Vor v zakone

A reader writes:

But anyway, you've stumbled onto a fascinating subject.  I looked up the wikipedia entry, and it has some of the basics of the legend -- the 'scab' or 'bitch' war during & after WWII (really afterwards; the idea was that any vory v zakony who served in the army against the Germans were traitors, etc., and so were picked off in the camps in the 1950s), the basic code, and so on.

It leaves a lot out, though.  For example, if you talk to old dissidents like Vladimir Bukovsky, the vory v zakony were heroes:  the only people who lived by any moral code at all in Soviet times.  Not just in refusing to work for the State, taking care of the poor, and so on, but in-- and this completely goes against the new LA-style- refusing luxury and ostentation.

There was a VERY strict code of behavior, sort of mafia-cum-Stoic-cum-Christian asceticism.  A vor v zakony might have been wealthy, but he would never show it; and he would always share the wealth.

Some of this sounds like humbug, but people like Bukovsky absolutely revered the Vory v zakony -- they were the ones who kept people alive in the GULAG camps, right into the 1970s and 1980s.

Bukovsky doesn't really know the end of the story, since he came to the West in 1976.  But if you believe Stephen Handelman's book on the Russian mafia, Comrade Criminal (he interviewed scores of Vory and other mafiosi in the late 1980s and early 1990s), the Vory v Zakony were basically wiped out circa 1991, right at the time of the Soviet collapse.  Wiped out by the nomenklatura criminals:  ie CP members who cashed in on export contracts, bought KGB muscle, and fought a brutal gangland war, basically the state mafia wiping out the last of the independent nonstate vory v zakony.

I don't know whether this is true, but it would make a great novel or movie!

 

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

All we have to do is fix ...

The LA Times reports:

Seventy percent of students seeking degrees at California's community colleges did not manage to attain them or transfer to four-year universities within six years, according to a new study that suggests that many two-year colleges are failing to prepare the state's future workforce.

Conducted by the Institute for Higher Education Leadership & Policy at Cal State Sacramento, the report, released Tuesday, found that most students who failed to obtain a degree or transfer in six years eventually dropped out; only 15% were still enrolled.

In addition, only about 40% of the 250,000 students the researchers tracked between 2003 and 2009 had earned at least 30 college credits, the minimum needed to provide an economic boost in jobs that require some college experience.

There were also significant disparities in the outcomes of black and Latino students. Only 26% of black students and 22% of Latino students had completed a degree or certificate or transferred after six years, compared to 37% of whites and 35% of Asian Pacific Islanders.

In these kind of educational achievement statistics, the main way to avoid being completely bored is to check whether whites or Asians win in the upper division and whether blacks or Latinos win in the lower division.

The findings point to a troubled college system that needs drastic revamping, said study coauthor Nancy Shulock, executive director of the higher education institute.

"It's not an understatement to say that the future of California is at stake," Shulock said. "Unlike other developing countries with which California and other states have to compete, each generation is getting less educated and attaining fewer higher degrees. The gaps are large and critical and when you look at the future face of California, they are the ones for whom we're not delivering much success."

My dad got an AA degree in aeronautical engineering from Pasadena JC in 1938, but I imagine it now it takes at least four years to get a degree in engineering. Presumably, the subject is just more complicated now.

My wife took a few courses at the local community college a half decade ago and was more than impressed with what she'd gotten for $78 per semester. She thought the instructors were about as good as she'd experienced at the U. of Illinois or at Northwestern U. The classroom learning environment was fine: the classes would start out large, but students would soon stop coming and by the last 2/3rds of the course, class sizes were quite reasonable. Unlike in high school, where discipline is a big problem, the students were well-behaved and non-distracting because the ones who didn't want to be there quickly stopped being there. The courses were reasonably rigorous and did a good job in helping her brush up on the field she was interested in.

I don't know what else I can say: California's community college problem doesn't appear to have much to do with the community colleges, per se. 

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

Is there any good software for checking prose style?

In the mid-1990s, Microsoft added a feature to Word that checks not just spelling but also grammar and prose style. It was rather rudimentary, but promising. The idea of using the brute processing power of the computer to point out potential stylistic infelicities was a good one. In fact, Microsoft hired James Fallows of The Atlantic to dream up new ideas for Word. 

But Microsoft soon had a near monopoly on word processing software, and subsequent improvements in Word have been grudging. I haven't seen Word 2010, but it doesn't appear they've done much to improve the self-editing process. I don't expect my computer to rewrite my stuff, but it doesn't seem too much to expect in 2010 that it can find more of the weak spots that I've overlooked.

Does anybody have any experience with third party software? Looking around on the Internet, it appears that the most heavily promoted product, White Smoke, might be a scam. (What does the name of the company imply? That it will help you write more graceful thank you notes after you've been elected Pope?) Judging by its well-written website, Editor from Serenity Software would appear to have potential.

The Microsoft model in the past, as a Silicon Valley executive explained to me in 1995, was to acquire third party makers of add-in software by making a lowball offer while simultaneously threatening to drive the target out of business if they didn't play ball. I clucked sympathetically at the executive's tale of Microsoftian nefariousness, but as a customer, it sounded pretty good to me.

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

The Land of the Defunct Empires

From my column in VDARE:

The F.B.I.  announced charges last week against 73 Armenian gangsters, almost  half of them in the  Los Angeles area, for running the largest Medicare fraud in history.

Or—to be strictly accurate—the largest the FBI yet knows about.

The indictment alleged that most of the defendants were "were Armenian nationals or immigrants and many maintained substantial ties to Armenia." They laundered their ill-gotten gains in Las Vegas casinos and/or couriered them back to Armenia.

Michael J. Gaeta, head of the New York F.B.I. office’s Russian Organized Crime Squad, explained: “New York and the U.S., to them it’s a big pot of gold, and they’re coming after it. And with the world getting smaller, it’s much easier for them to do it.”

Among the arrested: Armen Kazarian of the pleasant LA suburb of Glendale, who drives a $350,000 Rolls Royce Phantom. Kazarian is only the second “vor” (the ex-Soviet equivalent of a godfather) yet charged in the U.S. 

I’d never previously heard the term “vor” but I must say, it has a ring to it—like capo di tutti capi or Keyser Söze.

Why was Kazarian in this country in the first place? He was granted asylum in the U.S. in 1996. But he subsequently returned frequently to Armenia to oversee his transcontinental criminal doings.

Naturally, this got me thinking about TV crime dramas.

Law & Order has been the most successful drama in American television history. Counting its countless spinoffs, about 900 hour-long episodes have aired. L&O’s two-decade old formula has been to take a scandal from the news, add a murder, and then show that the richest, whitest, and most conservative character dunnit.

This year, however, NBC shut down the New York-based flagship show and substituted Law & Order: Los Angeles. ... The Wednesday, October 20 episode “Sylmar” will explore the national security threat posed by ... blue-eyed, blonde Americans who espouse extremist Islam:

Deputy District Attorney: “An All-American jihadi terrorist cell …”

Assistant District Attorney: “With enough explosives to take down the Staples Center!”

You can't make this stuff up. (Or, at least, I can't.)

Read the whole thing there and comment upon it below.

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

Clint Eastwood's "Hereafter"

From my review in Taki's Magazine of the drama starring Matt Damon:

The octogenarian Eastwood’s late success has held out hope to aging baby boomers that experience, guile, and a sense of perspective will help them get by when they can no longer outwork the young bastards.

Read the whole thing there.

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

Hints of Obama's Personality

Peter Baker writes in The Education of the President in the NYT Magazine:

Insulation is a curse of every president, but more than any president since Jimmy Carter, Obama comes across as an introvert, someone who finds extended contact with groups of people outside his immediate circle to be draining. He can rouse a stadium of 80,000 people, but that audience is an impersonal monolith; smaller group settings can be harder for him. Aides have learned that it can be good if he has a few moments after a big East Room event so he can gather his energy again. 

I'm like that. I get worn down by human contact, too. But, then, I haven't wanted to be President of the United States since I was nine years old.

Unlike Clinton, who never met a rope line he did not want to work, Obama does not relish glad-handing. That’s what he has Vice President Joe Biden for. 

I knew Biden had to be good for something.

When Obama addressed the Business Roundtable this year, he left after his speech without much meet-and-greet, leaving his aides frustrated that he had done himself more harm than good. 

Obama is not a large man. Most people aren't. But, still ...

If you can divide people up into Morning People and Night People and High Energy and (relatively) Low Energy (all celebrities are above average in energy), then Obama is a Low Energy Night Person. That seems kind of odd in a President. Clinton was a High Energy Night Person, Bush II a Low Energy Morning Person. I would guess that most CEO's tend to High Energy Morning People.

The President's great-uncle was the deputy head librarian at the University of Chicago's giant library: a worthy career, and one that Obama seems roughly cut out for.

On the other hand, Obama seems to like meeting people who tell him he's great:

But as Obama gets back on the campaign trail, aides have noticed his old spirit again. He particularly enjoys the so-called backyard sessions on the lawns of supporters. “That’s the happiest I’ve seen him in a long time,” an aide said.

He sounds a little depressed. If the economy turns around, though, he could come back strong in 2012. 

Late in the article there's a doozy of a clause inside a sentence:

One prominent Democratic lawmaker told me Obama’s problem is that he is not insecure — he always believes he is the smartest person in any room and never feels the sense of panic that makes a good politician run scared all the time, frenetically wooing lawmakers, power brokers, adversaries and voters as if the next election were a week away. 

Wait a minute? Did that just say "he always believes he is the smartest person in any room?"

Obama is a smart enough guy to be President -- he's good at explaining both sides of a problem -- but I can't recall any anecdotes about him ever  thinking up the solution to any problem. Are there any?

If Reagan or FDR or Washington ever caught themselves thinking "I'm the smartest guy in this room" their immediate reaction would have been: "Uh-oh, I'd better get some smarter guys in here, pronto!"

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

Are Europeans all Middle Easterners?

For quite a number of decades, it has been apparent that agriculture was first invented in the "Fertile Crescent" of the Middle East, then spread into Europe. But that raised the question of how agriculture spread: did Middle Easterners colonize Europe or did existing European hunter-gatherers pick up Middle Eastern techniques? A couple of decades or so ago, geneticists entered this debate. L.L. Cavalli-Sforza argued that most Europeans today are descended from Middle Eastern farmers. Bryan Sykes responded that most Europeans are descended from indigenous hunter-gatherers who switched to farming.

The latest view is that Cavalli-Sforza was even more right than he claimed. Matthias Schultz writes in Der Spiegel in "How Middle Eastern Milk Drinkers Conquered Europe:"

At around 5300 BC, everyone in Central Europe was suddenly farming and raising livestock. The members of the Linear Pottery culture kept cows in wooden pens, used rubbing stones and harvested grain. Within less than 300 years, the sedentary lifestyle had spread to the Paris basin.

The reasons behind the rapid shift have long been a mystery. Was it an idea that spread through Central Europe at the time, or an entire people?

Peaceful Cooperation or Invasion?

Many academics felt that the latter was inconceivable. Agriculture was invented in the Middle East, but many researchers found it hard to believe that people from that part of the world would have embarked on an endless march across the Bosporus and into the north.

Jens Lüning, a German archaeologist who specializes in the prehistoric period, was influential in establishing the conventional wisdom on the developments, namely that a small group of immigrants inducted the established inhabitants of Central Europe into sowing and milking with "missionary zeal." The new knowledge was then quickly passed on to others. This process continued at a swift pace, in a spirit of "peaceful cooperation," according to Lüning.

But now doubts are being raised on that explanation. New excavations in Turkey, as well as genetic analyses of domestic animals and Stone Age skeletons, paint a completely different picture:

• At around 7000 BC, a mass migration of farmers began from the Middle East to Europe.
• These ancient farmers brought along domesticated cattle and pigs.
• There was no interbreeding between the intruders and the original population.

Mutated for Milk

The new settlers also had something of a miracle food at their disposal. They produced fresh milk, which, as a result of a genetic mutation, they were soon able to drink in large quantities. The result was that the population of farmers grew and grew.

These striking insights come from biologists and chemists. In a barrage of articles in professional journals like Nature and BMC Evolutionary Biology, they have turned many of the prevailing views upside down over the course of the last three years. ...

In a bid to solve the mystery, molecular biologists have sawed into and analyzed countless Neolithic bones. The breakthrough came last year, when scientists discovered that the first milk drinkers lived in the territory of present-day Austria, Hungary and Slovakia.

But that was also where the nucleus of the Linear Pottery culture was located. "The trait of lactose tolerance quickly became established in the population," explains Joachim Burger, an anthropologist from the University of Mainz in southwestern Germany who is a member of the Leche team.

There's a good accompanying graphical map here.

Of course, all this raises even more questions, such as in regard to the recently surmised Neanderthal introgression

Having seen opinion shift several times on this topic over the last decade and a half, I look forward to future developments.

This lactose tolerant-centric view of the pre-history of Europe may provide some posthumous vindication to Raymond D. Crotty, an Irish dairy farmer turned economist, who emphasized the importance of the mutation to facilitate dairy farming as crucial to the dense populating of Northern Europe.

P.S. John Hawks comments here. Razib comments here.

P.P.S. Greg Cochran comments in the Comments.

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

Will Mozilo get off easy with SEC?

E. Scott Reckard of the LA Times, who was a leader in reporting on the SoCal-centric subprime scandals, reports that Angelo Mozilo, former boss of Countrywide Financial, is trying to settle with the Securities & Exchange Commision without admitting wrongdoing before his civil trial on stock fraud charges starts Tuesday:

Details of the settlement couldn't immediately be determined, although defendants in SEC cases generally settle them without admitting or denying wrongdoing.

The SEC's lawsuit, filed in June 2009, also accuses former Countrywide President David Sambol and former Chief Financial Officer Eric P. Sieracki of securities fraud. It wasn't clear whether they, too, were close to settling the lawsuit.

Mozilo attorney David Siegel, Sambol attorney Walter Brown and Sieracki attorney Shirli Weiss did not return calls seeking comment. A spokesman for the SEC's enforcement division declined to comment.

Securities fraud expert John Coffee, a professor at Columbia Law School, said a settlement could help Mozilo in fighting other civil cases arising out of the Countrywide collapse.

"Any verdict in favor of the SEC would permit private plaintiffs to free ride on it and utilize those findings in their cases," Coffee said.

A settlement, on the other hand, often doesn't require a plaintiff to admit to any wrongdoing. Coffee said it would allow Mozilo to "deny everything in other litigation."

A criminal investigation of Mozilo remains open, people with knowledge of the probe said. If the SEC case is settled, federal prosecutors will not see how the evidence against Mozilo plays out in a civil trial — which could factor into their decision on whether to bring charges. Criminal charges carry a higher standard of proof.

 

My reading of the history of the Housing Bubble is that Mozilo was something of a prime mover among corporate tycoons in that his attempt to push Countrywide's share of the mortgage market from 10% to 30% was a key factor. He wasn't just responding to the market, he had a strategic plan to push the market. The only way to get there was to take risks on marginal borrowers. 

There were always marginal firms in that business, but Mozilo wasn't an obvious crook, fool, moonshooter, or small-timer. He'd had a good business record helping build a huge business, but when his boss David Loeb stepped down and Mozilo moved up to CEO, he was overenthusiastic.

My impression is that Mozilo was fairly sincere in thinking these marginal borrowers had been underestimated.

Still, some nine figure fines and some jail time for some big names would help get the incentives less out of whack. The latter is really the only thing that can get through to financiers. Everybody figures the government can't take all your money away, you can always sock enough of it away to live on in luxury, but jail time gets people's attention.

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

Documentgate

This latest national crises over foreclosures, with banks putting a freeze on evictions because of shoddy paperwork, is interesting because most of the examples cited in the newspapers are clearly not injustices against homeowners but merely lawyers seizing on technicalities. For example, the NYT's "From this House, a National Foreclosure Freeze," makes no attempt to say that the lady who has been living in the house without paying a dime for two years has any moral claim to more free housing or that better paperwork handling would have led to any other outcome.

On the other hand, raising the fixed costs of housing transactions by enforcing costly paperwork procedures is probably a good idea in the long run. It would make flipping and, thus, housing bubbles a little less likely.

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

Congratulations to Chile

It's in the tradition of Peru's 1997 rescue of 71 of the 72 hostages  held in the Japanese ambassador's residence by terrorists.Take your time and do it right.

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

What's the right number of writers?

The question of Who Really Wrote Shakespeare's Plays? got me thinking about the optimal number of writers for different types of writing. 

For example, the recent scientific paper asserting that modern humans had some Neanderthal genes had 56 authors. In other genres, however, one or two people (a writer and an editor, say) does most of the work. In the more show-bizzy types of writing (e.g., movies and musical comedies), writing teams are fairly common, and everybody and his brother chips in bits of business.

For example, my wife was in a dinner theatre production of a Neil Simon play once, so I made up a half dozen new jokes for her, which got just as big laughs as Simon's did. (But this can change over time in a genre: for example, New York playwrights won a lot of legal control away from producers and directors in a 1919 strike. Contractually, I'm not positive we were allowed to alter lines, but I can't imagine an old showman like Neil Simon objecting.)

Thus, it's plausible that quite a few lines in the Shakespearean canon weren't envisioned solely by Shakespeare or Oxford or Bacon or whomever, but were made up by various actors, investors, script doctors, and miscellaneous hangers-on. (We're pretty sure that various minor Shakespearean plays were co-written, but I would guess that even the masterpieces have material invented by others during rehearsals and performances.)

There's some quantitative data available for comparisons across different genres of the amount of teamwork. The Pulitzer Prizes are a good source for comparisons. The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, first awarded in 1918, has always been won by a lone individual. In contrast, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama has been won by teams of more than one individual 13 times, typically for musicals or comedies (e.g., George S. Kaufman won twice with varying partners). So, Pulitzers for Drama go mostly to individuals, but there are enough exceptions to notice the difference between Drama and Fiction

Pulitzer Prizes won by teams: 
Letters and Drama:
Fiction: 0
Drama: 13
Poetry: 0
General Nonfiction: 2
History: 5 (or 6, if you count one book finished posthumously by another historian)
Biography / Autobiography: 4 (all biographies, I presume)

Journalism:
Commentary: 0
Criticism: 0
Feature Writing: 0
Investigative Reporting: 31 (with the award switching from mostly individuals to mostly teams around 1972, the year of Woodward and Bernstein)

Oscars:
Best Original Screenplay: 23
Best Adapted Screenplay: 21

Emmys
Comedy: From 1955 to 1978, the award was for an entire series: 19 of 24 times it was won by teams (Carl Reiner won twice as an individual for the Dick Van Dyke Show). In the last 31 years, the award has been for a single episode, with 13 of 31 going to teams.

Drama: 16 of the last 31 (for single episodes) have gone to teams.

A few observations:

- Who knows who really contributed what behind the scenes? For example, it recently emerged that the stripped-down style of the hugely influential short story writer Raymond Carver was more or less invented by his editor Gordon Lish by crossing out most of the sentences in his manuscripts. For the Oscars, the Writers Guild offers a credit-dispute resolution process, in which they'll go through different drafts line-by-line to figure out who gets a statue. Of course, nonwriters can have a huge impact on screenplays. For example, Annie Hall (which won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Woodie Allen and Marshall Brickman) was filmed as a murder mystery. Allen's film editor eventually convinced him to cut out most of the plot and patch with  voiceover to turn it into the romantic comedy we know today.

- Dialogue-dominated genres seem to tend toward teams more than prose-dominated genres

- Older genres (e.g., poetry) seem more individualistic than newer genres (e.g., TV writing)

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

"Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps"

 From my column in Taki's Magazine:

A cinematic development I hadn’t expected is Oliver Stone evolving into a director who makes movies that are fair, responsible, and forgettable. His sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, with Michael Douglas returning as reptilian financier Gordon Gekko, falls squarely into all three categories. ...

Surprisingly, Stone has taken some of the criticism to heart. Thus, his recent history-inspired films have been less contrived than, say, The Social Network. Stone’s 2008 biopic about George W. Bush, W, which used mostly public utterances as private dialogue, plausibly blamed the Iraq War on the younger Bush’s Daddy Issues, something Stone knows all about.

Stone’s new movie fictionalizing 2008’s Great Crash is informative and reasonable, with the conspiracy-theorizing kept to the margins. The financial industry, Stone sagely concludes (echoing his old-fashioned stockbroker father whose 1985 death inspired the first Wall Street), should raise capital for industry, not indulge in speculation.

Yet even the most desperate advertising copywriter wouldn’t adorn a movie ad with the quote “Informative and Reasonable!” in 72-point type. And if Oliver Stone won’t indulge in malicious speculation about Wall Street, to whom can we turn? ...

Money Never Sleeps at least does continue Stone’s practice of middlebrow free association, as if he were perusing Wikipedia on acid. Just as Gordon “Greed Is Good” Gekko’s name is a mashup of the lizard and Gordon Getty, once the richest man on the Forbes 400, Josh Brolin’s handsome villain is called “Bretton James,” an apparent concoction of Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and 1944’s Bretton Woods trade conference that set up the IMF and the World Bank, so you know he's rich and connected.

Read the whole thing there.

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

Ask Them

From my new VDARE.com column:

It’s time for Republican candidates to address Hispanic voters directly over illegal immigration.

As a general rule, human beings respond more constructively to being challenged than to being pandered to. Hence, GOP candidates should forthrightly ask for the support of Hispanic voters in opposing illegal immigration.

“My Democrat opponent expects you to vote for him because he assumes that on the issue of illegal immigration, you vote as Mexicans, as Salvadorans, as Colombians, or so forth. In contrast, I expect you to vote as patriotic American citizens because more illegal immigration is bad for American citizens. As President Kennedy said: ‘And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.’”

Would this work? Would appealing to Hispanic voters as patriotic Americans rather than as entitled ethnics convert some to voting Republican?

Maybe—maybe not.

But how could it be worse than the Rove rout?

More importantly, a straightforward appeal to Hispanic patriotism would subvert the MSM’s dominant trope that being against illegal immigration is somehow shameful. 

Read the whole thing there.

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

Two kinds of Italians

From the New York Times:

In the raucous race for governor of New York this year between Andrew M. Cuomo and Carl P. Paladino, an unexpected debate is mesmerizing the Italian-American community and increasingly spilling out into public view: Is the contest shattering long-held ethnic stereotypes or reinforcing them?

The tension has recast a milestone election for the state’s largest ethnic group, which has spent decades battling for political might.

But the two men are starkly different in how they view and express their Italian identity. 

Mr. Cuomo, the Democrat who is the state’s attorney general, prides himself on transcending the image of the unpolished, old-country Italian, and credits his father, Mario M. Cuomo, the former governor of New York, for debunking many of those stereotypes. ...

By contrast, Mr. Paladino, a Republican real estate developer from Buffalo, seems to relish his reputation as an undiluted, street-smart, up-by-the-bootstraps Italian. 

He travels to Italy up to a dozen times a year. He sometimes lapses into Italian. And he developed a habit of greeting associates, Italian-style, with a kiss on the cheek.

Paladino and Cuomo exemplify two quite different but equally stereotypical Italian male personalities, the boisterous Sonny Corleone and the watchful Michael Corleone. This split can be seen in two center-right prime ministers of Italy, Berlusconi and Andreotti (who barely moves his hands when he talks).

The quiet, cautious Italians get less publicity, of course, but remembering them helps you understand things like why the Italian World Cup soccer team is traditionally among the least flashy. They would be extremely satisfied getting out of the first round with a 1-0 win followed by two nil-nil draws.

Henry Kissinger, a close student of stereotypes, cited the more boring Suspicious Peasant version in his 1986 article on how World Cup teams reflect national character:

The Italian style reflects the national conviction, forged by the vicissitudes of an ancient history, that the grim struggle for survival must be based on a careful husbanding of energy for the main task. It presupposes a correct assessment of the opponent's character, paired with an unostentatious and matter-of-fact perseverance that obscures many intricate levels on which the competition takes place. . ...  But once the Italian team has imposed its pattern, it can play some of the most effective, even beautiful soccer in the world -- though it will never waste energy simply on looking good.

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

Henry Louis Gates on Malcolm Gladwell's family tree

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates is continuing his series of DNA and genealogical inquiries into the makeup of various celebrities. The usual pattern is that the celebrities turn out to be a little whiter than they had expected. For example, Mexican-American actress Eva Longoria turned out to 70% European, which surprised her because she thought she'd be more like 70% nonwhite.

Now Gates has an article in The Root about New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell's genealogy. Gladwell's own discussions of his family tree (English on his father's side, Northwest European, Jewish, and middle class mulatto on his Jamaican mother's side) have always struck me as well-adjusted, without much in the way of Obamaesque self-torment. His affection for both his parents is clear. Growing up in Canada, he had pretty dispassionate opinions on race. He didn't seem to possess an Obama-like realization of the how far you could go in America on being part-black until after he'd already become a star in New York with his first bestseller The Turning Point, at which point he finally grew his Richard Simmons-like 'fro that is the only thing that helps you notice that he's part black.

The last (and best) chapter in Gladwell's recent bestseller Outliers concerns his Jamaican free-persons-of-color family tree. He drew from his family history an innocuous conclusion about how everybody in Jamaica could grow up to be a New Yorker writer if not for the discrimination that his middle class mulatto ancestors practiced by not marrying blacks, but it seems likely that his ancestors drew opposite lessons from their history about the importance of careful mate choice.

So, the only thing Gates can trip Gladwell up on is his pride in there being a slave or two not very far back in his family tree:

In the end, we failed to find a single slave in Malcolm's Jamaican ancestry. What's more, we found a stunning instance of the opposite: black slave owners on the family tree. ...

This means that Malcolm's fifth-great-grandmother, a free woman of color, owned slaves. She even spelled one of them out by name, leaving her slave "Ruthie" to her grandson, Malcolm's third-great-grandfather Benjamin Samuel Levy, another free man of color.

"Oh my goodness," said Malcolm, stunned. "The kind of mental jujitsu you have to go through is quite remarkable. It was a class-based society, and so color was class, class was color. There it is. How far back in her history do we have to go, do we think, to find a slave? Her mother or maybe her grandmother?"

I told Malcolm that we didn't know. Margaret Mullings is as far back along that line of his family as we could go. Her mother, most likely, was not a slave. But beyond that, it is unclear. Obviously, Malcolm descends from slaves at some point in his family tree: every black person in the New World, except for recent immigrants from Africa, did. But his ancestors did not stay slaves for very long. And as soon as they were free and could afford to do so, it appears that they began to buy slaves themselves.

Malcolm quite correctly perceived Margaret's decision to own slaves as a class issue. "I'm assuming it's a way of underscoring your new status," he said. "If you are a member of this special privileged class and you would like to heighten your position and assert your whiteness, having a slave is certainly one sign of doing that, isn't it?"

The answer to that question is, of course, yes. But I also tend to think the issue was perhaps simpler, more crudely economic. Margaret Mullings had a farm; she needed workers, and the workers were slaves. That was the system. Does that let her off the moral hook? No. But it was the system.

It would be interesting to find out how far back in the President's African family tree you'd have to go to find slaveowners.

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

My favorite theory of who wrote Shakespeare's plays

"Another hot debate I remember I was in had to do with the identity of Shakespeare. No color was involved there; I just got intrigued over the Shakespearean dilemma. The King James translation of the Bible is considered the greatest piece of literature in English. … Well, if Shakespeare existed, he was then the top poet around. … If he existed, why didn’t King James use him? … In the prison debates I argued for the theory that King James himself was the real poet who used the nom de plume Shakespeare."

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Of course, any book involving Alex Haley raises its own issues of authenticity.

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

Shakespeare

I once read a scholarly biography of Shakespeare, which made for an odd experience since we know a fair amount about Shakespeare from property records and the like -- England having enjoyed careful registration of deeds and contracts for many centuries (perhaps more careful, it appears, than in 21st Century America) -- but none of it shedding much light on what we're most interested in: how Shakespeare came to write his plays.

Perhaps not surprisingly, considering the paucity of contemporaneous comment on Shakespeare as a writer, a couple of centuries later various people began to argue that somebody else must have written Shakespeare's plays. As Mark Twain pointed out, there's very little contemporaneous record (at least still remaining) of anybody noticing Shakespeare's retirement or death.

On the other hand, there's even less comment from the early 17th Century suggesting anybody else wrote them.

The truth is that there is always an absolutely colossal amount of popular culture, the vast majority of which is almost quickly forgotten, except for a tiny fraction that stays in a few influential people's minds and comes to form our heritage of high culture.

I suspect it would have been extremely surprising to people in England at the time of Shakespeare's death that 400 years later anybody would be interested in debating who wrote Shakespeare's plays. It's like the joke that drives the plot of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure: that a representative of a future civilization has to journey back in time to make sure that Bill & Ted don't have a high school falling out because the heavy metal music of the band they form after high school, Wyld Stallyns, is the basis of all cultural life in the 27th Century.

For another example, think back to the absolutely countless number of funny morning disk jockeys there used to be in America before satellite hook-ups turned local businesses into another winner-take-all industry. What if bootleg recordings of one of them came to be recognized in another generation or two as works of genius? People would wonder why almost nobody had noticed when the great genius disk jockey had been fired.

For example, from age 10 to 13, I thought the funniest guy in the world was the morning man at an underpowered San Fernando Valley radio station KGIL, Dick Whittington, who specialized in zany stunts like announcing that since the Vietnam War was so depressing, America needed to by cheered up by winning a war. Therefore, he led 10,000 listeners on an invasion and conquest of Catalina Island in 1972. And then after a number of years, he quit or got fired, and everybody instantly lost interest, the way most Londoners lost interest in Shakespeare when he retired back to Stratford.

This being the Internet Age, I can quickly find out that there are a few other people out there who have also thought about Dick Whittington in the last 20 years. From them, I can find out that, to my surprise, Whittington appears to be still alive, in retirement on the Central California coast, putatively writing an autobiographical novel. But, for the benefit of the anti-Stratfordians, I can point out that nobody seems to know anything else about Whittington, such as what his real name was, was he Jewish or gentile, straight or gay, how did he survive the Great Hollywood Snowstorm, and so forth?

Do recordings still exist of Dick Whittington's old radio shows? If they do, will our civilization someday come to be based upon them? Will we then have debates over whether he really existed or whether he was just a front man reading rants written for him by more historically significant characters in California  at the time, such as, say, Richard Feynman or Ronald Reagan?

P.S., The corollary of all this is that almost nobody whom we think of as long having not gotten his due was wholly ignored in his own time. For example, Jane Austen's reputation has grown to new and dizzy heights in my own lifetime. Yet, she was by no means unknown in her own. She was a bestselling author, the Prince Regent was an outspoken fan. And then she died, so interest fell off. But a few writers, often the very best, kept reading here and speaking up for her and her reputation endured, then soared in the last few decades. But the point is that rediscovered artists were almost never unknown in their own times. Even Vermeer was a big deal in his prime and during the lost centuries continued to a obsess a narrow lineage of connoisseurs.

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

Joe Sobran, RIP

Here's Ann Coulter's column on Sobran.

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