her as a sex kitten. At the show I attended in LA, she blew her voice out painfully on the second song, suggesting to me that 14-year-old girls shouldn't be on rock band world tours.

Anyway, when I was reading McLaren's obituaries yesterday, being reminded of how far he'd gotten in the garment and entertainment industries on sheer chutzpah, I decided to look up more about McLaren because I thought it was striking that he could have the most stereotypically Jewish career imaginable, yet be a Scotsman named Malcolm Robert Andrew McLaren. Pointing this out would be good way to shatter stereotypes!

But, then I worried that I ought to check his maternal line and his upbringing before saying this in public. To my surprise (although I shouldn't have been surprised), when I looked up McLaren on Wikipedia yesterday, I found:

McLaren was born to Pete McLaren, a Scottish^[6] teenaged war deserter, and Emmy (née Isaacs) in the suburbs of post-World War II London. His father left when he was two and he was raised by his maternal grandmother, Rose Corre Isaacs, the formerly wealthy daughter of Portuguese Sephardic Jewish diamond dealers, in Stoke Newington. McLaren told Andrew Denton on Enough Rope, that his grandmother always said to him, "To be bad is good... to be good is simply boring".^[7] ... When he was six, McLaren's mother married Martin Levi, a man working in London's rag trade.

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

"Upheaval in Kyrgyzstan Could Imperil Key U.S. Base"

Here's the #1 most important news story on NYTimes.com tonight:

Upheaval in Kyrgyzstan Could Imperil Key U.S. Base
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
Protests appear to have overthrown the government, calling into question the fate of a U.S. air base that supports the war in Afghanistan.

Whatever will America do without our key base in Kyrzygsrgtz ... ah, to hell with it. If I can't spell, I can't care about it.

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