Bloggers Questioned in NeoConGate?

The NYT reports:

Federal agents have begun asking reporters about any conversations they had with a former Pentagon analyst [Larry Franklin] who has been charged with illegally disclosing military secrets, senior government officials said on Friday.

The interviews by the Federal Bureau of Investigation are starting with four reporters, among them at least one newspaper journalist and others whose work has been published on the Internet, the officials said. They would not identify any of the journalists and said the number could increase.

Any bets on who these "Internet reporters" are?

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

Wolfowitz's History

Wolfowitzian History: George F. Will writes a laudatory column about Paul Wolfowitz entitled "Paul Wolfowitz: A Realist -- Really" that begins:

As he retires as deputy secretary of defense and becomes head of the World Bank, the man most responsible for the doctrinal justification of the Iraq War, and who has been characterized as representing Woodrow Wilson's utopian, rather than the realist, strain in American foreign policy, begs to differ. The question, he says, is who has been realistic for almost four decades.

The sprouting of freedom through the fissures in the concrete of dictatorships began, he recalls, in Greece, Spain and Portugal in the mid-1970s. This, he believes, disturbed Soviet leaders, and should have;...

That's a ... novel interpretation of the history of the mid-1970s.

Uh, Paul, the mid-1970s were not disturbing times for the Brezhnev regime. No, 1974-1979 were the glory years.

Along with the communist takeover of Southeast Asia in 1975, which was not a triumph of freedom and a humiliating defeat for the U.S. besides, the leftist military coup that overthrew the right wing Portuguese dictatorship in 1974 allowed the Soviets to make Portugal's ex-colonies Mozambique and Angola into satellites, giving the Soviets an excuse to inject Cuban troops into Africa. (Granted, Mozambique and Angola are worthless countries to have on your side, but at the time that wasn't as clear, and picking them up gave the Soviets the appearance of having momentum and historical inevitability on their side.) Indeed, the Kremlin almost turned Portugal itself into a satellite in 1975.

The Greek colonels who fell in 1974 had only been in power for seven years, and their regime collapsed due to their incompetent adventuring in Cyprus, which gave Turkey an excuse to seize the northern part of the island. That two NATO members were at the brink of all-out war with each other did not disturb the Kremlin.

Finally, Franco's dictatorship lasted his entire lifetime and expired only when he did in 1975. In contrast to the chaos that played into Soviet hands in Portugal and Greece, Franco's designated successor, King Juan Carlos, remains head of state today.

As Greg Cochran always says: nobody remembers anything. Apparently, George F. Will doesn't remember the 1970s because he doesn't call Wolfowitz on his BS.

Bloggers are constantly dislocating their shoulders patting themselves on the back about how they are checking up on the powers that be, but is there any evidence that public figures are less inclined to spout self-serving nonsense today than in the past?

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

Forbes: "Race-Based Medicine Arrives:"

Forbes: "Race-Based Medicine Arrives:"

A flood of studies has emerged showing racial differences in how patients suffer from disease--or benefit from drugs--in ailments ranging from osteoporosis to cancer. And several more have looked at the effects of drugs on particular racial groups. Many of the doctors conducting the studies are African-American.

Click here for a slide show of race- and gender-based medical differences. There is even evidence that some drugs work differently in women than in men. For instance, aspirin seems to prevent heart attacks and cause strokes in low-risk medicine, but a controversial study showed it did the opposite in women. "There is nothing in evolutionary biology more based on genetics than whether the embryo develops into a man or into woman. But people generally haven't studied drugs this way," says Harvard researcher Paul Ridker.

Part of the problem is that clinical trials have too often focused on white men. Over the years African-Americans, in particular, have been absent from many trials.

"Much of the data we have on medicines in general have been in white populations," says Keith C. Ferdinand, a pharmacology professor at Xavier University. "How do we know that any of this is true across the board?" asks Gary Butts, an associate dean at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

For many drugs, just doing a study looking at the effects of medicines on African-Americans might be useful. Ferdinand conducted such a trial with Crestor, a cholesterol drug from AstraZeneca. Patrick Griffith, a neurologist at the Morehose School of Medicine, conducted a trial of Aricept, the Pfizer and Eisai Alzheimer's medicine, in African-Americans. Both studies, funded by the manufacturers, found the drugs to be effective in those populations.

But issues emerged from cases where racial groups are compared, and differences are found. The labeling for AstraZeneca's cholesterol drug Crestor suggests starting the drug at a lower dose in Asians. Another AstraZeneca drug, the lung cancer pill Iressa, failed to extend life in a clinical trial but seems to have worked in Asians...

Jackson T. Wright, a cardiologist at Case Western Reserve University who co-authored the study, says that as firms like Novartis and Merck develop new blood pressure medicines, they should be careful to look at racial subgroups.

"I have yet to see a downside to doing studies that might point out differences in populations," Wright says. "One could always envision potential harm, but thus far that has not been a major concern." [More]

Of course, there are still intellectuals who would prefer that minority patients die, rather than admit that race is more than just a social construct.

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

Clublife

Clublife: An Irish-American bouncer at trendy NYC danceclubs frequented by Italian-Americans ("Guidos" as he calls them) gives the inside story on his job. Summary: Bouncing does not encourage inter-ethnic amity.

Big "Stan" is a bouncer at the club... Stan is a very large and very dark black man. At the beginning of the night, when greeting Stan, I feel as if I'm shaking hands with a catcher's mitt. Everything about the guy is just really, really big and really, really black.

Simply put, Stan wants to be left alone. So do I, but as a big, blockheaded white-guy bouncer, it's easy for me, because I can blend into the woodwork with the twenty other big, blockheaded white guys on the staff. A six-foot-seven, three hundred twenty pound black man isn't going to fly under anyone's radar anywhere, and Stan, therefore, becomes a magnet for every misfit Guido customer who walks past. On Saturday night, I stood nearby as he engaged in an animated conversation with one of these, the customer continually shaking Stan's hand and embracing him as if he'd been reunited with a long-lost relative.

"Who's that?" I asked. "Your retarded stepbrother?"

"Oh, s---. Ha ha."

"You know that guy?"

"Nope."

"Just another dopey white guy who feels the need to validate himself by saying hello to the big black dude?"

"Yup."...

Later in the night, yet another Guido made his approach:

"Yo! Damn, man. You like the biggest m----------- I ever seen!"

"What's up, man?"

"Yo, my brother just started doing test [testosterone], and he's gettin' really f------ big. You ever do dat s---, man?"

"F--- that s---," replied Stan. "Guys like me is why guys like you need test in the first place."

And here's my article on Frank Salter's ethological study of bouncers in Munich.

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

"Kingdom of Heaven:"

Ridley Scott's Crusader follow-up to "Gladiator" isn't terribly exciting, but it's more interesting than most movies this year.

Unsurprisingly, little Orlando Bloom (the blond elf Legolas in "Lord of the Rings") has a hard time comparing to "Gladiator's" Russell Crowe as a sword-swinging hero. And it doesn't help that the opening scene introduces 6'-4" Liam Neeson as Bloom's long-lost father, the Baron of Ibelin, come back to France to invite his illegitimate blacksmith son to accompany him to his castle in the Holy Land. The Hollywood tradition is to surround little stars with little supporting actors, not with magnificent brutes like Neeson. Still, it's fun to think about it from the illegitimate kid's point of view: I'm mad at my father for abandoning my mother, but, on the other hand, after all these years, I've finally realized: holy cow, my dad could beat up your dad!

A lot of men hate Bloom for being a teenybopper idol, a "practice boyfriend" for millions of girls. As far as I can tell, there are more pictures of Bloom on the Internet than anybody other than Britney Spears and George W. Bush. As I've mentioned before, however, this is a dead-end career path, since girls move on quickly to new boys-of-the-moment. To enjoy enduring careers, stars have to appeal primarily to their own sexes. Bloom, looking scruffy and dark in "Kingdom of Heaven," is trying hard to get past his teeny-bopper past, and I wish him well, although he's not there yet.

Although the backstory for Bloom's character Balian of Ibelin is completely fictitious, the film is surprisingly true to the main events of the 1180s. There really was a Balian of Ibelin who led the defense of Jerusalem against Saladin, the leader of the Muslim Saracens, and most of the other characters are fairly accurate historically. Dramatically, however, that's a problem, since Balian's decision -- to put up enough of a fight to justify negotiating an honorable surrender of Jerusalem in exchange for Saladin, whose promises remain famous for their trustworthiness, granting safe passage to the sea -- while reasonable, is not hugely inspiring. Obviously, the filmmakers feel that all this obsessing over Jerusalem for thousands of years is stupid, but reasonableness is not a terribly satisfying emotional payoff for an epic film.

Why does Jerusalem take up so much space in our brains? Medieval Europeans drew it as the center of the Earth. Oddly enough, it really is just about at the crossroads of the three continents of the Old World.

Enlightenment era figures denounced the Crusades as the height of irrationality -- to think that the Holy Land could be recovered after 450 years seemed nuts to them -- but the success of Zionism in recovering the Holy Land after 1800 years has put the Crusades in a new perspective.

Besides, there were pressing strategic issues inspiring the Crusades. The conversion of the ferocious Central Asian Turkish horse warriors to Islam had re-invigorated Muslim fanaticism and military power. The Seljuk Turks seized Jerusalem from the tolerant, pilgrim-hosting Egyptians and in 1071 inflicted a catastrophic defeat on the Orthodox Catholic Byzantine Empire at Manzikert. The Byzantines had blocked Muslim depradations by land on Western Europe for centuries (although Muslim pirates were a constant annoyance, kidnapping something like a million Europeans into slavery and raiding all over coastal Europe, even sacking, at a later date, Iceland), so the Western Europeans resolved that the best defense to the weakening of the Eastern Christians was a strong offense against the Muslims.

The First Crusade (begun in 1095) remains a marvel of long-distance force projection. In the long run, though, Palestine proved a less attractive place to live than France, so the Crusaders never had the masses of settlers necessary to make a permanent go of it in the Middle East, and the last Crusader castle fell in 1291, almost 200 years after the First Crusade.

*

Coming up in The American Conservative: my review of "Crash." Don't believe all the reviews about how it discredits racial stereotypes, yada yada. It's a lot more interesting than than. It's too bad Oscar voters are so biased toward late-in-the-year movies because Matt Dillon's performance is a marvel.

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

Chicago Sun-Times Review Blows Away 4th Grade Quality Book Report on Freakonomics in New York Times Book Review:

The little girl whose book report said, "This book told me more about penguins than I cared to know," brought a more critical perspective to analyzing Steven D. Levitt's abortion-cut-crime theory than Jim Holt's Freakonomics review in the NYT, which simply consists of elementary school-style summarization with zero skepticism or outside Googling to find the facts that Levitt is covering up. Holt burbles:

And the balance [of the crime decline]? Here is where Levitt and his collaborator, John Donohue of Stanford Law School, showed unsettling originality. Since abortion was legalized in 1973, around a million and a half women a year have ended unwanted pregnancies.

But, as Levitt has admitted, many of those abortions were of pregnancies that wouldn't have been conceived without legalized abortion.

Many of the women taking advantage of Roe v. Wade have been unmarried, poor and in their teens. Childhood poverty and a single-parent household are two of the strongest predictors of future criminality.

Of course, the percentage of children raised in single-parent families soared as abortion became common, and didn't start to level off until after the abortion rate started to drop in the early 1990s. The 1996 study "An Analysis of Out-Of-Wedlock Births in the United States" by George A. Akerlof and Janet L. Yellen of the Brookings Institute and the Federal Reserve Board, respectively, shows the impact of legalized abortion on outmoding the shotgun marriage. So, one effect of legalizing abortion was to increase "unwantedness" because it reduced pregnant women's moral leverage in getting their boyfriends to marry them.

As it happens, the crime rate started to drop in the early 1990's, just as children in the first post-Roe cohort were hitting their late teens, the criminal's prime.

For the one millionth time, the crime rate was dropping in the early 1990s among those born before legalization. Among those born after legalization, it was rising, with both the murder and serious violent crime rates among youths 17 and under peaking in 1993 and 1994.

Hence Levitt and Donohue's audacious claim: the crime drop was, in economists' parlance, an ''unintended benefit'' of legalized abortion.

A controlled experiment to test the truth of this theory is obviously out of the question. In ''Freakonomics,'' however, Levitt does the next best thing, teasing out subtle correlations that render the abortion-crime link more probable. (States like New York and California that legalized abortion before Roe v. Wade, for example, showed the earliest drops in crime.) In the social sciences, that is about as close as you can get to demonstrating causation.

It's remarkable how many reviewers cite this early decline in crime in New York and California as Levitt's devastating trump card, because anybody familiar with the history of gangsta rap ought to remember that those were among the first places where the teen crime rate went up. As Levitt admitted to me in 1999, “[T]he high abortion places like New York and California tended to have a bigger crack problem, and tended to have crack arrive earlier.” In other words, the two big urban areas that were the first to enjoy the purported crime-fighting benefits of legalized abortion in 1970, New York City and Los Angeles, were also the ground zeroes of the teen murder rampage that began, perhaps not coincidentally, about 16 years later. That the crack wars burned out there earlier too is hardly proof that abortion drove down the crime rate overall.

I realize that book reviewing doesn't pay enough to rationally justify doing any work other than this kind of summarization, but don't any of these people who have swallowed Levitt's theory hook, line, and sinker have any self-respect? Doesn't anybody anymore feel a thrill when watching Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon tell the seductive but homicidal femme fatale "I won't play the sap for you"? Why does the punditariat these days positively want to play the sap for deftly-marketed hooey?

I hope my review of Thomas Sowell's new book Black Rednecks and White Liberals that will appear Sunday night in VDARE.com shows what a motivated reviewer can actually accomplish in adding to the public's understanding rather than just summarizing a book.

IN SHARP CONTRAST to the laziness and credulity of the NYT "critic," the reviewer in the more blue-collar Chicago Sun-Times, Thomas Roesser, actually did some Google work before writing his review of Freakonomics, which is headlined "A good book errs on link between abortion, crime rate:"

Magazine writer and blog-meister Steve Sailer sails in with more data. Murder rates are now rising, says the FBI. From 1999 through 2002 (the latest data available), the murder rate jumped 17 percent among 25- to 34-year-olds born long after Roe. ''[T]he most obvious explanation for the ups and downs of the murder rate is the ups and downs of the crack business,'' he says. ''This generation, born right after legalization, is better behaved today in part because so many of its bad apples are now confined to prisons, wheelchairs and coffins.''

These are interesting challenges to a book that is causing Americans to debate its findings at office water coolers and at cocktail parties. It turns out that Sailer had debated Levitt on these facts before the book was published. Why weren't Sailer's facts taken into consideration when Levitt wrote the book? This he doesn't seem to do -- at least when confronted by Bill O'Reilly on Fox News the other night. It's a good book. Now, if Levitt would respond to Lott's and Sailer's challenge in our letters to the editor, it would be even better!

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

Elvis Levitt

A reader with experience as an inner city social worker points out that Steven D. Levitt is the Elvis of Economics in more ways than one:

A couple of further observations on abortion and crime:

First, it's fascinating to see Conventional Wisdom taking shape right before my eyes. Usually the process is not nearly so obvious, and has to be pieced together after the fact.

Second, reading about Levitt's theory that abortion cuts crime by culling unwanted babies reminds me of that old Elvis Presley song called "In the Ghetto." It went:

As the snow flies
On a cold and gray Chicago morn
A poor little baby child is born
In the ghetto
And his mama cries
Cause if there’s one thing that she don’t need
It’s another hungry mouth to feed
In the ghetto

Remember that one? It's the one where The King showed how sensitive and politically aware and stuff he was.

What the fans of Elvis and Levitt fail to get is that poor women don’t necessarily see their situation the same way middle class folks do. They may actually love their little bastard babies!

Middle class types see poor unwed teenage mothers as Scum of the Earth and a Terrible Social Problem. But poor women don’t see themselves that way. Instead, they think of themselves as human beings facing the age-old challenge of getting along in the world -- and, if they're lucky, passing their genes on to the next generation.

Unbelievable, I know. But bear with me for just a minute and try to see it from their point of view.

If you're a young underclass woman, one of the first things you notice is that there are not many marriage-worthy men in your social milieu. A whole lot of them are unemployed or in prison or dead.

So even though you may want to get married, you figure your prospects are pretty dim. If you wait to marry before having children, you probably won't have children.

You might as well have them now because, well, why wait? You're not getting any younger. More to the point, your mother and other female relatives are not getting any younger. And since they're the ones you'll have to rely on for child care and support, it's important to have your kids before they develop Type II diabetes and kidney failure and all the other health problems that tend to afflict black underclass folks more than white privileged types.

Will having kids hold back your career? Well, if you have an IQ of 80 and are looking for a reason to drop out of high school anyway, then no.

You’ve probably already figured out that your prospects of a good job are dim, and getting dimmer by the day, especially with immigrants flooding in by the millions to take the few jobs you're qualified to do.

So for you, its not a choice of a ghastly life as a welfare mother or good life in the burbs. Fate and the immigration mavens have already decreed that you will get mostly crumbs from America's bounteous economic table. The only choice you have is between a crummy life with kids or a crummy life without kids.

Your lack of career prospects just makes having kids look that much more attractive. Children are about the only thing you can produce that people will view as being truly valuable.

Besides, if you can't count on a spouse for love and companionship, kids become doubly important because they'll be the only family you’ve got.

So becoming a single mother makes quite a bit of sense to you. You realize it’s a scary prospect and a hard life, but what are your options?

You may not exactly be looking to get pregnant, but when it happens -- well, is it really all bad? Lots of others have done it before you. In fact, in your neighborhood, girls who have babies out of wedlock are becoming the norm.

The only people who can't seem to grasp what is going on here are the Really Smart Guys. Even though it should be getting pretty obvious by now, especially since the black illegitimacy rate is close to 70 percent. Admittedly, most of these out of wedlock pregnancies may not have been "planned" or "intended" in any sense that a middle class observer could understand. But that doesn’t mean they're necessarily "unwanted."

Seen from this perspective, poor women who have abortions are likely to be the strivers and achievers. They're the ones who see some prospect of improving their lives, and realize it may hold them back if they have five kids by four fathers. They're the ones who are trying, in their own way, to make good.

Inability to grasp what is wrong with Levitt's argument seems to be a case of "I'll see it when I believe it." Maybe all the bright guys who can't believe what's going on in the underclass world should ditch Elvis and listen to Fantasia Barrino sing:

Nowadays it's like a badge of honor
To be a baby mama...
Cause we the backbone of the hood.

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

Wolfowitzian History:

George F. Will writes a laudatory column about Paul Wolfowitz entitled "Paul Wolfowitz: A Realist -- Really" that begins:

As he retires as deputy secretary of defense and becomes head of the World Bank, the man most responsible for the doctrinal justification of the Iraq War, and who has been characterized as representing Woodrow Wilson's utopian, rather than the realist, strain in American foreign policy, begs to differ. The question, he says, is who has been realistic for almost four decades.

The sprouting of freedom through the fissures in the concrete of dictatorships began, he recalls, in Greece, Spain and Portugal in the mid-1970s. This, he believes, disturbed Soviet leaders, and should have;...

That's a ... novel interpretation of the history of the mid-1970s.

Uh, Paul, the mid-1970s were not disturbing times for the Brezhnev regime. No, 1974-1979 were the glory years.

Along with the communist takeover of Southeast Asia in 1975, which was not a triumph of freedom and a humiliating defeat for the U.S. besides, the leftist military coup that overthrew the right wing Portuguese dictatorship in 1974 allowed the Soviets to make Portugal's ex-colonies Mozambique and Angola into satellites, giving the Soviets an excuse to inject Cuban troops into Africa. (Granted, Mozambique and Angola are worthless countries to have on your side, but at the time that wasn't as clear, and picking them up gave the Soviets the appearance of having momentum and historical inevitability on their side. Indeed, the Kremlin almost turned Portugal itself into a satellite in 1975.

The Greek colonels who fell in 1974 had only been in power for seven years, and their regime collapsed due to their incompetent adventuring in Cyprus, which brought about the Turkish military seizure of the northern part of the island. That two NATO members were at the brink of all-out war with each other did not disturb the Kremlin.

Finally, Franco's dictatorship lasted his entire lifetime and expired only when he did in 1976. In contrast to the chaos that played into Soviet hands in Portugal and Greece, Franco's designated successor, King Juan Carlos, remains head of state today.

As Greg Cochran always says: nobody remembers anything. Apparently, George F. Will doesn't remember the 1970s because he doesn't call Wolfowitz on his BS.

Bloggers are constantly dislocating their shoulders patting themselves on the back about how they are checking up on the powers that be, but is their any evidence that public figures are less inclined to spout self-serving nonsense today than in the past?

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

"Crash" with Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Sandra Bullock, Brendan Fraser, by Paul Haggis

My review in The American Conservative will be available to electronic subscribers this weekend. To read my film reviews while the movies are still in the the theatre, you have to subscribe):

On Los Angeles' Wilshire Boulevard in 1991, during the murderous crack era, two young black men shoved snub-nosed .38s in the faces of screenwriter Paul Haggis and his wife and car-jacked their new Porsche. Out of that horrifying incident grew Haggis' directorial debut, the ensemble drama "Crash."

More than making up for the phoniness of his portrayal of women's boxing in "Million Dollar Baby," Haggis's "Crash" is perhaps the most honest movie yet about how America's racial patterns in crime generate corrosive, but sadly accurate, ethnic prejudices...

As two African-American men emerge from an expensive restaurant, one (played well by rapper Ludacris) entertainingly rants about how their waitress gave them poor service just because they are black. While his sidekick points out that she was black, too, they pass L.A.'s district attorney (Brendan Fraser of "The Mummy") and his Brentwood socialite wife (Sandra Bullock of "Speed"). Although heavily Botoxed, she visibly flinches at the sight of black guys just walking past her. This blatant racism enrages Ludacris, so he chooses the DA's Lincoln Navigator as tonight's vehicle to car-jack.

Afterwards, the DA groans, "Why'd they have to be black?" Calculating that the news is going to cost him either the black vote or the "law-and-order vote," he immediately instructs his aides to find some black to publicly promote.

Meanwhile, a black LAPD detective (Don Cheadle of "Hotel Rwanda") is investigating a road rage incident in which a white undercover policeman shot an out-of-control off-duty black cop. The DA's oily Irish-American fixer (character actor William Fichtner) lets Cheadle know the boss wants to prosecute the white cop to appease black voters, so he's not happy when Cheadle reveals the dead black officer had $300,000 in his trunk. (This is based on a 1997 LAPD scandal.)

The politico blurts out his frustration at how the tidy deals he engineers are constantly undermined by black malfeasance. "Why do blacks get themselves thrown in prison eight times more often per capita than whites?" he demands of Cheadle, who has no answer. Cheadle finally agrees to frame the innocent white cop in exchange for a promotion and the dropping of felony charges against his younger brother (who turns out to be one of the car-jackers).

Despite its admirable candor, "Crash" is not a realistic film. The immensity of L.A. means that Angelenos seldom run into other people they know by accident. Some L.A. screenwriters respond by crafting intricate coincidence-driven plots about a fantasy L.A. where everyone knows everyone else, as in Paul Thomas Anderson's "Magnolia" or Alex Cox's brilliant "Repo Man." Similarly, "Crash" slams together the lives of about 16 Angelenos of every ethnic group (except, oddly enough, Jewish) in a chain-reaction of racial conflicts.

Haggis imposes two more implausible but intensifying rules. Each character has clichéd qualities, both good and bad. The Irish cop (superbly portrayed by Matt Dillon of "Drugstore Cowboy") resents blacks' affirmative action privileges but risks his life to save a black woman he once abused. The immigrant Iranian shopkeeper is industrious yet also a touchy hothead. The Mexican locksmith is a good family man, while sporting alarming gang tattoos on his neck.

Finally, every character in "Crash" must bark out his innermost negative views about the race of every other character he collides with. In the opening scene, for example, an impolite Korean woman rear-ends the car driven by a Latino lady, who explains to her exactly what she (and everyone else in L.A.) thinks of Asian women drivers.

The mostly minority L.A. audience at my showing found this unlikely in-your-face frankness a hoot, an enjoyable holiday from the public politeness prevailing among Angelenos, whose social template was laid down long ago by upbeat Midwesterners.

Moreover, since 1992, when the LAPD, rather than be further condemned for brutality after Rodney King's beating, let a drunken mob run amok at Florence and Normandie, resulting in much of the city being burned down, law-abiding citizens have bought lots of guns for self-defense. And, as Robert A. Heinlein pointed out, "An armed society is a polite society."

"Crash" is too contrived to be a great movie, but it's a contrivance of an unusually high order.

Rated R for language, sexual content and some violence.

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

The Pathetic State of Book Criticism

The prestigious Economist runs a review of Freakonomics that's characteristic of contemporary book reviewing, which has become merely a larger-vocabulary version of the old book reports you did in grade school: just a summary of what the book says with negligible critical analysis. The Economist's anonymous reviewer simply recaps Levitt's arguments for his abortion-cut-crime theory. How hard would it have been for him to discover from Google that there is a bit of an empirical controversy over the subject? But book reviewing has become merely a branch of expository writing.

What's amusing about the Economist review is that one bit of evidence the reviewer cites in support of Levitt actually contradicts him:

One of his best-known, and in some quarters notorious, findings concerns America's falling crime-rate during the 1990s. Towards the end of that decade, confounding the expectations of most analysts, the teenage murder rate fell by more than 50% in the space of five years;

Okay, but abortion was liberalized in 15 states in 1970 and legalized in 1973, and now you are saying that the teenage murder rate fell sharply more than 20 years later??? Somebody forgot to count on their fingers.

Levitt claims the NYT is going to give Freakonomics a rave this weekend. Let's see if that reviewer does any work on the issue...

In contrast, Ann Marlowe does a lot of heavy lifting in reviewing Freakonomics for the New York Observer, raising serious questions about the abortion-cut-crime hypothesis.

By the way, Ann was the one who asked Ahmed Chalabi about my article on cousin marriage and whether the high degree of inbred clannishness in Iraq would work against democracy.

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

Statistics on "Unwanted Pregnancies"

Levitt's simplistic model of how abortion would cut crime by reducing "unwanted" births founders when you look at two facts: that, as Levitt admits, legalizing abortion greatly increased the number of unintended pregnancies, and that a lot of those unintended pregnancies go on to get born.

Physicians for Reproductive Health and the Alan Guttmacher Institute provide data that shows Levitt's simplistic model of "unwantedness" is a joke when applied to the real world. According to 1994 data, a full 48% of the 6.3 million pregnancies in the U.S. were unintended. Out of those 3.1 million unintended pregnancies, 47% were aborted, 13% miscarried, and a full 40% were born, or close to 1.25 million unintended births annually -- all with legalized abortion! This makes a hash out of Levitt's neat little model. I don't know what the overall effect is on who gets born, and he doesn't either.

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

It Takes a Selectionist to Catch a Selectionist

Because "selectionist" thinking is so verboten in American intellectual life today, the chattering classes have no practice in thinking critically about selectionist theories, as opposed to demonizing them as Thoughtcrime. So, they are saps for a selectionist, like Steven D. Levitt, when he tells them something they wanted to hear. As I pointed out in my Slate debate with Levitt way back in 1999:

The widespread assumption that your theory must be correct reveals just how many people deep down believe, whether they admit it publicly or not, that "certain people" are just permanently more incorrigible than others. As a contender for the World's Least Politically Correct Human, I'm sympathetic. It's ironic, but because I've been arguing for years that genetic diversity affects society, I was one of the few to notice in this particular case that crime has risen and fallen not because we are aborting the poor and black and unwanted, but because of that staple of genteel liberal commentary, Cultural Forces (e.g., crack).

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

Gay men and pheromones:

A lot of attention has been paid to Nicholas Wade's NYT article "For Gay Men, an Attraction to a Different Kind of Scent" about a study that found:

Using a brain imaging technique, Swedish researchers have shown that homosexual and heterosexual men respond differently to two odors that may be involved in sexual arousal, and that the gay men respond in the same way as women.

It's not terribly amazing that gay men are more like women than straight men on a particular trait. (Back in 1994 in "Why Lesbians Aren't Gay," I listed three dozen common traits for gay men and found they were more like straight women than straight men on roughly half the measures, just as lesbians are more like straight men than straight women about half the time. Gays are most like lesbians on only a few traits.)

However, the story is drawing attention for the two reasons Wade summarizes:

The new research may open the way to studying human pheromones, as well as the biological basis of sexual preference.

As Wade makes clear later on, pheromones have long been an underachiever. A decade ago they held the promise of revealing a sixth sense among humans, a sort of subsonic or infrared sense of smell. Perfume companies tried to bring out pheromone-based products that would drive the opposite sex wild, but nothing much panned out. So, any positive finding about pheromones is news, although the odds remain high that pheromones aren't terribly important among humans.

And, of course, anything about the biology of sexual orientation tends to be a nine-days-wonder. I do need to point out that the normally highly reliable Wade muffs up an important point about the putative gay gene when he writes:

Some researchers believe there is likely to be a genetic component of homosexuality because of its concordance among twins. The occurrence of male homosexuality in both members of a twin pair is 22 percent in nonidentical twins but rises to 52 percent in identical twins.

That's from an outdated study, unfortunately, which had some methodological problems with how it recruited its sample (advertising in a gay newspaper) that biased it in favor of a higher concordance rate, because concordant gay twins had twice the chance of seeing the ad in the gay newspaper than nonconcordant twins. I asked Prof. J. Michael Bailey of Northwestern U. about what is the state of the art in this field. He replied:

That figure is mine, and it was the best I could do at the time. A better figure was from 2000 and was about 20%, still well above 2-4%, the base rate in the population.

So, if one member of a pair of male identical twins is gay, four out of five times the other twin will be straight. (I don't believe Bailey is fully satisfied with this second study of his either, but by starting with the Australian government's official twin registry, it's an improvement over the first study ).

That 20% is a rather low concordance rate compared to other traits. So, about all that we can safely say about the cause(s) of male homosexuality is that the topic remains one of leading scientific mysteries of the 21st Century.

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

Steven Pinker debates Elizabeth Spelke over the Larry Summers issue

here. Pinker is so strong at debate that the only way to have made it a fair fight is to make him argue the incorrect side of the topic. One highlight:

SPELKE: In science, the judgments are subjective, every step of the way. Who's really talented? Who deserves bigger lab space? Who should get the next fellowship? Who should get promoted to tenure? These decisions are not based on clear and objective criteria. These are the cases where you see discrimination persisting...

PINKER: But that makes the wrong prediction: the harder the science, the greater the participation of women! We find exactly the opposite: it's the most subjective fields within academia — the social sciences, the humanities, the helping professions — that have the greatest representation of women. This follows exactly from the choices that women express in what gives them satisfaction in life. But it goes in the opposite direction to the prediction you made about the role of objective criteria in bringing about gender equity. Surely it's physics, and not, say, sociology, that has the more objective criteria for success.

Unable to come up with a reply, Spelke changed the subject.

As I wrote last winter in The American Conservative :

The more meritocratic the field, the more feminists accuse it of discriminating against women. In mathematics, new proofs either quickly fail or are accepted forever. In contrast, women flourish most in notoriously faddish, cliquish domains like the humanities. In Harvard's English department, 20 out of 51 professors are women, and at less exclusive colleges, they often comprise a majority.

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

Beating Up on Russia Is Easy and Fun

precisely because Russia is so weak today. The problem is that its new status as the Sick Man of Eurasia is similar to that of the old Ottoman Empire's role as the Sick Man of Europe in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, which caused so much trouble. The U.S. needs a Russia that's not falling apart to keep the Chinese from thinking about the many uses of a strong military and instead keep the Chinese focused on playing well with others.

In "Don't let Russian bear take US eyes off Chinese dragon," John Hughes writes in the Christian Science Monitor:

... the most significant change in China is that the government has eliminated funding for the majority of newspapers and media outlets. They must be self-supporting. Hence the executives in a modern, 50-story building in southern China which produces a bunch of newspapers with state-of-the-art technology are hungry, in their new profit-oriented orientation, to learn foreign management techniques.

In the 1890s, new printing technology lowered the cost of newspapers to a penny apiece, creating a paying mass audience for news for the first time. New York press barons William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer responded to less sophisticated new readers by hyping Spanish atrocities in Cuba (which, by the way, were pretty awful). This played a major role in bringing about America's war with Spain. Will the new Chinese mass market for capitalist news be too different?

Hughes continues:

What this and other evidence suggests is that the world's concern should be not so much with the eroding communist ideology in China that has failed almost everywhere else in the world, but the vigorous Chinese nationalism that seems gradually to be supplanting it.

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

Dan Seligman on the Decline in Crime:

In Forbes, Seligman writes:

The New York Times can't quite grasp the concept, but there's a stunningly simple explanation for the huge drop in crime rates: The villains are behind bars. A big story, inadequately memorialized by the media, is that crime in America has become a much smaller story. Crime rates have declined by a third since the early 1990s. Violent crimes--defined by the U.S. Justice Department as homicide, rape, robbery and assault--are down by some 60% since 1993.

Counterintuitive as it might seem, this happy result came about via a massive government social program. The program did not promote job training or administer therapy to thugs. Instead it consisted of putting them behind bars. Today's jail and prison population of 2.1 million is 53% above the 1993 number and roughly triple the 1984 number.

The connection of incarceration to crime rates is hard to ignore. The number of Americans in prison during 1984-2003 correlates -0.71 with the number of violent crimes in the country. That powerful negative coefficient says that increases in the prison population go hand in hand with declines in crimes committed.

The only part of this argument that makes sense is the assertion that our "three strikes and you're out" laws and drug laws are putting away a certain number of relatively harmless folks. But the magnitude of this problem has been wildly overstated. The "nonviolent" prison population is indeed sizable, but it isn't harmless. Last year the Justice Department's statistical bureau turned in a group portrait of inmates who were about to be released after serving time for nonviolent offenses. The data tell us that 95% had an arrest history before the arrest that led to their current imprisonment. On average they had 9.3 prior arrests and about a third of these had been for violent crimes. The fact is that a sizable proportion of criminals sentenced for nonviolent offenses like buying dope is, in fact, chronically violent.

Several weeks ago Charles Murray wrote an article for the London Times on the United Kingdom's growing criminal underclass. The U.K. is, it happens, one of the European countries with incarceration rates far lower than America's. England and Wales combined have a prison population of around 75,000 and a crime problem widely identified as out of control. Citing the American experience, Murray suggested that the British could substantially reduce crime if they were willing to go to an inmate level of around 250,000. Maybe, if enough Brits get mugged in coming years, they would be willing.

Murray was quoted in the Sunday Times:

“The US has dealt with the problem of the underclass by putting 2m people in jail, which has had a big impact. We haven’t rehabilitated anyone but just kept them out of society. It is not a happy solution but it is the only solution.”

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

Well, at least Levitt has a theory!

Dave Friedman blogs something that I've seen in similar words in many other places:

"All the arguments opposed to Levitt's that I have seen merely argue that Levitt is incorrect. They do not provide an alternative explanation for the reduction in crime. A successful critique of his argument would, I think, propose an alternative explanation."

That's not how science works. For example, if I take some scientific mystery that's not well understood, such as "What Came Before the Big Bang?" and I assert that the Big Bang was caused by commie pinkos fluoridating the water supply, well, the fact that you might not have an alternative hypothesis doesn't mean I win, or even that my idea should be treated respectfully.

The essence of the scientific method is the falsification of hypotheses. The falsifiers may not be as attractive figures as the hypothesizers, but their job is just as necessary.

Anyway, it's not as if we lack alternative hypotheses. Levitt himself lists a number of perfectly reasonable factors that he believes helped bring about the decline in crime -- the end of the crack wars, the vast increase in imprisonment, the addition of policemen, etc. I suspect those are correct and they may just have had an even larger influence than Levitt claims they did. Further, there are plenty of plausible theories he has never investigated. The crack wars permanently snuffed out the criminal careers of tens of thousands of the most dangerous young criminals by getting them murdered by other young criminals. I'd also point to the growth in popularity of smoking marijuana instead of crack among urban youths. Another likely factor is the increased moral traditionalism that emerged in the early 1990s: the abortion rate dropped sharply and the illegitimacy rate plateaued after a long, long increase.

Also, a lot of Levitt's supporters tend to assume that because some observers predicted an increase in crime in the late 1990s, then, because they were wrong, Levitt deserves credit as a seer. But, of course, Levitt didn't predict anything. He wrote in 1999, using crime data through 1997, by which time the big drop in crime was already in the books. It's easy to pick Giacomo to win the Kentucky Derby after the race is run. The funny thing, of course, is that the Levitt Effect doesn't even match up with what happened in the past when the history is looked at at the appropriate level of detail.

Now, lets make a prediction based on the putative Levitt Effect. The abortion rate per 1000 white women aged 15-44 dropped steadily from about 19 in 1991 to about 11 in 1999. (The black abortion rate dropped too, although not by not as large a percentage.) If Levitt believed in the Levitt Effect, then he should be predicting a sizable increase in the white juvenile (17 and under) violent crime rate over the decade or so beginning about 2007. Yet, I haven't heard Levitt raising the alarm about the coming generation of less culled white boys.

Of course, the Levitt Effect signally failed to predict the past, so it's effectiveness at predicting the future is doubtful as well.

Indeed, it's interesting that the decline in the abortion rate occurred during the same period as the decline in crime. Similarly, the illegitimacy rate among blacks started falling about 1995. In Levitt's "unwantedness" model, it's implied (but never stated) that abortion fights illegitimacy. Yet, when the abortion rate was going up in the 1970s, so was the illegitimacy rate. When the abortion rate among blacks was going down in the 1990s, the illegitimacy rate went down.

I suspect that what happened was that the catastrophe of the crack years inspired a rebirth of moral traditionalism that helped bring down, crime, abortion, and illegitimacy.

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

Well, at least Levitt has a theory!

Dave Friedman blogs something that I've seen in similar words in many other places:

"All the arguments opposed to Levitt's that I have seen merely argue that Levitt is incorrect. They do not provide an alternative explanation for the reduction in crime. A successful critique of his argument would, I think, propose an alternative explanation."

That's not how science works. For example, if I take some mystery that's not well understood, such as "What Came Before the Big Bang?" and I assert that the Big Bang was caused by fluoridation of the water supply, well, the fact that you might not have an alternative hypothesis doesn't mean I win, or even that my idea should be treated respectfully.

The essence of the scientific method is the falsification of hypotheses. The falsifiers may not be as attractive figures as the hypothesizers, but their job is just as necessary.

Anyway, it's not as if we lack alternative hypotheses. Levitt himself lists a number of perfectly reasonable factors that he believes helped bring about the decline in crime -- the end of the crack wars, the vast increase in imprisonment, the addition of policemen, etc. I suspect those are correct and they may just have had an even larger influence than Levitt claims they did. Further, there are plenty of plausible theories he has never investigated. The most obvious is the increased moral traditionalism that emerged in the early 1990s: the abortion rate dropped sharply and the illegitimacy rate plateaued after a long, long increase.

Also, a lot of Levitt's supporters tend to assume that because some observers predicted an increase in crime in the late 1990s, then, because they were wrong, Levitt deserves credit as a seer. But, of course, Levitt didn't predict anything. He wrote in 1999, using crime data through 1997, by which time the big drop in crime was already in the books. It's easy to pick Giacomo to win the Kentucky Derby after the race is run. The funny thing, of course, is that the Levitt Effect doesn't even match up with what happened in the past when the history is looked at at the appropriate level of detail.

Now, lets make a prediction based on the putative Levitt Effect. The abortion rate per 1000 white women aged 15-44 dropped steadily from about 19 in 1991 to about 11 in 1999. (The black abortion rate dropped too, although not by not as large a percentage.) If Levitt believed in the Levitt Effect, then he should be predicting a sizable increase in the white juvenile (17 and under) violent crime rate over the decade or so beginning about 2007. Yet, I haven't heard Levitt raising the alarm about the coming generation of less culled white boys.

Of course, the Levitt Effect signally failed to predict the past, so it's effectiveness at predicting the future is doubtful as well.

Indeed, it's interesting that the decline in the abortion rate occurred during the same period as the decline in crime. Similarly, the illegitimacy rate among blacks started falling about 1995. In Levitt's "unwantedness" model, it's implied (but never stated) that abortion fights illegitimacy. Yet, when the abortion rate was going up in the 1970s, so was the illegitimacy rate. When the abortion rate among blacks was going down in the 1990s, the illegitimacy rate went down.

I suspect that what happened was that the catastrophe of the crack years inspired a rebirth of moral traditionalism that helped bring down, crime, abortion, and illegitimacy.

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