Menopausal spinster Maureen Dowd's long essay on the failure of feminism,

"What's a Modern Girl to Do?," is getting a lot of attention. I've collected my comments from over the years on MoDo and her continuing series "I Hate Men! (Why, Oh, Why Didn't Any Man Ever Marry Me?)" here.

It appears to be finally dawning on poor, loveless, childless Maureen that feminism wasn't designed for heterosexuals like herself.

One thing I would like to point out is how desperate Maureen is to conform. She wants society to tell her, the Modern Girl, what to do, and is angry that it has given her mixed messages over the years. The notion that she should have figured out for herself how to live her life is not one that naturally occurs to her. But that hasn't stopped her from giving enormous amounts of advice, most of it bad, to other women on how they should live their lives. That's because she wants to lessen the discomfort she feels when she notices that other women have made other choices.

Something we don't hear much these days is how conformist women are. Maureen wants to do what all the other women do and she wants all the other women to do what she wants to to do. (No doubt this inculcated by natural selection: the reproductive upside to women of thinking for themselves is small compared to the downside of doing the wrong thing. It is more important for women than it is for men to play it safe.)

But combined with their insistence on taking everything personally, this conformism keeps women like MoDo from being very interesting pundits at anything requiring more general brainpower than personal snarkiness. (Not that male pundits are distinguishing themselves these days, either.)

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

The modern mindset:

Everyone of above-average intelligence knows that everyone is equal.

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

Outsourcing manufacturing

A reader writes:

Liquidmetal Technologies is a Caltech spinoff founded by Caltech profs who developed their products under NASA contract. Brilliant products: amorphous metals. Maybe the next generation of manufacturing materials. Metals that can be injection molded like plastic yet are stronger than steel.

They have their administrative offices in Southern California, but they chose South Korea as the place for their manufacturing. The profs are all white guys, all American-born except one, maybe. So why South Korea and not California? Why not develop the skilled machining, molding and material processing jobs in the USA and not in the Far East?

What kind of magical engineer-free manufacturing-free society do these high IQ knuckleheads think they can create? And why do we keep funding their research and their businesses and their universities?

Where would your father be if this was the attitude in California 50 years ago?

Where would my father be today if when he went went to work for Lockheed 66 years ago as an engineer on the P-38 fighter plane, if Kelly Johnson and the other executives had decided to outsource manufacturing to East Asia? Well, he would probably be living in a refugee camp for displaced Californians in the desert across from Yuma, Arizona in the Japanese-occupied West Bank of the Colorado River.

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

Illinois Irishmen Galore!

You probably haven't been as confused as I've been over all the ultra-Irish names in the news lately, but just in case, I think I've finally got it worked out. Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was brought from his native New York to Chicago, where he has investigated corruption in the administrations of former Illinois Republican governor George Ryan and current Chicago Democratic mayor Richie M. Daley, at the request of former Illinois Republican Senator Peter Fitzgerald, who wanted an outsider and an honest man (in the Eliot Ness-Untouchables tradition).

What threw me off is that Sen. Peter Fitzgerald and Patrick Fitzgerald are not related, but they are men of similar character. (I never met Peter Fitzgerald, but his brother Tom Fitzgerald was my corporate attorney when I did mergers & acquisitions in Chicago many years ago.) Peter served only one term in the U.S. Senate because he refused to play ball with the dubious way politics are done in Illinois. The Illinois GOP hierarchy was so outraged when they discovered that they had sent an honest man to Washington that Peter Fitzgerald didn't bother running for re-election.

That set in motion the farcical chain of events that included the Illinois GOP nominating Jack Ryan (no relation, other than moral, to George Ryan, or to Jim Ryan, the Republican candidate to replace George Ryan as governor in 2002) for Fitzgerald's seat in 2004. But Jim Ryan had to withdraw over icky revelations by his starlet ex-wife Jeri Ryan. Eventually, the Illinois GOP nominated Maryland resident Alan Keyes to run against Barack Obama (neither of whom, so far as I know, is Irish) and lose by about one billion to one.

Illinois, which was a consistently Republican state in the 1980-1990s, is now solidly Democratic, in large part because the Illinois GOP has managed the remarkable feat of acquiring among the voters a reputation as even more corrupt than the Illinois Democratic Party!

But Peter Fitzgerald's legacy looks like it will turn out to be Patrick Fitzgerald.

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

Illinois Irishmen Galore!

You probably haven't been as confused as I've been over all the ultra-Irish names in the news lately, but just in case, I think I've finally got it worked out. Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was brought from his native New York to Chicago, where he has investigated corruption in the administrations of former Illinois Republican governor George Ryan and current Chicago Democratic mayor Richie M. Daley, at the request of former Illinois Republican Senator Peter Fitzgerald.

What threw me off is that Sen. Peter Fitzgerald and Patrick Fitzgerald are not related, but they are men of similar character. (I never met Peter Fitzgerald, but his brother Tom Fitzgerald was my corporate attorney when I did mergers & acquisitions in Chicago many years ago.) Peter served only one term in the U.S. Senate because he refused to play ball with the dubious way politics are done in Illinois. The Illinois GOP hierarchy was so outraged when they discovered that they had sent an honest man to Washington that Peter Fitzgerald didn't bother running for re-election.

That set in motion the farcical chain of events that included the Illinois GOP nominating Jack Ryan (no relation, other than moral, to George Ryan, or to George Ryan's predecessor as governor Jim Ryan) for Fitzgerald's seat. But Jim Ryan had to withdraw when it turned out he liked to watch over men have a go at his starlet wife Gerri Ryan. Eventually, the Illinois GOP nominated Maryland resident Alan Keyes to run against Barack Obama (neither of whom is Irish) and lose by about one billion to one.

Illinois, which was a consistently Republican state in the 1980-1990s, is now solidly Democratic, in large part because the Illinois GOP has managed the remarkable feat of acquiring among the voters a reputation as even more corrupt than the Illinois Democratic Party!

But Peter Fitzgerald's legacy looks like it will turn out to be Patrick Fitzgerald.

***

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

Scooter Libby, Mob Lawyer

A depressing fact about being a lawyer is that innocent people make the worst clients, financially speaking. Say you rack up 1,000 hours saving an innocent man from prison, and then send him a bill for a quarter of a million dollars. How likely is he to pay? Well, from his perspective, his life has been nearly ruined, he's lost huge amounts of work, he's been put through hell, and now he's supposed to pay $250,000??? Not bloody likely.

On the other hand, say you spend a 1,000 hours saving a big time mobster from prison, and you send him a bill for $500,000. Will he pay? Sure. For him, it's a cost of doing business. It's a line item in his budget each year: Cost of Shysters.

So, all the monetary incentives are for lawyers to work for mobsters instead of innocent men. The only disincentive is that if you work for organized crime, respectable people don't want to associate with you. You've chosen your path in life, and foreclosed some options in return for the big bucks. For example, the mayor of Las Vegas is a mob lawyer, but that mostly shows the low moral standards of Las Vegas. In most cities, mob lawyers make a lot of money, but they are less likely to be given positions of honor and power in the city government.

Yet, from 1985 to 2000, the now-indicted Scooter Libby represented Marc Rich, one of the most notorious organized crime figures in the world, a man who, while on the lam from the U.S., systematically looted post-Soviet Russia and mentored many of the "oligarchs" in corrupt practices. When Libby's 15 years of work paid off with a pardon for Rich in the last hours of the Clinton Administration, after frantic entreaties for Rich by high figures in the Israeli government, opprobrium rightfully rained down on Bill Clinton's head. And yet, Libby immediately moved into the crucial position of chief-of-staff to Vice-President Cheney.

If Libby had spent the previous 15 years representing John Gotti, he couldn't have attained such a high position in the government. What is it about working for Marc Rich that made Libby largely immune to criticism?

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

Speaking of the protégés of Scooter Libby's client Marc Rich ...

The Washington Post today reports:

New Retreat for the Russian Rich: London Wealthiest Flooding 'Moscow on the Thames' With Cash

By Mary Jordan Washington Post Foreign Service Friday, October 28, 2005; A16

LONDON -- Russian billionaires, and mere megamillionaires, are dropping tens of millions of dollars for the most opulent houses in town. Jewelry stores and outrageously expensive boutiques are hiring Russian-speaking staff. And purveyors of everything from Bentleys to Beluga caviar are happily riding this wave of Russian affluence in a city some are starting to call "Moscow on the Thames."

Many trace the phenomenon to the day in 2003 when Roman Abramovich, a Russian oil tycoon in his mid-thirties, bought the Chelsea soccer club for $225 million, then paid out hundreds of millions more to assemble a star-studded juggernaut that won the English championship for the first time in 50 years. The British were agog at the cascade of Russian cash that turned humble Chelsea into mighty Chelski.

This is a city accustomed to wealth, even extraordinary wealth, much of it traditionally acquired through the sad but reliable deaths of ancestors. But London is also a magnet for those with new money: Norwegians with their shipping lines, Japanese with their gadgets and Saudis with their oil. They have all come and been tolerated, perhaps even envied, but the British capital has never seen anything quite like the Russians whose lavish wealth arrived after the Soviet Union departed.

No one, for example, had ever staged a political protest in London by sending a hundred silver limousines to the Russian Embassy. Then along came Boris Berezovsky, a billionaire who was granted political asylum by Britain after criminal fraud charges were filed against him back home. Angry at what he has called the politically motivated persecution of business leaders by the Russian government, Berezovsky organized last year's limousine protest, a street demonstration where the appropriate cocktail was martini, not molotov.

"Anyone who is anyone in Moscow is here," said Marina Starkova, director of Red Square, a London-based public relations and event-planning company catering to wealthy Russians.

Her clients enjoy London's safety, the favorable tax laws for off-shore investments and relative proximity to Moscow, just three hours and 20 minutes away by plane -- even less if you tell your Learjet pilot to step on it. But what really sets them apart from others with bulging portfolios, Starkova said, is that "Russians live like there is no tomorrow, so they spend, spend and spend." ...

Not everyone in Russia is so keen on the flight of billions of dollars to London. Much of the new wealth was accumulated at the expense of the state, when oil, gas and other natural resource industries were sold to private investors in often politically motivated deals.

That's putting it mildly...

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

Nicholas Wade on the Hap-Map

The NYT genetics reporter describes the latest on the DNA haplotype study.

Besides the hapmap's potential importance for medicine, it has undoubted significance for understanding the biology of the human genome and its recent evolution. The hapmap team has already identified 14 regions of the genome that show signs of having changed in different ethnic groups under the pressure of natural selection. One of the most striking, though known already from earlier studies, is a DNA region in Europeans that confers lactose tolerance, the unusual ability to digest milk in adulthood. This genetic propensity is known to have arisen among cattle herders of northern Europe some 5,000 years ago.

Other genomic regions bear strong marks of natural selection but contain no known gene, a highly perplexing outcome that suggests, Dr. Altshuler said, that "our current ability to predict the function of DNA is very flawed."

The common variation picked up by the hapmap is much the same in different ethnic groups, because most of it is inherited from the ancestral human population before modern humans are believed to have dispersed from Africa about 50,000 years ago. The four ethnic groups studied so far have yielded four million sites of common variation, from which the total number in the world's population is expected to be 10 million.

The hapmap researchers have found that the Chinese and Japanese genomes are so similar that they can be grouped together for many purposes. The genetic differences between Europeans, East Asians and Africans lie mostly in the relative abundance in each of the common DNA mutations. But the hapmap team has found a handful of fixed differences in the first million mutations it studied - 11 between Europeans and the Yoruba, 21 between Europeans and Asians and 5 between the Yoruba and Asians. The role of these mutations is unknown.

A more marked difference emerged on the X chromosome, which is more highly differentiated between ethnic groups than are the other chromosomes. The reason, Dr. Altshuler said, could arise from the fact that men carry only one X chromosome and so, unlike women, have no backup copy if a gene on their single X is inactivated through mutation. That puts the X chromosome under heavy pressure of natural selection when it is carried by a man, and the different pressures experienced by various ethnic groups may have forced the X chromosome to differentiate more than the other chromosomes.

The hapmap team believe they have created a powerful new tool for exploring the human genome but they advise researchers to be careful about publicizing their work, especially when exploring genetic links to human characteristics that are not medical. "We urge conservatism and restraint in the public dissemination and interpretation of such studies, especially if nonmedical phenotypes are explored," they wrote.

A reader writes:

I will be watching how hapmap awareness propagates, and it is certainly off to a careful start. Too careful maybe, or is this all part of the plan?

For example at wikipedia in the description of the hapmap they include this:

"Another potential concern is that the inclusion of populations based on ancestral geography could result in categories such as " race," which are largely socially constructed, being incorrectly viewed as precise and highly meaningful biological constructs. The project undertook the community consultations to understand community concerns about such issues."

This is simply text taken from the official government Hapmap site. Of course, I could be missing something, as my primitive brain is not good at various social double-think, but "ancestral geography" seems like a peculiar category. Unless of course one's ancestral geography includes places like the US, in which case ancestral geography does not seem like an appropriate thing to base the study on at all. Googling "ancestral geography" in order to get a better grasp of the meaning brought up the official hapmap site as the top page of course. In fact, the page that came up, Guidelines for Referring to the HapMap Populations in Publications and Presentations is very specific in how we are to talk about and describe these people's "ancestral geography".

So I am left confused. Unless the point of the whole thing is that it is okay to say that people with different "ancestral geographies" are indeed different, but it is not okay to say that different "races" are indeed different.

The more I write the more confused I become. I think it is because my brain lacks some key part that allows this to all make sense.

Of course, the U.S. Census Bureau talks about "race" all the time, and explains how it's different from "ethnicity," and indeed insists that every single person in America fill in their race.

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

Lew Rockwell's Two-Liners

The paleo-libertarian editor has a gift for the headline-response format, as in:

Robot Builds Copies of Itself
Uh oh.

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

"Kiss Kiss Bang Bang"

My review appears in the new American Conservative, available to electronic subscribers this weekend. A brief excerpt:

"Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" is a comic tribute to two of the richest veins of American pop culture during the last century: the hard-boiled Hollywood private eye novel, invented by Raymond Chandler in 1939's The Big Sleep, and its cousin, the LAPD mismatched buddy cop movie, honed to commercial perfection by screenwriter Shane Black in 1987's "Lethal Weapon."

After making himself perhaps the highest paid and most despised screenwriter, Black disappeared a decade ago. Now, Black is back with a loving spoof of the Chandlerian tradition, an ingenious, self-satirical contrivance that would be incomprehensible to anyone not familiar with Chandler's glorious cinematic offspring, such as "Chinatown," "Blade Runner," "LA Confidential," and "The Big Lebowski." Indeed, "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" is so fast-paced and convoluted that it's close to impenetrable, period. As in Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels, figuring out whodunnit takes a back seat to just enjoying the ride.

To play his detective leads, Black was able to hire cheaply two of the most gifted but least trustworthy stars, Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer. When just a small boy, Downey began receiving recreational drugs from his father, the leftist director of "Putney Swope." His abusive upbringing appears to have rewired his brain, connecting it directly to his mouth, making him superhumanly articulate, but also deactivating all the normal circuits for self-restraint and common sense. Watching this wounded man-child play a lovable loser to perfection resembles what it must have been like listening to the great castrati sing arias -- simultaneously awe-inspiring and guilt-inducing.

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

Gay Shocker: Basketball Star Comes Out of the Closet!

Oh ... sorry, scratch that headline, it was a lesbian basketball player. Never mind ... All right, let's try that again:

Lesbian Ho-Hummer: WNBA Star Says She's Playing for the Other Team.

Three-time Women's NBA most valuable player Sheryl Swoopes said:

"The talk about the WNBA being full of lesbians is not true. I mean, there are as many straight women in the league as there are gay.''

Got that? The WNBA is only 50% lesbian. That's not even a majority!

Now you might think that Swoopes's announcement that she turned lesbian six years ago would be denounced for promoting the "stereotype" that women's professional basketball is full of lesbians by the same sensitive souls who are denouncing Air Force Academy football coach Fisher DeBerry for promoting the "stereotype" that blacks tend to be faster runners.

But you would be wrong. In the final analysis, it's not what somebody says, but who says it that determines whether a statement will be celebrated or excoriated. Let me provide you with a helpful table so you too can understand the complex factors that enter into determining the reactions of sportswriters:

Sheryl Swoopes	Fisher DeBerry
Woman	Man
Black	White
Homosexual	Heterosexual
Good	Evil

See, being a modern sportswriter's not so complicated after all!

Sports, by its very nature, is politically incorrect because it all about inequality, determining who is superior to whom. So, sportswriters feel the need to lie about the big, obvious patterns we all notice in sports: e.g., that blacks tend to be faster runners; or that team sports appeal a lot to masculine men and masculine women, but not much to feminine women and feminine men. If they ever mentioned such horrible but true facts in their columns, the Earth would crash into the Sun.

The WNBA is a small-time league, with the maximum salary set at $89,000. The essential problem is that it appeals mostly to fans who are either lesbians (about 1% of the population) or the kind of guy fan who will watch anything. John Wooden, the 95-year-old former UCLA coach, likes watching women's basketball more than men's basketball these days because it reminds him of the (whiter) game of his early days. And considering the deterioration in the quality of the NBA over the last dozen years, he has a point. But the WNBA would benefit from using a smaller ball. (Their current ball is 1" less in the circumference than the NBA's ball, but the women need a significantly smaller ball, more like a volleyball, if they wanted to look less lame on the court.)

Lots of sportswriters are claiming that if we're lucky, this will encourage all those male homosexual jocks to come out of the closet. Swoopes herself said:

"What really irritates me is when people talk about football, baseball and the NBA, you don't hear all of this talk about the gay guys playing. But when you talk about the WNBA, then it becomes an issue. Sexuality and gender don't change anyone's performance on the court."

After all, they reason, we know that 10% of the population is homosexual, and there are thousands of famous male athletes, so there must be hundreds of closeted gay ones, right? That's simple math. You'd have to be a complete homophobe to dispute that.

Except it's not true.

It's fun to keep a list of some of the unlikely male athletes (e.g., Sandy Koufax, who has been married twice and currently lives with First Lady's college roommate) whom gays and sportswriters have claimed are homosexual. My favorite example is that frequent victim of rumors, Mets catcher Mike Piazza. The slugger has lived with about ten different lingerie models over the last decade. I have actually heard the argument made, "Well, that just shows how hard he's working to cover up his being gay. Why else would a man want to sleep with a lot of centerfolds? "

Piazza is also a metalhead whose obsession is playing heavy metal tunes on his electric guitar. Trust me, a guy whose favorite band is AC-DC isn't AC-DC himself.

Obviously, gays made up and spread the Piazza rumor just because they enjoy fantasizing about meeting Mike Piazza in a bathhouse someday.

But what about sportswriters, very few of whom are gay? These kind of stupid mistakes are made because journalists are supposed to assume that gays are exactly like straights in all ways except sexual orientation. Statistically, however, that's just not true. Male homosexuality correlates more or less with a long series of traits. In "Why Lesbians Aren't Gay" I listed about three dozen in which male and female homosexuals differ on average.

One big difference between straight and gay males is in the urge to become a professional athlete. Tragically, for about a decade we had a way to tell how many athletes in different sports were gay: the frankest indicator of the proportion of gay men in an occupation was the number of AIDS deaths in the 1982-1995 era.

Most of the occupations you'd assume to be heavily gay, such as Broadway chorographer and fashion designer, were decimated by AIDS in the 1980s and early 1990s, as was figure skating, where both Olympic male gold medallists from the 70s died of AIDS. Diving isn't as gay as figure skating but it's a lot gayer than football or golf, and, not surprisingly, the greatest diver of all time, Greg Louganis, is HIV infected.

Professional sports outside of figure skating suffered very few AIDS cases, typically one per major sport, except for boxing, where shooting heroin is a not uncommon way for old boxers to relieve the constant pain.

Despite having lots of sex with lots of women, virtually no prominent American athlete has contracted HIV heterosexually -- Magic Johnson is probably not an exception to that statement. The LA Times sports editor admitted that they had heard repeatedly that Magic was playing for both teams, but they decided to hush it up in the interests of promoting the idea that straights were just as likely to get AIDS as gays. But Magic's bisexuality is very much the exception that proves the rule about the NBA. So, the one time when the sports media had a chance to break a big news story -- and after Magic's AIDS announcement, it was definitely news -- about a true superstar of a male team sport not being completely heterosexual, it censored itself in order to promote political correctness!

The most interesting question raised by Swoopes is her contention that she wasn't born a lesbian (she used to be married and has an 8-year-old son). She claims she wasn't interested in women until she moved in with her assistant coach six years ago.

Now, that may sound politically incorrect to you -- after all, aren't we supposed to believe that homosexuality is genetic, not environmental, in origin. But, clearly, you haven't absorbed the lesson in the handy table above.

Seriously, I suspect that lesbianism is much more subject to cultural influences than is male homosexuality. In lots of times and places, lesbianism virtually didn't exist. In 19th Century Boston, for example, butch suffragettes would live together in "Boston marriages" and even sleep together, but, despite the frantic efforts of contemporary feminist academics to prove that they were doing the nasty, the weight of evidence suggests that it almost never even occurred to them.

A big question that nobody in our society wants to talk about is whether the enormous emphasis placed on team sports for girls these days makes them more likely to grow up to be lesbians.

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

Hogtown

Dispatches from the Hogtown Front is the new immigration-skeptic blog from Toronto. Of all the boring countries in the world, Canada is by far the most interesting, and Americans need to pay far more attention to it. Canada represents a sort of Best Case scenario of where multiculturalist America would be headed ... assuming America had almost no blacks or Hispanics. And, yet, Canada, even with many advantages, is still falling apart.

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

Another elderly white sports figure stifled in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave

One reason I like old farts is because, unlike the craven young, every now and then they just can't stop themselves from blurting out the truth. My wife calls it "Elderly Tourette's Syndrome."

Awhile back, Paul Hornung, who won the 1956 Heisman trophy as college football's best player at Notre Dame, lost his radio announcer job for suggesting that Notre Dame had to lower its admissions requirements for blacks. (The black quarterback of ND's last national championship team in 1988, Tony Rice, scored a 690 on the SAT: "If Tony Rice’s transcript and SAT scores were brought into the admissions office today, they would be set on fire.")

Outside of sports, what Hornung said would make you a much lauded liberal supporter of affirmative action, but Hornung was crucified by sportswriters for saying it because he was thought to be implying two pieces of crimethink:

- blacks are faster on average
- blacks have lower SATs and GPAs

Obviously, both are true, but that was his fatal mistake. Sportswriters believe that what you don't say is more important than what you do say. The true test of a respectable sportswriter is his adamantine ability to not mention the elephant in the living room -- racial differences in sports skills -- and to persecute anyone who does let slip an acknowledgment of reality.

Now, we have another brouhaha, which I earlier labeled inane-to-the-point-of-being-insane. Just now, an Air Force officer sent me this official email he just received about the high crimes of the 67-year-old Air Force Academy football coach, who dared to suggest that black players tend to run faster than players of other ancestries.

From: Funkhouser Ryan O Jr Maj USAFA/DSE
Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2005 5:06 PM
To: USAFA_All
Subject: Results of Coach DeBerry Press Conference

Sent on behalf of the Vice Superintendent, Brig Gen Irv Halter

During his weekly news conference Tuesday, Falcon Football Head Coach Fisher DeBerry made some inappropriate comments about recruiting minority athletes. They were inappropriate because they could be construed by some as stereotyping a particular racial group. The Academy will not tolerate inappropriate remarks by its staff, faculty, cadets or contractors. Coach DeBerry was officially reprimanded by his supervisor, Dr Mueh, and the Academy Superintendent.

Coach DeBerry released a public statement today:

“Today, it is my desire to make a public apology for remarks I made recently about minority recruitment. I realize that the things I said were hurtful to many people and I want everyone to understand that I never intended to offend anyone. Gazette columnist Milo Bryant was right today when he said that I should have never said what I did. I have made a mistake and I ask for everyone's forgiveness. I regret these statements and I sincerely hope they will not reflect negatively towards the Academy or our coaches and players. I thank the administration for the opportunity to make this apology.”

Coach DeBerry has been a successful coach and mentor to countless cadets for more than 25 years, and the Academy will continue to fully support him as our head football coach.

Of course, America's sportswriters, those true-blue defenders of liberty, piled on immediately:

Pat Forde, ESPN: DeBerry should retire before his legacy slips:

Then, after losing to TCU Saturday to drop to 3-5, DeBerry explained that the Horned Frogs' defensive success is attributable to the fact that it starts 11 African-Americans.

"… Afro-American kids can run very, very well," DeBerry said. "That doesn't mean that Caucasian kids and other descents can't run, but it's very obvious to me they run extremely well."

Again, not ideal timing. On Monday, the academy welcomed a new superintendent, Lt. Gen. John Regni, who pledged a zero-tolerance policy toward discrimination. On Tuesday, DeBerry piped up about TCU's African-American players, stopping just short of saying, "We need us some more of those black fellers."

I'm not saying that Fisher DeBerry discriminates. I went to high school on the base of the Air Force Academy, and I graduated a few years ahead of Fisher's son, Joe (who was a fine baseball player). I don't know anyone in my hometown of Colorado Springs, Colo., who doesn't think highly of DeBerry.

So it's not like DeBerry was inventing something here -- or even saying something many coaches don't talk about in private. But given the decades of wrongly stereotyping black athletes as physically superior and mentally inferior -- run fast, think slow -- the coach was walking into a minefield. He was creeping toward Jimmy "The Greek" territory -- and every coach knows that you don't go there. Certainly not without great care.

I'm all for a more open dialog about race in America, and especially in sports. But sweeping generalizations about fast black players are going to get a coach in trouble.

Combine DeBerry's two tone-deaf episodes and you have the unsettling feel of a coach who is losing his way. Combine that feel with the on-field results -- Air Force has lost 14 of its last 22 games and could have its first back-to-back losing seasons since 1980-81 -- and you have concerns about the state of the program.

For two decades, few coaches in college football have done better than Fisher DeBerry. In a no-win situation, he won routinely.

DeBerry's career record is 164-99-1. He's had just three losing seasons in 21 years -- the third-longest tenure in the game, behind only Joe Paterno and Bobby Bowden. He's won at least eight games in 11 different seasons. He's dominated the Commander In Chief competition against Army and Navy. His option offense has been perfectly tailored to the Falcons' strengths -- discipline and intelligent decision making -- and compensates for their physical shortcomings.

Not ideal timing! Forde is saying that the heavily white Air Force Falcons have, compared to blacker teams, better discipline and more intelligent decision making, which compensates for their physical shortcomings.

I'm all for a more open dialog about race in America, and especially in sports. But sweeping generalizations about smart, disciplined, slow white white players are going to get a sportswriter in trouble.

Here's Forde's email in case you want to praise him for his courageous defense of free speech.

Another brave, calls 'em as he sees 'em sports columnist:

Milo F. Bryant

Once again, these ritual eviscerations of elderly white sports figures by white sportswriters has very little to do with blacks, per se. This is just a white-on-white war over status. Blacks won't run any slower nor whites any faster because white sportswriters beat their chests and say certifiably insane things in order to show they are more racially sensitive than this outstanding coach.

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

Great correction in today's Wall Street Journal:

"ON AUG. 31, a mob of looters, which officials in the New Orleans mayor's office and police department say included gang members, attempted to break into the Hyatt Regency New Orleans, where city leaders had set up a command center. A Sept. 9 page-one article about communications difficulties after Hurricane Katrina didn't mean to imply that all of the people in the mob were gang members.

Let the word go forth from this time and place: New Orleans has equal opportunity mobs open to more than just gang members.

Hey, I thought those reports of looting and violence in New Orleans were all just anti-Bush and/or racist hallucinations by the anti-Bush and/or racist media? Man, keeping up with the conventional wisdom about New Orleans can give you a whiplash...

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

The demographics of Fitzgerald's Grand Jury

are not good news for the Bush boys. According to Time reporter Matthew Cooper, he noticed when he testified in front of the grand jury:

"They somewhat reflected the demographics of the District of Columbia. The majority were African American and were disproportionately women."

In the 2004 election exit poll, Kerry beat Bush among black women in the District of Columbia by a margin of 94-5. Fitzgerald apparently only needs a majority of the 23 grand jurors to indict.

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

My review of Why Gender Matters:

What Parents and Teachers Need to Know about the Emerging Science of Sex Differences by Leonard Sax appears in the new Fall 2005 issue of the Claremont Review of Books. Not online, so subscribe here. An excerpt:

I must note that the title of Sax's book is likely to raise the hackles of readers who are purists about proper English. They may rightly snort, "Is this book about French grammar?" Obviously, Sax is misusing "gender" when he means "sex" - male or female.

I fear, though, that this usage battle is lost because the English language really does need two different words to distinguish between the fact and the act of sex. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg claims her secretary Millicent invented the use of "gender" to mean "sex" in the early 1970s while typing the crusading feminist's briefs against sex discrimination. Millicent pointed out to her boss that judges, like all men, have dirty minds when it comes to the word "sex," so she should use the boring term "gender" to keep those animals thinking just about the law. On my iSteve.com website, for example, I reluctantly use "gender" rather than "sex" in the HTML title code to avoid having web monitoring software block access to it as presumably pornographic.

Unfortunately, "gender" now comes with a vast superstructure of 99 percent fact-free feminist theorizing about how sex differences are all just socially constructed. According to this orthodoxy, it's insensitive to doubt a burly transvestite truck driver who is demanding a government-subsidized sex change when he says he feels like a little girl inside. Yet, it's also insensitive to assume that the average little girl feels like a little girl inside.

Speaking of that, you may have noticed that a number of intensely motivated transsexuals, such as computer maven Lynn Conway, have long been conducting an obsessive smear-and-destroy campaign, aided by (who else?) the Southern Poverty Law Center, against myself and anyone else who has ever had a good word to say for Northwestern U. professor of psychology J. Michael Bailey. Now, Bailey has issued a statement in the matter.

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

There's still time for Michael Ledeen to begin his search for the "real forgers!"

Today, the media finally started to show some interest in the more intriguing question behind Plamegate: who forged the Niger yellowcake documents? All roads lead to Rome, and anytime anything convenient for the neocons and shady in nature happens involving the Italian intelligence service, informed eyes swivel toward National Review Online contributing editor Michael Ledeen

When I posted a rumor in April pointing in the general direction of Ledeen, that International Man of Mystery emailed me:

"This is total nonsense. I have nothing at all to do with the "Niger documents," I have not ever seen them, let alone create them or transmit them."

Yet, when I asked him if he would use his extensive contacts within the Italian spook community to search for the Real Forgers, he broke off contact.

Or maybe the French forged the documents to make everybody else look stupid.

We shall see.

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

Translation of latest Niger yellowcake forgeries investigative article

from La Repubblica can be found here.

Americans tend to think of Italy as being a not very serious country, with governments rising and falling constantly over seemingly petty comic opera disputes. Yet, Italy's history since the mob-assisted American invasion of Sicily in 1943 has had a lurid subterranean element involving the Mafia, a rogue Masonic lodge preparing an alternative post-coup government, the Pope's banker, the corruption of almost the entire power elite, the CIA, American funding of Italian election campaigns, and Michael Ledeen.

It doesn't take much to get Italians to conspire, but America bears some of the responsibility, since in the higher cause of fighting first Fascism, then Communism, we subsidized a fair amount of the underground activity over the years. Once again in the yellowcake fiasco, we appear to have brought out the traditional flaws in the Italian character.

On a related matter, Richard Sale of UPI writes:

A former senior State Department official told this reporter: "If Iraq had had the yellow cake in question, it would not have advanced its ability to develop a nuclear weapon because Iraq lacked the complex industrial capacity required to refine yellow cake into anything usable in that respect. In fact, in 1991 Iraq already had several hundred tons of yellow cake purchased in two deals with Niger in the early 1980's that were deemed of so little value by the IAEA that they were never removed as part of the UNSCOM disarmament effort because it was of so little significance. In fact, in the weeks after the fall of Baghdad, looters removed some of the yellow cake from its sealed drums to use the drums as containers for other materials. All along, since early 2003, I've wondered why virtually no-one said `so what?'" in reaction to the nuclear aspect of this entire affair."

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