GOP Brain Trust got rolled on "path to citizenship"

Something that has already been forgotten is that back in November, Republican elites started down the road to "immigration reform" largely assuming that they wouldn't have to grant the vote to illegal aliens. 

But that left them with two obvious rhetorical problems: 

First, since what they were for is amnesty but they can't admit that it's amnesty because Republican voters are against amnesty, that left them with nothing to call it. The Democrats immediately jumped in with their own helpful suggestion as to what to call the heart of the Schumer-Rubio bill: "a path to citizenship." But, of course, "a path to citizenship" is not what Republicans wanted.

Second, "a path to citizenship" just sounds nice. Naive American voters tend to think of citizenship as entailing responsibilities as well as privileges, even though that's increasingly less true in the real world.

Now, it should have been obvious to the GOP strategists that they were walking into this trap -- because it happened before. During Bush Push #2 in 2004, Karl Rove took citizenship off the table to placate Republican Congressmen, and immediately got rhetorically hammered by Democrats. As I wrote in VDARE on February 1, 2004:

For example, immigrants who become citizens vote for Democrats by landslide margins, so Congressional Republicans don't want more immigrants. KRAP [Karl Rove Amnesty Plan], therefore, denies citizenship to guest workers, leaving them a disenfranchised caste of unassimilated gastarbeiters. 

But Bush's new Machiavellianism automatically cedes the rhetorical high ground to the Democrats, who are already pushing for "earned legalization" (i.e., giving illegals the vote). Bush is left contradictorily sputtering about how wonderful immigrants are and how we don't want them to become our fellow citizens. 

Rove has spent three years telling the press what a brilliant political ploy amnesty would be, so his initial spin was: what a cynical political ploy!

On May 9, 2004, I noted in VDARE:

And, as I forecast, the Democrats have duly offered to not only give all illegal aliens amnesty, but also to put them on the road to citizenship…and, thus, to being good little Democrats. 

The whole thing offers the Dems some slam-dunk soundbites. For example, Rep. Bob Menendez, one of the bill's sponsors, said Bush's proposal "is a pathway to deportation. This is a pathway to the American dream." 

Touché!

Opening borders as the Yankee missionary impulse

How much of elite enthusiasm in the Northeast for opening the borders further to, among other worthy goals, save Mexicans from starvation is a transmutation of the old Yankee missionary impulse? In the 19th and early 20th Centuries, the wealthier northern Protestant denominations did a lot of missionary work abroad, such as in Hawaii, China, and the Arab world. In Hawaii, the Yankees started off doing good and wound up doing well, while in China they got kicked out, one and all.

Eventually, the high WASP progressives tired of Christian proselytizing, and also realized they weren't always as welcome in other lands as they had assumed. So, rather than go to heathen lands to uplift the benighted, why not just have the vibrantly diverse come here to be uplifted? The uplift urge continues.

Of course, little of the traditional northeastern Yankee uplift effort is currently directed at immigrants, which would be insensitive. Instead, it is focused upon you unenlightened nativist yahoos for not being persuaded by the browbeating of your betters that allowing mass immigration is your post-Christian duty.

Commenter David M. immediately replies:

You know, I don't think they would really want us nativist yahoos to change our ways. We give them an enemy and someone to feel morally superior to. 

I don't think that they want the immigrants to change either. They would rather that immigrants remain oppressed noble savages that they can protect from the evil nativists. As long as they remain foreign and distant (but simultaneously resident in the U.S.) they serve as excellent blank slates to project victimhood onto, while their actual behavior and beliefs remain totally irrelevant. If on the other hand they behave like white Americans (ala George Zimmerman) then they become real human beings, and must be lumped into the "good" or "evil" categories based on whether they have the right opinions and cultural habits.

Moneyball A's celebrate 28th year as PED pioneers

Everybody knows that the Oakland A's baseball team are plucky underdogs who use advanced statistics to outsmart the big budget teams, as Brad Pitt showed when playing Oakland general manager Billy Beane in 2011's hit movie Moneyball. 

Of course, when statistical analysis isn't enough (and when is it?), the A's just cheat, like they've been doing since Jose Canseco came up in 1986. Tyler Kepner writes in the NYT:

He might be baseball’s most confounding player, at once a marvel and a miscreant. Bartolo Colon flunked a drug test last summer and served a 50-game suspension. Now he says he is pitching better than he ever has.

Colon is the 40-year-old ace of the Oakland Athletics, the only All-Star on the team leading the American League West. Few players are older or seemingly in worse shape than Colon, who is 5 feet 11 inches and every bit of his listed weight of 267 pounds. 

And yet, after a 2-1 victory over the Pittsburgh Pirates at PNC Park on Monday, Colon was 12-3 with a 2.69 earned run average, pitching with enough confidence and precision to be the league leader in fewest walks per nine innings. 

... Who knew what to make of Colon last August, when he was suspended after testing positive for testosterone? He was 10-9 with a 3.43 E.R.A. when he was caught, after already pushing the system’s boundaries with the Yankees in 2011. 

Colon, whose career was sputtering because of injuries, had never told the Yankees that he was treated by a doctor who used Colon’s fat and bone marrow stem cells and injected them back into his elbow and shoulder. The doctor had used human growth hormone in similar procedures, but said he did not do so with Colon. 

It sounded shady enough, and the positive test, plus Colon’s subsequent link to the Biogenesis investigation, seemed to confirm that his renaissance was a mirage, too good to be true. Surely his cheating explained his success, and Colon, without the drugs, would decline. 

How do we know he's without drugs?

The A’s thought otherwise, as they often do, and brought him back for one year and $3 million, more than he had made in 2012.

Of course the A's signed Colon. The A's have had two general managers since 1983, Sandy Alderson and his protege Billy Beane, and the ballplayers they've employed have included notorious juicers practically the whole time. It's fun to make up bestselling airport books about how they win because their executives play the percentages, but let's not overlook names like Canseco, McGwire, Giambi, the other Giambi, Tejada, and Colon.

You'll notice that players now, finally, get penalized. But teams don't. And executives sure don't. If Billy Beane signs Colon and he gets away with cheating, the A's prosper. If Colon gets caught again and suspended for 100 games, the A's don't have to pay him for 100/162nd of a season. It's win-win.

U! S! A! -- We're Number Two!

But Schumer and Rubio have a plan to fix that.

The Awesomest Newspaper on Earth reports:

Mexico takes over from the U.S. as the fattest nation on earth, according to UN report 

Around 70 percent of Mexican adults are now classified as overweight ...

Only 10 per cent overweight in 1989 - before fast food was widely available 

The young and poor are the worst-affected groups 

By OLIVIA WILLIAMS

The U.S. has finally lost its dubious honour of having the world's highest number of overweight and obese people. 

Fuelled by a worsening diet of fizzy drinks and cheap fast food restaurants, Mexico has now become the fattest nation in the world.  

Around 70 per cent of Mexican adults are now overweight and a third of them are obese, causing a range of serious health problems. ...

Mexico may still be battling malnutrition and hunger among some of its poor but now it is also managing to claim the largest number of overweight people, according to a UN report.

The fat epidemic is most prominent among the poor and the young - many of whom also suffer from malnourishment because of poor diet. 

Part of the difficulty is that the crisis has taken hold rapidly - In 1989, fewer than 10 percent of Mexican adults had any weight problems. ...

This year was the first time Mexico has inched ahead into first place, with a 32.8 per cent obesity rate to America's 31.8 per cent. 

However, this was only among the most populated countries of the world. 

Both Mexico and the U.S. have nothing on the small countries such as American Samoa in the Pacific where the rate of overweight inhabitants has now reached 95 per cent.  

LEAGUE TABLE OF OBESE NATIONS
Mexico - 32.8 per cent
United States - 31.8 per cent
Syria - 31.6 per cent
Venezuela, Libya - 30.8 per cent
Trinidad & Tobago - 30.0 per cent
Vanuatu - 29.8 per cent
Iraq, Argentina - 29.4 per cent
Turkey - 29.3 per cent
Chile - 29.1 per cent
Czech Republic - 28.7 per cent
Lebanon - 28.2 per cent
New Zealand, Slovenia - 27.0 per cent
El Salvador - 26.9 per cent
Malta - 26.6 per cent
Panama, Antigua - 25.8 per cent
Israel - 25.5 per cent
Australia, Saint Vincent - 25.1 per cent
Dominica - 25.0 per cent
UK, Russia - 24.9 per cent
Hungary - 24.8 per cent 

This is, on the whole, a pretty cruddy list of countries that Mexico and America rule over: No Norway, while Syria, Libya, and Venezuela are third through fifth. Take that, ghost of Hugo Chavez -- your Bolivarian Republic is only Number T4!

Remember when George W. Bush announced in his third debate with John Kerry in 2004 on the subject of illegal immigrants: "you're going to come here if you're worth your salt, if you want to put food on the table for your families"? Much of the discussion of immigration seems to be predicated on the American ruling class's assumption that Mexicans are this close to starvation.

For more evidence that the U.S. if falling behind and can only retake it's rightful place at the top by importing more folks from the Global South, see this table. Fans of The Wire will be ashamed that Baltimore's down to #48 in the world.

NYT prepares surprised readers for Zimmerman acquittal

Having served on a jury, I now realize I have no idea what any jury is going to do. Still, it seems hard to believe objectively that the now-rested prosecution has managed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that George Zimmerman was guilty of second degree murder in the sad, unfortunate death of Trayvon Martin.

This, however, is coming as a surprise to numerous New York Times readers, who are used to a steady diet of stories about KKK rallies at Oberlin and fiftieth anniversary articles about obscure events in the civil rights struggle. So, here's an NYT article (not "opinion" or even "analysis," just plain news) explaining that, even if the "protocols of a criminal trial" (including technicalities such as the presumption of innocence) aren't on the side of the angels, the angels are still on the side of the angels, and that's what really counts. 

And anyway, the Trayvon thing got the black vote out to re-elect Obama, so don't expect any apologies. We did what worked and we'll do it again the next time it feels necessary.

Zimmerman Case Has Race as a Backdrop, but You Won’t Hear It in Court 

By LIZETTE ALVAREZ 

SANFORD, Fla. — From the very beginning, there was no more powerful theme in the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin than the issue of race.

It's not coincidental that the opening sentence reads like it was adapted from a book report on The Great Gatsby. We're talking Narrative, not trivialities like a man's guilt or innocence. The phrase "there was no more powerful theme in the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin" makes sense only in the context of the media's spinning of the story, but that pregnant topic is off limits.

But in the courtroom where George Zimmerman is on trial for second-degree murder, race lingers awkwardly on the sidelines, scarcely mentioned but impossible to ignore. 

For African-Americans here and across the country, the killing of Mr. Martin, 17, black and unarmed, was resonant with a back story steeped in layers of American history and the abiding conviction that justice serves only some of the people. 

Of course, the last 50 years of high black youth crime rates are not "resonant." Who told you that you get a say in what is American history and what is not? What are you, some kind of profiler?

Had Mr. Martin shot and killed Mr. Zimmerman under similar circumstances, black leaders say, the case would have barreled down a different path: Mr. Martin would have been quickly arrested by the Sanford Police Department and charged in the killing, without the benefit of the doubt.  

Instead, there was no arrest for six weeks. And only after sharp criticism from civil rights leaders and demonstrations here and elsewhere did the Florida governor transfer the case to a special prosecutor from another county.

Let's not mention the hoopla in the national media. We just report the news, we don't have any responsibilities for making it.

“For members of the African-American community, it’s a here-we-go-again moment,” said JeffriAnne Wilder, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Florida. “We want to get away from these things, but this did not happen in a vacuum. It happened against the backdrop of all the other things that have happened before.” 

Yet inside a Seminole County courtroom, with the prosecution’s case against Mr. Zimmerman now over, race only occasionally punctuated the proceedings. The judge made it clear that statements about race would be sharply limited and the term “racial profiling” not allowed. What is more, overtly bringing up race might not have helped the prosecution. 

“There is no question that race is the 800-pound gorilla in this trial,” said Ed Shohat, a Miami lawyer who is also a member of the Miami-Dade County Community Relations Board. “But if you overplay that card either way, you lose with the jury. You have to let the jury come to its own conclusion.” 

For supporters of the Martin family, Mr. Martin’s death was part of a more complex tale of profiling and injustice. But this perception has run up against the protocols of a criminal trial and Florida’s expansive self-defense laws. These laws, critics say, give too much leeway to people who say they acted violently because they felt threatened.

In other words, under the rule of law in Florida, the state of Florida has the burden of proof to demonstrate that Zimmerman wasn't acting in self-defense, and lots of luck with that.

Defense lawyers argue that Mr. Zimmerman, 29, a neighborhood watch volunteer in his gated community in Sanford, was attacked by a visiting Mr. Martin and, fearing for his life, shot him. Prosecutors counter that Mr. Zimmerman, whose mother is Peruvian

and who looks a little black himself

, set out to confront Mr. Martin and initiated the fight that ended in Mr. Martin’s death. The charge is second-degree murder, inflicting death with spite, hatred or ill will. But no one in the courtroom is saying outright that race or racial hatred entered into the shooting.

Unlike in the media, where we said it over and over despite a lack of evidence until we forced this absurdly over-charged trial to happen.

“It’s like we are watching two different trials,” said the Rev. Al Jackson, a pastor in Richmond Heights, a predominantly black community in Miami-Dade County, expressing frustration over the case and how it is unfolding at trial. “The law doesn’t care how this started, but we do. You are punishing this boy for defending himself, even though it wasn’t his fault.” 

Even so, race made an entrance on the first day of the trial. John Guy, a prosecutor, said in opening statements that Mr. Zimmerman had “profiled” Mr. Martin and pursued him because he was suspicious of the black teenager who looked as though “he was up to no good,” as Mr. Zimmerman told the police dispatcher in a call that night. He cited Mr. Zimmerman’s apparent frustration in that call, quoting him making derogatory references to potential burglars who always seemed to “get away.” 

Race came up again when the jury heard four other phone calls to the police by Mr. Zimmerman reporting suspicious people in the neighborhood, all of them black. The fact that Mr. Zimmerman was studying criminal justice in college and seemed eager for a career in law or law enforcement rounded out the prosecution’s portrait of a would-be vigilante. 

Race arose again, in topsy-turvy manner

I mean, what could be crazier than the concept of a black racially demeaning a non-black? Has the world gone insane?

when Rachel Jeantel, 19, a young black woman who was speaking to Mr. Martin on the phone shortly before he was shot, took the stand. Mr. Martin told her during that call, Ms. Jeantel said, that Mr. Zimmerman was following him; he called him a “creepy-ass cracker." The defense team quickly jumped on the words, suggesting to the jury that Mr. Martin had profiled Mr. Zimmerman.

Seriously, note the bizarre inversion of sense, where evidence of "profiling" is the worst sin imaginable, whereas evidence of racial animus is ignored. The term "cracker" is evidence of racial animus on the part of Martin, not of profiling. But in our anti-empirical age, the worst sin is Noticing Things.

On the other hand, the term "creepy-ass" suggests anti-gay profiling on the part of Martin, but the substantial possibility that this incident had a gay-bashing aspect to it would just make poor NYT readers' head explode, so let's never mention the obvious.

In the cocoon of the courthouse, even Mr. Martin’s bullet-scarred hooded sweatshirt, positioned for jurors in a clear plastic frame, appeared less a poignant symbol for the thousands who marched in his name than a lamentable but necessary piece of evidence.

Think of the Skittles!

Still, black pastors, sociologists and community leaders said in interviews that they feared that Mr. Martin’s death would be a story of justice denied, an all-too common insult that to them places Trayvon Martin’s name next to those of Rodney King, Amadou Diallo and other black men who were abused, beaten or killed by police officers. 

“Profiling, stereotyping, the disparity in treatment of African-Americans when it comes to criminal matters, how imbalanced it all is in the eyes of African-Americans,” said the Rev. Lowman Oliver, the pastor at St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church in Sanford. “That’s why so many eyes are on this case. It’s nationwide and international.” 

The makeup of the jury, six women, none black, is occasionally noted. Race also framed Ms. Jeantel’s turn on the witness stand, which drew heckling online from white and black observers who mocked her demeanor. In testimony over two days, Ms. Jeantel, a high school senior and Mr. Martin’s friend, was clearly uneasy in the spotlight, at times impatient and often hard to hear or understand.
“She was mammyfied,” said Ms. Wilder, the sociology professor, expressing disappointment over the reaction. “She has this riveting testimony, then she became, overnight, the teenage mammy: for not being smart and using these racial slurs and not being the best witness. A lot of people in the African-American community came out against her.” 

In the past two weeks, defense lawyers have chipped away at the prosecution’s case, legal analysts said, raising the possibility of an acquittal. The law in Florida allows for the use of force if someone fears great bodily harm, and prosecutors must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Zimmerman did not act in self-defense.

All this legal mumbo-jumbo like "beyond a reasonable doubt" that the racist crackers are using to get their good old boy off. Florida must be a racist hellhole if the government can't just go around convicting individuals of murder without meeting the burden of proof.

The twists and turns of the case — its weaknesses and legal complications — were not a factor for many supporters of the Martin family, until recently. “We thought this was an open-and-shut case,” said Mr. Jackson, the pastor in Richmond Heights. 

Probably a New York Times subscriber.

Mr. Oliver, the Sanford pastor, said he remained optimistic. “You can feel a little sense that anger is re-emerging,” he said.

Rev. Oliver is optimistic about having a good race riot if Zimmerman is acquitted?

The possibility of an acquittal has prompted community leaders, ministers and law enforcement officials in Miami and Sanford to prepare. This week in Miami, they will hold a meeting in Miami Gardens, where Mr. Martin lived, to talk about the complexity of the legal case and what has happened in the courtroom so far. They are also reaching out to young people in schools and parks and through Web sites, urging them to remain calm. 

“It is important that we still maintain peace, even though decisions are not made to our liking,” Mr. Jackson said. “That is our message, and that is what we are preaching.” 

Even the suggestion that trouble may follow an acquittal is fraught with racial overtones, particularly since much of the preparation is focused on the black community. 

But in cities like Miami, which have experienced racial unrest, the ministers and activists said it was a reasonable concern. It is better to be prepared, they say, than caught off guard. 

“Everybody wants to know the pulse of the community,” Mr. Jackson said. “It’s not an insult to ask whether we feel there will be unrest.” 

As the trial begins its third and perhaps final week, there is widespread agreement that one fact rises above all others: post-racial America, as some hoped it would be after a black man was elected president, is still a work in progress. 

“We are going to have to have a dialogue in this nation about racial matters,” Mr. Oliver said.

A "dialogue" about race is code for "Shut up and listen to your betters." But, having gotten Obama re-elected, white liberals are once again tiring of black people being less than satisfactory in their appointed roles as saints and martyrs, so the New York Times now returns to its regularly scheduled around-the-clock coverage of gay marriage.

In summary, I'm always being accused of being obsessed with questions of race. But, in reality, I just read the New York Times.

The Terman Family: Proof that IQ and heredity are frauds

Glancing at the comments on a Salon article on IQ testing:

politicalrealist3 23 hours ago 

Malcolm Gladwell wrote of the problems with IQ tests in "Outliers".  In the 1920s, Stanford psychology professor Lewis Terman thought the IQ test was the answer to predicting what would happene in people's lives.  He devoted his life to the concept.  He managed to track the children who had scored in the highest percentiles for decades. He thought their high IQs would predict their success.   

It didn't.  Only a tiny percentage of Terman's High IQ children excelled. Many were complete failures in life.  None were Nobel prize winners. Ironically, in California two children who DID win the Nobel prize were not a part of his group because their IQs were not high enough. 

I've run through this history before, but it's so ironic that it's worth repeating. 

One of the two Nobelists who just missed Terman's cut-off was physicist William Shockley. Shockley is often called "the father of Silicon Valley" because so many of the silicon chip firms were founded by lieutenants he recruited to work at Shockley Semiconductor, such as Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, founders of Intel. 

So, obviously, this proves that Louis Terman's obsession with IQ and heredity was pseudo-science.

And yet, Shockley didn't think so: as a Stanford professor in the 1960s and 1970s, he was a notorious advocate of the heritability of IQ. 

But that raises other questions, such as why was Shockley hired as a Stanford professor after he washed out as an entrepreneur by alienating his employees? And was Shockley really the father of Silicon Valley? After all, HP and a number of other Stanford-connected high-tech firms were flourishing there before Shockley arrived from Bell Labs.

The other candidate for the title of father of Silicon Valley is Stanford's dean of engineering Fred Terman, who mentored future entrepreneurs like Hewlett and Packard, and developed the military-industrial-academic-entrepreneurial complex on Stanford land that he leased to his former students. 

Fred Terman hired his buddy Shockley for Stanford. 

And Fred Terman was the son of Louis Terman, the inventor of the famous Stanford-Binet IQ test.

Of course, we now know that the Termans, father and son, and Shockley were totally wrong about everything, which is why nobody today at Stanford or in Silicon Valley ever worries about how smart anybody is. Hence, Stanford or Google just admit or hire applicants at random.

Does IQ testing work or not work?

My previous post cites an interesting new study of brain development that begins:

“IQ predicts many measures of life success ...

Here's an article in Salon by the author of a new book on the failures of IQ testing, which appears to be aimed at upper middle class parents of kids who are having trouble in school:

IQ tests hurt kids, schools — and don’t measure intelligence 

The research proves that IQ tests poorly predict learning disabilities. So why are schools still using them? 

BY SCOTT BARRY KAUFMAN

Can IQ testing both "predict" and "poorly predict" at the same time?

Can a glass be half-full and half-empty at the same time?

If it's your kid, of course you want more detail. You want to know your child's strengths as well as weaknesses. But one number IQ scores also have their uses, especially in social sciences when thinking about groups.

The half-full glass wisecrack that I use a lot seems snarky, but the truth is that I found learning enough about psychometrics in the 1990s to be able to write non-stupidly on the subject to be hard work. I noticed early in my writing career that writing X number of words on IQ was more mentally exhausting than writing X number of words on almost any other subject.

But, I don't regret the effort in that once you get the hang of thinking about IQ, you'll notice that you've learned a lot about how to think about the human world in general. The subject is so difficult that you need to improve your toolbox of helpful reductionist concepts, and you need to be able to hold opposing concepts like nature and nurture in mind at the same time, which isn't easy to do.

Back in 2007, I wrote up a Frequently Asked Questions list for IQ that discussed some of these issues:

Q. So, do IQ tests predict an individual's fate? 

A. In an absolute sense, not very accurately at all. Indeed, any single person's destiny is beyond the capability of all the tests ever invented to predict with much accuracy. 

Q. So, if IQ isn't all that accurate for making predictions about an individual, why even think of using it to compare groups, which are much more complicated?
A. That sounds sensible, but it's exactly backwards. The larger the sample size, the more the statistical noise washes out. 

Q. How can that be? 

A. If Adam and Zach take an IQ test and Adam outscores Zach by 15 points, it's far from impossible that Zach actually has the higher "true" IQ. A hundred random perturbations could have thrown the results off. Maybe if they took the test dozen times, Zach just might average higher than Adam. 

But for comparing the averages of large groups of people, the chance of error becomes vanishingly small. For example, the largest meta-analysis of American ethnic differences in IQ, Philip L. Roth's  2001 survey,[Ethnic group differences in cognitive ability in employment and educational settings: a meta-analysis, Personnel Psychology 54, 297–330.] aggregated 105 studies of 6,246,729 individuals. That's what you call a decent sample size. 

Q. So, you're saying that IQ testing can tell us more about group differences than about individual differences? 

A. If the sample sizes are big enough and all else is equal, a higher IQ group will virtually always outperform a lower IQ group on any behavioral metric.
One of the very few positive traits not correlated with IQ is musical rhythm—which is a reason high IQ rock stars like Mick Jagger, Pete Townshend, and David Bowie tell Drummer Jokes. 

Of course, everything else is seldom equal. A more conscientious group may well outperform a higher IQ group. On the other hand, conscientiousness, like many virtues, is positively correlated with IQ, so IQ tests work surprisingly well. 

Q. Wait a minute, does that mean that maybe some of the predictive power of IQ comes not from intelligence itself, but from virtues associated with it like conscientiousness? 

A. Most likely. But perhaps smarter people are more conscientious because they are more likely to foresee the bad consequences of slacking off. It's an interesting philosophical question, but, in a practical sense, so what? We have a test that can predict behavior. That's useful. 

Q. Can one number adequately describe a person's intelligence?
A. Sort of. 

Q. "Sort of"?!? What the heck kind of answer is that?
A. A realistic one. 

Q. How can something be true and not true at the same time?
A. How can the glass be half-full and half-empty at the same time? Most things about IQ testing are partly true and partly false at the same time. That's the nature of anything inherently statistical, which is most of reality. 

Humans are used to legalistic reasoning that attempts to draw bright lines between exclusive categories. For example, you are either old enough to vote or you aren't. There's no gray area. But the law is artificial and unlike most of reality. Many people have a hard time dealing with that fact, especially when it comes to thinking about IQ. 

Q. Enough epistemology! How can you rationalizing summing up something as multifaceted as intelligence in a single number? 

A. Think about SAT scores. Your total score says something about you, while breaking out your Math and Verbal scores separately says more. A kid who gets a total of 1400 out of 1600 (Math + Verbal) is definitely college material, while a kid who gets a 600 isn't. That's the big picture. For the fine detail, like which college to apply to, it helps to look at the subscores. A kid with a 1400 who got a 600 Math and an 800 Verbal would be better off at Swarthmore than at Cal Tech. 

A few years ago, the SAT added a third score, Writing, but many colleges aren't sure how useful it is, and there's some sentiment for dropping the Writing test as not worth the extra time or cost. In other words, there are diminishing marginal returns to more detail.

By the way, the FAQ was a mainstay of the Usenet era of Internet discussion groups before the invention of the World Wide Web. It was widely considered a terrific way to bring people up to speed. Yet, in this century, FAQs seem to have fallen dramatically out of fashion. Why? Does it have something to do with the rise of Wikipedia? 

The dialogue format for written instruction of difficult material has gone in and out of favor over the ages. Plato and Galileo used it, but at the moment it seems to be just not done.

Eric Turkheimer's got some 'splainin' to do

From Psychological Science:

The Nature and Nurture of High IQ
An Extended Sensitive Period for Intellectual Development 

“IQ predicts many measures of life success, as well as trajectories of brain development. Prolonged cortical thickening observed in individuals with high IQ might reflect an extended period of synaptogenesis and high environmental sensitivity or plasticity. We tested this hypothesis by examining the timing of changes in the magnitude of genetic and environmental influences on IQ as a function of IQ score. We found that individuals with high IQ show high environmental influence on IQ into adolescence (resembling younger children), whereas individuals with low IQ show high heritability of IQ in adolescence (resembling adults), a pattern consistent with an extended sensitive period for intellectual development in more-intelligent individuals. The pattern held across a cross-sectional sample of almost 11,000 twin pairs and a longitudinal sample of twins, biological siblings, and adoptive siblings.”

Sub-Obama blacks not welcome next to NPR HQ

From the Washington Post:

By now, Mary Dews-Hall was supposed to be back home. When the city tore down Temple Courts five years ago, staff assured her that she and her neighbors would return. That there was a plan. That this time wouldn’t be like the others, when poor, black neighborhoods were paved over in the name of progress. 

The New Communities Initiative was going to infuse prosperity into this troubled area, 10 blocks from the Capitol.

The housing project was on K-Street, kitty-corner from the NPR headquarters. Today, the housing project is a parking lot that charges $8 per hour. Could it be that NPR executives, K Street lobbyists, and others who can pay $8 per hour to park got tired of being polar-bear hunted, and are pretty effective at eventually getting their way?

It would serve as a template for remaking other violent neighborhoods in the District, a commitment to those who felt a changing city was leaving them behind. 

By the end of this year,180 units were to have been built for former Temple Courts tenants. So far, the plan hasn’t delivered one. 

The plan for Dews-Hall’s neighborhood was supposed to show that the city had figured out some of the great puzzles of urban renewal, how to revitalize a community without replacing it, how to create a place for prosperous newcomers without pushing out poor old-timers. 

Instead, New Communities has shown how hard it is to make affordable housing work in the modern American city and how easy it was to let a program that was the centerpiece of the District’s affordable-housing efforts unravel.

Have you ever noticed that every single thing in America -- Washington D.C. housing, Harvard, Augusta National, Goldman Sachs, Teach for America, or whatever -- runs on the basis of selectionism? The people with the power pick the new people they want to have around and don't pick the people they don't want around. The only exception to this pattern is immigration policy, where, as we all know, it would be unconscionable for citizens to have a say in who gets to become citizens. Didn't you hear that George W. Bush made a speech this weekend in favor of immigration reform? Who are you to doubt the word of George W. Bush?

Brazil gearing up for World Cup 2014, Olympics 2016

From ESPN:

An amateur football match in Brazil led to two deaths as a referee was beheaded by spectators after he had stabbed a player. 

The shocking incidents occurred in Maranhao, Brazil, last Sunday. According to reports, referee Otavio Jordao da Silva fatally stabbed footballer Josenir dos Santos Abreu. 

Dos Santos Abreu is believed to have struck the referee after questioning a decision. In retaliation, Jordao da Silva stabbed the player. 

Having witnessed the incident, an outraged group of spectators turned on the referee. He was tied up, beaten, stoned and quartered. They then put his head on a stake and planted it in the middle of the pitch.

I went to a professional soccer game at the Maracana (sp?) stadium in Rio in 1978, capacity 199,000 for the 1950 World Cup final. My father and I thought we were getting a deal because we only paid like a dollar apiece. But we ended up in the standing room only section on field level with all the tough eggs. Couldn't see much of what was happening, but we got an excellent view of the dry moat separating us spectators from the field in case we got the urge to dispute a call by lynching the ref. (There had apparently been an Unfortunate Incident.)

How immigration can solve all the world's problems

From the comments to "The Extended Stay American Dream:"

 Anononymous said... 

"everyone born here would have to leave. Then they would be replaced with immigrants." 

Excellent plan. Here's my implementation: 

Part the first: 

All third-world population to move to USA, supervised by the UN. All, no exceptions. America becomes an exponential-GDP economists-utopia with a population of billions of ad-revenue generators. NY-LA greater metropolitan area. World GDP doubles. Trillion dollar bills on the sidewalk. Third world poverty ended. Sally Struthers retires. 

Part the second: 

The non-vibrant portion of USA is banished to the now-vacated lands. The ultimate liberal-revenge fantasy. Now they can experience first-hand the misery they inflicted on those people by not allowing them to immigrate here. 

They can see first-hand life with the civil-wars, the gang-rapes, child-prostitution, drug-cartels, brutal dictatorships, AIDs. They will see what effect an accident of birth can have on your life. O Fortuna velut luna statu variabilis. 

Then we will build a wall around USA so that the non-vibrant can never come back. They will try to climb the wall and beg for permission to immigrate, but their pleas will fall on deaf ears. See how it feels, hah. (Also, no one can leave either.) 

The low population density will really make for a miserable GDP. It will be like living in a world-wide Australia, shudder. 

I'm torn as to whether infrastructure left behind should be left intact or sabotaged. Immigrants are so industrious they won't need it.

Indian says whites should not call anybody "Caucasian"

In the long run, the government's definitions of who gets money and prizes for being a favored race or ethnicity and who belongs to the legally disfavored groups who have to ante up the money and prizes is hugely important. 

For example, the government's effort to compensate the descendants of American slaves by defining everybody who wants to assert any sub-Saharan ancestry as a protected race is the fundamental reason the non-force of nature Barack Obama is in the White House. Similarly, the Nixon Administration's creation of a Hispanic ethnicity out of people of Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban descent is the reason the media has anointed Marco Rubio as Presidential Timber: the growth of the Mexican-American population makes the Cuban Rubio a natural!

Not surprisingly, there have been rumblings among the currently legally unprivileged as they strategize how to bail out of the white/Caucasian category. Arab groups, for example, have been asking to be excused from being white and instead get their own category so they can sue when disparate impact is not in their favor. The end game, which we are still a long way from, of course, is to leave Mitt Romney as the last remaining white person in America.

(When it comes to being legally privileged, I'm a Big Tent guy. I want as many people stuffed into the unprivileged tent with me to share the burden. But that's a pretty rare insight these days.)

Golfer Vijay Singh

"Caucasian" as a synonym for white is particularly troublesome to people who don't want to get left holding the fuzzy end of the racial privilege lollipop. Why? Because it is so geographically expansive. Physical anthropologists generally saw the Caucasoid race as extending to include North Africa, the Near East, and most of South Asia. 

In 1982, however, immigrant Indian and Pakistani businessmen, looking for low interest SBA loans and affirmative action in government contracting, talked the Reagan Administration into reclassifying them from white/Caucasian to Asian/Oriental, even though grouping Indians with Chinese rather than with Afghans makes little sense from the standpoint of physical, genetic, linguistic, or cultural anthropology. (The Himalayas really are a major barrier.) In America over the last generation or two, being nonwhite pays.

Here's a half-Indian New York Times reporter explaining, in effect, why the word that raises questions about her father's side of the family's legal privileges should be forgotten forever.

Has ‘Caucasian’ Lost Its Meaning?
By SHAILA DEWAN
Published: July 6, 2013

AS a racial classification, the term Caucasian has many flaws, dating as it does from a time when the study of race was based on skull measurements and travel diaries.

As opposed to today, when the study of race is based on assertions of political power in imposing intellectual taboos.

It has long been entirely unmoored from its geographical reference point, the Caucasus region.

Actually, the Caucasus Mountains are near the center of the traditional range of the Caucasoid race. People from the Caucasus region, such as Armenians, were always considered white in America for legal purposes.

 Even now, the word gives discussions of race a weird technocratic gravitas, as when the police insist that you step out of your “vehicle” instead of your car. ... 

I associate the word "Caucasian" with the LAPD from watching Adam 12 in the 1960s. It worked well for police radio talk "See the man, male Caucasian" especially in low light situations. Joseph Wambaugh's LAPD cop novels over the last 40 years have had a running theme of almost always having at least one character who is sort of a white European and sort of not.

The Supreme Court, which can be more colloquial, has used the term in only 64 cases, including a pair from the 1920s that reveal its limitations. In one, the court ruled that a Japanese man could not become a citizen because, although he may have been light-skinned, he was not Caucasian. In the other, an Indian was told that he could not become a citizen because, although he may have been technically Caucasian, he was certainly not white.

Ramzan Kadyrov throwing money

(A similar debate erupted more recently when the Tsarnaev brothers, believed to be responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing, were revealed to be Muslims from the Caucasus.) ... 

There is another reason to use it, said Jennifer L. Hochschild, a professor of government and African-American studies at Harvard. “The court, or some clever clerk, doesn’t really want to use the word white in part because roughly half of Hispanics consider themselves white.”

It's almost as if white Americans could use Hispanic racism to divide and conquer, when we all know the duty of whites is to unite-and-submit to The Others.

There are a number of terms that refer to various degrees of blackness, both current and out of favor: African-American, mulatto, Negro, colored, octaroon.

They are out of favor because lighter-skinned elites like the mulatto Barack Obama saw it was in his career interest to be "black" instead of something more accurate, as he demonstrates at some length in Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.

... IN the South, I was often asked about my ethnic origins, and I had a ready answer. “My father is from India,” I would recite, phrasing it in such a way as to avoid being mistaken for an American Indian. “And my mom is white.” Almost invariably, if I was speaking to black people, they would nod with understanding. If I was speaking to white people, I would get a puzzled look. “What kind of white?” they would ask. Only when I explained the Norwegian, Scottish and German mix of my ancestry would I get the nod. 

I theorized that this was because blacks understood “white” as a category, both historical and contemporary — a coherent group that wielded power and excluded others. Whites, I believed, were less comfortable with that notion. 

But Matthew Pratt Guterl, the author of “The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940,” had a different take. “They’re trying to trace your genealogy and figure out what your qualities are,” he said. “They’re looking in your face, they’re looking in the slope of your nose, the shape of your brow. There’s an effort to discern the truth of the matter, because all whitenesses are not equal.” In other words, they weren’t rejecting the category, they were policing its boundaries. 

Such racial boundaries have increasingly been called into question in the debate over affirmative action, once regarded as a form of restitution to descendants of slaves, but now complicated by all sorts of questions about who, exactly, is being helped. “What if some of them aren’t poor, what if some of them don’t have American parentage, what if some of them are really stupid?” Ms. Painter, the historian, asked. “There’s all kinds of characteristics that we stuff into race without looking, and then they pop out and we think, ‘I can’t deal with that.’ ” 

Doubtless, this society will continue to classify people by race for some time to come. And as we lumber toward justice, some of those classifications remain useful, even separate from other factors like economic class. Caucasian, though? Not so much. 

Shaila Dewan is an economics reporter for The New York Times.

We must lumber toward justice by continuing to provide Ms. Dewan's relatives on the paternal side taxpayer subsidized loans.

And ever since the Reagan Administration did such a huge favor for Indians by removing them from the official definition of white / Caucasian, they've been voting Republican ever since out of gratitude.

Oh, wait, the opposite appears to have happened.

No doubt, we can count on Republican deep thinkers like Kurt Bardella to figure all this out.

Inbred Rednecks v. Inbred Pakistanis

Google has 95,000 pages on "inbred rednecks" v. 242 on "inbred Pakistanis." 

From the Canadian Broadcasting Company:

First cousins who marry increase the risk of giving birth to a baby with birth defects including defects affecting the heart or lungs, a British study suggests. 

Researchers looked at birth anomalies in Bradford in the north of England where there is a large Pakistani community. In that community there's a high level of consanguineous marriage — matrimony between blood relatives. ...

 The risk of birth defects was double that in those of white British origin. ...

Of the more than a total of 11,000 babies in the study, 386 or 3 per cent had a congenital anomaly, such as heart and lung defects, cleft palates and Down syndrome. The children were born between 2007 and 2011.

These are just major birth defects. These poor kids probably have lots of minor defects, too, and learning disabilities that aren't obvious until school age.

 Less than one per cent of babies of white British origin were born to first cousins compared with 38 per cent in the Pakistani group.

Births to second cousins are probably not insignificant either, although the fraction of "shared alleles" is only 1/4th as high in offspring of second cousin marriages. (This is assuming de novo cousin marriages -- if your ancestors have been cousin marrying for a long time, your mileage may vary.)

Keep in mind that first cousin marriage is not just a cultural ideal in large parts of the world, it's a key engine of immigration fraud. An arranged marriage of an English-born girl to her cousin in the Old Country creates a visa for a member of the extended family, opening doors to more visas under "family reunification."

A dozen years or so ago, the horrible anti-immigration rightwing Danish government passed a law not giving a visa to a foreigner if his Danish-born bride is under age 24.

Kurt Bardella: Embodiment of the GOP Brain Trust

Here's a long, mildly amusing article about Kurt Bardella, a staffer for GOP congressman Darrell Issa. Bardella is representative of the kind of heavyweights who extrude the Republican conventional wisdom.

The Extended Stay American Dream

Commenters Rohan Swee and Dave Pinsen kick around the current mindset:

"I, too, have long been perplexed by these questions. A "nation of immigrants" should be mostly immigrants, no?" 

It's time to take it to the next level then, and make America truly a nation of immigrants. For starters, everyone born here would have to leave. Then they would be replaced with immigrants. And when the immigrants wanted to have kids, they would have to leave the country and start their families elsewhere, lest their kids be born here and miss out on the magic of immigrating here. 

So America would be a place where people came, worked for a few years, then moved on. Sort of like one of those extended stay business hotels. The United States of Extended Stay America.

Sounds like a plan!

There's a lot of money to be made off of constant churn. These days, the question that's in the forefront of everbody's thoughts and prayers is: "Is it good for the billionaires?" Anybody who isn't worried about the welfare of our precious billionairely resources is A) Not currently a billionaire himself, B) Obviously, never going to be a billionaire, and therefore C) A loser.

My favorite book of 2011 was Homesickness: An American History by Susan J. Matt. This academic gypsy historian, who finally earned tenure at the third college she was employed by, draws an insightful distinction between homesickness, which was indulged during the 19th Century but is derided these days because it's too particularist to make much money off of (you're homesick for Palmdale the way it was in 1981, when it seemed like everybody's dad was an aerospace engineer? Sorry, can't do much for you), versus nostalgia (you liked the Go-Gos when you were growing up Palmdale in 1981? Well, that's why we licensed "We've Got the Beat" for Target's Back-to-School-Days ads!)

"The Vulnerability of Minority Homeowners in the Housing Boom and Bust"

Here's an important new academic paper on the minority mortgage meltdown that backs up many of my insights of 2008 about the role of George W. Bush's 2002-2004 push for increasing minority homeownership by removing regulatory impediments (such as down payment requirements):

The Vulnerability of Minority Homeowners in the Housing Boom and Bust 

Patrick Bayer, Duke University and NBER 

Fernando Ferreira, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and NBER 

Stephen L Ross, University of Connecticut 

Abstract 

This paper examines mortgage outcomes for a large, representative sample of individual home purchases and refinances linked to credit scores in seven major US markets in the recent housing boom and bust. Among those with similar credit scores, black and Hispanic homeowners had much higher rates of delinquency and default in the downturn. These differences are not readily explained by the likelihood of receiving a subprime loan or by differential exposure to local shocks in the housing and labor market and are especially pronounced for loans originated near the peak of the boom. Our findings suggest that those black and Hispanic homeowners drawn into the market near the peak were especially vulnerable to adverse economic shocks and raise serious concerns about homeownership as a mechanism for reducing racial disparities in wealth. 

1. Introduction 

Homeownership has long been viewed as an important mechanism for building wealth and, hence, the substantially lower ownership rates of minority households may be a serious impediment to reducing racial wealth disparities. 

Motivated by this perspective, a number of public policy programs have an explicit goal of encouraging homeownership and many politicians have embraced it as a means of upwards mobility. President George W. Bush famously said in a 2004 speech that “We're creating... an ownership society in this country, where more Americans than ever will be able to open up their door where they live and say, welcome to my house, welcome to my piece of property”. With this view in mind, the expansion of housing credit in the United States from late 1990s to mid-2000s was largely cheered and homeownership by households of all races and ethnicities reached record high rates in the mid- 2000s.

As the subsequent housing and economic crises developed, however, the risks of homeownership became increasingly obvious. Delinquency and foreclosure rates rose sharply, especially in minority and low-income neighborhoods, and many households not only lost substantial housing wealth but also faced the prospect of lower credit scores (higher borrowing costs) for years to come. A comparison of mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures between 2005 and 2009 provides a particularly stark picture of the differential impact of the downturn by race. 

Figures 1 and 2 shows that while all homeowners had negligible 90-day delinquency and default rates in 2005 for our sample of seven major markets,

A rising tide lifts all boats

large racial differences had emerged by 2009. More than 1 in 10 black and Hispanic homeowners in our sample had a delinquent mortgage by 2009, compared to 1 in 25 for white households, and a similar pattern held for foreclosure rates. The differential impact of the downturn highlights a key concern with homeownership as a means for reducing racial wealth disparities. Namely, if the downside risks associated with owning a home are distributed unequally by race, increased rates of delinquency and default may ultimately exacerbate rather than diminish the racial wealth gap. 

There are huge differences in median or even 75th percentile wealth between whites versus blacks or Hispanics. Whites have been making more money for more generations, and they tend to spend proportionately less of their incomes on cars and fiestas. Since they tend to be related to other white people, they also are more likely to have a private safety net of family members who can help them out in a financial crisis so that they don't default.

But, lenders are not supposed to notice this. Fortunately, down payment requirements provided a race-neutral way to put your money where your mouth is. However, George W. Bush's war on down payment requirements in 2002-2004 as racist barriers to his Ownership Society neutered this.

In this paper, we examine mortgage outcomes by race during the last housing cycle in a diverse set of U.S. housing markets. The main goal of our analysis is to distinguish among a number of potential explanations for the higher rates of delinquency and default by minority homeowners in the housing market bust, with the ultimate aim of providing a better understanding of the benefits and risks associated with homeownership as a vehicle for building wealth. 

While researchers have documented the greater exposure of minority households to income and health shocks, much less is known about the differential impact of credit and financial shocks, especially in housing markets. The literature suggests that subprime lending has been an important factor in explaining rising foreclosure rates in low income and minority neighborhoods. Here we take a different approach by proposing an important explanation for high rates of negative credit market outcomes for minority homeowners during the crisis, i.e., the selection of high-risk households into the housing market close to the peak of the housing cycle. 

We explain this mechanism in the context of a simple model of credit markets in which borrowers are heterogeneous in both their risk of having adverse economic events and in their ability to manage adverse events should they occur. We show that an expansion in credit availability selects borrowers into the market that face a higher risk of adverse events, leading to an increase in default rates among borrowers unable to manage adverse events in any subsequent market downturn. To the extent that wealth and liquidity gaps leave minority households especially vulnerable to negative economic shocks, our model implies that those minority households drawn into homeownership following a major expansion of credit are especially likely to default in a subsequent downturn.

Our empirical results show that black and Hispanic households are more likely to become delinquent and default on their mortgages than white households with similar credit scores, house type, neighborhood, and loan characteristics, especially for mortgages originated for new home purchases in 2005-06. 

One prominent, potential explanation for higher delinquency and foreclosure rates is that minority borrowers were concentrated in the subprime sector of the market, where they faced higher interest rates and more onerous loan terms than white borrowers with equivalent credit history and circumstances. Since 2004, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data has contained an indicator for high cost (or rate-spread) loans that is often considered a proxy for subprime loans. Yet, while having a high-cost loan is a strong predictor of subsequent delinquency and default, controlling for this variable has only a minor impact on the estimated racial and ethnic differences in future credit market outcomes. These differences in delinquency and default are also relatively unaffected by the inclusion of lender and neighborhood fixed effects, and additional controls for the influence of subprime lending. Thus, strikingly, most of the observed differences in credit market outcomes for minority homeowners are not related to differential access to lenders, types of loans, or any observable factor that might have been used to price the mortgages in the first place.

In other words, stereotypical racial/ethnic  prejudices turned out to offer incremental insight, especially in the 2005-2006 environment of very, very low down payments.

We next consider whether racial and ethnic differences in loan performance might be attributable to differential exposure to the housing market collapse and associated recession. To capture shocks associated with both the labor and housing market, we include a series of controls that measure variation in the severity of the crisis: (i) tract and county by year fixed effects, (ii) individual indicators of a household’s equity position in each year, (iii) the interaction of equity position and county by year unemployment rates, and (iv) race-specific measures of unemployment rates by county and year. The addition of these controls has little impact on estimated differences between Hispanic and white homeowners in either the new purchase or refinance sample. And, while the inclusion of these controls does reduce the estimated differences in delinquencies and foreclosures between black and white homeowners to some extent, substantial differences remain, especially in the home purchase sample. Thus, while increased exposure to labor and housing market shocks explains some of the increased delinquency and default rate for minority homeowners, a substantial unexplained gap remains.

A big question is how much did the recession cause mortgage troubles versus how much did mortgage troubles cause the recession. More specifically, mortgage troubles in 2007-2008 in Sand States like California, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida did more to cause the national recession of 2008-2009 than vice-versa, according to the laws of time and space.

As a final test of the predictions of our mortgage market model following a major expansion of credit, we examine whether the timing of the selection into the housing market has an effect over and above the other mechanisms proposed in the literature. We find that racial and ethnic differences are largest for home purchase originations in 2006, the peak of the housing boom according to the Case-Shiller price index.

Peak = scraping bottom of the barrel.

Importantly, the larger differences in 2006 remain even after controlling for the subsequent higher rates of negative equity for borrowers who purchased near the peak of the housing market. Along similar lines, we also examine racial and ethnic differences for a subsample of refinance mortgages that were originally purchased between 1998 and 2008 and subsequently refinanced in our sample period. For this subsample, racial and ethnic differences in foreclosure are tiny for homes that were originally purchased from 1998 to 2003, but substantial for homeowners who originally purchased their homes between 2004 and 2007 – i.e., those drawn into the market at the peak of the credit expansion. 

Taken together, our results provide strong evidence that minority households drawn into homeownership late in the recent housing market boom were especially vulnerable in the subsequent downturn in ways that are not explained by (i) exposure to different lenders or loans, (ii) the performance of local labor and housing markets, and (iii) the differences in equity position. These results call into question the idea of encouraging homeownership as a general mechanism for reducing racial disparities in wealth. To the extent that increases in homeownership are driven by the entry of especially vulnerable households into the owner- occupied market, such a push may backfire, leaving vulnerable households in a difficult financial situation and adversely affecting their wealth and credit-worthiness for years.

This is enough of a direct shot across the bow of the entire race-mortgage sub-industry of activists and wheeler-dealer lenders and developers that Mr. and Mrs. Sandler's Center for Responsible Lending issued a denunciatory response here. Up until 2007, a lot of rich people and powerful politicians earned a lot of money and/or votes by fighting racism by inducing  blacks and, increasingly, Hispanics into debt peonage.

Not surprisingly, despite the mounting number of academic studies demonstrating this, it hasn't been a popular topic in the media.

La Liberté éclairant le monde

La Liberté éclairant le monde (Liberty Enlightening the World) is a gift from the people of France to the U.S.A. to recognize what the French saw as their co-developers of national liberty.

 The statue is of a robed female figure representing Libertas, the Roman goddess of freedom, who bears a torch and a tabula ansata (a tablet evoking the law) upon which is inscribed the date of the American Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776. A broken chain lies at her feet.

Symbolizing abolition.

It didn't have much to do with immigration. The message to the world was that America and France had liberated their own countries and you should admire this statue, then be inspired to go home and liberate your own country.

Not surprisingly, the French never felt oppressed enough in their nice country to immigrate to Amercia in vast numbers. So, Franco Americans tend to be a rather random collection of worthies who filtered in in small number. The Wikipedia  on "French-American" article lists these representatives Franco-Americans.

Brett Favre • Kate Chopin • Oliver Stone
Robert Goulet • Jack Kerouac • Henry David Thoreau
Angelina Jolie • Eleuthère Irénée du Pont • William C. Durant
John James Audubon • Rene Gagnon • Matt LeBlanc

Not bad, if a pretty random set of Americans.

Fourth of July Panhandlemania

This is the day when we celebrate such antiquated concepts such as self-rule and independence from global empire.

As an independent writer, I get to have a lot more fun than all the tame hacks whose jobs come with, say, health insurance. But, I'm directly dependent upon you, my readers, to help me pay some bills.

So, this is the Day 2 of my summer fundraising drive.

First, you can make a tax deductible contribution via VDARE by clicking here.

Second, you can make a non-tax deductible contribution by credit card via WePay by clicking here. 

Third: You can mail a non-tax deductible donation to:

Steve Sailer

P.O Box 4142

Valley Village, CA 91607-4142

Thanks.