Hatfields v. McCoys

I don't think this is an April Fools' Joke. Perhaps they could call it Yosemite Sam Syndrome:

Disease underlies Hatfield-McCoy feud
By MARILYNN MARCHIONE, AP Medical Writer

The most infamous feud in American folklore, the long-running battle between the Hatfields and McCoys, may be partly explained by a rare, inherited disease that can lead to hair-trigger rage and violent outbursts. Dozens of McCoy descendants apparently have the disease, which causes high blood pressure, racing hearts, severe headaches and too much adrenaline and other "fight or flight" stress hormones....

The Hatfields and McCoys have a storied and deadly history dating to Civil War times. Their generations of fighting over land, timber rights and even a pig are the subject of dozens of books, songs and countless jokes. Unfortunately for Appalachia, the feud is one of its greatest sources of fame.

Several genetic experts have known about the disease plaguing some of the McCoys for decades, but kept it secret. The Associated Press learned of it after several family members revealed their history to Vanderbilt doctors, who are trying to find more McCoy relatives to warn them of the risk....

Back then, "we didn't even know this existed," she said. "They just up and died."

Von Hippel-Lindau disease, which afflicts many family members, can cause tumors in the eyes, ears, pancreas, kidney, brain and spine. Roughly three-fourths of the affected McCoys have pheochromocytomas — tumors of the adrenal gland.

Her adoptive father, James Reynolds, said of the McCoys: "It don't take much to set them off. They've got a pretty good temper...

Still, many are dubious that this condition had much of a role in the bitter feud with the Hatfields, which played out in the hill country of eastern Kentucky and West Virginia for decades.

Some say the feud dates to Civil War days, when some members of the families took opposite sides. It grew into disputes over timber rights and land in the 1870s, and gained more notoriety in 1878, when Randolph or "Old Randal" McCoy accused a Hatfield of stealing one of his pigs. The hostilities left at least a dozen dead. ...

"The McCoy temperament is legendary. Whether or not we can blame it on genes, I don't know," said Randy McCoy, 43, of Durham, N.C., one of the organizers of the annual Hatfield-McCoy reunion. "There are a lot of underpinnings that are probably a more legitimate source of conflict."

"There was a lot of inter-marrying" that could have played havoc with the gene pool, he conceded. ...

Altina Waller, a professor of history at the University of Connecticut and author of a book about the feud, agreed.

"Medical folks like to find these kinds of explanations. Like the Salem witchcraft thing. That book came out about how that was caused by wheat that was grown that had this parasite or mold or fungus or something that caused everybody in Salem to go nuts," she said.

"How does it explain the other dozen or so feuds that I've looked at in other places?" she asked, citing disputes over coal and other issues. "The rage and violence as such was not confined to McCoys."

It sounds like a combination of the genetic and social effects of cousin marriage: bad recessive genes and excessive extended family loyalty, respectively. Update - Greg Cochran says it's a dominant genetic disease, not a recessive one.

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

"The Hoax"

From my review in The American Conservative (not online) of the film opening Friday, April 6:

Now, "The Hoax" rounds out cinematic Howard Hughes lore with a comic biopic of novelist Clifford Irving (played by Richard Gere), the scamster who brought the world's Hughes obsession to a crescendo in 1971-72 when he extracted huge advances from the greedy and credulous New York publishing and magazine industries for The Autobiography of Howard Hughes. ...

Exciting more controversy is the film's claim that Irving's fake autobiography helped inspire the Watergate break-in at the headquarters of Democratic National Committee chairman Larry O'Brien, who, possibly not coincidentally, had been Hughes' chief lobbyist.

While overstated, this is not wholly implausible. Nixon had several shady links to Hughes, such as the tycoon's unsecured $205,000 loan to his brother Donald's Nixonburger restaurant chain. Nixon believed the revelation of this dubious deal may have cost him the exceedingly close 1960 election. A decade later, according to his chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, Nixon was irrationally obsessed with plumbing the relationship between Hughes and O'Brien.

The truth is that we still don't really understand Watergate, mostly because, in sharp contrast to the JFK assassination, the media haven't been all that interested in finding out precisely what happened. The good guys won and bad guys lost, they reason, so why bother with details that might muddy the glorious memory?

It's hard to remember now, but JFK conspiracy theories were highly respectable in the media from the early 1970s until Oliver Stone's 1991 film "JFK" came out, at which point they became unfashionable. And yet, it was always likely that either the FBI or CIA or both had played a larger role in the overthrow of Nixon than in the Kennedy assassination, as was confirmed in 2005 by the revelation that the FBI's #2 man, J. Edgar Hoover loyalist W. Mark Felt was Deep Throat. But, nobody was ever very interested in Watergate after Nixon resigned.

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

Where are the African-American baseball players and golfers?

April 2007 is the sixtieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking into the major leagues (the subject of my 1996 National Review article "How Jackie Robinson Desegregated America") and the 10th anniversary of Tiger Woods monumental 12 shot victory in the Masters.

Ten years and counting
By Michael Arkush, Yahoo! Sports

Tiger Woods' 12-shot triumph at the 1997 Masters was about more than one man conquering a golf course and his competition. It was about a member of a race long mistreated capturing one of the sport's most prized possessions - the green jacket - for the first time. It was also about hope.

The Masters, which did not have an African-American participant until Lee Elder in 1975, would never be the same. Nor, presumably, would the game itself. Soon there would be other blacks to join Woods on the PGA Tour, surely within 10 years.

Well, it has been 10 years since Woods' historic win, and he is still the only black golfer on the PGA Tour.

Here are my two articles from April 2003 explaining this historic non-trend:

The Decline of the Black Golf Pro

The Decline of the Black Caddie

Similarly, African-American participation in baseball is constantly declining. As I explained in my 1996 National Review article "Great Black Hopes:"

Similarly, a group can tire of a career or pastime even if its members tend to be better than their rivals, if they enjoy more glittering opportunities elsewhere. This helps explain the strange tale of blacks and baseball over the last few decades. Within pro baseball, integration has caused segregation by position. The Negro Leagues starred legendary pitchers like Satchel Paige and catchers like Josh Gibson, but African-American Major Leaguers now concentrate primarily in the outfield, where their edge in speed counts most.

Even more unexpectedly, after African-Americans fled Southern segregation, they began specializing in basketball and football at the expense of what had long been their favorite game. Pundits often blame a shortage of baseball diamonds in the inner city. Yet, immigrants from rural Mexico haven't forsaken fastballs for free throws. More astute observers point to the decline of patriarchy in the black ghettos, since a love of baseball is best passed on by fathers playing catch with sons. Perhaps most important, however, is that black Americans have found baseball, with its straight-line baserunning, less suited for expressing their creativity than basketball or football.

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

Iran releases captured British soldiers

As your mother might say, "Now, isn't that nicer than fighting WWIII?" This was shaping up to be the stupidest conflict since the War of Jenkin's Ear, but, fortunately, sanity prevailed, although, as happens distressingly frequently, Iran's President Borat gets to act saner than America's President Bush.

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

"The Good Shepherd," now on DVD

It's a surprisingly respectful history of the CIA (or, as the movie points out, only lame-os not in CIA call it "the CIA") directed by Robert De Niro and written by Eric Roth as told via a central character based on James Jesus Angleton (played by Matt Damon).

Now, Angleton, who ran CIA's counter-intelligence operation for many years, was a pretty interesting fellow, half Mexican by descent (his unWASPy middle name is "hay-zoos"). His many enemies within CIA thought he was a paranoid loon. But, in this movie he's the most buttoned-down boring WASP spy imaginable. Damon's CIA man is so superhumanly affect-less that he never even notices that he's married to ... Angelina Jolie, who seems to have no more idea than the audience why she was cast in a role better suited to, say, Chloe Sevigny (who calls herself "another Aryan from Darien.")

The point of "The Good Shepherd" is apparently for a Catholic director and Jewish screenwriter to show that WASPs are boring, which is hardly the most slanderous thing anybody has ever said about WASPs. De Niro brings his old buddy Joe "I Amuse You?" Pesci out of retirement to play a Mafia don hired by Damon to assassinate Castro. Pesci enunciates the ethnic subtext of the movie:

Joseph Palmi: You know, we Italians have our families and the church, the Irish have the homeland, the Jews their tradition ... What do you guys have?

Edward Wilson: We have the United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.

If the alternative is rule by the likes of the twitchy maniacs that Joe Pesci normally plays, the movie seems to suggest, being bored by Matt Damon isn't so bad. The problem, though, is that for De Niro and Roth to get their message about WASP tediousness across, they made whole film a little boring.

That said, it's a relatively serious, informative film.

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

"Children of Men," now out on DVD

Alfonso Cuaron's movie version of Tory Baroness P.D. James' quiet sci-fi novel Children of Men about a world where no baby has been born in two decades is is just about as intellectually brain-dead as V for Vendetta (which I reviewed for American Conservative here), politically correct tripe all the way. If the human race were dying out, what would the biggest issue be? According to Cuaron it would be ... mistreatment of illegal immigrants!

It doesn't get much stupider than that, folks.

But Children of Men has a few advantages over V for Vendetta as a movie. Children of Men has Clive Owen, who has a classic movie star's face -- handsome but world-weary, Cary Grant meets Humphrey Bogart. (Why isn't he James Bond instead of that thuggish-looking guy?) V for Vendetta, in contrast, has somebody in a stupid Guy Fawkes mask.

Second, Children of Men has some distinctive visual direction with loooong tracking shots that excite people who play first-person shooter video games.

As somebody has pointed out, however, this first person gimmick undermines the first advantage -- Clive Owen's great face -- because to get a reaction shot from the star during the two 10 minutes segments without cuts, the cameraman has to laboriously swing the camera around 180 degrees to look at Clive, then back 180 degrees to the action. The one long tracking shot that knocked me out was not the two celebrated shoot-em-ups but a roughly 90 second funereal shot of Clive after his friend has been killed as he wanders aimlessly into the forest -- toward the camera so you can watch him emote the whole way. That's what you pay a movie star to do.

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

Sorry about the lack of new postings

Computer problems. Does anybody know whether it's yet safe to buy a new computer (desktop or laptop) with Microsoft Vista loaded on it?

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

"Children of Men," now out on DVD

Alfonso Cuaron's movie version of Tory Baroness P.D. James' quiet sci-fi novel Children of Men about a world where no baby has been born in two decades is is just about as intellectually brain-dead as V for Vendetta (which I reviewed for American Conservative here), politically correct tripe all the way. If the human race were dying out, what would the biggest issue be? According to Cuaron it would be ... mistreatment of illegal immigrants!

It doesn't get much stupider than that, folks.

But Children of Men has a few advantages over V for Vendetta as a movie. Children of Men has Clive Owen, who has a classic movie star's face -- handsome but world-weary, Cary Grant meets Humphrey Bogart. (Why isn't he James Bond instead of that thuggish-looking guy?) V for Vendetta, in contrast, has somebody in a stupid Guy Fawkes mask.

Second, Children of Men has some distinctive visual direction with loooong tracking shots that excite people who play first-person shooter video games.

As somebody has pointed out, however, this first person gimmick undermines the first advantage -- Clive Owen's great face -- because to get a reaction shot from the star during the two 10 minutes segments without cuts, the cameraman has to laboriously swing the camera around 180 degrees to look at Clive, then back 180 degrees to the action. The one long tracking shot that knocked me out was not the two celebrated shoot-em-ups but a roughly 90 second funereal shot of Clive after his friend has been killed as he wanders aimlessly into the forest -- toward the camera so you can watch him emote the whole way. That's what you pay a movie star to do.

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

From Commentary:

For $2.95:

Jewish Genius
Charles Murray
April 2007

Abstract –

Since its first issue in 1945, COMMENTARY has published hundreds of articles about Jews and Judaism. As one would expect, they cover just about every important aspect of the topic. But there is a lacuna, and not one involving some obscure bit of Judaica. COMMENTARY has never published a systematic discussion of one of the most obvious topics of all: the extravagant overrepresentation of Jews, relative to their numbers, in the top ranks of the arts, sciences, law, medicine, finance, entrepreneurship, and the media.

I have personal experience with the reluctance of Jews to talk about Jewish accomplishment—my co-author, the late Richard Herrnstein, gently resisted the paragraphs on Jewish IQ that I insisted on putting in The Bell Curve (1994). Both history and the contemporary revival of anti-Semitism in Europe make it easy to understand the reasons for that reluctance. But Jewish accomplishment constitutes a fascinating and important story. Recent scholarship is expanding our understanding of its origins.

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

College Fools' Day

My VDARE.com column:

April 01, 2007
Thoughts On College Fools' Day
By Steve Sailer

April Fools' Day is the traditional deadline for American colleges to mail out to applicants their letters of acceptance (thick) or rejection (thin).

The admissions process has been more frenzied than ever this year. Harvard has rejected an unprecedented 91 percent of its record 23,000 applicants. Remarkably, more than 3,000 Harvard wannabes were ranked first in their high school class. The university probably turned down over half of these valedictorians.

Many other elite colleges also saw new highs in applications received. This is due both to the growing convenience of applying to multiple colleges using the Common Application website, and to the ever-growing national (and even global) competition among students to attend a prestigious American college.

College administrations spend vast amounts of money recruiting top high school students. The administrators know that the surest way to acquire smarter, harder-working alumni, who can afford to donate more money to the old alma mater, is to bring in smarter, harder-working freshmen in the first place.

Doing a better job of recruiting is much more likely to have a sizable payoff than trying to do a better of job of, well, educating the kind of students you already get. …

One curious aspect of the college craziness: the seeming self-contempt with which white students at many elite colleges derisively refer to the predominantly white makeup of their schools' student bodies.

Take the Princeton Review's Best 361 Colleges guidebook, which summarizes students' opinions of their schools. An undergrad at well known little Colorado College in Colorado Springs, a school that is only two percent black, declares: "The typical Colorado College student is white and from an upper-middle-class home in a metropolitan suburb, but wishes this weren't true …" It's common for students quoted in Best 361 Colleges to lament the lack of ethnic diversity on their campuses, and to call for their administrations to do more to bring in minorities.

Is this the much discussed (but surprisingly little observed) phenomenon of White Guilt? Or is something else going on?
[More]

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

Apply Early, Apply Often

Awhile back, I recommended that ambitious high school students should apply to a lot of colleges, far more than the 4 to 8 of high school guidance counselor lore.

Not only is there a sizable randomness factor in acceptances, there is another, semi-independent source of randomness in financial aid offers. So, if you can't afford to pay more than $40,000 per year, multiplying the probabilities for acceptance times generous financial aid can point out the discouraging unlikelihood of getting the deal you want at the school you want.

Some vastly rich private colleges, such as Harvard, offer "need blind" admissions and fully discount to meet financial need, but the odds of getting into Harvard are 10 to 1 against. Schools that are easier to get into are generally harder to get highly generous need-based financial aid from (although they are easier to get merit scholarships from).

My son brings home the story of a girl at his high school who applied to two dozen colleges … and then at the very last moment added two more and had to beg her teachers and counselors to write recommendations a couple of months after the official fall closing date for such requests.

Well, it turns out that while she was accepted at a number of colleges, many of them stiffed her on financial aid. Fortunately, those last two, the 25th and 26th she added to her list, gave her acceptable financial aid packages. She would be in trouble today if she had stopped at merely 24 applications!

A medical student seconds my theory:

I think you've figured out the secret to getting into a good college, something I discovered myself about 8 years ago. When I was in high school I wasn't motivated to do a whole lot other than my homework, some SAT classes, some hospital volunteering, and a bit of debating my senior year.

That said, I went to Cornell in the Ivy League when a lot of the other "smarter" guys who had gone to my average suburban public high school had to settle for the public U. of Michigan or the like.

Our high school basically pushed hard the idea of "boiling down" colleges you'd want to go to to about 4 your senior year, and then applying to those. I've always been a life long skeptic, and the way I looked at it was that if these top schools have acceptance rates of about 10-20%, you should try to apply to a good number of them to get a spot. I applied to 9, I got into Cornell and Tulane, even though I was overall a mediocre applicant other than my grades and SAT score. I didn't even bother with backup schools, because I knew I could go to U-Toledo any time I wanted and perhaps later transfer to Michigan.

There was one guy who was valedictorian the year before me, who did *everything*. He ended up at U-M, because the only other places he applied to were Harvard and Yale. My year, the other Indian guy in my class (who was a lot more motivated than me) applied to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Michigan. He also went to Michigan - quite disappointed because getting in there certainly doesn't take staying at school everyday until 6 pm for 4 years and winning a whole cabinet full of debate, mock trial, and science olympiad awards; this guy could have easily gotten into Cornell, U-Penn, or Northwestern.

When I applied to 9 colleges my year, it was practically unheard of in the state of Ohio. The guidance counselors and school teachers discourage it purely because it means more paperwork for them.

I'm just amazed that some of these kids spend so much of their youth slaving away at these extracurriculars, and then completely screw up their college chances by applying to too few schools.

The Princeton Review offers a hint of one of the more Machiavellian angles of what's going on behind the scenes that causes your high school guidance counselor to give you the bad advice to limit your number of applications.

"The second possible scenario in safety schools might go something like this: Johnny's app sleeps with the fishes. Admissions committee's might not be receiving the quality apps they want from a certain high school. To hammer their new message home, an admissions office might reject an applicant or several applicants from that high school to set their new agenda in VERY clear terms. Basically, it's a message to the high school that hey, they're not gonna take students of this low caliber—whatever that caliber might be—anymore. Didn't think admissions counselors were such playas, did you?"

In other words, your high school guidance counselor doesn't have your best interests at heart. He has, at best, the interests of future student bodies at heart. If your school develops a reputation for applicants turning down admission offers from colleges, the colleges might retaliate on subsequent applicants from your school.

I don't know, but I suspect that this mostly happens at the elite prep schools that have lots of students apply to famous colleges each year. At run-of-the-mill high schools, counselor over-workedness is a more likely explanation.

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

The Odd Couple

NCAA Basketball Final: the Odd Couple -- Defending champion Florida's most distinctive player is 22-year-old junior Joakim Noah, 6'11" 230 pounds, who is the son of the half-African French tennis player/singer Yannick Noah (who looks like Milli Vanilli) and a blonde model babe. Yannick's French mom was on France's national basketball team. Young Noah is the most boyish-looking (to the point of seeming almost girlish) power forward ever (see UCLA fans having fun with Noah and Photoshop here, but Noah's Florida had the last laugh again today). Yet, he's hyper-aggressive.

In contrast, Ohio St.'s best known player is 19-year-old freshman Greg Oden, who is 7 feet tall and 280 pounds. Facially, he looks like he's 49 and just finished a 25-year sentence at San Quentin for killing the pimp who slashed him with a straight razor. I ran into the great Patrick Ewing when he was 38, and even that magnificent old warrior looked about a decade younger than Oden does at 19. When Oden showed up to high school as a 14-year-old ninth grader, his frightened classmates guessed he was 30. On the inside, however, he's kind of a nerdy guy (he took calculus as a senior in high school and enjoyed it) who mostly seems to play basketball because that's what you are supposed to do when you are 7 feet tall and 280 pounds of muscle and gristle.

Oden reminds me a little of another Ohio St. prodigy/oddity, football running back Robert Smith (not the Robert Smith who leads The Cure), who took a year off from football at Ohio St. because practice was getting in the way of his favorite classes. Smith, who looks to be about half white / half black, is a dedicated amateur astronomer. After he led the NFL in rushing in 2000, he retired at 28 because he had all the money he needed and he could still walk.

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

Did legalizing abortion cut crime?

Non-economist social scientists are beginning to weigh in on Steven D. Levitt's most famous Freakonomics theory. Here's a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association (2006, Aug):

Fertility and the Abortion-Crime Debate
Hangartner, D. , Sykes, B. L. and Hathaway, E. A.

Abstract: Recently some scholars have asserted that abortion legalization during the 1970s resulted in lower crime 15-20 years later. While economists have both substantiated and challenged these findings, sociologists and demographers have been mute on the topic. In this paper, we show that the supposed link between abortion and crime is actually the result of omitted variables bias and difficulties in distinguishing between age-period-cohort effects. We correct these problems and use quasi-experimental methods to retest the causal argument for homicide, property, and violent crime. Using a unique data set compiled from multiple sources, we find that abortion legalization did not have any measurable effect on crime 15-20 years later once appropriate controls are included. Our findings indicate that any drop in crime is the result of a mixture of unmeasured period and cohort effects and not abortion.

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

Reed College

Numerous colleges claim to be unique, but Reed, the small Portland liberal arts college, is perhaps the most paradoxical. Socially, it's notoriously granola 60s-ish, yet its academics are quite Dead White European Male and structured -- sort of a St. John's Lite, which is still pretty heavy.

Most strikingly, even though it doesn't put much emphasis on grades, and its students supposedly smoke a lot of dope, it's also notoriously hard for a liberal arts college.

So, lots of people don't graduate. A famous Reed dropout is Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple and billionaire. A not famous Reed dropout is my cousin Joe, the farmer and thousandaire.

Being hard hurts Reed in the USNWR rankings, because percentage of students graduating is entered as a positive variable in the formula. While over 95% of entering freshman graduate from the three most highly ranked liberal arts colleges, Williams, Amherst, and Swarthmore, only 73% graduate from Reed, which contributes to its #53 ranking by USNWR. Reed freshmen have virtually the same SAT scores (1280 at the 25th percentile, 1470 at the 75th percentile) as #5 Middlebury, but 94% of Middlebury students graduate. Demonstrating Reed's iconoclasm, the president of Reed, Colin Diver, even wrote an op-ed in the NYT in 2004 in praise of the SAT. Practically every president of an elite college depends heavily upon the SAT (and/or the Midwestern ACT), but seeing them admit that in the NYT is, well, unlikely.

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

Thick and Thin Letters

April Fools Day is the official final date for colleges to send out acceptances and rejections to applicants. That reminds me that the standard advice to apply to six to eight colleges -- two "stretch" schools, two to four reasonable odds schools, and two "safety" schools -- sounds nuts to me. That's what colleges want you to do because it's most convenient for them, and it allows them to maintain a seller's market after April 1st when many applicants find they've only been accepted to one or two (and sometimes, disastrously, zero) colleges, so they are poorly situated to dicker over financial aid (i.e., price). It's not what's in your best interest.

I probably don't have a lot of readers in high school, but to those I do have, I say:

Why not apply to a whole bunch of longshot colleges? And how do you know your good bet middle-of-the-road colleges really are a good bet? And what if both the admissions committees at your safety schools take a dislike to you? Then where are you? And how do you know the colleges that accept you will give you enough financial aid?

The online Common Application system used by most of the more desirable private colleges allows you to apply to a maximum of 20 colleges with no need to re-enter basic information. The incremental cost in application fees of applying to 20 colleges instead of six would be about $500, which is nothing compared to the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars you'll shell out to go to college for four years. Maybe half the incremental schools will require a supplemental essay, so that can mean a considerable amount of extra work, and some want custom financial aid apps, but, still …

The main downside would be if colleges colluded and punished students applying to a lot of colleges. I certainly wouldn't put it past the Ivy League, but I've never heard that they do it on acceptances, although they notoriously colluded on financial aid for many years.

As you may know, applying Early Decision to just one college, in return for agreeing to attend that school if accepted typically gives you a better chance of getting in to your favorite school, but if you don't go that route, apply to a lot of colleges.

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

The Onionization of America, Part 329

From ESPN, not The Onion:

Ex-NBA Star's Anti-Semitic Slurs Draw Suspension

Former NBA All-Star Micheal Ray Richardson appeared to be getting his life back on track after his league suspension in 1986 for drug use. He was coaching in the Continental Basketball Association and had led his team, the Albany Patroons [huh?], to the playoffs. But as they say: What goes up, must come down.

The Patroons have suspended Richardson for the rest of the CBA championship series for comments made to the Albany Times Union on Tuesday. Before Tuesdays game against the Yakima Sun Kings, Richardson made anti-Semitic comments to two reporters in his office when discussing the contract general manager Jim Coyne had offered him Monday to coach his team in the CBA and USBL.

"I've got big-time lawyers," Richardson said, according to the Times Union. "I've got big-time Jew lawyers."

When told by the reporters that the comment could be offensive to people because it plays to the stereotype that Jews are crafty and shrewd, he responded with, "Are you kidding me? They are. They've got the best security system in the world. Have you ever been to an airport in Tel Aviv? They're real crafty. Listen, they are hated all over the world, so they've got to be crafty."

And he continued, "They got a lot of power in this world, you know what I mean?" he said. "Which I think is great. I don't think there's nothing wrong with it. If you look in most professional sports, they're run by Jewish people. If you look at a lot of most successful corporations and stuff, more businesses, they're run by Jewish. It's not a knock, but they are some crafty people."

Richardson defended himself against charges of anti-Semitism in the manner that is becoming traditional for accused sports stars, pointing out that one of his ex-wives was Jewish.

Obviously, these are not "anti-Semitic slurs," but pro-Semitic compliments. And, equally obviously, everybody knows what this poor bastard said is more or less true. Most obviously of all, that was his real crime: telling the truth.

Since nobody is more holier than thou than sportswriters (the whole point of spectator sports is our love of inequality, of finding out who is better than whom, so sportswriters are the single profession, this side of gender studies professors, quickest to denounce anybody who publicly mentions inequalities), there can be no mercy. This mental butterfly must be crushed on the wheel of political correctness.

It will be interesting to see if Jesse or Al (or Barack?) jumps into defend him Richardson, since he's black, so he's got that going for him, unlike all the white sportsmen ruined for purported anti-black prejudice, such as Paul Hornung who lost his radio job. It would be right and fitting if Alan Dershowitz offered to take his case pro bono, but I don't think that will happen.

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

Cochran and Hawks

From World Science:

Human evolution, radically reappraised

Human evolution has been speeding up tremendously, a new study contends—so much, that the latest evolutionary changes seem to largely eclipse earlier ones that accompanied modern man’s “origin.”

The study, alongside other recent research on which it builds, amounts to a sweeping reappraisal of traditional views, which tended to assume that humans have reached an endpoint of evolution.

The findings suggest that not only is our evolution continuing: in a sense our very “origin” can be seen as ongoing, a geneticist not involved in the study said.

Gregory Cochran of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah, a co-author of the study, said the research may force a radical rethinking of the story of modern human evolution. “It turns it upside-down, pretty much,” he said. But skeptics question some aspects of the work.

The traditional picture of humans as a finished product began to erode in recent years, scientists said, with a crop of studies suggesting our evolution indeed goes on. But the newest investigation goes further. It claims the process has actually accelerated.

It also downplays the importance of a much-scrutinized era around 200,000 years ago, when humans considered “anatomically modern” first appear in the fossil record. In the study, this epoch emerges as just part of a vast arc of accelerating change.

“The origin of modern humans was a minor event compared to more recent evolutionary changes,” wrote the authors of the research, in a presentation slated for Friday in Philadelphia at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.

The authors are Cochran and anthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The findings will also be submitted to one or more scientific journals, Cochran said.

The proposal is “truly fascinating,” wrote University of Chicago geneticist Bruce Lahn in an email. He wasn’t involved in the work, though he did conduct earlier research finding that evolution may still be ongoing in the brain.

Even before the Hawks-Cochran study and its immediate forerunners, Lahn wrote, scientists had already noted a trend of accelerating change in the evolutionary lineage leading to modern humans from ape-like ancestors. But that phenomenon seemed to have occurred over time spans measured in millions of years; it was far from clear that it has continued in the recent past or today, he added.

Hawks and Cochran, by contrast, argue that the trend “is visible even in the last tens of thousands of years,” Lahn wrote. It “runs counter to the feeling in some quarters that the evolution of the human phenotype [form] has slowed down or even stopped in our recent past.”

If the study is correct, it raises new questions about how to define the “origin” of modern humans—a rather arbitrary decision in any case, Lahn remarked.

The origin is “defined probably more as a matter of convenience rather than reflecting any actual watershed evolutionary event,” he wrote. That is, it’s “useful to say that any past creatures that are within certain levels of similarities to us today should be considered as ‘the same’ as us.”

But if the changes that accompanied this event are only a trifling part of a wider trend, he added, it becomes reasonable to ask whether that further deflates the rationale for calling it an origin.

“In a sense,” he wrote, one could say “the origin is still ongoing.”

Evolution occurs when an individual acquires a beneficial genetic mutation, and it spreads throughout the population because those with it thrive and reproduce more. Ceaseless repetitions of this can change species, or produce new ones. As beneficial genes spread, harmful ones are weeded out; the whole process, called natural selection, propels evolution.

Hawks and Cochran analyzed measurements of skulls from Europe, Jordan, Nubia, South Africa, and China in the past 10,000 years, a period known as the Holocene era. They also studied European and West Asian skulls from the end of the Pleistocene era, which lasted from two million years ago until the Holocene.

“A constellation of features” changed across the board, Hawks and Cochran wrote in their presentation. “Holocene changes were similar in pattern and... faster than those at the archaic-modern transition,” the time when so-called modern humans appeared. But these changes “themselves were rapid compared to earlier hominid evolution.” Hominids are a family of primates that includes humans and their extinct, more ape-like though upright-walking ancestors and relatives.

Hawks and Cochran also analyzed past genetic studies to estimate the rate of production of genes that undergo positive selection—that is, genes that spread because they are beneficial. “The rate of generation of positively selected genes has increased as much as a hundredfold during the past 40,000 years,” they wrote.

There are ways to detect positive selection in genome data. But Mark Thomas, a genetic anthropologist at University College London, was skeptical that these would be enough to make Hawks’ and Cochran’s case. “The issue is that the most powerful methods for detecting selection are ones that lose their sensitivity going more than 30,000 years back,” he said. Other techniques can’t “distinguish between selection and population growth.”

Thomas added that he understands the skeletal data to show something different from what Hawks and Cochran say, but that he would need a fuller account of their findings to make a judgment.

Hawks and Cochran said some of the most notable physical changes in humans have been ones affecting the size of the brain case.

A “thing that should probably worry people is that brains have been getting smaller for 20,000 to 30,000 years,” said Cochran. But brain size and intelligence aren’t tightly linked, he added. Also, growth in more advanced brain areas might have made up for the shrinkage, Cochran said; he speculated that an almost breakneck evolution of higher foreheads in some peoples may reflect this. A study in the Jan. 14 British Dental Journal found such a trend visible in England in just the past millennium, he noted, a mere eyeblink in evolutionary time.
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My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Obama as the postmodern John Cheever of Honolulu

In one of the more memorable passages in Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, Obama more or less admits that his book's portrait of Hawaii is a fictionalized projection of his own self-pity and resentment.

On p. 340, he is in his late 20s, visiting Kenya, and on his way to meet his father's third wife (and second white American wife Ruth) and her son Mark, Obama's disturbing doppelganger, his half-brother who is home on vacation from Stanford, where he is a physics student.

"Ruth lived in Westlands [in Nairobi], an enclave of expensive homes set off by wide lawns and well-tended hedges, each one with a sentry post manned by brown-uniformed guards. … The coolness reminded me of the streets around Punahou [Obama's Honolulu prep school], Manoa, Tantalus, the streets where some of my wealthier classmates had lived back in Hawaii. Staring out Auma's car window, I though back to the envy I'd felt toward those classmates whenever they invited me over to play in their big backyards or swim in their swimming pools. And along with that envy, a different impression -- the sense of quiet desperation those big, pretty houses seemed to contain. The sound of someone's sister crying softly behind the door. The sight of a mother sneaking a tumbler of gin in midafternoon. The expression of a father's face as he sat alone in his den, his features clenched as he flicked between college football games on TV. An impression of loneliness that perhaps wasn't true, perhaps was just a projection of my own heart, but, that, either way, had made me want to run …"

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