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Steve Sailer Says: Help VDARE.COM (and Me) Celebrate the New Year!

By Steve Sailer

We at VDARE.COM will have one reason to celebrate come January 20, 2009. George W. Bush will be gone, and we’ll still be here.

And with your help, we’ll be around when the new President is history. But only with your help …

As you’ll recall, George W. Bush was supposed to introduce a new, compassionate conservatism, taking Ronald Reagan’s American optimism to a new global level. While Reagan’s optimistic outlook focused on tapping his fellow Americans’ capacities, Bush’s greatest enthusiasm has been reserved for foreigners. His grand strategy of what we at VDARE.COM have called Invite the World - Invade the World - In Hock to the World placed his trust in Mexican illegal immigrants, Iraqi voters, and Chinese factory workers and bankers.

The Bush Bubble was phony, of course. It proved to be a variant of an earlier version of “compassionate” governance seen in Latin American countries like Argentina in the post-War world.

It’s important to understand that Latin American inflationary economics, like Bushian compassionate conservatism, wasn’t intended to wreak devastation -- it just evolved as an attempt to keep everybody happy.

From the days of Juan Peron onward, the workers of Buenos Aires would complain to the government that they weren’t being paid enough, so El Presidente would order their bosses to pay them more. Then the factory owners would complain to the government that they were going bankrupt, so the government would order the commercial banks to lend the factories more money. Then the banks would complain that they were about to go broke, so the government would tell the Central Bank to lend the commercial banks more money. When the Central Bank complained that they were running out of reserves, they would be told to print more some more money, lots and lots more money.

America’s leaders, Republican and Democrat, looked at the Latin American defaults of the 1980s and took from them this lesson:

Never let workers get paid more.

That way, you can’t start down the Latin American path to ruin. All the experts, such as Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin, were agreed that the essential ingredient of economic success was keeping the average American from earning more money. Keep the supply of labor up -- and the price of labor down -- by not enforcing the laws against illegal immigration.

In other words, the key to avoiding the Hispanicization of the economy was to Hispanicize the population! (Of course, nobody ever quite put it in those words …)

Yet, Bush was not a cruel man, nor even a tough man. Like a lot of seemingly formidable Latin American generalissimos, he just wanted everybody to be happy.

In George W. Bush’s America, flat wages didn’t mean workers couldn’t have bigger houses, bigger TVs, and bigger rims on their rides. They could have it all … just by taking out bigger debts.

What could possibly go wrong?

Indeed, to Bush, one of the biggest problems facing the country was that the financial system was holding minorities back from their fair share of the American Dream by not lending them enough money. Bush egged the Bush Bubble on, denouncing traditional down payments on mortgages as the chief barrier to his goal of greatly increasing the number of minority homeowners. Mortgage dollars for home purchases leant to Hispanics soared a staggering 691 percent from 1999 to 2006.

Unlike the Bush family’s amigos in the old Mexican ruling party, however, George W. Bush wasn’t even competent enough to delay the economic collapse until after the election.

The Bush years ended in economic and political ruin, with the financial system more or less nationalized, and an incoming liberal Democratic President given almost carte blanche to hand out to his supporters however many hundreds of billions or even trillions he chooses.

While I wouldn’t be surprised if some of Obama’s “stimulus spending” goes to prop up big newspapers (after all, they gave him such lax scrutiny during the endless election), we can be sure that VDARE.COM won’t be getting any Obama Dollars.

To continue to provide you with the analyses and reporting that you literally cannot read anywhere else, we need your support.

When you realize how bad a job the MainStream Media did of exposing George W. Bush’s fundamental mistakes, just imagine what pushovers they will be for Barack Obama!

We certainly understand that it’s harder to give this year than last.

But if we are going to continue to expose how the world really works, your financial help is needed now more than ever.

Many thanks.

Steve Sailer

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

Who has turned out to be right in the Limbaugh-Black QB Controversy?

Back in 2003, Rush Limbaugh got himself in all sorts of trouble for saying during his (brief) tenure as a pregame show analyst for ESPN that Philadelphia Eagles QB Donovan McNabb wasn't as good as the media claimed:

"I don't think he's been that good from the get-go. I think what we've had here is a little social concern in the NFL. I think the media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. They're interested in black coaches and black quarterbacks doing well. I think there's a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he really didn't deserve. The defense carried this team."

Five and a half seasons later, McNabb is still a pretty good quarterback, with his team in the playoffs again.

But, it's worth taking a statistical look at black quarterbacks' performance in the NFL.

The source for my data is ESPN.com. It lists for the seven years 2002-2008 all the quarterbacks who have thrown at least 224 passes in a season (14 per game) -- in other words, the busiest 32 to 34 quarterbacks per year -- the "regulars."

One thing that jumps out of the data is that 2003, the year of the Limbaugh brouhaha, was the peak year in recent times for black quarterbacks. Among the top 32 quarterbacks that year, blacks accounted for over one quarter of all yards throw. In 2008, however, blacks only accounted for 14.7% of all yards passing among the top quarterbacks, a typical percentage for the last four seasons:

2002	21.6%
2003	25.7%
2004	17.7%
2005	15.7%
2006	13.0%
2007	15.8%
2008	14.7%

Other ways of measuring quarterbacks show similar stories. For example, the NFL's Passer Rating statistic (which aggregates percent completed, yards per attempt, touchdown percentage, and interception percentage) shows that the highest rated black passer in 2008 was Seattle's Seneca Wallace at 13th, followed by McNabb at 15th, Jason Campbell of Washington at 19th, David Garrard of Jacksonville at 20th, and JaMarcus Russell of Oakland at 26th.

Black quarterbacks tend to run better on average, but with Michael Vick in prison, none of the black regulars did much rushing in 2008.

So, it looks like Limbaugh's general assertion that black quarterbacks tended to be overhyped by the press has been borne out by the following half decade of statistics.

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

Shocking news: College football and basketball players not as smart as their classmates

A new report:

By MIKE KNOBLER

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Sunday, December 28, 2008

Football and men’s basketball players on the nation’s big-time college teams averaged hundreds of points lower on their SATs than their classmates, and some of the gaps are so large they call into question the lengths to which schools will go to win.

The biggest gap between football players and students as a whole occurred at the University of Florida, where players scored 346 points lower than the school’s overall student body [out of 1600 points, or about 1.5 standard deviations]. That’s larger than the difference in scores between typical students at the University of Georgia and Harvard University.

Hmmhmm, isn't Florida playing in the national championship game next month? Could there be a connection?

Seriously, one aspect of this that gets overlooked is that the average SAT scores at many state flagship schools have risen significantly over the last generation. For example, football players at Florida average 890, but U. of Florida students average 1236 which is pretty good. (Old timers who took the SAT before the fall of 1995 should subtract 110 points from these glitzy new scores to adjust them down to the harder scoring standards prevailing in their days.)

An 890 really isn't that bad. That's probably about the national average, if you included all the students who don't bother to take the SAT or ACT. (Am I right about that?). I suspect, however, that a lot of prize recruits took the SAT four or five times, and had lots of drilling in it.

Nationwide, football players average 220 points lower on the SAT than their classmates — and men’s basketball players average seven points less than football players.

Those figures come from an Atlanta Journal-Constitution study of 54 public universities, including the members of the six major Bowl Championship Series conferences and other schools whose teams finished the 2007-08 season ranked among the football or men’s basketball top 25.

While it’s commonly known that admission standards are different for athletes, the AJC study quantifies how wide the gap is between athletes and the general student body at major universities.

Georgia Tech’s football players had the nation’s best average SAT score, 1028 of a possible 1600, and best average high school GPA, 3.39 of a possible 4.0 in the core curriculum. But Tech’s football players still scored 315 SAT points lower on average than their classmates.

At the University of Georgia, the average football SAT was 949, which is 239 points behind the average for an undergraduate student at Georgia — and 79 points behind Tech’s football average. The Bulldogs’ average high school GPA was 2.77, or 45th out of 53 teams for which football GPAs were available. Their SAT average ranked them 22nd.

Nationwide, coaches who would never offer a scholarship to a player who was 6 inches shorter or half a second slower than other prospects routinely recruit players whose standardized test scores suggest they’re at a competitive disadvantage in the classroom.

It’s the price of winning.

“If you’re going to mount a competitive program in Division I-A, and our institution is committed to do that, some flexibility in admissions of athletes is going to take place,” said Tom Lifka, chairman of the committee that handles athlete admissions at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Every institution I know in the country operates in the same way. It may or may not be a good thing, but that’s the way it is.”

UCLA, which has won more NCAA championships in all sports than any other school, had the biggest gap between the average SAT scores of athletes in all sports and its overall student body, at 247 points. ...

FOOTBALL SAT SCORES:
THE TOP 10
School, Average
Georgia Tech, 1028
Oregon State, 997
Michigan, 997
Virginia, 993
Purdue, 974
Indiana, 973
Hawaii, 968
California, 967
Colorado, 966
Iowa, 964

THE BOTTOM 10
School, Average
Oklahoma State, 878
Louisville, 878
Memphis, 890
Florida, 890
Texas Tech, 901
Arkansas, 910
Texas A&M, 911
Mississippi State, 911
Washington State, 916
Michigan State, 917
...

Black athletes’ average SAT score was 102 points lower than the average for black students overall. White athletes’ average SAT score was 88 points lower than the average for white students overall. One expert says those numbers suggest schools are motivated by money, not affirmative action. If universities were motivated by affirmative action, they would enroll black students whose qualifications give them a better chance to succeed in class, rather than athletes whose skills help the school sell football and basketball tickets, said Allen Sack, director of the University of New Haven’s Institute for Sport Management and a former University of Notre Dame football player.

“The black athletes are far more represented in football and basketball, the two sports that produce the most revenue,” Sack said. “Is there exploitation going on? I would suggest there is.”

Sack said universities might be exploiting those athletes who enter with inferior academic credentials, even if athletes as a whole graduate at a higher rate than non-athletes. “The athletes should all be graduating at a higher rate than the student body because they have the incredible advantage of having tuition, room and board paid for them,” Sack said.

The most recent Division I data showed black athletes in men’s sports outperforming black men’s graduation rate overall, 48 percent to 38 percent, and black athletes in women’s sports outperforming black women’s graduation rate overall, 66 percent to 50 percent. For white women, the graduation rates were 74 percent for athletes, 67 percent overall. The only large group in which athletes underperformed: White men, with athletes graduating at 61 percent and students as a whole at 62 percent.

Here are the stats for 54 public university football powerhouses.

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

More on homicide trends

James Alan Fox of Northeastern University, whose study of homicide trends provided the basis for a somewhat misleading article in the New York Times today, has kindly sent me some more detailed data (derived from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics website) on recent trends in homicide offending rates.

Here's the NYT's graphs, which show not the expected rate per capita but the absolute number of perpetrators. The reader who doesn't stop to take this into account would assume that the black homicide rate is about twice the "white" rate. But, of course, there are far more white than black teens, so the black rate is actually much higher than just twice as bad.

First, Dr. Fox confirmed for me that what the New York Times referred to as number of homicides perpetrated by "whites" is actually the number for "whites plus most Hispanics." (The federal government is very careful about breaking out Hispanic statistics separately in almost all venues except crime rates. I wonder why?) This is an important point because it's likely that Hispanics now commit the majority of homicides in the younger age groups of the government's "whites plus Hispanics" aggregation.

Second, he sent me the per capita rates, from which I have calculated the ratio of homicide perpetrating rates. The following table lists the ratio of the murder rate for blacks to the murder rate for whites plus Hispanics. For example, in 2007, the black homicide rate among 14-17 year-old-males was 10.0 times the level of homicide rate for the aggregation of whites and Hispanics.

	14-17	18-24	25+
2000	8.1	9.1	7.6
2001	7.6	8.3	7.3
2002	7.0	8.3	7.6
2003	7.7	8.6	7.7
2004	7.7	8.2	7.0
2005	8.5	8.7	7.8
2006	9.3	9.3	8.1
2007	10.0	9.4	7.8

From this, it appears fairly safe to say that by 2007, the ratio of black to non-Hispanic white homicide rates was at least an order of magnitude for all age groups.

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

Homicide Rates: Back toward Crack among Blacks

After a huge dropoff with the ending of the crack wars around 1995, the black homicide perpetration rate has turned up again in this decade. For black male 14-17 year olds, according to tables prepared by James Alan Fox of Northeastern U., the number of homicide perpetrators in absolute terms is up 34% from 2000-2001 to 2006-2007, up 12% for black 18-24-year-0lds, and up 17% for blacks men 25+.

In contrast, for "whites" (which appear to include most Hispanics), the number of homicide perpetrators is up 3% for 14-17 year-olds, down -2% for 18-24 year-olds, and up 6% for 25+. The federal government carefully breaks out Hispanic data for almost everything except crime statistics, which makes non-black crime numbers hard to interpret. My guess would be that the homicide rate for whites/Hispanics is falling because the number of whites/Hispanics is growing rapidly due to Hispanic growth. Unfortunately, we can't use federal figures to break down white versus Hispanic crime trends, but I would guess that crime rate trends are pretty quiet among both whites and Hispanics in this decade.

Here in LA, there was a spike in Hispanic gang murders after Villaraigosa was elected mayor in 2005, but the LAPD remains in the capable hands of William Bratton, and that has faded out.

My assumption is that technological trends, especially the spread of cellphones and cellphone cameras, has made crime a riskier business, so crime rates should be dropping all else being equal.

When I debated economist Steven Levitt over crime in Slate in 1999, he asked me what my prediction for future crime trends was: I replied that I figured that black teens are currently benefiting from the example of their many older brothers and cousins whom the crack wars left in jail, wheelchairs, or cemeteries, but that eventually a new cohort of black teens would come along without direct experience of the horrors of crack wars of 1988-1994, and the homicide rate would go back up again.

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

My new VDARE.com column

Now that my argument that an underestimated source of the mortgage meltdown was pro-diversity policies is on the move from from being regarded as scurrilous infamy to being quietly accepted into the conventional wisdom, I lay out n VDARE.com an idea that commenters here and I have been kicking around for some time:

So now let me suggest another even less welcome Big Idea for the rest of the media to get around to in the next several months:

• The Crash is, at a fundamental level, a readjustment to demographic change. America’s immigration-driven shifting ethnic balance means that the average human capital of U.S. residents is now lower than was assumed.

The Crash is telling us that this readjustment can no longer be papered over or postponed.

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

Annual Excess Income Relief Effort

For all my readers who are concerned about having to write a big check to the IRS in 3.5 months, I'm at your service to relieve you of some of that burden! You can make a tax-deductible 2008 donation to me here.

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

"Valkyrie"

"Valkyrie," with Tom Cruise as Col. Stauffenberg, who led the July 20, 1944 assassination and coup plot against Hitler, is a fairly decent movie that never quite overcomes the obvious problems with making a thriller where you know ahead of time that the hero fails, and there's only one explosion and a brief shootout. Still, it's a respectable, grown-up film.

The accents, though, don't help matters. Hitler has a German accent and Stauffenberg an American accent, and in between these two moral poles, most of the supporting cast, such as Tom Wilkinson, Kenneth Branagh, and Eddie Izzard, have English accents. Granted, the English actors are quite good, but if you have Tom Cruise signed up as your hero and he can only do an American accent, then, rather than embarrass your star, shouldn't you find American character actors and do the whole thing with American accents? Sure, maybe the English are better character actors on a per capita average basis, but there are more than enough good American character actors to fill out the cast.

And that leads to the question of whether Cruise should have played Count Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. Ever since Cruise replaced his publicist with his sister, his public image has been in ruins, but I've never gotten too worked up over that. I've never much liked Cruise as an actor, because he doesn't seem to have much going for him except energy, but he has a track record with remarkably few outright failures on it ("Lions for Lambs" being the only one in this decade). Tom Cruise's name on a film suggests that it's not going to be totally bad. Strange as it may seem, the Cruise brand name implies that the film will be a quality product.

Facially, Cruise is quite plausible as the handsome 37-year-old colonel. Still, much of Stauffenberg's charisma, which was essential in his driving a military plot large enough to have a chance at not just killing Hitler but overthrowing the Nazi Party, stemmed from his epitomizing the best traits of the old German aristocracy. Cruise doesn't do upper class grace. Mostly, Cruise just does intensity. The film would have worked better with a Shakespearean-trained English actor as the Count. Or, if Cruise was essential to the financing, then lose the stage-trained Englishmen in the supporting roles and replace them with Americans.

Director Bryan Singer adds to the style of the film, especially its art direction, a note of gay hysteria that is not all that historically inaccurate in depicting Nazi Germany.

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

The place name that changed, then changed back

Which country is this?

It's almost forgotten now, but, in the manner of Bombay-->Mumbai, in the middle of the 20th Century, one well-known Western European state recurrently tried to persuade Anglophones to call it by a name almost unknown in English. I recall that many maps and globes I saw as a child in the 1960s used this obscure term as the main name for this country, with its famous English name in smaller type in parentheses below.

My cousins were attending school in this country when I visited them in 1965. They complained about having to take classes in the indigenous tongue, saying that English was the language of the future. Whiny snot-nosed teens they may have been, but they were right.

Got it by now?

Emphasizing the local name over the celebrated English name was an anti-English-colonialist gesture, same as changing Bombay to Mumbai (with, same as in India, the added bonus of pleasing some locals and displeasing others). But in this case, it didn't stick because it was too confusing and too inconvenient for foreigners, so the locals have largely given up on the name change, just as they have largely given upon the language. To this day, only this indigenous name appears on postage stamps, but the American media have largely given up using the new name and gone back to the more familiar old name.

Wikipedia gives an example of common-sense prevailing in this country:

From 1938 to 1962 the international plate on Irish cars was marked "EIR", short for Éire.^{[citation needed]} In 1922-1938 it was "SE", and from 1962 "IRL" has been adopted. Irish politician, Bernard Commons TD suggested to the Dáil in 1950 that the government examine "the tourist identification plate bearing the letters EIR" "with a view to the adoption of identification letters more readily associated with this country by foreigners".^[4] The amendment was effected under the Road Traffic Act 1961.

So, the lesson appears to be, once again, that non-Europeans get to change what Anglophones in the West call their historic places, but Europeans don't.

By the way, this is a different situation from the country on the opposite side of England insisting upon being called The Netherlands rather than the traditional Holland. Holland refers only to the culturally dominant coastal stretch that contains the big cities, but only 13% of the land area. It's the analog of using England to refer to Great Britain or the United Kingdom. It makes sense to choose a new name when incorporating a larger region or shrinking (e.g., Montenegro).

But, today, the main examples of European countries getting to change their placenames, following the dropping of some dictators' names at the end of the Cold War, is that Ukraine has talked the media into not referring to it as The Ukraine.

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

Frog-Boiling

The three main government-approved credit rating agencies -- Standard & Poor's, Moody's, and Fitch -- notoriously failed in recent years in rating complex structured financial assets.

My vague impression is that the ratings agencies first became corruptible in the 1970s when two things happened:

- They switched their basic business model in the early 1970s from being paid by users of their information (bond-buyers and the like) to being paid by issuers (debtors). That incentive structure created an obvious conflict of interest.

- The government started writing them into legislation around 1975, making them a legally-mandated quasi-cartel.

I spent years in the market research business telling consumer packaged goods manufacturers what their market share was, a business that's fairly comparable in We would have loved to have gotten into the more lucrative financial rating business (the Wall Street mark-up is a lot higher than the Corporate America mark-up), but up at least through a 2006 reform, you couldn't get into that market unless you were already in that market. We didn't have particularly large conflicts of interest in the market research business, since the primary users paid us for the data. Procter & Gamble is more interested in what Crest's market share is than anybody else is, so P&G pays its market research supplier and takes steps to make sure it's getting accurate information.

The surprising thing is that the ratings agencies didn’t get corrupted for several more decades after these 1970s changes. But, that long period of good behavior created an assumption on the part of the markets that just because they hadn’t allowed themselves to be corrupted by their incentive structure so far, they never would.

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

How Mrs. Thatcher became Mrs. Thatcher

John O'Sullivan has an interesting column in the Wall Street Journal comparing Sarah Palin to Margaret Thatcher, for whom he worked. He points out that:

Inevitably, Lloyd Bentsen's famous put-down of Dan Quayle in the 1988 vice-presidential debate is resurrected, such as by Paul Waugh (in the London Evening Standard) and Marie Cocco (in the Washington Post): "Newsflash! Governor, You're No Maggie Thatcher," sneered Mr. Waugh. Added Ms. Coco, "now we know Sarah Palin is no Margaret Thatcher -- and no Dan Quayle either!"

Jolly, rib-tickling stuff. But, as it happens, I know Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher is a friend of mine. And as a matter of fact, Margaret Thatcher and Sarah Palin have a great deal in common. ...

Things like that change your mind about a girl. But they also take time, during which she had to turn her instinctive beliefs into intellectually coherent policies against opposition inside and outside her own party. Like Mrs. Palin this year, Mrs. Thatcher knew there were serious gaps in her knowledge, especially of foreign affairs. She recruited experts who shared her general outlook (such as Robert Conquest and Hugh Thomas) to tutor her on these things. Even so she often seemed very alone in the Tory high command.

As a parliamentary sketch writer for the Daily Telegraph (and a not very repressed suburbanite), I watched Mrs. Thatcher's progress as opposition leader. She had been a good performer in less exalted positions. But initially she faltered. Against the smooth, condescending Prime Minister James Callaghan in particular she had a hard time. In contrast to his chuckling baritone she sounded shrill when she attacked. But she lowered her tone (vocally not morally), took lessons in presentation from (among others) Laurence Olivier, and prepared diligently for every debate and Question Time.

I can still recall her breakthrough performance in a July 1977 debate on the Labour government's collapsing economy. She dominated the House of Commons so wittily that the next day the Daily Mail's acerbic correspondent, Andrew Alexander, began his report: "If Mrs. Thatcher were a racehorse, she would have been tested for drugs yesterday." She was now on the way to becoming the world-historical figure who today is the gold standard of conservative statesmanship.

This explains much of my lack of interest in the ongoing "How smart is Sarah Palin?" brouhaha. She's not a plausible Presidential candidate until she wins re-election in 2010. Then, if Obama is in trouble, she could make a dash for 2012, or focus on 2016, when she'll be 52. If she skips 2012 and a Republican wins two terms, she could run in 2020 when she's 56.

What all this means is that she has the time to put herself through a lengthy educational process similar to the one Mrs. Thatcher undertook. If she succeeds in it, then she's Presidential Timber. If she doesn't, she's not. In either case, I'm not going to spend a lot of time worrying at present about whether she is going to succeed or not. It's Mrs. Palin's career, not mine.

Another similarity between Mrs. Thatcher and Mrs. Palin is that when Miss Roberts, then in her mid-20s, first showed up on the political scene by putting up good shows in losing runs for safe Labour seats in the 1950 and 1951 elections, she was the best looking woman in politics. I've stumbled across recollections by conservative-leaning English gentlemen of a certain age -- Alec Guinness, David Lean, and Kingsley Amis -- of what a crush they had on the future Mrs. Thatcher. The thing to keep in mind about her is that she is extremely English looking, with the kind of looks that are rarely seen in America, so Americans can't see what 1950s English saw in her.

On the other hand, Thatcher had two major career advantages over Palin: a rich husband and fewer children. Mrs. Thatcher told my wife how lucky she was to have had fraternal twins so she could have a boy and a girl all at once and then get back to her career.

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

NCAA athletes by ethnicity

I decided to start off after the Christmas break with some data analysis. Here are the NCAA two statistics on Division I college athletes by ethnicity.

Let's take a look at Asian - Pacific Islanders (which, I must say, for the purposes of sports is the silliest aggregation):

	Asian-PI
	Men
Fencing	8.5
Gymnastics	7.0
Squash	6.0
Tennis	5.1
Volleyball	4.2
Swimming/Diving	3.0
Golf	2.9
Rowing	2.6
Water_Polo	2.5
Sailing	2.1
Soccer	2.1
Skiing	2.0
Rifle	1.7
Football	1.6	Samoans
Wrestling	1.6
Track,_Outdoor	1.3
Baseball	1.2
Track,_Indoor	1.2
Cross_Country	1.0
Lacrosse	0.6
Ice_Hockey	0.5
Basketball	0.4
Archery	-
Bowling	-
All_Sports	1.7

Notes: Fencing is one of those classic I-didn't-know-they-hand-out-scholarships-in-this sports. One of the reasons Asians do so poorly in basketball is because they do pretty well in volleyball, a sport that requires a similar skill set. (Asians and Hispanics tend to have a California-orientation to their sports -- they are a little more likely to play the kind of sports, such as volleyball and water polo, that are big in California and the Olympics). The 1.6% of NCAA Division I football players who are Asian or Pacific Islander are probably mostly Pacific Islanders, such as Samoans, who tend to be huge. Asian women are 2.5 times more represented in college golf than Asian men.

Here are Hispanics:

	Hispanic
	Men
Soccer	7.3
Tennis	7.2
Cross_Country	6.0
Baseball	5.4
Wrestling	5.4
Fencing	5.2
Volleyball	5.2
Water_Polo	5.0
Track,_Outdoor	4.5
Track,_Indoor	4.4
Swimming/Diving	2.9
Rowing	2.8
Golf	2.6
Gymnastics	2.3
Football	2.2
Basketball	1.8
Lacrosse	1.0
Skiing	1.0
Rifle	0.8
Ice_Hockey	0.7
Squash	0.7
Sailing	0.5
Archery	-
Bowling	-
All_Sports	3.8

Overall, this is pretty unimpressive, with Hispanics represented at only about one-fifth of their share of the college-age population.

Hispanics are best represented in Division I soccer, but only at a rate of about half of their share of the total population and perhaps 40% of their share of 18-22 year olds. And that's their favorite sport. Baseball at 5.4% is weak too, below the level of blacks (6.0%). With blacks, you are always reading about what a tragedy it is that African-Americans have lost interest in baseball.

Cross country at 6.0% isn't bad -- underrepresented versus their share of the population, sure, but it's not like soccer where they have a tradition of the sport.

The tennis share (7.2%) seems high. I suspect that a lot of the Hispanics playing Division I tennis are rich kids from Latin America (38.4% of all Division I male tennis players are "non-resident aliens").

	Black
	Men
Basketball	60.4
Football	45.9
Track,_Indoor	27.5
Track,_Outdoor	27.2
Cross_Country	11.1
Soccer	9.3
Baseball	6.0
Wrestling	5.2
Tennis	4.7
Fencing	4.4
Gymnastics	4.4
Volleyball	3.7
Golf	2.7
Lacrosse	1.8
Rifle	1.7
Swimming/Diving	1.7
Water_Polo	1.2
Rowing	0.7
Sailing	0.5
Skiing	0.5
Ice_Hockey	0.4
Archery	-
Bowling	-
Squash	-
All_Sports	24.7

Not too many surprises here: basketball first, then football, then track. The cross country runners are probably almost all East Africans. A remarkable fraction of the star black high school cross country runners are East African immigrants. I wonder what % of the blacks playing golf, lacrosse, water polo and the like have a white parent?

	NH-W
	Men
Bowling	100
Rifle	90.8
Lacrosse	90.5
Archery	88.9
Sailing	88.0
Ice_Hockey	85.5
Golf	84.8
Baseball	84.5
Swimming/Diving	83.9
Wrestling	83.1
Rowing	82.7
Gymnastics	80.5
Skiing	79.8
Water_Polo	77.2
Cross_Country	76.5
Volleyball	76.5
Soccer	72.6
Squash	72.0
Fencing	71.0
Tennis	62.1
Track,_Indoor	61.9
Track,_Outdoor	61.9
Football	47.0
Basketball	32.5
All_Sports	64.2

I have no idea why the formatting comes out like this.

The low figure for whites in tennis is due to 21% registering as "Other" which is likely due to 38% being non-resident aliens. The NCAA doesn't appear to be as obsessive about making foreigners check off ethnicity boxes as it is about Americans.

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

Average verbal IQ scores in Presidential elections since 1976

The long-running General Social Survey includes a 10 word vocabulary test, from which you can roughly estimate IQ over large enough sample sizes. (Of course, it's biased in favor of people who are smarter with words than with numbers or images.) Audacious Epigone looks up the average IQs of white voters for each Presidential candidate 1976-2004.

Presumably, Republican candidates' voters generally average higher IQs overall -- in the exit polls, GOP voters average higher incomes and very similar education levels to Democratic voters -- but all the heat on this issue of who is smartest is generated among white people. When white Democrats go on and on about how Democrats are smarter than Republicans, they aren't thinking about all the blacks who turned out to vote for Obama this year -- e.g., in California, where Obama got 61% of the vote but gay marriage, despite the best efforts of Hollywood, got only 48% -- which Hollywood has ever since been blaming on media domination by the Elders of Mormon). In the 2008 exit poll, there was virtually no difference in years of education claimed among Obama and McCain supporters when aggregated across all races.

No, white Democrats only care about being smarter than white Republicans.

Audacious's analysis found several things of interest. On an IQ scale where the white average is set at 100, all candidates's voters since 1976 have averaged over 100. Dumb people don't vote as much as smart people and undecided swing voters tend to be not very smart either. Thus, the losing candidate in six of the eight elections had a higher IQ set of voters than the winner. In other words, losers tended to wind up with his base of people smart enough to have a fairly consistent ideology, while winners picked up the people who don't think about politics much and motivated the people sympathetic to his party in the left half of the Bell Curve to remember to show up to vote.

It's kind of like Jay Leno vs. David Letterman. Dave pitches his show at viewers with a 105 IQ, while Jay aims his show at 100 (I'm making these numbers up but I wouldn't be surprised if they were pretty accurate). Jay gets bigger ratings.

Third party voters, with the exception of Perot's, tend to have high IQs.

Republican whites tended to have higher IQs than Democrats in the early years, and as late as 1996, Dole enjoyed a 0.6 point edge over Clinton, but by 2004, Kerry had opened up a 3.9 point gap over Bush.

The future of the GOP would therefore appear to depend upon mobilizing large turnouts among whites with two digit IQs, just as the future of the Democrats depends upon mobilizing, as they successfully did in 2008, large numbers of nonwhites with two digit IQs.

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

Malcolm in a Muddle

Here's my review of Malcolm Gladwell's new bestseller, Outliers: The Story of Success.

Here's an excerpt from my 3700 word review:

Malcolm never misses an opportunity to miss the point. For example, consider the self-evident stupidity of Gladwell’s title, Outliers: The Story of Success. His book attempts to offer a General Theory of Success in America—why, on the whole, Jews and Asians are well educated and well-compensated while blacks and Mexicans aren’t—through anecdotes about a small number of anomalous "outliers."

Gladwell chose the word "outliers" for his title because it sounded scientific. He’s vaguely aware that statistical analysts are much concerned with the outliers in their datasets, so it sounds cool to write a book about why people like Bill Gates and the Beatles are successful and call it Outliers.

Of course, the reason statisticians think about outliers a lot is because, to quote Wikipedia, "Statistics derived from data sets that include outliers may be misleading."

For example, say you are a market researcher doing a random survey of consumers for a mutual fund company to determine the average net worth of Americans by different levels of education. You tote up your results and see that the mean wealth of your 100 college dropouts is $500,050,000.

"That’s weird," you say.

You then look at the individual surveys and see that one respondent claimed to have a fortune of fifty billion dollars.

Is he lying? Is he crazy? Or is he Bill Gates? You don’t know. All you know is that he’s an outlier and therefore you aren’t going to use him in your data set. Otherwise, your innumerate pointy-haired boss in the marketing department (who, by the way, loves Malcolm Gladwell) might take your findings as justifying a huge ad campaign aimed at the evidently vastly wealthy dropout market.

In contrast, Gladwell devotes 18 pages to Gates, without noticing that Gates is a perfect example of the kind of data point that the very concept of "outliers" tells you to be suspicious of.

But notice how Gladwell’s mistakes err in a direction favorable to his bank account. People will pay to read about the richest man in the world in the hopes that they’ll pick up some tips from him. So Gladwell makes up a theory about why Gates is so rich (he got to practice computer programming on an early timesharing terminal at his expensive prep school), just as he devotes eight pages to his theory of why the Beatles were so successful (they played live a lot in Hamburg in 1960-1962).

As usual with Gladwell, he manages to choose examples that undermine his own theory, even when his basic idea is fairly sensible. Yes, as Gladwell stresses, putting in ten thousand hours of practice is helpful at becoming really good at a trade, so it’s helpful to come from a privileged background where you can get in a lot of practice at a young age.

Nevertheless, while the Beatles got lots of practice at playing live in Hamburg, they aren’t the most famous rock group because they were an exceptionally great live band. In fact, they gave up playing live in 1967 and nobody much noticed.

Instead, they were the greatest songwriting and studio band.

Similarly, Bill Gates didn’t become the richest man in America by being a great programmer. In reality, he bought his strategically pivotal Disk Operating System from a Seattle programmer named Tim Paterson and then licensed it to IBM. No, Gates got rich by being a great monopolist—which is a more difficult career to practice far ahead of time.

Gladwell, the unofficial Minister of Propaganda for Multi-Culti Capitalism, seldom says anything negative about capitalists. For example, if you are looking for the deep roots of Gates’s unerring cunning at acquiring a monopoly at such a young age, it’s perhaps interesting that Gates’s father was a defense attorney for firms accused of antitrust violations. Unsurprisingly, Gladwell never notices that.

Indeed, Gladwell’s climactic depiction of the more just society he envisions is quite terrifying. In the grand summation of his book’s argument, he writes:

"We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that’s the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?" [p. 268]

Let a million monopolies bloom!

The great thing about Gladwell is that he’s so lacking in critical thinking skills that he just blurts out the underlying assumptions of today’s conventional wisdom, stating its stupidities in their Platonic form. To Gladwell, the long, laborious, and expensive development of the computer isn’t a great accomplishment of Western civilization for which posterity should be grateful. No, it’s a civil rights issue. See, back in 1968, "our world" hadn’t "allowed" enough teenagers—especially not enough black and Mexican ones, to use state-of-the-art time-sharing computers.

Just think—if our world had allowed a million teenagers to be given the same opportunity of unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal in 1868, we could have a billion Microsofts today!

More

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

"Spent out"???

Once again, a Washington Post reporter asks Team Obama how they are going to keep from wasting the hundreds of billions of "stimulus" dollars by spending it too fast and Team Obama replies that they are going to work hard to not spend it too slow:

Because they are intended to pump cash quickly into the economy, stimulus measures are released from the usual budgetary constraints that require the cost of new programs to be covered by cutting spending elsewhere or by raising taxes -- a one-time pass that could invite lawmakers to load the bill up with favored items.

[Larry] Summers and other Obama advisers said they are keenly aware of the problem and are working to convince lawmakers of the wisdom of limiting the package to projects that would create a large number of jobs quickly or make a down payment on Obama's broader economic goals, such as improving the health-care system or reducing emissions that contribute to global warming.

"While this may be Christmastime, it doesn't mean there's going to be a large number of unrelated ornaments under the Christmas tree," Summers said. "There's a commitment by all of us to discipline and to doing the right things in terms of accountability."

Summers said Obama's budget team is "scrubbing" various proposals for "basic soundness." The team also is developing ideas to make expenditures transparent to the public, perhaps through regular progress reports or even Internet sites where "people could monitor the fraction of each project that had been spent out," he said.

Does the term "spent out" connote to you a deep concern for making sure the taxpayers get their money's worth?

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

Where is Bernie's $50 billion?

Where is the $50 billion Bernie Madoff claims to have lost?

Clearly, some of it went to the guys running the feeder funds, like Walter Noel, but that doesn't appear to add up to close to $50 billion.

There are two kinds of Ponzi schemes: the kind where you do some investment that can't pay off in the long run and the kind where you don't do anything at all and just pretend to invest it. Harry Markopolous demonstrated that Madoff couldn't be actively pursuing the "split-strike" option strategy he claimed to be following because not enough of those types of options were traded in the whole world. So, was Madoff doing anything with the money other than paying it out to earlier investors?

Perhaps he recently started making wild bets in the markets to try to get back to even. But where is the documentation for these trades?

Or do he and his loved ones have it socked away somewhere? So far, his houses and yachts that have surfaced sound like those of a man with hundreds of millions -- but not tens of billions -- of dollars.

It's a $50 billion puzzle ...

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

How Obama could save Detroit and why he won't

Has anybody noticed how out of date Obama's automobile industry rhetoric is? He's still talking about cars as if gas was over $4 per gallon and global warming was the imminent threat, rather than global depression. He keeps talking about how Detroit has to stop making big pickup trucks and start making little runabouts. That kind of mindless rhetoric is killing Detroit, which makes profits on big hulks and loses money on go-karts.

If Obama wants the Detroit car companies to actually earn some cash flow and keep workers employed over the next 2-3 years, then the government should take major steps to solve consumers' big worries about buying from the (not-so) Big Three:

1. Figure out a way to guarantee Detroit's seven year warranties so even if they go out of business, new buyers can still get the cars serviced under warranty. They'll be a lot less likely to go out of business if customers don't have to worry about them going out of business.

2. Guarantee that new buyers won't pay gas prices over, say, $2.75 per gallon during the next 2 or 3 years, through a tax rebate or whatever.

3. The President of the United States of America should stop demonizing the most profitable products made by American car companies. Stop pretending that "green" cars are going to rescue Detroit. Admit that all the SWPL green stuff was just a load of campaign hooey that is now "inoperative."

If the government can lift those clouds of uncertainty from would-be customers minds, then Detroit could move a lot of metal.

But, Obama won't becaus:

A. This is all about the class struggle.

B. Obama loves power. Helping American businesses and consumers make mutually satisfactory transactions is not as much fun for him as forcing both of them to make and (not) buy cars that they (and, for that matter, Obama himself, whose last car weighed 4,000 pounds) don't want.

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

The Forward: "Madoff on the Couch"

From The Forward, the New York Jewish newspaper:

What Sort of Man? Madoff on the Couch

By Marissa Brostoff
Thu. Dec 18, 2008

In Shakespeare’s play “The Merchant of Venice,” Shylock, the usurious lender, attains the status of literature’s classic antisemitic stereotype, in part because of his relentless preying upon non-Jews.

But the victims devastated by Bernard Madoff, the investment guru charged with running an alleged Ponzi scheme that blew through $50 billion of other people’s money, were primarily his own.

In this, say observers looking at the case through a psychological lens, Madoff achieved a wholly different level of notoriety.

“Hitherto, all ethnic groups who ascended into a national class of benefactors made their wealth off other ethnic groups,” said Nelson W. Aldrich, author of the 1996 book “Old Money: The Mythology of Wealth in America.” “They soaked the Irish or sued the French Canadians. They wouldn’t dream of doing what Madoff did.”

This is not to say that Madoff excluded non-Jews from his ruinous scheme. Several large European banks and other non-Jewish institutions and individuals lost millions, even billions, through their investments with Madoff. But in interviews with the Forward, mental health experts agreed that from a psychological point of view, Madoff’s exploitation of his vast Jewish network of friends — many of them close — and acquaintances to bring investors into his alleged Ponzi scheme constituted a level of behavior verboten even as criminal actions go.

“He might have violated a primitive rule against hurting your own tribe,” said Ira Moses, director of Clinical Services at the William Alanson White Institute, a psychoanalytic training center. “He may have broken a taboo amongst criminals.” ...

The novelist Nathan Englander said that he generally has no patience for the idea that Jewish misdeeds will stoke antisemitism. But he said that the Madoff scandal — with its long lists of bilked Jewish charities and individuals covered in major newspapers — embarrassed even him.

“It really raises up for me this primal thing of, ‘This is the kind of thing that looks bad in a general Jewish way,’” Englander told the Forward. “It gave me that ‘circle the wagon’ mentality that I don’t have very often.”

Yet this kind of betrayal from inside a community is not unheard of — there is even a name for it: affinity fraud — but it is unusual.

How Madoff might have justified to himself his exploitation of his own community — in which he was not only a major philanthropist, but also actively engaged in an elite country club scene in Palm Beach, Fla., and New York — would depend on the extent to which he believed his own lies, psychologists said.

Had Madoff deluded himself into believing that his scheme could go on forever, he actually might have seen his victims as beneficiaries, psychoanalyst and Yale professor Dori Laub pointed out.

“It’s possible that what we’re dealing with is a man who’s essentially depressed and as a compensation begins to feel some omnipotence to fight the emptiness,” Laub said. “If you end up really being the messiah, you’ll be glorified.”

At the other end of the spectrum, some psychologists posited that unconscious hostility toward the Jewish community may have provoked him to choose his victims as he did. Noah Shaw, who has studied the psychology of money, said that he had worked with patients who generalized their hostile feelings toward their own family into antagonism directed at their ethnic community.

Stephen Rittenberg, a former director of treatment at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute who collaborated with Shaw on his research, had a similar assessment.

“If he were my patient I would try to address that aspect: Was there some kind of psychological hatred of his own family, his own community?” Rittenberg said.

But Shaw speculated as well that Madoff may have given his victims little thought at all and chose them simply because the Jewish community was the group most accessible to him.

“When people have feelings of inferiority or inadequacy, they need to beat the system, to outsmart the rules,” he said. “It works in an extremely temporary way. It’s the psychological mirror of a Ponzi scheme: If you don’t keep doing it, you collapse.”

Madoff’s motives are further obscured by the fact that there is something suicidal about the very structure of a Ponzi scheme, which has no way of working indefinitely.

“Maybe the ‘deal’ with Madoff is that on some deep level he’s not able to believe that the future exists,” said Rivka Galchen, author of this year’s novel “Atmospheric Disturbances” and a trained psychiatrist herself. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night for pretty much the majority of his professional life."

Or maybe, like Willie Sutton and banks, Madoff robbed Jews because that's where the money is.

In general, minority in-group morality as applied to business ethics rests on the assumption that most potential victims belong to the out-group. Gypsies, for example, tend to believe that driveway repair scams are morally okay because the great majority of the driveways in the world belong to non-Gypsies. But what if Gypsies got incredibly successful and ended up owning a sizable fraction of all the driveways in the world? Then they might wake up one morning to shocking headlines about how one Gypsy had scammed lots of other Gypsies out of billions.

Similarly, Bernie Madoff could set himself up as "the Jewish T-bill" (to quote the NY Times) with many of his customers trusting him with their money because they assumed he was delivering such stable returns by cheating (through front-running) the out-group of NASDAQ traders, not cheating (through a Ponzi scheme) the in-group of investors. After all, why would anybody try to cheat Jews, who, as we all know, are a tiny, beleaguered, discriminated-against minority ... Except that they now own a remarkable fraction of the world's financial assets, making them a prime target for scam artists.

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

New York Times starts catching up to iSteve

From the Sunday, 12/21/08 New York Times:

White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire

By JO BECKER, SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and STEPHEN LABATON

“We can put light where there’s darkness, and hope where there’s despondency in this country. And part of it is working together as a nation to encourage folks to own their own home.” — President Bush, Oct. 15, 2002

That, of course, as my readers (but practically nobody else's) know, was at the White House Conference on Minority Homeownership

... “How,” [Bush] wondered aloud, “did we get here?”

Eight years after arriving in Washington vowing to spread the dream of homeownership, Mr. Bush is leaving office, as he himself said recently, “faced with the prospect of a global meltdown” with roots in the housing sector he so ardently championed.

There are plenty of culprits, like lenders who peddled easy credit, consumers who took on mortgages they could not afford and Wall Street chieftains who loaded up on mortgage-backed securities without regard to the risk.

But the story of how we got here is partly one of Mr. Bush’s own making, according to a review of his tenure that included interviews with dozens of current and former administration officials.

From his earliest days in office, Mr. Bush paired his belief that Americans do best when they own their own home with his conviction that markets do best when let alone.

He pushed hard to expand homeownership, especially among minorities, an initiative that dovetailed with his ambition to expand the Republican tent — and with the business interests of some of his biggest donors. But his housing policies and hands-off approach to regulation encouraged lax lending standards.

Mr. Bush did foresee the danger posed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage finance giants. The president spent years pushing a recalcitrant Congress to toughen regulation of the companies, but was unwilling to compromise when his former Treasury secretary wanted to cut a deal. And the regulator Mr. Bush chose to oversee them — an old prep school buddy — pronounced the companies sound even as they headed toward insolvency.

... “The Bush administration took a lot of pride that homeownership had reached historic highs,” Mr. Snow said in an interview. “But what we forgot in the process was that it has to be done in the context of people being able to afford their house. We now realize there was a high cost.”

For much of the Bush presidency, the White House was preoccupied by terrorism and war; on the economic front, its pressing concerns were cutting taxes and privatizing Social Security. The housing market was a bright spot: ever-rising home values kept the economy humming, as owners drew down on their equity to buy consumer goods and pack their children off to college.

Lawrence B. Lindsay, Mr. Bush’s first chief economics adviser, said there was little impetus to raise alarms about the proliferation of easy credit that was helping Mr. Bush meet housing goals.

“No one wanted to stop that bubble,” Mr. Lindsay said. “It would have conflicted with the president’s own policies.”

Today, millions of Americans are facing foreclosure, homeownership rates are virtually no higher than when Mr. Bush took office, Fannie and Freddie are in a government conservatorship, and the bailout cost to taxpayers could run in the trillions. ...

But in private moments, aides say, the president is looking inward. During a recent ride aboard Marine One, the presidential helicopter, Mr. Bush sounded a reflective note.

“We absolutely wanted to increase homeownership,” Tony Fratto, his deputy press secretary, recalled him saying. “But we never wanted lenders to make bad decisions.”

Darrin West could not believe it. The president of the United States was standing in his living room.

It was June 17, 2002, a day Mr. West recalls as “the highlight of my life.” Mr. Bush, in Atlanta to unveil a plan to increase the number of minority homeowners by 5.5 million, was touring Park Place South, a development of starter homes in a neighborhood once marked by blight and crime.

Mr. West had patrolled there as a police officer, and now he was the proud owner of a $130,000 town house, bought with an adjustable-rate mortgage and a $20,000 government loan as his down payment — just the sort of creative public-private financing Mr. Bush was promoting.

“Part of economic security,” Mr. Bush declared that day, “is owning your own home.”

A lot has changed since then. Mr. West, beset by personal problems, left Atlanta. Unable to sell his home for what he owed, he said, he gave it back to the bank last year. Like other communities across America, Park Place South has been hit with a foreclosure crisis affecting at least 10 percent of its 232 homes, according to Masharn Wilson, a developer who led Mr. Bush’s tour.

“I just don’t think what he envisioned was actually carried out,” she said.

Park Place South is, in microcosm, the story of a well-intentioned policy gone awry. Advocating homeownership is hardly novel; the Clinton administration did it, too. For Mr. Bush, it was part of his vision of an “ownership society,” in which Americans would rely less on the government for health care, retirement and shelter. It was also good politics, a way to court black and Hispanic voters.

As I explained in detail back in October in "Karl Rove -- Architect of the Minority Mortgage Meltdown."

But for much of Mr. Bush’s tenure, government statistics show, incomes for most families remained relatively stagnant while housing prices skyrocketed. That put homeownership increasingly out of reach for first-time buyers like Mr. West.

So Mr. Bush had to, in his words, “use the mighty muscle of the federal government” to meet his goal. He proposed affordable housing tax incentives. He insisted that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac meet ambitious new goals for low-income lending.

Concerned that down payments were a barrier, Mr. Bush persuaded Congress to spend up to $200 million a year to help first-time buyers with down payments and closing costs.

And he pushed to allow first-time buyers to qualify for federally insured mortgages with no money down. Republican Congressional leaders and some housing advocates balked, arguing that homeowners with no stake in their investments would be more prone to walk away, as Mr. West did. Many economic experts, including some in the White House, now share that view.

The president also leaned on mortgage brokers and lenders to devise their own innovations. “Corporate America,” he said, “has a responsibility to work to make America a compassionate place.”

And corporate America, eyeing a lucrative market, delivered in ways Mr. Bush might not have expected, with a proliferation of too-good-to-be-true teaser rates and interest-only loans that were sold to investors in a loosely regulated environment.

“This administration made decisions that allowed the free market to operate as a barroom brawl instead of a prize fight,” said L. William Seidman, who advised Republican presidents and led the savings and loan bailout in the 1990s. “To make the market work well, you have to have a lot of rules.”

There's lots more, much of it making Bailout Czar Henry Paulson look like a prime fool.

Anyway, I want to say that the New York Times is welcome to my research. Perhaps one of these days, they'll run a story pointing out that George W. Bush's Transportation Department was fighting discrimination against Arabs by airport security on September 11, 2001 because Bush had promised to outlaw profiling of Arab air travelers in his second Presidential Debate with Al Gore on October 11, 2000.

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