Here's an email from a new public school teacher in
Those who can, do.
Those who can't, teach.
Those who can't teach get a Ph.D. in Education so they can implement instruction for instructional implementers.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Have you ever noticed how vastly much more attention is paid in the America press to Israel, a country of 6 million an ocean away, than to Mexico, a country of 109 million that shares a 1,952 mile border with us?
I'm not talking here about press bias for or against
For example, last year a leftist uprising that started among school teachers seized control of the big Mexican city of Oaxaca, a common destination for American tourists, and held it against federale attacks for quite a long time, but this seemingly interesting news created barely a ripple in the American media compared to the tsunami of reporting and commentating on Israel.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
By the most detailed account, Bonds didn't start juicing until after all the hoopla over Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa's jet-fueled home run chase in 1998 made him jealous and frustrated. He turned 34 in the second half of 1998, his 13th season, finishing the year with 411 homers, having hit 42, 40, and 37 over 1996-98.
My best guess is that if Bonds had stayed clean, right about now he'd wrapping up his career at age 43, probably playing DH in the American League, and trying to hang around to reach 600 homeruns. A normal looking Bonds hitting 189 homers over 1999-2007, or 21 per year, seems quite plausible. That would have moved him ahead of Frank Robinson, who had long been in fourth place with 586, behind Hank Aaron (755), Babe Ruth (714), and Willie Mays (660). (Sammy Sosa, who was likely a juicer, just passed 600, while Ken Griffey Jr., who certainly looked clean during his prime, is at 588 and counting.)
Assume Bonds had hit 600 homers, clean and while playing in pitchers parks most of his career. Add to that 500 stolen bases, a huge number of walks (e.g., 151 in 1996), a ton of runs scored, and good defense, that would likely have moved him past Frank Robinson and into contention with the great triumvirate of Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, and Hank Aaron to contend for the honor of the greatest player since WWII. As time goes by and the statistics of the cheaters fall into disrepute, Bonds clean numbers would have stood out more gloriously.
But he decided to throw it all away to beat the cheaters at their own game.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
In the wake of the
- Road-building is a national disgrace. It's corrupt -- Mayor Daley's closest buddies in Chicago are the road-builders who finance his campaigns in return for enormous contracts -- and thus the quality of our roads intentionally stink, wearing down our cars and lowering our gas mileage. They're supposed to fall apart because that puts more money in campaign donors' pockets. Roads in
- The more densely populated the country gets, the harder it is to build infrastructure because of Not In My Backyardism, which increases with the number of backyards. There will never be another freeway built in
- Compared to 1950, it takes forever to build anything these days, largely because of environmentalism, but every activist has his hand out too. To finish the Century Freeway to LAX, for example, CalTrans had to payoff hundreds of "community" organizations, including an AIDS group in
- The simplest way to slow the worsening of the population-to-infrastructure ratio is to cut back on immigration, just as it's also the simplest way to lessen the increasing stress on other problem spots, such as public schools, inequality, and health insurance. Instead, what we constantly hear is: "Oh, no, all we have to do is fix the public schools [inequality] [health care] [or various other problems that we have no likelihood of ever coming up with a magic bullet fix for].
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
The Atlanta Falcons quarterback who is facing trial on charges of horrific abuse of dogs while holding dog fights at his mansion, has one of the world's greatest bodies, but not, by most accounts, one of the world's greatest brains.
A reader sent me a link to a Randall Parker Future Pundit item from 2006 that was prescient:
High Testosterone Men More Abusive To Dogs
Another reader noted Peter King's obituary in Sports Illustrated for the brilliant football innovator Bill Walsh, who, more than anybody else, invented the modern pass-crazy NFL offensive style. King quotes Walsh from 1991, which might have some relevance to Vick:
"As a coach, I know I have to start with smart players. It might not have been so important in past years, but today we're asking players to do so much and to know so many schemes. Without basic intelligence, they simply can't play. And if they're not just plain smart, they're not going to be able to do the things a sophisticated coach is going to ask. With the speed on the field today, their technique and knowledge of what they have to do has to be keen or they'll get buried. A player like Bill Ring of the 49ers, who wasn't physically gifted, was a great contributor, despite his lack of speed and size and quickness, because he was a tremendous student of the game.
"As you'll see in this book, intelligent players have an infinitely better chance to succeed. On offense, they have to cope more and more with things like the no-huddle and quick snaps. In a few years, who knows? Maybe there won't be huddles. On defense, they have to cope with different schemes and all the substitution. When I look for players now, even at Stanford, I can rule out a lot of people fast. They have to have above-average intelligence combined with the ability to function under stress ...
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
I hadn't been paying much attention to economist John R. Lott's defamation lawsuit against Freakonomist Steven D. Levitt: I don't like lawsuits. But now I've finally read the two 2005 emails at the heart of one count of Lott's suit. I'm sure I don't understand all the details of the situation, but they seem pretty eye-opening.
They were between an economist named John McCall and Levitt, and they touch upon the October 2001 issue of the
From: John McCall
Subject: Freakonomics note yesterday to you
To: steve levitt
Hi Steve,
I went to the website you recommended -- have not gone after the round table proceedings yet -- I also found the following citations -- have not read any of them yet, but it appears they all replicate Lott's research. The Journal of Law and Economics is not chopped liver.
Have you read through any of these?
http://johnrlott.tripod.com/postsbyday/RTCResearch.html
Cordially,
John McCall PhD
Levitt replied:
From: slevitt@[deleted for anti-spam purposes]
Date: Wed May 25, 2005 9:18:28 PM US/Central
To: John McCall
Subject: Re: Freakonomics note yesterday to you
John,
It was not a peer refereed edition of the Journal. For $15,000 he was able to buy an issue and put in only work that supported him. My best friend was the editor and was outraged the press let Lott do this.
Steve
The Chronicle of Higher Education now writes:
"Mr. Levitt's letter of clarification, which was included in Friday's filing, offers a doozy of a concession. In his 2005 message, Mr. Levitt told Mr. McCall that "it was not a peer-refereed edition of the Journal." But in his letter of clarification, Mr. Levitt writes: "I acknowledge that the articles that were published in the conference issue were reviewed by referees engaged by the editors of the JLE. In fact, I was one of the peer referees."
"Mr. Levitt's letter also concedes that he had been invited to present a paper at the 1999 conference. (He did not do so.) That admission undermines his e-mail message's statement that Mr. Lott had "put in only work that supported him."
"In his letter of clarification to Mr. McCall, Mr. Levitt said, "At the time of my May 2005 e-mails to you, I knew that scholars with varying opinions had been invited to participate in the 1999 conference and had been informed that their papers would be considered for publication in what became the conference issue."
If Dr. Levitt wishes an opportunity to further clarify what has emerged so far of his letter of clarification, he is welcome to post in my comments.
Update: Mario Delgado posts some relevant information in a comment on the Deltoid blog, including a quote from a participant in the conference: "A participant in the conference told The Chronicle last year that Mr. Levitt's characterization of the issue as not peer-refereed was an exaggeration but not an outrageous untruth."
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
A friend's phone number is one digit off from the local recruiting office of the U.S. Marines, so their dinner is occasionally interrupted by young men calling to enlist. His daughter ordered the last caller to "Drop and give me 50!" Huffing and puffing ensued out of the phone.
In related news, the Sikhs are the War Nerd's kind of guys: "Sikh to Death."
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
A Lieutenant Colonel writes from
I just read your 2003 article, "Cousin Marriage Conundrum." You're right on the money about
On the other hand, pure tribal identity still plays a big role in
There is an interesting counterpoint to the enduring nature of tribal loyalty in
It doesn't always turn out this well, however.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Because I have one of those $9.97 subscriptions to the New Republic, I can't tell if Steven Pinker's cover story in the August 6th issue, which does such a fine job of summarizing a lot of my approach to thinking about humanity (with one obvious exception), is available to nonsubscribers. Can you get to the full article from here? Or, how about from there?
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Arnold Kling notes an article from the Milken Review, where Giovanni Peri writes:
U.S.-born workers are climbing the educational ladder, acquiring interactive/analytic skills and progressively leaving the manual jobs that would put them in competition with immigrants. If the trend continues as expected, the day is not far off when virtually all manual labor will be performed by foreign-born labor. This implies large wage gains for native workers, since they will be able to specialize in language-intensive and interactive tasks that are typically far better paid.
While some people shudder at the prospect of a more stratified society with immigrants at the bottom, keep in mind that the biggest gainers by far in this situation are the immigrants themselves.
Right, our current immigration system is the perfect policy for
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
According to Google News, none of the 1,294 news stories on the Swedish movie director's death mention that he finally admitted in 1999 that he had been a Nazi-supporter all through WWII, when he was in his 20s, because he found Nazism to be "fun and youthful." Bergman's Nazi enthusiasm wasn't unknown back in Bergman's heyday: Richard Grenier, Commentary's film critic, wrote a hostile article about it in the 1980s, but, otherwise, Bergman seems to have gotten a free pass over it.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
I'm looking for well-known pairs of celebrities whose faces would be readily accessible on Google Images who are second degree relatives:
- Grandfather and grandson
- Grandmother and granddaughter
- Uncle and nephew
- Aunt and niece.
I'd like to do a quick and dirty check of how much second degree relatives of the same sex look like each other. So far, all I can think of is Walter Huston and Angelica Huston, who don't look much like (although Angelica is obviously the daughter of her father John Huston), but crossing sex lines adds to the dissimilarity. (Danny Huston isn't that well-known although he seems to work a lot these days for reasons I don't comprehend.) Also, they'd ideally be the same general race -- that George P. Bush is mestizo distracts from evaluating how much he looks like George W. Bush or George H.W. Bush.
Please don't search out pairs who are particularly similar or dissimilar-looking -- I just want a bunch of pairs whose faces are reasonably well-known.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
A reader writes:
I think that your paper misses one of the prime motivators for first cousin marriage (at least among the community in which I gained some familiarity with it – Panjabi Muslims). In communities where extended families are still the norm, the success or otherwise of a marriage depends a lot on the relationship with the in-laws – for the bride in particular. She may have a great relationship with her husband, but if his mother doesn’t like her, she can make her life hell. And in fact it is almost expected that the relationship between mother in law and daughter in law will be very high conflict. A side effect of patriarchy – generally, older women have authority over younger women, having served their time at the bottom of the heap, they are forthright in exercising power over the “new girls” as they come along. When you give your daughter into her new family, you know that you are giving that family a lot of power over her – the power of life and death, in some cases, given the rate of honour killings and dowry deaths (among Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus alike). So who do you trust your daughter to? Your article refers to an immigrant bringing in “his’ nephew – but it is generally the women who play the major role in arranging the marriages (although the men certainly get to say yes or no). So when it comes to “who can I trust to care for my daughter” the answer is often “she will be safe in my sister’s home”. Or my husband’s sister’s/brother’s home – I haven’t done any empirical research as to how common it is to marry along the matrilineal vs patrilineal line (remembering that those lines are often related).
Of course, that trust is often completely misplaced. I’m not sure that kin relationships mean as much as your article makes out, especially when they are often artificially created – a lot of people aren’t really conscious of how many of their “aunties and uncles” are blood aunties and uncles. I rather doubt that it has much effect on social institutions in the ways described but that is a whole paper in itself rather than an e-mail.
Again, I don’t have the empirical evidence to hand, but it is not true that the cousin-marriage for immigration purposes “almost always works just in one direction -- with the new husband moving from the poor Muslim country to the rich European country” - brides are often brought over for British (or other Western) grooms. This is thought to re-infuse the family with the “home culture”, and there is a perception that a girl from back home will be more “traditional” (again this is often untrue). And while men generally have more autonomy in refusing a marriage, and are more likely to be forgiven if they walk right away from the whole thing, they too come under enormous emotional pressure in these situations. (“you will drag our family’s name into the mud and your sisters will never find husbands”). In
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Almost nobody (including me) took seriously the defamation suit filed by itinerant economist John R. Lott against celebrity Freakonomist Steven D. Levitt. After all, Lott is a kind of odd-looking guy with a tightly wound personality, while Levitt is the mediagenic embodiment of boyishly-appealing supergenius. Yet, I now guess I was wrong. The news of the proposed settlement, especially the "doozy of a concession" that Levitt is making to Lott, appears to validate Levitt's whispered-about reputation as a nasty in-fighter at academic politics, a bad man to get on the bad side of.
A Nobel Laureate invited me to speak at a discussion of Levitt's abortion-cut-crime theory at a big economics conference, but the session never materialized because Levitt's critics within the economics profession were reluctant to challenge Levitt in a venue likely to rouse his ire. As one young economist who had written a paper punching holes in Levitt's most famous theory explained to me why he wouldn't participate in the Laureate v. Levitt smackdown, "There's an old African saying: 'When the elephants wrestle, the grass gets trampled."
The Chronicle of Higher Education now reports that Levitt has offered "a doozy of a concession" to make the lawsuit go away:
Unusual Agreement Means Settlement May Be Near in 'Lott v. Levitt'
John R. Lott Jr.’s defamation lawsuit against his fellow economist Steven D. Levitt has provisionally been settled — but it may yet roar back to life.
In documents filed today in federal court, the two parties outlined a settlement that requires Mr. Levitt, who is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and a co-author of the best-selling book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explains the Hidden Side of Everything, to send a letter of clarification to John B. McCall, a retired economist in Texas.
Mr. Lott’s lawsuit alleges that Mr. Levitt defamed him in a 2005 e-mail message to Mr. McCall (who, contrary to what was reported in an earlier version of this blog item, is not the same John McCall who once taught Mr. Lott at the
The letter of clarification, which was included in today’s filing, offers a doozy of a concession. In his 2005 message, Mr. Levitt told Mr. McCall that “it was not a peer-refereed edition of the Journal.” But in his letter of clarification, Mr. Levitt writes: “I acknowledge that the articles that were published in the conference issue were reviewed by referees engaged by the editors of the JLE. In fact, I was one of the peer referees.”
Mr. Levitt’s letter also concedes that he had been invited to present a paper at the 1999 conference. (He did not do so.) That admission undermines his e-mail message’s statement that Mr. Lott had “put in only work that supported him.”
The provisional settlement is simple: Beyond the letter of clarification, the agreement does not require any formal apology from Mr. Levitt, and no money will change hands. [More]
My Washington Times review of Lott's anti-Freakonomics book Freedomnomics is here.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Steven Pinker's "Inherit the Wind: Our Weird Obsession with Genealogy" is the cover story in\ the August 6, 2007 issue of The New Republic. Here's an excerpt:
In the struggle between society and family, the exponential mathematics of kinship ordinarily works to the advantage of society. As time passes or groups get larger, family trees intertwine, dynasties dissipate, and nepotistic emotions get diluted. But families can defend themselves with a potent tactic: they can graft the twig tips of the family tree together by cousin marriage. If you force your daughter to marry her first cousin, then your son-in-law is your nephew, her father-inlaw is your brother, your parents’ estate will be worth twice as much per grandchild, and the couple will never have to bicker about which side of the family to visit on holidays. For these reasons, clans and dynasties in many cultures encourage first-or second-cousin marriage, tolerating the slightly elevated risk of genetic disease. Not only does cousin marriage amplify the average degree of relatedness among members of the clan, but it enmeshes them in a network of triangular relationships, with kinsmen valuing each other because of their many mutual kin as well as their own relatedness. As a result, the extended family, clan, or tribe can emerge as a powerfully cohesive bloc—and one with little common cause with other families, clans, or tribes in the larger polity that comprises them. The anthropologist Nancy Thornhill has shown that the prohibitions against incestuous marriages in most societies are not public-health measures aimed at reducing birth defects but the society’s way of fighting back against extended families.
In January 2003, during the buildup to the war in
Overall, Pinker does an excellent job of synthesizing what I've been writing for years, with one lacuna, which I'll explain at another time.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
I am sorry about no postings, but the family went camping at the spectacular Montana de Oro state park just south of
Morro Bay is only 200 miles north of LA, but the summer climate north of Point Concepcion west of Santa Barbara is wildly different - it was about 65 degrees, with a dense drizzly fog within a mile of the Pacific. Apparently, when the summer sun beats down on
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
My new VDARE.com column examines why what was wrong with the seemingly mile-wide coalition of special interests behind the Kennedy-Bush-McCain: It was only an inch deep. "What the Axis didn't have was any Americans below the elites who actually cared enough about the amnesty bill to write their Senators." For example, white liberals below the elite ranks did almost nothing to help the amnesty bill pass:
As Randall Burns has documented on VDARE.com, white liberals who are ordinary citizens showed negligible zeal for amnesty. The "progressive netroots" who hang out on Daily Kos and the like have turned themselves into a formidable political force, but they were yet another dog that didn't bark for amnesty. On the rare occasions when the Senate legislation came up on liberal blogs, the comments sections tended toward hostility.
Just about the only pro-amnesty talking point that white liberals could rally around was that passing the bill would make white conservatives—who are, by definition, evil racists, morally far inferior to white liberals—mad.
That kind of status-striving certainly motivated a lot of the biased pro-amnesty press coverage in the MSM. But it didn't seem to drive much positive political activism among the netroots.
The truth is that white liberals are bored by Mexican illegal immigrants, who lack the glamour of the 1960s black civil rights protestors. At the 2006 march for illegal aliens that I witnessed, I didn't see a single white American. Everyone marching down
In summary, the Axis of Amnesty coalition turned out to be a lot of chiefs and very few Indians. [More]
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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