Let's play the Blame Game!

A reader writes:

Your New Orleans article sure seemed to have stirred up a hornet’s nest! ... Do poor black people have worse judgment? Perhaps I’m not the best one to ask this: I’ve made enough mistakes to fill 20 lives! My guess is that your idea contains more than a kernel of truth….

Whenever the TV broadcasts hours of blacks behaving badly, this enormous pressure builds up to denounce the first person who mentions what everybody can see with their lying eyes. I believe it was Robert Conquest, historian of the Soviet terror, who pointed out that Hans Christian Anderson's "Emperor's New Clothes" is psychologically dubious: the more obvious the lie, the more angry the crowd would get at the truth-teller. As Theodore Dalrymple pointed out, the purpose of political correctness is to humiliate you by forcing you to go along with lies, so when somebody points out the truth, everybody gets mad at him for calling attention to how they've allowed themselves to be emasculated.

On the blame game:

The most would go to the Mayor for not forcibly evacuating the poor and elderly. The picture of those flooded buses says it all. True, some people would have refused to go, but that wouldn’t have been the city’s fault. You are right on target that the city’s “party” atmosphere contributed greatly to the debacle – no one took it seriously until it was too late with tragic results. The Mayor should do the honorable thing and resign as of October 1.

Perhaps, but, remember the poor guy got elected to office as a reformer, and the first thing he did was stage a sting on the crooked cab supervision racket in which his own cousin got arrested. But that just came back to haunt him because it showed he lacked the clan loyalty a New Orleans bigshot is supposed to display. According to Josh Levin in Slate.com,

"In the black community, the fizzling of these early successes did less to hurt Nagin's reputation than the perception that he was disloyal—to the cousin he had arrested, to the administration of his popular predecessor Marc Morial (which he frequently insinuated, perhaps appropriately, was complicit in City Hall corruption), and to the city's African-American population as a whole. After Morial's brother's house was raided as part of a corruption probe, a leading black preacher called Nagin a "white man in black skin." It didn't matter that, according to the Times-Picayune, he had done a demonstrably better job than Morial in giving government contracts to minority-owned businesses."

My reader continues:

The second biggest goat would be Tom Ridge and the Feds. It’s been over 3 years since 9/11 and the establishment of that department ….and we get the worst emergency performance ever? (Chertoff gets less of the blame because he’s been on the job a shorter time). Here’s where your much-commented upon failure of Bush to ever fire anyone really hurt….

Third would be Rumsfeld! Remember you wanted to make Powell Sec of Defense and have him re-institute the doctrine of Overwhelming Force. This was a textbook case of why massive manpower was needed to prevent chaos from spreading….

Rumsfeld refused to put down looting after we conquered Baghdad, which I said at the time was going to come back to haunt us.

Fourth would be Bush for not getting there sooner….

Republicans will try to blame the chaos on the bad behavior of the urban underclass, but anyone who knows anything takes that as a given in crisis situations. (Remember the NYC blackout of ’77?)

Exactly. That's been my point all along. For example, the hapless FEMA director Mike Brown admitted that the lawlessness in New Orleans surprised him. That's the kind of politically correct naiveté that all these denunciations of me by John Podhoretz and Michelle Malkin, etc. just encourage in public officials. And being oblivious to the obvious doesn't do poor minority underclass people any good when it's crunch time.

Everybody should have assumed that when the hammer finally came down, the New Orleans Police Department would fold and underclass thugs would run amok, making it unsafe for unarmed rescue workers to do their jobs. The government should have planned to helicopter combat troops in and do what it takes to restore order: tear gas, rubber bullets, and live ammo if necessary.

The GOP had better hope something happens to change the subject from Iraq and New Orleans to something else.

The Republican shouldn't wish to hard for a distraction or they might just get one, good and hard.

Now the nominee for worst performance by a journalist goes to… David Brooks.

Here’s what he said about the systematic failures of recent years:

“And the key fact to understanding why this is such a huge cultural moment is this: Last week's national humiliation comes at the end of a string of confidence-shaking institutional failures that have cumulatively changed the nation's psyche. Over the past few years, we have seen intelligence failures in the inability to prevent Sept. 11 and find W.M.D.'s in Iraq. We have seen incompetent postwar planning. We have seen the collapse of Enron and corruption scandals on Wall Street. We have seen scandals at our leading magazines and newspapers, steroids in baseball, the horror of Abu Ghraib. Public confidence has been shaken too by the steady rain of suicide bombings, the grisly horror of Beslan and the world's inability to do anything about rising oil prices.”

Say what? This guy is complaining about the failure of WMD intelligence in Iraq….and incompetent postwar planning?!? One of the men who shouted the loudest for this war now complains about it! How stupid does he think the public is? What’s next? Bush’s budget director complaining about deficits? Tom DeLay calling for better Congressional ethics? Louis Farrakhan opposing anti-Senitism? Or Vincente Fox criticizing too much Latin immigration into the US? AHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

More from Brooks:

“It's already clear this will be known as the grueling decade, the Hobbesian decade. Americans have had to acknowledge dark realities that it is not in our nature to readily acknowledge: the thin veneer of civilization, the elemental violence in human nature, the lurking ferocity of the environment, the limitations on what we can plan and know, the cumbersome reactions of bureaucracies, the uncertain progress good makes over evil.”

He’s exactly right: there ARE limits to what we know…all the more reason to be cautious when Wolfowitz, Karuathammer, Perle and Feith, et al came along selling their plan for a vast transformation of the Mid East! You’re right: journalists inhabit the softest sector in America and never get canned for bad advice. The old saying was “love means never having to say you’re sorry.” I guess being a neo-con means never having to say you’re wrong -- or sorry.

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

Remember those hundreds of parked buses in NO?

A reader writes:

"One might ask the following question. On election day the state and local Democrats with admirable efficiency and organization manage to have fleets of buses and vans at those now flooded housing projects to get their constituents to the polls. So where were they for the three days while the storm was bearing down on the city?"

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

Good Blog Coverage of NO:

Our Way of Life has lots of no BS entries on the social side of life when the police force disintegrates.

A professor at the U. of New Orleans, now sheltering with his sister on the Eastern Seaboard, writes:

"If you have any influence, try to cover the refusal of the Red Cross to assist Jefferson Parish (a white area of almost a half million pre storm) and the almost complete lack of media coverage of St. Bernard (68,000 people) and Plaquamines Parish, two areas that don't seem to have weathered the storm nearly as well as New Orleans (yes, there are worse hit areas in the metropolitan area)."

Military Thoughts has a long entry on what can be learned from NO about how to evacuate a city after a nuclear or dirty bomb attatck:

It can also be expected that certain segments of the populace to be evacuated will pose an additional nightmare for those conducting the evacuation.

Persons best described as having "problems", "issues", or "difficulties".

Street gangs that exist in ALL major American cities will undoubtedly taken advantage of the situation. A total break down of law and order due to the absence of police [in the event of an atomic blast, many "first responders", such as the police, may be killed or wounded. There will be just NOT enough law and order people to go around]. Street gangs do have the numbers, the organization, the weaponry, the physical and mental wherewithal to "take over" large portions of American cities and become the controlling force. All entering their "turf' will have to bend to their will.

In some American big cities, there exist areas where the community is very resistant to governmental authority of any type. Mandatory orders to evacuate WILL only heighten tensions and anger directed at "authority". Especially in the aftermath of an atomic detonation. Emotions will overpower reason. Governmental "officials" in this case will have to act as if they were "walking on eggs" when dealing with such unruly "communities". These WILL NOT be docile folks that obey and do as they are told.

Provisions will have to be made to "deal" with drug addicts of all sorts. Persons NO LONGER to get their "fix". Desperate people, whether they be "crackheads" [cocaine] or "fiends" [heroin] of a sort that will pose significant difficulties for "authority".

Indeed, the whole gamut of "street people" or "homeless" will pose grave problems for "authority". 75 % of such folks are either mentally deranged, alcoholics, or drug addicts. Corralling, immobilizing, sedating, and "securing" such folks will not be easy. Moving them by evacuation is one thing, handling them afterwards is a different matter. A subject for another blog. These folks again, are dangerous to "first responders" in normal circumstances, much less in the aftermath of a catastrophe.

[This being America, also include a category of armed folks. Desperate and wanting THEIR needs attended to right NOW, no matter what!! Normally law-abiding people becoming armed and dangerous given the serious situation. "Treat my family member now, doc, or you are going to get it!!" This does happen. I heard an interview on National Public Radio [NPR} a number of years ago now where a doctor described this exact event. In such a circumstance, the doctor DOES have to comply while someone is holding a gun to his head!!]

Other classes of people will also pose a problem for those implementing evacuation. NOT "difficult" or unruly or criminal minded people, but folks with problems that are no fault of their own. Among these people will be found:

Grossly obese persons.

[Years ago now, there was a famous incident where two para-medics attempted to manhandle a four hundred pound woman down eighteen flights of stairs to a waiting ambulance. In two hours, the paramedics were able to move this woman down ONE flight of stairs, all the while being harassed by an unruly and most vociferous group of family members!! The woman died!!]

Institutionalized persons, such as found in nursing homes, or in mental institutions

Handicapped persons, such as the wheelchair bound, paraplegics, quadriplegic, and the retarded.

Sick and infirm persons as found in intensive care units [ICU's] of hospitals.

There also seems to be a difficulty that arises when people WANT to go back INTO the disaster area. This may sound strange, but this seems to be a tendency folks have when the status of their family or possessions or dwelling is in question. People WANT to know WHAT has happened. There seems to be a strong desire for information. Danger does not deter. NOR do admonitions from authorities. People going INTO a disaster area create a further problem for the authorities.

Persons being evacuated FROM a disaster must also be decontaminated.

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

A reader responds to "The New Orleans Nightmare and Racial Reality:"

Awesome piece. The historical significance of this last week just makes my brain explode, I can't begin to grasp it. The failure of all levels of government on the one hand. But th biggest issue, as you say, is the total ripping of the veil away from the truth of black barbarism. And yet there is a concerted effort at the MSM to change the subject to white racism. So the truth having been exposed is now immediately buried again. Looting for electronic goodies is comprehensible if reprehensible--we know why they are doing it--sheer opportunism, hatred of rules of property. But shooting at rescuers, or violence within a shelter, is simply unfathomable. I wonder what refugee camps are like in Africa.

I suspect actual African tribes organize themselves well -- disaster isn't all that different from daily life and they know how to deal with that. But last year's Tropical Storm Jeanne in Haiti unleashed similar mayhem in urban zones.

A friend of mine, an anthropologist who lived for 3.5 years in the bush with hunter-gatherer tribes in Africa and liked it so much he almost gave up his American professorship to become a hunting guide for safaris, said that life was sweet in the villages, poor but harmonious, with that African joie de vivre ... until the first road came to town. Then everything went to hell. The arrival of the outside world shattered the traditional web of beliefs, evolved over thousands of years, in black magic that had kept people in line. Young men stopped believing that if they raped a pretty girl her grandmother would cast a spell that would give them blackwater fever.

But, yes, sniping during rescue operations, as in the 1967 Detroit riot, is a complete calamity since it can send rescuers fleeing. Generally, the amount of actual sniping gets exaggerated while it's happening, but that reflects the terror and revulsion that any sniping at relief workers generates.

Whenever the talking heads on TV and their partners in print notice that they are showing mass evidence of blacks behaving badly, they are inspired into a paroxysm of lying about white racism to prevent the formation of "stereotypes" among viewers inclined to believe their own lying eyes. But as Theodore Dalrymple points out (via The Ambler, Kevin Michael Grace):

"Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to cooperate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to."

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

Is there a relationship between IQ, race, and judgment?

Michelle Malkin and Instapundit are now tsk-tsking over my statement that

"What you won’t hear, except from me, is that 'Let the good times roll' is an especially risky message for African-Americans. The plain fact is that they tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society."

As I noted later in my article, as shown this month in Commentary (the same article by Charles Murray, "The Inequality Taboo" that InstaPundit linked to), there has long been a sizable gap in average IQ between African-Americans and non-Hispanic white Americans (and an even bigger gap between blacks and Northeast Asians). This is normally described as a one standard deviation difference, or 15 points, although there is some new evidence suggesting it may have narrowed to about 14 points recently.

So, first, is IQ related to judgment? And second, is it currently related to race?

IQ and Judgment: Here's an excerpt from a short essay by Linda Gottfredson, professor of education at the U. of Delaware:

5. IQ predicts on-the-job performance better overall than any other single predictor (SES [Social-Economic Status] isn't even in the running), it predicts better when performance is objectively rather than subjectively measured, and when the tasks/occupations are more complex in what they require workers to do. At the same cognitive complexity level, IQ predicts job performance equally well in manual and non-manual jobs (e.g., trades vs. clerical). The exact same complexity pattern is found with functional literacy--the hardest items are the most complex (require more inference, are abstract rather than concrete, contain more distracting irrelevant information, etc.)

6. A large follow-up of Australian [military] veterans found that IQ was the best predictor of death by age 40 (had 50+ predictors). Vehicle fatalities were the biggest cause (as is typical), and, compared to men with IQs of 100+, men of IQ85-100 had twice the rate and men IQ 80-85 had three times the rate. (Remember, SES could not explain this.) The US (and apparently Australia) forbid induction of persons below IQ 80 because they are not sufficiently trainable--found out the hard way.

Almost nobody in the media is aware of the vast investment the U.S. military has made over the last 88 years in IQ testing of potential recruits, and the huge number of correlation studies they have done comparing IQs for millions of soldiers to their actual performance. I was only barely aware of it myself until I spent hours last fall interviewing military psychometricians for my article showing that John F. Kerry had scored a bit lower on his military officer application IQ test than George W. Bush did. (This was the report that Tom Brokaw asked Kerry about on the NBC Nightly News.)

Because the U.S. military knows that bad things tend to happen to low IQ soldiers and to their comrades who have the misfortune to be standing nearby, the Armed Forces have since FY 1991 inducted almost no applicants whatsoever with IQs falling down in Category V and Category IV on the military's Armed Forces Qualification Test. In Fiscal Year 1998, for example, 0.0% of new enlisted personnel were Category Vs and 1.1% of males and 0.2% of females were Category IVs. (See Table 2.8 in this Defense Department report.)

According to this DOD report:

"The percentage of recruits in Categories I and II was slightly higher than for their civilian counterparts (males - 40 versus 39 percent; females - 36 versus 33 percent).

Category I is roughly an IQ of 113 or above, while Category II is about 104 through 112.

Category III accessions greatly exceeded civilian proportions (males - 59 versus 30 percent; females - 64 versus 37 percent)

Category III is roughly IQ 92 through 103.

While the percentage of recruits in Category IV was much lower than in the civilian population (males - 1 percent versus 20 percent; females - less than 1 percent versus 22 percent). The low percentage of Category IV recruits is, in part, a result of DoD limits of 4 percent Category IV recruits, with even lower Service limits.

Category IV is about 81 through 91.

Ten percent of civilian males and 9 percent of civilian females scored in Category V; DoD allows no Category V recruits.

In the early 1950s, at the request of the Pentagon, Congress outlawed the accession of recruits with IQs of 80 or below (the bottom tenth). During the Vietnam War, that military genius, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, started a program to draft men who scored in the 70s, but it proved a disaster.

The DOD reports:

"Most dramatic has been the decrease in accessions who score in Category IV [IQ 81 through 91] -- from 33 percent in FY 1979 to one percent or less since FY 1991."

Ever since the end of the Cold War and the liberation of Kuwait, the military has taken only a tiny number of recruits from this populous group. In all the controversy you hear these days about how will the military meet its recruitment targets, you never hear about one obvious step: accept more recruits from the bottom 30 percent of the IQ bell curve. The Pentagon hates the idea because dim soldiers are so hard to train and they make so many mistakes, some of them deadly.

Okay, so serious people (i.e., the U.S. military) know there is a sizable correlation between IQ and competence of judgment. Now, what about IQ and race?

The first thing to point out is that all the arguments about whether the IQ gap is solely from environmental differences or have a genetic component as well aren't terribly relevant here. As Thomas Sowell has pointed out, IQ is fairly stable throughout one's lifetime, so environmental interventions in the hope of raising black IQ would take at least one generation to work, which, in the case of the current disaster, is a slightly longer time frame than is relevant at the moment.

Anyway, my argument is specifically about culture -- that New Orleans's famously lax morals are worse for African-Americans than, say, Atlanta's.

Now, let's look at race and IQ from the U.S. military's perspective. Back in 2003, I wrote in VDARE.com:

Much of what the Army does is well worth studying, as I pointed out in my 1995 article "Where the Races Relate," which explained to university administrations what they could copy from the Army to improve race relations on campus. (Amazingly, they didn't listen.) The fine 1997 book All That We Can Be: Black Leadership and Racial Integration the Army Way by sociologists Charles C. Moskos and John Sibley Butler gives a detailed view.

It would be wonderful if racial gaps could be made to disappear with just a little discipline. But the Army has a secret weapon: it carefully selects which applicants it accepts. Black and white recruits are quite equal even before they join up.

Even in the 1970s when the quality of white recruits was low, respectable black families were proud to send their children into the Army. Back then, according to Moskos and Sibley, 90 percent of black enlistees were high school graduates, compared to only 40 percent of whites.

After President Reagan raised soldiers' pay and helped make patriotism fashionable again, the capabilities of white enlistees rose sharply. Now, virtually all recruits have high school diplomas.

White and black enlistees come from families with similar incomes. A 1999 Defense Department study found that among American households as a whole, the average income for whites was $44,400 and for blacks $27,900. Among enlistees, however, the racial gap was almost non-existent. White recruits came from households averaging $33,500 per year versus $32,000 for blacks - i.e. a figure well above the black national average.

Perhaps most importantly, the Army is a heavy user of aptitude tests. A surprisingly high fraction of young Americans are ineligible to join the Army because of lack of intelligence – extrapolating from Moskos and Sibley’s figures, about a fifth of all whites and three-fifths of all blacks wouldn’t make the cut.

The brain power of those accepted is impressive. Moskos and Sibley found that in 1994

"83 percent of white recruits scored in the upper half of the mental aptitude test (compared with 61 percent of white youths in the national population), while 59 percent of black recruits scored in the upper half (compared with 14 percent of the black youths nationwide)."

In other words, the Army's black enlisted personnel score just as well on the general aptitude test as the average white American. (African-American officers average even better, of course.)

There are still differences, so whites tend to predominate in the most intellectually-challenging military jobs. Still, by drawing just from blacks with relatively high IQs, the Army has managed to sidestep a huge number of problems.

So the magic race relations bullet that the military has found turns out to be - IQ tests.

And keeping out the lower-scorers.

This will be hard to apply in America at large.

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

Black Male Comics on Race Differences in Judgment:

A reader writes in regard to my much-denounced comment that the "Let the good times roll" philosophy of New Orleans is worse on average for blacks than for better educated groups with better judgment:

I don't see what's so controversial. If you observe popular Black culture (Chappelle's Show, Comic View on BET, etc.), they never tire of lampooning the wimpy discipline that Whites show their misbehaving kids, whereas the Black parents know that doing so for their children would be a joke, and thus more authoritarian measures are needed. Very few Black stand-up comics don't have some sort of whoopin' story where they recall how necessary it is to treat Black children differently by whipping them, provoking gales of laughter and cheers from the mostly Black audience. [I'm sure that will be a major theme of Chris Rock's up-coming sit-com about how his dad raised him.]

This only relates to the difference in treatment necessary to keep members of different races from behaving *badly,* while your remark addressed how to get them to behave *well,* but again I think many mainstream Black figures like Bill Cosby make the point that you need to more deliberately steer Black youth in a positive direction, as compared with the amount of calculated intervention needed in the cases of Whites or East Asians. Now, they might argue with you over the *causes* of why Black youth need more strict guidance than East Asians, but does anyone seriously doubt *that* they do, on average?

Sheesh.

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

New Orleans Police Department heads off to Vegas

The New York Times reports:

City to Offer Free Trips to Las Vegas for Officers
By JOSEPH B. TREASTER and CHRISTOPHER DREW

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 4 - A day after two police suicides and the abrupt resignations or desertions of up to 200 police officers, defiant city officials on Sunday began offering five-day vacations - and even trips to Las Vegas - to the police, firefighters and city emergency workers and their families.

The idea of paid vacations was raised by both Mayor C. Ray Nagin and senior police officials who said that their forces were exhausted and traumatized and that the arrival of the National Guard had made way for the officers to be relieved.

"I'm very concerned about individuals who have been here, particularly since the first few days, and have been through a lot of hardship," Mr. Nagin said in an interview.

He said most of the police officers, firefighters and emergency medical workers "are starting to show signs of very, very serious stress, and this is a way to give them time to reunite with their families."

Mr. Nagin, who has been demanding more federal assistance for days as his city struggled with despair, death and flooding, said he had asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency to pay for the trips but the agency said it could not. He said the city, therefore, would pay the costs.

He said he believed there were now enough National Guard members in the city to allow the police to take a break and still keep the city secure, and he brushed off questions about whether such a trip might look like a dereliction of duty.

"I'll take the heat on that," Mr. Nagin said. "We want to cater to them."

His words were seconded by the police superintendent, P. Edwin Compass III, in a separate interview. "When you go through something this devastating and traumatic," Mr. Compass said, "you've got to do something dramatic to jump-start the healing process."

The officials were planning to send 1,500 workers out in two shifts for five days each. They are sending them to Las Vegas because of the availability of hotel rooms and to Atlanta because many of them had relatives there.

Job well done, boys!

I've been denounced for saying the "Let the good times roll" moral climate of New Orleans is particularly bad for African-Americans, so I'm sure my critics will be happy that the NOPD will be recuperating in the only city with perhaps a worse ethical environment.

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

Thou shalt know him by his enemies

If so, I'm feeling pretty good right now because John Podhoretz, the unintentionally unfunny Ali G of nepotistic neoconservatism, who aspires to be chief Chekist enforcer of post-Trotskyite political correctness, is shocked, SHOCKED on NRO:

THE MOST DISGUSTING SENTENCE YET WRITTEN ABOUT KATRINA... [JPod]
...may not be Kanye West's denunciation of Bush after all. I think West is given a run for his money by by Steve Sailer's shockingly racist and paternalistic riff off of the New Orleans slogan "Let the good times roll," on the website vdare.com. "What you won’t hear, except from me, is that 'Let the good times roll' is an especially risky message for African-Americans. The plain fact is that they tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society."

Nobody with the unspeakable gall and tastelessness to write such sentences should be suggesting that any other person on earth requires "stricter moral guidance." Posted at 03:03 PM

Unsurprisingly, Pod the Lesser fails the basic test of web etiquette by not providing a live link to my article so you can read the supposedly offending words in context. Equally unsurprisingly, he offers no refutation whatsoever of my facts or logic. He just tries to read me out of the clique of People Like Us.

One amusing irony is that I supported my statement that the New Orleans moral culture is especially bad for blacks because they "tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups" by later in the article pointing out that the national average IQ of African-Americans is around 85. To document that, I linked to my article about Charles Murray's famous new article "The Inequality Taboo" about the white-black IQ gap. Murray's long work is the featured essay in this month's issue of Commentary, which was edited for many decades by JPod's dad, Norman Podhoretz. Commentary's website also highlights five previous Commentary articles by Murray, including "The Bell Curve and Its Critics."

As I pointed out in VDARE.com the last time Podhoretz Minor denounced me as "a bigoted, racist scum:"

Norman Podhoretz was somewhat anomalous among the first generation of neoconservatives, such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nathan Glazer, and James Q. Wilson, because he was trained as a literary critic rather than a social scientist. But like them, and like later neoconservatives such as Charles Murray, he had some audacious things to say about race.

In his 1963 essay in Commentary, "My Negro Problem—And Ours," the elder Podhoretz wrote:

"[F]or a long time I was puzzled to think that Jews were supposed to be rich when the only Jews I knew were poor, and that Negroes were supposed to be persecuted when it was the Negroes who were doing the only persecuting I knew about—and doing it, moreover, to me… [It] was the whites, the Italians and Jews, who feared the Negroes, not the other way around."

Thirty years later, the elder Podhoretz reflected on the controversy his article about "black thuggery" had caused:

"In 1963 those descriptions were very shocking to most white liberals. In their eyes Negroes were all long-suffering and noble victims of the kind who had become familiar through the struggles of the civil rights movement in the South, the "heroic period" of the movement, as one if its most heroic leaders, Bayard Rustin, called it. While none of my white critics went so far as to deny the truthfulness of the stories I told, they themselves could hardly imagine being afraid of Negroes (how could they when the only Negroes most of them knew personally were maids and cleaning women?). In any case they very much disliked the emphasis I placed on black thuggery and aggression.

"Today, when black-on-white violence is much more common than it was then, many white readers could easily top those stories with worse. And yet even today few of them would be willing to speak truthfully in public about their entirely rational fear of black violence and black crime. Telling the truth about blacks remains dangerous to one's reputation: to use that now famous phrase I once appropriated from D.H. Lawrence in talking about ambition, the fear of blacks has become the dirty little secret of our political culture. And since a dirty little secret breeds hypocrisy and cant in those who harbor it, I suppose it can still be said that most whites are sick and twisted in their feelings about blacks, albeit in a very different sense that they were in 1963."

Time for John Podhoretz to email to his father accusing him of being "a bigoted, racist scum!"

MORE: Podhoretz responds to the Derb with his usual mobsterish threats and complete lack of rational argumentation:

RE: JUDGMENT AND GUIDANCE [JPod]
Derb, you really really REALLY don't want to defend the presumption that "better educated" (i.e., white and Asian) people have better "native" judgment than black people, do you? NATIVE judgment? And I think you'd better check with Roger Clegg before you associate him with such noxious views.
Posted at 07:27 PM

All JPod can do is his usual "point and sputter" routine, combined with his usual sinister insinuations about unfortunate things that might happen to happen to you if cross him because, as we all know, he's, as they say, connected to the new, reigning version of what his Dad used to call The Family.

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

Bad news and good news coming from small towns

We've been hearing for several days that the plight of the big city blacks in New Orleans shows how racist America is, but it's starting to look like small town whites may have been hit harder by Hurricane Katrina, but nobody started to notice until today.

Almost forgotten in the hubbub over New Orleans is the fate of small town folks in the Delta. Here's the LA Times report about Chalmette, LA, south of New Orleans. It looks like nature did much worse outside New Orleans, but humanity did better:

Stranded in New Orleans' Shadow
Isolated in the storm's aftermath, the residents of Chalmette banded together for survival.
By Ellen Barry, Times Staff Writer

CHALMETTE, La. — Chalmette has been cut off from the world for six days... The losses were just coming into focus Saturday. A storm surge estimated at 25 feet had receded, leaving yellowish watermarks along the retail strip, but parts of the city were under an expanse of water, with a sheen of oil and a sickly sweet smell. On the front of houses, search-and rescue teams had spray-painted the numbers of dead found inside. One house had a blue six.

The water rose 10 feet in 10 minutes on the morning of the storm, residents said, so fast you could watch a wall of water advancing down residential streets. Sheriff Jack Stephens would not estimate a death toll, but spoke of several large groups of people who had died together.

Thirty-one elderly residents of a nursing home died "in their sleep" when their facility was flooded, he said. And in a subdivision, rescue personnel had found the bodies of 21 people who had tied themselves together, he said, probably in an attempt to evacuate. The scenes were so disturbing that 30 of his deputies could no longer work because of fatigue and emotional overload, Stephens said.

The federal response, he said, has been "woefully inadequate." ...

Over the next two days, she and Lobre played endless games of Yahtzee as they waited for the water to go down. It didn't. What happened instead was this: Boats began to pass under their window, driven by local people offering to throw necessities up to them. Batteries sailed up and so did cigarettes.

"It was like a Mardi Gras parade, but instead of beads, it was food, and lighters, and dry towels," Lobre said.

On the third day, the two hitched a ride on a boat to Chalmette High School, which had been made into a shelter. A woman bore a child there -- named Katrina -- and dead bodies were stored behind a stage, where the children couldn't see them.

Michael Couture, 31, is an avid fan of the reality show "Survivor," and always thought he would be good at it. What happened over six days, he said, was a real-life version: For the first few days, most of the stranded people focused on themselves. But then a community of interests developed. People raided local stores and distributed what they found.

Bruce Velez, a construction worker, made his way to houses all over the city; among the people he rescued was an elderly woman who had climbed on top of her refrigerator to escape the rising water.

Larry Strahub spent much of the week with 17 strangers in an apartment building. Personalities clashed at times, he said. But before he left -- he paddled 15 miles to find help on Saturday -- they planned a reunion.

Being one of those evil iSteve.com readers, you're probably wondering if the demographics of Chalmette had anything to do with how much better the local survivors self-organized for mutual aid than did the New Orleans survivors. Well, here's Chalmette's population:

White Non-Hispanic: 89.2%

Hispanic: 4.8%

Black: 2.4%

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

Maybe it was a good thing that most of the NOPD ran away

Updated: Better News: Apparently the Associated Press garbled the initial reports of a gunfight on a bridge in New Orleans to say that the police had killed five or six Army Corps of Engineers contractors. The corrected version says the contractors all survived and the police killed people who were, presumably, shooting at the contractors. We hope.

The New Orleans Police Department is apparently the exception to the rule "Better late than never." After days of letting anarchy reign, they've finally swung into action:

A spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers said that some of its contractors were killed Sunday by police as they walked across a bridge on their way to repair a canal.

Earlier, New Orleans police said they shot eight people carrying guns on a city bridge, killing five or six of them.

Deputy Police Chief W.J. Riley said the shootings took place on the Danziger Bridge over the Industrial Canal, which connects Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River. Riley said he has no other details.

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

NOPD hired Louis Farrakhan's chief bodyguard to provide "sensitivity training:"

Last June, the New Orleans Police Department superintendent Eddie Compass announced a $15,000 contract with Dennis Muhammad, chief of security for the Nation of Islam, to improve community relations. After protests, the contract was cancelled four days later, because, and I'm quoting the Nation of Islam's FinalCall.com news service here, "Jews, community officials deny contract to N.O.I. member."

I'm glad to see that the NOPD leadership had their priorities in order.

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

Anarchy in the Kobe - not.

Over on GNXP, commenter Neandertal quotes from NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof's book Thunder From the East about the Kobe earthquake in Japan. By the way, the governmental response was probably even worse than in New Orleans:

Just days after we moved to Tokyo in 1995, our son Geoffrey, then a baby, roused Sheryl for a 5:30 a.m. feeding. A few minutes later our bed began to shake. "Wake up, Nick!" Sheryl urged me with a poke. "It's an earthquake!" I grunted and, in an effort to reassure the household, kept sleeping. But it turned out to be the great earthquake that devastated the the port city of Kobe and killed 5,200 people. A modern city was reduced to rubble, and for the next few days ordinary middle-class families were thrown back virtually to the stone age, struggling to find water, food, toilets, and shelter. Homes and shops were abandoned, of course, and in America or Europe the result would have been widespread looting, as well as desperate fighting for water, food, and blankets.

Instead, the people of Kobe were majestic in their suffering. They lined up for water and other supplies, never jostling, and nobody climbed through the shattered store windows to help themselves. Even the yakuza, the Japanese gangsters, suspended their criminal behavior and tried to improve their image by trucking food to the hardest-hit areas to give it away to the newly homeless.

I was fascinated by these displays of public honesty, and so I kept searching for a case of theft or looting. Finally, I was thrilled to find one. Two young men had entered a shattered convenience store, picked up some food from the floor, and run out. Rumors of this crime spread around the town, and finally I was able to find the store and its owner. "Of course, we expect this kind of looting if there is an earthquake in Los Angeles," I noted triumphantly, fishing for a good quote, "but were you shocked that your fellow Japanese would take advantage of the chaos to do such a thing?"

The shop owner looked puzzled. "who said anything about Japanese?" he asked me politely. "The thieves weren't Japanese. They were foreigners. Iranians, it looked like."

He was right, it turned out...

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

New Orleans's Finest vs. New York's

CNN reported:

Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the Pentagon's National Guard Bureau, said two-thirds of the police in New Orleans have abandoned the force amid horrific conditions.

In contrast, the New York Police Department lost 23 men on 9/11, but the survivors kept reporting for duty. Even more heroic was the New York Fire Department, which lost 343 men (three hundred and forty-three men) in the WTC, but helped get thousands of civilians out of the buildings before they collapsed.

It wasn't widely mentioned, but around 95% of the NYFD was white. NYC firemen are largely a meritocratic but hereditary caste of ethnic Catholics. The few blacks who get in can expect lots of on-the-job harassment intended to keep the NYFD that way.

Hereditary castes are supposed to justify their existence by living up to the ideals of noblesse oblige - they live better than others do because they are not afraid to die to defend the others. That bargain is seldom fulfilled in real life. Yet, the NYFD not only satisfied the demands of noblesse oblige, but vastly exceeded them.

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

Anarchy in the LA

"Racial Realities and the New Orleans Nightmare" -- My new VDARE.com article is up a day early.

It was the Perfect Storm.

No, not Hurricane Katrina. That could have been much worse. Back in the 1990s, my friend Rob Brennan wrote an unpublished novel called Category 5 about a ferocious hurricane that strikes New Orleans at the worst possible angle. Katrina, in contrast, was a Category 4 hurricane and hit New Orleans only a glancing blow.

No, the perfect storm was actually the combination of social and governmental incompetence at local, state, and federal levels—and unmentionable racial reality.

Republican Presidents are supposed to provide adult supervision for crooked Democratic urban machines. But the White House is now occupied by George W. Bush, a politician so irresponsible, so uninterested in proficiency and honesty among his minions that late last year he tried to appoint as Secretary of Homeland Security the egregious Bernie Kerik.

Mr. Bush shows no evidence of holding his appointees accountable, so long as they remain loyal to him personally. Just as he has never vetoed a bill, he almost never fires anyone for poor performance.

VDARE.com readers are familiar with the contempt with which Mr. Bush treats his sworn duties to uphold the laws against illegal immigration. Now the whole country is starting to catch on to his disregard for his duties in his pursuit of image over effectiveness.

His invade-the-world-invite-the-world policies have left America unprepared for predictable domestic troubles, as Paul Craig Roberts recently pointed out here.

The ineptitude displayed by the Louisiana state government is also unsurprising. The state is unique in having a Latin political tradition (it uses the Code Napoleon rather than the English common law, even though Napoleon didn't release his code until the year after he sold Louisiana to Thomas Jefferson), a culture in which the Argentinean demagogue Juan Peron would have felt at home.

The unofficial state motto is "Laissez les bons temps rouler" or "Let the good times roll." Compare that to New Hampshire's official motto of "Live free or die," which displays a rather different understanding of freedom. Louisiana's reigning philosophy is freedom from responsibility.

It's a general rule that the tastier the indigenous cuisine, the lousier the government. Its culture has provided America with jazz, A Street Car Named Desire, and the great American comic novel of the 20th Century, A Confederacy of Dunces. New Orleans is a nice place to visit. But you wouldn't want to raise your kids there.

All this is now common parlance, more or less. What you won’t hear, except from me, is that "Let the good times roll" is an especially risky message for African-Americans. The plain fact is that they tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society.

New Orleans itself is two-thirds black. It has had nothing but black mayors since 1978. Most of them are from the light-skinned "creole of color" elite, including the notorious Marc H. Morial, now head of the National Urban League. The city government is corrupt and lackadaisical. While the police department has perhaps rebounded from the depths it reached a decade ago when an officer was condemned to death for having a mother of three rubbed out by drug gangstas in his employ, nobody should be surprised that last week numerous officers ran away, and some even freelanced as looters.

In a racially diverse democracy like New Orleans, voting for good government takes a backseat to voting for your tribe's representatives in the eternal ethnic tussle over slices of the pie. As the ultra-competent but not terribly democratic founder of the state of Singapore, Lee Kwan Yew, noted in a recent interview:

"In multiracial societies, you don't vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion."

For instance, after blacks took control of New Orleans, they required new police recruits to live in the city itself as a way to exclude white cops. Dean M. Shapiro writes for Court TV's "Crime Library":

"The department was being depleted of experienced officers and the numbers within the ranks were decreasing as crime stats were rising at an alarming rate… In order to beef up the rapidly dwindling numbers of NOPD, the department was forced to lower its acceptance standards. Recruits with criminal records, DWIs, unfavorable employment records and dishonorable discharges from the Armed Forces were allowed to enter the Police Academy, whereas they had previously been excluded… Their records were expunged and, on completion of their training, they were issued badges, guns and patrol cars and turned loose on the street… These new officers were expected to suddenly straighten up and begin enforcing the laws they had not-so-long-ago been breaking. They were expected to arrest those suspected of crimes, even if those accused had once been their street buddies. But this was an unrealistic expectation."

The state's Southeast Louisiana Hurricane Evacuation and Sheltering Plan made all the right noises about evacuating residents without cars by school bus. But state and local authorities apparently failed to execute, as the famous picture of about 200 New Orleans school buses neatly lined up in a flooded parking lot shows. [More]

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

More Bush Administration CYA

Michael Chertoff, whom Bush appointed Secretary of Homeland Security after Bernie Kerik cratered, claimed today:

"We were prepared for one catastrophe [the hurricane]. The second catastrophe [the levee breaking], frankly, added a level of challenge that no one has seen before.”

No one except those insightful structural engineers Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, who pointed out on the fourth Led Zeppelin album (the bestselling nameless one from 1971 with "Stairway to Heaven" on it):

If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break,

If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break.

The name of the song is, by the way, "When the Levee Breaks."

Chertoff also claimed:

"That 'perfect storm' of a combination of catastrophes exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody's foresight,"

Gosh, who could imagine that two disasters ever go together, like earthquake and fire in San Francisco in 1906 or earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004?

As I noted in my new VDARE.com article, "Racial Realities and the New Orleans Nightmare," up a day early, the perfect storm wasn't Katrinia, it was the combination of fecklessness at all three levels of government and at the bottom of New Orleans society. Louisiana's Democrats have plenty to answer for, but Republican Presidents are supposed to provide adult supervision. New Orleans is always going to have bad government, but there are enough competent people in the U.S. to staff the Federal government properly.

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

Bush's Mickey Mouse Mafia Unveiled

As I noted in my new VDARE.com article on the "New Orleans Nightmare," Bush never fires anybody for incompetence, just disloyalty, and his nominees have included men as awful as Bernie Kerik for Secretary of Homeland Security. Today, the Boston Herald got the goods on Bush's appointee as head of Federal Emergency Management Agency:

The federal official in charge of the bungled New Orleans rescue was fired from his last private-sector job overseeing horse shows.

And before joining the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a deputy director in 2001, GOP activist Mike Brown had no significant experience that would have qualified him for the position. The Oklahoman got the job through an old college friend who at the time was heading up FEMA. The agency, run by Brown since 2003, is now at the center of a growing fury over the handling of the New Orleans disaster...

Brown - formerly an estates and family lawyer - this week has has made several shocking public admissions, including interviews where he suggested FEMA was unaware of the misery and desperation of refugees stranded at the New Orleans convention center.

Before joining the Bush administration in 2001, Brown spent 11 years as the commissioner of judges and stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association, a breeders' and horse-show organization based in Colorado. ``We do disciplinary actions, certification of (show trial) judges. We hold classes to train people to become judges and stewards. And we keep records,'' explained a spokeswoman for the IAHA commissioner's office. ``This was his full-time job . . . for 11 years,'' she added.

Brown was forced out of the position after a spate of lawsuits over alleged supervision failures. ``He was asked to resign,'' Bill Pennington, president of the IAHA at the time, confirmed last night. Soon after, Brown was invited to join the administration by his old Oklahoma college roommate Joseph Allbaugh, the previous head of FEMA until he quit in 2003 to work for the president's re-election campaign.

The NYT reported:

This week [Mike Brown] has displayed striking candor, saying he awakened Monday thinking the agency had underestimated the storm and later admitting that the lawlessness surprised him.

Hey, there wasn't much looting when those towns on the upper Missouri River were flooded, right? So why would there be any looting in New Orleans? Are you saying there's some kind of difference between people in the Dakotas and people in Louisiana? Are you implying that maybe the police departments in the Dakotas are more competent and public-spirited than the police department in New Orleans? You better watch where you're going with that, mister. We don't cotton to that kind of talk in the Bush Administration!

There's this general assumption that political correctness can't really hurt us because everybody privately knows the facts about racial differences in behavior and acts upon them. For example, I'm sure Mike Brown made sure not to buy his family a home in an all black neighborhood precisely because he knows they have bad crime rates.

But the reality is much scarier. Although everybody knows the facts when it comes to their own private decision-making, an awful lot of people like Mike Brown have internalized the rhetoric they know they have to spout to keep their jobs and mindlessly apply it when it comes to public decision-making. I'm constantly struck by how people, even anonymous commenters in online discussions who have nothing to lose, make assertions about the facts affecting public policies that are completely at odds with what they'd tell me over a beer if we were discussing where to buy real estate. But they've brainwashed themselves so badly that it never occurs to them that the harsh facts of private life have any bearing on the glossy world of public policy.

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

What the mayor could have done

A reader writes:

It might well make sense, under some circumstances, to use the Superdome or Convention Center as emergency shelters. But if you were mayor, wouldn't you do a few other things as well? I mean, if I were evacuating thousands of people to a certain location, I'd make damn sure I had enough cops there to keep things organized and in control, along with somebody sufficiently senior to be in charge. And I'd move paramedics, doctors and nurses. Not to mention medicine which one could predict would be needed: antibiotics and insulin, at a minimum. Finally, I'd ship as much water as I possibly could. Food would be good too, but one can live a few days without resorting to cannibalism.

At a minimum, if none of those preparations were possible, I'd tell those shipped over before the flood began to bring a gallon of water each. And if I didn't have enough water to transport, I'd have some of the cops that I'd sent to the Superdome and Convention Center using the taps at those facilities to fill jugs, bottles, pots, or even buckets with water. I mean, even if FEMA had been maximally efficient, they'd have still taken a couple or three days to get aid to people. The fact that evacuation facilities had no food, water, or medicine at all is clearly attributable to local incompetence.

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

Here are the New Orleans buses

that could have evacuated the city before the hurricane hit, sitting around in nice, neat, flooded, useless rows afterwards. (Source: Yahoo News, 9/1/05, via "Our Way of Life," which has a lot of good commentary.) There are approximately 200 buses in this picture alone, and there are clearly more that are beyond the margins of the photo. If each one of the 200 could carry 60 people, that's 12,000 who could have been ferried out on each trip to, say, Baton Rouge on higher ground just 75 miles away.

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