Tall Noses Unclear on the Concept!

Yesterday, I cited Accordion Guy's discovery of a Japanese website's how-to diagrams for Santa Clauses on handing out gifts. This one, for example, suggests an overly-literal translation of the English phrase "stocking-stuffer" (along with that faintly fetishistic undertone that seems so common in Japanese culture). Today, a reader writes:

The page Accordion Guy links to is actually a parody. I've posted a rough translation here:

For example, the caption for this diagram reads:

Join the orthodox school of Santas with a traditional stocking stuffer. ... You can stuff presents into the stockings hanging by the bedside, but to avoid any confusion, just put the present inside her sock. Although it might hurt a bit if it's a big present, that is the way to true Santa-hood. Because then you're a Santa-kurousu. [Great pun, hard to translate. "Santa" + 苦労 kurou ("suffering") + すsu (infinitive verb ending) = "Claus."]

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

The American Conservative's December 19th issue

As a Christmas bonus, much of the issue is online, including articles by me, Gary "War Nerd" Brecher, Pat Buchanan, Scott McConnell, John Zmirak, Roger D. McGrath, Leon Hadar, Jim Antle, and Bill Kauffman.

End of the Rainbow
By Roger D. McGrath
Blacks lose the most ground in Los Angeles’ ongoing Hispanicization.

French Lessons
By Steve Sailer
The nation that neocons most love to hate has followed their immigration prescriptions—to devastating results.

Free Vermont
By Bill Kauffman
The Green Mountain State’s secession movement brings together hippie greens and libertarian gun owners.

Diminishing Returns
By W. James Antle III
Tax cuts and liberal-baiting may no longer be a surefire electoral strategy for the GOP.

Innocent Abroad
By Leon Hadar
Karen Hughes brings the gospel of Bush to the heathen masses.

Siberian Shamans at Wal-Mart
By John Zmirak
A blessed Santaclaustide to one and all!

Some of My Best Friends
By Steve Sailer
“Rent” doesn’t pay.

The Worst and the Dullest
By Scott McConnell
The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq by George Packer

Dueling Loyalties
By Howard Sutherland
The 50% American: Immigration and National Identity in the Age of Terror by Stanley A. Renshon

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The American Conservative Today

Purchase an online edition of this issue immediately!

It’s All Greek to Victor Davis Hanson
By Gary Brecher
A War Like No Other by Victor Davis Hanson


Who Killed General Motors?
By Patrick J. Buchanan
The Death of Economic Patriotism

The Cost of Sycophancy
By William Pfaff
Once-imperial Britain learns to kowtow.

Princely Advice
By Taki
The president should read The Prince.


Fourteen Days: Murtha-Hagel ’08; Republicans’ loose construction of the Magna Carta; Edwards feels heat, sees light

Deep Background: Businessmen cash out of Syria; Chechen mob supplies al-Qaeda; Argentina’s bungled counter-terrorism

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

Holidays

Noah Millman on Hanukkah and Christmas:

Besides being a minor holiday, and far from central to the Jewish religious narrative as Christmas is in the Christian religious narrative, Hanukkah is a decidedly particularist holiday, where Christmas is universalist. Judaism is, ultimately, universalist, but it gets to universalism through particularism. And Hanukkah speaks specifically to that particularism; it's a holiday of national deliverance, about the rededication of our Temple, the liberation of our people. Yes, these events ultimately have universal significance, but you're starting several steps removed. Christianity, by contrast, trumpets its universalism, and nowhere more clearly than in the story of Christmas, about God's presence on Earth becoming material and concrete.

It is a bit ridiculous, then, to see how our culture has on the one hand tried to suppress official recognition of Christmas (not only by the government but by other nonpublic but impersonal bodies; how many corporations send out Christmas cards as opposed to seasonal "holiday" cards?) while on the other hand ostentatiously celebrating Hanukkah alongside what recognition Christmas gets as if the presence of a menorah somehow "kashered" a Christmas tree. A Hanukkah menorah most certainly does not "universalize" a Christmas tree; if anything, the opposite is true: it turns the tree, which symbolizes a holiday whose message is "joy to the world and peace on Earth" into a particularist symbol like the menorah itself.

And it is very strange indeed that, as my boss related to me yesterday, his kids are learning Hanukkah songs at school but no "religious" Christmas songs ("Frosty the Snowman" is OK, but not "Silent Night") or that a lawyer we deal with, a Lutheran, can report that her son came home the other day and announced that he wishes he could celebrate Hanukkah (which he'd been learning about at his public school). Inasmuch as it is a religious holiday, Hanukkah should be just as problematic to the anti-religious vigilantes as Christmas; and inasmuch as it's a holiday with communal overtones, it's a holiday celebrated by the Jewish people, not the American people.

Of course, as a Jew, I appreciate the gesture. Having a menorah in the lobby of my building is nice - it says, in effect, "hey, we know this is your holiday now; have a good one." But I'm not entirely happy with it. Public celebration of Hanukkah distorts the holiday...

If I had to compare Hanukkah to an American and Christian holiday, it would not be Christmas, but rather Thanksgiving. What, ultimately, are we giving thanks for on Thanksgiving? For the fact that the American experiment was going to go forward, apparently with God's blessing.

*

What's wrong with MLK Day: A reader writes:

It's not the weather that makes MLK Day not a fun holiday. Everybody manages to party for the Super Bowl and it's impossible to get dinner reservations on Valentine's Day. MLK Day is boring because it's not associated with any fun activity. Even the serious Memorial Day has flowers and picnics to enliven it. What fun activity could white people participate in regarding this day where we would not be called racist? Let's say that August is the new destination for the MLK Day celebration, as you suggested, and we all have cookouts where we eat fried chicken and watermelon and play basketball. What would Jesse Jackson have to say about that?

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

"The Producers"

I saw a screening of the movie version of Mel Brooks's musical tonight. I sat there with a big dumb grin on my face the whole way through. At least a half dozen production numbers received rounds of applause from the audience. Along with about two-thirds of the crowd, I sat all the way through the credits to hear all the additional songs, such as Will Ferrell as Franz Liebkind, lunatic playwright of Springtime for Hitler, singing a mellow Jack Johnson-style ballad version of "Der Guten Tag Hop Clop." And a five second cameo at the very end of the credits by Mr. Brooks himself brought shouts of approval.

On the other hand, the guy in front of me didn't laugh once and left less than a second after the credits started rolling. (He probably liked "Rent.") This is a very old-fashioned musical, both a parody of and a tribute to old Broadway. To my mind, when it comes to musicals, "old-fashioned" is a synonym for "good," but if you don't agree, watch out.

Or if you are the kind of person who can't understand why they remade the 1968 movie version (hint: the new film has lots more singin' and dancin'), then it won't be for you.

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

A Christmas present from Steven D. Levitt?

The Freakonomist used his latest column in the New York Times magazine to promote a new unpublished paper by U. of Chicago grad student Andy Francis as:

" ... an empirical argument that may fundamentally challenge how people think about sex."

It turns out that Andy Francis was a research assistant to Dr. Levitt in 2003-2004.

And Mr. Francis describes the paper praised by Dr. Levitt in the New York Times as his “Job Market Paper.”

While this apparent attempt by Dr. Levitt to use his soapbox in the New York Times to help out an old student’s job search certainly reflects well on his amiability, my vague impression is that the NYT prefers that its writers disclose this kind of conflict of interest to readers. Perhaps Dr. Levitt obtained a waiver of the disclosure policy in this case from his editors? Or perhaps he forgot to mention it to them at the same time he was forgetting to mention to his readers that Francis's study was statistically insignificant?

By the way, Francis's paper is really quite good, even though he doesn't come close to proving his theory.

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

The Economy of Desire

The Economy of Desire: One of the most difficult questions in the social sciences is what causes male homosexual behavior. Is it innate? (And if it is, how did not disappear due to natural selection.) Is it conditioned by society? Freely chosen? (In contrast, the level of female homosexual behavior is clearly responsive to changes in social attitudes.)

In the New York Times Magazine, Steven D. Levitt writes in his Freakonomics column that a new study by a U. of Chicago grad student named Andy Francis found that:

Not a single man in the survey who had a relative with AIDS said he had had sex with a man in the previous five years; not a single man in that group declared himself to be attracted to men or to consider himself homosexual....

Because the sample size was so small - simple chance suggests that no more than a handful of men in a group that size would be attracted to men - it is hard to reach definitive conclusions from the survey data. (Obviously, not every single man changes his sexual behavior or identity when a relative contracts AIDS.) But taken as a whole, the numbers in Francis's study suggest that there may be a causal effect here - that having a relative with AIDS may change not just sexual behavior but also self-reported identity and desire.

In other words, sexual preference, while perhaps largely predetermined, may also be subject to the forces more typically associated with economics than biology. If this turns out to be true, it would change the way that everyone - scientists, politicians, theologians - thinks about sexuality. But it probably won't much change the way economists think. To them, it has always been clear: whether we like it or not, everything has its price.

Some rather grand claims.

Unfortunately, Levitt didn't bother to inform the NYT-reading public that the sample size of men who had a relative with AIDS was so tiny, only 60 individuals in total, that Francis's study did not attain statistical significance even at the loose 5 percent level.

The percentage of men in the no-relative-with-AIDS sample of 1451 who had engaged in homosexual acts in the last five years was 4.4%. That means that if there was no actual correlation between having a relative with AIDS and sexual orientation, you’d expect only to find 2.64 men having engaged in homosexual acts out of his sample of 60 who had a relative with AIDS. Instead of two or three such men, he found zero.

As reported here in Table 6, the p-value for this correlation was 0.086, meaning that if the relationship between the two variables was purely random, you'd still expect to find that result (0 men out of 60) 8.6% of the time by pure fluke.

Is that 0 out of 60 meaningful? Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows?

Clearly, this study should be redone with an adequate sample size. Unfortunately, putting together a large enough and unbiased enough sample to do these kind of subtle analyses of male homosexuality has historically proven very difficult.

One major concern over how much credence to put in Francis's result is data-mining, or looking at a lot of relationships and then highlighting the ones that appear statistically unlikely to happen by chance. The 1992 database Mr. Francis used allows a large number of statistical tests to be run. If you looked at 100 different correlations, you’d expect to find an average of five that are statistically significant at the five percent level.

So, one relevant question is whether Mr. Francis started his research in order to test a pre-existing hypothesis that being exposed to people with AIDS would make a man less likely to engage in male homosexuality. I’d never heard the theory before, but perhaps it was going around in some circles. (Apparently, he did not -- he only formulated it after looking at data.)

I don’t have a strong opinion on Mr. Francis’s theory on male homosexuality. (Few doubt that female homosexual behavior is responsive to changing social pressures, but most experienced researchers treat male and female homosexuality as highly distinct.) It sounds modestly plausible in theory, but I can’t think of much historical evidence for it. The only bit of anecdotal evidence for it that I can recall is that singer Lou Reed converted to heterosexuality (and stopped shooting heroin) right after AIDS was discovered. In contrast, San Francisco, for example, didn’t see mass conversions to heterosexuality after 1982. Indeed, AIDS seemed to lead, if anything, to an increased public commitment to homosexuality.

In summary, Mr. Francis has made a worthy beginning, but his hypothesis desperately needs to be retested with an adequate sample size.

Dr. Levitt would have been better advised to publicize this study on this blog, which is the appropriate medium for this kind of Scientific Wild Ass Guess. (In general, a better brand name for Dr. Levitt's version of social science than Freakonomics would be Scientific Wild Ass Guessonomics. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Blogs are fine sites to try out hypotheses.) Unfortunately, Levitt put it in the New York Times and failed to inform the public that the result was statistically insignificant.

Perhaps the correlation will prove to be true. But it may well not pan out. If that's so, it may be too late to recall the Instant Conventional Wisdom that Levitt has generated. "A lie goes halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on."

Andy Francis replies here.

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

The Economy of Desire

One of the most difficult questions in the social sciences is what causes male homosexual behavior. Is it innate? (And if it is, how did not disappear due to natural selection.) Is it conditioned by society? Freely chosen? (In contrast, the level of female homosexual behavior is clearly responsive to changes in social attitudes.)

In the New York Times Magazine, Steven D. Levitt writes in his Freakonomics column that a new study by a U. of Chicago grad student named Andy Francis found that:

Not a single man in the survey who had a relative with AIDS said he had had sex with a man in the previous five years; not a single man in that group declared himself to be attracted to men or to consider himself homosexual....

Because the sample size was so small - simple chance suggests that no more than a handful of men in a group that size would be attracted to men - it is hard to reach definitive conclusions from the survey data. (Obviously, not every single man changes his sexual behavior or identity when a relative contracts AIDS.) But taken as a whole, the numbers in Francis's study suggest that there may be a causal effect here - that having a relative with AIDS may change not just sexual behavior but also self-reported identity and desire.

In other words, sexual preference, while perhaps largely predetermined, may also be subject to the forces more typically associated with economics than biology. If this turns out to be true, it would change the way that everyone - scientists, politicians, theologians - thinks about sexuality. But it probably won't much change the way economists think. To them, it has always been clear: whether we like it or not, everything has its price.

Some rather grand claims.

Unfortunately, Levitt didn't bother to inform the NYT-reading public that the sample size of men who had a relative with AIDS was so tiny, only 60 individuals in total, that Francis's study did not attain statistical significance even at the loose 5 percent level.

The percentage of men in the no-relative-with-AIDS sample of 1451 who had engaged in homosexual acts in the last five years was 4.4%. That means that if there was no actual correlation between having a relative with AIDS and sexual orientation, you’d expect only to find 2.64 men having engaged in homosexual acts out of his sample of 60 who had a relative with AIDS. Instead of two or three such men, he found zero.

As reported here in Table 6, the p-value for this correlation was 0.086, meaning that if the relationship between the two variables was purely random, you'd still expect to find that result (0 men out of 60) 8.6% of the time by pure fluke.

Is that 0 out of 60 meaningful? Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows?

Clearly, this study should be redone with an adequate sample size. Unfortunately, putting together a large enough and unbiased enough sample to do these kind of subtle analyses of male homosexuality has historically proven very difficult.

One major concern over how much credence to put in Francis's result is data-mining, or looking at a lot of relationships and then highlighting the ones that appear statistically unlikely to happen by chance. The 1992 database Mr. Francis used allows a large number of statistical tests to be run. If you looked at 100 different correlations, you’d expect to find an average of five that are statistically significant at the five percent level.

So, one relevant question is whether Mr. Francis started his research in order to test a pre-existing hypothesis that being exposed to people with AIDS would make a man less likely to engage in male homosexuality. I’d never heard the theory before, but perhaps it was going around in some circles. (Apparently, he did not -- he only formulated it after looking at data.)

I don’t have a strong opinion on Mr. Francis’s theory (Few doubt that female homosexual behavior is responsive to changing social pressures, but most researchers into homosexuality treat male and female homosexuality has highly distinct.) It sounds modestly plausible in theory, but I can’t think of much historical evidence for it. The only bit of anecdotal evidence for it that I can recall is that singer Lou Reed converted to heterosexuality (and stopped shooting heroin) right after AIDS was discovered. In contrast, San Francisco, for example, didn’t see mass conversions to heterosexuality after 1982. Indeed, AIDS seemed to lead, if anything, to an increased public commitment to homosexuality.

In summary, Mr. Francis has made a worthy beginning, but his hypothesis desperately needs to be retested with an adequate sample size.

Dr. Levitt would have been better advised to publicize this study on this blog, which is the appropriate medium for this kind of Scientific Wild Ass Guess. (In general, a better brand name for Dr. Levitt's version of social science than Freakonomics would be Scientific Wild Ass Guessonomics. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Blogs are fine sites to try out hypotheses.) Unfortunately, Levitt put it in the New York Times and failed to inform the public that the result was statistically insignificant.

Perhaps the correlation will prove to be true. But it may well not pan out. If that's so, it may be too late to recall the Instant Conventional Wisdom that Levitt has generated. "A lie goes halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on."

Andy Francis replies here.

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

Every man a king!

The Irish Genghis Khan has been discovered. In northwestern Ireland, one out of every five Y-chromosomes appears to be descended in the direct male line from from the early medieval Uí Néill dynasty. I wouldn't be surprised if actor Sam Neill ("Jurassic Park"), who was born in Northern Ireland, is a direct descendent. (He's not as kingly as Sean Connery, but he'd do.)

Here's the abstract from American Journal of Human Genetics:

A Y-Chromosome Signature of Hegemony in Gaelic Ireland
Laoise T. Moore et al.

Seventeen-marker simple tandem repeat genetic analysis of Irish Y chromosomes reveals a previously unnoted modal haplotype that peaks in frequency in the northwestern part of the island. It shows a significant association with surnames purported to have descended from the most important and enduring dynasty of early medieval Ireland, the Uí Néill. This suggests that such phylogenetic predominance is a biological record of past hegemony and supports the veracity of semimythological early genealogies. The fact that about one in five males sampled in northwestern Ireland is likely a patrilineal descendent of a single early medieval ancestor is a powerful illustration of the potential link between prolificacy and power and of how Y-chromosome phylogeography can be influenced by social selection.

And here's a 2003 article, "The Norse Code," by Neil Macphail:

Are you a MacDonald herding sheep on your lonely croft? A MacDougall commuting home from your office job? Or even a MacAlister living a quiet but humdrum life?

If so, there is every possibility that lurking in your body is the genetic fingerprint of one of Scotland's greatest warriors - a fearsome man capable of tearing the heart out of a Viking foe.

An Oxford University scientist has traced the Y-chromosome, which determines maleness, of the founder of Clan Donald - the great Somerled of Argyll, who was born around 1100 and drove out the Viking invaders.

Geneticist Bryan Sykes says this microscopic fragment of the fearsome fighter still lives on in the DNA of half a million clansmen throughout the world. Indeed Professor Sykes says the Y-chromosome of the Gaelic warrior, who it seems had Norse blood himself, is so prevalent it could be among the most successful in the world.

Prof. Sykes and his team made the discovery almost by accident while they were researching genetic links between the Scots and the Vikings and looking for Norse Y-chromosomes. He and researcher Jayne Nicholson had taken thousands of DNA samples from men in the Highlands and Western Isles, and spotted a group that stood out.

They were at first puzzled, then Miss Nicholson looked at the donors' names. These revealed that among the men with the identical Y-chromosomes were MacDonalds, MacAlisters and MacDougalls. Prof. Sykes said: "There didn't seem all that much in it until Jayne said quietly that these clans were related. "The possibility that this Y-chromosome was inherited from the common ancestor of the MacDonalds, MacDougalls and MacAlisters was incredibly exciting.

They wrote to dozens of those clansmen throughout Scotland, enclosing a sampling brush for them to collect DNA from inside their cheeks. In the samples of those who replied, they found a single common Y-chromosome. To be double sure this was Somerled's, Prof Sykes embarked on a sensitive piece of research involving the living chiefs of the Clan Donald and their septs.

He said: "I wanted to see if the clan chiefs still alive, whose recorded genealogies descend from Somerled, also shared the same chromosome. This was a delicate task. We might find one or more of the chiefs did not have it - meaning one of their paternal ancestors might have been adopted, or had not been the biological father of his heir.

He approached Lord Godfrey Macdonald, Sir Ian Macdonald of Sleat, Ranald MacDonald of Clan Ranald, William McAlester of Loup and Ranald MacDonnell of Glengary, enclosing a DNA brush. The result was conclusive: 'They all shared the same chromosome. There was now no dought we had identified the legacy of Somerled.'

Now the only one whose lineage is in doubt is Somerled himself. Tradition says he descended from the ancient Irish kings - but Prof. Sykes says the chromosome proves his Norse ancestry.

Gregory Cochran emails:

The MacLeods have a similar story, and there are a zillion other such Y-chromosome studies in progress.

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

Even the Japanese love Christmas!

Although, judging by these faintly disturbing diagrams of the proper methods for how a Japanese Santa is supposed to leave presents, they aren't quite clear on the concept. Accordion Guy adds appropriate captions here.

A reader writes:

Those Japanese Christmas how-to's reminded me of the old story of the Japanese department store that reportedly made a life-size display of Santa crucified for Christmas.

I always thought it was true but apparently there is no documented evidence of this. It's evidently an urban legend.

Well, Christmas is the season for believing, and doggone it, I want to believe in this tale of the Japanese department store with the crucified Santa.

A reader writes:

Nearly every supermarket, restaurant, and big box store in Japan has Merry Christmas signs this time of year ... despite the fact that very few people in Japan are Christian. Most conspicuous is the blaring Christmas carols coming from every direction. Silent Night, The First Noel, and Jingle Bells seem to top the list, but, unfortunately, so does Wham's "Last Christmas." The Japanese are utterly shocked when I explain to them that this song was popular for only a brief time in the 1980s in America. I don't really know if that is true, as I have never even heard the song before coming to Japan, and, since I am only 23, I am not exactly old enough to recall the tune. I think that the true spirit of multiculturalism is about celebrating other people's traditions too; in Japan, the attitude seems to be, "If it is a reason to party, let's party!" rather than the American attitude of "Keep your parties indoors lest you offend my hypersensitivities." As a person who loves Christmas, it is very nice living in Japan, sans "Last Christmas."

In America, St. Patrick's Day is an ethnic holiday to which everybody is invited, as is Cinco de Mayo, although that is mostly a synthetic holiday invented by American liquor companies. (Real Mexicans are more excited by Mexican Independence Day in September.) Columbus Day is both an ethnic (Italian) and patriotic holiday.

I'm not sure exactly what Martin Luther King's Birthday is -- exclusive or inclusive -- because the public suffers from holiday boredom by the middle of January so it passes without much notice. My suggestion has always been to move MLK Day to August, where it would be much more popular.

But Kwanzaa and Hanukkah appear to be anti-inclusive holidays, the opposite of St. Patrick's Day.

Christmas, of course, is extremely inclusive, with something for all men of good will, which, I suspect, is why it is now so resented. The impressive, globe-spanning richness of "Christmas culture," the countless songs, the movies, the old legends, the literature, the recipes, the customs, the art, the decor, the costumes, and, worst of all, the genial benevolence of Christmas when compared to the cultural paucity of Kwanzaa and Hanukkah drive some people up the wall. The fundamental psychological issue is that Christmas is an all-around better holiday than its rivals, and in our status-hungry world, Christmas' superiority makes some people very angry.

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

Tookie v. Ah-nold:

A reader writes:

There is an irony here, in that both Tookie and the Governator are arguably in the position they are today [well, yesterday for Tookie], due to their superior physiques. Williams used his to dominate the thugs around him and become their leader. Given that he has at least two kids, he also parlayed his muscles into reproductive success. Schwarzenegger used his to dominate other bodybuilders in relatively effete contests of manliness; then to achieve stardom in movies, marry a Kennedy, then to become the governor. But: why would a guy who is governor based fundamentally on his hardman appearance want to tarnish his image by being perceived as merciful? Of all people, Tookie should have understand that - his murders appear to have been in part done for the purpose of demonstrating to his buddies how badass he was.

Live by the Big T, die by the Big T.

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

There's something strange about the soon-to-be late Tookie's anti-gang oeuvre:

I realize that the Nobel Peace Prize-nominated Tookie Williams, the co-founder of the Crips and murderer of four innocent people, is now (was then? time is getting late) a sincere anti-gang crusader who has kept millions of impressionable children like these from joining criminal street gangs like his Crips, but there's just something about these cover pictures from his anti-gang books that seems a little, well, irrelevant. Let me ponder this more deeply and perhaps I'll deduce what seems a bit off...

Dennis Dale writes:

By now you’ve seen the two more heavily circulated photos of Williams, one apparently from the cover of his book showing him stripped to the waist and flexing body-builder style (Williams is said to weigh about three hundred pounds and has a body-builder’s physique), and another of him in a similar stance, wearing prison issues and bearing a massive afro, the very image of a hardcore gangsta. These are pinups for the adoring. While Tookie’s famous gang protocol and his children’s books are lauded as, it would seem, Herculean efforts to save the nation’s youth from gang culture (150,000 lives saved and counting, according to the “Tookie Fact Sheet,” based on “emails and letters”) what actually evokes all this adoration is his impressive physical stature and the same brutality (inferred by the thinly veiled braggadocio of his oft told history) that makes Tookie’s ilk so dangerous, necessitating their removal from society.

You see, there isn’t one of us who, at one time or another, hasn’t wanted just once to be Tookie. Tookie wants to be Tookie. Tookie has cultivated his image as the hulking brute more than anything else, and had he never been caught and convicted of his crimes he would no doubt have gone on being Tookie for as long as he could have pulled it off before death or incarceration put a merciful end to his tear. Physical prowess and emotional detachment combine to make a powerful intoxicant, in the bearer and in the beholder. Just witness the continuing fascination with all things gangster, from The Sopranos to Fifty Cent.

Just beneath the thin veneer of our socialization, deep in the base of our brains, on the wrong side of the tracks from our still developing prefrontal cortexes in the amygdala where our fear resides, we not only reflexively defer to physical superiority; we revere it. Brute force and the audacity to use it are, deep down, considered values unto themselves, even if we don’t like to admit it. So when the celebrants make the pilgrimage to the shrine of Tookie it is hardly a handful of children’s books or some ridiculous contractual form legitimizing street gangs that brings them there. They are there to pay homage to the undeniable value of brute force.

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

Springtime in Sydney

Summer is a coming in Down Under and spirits are high. Joe Strummer has finally gotten his wish.

First, a Lebanese Muslim gang beat up people on the beach in the Sydney suburb of Cronulla. In response, a mob of 5,000 drunken Australian whites attacked Muslims.

So, how long until we read articles blaming discrimination, lack of affirmative action, unemployment, and/or Le Corbusier's soulless architecture for the white riot?

Oh, wait, that's odd, in this case the media seem to be blaming the riot on the rioters. What a novel concept! I wonder what's different between the French and Australian riots? Hmmhmmhm, it's puzzling ... I just can't put my finger on the difference...

Unfortunately, the Riot Porn blog doesn't have any Australian pictures up yet, but they do have a "Burning Tire of the Day" and, of course, lots more South Korean riot pictures. This time it's the South Korean dump truck drivers versus the Orc-like riot police in a well-organized donnybrook that is nominally supposed to have something or other to do with "labor rights for non-regular workers."

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

Uh-oh

From 1992 onward, only 1% of the new enlistees allowed into the U.S. military came from Category IV -- the 10th to 30th percentiles on the Armed Forces Qualification Test, the military's main IQ test. People who score from 80 to 92 in IQ were just more trouble than they were worth in today's high tech military.. Recently, however, the Army announced that due to recruiting difficulties, it would boost the Category IVs to 4%, which didn't sound too worrisome.

But what's happening in reality? The US Today reports:

The Army met its recruiting goals in October, the first month of the 2006 fiscal year, but 12 percent of its recruits scored in the lowest category on military entrance tests on science, math and word knowledge, “The Sun” of Baltimore reported this month. That was triple the number - 4 percent - that the Army expects in 2006.

Rep. John Murtha, the 37-year Marine veteran, who apparently drinks beers with the top brass regularly, claims it's worse:

They have lowered the standards. They're accepting 20 percent last year in category four. Now, this is a highly technical service we're dealing with, And yet they lowered the standards to category four, which they said when we had the volunteer army, that would eliminate all the category four.

So, what's really going on? I don't know. And I don't expect the media to cover this important national security issue in any depth, because if they did, they might have to admit that military puts tremendous weight on IQ, which the press has been denouncing as racist pseudoscience for decades.

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

Sign of hope in Compton

Having outlined last week the lurid history of Compton, the home of the Bloods and of West Coast gangsta rap, I want to point out a sign of social reconstruction in that blighted municipality between Los Angeles and Long Beach.

I recently went to a high school championship football game between a Compton school and a higher ranked private school. One little remarked development in recent decades is that the best high school football programs are now typically predominantly white schools, either exurban, or private. The leading football schools will now generally feature a few black stars at running back, receiver, or cornerback, but will be otherwise white, with a sprinkling of Hispanics, Asians, American Indians, and (most hoped for) huge Pacific Islanders. For example, the private school in last night's game featured a miniature version of Reggie Bush, an elusive black back who had run for over 2000 yards at 11 yards per carry, but was otherwise mostly white. Add in a terrific white quarterback averaging over 10 yards per both pass attempt and carry, a highly trained and motivated defense, and sensational special teams, such as a kicker who has made 26 of 33 field goals and 100% of his extra points over the last two years, and that combination had been good for three straight championships.

Physically, the mostly black Compton team looked much more impressive with a gigantic offensive line, including a 6'-5" 319 pound tight end, made up largely of Samoans and other Islanders, and a lot of strong, fast black running backs in the 200 pound range. But the fans of the private school were confident, since in recent decades in high school ball, black teams have tended to lack the militaristic discipline that football requires. Most of the student enthusiasm in places like Compton has gone into basketball, which reflects contemporary African-American culture's obsession with superstars. Football teams, with their scores of necessary but anonymous spear-carriers in helmets cloaking their individuality, have a hard time competing with the glamour of basketball, where the potential for showing off is so much greater.

Well, the underdog Compton football team just went out and dominated, and in a manner that coach Vince Lombardi himself would have admired. Most notably, they refrained from what you see in the NFL where black players celebrate every tackle and first down like they had just won the Super Bowl. They focused on the job at hand and didn't waste time and energy showing off for the crowd until late in the 4th quarter when they had the game more than wrapped up.

This is a real tribute to the coaching staff, and a sign of hope for Compton that its youth might be waking up from its catastrophic two decade-long obsession with the values of gangsta rap.

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

Die, Tookie, die!

The best argument for the death penalty is the one you almost never hear: we need an ultimate deterrent against criminals who already facing close to life in prison to dissuade them from rationally deciding that it's in their self-interest to kill witnesses to their crimes, such as the victims of their robberies. As Robert Stacy McCain points out in FrontPage, the latest liberal cause celebre, Tookie Williams, murdered four people in cold-blood in two separate robberies in 1979 to get rid of witnesses:

One accomplice told police: "I asked Tookie, I said, 'What you do?' He say, 'I killed him,' like that. And I say, 'Why you kill him?' He say, uh, 'So it wouldn't be no evidence.'" Williams later laughed as he bragged about the gurgling noise the dying clerk made: "You should have heard the way he sounded when I shot him."

Among his other contributions to society, Tookie is the co-founder of the Crips.

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

Tis the season for giving

Perhaps the leading enemy of free speech in America is now the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Of course, the SPLC long ago eradicated the last, faintest vestiges of poverty, southern or otherwise, in the lifestyle of founder Morris Dees, who is a member of the Direct Marketing Association's Hall of Fame.

That the SPLC is a festering sore on the American body politic has long been known to anyone who cares to spend a half hour Googling. Here's just part of a revealing statement by Jim Tharpe, the Deputy Metro Editor of the Atlanta Constitution, which he made during a Harvard panel discussion about his experience editing a massive Pulitzer-finalist investigative series on the Southern Poverty Law Center during his days at the Montgomery Advertiser:

I’d never done any reporting on nonprofits, I thought they were all good guys, they were mom-and-pop, bake-sale, raise-money-for-the-local-fire-department type operations. I had no idea how sophisticated they were, how much money they raised, and how little access you have to them as a reporter, some of which has already been covered here.

Our series was published in 1995 after three years of very brutal research under the threat of lawsuit the entire time.

Our findings were essentially these:

The [Southern Poverty Law] center was building up a huge surplus. It was 50-something million at that time; it’s now approaching 100 million [it's now over $150 million in net assets], but they’ve never spent more than 31 percent of the money they were bringing in on programs, and sometimes they spent as little as 18 percent. Most nonprofits spend about 75 percent on programs.

A sampling of their donors showed that they had no idea of the center’s wealth. The charity watchdog groups, the few that are in existence, had consistently criticized the center, even though nobody had reported that.

There was a problem with black employees at what was the nation’s richest civil rights organization; there were no blacks in the top management positions. Twelve out of the 13 black current and former employees we contacted cited racism at the center, which was a shocker to me. As of 1995, the center had hired only two black attorneys in its entire history...

They hired an attorney who began first by threatening me, then my editor, and then the publisher. "And you better be careful of the questions you ask and the stories you come up with," and they would cite the libel law to us. So we were under threat of lawsuit for two years, basically, during the research phase of the series...

We published the series over eight days in 1994, and it had very little effect, actually. I think the center now raises more money than it ever has. [Laughter]

The story really didn’t get out of Montgomery and that’s a real problem. The center’s donors are not in Montgomery; the center’s donors are in the Northeast and on the West Coast. So the story pretty much was contained in Montgomery where it got a shrug-of-the-shoulders reaction. [More, much more]

The SPLC continues to concoct bogeymen to demonize in pursuit of extracting donations from gullible elderly liberals. In recent years, Dees's operation has come to resemble Mel Brooks's title for a proposed sequel to his Star Wars' parody "Spaceballs:"

"Spaceballs II: The Search for More Money"

After a liberal scion to a large fortune promised $100 million to the Sierra Club if it ignored the impact of immigration on the American environment, Dees's sensitive nose for piles of of cash led him to trash true environmentalists like former three-time Democratic governor of Colorado Richard Lamm.

And, of course, the SPLC smears VDARE.com and me. Amusingly, its attacks on me show how bizarrely flexible Dees's definitions of "Southern" "Poverty" and "Law" have become. The SPLC has teamed up with a group of transsexuals who are out to wreck the careers of anybody who has ever had a kind word for Northwestern U. psychology professor J. Michael Bailey!

Now, D.A. King on VDARE.com's blog has pointed out that the charity vetting organization Charity Navigator gives the SPLC only one star out of four. By way of comparison, the notoriously corrupt and ineffectual NAACP gets two stars. The National Council of La Raza ("The Race") gets four stars.

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

A question from a reader

I read a great variety of sites but I have yet to find a general news site that I could recommend to people who can use the internet but still rely on the MainStream Media out of habit. I used to look at Google news but have lately been disappointed in it. Drudge sometimes has some punch but is not what I want to recommend as a liberation from MSM.

Any suggestions?

I probably spend more time reading the New York Times that any other news source. Sure, it's biased, but I enjoy playing the game of spotting-the-fallacy.

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

Be afraid, be very afraid

From Fast Company, via Marginal Revolution:

Levitt and Dubner have spun their tales of rigged sumo matches and inner-city crack dealers everywhere from CNN to The Charlie Rose Show to The 700 Club. ABC just signed the pair to a one-year deal for recurring spots on Good Morning America, World News Tonight, and Nightline, including backing for their own documentaries.

Suzanne Gluck, Levitt and Dubner's agent, says Freakonomics hasn't just inspired other numbers books. "People are pitching everything from 'The Medical Freakonomics' to 'The Freakonomics of Parenting,' " she says. "They're using freakonomics as a code word for unconventional wisdom."

Conventional wisdom says there's more to come. Dubner says, "We're working on another book: 'Superfreakonomics.' "

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