Modern Thought = Thoughtlessness

From 97 years ago:

CONCERNING THOSE WHO CANNOT SEE THE DIFFERENCE
G.K Chesterton, 1913

Why do people think it intelligent to say, "I can see no difference!" It is nowadays quite a mark of culture to say that one can see no difference between a man and a woman, or a man and an angel, or a man and an animal. If a man cannot see the difference between a horse and a cow across a large field, we do not call him cultured; we call him short-sighted. Now, there are really interesting differences between angels and women; nay, even between men and beasts, and all such things. They are differences which most people know instinctively, as most people know a cow is not a horse without looking for its mane; or most people know a horse is not a cow without looking for horns. Whether the difference ought to count in this or that important question is a completely different matter, but it ought not really to be so difficult simply to see the difference.

... modern thought means modern thoughtlessness.

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

Not getting the joke

From the American Prospect on how it's practically impossible to profile homegrown terrorists:

Another study found only broad trends among domestic jihadist terrorists, specifically that they are overwhelmingly male and about two-thirds of them are younger than 30 years old. As the above discussion may suggest, generalizing about the individuals involved is problematic. Indeed, there does not appear to be a common thread connecting the U.S. Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan with the Caucasian convert, Daniel Patrick Boyd; the Afghan immigrant Najibullah Zazi with Carlos Bledsoe, an African American of a happy childhood who converted to Islam and renamed himself Abdulhakim Muhammed; David Headley, who was born Daood Gilani to a successful Pakistani immigrant father and American mother, with Talib Islam, who was born Michael Finton and raised in multiple foster homes; or the educated pharmacist Tarek Mehanna, with the Somali American from Minneapolis Shirwa Ahmed, who traveled to the land of his birth and became the first U.S. citizen suicide bomber. 

Yup, not much in common there ... So, let's keep on giving the third degree at the airport to the 86-year-old retired general who tried to sneak his Medal of Honor on his trip to address cadets at West Point.

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

Is "The President Is Losing It" fiction?

You may have seen the anonymous interview floating around that begins

"A longtime Washington D.C. insider, and former advisor to the Obama election campaign and transition team, speaks out on an administration in crisis, and a president increasingly withdrawn from the job of President."

Most of the copies tend to be on obscure websites with a huge amount of advertising, so here's a link to it on Israpundit, which has mostly text.

Is this for real? 

Probably not. It's very easy to make stuff up and post it on the Internet.

But, if it were real, who is your guess who it would actually be?

I'll put my guess in the comments.

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

"Dreams from My Aunt: A Story of Race and Immigration"

As suggested by a commenter, here's Jonathan Elias of WBZTV.com in Boston:

Aunt Zeituni: 'The System Took Advantage Of Me'
President Obama's Aunt Speaks Exclusively With WBZ-TV

"If I come as an immigrant, you have the obligation to make me a citizen." Those are the words from 58-year-old Zeituni Onyango of Kenya in a recent exclusive interview with WBZ-TV.

Onyango is the aunt of President Barack Obama. She lived in the United States illegally for years, receiving public assistance in Boston.

Onyango is the aunt of President Barack Obama. She lived in the United States illegally for years, receiving public assistance in Boston.....

In 2004 a judge ordered Zeituni Onyango out of the country, but she never left. She stayed, hiding in plain sight. In 2005 she attended her nephew's swearing in as the junior Senator of Illinois. In 2008 she was invited to, and traveled to D.C. for President Obama's inauguration.

However her nephew, she says, never pulled any strings for her.

"Listen. Obama did not know my whereabouts."

Onyango hired a top immigration lawyer from Cleveland to help fight her case. We asked how she afforded that lawyer, when she claimed poverty.

"When you believe in Jesus Christ and almighty God, my help comes from heaven," she responded.

When asked about cutting in line ahead of those who have paid into the system she answered plainly, "I don't mind. You can take that house. I will be on the street with the homeless."

"To me America's dream became America's worst nightmare," she said adamantly. "I have been treated like public enemy number one."

She is still living in South Boston public housing, unemployed, and collecting about $700 a month in disability, she says. And now, Zeituni Onlyango is in this country legally.

In May 2010, Onyango's case went back before the same judge who ordered her out of the country in 2004. This time she was granted asylum in the United States. The ruling said a return to Kenya might put Onyango in danger. 

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

Crime victims = "They"

Timothy Egan writes at NY Times.com:

Beware, they told us in the train stations of northern Italy, of the Gypsy baby trick — an old ruse by Europe’s most reviled underclass. A woman will suddenly ask you to hold her child, and then just as you fumble to respond another Gypsy will grab your wallet. 

Watch out, they cautioned us in the lovely Turkish port city of Kusadasi, for the Gypsies who prey on tourists along the waterfront. And old lady will bump you, while a teenage hooligan grabs your bag. The Gypsy old-lady trick.

Those Gypsies, known by the less pejorative term of Roma, are getting kicked around the continent again, hardy perennials of European scapegoats. Unspoken characterizations based on ancient stereotypes — they are shiftless, clannish, prone to petty thievery and to begging, prostitution and dark motives — are now out in the open.

In the early days of a Mediterranean fall, one finds open hostility toward the Roma, encouraged by governments in a Europe that likes to think of itself as enlightened. France, following the lead of the Italians, Danes, Austrians and Swedes, is trying to expel the Roma in their midst.

"They" told me the same things about Gypsies when I backpacked around Europe in 1980. So, therefore, what "they" said can't be true because so many people have noticed the same pattern that it is a stereotype.

But, unlike Egan, I actually think "they" don't deserve to be dehumanized by anonymity. In my case, "they" were typically genial Australians backpacking around Europe for a gap year, who, coming from a country with very few Gypsies, had naively fallen for venerable Gypsy scams. "They" amiably passed on their hard-earned new knowledge to naive American travelers like myself.

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

The Roots of D'Souza's Ransom

From my VDARE.com column on Dinesh D'Souza's infinitely denounced upcoming book:

The Roots of Obama’s Rage is a silly title for a book about a man whose emotional tonality ranges from gracious condescension to wounded amour propre. More accurate, yet equally alliterative, would have been The Roots of Obama’s Resentment.

D’Souza churns out books frequently. (This is his 12th). And in his haste, he’s developed a bit of a reputation for sometimes …  neglecting to give full credit to his inspirations.

D’Souza’s most substantial book, 1995’s The End of Racism, owes much to Jared Taylor’s groundbreaking 1992 book Paved with Good Intentions—as Peter Brimelow politely pointed out in National Review (He Flinched, November  27, 1995).

But D’Souza was not merely unforthcoming about how intellectually indebted he was to Taylor—he even smeared Taylor in The End of Racism as a bad guy, the kind of dangerous white extremist from whom D’Souza’s moderate realism would protect everyone. (Just so his readers would know how to think about Taylor, D’Souza helpfully described him as "gaunt," even though Taylor may well be the most conventionally handsome of all American public intellectuals.)

In his latest book, D’Souza hasn’t actually attacked his most important sources. He’s just avoided mentioning them. 

Most notably, the central piece of evidence in The Roots of Obama’s Rage for D’Souza’s theory about Obama Sr.’s influence is the elder Obama's 1965 article, Problems Facing Our Socialism. This essay criticized the influential Sessional Paper No. 10 by Tom Mboya, a Kenayn labor leader who was financed by the anticommunist AFL-CIO (which, in turn, was financed by the CIA). Mboya had called for capitalism (under regulation) and colorblind treatment of white and Indian-owned businesses in Kenya.

D’Souza writes in Forbes:

“Obama Sr. was an economist, and in 1965 he published an important article in the East Africa Journal called ‘Problems Facing Our Socialism.’ … Remarkably, President Obama, who knows his father's history very well, has never mentioned his father's article. Even more remarkably, there has been virtually no reporting on a document that seems directly relevant to what the junior Obama is doing in the White House.”

This important historical document from 1965 wasn’t online until April 2008, when libertarian blogger Greg Ransom obtained a copy of Obama Sr.’s article from the dusty stacks of the UCLA library. Ransom’s April 7, 2008 blog post for the Ludwig von Mises Institute introducing his discovery, Obama Hid His Father’s Socialism from Readers, reads like a first draft for D’Souza book pitch:

"There’s a big mystery at the heart of Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father:  A Story of Race and Inheritance. What was Barack Obama doing seeking out Marxist professors in college? Why did Obama choose a Communist Party USA member as his socio-political counselor in high school? Why was he spending his time studying neocolonialism and the writings of Frantz Fanon, the pro-violence author of ‘the Communist Manifesto of neocolonialism,’ in college? Why did he take time out from his studies at Columbia to attend socialist conferences at Cooper Union?"

Ransom noted:

"… one thing is not left a mystery, the fact that Barack Obama organized his life on the ideals given to him by his Kenyan father. Obama tells us, ‘All of my life, I carried a single image of my father, one that I ... tried to take as my own.’ (p. 220) And what was that image? It was ‘the father of my dreams, the man in my mother’s stories, full of high-blown ideals.’ (p. 278) …

“So we know that his father’s ideals were a driving force in his life, but the one thing that Obama does not give us are the contents of those ideals."

But as far as I can tell from searching on Amazon’s online copy of The Roots of Obama’s Rage, the name “Ransom” doesn’t appear in D’Souza’s book.

It’s perfectly fine for D’Souza to profit off Ransom’s enterprise. But it would have been only polite to mention him.

Read the whole thing there and comment upon it below.

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

The GOP's "Pledge to America"

Commenter Wilson gives a quick intro to the House Republicans' "Pledge to America," a 2010 version of Newt Gingrich's winning 1994 "Contract with America."

It's basically a George W Bush Redux. It advocates no useful policy on enforcing the borders. It merely advocates (buried way down on page 20) to reaffirm the right of states to enforce immigration laws - a right they already have.

And I'm gunna go out on a limb and wager that it says nothing about eliminating racial preferences or CRA.

But it's opening lines are the best. "America is more than a country. America is an idea...America is an inspiration to those [immigrants] who yearn to be free..."

Aunt Zeituni couldn't have said it better.

Republicans have learned nothing from the Bush years. It's not a question of whether or not GOP policies will win votes, it's a question of whether they will actually make America better. We already know the answer to that.

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

Is the SAT getting easier?

It's interesting to look at California SAT scores over time. The farthest back data on the College Board site for the state of California is 1998, so I'll contrast 1998 to 2010. Overall, the mean score in California has dropped 3 points from 1520 to 1517 on a 600 to 2400 point scale. (Because the 1998 test was reported on a 400 to 1600 scale, I'm multiplying 1998 scores by 1.5 to match them up with 2010 scores).

A three point drop doesn't sound like much but that stability masks all sorts of things going on beneath the surface. For example, mean test scores have gone up for most ethnic groups: whites up 33 points, Asians up 57, blacks up 29, Mexican Americans up 14. (The total score went down because lower-scoring groups grew so fast.)

And that pattern of rising scores within groups is especially noteworthy because the number of high school seniors taking the test has gone up. (This data looks at each senior in the class of 1998 or 2000 and counts only the last time he or she took the SAT, so taking the test multiple times isn't a factor in these numbers.)

California SAT 1998 v. 2010
College Bound seniors	1998 #	2010 #	Chg	1998 Mean	2010 Mean	Chg	1998 v NHW	2010 v. NHW
Total	142,139	210,926	48%	1520	1517	-3	-89	-124
White	56,217	69,969	24%	1608	1641	33	0	0
Asian, As-Am, or Pac Isl	29,889	44,932	50%	1557	1614	57	-51	-27
Black or Af Am	8,868	14,476	63%	1292	1320	29	-317	-321
Mex or MA	18,494	42,380	129%	1341	1355	14	-267	-286
Other Hispanic	6,606	20,735	214%	1359	1325	-34	-249	-316
Puerto Rican	489	699	43%	1434	1489	55	-174	-152
American Indian	1,415	1,256	-11%	1479	1488	9	-129	-153
Other	7,863	8,498	8%	1566	1561	-5	-42	-80
No Response	12,298	7,981	-35%	1520	1566	47	-89	-75

For example, 24 percent more whites in the class of 2010 took the SAT than whites in the class of 1998, although I would guess that there were fewer white 17-year-olds in California in 2010 than in 1998. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) Black SAT-takers went up by 63 percent, even though lots of black families left California between 1998 and 2010. Clearly, there is a big push to get more marginal kids to take the SAT. (It's a great era to be in the testing racket!)

All else being equal, the higher the percentage of a group who takes the SAT, the lower the expected mean score (the scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel effect). But, except for the "Other Hispanic" category, where test takers exploded by 214%, we don't see that in the big groups here.

So, what's really going on with mean SAT scores in California? A few possibilities:

- Scoring is getting easier. 

- People are getting smarter.
- People in California are getting smarter relative to the rest of the country.

- Students are more familiar with test-taking because of all the other tests they take now.

- Students are better test-prepped for the SAT in 2010.

Considering the rank order of the size of the effect -- biggest gain among Asians, next biggest among whites, then blacks, then Mexicans, finally a bad dropoff among Central Americans, most of whom have recently arrived and don't know about SATs -- that would be about what I'd expect from average enthusiasm among parents for test prepping, so I don't think we can rule out the last possibility.

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

IQ genes

Robert Plomin of King's College London has been plugging away at the genetics of IQ for decades. It's been frustrating, but now he thinks he's getting somewhere. The London Sunday Times reports:

Scientists have identified more than 200 genes potentially associated with academic performance in schoolchildren.

Those schoolchildren possessing the "right" combinations achieved significantly better results in numeracy, literacy and science.

The finding emerged from a study of more than 4000 British children to pinpoint the genes and genetic combinations that influence reasoning skills and general intelligence.

One of its main conclusions is that intelligence is controlled by a network of thousands of genes with each making just a small contribution to overall intelligence, rather than the handful of powerful genes that scientists once predicted.

... There are potentially many millions of these variations, but the team restricted their search to looking at the million or so of the most common, to find out which gene variants were most frequently found in children with either a high or low level of academic achievement.

"Out of the gene variants we looked at, a couple of hundred are emerging which seem to have a small but significant relationship with ability in maths and English," said Professor Plomin.

... Research into height, for example, has picked out 300 genes that affect how tall people will grow, but even these genes can only explain 15 per cent of the total variations in human height. It implies that hundreds more genes must also play a part.

John Hawks points out a recent Nicholas Wade article in the NYT making a similar point the lessons of an experiment on fruit flies to breed for earlier hatching:

One well-known path to change is a heavily favorable mutation in a single gene. But it may be well known only because it is easy to study. Another path is exploitation of mildly favorable differences that already exist in many genes. 

The question has considerable practical importance because if complex traits, including susceptibility to disease, are influenced by just a few genes, then it should be easy to develop treatments that target the few genes’ products. But if tens or hundreds of genes are involved in each trait, the task may be close to impossible....

The conventional view is that evolutionary change is generally mediated by a favorable mutation in a gene that then washes through the whole population, a process called a hard sweep because all other versions of the gene are brushed away. The alternative, called a soft sweep, is that many genes influence a trait, in this case the rate of maturation, and that the growth-accelerating versions of each of these genes become just a little more common. Each fly has a greater chance of inheriting these growth-promoting versions and so will mature faster.

In sequencing their subjects’ genomes, the researchers found that a soft sweep was indeed responsible for the earlier hatching. No single gene had swept through the population to effect the change; rather, the alternative versions of a large number of genes had become slightly more common.

The debate about whether evolution proceeds by altering one or many genes started 90 years ago among the three founders of population genetics, Ronald Fisher, Sewall Wright and J. B. S. Haldane. Haldane favored the single mutation mechanism, but Fisher and Wright backed multiple gene change. The fruit fly experiment “is a total vindication of Wright and Fisher and a major defeat for Haldane and a lot of conventional geneticists who have sided with him,” Dr. Rose said.

The demise of the Haldane view “is very bad news for the pharmaceutical industry in general,” Dr. Rose said. If disease and other traits are controlled by many genes, it will be hard to find effective drugs; a single target would have been much simpler.

So, it's not surprising that intelligence is dependent upon a lot of genes. That's generally true for a lot of complicated traits.

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

SAT scores in California

With all the interest (264 comments and counting) generated by the huge number of Chinese and Korean names among the national merit semifinalists (top 0.5%) on the PSAT in California, here are the latest SAT scores from California. Interestingly, in California, whites average slightly higher than Asians / Pacific Islanders, both on the traditional M+V and the new three part total including Writing: whites 1641 to Asians 1614. (Nationally, however, Asians outscore whites 1636 to 1580.)

However, Asians / Pacific Islanders have higher standard deviations. (To view this tiny type more easily, you can hit "CTRL +")

California 2010 SAT			Total	Crit Read		Math		Writing
College Bound seniors	#	Share	Mean	Mean	SD	Mean	SD	Mean	SD
Total	210,926	100%	1517	501	113	516	119	500	113
White	69,969	33%	1641	546	100	553	102	542	100
Asian, As-Am, or Pac Isl	44,932	21%	1614	518	116	571	121	525	122
Black or Af Am	14,476	7%	1320	444	101	436	102	440	97
Mex or MA	42,380	20%	1355	449	95	458	96	448	90
Other Hispanic	20,735	10%	1325	440	102	444	102	441	95
Puerto Rican	699	0%	1489	501	101	495	105	493	100
American Indian	1,256	1%	1488	499	102	504	101	485	98
Other	8,498	4%	1561	517	113	525	118	519	115
No Response	7,981	4%	1566	523	121	526	123	517	121

Commenter Mitch, a Bay Area testing tutor, has argued that because the PSAT is a low stakes test, which whites tend to treat as the beginning of thinking about studying for the SAT, while Asian parents tend to treat it as an important milestone in the years-long process of boning up for the SAT, the high number of Asian semifinalists in California on the PSAT is exaggerated relative to the high stakes SAT.

Being lazy, I'll leave it up to interested readers to do the work to evaluate this hypothesis and post their findings in the comments.

For example, questions to consider are: What exactly are the racial percentages of National Merit semifinalists in California? Do a higher percentage of Asian 17-year-olds take the SAT in California than do white 17-year-olds? (One thing not to worry about much in California is the SAT v. ACT divide that confuses things when thinking about SAT scores in, say, Iowa: California is traditionally an SAT state.) What is the nationality makeup of Asian / Pacific Islander 17-year-olds in California? What about taking the SAT multiple times -- how does that affect the numbers? (Okay, I found the answer to this last question: "Students are counted only once, no matter how often they tested, and only their latest scores and most recent SAT Questionnaire responses are summarized.) And so forth and so on.

Good luck!

By the way, this is the first bit of quantitative evidence I can recall to support the common-sense notion that California has smarter than the national average white people. Considering how damnably expensive it is and all the high end industries and all the Nobel Prizes, you would think it would have smart white people. But on the NAEP, California non-Hispanic whites always lag badly behind, say, Texan whites. And that was true way back on the big 1960 federal Project Talent test of 15-year-olds, where Texans beat Californians. So, numbers like that got me assuming that most white Californians are less Hewletts and Packards and more Bodines and Spicolis. But, maybe, white people in California just can't be bothered with trying on low stakes tests?

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

"The Town"

From my Taki Magazine column:

The Town, set amidst the fading (but increasingly fashionable) Irish-American underclass of Boston’s gentrifying Charlestown neighborhood, is a model of crime genre filmmaking, perhaps the best-executed film since July’s Inception. Ten minutes into the first bank robbery in this heist movie, it’s evident that movie audiences are back in capable hands again.

There’s nothing particularly new about The Town. Ben Affleck directs himself as an ace bandit looking to make one last big score so he can get out of the game. Affleck, who helped write this adaptation of Chuck Hogan’s 2005 novel Prince of Thieves, emphasizes his strengths as an actor by playing an older, sadder, and soberer version of the Boston Irish lout in his breakthrough, Good Will Hunting.

In his gang of robbers as competent as a film crew, his right hand man is yet another fearless psycho played by Jeremy Renner of The Hurt Locker. As a boy, Affleck’s character was adopted by Renner’s family when his dad got life without parole. The townie accent employed by Renner, who is from Modesto, California, is so authenticious (as one of the crew explains) that I have no idea what he says. Except that he wants to permanently silence the pretty witness (Rebecca Hall of Vicky Cristina Barcelona) who might be able to identify them to the cocky FBI detective (handsome Jon Hamm of Mad Men). But this damsel in distress brings forth Affleck’s long buried white knight. 

We’ve seen it all before, but seldom this finely done.

One of the odder rituals of pop culture commentary is expressing amazement whenever another leading man competently directs a movie: Who could have imagined that Ben Affleck would establish himself as a capable director? After all, Affleck is only the umpty-umpth male movie star to take to directing. Whoever heard of Eastwood, Redford, Costner, Gibson, or Clooney?

Much of directing is acting like you know what you are doing. That’s how you hire the behind-the-scenes wizards who will actually make most of your movie for you, and that’s how you keep them happy on the set. And who is better at acting than an actor?

Granted, Affleck is not better at acting than a lot of actors.

 Read the whole thing here and comment upon it below.

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

Test scores and home prices

Real estate agents famously keep track of test scores in school districts, although it's not clear which is the leading and which the lagging indicator: public school test scores or home prices. It would seem like a consulting firm might profit by creating a statistical model alerting them to arbitrage opportunities where public school test scores and home prices have gotten out of whack.

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

National Merit Semifinalists by School and Surname

A reader sends me press releases from the National Merit Scholarship Corporation with the names of semifinalists sorted by high schools in California, Texas, Florida, Virginia, and Indiana.

The 16,000 semifinalists nationally scored in the top 0.5% of the PSAT test. However, minimum scores to be a semifinalist vary by state, with the highest cutoffs in Massachusetts and D.C., and the lowest in Wyoming.

Looking at the California semifinalists announced in 2009, well, holy moly, there are a lot of East Asians. You wouldn't think I'd be surprised after all these years, but I still am. For example, there are 36 semifinalists with the last name of Kim and 49 named Wang. Other Asian names: Nguyen, which is now one of the 100 most common in America (12), Chang (35), Chen or Cheng (56), Tang (8), Yang (15), and Zhang (20).

There are three Guptas and three Singhs. What other common Indian names are there?

My reader, who is Jewish, points out the decline in Jewish names from our day back in the 1970s. For example, in the entire state of California, only one semifinalist has a name beginning with "Gold...". Other common Jewish names also show up only rarely among the semifinalists: Cohen (1), Levy (1), and Kaplan (1). 

So, in the state of California, there was one Cohen who was a semifinalist, but 49 Wangs. Wow.

To give some perspective, if you search at Google News, there are 14,900 press pages currently mentioning "Cohen" (e.g., Sacha Baron-Cohen) and 14,500 currently mentioning "Wang" (e.g., Vera Wang), or about 1 to 1, not 49 to 1.

According to Wikipedia, the most common surnames in the U.S. in 2000 were, among white-black names, Adams (3 semifinalists in California), Johnson (3), Williams (3), Brown (6), Jones (7), Miller (2), Davis (1),  Wilson (2), Anderson (3), Taylor (3), Thomas (1),  However, this Wikipedia list of top 100 surnames is, for unexplained reasons, missing Smith (7).

Among highbrow WASP names, there are two Clark(e)s. (People named Clark or Clarke are descended in the male line from somebody who was a clerk -- i.e., literate -- seven centuries ago. I know it sounds ridiculous, but Nathanael Weyl found Clarks over-represented in intellectual fields in the late 20th Century.) No Huntingtons or Eliots.

Among celebrity names, I see a Munger in Palo Alto -- likely a relative of billionaire Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's gray eminence.

Among common Hispanic names found in the top 100 most common names of all types in the country: Garcia (1 semifinalist), Rodriguez (0), Lopez (0), Martinez (0), Hernandez (1), Gonzalez (1), Perez (0), Sanchez (0), Ramirez (0), Torres (2 -- is that a Sephardic name, as in Dana Torres, the Jewish Olympic swimmer from Beverly Hills?), Flores (1), Rivera (0), Gomez (0), Diaz (0), Reyes (0), Cruz (0), Morales (0), and Ortiz (1).

In California, high schools with the most semifinalists include Troy in Fullerton (80), University High in Irvine (60), Lynbrook in San Jose (58), Mission San Jose in Fremont (55), Monte Vista in Cupertino (53), Harker School in San Jose (50), Torrey Pines in north San Diego (48), Harvard-Westlake in North Hollywood (42), Palo Alto (46), Henry M. Gunn in Palo Alto (42), Palos Verdes Penninsula (36), and Arcadia (31). Most of these are public schools, with the exception of Harker and Harvard-Westlake.

Basically, having a lot of semifinalists is now all about having the East Asians. For example, among famous LA schools, Beverly Hills H.S. has eight, Loyola of Los Angeles six, Marlborough of Los Angeles four, Milken of Stephen Wise Temple ten, and Windward in Santa Monica (zero). Those are excellent numbers (except for Windward, which is where movie stars traditionally sent their, uh, more artistic scions), but these five prominent schools add up to 25% of Troy H.S. in Fullerton. Fullerton?

The semifinalists at Harvard-Westlake on Coldwater Canyon are a little less than half East Asian, but, still ... the school's two campuses (the other is just off Sunset Boulevard) are at the historic center of what had been the largest, richest Jewish community in the world outside of NYC

It would be interesting to calculate a sort of GINI score of inequality by high school for semifinalists. Some of these public schools have more semifinalists per year than most public schools in California could be expected to have in a century at recent rates.

For example, in contrast to Troy H.S. with 80, the city of Los Angeles (not counting the San Fernando Valley) has a total of five public school semifinalists: two at LA H.S. for the Performing Arts, one at LACES (the top academic magnet public high school in LAUSD), and one each at Venice HS (at the beach) and one at Eagle Rock HS (next to Pasadena).I'd roughly estimate there are about 50,000 sixteen year olds within these boundaries (although lots are in private schools or have dropped out), so, 5 out of 50,000 ...

The San Fernando Valley is more reasonable with about 30 semifinalists in LA public schools (although it lags well behind the public schools of the more Asian San Gabriel Valley), but the inequality of the main LA Basin is remarkable.

Another interesting thing is to compare San Francisco to San Jose -- maybe four or five times more semifinalists in San Jose than in San Francisco.

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

DC Election: Blacks v. Journolistas

Courtland Milloy, the Washington Post's local (i.e., black) columnist, writes in the WaPo about veteran hack Vince Gray's defeat of press favorite Adrian Fenty for mayor of DC:

But Fenty was a cruel mayor. He inflicted deep hurts, not little boo-boos that you kiss and blow to heaven and make feel okay overnight.

Air out those wounds.

Having taken office promising to cradle the most vulnerable residents, Fenty set out almost immediately shooting the wounded. Closing homeless shelters. Forgetting about job-training programs. Firing city workers with the wave of a callous hand -- black female heads of households more often than not.

Fenty boasted of being a hard-charging, can-do mayor. But he couldn't find time to meet with 98-year-old Dorothy Height and 82-year-old Maya Angelou. Respect for elders -- that's too old school for Fenty. Dis the sistas -- his supporters will understand.

Watch them at the chic new eateries, Fenty's hip newly arrived "creative class" firing up their "social media" networks whenever he's under attack: Why should the mayor have to stop his work just to meet with some old biddies, they tweet. Who cares if the mayor is arrogant as long as he gets the job done?

Myopic little twits.

And lordy don't complain about Rhee.

She's creating a "world-class school system," they text. As for you blacks: Don't you, like, even know what's good for you? So what if Fenty reneged on his promise to strengthen the city from the inside by helping the working poor move into the middle class. Nobody cares that he has opted to import a middle class, mostly young whites who can afford to pay high rent for condos that replaced affordable apartments.

Don't ask Fenty or Rhee whom this world-class school system will serve if low-income black residents are being evicted from his world-class city in droves.

You blacks, always playing the race card. 

There's lots more where this came from.

 

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

"Drill, Baby, Drill"

Virginia Heffernan writes in the NYT Sunday Magazine:

Drill, Baby, Drill

The word “drill” has come to define bad teaching. The piercing violence that “drilling” evokes just seems not to belong in sensitive pedagogy. Good teachers don’t fire off quiz questions and catechize kids about facts. They don’t plop students at computers to drill themselves on spelling or arithmetic. Drilling seems unimaginative and antisocial. It might even be harmful.

“In educational circles, sometimes the phrase ‘drill and kill’ is used, meaning that by drilling the student, you will kill his or her motivation to learn,” explains Daniel Willingham, a University of Virginia professor of psychology who has written extensively on learning and memory. “Drilling often conjures up images of late-19th-century schoolhouses, with students singsonging state capitals in unison without much comprehension of what they have ‘learned.’” ...

Oh, those schoolhouses — with the hickory sticks and the dunce caps. “Harrisburg! Salt Lake City! Montpelier! Tralalalala!” That does sound kind of fun — I mean, authoritarian. And drilling hardly has a better reputation outside academia. On message boards, students complain bitterly about Kumon, the extracurricular Japanese system of worksheet drills that many also admit has made them superb at math. Only unsportsmanlike parents hellbent on raising valedictorians, it seems, require their kids to do such rote work. At the same time, parents dismiss cutesy, flashy apps and Web sites that drill students using elaborate animation (like PopMath for arithmetic, iFlipr for custom flashcards, Cram for custom practice tests) as superficial edutainment, on par with children’s TV. 

Willingham also approves of drilling as a way to measure what you’ve learned. “Testing yourself is really good,” he told me. “It actually leads to better learning than studying” — e.g., reading passages over and over, sometimes with a highlighter. He explained, “You can’t be proficient at some academic tasks without having certain knowledge be automatic — ‘automatic’ meaning that you don’t have to think about it, you just know what to do with it.” For knowledge that must be automatic, like multiplication tables, “you need something like drilling,” Willingham wrote. He also warned, “You’d hope to make it a little less boring for the student.”

Here’s something I’ve found that makes drilling not boring: colorful, happy apps. 

By the way, the family of the Mr. Kumon who founded Kumon in Osaka in the 1950s now owns $400 million dollars worth of Kumon stock. The funny thing about Kumon is, last I checked, it is resolutely low-tech: it was completely paper and pencil drilling. You fill in a huge workbook of problems, then you give it to the Asian lady who owns the franchise, she grades it by flipping through the pages at amazing speed, then she gives you either a higher level workbook or one of their endless supply of additional problem sets at the same level.

Computers can make this more efficient by grading tests automatically. Moreover, they can shuffle questions on the fly so if you are doing badly, the computer can lower the difficulty until you get the hang of it.

The big question is whether math drilling programs can do what a first-rate tutor can do: figure out why you are making a recurrent mistake and explain it to you in a way you'd understand. In theory, it doesn't sound impossible, but here we are, in 2010, and I've never heard of anybody in Silicon Valley getting as rich off math tutoring as Mr. Kumon did.

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

No comment necessary

Valerie Jarrett, longtime consigliera to Barack Obama since she hired Michelle Obama a couple of decades ago to work for Mayor Daley, op-edizes in the WaPo:

Closing the wage gap: It's a matter of survival for working families

America first put an equal-pay law on the books in 1963, when women earned 59 cents for every dollar earned by a man. While this legislation was landmark at the time, its core provisions require updating if it is to fulfill its promise.

Nearly 50 years later, the wage gap has narrowed by only 18 cents. ...

In this harsh economic environment, the consequences of the pay disparity put women and their families, as well as our economy, at a significant disadvantage. We are still emerging from the deepest recession since the Great Depression. And while we have added private-sector jobs for eight straight months, we remain short of our goal of putting every American who wants a job back to work. Today, too many struggling families are still waiting to feel the benefits of economic progress.

That's why women's wages have perhaps never been more important. Women are the sole or co-breadwinners in two-thirds of American families. For them and their families, equal pay is not only a matter of principle; it's a matter of survival.

It is for this reason that President Obama applauds the work of the House of Representatives and strongly supports passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act in the Senate. It is common-sense legislation that will give women the tools they need to obtain equal pay for equal work. The House passed this legislation 256 to 163 in January 2009. The bill is on the Senate calendar and should come up for a vote this month. ...

It will also eliminate a loophole that some employers use to avoid paying women equal wages. Under the act, while employees will still have to prove that discrimination has taken place, employers will be required to prove in court that any wage differences were based on factors other than sex -- such as education, training or experience -- and were consistent with business necessity. The act will provide victims of sex-based pay discrimination the same remedies under the law that victims of other forms of discrimination have. ...

The Paycheck Fairness Act will also improve federal agency access to wage-related data, while protecting confidentiality. When it becomes law, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission will have access to important information from employers that, with time and analysis, will strengthen our ability to ensure compliance. The Labor Department will also be able to begin education and outreach efforts that will increase both employer and employee knowledge of their respective responsibilities and rights regarding equal pay.

For these reasons and more, the Paycheck Fairness Act merits swift passage. America cannot move forward, prosperous and faithful to its ideals, if the pay gap is allowed to persist for another 50 years. This act is not only good for women, it's good for working families, for business and for the American economy. 

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

DC voters: Adrian Fenty: Not black enough; Michelle Rhee: Extremely not black enough

From the Washington Examiner, on the Democratic mayoral primary in D.C. between the two cafe-au-lait candidates, young Obama-like incumbent Adrian Fenty and aging hack challenger Vince Gray, which turned out much like Obama's loss to Bobby Rush in the 2000 Democratic House of Representative primary.

The Democratic primary results were clear: Mayor Adrian Fenty lost because black voters didn't like him.

Granted, Fenty's campaign was troubled from start to finish. His closest advisers say he didn't listen to their calls to apologize to the public for running a brash, and closed administration months before he dropped his first apology in early August. The apology tour that ensued was far too late.

But at the end of the day, with campaign failings aside, Fenty won't have a second term because he lost a big part of his base by running a four-year race for results with blinders on that left black voters feeling as though they were being left behind. The sagging economy only served to worsen the effect.

Fenty's "lack of communication exacerbated fears of gentrification in the black community," the mayor's campaign Chairman Bill Lightfoot told The Washington Examiner.

The city's black majority wards on the east side of the Anacostia Rive helped push Fenty into office in 2006, but in 2010 they combined to give 82 percent of their vote to challenger D.C. Council Chairman Vince Gray. Fenty picked up just 16 percent of the vote in Wards 7 and 8.

In the city's two whitest wards in Northwest, Fenty took in 76 percent of the vote to Gray's 23 percent.

Gray also dominated in predominantly black, yet rapidly gentrifying Ward 5, picking up nearly 76 percent of the vote. The race was closer in more racially and economically mixed Wards 4, 6 and 1.

The 2010 Democratic primary could go down as the last in which the city has a black majority. By 2014, population trends show, the District will likely have a white majority for the first time since the 1950s. In Tuesday's vote, the rapid demographic change pitted old residents, who are mostly black, against new residents, who are mostly white.

Also, Fenty's decision to make Korean-American Dragon Princess Michelle Rhee boss of the schools and the face of his administration struck the white guy national reporters as smart and sexy. But Korean-black relations aren't always so hot, as this video from LA's Koreatown in April 1992 recalls.

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

The Camp of the Sinners

As I wrote in VDARE.com in May 2004, when Romania and Bulgaria were added to the European Union, "A Gypsy is haunting Europe ..."

There are now as many as 12 million Gypsies in the world (their birthrate is far higher than that of other Europeans). A large proportion have until now been bottled up in Eastern Europe. They are in many ways the European Union's worst nightmare, even though the great and the good of the EU lack a socially acceptable vocabulary for even discussing in public their concerns about Gypsies (more fashionably known as Roma or Romani).

But, I expected Gypsy troubles in Western Europe to take a few years after 2004 to build up:

The Communists made this traditionally nomadic people more sedentary, so an immediate deluge of Gypsies moving west may not be likely. Nevertheless, it's hard to imagine that all the Gypsies will stay in drab, hostile Eastern Europe when there are so many more cash-heavy and unsuspecting pockets to pick in the fat lands of the West.

From today's NYT:

Roma, on Move, Test Europe's 'Open Border'

by Suzanne Daley

Roma like Maria Murariu, 62, who tends to her dying husband in a foul-smelling room no bigger than a jail cell. She has not found work in five years.

“There is not much for us in Romania,” she said recently, watching her husband sleep. “And now that we are in the European Union, we have the right to go to other countries. It is better there.”

Thousands of Romania’s Roma, also known as Gypsies, have come to a similar conclusion in recent years, heading for the relative wealth of Western Europe, and setting off a clash within the European Union over just how open its “open borders” are.

A summit meeting of European leaders on Thursday degenerated into open discord over how to handle the unwanted immigrants. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France vowed to keep dismantling immigrant camps and angrily rejected complaints from European Commission officials that the French authorities were illegally singling out Roma for deportation. ...

Expulsions seem unlikely to offer a long-term solution. Many of the deported Roma are already planning their return.

Privately, some Romanian officials snicker over the French action. “They are just giving the Roma a paid vacation,” one official said.

Still, advocates for the Roma hope that the latest conflict will force the European Union to get serious about helping the Roma, who are openly reviled in most Eastern and Central European countries where they have lived in large numbers for centuries, most often under appalling conditions.

“There is nothing to focus the minds of policy makers like an army of poor people heading your way,” said Bernard Rorke, the director of Roma Initiatives for the nonprofit Open Society Foundation. 

 

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