September 3, 2005

Anarchy in the LA

"Racial Realities and the New Orleans Nightmare" -- My new VDARE.com article is up a day early.

It was the Perfect Storm.

No, not Hurricane Katrina. That could have been much worse. Back in the 1990s, my friend Rob Brennan wrote an unpublished novel called Category 5 about a ferocious hurricane that strikes New Orleans at the worst possible angle. Katrina, in contrast, was a Category 4 hurricane and hit New Orleans only a glancing blow.

No, the perfect storm was actually the combination of social and governmental incompetence at local, state, and federal levels—and unmentionable racial reality.

Republican Presidents are supposed to provide adult supervision for crooked Democratic urban machines. But the White House is now occupied by George W. Bush, a politician so irresponsible, so uninterested in proficiency and honesty among his minions that late last year he tried to appoint as Secretary of Homeland Security the egregious Bernie Kerik.

Mr. Bush shows no evidence of holding his appointees accountable, so long as they remain loyal to him personally. Just as he has never vetoed a bill, he almost never fires anyone for poor performance.

VDARE.com readers are familiar with the contempt with which Mr. Bush treats his sworn duties to uphold the laws against illegal immigration. Now the whole country is starting to catch on to his disregard for his duties in his pursuit of image over effectiveness.

His invade-the-world-invite-the-world policies have left America unprepared for predictable domestic troubles, as Paul Craig Roberts recently pointed out here.

The ineptitude displayed by the Louisiana state government is also unsurprising. The state is unique in having a Latin political tradition (it uses the Code Napoleon rather than the English common law, even though Napoleon didn't release his code until the year after he sold Louisiana to Thomas Jefferson), a culture in which the Argentinean demagogue Juan Peron would have felt at home.

The unofficial state motto is "Laissez les bons temps rouler" or "Let the good times roll." Compare that to New Hampshire's official motto of "Live free or die," which displays a rather different understanding of freedom. Louisiana's reigning philosophy is freedom from responsibility.

It's a general rule that the tastier the indigenous cuisine, the lousier the government. Its culture has provided America with jazz, A Street Car Named Desire, and the great American comic novel of the 20th Century, A Confederacy of Dunces. New Orleans is a nice place to visit. But you wouldn't want to raise your kids there.

All this is now common parlance, more or less. What you won’t hear, except from me, is that "Let the good times roll" is an especially risky message for African-Americans. The plain fact is that they tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society.

New Orleans itself is two-thirds black. It has had nothing but black mayors since 1978. Most of them are from the light-skinned "creole of color" elite, including the notorious Marc H. Morial, now head of the National Urban League. The city government is corrupt and lackadaisical. While the police department has perhaps rebounded from the depths it reached a decade ago when an officer was condemned to death for having a mother of three rubbed out by drug gangstas in his employ, nobody should be surprised that last week numerous officers ran away, and some even freelanced as looters.

In a racially diverse democracy like New Orleans, voting for good government takes a backseat to voting for your tribe's representatives in the eternal ethnic tussle over slices of the pie. As the ultra-competent but not terribly democratic founder of the state of Singapore, Lee Kwan Yew, noted in a recent interview:

"In multiracial societies, you don't vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion."

For instance, after blacks took control of New Orleans, they required new police recruits to live in the city itself as a way to exclude white cops. Dean M. Shapiro writes for Court TV's "Crime Library":

"The department was being depleted of experienced officers and the numbers within the ranks were decreasing as crime stats were rising at an alarming rate… In order to beef up the rapidly dwindling numbers of NOPD, the department was forced to lower its acceptance standards. Recruits with criminal records, DWIs, unfavorable employment records and dishonorable discharges from the Armed Forces were allowed to enter the Police Academy, whereas they had previously been excluded… Their records were expunged and, on completion of their training, they were issued badges, guns and patrol cars and turned loose on the street… These new officers were expected to suddenly straighten up and begin enforcing the laws they had not-so-long-ago been breaking. They were expected to arrest those suspected of crimes, even if those accused had once been their street buddies. But this was an unrealistic expectation."

The state's Southeast Louisiana Hurricane Evacuation and Sheltering Plan made all the right noises about evacuating residents without cars by school bus. But state and local authorities apparently failed to execute, as the famous picture of about 200 New Orleans school buses neatly lined up in a flooded parking lot shows. [More]


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

More Bush Administration CYA

Michael Chertoff, whom Bush appointed Secretary of Homeland Security after Bernie Kerik cratered, claimed today:

"We were prepared for one catastrophe [the hurricane]. The second catastrophe [the levee breaking], frankly, added a level of challenge that no one has seen before.”

No one except those insightful structural engineers Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, who pointed out on the fourth Led Zeppelin album (the bestselling nameless one from 1971 with "Stairway to Heaven" on it):

If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break,

If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break.

The name of the song is, by the way, "When the Levee Breaks."

Chertoff also claimed:

"That 'perfect storm' of a combination of catastrophes exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody's foresight,"

Gosh, who could imagine that two disasters ever go together, like earthquake and fire in San Francisco in 1906 or earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004?

As I noted in my new VDARE.com article, "Racial Realities and the New Orleans Nightmare," up a day early, the perfect storm wasn't Katrinia, it was the combination of fecklessness at all three levels of government and at the bottom of New Orleans society. Louisiana's Democrats have plenty to answer for, but Republican Presidents are supposed to provide adult supervision. New Orleans is always going to have bad government, but there are enough competent people in the U.S. to staff the Federal government properly.


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

Bush's Mickey Mouse Mafia Unveiled

As I noted in my new VDARE.com article on the "New Orleans Nightmare," Bush never fires anybody for incompetence, just disloyalty, and his nominees have included men as awful as Bernie Kerik for Secretary of Homeland Security. Today, the Boston Herald got the goods on Bush's appointee as head of Federal Emergency Management Agency:

The federal official in charge of the bungled New Orleans rescue was fired from his last private-sector job overseeing horse shows.

And before joining the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a deputy director in 2001, GOP activist Mike Brown had no significant experience that would have qualified him for the position. The Oklahoman got the job through an old college friend who at the time was heading up FEMA. The agency, run by Brown since 2003, is now at the center of a growing fury over the handling of the New Orleans disaster...

Brown - formerly an estates and family lawyer - this week has has made several shocking public admissions, including interviews where he suggested FEMA was unaware of the misery and desperation of refugees stranded at the New Orleans convention center.

Before joining the Bush administration in 2001, Brown spent 11 years as the commissioner of judges and stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association, a breeders' and horse-show organization based in Colorado. ``We do disciplinary actions, certification of (show trial) judges. We hold classes to train people to become judges and stewards. And we keep records,'' explained a spokeswoman for the IAHA commissioner's office. ``This was his full-time job . . . for 11 years,'' she added.

Brown was forced out of the position after a spate of lawsuits over alleged supervision failures. ``He was asked to resign,'' Bill Pennington, president of the IAHA at the time, confirmed last night. Soon after, Brown was invited to join the administration by his old Oklahoma college roommate Joseph Allbaugh, the previous head of FEMA until he quit in 2003 to work for the president's re-election campaign.

The NYT reported:

This week [Mike Brown] has displayed striking candor, saying he awakened Monday thinking the agency had underestimated the storm and later admitting that the lawlessness surprised him.

Hey, there wasn't much looting when those towns on the upper Missouri River were flooded, right? So why would there be any looting in New Orleans? Are you saying there's some kind of difference between people in the Dakotas and people in Louisiana? Are you implying that maybe the police departments in the Dakotas are more competent and public-spirited than the police department in New Orleans? You better watch where you're going with that, mister. We don't cotton to that kind of talk in the Bush Administration!

There's this general assumption that political correctness can't really hurt us because everybody privately knows the facts about racial differences in behavior and acts upon them. For example, I'm sure Mike Brown made sure not to buy his family a home in an all black neighborhood precisely because he knows they have bad crime rates.

But the reality is much scarier. Although everybody knows the facts when it comes to their own private decision-making, an awful lot of people like Mike Brown have internalized the rhetoric they know they have to spout to keep their jobs and mindlessly apply it when it comes to public decision-making. I'm constantly struck by how people, even anonymous commenters in online discussions who have nothing to lose, make assertions about the facts affecting public policies that are completely at odds with what they'd tell me over a beer if we were discussing where to buy real estate. But they've brainwashed themselves so badly that it never occurs to them that the harsh facts of private life have any bearing on the glossy world of public policy.


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

What the mayor could have done

A reader writes:

It might well make sense, under some circumstances, to use the Superdome or Convention Center as emergency shelters. But if you were mayor, wouldn't you do a few other things as well? I mean, if I were evacuating thousands of people to a certain location, I'd make damn sure I had enough cops there to keep things organized and in control, along with somebody sufficiently senior to be in charge. And I'd move paramedics, doctors and nurses. Not to mention medicine which one could predict would be needed: antibiotics and insulin, at a minimum. Finally, I'd ship as much water as I possibly could. Food would be good too, but one can live a few days without resorting to cannibalism.

At a minimum, if none of those preparations were possible, I'd tell those shipped over before the flood began to bring a gallon of water each. And if I didn't have enough water to transport, I'd have some of the cops that I'd sent to the Superdome and Convention Center using the taps at those facilities to fill jugs, bottles, pots, or even buckets with water. I mean, even if FEMA had been maximally efficient, they'd have still taken a couple or three days to get aid to people. The fact that evacuation facilities had no food, water, or medicine at all is clearly attributable to local incompetence.


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

Here are the New Orleans buses

that could have evacuated the city before the hurricane hit, sitting around in nice, neat, flooded, useless rows afterwards. (Source: Yahoo News, 9/1/05, via "Our Way of Life," which has a lot of good commentary.) There are approximately 200 buses in this picture alone, and there are clearly more that are beyond the margins of the photo. If each one of the 200 could carry 60 people, that's 12,000 who could have been ferried out on each trip to, say, Baton Rouge on higher ground just 75 miles away.

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

Black activist Randall Robinson claims cannibalism

is happening in New Orleans in the Huffington Post:

It is reported that black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive. Four days after the storm, thousands of blacks in New Orleans are dying like dogs. No-one has come to help them.

Robinson goes on to blame this purported cannibalism by blacks on ... [drumroll, please] white people.

He doesn't explain who is reporting that there is cannibalism. New Orleans has among the highest average obesity rates of any city in America, so I don't think they are quite at Donner Party straits yet.


Robinson's hysteria reminds me of The Onion essay by a corporate middle manager trapped in an elevator for forty-five minutes:

Well, I suppose everyone's heard about last week's incident by now, and you probably have a pretty low opinion of us survivors. And, all things considered, perhaps we deserve it. Perhaps we panicked and resorted to cannibalism a bit early. But you weren't there. You don't know what it was like. I just want you to hear our side of the story before you go judging us.

When the six of us got into the elevator on that fateful day, we had no idea what was going to happen. We thought we were just going to take a little ride from the 12th floor to the lobby, just like every other day. Do you think we knew that elevator was going to get stuck between floors? Do you think we got into the elevator saying, "Hey, you know, we should eat our good old pal Jerry Weinhoff from Accounts Payable"? Of course not. [More]


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

"The Raft of the Medusa"

The immense 1819 painting by Théodore Géricault, recalls events oddly redolent of the last week's in New Orleans, from the incompetence of the Bourbon political appointee put in charge of the Medusa who ran it onto a sand bar to the pointless fighting among the survivors on the life raft. Wikipedia has the story. Unlike the claims of black activist Randall Robinson about survivors in New Orleans, however, the sailors really did resort to resort to cannibalism after only four days.


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

Is Bush a total idiot or what?

The President said on Thursday in an interview on ABC's Good Morning America:

"I think there ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this, whether it be looting, or price-gouging at the gasoline pump or taking advantage of charitable giving, or insurance fraud."

Looting and "price-gouging" (i.e., raising prices until supply equals demand) are the same in Bush's mind?

I remember the lines at the gas stations in 1973 and 1979 caused by Nixon's price controls on gasoline, which Reagan dumped as soon as he came in office. I guess Bush doesn't.


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

Black activist Randall Robinson claims cannibalism

is happening in New Orleans in the Huffington Post:

It is reported that black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive. Four days after the storm, thousands of blacks in New Orleans are dying like dogs. No-one has come to help them.

Robinson goes on to blame this purported cannibalism by blacks on ... [drumroll, please] white people.

He doesn't explain who is reporting that there is cannibalism. New Orleans has among the highest average obesity rates of any city in America, so I don't think they are quite at Donner Party straits yet. Robinson's hysteria reminds me of The Onion essay by a corporate middle manager trapped in an elevator for forty-five minutes:

Well, I suppose everyone's heard about last week's incident by now, and you probably have a pretty low opinion of us survivors. And, all things considered, perhaps we deserve it. Perhaps we panicked and resorted to cannibalism a bit early. But you weren't there. You don't know what it was like. I just want you to hear our side of the story before you go judging us.

When the six of us got into the elevator on that fateful day, we had no idea what was going to happen. We thought we were just going to take a little ride from the 12th floor to the lobby, just like every other day. Do you think we knew that elevator was going to get stuck between floors? Do you think we got into the elevator saying, "Hey, you know, we should eat our good old pal Jerry Weinhoff from Accounts Payable"? Of course not. [More]


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

Here are the New Orleans buses

that could have evacuated the city before the hurricane hit, sitting around in nice, neat, flooded, useless rows afterwards. (Source: Yahoo News, 9/1/05, via "Our Way of Life," which has a lot of good commentary.) There are approximately 200 buses in this picture alone, and there are clearly more that are beyond the margins of the photo. If each one of the 200 could carry 60 people, that's 12,000 who could have been ferried out on each trip to, say, Baton Rouge on higher ground just 75 miles away.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

September 2, 2005

Wrong Bush

A reader writes:

The worst management I've ever experience was Hurricane Floyd in S.C. in 1999. The evacuation of it led to the worst traffic jam in U.S. history: the population of Charleston was stranded on I-26 for hours and hours. I was almost 39 weeks pregnant and stuck out there without any cop or ambulance in sight. And all we could do was salivate at the incoming lanes on the interstate which had been empty for hours, but the bureaucracy just hadn't given the go ahead for us to travel on them.

The best: Jeb Bush, by far, I or my elders, have never experienced a Governor who is so prepared and who is anything but nonchalant. Before every hurricane we have, he has buses and other emergency vehicles ready at the Florida-Georgia line to invade Florida as soon as the hurricane passes.

One of the many odd things about George W. Bush being President is that if the voters in the Presidential election had been restricted to his own parents and the candidates restricted to his own siblings, Jeb would have beat George 2-0.


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

"Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang"

Early movie hype: "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang," with Robert Downey Jr. as an ineffectual thief turned actor who stumbles into trying to solve a murder mystery derived from every famous Los Angeles detective story from Raymond Chandler's great "Farewell, My Lovely" through "Chinatown," "Lethal Weapon," and "LA Confidential," is the "Big Lebowski" of this decade. And that's high praise indeed.

They've pushed the rollout back to late October, probably to boost Downey's Best Actor chances, although the Academy doesn't give comedies much respect.


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

Three words, Raffy, three words: "Human Growth Hormone"

From the Associated Press:

Slumping Palmeiro Loses First Base Job

BALTIMORE -- Rafael Palmeiro has lost his job as the Baltimore Orioles' regular first baseman, the result of a prolonged slump that began after he returned from a 10-day suspension for testing positive for steroids.

Mired in a 2-for-22 skid in which he has gone hitless in his last 14 at-bats, the left-handed hitting Palmeiro did not start Monday against Oakland right-hander Kirk Saarloos. Asked if he sees Palmeiro as the team's everyday first baseman for the rest of the season, Orioles interim manager Sam Perlozzo responded, "No, I don't, but if he would swing the bat he would be. I don't have a problem with playing everyone that can help us on a regular basis."

Palmeiro was hitting .280 with 18 homers and 59 RBIs at the time of his suspension. Since his return, he has no homers and just one RBI in six games. His batting average has also dropped 12 points to .268.

Unlike steroids, baseball doesn't test for Human Growth Hormone. Expect to soon see baseball players with all those weird jaw deformities, kind of like how normally sleek-looking track king Carl Lewis showed up for the 1996 Olympics looking like a squirrel with his cheeks stuffed with nuts.


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

Looking on the bright side of New Orleans

At least the rioters haven't been able to burn it down the way looters torched much of Los Angeles in 1992.


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

Low productivity labor

The huge supply of cheap immigrant labor in the US means that we lag at increasing productivity, which is the main engine of higher standards of living. For example, in LA it's very hard to find the kind of automated robot car-washing facilities that many gas stations offer in Chicago. In LA, you can only get your car washed by a swarm of illegal immigrants. I'm sure in ancient Rome, you could only get your chariot washed by a crew of slaves with buckets and sponges, but you might think we would have progressed since then.

Further, while Chicago's automated washing systems are open 24/7, in LA it doesn't pay to have the illegals work before noon (when demand for car washing is light). So, if you get told by your boss to go pick up a client and your car is filthy, well, you're out of luck.

Or, how come the waitress has to come to your table four times at the end of restaurant meal?

First, you call her over to tell her you'd like your check.

Second, she brings the check.

Third, she comes back to pick up your credit card.

Fourth, she comes back with the credit card slip for you to sign.

Couldn't this all be done electronically right at your table with no visits at all by the waitress?


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

September 1, 2005

IQ, Abortion, and Crime

A reader who was an inner city social worker comments:

Now I'm soooooo confused! As you point out, Charles Murray in his article "The Inequality Taboo," has "calculated that 60% of the babies born to black women who began participating in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth in 1979 were born to women with IQs below the black female average of 85.7. Only 7% were born to black women with IQs over 100."

But wait, weren't all those [low IQ, lower class] women having abortions? That's what genius economist Steven Levitt says in his super-brilliant book *Freakonomics,* where he tells us that abortion cut crime substantially because it kept hordes of little ghetto marauders from being born. Well, OK, Levitt doesn’t exactly put it that way, but we all know what he means (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).

If we are to believe Murray's figures, then it would seem that the black women who had abortions must actually have been the *brighter* ones -- whose children (had they been born), would statistically have been less likely to commit crimes than those born to lower-IQ women.

Could this mean that Levitt is, ahem, wrong?

That's what I told Levitt back in 1999: that the most likely explanation for why the serious violent crime rate show up among those born after abortion was legalized was that legalized abortion hollowed out the black middle class, while the black underclass just let s--- happen all the way to the maternity ward.


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

August 31, 2005

"The Constant Gardener"

Everybody else is giving this adaptation of John Le Carre's bestseller about corporate conspiracies in Kenya dutifully rapturous reviews. From my review in the Sept. 28th issue of The American Conservative

"Hotel Rwanda," despite its catering to white liberal self-obsession, at least was about some closely observed Africans. "The Constant Gardener," in contrast, exemplifies how cinematic political correctness, the fear of showing human differences, strips Africans of their distinctiveness, rendering them ciphers who merely suffer nobly at the hands of fascinating white villains.

"The Constant Gardener" of the title is a handsome but passive British diplomat (Ralph Fiennes of "The English Patient") married to a feisty but gorgeous activist wife (Rachel Weisz of "The Mummy"). Her anti-racist dedication is so saintly that she refuses to have their baby delivered at a white-run hospital. (If Weisz's character were real, she'd be appalling, but, fortunately, even the most radically chic put their own babies' survival above their ideological fashion statements.)

When she loses the child in a hellhole slum clinic, she barely notices because she can tell that the European scientists examining the dying tribeswoman in the next bed are up to no good. She discovers that the nefarious multinational pharmaceutical firm is testing a new tuberculosis drug in Kenya on patients dying of both AIDS and TB without obtaining -- you'll be shocked to learn -- their fully informed consent. (Although Le Carré's Cold War spy stories were endlessly praised for the moral ambiguity he discerned within the KGB, he portrays "Big Pharma" as the epitome of evil.)

Objectively speaking, overly aggressive clinical trials must rank about 312th on the list of Africa's most pressing problems, in-between overcrowded buses and hostile hippopotamuses. (Ludicrously, the screenplay claims that the evil corporation is cutting corners to rush the pill to market because of the obscene profits it will make preventing an epidemic of a new antibiotic-resistant form of TB that threatens to kill two billion people. In that case, the drug company would deserve a tickertape parade.) But, unlike Africa's major tribulations -- many of which stem from its traditional polygamous and matrilocal family structures that are profoundly dysfunctional in the modern world because they lead to low paternal investment in children -- slipshod drug testing is one that can be rightfully blamed on white people.

Don't assume, though, that Le Carré and the American critics who revere him are consumed by White Guilt. They're not blaming themselves, just white people they already hated. White culturati use black victims as props in their endless competition to win superior moral status over other whites, especially ones who make more money than they do.


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

August 29, 2005

David Rieff on Muslim immigrants in Europe

In an essay entitled "An Islamic Alientation" (echoing Peter Brimelow's book) in the New York Times Magazine, Susan Sontag's son echoes many of my themes.

Even if they produced no other positive result, the attacks on the London Underground have compelled Europeans of all faiths to think with new urgency about the Continent's Muslim minority. Such a reckoning was long overdue. Some left-wing politicians, like London's mayor, Ken Livingstone, have chosen to emphasize the proximate causes of Muslim anger, focusing on the outrage widely felt in Islamic immigrant communities over the war in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the harsh reality is that the crisis in relations between the European mainstream and the Islamic diaspora has far deeper roots, consoling as it might be to pretend otherwise.

Indeed, the news could scarcely be worse. What Europeans are waking up to is a difficult truth: the immigrants who perform the Continent's menial jobs, and, as is often forgotten, began coming to Europe in the 1950's because European governments and businesses encouraged their mass migration, are profoundly alienated from European society for reasons that have little to do with the Middle East and everything to do with Europe. This alienation is cultural, historical and above all religious, as much if not more than it is political. Immigrants who were drawn to Europe because of the Continent's economic success are in rebellion against the cultural, social and even psychological sources of that success...

In January 2004, I wrote in "Four Failed Immigration Approaches,"

But look at Europe. Its experience proves that the different immigrant-treatment approaches of the host countries matters less than what the immigrants bring with them.

Likewise, Rieff explains that none of the European's states' latest responses are likely to prove terribly effective.

Strikingly, Rieff notes:


In a sense, Europe's bad fortune is that Islam is in crisis. Imagine that Mexican Catholicism was in a similar state, and that a powerful, well-financed minority of anti-modern purists was doing its most successful proselytizing among Mexican immigrants in places like Los Angeles, Phoenix and Chicago, above all among the discontented, underemployed youth of the barrios. The predictable, perhaps even the inevitable, result would be the same sort of estrangement between Hispanics and the American mainstream.

Yet, it's crucial to keep in mind that when this vast social experiment of importing millions of poor Muslims "to do the jobs Europeans just won't do" began, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Islam looked like a beaten and broken faith, and Muslims appeared to be dutiful and submissive laborers, just the way the American elite conceives of Latin American immigrants: as cheerful replacements for those uppity blacks whom you can't trust as servants anymore.

The future remains unwritten. Still, history suggests prudence, something that has been in short supply among the ruling classes of both Europe and American in recent decades.

Of course, I've also been pointing out in VDARE.com essays like "The Wind from the South" that much of Latin America south of Mexico is increasingly in crisis due to the growth of anti-white populism in reaction to the still-unresolved racial problems growing out of the Conquest of 500 years ago. This movement is likely to become vocal in Mexico during the Presidential election of 2006.

Will indigenous anti-white populism become a major problem in the U.S. as the Hispanic population becomes increasingly less white as the poorer, more brown and black sources of immigrants are progressively tapped? I don't know, I'd guess the chance of Latinos in the U.S. someday becoming a massive problem on the order of Muslims in Europe is less than 50% but more than 10%.

But why do we continue to exacerbate the odds? When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing you do is stop digging.


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

Wedding Crashers & Mark Wahlberg

"The Wedding Crashers" -- I finally saw the sex comedy starring Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn about a couple of likable sleaze-dogs who attend wedding receptions uninvited to meet bridesmaids who are in the mood for love.

Well, it's not a sequel, remake, or old TV show, so it's got that going for it, which is nice. (Otherwise, it's mildly funny, but it's making a lot of money because even mildly funny is unusual these days.)

It is, however, roughly the 300th comedy about weddings. It's a hit because Americans love comedies with "wedding" in the title. Our culture has become so casual that nuptials provide one of the few remaining formal occasions that can make indignities and embarrassments so much funnier.

Vaughn is an oddity, a comic actor with no apparent sense of timing. He simply spits out great bursts of semi-funny dialogue at high speed, with none of the rhythmic variation that comedians use to set up punch lines. (To see how it's normally done, watch for old pro Christopher Walken delivering a one-liner about his daughter's sweet 16 party late in the movie using his trademark off-kilter rhythm). Vaughn's shtick sort of works because we are used to movie motormouths being little Steve Buscemi-types, instead of an enormous 6'-5" 46 extra-long suitcoat galoot like Vaughn.

***

Mark Wahlberg: Heir to The Movie Gods -- Mark Wahlberg is a likable actor in a low-expectations sort of way, but why does Hollywood keep casting him in roles pioneered by famous stars? Reviewing "The Italian Job" remake of a couple of years ago, in which Mark Wahlberg took what was Michael Caine's role in the 1969 original, I noted:

For inexplicable reasons, Wahlberg has recently become the go-to guy to remake parts originated by screen legends. He has also recently redone Charlton Heston's role in "Planet of the Apes" and Cary Grant's in "Charade" (renamed "The Truth about Charlie"). Perhaps Wahlberg will next star in new versions of "Modern Times," "Citizen Kane," and "The King and I?"

This August brings us "Four Brothers," a remake of "The Sons of Katie Elder," in which Wahlberg will take on a role originated by ... John Wayne.

A reader replies

I feel like there's something cypher-y about Wahlberg. Maybe that has something to do with it. Like, rather than trying to match Heston/Grant/Wayne with a non-existent contemporary equal, the filmmakers just give us an unprepossessing semi-everyman into which we can channel our memories of the necessary charisma.

Another says:

When I see Mark Wahlberg playing roles originated by Grant, Heston, Caine, and now Wayne, I can't help thinking that they've brought in a boy to do a man's job. And I expect that's part of the appeal of casting Wahlberg: he can help a movie skew towards a younger audience.

One of my big pet peeves about Hollywood movies is that there really are no longer any old-fashioned male stars like John Wayne or Robert Mitchum, i.e. guys who were tough and manly and not cute and pretty. Even today's action stars tend to be "pretty boys" like Keanu Reeves or Tom Cruise.

I think that helped sink "Kingdom of Heaven" -- the presence in the early scenes of the formidable Liam Neeson, who is built on John Wayne's scale, made Orlando Bloom look too insubstantial for his subsequent role as a military leader. In contrast, Bloom had done fine as the hero in "Pirates of the Caribbean," where he was contrasted mostly with the fey Johnny Depp.


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

Bitter Asian Men

Bitter Asian Men: Here's a website that's amusing, sensible, and, I hope, empathy-building:

"Welcome to Bitter Asian Men, the site made by bitter asian men, for bitter asian men... and also for all of you out there who might be curious as to why we, as asian men, are so bitter. Are you a BAM looking for the right way to express his rage at the world? You've come to the right place. Are you [an Asian woman] looking for insight as to why your Asian ex-boyfriend isn't talking to you after you dumped him and started dating some frat boy? Again, you've come to the right place. Wonder why that Asian guy glares at you every time you ask him what brand of egg rolls he likes best? You're definitely in the right place!

I've long pointed out -- beginning with "Is Love Colorblind?" -- that much of the bitterness felt by many Asian-American males toward whites is perfectly understandable if you look at the gender gap in white-Asian interracial marriages. Of course, that has led to quite a lot of Asian male bitterness being directed at me and my family personally, on the principle of kill-the-bearer-of-bad-news. As Enoch Powell said in his much denounced 1968 speech:

"Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: ‘if only’, they love to think, ‘if only people wouldn't talk about it, it probably wouldn't happen.' Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical."

And I wasn't even making a prediction, just committing the sin of documenting on paper what everybody who lives in a cosmopolitan American city has seen with his own lying eyes.


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

Iraq Constitution or Peace Treaty?

Over at ParaPundit, Randall Parker quotes professor Karol Soltan that the "constitutional convention" in Baghdad is actually more like a peace treaty negotiation:

"It's not like Philadelphia. They're not 13 relatively homogeneous states at little risk of fighting a civil war. They're trying to prevent an early-stage civil war from exploding. They've spent a lot of time trying to settle borders and generally diminish the potential for violent conflict. In effect, they're working out key provisions of a peace treaty. Constitution-making is much more difficult."

In some ways, that's an encouraging perspective. The Iraqis don't have to work out rules for governing that they'll all abide by. For purposes of the U.S. getting out of there, theyl just have to work out how to stay out of each other's hair.

The problem, as always, is oil. It's relatively easy for the Swiss to get along with each other because individuals are highly productive and the country has few natural resources to squabble over. In contrast, Iraqis aren't very good at producing good and services, but the territory is loaded with oil.

On the other hand, Iraq has so much oil that it might be possible to divvy up the pie in such a way that everybody gets at least a moderate sized slice. A reader writes:

Your item about Ahmad the Thief set off an epiphany: with the rise in oil prices, Iraq’s oil wealth is now worth over $8 trillion. (If the price hits $100/barrel, that # goes to $10 trillion). Since there are roughly 27 million Iraqis, that amounts to a per capita wealth of about 300 grand. So the potential for a happy ending is there.

Two questions remain:

1) Will the new leadership be honest and wise enough to distribute this wealth fairly (or will it end up in the Chalabi family Swiss Bank Account?). Will they invest in their future?

2) Can the grassroots realize that they have a potential windfall coming and refrain from killing each other?

There two questions are the whole shooting match (perhaps not the best cliché to use here!). I’d only give it a 10% chance of working. But six months ago, I would have said it’s less than 1%. So perhaps Wolfie’s idea of (to borrow Pat Buchanan’s term) “starting a fire in the world’s gas station” had some wisdom after all. Let’s see: the rest of the world has to undergo a recession and energy crisis to fulfill Wolfie’s vision. Talk about sacrifice!


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

Isn't it time to retire the phrase "white-bread" as a term of ethnic abuse?

In Slate.com, an article by Neal Pollack begins:

A full-page ad for Monster.com in this week's Sports Illustrated shows a clean-cut, white, college-graduate type in an empty baseball stadium... Hovering above our white-bread college grad are these words: "You are the General Manager of you."

Don't you think it's about time to retire the phrase "white-bread" as a put-down of white Protestants (or of white gentiles in general)? I'm not Protestant myself, but as a former marketing researcher, it strikes me as an embarrassingly out-of-date ethnic slur. These days, white bread appears from my observations to be eaten most heavily by inner city blacks, while the kind of person Pollack disparages as "white-bread" would barely touch the stuff.


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

Mickey Kaus on Malcolm Gladwell

Gladwell was a fairly original thinker for a journalist back in the 1990s (here's his rather brave 1997 article on racial differences in sports), but the opportunity to get rich has not been good for his soul. As his popularity as a corporate speaker has skyrocketed, his insight and honesty have fallen (see my review of his bestseller Blink). Mickey lashes out at a Gladwell piece on health care, then steps back to generalize perceptively about the upscale liberal reading public:

Like many New Yorker policy articles, Gladwell's reads like a lecture to an isolated, ill-informed and somewhat gullible group of highly literate children. They are cheap dates. They won't think of the obvious objections. They won't demand that you "play Notre Dame," as my boss Charles Peters used to say, and take on the best arguments for the other side. They just need to be given a bit of intellectual entertainment and pointed off in a comforting anti-Bush direction. [Like highbrow sheep?-- ed You said that.]...

Indeed, there's a huge market in this country for people who will flatter liberals about how they are culturally and ethically superior to conservatives. Just as there is plenty of money to be made telling conservatives why they are more patriotic, practical, and moral (conservatives are "moral," liberals are "ethical"). Over the years, Gladwell has been perfecting a spiel that might eventually prove the most profitable of all: he tries to appeal to his readers' capitalist greed and progressive snobbery simultaneously.

Mickey goes on:

Late hit: This is the second Gladwell article I've read that enthusiastically promotes the ideas in a book without grappling with even the obvious possible criticisms. (The other author given similar treatment was Judith Rich Harris). He's becoming the Cousin Brucie of the bien pensants! 9:59 P.M. link

In contrast, here's my essay on Harris's book The Nurture Assumption from National Review. In general, the quality of book reviewing in prestige dailies is atrocious, as the initial reviews of Freakonomics by Gladwell's buddies Levitt and Dubner displayed.

By the way, I've wondered whether Gladwell really makes $40,000 per speech for the 25 speeches he gives a year. So, a reader sent me what it cost to get P.J. O'Rourke to give a speech at a corporate shindig in the middle of the country: $32,500.

Now, P.J. was, and perhaps still is, a heck of a writer, but these days it would be hard to say he's any better than the War Nerd. So, you can see the restraining effect that being able to make $32,500 for a day's work could have on you: a single publicized "gaffe" where you tell the truth about some taboo topic and your annual corporate speaking engagement income suddenly drops to the same level as the War Nerd's: zero.


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

August 28, 2005

The WSJ's Ahmed Chalabi Fan Club is back in high gear:

The Wall Street Journal runs a loooong article called "The Chalabi Comeback: Iraq's 'indispensable' man returns to center stage" about the ultra-wonderfulness of Dr. Chalabi, who fed us so much of the phony info on Saddam's non-existent WMDs in order to get us into this war. I particularly like how WSJ editorialist Robert L. Pollock praises "Ahmad the Thief" (as he is known because of his defrauding so many average Jordanians) because "Mr. Chalabi has assumed special responsibility for oil and infrastructure security." In other words, Chalabi has wormed his way into control of the armed men who are supposed to control Iraq's oil industry.

As I wrote in 2004 in The American Conservative, "

What does Chalabi really want? The simplest guess is that he wants what too many ambitious Iraqis want these days: to be a trillionaire. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, "Iraq is estimated to hold 115 billion barrels of proven oil reserves." At $40 per barrel, Iraq's oil is worth $4.6 trillion. Sure, Iraq's last trillionaire, Saddam Hussein, ended up in a hole in the ground, but he had one helluva ride along the way.

In The New Yorker, Jane Mayer quoted Scott Ritter, the much-reviled but apparently truth-telling weapons inspector, as saying, "[Chalabi] told me [in 1998] that, if I played ball, when he became President he'd control all of the oil concessions, and he'd make sure I was well taken care of."


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

My new VDARE.com column on Charles Murray's "The Inequality Taboo:"

My new VDARE.com column on Charles Murray's "The Inequality Taboo:"

One of the most newsworthy aspects of "The Inequality Taboo" is Murray's view that the white-black IQ gap may have narrowed slightly in recent years. According to Murray's article, the three most recent re-normings of major IQ tests came up with a mean white-black gap of 0.92 standard deviations, or 14 points.

That doesn't sound like much of a change from the one standard deviation (15 points) racial gap that IQ realists have been talking about for decades. But, in reality, they've been intentionally understating the traditional size of the difference. A 2001 meta-analysis of eight decades of data suggested a 1.1 standard deviation gap (16.5) points. So, if this new 14 point gap found in the three recent re-normings holds up as more data comes in, we may have seen some significant progress on this massive social problem.

Currently, though, the evidence remains far from clear. Murray writes in a footnote:

"Forced to make a bet, I would guess that the black-white difference in IQ has dropped by somewhere in the range of .10–.20 standard deviations over the last few decades. I must admit, however, that I am influenced by a gut-level conviction that the radical improvement in the political, legal, and economic environment for blacks in the last half of the 20th century must have had an effect on IQ."

Murray is too honest, however, to skip over the other, more disturbing, possibility: that the greater fertility of lower IQ women has had a dysgenic and/or "dyscultural" effect. Murray has calculated that 60% of the babies born to black women who began participating in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth in 1979 were born to women with IQs below the black female average of 85.7. Only 7% were born to black women with IQs over 100.

I hope that the improved nutrition, health care, and other environmental enhancements that have allowed African-Americans to come to dominate basketball, football, and sprinting in recent decades have also driven up black IQ scores more than the tendency of intelligent black women to remain childless has driven them down.

But the overall situation remains murky. It needs more research than is currently being funded.

Does part of the white-black IQ gap have a genetic basis? Murray suggests an experiment that might prove conclusive:

"To the extent that genes play a role, IQ will vary by racial admixture. In the past, studies that have attempted to test this hypothesis have had no accurate way to measure the degree of admixture, and the results have been accordingly muddy. The recent advances in using genetic markers solve that problem. Take a large sample of racially diverse people, give them a good IQ test, and then use genetic markers to create a variable that no longer classifies people as 'white' or 'black,' but along a continuum. Analyze the variation in IQ scores according to that continuum. The results would be close to dispositive."

I bet, however, that Murray's critics won't rush to fund this study and put their money where their mouths are. [More]


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

Robert Trivers

Robert Trivers: Ranking with William D. Hamilton as one of the great creative geniuses of sociobiology, Trivers's roller-coaster career has been buffetted about by his manic-depression. He now appears to be on another upswing, and is getting a lot of media attention, although most of it so far has gingerly avoided touching upon his mental illnesses. A new article in The Guardian [via GNXP], fortunately, gives us more of his personality:

Robert Trivers could have been one of the great romantic heroes of 20th-century science if he'd died in the 70s, as some people supposed he would...

During the second world war, Howard Trivers worked for the army, and produced the regulations for denazification: he was rewarded with a post in the state department, so Robert Trivers grew up in a diplomatic household, a handicap he has triumphantly overcome: his opponents at Harvard are described as fools, and he says Richard Lewontin, the intellectual leader of the campaigns against sociobiology, grossly underestimated the role that selection plays in the makeup of the genome, while sanctioning all sorts of slanders against his opponents. Trivers says of his old enemy Stephen Jay Gould's theory that the female orgasm was merely a by- product of the fact that the opposite sex has them, "It makes you wonder just how close Steve had ever been to that blessed event if he thought it was a side-effect ..."

In order to become a lawyer, he had to have a humanities degree, so his first studies at Harvard were in American history. They were interrupted by the first, and worst, of his breakdowns, which took the form of spiralling mania - staying up all night, night after night, reading Wittgenstein and then collapsing. He was hospitalised, and treated with the first generation of effective anti-psychotic drugs.

[Trivers's] mentor was an ornithologist called Bill Drury, whose memory he venerates... Drury became very close to his pupil and his trust was reciprocated: "Bill and I were walking in the woods one day, and I told him that my first breakdown had been so painful that I had resolved that if I ever felt another one coming on, I would kill myself. Lately, however, I had changed my mind, and drawn up a list of 10 people I would kill first in that event. I wanted to know if this was going forwards or backwards. He thought for a while, then he said 'Can I add three names to that list?'. That was his only comment." [More]


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