iSteve.com Has Been Splendidized

One of the stranger artifacts I've found on Google is a translation of my blog from last December into the argot spoken in Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies by the daft debutante Lady Agatha Runcible, as played by Fenella Woolgar in Stephen Fry's terrific 2004 movie adaptation "Bright Young Things." For example,

The bloody university's main concern appears to be to make students feel "comfortable," a shriekworthy word that reappears constantly in Claremont publications despite the frightfully divine obvious hopelessness of the simply bogus project. Ugh, how uncouth! Darling, the beastly only way to make 19-year-olds feel comfortable is fabulously to wait 30 years while they sag into their well-padded maturities, darling! Dash me twice, right now, they are, and I don't want to be frightfully mean, teenagers and their surging hormones have far more important emotions for them to feel than comfort, which is terribly just too bogus! I say, adults, however, who make careers out of encouraging kids to mold permanently self-pitying identities around their transient social discomforts have much to answer for, my dear fellow! [More]

Apparently, the Splendidizer was a program available through the film's website, which is no longer on line.

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

Perjury rap for Rove?

From Editor & Publisher:

Now that Time Inc. has turned over documents to federal court, presumably revealing who its reporter, Matt Cooper, identified as his source in the Valerie Plame/CIA case, speculation runs rampant on the name of that source, and what might happen to him or her. Tonight, on the syndicated McLaughlin Group political talk show, Lawrence O'Donnell, senior MSNBC political analyst, claimed to know that name--and it is, according to him, top White House mastermind Karl Rove.

Here is the transcript of O'Donnell's remarks:

"What we're going to go to now in the next stage, when Matt Cooper's e-mails, within Time Magazine, are handed over to the grand jury, the ultimate revelation, probably within the week of who his source is.

"And I know I'm going to get pulled into the grand jury for saying this but the source of...for Matt Cooper was Karl Rove, and that will be revealed in this document dump that Time magazine's going to do with the grand jury."

Other panelists then joined in discussing whether, if true, this would suggest a perjury rap for Rove, if he told the grand jury he did not leak to Cooper.

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

The single best debate over Levitt's abortion-cut-crime theory:

I hadn't seen this before from the comments section of Tim Lambert's Deltoid blog, but Jack Strocchi rips into Levitt's Freakonomics adulators. Strocchi's performance makes me sense how Darwin must have felt having T.H. Huxley as his "bulldog."

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

John Tierney Nails Iraq

Too bad nobody will read it because it's the Fourth of July weekend, but Tierney's New York Times op-ed, "Get Out, You Damned One," is his best yet. I'm obviously prejudiced, because much of it is built on my work, especially my "Cousin Marriage Conundrum" article that Tierney made the basis for his NYT article "Iraq’s Family Bonds Complicate U.S. Efforts" that he wrote while stationed in Baghdad in September 2003.

Here's his July 2, 2005 op-ed:

President Bush has the bully pulpit, but Saddam Hussein has the hot novel. Bootleg copies of his latest work are selling briskly in the Middle East, and not just because of the free publicity he got when Jordan banned it this week. Say what you will about Saddam, he knows his audience. Skip to next paragraph

The critics have not been kind to the prose and the plot, but they miss Saddam's strength. He's a marketer. He is said to have finished the novel just as the war was beginning, when American leaders were fantasizing about their troops' being welcomed as liberators. But Saddam knew enough to give his novel a surefire title for the post-invasion era: "Get Out, You Damned One."

It's a naked appeal to xenophobia, an impulse that's far more ancient and widespread than the yearning for democracy that President Bush talked about this week. Yet it's been curiously underestimated by conservatives who used to pay close attention to just this sort of instinct.

When liberal intellectuals dreamed of a socialist world with a selfless "New Man," conservatives realized that he'd be as greedy as ever. When some feminists envisioned the end of gender stereotypes, conservatives insisted there were ingrained differences between the sexes. Yet when American troops met resistance after the war, conservatives dismissed the early insurgents as "dead-enders" and expected Iraqis to join Americans in quickly vanquishing the thugs.

In those early days, when the memory of Saddam was still fresh, you could walk down a street in Baghdad and be greeted by an Iraqi stranger thanking you for bringing freedom. But even back then there were plenty of Iraqis like Saleh Youssef Sayel, who proudly told me of the reaction of his 5-year-old son, Mustafa, to an American soldier.

"The soldier tried to shake his hand, but my son refused," he said. "He knew enough English to say, 'No. You go.' Later he told me he wanted a gun to kill Americans. This is a natural feeling. Nobody wants a stranger in your house or your country."

The natural impulse to dislike outsiders is so strong that it barely matters who the outsiders are.

When experimental psychologists divide subjects into purely arbitrary groups - by the color of their eyes, their taste in art, the flip of a coin - the members of a group quickly become so hostile to the other group that they'll try to deny rewards to the outsiders even at a cost to themselves.

And when the members of a group really have something in common, like family ties, they're willing to fight outsiders even if it means their own deaths. Xenophobia produced genetic rewards for hunter-gatherer clans. When the evolutionary psychologist J. B. S. Haldane was asked whether he would lay down his life for his brother, he replied, "No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins."

Iraqis have their own version of that line: "My brother and I against my cousin; my cousin and I against the world."

Because marriage between cousins is so common in the Middle East - half of Iraqis are married to their first or second cousins - Arabs live in tightly knit clans long resistant to outsiders, including would-be liberators. T. E. Lawrence learned that lesson when trying to unify Arabs early in the last century.

"The Semites' idea of nationality," he wrote, "was the independence of clans and villages, and their ideal of national union was episodic combined resistance to an intruder. Constructive policies, an organized state, an extended empire, were not so much beyond their sight as hateful in it. They were fighting to get rid of Empire, not to win it."

[More]

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

Mexico's New Stamps Depicts Black as Ape-Man

To celebrate the art of caricature in Mexico, Vicente Fox's government has issued a series of postage stamps commemorating the popular comic strip character Memin Pinguin, a black youth drawn to look like he's part-chimpanzee.

Defying U.S., Mexicans flock to buy 'racist' stamps

By Catherine Bremer

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Crowds of Mexicans lined up at post offices on Friday to buy a new set of stamps featuring a 1940s black comic-book hero whose stereotypical looks and antics have been slammed as racist in the United States.

Some 400 people, from comic fans to Mexicans simply wanting to defy the White House, descended on Mexico City's main post office. Media reports said one bought 4,000 stamps of Memin Pinguin, a mischievous black boy whose thick lips, flat nose and monkey-like antics have offended U.S. civil rights groups.

The basic take-home lesson of this is that the cultural level of the Mexican masses is extremely low, and importing millions more uneducated Mexicans into the U.S. isn't making our cultural level more "vibrant," it's just depressing ours as well. One might think that American white liberals who pride themselves on their superior cultural sophistication might object to what mass immigration is doing to American culture, but they don't because they don't care about superior culture, just about feeling superior to other American whites.

Ironically, the average Mexican appears to be somewhere around 5% black by ancestry, although the African contribution to the Mexican population has been shoved down the memory hole by the Mexican government. For the full story, see my 2002 article "Where Did Mexico's Blacks Go?"

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

"Mr. Bush, Put Up this Wall!"

Randall Parker has been studying the cost of building security barriers. The highest cost per mile he's seen for the highly successful new Israeli fence around (and partly in) the West Bank is $4.15 million.

Even at $4.15 million per mile a barrier on the US border with Mexico would still be under $10 billion and therefore cost less than one year of illegal alien health care.

The Iraq-Syria border is about one third the length of the U.S.-Mexico border.

The highly effective anti-illegal immigration fence in San Diego came out to about $1.7 million per mile. The Israeli fence is much more lethal (e.g., includes landmines), as is appropriate for dealing with suicide bombers.

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

ABC Kills Housing Segregation Reality Show

The AP reports:

"Welcome to the Neighborhood," an ABC reality series that pushes hot buttons of racism and anti-homosexuality, was pulled by the network before its debut.

The program had drawn criticism from groups claiming it risked fostering prejudice.

In a statement Wednesday, ABC acknowledged the delicate nature of the series in which families asked to pick a new neighbor are made to expose and overcome their biases.

"Welcome to the Neighborhood" demonstrates what happens when people are forced to "confront preconceived notions of what makes a good neighbor," the network said.

"However, the fact that true change only happens over time made the episodic nature of this series challenging, and given the sensitivity of the subject matter in early episodes we have decided not to air the series at this time."

A spokeswoman for the network said ABC had no further comment. A replacement program was not announced.

The six-episode show, which was to debut July 10 in the "Desperate Housewives" slot, follows three families in Austin, Texas, who are given the chance to choose a new neighbor for a house on their street.

Each family initially wants someone similar to them — white and conservative.

Instead, they must choose from a diverse group that includes families that are black, Hispanic and Asian; two gay white men who've adopted a black child; a couple covered in tattoos and piercings; a couple who met at the woman's initiation as a witch; and a poor white family.

In the early episodes, one man makes a crack about the number of children piling out of the Hispanic family's car and displays of affection between the gay men provoke disgust.

The series' producers had said it was intended to promote a healthy and open debate about prejudice and people's fear of differences.

The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, after viewing the series, expressed strong concerns.

While it ultimately carries a valuable message about diversity and acceptance, those watching the first episodes could be left thinking discrimination is "not that big a deal," GLAAD spokesman Damon Romine said Wednesday.

"Regardless of how things turn out at the end of the last show, it's dangerous to let intolerance and bigotry go unchallenged for weeks at a time," he said, adding that GLAAD hopes a revised version might air.

A little too much reality for Reality TV, I guess...

Gosh, you ever wonder why the country is dividing up into childless blue and family-rich red zones?

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

More of James Q. Wilson on Steven D. Levitt's Freakonomics

from the July issue of Commentary:

The abortion-crime connection [is] … symptomatic of a general disposition on the part of Levitt or his coauthor to avoid being thought politically incorrect. For just as this book's discussion of abortion ignores race, so its chapter on the gap in educational achievement between blacks and whites soft-pedals some indisputably important facts.

The chapter begins by considering how little influence parents may exert over their child's personality given that half of the difference among personalities can be attributed to genes. This is quite correct. But genes also account for well over half (in some studies, as much as three-quarters) of differences in intellectual ability. If we are explain the black-white gap in educational achievement, we cannot turn away from the fact that on average, African Americans have a lower IQ than white Americans.

There are, of course, many highly talented blacks and many really stupid whites.

[Using stylized data from the normal probability distribution, I've estimated that about 33 million non-Hispanic whites score below the average black on IQ tests, and about 6 million blacks score above the 100 million whites who are below the white average. -- Steve]

But these important individual differences are not relevant to explaining the average difference between black and white school achievement. That difference is not the product of racist innuendo; the matter has been measured for decades, often by means of tests that do not require the use of words.

It is true enough that black IQ scores have risen -- owing, one suspects, to improvements in the social condition of blacks over the last several generations. But the black white gap in educational attainment has not narrowed. In Freakonomics, the authors assert that this gap is the result of differences in incomes between blacks and whites. Such differences certainly exist. But income differences are themselves in large measure the result of differences in intelligence, so one cannot explain the gap in IQ-based school scores by "controlling" for income.

The best test of this was done by Sandra Scarr and Richard Weinberg. They looked for changes in the IQ scores of black children who had been adopted by white families, mostly middle-class and well-educated. Over a ten-year period, there was no significant gain in the IQ's of the adopted black children. (Not was there any gain in the IQ's of adopted white children.) The data strongly suggest that parental environment, even in well-to-do families, has only a modest and probably short-lived effect on educational ability.

If you bothered to look up Levitt's original paper on the black-white test gap, written with Roland G. Fryer, you would find that that the authors are indeed aware of the many other studies that have been done of this issue. But they also think that once one "controls" for socioeconomic status, black and white schoolchildren become "observationally equivalent." Observationally, perhaps, but not actually.

As they themselves note, moreover, the gap between black and white test scores increases as children get older, and this widening gap cannot be explained by socio-economic differences in the quality of the schools the children attend. Experts on genetics have long known that heritability increases with age, and so, as a result, will the average gaps in school achievement between white and black children.

Wilson belongs to the heroic first generation of neoconservatives, who were primarily heterodox social scientists largely concerned with explaining domestic issues involving race and ethnicity: Wilson, Moynihan, Glazer, Sowell, Herrnstein, Coleman, Banfield, and Murray. Basically, I'm an Old Neocon in that tradition.

By a strange process, the second generation of neocons became primarily propagandists for a foreign political party and largely gave up research and analysis.

By the way, I wrote about Levitt and Fryer's IQ paper last October:

http://www.iSteve.com/Oct04.htm#levitt

Steven Levitt "eliminates" the black-white test score gap! Levitt is the imaginative U. of Chicago professor who recently was named the top young economist in America...

Levitt has now turned his peripatetic attention to the IQ racial gap, with the goal of statistically showing that it can be eliminated just by adjusting for various environmental factors. In a May 2004 paper in the Review of Economics and Statistics called "Understanding the black-white test score gap in the first two years of school," Levitt and Roland G. Fryer Jr. claim

"As in previous data sets, we observe substantial racial differences in test scores in the raw data: black kindergartners score on average 0.64 standard deviation worse than whites. In stark contrast to earlier studies (including those looking at kindergartners), however, after controlling for a small number of other observable characteristics (children’s age, child’s birth weight, a socioeconomic status measure, WIC participation, mother’s age at first birth, and number of children’s books in the home), we essentially eliminate the black-white test score gap in math and reading for students entering kindergarten."

However, I have thought of a simpler way to "essentially eliminate the black-white test score gap" than the one they describe. First, though, let's think of an analogy for what they are doing. Say you were attempting to "essentially eliminate" the Japanese-Lithuanian child height gap. You could control for household environmental measures such as the length of the beds, the height of the ceilings, the average inseam length of pants hanging in the closets, the size of the shoes, etc. Or you could simply control for the height of the parents. Much simpler! Occam would approve.

Similarly, if you controlled simply for the IQ of the parents, I bet you wouldn't have to laboriously include so many proxies for the parents' IQ like socio-economic status, WIC participation (i.e., get free formula from the government for being poor), mother's age at first birth, number of children's books in the home, and birth weight.

This generated the usual indignant replies from Levitt's ex-students about how my reductionist crudities were unfair to the ineffably brilliant sophistication of Levitt's thinking, which they couldn't quite explain because you had to be there to fully experience its wonderfulness. Levitt looks like he's well on his way toward becoming one of those charismatic U. of Chicago professors whose students take his every idea on faith, like Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom.

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

Where's the evidence?

NRO claims the Iraq Attaq was part of the War on Terror, not Bush's War in Error, because Iraq was up to its eyeballs in promoting terrorism.

Yet, the Bush Administration has almost the entire leadership of Saddam's regime in custody. They've been sweating some of them for over two years. Yet, have you seen any televised confessions of top Baathist officials to their involvement with anything the Bushies claimed justified this war? We know the WMD was all lies, but what about Atta's supposed meeting with an Iraqi diplomat in Prague or the practice hijacking camp or all the rest of the fairy tales we were fed? I don't even think the story that Saddam had doubles was true.

What, do you think some Baathists wouldn't sell out their colleagues out to get more favorable treatment for themselves? They're Arabs! Of course they would ... if they had anything to sell. But, they don't.

The truths is, it was almost all lies. And we ate them up, and even after we knew they were lies, we re-elected the liars.

For some reason, I am reminded of Wordsworth's great poem, "London, 1802:"

Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.

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

Mounties use DNA tests to discover race of criminals

Carolyn Abraham of the Toronto Globe & Mail, who wrote that long article on "The New Science of Race," is back with another article, "Molecular Eyewitness: DNA gets a human face," this time on how the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and other law enforcement agencies are employing DNAprint's genetic test to estimate the racial admixture of suspects from evidence samples.

Funny how for something that doesn't exist, race sure seems to act like it exists.

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

Too funny to pass up

Way back in 1997, I wrote in my groundbreaking article "Is Love Colorblind?" about why interracial couples are more likely to be black husband-white wife and white husband-Asian wife than vice-versa:

Despite these opportunities to meet white men, so many middle-class black women have trouble landing satisfactory husbands that they have made Terry (Waiting to Exhale) McMillan, author of novels specifically about and for them, into a best-selling brand name. Probably the most popular romance advice regularly offered to affluent black women of a certain age is to find true love in the brawny arms of a younger black man. Both Miss McMillan's 1996 best-seller How Stella Got Her Groove Back and the most celebrated of all books by black women, Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, are romance novels about well-to-do older women and somewhat dangerous younger men. Of course, as Miss Hurston herself later learned at age 49, when she (briefly) married a 23-year-old gym coach, that seldom works out in real life.

Today, the AP reports:

Terry McMillan divorcing 'Groove' muse

(AP) -- Author Terry McMillan has filed for divorce from the man who inspired the 1996 novel "How Stella Got Her Groove Back," which chronicled the romantic adventures of a 40-something woman who falls for a guy half her age. In papers filed in Contra Costa County Superior Court, McMillan, 53, says she decided to end her 6 1/2-year marriage to Jonathan Plummer, 30, after learning he is gay.

The revelation led her to conclude Plummer married only to get his U.S. citizenship, she said. McMillan met Plummer at a Jamaican resort a decade ago.

"It was devastating to discover that a relationship I had publicized to the world as life-affirming and built on mutual love was actually based on deceit," she said in court papers. "I was humiliated."

In response, Plummer maintained McMillan treated him with "homophobic" scorn bordering on harassment since he came out to her as gay just before Christmas.

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

"Hollywood's Other Obsession: Blond Bad Guys:"

"Hollywood's Other Obsession: Blond Bad Guys:" My new VDARE.com column is up:

Exactly why Hollywood hates blond men almost as much as it loves blond women is not clear... This prejudice against blond men would seem to be on a collision course with the tendency of movie moguls, such as Steven Spielberg, to marry blonde women, such as Kate Capshaw. This means the industry's hereditary elite will tend to become blonder over the generations. No doubt it will cause no end of father-son conflicts, keeping Beverly Hills psychiatrists prosperous for the rest of the century. [More]

And who can forget "Lethal Weapon II" where the bad guys were Afrikaaner drug smugglers in the South African embassy? Fortunately, Mel Gibson seduced the beautiful blonde Boer babe away from dark side.

My all-time favorite blond bad guy is Gary Busey's Mr. Joshua in the original "Lethal Weapon." Busey has had a two-role career: Buddy Holly and Mr. Joshua, which shows a fair amount of range, but he hasn't made much of a mark in anything else. Of course, falling off a motorcycle onto his head hasn't helped.

A reader asks:

How far back does the blond bad guy motif go? Is it left over from WWII and the SS? Or were they doing this in the early 1930's as well? It would be kind of interesting if Hollywood was still doing its part to win the war against the Nazis.

But I would imagine that it is simply the flip side of your other article. If the leading lady has to be pale and blonde, and the hero has to be darker, well the villain has to stand out. We would not want the audience to pull a brain muscle in the theater.

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

The NYT runs _another_ rave review of Freakonomics

After Jim Holt's softball review last month, Roger Lowenstein says the same old same old all over again, accepting Levitt's abortion-cut-crime theory without demurral or the slightest evidence that he even spent fifteen minutes Googling the subject.

Aren't these NYT tongue-baths of Freakonomics getting a little unseemly? After all, the NYT now employs Levitt and Dubner to write a regular "Freakonomics" column for the NYT Magazine. Does the term "conflict of interest" come to mind?

Okay, okay, I know a lot of economists are shocked, SHOCKED by my insinuations that some of the puffery associated with the Freakonomics fad is a bit self-interested, so forget I ever said that... I admit, it's utterly beyond belief that anyone associated with economics could ever be motivated by financial gain. It would violate all the laws of economics if economists weren't an exception to the laws of economics.

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

They Saved Einstein's Brain!

Interesting article from the LA Times on McMaster U. psychologist Sandra Witelson, who has been dissecting hundreds of brains (after their owners no longer need them, I'm glad to report). She finds strong sex differences. Does that mean Larry Summers can take back the $50 million in other people's money he's promised to make up for his gaffe?

By the way, Dr. Witelson has chopped up Einstein's brain and finds it to have been, no fooling, a "one in a billion brain."

Back when I was a kid, while Einstein's brain was still floating in a jar undissected, and you could only look at the outside of it, my fourth grade teacher explained that Einstein's brain was extra-wrinkled, which shows that every time you learn something new, you get a new wrinkle in your brain. But the new article is unaccountably silent on the Wrinkled Brain Theory.

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

Batmania

Random notes:

- Notice how the Gotham City muggers are blond?

- This time, Gotham City looks more like Chicago than New York, with all the liftable bridges over the river and the art deco Wayne Tower looks like a bigger version of the Board of Trade building at the end of Lasalle St. A lot of the underground road footage was shot on Lower Wacker Drive, a rather ominous-looking shortcut under the Loop that I took to work every day for years. However, Chicago is lacking in blond muggers.

- As a boy, Christian Bale starred in Steven Spielberg's 1987 "Empire of the Sun," which was a rare box office dud for Spielberg ($22 million domestically, but I thought was one of the greatest movies ever made. Bale plays an English lad living in the wealthy European suburb of Shanghai on December 7, 1941 who is interned in a brutal camp by the Japanese. Objectively, he's a pitiful victim of the war, but he finds World War II to be a blast. Spielberg took the script by Tom Stoppard and augmented Stoppard's trademark "surreal realism" -- a style Stoppard invented in "After Magritte" where a seemingly impossible tableau is later explained. For example, the remarkably memorable scene that begins with Bale's Japanese friend on the other side of the fence singing a Shinto hymn and climbing into his Kamikaze was largely Spielberg's invention. Stoppard couldn't imagine spending the money the scene cost, but Spielberg came up with the most Stoppardian segment in any of the many movies Stoppard has worked on.

- Gary Oldman doesn't have much to do as the only honest cop in Gotham City, but he gives a seminar in acting solely through facial expressions when he is pressed into driving the Batmobile. Oldman was great way back in 1986's "Sid and Nancy" (he beat out Daniel Day-Lewis for the role of Sid Vicious), but Chloe Webb was even better. But there aren't a lot of roles for funny-looking girls (other than as Danny Devito's girlfriend in "Twins"), so her career never amounted to much. Too bad Tim Roth turned down the role of Johnny Rotten.

- Practically the entire cast of "Batman Begins" is from the British Isles, other than Katie Holmes, Morgan Freeman, and Ken Watanabe. The British are still just better than we are at the kind of classy showmanship that this kind of film demands.

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

Did the Iranian people just elect a hostage-taker as president?

There's photographic evidence that the landslide winner in the recent Iranian election was one of the creeps who took American Embassy workers hostage in 1978-1980. (Of course, in the age of PhotoShop, seeing in the media should not be believing.)

Another triumph of democracy!

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

Why don't we seal the Syrian border?

asks Andrew Sullivan, wondering why the Bush Administration constantly complains about fighters slipping in from Syria but doesn't seem to do anything about it.

Let me update what I wrote over two years ago about Iraq's borders, just after the capture of Baghdad. Obviously, the U.S. military knows how to seal even a much more dangerous border, from its experience on the Korean peninsula over the last half century. Similarly, Israel has largely stopped the infiltration of suicide bombers by largely fencing off Gaza and much of the West Bank. Heck, the King of Morocco ended infiltration of Polisario guerillas into his new territory of Spanish Sahara by building a dirt berm around it.

There are four likely reasons the Bush Administration isn't letting the military seal the border in Iraq:

1. Bush wants Al-Qaeda fighters to get into Iraq so he can claim Iraq is part of the 9/11 payback.

2. At least part of the Administration wants to conquer Syria, which is more of a problem for Israel than Iraq was, so they want the border to stay porous as an excuse for invading Syria. As Noah Millman has long pointed out, taking out Saddam was a lower priority for the Likud government compared to the threats posed to Israel by Iran and Syria. But, the Likud fellow travelers in the Bush Administration assumed that getting U.S. troops into Iraq would make it more likely the U.S. would then turn on Syria and/or Iran. Neutralizing Syria by sealing the border would lessen the chance of the U.S. invading Syria, so that's not a popular choice within the Bush Administration.

3. Successfully sealing off the Syrian border would give the lie to the claim that it's impossible to seal off the Mexican border to cut back on illegal immigration, and that's the last thing Mr. Bush wants to do.

4. The Syrian border actually isn't all that important. This is primarily an ethno-nationalist rebellion, and Bush is exaggerating the importance of the foreign element so he can tell people his War in Error is part of the War on Terror. Maybe it would be cost-ineffective to worry about the border. Still, how much time does laying landmines use up?

More on sealing the border(s): A reader writes:

Fences are OK. Walls are better. Concrete walls better still.

Tilt-up concrete construction has been used in the Southwest since the 1940s. Essentially, you cast a reinforced concrete slab on the ground (say 4-6" thick) and then, after a few weeks, tilt it up to make a wall. Simple, and quick. An experienced crew can tilt up 30 panels a day and you can make them 60'x60' or larger. Secure? We build prisons out of them in Texas.

If you wanted a 6" thick, 60' high wall of concrete along the border withSyria or Mexico, you would need a few square miles of flat land under guard and semis to move the slabs out to the border. With a few square miles, you could supply multiple crews for a few weeks. Stage the areas to cast the slabs up and down the border and guard the goddamned things like we used to be able to do before GHW Bush and Bill Clinton drove all of the professionals out of the US military. Build a berm and compress the earth, and tilt up the wall in between braces pounded into the earth.

While construction is going on, let everyone know that activity in the immediate few miles will draw fire without any attempt to verify the target. Period.

So, lets assume 25 slabs per crew per day, 10 crews working, each slab 60' long, that would be 2.84 miles a day (15000/5280), and if we were working for 135 days we would be done. End of story. Cost? My back of the envelope is $275,000,000 for materials times a mutiplier for the cost of shipping them in plus the labor (which, if it is military, is already a sunk cost). How about an even billion, which is a lot less than we have spent so far. Patrol night and day in Blackhawks with IR and respond immediately and with overwhelming force every time anything, even a camel, gets close to the wall.

Think that Bush would do it? No, and I don't think that you are being paranoid when you say that this would make people think "Hmmm ... why not here?" I sent a sketch of this idea to a friend in DC a few days ago and but he thought that it might affect the efforts to attract Hispanics to the Republican Party. Wonderful.

Update: My wall expert has now priced out what it would cost to buy the wall from his local Lowe's Home Center:

So, I was thinking to myself, let's assume $500 of rebar and the suggested 3031 80 pound bags of Quick-Crete that Lowe's suggests for one of these wall panels (60'x60'). We would need to look at transportation costs, labor, forms (which can be reused for a while), and so on, but just the concrete and rebar would be $13,000 per slab. We need 34000 slabs to run right down the Syrian border, so that would be $442,000,000 if we bought this at Lowe's, and I would hope that buying in bulk would give us a little bit of a discount. I know, I know, we would have to truck in water, we would have to do the earthworks, and so on. But still -- we could seal the Syrian border with with crap we can buy at Lowe's and even if it costs us $2,000,000,000 because my math is lousy, we would still be running at under 1% of the cost of this goat rodeo so far.

Why do they have to be 60 feet tall? The walls the Border Patrol has built in towns on the Mexican border like Nogales and Naco are about 15 feet tall. They're effective, but the BP boys have to watch them to keep people from climbing over them on extra long ladders. But they don't have any spikes on top of them or electrification or landmines below them, or all the other sadistic (and fun to dream up) anti-personnel schemes that would be perfectly justifiable in using to keep Al-Qaeda terrorists from entering Iraq to set off car bombs.

Randall Parker has been studying the cost of building security barriers. The highest cost per mile he's seen for the highly successful new Israeli fence around (and partly in) the West Bank is $4.15 million.

Even at $4.15 million per mile a barrier on the US border with Mexico would still be under $10 billion and therefore cost less than one year of illegal alien health care.

The Iraq-Syria border is about one third the length of the U.S.-Mexico border.

The highly effective anti-illegal immigration fence in San Diego came out to about $1.7 million per mile. The Israeli fence is much more lethal (e.g., includes landmines), as is appropriate for dealing with suicide bombers.

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

How interracial marriage keeps the ruling class relatively white in Latin America

From Georgie Anne Geyer's 1970 book The New Latins:

In Bolivia, for instance, divorce came into being with the 1952 revolution, which also disgorged from the lowest depths of society and flung to its apex an entire new class of Indian and Mestizo leaders. Almost without exception, these leaders divorced their original wives and married women of a higher social class -- a class whose status coincided with their newly acquired importance.

Their new children would come out whiter than they were. And so it goes...

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