The black hole of American comedy (continued)

One of the secrets of Saturday Night Live's long-running success is that its boss Lorne Michael's run-of-the-mill liberalism is offset by SNL's main political writer Jim Downey's Republicanism. Downey has been especially good at making sure loser Republicans like Bob Dole into crotchety minor heroes. 

But, Obama is off limits. Last month, Michaels announced that he hadn't been able to figure out anything funny about Obama yet. But, don't worry, he's still working on it and will probably come up with something in two or three months.

Now, you might think that last week's bomb by Obama in the Presidential debate would offer a comic gold mine. But, you're forgetting the Prime Directive: satire of The One We've Been Waiting For is off-limits.

So, here's a tick-tock of the agonies Downey had to go through to come up with a Presidential debate sketch that (unmentioned premise) wouldn't violate the Prime Directive.

Which section of the Sunday newspaper would the candidates turn to first?

It's the Sunday between Christmas and New Year's Day and not much is going on. Which section of the Sunday newspaper would various famous politicians turn to first because it's most personally interesting?

Richard Nixon: Reports from foreign capitals, followed by the NFL news.

Ronald Reagan: The op-eds

Adlai Stevenson: The society page.

Bill Clinton: The movie news. (Maybe there's an Air Force One sequel in the works! Air Force One II? Air Force Two? Hmmmhmm ... needs work.)

George W. Bush: The sports page to catch up on the baseball Hot Stove League news.

Lyndon Johnson: Politics

Mitt Romney: The business section

Barack Obama: The book reviews, especially new upper middle-brow fiction. Obama has good taste in novels (better than mine), such as David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet. (That's a Shogun-like story of the Dutch trading outpost in Japan on an island in Nagasaki harbor in 1799. It really takes off toward end when a British navy ship arrives, as in the Nagasaki Harbor Incident of 1808 when an improvising British captain almost conquered the Dutch entrepot. Mitchell is tremendous at explaining the real-time decision making of an Age of Nelson captain. Mitchell would make a good successor to C.S. Forester and Patrick O'Brian as a writer of sea stories.)

2012 iSteve Panhandling Drive

Dear Readers:

I want to thank you for all the support you've given me over the years. I hope I've provided in good measure. Looking at some stats, I see:

7,200 posts at this site alone.

234,000 published comments.

29,000,000 page views

Now, though, I have some sizable bills to pay and I need to turn to you again for financial assistance. Thus, I'm kicking off my first fund-raising drive since 14 months ago in August 2011. 

There are a few ways to support my work:

First: You can send me money via Amazon (not tax-deductible). Click here and then click on the button for the amount you want to pay. It's especially quick if you already have an Amazon account, but any major credit card will work fine. (I want to thank all the generous folks who helped me work out the kinks in this method, using their own real money.)

Second: You can make a tax deductible contribution via VDARE by clicking here.

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Thank you.

Why elite college presidents love racial preferences

With affirmative action back in the news, it's worthy recycling my 2005 explanation in The American Conservative of why elite college presidents always proclaim the necessity of preferences for politically powerful organized victim groups. Writing about the Larry Summers Brouhaha at Harvard, I noted:

[Larry] Summers' job is partly to enhance, but mostly to protect, one of the world's most valuable brand names. "Harvard" stands for "intelligence," extreme far right edge of the IQ Bell Curve smarts. America is increasingly stratified by IQ, and the resulting class war that the clever are waging upon the clueless means that having Harvard's endorsement of your brainpower is ever more desirable. Thus, applications and SAT scores have skyrocketed over the last half century. 

Yet, Harvard's IQ elitism sharply contradicts its professed egalitarianism. The typical Harvard professor or student considers himself superior to ordinary folks for two conflicting reasons: first, he constantly proclaims his belief in human equality, but they don't; and second, he has a high IQ, but they don't. 

Further, he believes his brains weren't the luck of his genes. No, he earned them. Which in turn means he feels that dumb people deserve to be dumb. 

Ivy League presidents aren't much worried that the left half of the Bell Curve will get themselves well enough organized to challenge the hegemony of the IQ overclass. No, what they fear is opposition to their use of IQ sorting mechanisms, such as the politically incorrect but crucial SAT, from those identity politics pressure groups who perform below average in a pure meritocracy, such as women, blacks, and Hispanics. But, they each boast enough high IQ activists, like Nancy Hopkins, to make trouble for prestige universities. 

So, Harvard, like virtually all famous universities, buys off females and minorities with "a commitment to diversity" -- in other words, quotas. By boosting less competent women, blacks and Hispanics at the expense of the more marginal men, whites, and Asians, Harvard preserves most of its freedom to continue to discriminate ruthlessly on IQ. 

What is obviously in the best interest of Harvard, and of the IQ aristocracy in general, is for everybody just to shut up about group differences in intelligence. Stifling arguments allows the IQ upper class to quietly push its interests at the expense of everyone else. So, Summers bought peace fast.

Of course, the $50 million Larry handed to Drew Gilpin Faust as reparations didn't save his job, but it did help Dr. Faust acquire the presidency of Harvard. (By the way, you've got to hand it to Ms. Gilpin Faust: she can play the feminist resentment card or she can play the feminine wiles card. Her early career at Penn was, let's just say, not hurt when, as a young woman, she divorced her first husband and married the chairman of her department.)

What terrifies elite universities is the kind of anti-discrimination solution imposed on many fire departments, such as in Chicago where the hiring test has been made so easy that about 96% of white applicants pass, after which fire cadets are chosen at random.

In New Republic, Nicholas Lemann calls Obama "The Cipher"

"The Cipher" is the print title of The New Republic's review (by veteran liberal Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia School of Journalism) of the massive biography of Barack Obama by David Maraniss. Lemann's review confirms, from a different political standpoint, much of my recent review of Maraniss's biography in VDARE. 

Lemann writes:

... If you belong to an extended family that gets together for holiday dinners, most of whose members are not active participants in the national political conversation, you surely can’t make it through a single gathering without some uncle or cousin saying something that, if it came out of the mouth of a member of Congress, would be treated as an instantly career-ending mistake. And if—less likely—you actually know a member of Congress well, you may have seen that even many of them, when feeling relaxed, haven’t fit the entirety of their views inside the acceptable range of the moment. 

It isn’t so easy or natural to stay eternally within the white lines. Some people may be so naturally conventional that the project takes no effort. But what about the rest? Do they do it by calculation? By control? By willing themselves, like actors, into character? Questions like these come to mind especially in the case of Barack Obama, who spent his early life in circumstances where he was unlikely to imbibe and absorb standard-issue American politics from the people around him. “First black president” doesn’t begin to capture the improbability of Obama’s getting where he has gotten. The son of a teenage mother and an almost completely absent father, raised off the American mainland and in Indonesia, with relatives all over the cultural, geographic, and political map, wanting for any real homestead or hometown....

Obama didn’t start striking people as a future president until he was at Harvard Law School. Here he is a sensitive, searching, occasionally mesmerizing young man—as he was in Dreams from My Father. How and when did the big transition happen? We’ll have to wait for Maraniss’s next volume to find out.  

... The many details that Maraniss has unearthed about Obama fall into two main categories: first, Obama’s childhood circumstances were more emotionally difficult than he has made them out to be; second, his narrative of finding a comfortable, lasting cultural identity by embracing his African Americanness seems too pat. ... 

Obama’s mother was a remarkably determined and independent person who, under difficult circumstances, built a significant life for herself as an anthropologist in Indonesia, but Maraniss insistently points out what Obama himself was too diplomatic to say outright in Dreams from My Father: she consistently decided, from the time he was about ten, to structure her life so that she spent almost no time with him, and there is some evidence that he sensed this and resented it deeply. The current, therapeutically driven assumptions governing American upper-middle-class culture would surely lead to a prediction, from the evidence we have, that the adult Obama would be a complete basket case. He cannot possibly be as imperturbable as he appears to be, but it is still remarkable and unexplained how he wound up with both an unstoppable drive to power and complete self-control, a rare combination even in successful politicians. 

... MARANISS HAS carefully established the true identities of the pseudonymous composite characters in Dreams from My Father, and found, in a couple of cases, that people whom Obama presented as crucial guides on his journey to blackness were actually not black. One can’t gainsay the genuineness of the feeling of homecoming Obama got from finding his way into the heart of the African American experience, most notably through his marriage, from a point completely outside it. But it is also a sign of the weirdness of America’s racial customs—most whites assume that anybody who has dark skin also has a set of identical, deeply ingrained experiences and attitudes that just weren’t part of Obama’s life growing up—that Obama has been able to sell this version of himself so successfully. As Maraniss puts it, “It does not diminish the importance of race to note that the formation of his persona began not with the color of his skin but the circumstances of his family—all of his family, on both sides, not just the absent father, as the title of his memoir suggests. All of his family—leaving and being left.” Being black serves in part as an effective cover for something else that is as deeply, or perhaps more deeply, part of him—a fundamental guardedness and unknowability. 

So, who is the President really on the inside? The Muslim Manchurian candidate? An Alinskyite socialist? The committed follower of Rev. Wright, as he portrayed himself in his first autobiography? A U. of Chicago academic slightly to the left of Richard Epstein? A WASPish golfer?  Or maybe there's not much there there ... 

... [Girlfriend] Genevieve Cook’s diary brims over with frustration about her inability to breach the defenses Obama had erected around himself. “[A] wall—the veil,” she calls it at one point; “[b]ut he is so wary, wary ... resents extra weight,” she says at another.  

... In his resistance to being pinned down in any way, there is a lot of his mother. As Maraniss puts it: “Ann had the will to avoid the traps life set for her, and she infused that same will in her son.” 

THIS CAMPAIGN hasn’t cleared up the fundamental mysteriousness of Obama very much. He has been uncannily successful at making Mitt Romney, not himself, the main subject of the campaign. Ask yourself: what portion of your personal campaign conversational time this season has been devoted to Romney, and what portion has been devoted to the man who is far more likely to be our president for the next four years? On Election Day 2008, would you have predicted that Obama would soon move his whole stack of chips onto the venerable liberal cause of universal health care? How clear a sense do you have now of what Obama’s second term will look like? 

The portion of Obama’s life story we get here gives us full satisfaction if the question is how he was able to give his celebrated and career-launching keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, in which he proposed that there could be a way of bridging all political and cultural divisions.

The way: Elect me President!

Otherwise, Obama as president—what drives him, how he makes choices—is fundamentally mysterious, and neither Maraniss’s book nor this presidential campaign has done much to clear it up. If there is a politically applicable impression that emerges from the great mass of material, it is how much Obama is a child of the postcolonial era. Hawaii, Kenya, and Indonesia were all former colonies or possessions of the West, one of which was absorbed into a larger democratic nation, the other two of which became independent. The careers of Obama’s grandparents, his parents, and his stepfather all can be seen as workings out of the ways in which post-colonialism plays itself out in individual lives.

 So, I guess Dinesh D'Souza isn't totally crazy like everybody said he was.

And though the term “post-colonial” reads as “left,” both of Obama’s parents, though they probably would have been comfortable with that equation as applying to them politically, chose to work not as lifelong rebels but in the sorts of establishment roles that the end of colonialism opened up: his mother, in Indonesia, at the Ford Foundation; his father, in Kenya, at Shell Oil and then in a government bureau meant to promote the tourist business.  

Right. Obama's roots are in America's Cold War strategy to co-opt the Third World left by giving jobs and influence to people just to the right of the KGB.

... After the election, the chance that Obama will feel that he has finally been set free to let the world see who he really is and what he really believes is nil. 

But it’s also a safe bet that his core convictions are not those of the old Democratic Leadership Council. Romney palpably wishes to restore American hegemony in the world; Obama (drone attacks and dead Osama bin Laden or not) does not. Romney believes in business as the core institution in society in a way that Obama does not. We will surely find out something more about Obama’s convictions and his priorities in the six months after Election Day—not before.

Indeed.

As to what that will be, it’s hard to think of any politician running for reelection about whom the question is more difficult to answer.  

Nicholas Lemann is dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and is the author, most recently, of Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). This article appeared in the October 25, 2012 issue of the magazine under the headline "The Cipher."

One possibility is that Obama is intermittently worn down by the phoniness of his life. Here he is pretending to be the Heroic Man of Action when he's really a passive observer, an elegant writer undermined by his inability to come up with anything original to write in that prose-poetry style of his. He wrote a vast autobiography at age 33 to claim the advantages of being black in modern America, but by upbringing he doesn't feel black at all on the inside, and thus only associates with a tiny stratum of the most bourgeois blacks. 

The main stereotypically black aspect about Obama is his vast self-esteem, which greatly enjoys the acclaim of being President. But he also has a skeptical underside -- he doesn't like to flat out lie if there is some lawyerly language with which to trick the vast majority of his listeners and readers. And that part, the best part of him, perhaps finds his absurd career to be kind of depressing. 

Japanese win another Nobel

Back in 1999, I got into a discussion of Japanese creativity. For 20 years, I'd been hearing, often from the Japanese themselves, that they weren't creative. On the other hand, I owned a lot of cool gadgets that had at least been improved upon by the Japanese. On the other other hand, it was pointed out to me that the Japanese sure didn't win many hard science Nobel Prizes: only five Japanese winners up through 1999. 

Beginning in 2000, however, there have been 11 Japanese hard science Nobel Laureates. The latest is Shinya Yamanaka, age 50, for coming up in 2006 with a much less creepy way to use stem cells. (He shared it with John B. Gurdon of Britain, who was the first to clone an animal way back in 1962.)

Nicholas Wade reports in the NYT:

In a brief interview today, Dr. Yamanaka, who was born in 1962 in Higashiosaka, Japan, said that he had trained as surgeon but “gave it up because I learned I was not talented.” Having seen how little the best surgeons could do to help some patients, he decided to go into basic research and did postdoctoral training at the Gladstone Institutes in California. 

“When I came back to Japan in the 90s I suffered from a disease which I called PAD — post-America depression,” he said. Another Japanese Nobel prizewinner, Susumu Tonegawa of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has criticized the lack of research freedom given to scientists in Japan. Dr. Yamanaka said that there were still some problems, but that conditions had become much better since Dr. Tonegawa moved from Japan. Dr. Tonegawa won an unshared Nobel Prize in 1987 for discovering the basis of antibody diversity.

The real reason Obama was no good in the first debate

Arriving everyday here at iSteve, along with my readers' many astute observations, are a vast number of spam comments. Most start off with some semi-literate gibberish apparently composed by a Third World digital sweatshop worker and end up with a sales pitch for Ugg or Christian Louboutin. Google funnels most spam comments into the Spam file, but I periodically have to go through the Spam and look for real comments. For example, Google always sends Svigor's comments to Spam, which I assume is wholly coincidental. Here's a comment from an Anonymous on the first debate that I just rescued:

Obama was jonesing for a cigarette. Smokers concentrate better when they are smoking. I'm surprised he didn't yawn. Obama should come out as a Smoker's Rights advocate, then he could smoke in public, and, reduce taxes on the poor. 

Breaking News! Obama may not be perfect after all

From the Washington Post:

Is Obama overrated as a candidate?

By Chris Cillizza, Published: October 7 

In his closing remarks at the first debate in Denver last week, President Obama uttered the following sentence: “Four years ago, I said that I’m not a perfect man and I wouldn’t be a perfect president.” 

For anyone who has watched Obama campaign for a second term this year, the phrase is old hat — part of the president’s seemingly self-effacing acknowledgment that he has, is and will continue to make mistakes but that he does so in the service of trying to do the right thing. 

But the now-familiar phrase took on a different — and more troubling — meaning for the president in the debate as it capped a decidedly desultory performance that left even his most loyal allies wondering what was wrong with him. 

Obama’s debate performance also raised a bigger question: Is he overrated as a candidate? 

Four years ago, that question would have been unimaginable. After all, this was a man who in his first run for national office not only outmaneuvered the Clinton family to win the Democratic presidential nomination but also went on to claim a 365-electoral-vote general-election landslide against Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz). And, oh by the way, Obama did all that while raising $750 million (including $500 million online) — a sum that shattered all fundraising records.

He beat the second string Clinton and the 72-year-old McCain and he sucked up a whole lot of Wall Street cash!

Let me make a prediction: Obama will do better and Romney worse in the next debate, as regression toward the mean kicks in.

Let me make another prediction: the reasons Obama went from nobody to President in four years without actually doing anything -- recall that it took Ulysses S. Grant eight years to go from nobody to President, during which he took Vicksburg --  will continue to go unexplored.

The Unmentionable Ethnicity: English-American

From Reuters:

Romney's English Roots Surprise Cousins Left Behind 

By REUTERS 

BARROW-IN-FURNESS, England (Reuters) - Mitt Romney's fight to become America's next president has the backing of one enthusiastic group of supporters, although they don't actually have a vote: his relatives in England. 

Few associate the Republican candidate with Britain but it was in England's industrial northwest that his ancestors lived for generations and converted to Mormonism before leaving for the United States in 1841 in search of the promised land.

In English cultural history, there's one moderately famous Romney, a distant kinsman of the candidate who shares his father's name:

Dalton has plenty of Romney-related history. Its most famous son was George Romney, who went to London and became one of the most celebrated portrait painters of the 18th century. 

Two streets and a park are named after the artist, who is said to have had a secret affair with the mistress of Lord Nelson [right], the naval hero who defeated the French at Trafalgar. 

George was buried in the churchyard of St Mary's parish church - where Mitt Romney's great-great grandparents, Elizabeth and Miles, were baptized and married before converting to the Mormon faith in 1837 and moving to the United States.

I like the first George Romney's painting of Thomas Paine.

But being English-American -- in the tradition of Franklin, Washington, and Lincoln -- is not something to be boasted of:

When he came to Britain in July this year, Romney did not visit the area where his family have their roots - unusual since emphasizing a European heritage is often seen as an electoral plus in U.S. politics. 

Barack Obama, who faces Romney in the November 6 presidential election, went down well last year when he toured an Irish village where one of his forebears once lived [O'Bama? Baroque O'Blarney?]

Romney's campaign spokeswoman made no comment when asked how the Republican challenger felt about his English origins. 

Affirmative action: Exotic India turns out to be just like the U.S.

From the New York Times:

With Affirmative Action, India’s Rich Gain School Slots Meant for Poor

Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times 

CHENNAI, India — The two women both claim that affirmative action cost them coveted spots at elite public universities. Both cases have now reached the Supreme Court. 

One of the women, Abigail Fisher, 22, who is white, says she was denied admission to the University of Texas based on her race, and on Wednesday, the United States Supreme Court is to hear her plea in what may be the year’s most important decision. The other woman is from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, and two weeks ago the Indian Supreme Court ordered that she be admitted to medical school pending the outcome of a broader court review. 

“When I came to know that I could not get into any medical college, I was really shocked,” C. V. Gayathri, the Indian student, said in an interview. “I didn’t speak to anyone for a week. I cried. I was very depressed.” 

Though the outlines of the two cases are similar, differences between how the world’s two largest democracies have chosen to redress centuries of past discrimination are striking. While affirmative action in the United States is now threatened, the program in India is a vast system of political patronage that increasingly works to reward the powerful rather than uplift those in need.

Exactly what purpose does the word "while" serve in that last sentence, other than that of Magician's Assistant? How does this differ from the U.S.?

From the New York Times eight years ago:

Top Colleges Take More Blacks, but Which Ones? 

By SARA RIMER and KAREN W. ARENSON 

Published: June 24, 2004

At the most recent reunion of Harvard University's black alumni, there was lots of pleased talk about the increase in the number of black students at Harvard. But the celebratory mood was broken in one forum, when some speakers brought up the thorny issue of exactly who those black students were. 

While about 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard's undergraduates were black, Lani Guinier, a Harvard law professor, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard's African and African-American studies department, pointed out that the majority of them -- perhaps as many as two-thirds -- were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples. 

What concerned the two professors, they said, was that in the high-stakes world of admissions to the most selective colleges -- and with it, entry into the country's inner circles of power, wealth and influence -- African-American students whose families have been in America for generations were being left behind.

Isn't the President of the United States of America a classic example of the Gates-Guinier theorem in action? He didn't decide he was black until his mid-20s.

On the other hand, the First Lady is an exemplary African-American, with all four grandparents descended from American slaves. But her expensive Harvard Law School education turned out to be mostly a waste as she dropped her law license long ago to go into the diversity business (other than she did meet her husband through her ill-fated law career).

The rest of the article about India is pretty interesting about how the affirmative action program in India has made being an Untouchable a coveted legal distinction. However, I can never quite tell  what to make of articles about the Indian caste system since the Indians in the American media almost all come from the upper castes. There are virtually no Untouchable-Americans.

Strange New Respect for judge in FDNY case

From the New York Times:

For Judge in Firefighter Discrimination Case, an Evolving Opinion 

By MOSI SECRET

One after another, nearly 150 white firefighters approached a lectern facing a federal judge and, voices sometimes trembling with anger, decried what they called a perversion of justice. Years of hard work to make it into the ranks of the department were being tossed aside to make way for unqualified minority candidates, they said, all in a questionable effort to end discrimination.

The target of their wrath sat silently before them: Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis of Federal District Court in Brooklyn, whose expansive rulings have forced the New York Fire Department — “a stubborn bastion of white male privilege,” in his words — to overhaul its practices to hire more minority candidates.
One fireman, Sean Fitzgerald, bluntly accused the judge of playing a “social experiment” and questioned whether he was driven by “socioeconomic problems, personal ambition or inner guilt.” 

The remarkable demonstration of opposition, which played out over four days in federal court last week, underscored the degree to which Judge Garaufis has emerged as the most prominent and provocative figure in New York City’s most contentious integration battle in decades. Critics have dubbed him “Emperor Garaufis” and have accused him of being a publicity-seeking liberal crusader whose imposition of racial quotas has jeopardized public safety. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has called for his removal from the case. 

But the case has also highlighted the evolution of his thinking on the government’s role in helping minorities. A product of the machine-driven world of Queens politics, he fiercely opposed federally mandated integration efforts as a young school board member from a mostly white district in the 1970s. Decades later, he pulled aside a black colleague on the federal bench and asked him searchingly, “How does it feel to be a black person in society?”

And then Judge Garaufis asked his black colleague, "May I touch your hair?"

“How does it feel to be a black person in society?” As opposed to ... what? ... A black person living with a family of wolves in the wilderness?

Seriously, judging by the quality of analysis in his Vulcan Society decision, Garaufis appears to be an innumerate dolt (here's my 2009 analysis of his decision). But who cares about that when the New York Times only cares about Who? Whom? and Whose side are you on?

A tribute to J.P. Rushton: "Jensen's bulldog"

James Thompson of University College London recently wrote of J.P. Rushton, who died last week:

Phil Rushton is tough minded, and has needed to be. Scholarly enquiry often leads to surprising answers, and expounding unpopular views is no project for the faint hearted. His key achievement has been to gather together what would otherwise have been a rag tag of disparate findings and bind them into a coherent pattern of r-K evolutionary strategies. His approach is one more example of an Eysenkian gesamtkunstwerk, to which those of hereditarian persuasion seem drawn, in which an over-arching theory provides a sweet symphony that brings order to chaos. This has given the debate about behavioural differences between genetic groups a new rationale, and for that alone Rushton deserves praise. 

In terms of his approach to the data he has shown doggedness in tracking down evidence and arguing his case. His 2005 review with Jensen sets out the hereditarian case as thoroughly and forcefully as has ever been achieved, and must be considered his shared magnum opus. In the best sense of the term he has been Jensen’s bulldog, taking on all comers with dogged persistence. 

(T.H. Huxley was known as "Darwin's bulldog.")

Jensen and Rushton were able to draw together the main points of a complex argument and also retain the sense of challenge and flexibility as they invited their critics to grasp the gauntlet they had thrown down. By proposing to identify the 10 major fields of contention, and by rating their own progress in each of them they challenged others to reply. 

What is most notable about Rushton is his intellectual resilience. He can grasp the big picture, and can assemble evidence in its favour. He has the capacity to understand the implications of individual findings, and to track down confirmatory or dis-confirmatory consequences. He can also link together entirely disparate publication networks, such as looking at cousin marriage in Japan to illuminate group differences in America. At every stage of discovery he believes he has done enough to convince his critics, but finds that the goal posts have been moved yet again. He has had to pick his way through a maze of imprecise hypotheses, as his critics reply to his specific proposals with a general portmanteau complaint that “these effects could be due to any number of things”.  As he himself has observed, the hard-line environmentalist position is not progressive. It does not deign to specify environmental effects in any rigorous way, but tends to multiply ad hoc objections and demand standards never yet achieved in social science. It would be enough to discourage the strongest of constitutions, but despite reverses Rushton pushes on, tracking down weak arguments, studying the implications of research results so as to take them to further levels of examination,  gathering new evidence, and as a consequence leaving well-constructed cairns of evidence along the trail-ways of exploration for other researchers to follow.

A reader has dug up some 1970s pictures of Rushton with a bass guitarist's head of hair.

Visitation will be Tuesday, funeral Wednesday in London, Ontario, Canada (not London, England, which had me momentarily confused since Rushton was a leading light of the London School descending intellectually from Darwin and Galton), Details here.

The Word Gap: blacks v. American Indians

As we all know from reading the newspapers, the reason for The Gap in school achievement, as proven by Hart & Risley, is because African-Americans don't talk enough.

But wouldn't this actually apply to New World Indians instead of blacks?

There is, however, no doubt that the various races, when carefully compared and measured, differ much from each other, as in the texture of the hair, the relative proportions of all parts of the body, the capacity of the lungs, the form and capacity of the skull, and even in the convolutions of the brain. But it would be an endless task to specify the numerous points of difference. The races differ also in constitution, in acclimatisation and in liability to certain diseases. Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotional, but partly in their intellectual faculties. Everyone who has had the opportunity of comparison must have been struck with the contrast between the taciturn, even morose, aborigines of S. America and the lighthearted, talkative negroes.

Charles Darwin

The Descent of Man

The Gap: Nobody is even trying to make sense anymore

From Friday's NYT, a good example of the current conventional wisdom about The Gap: few African-Americans do well enough in math to get into Stuyvesant High School because their mothers didn't teach them enough English words (unlike, presumably, all those Stuyvesant students whose mothers don't speak English at all).

Before a Test, a Poverty of Words 

By GINIA BELLAFANTE 

... Earlier in the year when I met Steven F. Wilson, founder of a network of charter schools that serve poor and largely black communities in Brooklyn, I asked him what he considered the greatest challenge on the first day of kindergarten each year. He answered, without a second’s hesitation: “Word deficit.” As it happens, in the ’80s, the psychologists Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley spent years cataloging the number of words spoken to young children in dozens of families from different socioeconomic groups, and what they found was not only a disparity in the complexity of words used, but also astonishing differences in sheer number. Children of professionals were, on average, exposed to approximately 1,500 more words hourly than children growing up in poverty. This resulted in a gap of more than 32 million words by the time the children reached the age of 4. 

This issue, though seemingly crucial, has been obscured in the recently intensified debate over the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test, the multiple-choice exam used as the sole metric for entrance into some of New York City’s elite public high schools, including Stuyvesant and Bronx Science. 

... Two weeks ago, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, along with other organizations, filed a federal civil rights complaint challenging the single-score admissions process as perilously narrow and arguing that it negatively affected black and Hispanic children, who are grossly underrepresented in these schools, so long considered forceful agents of mobility.  ...

As the complaint makes note, of the 967 eighth-grade students offered admission to Stuyvesant for the current school year, only 19 were black and 32 Hispanic. During the previous school year, only 3.5 percent of students at Bronx Science were black and 7.2 percent Hispanic.  

Okay, but Stuyvesant is 72% Asian and Bronx Science 62% Asian. And a large fraction of those are children of immigrants who often struggle with English.

And the test is 50% math, and the verbal portion is highly oriented toward logic.

How does the Hart-Risley vocabulary theory explain Stuyvesant?

As the education theorist E. D. Hirsch recently wrote in a review of Paul Tough’s new book, “How Children Succeed,” there is strong evidence that increasing the general knowledge and vocabulary of a child before age 6 is the single highest correlate with later success.

I suspect that there is actually strong evidence that "the general knowledge and vocabulary of a child before age 6 is the single highest correlate with later success" but that nobody has come close to proving that "increasing" them matters much, and that even if it does, nobody knows how to reliably accomplish that.

Schools have an enormously hard time pushing through the deficiencies with which many children arrive.

Actually, six year old are extremely good at arriving at school and learning the accents, slang, even the entire new language of the kids on the playground. Smallish children can quickly adapt to speaking a different language from their parents. (Here's my 2000 article, with quotes from Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky, on the facility with which children can learn new languages.) That's why Ron Unz's successful 1998 initiative to reduce bilingual education in California didn't cause all the doom and gloom that people in the bilingual ed racket predicted: once the schools made clear that the kids were supposed to learn English, they learned English. English is cool.

By the way, an article seven years ago in the NYT sort of pointed out that the way the exam for the NYC elite public high schools ranks scores gives Asian immigrants an advantage. Has this system been altered since then?

Admission Test's Scoring Quirk Throws Balance Into Question 

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN 

Published: November 12, 2005 

For weeks, Joshua N. Feinman had graded practice tests to help his daughter prepare for New York City's specialized high school exam. Then one day, he took a hard look at the scoring chart from her private test-prep class and was stunned by how the verbal and math scores added up. 

''I took a look and said, 'Wow, this thing is really nonlinear,' '' said Mr. Feinman, the chief economist of Deutsche Asset Management. '' 'Wow, it's much better to score high in one and low in the other than to score good in both.' '' 

Mr. Feinman had stumbled on a little-known facet of the test: because of the complex way it is graded, a student scoring extremely high on one part of the exam has a sharp advantage over a student with high but more balanced scores in each subject. 

For Mr. Feinman's daughter, Amanda, and more than 26,000 other eighth graders who will get their results in February, the implications loom large. Last year, for instance, a student with a 99 percentile score in math and 49 percentile in verbal would have been admitted to Stuyvesant High School -- the most coveted specialized school -- but a student with a 97 in math and 92 in verbal would not. ...

City education officials and the company that has prepared the test since 1983, American Guidance Service, said that they were aware of the potential outcomes and that scoring for the exam had to be designed this way to identify the best test takers. They also said their hands were tied by state law, which they said required that admission to the specialized schools be based on a single combined score in math and verbal. ...

''Stuyvesant loves lopsided geniuses,'' said Naomi Bushman, a mathematics education consultant who runs a test-prep course for the exam. ...

Principals said they were aware that a super-high score on one part could substantially lift an applicant's chances, because many recent immigrants with extremely limited English skills had earned admission by posting exceptional math scores.

There just aren't very many "lopsided geniuses" among NAMS. Going to a more balanced scoring system would benefit blacks and Hispanics, but it would also benefit whites, so I guess we can't do that.

In the long run ...

For a long time, I've been pointing out that nobody really knows terribly much about effective policies to improve the the educational and economic performance of people already in America, so we shouldn't ignore the impact of policies influencing who is in America (e.g., immigration, affordable family formation for the middle class, encourage the poor to use contraception, and so forth).

One obvious argument with that is that the payoffs are years away. There would seem to be a long lag time. So, the conventional wisdom is, let's just ignore all that long run stuff and concentrate on fixing the people we've currently got.

But, you'll notice, over the years the conventional wisdom has slowly come to admit defeat at fixing The Gap between the races at later ages. So, the emphasis on interventions keeps getting pushed earlier and earlier in life. Currently, all the excitement is focused on pre-K. If only we can fix things up for poor children before they start kindergarten, then we will find out decades later that we have closed The Gap! (And when that proves not to work, then all the attention will be focused upon the first 12 months of life. And then when that fizzles out, the Big Thing will be pre-natal care. And then it will be the first hour after conception. And then the first second after conception.)

Of course, we don't yet know how to fix things up pre-K, so we need to first to do many years of research to find replicable programs. To quote again from Princeton social scientist Thomas J. Espenshade in the New York Times:

We need more research into the impact of factors like diet and nutrition, the amount of time parents talk and read with their kids, exposure to electronic screen time, sleep routines and the way stress outside the home affects family life. But we already know that an expansion of early-childhood education is urgently needed, along with programs, like peer-to-peer mentoring, that help low-income families support their children’s learning. The first few years of life are the most critical ones, when parental investments and early-childhood interventions have a higher payoff than at later ages, particularly for disadvantaged children. 

So, when is the interventionist solution going to actually pay off? 

Espenshade briefly alludes to the problem with the conventional wisdom at the end of his piece:

In 2003, in the Grutter decision, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that she expected such preferences to disappear within 25 years — by 2028. The children who would go off to college that year are already 2 years old.

So, apparently, O'Connor's obiter dicta, along with the cohorts she was talking about are already doomed. They are already two years old, and they haven't been read Goodnight, Moon enough times or eaten enough organic baby food or whatever, and so we already know The Gap will still be around in 2028. Heck, we need decades of research to figure out what to do before we can start doing it. 

Okay, so if the mainstream approaches to solving the problems caused by The Gap are both unproven and even if they worked would work glacially slow, why not get started now on selectionist solutions?

How to cut the poverty rate

Nicholas Kristof writes in the New York Times:

Why Let the Rich Hoard All the Toys? 

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Yet you gasp: one avaricious little boy is jealously guarding a mountain of toys for himself. A handful of other children are quietly playing with a few toys each, while 90 of the children are looking on forlornly — empty-handed. 

The one greedy boy has hoarded more toys than all those 90 children put together! 

“What’s going on?” you ask. “Let’s learn to share! One child shouldn’t hog everything for himself!” 

The greedy little boy looks at you, indignant. “Do you believe in redistribution?” he asks suspiciously, his lips curling in contempt. “I don’t want to share. This is America!” 

And then he summons his private security firm and has you dragged off the premises. Well, maybe not, but you get the point. 

That kindergarten distribution is precisely what America looks like. ... 

As I see it, the best way to create a more equitable society wouldn’t be Robin Hood-style redistribution, but a focus on inner-city and rural education — including early childhood programs — and job training. That approach would expand opportunity, even up the starting line, and chip away at cycles of poverty.

Wouldn't the most effective ways to reduce the percentage of people in America living in poverty be:

A) Not let in so many poor foreigners?

B) Encourage American poor people to have fewer children, especially not at young ages?

C) Encourage American non-poor people to have more children, especially at younger ages?

Granted, my ideas will take years to work. On the other hand, the government, the schools, the foundations, the universities have all been working on Mr. Kristoff's plan for about a half century now. How's that working out for you?

Meanwhile, Thomas J. Espenshade writes in the NYT:

Moving Beyond Affirmative Action 

By THOMAS J. ESPENSHADE 

ON Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas, the latest in a long line of conservative assaults on affirmative action that dates to the late 1970s. ... 

To be clear, I believe that race-conscious affirmative action is necessary, and often beneficial — though I am not hopeful that the court will agree. Our study showed that eliminating it would reduce the number of black students by about 60 percent, and the number of Hispanic students by about one-third, at selective private schools. We also showed that there is no substitute policy, including preferences based on socioeconomic class, that would generate as much racial and ethnic diversity as affirmative action, given the large numbers of working-class non-Hispanic whites and Asians in the applicant pool. 

In other words, working class whites are the main losers from race/ethnic preferences, which may explain why it is so out of fashion to complain about it, you loser, you.

... The racial and socioeconomic gap in academic performance is America’s most pressing domestic issue. When they enter kindergarten, black children are about one year behind white children. When they graduate from high school, black teenagers are four years behind white teenagers. 

So, The Gap is relatively small at younger ages, and bigger at older ages. That suggests that the environmental differences in the early years aren't that important, right?

Despite the No Child Left Behind law, the Race to the Top initiative and endless debate over K-12 school reforms — accountability, standards, smaller classes, more effective teachers, better pay, charter schools, extended day, yearlong schools — the performance gaps have persisted, especially at the later ages. 

"Especially at later ages." So, it must be differences in the environment at later ages that matter, right?

If affirmative action is abolished, selective colleges and universities will face a stark choice. They can try to manufacture diversity by giving more weight in admissions to those factors that are sometimes close substitutes for race — for example, having overcome disadvantage in a poor urban neighborhood. Or they can take a far bolder step: putting their endowments and influence behind a comprehensive effort to close the learning gap that starts at birth. Higher education has a responsibility for all of education. The job of those atop the academic pyramid is not over once they’ve enrolled a diverse freshman class. 

We need more research into the impact of factors like diet and nutrition, the amount of time parents talk and read with their kids, exposure to electronic screen time, sleep routines and the way stress outside the home affects family life. But we already know that an expansion of early-childhood education is urgently needed, along with programs, like peer-to-peer mentoring, that help low-income families support their children’s learning. The first few years of life are the most critical ones ...

Huh? I realize that's the conventional wisdom -- we need to take small black children away from their moms for every single waking hour of the day and have them raised by college educated professionals (thus giving their moms more free time to hit the clubs and get knocked up some more) -- but how does it work that the "first few years of life are the most critical ones" except that the effects of Mom not reading Goodnight Moon only show up in a major way a decade later when the child can't handle Algebra?

We need "a comprehensive effort to close the learning gap that starts at birth." But, you might almost think that The Gap starts nine months before birth ...

Philosopher Quayshawn Spencer on "How to Be a Biological Racial Realist"

Philosophy is a field that moves slowly, but tends to have some long term impact on the climate of thought because philosophers eventually get around to thinking very carefully about questions. 

On the other hand, philosophers tend to be limited by not knowing -- or at least not caring to know -- a lot of facts. Personally, for example, I find that having a big mental grab bag of facts and noticed tendencies that I can juxtapose into novel analogies is useful to the way I like to think, but that's too anarchic for philosophy.

Philosophers like to discuss the logical paradoxes of, say, "The present king of France is bald," but that just gets me thinking about, I dunno, can you measure hereditary patterns of baldness from royal portraits? Or what kind of personality traits are linked to baldness? We have first rate psychological descriptions of many of the kings of France and other European countries written by Venetian ambassadors and other contemporary observers, so perhaps that data can be merged with the data from royal portraits. But this turn of mind is why I'm not a philosopher. 

So far, the quality of philosophical thinking about race has been mediocre, with lots of credulous Race Does Not Exist jabber. Fortunately, a young African American philosophy professor at USF named Quayshawn Spencer is setting out to improve it. Here's an invitation to a talk he's giving at UCSD:

Dear Friends of Philosophy,

You are invited to the next Friday, October 12th, colloquium with Professor Quayshawn Spencer, University of San Francisco, who will be giving a talk entitled "How to Be a Biological Racial Realist ." His colloquium will take place from 4:00 – 6:00p in the Seminar Room, H&SS 7077. Reception to follow.  

Abstract: 

In this talk, I will show that the case for biological racial realism is more formidable than philosophers have thought, provided that one adopts the right semantic, metaphysical, and biological assumptions.  Specifically, I will argue that given a referentialist account of the meaning of ‘race’, a genuine kind account of biologically real kindhood, a fuzzy graph-theoretic account of populations, and the landmark results from Noah Rosenberg et al. (2002; 2005) on human population substructure, one can fashion a respectable account of race as the “B-partition” of metapopulations in a species (or “BPM race theory”).  After developing this nuanced biological theory of race, I defend it against popular criticisms, such as semantic objections (e.g. Feldman 2008), metaphysical objections (Gannett 2003; Kaplan and Winther 2012), and sampling and other methodological objections (Kittles and Weiss 2003; Kalinowski 2011).  I finish by discussing how BPM race theory fares with racial constructivism, and how it might inform issues that social and political philosophers care about.

Keep in mind that "realism" in philosophy isn't used the way I use "realism" (i.e., urbane impatience with lies, ignorance, spin, and wishful thinking). In philosophy, "realism" just means you are arguing that something is real.

But, this looks to be an important starting point. Here's Dr. Spencer's home page.

Personally, I've long argued that the usual race realist standpoint of thinking of races as subspecies in the Linnaean framework has reached diminishing returns. Instead, there is much to be gained by my new framework where we think of racial groups as big extended families given more and longer-lasting coherence by some degree of inbreeding.

Here's a short article demonstrating that bettors at the Kentucky Derby think more like I do than they think like the great Linnaeus.

SAT and ACT: How hard are they scraping the bottom of the barrel and are they finding any diamonds in the rough?

There was recently some publicity over the national average SAT and ACT college admission test scores dropping. The Unsilenced Science has a vast post with dozens of graphs on the latest SAT and ACT college entrance scores by demographics and state. 

However, there has always been an issue with tracking changes in average SAT/ACT scores in that not everybody takes either of the two tests, and (increasingly) some students take both tests.

However, in the comments, The U.S. and I go back and forth on how to deal with this perpetual stumbling block in SAT/ACT analyses and he points out that a number of states have recently made the SAT or ACT mandatory. 

Here are the significant, single-year participation changes: Colorado’s ACT participation went from 62% to 99% in 2002, and its ACT score fell from 21.5 to 20.1. (SAT-ACT composite fell from 501 to 472.) Illinois went from 71% to 99% in 2002 with a drop from 21.6 to 20.1 (498 to 464). Kentucky went from 72% to 100% in 2009 with a drop from 20.9 to 19.4 (478 to 444). Michigan went from 70% to 100% in 2008 with a drop from 21.5 to 19.6 (492 to 448). Utah went from 73% to 97% in 2012 with a drop from 21.8 to 20.7 (493 to 469). Maine SAT participation went from 73% to 100% in 2007, and its SAT-ACT composite fell from 501 to 469. Delaware went from 74% to 100% in 2012, and its SAT-ACT composite fell from 492 to 465. In fact, Arizona’s ACT participation more than doubled between 2009 and 2011 from 15% to 34% with a similar drop from 21.9 to 19.7. (The SAT-ACT composite went from 508 to 474 as SAT participation went from 26% to 28%.)

I'd never seen that data before and it's pretty interesting. I responded, doing some top of the head calculations:

So from this we can calculate the average score of the incremental test takers. For example, in Illinois, when 71% took the SAT, the average was 21.6, but when 99% took it, the average fell to 20.1. So, all else being equal, that means the incremental 28% averaged a 17, which is 4.6 points lower than what the 71% averaged, and 4.6 is pretty close to one standard deviation.  

If the additional 28% came from the bottom of the distribution, the 2nd to 28th percentiles, then the median of the incremental test takers would be about the 14th or 15th percentiles overall, while the median of the previous 71% would be about the 64th percentile. That would imply a drop of around 6 to 6.5 points, maybe, but instead the drop was about 3/4ths of that. So, some of the incremental scorers came from above the bottom 28% -- although not too many.  

It would be interesting to see if this law made any measurable increase in high scorers (above 30 or above 25) and which race they most came from. I'm betting offhand that the new law rousted more semi-smart white kids into taking the ACT than other races. Probably kids who were set on going into the Army and had done well on the AFQT, that kind of thing.

Keep in mind that 100% participation doesn't mean 100% of all 17 year olds in the state take the SAT or ACT, just, I'm presuming, 100% of the non-dropouts.

So, I think the data is there to answer some questions about the remaining untested students, both including what are the likelihood of them succeeding in college and how many who have the right stuff to make it in college are being overlooked.

Secondly, this information on the scores of the bottom untested ranks should allow somebody to adjust the national figures for participation and track changes over time at the national level, which would be of obvious import.