What Israel's latest border fence looks like

Thanks to Patrick Cleburne in VDARE

Israel used to rely upon the Mubarak government to keep sub-Saharan Africans from crossing the Sinai border, but since the Arab Spring, that hasn't been happening. So, in a couple of years, Israel has fenced off the border to keep out economic migrants (or, as it calls them, "illegal infiltrators"). As I've said before, there is much Americans can learn from Israelis about how a serious, intelligent, self-governing nation deals with its problems.

Is the American wedding system an in-direct dowry?

Cultures often differ on whether they have a bride price or a dowry system for contracting marriages. In cultures where wives pay their own way, such as in New Guinea and African hoe agriculture economies, where much of the farm work consists of light weeding in light soil, it's common for grooms to pay their brides' families for their new wife's future services, often in cows or other valuables (Borat says that in his country, a wife costs "15 gallons of insecticide").

In cultures where men do much of the farm work (e.g., heavy plowing in rich soil), however, it was common for the bride's parents to pay a dowry to the groom. 

Now, anthropology is full of exceptions (what Robin Fox calls "ethnographic dazzle"), but this is something of a general pattern.

In normal American culture, we don't have either, at least not explicitly. And yet, my wife contends that the standard wedding protocol provides an in-direct dowry from the bride's parents laundered through the guests. 

I am the last person to pose as an expert on etiquette, so I may be getting this wrong, but her parents shelled out for a big wedding and big reception. My parents paid for the smaller rehearsal dinner the night before (largely attended by my relatives and friends from out of town) and, perhaps, the alcohol at the reception (I can't remember). But my brides' parents bore the bulk of the costs.

At the reception, lots and lots of people came up to us and handed us money. Others bought presents (some of which we returned for cash -- I especially recall six small plain water glasses that I was about to give away until I turned them over and saw "Baccarat" stamped on the bottom -- we returned them for $350, which was nice money in 1987). 

The general idea is that guests should give the couple cash or a gift roughly equivalent to their share of the cost of the reception provided by the bride's parents. In other words, the gifts functioned more or less as a dowry from my in-laws to set us up, but indirectly routed through the guests.

Does this interpretation make sense?

Mark Zuckerberg's conservative sock puppet site: Lindsey Graham has "our back"

As part of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's complex, multi-faceted plan to get Congress to pound down computer programmers' salaries further, the Big Zuck recently launched the FWD.US immigration deform advocacy umbrella group (a.k.a., the National Association for the Advancement of Billionaire People). Now, FWD.US has launched twin Republican and Democratic subsidiaries: Americans for a Conservative Direction and Council for American Job Growth, which are running ads supporting politicians backing the Gang of Eight's plan. 

Yes, I know this sounds like I've been dipping into Umberto Eco again, but it's true. 

The two subsidiary websites have identical little symbols come up on tabs in your browser, just red for the Republican "Americans for a Conservative Direction" and blue for the Democratic "Council for American Job Growth." The Republican site has headlines in red and subheads in blue, while the Democratic site has headlines in blue and subheads in red.

Try it and see for yourself!

Zuck's Republican sock puppet website has videos up of ads it made for Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio. The site's text reads:

Fixing a Broken Immigration System 

Our country has a broken immigration system and a broken border, both of which present huge obstacles to the businesses, job creators, and legal immigrants who have played by the rules and will help continue to grow our economy. It’s well past time for Congress to get to work on real solutions to secure our border, hold those who have broken our laws accountable, and improve our legal immigration system to meet our country’s needs and boost America’s competitiveness in a global economy.

Here's Zuck's Rubio ad:

And here's Zuck's Republican front men:

Our Board 

Haley Barbour 

Former Governor Haley Barbour served as the 62nd governor of Mississippi from 2004 to 2012 and served as Chairman of the Republican National Committee in the mid '90s. 

Sally Bradshaw 

Sally Bradshaw worked as former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s Chief of Staff from 1999-2001, and served as a Co-Chair of the Republican National Committee’s Growth and Opportunity Project. 

Joel Kaplan 

Joel Kaplan is currently Vice President of US Public Policy at Facebook.  Joel also served as Deputy Chief of Staff to former President George W. Bush. 

Dan Senor 

Dan Senor is former chief advisor to Representative Paul Ryan on the Romney-Ryan 2012 campaign 

Rob Jesmer 

Rob Jesmer worked as the former Executive Director at the National Republican Senatorial Committee from 2008 – 2012. 

Meanwhile, Zuck is also funding for the Democrats the Council for American Job Growth, whose boilerplate reads:

Commonsense Principles to Create Jobs 

The U.S. has been built on the ingenuity and drive of immigrants – but right now, our broken immigration system and broken border are stalling job creation, hurting families, and hindering America’s competitiveness in the global economy. Congress must act to reform the legal immigration system to help small businesses continue to create and fill good jobs, and strengthen communities and American families. 

Here's Zuck's ad for Sen. Mark Begich (Democrat-Alaska).

Both the Graham and Begich ads are triple-bankshots intended to burnish their respective recipients' conservative, economic populist, patriotic credentials in the eyes of their Red State voters to give them cover to ram through amnesty and guest workers. For example, Zuck's blue ad credits Begich with wanting to open Alaska National Wildlife Reserve to oil drilling, a stance popular with blue collar Alaskans voters. Meanwhile, Zuck's red ad has Lindsay! pointing out that Obama is against the Keystone XL pipeline. Neither ad mentions immigration.

But the Sierra Club is mad at Zuckerberg for his attempt at finesse. From ABC News:

Less than three weeks after Mark Zuckerberg officially launched his pro-immigration reform group, the billionaire technology mogul seems to be experiencing the Facebook equivalent of a liberal de-friending. ...

Those television commercials led the Sierra Club to post a message to the environmental group's Facebook page on Monday urging Zuckerberg to "re-think his priorities." 

"Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is bankrolling political ads that push dangerous, dirty projects like the Keystone XL pipeline and drilling in America's pristine Arctic Refuge," says the message accompanying a thumbs-down graphic dripping with oil. 

"Just last week, the Sierra Club announced our support for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants -- so we know how important immigration reform is to the future of our country," Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, said in a statement to ABC News. "The way to achieve reform, however, isn't by pushing dirty fuel schemes that threaten our future and our families. Mark Zuckerberg has made comments in the past recognizing that we need to pursue a clean energy future, and there is no reason he needs to trade those principles for a few political points."

 "Maintaining two separate entities, Americans for a Conservative Direction and the Council for American Job Growth, to support elected officials across the political spectrum -- separately -- means that we can more effectively communicate with targeted audiences of their constituents," FWD.us spokeswoman Kate Hansen said in a statement.

In contrast, when the Sierra Club's stance on immigration gets bought, it stays bought.

In other news, Bill Gates (net worth $66 billion) and Steve Ballmer ($15.9 billion) have just joined Zuck's FWD.US umbrella group to reduce programmers' wages, because you can never be too rich or too low-paying.

Oh, that reminds me to ask you for more money, because I can only afford to have one entity.

First: you can make a non-tax deductible contribution to me by credit card via WePay by clicking here.

Second: you can make a tax deductible contribution to me via VDARE by clicking here.

Third: You can mail a non-tax deductible donation to:

Steve Sailer
P.O Box 4142
Valley Village, CA 91607-4142

Thanks.

Djoker's Best Buds: Diversity is Cambridge's strength

Dias Kadyrbayev and Azamat
Tazhayakov, from Boratstan but
Straight Outta Cambridge

From USA Today

Dias Kadyrbayev and Azamat Tazhayakov, 19, were charged Wednesday with conspiracy to obstruct justice by conspiring to destroy, conceal and cover up tangible objects belonging to [Djoker] Tsarnaev, namely a laptop computer and backpack containing fireworks. ... 

Kadyrbayev, a citizen of Kazakhstan who entered the United States on a student visa, faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted. 

UMass Dartmouth says Kadyrbayev is no longer a student there. His profile on the VK Russian social network site says he is a member of the class of 2015 at the School of Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, Sara McDonnell, assistant media relations manager at MIT, said, "There is no registered MIT student of that name." .... 

Kadyrbayev first met Tsarnaev in the fall of 2011 at UMass and became better friends with him the following spring, he told investigators. ... 

Kadyrbayev's VK "world view" is Islam, his "personal priority" is listed as "improving the world" and next to "Important in others" he has listed "kindness and honesty." He has listed his views on smoking and alcohol as "very negative." .... 

Kadyrbayev indicates his music preferences are Gucci Mane, Ralph Cieli and Juicy J. 

...Azamat Tazhayakov is a Kazakhstan national, a pretty good soccer player and a 19-year-old accused of helping the suspected Boston Marathon bomber get away with the crime. 

In Kazakhstan, Tazhayakov grew up in Atyrau and graduated from Miras International School in Astana, according to his Facebook page. At the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, he played in the indoor soccer league and made the all-star team, league records show. 

The school said Wednesday he has been suspended pending the outcome of the case. 

West Kazakhstan Today [is that like the USA Today of West Kazakhstan?] reported April 26 that Tazhayakov's father, Ismagoulov Amir Tazhayakhovich, a deputy on the city council of the family's hometown Atyrau, planned to fly to Boston to see his son, who had been arrested on immigration charges. 

The father is a "well-known businessman" who chairs the board of directors of Abylaikhan Group JSC, a residential home builder, the newspaper reported. ...

Robel Phillipos

Robel Phillipos, charged with lying to authorities investigating the Boston Marathon bombings, was the first friend to recognize Dzhokar Tsarnaev's photo on TV news and alert the two other university students accused of aiding the suspect, according to the FBI affidavit released Wednesday. 

Phillipos, Tsarnaev and Dias Kadyrbayev and Azamat Tazhayakov attended the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. Phillipos, 19, of Cambridge, was studying marketing, but the university said Wednesday he is not currently enrolled. 

With Tsarnaev, he was a 2011 graduate of the prestigious [?] Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, the city schools' superintendent's office said. 

Phillipos, a U.S. citizen, lives with his mother, who is from Ethiopia and works with refugees, WHDH-TV reported. Their Cambridge apartment is next to the gas station where the Tsarnaev brothers carjacked a vehicle before getting into the shootout with police in which 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed. 

"Robel is a nice boy, very nice kid," said neighbor Tecleverhan Mengistu, who has known the family for 15 years. 

Weddings today v. yesterday

The Little Brown Church
is little, brown

These days, being married is less common, but getting married is usually a massive to-do. There may be some causal connection.

To get a sense of how things have changed, consider one wedding that took place not far from where I grew up. I would sometimes walk past a church called, aptly, the Little Brown Church. It's made out of wood, has virtually no decor, and is extremely little. It's belltower is about 13 feet tall. Seating capacity might be 60 people. It's the least pretentious church imaginable.

Where are the other 14 people?

Yet, it was the site of a 1952 wedding that turned out to be of historic importance. Ronald Reagan married starlet Nancy Davis in the Little Brown Church on March 4, 1952.

The best man was Sunset Boulevard star William Holden and the matron of honor was Holden's wife Ardis.

You call that a wedding cake?

A small reception followed at the Holdens' house in Toluca Lake. The bridal couple then went to the fanciest hotel in Riverside, CA, then on to Phoenix to visit Nancy's parents on their honeymoon.

It was Ron's second marriage, but Nancy's first.

It's hard to imagine anything like this today.

Immigration bill flop sweat at the Washington Post

From the WaPo:

Obama tries to set realistic expectations on immigration

David Nakamura 5:03 PM ET

Meeting with liberal supporters, he says a deal might not have everything they want.

• Rubio: Bill unlikely to pass House
• The Fix: Public opinion up for grabs

May Day illegal immigrant marches flop

Remember the vast throngs of illegal aliens excitedly waving Mexican flags who took over American cities on spring days in 2006 to support the Kennedy-McCain amnesty bill? Wikipedia recounts:

A major demonstration in Chicago on March 10, 2006 estimated at 100,000 people was the initial impetus for protests throughout the country.[1] The largest single demonstration occurred in Los Angeles on March 25, 2006 with a march of more than 500,000 people through downtown.[2] The largest nationwide day of protest occurred on April 10, 2006, in 102 cities across the country,[3][4] with 350,000–500,000 in Dallas and around 300,000 in Chicago.[5] Most of the protests were peaceful and attracted considerable media attention. 

Then on May Day 2006:

An estimated 400,000 marched in Chicago, according to police, though organizers pegged the total at closer to 700,000; ... An estimated 400,000 marched in Los Angeles, according to police.

Well, that kind of humongous turnout (large driven by funny Spanish-language drive time radio DJs) has never been repeated. From today's Los Angeles Times:

Two sets of marchers converged on the Civic Center in downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday afternoon in what police described as a peaceful and modestly sized crowd compared to previous years.

The LAT's short video is well-worth watching to show how non-formidable these people are: a white activist chants slogans in Spanish while a limited number of short brown marchers echo his lead with an attempt at enthusiasm.

The NYT article tries to be upbeat, but it's infused with flop sweat:

Across the Country, Supporters Rally for Immigration Overhaul 

By JULIA PRESTON 

Published: May 1, 2013

Tens of thousands of immigrants, Latinos and other supporters of an overhaul of the immigration system turned out on Wednesday to mark May 1 with marches, rallies and prayer vigils, hoping to show Congress that momentum is building in favor of a path to citizenship for 11 million immigrants in the country illegally. 

First, some excuses:

Instead of concentrating their forces for one large demonstration on May Day, the immigrant and labor groups organizing the events said they chose to hold smaller actions in more than 100 cities to draw more local supporters. ...

Many immigrants who support overhaul legislation now before the Senate do not have legal immigration status, so they cannot travel easily across state lines and they think twice about turning out in public. ...

Now, some reporting.

In Richmond, Va., about 150 people had a minirally and then marched to the headquarters of the Republican Party, chanting, “Yes, we can” in English and Spanish. In an impromptu speech, Jaime Contreras, vice president for Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, told Republicans, “There’s no honor in being on the wrong side of history as the last stronghold fighting against civil rights.”

150 people? Okay, well that was Virginia. What about in the Southwest?

In Tucson, 250 people turned out for a morning march in desert heat, accompanied by indigenous dancers and Mexican music. The marchers said the prospect of immigration action in Washington had created an upbeat mood in southern Arizona. 

“There is hope for everyone," said Rosalva Fuentes, 43, an immigrant from Mexico who lives in Tucson. “Ten years ago people were so scared.. Now we fight for equality.”

Tomás Rodríguez, 41, said he had lived in Tucson for two decades without immigration papers, working in construction. Mr. Rodríguez, who attended with his 17-year-old daughter, Stephanie, a United States citizen, said he was not afraid to join the march. ..

Leading organizers of the May 1 events included the Service Employees International Union and other labor unions; Mi Familia Vota, a Latino voter registration organization; and the Fair Immigration Reform Movement, a coalition of immigrant community groups.

250 demonstrators in Tucson? That's pathetic.

“The big strategy is to point the people power of the movement towards getting Congress to finish the job in 2013,” said Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change, one of the main organizers. “Tremendous hope and expectation has been raised in the community.”

Deepak is, what, an Aztec name? Mayan?

... Eliseo Medina, a top official of the Service Employees International Union, spent the day in what he called “our war room” at its headquarters in Washington, monitoring the activities. 

“We were not particularly looking to have huge events," Mr. Medina said, "we are going for expanding.” ...

In 2006, when major immigration legislation came before Congress, many hundreds of thousands of immigrants and advocates took to the streets in cities like Los Angeles and New York.  

Way back then, I attended a minor march in Van Nuys and it was still pretty gigantic even though an enormous march was going on simultaneously in downtown LA 20 miles away. But, I noticed something electorally important: the march was immense but the marchers were tiny. They weren't big Chicanos like the American-born Mexicans I'd grown up with, who all have the vote. The marchers were short immigrants; in other words, they weren't being joined by taller Mexican-American voters. And that said a lot about how much Hispanic voters care about amnesty (i.e., not too much).

Sailer: Forbes Israel's list of 165 Jewish billionaires

From my new column in Taki's Magazine:

Forbes Israel, the Tel Aviv offshoot of the American business magazine, has a cover story on Jewish billionaires. The Israeli edition has made up a list, drawn from Forbes‘s overall ranking of the world’s 1,426 billionaires, of the 165 richest Jews in the world. 

In America, this just isn’t done in the mainstream media, even though it’s obviously interesting and important, and fairly easy to do. 

Here’s my count of Forbes Israel‘s list, with Jewish billionaires as a fraction of the country’s total number of billionaires: 

US 105 / 442 = 24%
Israel 16 / 16 = 100%
Russia 12 / 99 = 12%
Canada 6 / 29 = 21%
Brazil 6 / 45 = 13%
UK 5 / 37 = 14%
Ukraine 3 / 10 = 30%
Monaco 3 / 3 = 100%
Australia 3 / 22 = 14%
Spain 2 / 20 = 10%
France 2 / 24 = 8%
Germany 1 / 58 = 2%
Hong Kong 1 / 39 = 3% 

Read the whole thing there. By the way, before quoting the numbers in this posting, please read the article because it reveals a more accurate source than Forbes Israel.

Sailer: "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Dzhokhar"

From my new VDARE essay:

Excerpts from press coverage of the acquittal of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on April 15, 2014: 

I
Associated Press: In an expected development, confessed Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was acquitted today on each of four counts of first-degree homicide and 190 counts of aggravated assault. The jury of eleven women and one man declared him “innocent on account of cuteness.” 

II
TMZ: Juror Kendra Newton explained after the verdict, “To be honest, I kind of zoned out, you know? I was trying to pay attention so I could write a book and make a lot of money, but trials are way more boring and confusing than you’d think from TV. They should edit out all the dull parts and have a musical score that tells you how you are supposed to feel.”  

III
World Star Hip Hop: I liked when the lawyer lady said, “If you ain’t a bigot, you must acquit it.” 

IV
Boston Globe: Commenting on the verdict, Senator John McCain, a member of the bipartisan Gang of Seven immigration reform leaders, told reporters, “This just proves what I’ve always believed: We must immediately grant American citizenship to anybody in the world who wants it. And bomb everybody who doesn’t.”

Read the whole thing there.

My first panhandling drive of 2013 has been going pretty well the last three days.

First: you can make a non-tax deductible contribution to me by credit card via WePay by clicking here.

Second: you can make a tax deductible contribution to me via VDARE by clicking here.

Third: You can mail a non-tax deductible donation to:

Steve Sailer
P.O Box 4142
Valley Village, CA 91607-4142

Thanks.

Poor Jason Collins: Google breaks Google Gaydar just in time for his coming out

Last year, I pointed out in Taki's the unintended existence of what I called Google Gaydar. Go to the home page of Google.com and type in the name of a celebrity, then hit the space bar. Google gives you ten possible auto-complete prompts based on what others have typed. If the celebrity is the subject of gay rumors, one of the first prompts will be the word "gay." If that doesn't come up, you can add the letter "g" and see if "gay" comes up. 

For example, Bill Murray got a 0 on Google Gaydar, with the word "gay" never being prompted by Google in either situation. With Kevin Spacey, however, "gay" was the first prompt. 

It was an interesting tool for gauging, for whatever they are worth, public perceptions and rumors, the Undernews.

But now Google has broken Google Gaydar. The prompt system still works, but "gay" won't be offered as prompt. You can type in even "Harvey Fierstein g" and still not get "gay" as a prompt. Today, the first g prompt for the out Broadway actor who often performs in drag is "gerbil" -- that's okay with Google, but "gay" is not. 

Ironically, aged basketball player Jason Collins's carefully choreographed coming out party in the media is snagged on this too: Google's first prompt for "Jason Collins g" is "girlfriend." "Gay" won't come up as a prompt for Collins. Google is trying to force him back into the closet!

Bing Gaydar still seems to work, though.

If you pay attention to Google, you'll notice a lot of oddities like this that come and go. In 2010, I pointed out that Pat Buchanan had been deleted from Google's prompting system. You could type in "Pat Bu" and be prompted with

Pat Burrell
Pat bus schedule
Pat Buttram
Pat Burrell stats
Pat Burns
Pat Burrell wife
Pat Burke
Pat Buckley Moss
Pat Buckley
Pat Burns cancer

But not with the name of the devil incarnate Pat Buchanan. (On Bing, at the time, he was the first prompt.)

Now, however, Pat is back in the good graces of Google Prompt and comes up first.

What happened? Who knows? Nobody was all that interested in asking. My impression is that the media is slightly terrified of Google. The search firm has so much power that all we can do  is hope they live up their motto "Don't be evil," because if they don't, whaddaya whaddaya?

My guess is that these weird events are not generally part of a Conspiracy that Goes All the Way to the Top with Sergey and Larry sitting around deciding who they are going to mess with today.

Instead, my guess is that on the inside, Google is a big ball of twine, with lots of low-level employees having fiefdoms over chunks of the extremely complicated code. If an individual Google worker gets bored and decides to screw with individuals or websites that he doesn't like, he can get away with it for awhile, especially if it's intermittent and thus not always replicable.

For example, I notice that most of the time my posts pop right up in searches, but some fraction of the time, Google forgets about my posts except for my weekly archives. Right now, for example if I type in "Steve Sailer Hart Risley" I get excellent search results to individual posts I've done. Other times, however, I only get links to Blog Archive 10/7/2011 - 10/13/2011 or whatever. This can go on for a few hours, then go back to working right.

Is this just accidental or is some clever Googleite screwing around by creating non-replicable problems for objects of his ire? Who knows? And nobody seems that interested in finding out.

Human Biodiversity: Seven-Footers

Here's a fun 2011 Sports Illustrated article by Pablo Torre on retired NBA seven-footers:

An actual accounting of 7-footers, domestic or global, does not exist in any reliable form. National surveys by the Center for Disease Control list no head count or percentile at that height. (Only 5% of adult American males are 6'3" or taller.) "In terms of the growth spectrum, 7 feet is simply extreme," explains endocrinologist Shlomo Melmed, dean of the medical faculty at L.A.'s Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The term 7-footer is itself a kind of outer limit, a far-off threshold beyond which precise measurement seems superfluous. A 6'4" guard isn't a 6-footer, after all. The curve shaped by the CDC's available statistics, however, does allow one to estimate the number of American men between the ages of 20 and 40 who are 7 feet or taller: fewer than 70 in all. Which indicates, by further extrapolation, that while the probability of, say, an American between 6'6" and 6'8" being an NBA player today stands at a mere 0.07%, it's a staggering 17% for someone 7 feet or taller.

There are a lot of issues with this, but it's not a bad first cut at the question. 

The article focuses upon iSteve favorite Mark Eaton. I learned an important lesson from him when we were at UCLA in 1981.

NumbersUSA: Gang of 8 bill means 33 million more immigrants

Neil Munro writes in the Daily Caller:

The pending Senate immigration bill would bring a minimum of 33 million people into the country during its first decade of operation, according to an analysis by NumbersUSA, a group that wants to slow the current immigration rate. 

By 2024, the inflow would include an estimated 9.2 million illegal immigrants, plus 2.5 million illegals who arrived as children — dubbed ‘Dreamers’ — plus roughly 3.4 million company-sponsored employees with university degrees, said the unreleased analysis. 

The majority of the inflow, or roughly 17 million people, would consist of family members of illegals, recent immigrants and of company-sponsored workers, according to the NumbersUSA analysis provided to The Daily Caller.

Or America could converge to Third World status and the would-be newcomers would decide to stay home or go elsewhere.

Slate: "Why Do So Many Moms Feel Sorry for Dzhokhar? Why Are Teen Girls in Love With Him?"

I hadn't seen this when I wrote my upcoming parody that should appear in VDARE soon, but I could sense it, so this phenomenon makes up one of my piece's major joke-lines.

From Slate:

Why All This Maternal Sympathy for Dzhokhar?
By Hanna Rosin | Posted Monday, April 29, 2013,

It’s not all that surprising that the suspected Boston bombers, particularly younger brother Dzhokhar, have already inspired passionate crushes in girls. (Here is a Tumblr called Free Jahar, as his would-be girlfriends call him, anchored by a photo of him kicking back in his Timberlands.) As Rachel Monroe wrote last year in her excellent essay “The Killer Crush,” extravagant murderers like James Holmes (the Aurora, Colo., shooter) and the Columbine boys tend to bring on alarming fevers of admiration from teenagers, and maybe some of them grow up to be the women who marry the guys in prison. (Hybristophilia is the technical term for getting turned on by high-profile criminals.) 

The fan-girl fantasies involve an injured Dzhokhar showing up at your house and lots of Florence Nightingale–like ministrations (before they get porny, of course). You can almost imagine them as one of the "~♥~ Let me take care of you ~♥~" series of videos where women with soothing voices bring out the warm cloths. Here is a scene from one posted on the “Free Jahar” site: 

[Dzhokhar] sounded much more terrified than you could have possibly been. “Are you okay?” You begged him to tell you he was fine, nobody really knew. “I’m hit, in the leg, but I- wait what? You’re asking if I’m okay?” He was surprised, but calmer now. “I know you didn’t do it, and even if you did, I know you aren’t harmful.” He sighed with your words, he felt safe for the first time since he saw his face on the television. 

But what stands out in the ardor for Dzhokhar is a deep maternal strain. Given what the man is accused of doing—killing an 8-year-old, among others, and helping to set off bombs that were loaded to maim—how do you explain that? In the past week and a half I have not been to a school pickup, birthday, book party, or dinner where one of my mom friends has not said some version of “I feel sorry for that poor kid.” This group includes mothers of infants and grandmothers and generally pretty reasonable intelligent types, including one who is an expert on Middle Eastern extremist groups. 

Many of them mention that ubiquitous photo of Dzhokhar with his hair tousled and too few hairs on his chin to shave. Some bring up the prom photo with the red carnation or the goofy video of him wrestling with his friends.* Some mention the “I love you, bro” tweets from his many friends. Some just seem anguished by the vision of that “poor kid” alone in the boat by himself, bleeding for all those hours. All of this sympathy stems of course from the storyline that coalesced early: a hapless genial pothead being coerced into killing by his sadistic older brother. As with such storylines, all evidence to the contrary gets suppressed. 

And Rosin brings up, naively, another one of my upcoming essay's joke themes:

(Older brother Tamerlan’s inability to continue to box in the top national competition because he wasn’t a citizen after a rule change barring legal residents—in other words, to become more American—seems to have narrowed his options and radicalized him, for example.)

Finally, a gay male athlete comes out and he is ...

There has been much anticipation in the press that Real Soon Now an active major team sport jock would finally come out of the closet. But I've noticed that there has been an automatic assumption that he would turn out to be a good player -- you know, like, Tom Brady would announce that he had been living a lie, just going through the motions with Bridget Moynahan and Giselle Bundchen. 

But, what, I wondered, if the gay comer-outer turned out to be lousy? That's not exactly unprecedented. For example, when I was young, I was a big fan of the L.A. Dodgers during their pennant years of 1977-78. They had lots of fine ballplayers -- Sutton, Garvey, Cey, Lopes, Russell, Reggie Smith, Dusty Baker, and so forth -- and a terrible player, Glenn Burke. Well, eventually, Burke was traded to Oakland and then they cut him and then he came out of the closet and then died of AIDS. 

Ever since, you read about how he was a victim of prejudice, that that's what halted his baseball career. No, what hurt Burke's career was that he was no good. He was an outfielder/ first basemen who, at his peak in age 25 in 94 games hit .233 with 1 homer and 16 rbis. My recollection of Burke from listening to a lot of Dodger games on the radio was: "rally killer." For his career from age 23 to 26 his Wins Above Replacement number was -2.4. In other words, some random Triple A player would have been less deleterious to the Dodgers, but they kept giving him a chance to prove himself because he was fast and looked strong. (My vague impression is that Burke was assumed to be gay by Dodger management.)

The Collins Twins: Compare the facial
expressions. Which one looks gay?

So, today, NBA player Jason Collins announced to vast fanfare that he was gay. He is a 34-year-old seven-footer who, along with his 6'11" twin brother Jarron Collins, has been well-publicized since the 1990s, first at Harvard-Westlake (where actor Jason Segel was his back-up), then during four years at Stanford, where he finally developed into an effective Division I player as a senior, then as a #18 pick in the first round of the NBA draft. (I've often written about the Collins twins since I'm interested in twins for what they can teach us about human biodiversity. As I noted in Taki's three years ago, the Collins twins, like the NBA Lopez twins, are publicly agnostic on whether they are identical or fraternal twins.)

The Collins twins are a West Coast version of all those hated Duke basketball players from stable middle class backgrounds who stick around college for four years and learn to play team basketball, then go on to unimpressive NBA careers because they aren't super athletes. Personally, I like the Duke/Stanford model of recruiting athletes who aren't complete thugs and aren't totally out of place at an academic institution, but I'm in a minority.

As befits their middle class backgrounds and zillion dollar educations, the Collins twins are articulate. For example, when retired NBA player John Amaechi came out of the closet in 2007, amid much celebration of his bravery, I quoted Jarron pointing out:

"[Teammate Jarron] Collins' memory, though, is that Amaechi wasn't just indifferent toward his job, but irritated by it and the pro sports atmosphere. "He just wasn't interested in basketball, period," Collins said. "I never knew someone who just disliked the game. I would say that everyone has different motivations to play the game of basketball. John was very clear that money was his. But it really was like, he didn't like the game. It's kind of hard if you hate it." 

Amaechi was an example of how much some gay men don't like sports, even if they are being paid millions to play a sport. Amaechi was a 6'10" and 270 pound project from England who never developed because he despised practicing basketball as something that kept him away from visiting art galleries and his other interests, none of which had anything to do with sports.

I pointed out during the brief Amaechi whoop-tee-doo that the most likely gay male contact sport players would be guys who were given the rare genetic gifts to play whether or not they were obsessed with competitive sports, such as very tall basketball players. (In contrast, small, ferocious, over-achieving star athletes are unlikely to be gay. For example, I'm guessing that Wes Welker isn't gay. Let's see if he's married. Oh, indeed he is ... Mrs. Welker was formerly Miss Hooters.)

And what do you know? The next example of a team sport athlete coming out of the closet turns out to be another NBA big man.

My impression is that Jason Collins isn't a complete fraud like Amaechi was, that Collins is a conscientious professional athlete who worked hard at defense. Despite his height, he was never a shot blocker, but I believe he had good fundamentals on defense.

But he's still terrible at this stage in his career.

Jason's coming out of the closet is being given a big whoop-tee-do on the grounds that he is the first active male major team sport player to do so. But, "active" sounds like a stretch. In his just concluded season with two teams at age 34, he played only 384 minutes out of a possible 3936 or more.

Basketball-Reference has a handy "Per 36 minutes" section that projects out how well he would have done if he'd been allowed to play full time (and had not gotten tired or fouled out). Collins' 2012-13 per 36 minute stats are some of the worst I've ever seen. If he'd played 36 minutes per game, the seven-footer would have averaged 3.8 points per game, 5.6 rebounds, 0.7 assists, 0.9 blocks, and 8.0 personal fouls. His field goal percentage was .310!

Nate Silver, who isn't exactly unbiased, writes in the New York Times:

In some ways, that makes Mr. Collins’s decision to come out much braver. He would hardly have been guaranteed a job next year, regardless of his sexual orientation. If N.B.A. teams discriminate against him at all for being gay, that could keep him on the sidelines.

More skeptically, perhaps Jason Collins is trying to pressure the NBA into giving him one more year just to prove they aren't homophobic? Or this announcement could be calculated to help him do well on the public appearance circuit in his onrushing retirement. He can now look forward to several years of being paid to accept awards for his "bravery." Maybe this will get him a shot at a TV gig.

But, Jason, even before he got old, has never been very good (and 6'-11" Jarron, who has been out of the league for two years, was worse). A few weeks ago, commenter jody wrote:

when i was younger i didn't get this at first, and chuckled along when [ESPN] clowned players like [shawn] bradley. then after a while, i started to get it, and noticed they never ridiculed the goofy, clumsy, or just plain bad black players with nearly as much verve or ardor. and there are a lot of them. they screw up all the time too or have terrible careers. and the sports guys simply ignore it most of the time. 

i remember during some of bradley's later seasons, there were these twins in the league, jason collins and jarron collins, who were pure crap. yet they were 25 minute a game starters at center, and not one time ever were they clowned by ESPN or any sports writers. these two guys turned in a few seasons where they were playing 30 minutes a game and scoring 4 points or something ridiculous, the way erick dampier was for a couple years.

And that was back in their 20s when Jason and Jarron were young. Jason is old and extremely bad now, but being mediocre at his brief peak, then decrepit for years, and gay hasn't kept him from collecting $32,816,349 in salary over his career.

A sidelight is that this raises the question of concordance in terms of sexual identity among identical twins. (We don't know that the Collins' are identical, but that's the way to guess.) Jason writes in Sports Illustrated:

The first relative I came out to was my aunt Teri, a superior court judge in San Francisco. Her reaction surprised me. "I've known you were gay for years," she said....

It was around this time that I began noticing subtle differences between Jarron and me. Our twinness was no longer synchronized. I couldn't identify with his attraction to girls. ... 

I didn't come out to my brother until last summer. His reaction to my breakfast revelation was radically different from Aunt Teri's. He was downright astounded. He never suspected. So much for twin telepathy.

Northwestern U. psychologist J. Michael Bailey has done two studies of sexual orientation concordance among male identical twins. The first came up with an estimate of 50%, but Bailey became uncomfortable with the possibility that his figure was biased from how he'd recruited participants. So, he did another one using the national twin registry in Australia, and came up with, I believe, a figure of only around 22%. That is well above the single digit percentage you'd find if both nature and nurture among identical twins raised together had no effect and sexual orientation was completely random, but it's still strikingly low, meaning the causes of male homosexuality remain scientifically murky.

By the way, a half-dozen years ago I put up a post about Where are all the famous gay oldtime baseball players? After all, there is a vast literature devoted to the history of baseball, and yet few examples of old timers who turned out to be gay. A number of commenters wrote in to point out that everybody knows that a certain well-known hitter who is not quite a Hall of Famer (but was really good) is gay. This bon vivant was a media favorite during his long baseball career for his manners, charm, and superb taste in fine dining. In other words, he was an exemplar of some stereotypically gay virtues. But, he was not subject to many gay rumors, however, because most of the gay rumors are started by gays as sex fantasies, and this ballplayer was always a little on the plump side.

P.S., a commenter points out that Jason Collins still scores a zero on my Google Gaydar system of using Google's search prompts to see if anybody had been searching to see if he was gay. (Granted there are several Jason Collins out there, but the first prompt was NBA so he's the most prominent.) He's the kind of nice young gay man who doesn't loom large in gay fantasies.

By the way, I was recently cited as an authority on the TV show Red Eye by guest Gavin McInnes as the authority on the lack of gays among male golfers. Gavin slightly overstated my findings in saying there are "no" gay male golfers, but it is clear that in golf gay men are as rare, both at the professional and at the enthusiastic hobbyist level, as lesbians are common. As I pointed out in "Why Lesbians Aren't Gay" way back in 1994:

In roughly half the traits, homosexuals tend to more resemble the opposite sex than they do the rest of their own sex. For example, many heterosexual men and lesbian women are enthusiasts for golf, as well as other hit-a-ball-with-a-stick games like softball and pool. Lesbian-feminist sportswriter Mariah Burton Nelson recently estimated, not implausibly, that 30% of the Ladies Professional Golf Association women touring pros were lesbians. While such estimates are hard to verify, it's clear that the marketers at the LPGA desperately wish they had more mothers-of-three like Nancy Lopez, the most popular woman golfer ever: i.e., a victorious yet still feminine champion with whom other heterosexual women enjoy identifying. 

In contrast, pre-menopausal straight women and gay men typically find golf pointless. For example, despite incessant socialization toward golf, only one out of nine wives of PGA touring pros plays golf herself! And gay male golf fanatics are so rare that it's difficult to even come up with an exception that proves this rule (which might explain why golfers wear those god-awful pants).

Among famous gay male entertainers who are enthusiastic golfers, the only name that comes to mind is Johnny Mathis.

On the other hand, other country club sports, such as tennis (Bill Tilden and Hitler's favorite Baron Gottfried von Cramm) and diving (Greg Louganis), have gay male legends. I would hardly be surprised if the gay percentage in men's golf isn't at least as high as in baseball, but it's still low.

In summary, the weight of evidence illuminates much about the natures of masculinity and femininity, which are rather things to understand.

Tamerlan: An unambitious pimp

From the Washington Post:

The Tsarnaev family: A faded portrait of an immigrant’s American dream 

... A neighbor who lived next to the Tsarnaev family for five years said the older brother stood out in the early years for his flashy clothes and his devotion to fitness. 

“He used to be more dressed like a pimp, kind of Eurotrash,” said the neighbor, who declined to be named, for fear of being associated with terrorists. “Trying to be fancy, but cheap looking” in pointy-toed shoes and matched track suits. ...

Katherine Russell grew up in a sprawling house on a quiet cul-de-sac in North Kingstown, R.I., not far from the ocean. Her pedigree was New England blue blood: Her grandfather and father both attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale. Her father is an emergency room doctor. Her mother is a nurse and social worker. 

Tall and fit, with long auburn hair, Russell graduated in 2007 from high school and soon left home to attend Suffolk University in Boston. She was interested in the Peace Corps and excelled at drawing, winning a state competition. 

In Boston, Russell met Tamerlan at a nightclub, according to her attorney. 

... Russell’s family was startled when she dropped out of college, converted to Islam and began to cover her hair, legs and arms in a show of Muslim modesty. ...

Marriage changed Tamerlan, as well. He dropped the flashy clothes, a change in look so drastic that his next-door neighbor at first thought the tall, athletic son had left town. Tamerlan now came out in the street in raggedy sweatpants and ratty T-shirts, sometimes with a bathrobe over his clothes. 

“I thought a different person had moved in,” the neighbor said.

Zubeidat was arrested last year, accused of trying to steal up to nine dresses from a Lord & Taylor store in Natick, Mass. The couple’s two daughters, Bella and Ailina, moved to New Jersey, where Bella was arrested in December, along with a man named Ahmad Khalil, and charged with possession of and intent to distribute marijuana. ... 

Back in Cambridge, Tamerlan and Russell received welfare payments, just as his parents had in earlier years, the Massachusetts Health and Human Services agency confirmed. 

Finances were tight. ... And in late January, the Tsarnaevs lost the Section 8 housing voucher that had subsidized their rent, according to someone in local government familiar with the case. 

The only steady income at the Norfolk Street apartment came from Russell, who, according to her family’s attorney, worked 70 to 80 hours a week as a home health aide while Tamerlan stayed home with their daughter. 

“He wasn’t really willing to work,” the Russell family intimate said.  

So, basically, Tamerlan was an unambitious pimp who, after he landed one woman to support him, was too lazy to keep up appearances.

Interestingly, an ethnographic documentary featuring Tamerlan's cab-driving second cousin Chic Tsarnaev was made in 1993 by Tracey Ullman. It's quite culturally informative.

My first panhandling drive of 2013 has been going pretty well the last couple of days.

First: you can make a non-tax deductible contribution to me by credit card via WePay by clicking here.

Second: you can make a tax deductible contribution to me via VDARE by clicking here. I should have a new VDARE article out by midweek or so.

Third: You can mail a non-tax deductible donation to:

Steve Sailer
P.O Box 4142
Valley Village, CA 91607-4142

Thanks.

Open Borders: The Case

From The Atlantic:

If People Could Immigrate Anywhere, Would Poverty Be Eliminated? 

Some economists are pushing for "open borders" 

SHAUN RAVIV 

What if there was a program that would cost nothing, improve the lives of millions of people from poorer nations, and double world GDP? At least one economist says that increased mobility of people is by far the biggest missed opportunity in development. And an informally aligned group of advocates is doing its best to make the world aware of the "open borders" movement, which suggests that individuals should be able to move between countries at will. 

Vipul Naik is the face, or at least the voice, of open borders on the Internet. In March 2012, he launched Open Borders: The Case, a website dedicated to the idea. Naik, a Ph.D. candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, is striving for "a world where there is a strong presumption in favor of allowing people to migrate and where this presumption can be overridden or curtailed only under exceptional circumstances."

I don't know what kind of name Shaun Raviv is, but Vipul Naik is a polite and intelligent young graduate of Chennai Mathematical Institute in Tamil Nadu, India. 

I admire his ethnocentric loyalty. His people have overpopulated their own country, with dire consequences. He strives to talk Americans into allowing his people to come to America in vast numbers to overpopulate our country.

Douthat on the real purpose of "immigration reform"

From the NYT:

When Assimilation Stalls 

By ROSS DOUTHAT 

THE immigration legislation percolating in the Senate ... real priority is to accelerate existing immigration trends. The enforcement mechanisms phase in gradually, with ambiguous prospects for success, while the legislation’s impact on migration would be immediate: more paths to residency for foreigners, instant legal status for the 11 million here illegally, and the implicit promise to future border-crossers that some kind of amnesty always comes to those who come and wait. 

Today, almost 25 percent of working-age Americans are first-generation immigrants or their children. That figure is up sharply since the 1960s, and it’s projected to climb to 37 percent by 2050. A vote for the Senate legislation would be a vote for that number to climb faster still. 

The bill has been written this way because America’s leadership class, Republicans as well as Democrats, assumes that continued mass immigration is exactly what our economy needs. As America struggles to adapt to an aging population, the bill’s supporters argue, immigrants offer youth, vitality and tax dollars. As we try to escape economic stagnation, mass immigration promises an extra shot of growth. 

Is there any reason to be skeptical of this optimistic consensus? Actually, there are two: the assimilation patterns for descendants of Hispanic (particularly Mexican) immigrants and the socioeconomic disarray among the native-born poor and working class. 

Conservatives have long worried that recent immigrants from Latin America would assimilate more slowly than previous new arrivals — because of their sheer numbers and shared language, and because the American economy has changed in ways that make it harder for less-educated workers to assimilate and rise. 

As my colleague David Leonhardt wrote recently, those fears seem unfounded if you look at second-generation Hispanics, who make clear progress — economic, educational and linguistic — relative to their immigrant parents.
But there’s a substantial body of literature showing that progress stalling out, especially for Mexican-Americans, between the second generation and the third. A 2002 study, for instance, reported that despite “improvements in human capital and earnings” for second-generation Mexican immigrants, the third generation still “trails the education and earnings of the average American,” and shows little sign of catching up. In their 2009 book “Generations of Exclusion,” the sociologists Edward Telles and Vilma Ortiz found similar stagnation and slippage for descendants of Mexican immigrants during the second half of the 20th century. 

Hispanics not catching up to whites economically

This would seem relevant to thinking about immigration policy, but almost nobody draws the connection. Annie Lowrey writes in the NYT:

The Urban Institute study found that the racial wealth gap yawned during the recession, even as the income gap between white Americans and nonwhite Americans remained stable. As of 2010, white families, on average, earned about $2 for every $1 that black and Hispanic families earned, a ratio that has remained roughly constant for the last 30 years. But when it comes to wealth — as measured by assets, like cash savings, homes and retirement accounts, minus debts, like mortgages and credit card balances — white families have far outpaced black and Hispanic ones. Before the recession, white families, on average, were about four times as wealthy as nonwhite families, according to the Urban Institute’s analysis of Federal Reserve data. By 2010, whites were about six times as wealthy. 

The dollar value of that gap has grown, as well. By the most recent data, the average white family had about $632,000 in wealth, versus $98,000 for black families and $110,000 for Hispanic families.

A commenter writes in:

Please note that the MEDIAN wealth for white families was 110,729 in 2010. For black households the "wealth" drops to 4,995 and Hispanics "wealth" is 7,424. These are figures released by the United States Census Bureau. 

Lowrey (is she Ezra Klein's girlfriend?) continues:

Two major factors helped to widen this wealth gap in recent years. The first is that the housing downturn hit black and Hispanic households harder than it hit white households, in aggregate. Many young Hispanic families, for instance, bought homes as the housing bubble was inflating and reaching its peak, leaving them saddled with heavy debt burdens as house prices plunged in places like suburban Phoenix and inland California.

So, lenders overestimated Hispanic ability to pay off big loans.

Discriminatory lending practices were also a factor. “We know that communities of color, their rate of subprime or predatory loans was twice what it is in the overall population,” said Tom Shapiro, the director of the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University. 

So, lenders underestimated Hispanic ability to pay off big loans.

Which one is it?

Something similar may be happening as the housing recovery takes hold. “Some people talk about it in terms of a land grab,” said Professor Hamilton of the New School, as mainly white investors are buying foreclosed homes from disproportionately minority owners. “As the housing market starts to appreciate, some of those minority buyers might not be back.”

Clearly, the failure of minorities to pay their old mortgages means we'll need more programs to fight discrimination and racial inequality by encouraging fast-buck lenders to give them new mortgages. What could possibly go wrong?