Olympics notes

- Isn't it odd how skier Bode Miller looks even more like George W. Bush this time around? And how skater Johnny Weir is starting to look like Michael Madsen from all those Tarantino movies?

- Have you noticed how over the years short track speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno has gone from the Newest New Thing to the Old Reliable of Winter Olympics television entertainment? Every time you see him, you know, win or lose, you are in for a few minutes of hypnotic circling suddenly devolving into some insane wipe-out that will leave every single person in South Korea extremely worked up.

- Three commercials in heavy rotation on the Olympics broadcasts -- McDonald's, Wal-Mart, and Chevy -- feature little girls' hockey teams. Is hockey supposed to be the best "keep-her-off-the-pole" talisman?

- Speaking of commercials, why don't advertisers make slight variants of their commercials to keep people from completely zoning out the 73rd time they've seen it? They shoot way more footage than they use, so why not whip up alternative versions to keep viewers awake during the Olympics? Here's an easy way to keep siblings competitively engaged: shoot three or four different punchlines and then make one slight variation in each version's set-up shots. That way, somebody who is paying close attention will be able to achieve dominance over the rest of his family by accurately predicting the punchline. It will drive his siblings crazy, so they will also study the commercials looking for clues so they can beat him to the punchline.

- Also, advertising agencies keep missing the sweet spot between too boring and too interesting that you don't notice what brand is being advertised. A lot of prestige ads that run on the Olympics are so expensive, so filled with show-offy scenes from around the world that you often lose the thread before they finally flash the sponsor's logo for 0.8 seconds at the end. I'm sure those kind of ads win awards -- nobody loves to give awards to each other more than advertising people -- but are they really effective at selling whatever sponsor that's revealed at the very end? Especially when the stylistic theme of countless commercials is exactly the same: Despite, or perhaps because of, global diversity, everybody on Earth loves us. The Globalist commercial is inherently distracting because it packs so much information demanding to be decoded into one 30-second spot that viewers' attentions are constantly tempted away from the point of the commercial into distraction and woolgathering. Professional advertising people tend to be so knowing and quick about standard visual imagery that they are clueless about what goes through other people's heads when presented with a picture of a landmark that strikes ad folks as the worst depths of cliche: Oh, look, there's that big rock that begins with an "A" in that place that begins with an "A," so that shot must be from, what, Antarctica? But, there's no snow. That big rock must be in some other large place that begins with an "A." Africa? Argentina? No, now I remember, that big rock is in Australia! Wouldn't it be awesome to visit that big rock on vacation? Out of all the big rocks in the world, I hear it's the biggest! But isn't it inconveniently out in the middle of nowhere and, in the final analysis, is just a big rock? By the way, if there's no snow in Australia, how come there are Australians in the Winter Olympics? Speaking of no snow, whatever happened to the Jamaican bobsled team? Hey, that commercial's over. What was it about, anyway? Well, never mind, we're back to the luge. Wow, von Schievenhuffel is going really fast!

Instead, why not borrow a trick from cable networks that keep a small logo up on a lower corner of the screen? Hey, this show is on the Discovery Channel! I'll have to try to remember that. Similarly, put the sponsor's logo in the corner throughout the commercial. Your ad won't win any awards and your ad agency might get sanctioned by the Advertising Council for violating the professional ethics of the advertising business by being overly attentive to the client's interests instead of to your own sense of creative self-expression, but, so what?

- In general, what human beings like is Similarity-with-Variation. That's why people enjoy the architecture of Paris more than the architecture of Magnetogorsk or Beverly Hills. In Paris, most buildings are six stories high and have mansard roof, so streets are harmonious, but there's a lot of variation within Baron Haussmann's limits. In contrast, as Woody Allen in Annie Hall and Nathanael West in Day of the Locust complained, there's too much variation in Beverly Hills: "Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles," scoffed West. That's what ads during the Olympics are missing: the optimal combination of continuity and difference. It's why short track speed skating is fun to watch (once every four years): everybody always goes around and around for awhile, but then something crazy happens. People like that.

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

Why you don't want to be an NFL running back

From the AP:

LaDainian Tomlinson, who became one of the NFL's best running backs during a nine-year career, has been released by the San Diego Chargers, the team said on Monday.

The 30-year-old, who is San Diego's all-time rusher, had expected the move for some time since he was due a $2 million roster bonus on March 5. He would have earned $5 million in total salary this year.

Contract? What contract? The contract only applies if you, LaDainian, hadn't turned out to be worn down by nine years of being slammed by opponents while carrying the ball for the San Diego Chargers franchise. Your contract merely says, in effect, that if you were still in prime form, then we would have paid you to play another year for us, not for anybody else. You, on the other hand, turned out to be over the hill at age 30, so don't let the doorknob hit you on the way out, LaDainian.

Question for Toby Gerhart: Are you sure you'll never learn to reliably hit the split-fingered fastball? They have guaranteed contracts in baseball for big, fast, strong guys who can. And in baseball, all-time greats aren't used up and thrown away by age 30.

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

Supreme Court to hear Chicago Firemen Test?

From the AP:

The Supreme Court on Monday seemed willing to let a group of African Americans sue Chicago for discrimination over a hiring test that weeded out black applicants to become firefighters.

It is the second time in as many years that the high court has tackled discrimination in testing within the firefighting ranks. In a landmark case last year, the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision said New Haven, Conn., violated white firefighters' civil rights by throwing out an exam in which no African-Americans scored high enough to be promoted to lieutenant or captain.

In Monday's case, the city of Chicago decided to use a test to weed out potential firefighter trainee applicants. Anyone who scored 64 or below was deemed not qualified. But the city set a second cutoff score of 89 points.

Officials told applicants who scored below 89 but above 64 that although they passed the test, they likely would not be hired because of the large number of people who scored 89 or above. The majority of those in the top-scoring group were white; only 11 percent were black.

"Chicago used an unlawful cutoff score to determine which applicants it would hire as firefighters," said John Payton, director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. "There is no dispute that the cutoff score had an adverse impact on qualified black applicants and was not job-related."

However, the issue before the court was whether the aspiring black firefighters waited too long to sue. People are supposed to sue within 300 days after an employment action they seek to challenge as unlawful.

The city says the clock started when it announced the use of the test scores in January 26, 1996. The first lawsuit in the case was filed on March 31, 1997, 430 days after the city announced the results.

But the plaintiffs say a new act of discrimination also happened each time the scores were used in hiring firefighter trainees between May 1996 and October 2001.

A U.S. District judge agreed with the black applicants, but the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that decision. The federal appeals court said the limitation period began when the city placed the applicants into the middle tier.

"And after that decision was made, there was nothing else that Chicago did that affected petitioners in the terms required by the statute," city lawyer Benna Solomon argued. "Hiring others did not adversely affect petitioners."

But "what is the list, other than an administratively convenient way to use the scores?" Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked.

Added Justice Sonia Sotomayor: "When you hire, aren't you acting upon the results?"

Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal argued that if the court allows the city of Chicago to hire using its flawed method, that will tell employers they can get away with a discriminatory test if they manage to avoid a lawsuit within the 300-day limit .

"If the rule of the city of Chicago were adopted, then an employer who made it 300 days without an EEOC charge being filed ... would then be able to, for all time, use that discriminatory test," Kaytal said.

The court is expected to make a decision before fall.

The case is Lewis v. Chicago, 08-974.

This is not an obscure case: Mayor Daley put the city through contortions in the 1990s to come up with racially fair fire and police test, and was shocked when whites always did so much better on them.

Will anybody nationally come to the defense of the Chicago firemen most qualified to save lives?

The two guys who did the most to impede Obama's momentum last summer were Frank Ricci and James Crowley. And, yet, nobody seems to pick up on these huge New York and Chicago fire department cases as politicizable.

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

A simple electoral rule

My new VDARE.com column outlines a simple rule for electoral success: Places that white Americans move to vote Republican in the future, while places that immigrants move to vote Democratic down the road: even Dallas and Houston.

In 1980, I met on a train through Italy a couple of English soccer hooligans who were headed for a post-match riot in Turin. When they asked where I was from, I replied, “Houston”, where I had just graduated from college. They had never heard of Houston, so I suggested “Dallas” as a reasonable approximation.

“Who shot J.R.?” the yobs exclaimed in happy unison.

Although Southfork Ranch, the fictional abode of Television Texan J.R. Ewing, was set in Dallas, Houston was even more the capital of capitalist exuberance during the 1970s oil boom.

By 1980, Houston’s Harris County was the third most populous in America, and the downtown business district had sprouted the most outlandish skyline west of the Mississippi (although Dallas wasn’t far behind).

Unsurprisingly, except apparently to the banks, oil prices eventually came down and the Texas bubble popped. Yet the modern Republican Party’s state electorate was forged in the 1970s. In contrast to the housing boom of the last decade in California, in Texas back then construction wasn’t considered “a job Americans just wouldn’t [or shouldn’t] do.” Nor was it yet universally assumed by the Establishment that high wages for American workers were an evil to be fought at all cost.

Back in the 1970s, strong demand bid up workers’ wages in Texas. That lured in large numbers of American workers to Texas from the declining cities of the Rust Belt. Although American newcomers to Texas in the 1970s typically came from places where the Democrats had ruled at least since FDR, they joined with native Texans in trending Republican.

After voting for Carter in 1976, Texas went for Reagan in 1980 and hasn’t wavered since. Texas kept the GOP viable at the national level when California, which voted for nine out of ten Republican Presidential candidates from 1952-1988, flipped Democratic.

Read the rest there and comment upon it here.

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

Figureskaters v. Halfpipers

From my new column in Taki's Magazine:

The sportswear of Olympic events range from Fabulousity Uber Alles (figure skating) to revealingly narcissistic (diving) to trimly functional (gymnastics) to overtly Lebowskian (halfpipe snowboarding).

To a man from Mars, figure skating and the halfpipe wouldn’t seem all that different—in both, competitors are primarily judged on gracefully executing aerial rotations—but their clothes demonstrate that they are wildly different in what kind of young Americans they appeal to.

Although Fred Astaire demonstrated that a man can dance perfectly well while well-dressed, male figure skaters typically pursue sparkliness over taste and even sanity.

In contrast, the 2010 American snowboard team espoused a uniform carefully designed to look like they found their clothes at the bottom of a trunk in Kurt Cobain’s mom’s attic: hooded flannel shirts and torn baggy jeans.

The snowboarder uniforms are actually made out of Gore-Tex with the slacker designs (including the rips in the supposed denim) merely printed on them. But neither authenticity nor aerodynamism is the point. The point is that they are not tight-fitting like the figure skaters’ outfits.

Read the rest there and comment upon it here.

Correction: My reference to an "opera aria" in a video I linked to of Vitaly Scherbo and another gymnast was inaccurate. A reader points out:

The piece in question is not actually from an opera. It is the "Panis Angelicus": the text is an ancient Catholic Latin hymn of praise to Christ present in the Eucharist. The text's opening words are "Panis Angelicus, fit panis hominum," which means "Bread of Angels, become the bread of men". The musical setting is that by Cesar Franck, who was one of the great composers of organ works and other sacred music in the late 19th century.

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

Outfits

Men's figure skating should have a rule that the skaters can't wear any styles of clothes that weren't worn in dance scenes in Hollywood musicals by either Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, or Jimmy Cagney.

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

Blonde Buttkicking Babes of the North

After winning the Women's Downhill ski race yesterday despite an injury that left her skiing primarily on one leg, Lindsey Vonn, the American champion, broke into tears during her interview until her husband interjected something like, "That's enough crying, Lindsey. Today is a good day," and led her away from the cameras.

Vonn is a big, super-strong, ultra-competitive beautiful girly girl. And that's not too uncommon in the Winter Olympics. The Winter Olympics are always being criticized for all the blue-eyed victors, but a high degree of sexual equality in sports and physical labor is a long-standing cultural attribute that increases the farther north you go in Europe, and among Americans from Northern Europe.

The buttkicking Nordic babe has a more than 1000-year-long history in North America from Leif Eric's ferocious sister Freydis Ericsdottir, who took the lead in battling the Skraelings for Vinland, down to Elin Nordegren Woods running amok with Tiger's golf club last Thanksgiving.

I think it has something to do with the lack of Jersey Shore / Silvio Berlusconi-style strutting machismo the farther north in Europe. If an Italian superbo is laying on the bronzer, hair gel, and pinky rings as symbols of his masculinity, then an Italian women feels impelled to lay on the long fingernails and other excesses of femininity. In contrast, if a Swedish man is uncontriving about his masculinity, it frees up Swedish women to be uncontrived about their femininity.

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

National Merit Qualifying Scores by State

From the Washington Post, here are the scores by state on the Preliminary SAT (PSAT) required to make the first cut in the National Merit Scholarship program. (To convert from the three part PSAT score to the traditional two-part SAT Math plus Verbal scores, divide by 3 and multiply by 20: e.g., Arizona requires a 210, which is like a 1400 on the SAT.) It's a good indication of the number of upper middle class residents by state.

For example, Washington D.C. always trails all 50 states on average National Assessment of Educational Progress scores for public school students, but it ties with Massachusetts (which leads NAEP scores more often than any other state), Maryland, and New Jersey for first on this measure with a 221 (the equivalent of a 1473 on the post-1995 SAT). Montana usually is close behind Massachusetts on the NAEP, but only requires a 204 because it lacks much of a native, childbearing upper middle class. In contrast, California, whose white students do relatively poorly on the NAEP on average, does well on this measure, requiring a 218. The lowest scoring state is Wyoming at 201. I would guess that's about 2/3rds of a standard deviation behind the top four states.

Alaska 211
Arizona 210
Arkansas 203
California 218
Colorado 213
Connecticut 218
Delaware 219
Washington D.C. 221
Florida 211
Georgia 214
Hawaii 214
Idaho 209
Illinois 214
Indiana 211
Iowa 209
Kansas 211
Kentucky 209
Louisiana 207
Maine 213
Maryland 221
Massachusetts 221
Michigan 209
Minnesota 215
Mississippi 203
Missouri 211
Montana 204
Nebraska 206
Nevada 202
New Hampshire 213
New Jersey 221
New Mexico 208
New York 218
North Carolina 214
North Dakota 202
Ohio 211
Oklahoma 207
Oregon 213
Pennsylvania 214
Rhode Island 217
South Carolina 211
South Dakota 205
Tennessee 213
Texas 216
Utah 206
Vermont 213
Virginia 218
Washington 217
West Virginia 203
Wisconsin 207
Wyoming 201

I haven't quantified this, but I would assume that Blue States average higher scores than Red States on this measure, although Texas does well at 216.

In general, Texas does fairly well on most tests of educational competence, and it's encouraging that such a huge state seems to perform relatively well both for the average and for the elite. It would be interesting to know how far back this goes in time, since Texas does not have a historical reputation for educational attainment the way Massachusetts does.

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

Unemployment and the I Word

From my new VDARE.com column:

The March issue of The Atlantic features Don Peck’s long, well-researched, and deeply depressing cover story "How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America." Peck reports:

“[Men have] suffered roughly three-quarters of the 8 million job losses since the beginning of 2008 … In November, 19.4 percent of all men in their prime working years, 25 to 54, did not have jobs, the highest figure since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking the statistic in 1948.”

The implications, as Peck documents, are baleful:

“… this era of high joblessness is probably just beginning. Before it ends, it will likely … leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar men. It could cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a despair not seen for decades.“

Despite the gravity of the unemployment problem, there has been almost zero discussion in the Main Stream Media of the role of immigration policy in how we got here—and how changes in immigration policy could help get us out of this jam.

After Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) responded to Scott Brown’s election by announcing he was fast-tracking a bipartisan jobs bill, eight Republican Senators released a joint letter to Reid with their suggestions. Sen. Jeff Sessions, who did so much to save America from the Bush-Kennedy-McCain amnesty bills of 2006 and 2007, and his seven colleagues recommended a half-dozen commonsense steps for reducing unemployment among American citizens by more effectively enforcing laws against illegal immigration.

Keep in mind, these Republicans’ letter didn’t even mention anything about legal immigration—such as imposing a temporary moratorium until the employment problem clears up.

Of course, none of the Patriotic Eight’s illegal immigration reforms made Reid’s bill, which turned out to be the usual Official Bipartisan Consensus of spending increases and tax cuts. (As of Sunday morning, that bill’s progress had stalled due to squabbling.)

And almost none of the press coverage about unemployment mentions immigration.

Read the rest there and comment upon it here.

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

"The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks"

In The New Republic, in "The Other Secret Jews," Adam Kirsch reviews The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks by Marc David Baer.

A number of years ago, a friend in Istanbul mentioned several times that many of his friends and acquaintances in classical music, cinephile, and other high culture circles in the Turkish capital were crypto-Jews. I had no idea what he was talking about until I did some research into the Donme (or Donmeh or other variant spellings), and discovered that they were the descendants of followers of the Jewish False Messiah of the 1660s, Sabbatai Zevi (spellings vary), who after Zevi's apostasy, had publicly converted to Islam but had continued to worship Zevi, and remained a small, relatively endogamous elite who played key roles in Turkish revolutions and subsequent life.

For example, the foreign minister in Turkey's most recent Kemalist party government, Ismail Cem, was a Donmeh. (Perhaps a certain amount of the former neocon ardor for Turkey as the Good Muslim Country, which was so rudely interrupted in early 2003 when the Turkish parliament voted to not allow the U.S. to use its big base in Turkey to invade Iraq, much to the surprise and dismay of Paul Wolfowitz, had to do with Americans and Israelis being used to dealing with Turkish diplomats with many of whom they felt culturally compatible.)

The Donme are fascinating in an Umberto Eco sort of way, so, back in 2006, I wrote four long blog posts about them. The Donmeh are representative of how in the realm of the old Byzantine Empire, things are lot more, well, byzantine than we poor dumb Americans assume. We think of Muslim lands as uniformly Islamic, but there are millions of people there who are only vaguely Muslim, like the tens of millions of Alevis in rural Turkey and the ruling Alawi minority in Syria, not to mention the 50,000 Gnostics in Southern Iraq who believe in "planetary archons," and the Lucifer-worshiping Yezidis in Kurdistan. Then there are the Samaritans of Israel and the Druze, who won't tell you what they believe. There are people in the Middle East who worship a sword stuck into the ground and others who worship a large black dog. If it sometimes seems as if the U.S. government doesn't have much of a clue what we are dealing with over there, well, one reason is that it doesn't.

Kirsch's review confirms the history of the Donmeh I reported, but when he gets to recent generations after Kemal's revolution, he more or less announces, "Nothing to see here, folks, just move along, nothing to see. This topic is much more boring than it sounds. It's purely of antiquarian interest."

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

Sliding it right by you again

From my 2002 Winter Olympics blogging:

Judging Skating: An irony of the figure skating pairs controversy is that one of the flagrantly biased NBC announcers, Scott Hamilton, was the beneficiary of one of the most rigged decisions in skating history. Coming into the 1984 Games, Scott had been World Champion three years in a row. Everyone knew that if he won the gold, the personable (and heterosexual!) American would be a great ambassador for the sport. So, even though at Sarajevo Hamilton was sick and skated a weak final program, blowing off two triple jumps, he still was handed the gold.

Similarly, Sale and Pelletier, the supposedly martyred Canadian pairs skaters, were only in gold medal contention because the judges decided to not penalize justly their catastrophic double fall at the climax of their short program.

I sort of sympathize with this "cumulative" approach to judging, which tries to lessen the general problem with the Winter Games, which is that it's damn slippery out there. Thus, too many events turn on almost-random mistakes rather than on talent. The skating judges try to smooth out the results by voting for the competitors who have shown themselves the best over the years. Of course, on the other hand, that lends skating its aura of bogusness.

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

Notes from the Past

Nothing much ever changes in the Olympics, so I might run some old posts:

How to improve Men's Figure Skating

Watching biathlon, which combines cross country skiing and rifle target shooting, it occurred to me that the way to make men's figure skating a little less twirly is to combine it with that ultimate regular guy sport, paintball. Each competitor would get one shot at the rival of his choice:

Scott Hamilton: "And now Plushenko's going to try his quad toe loop. Here he goes --"

SPLAT

Scott Hamilton: "Johnny Weir has shot Plushenko!"

Dick Button: "Right between the shoulder blades at the top of his jump. Plushenko did a complete face plant in the ice."

Plus, aesthetically speaking, large random splashes of paint could only improve the competitors' costumes.

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

Greece and Olympics

How much of the Greek bankruptcy has roots in the expenses of the 2004 Summer Olympics (and the backscratching political deals within Greece to get funding for the Olympics)? How much of the oil price spike of the summer of 2008 had to do with the Chinese stocking up in anticipation of the Olympics?

You would think it would be easy to make money on a sporting event where you don't pay the athletes in anything except glory, but after the 1984 LA Olympics, which made a fortune by using old stadia, it hasn't worked out like that.

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

The Chinese Mating Market

The Chinese love of numbers and disdain for polite euphemisms and esteem-boosting lead to some amusing artifacts. For example, here's a popular test somebody on the Internet made up for Chinese yuppies and yuppettes to rate their value on the high-end mating market. I've rearranged the order of the questions so readers can more conveniently compare sex differences:

Age
Female Age
23 and under (10 pts); 23-25 (8 pts); 25-27 (6 pts); 28-29 (4pts); 29-32 (1 pt); 32 and above (0 pts)
Male Age
26-32 (10 pts); 32-36 (8 pts); 23-26 (6 pts); 36-40 (4 pts); 20-23 (1 pt), the rest 0 pts

Place of Origin
Female Place of Origin
Prefecture level city (10 pts); average provincial capital city (8 pts); first-line cities (6 pts); county seat (4 pts); small town (1 pt); rural 0 pts
Male Place of Origin
Europe or America (10 pts); Singapore, Hong Kong (8 pts); Korea (6 pts); China city (4 pts); other (1 pt); rural 0 pts

Education
Female Education
Bachelor’s Degree in popular major (10 pts); 211 Bachelor’s Degree (8 pts); Associate’s Degree (6 pts); high school or vocational school (4 pts); Either third-rate Bachelor’s Degree or Doctorate and above 0 pts
Male Education
Famous university MBA (10 pts); “sea turtle” returnee (8 pts); Famous university Bachelor’s Degree (6 pts); 211 Master’s Degree (4 pts); 211 Bachelor’s Degree (1 pt); third-rate Bachelor’s Degree and under 0 pts

Looks
Female Features/Appearance
Fair skin, beautiful appearance (10 pts); fair skin, proper/correct features (8 pts); fair skin, features collectively are relatively harmonious (6 pts); beautiful appearance, poor skin (4 pts); proper/correct features, poor skin (1 pt); poor skin, features not harmonious (0 pts)
Female Weight
45-50kg (10 pts); 50-55kg (8 pts); 40-45kg (6 pts); height 165cm and above 55-60kg (4 pts); height 158cm and below 35-40kg (1 pt); the rest 0 pts
Female Body/Physique
Front protrudes, back perky, waist and legs distinct (10 pts); long legs, ample breasts (8 pts); fine and well proportioned (6 pts); airport + proportionate (4 pts); plump and smooth skinned + relatively poor proportions (1 pt); Either long waist and short legs, out of proportion, entire body dull, etc. 0 pts
Male Appearance
Relatively handsome (10 pts); proper/correct features (8 pts); average (6 pts); relatively ugly (4 pts); extremely ugly (1 pt); no such thing as zero points for men’s appearance

Height
Female Height
165-172 (10 pts); 158-164 (8 pts); 172-174 (6 pts); 155-158 (4 pts); 174-176 (1 pt); the rest 0 pts
Male Height
178-183 (10 pts); 183-186 (8 pts); 175-178 (6 pts); 170-174 (4 pts); 186-189 (1 pt); the rest 0 pts

Sex life
Female Chastity
CN (20 pts), Not-CN (-20 pts)
Male Sexual Ability
No ED (20 pts), ED (-20 pts) [ED = erectile dysfunction]

Resources
Female Background
Rich/powerful family (10 pts); high-ranking government child (8 pts); parents have high positions in companies (6 pts); civil servant household (4 pts); relatively well-off (1 pt); the others 0 pts
Male Occupation
Profitable entrepreneur (10 pts); small family business (8 pts); back office civil servant (6 pts); medium to high position in company (4 pts); low-level white-collar worker (1 pt), the rest 0 pts
Male Assets
10 million or above (10pts); 5-10 million (8 pts); 2-5 million (6 pts); 1-2 million (4 pts); 500k-1 million (1 pt); less than 500k 0 pts
Male House/Property
N [many/multiple] houses (10 pts); 2 or more hoouses (8 pts); 1 un-mortgaged fully owned house (6 pts); currently paying mortgage (4 pts); paying 3k or above rent (1 pt); the others 0 pts
Male Car
Audi A6 or better (10 pts); Passat-grade (8 pts); Elantra-grade (6 pts); Peugeot 307, Fit-grade (4 pts); Geely, Chery-grade (1 pt); other 0 pts

Female Only:
Female Personality
Gentle, considerate (10 pts); gentle, a little temper (4 pts), not gentle 0 pts

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

Nepotism v. Neposchism

Writing about the Coen Brothers got me thinking about one question I've never seen any research upon: Do brothers who make their livings together get along on average better or worse than non-relatives? What tends to dominate: brotherly love or sibling rivalry?

The writer-director brother act is relatively new in Hollywood history. Before the Coens emerged in the 1980s, the the only fraternal writing team I can think of were the Epstein identical twins (Casablanca). (There were acting teams like the Marx Brothers, and lots of brothers in various roles behind the scenes such as the Warners and the Selznicks.)

Since then, there have been frauteurs like the Farrelly, Wachowski, Wayan, Hughes, Weisz, and Polish Brothers. My guess is that the modern writer-director job often tends to be too hard for one individual to do, so brother pairs have flourished.

On the other hand, this trend may be dying out. I'm not sure if many new Coen-like brother acts have emerged in the movie business since early in the last decade -- perhaps because the end of the Baby Boom in 1964 reduced the average number of brothers the typical guy has.

But the question remains: do brothers who work together tend to get along better or worse?

There are a lot of examples in popular music history of brother acts -- the Jacksons, the Osmonds, the Everlys, Van Halen, the Kinks, the Beach Boys, Creedence, Oasis, Allmans, AC/DC, Bee-Gees, Radiohead, the Blasters, Dire Straits, Toto (who used to play in my baseball league at the park), the Dorseys, and so forth. (There might be an even higher proportion of sister acts, but I'll put that aside for another time.)

Many of these brothers squabbled something fierce, but then most musical acts do, so it's hard to tell whether brothers get along better or worse. The Van Halen brothers seem to get along better with each other than with their bandmates (which isn't necessarily saying much in absolute terms), while the Fogertys of Creedence got along worse.

My guess would be that show biz, with the seeming arbitrariness of fame, is even more destructive of fraternal comity than most occupations.

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

"A Serious Man"

In my Taki's Magazine column, I compare the Coen Brothers to Quentin Tarantino. The opening:

Inflation in the number of Best Picture Oscar nominees from five to ten means that to have any hope of keeping them all straight in your head, you’ll need to group them. Fortunately, the Best Picture nods fall into five obvious pairings:

— The Easily Confused Titles: Up and Up in the Air.

— The Exes’ Action Flicks: James Cameron’s Avatar and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker.

— The Movies about 350-Pound Black 16-Year-Olds: Precious and The Blind Side. (Two films that, together, teach us that if you are going to be an impoverished but colossal teen, it’s better to be a guy than a girl.)

— The Foreign Films That Aren't Going to Win: An Education and District 9.

— And, finally, The Battle of the Aging Wunderkinds: Quentin Tarantino’s violent Jewish heroes in Inglourious Basterds vs. Joel and Ethan Coen’s passive-aggressive Jewish villains in A Serious Man.

Read the rest there and comment upon it below.

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

Google Deunpersonizes Pat Buchanan

A few weeks ago, we noticed that Google had rigged their little "prompting" system on the Google home page, where, as you type your search term, it offers up the most popular searches beginning with those letters. Oddly, Pat Buchanan had been relegated to Unperson status by Google, unlike Yahoo's and Bing's search engines where Buchanan was the second prompt for "Pat B" after only Pat Benatar.

Obviously, that wasn't the most crucial issue of our times, but it does say something when a super-rich and powerful near monopolist surreptitiously engages in petty political vendettas.

I concluded, "Ridicule is the best medicine."

And ridicule seems to have worked. Buchanan is now second on Google among the "Pat B" prompts, well ahead of the immortal Pat Buttram.

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

Dating and Age

From the NYT's "The New Math of Campus:"

North Carolina, with a student body that is nearly 60 percent female, is just one of many large universities that at times feel eerily like women’s colleges. Women have represented about 57 percent of enrollments at American colleges since at least 2000, according to a recent report by the American Council on Education. Researchers there cite several reasons: women tend to have higher grades; men tend to drop out in disproportionate numbers; and female enrollment skews higher among older students, low-income students, and black and Hispanic students....

And then there's this:

Jayne Dallas, a senior studying advertising who was seated across the table, grumbled that the population of male undergraduates was even smaller when you looked at it as a dating pool. “Out of that 40 percent, there are maybe 20 percent that we would consider, and out of those 20, 10 have girlfriends, so all the girls are fighting over that other 10 percent,” she said....

Has this ever actually been studied? A huge fraction of psychology studies are done on college students under the often dubious assumption that they are representative of humanity, so why not actually study college students qua college students?

The U. of North Carolina is probably one of the top ten state flagship universities, so its male s students are not exactly losers in the big picture of things. And, no, there are no engineers on campus:

Stephen M. Farmer, North Carolina’s director of admissions, said that the university has a high female presence in part because it does not have an engineering school, which at most schools tend to be heavily male. ...

One of the things that's going on here is age: Many of these U. of North Carolina coeds who won't pay any attention to half the male undergrads would be charmed by the same guys if they were a half dozen years older, more experienced, and more prosperous. But 19-year-old male undergrads strike them as callow. (The rule of thumb for Hollywood movies is that the hero should be around age 35. The heroine should be considerably younger.)

At colleges in big cities, women do have more options. “By my sophomore year, I just had the feeling that there is nobody in this school that I could date,” said Ashley Crisostomo, a senior at Fordham University in New York, which is 55 percent female. She has tended to date older professionals in the city. [Probably some of whom are Fordham grads.]

But in a classic college town, the social life is usually limited to fraternity parties, local bars or coffeehouses. And college men — not usually known for their debonair ways — can be particularly unmannerly when the numbers are in their favor.

Our society uses the educational system to stratify by IQ. At the same time, the school system winds up stratifying socially by age, lumping males and females of the same birthyear together. And it maintains that age stratification longest for the highest IQ people (e.g., people who go to law school, grad school, and the like).

But young women tend to want slightly older, more worldly men, and high IQ young men tend to be particularly unworldly when they are young. They're thinking about Schrodinger's Cat or other kinds of difficult abstract ideas that you can only learn when you are young, rather than about the kinds of less lofty ideas that intrigue women.

Most other cultures have had less stratification of socializing by birth-year. A quick search suggests that in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, that ultimate authority for all this kind of top-of-the-head evo psych generalizing, Elizabeth Bennett is 20-years-old, while Mr. Darcy is 28.

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