December 18, 2009

True Blue

The San Francisco Weekly rakes the muck about San Francisco city government in "The Worst-Run Big City in the U.S." I especially liked the picture of San Francisco's male model mayor with the caption, "Mayor Gavin Newsom ponders the differences among the Accountability Matrix, Accountability Index, and Accountability Report."

In short, the better your location, the more you can get away with. (I bet Istanbul is a poorly run city, too.) Due to geography, San Francisco doesn't have much in the way of nearby suburbs to compete with, giving it lots of leeway to be incompetent.

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

In praise of David Frum

I have a few nice things to say about pundit David Frum in my new VDARE.com column.

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

An Observation

The current President of the United States, like the previous President, is a lightweight who got elected only because of who his daddy was.

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

December 17, 2009

The future

From the AP:
The final chapter has been written for the lone bookstore on the streets of Laredo. [That's Laredo, Texas, not Nuevo Laredo across the Rio Grande in Mexico.]

With a population of nearly a quarter-million people, this city could soon be the largest in the nation without a single bookseller.

The situation is so grim that schoolchildren have pleaded for a reprieve from next month's planned shutdown of the B. Dalton bookstore. After that, the nearest store will be 150 miles away in San Antonio.

The B. Dalton store was never a community destination with comfy couches and an espresso bar, but its closing will create a literary void in a city with a high illiteracy rate. Industry analysts and book associations could not name a larger American city without a single bookseller.

"Corporate America considers Laredo kind of the backwater," said the city's most prolific author, Jerry Thompson, a professor at Texas A&M University International who has written more than 20 books.

Since the closing was announced, book lovers in Laredo have flocked to the small store located between City Trendz ("Laredo's No. 1 Underground Hip Hop Shop") and a store that offers $4 indoor go-kart rides to stock up on their favorite titles.

I'm sure the local Wal-Mart sells bestsellers as well. And there's Amazon.com.

Still, I probably spend a couple of hours per week in my local bookstore, a big Barnes & Noble that fills what used to be the local movie theater. It's not necessary to my life, but it's certainly a civilized amenity.

The future doesn't look terribly apocalyptic to me. In fact, it probably won't even be worse than the present, mostly due to the beneficent workings of Moore's Law. But the opportunity cost ...

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

December 16, 2009

The samurai version of hitting a bucket of balls

I finally figured out why the Japanese love to go the driving range and hit golf balls instead of play golf on a course.

It ties into the ancient samurai tradition of practicing for battle by first beheading a bunch of criminals. Beheading prisoners is to war as the driving range is to the golf course.

For example, the 60-something retired samurai Yamamoto Tsunetomo said in Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, from the early 17th Century:
Yamamaoto Kichizaemon was ordered b his father Jin'emon to cut down a dog at the age of five, and at the age of fifteen he was made to execute a criminal. Everybody, by the time they were fourteen or fifteen, was ordered to do a beheading without fail.

Last year I went to the Kase Execution Grounds to try my hand at beheading and I found it to be an extremely good feeling. To think that it is unnerving is a symptom of cowardice.

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

December 15, 2009

Shinnecock "Indians" get their casino

From the New York Times:

The Obama administration said Tuesday that the Shinnecock Indians on Long Island meet the criteria for federal recognition, signaling the end of a 30-year court battle and clearing a path for the tribe to pursue its plans for a casino in New York City or its suburbs.

The announcement all but assures that the 1,066-member Shinnecock Indian Nation will receive formal federal recognition, though a public-comment period of up to six months must be held before the final order is issued.

The news could mean significant changes for the relatively poor tribe, most of whose members live on 800 acres in Southampton, N.Y., not far from some of Long Island’s wealthiest communities and expansive celebrity-owned estates.

Shinnecock leaders have long argued that a casino could turn around the tribe’s fortunes.

“This recognition comes after years of anguish and frustration for many members of our Nation, living and deceased,” Randy King, chairman of the Shinnecock trustees, said in a statement, adding, “Perhaps this recognition will help some of our neighbors better understand us and foster a new mutual respect.”

Once it is federally recognized, the tribe would be entitled to build a “Class II” casino on its land that could have thousands of video slot machines but no table games. That has worried some local officials because of the implications that such a casino would have for traffic and tourism in the wealthy resort areas. ...

The tribe is also hoping to resolve more than $1 billion worth of land disputes in the Hamptons, including its claim to the site of the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, which has played host to the U.S. Open several times.

The article doesn't mention that the Shinnecock "Indians" are well known to be triracial, with ample African and white ancestry. That's just too complicated for New York Times readers, I guess.

Here, for example, is a photo I found of Randy King, chairman of the Shinnecock trustees, who is mentioned (but not, of course, pictured) in the NYT article. In the same picture there is also one white guy and three NAACP officials. Try to guess which is which. It's not too hard, but it's not totally obvious either. (The answer appears in the Comments.)

I'm not saying that zillion dollar casinos shouldn't be handed out to mixed race people based on their ancestry, just that you might think that the New York Times would at least mention in a long article why it took from 1978 until the Obama Administration for the federal government to accept that the Shinnecocks are Indians under the law. I mean, I live 3,000 miles away and I knew all about the Shinnecocks' ancestry for decades, but, apparently, no word about it is fit to print in the NYT.

Indeed, decades ago I read an article about how the first African-American to play in the U.S. Open golf tournament was in 1895, when a Shinnecock who had helped build the first course on the site, competed in the Open.

For example, here's the 1892 oil painting Shinnecock Indian Girl by William Merrit Chase. The text explains: "In the features was to be seen a curious blending of the two types, Indian and African."

Or, here's a picture of tribal trustee, Lance Gumbs, who looks a little like comedian David Allan Grier.

And here's a picture of Peter Smith, who was head groundskeeper at Shinnecock Hills, a position long reserved for a Shinnecock, for the 1995 U.S. Open. There was a big to-do about racism when he was replaced by a groundskeeper from Pebble Beach to get ready for the 2004 Open. Smith looks rather like Hugo Chavez, whose ancestry isn't that different from the Shinnecocks.

One interesting thing is how within a couple of hundred years, a moderately endogamous population of highly divergent antecedents can develop a fairly homogeneous look.

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

The Jews of Bentonville, Arkansas

Back in 1991-1993, I long-distance managed two employees who were stationed near Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, a small town not far over the border from Missouri, Oklahoma, and Kansas. (Local legend had it that Sam Walton had picked out Bentonville because of its easy access to four different hunting seasons). So, I made a lot of visits to Bentonville.

It was a nice place: pleasant rolling countryside. The locals were friendly, and happy they were finally catching up to the rest of the country in prosperity. Low level Wal-Mart employees, such as assistant shoe department manager, had gotten in on Wal-Mart stock options early and hence were retiring to lake front homes.

In contrast, the upper ranks of Wal-Mart management were the brusquest clients I ever dealt with. Yet, they had principled reasons for treating visiting salesmen like me like dirt: they felt that America corporate life was corrupted by all the little favors salesmen did their clients, like taking them to nice restaurants and NFL games, and that they owed it to their stockholders (including stockholder-in-chief Sam Walton) to maximize profits rather than maximize the lifestyles of managers.

As far as I could tell, at the time, most of Wal-Mart's headquarters staff, including their brilliant IT department, were recruited from middle America.

Most of the Merchant Princes of the second half of the 20th Century, Leslie Wexner, Bernie Marcus, and so forth, were Jewish, and most at home serving metropolitan areas. Sam Walton, the greatest merchant of the era, however, was a product of the underserved middle of the country. He got started quietly building the biggest retail chain in world history by better meeting the needs of the kind of small town folks whom he understood better than than urban merchants.

Big city companies like mine were opening satellite offices to better serve at Wal-Marts' beck and call, and tended to rotate in big city outsiders. Of the two people whom I inherited to manage in Bentonville, one was a local good old boy, and one was a transplant from the East Coast, either Jewish or Italian, I forget which. She liked it a lot in Bentonville -- it was cheap, the locals were friendly, and business was heading up -- and was intent on staying.

Hence, Bentonville is one of the few small towns in middle America with a growing Jewish population, for which it has attracted, unsurprisingly, a fair amount of media attention.

From a book review by Jay P. Greene, a Jewish professor at the U. of Arkansas (35 miles away in Fayetteville) in the Wall Street Journal of Boom Town: How Wal*Mart Transformed an All-American Town into an International Community by Marjorie Rosen.
In recent years, Tyson Foods, J.B. Hunt Trucking and, most prominent of all, Wal-Mart have attracted workers from across the globe to the tiny corner of northwest Arkansas where the companies are headquartered. The effect on the local community, according to Marjorie Rosen in "Boom Town," has been "cold stark fear—at least among a segment of the white Christian majority, which sees its comfortable, all-white way of life fading."

But very little in "Boom Town," an engaging if sometimes distorted community portrait, actually supports this storyline of white Christians resenting the influx of diverse newcomers. Instead, we learn about African-American, Jewish, Muslim and Hindu groups blending rather smoothly into business and social life in Bentonville, Ark. (Wal-Mart's home base), and the surrounding area. Peaches Coleman, the African-American wife of Wal-Mart's now-retired director of human resources, captures the real state of community relations. She remembers that "people threw bricks at our house" when she was growing up in Chicago; but in northwest Arkansas, she reports, her white neighbors "reached out to us in many ways that they didn't really have to . . . and in ways that have endeared this place to me."

There are really two distinct narratives in "Boom Town." One shows the ease with which well-educated African-American, Jewish, Muslim and Hindu newcomers have been accepted by local residents; the other shows the difficulties that low-skilled Hispanics have experienced, many of whom were attracted to the region by jobs at Tyson's chicken-processing plants. Ms. Rosen tries hard but can't comfortably combine the two into a single narrative about how white, rural Christians react to diversity. Besides, her accounts of police tension with low-income minorities and of over-reaction to illegal immigration could as easily be told about any American city. Being the "buckle of the Bible Belt" does not seem to make things any worse than in Phoenix or New York.

Ms. Rosen seems to expect that there should be especially severe problems with the acceptance of diverse newcomers in a geographical area that is, as she repeatedly puts it, "emphatically Christian." Instead, she finds that people of faith have an easy time understanding and accepting one another, including people who belong to different religious traditions, because they share a respect for religious belief. This type of tolerance is common in semi-rural northwest Arkansas but is not so common, one suspects, in the media and political centers that dot the coasts. ...

"Boom Town" does reveal some biased thinking, but it is often Ms. Rosen's own. In her epilogue she provides a stereotype-laden description of how she was pulled over by the Bentonville police for driving slowly through a construction zone at midnight. The police obviously suspected that she was drunk and subjected her to a sobriety test. In Ms. Rosen's mind the particular policeman who confronted her "regards me as though I were an alien . . . just arrived from an alternate universe called New York City." She continues: "My heart races as the boy-cop looks through my pocketbook, perhaps for a kilo of marijuana or a fifth of moonshine." Moonshine? The irony of associating Arkansans with moonshine in a book condemning stereotypes appears to be lost on the author.

Actually, when trying to navigate my rental car from Bentonville to the airport while talking business strategy on my first cell phone in 1991, I got so lost I ended up way up a holler with guys sitting on the front porches of their shacks, giving me very suspicious looks. I don't know if they were wondering whether I was a revenooer from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms out to look for their stills, but I like to think they were.

Anyway, there's not much money to be made in writing about how things are actually pretty nice in Bentonville. And there's little downside for distorting the situation. So, why not do it?

A 2006 New York Times article, "In Wal-Mart's Home, Synagogue Signals Growth," gives a less tendentious account than Ms. Rosen's book. This article is unusual in attributing agency to Jews, who are more typically treated by the press as purely passive individuals who get pushed around by yokels.

Then the Wal-Mart Jews arrived.

Recruited from around the country as workers for Wal-Mart or one of its suppliers, hundreds of which have opened offices near the retailer's headquarters here, a growing number of Jewish families have become increasingly vocal proponents of religious neutrality in the county. They have asked school principals to rename Christmas vacation as winter break (many have) and lobbied the mayor's office to put a menorah on the town square (it did).

Wal-Mart has transformed small towns across America, but perhaps its greatest impact has been on Bentonville, where the migration of executives from cities like New York, Boston and Atlanta has turned this sedate rural community into a teeming mini-metropolis populated by Hindus, Muslims and Jews.

It is the Jews of Benton County, however, who have asserted themselves most. Two years ago, they opened the county's first synagogue and, ever since, its roughly 100 members have become eager spokesmen and women for a religion that remains a mystery to most people here.

When the synagogue celebrated its first bar mitzvah, the boy's father — Scott Winchester, whose company sells propane tanks to Wal-Mart — invited two local radio D.J.'s, who broadcast the event across the county, even though, by their own admission, they had only a vague idea of what a bar mitzvah was.

"Jesus was Jewish," one D.J. noted in a dispatch from the reception at a local hotel. The other remarked, "I love Seinfeld."

Shortly after he moved to the area, Tom Douglass, a member of the synagogue who works in Wal-Mart's logistics department, made a presentation about Hanukkah to his son's kindergarten class. The lesson, complete with an explanation of how to play with a spinning dreidel and compete for chocolate coins, imported from New York, proved so popular that the school's librarian taped it for future classes....

Not everyone is ordering the knishes, but Christians throughout Benton County are slowly learning the complexities of Jewish life. Gary Compton, the superintendent of schools in Bentonville and a member of a Methodist church in town, has learned not to schedule PTA meetings the night before Jewish holidays, which begin at sundown, and has encouraged the high school choir to incorporate Jewish songs into a largely Christian lineup.

"We need to get better at some things," he said. "You just don't go from being noninclusive to being inclusive overnight."

Surrounded by Christian neighbors, Bible study groups, 100-foot-tall crucifixes and free copies of the book "The Truth About Mary Magdalene" left in the seating area of the Bentonville IHOP, the Jews of Benton County say they have become more observant in — and protective of — their faith than ever before.

Marcy Winchester, the mother of the synagogue's first bar mitzvah, said, "You have to try harder to be Jewish down here."...

There were, for example, Betsy and Marc Rosen, who moved to Benton County from Chicago in 2000 after Mr. Rosen was offered a job in Wal-Mart's technology department. The family did not attend a synagogue in Chicago because, Mrs. Rosen said, "you didn't need a synagogue to have a Jewish identity." There were Jewish neighbors, Jewish friends, Jewish family.

But not in Bentonville, where her daughter brought home from day care a picture of Jesus to color in. Suddenly, a synagogue did not seem like a luxury anymore, but a necessity to preserve her family's Jewish heritage.

In summary, some of Bentonville's Jews, most of them not very religious, highly assimilated corporate staffers from Suburban America, upon finding themselves in a heavily Christian region, rediscover and aggressively assert their Jewishness, using their advantages in media-savviness and argumentativeness to shake things up locally. Keep in mind that the number of Jews in Benton County, population 203,107, remains tiny: the synagogue had about 100 members in 2006, so the various changes that the polite locals graciously made in their customs at the insistence of Bentonville's Jews benefit only a tiny fraction of the community.

My guess would be that most Jews in Bentonville would prefer not to inconvenience the locals by making a big stink about how Christmas vacation is called "Christmas vacation" instead of "Winter break." (Here's Tom Piatak's 2006 VDARE.com article on Christmas I mean Winter in Bentonville.)

But there's no conceptual vocabulary in 21st Century America anymore for talking sense to the handful who get a kick, like George Costanza's father on Festivus, out of "the airing of grievances." They wouldn't schedule a PTA meeting on Christmas Eve, would they? Why should the majority rule? The minority should be equal to the majority!

In the 21st Century, Jewish Studies is perhaps the most understudied field of knowledge relative to its importance in understanding how the contemporary world works, and Bentonville provides an interesting case study of tendencies under the mildest of circumstances.

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

Amnesty Kabuki Theatre: April Fools Day Countdown

From the Washington Post,
A broad cross-section of House Democrats unveiled a new comprehensive immigration reform bill Tuesday, laying down an early marker for what they hope will be a major 2010 debate.

More than 80 co-sponsors have already signed on to the legislation, which is authored by Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) and titled the Comprehensive Immigration Reform for America's Security and Prosperity Act of 2009, or "CIR ASAP" for short. The bill includes provisions strengthening border security, creating a streamlined employment verification system, altering the visa program to promote the reunification of families and establishing a commission to recommend changes to the current system of H-1B and H-2B visas for skilled workers.

The measure, a summary of which is available here (PDF), also contains an "earned legalization program" for current undocumented workers, giving them the chance to get legal status if they pay a $500 fine, pass a criminal background check and show that they have made valuable contributions to American society "through employment, education, military service or other volunteer/community service."

Gutierrez and several members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus as well as the Congressional Black Caucus and other groups jammed into an overstuffed, sweltering House committee room Tuesday to release the bill and demand action.

Standing before a cadre of activists chanting "Si, se puede," and a group of children wearing shirts that said "future voter," Gutierrez said that years of hard work and negotiations on the issue had brought them "to this bill and to this meeting, which marks the final push toward comprehensive immigration reform."

All through 2009, the Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats have repeatedly announced that they are about to begin work on amnesty legislation Real Soon Now. Their unstated goal is to freeze unemployed illegal immigrants in place in the U.S. through April 1, 2010, the date of the Census, by implying that if they go back to their warm homelands this winter to live with their families, they'll miss out on the coming Amnesty.

But, from the point of view of people like Rep. Gutierrez, the key date is April Fool's Day, when the Census will count every warm body it finds in the U.S., citizen or legal immigrant or illegal immigrant equally. The more unemployed illegal immigrants stick it out through the winter before going home, the more power professional Hispanics like Gutierrez will enjoy under the Voting Rights Act, the bigger the explicit and implicit quotas for Hispanics, and so forth and so on.

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

Tiger's HGH doctor?

The New York Times has a long story on a high-end Canadian sports doctor who got arrested crossing the border with Human Growth Hormone. Tiger Woods is one of his patients.

End of story? No, it's a little more complicated. The doc says that the HGH is for himself, and, judging by the 50 year old's picture, he looks like he does partake. He says, you don't need an expensive Canadian doctor to fly in to to provide you with HGH.

Which is true. I know two identical twin businessmen. One has prescriptions for HGH and ritalin, the other is into a sort of Christian Zen spirituality, and the difference in personal affect is striking: one is very energizing to be around, the other is very calming to talk to.

Instead, says the Canadian doc, what he provides athletes is his special "platelet" treatment, and he was just called in by Tiger's agent to help him recover faster from his knee surgery.

But, it looks like the topic that I raised in May: Is Tiger a Juicer? is now in play in the media.

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

December 14, 2009

Oscar Prediction

I certainly haven't seen all the 2009 movies (and I never will), but I'll predict that the Best Director Oscar won't go to James Cameron for "Avatar," but to his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow for "The Hurt Locker," making her the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director.

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

December 13, 2009

"English Lessons"

My March 23, 2009 article in The American Conservative on the first decade after the demise of mandatory bilingual education California was never fully on line, so here's the whole thing.
I was visiting a typical Southern California public high school, one in which the student body is close to three-fourths Latino, when it dawned on me that virtually all the kids’ hallway conversations with friends were conducted in English. Indeed, most of the students spoke English without an accent. Well, to be pedantic, they had teen accents -- it’s practically impossible for a high school girl to roll her eyes and exclaim “That is so gay” without sounding a little like Moon Unit Zappa in Valley Girl -- but only a minority of the Hispanic students had Spanish accents.

Nor, I recalled, had I heard teachers lecturing in anything but English. I found out later that a couple of percent of all the classes were conducted in Spanish for the children of parents who requested it, but few parents did.

I realized then that I had barely heard any public discussion in half a decade about the once contentious topic of bilingual education. Yet, it had been promoted adamantly by America’s educational and political establishment from 1968, when Congress passed the first of five Bilingual Education Acts, through the 1990s.

I went home and read up on bilingual education. I quickly discovered the topic of educating “Limited English Proficient” (LEP) students is buried under a bureaucratic jargon that appears to consist of literal translations from some distant language unknown to Earthlings. For example, when an LEP child masters English, he becomes a Reclassified-Fluent English Proficient (R-FEP). His R-FEP status is tabulated at the federal Office of English Language Acquisition, Language Enhancement, and Academic Achievement for Limited-English-Proficient Students (OELALEAALEPS).

Eventually, I discovered that bilingual education is by no means dead. Yet, it has clearly lost the momentum, the sense of inevitability, it long enjoyed.

That means that America may have dodged a bullet, a long-term threat to our national unity, because nothing divides a country more than multiple languages. In contrast, a shared language enables shared sentiments.

In the three decades when America’s great and good actively promoted Spanish in the public schools, giving official blessing to a second language, it seemed plausible that our country was inflicting upon itself something that could turn into another Quebec a generation or two down the road. Or worse, a Kosovo, which was plunged into war in the 1990s by decades of unassimilated illegal immigration from Albania into a Serbian part of the republic formerly known as Yugoslavia.

And, it struck me, the man who did more to head off the dangers posed by bilingual education is a friend of mine. In fact, he’s my boss: The American Conservative’s publisher Ron Unz.

Okay, I’m biased. But a decade after the 61-39 landslide victory of Ron’s initiative, Proposition 227, put bilingual education on the ropes in California, America’s forerunner state, it’s time to review how the seemingly predestined triumph of bilingualism was knocked off track.

The history of educational plans in America is notoriously littered with broken dreams.

Unintended consequences predominate because the reigning dogma of the education industry—the intellectual equality of all students—is wrong. This obdurate refusal on the part of everybody who is anybody in the education business to admit publicly the manifold implications of some kids being smarter than others makes it difficult to get anything done in the real world.

Thus, for example, George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy got together in 2001 to pass the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, which mandates that by the 2013-2014 school year, every student in America’s public schools score on reading and math tests at the “proficient” level (roughly, a B+). This, I can assure you, won’t happen.

Yet, the terrible irony about the decades wasted pushing bilingual education is that the conventional wisdom that no child need be left behind is much truer for young children learning English than for anything else in American education. That’s why the otherwise often zany NCLB has helped consolidate the progress initiated by Unz’s pro-English initiatives.

The most popular public rationale for bilingual education -- that the children of immigrants need to be taught in their native language so that they don’t fall behind academically while they spend many years learning English -- sounds plausible as long as you forget how remarkably good small children are at learning a new language.

Most little kids can pick up a language simply by being immersed in it. But if they wait until high school, it becomes a struggle that many will never overcome.

Linguist Noam Chomsky’s 1950s research showed that very young people have an innate language-learning ability. As he noted by email, "There is no dispute about the fact that pre-puberty (in fact, much earlier) children have unusual facility in acquiring new languages.”

Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, author of the bestseller The Language Instinct, told me, "When it comes to learning a second language, the younger the better…. People who began to learn English at six ended up on average more proficient than those who began at seven, and so on." Pinker pointed to the famously thick Bavarian accent of Henry Kissinger, who arrived in America at age fifteen. In contrast, his one-year younger brother acquired a nearly perfect American accent. (Walter Kissinger, though, has suggested another reason for the fraternal accent difference: “Because I am the Kissinger who listens.”)

Judith Rich Harris, author of the The Nurture Assumption, pointed out, "The problem with bilingual education is that these programs create peer groups of children who do not speak English well. They don't have to learn English in order to communicate with the children they want to play with, and they don't have to learn English in order to be accepted by their classmates. So, their motivation to learn English is no different from their motivation to learn the state capitals or the multiplication tables.”

The hidden reason why bilingual education supporters wanted to drag out the learning of English over many years was to keep Latinos from ever being fully adept in English. The chief donor to the campaign against Proposition 227, for example, was the Republican Italian-American billionaire Jerry Perenchio, then-owner of the giant Spanish-language Univision television network. As Perenchio evidently reasoned, bilingual educations keeps Hispanics chained to Univision.

Similarly, Hispanic political leaders want American-born Latinos to go through life marked by Spanish accents so that they will feel isolated from the American majority … and thus in the need of Hispanic political leaders.

Bilingual education was always widely disliked by the public (a national Zogby poll in 1998 found that 84% of Republicans and 72% of Democrats favored requiring schools to use English immersion), but the bilingual industry succeeded in branding it a civil rights issue, intimidating most would-be opponents.

Unz, a theoretical physicist (who had studied under Stephen Hawking) turned Silicon Valley entrepreneur, had debuted in politics at age 32 by challenging incumbent California governor Pete Wilson for the GOP nomination in 1994. Wilson beat him (and went on to win re-election by 15 points), but Unz garnered 34 percent of the vote. Since Ron may have the least stereotypically political personality I’ve ever come across, I’m still amazed by that percentage, which seems as unlikely as would, say, Babe Ruth having won a bronze medal at the 1928 Winter Olympics in Men’s Figure Skating.

With the help of immigrant parents tired of having their children not taught English, Unz’s English for the Children organization put on the ballot Proposition 227, which made one year of “sheltered English immersion” instruction the default. (Bilingual instruction was only allowed upon a parent-initiated request.) It passed easily, and even won 37 percent of Latinos and 57 percent of Asians.

Unz’s Proposition 203 campaign in Arizona in 2000 showed this was no fluke. With 29 months to learn from their California mistakes, the best that bilingual advocates could come up with for the rematch was to ignore Spanish and campaign against Prop. 203’s impact on the right of Navajos and Hopis to school their children in their own languages. Native Americans didn't decide to come to the U.S.; instead, the U.S. had decided to come to the Native Americans. This clever tactic cut Prop. 203’s 50-point lead in half, but it still wound up winning 63-37.

Ron’s initiatives were a rare example in recent years of an assertion of cultural self-confidence by the American majority. Proposition 227 meant that California schools were finally told to sell to immigrants what the world wants to buy: the English language.

Immigrant parents understand that English is the language of money, the lingua franca of the global economy. (In Switzerland, for instance, 24% of the work force speaks English on the job). And their children have reacted positively to schools asserting the primacy of English. After all, English is the world’s coolest language, the mother tongue of blockbuster movies.

When the No Child Left Behind bill came up for debate in Congress shortly after Unz’s victory in Arizona, proponents of bilingual education were in disarray. Not a single member of the Hispanic Caucus voted against dumping the 1994 Bilingual Education Act (which had called for "developing the English skills ... and to the extent possible, the native-language skills" of LEP students) in favor of a new English Language Acquisition Act as part of NCLB, in which all references to “bilingual education” and “bilingualism” as goals were stricken.

The 2001 NCLB legislation wound up muddled. For example, the law directs that by 2014 every student in the Limited English Proficient category be proficient in English, which isn’t even theoretically possible. Still, the NCLB’s obsession with testing for progress in math and “English language arts” achievement (and penalizing school districts that fall behind) had the salutary effect of making long, drawn-out bilingual programs an expensive luxury.

At least some of the government funding incentives have finally started pointing vaguely in the right direction. Consider Garfield H.S., the 99 percent Latino high school in East L.A., once home to famed calculus teacher Jaime Escalante (played by Edward James Olmos in the 1988 film “Stand and Deliver”). Back in the 2002-2003 school year, before the effects of NCLB were fully felt, exactly zero students were reclassified as having become proficient in English. In other words, the Garfield administration wasn’t in the mood to see students learn English. In 2006-2007, though, 155 students were reclassified. This is out of 1862 “English Learners,” so progress isn’t quick. Still, you can at least say it’s up ∞ percent.

[A student, no matter how accent-free in English, can't get reclassifed as no longer being an English Learner until he achieves at least a Basic score on a scale running from Far Below Basic to Advanced on the California Standards Test in all subjects, including math. So, lots of students remain locked into classification as English Learners not because they haven't learned English but because they are below average in intelligence -- a problem, unlike not speaking English, that schools can't do all that much about.]

This de-emphasis on bilingual education hasn’t solved all problems. The test score gaps between ethnic groups remain substantial, and the huge number of illegal immigrants means that many communities are de facto Spanish-speaking.

At least, though, in the decade since Prop. 227, the country has slowly been cutting back on the schools using the taxpayers’ money to make America’s dual language problem even worse.

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

Ingram edges Gerhart for Heisman

From the NYT:
Ingram received 1,304 total votes in the closest contest in the award’s 75-year history, beating Stanford running back Toby Gerhart by 28 points.

To win, Gerhart needed to have scored five touchdowns instead of just four against Cal in Stanford's 34-28 late season loss.

Personally, I would have voted for the the big Cameroonian lineman Suh, but it was fun following Gerhart from earlier than almost everybody else this season, and acting like I actually knew something about college football.

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

December 11, 2009

Who's to blame: Clinton or Bush?



From Dr. Housing Bubble, a graph relevant to the problem of allocating blame for the Housing Bubble/Crash between the Clinton and Bush Administrations.

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

More Reviews of Books I Haven't Read: The Book of Basketball

Here's another book I skimmed at the book store:

The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy by ESPN columnist Bill Simmons (with a Foreword by Malcolm Gladwell)

Simmons' huge book is highly informative, entertaining, and impressive. It would make an excellent Christmas gift for any intelligent pro basketball fan on your list over the age of 16 or so.

The problem with giving books as gifts is that they come with an unwritten inscription: Read the Whole Thing. This book, on the other hand, is so long that nobody could possibly feel expected to read the whole thing, and your recipient can open the book anywhere and be amused and intrigued immediately.

I only skimmed through the central section on ranking the top 96 players in pro history. Simmons is notoriously biased in favor of his Boston Celtics, so they do very well in his rankings, as do their historic archrivals, the Los Angeles Lakers (e.g., Simmons ranks Jerry West ahead of his coeval Oscar Robertson, who had more spectacular statistics in his prime). He rationalizes his Celtics bias by putting a heavy emphasis on winning playoff series (or losing playoffs to the Celtics, which is excusable because they are the Celtics). That's reasonably justified in basketball, where one player makes up 20% of his team on the floor at any point, more so than in baseball or football.

Simmons' book appear to be modeled on Bill James' Historical Baseball Abstracts, where there are various organizing devices, but plenty of room for digressions. For example, his list of top players pauses to include a list of the most genetically unique players in NBA history, including the Avatar-like Manute Bol, the 7'6" Dinka herdsman:
... of all the players I watched walk by me in the Boston Garden tunnel, only four stood out: Michael Jordan (because he was so overwhelmingly famous), David Robinson (we'll get to why later), Larry Bird (ditto) and Manute. He was breathtaking in person, and not just because of his surreal height and skin so dark that it made him seem purple. * When Manute emerged from the tunnel, we'd stop talking and gawk with our mouths agape, like everyone watching the aliens emerge from the Close Encounters UFO. It was incredible. I would have bought a ticket just to watch Manute Bol stroll by me.

------------------
* Our country is so uptight that this point might be considered racist. Here's my defense: Manute Bol was f****** purple. I don't know what else to tell you.

Unlike James, however, Simmons isn't a statistical innovator. He mostly just uses the traditional box score statistics, but he knows them all and deploys them in a very context-sensitive fashion. For example, he includes my single favorite utterly obscure statistic, the number of steals a 35-year-old Jerry West had in 1973-1974: 81. And Simmons explains exactly why it's an important number.
What bugs me about [how West is underrated] is that -- the same way Oscar was helped by a triple-double infatuation historically -- West's legacy was wounded by the lack of a three-point line, the lack of All-Defense teams (didn't start until 1969) and that they didn't keep track of steals until 1973-1974. *

---------------
* West only played two months of the '74 season before blowing out his knee (ending his career), but in those 31 games, he had 81 steals. And that was at the tail end of his basketball life! Imagine West's resume if he was averaging 3 steals a game, made 3 three's a game, shot 40-plus from three and made 13 first-team All Defenses.

Now that Youtube has come along, Simmons can watch highlight reels of all the players before his time. In baseball, that's not all that helpful because it's hard to see much difference over time. From ancient newsreels of the 1924 World Series, you can't really tell whether Walter Johnson's fastball was 95 mph or 85 mph. (I'd guess the latter, but who knows?) So, Bill James' default in looking at historic baseball statistics analysis is to measure players against the league average, and assume only a modest increase in the quality of the league average over the decades.

But, with basketball, you can easily see on Youtube how much the game improved in a fairly short period of time.

For example, here's a two-minute video about a 1962 Lakers-Celtics NBA Finals game in which Elgin Baylor scored 61 points. Now I had always grown up hearing about how Elgin Baylor had invented the modern aerial game of basketball but he doesn't seem to be getting terribly far off the ground in these clips. At least Baylor is getting farther off the ground than the Celtics who are, theoretically, supposed to be playing defense against him, none of whom seem to have heard of the concepts of double-teaming or denying the ball to the guy who is on his way to scoring 61 on you in the Finals. And the Celtics were, by far, the greatest team of that era, so I don't want to even think about what a Pistons-Royals game in November would have been like back then.

Similarly, video explains the discrepancy between Earl the Pearl Monroe's legend and his merely pretty good statistics. Monroe had a unique spinning style that was exhilarating to watch, but wasn't all that effective because pirouetting around on the ground didn't get him that much closer to the basket. In contrast, the young Michael Jordan's style of going up and at the basket was brutally direct and effective.

Anyway, Simmons knows infinitely more about basketball than I do, so read his book.

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

Reviews of Books I Didn't Read: SuperFreakonomics

I've been skimming a few books at the book store. Here's one:
SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.

It must annoy U. of Chicago economist Levitt -- in a fuming all the way to the bank kinda way -- that he gets compared to Malcolm Gladwell a lot, when anybody just flipping idly through their respective books ought to be able to notice that Levitt is a lot smarter.

My impression after a half hour is that SuperFreakonomics is very competently done. I didn't see anything implausible, in contrast to the way you can't read Gladwell for 3 minutes without stumbling upon something that sounds just plain wrong. (SuperFreakonomics elicited much angry response because it expresses some skepticism about Climate Change dogma, but I don't know anything about climate, so I skipped those parts.)

Really, the appropriate comparison isn't Levitt to Gladwell, it's Dubner to Gladwell. Dubner is better with words than numbers, so he found somebody who is better with numbers than with words to team up with. Dubner doesn't make anywhere near as much money as Gladwell does winging it alone, but Dubner's not making himself into a laughing stock either.

Yet, from my idiosyncratic point of view, SuperFreakonomics seemed a little dull. I learned, for example, that prostitution offers a convenient way for lazy women to earn a living. But I didn't see anything on topics of much interest to me. For example, Levitt's work with Roland Fryer isn't mentioned in the index.

Now that I think about it, that might be intentional. Consider it from Levitt's point of view. He's a rational, risk-averse economist. He knows his book will make a lot of money no matter what he puts in it. So, maybe Levitt figured, "What do I need Heckman and Sailer punching holes in my reputation for, anyway? I'll just stay away from subjects where they know more than I do, and we'll all be happy."

In contrast, Gladwell has a natural born kamikaze pilot's instinct for lashing back at criticism from exactly the wrong people: "Pinker? Murray? Posner? Sailer? Bring 'em on!"

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

December 10, 2009

Subprime: The Sequel

From today's LA Times, more Tarantinoesque events in LA's expensive suburbs:
Authorities declared the death of a prominent L.A. attorney shot in the head outside his Rolling Hills Estates home a homicide and said they were now scrutinizing his casework for potential clues.

Detectives have already interviewed Jeffrey Tidus' family and business partners at Baute & Tidus, a downtown Los Angeles law firm specializing in civil litigation, to help them identify any cases or incidents that could have spurred conflict.

Los Angeles County sheriff's Lt. Dave Dolson said that the motive for the Monday evening shooting remained unclear and that his investigators had not ruled out anything from a targeted killing to an unplanned confrontation [which happens all the time in Palos Verde].

"At this point we are certain it is a murder," Dolson said.

Tidus, 53, represented many high-profile corporate clients, including New Century Financial, a subprime lender that saw three former officers charged this week with securities fraud. Tidus and his wife also own several toy stores.

The toy store business is notoriously cut-throat, especially this time of year, so I'm sure that's the real story here.

Jill Stewart of the LA Weekly has a more vivid description:
Rumors gripped the Los Angeles legal community today after the shocking fatal shooting Monday, in posh Rolling Hills Estates, of attorney Jeffrey A. Tidus. He was killed just hours after top executives at a firm Tidus represented, New Century Financial, were accused of fraud by federal regulators.

The bizarre timing has powerful attorneys in Los Angeles buzzing about why and how Tidus died. ...

Tidus was discovered by his wife about 8:30 pm on Monday, after she heard a single gunshot. She found him slumped behind a Prius outside their home in the 4600 block of Sugarhill Drive in Rolling Hills Estates, a leafy suburb of Los Angeles in which violent crime is rare and horse trails crisscross the pricey estates and neighborhoods.

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

Climate Change v. Population Change

An excerpt from my VDARE.com column from last week:
Shortly after President Obama returns to Washington from Norway with his Nobel Prize, he's going to roar off to Denmark in his personal 747 jumbo jet to raise awareness about the need to cut carbon emissions to forestall Climate Change—the cause formerly known as “Global Warming”.

But while the President gears up his campaign for Climate Change awareness in Denmark, a Population Change anti-awareness campaign has long been in full swing in America.

The acid test of the sincerity of Climate Change activists: do they publicly demand a U.S immigration moratorium to keep carbon emissions from increasing?

A few environmentalists pass this test proudly. For example, Californians for Population Stabilization have started a new ad campaign:
“The campaign recognizes immigration as the number one factor driving U.S. population growth and makes the point that when immigrants settle in the U.S. their energy use quickly becomes Americanized. As a result, immigrants’ carbon emissions skyrocket. The result is a quadrupling of immigrants’ carbon footprint compared to the amount of carbon emissions they produced in their home countries.”

Mexicans don’t illegally immigrate to avoid starvation. The average life expectancy in Mexico is over 76 years. Instead, the major motivations for sneaking into America include: the hope of owning a big truck or SUV and to have more kids than you could afford to have in your own country. The current total fertility rate in Mexico is 2.34 babies per woman per lifetime—versus 3.7 babies among immigrant Latinas in California.

But, alas, the vast majority of those who claim that carbon emissions is the overwhelming issue of our age fail this test of good faith flatly.

On the other hand, their dishonesty doesn’t guarantee that they aren’t right about carbon and global warming. Global warming true believers seem, on the whole, like the kind of people who would be more likely to be right about something for bad reasons than for good reasons.

As you may have noticed from the above, I normally don’t have much to say about climate change. I’m sort of an agnostic.

I know enough about statistics to realize how much effort would be required for me to develop an opinion worth expressing. Nor is it obvious that, even if I invested years of work, I would be able to add much value to the discussion.

After all, both sides in the debate over anthropogenic global warming debate are lavishly funded. ...

Yet why are those Climate Change insights so seldom applied to the question of Population Change?

Read the whole thing there and comment upon it below.

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

Heather Mac Donald on "The Bilingual Ban that Worked"

Heather Mac Donald's article in City Journal details the success of Ron Unz's 1998 Proposition 227 in California that largely replaced bilingual education with English immersion:

And the transformation in the classroom has to be seen to be believed. It is extraordinary, for example, to observe elementary school teachers in Santa Ana, once a bastion of bilingual education, talking to their young Hispanic students exclusively in English about the Great Wall of China. It is just as extraordinary to see those students eagerly raising their hands to read English workbooks aloud in class. The main sign that the students are not native English speakers is an occasional reminder about past-tense formation or the pronunciation of word endings, but plenty of English-only speakers in the state need such assistance, too. Schools are not universally following the time frame set out in Prop. 227: a year of separate instruction in English followed by integration with English-only students. In some schools, English learners remain cloistered for a longer period. But regardless of classroom composition, English learners are being taught “overwhelmingly in English,” which is the most important goal of 227.

Self-esteem seems fine. “I didn’t know how to speak English in first grade,” says a husky fourth-grade boy at Adams Elementary School in Santa Ana. “I just figured out at the end of the year and talked all English.” The boy’s classmates, who are sitting next to him at a picnic table under a pepper tree for lunch, jostle to get in on the interview. They are fluent in schoolyard insults. “He’s a special ed!” one boy says of another. “I am not a special ed, you liar!” retorts the target. The fifth-grade girls at a table nearby complain that the boys are lazy. A slender girl has recently arrived from Mexico. Her translator for that day, a tiny blue-eyed girl named Lily, drapes her arm lovingly around the new immigrant and will sit next to her in all their classes, explaining what the teacher is saying. The pair and their fellow pupils amble back into the school after lunch, any signs of psychological distress well concealed. No one reports unhappiness at speaking English in class; on the contrary, they brag that it’s easy.

Hispanic kids want to learn how to speak English. English is currently a much cooler language than Spanish in terms of pop culture. And their parents know their kids can make more money as adults if they speak English. Little kids are language sponges, so once public institutions swung behind promoting English, the kids hopped right on board.

Unz's initiative is a rare example in modern American life of a public policy problem being solved. Not surprisingly, it has therefore disappeared down the memory hole. There are no Ken Burns documentaries on PBS to celebrate his accomplishment.

Heather considers at some length the murky methodological issues of measuring the impact of this profound change on scores on written tests. One problem is that there are now a lot of kids in California schools who speak English fluently, but who can't get reclassified that they have learned English because they can't pass the written test of English fluency. Why not? Because these kids who speak English but can't pass a test of written English can't pass any written tests, including math tests. They're not very bright.

But, at least the schools taught them how to speak English, which they were actively avoiding doing, at considerable incremental expense, before Prop. 227.

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

Smart fraction theory

A new study vindicates La Griffe du Lion's "smart fraction theory:"

The impact of smart fractions, cognitive ability of politicians and average competence of peoples on social development

Heiner Rindermann, Michael Sailer and James Thompson

Abstract: Smart fraction theory supposes that gifted and talented persons are especially relevant for societal development. Using results for the 95th percentile from TIMSS 1995-2007, PISA 2000-2006 and PIRLS 2001-2006 we calculated an ability sum value (N=90 countries) for the upper level group (equivalent to a within country IQ-threshold of 125 or a student assessment score of 667) and compared its influence with the mean ability and the 5th percentile ability on wealth (GDP), patent rates, Nobel Prizes, numbers of scientists, political variables (government effectiveness, democracy, rule of law, political liberty), HIV, AIDS and homicide. Additionally, using information on school and professional education, we estimated the cognitive competence of political leaders in N=90 countries. Results of correlations, regression and path analyses generally show a larger impact of the smart fractions’ ability on positively valued outcomes than of the mean result or the 5th percentile fraction. The influence of the 5th percentile fraction on HIV, AIDS and homicide, however, was stronger. The intelligence of politicians was less important, a longitudinal crosslagged analysis could show a positive influence on the cognitive development of nations.

House subcommittee votes for college football playoff

The AP reports:
A House subcommittee approved legislation Wednesday aimed at forcing college football to switch to a playoff system to determine its national champion, over the objections of some lawmakers who said Congress has meatier targets to tackle. "What can we say - it's December and the BCS is in chaos again," said the bill's sponsor, Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, the top Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. He said the BCS system is unfair and won't change unless prompted by Congress.

Glad to see Texas Republicans have their priorities straight! (Barton represents part of Fort Worth, where undefeated TCU, which was shut out of the BCS national title game, is located, but not Austin, where undefeated Texas, which is in the title game, is located.)

Isn't college football, an extremely expensive zero sum endeavor, interesting enough without a playoff system? What could be a better use of rich Red Staters' philanthropy than constructing ever more state-of-the-art weight rooms?

I also have an aesthetic objection to a national championship playoff. National championships are great for less viscerally appealing sports. But football's appeal is that it's the game closest to war. My hazy impression is that English villages started playing some ancestor of football (and its cousin sports) about the time they stopped making war on each other. Instead of besieging your neighbors and sacking their town, you challenged them to a mass melee game involving propelling a pigskin, as a way for young men to enjoy some of the fun of war without too much maiming, raping, and pillaging.

The traditional model of college football that emerged by the mid-20th Century reflected a rather 18th Century balance-of-power version of war, in which teams engaged in set-piece battles with traditional regional rivals, and the ones who did best this year were invited to an intersectional exhibition game on New Year's Day. But, like in an 18th Century European war, there was no single overwhelming winner and everybody else a loser. Half the teams finished their seasons with a victory. Everybody had something to look back upon gladly and something to regret.

So, while a playoff system makes perfect sense for NCAA badminton or whatever, increasing the emphasis on Complete Conquest and Final Victory in our national war game strikes me as distastefully Napoleonic. Of course, lots of people liked Napoleon. For a century, he was the most popular delusionary identity in lunatic asylums.

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

The movie Quentin Tarantino was born to make

When life turns into a Quentin Tarantino movie, it's time for Quentin Tarantino to make a movie about a life.

I know that Tarantino hates making movies about anything other than other movies, but this Orange County Lebanese car salesman with a 3rd grade education turned subprime lender turned Hollywood producer was probably never living in the real world. He likely saw his whole life as straight out of Starsky & Hutch.

C'mon, Quentin, nobody cares about your crush on Goebbels. Make a movie about a SoCal hustler who uses the Grift of the Century, subprime, to turn himself, briefly, into a mogul. It's a natural for you.

The Orange County Register reports:
Armed Men Invade Subprime Lender's Home

NEWPORT BEACH – Police arrested three men Tuesday night on suspicion of breaking into the Newport Coast mansion of a prominent former subprime lender.

Three people at the home of Daniel Sadek [to be played by Vince Vaughn or Eli Roth] suffered head injuries during the home invasion, and one of them was taken to the hospital for treatment. ...

Four armed men forced their way into a home at 3 Longboat, off Pelican Ridge, while another waited outside, Newport Beach police said.

The house was the scene of a fire two weeks ago. A Mercedes Benz CLK 550 parked in the driveway caught fire at 3 a.m. Thanksgiving morning and singed the house and garage before firefighters knocked it down. ...

The men arrested were identified as Mickael Andre Hastings [Samuel L. Jackson], 36, of Los Angeles, Antoine Bashiri Boyd [Djimon Hounsou], 31, of Los Angeles, and Peter Joseph Paturzo [Mickey Rourke], 44, of Mission Viejo.

Sadek made and lost a fortune in the subprime mortgage business. Quick Loan Funding, which he founded in 2002, wrote about $4 billion in subprime mortgages before it collapsed in 2007.

He declared bankruptcy in Nevada two months ago.

With his earnings from Quick Loan, Sadek lived a high-roller lifestyle. He bought the Newport Coast mansion, a fleet of exotic cars and crashed some of them in a movie he financed called "Redline." He bought a condo in Las Vegas where he became a high roller at the blackjack tables. Court records list cash advances taken out on his credit card at casinos from Hawaiian Gardens to Lebanon [where he was born].

In court filings, he acknowledges gambling in the multi-million dollar range.

Police did not immediately know whether the men who paid Sadek a visit Tuesday night were collecting on a debt or were there to rob. They were taking cash and jewelry, Lt. Craig Fox of the Newport Beach Police Department said. ...

In September, Vanity Fair ranked Sadek No. 86 on a list of institutions and people most to blame for the nation's economic problems. The magazine called him "Predator Zero in the subprime-mortgage game," and quoted a competitor saying he "would have written a loan to 'an insolvent arsonist.'"

In May 2007, the Register reported that Sadek's company, Quick Loan, had been accused of predatory lending, deceptive underwriting and fraud in at least eight lawsuits. ...

Since the housing market collapse, Sadek's finances have fallen apart. Over the last two years, he's been sued in Superior Court a dozen times; Quick Loan Funding was sued 13 times locally in its last two years. ...

Court documents filed by his attorney in July said that Sadek was under medical care for an "extreme panic disorder" and regularly taking "substantial doses" of the anti-anxiety drug Xanax. At the time, Wells Fargo was trying to get Sadek to give a deposition in a lawsuit over his use of some accounts; but the court filing claimed he would have to take so much medication to make the trip to Temecula for the deposition that it might impair his concentration and memory.

Sadek got into home loans in 2002 after seeing how many mortgage brokers came into Fletcher Jones Motorcars, where he worked as a salesman.

Although his education had stopped at third grade, Sadek paid the $250 for a state lender license and started selling home loans through his company, Quick Loan Funding.

Over the next five years, Quick Loan wrote $3.8 billion in mortgages, lending money fast - and often on onerous terms - to people with shaky credit.

Boosted by high fees and interest rates - high even for the subprime industry - Quick Loan's after-tax profits averaged 29 percent of revenue. In 2005, Quick Loan's biggest year, profit topped $37 million.

Sadek used the earnings to live the high life, buying a fleet of Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches, dating a soap opera starlet and producing movies. He cultivated a rebel image, wearing a beard and hair to his shoulders, dressing in T-shirts and flip-flops, eschewing the typical mortgage banker's pinstripes.

His movie "Redline" starred his then-girlfriend, Nadia Bjorlin [Fergie], comedian Eddie Griffin [Eddie Griffin], and his fleet of Ferraris, Porsches and Saleen S7 exotic cars. [Eddie famously crashed one of his Enzo Ferrari's during a publicity event.] It cost him $31 million to make, distribute and publicize, he once told the Register, but only earned $8.2 million in ticket sales worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo. Sadek was sued in federal court by the Cartoon Network for failing to pay $845,000 in advertising for the film.

He flew private jets to Las Vegas, where he gambled with high rollers at the Bellagio Resort.

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

December 9, 2009

Splitting Texas into five states

Here is the opening of my new VDARE.com column on how thinking through the pros and cons of one of the odder bits of political lore can help explain more general phenomena:
Arguably, the 1845 treaty of annexation gave the new state of Texas the right to split into five states.

With modern Texas providing relatively effective government without high taxes or high land prices, the state has attracted a population (now approaching 25 million) huge enough to justify being divided up into five smaller states.

Here’s a fanciful map by Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com of what a split-up Texas might look like politically, using Texas’s 254 counties as building blocks.

(Silver’s state names are all wrong, of course. Texans would never agree to any names for new states that didn’t include the word “Texas” in them—such as South Texas, West Texas, North Texas, East Texas, and Central Texas.)

Divvying up Texas may seem at present irrelevant—none are prouder than Texans of the humongousness of their state. But thinking through the implications of this scenario is illuminating.


Read the whole thing there and comment upon it here.

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

One California problem that might just solve itself

From the LA Times:
Animal shelters seeing glut of Chihuahuas
The once-fashionable little canines are replacing pit bulls as the breed most often left at shelters.

... And at the Peninsula Humane Society in San Mateo, "the number of Chihuahuas has eclipsed pit bulls as the most common breed" ...

Chihuahuas, pit bulls. Pit bulls, Chihuahuas ... It seems like there ought to be a solution to the dog pound overcrowding problem in there somewhere.

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

Super Jocks and Marriage: The Dynastic Urge

Many have asked why famous athletes bother to get married if they aren't going to respect their vows about forsaking all others. Some, like Wilt Chamberlain, never bothered.

Obviously, there are a lot of different reasons, but I think one that might get overlooked in modern America is the old-fashioned dynastic urge that highly successful men are especially prone to. Think of Sean Connery waxing dynastic near the end of The Man Who Would Be King. That this woman is the one worthy of commingling her genes with mine and bearing the sons who will carry forward my name, bringing satisfaction to my old age as their sons have done for Archie Manning and Ken Griffey Sr. Also, I probably won't be around that much while my kids are growing up, but she looks like she can handle it on her own.

The same kind of thinking helps explain the semi-pro skankiness of Tiger's list. Many have asked why Tiger wasn't cheating with somebody more of a rival to his wife. But there's a certain logic to aiming low to keep the peace around the house: Jamie Grubbs isn't a plausible threat to Elin Nordegren Woods to displace her as a second Mrs. Woods, while, say, Zooey Deschanel would be. (Tiger's problem is that the low quality got lost in the high quantity.)

Marrying a formidable woman can be expensive when it comes to the divorce settlement, however.

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

All the really cool crimes in LA are committed by ...

guys from somewhere roughly between St. Petersburg and Kabul. From the LA Times, we have the story of Pavel Valkovich, who hired a second hit man to behead the first hit man he'd hired:
A Sherman Oaks man who pleaded guilty earlier this year to a bank fraud charge has admitted to federal authorities that he sought to have a witness in the case killed in a drive-by shooting, officials said Wednesday.

Pavel Valkovich, 28, pleaded guilty Tuesday to one count of solicitation of murder for offering to pay $10,000 to arrange for the slaying of a man who was cooperating with authorities in the fraud case against him. Valkovich was involved in a scheme in which he and others used stolen personal identifying information to transfer funds from victims' bank accounts to PayPal accounts he and his cohorts could access, prosecutors contend.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Jennifer L Williams said Valkovich had initially pleaded not guilty in the case and was seeking to have the witness killed to stop him from testifying. When Valkovich later learned that the person had already begun cooperating, he changed his plea to guilty. But he continued with his plan to have the witness killed, Williams said. Only his motive had changed -- to revenge.

Valkovich approached a fellow inmate in the Federal Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles and asked that he arrange for someone to kill the witness with a gun equipped with a silencer, according to prosecutors. Unfortunately for Valkovich, the witness in the fraud case wasn't the only one who ended up cooperating with authorities.

The inmate he approached as a go-between told prosecutors about the plot and agreed to testify against Valkovich.

Valkovich was charged with the crime and transferred to another jail. Apparently unfazed, he approached another inmate, this time about arranging a pair of killings, prosecutors contend. He wanted the original informant dead, as well as the first guy who was supposed to have arranged for his killing. He was willing to pay $40,000 for the job and provided the inmate, who was slated to be released soon, with information about the targets' appearance, residences and cars. He also had a special request, according to prosecutors: He wanted the first inmate he had approached not only killed, but beheaded.

I wonder if it's the same Pavel Valkovich who got into an altercation with Jennifer Lopez's bodyguards six years ago in Miami Beach?

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

The Jordan/Woods Access Media Model

Michael Fitzpatrick at the Bleacher Report explains what it's like to be a sports reporter covering the Most Famous Athlete in America, and why coverage is so erratic, going from hero worship for years to More than We Need to Know in a couple of days.

(By the way, the one Chicago Bulls game I attended in my life, I sat in the press box, which is the least fun place to watch your home team play: no cheering in the press box! One thing I noticed is that the median accredited sports reporter is poor: 100% acrylic fiber sweater poor. Of course, most of these poor bastards were representing the Decatur News-Gazette or whatever, but it's not like the subsequent coming of the Internet has made journalism a better career choice.)

Considering that he has looked to Michael Jordan as a mentor for most of his career, it’s no surprise that Tiger Woods has followed the "Michael Jordan Model" in dealing with the media.

It’s also no surprise that the media—sports and gossip writers alike—have now turned on Woods in a New York minute, just as they did with Jordan. [After Jordan's 2009 Hall of Fame speech?]

The Jordan/Woods strategy on how to deal with the media is intricate, complex and is slowly implemented over a series of years ... .

First and foremost, they establish their dominance.

The moment they walk into the media center, or step in front of a group of reporters, the immediately turn on the "I’m better than you and I’m only here because the NBA/PGA Tour is making me be here. In my mind, the journalism profession is worthless and my intelligence is head and shoulders above yours."

They will look down on the media.

They will insert subtle comments intended to put down the journalism profession.

They will embarrass reporters in front of their peers if they ask intrusive or difficult questions, in the hopes that the thought of further embarrassment might stop them from asking similar questions in the future.

They will also create a set of rules:

1) I’ll let you hang with me as long as you never print anything detrimental to my image.

2) The moment you print something bad about me or any of my friends or close associates, you are cut off for good. You will be forever banished from the ‘circle of trust’, and you will spend the rest of your days receiving nothing more than vague, detail-less answers.

3) One person straying from the Jordan/Woods rules can ruin it for the rest. For example, if one single reporter writes an embarrassing or negative article about them, they may completely cut off the media for a few days.

The ultimate principle: If Woods or Jordan ever feel as if they are losing control over what journalists print or say, they will punish them, and possibly even cut hem off for good. ...

In Michael Leahy's book "When Nothing Else Matter" about Jordan's final comeback with the Washington Wizards, he referred to those journalists who played by Jordan's rules as the "Jordan Guys".

They got to hang with Jordan, talk to him about personal issues, about his family, his friends, etc., but, professionally speaking it didn't matter much because they were often too afraid to print anything they might have uncovered anyway.

... So, when the opportunity does arise where they can print the absolute truth and offer their real opinions of you without any real threat of being "punished"—because every single reporter in the country is doing the same thing—they are going to remember all those times Jordan/Woods looked at them like they were fools.

They are going to remember all of those little comments that implied how Jordan/Woods thought journalists were sleazy and worthless.

They are going to remember all those times they were embarrassed by Jordan/Woods in front of their peers.

They are going to remember all those times that their stories suffered because Jordan/Woods were "punishing" the media by not speaking to them for days on end.

They are going to remember that this whole unspoken arrangement was never really an arrangement of equals.

And they are going to remember what it felt like all those years to be treated like a peasant by men who thought they were better than them just because they could hit a little white ball, are throw a round orange ball through a steel hoop.

Personally, I think there is something to be said for hypocrisy. Michael Jordan is not a nice guy. But, he's taken pains over the years to arrange his private affairs so that they stayed relatively private to anyone who didn't understand how to read between the lines, which, of course, includes most of the little kids who idolized him. For example, I hadn't even realized until I looked it up yesterday that Mrs. Jordan had finally pulled the plug on their marriage, walking away with $182 million in 2006.

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

"Crazy Heart"

My review of next week's movie "Crazy Heart" is up at Taki's Magazine. It's getting a lot of buzz as the Jeff-Bridges-Finally-Wins-His-Oscar movie.

Read it there and comment upon it below.

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

Tiger's Mentor

What are we up to with Tiger now? Nine? Ten?

Clearly, these aren't great romances; a lot of them are pros, or at least dedicated amateurs.

The more interesting question is: Who taught Tiger how this complicated Las Vegas-centric system works?

John Katsilometes reports in the Las Vegas Sun:

For Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, the whole tawdry package is an early holiday gift.

And the man at the center is Tiger Claus.

“This is great for the city because they spell the city’s name right, L-A-S V-E-G-A-S,” Goodman [a former mob lawyer] said at the ceremonial lighting of the official Las Vegas Christmas tree on Fremont Street. “It’s great for the city to have its name out there, as long as they spell it right. Las Vegas, Nevada.”

Goodman was speaking to the Tiger Woods conundrum, in which the golfing legend has been linked to as many as 10 women (11, if you count his wife, Elin Nordegren), including at least three with ties to Las Vegas.

The original suspected mistress, former Tao nightclub hostess and Turnberry Place condominium owner Rachel Uchitel, has denied an affair with Woods. Uchitel has retained raptor-like attorney Gloria Allred to represent her legally and, we suspect, spiritually. Others with Vegas links are Vegas cocktail server Janine Grubbs and Light Group VIP hostess Kalika Moaquin, who has worked at the Bank and Bare Pool Lounge. As my man URL, Ubiquitous Robin Leach, has been energetically blogging and tweeting, Woods has been known to chip around such Vegas fun spots as the The Mansion at MGM Grand, Bellagio and, we suspect, Binion’s.

Asked if this all doesn’t fly in the face of our city’s promissory slogan, “What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas,” Goodman shook his head.

“No, it’s a great reminder that you can have fun in Las Vegas,” Goodman said. “Adult fun, that it’s a playground for adults. It’s salacious, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

Let’s see. “There’s Nothing Wrong With That” could be an effective ad campaign. Sort of has a nice ring to it … but not a wedding ring.


I don't know who coached Tiger on how the system works, but I can guess, and I'll give you a two letter hint:

MJ

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

December 8, 2009

Is David Gelbaum broke?

Don't recognize the name? Keep reading.

From the New York Times:
Civil Liberties Group Loses $20 Million Donor

A longtime anonymous donor to the American Civil Liberties Union has withdrawn his annual gift of more than $20 million, punching a 25 percent hole in its annual operating budget and forcing cutbacks in operations.

Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the A.C.L.U., acknowledged in a written statement that a “family” had told the organization in September that it could not make its annual gifts, at least for next year. “This family, that has sought to protect its privacy by arranging its gifts anonymously, notified us last month that due to market conditions it will be unable to make its expected sizable donations of over $20 million,” Mr. Romero said.

A.C.L.U. board members, who insisted on anonymity because the loss of the gift was reported in an executive session of their meeting, identified the donor as David Gelbaum, who made a fortune as a hedge fund manager and is now better known as a major investor in clean technology. ...

Mr. Gelbaum began contributing $50,000 or so annually to the A.C.L.U. in the early 1980s and kept increasing his gifts, to $22.5 million in 2008, board members said.

The only condition he placed on the gifts was that he remain anonymous, so only a handful of people at the A.C.L.U. knew he was the donor. ... Mr. Romero did not reveal Mr. Gelbaum’s name, describing him only as “a donor,” board members said

Still, it is hard to keep secrets with a board of more than 80 members, most of whom report to state affiliates. “As soon as he started telling us, anyone who had a laptop with them was busy Googling” and figured out who the donor was, a national board member said.

Mr. Romero told the board that the donor had also stopped giving to three “sister organizations,” a phrase board members said he had used in the past to describe other groups with which the A.C.L.U. has collaborated, like the Sierra Club.

Mr. Gelbaum took a rare turn in the spotlight earlier this decade when environmental activists said he was behind the Sierra Club’s decision to adopt a neutral stance on immigration. Some people believe immigration has aggravated environmental problems.

He had given the organization a total of $101.5 million, according to The Los Angeles Times, which wrote what is perhaps the only major profile of him, in 2004. In the article, he is quoted as saying that he told Carl Pope, the Sierra Club’s executive director, in 1994 or 1995 “that if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me.”

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

The Age of Sailer: A Quantitative Analysis

Reading about the lady (below) who decided to apply contemporary upper middle class methods of improvement to her marriage got me to wondering about whether all the private tutoring and summer skill-building camps that 21st Century upper middle class people subject their kids to actually work at all.

Compare the engulfing level of instruction that young tennis players, for example, are given these days to the casual upbringing of tennis players of the past. When Pancho Gonzales was 12 in 1940 in East LA, he wanted a bicycle for his birthday, but his parents couldn't afford one so they gave him a tennis racket instead. That, as far as I can tell, was the full extent of his parents' contribution to his tennis career. Little Pancho wandered over to the public courts next to the LA Coliseum and started playing tennis. He never took a lesson, but was the number one pro in the world in the second half of the 1950s and was a major force in tennis from the 1940s into the 1970s.

In contrast, the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, grew up in Compton, not far from East LA, but their hyperambitious father moved them to West Palm Beach so they could attend a famous tennis academy. (When the Williams sisters started on the pro circuit, their favorite music was Alternative Rock because that's what the rich white kids at their tennis academy listened to.)

But it's hard to tell how much better are today's star tennis players, who are largely raised at tennis academies, than Pancho Gonzales was. As 1920s golfer Bobby Jones told a fan in the 1940s who was raving to him about how Ben Hogan was the best golfer ever, "All you can be is the best of your time."

There are probably fewer Mexican-American star athletes today than in the days of Gonzales and Lee Trevino, which suggests that the contemporary white intensive parenting style is paying off, but that's awfully circumstantial evidence.

I have found one fairly objective metric: NFL field goal kicking percentages. Back in the old days, football coaches would ask for volunteers for placekicker, see who looked best, give him a few tips, and maybe lend him a couple of extra footballs to practice with.

Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, NFL teams hired soccer players from all over the world like Garo Yepremian (who, why am I surprised? has a motivational speaking business). But, since then, the job has almost 100% been monopolized by white middle class Americans, typically ones who played AYSO soccer. These days, ambitious parents send their sons to placekicking camps or hire prominent kicking tutors such as Chris Sailer to give their sons private instruction.

Are football kickers still getting better in the Age of Sailer (Chris, not Steve)? Does this modern parenting system of chauffeuring and expensive tutelage actually work?

Yes, at least in this case, it appears it does. Contemporary NFL field goal kickers are much better than old ones.

Here are field goal percentages in the NFL every tenth year from 1958 through 2008, according to Pro-Football-Reference.com:


FG Made % Chg Missed % Chg
1958 46.9%
53.1%
1968 55.6% 18.6% 44.4% -16.4%
1978 63.1% 13.5% 36.9% -16.9%
1988 71.7% 13.6% 28.3% -23.3%
1998 79.6% 11.0% 20.4% -27.9%
2008 84.5% 6.2% 15.5% -24.0%

At first glance, it looks like the rate of improvement is slowing down, but that's mostly because the field goal percentage was so high by 2008 (84.5%) that kickers were running into diminishing returns on improvement. If you flip the calculation upside down and focus on decrease in percentage missed, 1999-2008 was the second best decade ever in terms of relative improvement, behind only the previous decade.

From 50 yards or farther, 28 NFL teams made 28 out of 70 attempts in 1988. Two decades later, 32 NFL teams made 66 out of 104 fifty+ yard attempts. (Long field goals are dangerous to attempt because they can be run back, and the field goal kicking unit is heavier and slower than the kicking off unit, so a field goal that comes up short can turn into a back-breaking 109 yard field goal return for a touchdown.)

For a test of pure technique, not a test of strength, NFL kickers missed only 0.5% of Points-After-Touchdown (19 yard kicks) in 2008, versus 1.7% in 1998, and about 5% several decades ago.

So, yes, in this example, at least, the white middle class method of intensive/expensive childrearing seems to be resulting in better performance.

By the way, isn't it about time that the NFL made kicking a field goal more of an accomplishment? What these guys are doing 84.5% of the time is pretty amazing -- go out and stand on a high school football field 40 yards from the goal posts and notice how few degrees of your horizon they take up. Then realize that high school goal posts are 23'4" wide, while college and NFL goal posts are only 18'6" wide.

Right now, though, being an NFL kicker is a terrible job, like being a long-snapper, because you only get noticed when you mess up. Unless there's a foot of snow on the field, nobody is going to remember the name of the guy who makes the game winning 40 yard field goal, because it's so expected these days. But they will remember the bum who missed.

The NFL could either make the goal posts even narrower, or it could just move them back behind the back line of the end zone a few yards to make each field goal attempt longer. For example, they could just rotate the existing goal posts 180 degrees so that the offset is pointing in the other direction, adding about four yards to the distance.