The Feb. 27th issue of The American Conservative

is now semi-online. It includes my article "Cesar Chavez, Minuteman."

February 27, 2006 Issue


Democracy & Its Discontents
By Leon Hadar
Contrary to the daydreams of the Bush administration, voting does not necessarily bring peace to unstable societies.


Who Elected Hamas?
By M.J. Rosenberg
The victory of the Palestinian militants was eminently predictable and perhaps inevitable.

Cesar Chavez, Minuteman
By Steve Sailer
The labor leader campaigned against the illegal immigrants who undercut his union members’ wages—until he became an ethnic icon.

War in Error
By Andrew J. Bacevich
Destroying the village to save it from al-Qaeda

Don’t Democratize
By John Laughland
Deterrence worked with the Soviets. Why not Iran?

Food for Thought
By Rod Dreher
Conservatives know that we pay a price when we trade dining tables for drive-thrus.

War of the Worlds
By William S. Lind
The Christian West is caught between radical Islam and the Brave New World

Report Card
By W. James Antle III
Bush’s education reform plan turns four—and flunks.

Armies of the Right?
By Paul Gottfried
The new American militarism comes from the Left, not the Right.



Field Trip From Woody World
By Steve Sailer
Woody Allen’s “Match Point”

Try 5 FREE Issues of The American Conservative Today

Purchase an online edition of this issue immediately!

Alienation as Self-Medication
By Elizabeth Wright
Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America by John McWhorter

Still Fighting the Last War
By William Anthony Hay
The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis

Authoritarian Personalities
By R.J. Stove
The Virtuoso Conductors: The Central European Tradition from Wagner to Karajan by Raymond Holden



Après Alan, Le Deluge?
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Greenspan’s Great Depression

The Deuce’s Detroit
By Taki
Ford should specialize in cars, not layoffs.



Fourteen Days: The State of Delusion is Strong; Bush Borrows From Orwell; Democrats Can’t Hack Hackett

Deep Background: Big Brother is Watching Britain; A New Water-gate?; Undercover Agents Want Their Frequent Flier Miles

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

"An appeal to Larry Summers"

Half Sigma writes:

All his apologizing didn't save his job. What a waste. Too bad he wasn't a man who stood up for his beliefs. He would have still been forced to resign, but at least he wouldn't have resigned as a wuss.

So here is what I urge Summers to do. Summers needs to recant his apologies. He needs to say something like this:

After my remarks I apologized over and over again. This was a mistake on my part. I confess that I was a wuss. I thought that if I kissed the asses of Harvard's left wing I would be allowed to keep my job with its big salary and prestige. But I was wrong.

However, all the apologies don't reflect my true beliefs. I stand by everything I originally said. The only thing I regret about my remarks is that I apologized for them.

To which I'd add: "And, oh, yeah, that $50 million in gender quotas I promised? Well, it's not just a waste of money, but worse than a waste. Spending the money will actually make things worse."

A reader writes:

Now that poor Larry has resigned, have you seen the attempts to bring Title IX into science? I mean, the effects on college sports were bad enough, but ultimately the country will not suffer horrendously if a couple of guys can't get onto the wrestling team. We already have problems getting enough engineers and scientists, though...if we start giving the slots away to women (who will avoid the hard-science jobs) things will get even worse. Maybe you can get a little awareness of this on the right-wing blogosphere...frame it as a competitiveness issue.

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

The iSteve mailing list for my published articles

One way to make sure you get my published articles is to join my iSteve email list on Yahoogroups.com. This is a "one-way list" that I use to send out my articles from VDARE.com, The American Conservative, and other publications for which I write. Typically, I send out about one emailed article every six days, so your inbox won't overload. (And I have a process in place to prevent you from being spammed via this.)

Let me be clear about the contents: I email out my articles that appear in the left hand column of iSteve.com, not the daily blog items that appear in this, the right hand column.

What are the advantages of joining this email group?

- A number of my most famous readers use my emailings to keep up on my articles without having to check my blog daily. (Hmmmhmm, maybe there is a lesson in their efficient use of time for all of us ...). I don't want to discourage you from checking www.iSteve.com constantly, but if you miss a few days, you won't miss an important article.

- Emails of my articles are easy to forward on to your friends.

- Because I am an inveterate tinkerer with my prose style, I typically polish the emails so they are even a little better than the published versions.

By the way, I send out my VDARE.com articles in two formats -- with links and without links -- in the same email. For those whose email readers have no trouble with heavily formatted emails with lots of URLs embedded, the first version in the email is for you. For those who prefer plain text, just page down to the second vanilla version.

You can sign up by sending a blank email here.

Or you can go here, and then click on the blue "Join This Group!" button in the upper left corner.

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

The Princess Sweepstakes

A reader writes:

In watching tonight's figure skating competition, you may want to pay some attention to Shizuka Arakawa, who just may steal the gold. Arakawa, Cohen and Slutskaya are in a virtual tie after the short program. Slutskaya is about the jumps and ignores presentation... Arakawa has wonderful grace and a Ina Bauer to die for not to mention a triple/triple/triple combination that will be unveiled tonight. The only thing that may work against Arakawa, despite her "dark horse" spot is the pressure of the Japanese media, who have medaled at all during these games and now these Japanese ladies are the last hope for a medal.

The pressure the Japanese media put on the country's athletes when they compete on the world stage is overwhelming. Japan is an extremely homogenous, conformist, group-oriented and media-drenched country, so everybody gets excited at once about the same things. All the athletes feel the honor of Japan rests on their shoulders -- no Shanni Davises there! -- so they repeatedly collapse under it.

The Japanese finally had a good Summer Olympics in 2004, after a couple of decades of flame-outs, but this winter Olympics has been awful.

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

The Three Eras of Martin Luther King Blvd. in Los Angeles

A reader writes:

I read your review of Jared Diamond's books, and wanted to thank you for your insightful writing.

In it, I wrote:

Ironically, when I left the "Collapse" exhibit [based on Diamond's bestseller], with its warnings about overpopulation, at Los Angeles's Natural History museum, I turned out of the parking lot onto Martin Luther King Boulevard, where the billboards were in Spanish. In LA, the African Americans have been pushed off even MLK Blvd. by Latin American immigrants.

My reader goes on:

As far as your shock at how the area around Martin Luther King Blvd looks, with its signs in Spanish, it is amazing. Amazing to me Steve, because I grew up in this area. My parents lived about 2 blocks from the LA Coliseum. This was in the late 50's. Back then the Coliseum was the home of The Dodgers baseball team. As a kid of around ten years old ,I would play baseball on various empty parking lots on Saturdays with a bunch of other kids. The strange thing about this was that the other kids were all different ethnicities and races. Some of the kids were black, white, chinese, mexicans, germans [including me], italians, cubans, and who knows what else. We were all regulated, so we wouldn't fight ,by an older mexican girl named Nan. She made all of us custom teeshirts. This was not part of some organization ,but just kids meeting to play.

All of this seems like a dream now. I relate this to you as it reminded me of some of your writings on citizenism. Sure, sometimes some of the kids would fight about stuff, but all of them fought in English. And by the way, Martin Luther King Blvd. was called Santa Barbara Blvd., at that time. And also, the parents of the different kids didn't really hang out with each other, but they would sometimes greet each other with at least an hello.

Of course, at that time, immigration was slow, few in numbers, and orderly, and I think that may have been why things kind of worked out better between the races. I'm not really sure. Now, however, it seems as if Los Angeles or even California is headed towards something ominous, a total breakdown. I hope not. Thanks again for all your work.

This is similar to the description in Colin Powell's autobiography of the integrated Harlem neighborhood he grew up in a little earlier. The state of housing segregation in the U.S. at the time was complicated. In LA, for example, upper middle class neighborhoods were almost completely segregated due to racial covenants in home ownership contracts, but rental neighborhoods could be integrated. (In Chicago, however, working class neighborhoods were segregated, sometimes by violence.)

Then, two great migrations put huge stresses on non-Southern cities and overwhelmed housing integration. The first was the black migration that kicked into overdrive during WWII, especially following the mechanization of cotton-picking. This sent a lot of the more unskilled Southern blacks north. Then, when northern states raised their welfare payments in the early 1960s, this attracted a particularly feckless, and crime-prone group of Southern blacks.

Then, the Latin American influx (first Puerto Ricans in the 1940s and 1950s in NYC, then Mexicans everywhere else) overwhelmed integration.

The point is, however, that ethnically stable cities can often work out reasonable solutions. But when the ethnic balance is rapidly tipping, bad things can happen, as in the formerly black areas of Los Angeles that are being ethnically cleansed by Hispanics, where racial gang violence is widespread (as reflect in the recent LA jail riots between blacks and Latinos).

My in-laws saw the dire effects of rapid ethnic change first hand, to their intense cost. My late father-in-law was a classical musician and union leader and my late mother-in-law was a public school special ed teacher. When their working class neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago started to integrate around 1966, many of their friends told them to sell out as soon as possible, before the neighborhood tipped to all black.

But, as good liberals, they believed in integration. And the first blacks moving in were middle class. So, they joined an anti-tipping liberal group run by Father Edward McKenna (a classical composer who has written a couple of operas with librettos by Father Andrew Greeley), where neighborhood homeowners swore to each other they wouldn't sell no matter how black the neighborhood got.

Well, the crime rate, which had been non-existent when the neighborhood was all white, started to soar, housing prices fell, and pretty soon the middle class blacks were selling out because underclass blacks were moving in. The members of the pro-integration group started to break their promises and move out. My in-laws stuck with their vows. But, then in 1968, black rioters looted all the stores in the neighborhood after Martin Luther King was murdered, and their small children were mugged three times. So, they finally sold, losing about half of their live savings, and bought a farm 65 miles out of town, where they didn't have indoor plumbing for two years.

The last time I visited their old neighborhood in the 1990s, it looked like a war zone, with about 1/3rd of the houses abandoned or torn down.

On the other hand, just to the west is the independent suburban municipality of Oak Park (Hemingway's hometown), which has perhaps the most architecturally distinguished domestic architecture in America, with dozens of Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie-style homes. There, with even more to lose, homeowners successfully resisted Oak Park tipping all black by instituting the "black a block" program in which real estate agents were only allowed to sell one home per block to blacks. It's completely illegal, but highly successful.

Something that is almost completely overlooked is the beneficial aspect that the great black migration of 1945-1970 had on the South, which made the civil rights revolution grudgingly acceptable to Southern whites over 1965-1970. Southern whites had denied Southern blacks the vote since roughly 1877 because in many locales blacks had the majority. But the great black migration out of the South strengthened the white majority in the South, making equal voting rights easier to accept for whites.

With the exception of some urban disasters like New Orleans, today, the South is better governed than when white Democrats ran it in Jim Crow days. The business-oriented white GOP controls most Southern states today, and has helped make them more economically competitive than in the days of the Democrat's Solid South when all the emphasis on keeping blacks down got in the way of economic development.

A reader adds:

I work for the Census so I interview a lot of rental units. I find it interesting that small multi-unit apt complexes (4-12 units or so) are often 100% of one ethnicity or another. It's pretty clear the land-lord is making a conscious decision to rent to only one ethnicity. Landlords are almost always upper-middle-class whites. So I don't think it's a case of some ethnic land-lord making enclaves for their peeps. No, I think it's land-lords trying to make an attractive living arrangement (ie ethnically homogenous) for his tentans. But there's probably self-selection by prospective tenants as well.

Oh, and all this is illegal but is widely done.

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

"Bond, not Blond"

Here's the first official publicity shot of actor Daniel Craig as the new James Bond in the upcoming film "Casino Royale." You may notice something different about the blond actor's look when he's playing James Bond: he suddenly has brown hair. James Bond is supposed to be tall, dark, and handsome, but Craig is none of those, so they changed what they could, his hair color.

In contrast, Steven Spielberg cast the naturally blond-haired, blue-eyed Craig as the only one of the Mossad assassins in "Munich" who doesn't suffer moral qualms about killing people. (Must be too much Teutonic blood tainting his ethics, I guess.)

Craig is a fine actor, but his casting as James Bond seems like a money-saving stopgap, especially when Pierce Brosnan isn't quite over the hill yet, but was asking for $30 million. Brosnan's natural heir apparent as James Bond would seem to be Clive Owen, but I suspect that Owen would cost more than Craig.

I like my James Bonds to appear, like Bond, English and upper crust, like Roger Moore. Sean Connery is one of the greatest movie stars of all time, but he was too Scottish and too proletarian to be well-cast as Bond, although he got by on his colossal charisma. My dark horse choice for James Bond would be Hugh Grant, who makes a terrific cad, as in the Bridget Jones movies. I'll have to get by with seeing Hugh as Simon Cowell in "American Dreamz," where he costars with Dennis Quaid as George W. Bush.

The CraigNotBond website proposes some other roles that Daniel Craig would be better suited for, such as playing the rodent-obsessed groundskeeper Carl Spackler (first portrayed by Bill Murray) in a prequel to "Caddyshack."

If you want to learn more about why blonde women and brunet men are most in demand in the media, I reviewed Peter Frost's valuable book "Fair Women, Dark Men" at VDARE.com here.

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

Merck and Vioxx

Your Lying Eyes has a good summary of the current state of the lawsuits against Merck for not acting for years upon studies showing that its anti-pain medicine Vioxx was killing off thousands of users. Check out the comments, too. Why do you think there's not much media interest in this case?

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

John Derbyshire on "Hesperophobia"

Derb's "Hesperophobia" article that got spiked by NRO can be found on his website here.

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

What's the deal with Norwegians and skiing?

"A short history of skiing" -- Nothing too exciting about this long article by Morten Lund, but if you are wondering about the social history of Nordic and Alpine skiing, it does a good analytical job of explaining the emotional relationship between modern Nordic skiing (cross country, biathlon, and ski-jumping), which was largely developed in the Telemark district of Norway in the middle of the 19th Century, and Norwegian nationalism (leading to independence from Sweden in 1905).

It also discusses why Austrians are winning so many Alpine (downhill) skiing medals this year (they invented Alpine ski training). And you may recall Sir Arnold Lunn, the Christian apologist who was a contributor to National Review in the early 1970s. Well, what do you know, he invented the slalom in 1922. (He was knighted for contributions to Anglo-Swiss amity.)

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

Forensic Anthropology Marches On

Nobody in Sicily hates anybody worse than Boasian cultural anthropologists hate forensic anthropologists, because the latter are paid to look at human biological differences to do useful things, like solve crimes.

DNA 'could predict your surname'
By Paul Rincon, BBC News science reporter

Forensic scientists could use DNA retrieved from a crime scene to predict the surname of the suspect, according to a new British study. It is not perfect, but could be an important investigative tool when combined with other intelligence.

The method exploits genetic likenesses between men who share the same surname, and may help prioritise inquiries. Details of the research from the University of Leicester, UK, appear in the latest edition of Current Biology.

The technique is based on work comparing the Y chromosomes of men with the same surname. The Y chromosome is a package of genetic material found only in males. It is passed down from father to son, just like a surname....

For the study, Turi King and colleagues from the University of Leicester recruited at random 150 pairs of men who shared a British surname and compared their Y chromosomes. Across the sample, the authors determined that just under a quarter of the pairs had recent common ancestry.

Given the small sample size and the random recruitment, Dr Jobling said he was surprised at the strength of the signal. Sharing a surname also significantly raised the likelihood of sharing the same type of Y chromosome, with the link getting stronger as the surname gets rarer.

The researchers used the data to roughly test the predictive power of the method. They found the approach was most useful for less common names, with a 34% chance of prediction in the 80 least common surnames from the 150-name sample.

"This range of surnames makes up 42% of the population. So we're looking at prediction in just under half of the population. We have to exclude the Smiths and Joneses," Dr Jobling said.

Speaking of anthropologists, here's a nugget from the NY Sun's article on Larry Summers being driven out of the presidency of Harvard:

In a recent interview, an anthropology professor who clashed with Mr. Summers and subsequently quit as dean of Harvard's graduate school of arts and sciences, Peter Ellison, recounted an early conversation in which Mr. Summers said professors in the social sciences could usually be ranked in terms of intellect. "President Summers asked me, didn't I agree that, in general, economists are smarter than political scientists, and political scientists are smarter than sociologists?" Mr. Ellison told the Boston Globe. "I laughed nervously and didn't reply."

Actually, Larry was being diplomatic in that he didn't go on to finish his chain of logic by saying: "And who's the dumbest of them all? Right! Cultural anthropologists!"

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

Let the World's Greatest Princess contest begin!

As I blogged in 2002:

A sports-talk show was debating this morning, "If you like watching women's skating, does that mean you're secretly gay?" One thing I've noticed about myself is that I often intensely enjoy watching feminine-effeminate pastimes like figure skating and Broadway musicals, but I don't spend all that much time thinking about them in-between seeing them. In contrast, I seldom enjoy golf while I'm playing it - my handicap is my swing - but in between rounds I've spent a truly massively useless amount of my life thinking about golf, especially golf course architecture. In fact, when I was changing careers in 2000, I intentionally didn't play for an entire year because when I do play, especially on a fine course, I can't stop thinking about golf for days or weeks afterwards.

This mental gap works in the opposite direction as well. Of all the art forms, golf course architecture is one of the biggest - as measured in objective terms such as dollars spent on it or acres covered by it (more than Delaware and Rhode Island combined). Yet, the rest of the art world pays zero attention to it, probably because it appeals almost solely to the kind of heterosexual guys who don't care much about other kinds of art. If you are interested in seeing how hardcore golf course connoisseurs think, check out the discussions at GolfClubAtlas, where you can read, for example, a 70 message thread about the aesthetic failure of the new fairway bunker on Riviera's 7th hole. The aficionados on the discussion group may seem way over the top, but that's how art forms progress - they require not just people who love good art, but also people who deeply hate bad art and want to stamp it out of existence.

American Sasha Cohen looked very good and took a miniscule lead over the Russian veteran Slutskaya. The final is Thursday.

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

Something nonboring about Francis Fukuyama

Well, I managed to keep up my perfect record in regards to Francis "End of History" Fukuyama's writings by not making it all the way through his celebrated essay "After Neoconservatism" in the NYT Magazine. Leon Hadar actually read it all and writes:

"What FF is basically arguing is (and here I'm borrowing from another political philosopher, Bill Maher), is that the neocons were using a great film script (which Fukuyama helped to write), but that they just did a lousy job in directing and producing the movie on Iraq."

I'm not saying that Fukuyama is always wrong. What I am saying is that Fukuyama's first idea about anything is always wrong, but, unlike his pals, he often comes up with a better answer 5 or 10 or 15 years later. Granted, that isn't a particularly scintillating track record, but compared to the true believer neocons who never learn from anything, he's Edmund Burke predicting the whole course of the French Revolution in 1790.

Anyway, what's interesting about Fukuyama is that he is, as far as I can tell, just about the only minority intellectual in America who does not write heavily about race. Guys like Thomas Sowell and Stephen Carter tried to write about something else, but the demand for writing about race was too great. (Of course, Americans are less interested in East Asians than in blacks, so the demand for Fukuyama's views on race would not be as strong). In fact, Fukuyama goes out of his way to ignore race even when it's obviously relevant. For example, his book "The Great Disruption" is primarily about crime and illegitimacy, but he dismisses race's relevance to these subjects in a single page!

However, being a minority is still valuable to Fukuyama in his spat with his former neocon pals. In 2005, when Charles Krauthammer tried to play the Anti-Semite Card on him for daring to criticize the neocons, he didn't collapse like most white conservatives intellectuals would because, hey, he's not white! So, he enjoys privileges.

As I wrote in 2005:

You may recall that prominent neocon Francis "End of History" Fukuyama jumped ship awhile ago and criticized Charles Krauthammer in The National Interest for his lack of realism about the Iraq War. Krauthammer responded, predictably, by playing the anti-Semitism card. Here is part of Fukuyama's rebuttal:

"Krauthammer says I have a "novel way of Judaizing neoconservatism", and that my argument is a more "implicit and subtle" version of things said by Pat Buchanan and Mahathir Mohamad. Since he thinks the latter two are anti-Semites, he is clearly implying that I am one as well. If he really thinks this is so, he should say that openly."

A little late, perhaps, Francis? "First they came for Pat Buchanan, but I was not Pat Buchanan, so I said nothing. Then they came ...". But better late than never. Fukuyama continues:

"What I said in my critique of [Krauthammer's] speech was, of course, quite different. I said that there was a very coherent set of strategic ideas that have come out of Israel's experience dealing with the Arabs and the world community, having to do with threat perception, preemption, the relative balance of carrots and sticks to be used in dealing with the Arabs, the United Nations, and the like. Anyone who has dealt with the Arab-Israeli conflict understands these ideas, and many people (myself included) believe that they were well suited to Israel's actual situation. You do not have to he Jewish to understand or adopt these ideas as your own, which is why people like Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld share them. And it is not so hard to understand how one's experience of Arab-Israeli politics can come to color one's broader view of the world: The 1975 "Zionism is racism" resolution deeply discredited the UN, in the eyes of Jews and non-Jews alike, on issues having nothing to do with the Middle East. This is not about Judaism; it is about ideas. It would be quite disingenuous of Charles Krauthammer to assert that his view of how Israel needs to deal with the Arabs (that is, the testicular route to hearts and minds) has no impact on the way he thinks the United States should deal with them. And it is perfectly legitimate to ask whether this is the best way for the United States to proceed."

Well said. America's foreign policy blunders of the last 30 months have less to do with the fact that so many highly influential people in Washington and New York, like Krauthammer, think about Israel and its welfare all the time, as to the fact that it has become extremely dangerous to one's career to point out that they do.

Gene Expression offered a telling analogy in support of Fukuyama's calling a spade a spade here: if top Pentagon civilians were named Patel, Pondicherry, and the like, and if they had talked America into invading Pakistan, wouldn't it be acceptable to point out that their ethnicity made them a little biased? So why not in the case of Wolfowitz, Feith, and Perle?

By the way, over on Dennis Dale's Untethered site, Carter van Carter of Across Difficult Country brings up David Stove's rebuttal to Fukuyama's "End of History" theory:

"Is the world about to surrender for good to liberalism and the free market? Will there soon be no more Colonel Qaddafis, only Colonel Sanders everywhere and forever?"...

"The long proof, in a nutshell, is that the mixture which Fukuyama expects to freeze history forever — a combination of Enlightenment values with the free market — is actually one of the most explosive mixtures known to man. Fukuyama thinks that nothing will ever happen again because a mixture like that of petrol, air, and lighted matches is widespread, and spreading wider. Well, Woodrow Wilson thought the same; but it is an odd world view, to say the least."

And to finish off my blogrolling, here's the website of David's son, R.J. Stove, who often writes for The American Conservative.

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

The Port Deal

As you've heard, a company owned by the government of Dubai, the playground of the United Arab Emirates, wants to buy the British company that manages operations at six American ports. Obviously, ports are sensitive spots in staying safe from terrorism. And the odds that a Dubai citizen has a cousin who is inclined toward terrorism is much higher than for British nationals. Still, my question is: Does anybody know whether Arabs actually do any work in this company? Would there be Arabs in decision-making roles down on the docks, or is that all too much trouble for them and they'll just hire somebody else to do the work?

Gulf Arabs are quite the possibly the laziest people on Earth (the unbelievably hot and humid climate doesn't help). According to the CIA Factbook, only 19% of the residents of the United Arab Emirates are natives. The rest are guest workers. During the first Gulf War, P.J. O'Rourke took part in a betting pool with the other war correspondents: first person to see a Saudi national pick up anything heavier than money wins.

Of course, the Wall Street Journal editorial page has come out all for the Port Deal in an editorial entitled: "Ports of Politics: How to sound like a hawk without being one." According to the WSJ, being in favor of homeland security is a poor substitute for being a hawk abroad. See, from the WSJ's perspective, since we must continue to invite the world into America, therefore, we must continue to invade the world to make it safe for America.

It's all just simple logic, as the WSJ makes clear in this utterly reassuring explanation.

Yes, some of the 9/11 hijackers were UAE citizens. But then the London subway bombings last year were perpetrated by citizens of Britain, home to the company (P&O) that currently manages the ports that Dubai Ports World would take over. Which tells us three things: First, this work is already being outsourced to "a foreign-based company"; second, discriminating against a Mideast company offers no security guarantees because attacks are sometimes homegrown; and third, Mr. Graham likes to talk first and ask questions later.

Being one of those dubious types who reads sources of crimethink like iSteve.com, you might be saying to yourself:

"Okay, but isn't there a difference between Dubai and Britain? And, while certainly there are terrorists within Britain, wouldn't Dubai nationals be more more likely to have ties to terrorism?

But that just shows you are one of those bad people who thinks in terms of stereotypes. The WSJ knows better!

So does President Bush, who said from Air Force One:

"''I really don't understand why it's OK for a British company to operate our ports, but not a company from the Middle East,..."

What are you people, some kind of racists who thinks Arabs are more likely than Brits to be terrorists? That's the voice of our President talking, and we must obey! Otherwise, your on the side of the terrorists.

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

Why are television news anchorettes so blonde?

Jack Shafer writes in Slate in "TV's Aryan Sisterhood" that:

Joanna Pitman estimates in On Blondes that only one in 20 white adult Americans is a genuine blond, yet one in three adult American females sports has the look. If you do the math, it's clear that many female newscasters lie about their true hair color every time they appear on television. Lest you think I exaggerate the bogus-blonde glut, I recommend a visit to TVheads.com. The Web site maintains an archive of 50,000 newscaster images collected by volunteers during the last three years. TVheads.com breaks out newscasters by network and by sex, and by my definition of blond, at least 60 percent of the females qualify.

Unfortunately, the theory Shafer offers for why this is so is clearly wrong:

As the leading scholar of blond studies, Joanna Pitman provides us with the best collection of statistics, history, prehistory, and commentary on the subject. Her book offers an evolutionary psychology explanation for the hair color's timeless allure: We associate blond with youth, she writes, because the hair of babies and that of young children tends to become wan and darken with age. Pittman—a blonde, incidentally—notes blond women appear younger and thus more fertile, winning them an evolutionary advantage over brunettes.

From an evolutionary standpoint, however, it makes no sense that women trying to catch male attention would want to look like toddlers. Prepubescent children don't appear "more fertile," they appear infertile. So, that is likely only a coincidence. Much more plausible is a theory I offered in VDARE in 2003:

The press typically attributes the popularity of blondeness to the evil monopoly of the WASP elite (or whatever). But that doesn't make much sense because there's little demand for blond men. Hollywood, for example, believes that ladies prefer their gentlemen tall, dark, and handsome, a phrase coined by Mae West about Cary Grant. There are dramatically more blonde actresses than actors, because audiences apparently associate darker hair with mature masculinity. In the vast majority of love scenes in movies, the man is darker in hair and skin color than the woman. Actors typically described as blond, such as Leonardo DiCaprio, generally wear their hair much darker than do blonde actresses, such as Meryl Streep or Kate Hudson. Even Conan the Barbarian was played as a brunet by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

This pattern appears to be true around the world. Latin American television, for example, is full of blonde women and darker Latin lover-type men.

Why do gentlemen prefer blondes - or at least take more notice of them? My guess is that it's largely because blonde hair is inherently more noticeable. [It reflects more light.] Women like to wear gold and silver jewelry for the same reason—it makes them, to put it crudely, shinier.

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

Bitter Asian Men

"Yellow Fever" -- Here's a funny 15 minute downloadable video made by some Asian-American college students, in which one of them investigates why he can't get a girlfriend.

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

Lefthanders

Despite my interest in human biodiversity, I don't write much about lefthandedness, mostly because it is so lacking in political relevance. In fact, lefthandedness is interesting for what it says about why some minorities become politically salient and others do not.

For example, at some point in the first half of the 20th Century, there was a hugely successful Lefthanders Liberation movement that succeeded in persuading parents and teachers not to force lefthanders to write righthanded. Three Presidents in a row were born lefthanded, but Reagan (born 1911) was converted to writing righthanded as a lad, while Bush the First (b. 1924) and Clinton (b. 1946), were not. Considering, how much the media is enraptured with stories of the overcoming of social prejudices, you'd think this would be a natural topic. Yet, PBS doesn't see fit to celebrate Lefthanders History Month. Indeed, I have only the haziest understanding of how this important social change came about. I have a pet theory that the rise of lefthanded baseball stars like Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Ted Williams, and Lefty Grove contributed, but there is so little concern with this topic in the press that I've never seen it addressed.

So, why are lefthanders not recognized as an a valid minority in our minority-obsessed media?

First, lefthanders aren't a racial minority (using my definition of a racial group as a "partly inbred extended family"). A review article of research on lefthanders by Monica Watkins reports that lefthanded is only modestly hereditary in the narrow sense:

Porac (1976 as reviewed in Coren 1992) completed a three year study of 459 Canadian families. Results were similar to eleven former studies ranging from 1913 to 1982. If neither parent is left-handed or if only the father is left handed, the child has a 1:10 chance of being left-handed. However, if only the mother is left-handed, the ratio is 2:10. Finally, if both parents are left-handed, the chance rises to 4:10. Therefore, as Porac states, even under "genetically optimal" circumstances, the chance of right-handedness is still much greater than the chance of left handedness.

Second, lefthanders aren't an ethnic group either (using my definition of an ethnic groups as ones defined by shared traits that are often passed down within biological families -- e.g., language, surname, religion, cuisine, accent, self-identification, historical or mythological heroes, musical styles, etc. -- but that don't have to be). Lefthanders are somewhat less common in some ethnic groups due to cultural animus (e.g., Germans were very anti-lefthanded), but I've never heard of anybody who tried to turn their kids into lefthanders (other than some baseball crazy dads, since lefthanded hitters have a couple of advantages).

Perhaps a closer analogy to lefthandedness might be homosexuality, which has much political salience although it's neither racial nor religious, but sexuality is much more fundamental to identity. Further, homosexuals have much stronger motivations to seek each other out than lefthanders, and homosexuals engage in, uh, bonding experiences, while lefthanders do not.

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

Larry Summers out at Harvard

Larry Summers is resigning as President of Harvard: Those crazy Muslims getting upset over a few cartoons, don't they know that here in the West we have a sacred tradition of freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry? In an advanced society like ours, nobody ever gets punished for telling the truth. Oh, wait a minute ... never mind ... Sorry, furious Muslims, I guess you are just less hypocritical than we are.

Here are my articles on last year's Larry Summers Brouhaha:

The Education of Larry Summers
American Conservative
2/28/05
I tried to explain the Larry Summers brouhaha to my wife, but she stumped me with a simple question: "Why did Summers give in so fast and promise, in effect, to make it harder for our sons to someday get hired there? What's the President of Harvard so scared of?

The Larry Summers Show Trial
VDARE.com
2/20/05
Possibly the most prominent American female economist today is Deirdre McCloskey—who, perhaps not coincidentally, used to be the prominent American male economist Donald McCloskey.

We're Different. Get Over It.
National Post of Toronto
2/24/05
In fact, it's precisely because the presentation by Summers, one of the world's leading economists, was lacking in crude misstatements that it was so threatening to feminists. When finally published, it turned out to be humbly argued, open-minded, well-informed, logically rigorous, and, in sum, cumulatively devastating to the feminist orthodoxy from which many of Summers' female critics have professionally and financially profited.

Why Some Men Don't Support Summers
VDARE.com
3/6/05
Why do these male scientists and engineers echo Nancy Hopkins in demanding massive social engineering to get more women to become as obsessive about the pocket-protector professions as they are? Paradoxically, this is typically because of how little these nerds appreciate women. They don't like females the way they are. They want a vast societal effort to remold women into liking the same nerdy things they like. That way, maybe, they can can finally get dates.

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

Brokeback Mountain Posts

The Best Actor Oscar Race: The frontrunners appear to be Philip Seymour Hoffman for portraying the world's gayest gay in "Capote " and Heath Ledger for portraying the world's straightest gay in "Brokeback Mountain." One of the oddities of contemporary movies is that only straight actors, like Hoffman and Ledger, or Tom Hanks in "Philadelphia" and William Hurt in "Kiss of the Spider Woman" (to cite two Best Actor winning roles), are allowed to play gays.

Joaquin Phoenix is likely the other main contender, for playing in "Walk the Line" Johnny Cash who, amazing as it may seem to Oscar voters, was not gay. (The other nominees are David Strathairn as the self-righteous Edward R. Murrow in "Good Night, and Good Luck" and Terrence Howard as an unbelievably soft, sodden pimp in "Hustle and Flow.")

Ledger is just about the only thing the drab, dreary "Brokeback Mountain" has going for it, but he and his deep, deep voice are most impressive. (He's also good doing a George Sanders impersonation in the silly but likable "Casanova.")

"Walk the Line" is a better movie than "Brokeback." For example, Reese Witherspoon is infinitely superior in "Walk" to Jake Gyllenhaal in "Brokeback," where he often looks like a member of a country music boy band for teenyboppers. At other times, Gyllenhaal looks like Mad Magazine's Alfred E. Neuman wearing a cowboy hat. That he got a best Supporting Actor nomination for "Brokeback" is just a Culture War political gesture on the part of Hollywood. The only one of "Brokeback's" eight nominations that it actually deserves is Ledger's.

If you look at the top three love story movies on the American Film Institute's list -- "Casablanca," "Gone With the Wind," and "West Side Story" -- you'll notice a common denominator. There's a lot else going on besides the romance: WWII, the Civil War, and an ethnic gang war, respectively. But there's nothing else going on in "Brokeback." You learn next to nothing about sheepherding or ranch work or bull riding or the combine business. It's just two not very intelligent guys talking about their relationship. You don't learning anything about their jobs or anything else. It's a chick flick of the dullest kind.

Even the vaunted cinematography is weak. The camera gets pointed at a lot of potentially beautiful mountain scenery, but they must have lacked the budget to wait around for the sun to come out.

"Brokeback Mountain" works on two levels, both bogus. It's a heterosexual liberal's fantasy that homosexuals are just like heterosexuals except for sexual orientation. In reality, the odds that Gyllenhaal's character, who is of average to above-average masculinity, and Ledger's character, who is out at the far right edge of the masculinity bell curve with John Wayne, would both be homosexual is one in a million.

And it's a gay's fantasy that somewhere out there is an ultra-masculine cowboy who will fall head over heels in love with me and pine away for me his whole life. To be precise, it's that ultimate gay's fantasy, the same one as in "Kiss of the Spider Woman," where William Hurt's flouncy window-dresser seduces the ultra-macho Raul Julia: that you're so irresistible that you attract a Real Man who is only gay for you. It's a silly, silly movie, and I suspect the people making it deep down recognized that fact, so they made it slooooow and serious to cover up its essential campiness.

Unfortunately, the prosaic "Walk the Line" suffers from Phoenix lacking Cash's mythic resonance. Phoenix is a fine actor, but his voice isn't pitched low enough to play Johnny Cash. I'm sorry, but when the actor rumbles, "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash," it has to be be a thrilling moment, but Phoenix just doesn't have the pipes for it.

So, who should have played Johnny Cash? The man with the deep voice, Heath Ledger. He's much fairer than Cash, who often fooled people into believing he was part American Indian, but they can do more with makeup than they can with vocal timbre. Ledger doesn't look like Cash, although he has enough of his size to be satisfactory, but then Phoenix doesn't look much like Cash either.

I don't know if Ledger can sing, but it was pointless to have Phoenix sing Cash's songs in "Walk the Line" when he could have just lip-synced them like Jessica Lange did Patsy Cline's songs in the excellent biopic "Sweet Dreams." They must have insisted on Phoenix singing rather than lip-syncing because otherwise there would have been an obvious disconnect between his singing and speaking voices. But that just meant that the songs lack Cash's famous sound.

And, switching roles with Phoenix would have gotten Ledger out of "Brokeback."

A gay reader on Heath Ledger in "Brokeback Mountain:" He writes:

As a gay man, I found your comment on "Brokeback Mountain" spot on.

The part about BbM being a heterosexual liberal's fantasy is absolutely true and it shows how very little they know about gay men.

[Just about everybody creatively involved with BbM is either a straight man -- director Ang Lee, screenwriter Larry McMurtry, and actors Heath Ledger and, presumably, Jake Gyllenhaal, or a woman: short story writer Annie Proulx and screenwriter Diana Ossana.]

The truth is, and I'm sure you know, that gay men do not have the same type of relationships as straight people. There is a significant number of gay men who have open relationships and as for the monogamous relationships, they quickly get boring and somebody ends up cheating (at a higher rate than in straight relationships) or they just do not last very long at all (something lasting longer than 15 years is a miracle).

Liberals cannot deal with this reality, so they invent Ledger as the ideal homosexual, one that does not cheat because he is so committed to his love for Gyllenhaal. Realistically, if Ledger's character was gay, he would have had other partners like Gyllenhaal.

I think they were forced to make Gyllenhaal somewhat promiscuous or else the entire script would have been laughable (not that it isn't already). I don't find Gyllenhaal's character all that masculine in the film to tell you the truth or the real Gyllenhaal for that matter so I do not think the chances of him being gay, realistically speaking, would be as rare as you say. Would it be uncommon? Yes, but not terribly so.

Heath Ledger on the other hand is a complete joke. There is no way in hell a character as masculine as him would be gay. Every gay man has his "gay moments". There is no way Ledger's character would have any of those.

As for the gay fantasy, I think you missed one crucial point. It's a gay man's fantasy that he can TURN a masculine man gay and have him pine at him forever (and be monogamous of course!). Amateur gay porn sites boost their traffic tremendously among their gay audience by just adding "str8" to the titlebar. I think this is indicative of the self-loathing that can be found among many "str8 acting" gay men. They search for something they lack, hyper-masculinity and they also see something in straightness that they don't see in gayness: loyalty.

Since the masculine man is not a "real" gay but a "convert", they assume that he will be more loyal to them because they helped him "convert" and because he has not been exposed as much to the gay "culture". The obsession with straightness among gay men is made most explicit in Hollywood. Obviously there are many gay men who work in Hollywood, in front of the camera and behind it, and many remain closeted for various economic reasons. However, a friend of mine noticed that casting agents who were gay would not cast other gay actors based on the fact that "they liked musicals" (read: they were flaming off the set but not while acting)...

Also, "str8 acting" gays come out later in life than some of those who are more effeminate. Part of it is due to the obviousness of the more fey homosexuals but I do think some self-loathing comes into play. They do not like their masculinity to be in question until they reach a point where it becomes unbearable to "play straight". Effeminate homosexuals don't care that much about how "masculine" they appear. They have been tormented during childhood and they are used to the abuse by now so they do not have to put up as big of a front. That does not mean that they are not attracted to straight men. Many are. But they are more tolerant of dating an effeminate homosexual than their str8 acting counterparts.

Overall, I just wish liberals and homosexuals would just leave the politics behind for once and tell the truth. Homosexuals are generally nice people, they just have one major vice. Is it so wrong to admit it?

Is Brokeback Mountain "slash fiction" for women? An anthropologist reader points toward the book by evolutionary psychologists Catherine Salmon & Donald Symons called Warrior lovers: Erotic fiction, evolution, and female sexuality, and asks:

Reading your comments on Brokeback Mountain: I haven't seen it, but I wonder if you've run into the phenomenon of "slash" fiction (widely available on the web, mostly non-commercial, and sometimes in violation of copyright laws)? Slash involves taking male buddies from popular fiction -- Kirk/Spock, Holmes/Watson, Starsky/Hutch (hence the "slash") -- and writing stories in which, in the course of their adventures, they find out that they're more than just good friends, and wind up having graphic sex together.

"Slash" is about 100% written and read by women -- some lesbian but most straight. In fact it follows romance novel formulas very closely. One member of the buddy pair is more sensitive and feminine -- physically a man, emotionally a woman -- while the other is a conventional romance hero. With Kirk/Spock, it's Kirk who's the sensitive one and Spock who's the cold, emotionally distant hero who discovers his true feelings at the end. Part of the appeal is that the guys end up having sex not because they're gay, but because True Love conquers all.

Gay men aren't any more interested in "slash" than straight men are in Georgette Heyer. [Who?] The real parallel to "slash" among straight men is girl-on-girl pornography, where women combine ultra-feminine bodies with implausibly guy-like appetites for casual sex. Presumably these women inhabit the same male fantasy land where hot babes are interested in cool guy stuff, like martial arts and field-stripping automatic weapons, instead of boring girl stuff, like relationships and feelings (whatever those are).

Both slash and girl-girl porn tell us a lot (maybe more than we'd like to know) about the chasm between male and female sexuality. but, apart from the physical activities, they have nothing to do with real homosexuality. It's funny how many reviewers are so clueless about human sexuality they can't figure stuff like this out.

Another reader points out that a similar phenomenon exists in Japan, where it is called Yaoi.

This might explain why the whole movie seems to be taking place in some alternate universe.

If you're looking for a film set in what's recognizably our own space-time continuum, you could do a lot worse than the insightful romantic comedy "Something New" about an affluent black woman who, unable to find a black man of her class, reluctantly tries dating a white guy. Over the years, in response to my "Is Love Colorblind?" article, I've gotten hundreds of emails from well-educated black women just like the heroine. The "Something New" screenplay rings quite true.

A reader writes:

I think that more than anything else, what slash and girl-on-girl porn represent women and men (respectively) trying to dispel their anxieties about the opposite sex.

I think that most men are secretly (or openly) afraid that women don't like sex and only view it as a bargaining chip to get what they want out of males (companionship, emotional and physical support, or babies). Women are afraid that men only want them for sex and thus view emotional support of females mainly as a chore that they perform in order to get sex, or in order to have her give him children (in other ways, the same way men worry about women and sex).

Girl-on-girl porn "proves" that women want sex, because if they didn't, why would lesbians bother having sex with each other, instead of just cuddling all the time? Similarly, if gay men get all "girly" around each other and think about love, commitment, and relationships, then that "proves" that men are interested in such things - because if they were just ploys to get sex, gay men would have no reason to do these things amongst each other, because they can easily get sex from each other.

So heterohomophilia (a term I coined for heterosexual fascination with homosexuals of the opposite sex) is, I think, as much about dealing with insecurity as anything else.

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

The underlying reality of the Danish cartoon riots

I've said it before, but I have to keep it saying it again. Even more than most people, what Muslims want is not so much freedom for all as domination for themselves. Cruel history has taught them that the only way to avoid the bite of the whip is to crack the whip themselves.

The good news is that this attitude means that they don't cooperate well with each other. What's really trouble is a people who want to dominate the rest of the world, but don't mind subordinating themselves for the good of their own people, like the Germans in the first half of the 20th Century.

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

A classic example

of the modern sportswriter's obsession with finding the next Jackie Robinson, no matter how diminishing the returns. From the NYT:

Black Athletes Missing From the Pilot's Seat
By JOHN ELIGON

TURIN, Italy, Feb. 19 — Herschel Walker demonstrated that blacks could have success in the essentially white sport of bobsledding when he competed in the Winter Olympics 14 years ago.

But Walker did so as a push athlete, not as a driver. The role of the pusher is defined by strength, brawn and athleticism. The role of the driver is a lauded position that requires grace, wits and touch. The driver steers the sled down the track, while the pushers are charged with getting the sled off to a fast start, then hopping in for the ride.

Many blacks have competed in the Olympics for the United States as push athletes, but none have held the coveted pilot position.

This may evoke comparisons to a discredited stigma once attached to blacks in football — that they were not intelligent enough to play quarterback and were better suited for athletic positions like running back and wide receiver.

Now, all 32 starters are black at tailback in the NFL, the second most important position in the most important league in American sports, but the NYT does not run articles asking why that is. Instead, it's considered more newsworthy to wonder why there aren't black pilots in the bobsled!

The more interesting question about the demographics of the bobsled is why there are any blacks in bobsledding at all, since there are so few in ski-jumping, biathlon, and so forth. Most notably, there are very few blacks in luge, where many bobsledders start out.

Virtually no African-Americans grow up planning on becoming bobsledders. The reason that there are any black bobsledders is because blacks are recruited to be pushers because of their greater combination of speed and strength. (Heisman Trophy winner Herschel Walker, who finished 7th in the 1992 Winter Olympics as the pusher on the 4-man bobsled, being an extraordinary example. Herschel held the world record in the 60 yard dash for a few minutes until Carl Lewis broke it in the next heat.

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

Winter Races -- and the Races of Man

My new VDARE.com column is up.

"So try not to laugh when someone says these are the world’s greatest athletes, despite a paucity of blacks that makes the Winter Games look like a GOP convention."–Bryant Gumbel on HBO’s Real Sports

Last fall, the Air Force Academy's distinguish football coach Fisher DeBerry was put through the wringer by white sportswriters for alleged racial insensitivity.

His crime: Mentioning that black players tend to be faster than white players.

But newscaster Gumbel's statement, quoted above, has been met with little outcry, so far.

Why the difference?

Well, unlike DeBerry, Gumbel is black. Everyone already knows he's less of a fan of white men than he is of white women, such as the blonde trophy wife for whom he traded in his black first wife of 26 years.

And everybody knows these periodic "two minute hates" directed by white sportswriters at white sportsmen too old fashioned to avoid blurting out the truth have very little to do with blacks, per se. This is just a white-on-white war over status. Blacks are free to say whatever they feel like because white journalists seldom consider them rivals.

Predictably, sportswriters are already playing up the 1000 meter speedskating gold medal won by the African-American Shani Davis as an epochal social breakthrough, one that will finally unleash the cleansing power of diversity on the white bread Winter Olympics.

It won’t. The truth is that African-Americans' sporting interests have been getting less diverse, as they focus ever more on their strong suits, basketball and football.

For example, when Tiger Woods, who is one-quarter black, won the Masters nine years ago, it was widely predicted that blacks would soon flood the ranks of pro golf.

Instead, the opposite has happened. Between 1964 and 1986, five black pros (Pete Brown, Charlie Sifford, Lee Elder, Calvin Peete and Jim Thorpe) won a total of 23 PGA tournaments. But in the 20 years since, no black other than Woods has won.

Similarly, Arthur Ashe won the U.S. Open tennis tournament 38 years ago. But no African-American man has won a major championship since him.

And Wendell Scott, a black driver, won a NASCAR stock car race back in 1963. But African-American interest in motor sports is minimal today.

The African-American share of major league baseball rosters has fallen from 27 percent in 1974 to 9 percent last year. Last fall, home run king Hank Aaron criticized the Houston Astros for having no African-American players. (But that black lack didn't stop the team from winning the National League pennant).

The unmentionable truth: human beings like to hang out with people like themselves.

And they will develop institutions to allow them to do so.

For instance, the middle of February was traditionally the deadest time of the year in sports. But today, Sunday, February 19, was full of events that have turned into de facto ethnic pride celebrations.

[More]

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

Davos Man Olympics?

Economist Arnold Kling writes on TCS:

If you think about it, the nationalistic element of the Olympics is unnecessary. Why make a big deal about how many medals are won by "the United States" as a collective entity? Why not just focus on the achievements of the individual entrants?

Back during the Sydney Summer Olympics, I explained why on VDARE:

In the post-nationalist's fantasy, the Olympics wouldn't be organized by anything so passé as nationality. Instead, athletes sponsored by Coke would battle Nike's hired guns for world marketing supremacy. The only problem with this vision: nobody would watch. (Well, I'd watch, but I'm a sports statistics geek.)

In these hypothetical Globalist Games, how would you know whom to root for?

Especially in the Winter Olympics, where so many of the competitors are wearing helmets and goggles, it's hard to pick out a favorite just because you like the twinkle in his eye.

What normal humans want out of spectator sports is a Good Guy to support. Over millions of years, our ancestors evolved a fascination with conflict. This was a crucial educational tool in the prehistoric world, where, judging by the horrendous violent death rates that contemporary hunter-gatherers inflict upon each other, people needed to be aficionados of fighting just to survive. Thus we tend to identify with one contestant in order to raise our interest level. The only question: how we decide.

There are a lot of options. People have often rooted for their own race, or religion, or class, or ideology. What people don't cheer for much, despite the brilliance of modern advertising agencies, are corporations. The main exceptions are fans that are also employees or investors, or customers with a lot of money and pride invested in their purchases. Thus, Ford owners looking for bragging rights might cheer on the Ford stock car racing factory team. Similarly, college alumni want their school's team to win to keep up the value of their résumés.

In general, however, people root for those who represent their region. Nebraska's high school dropouts still cheer for the U. of Nebraska football team. The citizens of St. Louis pull for the St. Louis Cardinal baseball team, whether or not it features a single player from St. Louis. And in the Olympics, spectators support their own countries' athletes.

It doesn't matter if you think rowing is the most boring sport imaginable and you don't even want to think about what "coxless pairs" might be. When the race starts, well, they may be a coxless pair, but, dammit, they're our coxless pair!

What the post-nationalists fail to consider is that humans want to divide themselves up into rival groups. If they don't form teams based on the legal concept of nationality, they will do it some other way. Deconstruct American patriotism via mass immigration and the ensuing explosion of identity politics will reach the point where Americans stop rooting for Olympic athletes just because they are their fellow American citizens.

Watch out. When patriotism collapses, as Eastern Europe shows, race wars can rapidly ensue.

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

Great moments in casting

Leon Hadar's Global Paradigm has an informative posting on the new anti-American Turkish blockbuster movie "Valley of the Wolf: Iraq."

Other scenes show ruthless [U.S.] marines killing Iraqis and soldiers mistreating inmates at Abu Ghraib prison, as well as an American Jewish surgeon, played by Gary Busey, who takes what look like kidneys from inmates during surgery to New York, London and Israel — all, according to the screenwriter, Bahadir Ozdener, inspired by real events.

This movie, the most expensive in Turkish history, should inspire in me a lot of Deep Thoughts on the folly of investing much hope in democratizing the Muslim world, but all I can think is: Wait a minute -- Gary Busey plays a Jewish surgeon?

Can you imagine the malpractice lawsuit trials? The jury would take one look at Gary's mug and say, "No need for all the yakity-yak, judge, we find for the plaintiff."

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

Elite Mexican attitudes toward the U.S.:

A reader writes to relate a story a professor told him of a visit to a top bureaucrat's office in Mexico City:

On the wall behind the official's desk, there was a giant, elaborate mural of a huge octopus with a red, white and blue top hat. It's tentacles were reaching out all over the landscape of central America and strangling masses of tiny brown people.

The fact that this fellow had this covering the wall behind his desk to greet anyone who came into his governmental office says a lot about the absurd official story that the Mexican government tries to sell to its people. On the one hand, you marvel at the chutzpah involved. But on the other, it seems only perfectly natural for them to want to pawn off their failed economic policies on something besides themselves, even if that something is the very reason they have a per capita income better than most of the world.

The really amazing thing is that we continue to gladly serve as the stopgap solution for their irrational governance.

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