More on bribery

A reader writes:

Bribery has been used very effectively in the past to keep potential enemies tame. In World War 2 there was a British-American scheme to buy off General Franco's military advisers to keep Spain neutral, according to this New York Times book review of Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of Secrets:

And the research is at its most impressive when Stafford reconstructs a byzantine British-American scheme to bribe the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and his military command to keep Spain out of the war. That scheme involved $10 million, an infamous international financier, the United States Treasury and Churchill's man in Madrid. And it seems to have worked.

It only cost $10 million, which even in 1940s money seems like a bargain to eliminate Spain from the War.

I hadn't heard that before and I can't confirm it elsewhere yet.

Certainly Franco's lack of enthusiasm for the Axis cause, despite German and Italian aid to the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War, was strategically important.

After the Americans and the British landed in northwest Africa in November 1942, the U.S. was scared that Franco would let the German army move through Spain and fall on the green American troops from the rear. (The OSS gave the two-fisted physical anthropologist Carleton Coon the mission, in that eventuality, of becoming the "Lawrence of Morocco:" he was to disappear into the Atlas mountains and organize the wild Berber tribes that he had long studied into a guerilla resistance.) Fortunately, Franco ungratefully kept the Germans at arm's length.

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

Time to cut out the middleman

To influence the Middle East, why buy influence in Washington, when it's even cheaper to buy it directly in the Middle East?

One of the anomalies of modern history is how cheap it is to buy long term influence in Washington. America is a vastly wealthy country, but only a tiny fraction of its rich men bother to pay for the kind of institutions that can have long term effects on the direction of American policy.

The Exile ran a story pointing out how an ultra-corrupt American politician like Rep. Rep. Duke Cunningham is a penny ante thief, stealing a few million. Rep. Jefferson was found with $90,000 in his freezer. Hoo-boy. In contrast, quite a few Russian politicians, despite a tiny economy to leech from, have ended up with hundreds of millions or even billions.

But you can be a perfectly honest donor and buy influence legitimately by paying for a think tank or a magazine. Public policy intellectuals are cheap. I've visited the offices of the think tank with perhaps the most influence on global events in this decade, and, let me tell you, it looked pretty non-descript compared to the average third tier corporate law firm's office.

But, even leasing wonks to agitate to get the U.S. is to do what you want in the Middle East seems pretty expensive compared to going to the source. Right now, tens of millions of dollars are being spent in Washington to persuade the U.S. into a war with Iran or Syria to deal with the problem that Hezbollah is causing Israel. Such a war would no doubt cost the American taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars, So, the return on investment to the investors would be pretty high.

But the nutty thing is that the annual Iranian subsidy of Hezbollah, which we are constantly told is a world-historical crisis, turns out to be about $100 million.

For 28 years, the U.S. has paid Egypt $2 billion annually not to blunder into another war with Israel. This has been a good deal for all concerned, but it's pretty expensive because it's public. I would imagine you could rent most of the important people in Egypt for a lot less, if you did it surreptitiously with deposits in the right Swiss bank accounts.

Lebanon is a tiny country compared to Egypt with less than $4 million, which is why Iran's $100 million seems so vast to them.

Surely, the friends of Israel could outbid Iran for influence in Lebanon? There's always the problem of making sure the VIPs you buy stay bought, but the people who have the money to spend on this problem are often geniuses at structuring deals, so that doesn't seem insurmountable.

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

A thought on "nation building"

The last two administrations have devoted a lot of effort to nation building abroad, but there is a fundamental problem with the idea: historically, nations are primarily built by war, especially against invading Great Powers. United Germany, for example, was built mostly by war with the French, especially defeat by Napoleon and victory over Napoleon III.

The United States most definitely did not "build" the nations of West Germany and Japan after WWII. Instead, we took two supremely united nations that had been forged into terrible instruments of war and defanged them. The Occupations, the transformations of these two militarist nation-states into good neighbors, were perhaps the greatest triumph of American New Dealers, much more impressive in many ways than the New Deal itself.

In contrast, despite all the big talk about Islamofascism, Iraq is the anti-Germany. The sinister fact is that the only plausible way that we could facilitate the nation building of Iraq is by losing to some upstart Iraqi insurgent, as modern Turkey was forged by Ataturk in his victories over the British and French would-be colonialists after WWI. So far, no general of genius has emerged in the Iraqi insurgency, but it might still happen.

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

The Bad News and the Good News about "4th Generation Warfare:"

The U.S. has shown itself in Iran poorly equipped to fight guerillas who use civilians as shields. We're too humane to use the old Roman method -- kill 'em all, civilian and militant, and let the gods sort them out -- and too ignorant about Iraq to eliminate the bad guys retail.

We'll know fairly soon whether the Israelis have some better way to handle underground fighters. It would be nice if they did, because asymmetrical warfare is a major nuisance, and weaponry is only going to get smaller and more easily hidden. Right now, the Hezbollah guerrillas' rockets are mostly of the kind that Francis Scott Key would vaguely recognize -- they fired 200 rockets into Israel yesterday, their biggest barrage yet, and killed one Israeli civilian. So far, while trying not to hurt civilians, the Israeli Air Force has killed vastly more civilians than Hezbollah has while trying to kill civilians. But we can't assume that happy state of affairs will last for too many more years or decades. In the future they might someday have enough guidance or nasty enough weapons to cause real trouble.

On the other hand, the good news is that not too many ambitious men want to live like guerilla chieftains for the rest of their lives, sleeping in caves or a different safe house every night. So the problem is somewhat self-limiting.

Say the Hezbollah leader comes out of this fracas much strengthened and eventually he succeeds in modernizing the 1932 Lebanese census gerrymander that restricts the Shi'ites to the lowly Speaker of the House role, and under the new principle of one-man one-vote he gets elected President of Lebanon. His followers then take control of the big government ministries and he moves into a beautiful presidential mansion in Beirut overlooking the sea, preaching blood and thunder from his majestic presidential balcony.

That's the end of the world, right? Well, actually, no. If that happened, the Israeli air force, which has complete air supremacy, can then credibly deter him by threatening to blow up the physical emblems of his triumph, along with him personally in his magnificent presidential bed, just as they've deterred their other neighbors for a generation.

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

How Jews actually felt about the 1924 immigration restriction

It's widely believed by Jews today that the 1924 legislation that cut back on immigration was an anti-Semitic conspiracy. That mythology is one of the main reasons the media is, on the whole, so virulently against immigration restriction today. In reality, Jewish opinion in 1924 was, sensibly, much more mixed. The most politically powerful Jewish figure in America in the early 1920s, American Federation of Labor founder Samuel Gompers, himself an immigrant, was a strong voice for cutting back on immigration.

I stumbled upon the following passage in the 1978 autobiography, In Search of History, by the famous reporter Theodore H. White, author of The Making of the President series. Around 1925, when he was ten or eleven, he was asked by his teacher to do a special presentation to her night school seminar to show what a child was capable of. A half century later, White recalled his discussions with his father, who was an Orthodox Jew and a socialist:

My assignment was to study immigration, and then to speak to the seminar about whether immigrants were good or bad for America. Her seminar mates would question me to find out how well I had mastered the subject. The Immigration Act of 1924 -- the "Closing of the Gates" -- had just been passed; there was much to read in both papers and magazines about the controversy, but my guide was my father. He put it both ways: the country had been built by immigrants, so immigrants were not bad. He had been an immigrant himself. On the other hand, as a strong labor man, he followed the A. F. of L. line of those days. The National Association of Manufacturers (the capitalists) wanted to continue unrestricted immigration so they could sweat cheap labor. But the American Federation of Labor wanted to keep the wages of American workingmen from being undercut by foreigners. This was a conundrum for my father: he was an immigrant himself, as were all our friends and neighbors. He helped me get all the facts, and I made a speech on the platform of a classroom at Boston University Teachers College at nine one night, explaining both sides of the story and taking no position. I enjoyed it all, especially when the teachers began asking me questions; I had all the dates and facts, and an attentive audience, but no answers then just as I have none now.

In the long run, class proves less powerful than race (in the sense of family and ancestry) in shaping the imagination. Today, most of Jewish opinion believes that immigration restriction was bad for the Jews, so therefore they are against it now. That it was good for the working class, which included much of the Jewish population at the time, is forgotten.

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

"The Revolution was made, not to make France free, but to make her formidable,"

said Edmund Burke in 1796. The formidable fight put up by Hezbollah, so rare among Arabs in recent generations, underscores the lunacy of the neoconservative theory that the problem with Muslim countries and the reason they don't get along with Israel are the elderly dictators who run them, and that the solution is for the U.S. to promote democratic revolution, faster please.. In reality, the rickety, illegitimate regimes in Egypt, Jordan, Syria (and, formerly, Iraq), have meant that battlefield opposition to Israel has been hopeless for a generation. How many Syrians would fight for the Alawite heretic regime, unless Syria was invaded? In Hezbollah, however, Israel has now run into an organization whose people actually believe their bosses' pronouncements and are willing to die for them.

Fortunately, Hezbollah doesn't have much of a population and economic base to draw from (maybe 1.5 to 2.0 million people, most of them poor), and only about $100 million per year in chump change from Iran.

By the way, Bush's idea of using Israel as America's proxy in our struggle with Iran is a lot like our attempt to use Israel's old ally, apartheid South Africa, as our proxy to fight the Soviet Union's proxy, Cuba, in African countries like Angola in the 1970s. Militarily, it made a lot of sense, but politically it was so disastrous that it didn't work. Was it fair that everybody around the world was so prejudiced against the Boer State? No, but, then, life isn't fair.

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

Are demographics dragging the IDF down?

A reader writes:

Here's a suggestion for an iSteve piece: New new thing - perception - factoid - and perhaps reality: Israel is militarily weak.

Why? because the much-celebrated Israeli Defense Force, after days of repeated efforts to do so, can't defeat Party of Allah guerrillas fighting within

actual sight of the border of Israel.

There is no good strategic military or diplomatic reason for the Israelis' rather diffident efforts to capture Assembly of Allah [Hezbollah] villages within 155 mm artillery range of Israel. Diplomatically, the Israelis gain almost zero good will by holding off their ground attacks but bombing the bejeebers out of Lebanon.

At the strategic and operational military level, the Israelis would have been smarter to launch a fast moving blitzkrieg ground invasion of southern Lebanon, to first cut off the Assembly of Allah fighters near the border from escape or reinforcement and disrupt rocket launching from deeper within Lebanon. Later, as a second step, the IDF should have taken on the A. of A. defensive strongpoint nearer the border.

And getting the dirty work done as soon as possible in southern Lebanon would have been a smart move both diplomatically and militarily.

At the tactical military level, the Israelis made the mistake of not assigning a sufficient quantity of infantry to retake the Arab village where the IF suffered thirty or so killed or wounded. US Army doctrine specifies a least a 3:1 ratio of attackers to defenders if determined defense is expected. The IDF sent in their soi-disant Golani brigade of roughly 2,000 men against approximately the same number of A. of A. fighters. This was a tactical mistake plain and simple. ( On paper, a US Army brigade would have about 4,800 soldiers, btw. )

... What's a deeper reason for the Israeli Defense Forces problems? One school of thought is that the IDF has always been overrated because the IDF has always fought patsies in the past. Arabs are incompetent when they try to fight in the highly mechanized Western mode.

Another possible reason for Israel's timorousness is that Israel doesn't have many men of prime military age. They Israelis have been trying to keep their demographic problem hushed up, but it may be that Israel has been experiencing net out-migration during the past six or eight years ... lots of dudes moving back to Brooklyn or to Pasadena. Yes, Israel had a few good recruiting years during the 1990's when a lot of Russians wanted to get out of the disintegrating USSR, but that's in the past. The Jewish Israeli population is now aging and shrinking in absolute size. This would explain why Israel seems to be extremely averse to suffering too many IDF casualties.

I'm not sure if it's really that dire. I see an estimate of a total fertility rate of 2.7 babies per Jewish Israeli woman, which is high for a first world population. But I wonder what proportion of the population is now made up of ultra-orthodox who won't fight? A paper by Dov Friedlander divvies up Israel's fertility in the late 1990s like this:

The Jewish non-religious group of both ethnicities (67 per cent-70 per cent) with TFR of 2.0-2.2

The Jewish ultra-orthodox, and the National Orthodox (12 per cent-15 per cent) with TFR 6.0-7.0

The Arab Christian population (2 per cent) with TFR of 2.6

Arab Moslems and Druze (16 per cent) with TFR of 4.0

Israel’s overall TFR 2.9

(Of course, what counts for cannon fodder at present are birth rates in the 1980s, not in the late 1990s.)

On the other hand, the Palestinian total fertility rates are sky high -- both sides are are fighting a Battle of the Cradle. But the Palestinians don't have much in the way of weapons, so they have been forced to rely on tactics like suicide bombing.

I don't know what the fertility rate of the Lebanese Shia is, but for Lebanon as a whole, it's only 1.9. Strikingly, the Iranian total fertility rate is only 1.8, lower than America's. The Iranian birthrate fell sharply in the early 1990s, when the ruling clerics endorsed population limitation. However, due to "population momentum," the population of Iran will continue growing for several more decades.

The other thing to keep in mind is are the small sizes of the countries: the total population of Israel and Lebanon combined is just over half that of Southern California: Lebanon 3.9 million and Israel 6.4 million. Lebanon's #1 secret is what % are Shi'ites (the Christians haven't allowed a census since 1932, when they were a majority), but there are no more than 2 million and probably fewer. So, this isn't exactly Japan vs. China or Germany vs. Russia.

Israel's demographic shrinkage might explain its reluctance to launch larger ground war in Lebanon. However, demographic problems do not explain or excuse the IDF's tactical mistake of suffering more casualties during the past week by attacking with an insufficient quantity of infantrymen ... unless the IDF fears that only a small percentage of its ground forces, its elite units, are up to the task of fighting Allah's Faction within plain sight of the border of Israel. This does not bode well for the future of Israel.

Now, the War Nerd makes the same argument. Gary Brecher writes:

July in Fresno, and yet I'm happy. In a mean way, the only way I know. For once I don't care how hot and miserable it is, because I've got something waiting for me at home: AC and CNN. God, I love watching CNN right now. Watching that needlenose whiner Anderson Cooper, trying not to state the obvious: Hezbollah is not only winning every round of this fight, but it was bound to win from the start. Get Jane Fonda out in the streets again, spray some pain relief on her saggy old throat, stuff a bullhorn in her liver-spotted hand and have her sing out: "Who needs Ho Chi Minh/Hezbollah is gonna win!"

The rest of you idiots actually seem to take Cooper seriously when he talks about how the IDF is going to "expel Hezbollah from Southern Lebanon." Christ, Hezbollah IS Southern Lebanon. You might as well try to expel ants.

I said in a column 16 months ago that Lebanon was due for a slow but unstoppable warming trend, finishing up with a hot war.

http://www.exile.ru/2005-February-25/war_nerd.html

Like I said in that column, we're not dealing with a few bad apples or bad luck. We're dealing with demographics, and demographics has no more mercy than a glacier. For a hundred years Lebanon has been shifting from a Maronite-Christian country with a bunch of non-Christian minorities (the Druze -- my personal favorites, the Sunni, the Shia) to a Muslim country with a Christian minority that's trying to emigrate as fast as it can fake up its resume for Uncle Sam's Migras. That part of the war is over, and Islam won. All that's left to see now is which Islam ends up in power: the Shia, with Syria and Iran backing them, or the Sunni, who have the backing of...well, nobody, actually.

Add in a couple of real important facts nobody ever mentions on CNN -- birthrate and morale. The Shia, who cluster in the slums of S and E Beirut and in the rural south of Lebanon, have the highest birthrate in Lebanon and have always been the poorest, most death-hungry people around. That's the stuff you make great soldiers from.

And Hezbollah has great soldiers. That's one reason I can't help liking them. They're some of the most underrated soldiers on earth facing what I consider the most overrated military force on earth, the IDF. The Israelis have been coasting on their reputation for a long time, but way back in Gulf War I it was clear they made their record like a Don King fighter, padding their Win column against a bunch of bums. When I saw those pitiful Arab "soldiers" crawling toward US camera crews on their hands and knees to surrender, the first thing that went through my head was, "Whoa, so that's the kind of opponent the Israelis have been showboating against?...

But we're talking demographics again, dude. Passage of time, plus difference in birthrate, means that by now the IDF has a thin, real thin, crust of Ashkenazi brains'n'brawn on top and a bunch of flabby mama's boys under them....

Casualties. That's the key here. Every war, every army has a different population base, different demographics, and a different take on casualties. Israel's biggest weakness has always been that it hates to take casualties. You can see that in their famous prisoner exchanges, giving away hundreds of Islamic prisoners to get back one IDF guy, or in one case just the bodies of a couple of dead IDF guys. You can see it in the design of the Merkava -- a brilliant design, one that gives infantry the full protection of MBT armor, but also an indication that this army is terrified its guys might get hurt.

Compare that to the Hezbollah attitude to death, which is basically extreme eagerness. Death? Hell yes, can I have seconds? The sooner the better! I've talked about the Shia and their whole Gimme Martyrdom deal before.

http://www.exile.ru/2004-September-04/war_nerd.html

Like I said in that column, killing Shi'ites a few at a time is pointless. ...

The way Israel is conducting the war right now is the worst of both worlds: it's too bloody and not bloody enough at the same time. Give me a second to explain what I mean by that. At the moment that skinny nasal-voiced jerk Anderson Cooper is saying Israel's killed about 320 Lebanese, vs. 36 Israelis dead. Now actually that's a perfectly standard count for asymmetrical warfare; the technologically superior force usually kills about ten of the guerrillas for every one of its own losses. But in PR terms, this war has been a disaster for Israel, a can't win scenario. Just try this experiment: watch CNN with the sound off for a few minutes. Without that non-stop pro-Israel commentary, you'll see what the whole world outside the US sees: non-stop video feed of terrified Lebanese civvies fleeing in terror, crying on camera, hugging their bloodied-up kids. Then there's a shot of the IDF zooming around in their Merkavas and US-supplied SP 155mms, blasting dry hills or doing dirt donuts on some local's wrecked house.

An Israeli reader responds:

Are demographics dragging the IDF down?

Simply said, no.

How do I know this?

Because demographics are not something that is being hushed up in Israel. It's talked about all the time and the needs of the army are talked about all the time. The fact is that the army has enough recruits and volunteers for combat units to meet its needs and to cause the following changes in the past few years: service in the reserves has been reduced by approximately five years recently and more of the burden is placed on the standing army. There are economic considerations as well. The chances of getting called up (other than at times of war) has also been reduced. The duration of military service may also be reduced from three years to two and a half years. Women are now being used (voluntarily) in combat roles. I'm not sure what impact that has had.

Look at your numbers by Friedlander. They don't tell the whole story. "The Jewish ultra-orthodox, and the National Orthodox (12 per cent-15 per cent) with TFR 6.0-7.0" These two camps were lumped together. But the National Orthodox do serve in the army, are highly motivated and their women have lots of babies. Also the Druze serve in the army.

Israel's Achilles heel is its low tolerance for casualties. Israelis just don't like it when its 18-21 year old men die. We're funny that way.

As General Patton said: "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."

Israel's combat units are manned by the best and the brightest. Getting into a good unit is for Israelis like getting into a good college is for Americans. That means their parents make up Israel's political, media and business elites (They themselves were also most likely in combat units). Israel's most influential sectors have kids in combat units, and they use their influence to affect policies in a way that protects their children (in their view).

That's why Israeli elites prefers Kassam rockets landing randomly on Sderot (a town with no elites, except Israel's minister of Defence is from there but that's an anomaly) than having their sons in the Gaza strip fighting Hamas, which is the real reason for the disengagement.

Israel is not losing this round of fighting. Hezbollah will come out of this weaker than it started. Syria will also be weakened by this. Patience.

BTW: Israel has called up a lot of reserves for this war and compliance has been 110%. That's because many people who weren't called up showed up at their units to volunteer or because they figured they were accidentally forgotten.

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

World War III ... Not

Despite the frenzy among much of the punditariat in the U.S., the fighting In Lebanon is playing out more like a 1970s squabble, such as Israel's 1978 incursion into Lebanon, than as something on the scale of August 1914 or June 1941.

Israel is hamstrung by the typical problem civilized nations run into when invading more backward countries, just as we have in Iraq: the most reliable way to defeat urban guerillas is to flatten their whole city, but the invaders would prefer not to. The War Nerd has observed that the reason you don't hear much about urban guerillas before the 20th Century is because conquerors weren't that civilized. If a city rose up, it was put to the sword. End of story.

As I pointed out in my review of "Black Hawk Down" in 2002, the basic dilemma facing a top dog like America or Israel is whether you go in light with infantry, and get a lot of your boys killed in fair fights (as happened to us in Mogadishu in 1993), or go in heavy, with tanks and armored bulldozers, and risk crushing civilians in their own homes. At Jenin in the West Bank in 2002, the Israelis started out light, took heavier causalities than they could tolerate, and ended up going in heavy with armored bulldozers. This proved militarily effective, but looked bad on TV.

The hoped-for third way is to use pinpoint bombing, missiles, and artillery, but that depends upon having good intelligence. Judging by their failure to diminish the rocket attacks despite pounding a lot of sites in Lebanon, Israel doesn't have good moles within Hezbollah.

Hezbollah's rocket barrage of northern Israel hasn't proven terribly lethal -- about 1.2 Israeli civilians have been killed per day since July 12, far below the civilian deaths Israel has inflicted on the Lebanese -- but the economic toll of temporarily evacuating the north is expensive. Worse, it's worrisome for the future, since improvements in guidance are inevitable over the years. This could have unfortunate effects on capital investment in Israel.

I would think that it's not beyond Israeli technical capacity to come up with a fire suppression system that tracks ballistic missile launches back to their point of origin and drops an explosive payload on that site within 30 seconds.

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

Arranged marriages in Michigan

A reader from Dearborn writes;

We have a very large population of immigrants from the Middle East, many of whom are Muslims. Marrying off daughters who do not do well in school by the age of 16 is not uncommon. Of course, this is arranged by dad. In addition, some of the dad's accept a dowry for one of their daughters while visiting the home land. Dearborn schools are constantly on the alert for kidnappings uniting school girls with their unknown future husbands in the Middle East. These girls don't have a choice. Wake up, Steve, and join the 16th century! It's as if we have sharia (Muslim law) in Dearborn.

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

Breaking News:

1 dead, 5 injured

07:01 PM PDT on Friday, July 28, 2006

SEATTLE – One person is dead and five others have been injured in a shooting at the Jewish Federation at 2031 Third Ave. in downtown Seattle. One suspect has been taken into custody.

Seattle police spokesman Rich Pruitt said police are confident that only one shooter was involved.

Sources told KING 5 the suspect is a 31-year-old Pakistani man with a criminal background. He is from the Pasco but his citizenship status or how long he has lived in the United States is unknown. Also unknown is what sort of criminal record he has. Officials are on the way to the Pasco to interview his family.

According to the Seattle Times, a man got through security at the Jewish Federation and told staff members, "I'm a Muslim American; I'm angry at Israel," then began shooting, according to Amy Wasser-Simpson, the vice president for planning and community services for the Jewish Federation.

You keep hearing how there haven't been any terrorist attacks in the U.S. since 9/11. I wonder if this attack will disappear down the memory hole like the July 4, 2002 massacre at the Los Angeles International Airport when Egyptian immigrant Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, who got to stay in America on his wife's Diversity Lottery Visa, killed two Jews at the Israeli El Al Airline counter.

Anti-Semitic terrorism ... another job Americans just won't do!

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

Derb v. Jonah on childrearing

For visitors from The Corner, here's an excerpt from a 1998 review I published in National Review of Judith Rich Harris's The Nurture Assumption. (This followed a long series of email exchanges with Harris's mentor, Steven Pinker.)

The Nature of Nurture

... Still, Judith Rich Harris's Camille Paglia-like ambitiousness drives her to overstate both the novelty of her true ideas (that genes and peers matter) and the truth of her novel idea (that parent's don't matter).

She's right that innate differences between children are important, but for experienced parents not befuddled by modern egalitarianism that's old, even ancient, news. That offspring raised side-by-side can possess wildly different personalities was clear to well-known parents like Adam & Eve, Isaac & Rebecca, and King Lear. (A second child always undermines parents' belief in their power to mold their children, but child-rearing books hush this up because their market is first-time parents.)

Further, although child development experts before Mrs. Harris may have failed to understand the power of peer groups, parents always knew. They've tried to shield their kids from Bad Influences since long before King Henry IV sought to keep Prince Hal away from "vulgar companions" like Falstaff. Today, this concern is behind much of the de facto racial segregation that's pervasive in housing and schooling.

In contrast, her third assertion -- parents don't matter -- is plausible only within her narrow, arbitrary boundaries. To fully explain human behavior, everything matters...

To show that peers outweigh parents, she repeatedly cites Darwinian linguist Pinker's work on how young immigrant kids automatically develop the accents of their playmates, not their parents. True, but there's more to life than language. Not until p. 191 does she admit -- in a footnote -- that immigrant parents do pass down home-based aspects of their culture like cuisine, since kids don't learn to cook from their friends. (How about attitudes toward housekeeping, charity, courtesy, wife-beating, and child-rearing itself?) Not until p. 330 does she recall something else where peers don't much matter: religion! Worse, she never notices what Thomas Sowell has voluminously documented in his accounts of ethnic economic specialization. It's parents and relatives who pass on both specific occupations (e.g., Italians and marble-cutting or Cambodians and donut-making) and general attitudes toward hard work, thrift, and entrepreneurship.

Nor can peers account for social change among young children, such as the current switch from football to soccer, since preteen peer groups are intensely conservative. (Some playground games have been passed down since Roman times). Even more so, the trend toward having little girls play soccer and other cootie-infested boys sports did not, rest assured, originate among peer groups of little girls. That was primarily their dads' idea, especially sports-crazed dads without sons.

While millions of parents sweat and save to get their kids into neighborhoods and schools offering better peer groups, Mrs. Harris redefines this merely as an "indirect" parental influence. She claims modern studies can't find predictable relationships between "direct" influences (i.e., different child-rearing styles) and how children turn out. But that may be merely an inherent shortcoming of these non-experimental analyses. For example, she asserts (not necessarily reliably) that studies prove it doesn't matter whether mothers work or not. But the same methodology would report that it doesn't matter whether you buy a minivan or a Miata, since purchasers of different classes of vehicles report roughly similar satisfaction. In reality, women don't randomly choose home or work; they agonize over balancing career and family. They tailor their family size to fit their career ambitions and vice-versa. Mothers then readjust as necessary to best meet their particular families' conflicting needs for money and mothering. For instance, a working mother might quit when her second baby proves unexpectedly colicky, then return when the children enter school, then shift to part time after her husband gets a big raise. That's bad for these studies, but good for their kids.

Finally, why do mothers care so much? Disappointingly for a Darwinian, Mrs. Harris blames it on The Media. She hopes her book will encourage parents to fret less, but it will likely have little impact on mothers, since natural selection has crafted them so that "'Worry' is a mother's middle name." In contrast, men will find her view more appealing, with painful consequences not just for their kids, but for themselves and all of society. The more violent and poverty-stricken will a culture become, the less it persuades men that "fathering" requires decades rather than minutes. [More]

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

I missed this when it came out last year

From Human Events:

Billboard Causes Panic: Los Angeles Population Plummets 14% in Three Days
by Mac Johnson Posted May 12, 2005

Los Angeles -- A controversial billboard campaign in Los Angeles continued to make headlines this week as anger rapidly turned to confusion and hysteria.

The billboard, advertising a Spanish Language television station, originally made news by enraging many Americans with its aggressive Mexican Nationalist message --declaring that Los Angeles was no longer part of the United States, but was instead a Mexican city once again.

Below the banner message in which “Los Angeles, CA” had been crossed out and changed in blaring red type to read “Los Angeles, MEXICO,” the billboard pronounced in Spanish “Your City. Your Team.”

Now Gringo anger is the least of the problems caused by the Billboard, as the apparently quite believable reconquista it announces sends shockwaves through the city’s residents, Anglo and Latino alike. In a scene reminiscent of war-torn Europe 60 years ago, the roads leading north out of Los Angeles are choked with thousands of Mexican refugees stoically carrying their meager possessions with them.

When I asked what had precipitated this mass exodus, one migrant, whom we’ll call Jose “X,” simply turned, pointed to the Billboard looming over his neighborhood and said, “¡Oh Man! I stopped walking too soon!” --then bravely continued on with the others.

I asked a second man why he was fleeing Los Angeles, Mexico. “I did a lotta bad things back in Mexico, I’m afraid of police there,” he said matter-of-factly, then added “In America, police must give me Latte, so I walk to America. Again. ¡Norte!”

When questioned about the efflux of migrants blackening all roads leading out of Los Angeles, Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Hugh Dick responded “What Mexicans? I don’t see any Mexicans.”

The Mexican government has seen the problem though and quickly dispatched officials to the scene to aid the population in re-escaping to America. “This is a tragedy,” said Luis de Silva de Gonzales y Ramon de Dinero debajo de Mesa. He added “These people thought they were safe and prosperous, now they’re just in Mexico. Again. ¡Norte!”

The reconquista panic has taken myriad forms. Los Angeles wholesalers were said to be totally out of Chiclets brand gum, as terrified Los Angelenos, believing they were in Mexico, immediately sent their children into the streets to sell gum to tourists. A dazed passer-by, Richard Martinez, commented, “I had a good paying job, Man. Now this happens. Heck, I don’t even know how to speak Spanish except a little to my Grandmother. How am I supposed to make a living asking for hugs and cookies? I’m an American for Chrissake! Quit lumping me in with all these illegals --I DON’T WANT ANY GUM, OK? VAMOOS, YOU LITTLE URCHINS!-- Screw it. I’m moving to Canada.” ...

President Vicente Fox of Mexico subsequently released a statement condemning Bush’s total support for illegal aliens as “lukewarm” and demanding that Bush immediately deploy the Marines to Los Angeles to “restore Mexico’s moneymaker, dammit.” Adding, “¿Do you think these people can sell enough gum to wire home a billion dollars a month? ¡Take back L.A. now!”...

Anti-American liberal whites in Los Angeles briefly poured into the streets to celebrate L.A.’s “liberation” from United States “hegemony”, but they were quickly dispersed with massive force from the Federale LAPD. Commented one smiling officer as he repeatedly swung his baton onto a crying trustafarian, “Where’s your First Amendment NOW, pinko?” The officer then asked us to pay a $100 cash fee for a “reporting license.” “After this, I’m gonna start me a drug gang!” he told a grinning friend standing nearby, on the thin neck of a “Peace Activist”. [More]

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

Moral philosophy clarified

A libertarian in Istanbul writes:

Actually, Steve, Cowen's logic is flawed right from the outset. How does #2 not follow from #1?

If I call you my brother, and then turn around and call the whole world my "brothas", then the word brother - due to the absence of 'scarcity' in its usage - loses its meaning. If, that is, the very stranger right at the other side of the world is morally equivalent in value to my brother, then they pretty much become interchangeable. The trouble with this is, there's no discriminant left to oblige me to be morally committed towards one or the other.

This is the universal moral conundrum that egalitarianism always falls into: when everybody is equally valuable, everybody is equally valueless.

The very nature of economic scarcity and choice defies the notion of universal equivalence.

He thinks he's pushing the Kantian "categorical imperative" but - like all who get dizzy with the nuances of the sage of Königsberg - he confuses two things here: categorical imperative in no way requires that all categories be equal in moral value. All mothers may more or less be valuable to their relative offspring, and we cannot treat the bond between a Bantu mother and her children as less valuable than our own - which, in fact, conservatives like you don't to at all - but that doesn't mean that every mother has an equal obligation to every child on earth. Such would be the total nullification of the categorical nature of the mother-child bond.

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

The Da Vinci Code v. Foucault's Pendulum

I recently came up with an idea for a conspiracy theory thriller novel, so I read these two famous examples of the genre (plus Richard Condon's 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate, which isn't as good as the 1962 movie version, but is better than the 2004 remake).

I'm inclined to believe that Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code is an intentional attempt to dumb down for a mass audience Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. This 1989 bestseller (although hardly on the same scale as TDVC, which has sold at least 40 million copies) tells of three bored editors at a vanity publishing house who synthesize the occult manuscripts submitted by pay-to-publish cranks into the ultimate conspiracy theory amalgamating every obsession of European crackpottery for the last 600 years, only to have the authors come to believe the editors really do know the secret of the Knights Templar and pursue them murderously to get it.

Eco, for example, is a "professor of semiotics" while Brown's hero Robert Langdon is a "professor of symbology." And the subject matter of the books overlap: Knights Templar, Masons, Mary Magdalene as Mrs. Jesus Christ, Rosicrucians, etc.. Of course, Eco's treatment of these hermeneutic obsessions is brilliantly ironic while Brown's is credulous.

On the other hand, it's clear from trudging my way through The Da Vinci Code that Dan Brown doesn't so much understand the common mind as have the common mind. I've never read a less confidence-inspiring author, one who radiates so obviously that he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. It's not just the clunky prose style -- that's forgivable in well-informed authors like James Michener and Tom Clancy -- it's the small mistakes of fact and judgment that pop up every couple of pages in the narration. It's impossible to take the giant conspiracy theories seriously when he gets so many little things wrong.

After reading The Da Vinci Code, the campaign by Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett to rename the anti-religious as "brights" (on the model of how homosexuals got themselves renamed "gays") seems particularly hilarious.

Umberto Eco, on the other hand, turns out to be a fine fellow, much more admirable than you'd expect a European postmodernist academic to be. "Foucault's Pendulum," which is named after the 19th Century physicist rather than the 20th Century philosopher, is an immensely long book (I confess to having skimmed some of the later sections without feeling shortchanged), but Eco has his head squarely on his shoulders.

Toward the end, Eco's narrator sums up the kind of thinking underlying the popularity of The Da Vinci Code:

A plot, if there is to be one, must be a secret. A secret that, if we only knew it, would dispel our frustration, lead us to salvation; or else the knowing of it in itself would be salvation. Does such a luminous secret exist?

Yes, provided it is never known. Known, it will only disappoint us. Hadn't Aglie spoken of the yearning for mystery that stirred the age of the Antonines [second century AD Rome]? Yet someone had just arrived and declared himself the Son of God, the Son of God made flesh, to redeem the sins of the world. Was that a run-of-the-mill mystery? And he promised salvation to all: you only had to love your neighbor. Was that a trivial secret? And he bequeathed the idea that whoever uttered the right worlds at the right time could turn a chunk of bread and a half-glass of win into the body and blood of the Son of God, and be nourished by it. Was that a paltry riddle? ... And yet they, who now had salvation within their grasp -- do-it-yourself salvation -- turned deaf ears. Is that all there is to it? How trite. And they kept on scouring the Mediterranean in their boats, looking for a lost knowledge, of which those thirty-denarii dogmas were but the superficial veil, the parable for the poor in spirit, the allusive hieroglyph, the wink of the eye at the pneumatics. The mystery of the Trinity? Too simple: there had to be more to it.

Someone -- Rubinstein, maybe -- once said, when asked if he believed in God: "Oh, no, I believe ... in something much bigger." And someone else -- was it Chesterton? -- said that when men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything. [p. 620]

"Umberto Eco" is a blatantly Nabokovian name, echoing the narrator of Lolita, Humbert Humbert, and the obsession Vladimir Nabokov shared with Jorge Luis Borges (who shows up in Nabokov's science-fiction novel Ada as "Osberg, the author of The Gitanilla, the AntiTerran Lolita") with reflections and doubles.

Eco's mock-scholarly foreword to his first bestseller, The Name of the Rose, reads as if the fictitious foreword to Lolita by "John Ray Jr., Ph.D." had instead been written by the mad, self-absorbed, coyly homosexual literary scholar Charles Kinbote of Nabokov's great Pale Fire:

On August 16, 1968, I was handed a book written by a certain Abbe Vallet, Le Manuscrip de Dom Adson de Melk, traduit en francais d'apres l'edition de Dom J. Mabillon (Aux Presses de l'Abbaye de la Source, Paris, 1842). ... The scholarly discovery (I mean mine, the third in chronological order) entertained me while I was in Prague, waiting for a dear friend. Six days later Soviet troops invaded that unhappy city. I managed, not without adventure, to reach the Austrian border at Linz, and from there I journeyed to Vienna, where I met my beloved, and together we sailed up the Danube.

In a state of intellectual excitement, I read with fascination the terrible story of Adso of Melk, and I allowed myself to be so absorbed by it that, almost in a single burst of energy, I completed a translation, using some of those large notebooks from the Papeterie Joseph Gilbert in which it is so pleasant to write if you use a felt-tip pen.

On the next page comes Eco's pitch-perfect tribute to Borges:

"... then, in 1970, in Buenos Aires, as I was browsing among the shelves of a little antiquarian bookseller on Corrientes, not far from the more illustrious Patio del Tango of that great street, I came upon the Castilian version of a little work by Milo Temesvar, On the Use of Mirrors in the Game of Chess."

And in the main part of the story, we find a blind librarian, Jorge of Burgos. The main character, played by Sean Connery in the movie, the insightful and commonsensical friar-detective William of Baskerville, is a tribute both to an old favorite of the Anglophile Borges (who wished he'd been born Anthony Burgess), Sherlock Holmes, and to the English philosopher William of Ockham, whose Razor pointed the way out of the luxurious but impenetrable thickets of medieval thought.

So, I went to look up what the real name of "Umberto Eco" actually is, only to find out that it is his real name. Which, now that I think about it, is more Nabokovian/Borgesian than a pseudonym would be.

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

Dog Bites Man, Part Umpty-Ump Million

The Star-Ledger of New Jersey reports:

State Police flunking the minorities they recruit:
Tests and background checks foil effort for a more-diverse force
BY RICK HEPP, ROBERT GEBELOFF AND JOHN P. MARTIN, Star-Ledger Staff

On Friday, 102 men and women are expected to walk across the stage at the State Police training academy in Sea Girt, collect their badges and join the ranks of New Jersey's top law enforcement agency.

This latest batch of graduating troopers looks like many of the previous classes, but less and less like the state they will serve. Seventy-nine of the 102 are white men.

Seven years and millions of dollars after the State Police conceded their minority recruiting efforts were "significantly flawed" and pledged improvement, the race and gender makeup of the rank and file remains effectively unchanged.

A Star-Ledger analysis of recruiting data since 1999 shows more minorities and women than ever are applying for the force but are being rejected because they fail admission tests at disproportionately higher rates.

This rejection, according to the newspaper's analysis, occurs at various stages of the multitiered selection process: Hispanics and black candidates failed the background check at least three times more often than white applicants; women were nearly three times as likely as men to fail the physical; seven in 10 black applicants didn't pass the written test.

Why the failures persist and how to fix them have perplexed four successive attorneys general and four State Police superintendents. And they linger despite an overhaul of the recruiting and testing process, the hiring of outside consultants to grade applicants, and regular monitoring by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which sued the state a decade ago to address the issue.

In the past decade, the state's minority population has steadily risen and now hovers near 35 percent. By 2025, Census estimates indicate, almost half of New Jersey's residents will be members of minorities.

Today white males account for one-third of the state's population. But they make up four-fifths of the 2,966 active members of the State Police force, a rate only slightly lower than the racial makeup in 1999.

"I'm not saying these (recruiting) efforts are for nil," said Renee Steinhagen, executive director of New Jersey Appleseed, a public-interest law center, and a longtime critic of the State Police. "But they're not where they should be. I still believe the State Police has not changed."

State officials, law enforcement experts and the advocates who brought the initial NAACP lawsuit acknowledge the lack of success but haven't been able to explain or fix it.

As Yul Brynner said in "The King and I," "Tis a puzzlement." What possible reason could there be that women don't do as well on average as men on tests of strength, and blacks and Hispanics don't do as well on average as whites on tests of intelligence and law-abidingness? The true explanation must be incredibly complicated, as Occam's Butterknife demands.

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

A Sailer cartoon

Rex F. May (aka, Baloo) cartoonizes my VDARE.com column on Lebanon: The cartoonist liked my Orwell knock-off ending well enough to turn it into a cartoon. You can find more of his cartoons here.

The phrase "diversity is strength" echoes 1984's Party slogan "ignorance is strength," but I wonder if "diversity is unity" wouldn't be more in the spirit of that dystopian novel.

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

Etymology of "elites" (plural):

A reader suggests a likely route for how "elites" became so fashionable in high level political discourse in this decade:

I'm not sure if it's the first use of the term, but Christopher Lash's Revolt of the Elites (1995) was the first I remember hearing the term. I quickly looked over my copy of the book and found two definitions of elites:

1. (pg. 3) "The new elites, which include not only corporate managers but all those professions that produce and manipulate information..are far more cosmopolitan, or at least more restless and migratory, than their predecessors."

2. (pg 25-6) "Today it is the elites, however - those who control the international flow of money and information, preside over philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher learning, manage the instruments of cultural production and thus set the terms of public debate..."

Lasch may have used the term "elites" rather than elite to mirror Ortega y Gasset's Revolt of the Masses, as he compares the revolts of the two groups in chapter 2 of the book. The index of the book does not have an entry for "elites" but it does include one for "elite class."

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

The economics of Middle East turmoil

Rice U. economics professor Mahmoud Amin El-Gamal writes on his "Islam and Economics" blog:

The economics of middle east turmoil: With numerous self-styled pundits commenting on the current events in the middle east, I am surprised not to have heard anyone yet bring up a simple economic formula: If you are a major oil exporter, and you spend $1 in any direction that increases turmoil in the region, or ensures continuation of turmoil, you are likely to reap the fruits manyfold through higher oil prices.

Wars have always more than paid for themselves from the point of view of arms dealers, etc. Now, they are also an economically profitable trade for oil exporting countries. (Or course, some oil exporting countries in the region are nervous about long-term implications of the fighting, but they cannot deny that the fighting makes them much richer). Some countries lose tourism receipts, of course, but (a la Kaldor-Hicks efficiency analyses), they can be -- and probably will be, directly or indirectly -- compensated for those lost receipts. Construction firms will make huge profits, no doubt...

All in all, the more turmoil there is, the more that the rich will grow richer. The poor and dispossessed will die, but their surviving family members can be fed empty slogans by beneficiaries on all sides. In the final analysis, economists can even celebrate the eventual rise in per capita income, especially if the death tolls are substantial.

Of course, this strategy would work best for an oil producer well-insulated from the turmoil it exacerbated. Thus, it would be more rational for, say, Norway to fund instability in the Persian Gulf than for, say, Kuwait to try to ride the tiger.

The Soviet Union, as a major oil and mineral producer, was a big winner from the oil price rises of 1973 and 1979. The profits helped fund the Soviets' adventuresome foreign policy of 1974-1979, which in turn raised fears around the world, driving up oil and gold, further strengthening the Soviets. (Similarly, South Africa was a big winner from the precious metals bubble of 1979.) Then, in 1986, the Reagan Administration talked the Saudis into flooding the world with cheap oil, driving the price of a barrel down to about $10. As planned, this devastated the Soviet's ability to project force. Like a shark that has to keep moving forward or die, the Soviet Union was gone within a half dozen years.

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