Spengler

The Asia Times columnist is one of the more interesting of the pseudonymous foreign policy commentators that have appeared in the Internet Age -- not quite as good as the War Nerd, but better than Wretchard of Belmont Club, who specializes in discerning in every single thing that George W. Bush does some unbelievably complex triple-bankshot strategy that Bush couldn't even understand, much less conceive.

Spengler is clever and has original ideas, some of which might even be true. I'd like Spengler better if he'd use words like "perhaps" and "possibly" more. His absolute self-confidence, though, gets on my nerves, and drives me to search out evidence that he's really not the all-knowing seer he seems to think he is. This is unfortunate because my looking for reasons to think the Spengler glass is half empty gets in the way of recognizing that the Spengler glass is also half full.

For example, back in May he wrote on the paradox of how popular Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code is in an America that isn't lacking in Christian faith. Spengler hasn't actually read it or seen the movie version, but that doesn't stop him from opining about it at some length. (Having seen and read it, I won't hold that against him -- he's got better things to do than trudge through Brown's 839 one-page chapters.)

After some interesting speculations about his ostensible subject, he's suddenly off to the races and is laying out his Grand Unified Theory of the Divided European Soul that is way too profound (or wrong -- I can't tell which) for me to wrap my tired brain around. So, resentfully, I start looking for reasons to believe he doesn't know what he's so confidently talking about. And, rather like in Dan Brown's bestseller, they show up:

"That is why the Renaissance offered such a short burst of creative output before the Counter-Reformation put the artists in their place and brought forth an era of religious orthodoxy and artistic mediocrity."

This seems to be close to exactly backward. The Counter-Reformation inspired, subsidized, and unleashed the Catholic geniuses of Baroque art: Caravaggio, Rubens, Borromini, and, most of all, Bernini. One of the new Pope Urban VIII's first audiences in 1623 was with the 25-year-old Bernini, to whom the Pope said:

"It is your great good luck, Cavaliere, to see Maffeo Barberini pope. But we are even luckier in that the Cavaliere Bernini lives at the time of our pontificate."

The big problem with the populist Counter-Reformation was that, instead, it (eventually) put scientists in their place, such as Galilelo.

The same combination of grandiosity and dubiousness characterizes what now appears to be Spengler's most famous theory -- that Iran must go on the warpath now to head off a demographic crisis that it will face in, oh, say, forty years. See, Iran's birthrate, which used to be quite high, dropped sharply in the 1990s and is now below America's total fertility rate. So, when all those people born in the 1970s and 1980s get ready to retire several decades from now, there won't be enough young workers to pay their pensions. Thus, it is historically inevitable that the mullahs will immediately set out to create an Iranian empire in greater Middle East right now so that the retirees of 2046 will have some plunder to retire upon.

I know that sounds ridiculous, but every few days I get an email from somebody with one of Spengler's columns on the subject. For example, he said:

"All that matters is the coming confrontation between the United States and Iran. Iran's own demographic future resembles that of Europe more than it does the United States. By mid-century, Iran's aged will compose nearly a third of its population, and its population pyramid will invert. Social and economic catastrophe threatens Iran, persuading its present leaders to establish a regional empire while they still have the opportunity."

One obvious question is: So why did the mullahs pass a family planning law in 1993 that encouraged smaller families?

And who in the world would fight a war now (and against the strongest military in the world!) to head off a pension problem in 40 years? The longest lead time I've ever heard of was the German General Staff's 1914 forecast that Russia would be stronger than Germany in 20 to 25 years, so they should fight them now. And how'd that work out for Germany?

And Muslims aren't Germans when it comes to worrying about the far future. That's why Arabs are always saying "Inshallah" -- If Allah wills it. Fate. Kismet.

Moreover, there's a general pattern of governmental decadence around the globe that is making the world more peaceful on the macro-scale as the competence of militaries declines. After the great European wars of the first half of the 20th Century and the global collapse of empires in the second half, the world is finally settling down. Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy is coming ever more into play:

"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions."

The Iranian Revolution is now 27 years old. It was never all that dynamic when it was young and it's pretty old now.

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

"Spengler" outs himself

Speaking of interesting but overconfident Internet pundits, a few years ago a reader pointed out to me that "Spengler" was very likely David P. Goldman, a former high-ranking member of the Lyndon LaRouche cult.

I posted on October 27, 2006:

I won't explain the persuasive evidence for his long-ago Lyndon LaRouche connection, since that would necessitate revealing his real name, which might hurt him in his day job. But I'm 95% persuaded of a reader's suggestion that many years ago the individual who is now the extremely self-confident columnist "Spengler" of the Asia Times was a close colleague of the crackpot perennial Presidential candidate.

That reminds me that adventuring in the Middle East seems to appeal most to two sets of people:

- The not very bright sorts who get Iraq and Iran and Saddam and Osama confused.

- And the extremely bright but not quite stable sorts who can convince themselves of anything.

LaRouche and Goldman had cowritten a book together in 1980, The Ugly Truth about Milton Friedman.

Now, Spengler/Goldman, who is an editor at First Things, has come out with a column in Asia Times doing the opposite of what I did: revealing his name, but not his old Larouche connection.

Now, just because somebody belonged to a cult doesn't mean that we shouldn't take them seriously. For example, Alan Greenspan was part of the inner circle of Ayn Rand's cult well into his forties (going so far as to sign the notoriously loony Stalin-like manifesto denouncing Rand's ex-boyfriend Nathaniel Branden when he was 42). And then Greenspan became the most powerful unelected official in the world, and look how swell that worked out.

Oh, wait ... never mind. I guess I need to find a new example of an ex-cultist making good. Let me get back to you on this one ...

As for Spengler's opinions of me, he recently posted this on one of his discussion pages:

"I think Sailer is a racist SOB who sees the data through a distorted lens. Not all of what he says is wrong, though. There is a problem with illegitimacy. But I don't think Hispanics are stupid as he argues."

"Sailer is deeply misguided. A lot of the Hispanics coming to the US are in fact Asians -- southern Mexican or central American Indians with very poor education, nutrition, etc. Their first generation is pretty disastrous, but so were the Irish, Italians and Slavs. The Catholic Church in America wrote off a whole generation, maybe two, of Irish men. Can they assimilate? Sure. But I ought to point out that American kids of European ancestry aren't doing so well at the moment, either."

This is a classic example of the East Coast intellectual's ruling mental framework for thinking about illegal immigration: it's always all about Ellis Island. It's not about 2009, it's about bragging rights over 1909.

And, besides, nobody around here ever noticed any Mexicans around until 1997. So, their future must be a complete blank slate! Anything could happen. They have no track record whatsoever!

By the way, in case you were wondering (and, admit it, you were), Lyndon LaRouche is one of those folks, like Hugh Hefner, whom many people just assume are Jewish, but aren't.

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

Who exactly will Iran invade?

"Spengler" has been claiming for some time that because of Iran's rapidly falling birthrate (the number of babies per woman in Iran is now lower than in the U.S.), Iran must lash out at its neighbors in a string of conquests to secure its prosperity before it runs out of cannon fodder. (Of course, that raises the questions of why the mullahs began promoting birth control in the early 1990s if they were planning on a campaign of conquest, but never mind that for now ...)

I've been pointing out, however, that Iran doesn't seem to be doing much of anything to prepare itself for the military offensives that Spengler sees in its future. Instead, it's devoting itself to strengthening its defensive capabilities, which is what you would do too if your east and west neighbors had both been conquered in the last half decade.

Maybe I'm wrong and Spengler is right. But who exactly would Iran conquer?

It shares a border with nuclear-armed Pakistan, but the only reason for fighting a war over the Baluchi Desert would be to force the loser to take more of it. West Asia is full of horrible places, but Baluchistan, I hear, is special even in that league. And that's just the landscape, climate, and scorpions. The Baluchis themselves are worse.

Iran has a long border with Afghanistan, but, folks, while the Iranians might be crazy, they aren't so crazy that they want to try to occupy that place. Afghanistan is a fun setting for a few of your less-housebroken countrymen to wage the Great Game, as Kipling called the British-Russian rivalry centered over Afghanistan, but there's nothing worth the cost of occupying the godforsaken place. Afghanistan appears to be the last foreign country that a Persian Army went deep into, but that was over 150 years ago, and they may have been invited in.

And then there's Turkmenistan. Verily, it is written: "The nation that rules Turkmenistan shall rule the world!" Verily, it is wrong.

Moving counterclockwise along Iran's borders, we come to little Azerbaijan, which has oil. It also has a nasty post-Communist hereditary dictatorship, so I guess the Iranians could announce that they were invading to spread democracy to Azerbaijan. But big oil brings big friends, like the U.S., and the Iranians remember what happened to the last guy in the region who invaded a small oil country.

Iran has a 20 mile border with Armenia, which has an important natural resource: Armenians. For poorly understood reasons, Armenians can make money anywhere in the world ... except Armenia (although Armenia's economy is finally taking off, and Armenia should soon reach half of Mexico's per capita income).

Iran borders Turkey, but, trust me, Iran will not invade Turkey. (See the Mel Gibson movie "Gallipoli" for details.)

Then there's Iraq, where Iran has close ties with influential members of the Shi'ite majority that was recently installed in power, to the joy of the Iranian mullahs, by ... America.

Iraq has oil, but it is also full of American troops, who would much more enjoy a mission of obliterating an Iranian tank assault than their current mission. I'm not sure quite what the current mission is, but it's definitely less fun than would be squaring off in open country against a shooting gallery full of Shah-era tanks and planes.

Finally, beyond Sunni-dominated and American-garrisoned Kuwait, there's a real prize: the oil field region of Saudi Arabia, which is heavily populated by Shi'ites.

One advantage of being an old coot like me is that when the latest worries come along, after awhile you remember that you already worried about it long ago ... and got bored. Folks, I was worrying about Iran taking over the Shi'ite oil zone of Saudi Arabia in 1979. Despite all the complex theories I constructed at the time about how this was about to happen, it didn't. And it didn't happen over the last 27 years. Will it happen over the next 27 years?

The basic problem, as far as I can tell, is that Arab and Persian Shi'ites are Arabs and Persians. They speak different languages, have different cultures outside of religion, and have different relatives.

Then there's the changing economics of oil.

Obviously, the best thing is to own the oil, because then you can be rich, like President Bongo of oil-exporting Gabon, plus enjoy other perks, like renaming your hometown Bongoville, which would be fun to do even if you were not named Bongo.

If you grabbed ownership of an oil country, you could, presumably, use the proceeds to buy weapons to take over another country, and so on. That's what we theorized Saddam was intending in 1990 after seizing Kuwait (although I haven't seen much evidence merge recently that he really intended to keep going on a chain of conquests).

From America's economic standpoint, however, it doesn't particularly matter who owns the oil because oil is fairly fungible and the price is determined, more or less, by the global balance of supply and demand.

However, we don't want any one government owning too large a fraction of the oil because that makes monopoly price hikes more feasible. Saudi Arabia's huge share of the world's reserves and low population made OPEC's oil price rise feasible in the 1970s -- OPEC was less a true cartel than Saudi Arabia and a bunch of hanger-ons. If Saudi Arabia was willing to cut production radically, the world price went up, even if Iran and other countries pumped more than they agreed. Likewise, Saudi Arabia could singlehandedly cut the price of oil to $10 in 1986 at the Reagan Administration's behest to strangle the Soviet economy.

Theoretically, you wouldn't need ownership to exercise this kind of pumping restraint to drive up prices -- if Tehran could put the word out to the new Shi'ite oil regimes that they were all going to cut back, a Shi'ite consortium might be able to have sufficient market power to boost prices.

But, that all seems terribly theoretical. I strongly doubt that separate Shi'ite states could or would coordinate that much, sacrificing their own sales because they trust the others to cut back too. There are good reasons people in that part of the world aren't very trusting.

Of course, the most likely outcome of instability in the Gulf is simply more chaos, more vandalism and corruption, fewer repairs, and lower production for all concerned, as we've seen in Iraq.

This could drive the world price of oil into 3 digits, but as a strategic or economic weapon, an oil boycott, in these days of large populations in the OPEC countries, is akin to holding their breath until they turn blue.

A reader writes:

You wrote that American GDP is about 20 times higher than Iranian GDP. This is true if we use purchasing power parity, but if we use exchange rates, then the American GDP is about 68 times bigger, 12300 billion / 180 billion. The question is, what should we use for comparing military spending? GDP at PPP or GDP at exchange rates? Iran's military spending, being 3.3% of GDP, would be 6 billion if we use exchange rates and 18.5 billion if we use PPP.

I suggest that we use the average of the two. Military spending consists of personnel costs and hardware purchases. Iran's personnel costs are determined by Iran's wages, which are low, but Iran's weapons expenditures have to made at international prices. If we assume that personnel costs are about half of Iran's budget, then using the average of miltary spending at PPPand that at exchange rates makes sense. Anyway, the average of the figures is about 12 billion, which is less than 3% of American military spending. Obviously, the neo-con warmongers have cause to be worried.

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

Spengler comes out about being an ex-Larouchie

A reader pointed out to me a few years ago that the interesting but excitable Asia Times columnist Spengler was almost certainly David P. Goldman, an ex-acolyte of Lyndon LaRouche. I published the LaRouche connection, but kept Goldman's name a secret to protect his privacy.

Now, Goldman, in his new job at First Things, has come out of the closet about his eight years working for LaRouche:

In 1981 ... I ran the economics desk for LaRouche’s publications. Among my colleagues were several researchers who went on to distinguished careers. The Asia desk chief, for instance, was Dan Sneider, afterward a distinguished correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor and the San Francisco Mercury, and now director of a university research institute. European economics was handled by Laurent Murawiec, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute; the Middle East desk was headed by Bob Dreyfuss, now a regular contributor to the Nation, American Prospect, and New Republic; and the chief science writer was Jonathan Tennenbaum, a brilliant mathematician who had taught at the University of Copenhagen.

We were all about thirty, and most of us were Jewish. The question, of course, is what were a group of young Jews doing in the company of a cult leader with a paranoid view of the world and a thinly disguised anti-Semitic streak.

Here is one answer: We were all long-in-the-tooth student radicals. LaRouche’s organization was the flotsam washed up by the wave of the collective madness that had swept through the youth of the world in 1968 and left many of its participants maladapted to ordinary life for years afterward....

In reviewing my own missteps in life, I feel that temptation to represent myself as a monster in order to cover up something even more painful: I was a coward. I was afraid of being Jewish. Everything else is rationalization. My intellectual life really began only a quarter-century ago when I reconciled myself to being Jewish.

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

Michelle Obama and the affirmative action perpetual futility machine

"Spengler," the Asia Times columnist who was a close associate of Lyndon Larouche back in the 1980s, takes a whack at Michelle Obama's "rage of a privileged class" as exemplified by her Princeton thesis. Typos ahoy!

That reminds me of something I didn't squeeze into my long VDARE article on Michelle and racial quotas: how the downsides of affirmative action just spawn more angry demands for more affirmative action. It's a perpetual motion machine that never goes anywhere.

Michelle got into Whitney Young H.S., Princeton, Harvard Law School, and Sidley Austin LLC due to racial preferences. The entire time she felt aggrieved because people around her at these intellectually elite institutions kept noticing she wasn't as smart as the average person there, and were guessing that she got in because of her race. That both presumptions were accurate only made them more enraging. Those 14 years she endured in over her head due to affirmative action still gnaw away at her psyche, as the recent Newsweek cover story on her makes clear.

With her aggressive personality and need for attention and dominance, she would have been perfectly happy being a big fish in a little pond, but because elite America institutions are so desperate for hard-working blacks with 115 IQs, she kept getting lured into situations where should couldn't be satisfied.

So, did all this bitter experience turn her into a campaigner against affirmative action?

Are you kidding? As usual, the exact opposite happened.

Here's the beginning of the press release put out by her employer after her husband became a U.S. Senator and she got a $195,000 raise:

May 9, 2005

Michelle Obama has been appointed vice president for community and external affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals. Obama, who was previously the executive director for community affairs at the Hospitals, will be responsible for all programs and initiatives that involve the relationship between the Hospitals and the community. She will also take over management of the Hospitals' business diversity program.

Prior to joining the Hospitals, Obama worked as an associate dean of student services for the University of Chicago where she developed the University's first office of community service. She came to the Hospitals in 2002 and quickly built up programs for community relations, neighborhood outreach, volunteer recruitment, staff diversity and minority contracting. [Emphasis mine, although you could argue that her entire job was just diversity.]

She apparently couldn't cut it in big time corporate law, so she became a ... professional diversicrat, in charge of luring other blacks in over their heads, just like she had been, so they can also become underqualified and resentful too, suitable for becoming, in turn, professional diversicrats. Lather, rinse, and repeat, until the end of time.

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

Dear Sen. Obama: Don't try to sound folksy

Obama's "lipstick on a pig" blunder is a reminder that he needs to hire a jokewriter so he can poke some much-needed fun at himself. Over the last dozen days, the whole race has wandered off into old-fashioned American comedy (what could Frank Capra have done with a Sarah Palin character?), leaving the new-fangled Obama rattled.

Jeez, when somebody makes a joke about the the stupid job you had when you were in your 20s, you make a joke back. You don't get all hurt, peeved, and self-righteous like Obama did about Palin's little "community organizer" witticism. Maybe his "lipstick" line wasn't aimed at Palin, but he ought to have expected that everybody would take it that way by now.

Obama's Achilles heel has always been that his gimlet-eyed appraisal of human beings doesn't extend to himself -- he can't keep from feeling sorry for himself. It seems like a hundred years ago that I called Obama "a close student of other people’s weaknesses, a literary artist of considerable power in plumbing his deep reservoirs of self-pity and resentment, an unfunny Evelyn Waugh..." (Waugh could never stop feeling sorry for himself that he was born into a merely affluent, respectable family rather than a rich, aristocratic one. Obama's sad "story of race and inheritance" is more complicated, but still rather similar.)

That's why Dreams from My Father reads like the Brideshead Revisited of law school application essays.

The GOP brain trust (if such an oxymoronic body exists) will sooner or later figure that out and try to spend the rest of the campaign poking and prodding Obama's delicate self-image to see what happens.

In one of his half-brilliant, half-wrongheaded insights, Spengler suggests:

"Combine a child's response to serial abandonment with the perspective of an outsider, and Obama became an alien species against which American politics had no natural defenses. He is a Third World anthropologist profiling Americans, in but not of the American system."

Sometimes, Obama reminds me of the persona Christian Lander invented for the narrator of Stuff White People Like: the mild-mannered but cold-blooded interloping observer/exploiter of upper-middle class Americans' self-delusions and status anxieties. (Perhaps Lander had Obama in mind?) Those traits can take you a long way, but Obama may have to show a little more to go all the way.

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

German exhaustion

Because we English-speakers won the Big One, we don't pay much attention to Germans anymore, although that wasn't true of Americans in the past such as Mark Twain. But the Germans still have much influence upon us. It was only recently, for example, that I noticed how much of the 1960s hippie movement was derived from earlier German sources.

Many fin de siècle Germans were indefatigably obsessed with their exhaustion, which they tirelessly combated with strenuous new "life reform" regimens. Anna Katharina Schaffner writes in the Times Literary Supplement on "German Burnout:"

Martynkewicz marshals an impressive range of evidence to establish that numerous German bourgeois and bohemians living around the turn of the twentieth century felt physically and emotionally drained by the demands of what they perceived as an ever more complex modernity. Perceptive case studies include the “tired colossus” Otto von Bismarck, the diet-obsessed Friedrich Nietzsche, the sharp and ascetic Cosima Wagner, the depressed Protestant Max Weber, and the fitness fanatic Franz Kafka, as well as Gustav Meyrink, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke and many other key figures of German modernism. 

Rilke’s famous dictum “Du mußt dein Leben ändern” ["You must change your life"]

I liked on the Larry Sanders show when Hank the sidekick says thankfully to guest Jeff Goldblum: "Jurassic Park ... that movie ... changed my life."

neatly sums up the resolute attempts of these characters to counter their exhaustion-related disease by subscribing to various tenets of Lebensreform (lifestyle reform). It is one of the many strengths of this fine study that the intricate connection between these salvation-promising reform movements and exhaustion is so cogently demonstrated: Martynkewicz shows that the fin de siècle did not just produce exhaustion, but also saw the advent of numerous strategies to counter and even to prevent its effects. “In times of weakness and illness”, he writes, “the longing for salvation and redemption, as well as for saviours, spiritual guides, prophets, trainers and dieticians, multiplies.” Among the prophets we encounter are the naturopath Ernst Schweninger, whose allegedly miraculous regime was said to have transformed the “obese and miserable dotard” Bismarck into a strong and “elastic” young man; the raw food advocate and deviser of Bircher muesli, Max Bircher-Benner; his colleague Heinrich Lahmann; and the endocrinologist Eugen Steinach, who performed and popularized dubious and later discredited rejuvenation operations. 

Other practices that were frequently mobilized to counter exhaustion include nudism, vegetarianism, macrobiotics, gymnastics, yoga, gardening and expressive dancing. Martynkewicz discusses the thriving sanatorium culture (famously satirized in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain), as well as a phenomenon called “Europe-fatigue”, manifest in an escapist idealization of the Orient’s exotic otherness, as seen, for example, in Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. Das Zeitalter der Erschöpfung goes on to engage with a range of famous declinist thinkers such as Oswald Spengler and, above all, Nietzsche, who articulated a sense of “belatedness” and bitterly complained about the decadence, degeneracy and weakness of their contemporaries.

I suspect you could add Hitler to that list as a late fin de siècle figure unflagging in his worries that race-poisoning was exhausting the Germans.

Of course, from the perspective of other times and places, late 19th and 20th century Germans seem notably inexhaustible. 

And that pretty much uses up my mental energy on the subject. Time to go watch some TV.

   

So, who is the ex-LaRouchie foreign policy pundit?

I won't explain the persuasive evidence for his long-ago Lyndon LaRouche connection, since that would necessitate revealing his real name, which might hurt him in his day job. But I'm 95% persuaded of a reader's suggestion that many years ago the individual who is now the extremely self-confident columnist "Spengler" of the Asia Times was a close colleague of the crackpot perennial Presidential candidate.

That reminds me that adventuring in the Middle East seems to appeal most to two sets of people:

- The not very bright sorts who get Iraq and Iran and Saddam and Osama confused.

- And the extremely bright but not quite stable sorts who can convince themselves of anything.

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

Some new additions to the blogroll

Below in blue are how they refer to themselves, while in bold blue is how I refer to them in my Links listing near the top of the left hand column:

16 Volts Per Minute -- Since Finland is one of those countries that's so boring it's interesting (e.g., because of its location it could have had a catastrophic 20th Century, but through the heroic efforts of its own people, it managed to avoid most of the horrors of the last century), it's interesting to read a bright Finn in Ontario's reflections on the differences between Finland and North America.

Mean Mr. Mustard -- A rapidly improving blog by a college student.

Taki's Top Drawer -- Not a blog, but an archive of the Last Aristocrat's latest published columns.

Dennis Dale's Untethered -- Highly talented writer's reflections, but, please, break it up into more paragraphs!

Mahalanobis -- Economist turned hedge fund guy's quantitative observations

Matt Yglesias -- This is his personal stuff, so my influence on him shows up more here than when he has to share a forum with the likes of Garance Franke-Ruta (who also has a blog, but it's deadly dull -- Garance, you're only interesting when denouncing me or passing on my ideas under your byline, so don't try thinking for yourself.)

Snouck Hurgronje -- Dutch observer of the Muslim immigration issue.

Martin Kelly -- Dyspeptic Glawegian, formerly the G-Gnome

Abode of Amritas -- Hawaiian linguist

Spengler -- The Asian Times columnist

Hard Right -- A. C. Kleinheider's lively and funny blog

Albion's Seedlings -- James C. Bennett's Anglospherist blog

Faceright -- Generalist.

Daily Dose of Optimism -- Investing

Surfeited with Dainties -- Michael Brendan Dougherty has added as co-author John Murphy, who hopefully has a middle name like Seamus or Eoghan

Relapsed Catholic -- From Canada

Leon Hadar -- American Conservative and Cato Institute foreign policy analyst

Udolpho -- Good nasty fun

Dusk in Autumn -- High end human biodiversity and linguistics analysis.

I'm sure I've missed a lot of other good ones I've added in recent months.

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