Amnesty: Our betters are back at it

The Washington Post reports:

A bipartisan task force will recommend today that the United States overhaul its immigration system in response to national security concerns, saying that the country should end strict quotas on work-based immigrant visas to maintain its scientific, technological and military edge.

"The continued failure to devise and implement a sound and sustainable immigration policy threatens to weaken America's economy, to jeopardize its diplomacy, and to imperil its national security," concluded an independent Council on Foreign Relations panel, co-chaired by former Florida governor Jeb Bush (R) and former Clinton White House chief of staff Thomas V. "Mack" McLarty III....

The panel also recommended "earned legalization, not amnesty" for an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants now living in the United States, requiring those who wish to stay to work, pay taxes, learn English, pass background checks, pay fines and wait their turn behind legal immigrants. ...

Edward Alden, the task force's director and a CFR fellow, said the involvement of Bush, a prominent national Republican and the brother of former president George W. Bush, and McLarty, a Democrat and senior international fellow at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, was intended to create political space for centrists in both parties.

"Politically what this group shows is a consensus is possible on this issue," Alden said. "There is a commitment on all sides of the political debate to much tougher and more consistent enforcement . . . The trade-off on the other side is, you've got to have a flexible enough system in which it will be possible to adjust" employer-based immigration based on economic conditions, he said.

Also serving on the 19-member panel were Eliseo Medina, international executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union; Raul H. Yzaguirre past president and chief executive officer of the National Council of La Raza; Robert C. Bonner, former head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Drug Enforcement Administration; and Richard D. Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's ethics and religious liberty commission.

These kind of efforts to slide amnesty by us by assembling an Establishment Republican and Democrat coalition of the Great and the Good always remind me of Guy Crouchback's reaction to the Hitler-Stalin Pact at the beginning of Evelyn Waugh's WWII trilogy, Sword of Honor:

Just seven days earlier he had opened his morning newspaper on the headlines announcing the Russian-German alliance. News that shook the politicians and young poets of a dozen capital cities brought deep peace to one English heart . ... But, now, splendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle.

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

President disses Vice President

From the LA Times:

President Obama, issuing an unusual clarification of his vice president's words, said today that his administration has "absolutely not" given its blessing for an Israeli attack on Iran.

Obama said that though Israel has the right to defend itself, U.S. officials have emphasized the need to avoid "major conflict in the Middle East."

Vice President Joe Biden created a stir Sunday by suggesting that the United States would stand aside if the Israelis wanted to attack.

"Israel can determine for itself -- it's a sovereign nation -- what's in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran and anyone else," Biden said on ABC's "This Week."

Biden's words set off a debate over whether the White House was hardening its line on Iran in the wake of Tehran's postelection crackdown, or whether Biden had simply committed a gaffe. ...

Obama's comment was not the first time that administration officials have had to clarify Biden comments that varied from the official line. In April, White House officials struggled to explain that they were not recommending the public avoid airplanes and subways, even though Biden said that he would not want family members to use them because of the threat of swine flu.

Like I've been saying since last August, Biden is "kind of a bozo," which is fine in a Senator or blogger or whatever, but not so fine in a Vice President, especially when he's talking foreign policy, because foreigners might not realize he's just Old Joe Biden running off at the mouth again, but might take what he says seriously on the assumption that he's, like, you know, the Vice President of the United States of America. (As a commenter points out, Biden was brought on board specifically to impart foreign policy gravitas to the newcomer from the South Side of Chicago.)

Biden is just a veteran local hack politician -- he represented in Delaware less than half as many people as a Los Angeles County Supervisor represents, not one of whom is the second coming of George Kennan, either -- elevated to the Vice Presidency by the infallible wisdom of Obama.

But, who cares about the actual Vice President's performance? Now, back to wall-to-wall coverage of the former Vice Presidential candidate!

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

Barry Is Back

Barry Ritholtz, television commentator and Big Picture blogger, replies in the Comments, continuing our discussion on whether or not "Diversity was a major factor in the mortgage meltdown:"

We live in very different worlds.

Mine is data and numbers and statistics and facts. In the investment world, by how well your theories of what is really going translates into an investable theme; you are judged by performance, not rhetoric.

Your world is all soft theory and suppositions and squishy reasoning and hard-to-prove causation. In my world, it would be described as "not actionable in the investment realm."

I am happy to visit, but the commute is a bitch.

Funny, though, but I've presented 95%+ plus of the "data and numbers and statistics and facts" in this discussion. Barry had only one set of numbers, and when I pointed out how they were too narrowly specified and were generally irrelevant, well, he had shot his wad in the data department and was forced first to make concessions, then to go back to this kind of bluster.

By the way, Barry, did your "investment world" do a really bang-up job of assessing the value of all those mortgages issued in, say, Riverside-San Bernardino in 2005? (Numbers that were readily downloadable from the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act database by October 2006, well before the crash?) Maybe, just maybe, your peers were missing a piece of the puzzle intellectually that would have enabled them to make sense of the numbers?

Barry, it's not your fault that you wrote a whole book about the Crash without thinking about the Diversity angle. Nobody thinks about the downsides of Diveristy. It's just not done in polite society You don't have to get your ego all tied up like this in trying to bluster your way out of admitting you made a mistake. Everybody made the same mistake as you.

The interesting legal question is whether it's against the law to use my insights in offering investment advice. It would almost certainly be disastrous for a mortgage lender to be caught in discovery of a discrimination lawsuit exchanging emails about the higher rates of defaults among Non-Asian Minorities. But is it illegal for an investment adviser to use ethnic demographics in, say, advising clients which states' bonds to avoid?

Certainly, the most sensible thing for an investment adviser like Barry to do would be to incorporate my ideas in his decision-making while loudly claiming in public to not believe them.

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

We're in Deep State

Matt Taibbi has a Rolling Stone article on Goldman Sachs:

After the oil bubble collapsed last fall, there was no new bubble to keep things humming — this time, the money seems to be really gone, like worldwide-depression gone. So the financial safari has moved elsewhere, and the big game in the hunt has become the only remaining pool of dumb, unguarded capital left to feed upon: taxpayer money. Here, in the biggest bailout in history, is where Goldman Sachs really started to flex its muscle. ...

The collective message of all of this — the AIG bailout, the swift approval for its bank-holding conversion, the TARP funds — is that when it comes to Goldman Sachs, there isn't a free market at all. The government might let other players on the market die, but it simply will not allow Goldman to fail under any circumstances. Its edge in the market has suddenly become an open declaration of supreme privilege. "In the past it was an implicit advantage," says Simon Johnson, an economics professor at MIT and former official at the International Monetary Fund, who compares the bailout to the crony capitalism he has seen in Third World countries. "Now it's more of an explicit advantage." ...

Fast-forward to today. It's early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs — its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign — sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs.

Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm's co-head of finance.) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion- dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an "environmental plan," called cap-and-trade. The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that's been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.

Meanwhile, Barry Ritholtz has a scanned copy of Michael Lewis's Vanity Fair article on AIG's Financial Products division, The Man who Crashed the World. (By the way, Barry, we haven't heard from you lately and we miss you around here. C'mon back)

Lewis makes Joe Cassano sound like the pointy-haired boss on Dilbert.

The basic story is one of predatory securitizing. It took Cassano over a year to realize that the mortgage-backed securities he was insuring had shifted in composition between 2003 and 2005 from only slightly subprime to heavily subprime.

[AIG executive Gene Park] suspected Joe Cassano didn't understand what he had done, but even so Park was shocked by the magnitude of the misunderstanding: these piles of consumer loans were now 95 percent U.S. subprime mortgages. Park then conducted a little survey, asking the people around A.I.G. F.P. most directly involved in insuring them how much subprime was in them. He asked Gary Gorton, a Yale professor who had helped build the model Cassano used to price the credit-default swaps. Gorton guessed that the piles were no more than 10 percent subprime. he asked a risk analyst in London, who guessed 20 percent. ...

Still, Cassano agreed to meet with all the big Wall Street firms and discuss the logic of their deals ... Cassano set out on a series of meetings with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and the rest -- all of whom argued unlikely it was for housing prices to fall all at once [across the country.] "They all said the same thing" ... (The lone exception, he said, was Goldman Sachs. ... who said: Between you and me, you're right. These things are going to blow up.) The A.I.G. F.P. executives present were shocked by how little actual thought or analysis seemed to underpin the subprime-mortgage machine: it was simply a bet that U.S. home prices would never fall.

But how did this logic about the reliability of MBSs ever make sense even in the abstract? As it turned out, housing prices didn't go down in large parts of the country, at least not until after the Crash. Before that, they only fell in parts of the country where they had gone up the most, i.e., California. (Also, Greater Detroit, but who cares if a house drops from $65k to $12k? It never amounted to much in the first place.) But California by itself was enough, due to high home prices, to crash the national economy. Add in Florida, Arizona, and Nevada, and there goes the world. So, who cares if home prices are stable in Dallas and Charlotte if they are plummeting in San Bernardino, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Miami?

Greed is the whole point of Wall Street, but the big question is: Where was Fear? The Greed was based on the increasing Quantity of the population, which should drive up demand for homes, but Fear over the Quality of the population of new home buyers was simply not part of the mental universe of sophisticates.

It still isn't.

Cassano finally admitted this was nuts in 2006, but he didn't try to get out of previous bets on subprimes, he just stopped taking new ones. But, after AIG got out of the game, the investment banks turned out to be willing to hold subprime MBSs unhedged:

The big Wall Street firms solved the problem by taking the risk themselves. The hundreds of billions of dollars in subprime losses suffered by Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and the others were hundreds of billions in losses that might otherwise have been suffered by AIG F.P. Unwilling to take the risk of subprime mortgage bonds in 2004 and 2005 [or, less willing than AIG was], the Wall Street firms swallowed the risk in 2006 and 2007. ... A.I.G. F.P. wasn't an aberration; what happened at A.I.G. F.P. could have happened anywhere on Wall Street ... and did.

When the world finally woke up in the summer of 2007,

The subsequent race by big Wall street banks to obtain billions in collater from A.I.G. was an upmarket version of a run on the bank. Goldman Sachs was the first to the door, with shockingly low prices for subprime-mortgage bonds ... A.I.G. couldn't afford to pay Goldman off in March 2008, but that was O.K. The U.S. Treasury, led by the former head of Goldman Sachs, Hank Paulson, agreed to make good on A.I.G.'s gambling debts. One hundred cents on the dollar.

So, basically, the smart boys at Goldman knew it was nuts, but they figured that no matter who was in the White House, they'd have it all rigged that they would get bailed out. And the not-smart boys at the other Wall Street firms figured that if the smart boys at Goldman weren't worried, why should they be worried? (Other than that they weren't part of the Deep State like Goldman was ...)

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

Sarah Palin

The unmentionable issue regarding Palin is that a 45 year old woman with five children hasn’t had time to think through all the national and international issues a President needs to have thought about. Her five children have taken up too much of her attention. In contrast, Margaret Thatcher once told my wife that she was glad she had had fraternal twins so she could get having babies over and done with and get back to work.

If Palin were a man, there’d be a wife to deal with the kids, so the Governor could get back to thinking about about non-family, non-local topics.

This is all totally obvious, but nobody is supposed to mention stuff like this anymore.

By the way, 67-year-old genius Vice-President Joe Biden got off message on a talk show yesterday and basically told Israel it's okay to bomb Iran.

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

Easy offers

Prominent man of letters Walter Kirn writes an essay in the New York Times Magazine "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Aptitude," in which he explains (to the extent that "explain" can be used to characterize his effort):

1. He wants you to know that he got very high SAT scores, which helped get him into Princeton
2. But he's not all stuck up over it; in fact, he says he's really not that smart
3. Women of Color worked much harder at Princeton than he did
4. So, Sonia Sotomayor was right about Ricci
5. Now that he's long graduated from Princeton, he sort of thinks that his place should have been given to "another Sotomayor."
6. Walter Kirn, a frequent contributor, is the author, most recently, of “Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever.”

It's always fun to learn about people on Wikipedia. One thing you learn is that it's easier to theoretically give up in the name of diversity privileges you got in the past than to give up in actuality privileges you are getting in the present. Wikipedia reports that Kirn has two academic jobs that no doubt he could have foresworn so that "another Sotomayor" could have had them instead of him, but, for some reason, he didn't:

In addition to teaching nonfiction writing at the University of Montana, Kirn was the 2008-09 Vare Nonfiction Writer in Residence at the University of Chicago.

Kirn, who has published seven books (two of them have been filmed), appears to have had something going for himself besides just his SAT scores:

Kirn married Maggie McGuane, a model and the daughter of actress Margot Kidder and novelist Thomas McGuane, in 1995. Kirn was 32 at the time; McGuane was 19.

Margot Kidder, who played Lois Lane in the original "Superman," was one of the great beauties of the 1970s. She was married from 1975 to 1976 to the then-promising novelist Thomas McGuane during his "Captain Berserko" phase as a Hollywood screenwriter and director (92 in the Shade). Glamorous in-laws, but perhaps not the most stable ones: Kirn's ex-wife writes in the current Vogue:

Nor did I have role models of frugality to draw on: My mother, who raised me with both an excess of funds and socialist-leaning ideals [one of her mother's boyfriends was Pierre Trudeau], likes to joke that she considers wealth the way most view bacterial infections—to be gotten rid of, before it has a chance to grow.

Apparently, the Kirn-McGuane marriage didn't end all that amicably. The New York Observer reports:

Mr. [Jay Bright Lights Big City] McInerney was standing with Maggie McGuane, the daughter of acclaimed writer and legendary partier Thomas McGuane. ... Mr. McGuane’s daughter said her father considered his drinking days “invisible—never happened.” She used to be married to the writer Walter Kirn. “He used to be a big drinker, but now he’s a teetotaler, too,” said Ms. McGuane, who resides in Montana and works as a journalist. “If I had any message, it would be ‘Beware of the teetotaler.’ Because they’re absolutists, and they can be a little dangerous.”

It turns out that Kirn might be a little personally biased about the Ricci white firefighter case, since, judging by Jezebel's brusque summary of Maggie McGuane's 2007 article in Vogue about how her boyfriend's son is enlisting in the military, his ex-wife may have cuckolded him with a white firefighter:

The things you learn when you divorce your raging a****** literati husband to marry a firefighter! The story goes on to talk about how sometimes we forget that there are actually white people in the military with moms who take yoga and everything, and that firefighters don't necessarily think it's a stupid idea for their sons to enlist in the army which can be a BIG turn-off if you are a wealthy writerly type who is married to one. (Quote: "Our once fiery romance grew closer in temperature to Haagen-Dazs.") But then when Maggie's brawny new fireman husband watches his son go to Kentucky and thinks about maybe what it would be like if he replaced "Kentucky" with "Ramadi" he too realizes Operation Iraqi Freedom was a bad idea, just like she was telling him all along, and even starts to attend peace protests, so it's really okay that rich people don't have to shoulder as much of the burden as poor people because if poor people didn't lose so many lives in wars they wouldn't realize how f*****-up American foreign policy is, which rich people know about just by reading erudite publications such as Vogue.

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

WWTDD on the Michael Jackson Memorial

The Washington Post reports:

Like a modern-day Willy Wonka tale, more than 1.6 million fans waited to learn Sunday whether they were among the lucky few to win access to Michael Jackson's memorial service Tuesday at Staples Center.

On Sunday evening, fans around the world started posting Twitter messages about receiving tickets.

"OMG OMG OMG OMG i got tickets to the Michael Jackson memorial service!!!"

A few days ago, What Would Tyler Durden Do had a Kornbluthian suggestion about what to do with the lucky winners:

If LA wants to clean itself up, they should wait for all 30,000 people to show up and then just lock the doors. It’s not gonna be the team behind the Large Hadron Collider. It’s gonna be Billy Bush and Mary Hart and Joe Jackson and 800 lawyers and an army of delusional retards who the only thing they had to take time off from was clogging up 911 with calls about “that bitch is crazy, you needa arrest her ass.” They should lock the doors, and then it turns out [the fans had] actually climbed aboard a rocket.

And then just shoot that thing right into the Sun.

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

All-Star Break

With baseball's All-Star game coming up and Dominican star Manny Ramirez back from his 50 game suspension for steroids, here's the full-length version of my review from The American Conservative of the film "Sugar:"

“Sugar” is a critically acclaimed indie film about a 20-year-old Dominican pitcher’s minor league baseball season in Iowa. “Half Nelson,” the last collaboration of its married auteurs, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, brought Ryan Gosling a Best Actor nomination as a caring white liberal teacher in a Brooklyn slum school attended by African-Americans and Dominicans. Because numerous Dominican immigrants in New York City are failed minor leaguers, “Sugar” was a logical next film for the pair.

This movie is about a black Dominican, but it was very much made for white Americans. Indeed, “Sugar” exemplifies Sundance movies. It’s so sensitive, subtle, soft-spoken, averse to crowd-pleasing gimmicks, and generally beholden to the Stuff White People Like rulebook that few ballplayers of any nationality would pay to see it. Dodger slugger Manny Ramirez would snore so loudly through it that the audience couldn’t hear the soundtrack’s climactic song: Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah sung in Spanish.

Boden and Fleck wanted not a tale of triumph, but a statistically representative illustration of the typical Dominican athlete’s brief career. We see the young pitcher Sugar (portrayed by Algenis Perez Soto, an amateur second baseman who visibly can’t throw his character’s supposed 95 mph fastball) at the Kansas City organization’s training academy in the baseball-mad small city of San Pedro de Macorís (birthplace of 73 major league players, including Sammy Sosa). We follow him to spring training in Phoenix, then to Single A ball in Iowa. There, he’s lonely because there are no Spanish-speaking girls to chat up. After an injury, he’s demoted to the bullpen. His pride too wounded to return home, he quits the team and hops a bus to the South Bronx, where he pursues a career in illegal immigration.

Although most Dominicans (such as the American-born Alex Rodriguez) are some shade of beige, San Pedro ballplayers tend to be descended from black Jamaicans brought in to chop sugar cane. Last year, the 88 Dominicans made up almost 12 percent of major league rosters, despite the Dominican Republic having only three percent of America’s population. The average major league salary is approaching $3 million, so Dominican big leaguers earn around a quarter of a billion dollars annually.

The young ballplayer claims he’s nicknamed “Sugar” because he’s “so sweet with the ladies,” but Boden and Fleck want their film’s title to convey that by signing so many Dominican teens, baseball teams are, like sugar companies, neocolonialist exploiters. To the filmmakers, American ballclubs are to blame both for exploiting Dominicans and for not exploiting African Americans. Fleck complains that the black American share “has gone down to somewhere around 8 or 9 percent now, while the Dominican population in baseball has risen dramatically. Major League Baseball has taken money out of the inner cities … and flipped it into the Dominican Republic, where they can sign players much cheaper.” In the Sundance worldview, whatever happens is white people’s fault; blacks can’t make choices for themselves.

In reality, while MLB teams would love to employ verbally charismatic African Americans instead of tongue-tied Spanish speakers, black American kids these days mostly consider baseball boring. The Dominican Republic represents one of the few sizable concentrations of fast and strong youths of West African descent who find baseball more fascinating than basketball, soccer, or cricket. (Also, steroids can be bought legally without a prescription in Dominican pharmacies.)

The real scandal is that big league baseball has facilitated the illegal immigration of tens of thousands of washed-up uneducated jocks. MLB privatizes profits and socializes costs.

The irony in this trend of dramas striving to be “more documentary-like” is that the best documentaries are far more satisfyingly dramatic than “Sugar.” For example, Werner Herzog’s popular documentary “Grizzly Man” culminates with the annoying protagonist being devoured by a bear. Documentaries that follow somebody as ho-hum as Sugar are unlikely to get widely distributed or even finished.

Boden and Fleck are garnering critical kudos for refusing to create an intriguing plot. Yet, they didn’t have to redo “Rocky” They could have, say, made the kid not a 20-year-old prospect but an 18-year-old prodigy. Once the audience is rooting for him, they could then have yanked the rug out by revealing that the phenom’s agent, like previous Dominican talent hustlers (such as, ironically enough, their own technical advisor, ex-Cincinnati Red Jose Rijo), had defrauded the Americans: the sensation’s not 18, he’s really 22, with just a journeyman’s natural talent. Now, that would be a story.

Rated R for language, some sexuality, and brief drug use.

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

Why the Ricci case is the exception instead of the rule

Here's an old column I wrote in for Taki's Magazine on May 20, 2009, that I forgot to post a link to because I was traveling:

Following up on Jared Taylor’s article, the Ricci reverse discrimination lawsuit now before the Supreme Court is not one of those “hard cases” about which law students are warned. There is nothing anomalous about the discrimination against the New Haven firemen ...

Instead, what’s unusual is that we’re even hearing about the victimization of these unprotected majorities.

I suspect that’s largely because Frank Ricci and his friends are firemen. Firefighters show up more than any other profession in prominent reverse discrimination suits, perhaps because they enjoy civil service protection, unions, and, most of all, public admiration.

In a culture that increasingly holds blue-collar workers in contempt, firemen are the exception to the rule. They risk their lives for you, and they don’t give you speeding tickets. As the cops in Joseph Wambaugh’s LAPD novels are always telling each other: If you really wanted people to like you, you should have been a fireman.

It’s worth exploring some of the more subtle game theory reasons why there is so little public outcry against discrimination against white males other than firefighters. Why is Ricci close to being the exception that proves the rule?

First, affirmative action targets marginal white males.

For example, although white guys who are already firemen have a fighting chance of staving off unfair treatment in promotions, white guys who just want to become firemen are discriminated against in hiring with impunity. ...

Cheating an already employed white fireman out of a promotion is dicey because he doesn’t go away. He’s still a fireman. So he hangs around, he complains, he organizes other white firemen to complain to their aldermen about why the politicians aren’t releasing the results, maybe he talks his sister-in-law’s cousin who is a file clerk in Personnel into Xeroxing the secret results of the test and leaking it to him. And then he hires a lawyer.

In contrast, cheating some random white guy off the street out of his lifelong dream of becoming a fireman is a piece of cake: “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” What can this marginal man do about his suspicions? Not much. He’s not connected.

Moreover, announcing that you are a victim of racial preferences is normally to admit you are marginal, that you would have only barely made the cut anyway. How uncool is that? [Notice that the New Haven plaintiffs were all the top scorers, because the entire test got ham-handedly thrown out. If the New Haven politicians had been subtler, more expert in their racial discriminating, they would have victimized just the marginal white scorers.]

Similarly, affirmative action, by definition, doesn’t impact those who made the cut. Consider Harvard students. While some freshmen may enter Harvard sore that affirmative action might have cost high school friends admission to Harvard, soon they have lots of swell new friends, who, unsurprisingly, are all Harvard students, unlike those losers they used to hang around with in high school who didn’t have what it takes to get into Harvard.

Hence, you don’t see a lot of solidarity in opposing affirmative action.

More

Read the whole thing there and comment upon it here.

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

Michael Jackson and Fred Astaire

It's not widely remembered today, but Fred Astaire was a sizable singing star in his day, who introduced such standards as "Night and Day," "Cheek to Cheek," "The Way You Look Tonight," "They Can't Take that Away from Me," "Something's Gotta Give," and even that noir classic "One for My Baby." Although he had a light voice, his perfect timing and professionalism were much appreciated by composers. Today, anthologies of Great American Songs that can't afford the rights to Frank Sinatra's recordings will often choose Astaire's 1952 re-recordings of his work with Oscar Peterson's quintet as the next best thing.

In other words, Astaire's talents were roughly similar to Michael Jackson's: great dancer, pretty good singer.

But, jeez, look at the difference in their careers and lives: Astaire lived to be 88, exemplified the concept of growing old gracefully in how he slowly wound down his show biz career, enjoyed a decorous private life devoted to his family and his grown-man hobbies (horseracing and golf), and left behind an enormous body of creative dance work in his movies. With Astaire, there's no single peak that overwhelms everything else.

Astaire didn't write songs, but Jackson, who couldn't play an instrument, wasn't particularly fertile of melodic invention, either: even "Billie Jean" succeeded because of an enormous amount of production effort -- it was mixed 91 times -- that went into making it sound minimalistically under-produced. Jackson would have benefited from the pre-Dylan assumption that singers didn't have to write their own music.

For Michael as a dancer, what to do we really have? The live "Billie Jean" on the Motown 25th Anniversay show, the "Beat It" video, and a few other peaks, but most everything else is overshadowed in the build-up to or let-down from 1983.

One of Jackson's career problems was that, unlike Astaire, he appeared in only one real feature-length musical movie, The Wiz. Our popular culture had largely lost its ability to make musical movies. In contrast, the lightweight musical comedies of the 1930s provided Astaire with an established genre, routine frameworks within which he could repeatedly exercise his genius without worrying too much about script, acting, the Meaning of It All, etc. The studio system took care of that kind of thing. (Berry Gordy modeled Motown on 1930s Hollywood studios, and had remarkable success that has never been surpassed, but the cult of authenticity makes that impossible to reproduce in pop music today above the teenybopper level.)

Musical comedy movies gave Astaire a reason to get up and put in a hard day's work doing something he knew how to do. He didn't wait around for inspiration to strike him; the inspiration would come during the drudgery. Astaire was by no means psychologically bullet-proof. He was insecure and used his inner nagging voice to push him to constantly revise and improve his dance sequences. But then get up the next day and start on the next one.

The more ambitious genre of musicals that Rodgers and Hammerstein introduced with Oklahoma in 1943 were a great leap forward aesthetically, but perhaps they began to introduce that note of megalomaniacal artistic ambition into American pop music -- notice how, say, Leonard Bernstein was permanently stuck by his inability to top West Side Story -- of which Jackson's later career was a sad exemplar.

Unlike Fred Astaire, Michael Jackson didn't have any kind of framework. Astaire was a craftsman who happened to be a genius. Jackson was a genius for about six months at age 25, and spent the rest of his life having people tell him he was a genius.

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

The American Media's Bias toward English-Speaking Foreigners

The Iranian election protests have apparently sputtered out, significantly faster than the Mexican election protests of 2006 that excited far less interest in the American press. Obviously, there are a lot of specific reasons for this disparity, but I think there's a general pattern emerging.

As English has become the world's dominant language, it has become easier for Americans to be influenced by foreigners who are fluent in English. For example, Americans follow political controversies in Iran by reading blogs by Iranians -- Iranians who like to write in English, of course, which is hardly a representative sample of Iranian opinion.

This means that the American press will tend to be biased toward political movements who represent the better educated, wealthier, more cosmopolitan, Internet-savvy, and more elitist elements in a foreign country (i.e., those likely to speak English well), while the American media will be less sympathetic toward parties comprised of the less educated, poorer, more xenophobic, offline, and more populist elements.

Thus, the American media was sympathetic toward Mousavi's complaints about vote-counting in Iran because because his supporters were good at communicating them to Americans, while the populist Ahmadinejad draws his support from uncool people who don't speak much English. In contrast, the complaints of Lopez-Obrador, the populist mayor of Mexico City, about vote-counting in Mexico were greeted with yawns in the U.S. press because his supporters are generally not very articulate in English, and his party's ideology is fairly anti-American and anti-globalist.

Being biased toward the better English speakers is not just a custom of convenience for the American media and the American government. There's a moral feeling as well that the better English speakers deserve to win because they are more like us. Of course, this is self-serving: promoting the triumph of English-proficient classes also promotes the global dominance of American media institutions.

This is hardly a new phenomenon, of course. FDR's Administration routinely overestimated Chiang Kai-shek's regime in part because it possessed a facade of charming English-speaking UCLA and Berkeley-educated officials, even though the real decisions were made in very Chinese ways that Washington never understood. Meanwhile, Mao's rebels had few English speakers, so FDR underestimated them.

Similarly, why did the U.S. side with Maliki's Iranian-aligned Shi-ites in Iraq, when it would have made more strategic sense to side with the anti-Iranian Iraqi nationalist Shi-ites of Muqtada al-Sadr? A big reason is that Maliki's gang, who had spent decades in Iran while their rivals were holed up in the slums of Iraq (such as Sadr City), were more cosmopolitan -- i.e., were better at speaking English.

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

Mr. Ritholtz replies: "They are cogent arguments ..."

In a new Comment, Barry Ritholtz, blogger (The Big Picture) and author of Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy, replies to a sampling of my articles on how "Diversity was a major factor in the mortgage meltdown:"

I think we are approaching this from two entirely different universes.

I am looking for cause and effect; I want to see data that supports or detracts from the proposition at hand. PROVE TO ME that X caused Y (including actual statistics).

Your proposal of Diversity causing the housing crash reads to me as a soft philosophical argument that is by definition unprovable -- and undisprovable.

At the very least, I see no proof in your writings. They are cogent arguments that leap from A to B to C -- but they lack the rigorous statistical evidence to demonstrate something convincingly to people who insist on hard data.

In my belief system, I use as few assumptions as possible. I try to avoid things that are unquantifiable. Statistical back testing is just on way to do that.

But even softer analyses such as war-gaming and alternative scenarios have to have some reasonable basis for proceeding. It cant be all assumptions, beliefs guesses and hunches.

This shows heartening progress in just a few days. Before he was exposed to my work, Mr. Ritholtz was denouncing and demonizing anybody who shared my views.

Here's a sample of what he wrote at the beginning of this week:

I’ve run out of patience with tired memes and discredited claims by fools and partisan.

The rhetoric of those pushing nonsense on the public in an attempt to confuse rather than illuminate — the phrase is “agnotology” – only serves to aid the lobbyists working on behalf of the Banks and Investment houses to maintain the status quo. ..

The nonsense rhetoric blogged about has no cost to those pushing these discredited memes ...

Now, having finally read my articles, he admits I offer "cogent arguments." He no longer seems to think he can prove them wrong, so he's insisting that I haven't proved them right.

He today argues, not incorrectly, "but they lack the rigorous statistical evidence to demonstrate something convincingly to people who insist on hard data."

Of course, that tends to be true of all historical writing. As the venerable historian Jacques Barzun wrote at age 93 in his summa, From Dawn to Decadence, in one of his 12 modest dictums summing up what he's learned during his career as a historian:

The historian does not isolate causes, which defy sorting out even in the natural world; he describes conditions that he judges relevant, adding occasionally an estimate of their relative strength.

Further, let me point out, that I'm not done yet collecting data. For example, we now know the subprime default rates by race for the state of Massachusetts. We now know, on a national level, the default rates by race for FHA loans in the 1990s. Eventually, somebody will apply the same laborious process to the Big One -- California -- and then we will be a lot farther along.

In summary, as Mr. Ritholtz more or less admits, my arguments, long ignored, distorted, or demonized, deserve a place at the table in any discussion attempting to discern the historical causes of the present unpleasantness.

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

"Who? Whom?" Part 418

As Justice Alito's concurring opinion in Ricci documented in amusing detail, Frank Ricci and colleagues were the victims of blatant racial discrimination by a black power broker and his allied white mayor in New Haven.

Stanford Law Professor Richard Thompson Ford says, that, well, equal protection of the laws isn't the point of civil rights legislation. Sure, the laws include a lot of colorblind rhetoric, but the whole point is to benefit blacks at the expense of whites, so it's a dirty trick for the Supreme Court to read the laws and the Constitution literally and apply them evenhandedly. He writes in Slate:

The plaintiffs in Ricci were undoubtedly sympathetic: hardworking public servants—17 of them white, one Hispanic—who expected that the exam they studied for and did well on would determine their eligibility for moving up the ranks. But their legal argument is the latest in a long-standing campaign to turn civil rights laws against themselves. There's a striking progression in the attacks on civil rights. In the early 1970s, affirmative action was widely considered to be a logical extension of civil rights principles: Even President Nixon—a man not known for his enlightened racial attitudes—supported it. But by the end of the decade, affirmative action was under attack as reverse discrimination. And now we see the next step in the march against civil rights with the part of federal civil rights law—Title VII—called "disparate impact" that prohibits employers from using promotional or hiring procedures that screen out minorities unless they can prove that the procedure is closely job-related.

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

Fixing the Supreme Court

That Justice Ginsburg's dissent in Ricci managed to get four out of nine votes points out major flaws in both American intellectual life and in the Supreme Court.

Some of what's wrong with the Supreme Court is structural. Justices used to drop dead of heart attacks before they aged too far into mental decline. By this point, lots of people have heard about the best solution: replace lifetime tenure with single 18 year terms, with the President getting to select two justices for each election he wins.

What nobody knows, as far as I know, is how to get there from here. How do you work out which Justice gets forced into retirement first to make room for new blood? This could be very hard to work out in a bipartisan manner. (If you have any technical suggestions for how the transition should be managed, please put them in the comments.)

Now that the Democrats have complete power in Congress and the White House, however, they can just go ahead an make this reform on their own. I can't imagine they would, though.

A more subtle defect in the Supreme Court is the lack of adult supervision. We still have the obsolete system of ailing Justices such as 76-year-old Ginsburg (cancer surgery in February) and extremely elderly Justices (Stevens is a ridiculous 89) being assisted solely by clerks who are largely in their late 20s: the senile being aided by the puerile.

Consider the futility of relying on clerks for a complicated topic like testing in the Ricci case. Do you think Justice Ginsburg's clerks were told the truth about testing when they were in law school? I don't care what your LSAT score is, to understand the reality behind Ricci, you have to do a lot of self-education and you have to learn about how the world really works. And that takes time. I moved to Chicago at age 23, and from then on I heard a lot about fireman and policeman testing, but it took me until my mid-30s to develop a mature understanding of the subject that wasn't just based on idealistic assumptions about how things should work. And I'm still figuring out things about fireman testing that make me say, like Huxley reading The Origin of Species, "How stupid of me not to have thought of that."

Occasionally, we see Justices instead hiring grown-up clerks with some experience of life (Justice Thomas recently hired a clerk who had already made partner at her law firm), but the salary is only around $65,000. (Supreme Court clerks get big signing bonuses from the private law firms that hire them when their year is up, but still ...)

What we need is a modest budget (say, $3 million per year across the 9 Justices) to allow each member of the Supreme Court to hire a mature Chief of Staff to manage the clerks, with, say, a three year term.

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

Ricci: When even the NYT Letters-to-the-Editor make sense

Traditionally, the New York Times has the world's worst Letters-to-the-Editor page, filled with credentialed but clueless poohbahs writing in to say how much they agree with the NYT's soporific editorials, but they were disappointed that the editorial didn't include some additional argument so dumb that not even the NYT Editorial board would fall for it.

It indicates just how badly the diversitarians got smoked intellectually on Ricci that even the NYT's Letters-to-the-Editor section (The Firefighters' Test: Flawed or Fair?) responding to the paper's editorial denouncing the New Haven test is pretty good.

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

Troy Patterson

I've been giving various Slate writers a hard time lately, so I want to say how much I enjoy the work of Slate's TV critic Troy Patterson.

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

More on Michael Jackson

Over in Taki's Magazine, I write:

The late Michael Jackson was a strange individual, but his various obsessions, such as weight loss, whitening his skin, and expensively designing his children, were hardly unique to him.

They are shared by more than few of his legion of female fans. To become a superstar, you have to embody some of the inner fixations of either the male or female publics. And in popular music in recent decades, the biggest names have had largely feminine audiences because male tastes have fragmented into multitudinous narrow genres, such as, say, Melodic Death Metal.

Read the whole thing there and comment on it here.

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

The Mortgage Meltdown and Pearl Harbor

Look, Sailer, why do you keep saying that we should keep in mind that Pearl Harbor got us into World War II? Lots of other countries got into World War II without Pearl Harbor happening to them. And even if Pearl Harbor never happened to us, we probably would have gotten into World War II eventually anyway. Therefore, you should shut up, and nobody should ever mention Pearl Harbor again.

Or:

C'mon, Sailer, why are you so evil as to mention the Wall Street Crash of 1929 when discussing the Great Depression? Lots of other countries were involved in the Great Depression. And even if there hadn't been a Wall Street Crash in 1929, the U.S. probably would have suffered in a Great Depression sooner or later anyway. Thus, logically, anybody who mentions the Wall Street Crash of 1929 should be hounded out of polite society.

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

Liberals to America: Hey, we were only kidding about "equal protection"

The Ricci reactions have made more evident that liberals are peeved that anybody takes seriously all that language in the civil rights laws about equal protection. In the liberal mind, the specific wording of the laws was just a sham to get them approved. The laws are really simply about "Who? Whom?" Thus, the idea of civil rights laws being used by the Supreme Court to protect the civil rights of white guys like Frank Ricci is an affront against all that is holy (i.e., civil rights laws).

Consider this entry, From Washingto to New Haven, the Rules They Are A-Changin', on the Washington Post's XX blog by Nicole Allan, the Slate intern/Yalie who coauthored with Emily Bazelon that long article in Slate entitled The Ladder.

The plaintiffs in the hotly contested affirmative action case Ricci v. DeStefano stood out among the crowd outside New Haven City Hall today. They wore dress blues and wide smiles or poker-faces that occasionally cracked into grins. They were, but for one, white, and they were celebrating their win in a 5-4 decision handed down by a sharply divided Supreme Court.

Mingling on the sidewalk before the conference, plaintiff Frank Ricci posed for photos with his family. Ben Vargas, the one Hispanic amongst the 18 plaintiffs, grinned beneath his sunglasses and crisp peaked cap. Attorney Karen Torre, surrounded by her clients and jokingly donning one of their caps, delivered a statement in boldly Obama-esque fashion: “We had the audacity of hope—that some court at some point would enforce the letter and spirit of the civil rights laws, accord to firefighters the recognition and respect that they deserve, and reject attempts to lower professional standards of competence for the sake of identity politics.”

It took some audacity indeed to invoke Obama in support of a lawsuit that called into question the country’s most significant civil rights statutes. ...

I kept thinking about the black firefighters I’ve been talking to over the past few weeks, none of whom I saw at the press conference. After decades and decades of lawsuits founded upon civil rights statutes, they have started to get ahead. Blacks and Hispanics, who make up about 60 percent of New Haven’s population, are now more or less proportionally represented within the rank and file of the city’s fire department. But their efforts to penetrate the upper management ranks have been less fruitful. Currently, only one of the city’s 21 fire captains is African-American. The anti-discrimination laws that once won them spots in New Haven’s firehouses are now the laws that have planted the smiles on Frank Ricci’s and Ben Vargas’ faces. There go the rules, changing again.

As Strobe Talbott wrote in Time in 1982:

Lenin, with his knack for hortatory pungency, reduced the past and future alike to two pronouns and a question mark: "Who—whom?" No verb was necessary. It meant who would prevail over whom? And the question was largely rhetorical, implying that the answer was never in doubt. Lenin and those who followed him would prevail over "them," whoever they were.

The funny thing is how modern American liberals consider their Who? Whom? mindset not cynical, but sacred.

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

Barone on Ricci

Michael Barone has a good column today on Ricci, Firefighter case shows seamy side of racial politics, which is clearly drawn from my stuff. Considering all the mean things I said about him a number of years ago, it's big of him to be a reader.

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