"How Immigration Boosts Your Pay"

At Mother Jones, Kevin Drum quotes economist Giovanni Peri's latest study correlating immigration levels by state and income up through 2007. (Don't worry about what happened in high immigration states like California after 2007. I'm sure all the trends stayed the same.)

Why does immigration increase average income? How does it increase productivity and efficiency? Here's the scoop:

The analysis begins with the well-documented phenomenon that U.S.-born workers and immigrants tend to take different occupations....Because those born in the United States have relatively better English language skills, they tend to specialize in communication tasks. Immigrants tend to specialize in other tasks, such as manual labor. Just as in the standard concept of comparative advantage, this results in specialization and improved production efficiency.

If these patterns are driving the differences across states, then in states where immigration has been heavy, U.S.-born workers with less education should have shifted toward more communication-intensive jobs. Figure 3 shows exactly this....In states with a heavy concentration of less-educated immigrants, U.S.-born workers have migrated toward more communication-intensive occupations. Those jobs pay higher wages than manual jobs, so such a mechanism has stimulated the productivity of workers born in the United States and generated new employment opportunities.

What's really striking about this is that the very mechanism that provides the productivity boost — the fact that immigrants don't speak English well and therefore push native workers out of manual labor and into higher-paying jobs — is precisely the thing that most provokes the immigrant skeptics. They all want immigrants to assimilate faster and speak English better, but if they did then they'd just start competing for the higher paying jobs that natives now monopolize.

Isn't it nice that immigrants "push native workers out of manual labor and into higher-paying jobs" in fields where English skills are crucial. Who hasn't known some American-born construction worker who got pushed out of low paying manual labor when the whole construction site switched to Spanish-speaking so he became a $100,000 per week script doctor for Ridley Scott movies? Or at least as a Human Sign pointing the way to the theatre showing Robin Hood? They're both communications work!

Peri writes:

To better understand this mechanism, it is useful to consider the following hypothetical illustration. As young immigrants with low schooling levels take manually intensive construction jobs, the construction companies that employ them have opportunities to expand. This increases the demand for construction supervisors, coordinators, designers, and so on. Those are occupations with greater communication intensity and are typically staffed by U.S.-born workers who have moved away from manual construction jobs.

Right. In, say, California's Inland Empire in 2007, Americans who used to be construction workers but were displaced by immigrants moved into "greater communication intensity" jobs like, say, peddling subprime mortgages for Countrywide or flipping houses using zero downpayment mortgages from Washington Mutual.

What could possibly go wrong?

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

"The Tillman Story"

From my movie review in Taki's Magazine

The Tillman Story is a documentary about Pat Tillman, the NFL player who, following 9/11, turned down a $3.6 million Arizona Cardinals offer to enlist as a private in the U.S. Army, then died in Afghanistan in 2004. The film has elicited critical praise but not much media hype.

How come? As Afghanistan evolves into Mr. Obama’s War, antiwar sentiment is at a low ebb among the press.

In reality, The Tillman Story, directed by Amir Bar-Lev and narrated by Josh Brolin, is a lesser example of the documentarian’s art. Yet, it’s worth sitting through because of the light it shines on what’s becoming America’s forever war. It also affords us a glimpse of that mysterious hero who refused to do interviews about why he chose to fight for his country in an era when so few of the noblesse have been obliging.

The Tillman Story is most striking whenever Pat and his giant jaw are on screen. Like an American hero from the pre-Muhammad Ali era, Tillman wanted fame, but he wanted to earn it, and without boasting, without PR. ...

Viewers can infer much from The Tillman Story about the futility of what Kipling called “the savage wars of peace.” Since the Gulf War of 1991, a sizable fraction of American fatalities have been due to “friendly fire” because the American advantage in firepower is so overwhelming. (U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan fired in anger an average of about a quarter of a million bullets per day.) And U.S. marksmanship is lethally good. (The Army coroner who autopsied Tillman’s bullet-riddled corpse refused to certify that he’d been killed by hostile fire because the Taliban can’t shoot that straight.)

Read the whole thing there and comment upon it below.

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

E.O. Wilson v. W.D. Hamilton: Round II, 45 Years Later

From the NYT:

Scientists Square Off on Evolutionary Value of Helping Relatives
By CARL ZIMMER

Why are worker ants sterile? Why do birds sometimes help their parents raise more chicks, instead of having chicks of their own? Why do bacteria explode with toxins to kill rival colonies? In 1964, the British biologist William Hamilton published a landmark paper to answer these kinds of questions. Sometimes, he argued, helping your relatives can spread your genes faster than having children of your own.

For the past 46 years, biologists have used Dr. Hamilton’s theory to make sense of how animal societies evolve. They’ve even applied it to the evolution of our own species. But in the latest issue of the journal Nature, a team of prominent evolutionary biologists at Harvard try to demolish the theory.

The scientists argue that studies on animals since Dr. Hamilton’s day have failed to support it. The scientists write that a close look at the underlying math reveals that Dr. Hamilton’s theory is superfluous. “It’s precisely like an ancient epicycle in the solar system,” said Martin Nowak, a co-author of the paper with Edward O. Wilson and Corina Tarnita. “The world is much simpler without it.”

Other biologists are sharply divided about the paper. Some praise it for challenging a concept that has outlived its usefulness. But others dismiss it as fundamentally wrong.

“Things are just bouncing around right now like a box full of Ping-Pong balls,” said James Hunt, a biologist at North Carolina State University.

Dr. Hamilton, who died in 2000, saw his theory as following logically from what biologists already knew about natural selection. Some individuals have more offspring than others, thanks to the particular versions of genes they carry. But Dr. Hamilton argued that in order to judge the reproductive success of an individual, scientists had to look at the genes it shared with its relatives.

We inherit half of our genetic material from each parent, which means that siblings have, on average, 50 percent [1/2] of the same versions of genes. We share a lower percentage with first cousins [1/8], second cousins [1/32] and so on. If we give enough help to relatives so they can survive and have children, then they can pass on more copies of our own genes. Dr. Hamilton called this new way of tallying reproductive success inclusive fitness.

Each organism faces a trade-off between putting effort into raising its own offspring or helping its relatives. If the benefits of helping a relative outweigh the costs, Dr. Hamilton argued, altruism can evolve.

The idea wasn't exactly wholly new. J.B.S. Haldane liked to joke in the 1950s when he was asked if he'd give up his life for his brother: No, but maybe for 2 brothers or 8 first cousins.

Dr. Hamilton believed that one of the things his theory could explain was the presence of sterile females among ants, wasps, and some other social insects. These species have peculiar genetics that cause females to be more closely related to their sisters than to their brothers, or even to their own offspring. In these situations, a female ant may be able to spread more genes by helping to raise her queen mother’s eggs than trying to lay eggs of her own.

Wilson didn't like Hamilton's theory the first time he heard of it either. In his delightful autobiography Naturalist, Wilson described how he wrestled with Hamilton's epochal papers during an 18-hour train ride in 1965:

"Impossible, I thought, this can't be right. Too simple… By dinnertime, as the train rumbled on into Virginia, I was growing frustrated and angry… And because I modestly thought of myself as the world authority on social insects, I also thought it unlikely that anyone else could explain their origin, certainly not in one clean stroke… By the time we reached Miami, in the early afternoon, I gave up. I was a convert and put myself in Hamilton's hands. I had undergone what historians of science call a paradigm shift."

Zimmer continues:

But as the years passed, Dr. Wilson’s enthusiasm for the theory waned. “It was getting tattered,” he said. Many species with sterile females, for example, do not have the strange genetics of ants and wasps. And many species with the right genetics have not produced sterile females. ...

A number of scientists strongly disagree, though. “This paper, far from showing shortcomings in inclusive fitness theory, shows the shortcomings of the authors,” said Frances Ratnieks of the University of Sussex.

Dr. Ratnieks argues that the Harvard researchers cannot rule out kinship as a driving force in social evolution because their model is flawed. It does not include how closely related animals are.

That would seem to be a big factor. 

Read the rest of the article here. 

To see some of the more interesting implications of Hamilton's theory, see my 2004 VDARE.com article.

  

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

"Bad Students, Not Bad Schools"

From my new VDARE.com column:

The new book by sometime VDARE.com contributor Robert Weissberg, Bad Students, Not Bad Schools, has become even timelier following the recent popping of the test score bubble in New York City public schools.

Weissberg, a professor of political science emeritus at the U. of Illinois, wittily surveys in his conversational prose style a half century of educational research. He debunks the fluff that comprises most of this fad-driven field, while highlighting the replicable social science whose lessons go ignored.

Weissberg’s conclusion: the quality of students—intelligence and motivation—is by far the most important factor in whether a school is “bad” or “good”. ...

What makes Bad Students, Not Bad Schools particularly interesting is that in early 21st Century, New York City emerged as the glamor spot of school reform. The rich, the powerful, and the influential teamed up to fight the racial “gap” in school achievement allegedly caused by bad schools. And from 2004 onward, Weissberg was there, watching the idols of the hour up close.

Years before, as it happened, Weissberg himself had grown up in New York City. After a brief (but instructive) spell in 1953 at Booker T. Washington Junior High School on the border of the Upper West Side and Harlem—an expensive new school rapidly deteriorating under the assault from its less scholarly students—Weissberg’s mom yanked him out and headed for the Jersey suburbs.

That bad students can make a school bad is a lesson that tens of millions of Americans besides Weissberg have learned the hard way. Yet, when it comes to thinking about education, we’re not supposed to draw any insights from our own lives. In contrast, you can win fame and, if not fortune, at least a pleasant career by loudly proclaiming that bad schools make good students bad.

Weissberg documents the almost innumerable boondoggles tried out in the public schools in the name of closing the racial gap in achievement.

Over the last decade, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg epitomized the media / governmental / philanthropic complex that has come to dominate discussion of school reform. A Democrat turned Republican turned Independent, Bloomberg struck the press as the perfect non-ideological technocrat to bring “business-like” methods to the public schools to eliminate the gap. 

 Read the whole thing there and comment upon it here.

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

Google does it again

From PC World:

Google Maps Misplaces Lincoln Memorial

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal, PC World

Aug 28, 2010 2:38 pm

A curious thing has been happening on Google Maps -- the Lincoln Memorial is being misplaced in favor of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial [see screen capture from early today and compare it to the now correct map on Google] which is a good half a mile south of the more famous memorial.

According to the Geographic Travels blog, this "misplacement" has been happening for about two days now. Typing "Lincoln Memorial" into the regular Google search bar brings up a number of listings related to the Lincoln Memorial, yet shows a map of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial.

Is this a Google Maps glitch, or could this have anything to do with the fact that conservative radio and TV host Glenn Beck is holding a controversial "non-political" rally at the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday?

Beck's rally, which is called the "Restoring Honor" rally, is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. Eastern Time today on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. 

I saw this wrong map for myself several times, as late as about dawn EDT on Saturday.

This is part of a growing scandal of Google abusing its near monopoly power for (currently) petty political purposes. Google maintains plausible deniability by making minor "mistakes" (sending Glenn Beck's followers to the wrong place, turning Pat Buchanan into a unperson in the Prompts for awhile, and so forth). Misplacing the Lincoln Memorial is, of course, not a mistake, it's, at best, a prank. I don't know whether these dirty tricks are caused merely by individuals at Google abusing their authority, or whether Google, normally a most methodical company, is testing what it can get away with politically.

If it's the former, has anyone at Google ever been punished for these political dirty tricks? I've never heard any follow up to the Pat Buchanan unpersonization, no apology, no press release, nobody reprimanded. So, it may well go down in company annals as a successful little experiment in what Google can get away with by picking  on the unfashionable. We'll see if they get away with misplacing the Lincoln Memorial.

Similarly, a lot of my VDARE.com articles tend to come and go from Google intermittently. For example, a few months ago, I needed to look up the long stream of closely reasoned abuse I've directed at Bill Gates' educational philanthropic efforts over the years. Funny, I couldn't find it through Google. So, I went to Microsoft's Bing search engine and, bingo, there were all my attacks on Bill Gates, right at the top of Microsoft Bing's list.

My personal guess is that Google will be able to get away with manipulating its data for political purposes as long as its masks its manipulations as mistakes that can be "fixed" instantly when the heat gets too intense. Google is too powerful and too scary for most media figures to question publicly. My strategy is the opposite: to speak out about Google's political scandals. We'll see...

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

"Does Your Language Shape How You Think?"

Guy Deutscher proposes in the New York Times Magazine a commonsensical compromise on the old Sapir-Whorf controversy that differences in language ("Eskimos have a 100 different words for 'snow!'") force different ways of thinking. (I've noticed that skiers have a lot of different words for snow, such as "corn.")

This has become very unfashionable in recent years. But Deutscher points out that: "Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey." So, English can expand to meet the needs of skiers and, now, snowboarders (who seem to have some different terms for snow than skiers), but English speakers don't have to worry about, say, whether snow is masculine or feminine.

Thus, Frenchmen tend to strike Englishmen as having gender on the brain all the time. (And maybe, to some extent, they do.)

Some Australian Aboriginal languages don't have terms like "right" or "left." Instead, speakers use absolute directions at all times: "East" or "West."

Presumably, they only verbally teach each other line dances where everybody is facing the same direction. Would they be flummoxed by trying to teach a dance where people stand in a circle like the Hokey-Pokey?

You put your -- depending upon where you are facing -- north (east, south, or west) foot in,
You take your -- depending upon where you are facing -- north (east, south, or west) foot out.

Not surprisingly, Aborigines are famous for their sense of direction. In one experiment at an Australian preschool, when the children were asked to point in the direction of their homes, a majority of the Aboriginal tykes got it right, compared to a basically random number of the white toddlers.

That reminds me of how Adam Smith was kidnapped at age three by gypsies, but was soon rescued. His biographer wrote, "He would have made, I fear, a poor gypsy." In contrast, I think, at least in regard to speaking the language, I would have made a pretty fair Australian Aborigine. I think about direction all the time. My favorite R.E.M. song is Stand:

Stand in the place where you live
Now face North
Think about direction
Wonder why you haven't before
Now stand in the place where you work
Now face West
Think about the place where you live
Wonder why you haven't before

If you are confused, check with the sun
Carry a compass to help you along
Your feet are going to be on the ground
Your head is there to move you around, so

Stand in the place where you live
Now face North
Think about direction
Wonder why you haven't before

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

Infinite Loop

Nothing much going on, so I'll regale you with my favorite set of index entries. 

Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire begins with a 999 line poem by the Robert Frost-like American poet John Shade. The rest of the novel consists of scholarly apparatus, mostly footnotes to the poem concocted by the manuscript's erratic editor, Charles Kinbote, which tell the story of Charles the Beloved, the recently and most unfairly deposed king of Zembla ("a distant northern land").

The chatty index includes the following widely dispersed references to where the Zemblan crown jewels were hidden to keep them out of the hands of Communist revolutionaries. 

From Kinbote's Index to Pale Fire:

- Andronnikov and Niagarin, two Soviet experts in quest of a buried treasure, 130, 681, 741; see Crown Jewels.

- Crown Jewels, 130, 681; see Hiding Place.

- Hiding Place, potaynik (q.v.)

- Niagarin and Andronnikov, two Soviet "experts" still in quest of a buried treasure, 130, 681, 741; see Crown Jewels.

- Potaynik, taynik (q.v.)

- Taynik, Russ., secret place; see Crown Jewels.

In 1986, inspired by Pale Fire, I wrote a computer manual that included (of course) the index entries:

- Infinite Loop; see Loop, Infinite 

- Loop, Infinite; see Infinite Loop

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

College Dropout Factories

The Washington Monthly has a long article about colleges that are "dropout factories," such as Chicago State, a four-year college which only graduates 13% of its freshmen. I'm shocked to hear that a taxpayer-funded college on the south side of Chicago just 1.1 miles east on 95th Street of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ is a boondoggle. (Chicago State is located, coincidentally enough, at 9501 S. Martin Luther King Drive. As Chris Rock would say, "Run!")

The authors conclude:

There is no reason that states can’t quickly build newer, better, more cost-effective public universities to educate people who are currently stuck in college dropout factories.  

Presumably, the buildings at Chicago State are infected with Legionnaire's Disease or evil spirits or something and therefore must be torn down. I'm sure putting up a $578,000,000 school building will get those graduations rates right up.

The school that would later become Chicago State was founded in September 1867 and called the Cook County Normal School—“Normal” referring to schools that prepare teachers for the classroom. For a century or so, it fulfilled this teacher-training role reasonably well. But in 1965 the school was acquired by the state of Illinois, soon renamed Chicago State, and converted into a standard four-year institution. In 1972, Chicago State moved to a newly built $95 million campus that could accommodate an additional 10,000 students. Most of them would be drawn from the city’s poor and working-class South Side and nearby suburbs. It was an admirable attempt to open new doors to a demographic that had been largely shut out of higher education. But it wasn’t long before signs of neglect and mismanagement were obvious. Passage rates on an elementary education teacher licensure exam, for instance, plummeted from 82 percent in 1968 to 42 percent in 1973, and the school almost lost its teacher accreditation.

One year later, in 1974, a devastating series on Chicago State appeared in the Chicago Defender, the city’s premier black newspaper. Under the heading “Why Johnny’s Teacher Can’t Read,” the articles blasted the school, calling it a “diploma mill, with little quality control or concern about the product,” and noted “oppressively low” morale among students. Chicago State is a “ripoff institution,” it said, “a place where a comfortable white administration and faculty is providing a second-rate education for black students.” 

Obviously, white control was the problem. And, apparently, still is, a generation and a half later. (White people, I've learned from reading articles like this, apparently have very long-lasting juju.)

Seriously, isn't the problem here the absurd emphasis our society puts on high school students attending a "four-year college" right out of high school? If they feel like they have to go to college, send them to junior colleges. President Obama makes a big deal about how everybody must go to college for at least year. Fine. But don't expect everybody to get a 4-year degree. And don't send them to 4-year-colleges.

Send them to JC. Let the dropouts dropout, let the mediocre students get AA degrees and then get jobs, and let the best students go on to four-year-institutions. 

Our society needs to keep in mind the need to offer attainable goals, such as two year diplomas.

Say you you were an above average student in your urban high school with a 95 IQ. There are a whole bunch of people in America with 95 IQs, but nobody who is anybody ever thinks about them.

You show up at a four-year college and struggle with the 100 level courses but find you can grit them out with a lot of work. You flip through some of the textbooks used in 300 level courses and are dismayed at how far above your head they are. You'll never be able to complete the requirements for a BA. So, why not drop out now, rather than waste a few more years?

On the other hand, if you are at a junior college, you can focus on sweating out your Associates of Art degree so that you can walk the stage in front of your family. That goal is attainable enough to keep you working. (Similarly we should have Associates high school diplomas for kids with IQs in the 60s through 80s. That would give them an attainable walk-the-stage goal so they don't drop out in 9th grade)

What should be done with Chicago State is demoting it to junior college status so it can concentrate on providing basic education to the locals. (Demotion would also be for the encouragement of the others.)

But, how likely is that to happen?

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

Karl Rove's righthand boy comes out of closet, finally

James Fulford at VDARE.com's blog quotes the following from The Atlantic about one of the main pushers for amnesty in the Bush White House:

Ken Mehlman, President Bush’s campaign manager in 2004 and a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, has told family and associates that he is gay. Mehlman arrived at this conclusion about his identity fairly recently, he said in an interview. 

Fairly recently? I arrived at that conclusion about the now-44-year-old many years ago, and I've never even heard him on TV. This isn't exactly a bolt from the blue.

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

More Summer Panhandling

I'd rather write than beg, but it's time to shake the tin cup again.

You can send me an email and I'll send you my P.O. Box address.

Or, you can use Paypal to send me money directly. Use any credit card or your Paypal account. To get started, just click on the Paypal "Donate" button on the top of column to the right.

When that takes you to Paypal, if you want to use your credit card, fill in your credit card info on the lower left part of the screen. Or, if you want to use your Paypal account, fill in your Paypal ID and password on the lower right of the screen.

Thanks. I appreciate it, deeply.

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

Tom Friedman: Take Up the White Person's Burden

You can always count on Tom Friedman in the NYT to express the state-of-the-art conventional wisdom in its purest form:

[Geoffrey] Canada’s point is that the only way to fix our schools is not with a Superman or a super-theory. No, it’s with supermen and superwomen pushing super-hard to assemble what we know works: better-trained teachers working with the best methods under the best principals supported by more involved parents.

The literary level isn't quite the same, but Friedman's thinking is similar to Kipling's advice to the United States in 1899:

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

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

Don't mention the population

The New York Times highlights an article, To Catch Cairo Overflow, 2 Megacities Rise in the Sand, about two new cities that the government of Egypt is building in sands outside monstrous Cairo to hold seven million people between them.

The reporter seems rather aghast about it all, but the odd (but increasingly familiar) thing about the article is that there's little discussion of the underlying reason: Egypt's population growth. The population of Egypt is now approaching 84 million, having doubled in the last third of a century. The latest UN population projection is that Egypt will hit 130 million by 2050.

Third World population growth is becoming an unmentionable in the press. There's nothing much more fundamental in human affairs than population, but we talk about it less and less.

This reflects the general anti-reductionist trend in Western thought. As the education level of the elites rise, the popularity of Occam's Razor seems to decline. Who wants to figure out the simplest way to comprehend how things basically work when it's better for your career to assert that everything's very, very complicated, and only an expert like yourself could possibly begin to grasp the complexities of it all?

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

Hunters and Gatherers

Robin Hanson asks "Why No Gather-Sport?"

Now sports let us show off many kinds of physically-expressed abilities. But it seems to me that most sports emphasize hunting skills, such as chasing, evading, throwing, and hitting, far more than gathering skills, such as visual search and fine finger control. Now it makes sense for men to prefer hunting sports, but oddly females also seem to prefer them; pretty much all sports emphasize hunting more than gathering skills. Why don’t women prefer sports designed to show off the skills for which female bodies were designed?

Women have a gathering-derived sport, a huge one. It's called "shopping."

For example, in western Michigan, many men take off from work the first week of deer-hunting season each year. Many of their wives have, in turn, made it traditional to stay in hotels that week on Chicago's Magnificent Mile and hit the department stores and Oak Street boutiques.

Hunting and gathering doesn't change, it just gets more expensive.

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

Efraim Diveroli Update

A couple of years ago, the NYT broke the story of a 22-year-old Miami Beach arms dealer, Efraim Diveroli, who had landed a $300,000,000 Pentagon contract to deliver ammunition to the fledgling Afghan Army, and was illegally fulfilling the deal using aged Chinese ammo. It was a  nine-days-wonder of a story as many were sure at first that Cheney or Rumsfeld or somebody like that was involved. 

But, as I was the first to point out, it probably didn't involve a conspiracy that-goes-straight-to-the-top. Diveroli was apparently just a young hustler from a family of hustlers (his grandfather owns a big, scary gun shop in South Central LA; his uncle Shmuley Boteach was Michael Jackson's rabbi) carrying out the kind of semi-bait switch business (offer a low price, then deliver low quality) that is familiar to customers of Brooklyn camera shops. And don't forget to sign up as an ethnically disadvantaged small business!

The Reagan Administration made Hasidics into a legally advantaged minority for the sake of federal contracting in 1982. Despite their claims, I don't think the Boteach-Diveroli family is very Hasidic, however. Clean-shaven Efraim's Uncle Shmuley converted to being Hasidic for awhile, but then the Hasidics got tired of his antics and he stopped being Hasidic. From Government Executive trade magazine:

A Government Executive investigation in April 2008 showed that AEY's business exploded after the company was improperly designated as a small disadvantaged business less than one year before receiving the massive Afghan munitions contract.

Before the designation first appeared in the Federal Procurement Data System in mid-2006, AEY had earned a modest $8.1 million in business with the federal government. Since the SDB label was applied, the contractor earned more than $204 million in federal contracts.

Small disadvantaged businesses can receive price evaluation adjustments or proposal evaluation credits on Defense contracts. But Diveroli was anything but disadvantaged, coming from an extremely wealthy family. His father owns a pair of highly successful military and police supply companies, both of which receive government contracts. And his grandfather is one of the largest property owners in Los Angeles.

Well, Diveroli's back in trouble again, arrested by federal undercover agents in his silver Audi convertible for violating his parole. The details of the latest case make him sound a little more likable, less purely mercenary: he not only likes selling weaponry, he likes shooting it off, too.

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

Sammy Sosa

Chicago Cubs slugger Sammy Sosa was a huge deal in American culture a decade ago, but for years now, you only hear of him when he lightens his skins. Here's a long article by Shane Tritsch in Chicago Magazine on the deep riff between the slugger, now retired in Miami, and the Cubs.

Sosa started out dirt poor in the Dominican Republic as a child laborer. He only got to start playing a lot of baseball at 14, and 5 years later his physical skills had him in the majors. But his slowness of learning and his evident lack of learning ability kept him and his fans frustrated. But then he started to bulk up in his mid-20s. After a weak season in 1997, he returned at age 29 a new man. He hit 66 homers to challenge Mark McGwire for the all time single season homers record. It was one of the biggest baseball stories of the last century.

He had two more seasons with over 60 homers, including 2001's .328, 64 homers, 160 rbis, 146 runs, 116 walks, and 425 total bases. Will we ever see those kind of numbers again?

The Cubs let him do whatever he wanted, including letting him choose all the music in the locker room all the time. He had some Aspergery traits that meant he might boom out his new favorite song 35 times in a row. Eventually, better drug testing meant he had to ease off on the juice and his performance skidded. The Cubs ingloriously greased the skids under him and he was gone, and they haven't asked him to return either.

A sad story. With the right kind of leadership, he could stayed off the juice and, with his work ethic, could have been a solid all-around ballplayer. But the Cubs, who obviously knew he was on steroids, did everything they could to facilitate the Sammy Show. And the fans loved it.

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

Summer Panhandling Drive Continues

I'd rather write than beg, but it's time to shake the tin cup again.

You can send me an email and I'll send you my P.O. Box address.

Or, you can use Paypal to send me money directly. Use any credit card or your Paypal account. To get started, just click on the Paypal "Donate" button on the top of column to the right.

When that takes you to Paypal, if you want to use your credit card, fill in your credit card info on the lower left part of the screen. Or, if you want to use your Paypal account, fill in your Paypal ID and password on the lower right of the screen.

Thanks. I appreciate it, deeply.

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

The best country in the world

According to a Newsweek cover story, the ten best countries in the world are:

Finland, Switzerland, Sweden, Australia, Luxembourg, Norway, Canada, Netherlands, Japan and Denmark. 

Why is Finland #1?

I would have to say that it's because there are (at times) more iSteve readers in Finland per capita than in any other country. I haven't read Newsweek's reasons, but I can't imagine they'll be any more plausible.

By the way, have you ever noticed how many people don't really believe that Switzerland and Sweden are different countries? It's all just Swedzerland or Swiden to them. (My father says his father told him that a lot of Swedes immigrated to Switzerland in the 19th Century, but I can't find any record of this.)

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

"The Switch"

From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:

The year’s third romantic comedy about artificial insemination, The Switch, turns out to be a pleasant surprise amidst the movies being dumped in the dead weeks before Labor Day. Pitched at a higher level of wit than either Jennifer Lopez’s The Back-Up Plan or the critically-slathered lesbian sitcom The Kids Are All Right, The Switch is a low-key, wry, poignant relationship film self-consciously modeled on Annie Hall and When Harry Met Sally. Although hardly as funny as its progenitors, The Switch turned out better than its on-the-nose trailer portended.

While Jennifer Aniston is top-billed as Kassie Larson, a television producer intent upon single motherhood the scientific way, Jason Bateman plays the central character, Wally Mars. He’s a neurotic, nebbishy Wall Street quant who has been platonic best friends with Kassie for a half-dozen years. Bateman portrays Wally as a handsomer, less overtly hostile, and less ethnic version of Woody Allen’s anhedonic worrywart Alvy Singer. ...

The Switch was adapted by Allan Loeb from The Baster, a Jeffrey Eugenides short story that appeared in The New Yorker in 1996. ... Loeb’s screenplay begins with Kassie explaining to Wally that she’s given up waiting for Mr. Right, and wants him to help her find the perfect sperm donor. This just makes Wally even more depressed and sardonic. With no help from Wally, she locates her ideal genes in a rock-climber from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, played by the blond and blue-eyed Patrick Wilson. Wally calls him “The Viking.” (Not surprisingly, Denmark is said to lead the world in export of frozen semen.) ...

The Switch is one of countless American movies that preach the moral: “Hey, pretty blonde girl, don’t fall for the athletic blond boy. Fall for the funny brunet boy instead!” You might almost think that screenwriters like Loeb have a personal interest in this theme.

Read the whole thing there and comment upon it here.

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