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The Brief Rise and Sudden Fall of the Italian-American Civil Rights League: From Wikipedia:

The Italian-American Civil Rights League was a short-lived grass-roots political organization which existed in and around New York City in the early 1970s. Its stated goal was to combat pejorative stereotypes about Italian-Americans, specifically their association with the Mafia.

A precise, fixed date can be assigned to denote the group's founding: April 30, 1970, when approximately 30 Italian-Americans, led by reputed mobster Joseph Colombo, picketed the Manhattan headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They were there to protest the recent arrest of Colombo's son... Prior to this, the senior Colombo had complained of unfair harassment of him and his family by various federal law-enforcement authorities, who alleged that Colombo was the boss of one of New York City's five Mafia families � a charge he repeatedly denied.

The 30 demonstrators who appeared at the FBI building were joined by others in successive days, and ultimately their number grew to more than 5,000. The group then adopted the name "Italian-American Civil Rights League" after Colombo's attorney, Barry Slotnick, had suggested it...

Within two months, the organization claimed 45,000 dues-paying members, and held a large rally in Columbus Circle on June 28, 1970. The league gained further momentum when Frank Sinatra held a benefit concert in its honor at Madison Square Garden in November of that year.

The group then turned its attention to what it perceived as cultural slights against Italian-Americans, using boycott threats to force Alka-Seltzer and General Motors to withdraw television commercials the league objected to, and also got United States Attorney General John Mitchell to order the United States Justice Department to stop using the word "Mafia" in official documents and press releases. The league also secured an agreement from Al Ruddy, the producer of The Godfather, to omit the terms "Mafia" and "Cosa Nostra" from the film's dialogue, and succeeded in having Macy's stop selling a board game called The Godfather Game....

On June 28, 1971, the league held another rally in Columbus Circle � but this time tragedy would result, as Colombo was shot three times in the head by an African-American named Jerome Johnson (who was then immediately shot and killed himself); the blast left Colombo in a coma from which he would never recover (he died on May 22, 1978). Theories abounded as to the motive for the shooting; the most commonly-held belief was that other Mafia bosses in New York ordered the hit because they did not like the media attention Colombo and the group were receiving. The organization, at that time believed to number more than 100,000, had effectively disappeared within a year after the shooting.

Honest Italian-Americans ended up greatly benefiting from the collapse of the Italian American Civil Rights League. With the danger of being accused of racism removed, the federal government during the Reagan Administration hammered the Mafia and left it a shell of what it once was. Since the Mafia preyed most of all on their co-ethnics, that was a huge win for Italian-Americans.

Other ethnic groups have not been as lucky. This issue is not whether or not one group is more prone to organized nefariousness than any other. The issue is that if a group is exempted from criticism, as Mr. Colombo attempted to get Italian-Americans exempted, so that anyone who publicly notes anything bad about its behavior is excoriated as a racist or worse, the temptation for members of the group to engage in nefariousness increases. We all have urges that are worthy of criticism, but if we can arrange things so nobody is allowed to criticize us, then the temptation to give in to those urges can be overpowering.

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The demographics of Scooter Libby's upcoming jury in Washington D.C.: The odds are that, like the grand jury that indicted him, it will be dominated by black women. According to the 2004 exit poll, only 5% of black women in DC voted for Bush. 

So, since he is highly likely to be convicted, Libby has a choice to make:

- Does he try to run out the clock by going to trial and then appealing his conviction over and over in the hopes that he won't have to serve any prison time before Pardon Day, December 24, 2008, or

- Does he make a deal now and avoid prison by rolling over on a big enchilada like Dick Cheney?

If I were Libby, I would be building a very detailed calendar to estimate just how long it would take Patrick Fitzgerald to put me in prison. 

Any readers with knowledge of the courts have any estimates on how likely it would be that Fitzgerald could hustle Libby into prison in less than 37 months?

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Kaus notes a Marc Rich angle in Libby's perjury:

Pardon My Perjury
The secret of Scooter's confidence?
By Mickey Kaus
Updated Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2005, at 2:11 AM ET

Q--If He's So Dumb, Why Isn't He Rich? A--Maybe He Is: A week ago the question of the day, after the NYT reported that Libby's notes show him learning the secret of Mrs. Wilson from Vice-President Cheney, was

Would Libby really have been dumb enough to contradict his own notes (which the prosecutor has had from the start) under oath?

We now think we know the answer to that question, which is that Libby wasn't dumb enough to contradict his own notes. Instead he was dumb enough to avoid contradicting his notes by concocting a wildly implausible story about how he forgot what was in his notes! The story is non-believable on its face, whether Tim Russert testifies or not. ... Who would take such an idiotic risk before a much-feared special prosecutor? One answer: Someone who knows he'll be protected in the end. Someone who knows, for example, that he'll be pardoned. Maybe even someone who had represented a client who'd been pardoned in similarly controversial circumstances. It's easier to be a highwire daredevil when you know you have a safety net.

There were always two key dates for I. Lewis Libby as he attempted to run out the clock on Patrick Fitzgerald.

- For the team, don't get indicted until after November 2, 2004 (Election Day)

- For himself, don't go to prison until after December 24, 2008 (Pardon Day)

Christmas Eve 2008 is the best date for Bush to pardon the Iraq Attaq plotters, just as his father pardoned Iran-Contra figures, such as current Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams, on Christmas Eve 1992. Bill Clinton, in contrast, procrastinated until practically Bush II's inauguration, when the attention of the country was already focused on Washington, and was roasted for it. Christmas Eve is a much better day than Inaugural Day for unpopular pardons, because the populace is bored with politics and is in a benign mood. 

Pardon Day is just over three years away, so the clock is ticking on Fitzgerald. In Illinois, he indicted 65 people and convicted 59 before unveiling his final indictment in his bribery probe: former Gov. George Ryan. In this investigation, he's starting much higher up, with the right hand men of both the Veep (Libby) and the President (Rove). But Pardon Day is coming. 

Fitzgerald can impose a lot financial hardship on Libby over the next three years and seven weeks until Pardon Day, but Libby no doubt has rich and powerful friends who will surely make it up to him if he protect the rest of the cabal by keeping his mouth shut and simply dragging out the proceedings until then. And the remarkable example of Abrams, John Podhoretz's brother-in-law, shows that a pardoned criminal can still come back to get his dream job. 

But, is Libby a Liddy? This amateur novelist doesn't strike me as the G. Gordon Liddy-type who laughs at prison. So, can Fitzgerald speed the wheels of justice enough to put a plausible fear of doing serious prison time before Pardon Day into Libby, and thus get him to squeal?

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Italy since 1943: With Italy much in the news again (see below) because of its role in Libbygate and the Yellowcake Forgeries, it's worth reviewing in more detail the  contemporary history of that country. 

In the 20th Century, Italy seemed like a misfit. In an age of mass ideologies and mass armies, the Italian tastes for luxury, extended family, personal connections, bribery, and stealth (see Shakespeare's many plays set in Italy for the traditional English view of Italians as stylish but unsound) -- and consequent incompetence at large-scale organization -- made the country seem outmoded. Italy's attempt at mass-scale modernity, Fascism, seemed more like the exception that proved the rule that Italy wasn't cut out for the age of ideology. You'd have to live in a country where the trains didn't run on time to see an obvious popinjay like Mussolini as the wave of the future.

Fortunately, the era of mass ideologies and mass warfare is over (knock on wood), and our political vices are returning to the more human scale that the Italians have always found more congenial. 

Most Americans feel a deep aversion toward conspiracy theories. To label something as a "conspiracy theory" is to dismiss it out of hand. Americans believe they believe in high-minded principles and believe their enemies believe in evil ideologies. Thus, when members of our government decided to respond to 9/11 by invading Iraq, lots of educated Americans suddenly decided that Osama and Saddam were united by their ideology of Islamofascism, thus justifying the Iraq Attaq. Nobody, including all the alleged Islamofascists, had ever heard of "Islamfofascism" before, but the term quickly became popular among certain classes of Americans. Suggestions that the various players in the Bush Administration were motivated by less principled reasons were denounced as conspiracy theories. 

In Italy, in contrast, conspiracy theories are most people's preferred explanation for how the world works, for the simple reason that, in their part of the world, conspiracies are the main mechanism for actually getting anything done. The notion that political operators would favor something on principle seems laughable. The political is personal, in the sense that if you want to understand historical events, you need to understand the connections among the players.

We often heard before the Iraq Attaq that because the U.S. did such a good job reforming Germany and Japan after WWII, we were bound to do the same for Iraq. Strikingly, though, we never heard much about the long-term impact of the 1943 American invasion of western Sicily, which Patton rolled through so easily while Montgomery's British army struggled up the east coast. 

The U.S. government long refused to release documents that could confirm or disprove the story that the military made a deal with the Sicilian-born mobster Lucky Luciano to ease the invasion, but Italian experts on the Sicilian mafia date that organization's comeback to 1943. When the Fascist state evaporated in Sicily, we needed to keep civil order without tying down scores of thousands of our troops. (Sound familiar?) So, we turned local control over to patriarchs of families not contaminated by ties to Fascism, men of respect within their own communities, friends who had friends who could keep things quiet and keep out the Communists: i.e., mafioso who had been lying low during Mussolini's crackdown on the mob. Some of this was naivet� on our part, some of it was rigged by well-connected individuals among the 15% of our invasion force that was of Sicilian descent, and some of it was realpolitik. 

It worked, but the blowback lasted for at least 50 years. In recent decades, a few heroic Italian prosecutors and cops have made progress against the Sicilian mafia, but Italy remains a country where nothing is what it seems. It's not hard to get Italians to connive and conspire, but the U.S. also funded a lot of these Italian predilections during the Cold War. 

The overwhelming importance of defeating our subsequent ideological foe during the Cold War caused the U.S. to tolerate, even subsidize, a lot of conspiratorial criminality in Italy, where the chance of a Communist takeover, by invasion, coup, or election was always fairly high. The Mafia's get-out-the-vote abilities in southern Italy made it a bulwark of the anti-Communist Christian Democrats, which we heavily subsidized. Our main man in Cold War Italy, Giulio Andreotti, seven times Prime Minister of Italy, has spent most of his retirement being tried for connections to the Mafia and murdering a scandal-mongering journalist.

In the north of Italy, NATO established a network of potential sleeper cells of armed, trained "stay-behind" resistance fighters who would sabotage any Soviet takeover (Operation Gladio). Very patriotic, but of course, being Italians, some of the conspirators weren't content to wait around until their country needed them and began to freelance on their own.

The late 1970s and early 1980s were the fever years in Italy, when the chance of a Communist takeover at the ballot box and leftwing kidnappings were at their peak. Bizarre events were common, such as the horrendous bombing of the Bologna train station, apparently by rightwingers, the hanging death of "the Pope's banker" Roberto Calvi, and the discovery, most ridiculous sounding of all, of the secret and sinister P2 Lodge of Free Masons to which much of the right of center Italian establishment apparently belonged.

All this seems very alien to most Americans. Yet a few Americans positively love to conspire, most notoriously Lee Harvey Oswald. Another inveterate plotter is NRO Contributing Editor and International Man of Mystery Michael Ledeen. Separating truth from fiction about Ledeen is hard, but a few things are agreed-upon, such as his role in initiating the Iran-Contra scandal that almost destroyed the Reagan Presidency and his central role in setting up the recent meetings in Europe, including Rome, between the Neocongate suspect Larry Franklin, fellow Feith operative Harold Rhode, Italian Intelligence agents (SISMI), and Ledeen's old collaborator from Iran-Contra, the notoriously unreliable Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar.

Ledeen spent most of his formative years in the late 1970s and very early 1980s in Italy, moving in CIA-related journalistic / intelligence circles. He was apparently a consultant for SISMI, the Italian Intelligence service, during those years. For an anti-Ledeen report on what he was supposedly up to during those years, see this, the accuracy of which I absolutely cannot vouch for.

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The Italian Connection: Nur al-Cubicle has posted quick and dirty translations of two brand new articles by Carlo Bonini and Giuseppi d'Avanzo in La Repubblica on Italy's SISMi's role in the Iraq Attaq.

So, once more we venture into the Funhouse of Italians, Iraqis, Iranians, Michael Ledeen, Larry Franklin, Ahmed Chalabi, and Manucher Ghorbanifar! God alone knows how much of these articles is truthful, but, compared to the average veracity of Ledeen's efforts for National Review Onloan, well, I know who I'd bet on.

The first article revolves around yet another meeting in Rome, this time not long before the invasion. It raises the old question of whether or not the neocons' Iraq Attaq agitation was in part a false-flag operation run by the ayatollahs' spy agency in Tehran (what I call the Manchumpian Candidate scenario):

The story of Italian military intervention in Iraq begins when the resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Michael Ledeen, sponsored by Defense Minister Antonio Martino, debarks in Rome with Pentagon men in tow to meet a handful of �Iranian exiles.� The meeting is organized by SISMI. In an Agency �safe house� near Piazza di Spagna (however, other sources have told us it was a reserved room in the Parco dei Principi Hotel).

Twenty men are gathered around a large table, covered by maps of Iraq, Iran and Syria. The big cheese are Lawrence Franklin and Harold Rhode of the Office of Special Plans, Michael Ledeen of the AIE, a SISMI chief accompanied by his assistant (the former is a balding man between 46 and 48 years of age; the latter is younger, around 38, with braces on his teeth) and some mysterious Iranians.

Pollari confirms the meeting to La Repubblica: When [Defense Minister Martino] asked me to organize the meeting, I became curious. But it was my job and I wasn�t born yesterday. It�s true�my men were also present at the meeting. I wanted to know what was cooking. It�s also true that there were maps of Iraq and Iran on the table. I can tell you those Iranians were not exactly �exiles�. The came and went from Tehran with their passports with no difficulty whatsoever as if they were transparent to the eyes of the Pasdaran.

So the Iranians were not exiles. They were not opponents of the regime of the ayatollahs. These men are members of the regime, sent by Tehran. If someone in Washington is wondering what the devil they were doing there on the eve of the invasion, in Rome, elbow-to-elbow with people from the Pentagon, we can supply some elucidation. But to make some sense out of the confusion, you have to listen to an American intelligence source, who has requested anonymity. He tells us: You Italians have always underestimated the work of conversion carried out Ahmed Chalabi, the chairman of Iraqi National Congress. You tend to omit this chapter from your side of the story because you think Ahmed concerns only the Americans. But that�s not the way it is: he is also your business, far beyond anything you currently believe or imagine.

So what do we know about Ahmed Chelabi? The darling of the Neocons, Chalabi has been charged by the hawks in the Pentagon to pass intel on WMD proliferation to European intelligence agencies supposedly garnered from presumed scientists, who have defected from Baghdad. The person charged with �intelligence gathering� and story invention is Aras Habib Karim, Chalabi�s personal intelligence man.

Aras is a key player. He coordinates the Intelligence Collection Programme. He supervises and fabricates the �output� of the dissidents. He is a Shi�ite Kurd just under 50, extremely clever, consumately evil and a magician of double-cross and document forgery. But there is something peculiar about him. The CIA has long considered him an �Iranian agent.� A second key player is an American, Francis Brooke.

The bogus Italian dossier on the Niger uranium turns up [at the meeting] also�and we don�t know exactly why--because Chalabi is in possession of it.

The second article concerns SISMI's self-congratulation in helping subvert the Iraqi army before the invasion. The background is that the Italians had lots of links to the Iraqi military going back decades. Back in the old days, Iraqi officers would go to get their advanced military training in ... Italy! (That may explain a lot about the Iraqi army's performance in the wars of 1980-1988, 1991, and 2003). So, SISMI apparently infiltrated 20 men into Iraq a few months before the American invasion to report on the status of the Iraqi war machine and bribe Iraqi officers to surrender in return for money, American residency, and the like. 

But, that effort produced an unwelcome side effect that had to be hushed up: it quickly emerged that no invasion was needed. Iraq had not WMDs and was utterly contained as a convention power.

What this [Italian] cabinet official [the reporters' source] does not say�what he cannot say� is that our military intelligence service--and therefore the Italian Government (similar to, Iraqi National Congress�and therefore the Pentagon), knows for certain as early as the month of January 2003 (and probably in December 2002) that there are no WMDs in the arsenals of Saddam Hussein. There is no nuclear weapon. There are no long-range missiles. There is no possibility of arming missile warheads with chemical or biological agents. There is only a military which does not want to engage the enemy and a General Staff waiting to surrender at the highest possible price.

And this is the most valuable information which the SISMI agents, integrated into SCIRI�s Shi�ite underground intelligence network led by Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Akim and Ahmed Chalabi�s Iraqi National Congress web of spies given to Coalition Unified Command in Doha. The Iraqi army is made out of paper- m�ch� and poorly armed�even for a small-scale conventional war, the consequences of the drawn-out war with Iran, the invasion of Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War, the long-lasting imposed no-fly zones, the embargo and the sanctions. In conversations between Italian agents and the Iraqi officers trained in Italian military academies, at Finmeccanica [Italian defense industry] and at Selenia [a defense communications company] who eventually became generals, demolishes any hypothesis of Saddam�s WMD with a sneer and a dismissive wave of the hand.

The Iraqi officers explain how their tanks and armored carriers are relics of the 1980-88 war with Tehran and lack spare parts. They are basically unusable pieces of junk. They reveal to our agents that Saddam�s Armed Forces, from the lowliest regiment to the General Staff, are completely demoralized, inadequately equipped and shoeless.

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How long until the first Freakonomics argument against Alito? It's only a matter of time until we start hearing that putting Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court would unleash a vast crime wave in 20 years by making abortion illegal.

By the way, if Samuel Alito of Trenton, NJ had been a lawyer for a notorious organized crime figure off-and-on during 1985-2000, do you think he would have been nominated for the Supreme Court? So, why didn't anybody object to Scooter Libby, longtime lawyer for notorious traitor and sanctions-buster Marc Rich, filling three positions simultaneously in the White House?

ABC News reported:

Dec. 1, 2004 � Former American fugitive Marc Rich was a middleman for several of Iraq's suspect oil deals in February 2001, just one month after his pardon from President Clinton, according to oil industry shipping records obtained by ABC News.

And a U.S. criminal investigation is looking into whether Rich, as well as several other prominent oil traders, made illegal payments to Iraq in order to obtain the lucrative oil contracts.

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Rushton on ethnic nepotism: One of the great nonfiction books of the 20th Century is Pierre L. van den Berghe's The Ethnic Phenomenon of 1981, which showed how much of the conflict in the world is explainable in terms of "ethnic nepotism," a concept based on W.D. Hamilton's theory of kin selection. 

Why do people care so much about who is related to whom? Because, as Hamilton's logic showed, that's toward whom they are more nepotistic (i.e., altruistic). In turn, ethnocentrism, nationalism, and racism are essentially the inevitable flip side of nepotism. If people discriminate in favor of their relatives, they are going to discriminate against their non-relatives.

As a sociologist, van den Berghe was not particularly concerned about whether co-ethnics were actually related to each other or whether they simply believed they are and thus behaved like they would expect relatives to behave toward each other. 

With many nature-nurture questions like this, agnosticism about ultimate causes is often wisest. Without in-depth adoption and twin studies, it is very, very hard to disentangle whether a trait is inherited racially from your biological parents or ethnically from your social parents (since both kinds of parents are typically the same). For many practical and political questions, the more relevant issue is whether this racial and/or ethnic tendency is likely to stay roughly the same for a considerable number of years into the future. 

Nonetheless, it's interesting to see if genetic relatedness among members of a racial group is strong enough to trigger the kin altruism that we see in smaller extended families. Frank Salter took the lead in researching this back in the 1990s.

Now,  J.P. Rushton writes:

A paper showing a strong genetic contribution to patriotism and in-group loyalty was published in the October issue of Nations and Nationalism, entitled "Ethnic nationalism, evolutionary psychology, and genetic similarity theory."

[Based on Salter's analysis of Cavalli-Sforza's genetic data,] co-ethnics are as similar to each other as half-siblings when compared to all the genetic variation in the world. Two-random English people are the equivalent of 1/32 cousin by comparison with Germans; 3/8 cousin by comparison with people from the Near East; � cousin by comparison with people from India; half-siblings by comparison with people from China; and like full-sibs compared with people from Africa.

This is driven by in-breeding, which is routinely overlooked when discussing Hamilton's famous theory. Hamilton agreed with van den Berghe, but Hamilton's more outspoken colleagues such as Richard Dawkins have frequently pooh-poohed the idea of ethnic nepotism without coming to grips with the implications of in-breeding. Rushton writes:

In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins (1976) argued that the mathematics of kin selection soon made coefficients of relatedness, even between kin, vanishingly small. One example he offered was that Queen Elizabeth II, while a direct descendant of William the Conqueror (1066), is unlikely to share a single one of her ancestor�s genes... [In reality, however,] Elizabeth II is considerably more genetically similar to William the Conqueror than she is to an average person alive today.

Rushton continues in his summary:

The pull of genetic similarity was also found to be fine-tuned, operating within marriages, within friendships, and among acquaintances--and even within families following bereavement.

Studies of adoptees and also of identical and fraternal twins show the preferences for similarity is substantially heritable.

"Likeness leads to liking," said the study's author, J. Philippe Rushton, professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario. "People have a need to identify and be with others like themselves ('their own kind'). It is a powerful force in human affairs."

Rushton anchored the human preference for similarity in the evolutionary psychology of altruism, which suggests that favoritism toward kin and similar others evolved to help replicate shared genes. In-group loyalty is almost always seen as a virtue and extension of family loyalty. This explains why ethnic remarks are so easily taken as "fighting words."

The paper described the group-identification processes as innate--part of the evolved machinery of the human mind. Even very young children make in-group/out-group distinctions about race and ethnicity in the absence of social learning.

"Other than through evolution it is difficult to explain why people group themselves and others using social categories and why these categories assume such powerful emotional and evaluative overtones (including guilt, empathy, self-esteem, relief at securing a group identity, and distress at losing it)."

The politics of ethnic identity are increasingly replacing the politics of class as the major threat to the stability of nations.

Although social scientists and historians have been quick to condemn the extent to which political leaders or would-be leaders have been able to manipulate ethnic identity, the question they never ask, let alone attempt to answer is, "Why is it always so easy?"

The answer lies in the fact that the aggregate of genes people share with their fellow ethnics dwarfs those they share with their extended families. Rather than being a mere poor relation of family nepotism, ethnic nepotism is virtually a proxy for it.

Now, I haven't studied the paper in-depth. So, here are a few ill-informed caveats:

- Enthusiasts for this idea, such as mathematical geneticist Henry Harpending (whose conversion to the idea of ethnic nepotism being a genetically driven phenomenon a few years ago provided some of the recent impetus), have a tendency to slightly over-estimate the relatedness levels for a technical reason I'll skip over here.

- Another issue is how genes for this kind of racial altruism could evolve. While not simple, I don't think this is an insuperable problem. It's easy to imagine tendencies evolving like "Feel more altruistic and trusting toward people who speak the same language as you." Or "Be more trusting of people you grew up around, and of people who grew up around the people you grew up around, and so forth." This can create a long chain of cousins and other relatives.

- As the success of infant adoption shows, humans don't seem to have built-in fool-proof mechanisms for identifying genetic kin. What we seem to have built-in are rules of thumb like, if you grew up in the same home as her, don't be attracted to her because she's probably your sister. Or if you grew up with him, feel altruistic toward him because he's probably your brother. It's hardly impossible to hypothesize broader built in rules of thumb, like trust people you can talk to more than people you can't talk to because you don't share a common language.

- Finally, it's crucial to keep in mind that nepotism has its flip side. You can call it "sibling rivalry" or, as one of my readers suggested: "neposchism." While we feel more altruistically toward people more related to us genetically, they also are often our greatest rivals for resources, such as inheritances. Thus, we are more likely to go to war with our racial neighbors, but we are also more likely to team up with them.

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NYT catches up with iSteve.com, finally: Here is Nicholas Wade's Nov. 1st article in the New York Times: "Scientists Link a Prolific Gene Tree to the Manchu Conquerors of China." And here's my Oct. 20th version of the same story: "Does Genghis Khan have a rival as History's Greatest Lover?"

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The Scooter Libby-Marc Rich connection: As I pointed out on Friday, you can make a lot of money being a mob lawyer, but in return you normally have to sacrifice your ambitions for positions of power and trust in the government. Nobody would allow John Gotti's lawyer to become "Dick Cheney's Dick Cheney," but, until very recently, there were few vocal objections to I. Lewis Libby, the long-time lawyer for world-class mobster Marc Rich, being a key player in the White House for the last half decade. Why the double standard?

Jim Pinkerton writes in Newsday:

... Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York flailed at Libby, declaring the alleged actions of Vice President Dick Cheney's now-former chief of staff to be "reprehensible."

Clinton must be careful, however, because Libby's past legal career is closely intertwined with her husband's presidency. During the 1980s and 1990s, Libby was a lawyer for Marc Rich.

And if you don't remember Marc Rich, you will be reminded of him soon enough. He's the American financier who skipped out of the United States in 1983, one step ahead of a $48-million tax bill and a 51-count indictment for various skullduggeries, including trading with Iran amidst the American hostage crisis. As Rich's lawyer over the next two decades, Libby collected, by his own estimate, some $2 million in fees.

Wait, there's more. In January 2001, outgoing President Bill Clinton gave Rich a pardon. Interestingly, Rich's ex-wife, Denise, donated more than a million dollars to Democratic causes around then, including $70,000 to Hillary Clinton's 2000 Senate campaign and $450,000 to the Clinton Foundation.

Libby denied having anything to do with the pardon effort, but admitted he had called Rich on January 22, 2001 - which is to say, after he started working for Cheney - to congratulate him on his getting off. And Libby's powerful presence inside the White House - his title was assistant to George W. Bush as well chief of staff to Cheney - might help explain why the incoming Bush administration failed to pursue obvious threads of corruption trailing out of President Clinton's pardon of Rich and other dubious figures.

For his part, Rich shows no signs of behaving better. Still wheeling and dealing out of Switzerland, he is a featured nogoodnik in the new UN report on Saddam Hussein and the UN's corrupt Oil for Food program. Which is to say, investigators might wish to look into any continuing Libby-Rich links.

Back in 2001, Clinton wrote in the NYT to explain his pardon of Rich:

7) the case for the pardons was reviewed and advocated not only by my former White House counsel Jack Quinn but also by three distinguished Republican attorneys: Leonard Garment, a former Nixon White House official; William Bradford Reynolds, a former high-ranking official in the Reagan Justice Department; and Lewis Libby, now Vice President Cheney's chief of staff; 

After first scoffing at Clinton's citation of Libby's involvement, Byron York changed his tune in National Review Online after he listened to Libby's testimony:

Bad Night for the GOP: Lewis Libby comes to Marc Rich�s defense.

March 2, 2001 8:55 a.m.

Lewis Libby, a top Republican lawyer who is now vice president Dick Cheney's chief of staff, told the House Government Reform Committee last night that he agreed with much of Bill Clinton's widely discredited op-ed article outlining the former president's reasons for pardoning fugitive tax evader Marc Rich.

In a session that stretched late into the evening, Libby, who represented Rich for several years ending in the spring of 2000, told the committee he believes Rich is not guilty of the tax and racketeering charges filed by federal prosecutors in 1983. Libby also said he "quite possibly" would have considered applying for a pardon for Rich had Rich asked him to do so.

Libby, who said his law firms collected as much as $2 million for representing Rich, testified he had nothing to do with the application that led to clemency for Rich. He declined to say whether he approved of the decision to pardon Rich, but he conceded that he called Rich on January 22, two days after the pardon, to "congratulate him on having reached a result that he had sought for a long time." Libby testified he made the call from his home to make clear that he was calling in a personal capacity, and not as a representative of the Bush administration.

In a particularly damaging exchange with Pennsylvania Democrat Paul Kanjorski , Libby agreed that Rich might be characterized as a traitor for fleeing the country and renouncing his American citizenship. Kanjorski asked Libby why he would call a traitor to congratulate him on his good fortune in winning a pardon. Visibly uncomfortable, Libby had no answer.

For Republicans, Libby's testimony was a sour endnote to what had been a long day of revelations that made President Clinton's decision to pardon Rich seem even more inexplicable than previously thought.

Pinkerton served in the Reagan and first Bush White Houses, but I think he's being naive to think that the Libby-Rich connection will be given much of an airing in the press. They've had close to five years to discuss it and it's never gotten any traction.

Why not?

Clinton argued in defense of his pardon for Rich:

(8) finally, and importantly, many present and former high-ranking Israeli officials of both major political parties and leaders of Jewish communities in America and Europe urged the pardon of Mr. Rich because of his contributions and services to Israeli charitable causes, to the Mossad's efforts to rescue and evacuate Jews from hostile countries, and to the peace process through sponsorship of education and health programs in Gaza and the West Bank.

That appears to be plausible. Newsweek's Michael Isikoff broke a story in August 2001 based on transcripts of phone conversations between Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak:

Barak first raised the issue with Clinton on Dec. 11, 2000, the same day Jack Quinn, Rich's newly hired lawyer (and former Clinton White House counsel) submitted a thick pardon application that included a personal letter from Rich's ex-wife Denise requesting the pardon be granted.

In that first conversation, Barak described Rich as a "Jewish American businessman" who was "making a lot of philanthropic contributions to Israeli institutions and activities like education."

Barak acknowledged that Rich had "violated certain rules of the game in the United States." But "I just wanted to let you know that here he is highly appreciated," the Israeli leader said. Clinton was not caught off guard by the information. "I know about the case because I know his ex-wife. She wants to help him, too. If your ex-wife wants to help you, that's good."

Barak raised the issue of a Rich pardon a second time on Jan. 8, 2001, with less than two weeks left in Clinton's presidency. "I believe it could be important (gap) not just financially, but he helped Mossad [the Israeli intelligence agency] on more than one case." [The word "gap" is typically used when note-takers cannot make out a garbled word or sentence.]

Clinton, who described the case as "bizarre," warned Barak: "It's best that we not say much about that." "Okay, I'm not mentioning it anyplace," Barak said.

In their third conversation, on Jan. 19, transcripts show the two leaders spoke by phone for 22 minutes, between 2:47 p.m. and 3:09 p.m., and that it was Clinton and not Barak who raised the Rich matter that afternoon.

"I'm trying to do something on clemency for Rich, but it is very difficult," Clinton said. "Might it move forward?" Barak asked. The president ruminated about the problems he was facing.

"I'm working on that, but I'm not sure. There's nothing illegal about it, but there's no precedent. He was overseas when he was indicted and never came home."

Clinton concluded that the question "is not whether he should get it or not, but whether he should get it without coming back here. That's the dilemma I'm working through." 

The Forward newspaper of New York (formerly the Jewish Daily Forward), which provides better coverage of this kind of issue than the mainstream media, reported in 2003:

Marc Rich, the pardoned tax fugitive, has given away more than $100 million in the last two decades, according to an elegant, hard-bound history of his philanthropic work issued recently by his foundation.

It turns out, though, that even if recipients returned every penny, it still might not be enough to settle his tax bill. New York state tax authorities told the Forward that a two-year-old warrant seeking $137 million from Rich in unpaid state taxes and fines remains outstanding.

The billionaire financier is best known as the recipient of a controversial January 2001 pardon from then-president Bill Clinton. Rich had fled the United States for Europe in 1983 shortly before a grand jury indicted him on charges that he and his associates plotted to evade $48 million in federal taxes and violated sanctions against Iran while Americans were being held hostage there.

But the Switzerland-based Rich Foundation for Education, Culture and Welfare is highlighting another side of Rich's activities during the last two decades. In recent months, it has mailed out approximately 1,000 copies of a hard-bound, 105-page commemorative book detailing 20 years of Rich's charitable work. The book has been sent to other foundations, non-profit organizations and journalists around the world, said Avner Azulay, the Rich Foundation's Israel-based managing director, in an e-mail to the Forward.

Between 1981 and 2001, Rich's foundations gave approximately $115 million to nearly 1,200 organizations in more than 50 countries, according to the book. The majority of Rich's giving � $60.2 million � has been in Israel, where he has funded a diverse array of cultural, educational, social welfare and Jewish-Arab coexistence projects. Rich has also given widely to both Jewish and non-Jewish causes in Latin America and Europe, and he donated $395,000 to fund projects, such as public-health efforts, in the Palestinian territories....

Azulay, a former Mossad agent, said that questions about Rich's legal issues and personal matters are "irrelevant to the Rich Foundation's activity, before or after the pardon." Rich did not reply to an e-mail seeking comment.

One of Rich's most prominent gifts was to Birthright Israel, the $210 million Jerusalem-based partnership between Jewish communities around the world, the Israeli government and Diaspora Jewish philanthropists that has brought 40,000 young Jews on trips to Israel since 2000. As one of its philanthropic partners, Rich pledged $5 million to the program.

Rich, who has renounced his American citizenship, has been more modest in his giving to programs in the United States � such gifts total only $3.7 million...

Only 17 American Jewish groups and institutions are listed in the commemorative book as having received funding for American-based projects, including, among others, several yeshivas, the Center for Jewish History in New York and the Anti-Defamation League.

Rich's giving, and the suspicion that it contributed to the willingness of prominent American Jews and Israeli officials to support his clemency effort, sparked an uproar in some segments of the American Jewish community.

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, blasted those who had supported Rich's pardon appeal after accepting his money. Writing in a February 2001 opinion article, the Reform leader argued that the fugitive's supporters "were bought" by his philanthropy.

Prominent individuals associated with Birthright Israel wrote to the president urging him to pardon Rich. So did the ADL's national director, Abraham Foxman, whose organization received $250,000 from Rich. Foxman later declared at a press conference that it had "probably" been a mistake to lobby Clinton for the pardon...

A new round of publicity regarding the pardon appeared to be avoided late last month, when U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler upheld the right of the Bush administration to deny public access to records on the 177 pardons and commutations Clinton approved on his last day in office.

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Is Halloween now the #2 holiday? As the holiday of fantasy, it appears to have left Thanksgiving (food), Easter (religion), and the Fourth of July (patriotism) far behind in popularity. But it seems unlikely to ever catch modern America's leading holiday, Christmas (shopping).

By the way, what was Congress thinking when they recently extended daylight savings time past Halloween to November 5th, starting next year? How will it be fun for little kids to trick or treat when the sun is up? How is that scary? How will you leave your porch light off to tell kids to stay away because you don't have any candy when the sun is shining?

***

"What's a Modern Girl to Do?" My wife's suggestion for Maureen Dowd:

Before everything else, admit to yourself that, at age 53, you've graduated from "girl" to "gal."

***

More on "Maureen Dowdies:" A mother of three writes:

I have been laughing while reading your Maureen Dowd commentary. I completely agree with your psychological analysis of Ms. Dowd. She is another sad example of the misguided thinking of the feminists. You would think she would have figured out something was amiss when even Gloria Steinem married!

The high profile professions that require attractiveness but not too much intelligence seem to be littered with aging women who never married, never had babies or married too late in life to have babies - "Maureen Dowdies." Whenever I see newscastress Diane Sawyer on television, I feel pity towards her. This is a very attractive, former beauty queen who married late and has no children. 

(A friend of mine who had the misfortune to contract to do some work on their palatial apartment says that Sawyer's husband Mike Nichols, director of "Closer," is the most horrible human being he ever met.)

When she dies, all that will be left are tapes of her old Good Morning America shows! My mother, though, who came of age shortly before feminism, greatly admires her. I, on the other hand, am a tremendous disappointment to my mother. First of all, because I married - my mother claims she never wanted to marry but was pressured into it by her mother. Secondly, because I had three children - my mother also claims that she never wanted to have children - but, again, was pressured into it. I guess I could have spent my life reading a teleprompter instead of wasting it by marrying and having babies!

By the way, selecting and marrying a quality man and raising children well drains away a tremendous amount of time and energy - not much is left over for plotting to win those Scrabble contests! Even in the climate of the 1980's, I knew that certain males that I dated were not suitable for marriage. Some of my friends just seemed to blunder into pregnancy or marriage or both to obviously unsuitable guys. I am talking about very attractive girls who married guys with alcohol/drug problems and guys with erratic work records! It doesn't take much thinking to determine that these were bad choices! Now, the girls were not perfect, either, but we both know that very attractive and young and female means that they could have done better than semi-employed, alcoholic males!

Maureen Dowd is one of those once-upon-a-time young, very attractive females who swallowed that whole feminist thing about marriage being slavery for women. Actually, what the feminists really meant is that marriage is slavery for lesbians - which is probably somewhat accurate. Maureen just never figured out the lesbian part. 

Then, it sounds like once she decided she might like to marry, she continued making bad choices. Why was she wasting time dating Michael Douglas in the 1990's when she must have been pushing forty? He was all over the tabloids with headlines like "Sex-Addict" and "Michael Douglas addicted to painkillers" or some such thing! On the other hand, he was a good prospect for Catherine Zeta-Jones. He was already aging and paunchy - hence, he was grateful that this younger, beautiful woman married him - not much chance of him straying. Plus, he gave her much more visibility in Hollywood, and this has helped her career. And, of course, he was willing to have more children with her. 

Ah well, I digress - I must end my bloviating and head to the Halloween, er "Safety", parade (yes, the politically correct name used at my daughter's school is "Safety Parade").

***

Spittle-emitting Iranian President screeches: Muslim states' armies stand behind the Palestinians in their struggle with the Israeli Defense Force to eradicate the Zionist Entity!!!! (Or words to that the effect.)

Well, to be precise, the armies of the Muslim world stand behind the front lines with Israel, hundreds and hundreds of miles behind the front lines. And "stand" might be not be quite the mot juste . Perhaps, a more descriptive term than "stand" would be "recline," "stretch out," "get comfy," or "snooze in their barracks."

I mean, be honest, if you were some Muslim general, would you want to tangle with the IDF? Getting your butt kicked gets old really fast. Been there, done that in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982. And then the Soviets collapsed so all their old Red Army equipment is rusting. Israeli regional military supremacy is only getting more overwhelming.

***Permalink***

Menopausal spinster Maureen Dowd's long essay on the failure of feminism, "What's a Modern Girl to Do?," is getting a lot of attention. I've collected my comments from over the years on MoDo and her continuing series "I Hate Men! (Why, Oh, Why Didn't a Man Ever Marry Me?)" here.

It appears to be finally dawning on poor, loveless, childless Maureen that feminism wasn't designed for heterosexuals like herself.

One thing I would like to point out is how desperate Maureen is to conform. She wants society to tell her, the Modern Girl, what to do, and is angry that it has given her mixed messages over the years. The notion that she should have figured out for herself how to live her life is not one that naturally occurs to her. But that hasn't stopped her from giving enormous amounts of advice, most of it bad, to other women on how they should live their lives. That's because she wants to lessen the discomfort she feels when she notices that other women have made other choices.

Something we don't hear much these days is how conformist women are. Maureen wants to do what all the other women do and she wants all the other women to do what she wants to to do. (No doubt this inculcated by natural selection: the reproductive upside to women of thinking for themselves is small compared to the downside of doing the wrong thing. It is more important for women than it is for men to play it safe.)

But combined with their insistence on taking everything personally, this conformism keeps women like MoDo from being very interesting pundits at anything requiring more general brainpower than personal snarkiness. (Not that male pundits are distinguishing themselves these days, either.)

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Nominate Patrick Fitzgerald for the Supreme Court? Columnist Jim Pinkerton wonders if Bush might not try to kill two birds with one stone by nominating his Administration's nemesis, apparently incorruptible and unstoppable prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, to the Supreme Court. 

One of the more likely possibilities, Michael Luttig, is interesting because his father was murdered by a 17-year-old black carjacker in 1994. It would be fun to see the Democrats bring up that case to use against him!

The NYT wrote about the murderer, the middle-class son of a local politician:

"He said that as a light-skinned black teenager with lots of white friends he felt that stepping into the drug world helped him fit in with some black teenagers in town." "When I started selling crack," Beazley says, "it was like 'I'm cool, I can fit in.' I didn't want to be shunned by the black community, I guess you could say. That's a sad thing to say."

Indeed.

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The FBI's Intentionally Misleading Crime Statistics: At the VDARE.com blog, a reader tries to get to the bottom of how the FBI gets away with violating federal guidelines by not breaking "Hispanics" out as a separate category in crime rate statistics.

***

The new American Conservative issue of Nov. 7th: Here's what's online at www.AmConMag.com: 

Superpower Showdown
By James P. Pinkerton
America needs a new strategy for dealing with China, a country we can�t contain and can�t afford to fight.

Bad For You Too?
By Leon Hadar
Israel expected the Iraq War to disarm one enemy. Instead it has created others.

Border Bait and Switch
By W. James Antle III
Open-borders advocates hide their true colors.

Forging the Case for War
By Philip Giraldi
The Plame case may go beyond the outing of a CIA agent to the fabrication of the documents that led us to invade Iraq.

Broken Homes, Broken Children
By Mary Eberstadt
Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce by Elizabeth Marquardt

Burn What You Worshipped
By Patrick J. Buchanan
The Battle for Trafalgar Square

Statesman and Swordsman
By Taki
Duff Cooper in love and war

Try 5 FREE Issues of
The American Conservative Today

And what's not online includes: 

How I Became A Conservative
By Roger Scruton
During the Paris unrest of �68, a young man discovers himself�and Edmund Burke�on the other side of the barricades.

The Miller�s Tale
By Justin Raimondo
Judith Miller didn�t go to jail on principle but to protect Chalabi.

The Bullets Are Working
By R.J. Stove
The Awful End of Prince William the Silent: The First Assassination of a Head of State With a Handgun by Lisa Jardine

Family Man in Babylon
By Clark Stooksbury
Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer by Scott Eyman

Fourteen Days: O�Connor�s Successor; Bush�s First Veto: Torture Restrictions; Boy Meets Girl Meets Girl

Deep Background: Yelling Terrorism in a Crowded Subway; Syria�s Reprieve

A Woman�s Place Is in the Mine
By Steve Sailer
Charlize Theron in �North Country�

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Brent Staples gazes at his genetic navel: The NYT editorial writer who is obsessed with his mixed-race genealogy has ponied up for the DNAPrint Genomics racial admixture test (AncestryByDNA) and tells us about the results in "Why Race Isn't as 'Black' and 'White' as We Think:"

I've known all this for a long time, and was not surprised by the results of a genetic screening performed by DNAPrint Genomics, a company that traces ancestral origins to far-flung parts of the globe. A little more than half of my genetic material came from sub-Saharan Africa - common for people who regard themselves as black - with slightly more than a quarter from Europe.

The result that knocked me off my chair showed that one-fifth of my ancestry is Asian. Poring over the charts and statistics, I said out loud, "This has got to be a mistake."

That's a common response among people who are tested. 

There's a reason for that: at the individual level, there are a lot of dubious results, as DNAPrint's own FAQ admits. Staples goes on:

Ostensibly white people who always thought of themselves as 100 percent European find they have substantial African ancestry. People who regard themselves as black sometimes discover that the African ancestry is a minority portion of their DNA. These results are forcing people to re-examine the arbitrary calculations our culture uses to decide who is "white" and who is "black."

Actually, although individuals with anomalous results get a lot of publicity (for example, back in 2002 I gullibly wrote up DNAPrint technical advisor Mark D. Shriver's claim to be 22% black even though he'd always though he was all white-- he has since retracted that), when you look at a large number of people, the vast majority turn out to be what they think they are. About 90% of people who call themselves African-American are at least half black by ancestry and practically nobody who calls himself white is over 10% African.

Staples daydreams:

Which brings me back to my Asian ancestry. It comes as a surprise, given that my family's oral histories contain not a single person who is described as Asian. More testing on other family members should clarify the issue, but for now, I can only guess. This ancestry could well have come through a 19th-century ancestor who was incorrectly described as Indian, often a catchall category at the time. 

But, to be close to 20% Asian, Staples would need at least three of his 16 great-great-grandparents to have been full-blooded Asians passing, for inexplicable reasons, as American Indians (that would put him at 18.75% Asian). If the Asian genes came from just one part of his family tree, then one of his grandparents would have to be over 3/4th Asian, which would likely be noticeable. Considering how much he studies his family tree, the odds of this being true are remote. 

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The Slow Suicide (a.k.a. Bushicide) of the GOP: My new VDARE column is up. An excerpt:

In states where young white couples make enough money to buy a house with a yard in a neighborhood with a decent public school, they are more likely to get married and more likely to have more children. And where you find lots of white married couples with lots of children, you'll find lots of Republican voters.

So you might think that the Bush Administration would promote policies making family formation more affordable for its political base. But the latest government data suggest that it is accomplishing the opposite...

Now the National Center for Health Statistics has released its "Preliminary Births for 2004" report. And it's more apparent than ever that the demographic trend is not the GOP's friend.

For example, illegitimate births grew 3.8 percent in just one year to a new record of 1,470,000 in 2004. That's 35.7 percent of all births, up from 34.6 percent in 2003.

Among non-Hispanic whites, the illegitimacy rate rose to 24.5 percent...

The President has repeatedly assured us, "Family values don't stop at the Rio Grande River." Yet the U.S. Hispanic illegitimacy rate rose from 45.0 percent to 46.4 percent.

Sure, Latinos are assimilating�but they are assimilating toward African-American norms. The illegitimacy rate is actually higher for American-born Hispanics than for immigrant Hispanics. (Which doesn't bode well for the future crime rate.)

The GOP won 58 percent of the white vote in 2004. It gets about nine out of every ten of its votes from whites.

So it's not good news for Republicans that the number of babies born to white women dropped by 18,000 last year to 2.303 million, because:

- Having babies (legitimately) encourages whites to vote Republican.

- Judging from past elections, white babies are about twice as likely to grow up to vote Republican as are nonwhite babies.

White women accounted for only 56.0 percent of all births in the U.S. last year, down from 56.7 percent in 2003.

The total fertility rate, or expected lifetime number of babies, among white women in their childbearing years fell from 1.87 to 1.85.

That's about 1/8th below the replacement rate at which a demographic group can maintain a stable size.

In contrast, the number of babies born to Hispanic women grew by 33,000 (or 3.6 percent in one year) to 945,000, or 23.0% of all births. (Latinos make up only about 14 percent of all residents, and 6.0 percent of all voters.)

The Hispanic total fertility rate rose from 2.79 to 2.82. 

[More]

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The modern mindset:

Everyone of above-average intelligence knows that everyone is equal.

If you can come up with a better way to phrase this, please let me know: E-mail me.

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Outsourcing: A reader writes:

Liquidmetal Technologies is a Caltech spinoff founded by Caltech profs who developed their products under NASA contract.  Brilliant products: amorphous metals.  Maybe the next generation of manufacturing materials.  Metals that can be injection molded like plastic yet are stronger than steel.

They have their administrative offices in Southern California, but they chose South Korea as the place for their manufacturing. The profs are all white guys, all American-born except one, maybe. So why South Korea and not California?  Why not develop the skilled machining, molding and material processing jobs in the USA and not in the Far East?

What kind of magical engineer-free manufacturing-free society do these high IQ knuckleheads think they can create?  And why do we keep funding their research and their businesses and their universities?

Where would your father be if this was the attitude in California 50 years ago? 

Where would my 88-year-old father be today if, when he went went to work for Lockheed 66 years ago as an engineer on the P-38 fighter plane, Kelly Johnson and the other executives had decided to outsource manufacturing to East Asia? Well, he would probably be living today in the desert across from Yuma, Arizona, in a refugee camp for displaced Californians in the Japanese-occupied West Bank of the Colorado River.

Oops - A reader writes:

There are a lot of Koreans in the management of liquidmetal. The company is doing terribly. It was delisted from Nasdaq recently, and has been losing about 6mm per quarter since its IPO in 2002. I agree with all the points you are making, but this is not necessarily a great example of it. I do wonder why US taxpayer funded research has to result in overseas manufacturing jobs though.

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Illinois Irishmen Galore! You probably haven't been as confused as I've been over all the ultra-Irish names in the news lately, but just in case, I think I've finally got it worked out. Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was brought from his native New York to Chicago, where he has investigated corruption in the administrations of former Illinois Republican governor George Ryan and current Chicago Democratic mayor Richie M. Daley, at the request of former Illinois Republican Senator Peter Fitzgerald, who wanted an outsider and an honest man (in the Eliot Ness-Untouchables tradition).

What threw me off is that Sen. Peter Fitzgerald and Patrick Fitzgerald are not related, but they are men of similar character. (I never met Peter Fitzgerald, but his brother Tom Fitzgerald was my corporate attorney when I did mergers & acquisitions in Chicago many years ago.) Peter served only one term in the U.S. Senate because he refused to play ball with the dubious way politics are done in Illinois. The Illinois GOP hierarchy was so outraged when they discovered that they had sent an honest man to Washington that Peter Fitzgerald didn't bother running for re-election.

That set in motion the farcical chain of events that included the Illinois GOP nominating Jack Ryan (no relation, other than moral, to George Ryan, or to Jim Ryan, the Republican candidate to replace George Ryan as governor in 2002) for Fitzgerald's seat in 2004. But Jim Ryan had to withdraw over icky revelations by his starlet ex-wife Jeri Ryan. Eventually, the Illinois GOP nominated Maryland resident Alan Keyes to run against Barack Obama (neither of whom, so far as I know, is Irish) and lose by about one billion to one.

Illinois, which was a consistently Republican state in the 1980-1990s, is now solidly Democratic, in large part because the Illinois GOP has managed the remarkable feat of acquiring among the voters a reputation as even more corrupt than the Illinois Democratic Party!

But Peter Fitzgerald's legacy looks like it will turn out to be Patrick Fitzgerald.

***Permalink***

Scooter Libby, Mob Lawyer: A depressing fact about being a lawyer is that innocent people make the worst clients, financially speaking. Say you rack up 1,000 hours saving an innocent man from prison, and then send him a bill for a quarter of a million dollars. How likely is he to pay? Well, from his perspective, his life has been nearly ruined, he's lost huge amounts of work, he's been put through hell, and now he's supposed to pay $250,000??? Not bloody likely.

On the other hand, say you spend 1,000 hours saving a big time mobster from prison, and you send him a bill for $500,000. Will he pay? Sure. For him, it's a cost of doing business. It's a line item in his budget each year: Cost of Shysters.

So, all the monetary incentives are for lawyers to work for mobsters instead of innocent men or disorganized criminals. The only disincentive is that if you work for organized crime, respectable people don't want to associate with you. You've chosen your path in life, and foreclosed some options in return for the big bucks. For example, the mayor of Las Vegas, Oscar Goodman, is a mob lawyer, but that mostly shows the low moral standards of Las Vegas. In most cities, mob lawyers make a lot of money, but they are less likely to be given positions of honor and power in the city government.

Yet, from 1985 to 2000, the now-indicted Scooter Libby represented Marc Rich, one of the most notorious organized crime figures in the world, a man who, while on the lam from the U.S., systematically looted post-Soviet Russia and mentored many of the "oligarchs" in corrupt practices. According to the NYT, Libby earned $2 million in fees from Rich!

When Libby's 15 years of work paid off with a pardon for Rich in the last hours of the Clinton Administration, after frantic entreaties for Rich by high figures in the Israeli government, opprobrium rightfully rained down on Bill Clinton's head. And yet, Libby immediately moved into the crucial position of chief-of-staff to Vice-President Cheney. Indeed, he was more than merely that. The NYT reports:

... he had the exalted position of being a full member of President Bush's inner circle. In fact, he exercised more influence than senior vice-presidential aides in previous administrations, holding three pivotal jobs at once: assistant to the president, chief of staff to the vice president and Mr. Cheney's national security adviser.

If Libby had spent the previous 15 years representing John Gotti, he couldn't have attained such a high position in the government. What is it about working for Marc Rich that made Libby largely immune to criticism until now?

***Permalink***

Speaking of the prot�g�s of Marc Rich ... The Washington Post today reports:

New Retreat for the Russian Rich: London Wealthiest Flooding 'Moscow on the Thames' With Cash

By Mary Jordan Washington Post Foreign Service Friday, October 28, 2005; A16

LONDON -- Russian billionaires, and mere megamillionaires, are dropping tens of millions of dollars for the most opulent houses in town. Jewelry stores and outrageously expensive boutiques are hiring Russian-speaking staff. And purveyors of everything from Bentleys to Beluga caviar are happily riding this wave of Russian affluence in a city some are starting to call "Moscow on the Thames."

Many trace the phenomenon to the day in 2003 when Roman Abramovich, a Russian oil tycoon in his mid-thirties, bought the Chelsea soccer club for $225 million, then paid out hundreds of millions more to assemble a star-studded juggernaut that won the English championship for the first time in 50 years. The British were agog at the cascade of Russian cash that turned humble Chelsea into mighty Chelski.

This is a city accustomed to wealth, even extraordinary wealth, much of it traditionally acquired through the sad but reliable deaths of ancestors. But London is also a magnet for those with new money: Norwegians with their shipping lines, Japanese with their gadgets and Saudis with their oil. They have all come and been tolerated, perhaps even envied, but the British capital has never seen anything quite like the Russians whose lavish wealth arrived after the Soviet Union departed.

No one, for example, had ever staged a political protest in London by sending a hundred silver limousines to the Russian Embassy. Then along came Boris Berezovsky, a billionaire who was granted political asylum by Britain after criminal fraud charges were filed against him back home. Angry at what he has called the politically motivated persecution of business leaders by the Russian government, Berezovsky organized last year's limousine protest, a street demonstration where the appropriate cocktail was martini, not molotov.

"Anyone who is anyone in Moscow is here," said Marina Starkova, director of Red Square, a London-based public relations and event-planning company catering to wealthy Russians.

Her clients enjoy London's safety, the favorable tax laws for off-shore investments and relative proximity to Moscow, just three hours and 20 minutes away by plane -- even less if you tell your Learjet pilot to step on it. But what really sets them apart from others with bulging portfolios, Starkova said, is that "Russians live like there is no tomorrow, so they spend, spend and spend." ...

Not everyone in Russia is so keen on the flight of billions of dollars to London. Much of the new wealth was accumulated at the expense of the state, when oil, gas and other natural resource industries were sold to private investors in often politically motivated deals.

That's putting it mildly...

***Permalink***

Gay Shocker: Basketball Star Comes Out of the Closet! Oh ... sorry, scratch that headline, it was a lesbian basketball player. Never mind ... All right, let's try that again:

Lesbian Ho-Hummer: WNBA Star Says She's Playing for the Other Team.

Three-time Women's NBA most valuable player Sheryl Swoopes said:

"The talk about the WNBA being full of lesbians is not true. I mean, there are as many straight women in the league as there are gay.''

Got that? The WNBA is only 50% lesbian. That's not even a majority!

Now you might think that Swoopes's announcement that she turned lesbian six years ago would be denounced for validating the "stereotype" that women's professional basketball is full of lesbians by the same sensitive souls who are denouncing Air Force Academy football coach Fisher DeBerry for mentioning the "stereotype" that blacks tend to be faster runners. 

But you would be wrong. In the final analysis, it's not what somebody says, but who says it that determines whether a statement will be celebrated or excoriated. Let me provide you with a handy table so you too can understand the complex factors that enter into determining the reactions of sportswriters:

See, being a modern sportswriter's not so complicated after all!

Sports, by its very nature, is politically incorrect because it is all about inequality, determining who is superior to whom. So, sportswriters feel the need to lie about the big, obvious patterns we all notice in sports: e.g., that blacks tend to be faster runners; or that team sports appeal a lot to masculine men and masculine women, but not much to feminine women and feminine men. If they ever mentioned such horrible but true facts in their columns, the Earth would crash into the Sun.

The WNBA is a small-time league, with the maximum salary set at $89,000. The essential problem is that it appeals mostly to fans who are either lesbians (about 1% of the population) or the kind of guy fan who will watch anything. John Wooden, the 95-year-old former UCLA coach, likes watching women's basketball more than men's basketball these days because it reminds him of the (whiter) game of his early days. And considering the deterioration in the quality of the NBA over the last dozen years, he has a point. But the WNBA would benefit from using a smaller ball. (Their current ball is 1" less in the circumference than the NBA's ball, but the women need a significantly smaller ball, more like a volleyball, if they wanted to look less lame on the court.)

Lots of sportswriters are claiming that if we're lucky, this will encourage all those male homosexual jocks to come out of the closet. Swoopes herself said:

"What really irritates me is when people talk about football, baseball and the NBA, you don't hear all of this talk about the gay guys playing. But when you talk about the WNBA, then it becomes an issue. Sexuality and gender don't change anyone's performance on the court."

After all, they reason, we know that 10% of the population is homosexual, and there are thousands of famous male athletes, so there must be hundreds of closeted gay ones, right? That's simple math. You'd have to be a complete homophobe to dispute that.

Except it's not true.

It's fun to keep a list of some of the unlikely male athletes whom gays and sportswriters have claimed are homosexual (e.g., Sandy Koufax, who has been married twice and currently lives with a woman who was First Lady Laura Bush's college roommate). My favorite example is that frequent victim of rumors, Mets catcher Mike Piazza. The slugger has lived with about ten different lingerie models over the last decade. I have actually heard the argument made, "Well, that just shows how hard he's working to cover up his being gay. Why else would a man want to sleep with a lot of centerfolds? "

Piazza is also a metalhead whose obsession is playing heavy metal tunes on his electric guitar. Trust me, a guy whose favorite band is AC-DC isn't AC-DC himself.

Obviously, gays made up and spread the Piazza rumor just because they enjoy fantasizing about meeting Mike Piazza in a bathhouse someday. 

But what about sportswriters, very few of whom are gay? These kind of stupid mistakes are made because journalists are supposed to assume that gays are exactly like straights in all ways except sexual orientation. Statistically, however, that's just not true. Male homosexuality correlates more or less with a long series of traits. In "Why Lesbians Aren't Gay" I listed about three dozen in which male and female homosexuals differ on average.

One big difference between straight and gay males is in the urge to become a professional athlete. Tragically, for about a decade we had a way to tell how many athletes in different sports were gay:  the frankest indicator of the proportion of gay men in an occupation was the number of AIDS deaths in the 1982-1995 era.

Most of the occupations you'd assume to be heavily gay, such as Broadway chorographer and fashion designer, were decimated by AIDS in the 1980s and early 1990s, as was figure skating, where both Olympic male gold medallists from the 70s died of AIDS. Diving isn't as gay as figure skating but it's a lot gayer than football or golf, and, not surprisingly, the greatest diver of all time, Greg Louganis, is HIV infected.

Professional sports outside of figure skating suffered very few AIDS cases, typically one per major sport, except for boxing, where shooting heroin is a not uncommon way for old boxers to relieve the constant pain. 

Despite having lots of sex with lots of women, virtually no prominent American athlete has contracted HIV heterosexually -- Magic Johnson is probably not an exception to that statement. The LA Times sports editor admitted that they had heard repeatedly that Magic was playing for both teams, but they decided to hush it up in the interests of promoting the idea that straights were just as likely to get AIDS as gays. But Magic's bisexuality is very much the exception that proves the rule about the NBA. So, the one time when the sports media had a chance to break a big news story -- and after Magic's AIDS announcement, it was definitely news -- about a true superstar of a male team sport not being completely heterosexual, it censored itself in order to promote political correctness!

The most interesting question raised by Swoopes is her contention that she wasn't born a lesbian (she used to be married and has an 8-year-old son). She claims she wasn't interested in women until she moved in with her assistant coach six years ago.

Now, that may sound politically incorrect to you -- after all, aren't we supposed to believe that homosexuality is genetic, not environmental, in origin. But, clearly, you haven't absorbed the lesson in the handy table above.

Seriously, I suspect that lesbianism is much more subject to cultural influences than is male homosexuality. In lots of times and places, lesbianism virtually didn't exist. In 19th Century Boston, for example, butch suffragettes would live together in "Boston marriages" and even sleep together, but, despite the frantic efforts of contemporary feminist academics to prove that they were doing the nasty, the weight of evidence suggests that it almost never even occurred to them.

A big question that nobody in our society wants to talk about is whether the enormous emphasis placed on team sports for girls these days makes them more likely to grow up to be lesbians.

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"Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" -- my review appears in the new American Conservative, available to electronic subscribers this weekend. A brief excerpt:

"Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" is a comic tribute to two of the richest veins of American pop culture during the last century: the hard-boiled Hollywood private eye novel, invented by Raymond Chandler in 1939's The Big Sleep, and its cousin, the LAPD mismatched buddy cop movie, honed to commercial perfection by screenwriter Shane Black in 1987's "Lethal Weapon."

After making himself perhaps the highest paid and most despised screenwriter, Black disappeared a decade ago. Now, Black is back with a loving spoof of the Chandlerian tradition, an ingenious, self-satirical contrivance that would be incomprehensible to anyone not familiar with Chandler's glorious cinematic offspring, such as "Chinatown," "Blade Runner," "LA Confidential," and "The Big Lebowski." Indeed, "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" is so fast-paced and convoluted that it's close to impenetrable, period. As in Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels, figuring out whodunnit takes a back seat to just enjoying the ride.

To play his detective leads, Black was able to hire cheaply two of the most gifted but least trustworthy stars, Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer. When just a small boy, Downey began receiving recreational drugs from his father, the leftist director of "Putney Swope." His abusive upbringing appears to have rewired his brain, connecting it directly to his mouth, making him superhumanly articulate, but also deactivating all the normal circuits for self-restraint and common sense. Watching this wounded man-child play a lovable loser to perfection resembles what it must have been like listening to the great castrati sing arias -- simultaneously awe-inspiring and guilt-inducing.

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Lew Rockwell's Two-Liners: The paleo-libertarian editor has a gift for the headline-response format, as in:

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Nicholas Wade on the Hap-Map: The NYT genetics reporter describes the latest on the DNA haplotype study.

Besides the hapmap's potential importance for medicine, it has undoubted significance for understanding the biology of the human genome and its recent evolution. The hapmap team has already identified 14 regions of the genome that show signs of having changed in different ethnic groups under the pressure of natural selection. One of the most striking, though known already from earlier studies, is a DNA region in Europeans that confers lactose tolerance, the unusual ability to digest milk in adulthood. This genetic propensity is known to have arisen among cattle herders of northern Europe some 5,000 years ago.

Other genomic regions bear strong marks of natural selection but contain no known gene, a highly perplexing outcome that suggests, Dr. Altshuler said, that "our current ability to predict the function of DNA is very flawed."

The common variation picked up by the hapmap is much the same in different ethnic groups, because most of it is inherited from the ancestral human population before modern humans are believed to have dispersed from Africa about 50,000 years ago. The four ethnic groups studied so far have yielded four million sites of common variation, from which the total number in the world's population is expected to be 10 million.

The hapmap researchers have found that the Chinese and Japanese genomes are so similar that they can be grouped together for many purposes. The genetic differences between Europeans, East Asians and Africans lie mostly in the relative abundance in each of the common DNA mutations. But the hapmap team has found a handful of fixed differences in the first million mutations it studied - 11 between Europeans and the Yoruba, 21 between Europeans and Asians and 5 between the Yoruba and Asians. The role of these mutations is unknown.

A more marked difference emerged on the X chromosome, which is more highly differentiated between ethnic groups than are the other chromosomes. The reason, Dr. Altshuler said, could arise from the fact that men carry only one X chromosome and so, unlike women, have no backup copy if a gene on their single X is inactivated through mutation. That puts the X chromosome under heavy pressure of natural selection when it is carried by a man, and the different pressures experienced by various ethnic groups may have forced the X chromosome to differentiate more than the other chromosomes.

The hapmap team believe they have created a powerful new tool for exploring the human genome but they advise researchers to be careful about publicizing their work, especially when exploring genetic links to human characteristics that are not medical. "We urge conservatism and restraint in the public dissemination and interpretation of such studies, especially if nonmedical phenotypes are explored," they wrote.

A reader writes:

I will be watching how hapmap awareness propagates, and it is certainly off to a careful start. Too careful maybe, or is this all part of the plan? 

For example at wikipedia in the description of the hapmap they include this:

"Another potential concern is that the inclusion of populations based on ancestral geography could result in categories such as " race," which are largely socially constructed, being incorrectly viewed as precise and highly meaningful biological constructs. The project undertook the community consultations to understand community concerns about such issues."

This is simply text taken from the official government Hapmap site. Of course, I could be missing something, as my primitive brain is not good at various social double-think, but "ancestral geography" seems like a peculiar category. Unless of course one's ancestral geography includes places like the US, in which case ancestral geography does not seem like an appropriate thing to base the study on at all. Googling "ancestral geography" in order to get a better grasp of the meaning brought up the official hapmap site as the top page of course. In fact, the page that came up, Guidelines for Referring to the HapMap Populations in Publications and Presentations is very specific in how we are to talk about and describe these people's "ancestral geography".

So I am left confused. Unless the point of the whole thing is that it is okay to say that people with different "ancestral geographies" are indeed different, but it is not okay to say that different "races" are indeed different.

The more I write the more confused I become. I think it is because my brain lacks some key part that allows this to all make sense.

Of course, the U.S. Census Bureau talks about "race" all the time, and explains how it's different from "ethnicity," and indeed insists that every single person in America fill in their race.

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Dispatches from the Hogtown Front is the new immigration-skeptic blog from Toronto. Of all the boring countries in the world, Canada is by far the most interesting, and Americans need to pay far more attention to it. Canada represents a sort of Best Case scenario of where multiculturalist America might be headed ... assuming America, like Canada, had almost no blacks or Hispanics. And, yet, Canada, even with many advantages, is still falling apart.

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Another elderly white sports figure stifled in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave: One reason I like old farts is because, unlike the craven young, every now and then  they just can't stop themselves from blurting out the truth. My wife calls it "Elderly Tourette's Syndrome."

Awhile back, for example, Paul Hornung, who won the 1956 Heisman trophy as college football's best player at Notre Dame, lost his radio announcer job for suggesting that Notre Dame should lower its admissions requirements for black athletes. (The black quarterback of ND's last national championship team in 1988, Tony Rice, scored a 690 on the SAT, but "If Tony Rice�s transcript and SAT scores were brought into the admissions office today, they would be set on fire.") Outside of sports, what Hornung said would make him a much lauded liberal supporter of affirmative action, but Hornung was crucified by sportswriters for saying it because he was thought to be implying two pieces of crimethink:

- blacks are faster runners on average
- blacks have lower SATs and GPAs

Obviously, both are true, but that was his fatal mistake: alluding to the truth. Sportswriters believe that what you don't say is more important than what you do say. The true test of a respectable sportswriter is his adamantine ability to not mention the elephant in the living room -- racial differences in sports skills -- and to persecute anyone who does let slip an acknowledgment of reality.

Now, we have another brouhaha, which I earlier labeled inane-to-the-point-of-being-insane. Just now, an Air Force officer sent me this official email he received about the high crimes of the 67-year-old Air Force Academy football coach, who dared to suggest that black players tend to run faster than players of other ancestries. Due to the strict admissions standards of the Air Force Academy, only 12 of the 77 Air Force Falcon football players, or 16%, appear to be African-American (judging from their media guide photos) compared to 69% of NFL players. Coach Fisher DeBerry's crime was to publicly wish he could recruit more blacks because they run better.

From: Funkhouser Ryan O Jr Maj USAFA/DSE 
Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2005 5:06 PM 
To: USAFA_All 
Subject: Results of Coach DeBerry Press Conference

Sent on behalf of the Vice Superintendent, Brig Gen Irv Halter 

During his weekly news conference Tuesday, Falcon Football Head Coach Fisher DeBerry made some inappropriate comments about recruiting minority athletes. They were inappropriate because they could be construed by some as stereotyping a particular racial group. The Academy will not tolerate inappropriate remarks by its staff, faculty, cadets or contractors. Coach DeBerry was officially reprimanded by his supervisor, Dr Mueh, and the Academy Superintendent.

Coach DeBerry released a public statement today: 

�Today, it is my desire to make a public apology for remarks I made recently about minority recruitment. I realize that the things I said were hurtful to many people and I want everyone to understand that I never intended to offend anyone. Gazette columnist Milo Bryant was right today when he said that I should have never said what I did. I have made a mistake and I ask for everyone's forgiveness. I regret these statements and I sincerely hope they will not reflect negatively towards the Academy or our coaches and players. I thank the administration for the opportunity to make this apology.�

Coach DeBerry has been a successful coach and mentor to countless cadets for more than 25 years, and the Academy will continue to fully support him as our head football coach.

Of course, America's sportswriters, those true-blue defenders of liberty, piled on immediately:

Pat Forde, ESPN: DeBerry should retire before his legacy slips:

Then, after losing to TCU Saturday to drop to 3-5, DeBerry explained that the Horned Frogs' defensive success is attributable to the fact that it starts 11 African-Americans.

"� Afro-American kids can run very, very well," DeBerry said. "That doesn't mean that Caucasian kids and other descents can't run, but it's very obvious to me they run extremely well."

Again, not ideal timing. On Monday, the academy welcomed a new superintendent, Lt. Gen. John Regni, who pledged a zero-tolerance policy toward discrimination. On Tuesday, DeBerry piped up about TCU's African-American players, stopping just short of saying, "We need us some more of those black fellers."

I'm not saying that Fisher DeBerry discriminates. I went to high school on the base of the Air Force Academy, and I graduated a few years ahead of Fisher's son, Joe (who was a fine baseball player). I don't know anyone in my hometown of Colorado Springs, Colo., who doesn't think highly of DeBerry.

So it's not like DeBerry was inventing something here -- or even saying something many coaches don't talk about in private. But given the decades of wrongly stereotyping black athletes as physically superior and mentally inferior -- run fast, think slow -- the coach was walking into a minefield. He was creeping toward Jimmy "The Greek" territory -- and every coach knows that you don't go there. Certainly not without great care.

I'm all for a more open dialog about race in America, and especially in sports. But sweeping generalizations about fast black players are going to get a coach in trouble.

Combine DeBerry's two tone-deaf episodes and you have the unsettling feel of a coach who is losing his way. Combine that feel with the on-field results -- Air Force has lost 14 of its last 22 games and could have its first back-to-back losing seasons since 1980-81 -- and you have concerns about the state of the program.

For two decades, few coaches in college football have done better than Fisher DeBerry. In a no-win situation, he won routinely.

DeBerry's career record is 164-99-1. He's had just three losing seasons in 21 years -- the third-longest tenure in the game, behind only Joe Paterno and Bobby Bowden. He's won at least eight games in 11 different seasons. He's dominated the Commander In Chief competition against Army and Navy. His option offense has been perfectly tailored to the Falcons' strengths -- discipline and intelligent decision making -- and compensates for their physical shortcomings.

Not ideal timing! Forde is saying that the heavily white Air Force Falcon football players have, compared to other (i.e., blacker) teams, better discipline and more intelligent decision making, which compensates for their physical shortcomings.

I'm all for a more open dialog about race in America, and especially in sports. But sweeping generalizations about smart, disciplined, slow white white players are going to get a sportswriter in trouble.

Or at least they ought to ... when he denounces a distinguished coach for saying much less.

Here's Forde's email in case you want to praise him for his courageous defense of free speech.

More brave, call 'em as they see 'em sports columnists:

Milo F. Bryant, 

David Ramsey, 
Pete Alfano

Tim Layden

Mike Littwin
Thomas George

Once again, these ritual eviscerations of elderly white sports figures by white sportswriters have very little to do with blacks, per se. This is just a white-on-white war over status. Blacks won't run any slower nor whites any faster because white sportswriters beat their chests and say certifiably insane things in order to show they are more racially sensitive than this outstanding coach by lying at the top of their lungs.

*

As Theodore Dalrymple points out (via The Ambler, Kevin Michael Grace):

"Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to cooperate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to."

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The demographics of Patrick Fitzgerald's Grand Jury are not good news for the Bush boys. According to Time reporter Matthew Cooper, he noticed when he testified in front of the grand jury that:

"They somewhat reflected the demographics of the District of Columbia. The majority were African American and were disproportionately women."

In the 2004 election exit poll, Kerry beat Bush among black women in the District of Columbia by a margin of 94-5. Fitzgerald apparently only needs a majority of the 23 grand jurors to indict.

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Great correction in today's Wall Street Journal:

"ON AUG. 31, a mob of looters, which officials in the New Orleans mayor's office and police department say included gang members, attempted to break into the Hyatt Regency New Orleans, where city leaders had set up a command center. A Sept. 9 page-one article  about communications difficulties after Hurricane Katrina didn't mean to imply that all of the people in the mob were gang members.

Let the word go forth from this time and place: New Orleans has equal opportunity mobs open to more than just gang members.

Hey, I thought those reports of looting and violence in New Orleans were all just anti-Bush and/or racist hallucinations by the anti-Bush and/or racist media? Man, keeping up with the conventional wisdom about New Orleans can give you a whiplash...

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My review of Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know about the Emerging Science of Sex Differences by Leonard Sax appears in the new Fall 2005 issue of the Claremont Review of Books. Not online, so subscribe here. An excerpt:

I must note that the title of Sax's book is likely to raise the hackles of readers who are purists about proper English. They may rightly snort, "Is this book about French grammar?" Obviously, Sax is misusing "gender" when he means "sex" - male or female.

I fear, though, that this usage battle is lost because the English language really does need two different words to distinguish between the fact and the act of sex. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg claims her secretary Millicent invented the use of "gender" to mean "sex" in the early 1970s while typing the crusading feminist's briefs against sex discrimination. Millicent pointed out to her boss that judges, like all men, have dirty minds when it comes to the word "sex," so she should use the boring term "gender" to keep those animals thinking just about the law. On my iSteve.com website, for example, I reluctantly use "gender" rather than "sex" in the HTML title code to avoid having web monitoring software block access to it as presumably pornographic.

Unfortunately, "gender" now comes with a vast superstructure of 99 percent fact-free feminist theorizing about how sex differences are all just socially constructed. According to this orthodoxy, it's insensitive to doubt a burly transvestite truck driver who is demanding a government-subsidized sex change when he says he feels like a little girl inside. Yet, it's also insensitive to assume that the average little girl feels like a little girl inside.

Speaking of that, you may have noticed that a number of intensely motivated transsexuals, such as computer maven Lynn Conway, have long been conducting an obsessive smear-and-destroy campaign, aided by (who else?) the Southern Poverty Law Center, against myself and anyone else who has ever had a good word to say for Northwestern U. professor of psychology J. Michael Bailey. They take it extremely personally that Bailey has expressed skepticism over whether all those burly truck drivers who want sex change operations really do feel like little girls inside. Now, Bailey has issued a statement in the matter (link fixed).

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A Methuselah Mouse Prize for IQ? A number of foundations have joined together to offer a cash prize to whomever can develop the longest-lived laboratory mouse. A reader suggests:

I was looking at Aubrey de Grey's SENS website, and was inspired to a variation. An IQ project. However many millions for the first person to raise IQ 30 points in a small number of normal people. The creatine study in Australia showed a route: massive creatine supplementation.

To be honest, I have a couple of ideas on where to begin: Fix small micronutrient deficiencies, make sure the people sleep enough, get some exercise, maybe work with neurofeedback (saw a book, symphony in the brain, claimed to have raised IQ 10 points), add creatine to the diet, remove trans fat from the diet, add omega-3's, filter lead and mercury out, both from food and water, and from the body. Learn to use the left hand. Provigil, vascular dilators, no one really knows. Remove trans-fat from the body.

Some of these may not be feasible, but some are, and we'd gain publicity in a couple of ways: we wouldn't be the evil people pointing out blacks are dumber on average. We would be the people trying to improve the world. The really high goal (30 points instead of 5 or 10) says that everyone would benefit, and benefit alot, and the importance of IQ would get out there as a problem (which we want to fix) rather than a condition (that we have to live with). By focusing on euphenotypics, people would benefit, not just vaguely conceived future generations.

You could call it the Solomon Psyche contest.

Maybe the contest should be restricted to boosting the IQs of a sample averaging below 100? That's presumably easier to do (to the extent it's doable at all) since below average people are more likely to be suffering from correctable deficiencies. For example, people Africa average about 70 on IQ tests, while their cousins in America average about a standard deviation higher, suggesting that malnutrition, disease, and the like in Africa is lowering IQs below the genetic potential. We already know that lack of iodine and iron in the diet can undermine cognitive performance (which is why salt and flour is fortified here in America).

Second, focusing on the left half of the bell curve is less likely to raise the worry that the contestants are breeding superhumans who will take over the world. We really don't want a mob with torches burning down Dr. Frankenbrain's laboratory.

A methodological problem with any human testing program (e.g., the NCLB) is how do you keep subjects from sandbagging on the pre-treatment IQ test so they get higher scores on the post-treatment IQ test in order to win the prize? Maybe the foundation that offers the prize would pick and test the subjects themselves and then anybody competing for the prize would have to choose subjects from the list provided by the foundation? So, all you need is a rich foundation!

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Translation of latest Niger yellowcake forgeries investigative article from La Repubblica can be found here.

Americans tend to think of Italy as being a not very serious country, with governments rising and falling constantly over seemingly petty comic opera disputes. Yet, Italy's history since the mob-assisted American invasion of Sicily in 1943 has had a lurid subterranean element involving the Mafia, a rogue Masonic lodge preparing an alternative post-coup government, the Pope's banker, the corruption of almost the entire power elite, the CIA, American funding of Italian election campaigns, and Michael Ledeen. 

It doesn't take much to get Italians to conspire, but America bears some of the responsibility, since in the higher cause of fighting first Fascism, then Communism, we subsidized a fair amount of the underground activity over the years. Once again, in the yellowcake fiasco, the U.S. government appears to have elicited the traditional flaws in the Italian character. 

A historian reader writes:

"Your post on Italy earlier today brings to mind a point that I've mentioned on a few occasions.  Italy and Belgium are failed states.  That term usually have a very different meaning that brings to mind Somalia or Haiti.  But if you think in terms of public institutions and the state, neither Italy nor Belgium really work.  Both have very high levels of corruption and limited public accountability, along with serious political movements to break up the country.  Neither works as a political structure, and, behind living standards many Americans would envy, lies a fundamental crisis of legitimacy.  It's hard to see many countries breaking up, but one could imagine it of Italy and Belgium.  The whole thing is one of the undiscussed stories of our time.  VDare and Chronicles have run some thoughtful commentary on both cases, but not many other publications note this."

On a related matter, Richard Sale of UPI writes:

A former senior State Department official told this reporter: "If Iraq had had the yellow cake in question, it would not have advanced its ability to develop a nuclear weapon because Iraq lacked the complex industrial capacity required to refine yellow cake into anything usable in that respect. In fact, in 1991 Iraq already had several hundred tons of yellow cake purchased in two deals with Niger in the early 1980's that were deemed of so little value by the IAEA that they were never removed as part of the UNSCOM disarmament effort because it was of so little significance. In fact, in the weeks after the fall of Baghdad, looters removed some of the yellow cake from its sealed drums to use the drums as containers for other materials. All along, since early 2003, I've wondered why virtually no-one said `so what?'" in reaction to the nuclear aspect of this entire affair."

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Latest inane-to-the-point-of-being-insane sports and race controversy: The AP reports:

Air Force Investigating Coach's Racially Charged Remarks:
DeBerry, in 22nd Year at Academy, Complained About Program's Lack of Minorities

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (Oct. 25) - The Air Force Academy is looking into comments made by longtime football coach Fisher DeBerry, who said black athletes "run very, very well" and that the program lacks minority athletes.

The 67-year-old DeBerry, in his 22nd year at Air Force, first mentioned the academy's lack of minority players compared to other schools on Monday.

"We were looking at things, like you don't see many minority athletes in our program," DeBerry was quoted as saying in The Gazette of Colorado Springs.

DeBerry elaborated on his comments during his weekly luncheon Tuesday.

"It just seems to be that way, that Afro-American kids can run very, very well. That doesn't mean that Caucasian kids and other descents can't run, but it's very obvious to me they run extremely well," DeBerry said in remarks broadcast Tuesday night by Denver television station KWGN.

Academy officials released a statement Tuesday, saying they were aware of the remarks.

"We cannot comment further until we have a chance to review all the reports, the coach's actual statements and to speak with the coach personally," academy spokesman Lt. Col Laurent Fox said.

DeBerry is the winningest coach in service academy history with a record of 161-94-1. He has had 17 winning seasons and won 12 bowl games.

Other controversial remarks for which DeBerry is being investigated by the U.S. government include "Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly" and "Tomorrow is another day."

Update: The boys at Caste Football are calling for his head, too.

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There's still time for Michael Ledeen to begin his search for the "real forgers!" Today, the media finally started to show some interest in the more intriguing question behind Plamegate: who forged the Niger yellowcake documents? All roads lead to Rome, and anytime anything convenient for the neocons and shady in nature happens involving the Italian intelligence service, informed eyes swivel toward National Review Online contributing editor Michael Ledeen

When I posted a rumor in April pointing in the general direction of Ledeen, that International Man of Mystery emailed me:

"This is total nonsense. I have nothing at all to do with the "Niger documents," I have not ever seen them, let alone create them or transmit them."

Yet, when I asked him if he would use his extensive contacts within the Italian spook community to search for the Real Forgers, he broke off contact.

Or maybe the French forged the documents to make everybody else look stupid.

We shall see.

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Linda Gottfredson devastates Evolutionary Psychology: 

"How did humans evolve such remarkable intellectual powers?"

As I've mentioned before, a major problem with orthodox Evolutionary Psychology of the Tooby-Cosmides mode is that it is heavily concerned with brain functioning, yet, because (understandably) it wishes to avoid being crucified for political incorrectness, it tries hard to ignore the vast amount of knowledge about the subject that has been generated over the last 100 years by IQ psychometricians. So, it generates theories like "domain-specific massive modularity" of brain function that are divorced from the reality of the importance of the general factor (g) of intelligence that psychometricians have uncovered going back to Spearman in 1904.

Now, one of the leading scholars of the current social impact of IQ, Linda S. Gottfredson, has reversed the situation by developing a theory of the evolution of intelligence based on how brainpower works today in her upcoming book chapter "Innovation, Fatal Accidents, and the Evolution of General Intelligence" (link now fixed). This is important stuff.

�How did humans evolve such remarkable intellectual powers?� This is surely one of the most enduring and captivating questions in the life sciences, from paleoanthropology to neuroscience. [For the rest, click the "Permalink" below ...] [Much more]

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"On Human Diversity" -- Armand M. Leroi, the author of that fine essay "A Family Tree in Every Gene" in the New York Times earlier this year has an article in The Scientist called "On Human Diversity."

[For the rest, click the "Permalink" below ...]

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PRESS RELEASE -- WASHINGTON D.C.
President Bush has announced his plan to end the war in Iraq:

1. Declare an open border with Syria 
2. Amnesty for all insurgents/terrorists 
3. A guest bomber program

Thanks to a reader!

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Corruption's Correlates -- What contributes to corruption? My criminologist reader has calculated correlation coefficients between Transparency International's 2005 Corruption Perception Index and various national demographic factors. 

One confusing aspect is that the CPI gives the highest scores to the least corrupt countries, so it's actually an honesty index. Thus, the following coefficients are for correlations with honesty. Positive correlations are good, negative correlations are bad. 

- IQ (from Lynn and Vanhanen's list) correlates at an impressive .708 with the honesty index. 

Interesting how the IQ correlation is stronger than any of the other factors. Perhaps smarter societies rationalize their systems. National IQ is turning out to be a powerful shaper of society. And my brilliant professors all told me that individual traits do not matter at aggregate levels!

- predominantly Muslim country, -.257

- predominantly Protestant country, .345; 

- predominantly white county, .521. 

- ethnic diversity, -.364 for 121 countries (that offers some supports Lee Kuan Yew's contention that multiculturalism combined with democracy equals corruption).

- first and second cousin marriages (percent consanguineous), -0.160. 

One difficulty is that most of the samples for cousin marriages were of subpopulations so they did not match up with the CPI data which is national. I found comparable data for 35 countries. Sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia were not represented. The 7 Muslim countries fit your model perfectly, but the heavy sampling of Latin American countries (13) weakened the correlation greatly--it ended up being -.16 (remember that high CPI is low corruption). Also, consanguinity is not normally distributed--the Muslim countries averaged around 30% while no other country in the sample was higher than 6.3%. 

So, my cousin marriage theory -- that the Arabs and Muslims have trouble forming effective nation-states because their extended families are too strong for patriotism to flourish due to high rates of cousin marriage -- is  neither supported nor debunked by this data. The methodological problem is that, as I observed in 2003, the Muslim countries have lots of cousin marriage and lots of nepotism. But the rest of the world has so little cousin marriage that there isn't much relationship to corruption. It could well be that cousin marriage helps makes the Muslim countries the way they are, but this methodology won't nail it down.

By the way, how many other blogs provides you with the results of original statistical analyses of topics of global importance? You can read baseball sabremetric blogs and see this kind of research, but thinking quantitatively about baseball is a lot more socially acceptable than thinking quantitatively about world affairs.

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Good Questions: 

If you're going to go in and try to topple Saddam Hussein, you have to go to Baghdad. Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you do with it. It's not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that's currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists? How much credibility is that government going to have if it's set up by the United States military when it's there? How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens to it once we leave?

Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, April 13, 1991

The truly strange thing is that a decade later, Dick Cheney agitated ceaselessly to topple Saddam Hussein ... yet he never bothered to answer any of those questions he posed in 1991. 

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My new VDARE.com column "The Bush Bust:"

The Bush Administration is currently imploding on multiple fronts.

- After years of encouraging illegal immigration, President Bush has suddenly responded to the ever-increasing frustration of American citizens by announcing that he intends to deport all illegal aliens. Well, either that or make them all legal aliens. Or something. The details haven't all been revealed yet. But, after all, if you can't trust George W. Bush to enforce the immigration laws � Having burned his base on border security for nearly five years�and for over four years since 9/11!�nobody seems willing to give Bush any more credence.

- The President clearly wants to start a wag-the-dog war with Syria and/or Iran over their failure to control their borders (while desiring to reward Mexico for the same thing). But the public's patience with Bush's grand strategy of Invite-the-World-Invade-the-World is at an all time low. Bush�s approval rating continues its natural course downward, now descending into deeply negative territory.

- Karl Rove, the alleged brains of the operation, and Scooter Libby, for 15 years a lawyer for international conman Marc Rich and for the last five years chief-of-staff for Vice President Cheney, are sweating out the possibility of indictment.

- Bush's attempt to elevate his undistinguished former personal lawyer Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court has been greeted with derision even by many of his most sycophantic supporters at outlets like National Review.

Here at VDARE.com we'd like to take this opportunity to mention:

We told you so.

For years, since well before 9/11, we've been a rare independent voice telling you that George W. Bush, Karl Rove, and the whole gang were men of both poor character and poor judgment.

We knew that they were interested neither in what was good for the American people, nor knowledgeable about what was what was good for the Republican Party.

Why? Because their immigration policy has always been ludicrous.

But the mainstream media was too biased on the topic to notice.   [More]

Don't forget to donate to the VDARE.com tax-deductible fund-raiser.

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"The Specter of Difference" is the new article by John Derbyshire in the Nov. 7th issue of National Review. It was inspired by Bruce Lahn's recent discovery of two heterogeneously distributed brain development genes. The Derb writes:

While I believe that results like these out of the human sciences should prompt us to begin some hard thinking about our society, and about what we can reasonably expect social policies to accomplish, I don�t think that conservatives should fear these results, or strive to deny them. For all the corruption it has suffered from public financing and infection by campus political fads, science is, I shall always believe, a fundamentally conservative profession. Pseudoscience and wishful thinking � they are usually the same thing � have their natural home on the political left, Marx�s �scientific socialism� being only the best-known example. True science doesn�t care what we believe or what we wish for. It just tells us what is, and leaves us to come to terms with it as best we can. Science is a Daddy discipline, not a Mommy discipline.

It is not the case, as foolish people like Richard Dawkins tell us, that science excludes religion. (The research geneticist personally best known to me, another native of China, is a passionate adherent of the Falun Gong sect.) It is true, however, that in his working hours a scientist owes devotion to only one deity, the one Rudyard Kipling called �the God of Things As They Are.� That God is, as Kipling himself was, profoundly conservative in all His works, and conservatives, religious or otherwise, have nothing to fear from Him. To judge from history, in fact, His greatest delight is to make fools � or slaves, or corpses � of pacifists, family-breakers, sexual liberators, dispensers of unconditional welfare, love-the-world purveyors of Uplift, Scientific Socialists, and deniers of unpleasant truths.

Some of the truths now beginning to emerge from the human sciences will strike us as very unpleasant indeed. Some of them will force us to hard thinking about our nation, our ideals, and our traditional boundless optimism towards the potentialities of human beings. We have it on good authority, though, that we shall know the truth, and the truth shall make us free. I believe that if we hold fast to faith in that proposition, and trust science to uncover the truth, neither we nor our country will come to any harm.   [More] ...

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Dick Cheney, pump head? Here's an excerpt from Jeffrey Goldberg's upcoming New Yorker article on Brent Scowcroft, former national security adviser and current best friend to ex-President George H.W. Bush:

"The real anomaly in the Administration is Cheney," Scowcroft said. "I consider Cheney a good friend -- I've known him for thirty years. But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore." He went on, "I don't think Dick Cheney is a neocon, but allied to the core of neocons is that bunch who thought we made a mistake in the first Gulf War, that we should have finished the job. There was another bunch who were traumatized by 9/11, and who thought, 'The world's going to hell and we've got to show we're not going to take this, and we've got to respond, and Afghanistan is O.K., but it's not sufficient.'" Scowcroft supported the invasion of Afghanistan as a "direct response" to terrorism.

Perhaps the greatest mystery of this Administration has been, as Scowcroft asks, what happened to the Cheney of 1991? [For the rest, click the "Permalink" below ...]

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"Biocentric yuppiedom versus the West" is the title of Larry Auster's latest post on my failings.

Whatever happened to yuppies, anyway? For about a dozen years after 1981, you heard about them all the time, but now you never hear the word anymore. Are there no more young urban professionals? I certainly was a yuppie a long time ago, but I guess I'm an osbbie today -- old, suburban, and broke.

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No bias here, no sirree! The Associated Press writes:

"Caught between business supporters who need foreign workers and conservatives clamoring for a clampdown on illegal immigration, President Bush tried on Saturday to give his temporary guest-worker plan a nudge by promising strong enforcement." [Emphasis mine].

Notice the language the AP uses to summarize a debate between the wealthy and the average American:

- Business supporters "need foreign workers." It's not that businesses "want" foreign workers. No, it's a proven, scientific fact that they NEED foreign workers. 

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Razib offers a philosophy of science for the 21st century at GNXP in "Extremism in defense of precision is no vice." This kid is well on his way to being the Popper and Kuhn of this century, although he strikes me as wiser than either. 

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Speaking of wise young men, Noah at Gideon's Blog discusses my "citizenist" position.  (Unfortunately, his comments don't seem to be working.) I have to take exception, though, to his statement:

To put it bluntly: it cannot be that white people "inherently" reject tribal or racial consciousness; no one familiar with the history of European nationalism, to say nothing of the color line and race slavery, can seriously maintain such a thing.

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UPDATED: Transparency International's 2005 Corruption Perceptions Index is now out. The top of the list (the least corrupt) is dominated by northwestern European countries and their offspring. (Singapore's impressive 9.4 rating is testimony to Lee Kuan Yew.) America's 7.6 score isn't terrible, but it's rather embarrassing. Mexico scored 3.5, tying it with Ghana, Peru, Turkey, and Panama in 65th place. Since America is becoming ever more "vibrant," that suggests where our score is headed.

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The man with the negative IQ: Thrasymachus calculates, based on the Gaussian normal distribution:

"Assuming a global average IQ of 93 and a global population of 6 billion, there is 1 person alive with a negative IQ."

Unfortunately, he doesn't speculate on who that individual might be. Perhaps he should start a betting pool.

We know who General Tommy Franks would put his money on.

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Rubbing It In: Most private colleges now have a sticker price of $40,000 to $45,000 per year (tuition plus room, board, and miscellaneous), or $160,000 to $180,000 for four years. They then discount off this absurdly high price for most families earning less than, roughly, $120,000 to $160,000 per year. The colleges don't call this a discount, and prefer to trumpet their charitableness. Yet, of course, to anyone who took Econ 101, "financial aid" is just another name for the profit maximizing strategy of "price discrimination," or getting each customer to pay the maximum they can. 

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The ultimate logic of the present moment: If front-runner Hillary Clinton wins the 2008 election and is re-elected, then two families will rule America for 28 straight years. The next step in this grand historical evolution seems obvious.

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An important essay by Peter Brimelow in VDARE.com on the paradoxical roots of conservatism and liberalism:

The core of conservatism, it seems to me, is this recognition and acceptance of the elemental emotions. Conservatism understands that it is futile to debate the feelings of the mother for her child�or such human instincts as the bonds of tribe, nation, even race. Of course, all are painfully vulnerable to deconstruction by rationalistic intellectuals�but not, ultimately, to destruction. These commitments are Jungian rather than Freudian, not irrational but arational�beyond the reach of reason.

  [More]

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Race v. Ethnicity: Much of the confusion in modern American intellectual discourse would be cleared up if pundits would adapt my definitions of race and ethnicity, which I've designed to fit the way the U.S. Census Bureau uses the terms.

- A racial group is a partly inbred extended biological family.

- An ethnic groups is one defined by shared traits that are often passed down within biological families -- e.g., language, surname, religion, cuisine, accent, self-identification, historical or mythological heroes, musical styles, etc. -- but that don't have to be. 

The difference is perhaps easiest to see with adopted children. [For the rest, click the "Permalink" below ...]

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Bush's cronyism and nepotism: Publisher Adam Bellow (yes, son of author Saul) has some thoughts on how dynastic families like the Bushes are vulnerable to cronyism. An alternative interpretation is that the Bush Administration isn't quite nepotistic enough. Although John F. Kennedy was frequently laid up with various illnesses, and occasionally out of his head on pain medication (as at his first disastrous summit meeting, which encouraged Khrushchev to provoke the Cuban Missile Crisis), he had his energetic brother Bobby by his side to cover for him. In contrast, Bush's more competent brother, Jeb, has no role in the White House because he's down in Florida being governor.

One of the unfortunate accidents of recent American history was that in 1994,[For the rest, click the "Permalink" below ...]

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My Summer Film Reviews from The American Conservative (subscribe here to read my reviews when the films are in the theatres):

2046 (Wong Kar Wai, Tony Leung, Zhang Ziyi) - 9

Hustle & Flow (Terrence Howard) - 5

Broken Flowers (Bill Murray, Jim Jarmusch) & The Beautiful Country (Nick Nolte)  - 7, 6

My old reviews are archived here.

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Cultural differences in birthin' babies: A hospital worker explains how different kinds of people act different in the delivery room.

John Derbyshire writes:

I can only put down to faulty memory your failure to quote from Chapter 71 of my novel FIRE FROM THE SUN: 

"Strange thing, culture," remarked senior nurse to junior -- a rookie -- as they cleaned up afterwards.  "Whites curse and blacks holler.  Hispanics I've known to actually sing.  But the Chinese -- not a whisper."

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The Udolpho Blog: Not at all like The The Manolo Blog, except for also being funny:

Please do not join class action suits against our sponsors

Make sure to send Udolpho a comment. He really appreciates it.

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Mysterious Andrew Sullivan Parenthetical Comment of the Day:

(This item is just for JPod. Love you, blue eyes.)

I'm not sure I want to know what is behind this.

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Making Jennifer Senior of New York magazine look like an IQ expert appears to be the goal of the new article in Slate, "Moral Courage: Is defending The Bell Curve an example of intellectual honesty?" by Stephen Metcalf, whose qualifications are, apparently, that he is "a Slate critic and lives in Brooklyn."

Metcalf's denunciation of Charles Murray's recent Commentary magazine article "The Inequality Taboo" is full of howlers such as:

[For the rest, click the "Permalink" below ...]

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New VDARE.com Column: Is the NFL discriminating against white players?

[For the rest, click the "Permalink" below ...]

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The Cochran-Harpending theory is not good for the Jews, according to the cover story in New York magazine: "Are Jews smarter? Why the controversial new study of Jewish intelligence has everybody plotzing." 

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Charlize Theron plays an iron miner in "North Country:" I review the fictionalized biopic (opening Friday, October 21st) about the lady miner who sued for sexual harassment in the American Conservative now available to electronic subscribers (subscribe here). An excerpt:

You might assume that the sexual harassment issue died of hypocrisy in 1998 when feminists stood by the wounded Bill Clinton, but the left's long march through the institutions is immune to shame. The media is perhaps the key institution, because, as Orwell noted in 1984, "'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'"

So, now we have "North Country," a thoroughly fictionalized retelling of the landmark Jenson v. Eveleth sexual harassment case. Charlize Theron, the 2003 Best Actress winner for "Monster," stars as a gorgeous miner who learns that the men who labor in the open pits of the Mesabi Iron Range are crude. Ultimately, she wins a "hostile environment" lawsuit against the mine.

Unlike in "Monster," where Charlize famously had her lovely complexion artificially weathered, here she looks like what she is, a former model posing amidst vast heaps of rubble. (Charlize recently attributed her beauty to thinking nice thoughts, burbling to Oprah, "I really believe that we look physically the way we do because of the emotional impact that we've made on our bodies during our life." Well, sure �)

Still, Charlize's face is bland, distinguishable from all the gaunt blondes in Hollywood only by a layer of adorable baby fat.

Her "North Country" heroine is equally dull. Feminist victimism has rendered actresses' roles more two-dimensional -- notice how few femme fatale characters there are anymore? -- denying them any less-than-saintly motivations while insisting, stupidly, that they compete with men on physical strength.

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The war between white culture and white nationalism:  

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Tax-Deductible VDARE fundraising drive -- You can read Peter Brimelow's message here.

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My new VDARE column: I answer Jared Taylor's attack on my "citizenism."

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More Republican scandals: With Karl Rove scheduled for a fourth round of testimony in  the Valerie Plame outing, Larry Franklin pleading guilty to three felony counts, and Tom Delay getting indicted every week, I recall that in September of 2004, I predicted: 

"... a second term for the Bush Administration is likely to resemble the second term of the Nixon Administration, with the scandals of the first four years finally bubbling to the surface."

But all the scandals so far are penny ante stuff compared to the Big One -- lying us into the Iraq War. 

My guess at this point is that that the central Iraq scandal is too big, too far reaching, too "sensitive," with too many important people tied into it, and just too generally awful for patriotic Americans to bear contemplating for it to ever come up in court. They might nail you for exposing a CIA agent, but start a war based on lies and fraud ... well, it's just too far beyond comprehension... I imagine the participants have December 24th, 2008 marked on their mental calendars as the day they expect to be pardoned by a lame duck George W. Bush.

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Crime statistics: Government agencies are normally ultra-enthusiastic about breaking out Hispanics as a separate demographic category ... except when it comes to crime statistics.
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Saletan's suburb: Slate's national correspondent William Saletan has denounced both Bill Bennett and myself in an article entitled "Natural Unborn Killers: The bigotry of Bill Bennett's low expectations." Saletan claims that it is not "morally acceptable to predict the criminal propensity of unborn children based on the color of their skin." 

In response, I pointed out that Bennett was not predicting based on the color of the unborn children's future skin, but on the current behavior of their parents. 

So, did Saletan follow his own moral advice when buying a house for himself and his family? 
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Slate: It's Sailer's Fault, not Levitt's! Slate.com runs a deeply misleading essay by their "Human Nature" columnist William Saletan entitled "Natural Unborn Killers: The bigotry of Bill Bennett's low expectations." I'll explain the hypocrisy of Saletan's central argument below, but let me start with the parts about me. Saletan writes in Slate:

Here's what Bennett's defenders are saying...

6. The idea of linking crime and abortion to race came from liberals. Bennett implies he got the idea from Slate: "The author of Freakonomics, Steve Levitt, engages the theory that abortion reduces crime, and he also discusses, as I did, the racial implications of abortion and crime. And he does that in an extended debate on Slate.com."

Sorry, wrong again. Here's Levitt's debate in Slate. Paste his comments into a word-processing file and run a search for the word "black." You won't find it. The only person who brings up race in the exchange is Steve Sailer, a conservative Bennett supporter. Levitt shrugs it off, saying "race really is not an integral part of the story." As to Bennett's latest comments, Levitt repeats,

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"Proof" -- In the movie adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Gwyneth Paltrow plays the daughter of a brilliant and insane John ("Beautiful Mind") Nash-like mathematician (Anthony Hopkins) who worries about which of her father's attributes she inherited, while handsome young U. of Chicago math prof (Jake Gyllenhaal) tries to get her to notice him. From my review in the upcoming Oct. 24th American Conservative (now available to electronic subscribers):

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Levitt's race-abortion-crime theory: Today, responding to Bill Bennett's controversial citation of his theory that legalizing abortion cut crime, economist Steven D. Levitt, co-author of the bestseller Freakonomics, asserted on his blog that "Race is not an important part of the abortion-crime argument that John Donohue and I have made in academic papers and that Dubner and I discuss in Freakonomics." Indeed, Levitt left out any mention of the much higher abortion and crime rates found among blacks from his best-selling book. However, his 2001 academic paper with John J. Donohue contains this passage:

Fertility declines for black women are three times greater than for whites (12 percent compared to 4 percent). Given that homicide rates of black youths are roughly nine times higher than those of white youths, racial differences in the fertility effects of abortion are likely to translate into greater homicide reductions. Under the assumption that those black and white births eliminated by legalized abortion would have experienced the average criminal propensities of their respective races, then the predicted reduction in homicide is 8.9 percent. In other words, taking into account differential abortion rates by race raises the predicted impact of abortion legalization on homicide from 5.4 percent to 8.9 percent. 

[Thanks to James Taranto --SS.]

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One more point on the Bennett Freakonomics brouhaha: One of the logical distinctions that needs to be made in thinking about the purely hypothetical effect on crime of a prenatal genocide of an entire ethnic group is: 

Are we talking about what would be the impact on the total number of crimes in the country?

Or are we talking about the impact on the national per capita crime rate?

Steven D. Levitt, author of the abortion-cut-crime theory, tries to glide past the nasty racial implications of his theory by claiming on his blog:

... if you prohibit any group from reproducing, then the crime rate will go down)...

But that's not true. 
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Levitt on Bennett: On his Freakonomics blog, economist Steven D. Levitt, the main promoter of the old theory that legalizing abortion cut crime, writes:

2) Race is not an important part of the abortion-crime argument that John Donohue and I have made in academic papers and that Dubner and I discuss in Freakonomics. 

C'mon, Steven, try being frank about your abortion-crime theory for once. Your widely circulated draft paper in 1999 argued that one reason abortion should have cut crime is because blacks, per capita, have more abortions and commit more crimes. (See this NYT story from 1999 for the details). You dropped that reference later to stay out of trouble.

It is true that, on average, crime involvement in the U.S. is higher among blacks than whites. Importantly, however, once you control for income, the likelihood of growing up in a female-headed household, having a teenage mother, and how urban the environment is, the importance of race disappears for all crimes except homicide. (The homicide gap is partly explained by crack markets).

Oh, boy ... where to begin?

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William Bennett blasted for citing Steven D. Levitt's Freakonomics theory: Ever since New Orleans, the hysteria among the political and media elite has been building: Who among us bigshots will crack first and allude to the elephant in the living room? 

That snorting pachyderm that they've all been trying to ignore is the higher crime rate among African-Americans. According to the official Bureau of Justice Statistics, "Blacks were 7 times more likely than whites to commit homicide in 2002," but You Can't Talk About That.

Today, the mounting pressure finally burst over merely an abstract musing on the radio.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi immediately spoke on the floor of the House:

"Mr. Speaker, I rise this evening to express my deep disdain and disgust for comments made yesterday by former Reagan Secretary of Education William Bennett on his radio call-in show. ... [For the rest, click the "Permalink" below ...]*

P.S. On an unrelated note, here's my 2003 article about Bill Bennett's gambling.

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"Capote" and the death penalty - The biopic with the great character actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, the American Alec Guinness, as the fey author of the first modern true crime book, In Cold Blood, opens Friday, Sept. 30 in NYC and LA. Here are some brief excerpts from my review in the October 10th issue of The American Conservative (now on newsstands). The film recounts the visits Capote made to one of the two condemned murderers, Perry Smith, on Death Row:

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Who Ya Gonna Believe? The aptly-named "Lying Eyes" blog says it well about the latest Conventional Wisdom about the New Orleans Convention Center anarchy:

Reports That Conditions in NOLA Were Exaggerated are Exaggerated 

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The Color of Crime and the New Orleans Nightmare -- My new VDARE.com column is up.

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My new VDARE.com column is up now. It's a big one on what we can learn from New Orleans on this, the fourth anniversary of 9/11. It reuses quite a bit of material from this blog, but, I hope, integrates it well into a coherent essay.

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Big Gene News: For years, various authority figures, both scientific and self-appointed, have been assuring us that Science Says that there are no average genetic differences in brain functions between people from different parts of the world. Well, they've been yanking our chains. 
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"Racial Realities and the New Orleans Nightmare" -- My new VDARE.com article is up a day early. 

It was the Perfect Storm.

No, not Hurricane Katrina. That could have been much worse. Back in the 1990s, my friend Rob Brennan wrote an unpublished novel called Category 5 about a ferocious hurricane that strikes New Orleans at the worst possible angle. Katrina, in contrast, was a Category 4 hurricane and hit New Orleans only a glancing blow.

No, the perfect storm was actually the combination of social and governmental incompetence at local, state, and federal levels�and unmentionable racial reality.
  [More]

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"Defining Conservatism Down" by Austin Bramwell of the National Review Board of Trustees is now up on The American Conservative website. My favorite paragraphs:

Second, a loose network of what John O�Sullivan has called �evolutionary conservatives� attempts to understand politics in light of genetic science. Unlike many conservatives, evolutionary conservatives remain undaunted by the apoplectic reaction of liberals to Charles Murray�s Bell Curve and Dinesh D�Souza�s End of Racism. Steve Sailer, for example, the most talented evolutionary conservative, writes with rigor and imagination on such scabrous topics as race, IQ, voting patterns, and national identity. Though other writers treat these ideas as taboo, perhaps because they seem to undermine American ideals of equality and self-reliance, evolutionary conservatives pride themselves on preferring truth to wishful thinking.

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Tierney in NYT on the Sailer Theory of the evolution of golf's appeal:

The Golf Gene

By JOHN TIERNEY 

New York Times

Published: August 20, 2005

The P.G.A. championship didn't end until Monday, which was ostensibly a workday, but more than five million men still managed to watch it on television. Why? 

As an action-packed sport, golf ranks down with baseball and bowling, except that baseball is faster-paced and bowlers are whirling dervishes compared with golfers. Some golfers do exhibit sudden movements when they win a tournament, but it's always a shock to see they can get both feet in the air at once...

Was golf the modern version of Pleistocene hunting on the savanna? The notion had already occurred to devotees of evolutionary psychology, as I discovered from reading Edward O. Wilson and Steve Sailer. They point to surveys and other research showing that people in widely different places and cultures have a common vision of what makes a beautiful landscape - and it looks a lot like the view from golfers' favorite tees....

For Further Reading:

From Bauhaus to Golf Course: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of the Art of Golf Course Architecture by Steve Sailer. The American Conservative, April 11, 2005.

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"Abuse stories 'isolating African communities'" worries the lefty Guardian:

The government was yesterday urged to ensure that African communities in the UK are not stigmatised over claims of ritualistic child abuse. At a summit called by ministers amid concerns over abuse linked to rituals such as exorcism, there were calls for a focus on a wider range of immigrant communities in the UK, some of which are seen as hard to reach by social services and other authorities.

Ministers from the Department for Education and Skills and the Home Office, meeting representatives of the police, local government, faith and community groups, were also warned that ritualistic abuse - the extent of which is little-researched - should be examined in the context of wider issues of child abuse in communities new to the UK.

The summit, hosted by the children's minister, Beverley Hughes, follows a high-profile court case earlier this month in which three adults were jailed for their involvement in the abuse of an eight-year-old girl from Angola who they accused of being a witch. The Old Bailey heard that the child, brought to Britain from Angola by her aunt, had been beaten, cut and had chilli peppers rubbed in her eyes. Sita Kisanga and her brother Sebastian Pinto were convicted of aiding and abetting child cruelty, along with the child's aunt, found guilty of cruelty.

Ministers were also prompted to act following a leaked report for the Metropolitan police which identified a belief among some members of an African community that children were being abused during exorcism rituals at Pentecostal churches, and another police study indicating high numbers of African boys going missing from school records.

However, African church leaders and campaigners against child abuse within African communities have warned that some media coverage - including claims of child sacrifice in London churches - risks isolating hard-to-reach groups.

A reader responds:

Here is a perfect example of how the pro-immigration multi-culturalist socialworker/engineers sabotage Western culture.

Recently, three African adults were arrested in Britain for torturing a small child in strange exorcism ceremonies. They beat her, cut her and rubbed hot chilli peppers in her eyes over a period of days. Initial news reports said this was a growing problem and was due to religious beliefs of African "protestant fundamentalist churches". It has not happened in a vacuum. (and don't get me started on "muti", the magic practiced by Africans that requires body parts like hearts, livers, fingers and eyes taken from another living human being.)

After a mere two weeks (see the link above), the British sensitivity establishment has already shifted its attention from African exorcisms, torture and death of small children to the dangers of stigmatizing the African community itself.

They call the African neighborhoods and people who either torture children (or defend the torturers and marginalize the torture) as "hard to reach" and fear that the general public's shock and outrage by these religious practices will "isolate African communities".

This is a classic social engineer's maneuver. The socialworker/engineer assumes the mantle of managing everyone's feelings and interrelationships. It is their job to properly gauge the responses of each group and control the level and intensity of feeling. Naturally, they have the goal of bringing African aboriginals into the 21st Century as fast as possible (while preserving their quaint customs and endearing folkways). They also have the job of reengineering the English People to accommodate some of the more bizarre (but harmless) aspects of aboriginal life.

What they refuse to accept is that their way is not the only way, and that the English people may have their own solution to the problem that does not require accommodation or being re-engineered on the part of the English People: increased English shock and outrage until the Africans (I will not say African "communities") either leave; or abase themselves; admit that their savage and barbarian practices are just that: savage and barbarian; admit their sin; beg forgiveness for their savagery; and swear never to do it again.

To reduce English anger, the socialworker/engineer are trying to implant the same memes they use for every other conflict involving savage communities versus civilized communities: persuade the public that the problem isn't "African ritual violence against children" (of which only the Africans partake, and which Africans can only stop by snitching on each other, reporting their own offenders, and changing their morality and religion), but the greater problem of "violence in society" {sample: "It requires us all to proceed sensitively and constructively, and not stigmatise any one community." another sample: "We can't separate it from the issue of wider abuse of children, especially children who are being privately fostered,".

In short, the social workers are unable to address the problem except by gentle persuasion, AND it can work only if the English People agree to not notice what Africans are doing, AND (I fear) only if The Guardian stops writing about such torture and killing, or if it does, that it stop mentioning the fact that torture/killers are African. In short: we must either avert our gaze, go blind, or stick our head in the sand.

It equates the beating a child gets when an English father comes home drunk, with organized religious activities of many Africans out of a deeply-held aboriginal belief in evil spirits and other mumbo-jumbo. 

As it is, the Brit socialworker/engineers have already given up the high ground of telling the Africans their behavior is just plain wrong and that what they call their religion is completely unacceptable to England. 

As an aside, note the careful way the social workers have already tried to implicate the English in these African crimes. They have called the African religion "protestant fundamentalism" to suggest English guilt as colonialists. They expect us to forget that the missionaries taught the savages a religion of peace, and that it was the Africans alone that engrafted syncretistic native child abuse and torture on that religion. I would no more call the witch-hunting religion of the African child abusers "protestant fundamentalism" than I would call Haitian voodoo "catholicism".

As a final aside, do you think for a moment that the socialworker/engineer women would ever stop blaming men for all domestic violence? That they would drop their male-stigmatizing political reeducation courses they present for judges and policemen as male-bashing and "stigmatizing" a male "community"? Of course they wouldn't. The question is, "Why not?" Find the answer to that, and I think you will have found the nut of the "Church of Liberalism and Multiculturalism".

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"What�s Holding Black Kids Back?" asks Kay S. Hymowitz in City Journal: 

The difference between middle-class and low-income child rearing has been captured at its starkest�and most unsettling�by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley in their 1995 book Meaningful Differences. As War on Poverty foot soldiers with a special interest in language development, Hart and Risley were troubled by the mediocre results of the curriculum they had helped design at the Turner House Preschool in a poor black Kansas City neighborhood. Comparing their subjects with those at a lab school for the children of University of Kansas professors, Hart and Risley found to their dismay that not only did the university kids know more words than the Turner kids, but they learned faster. The gap between upper- and lower-income kids, they concluded, �seemed unalterable by intervention by the time the children were 4 years old.�

Trying to understand why, their team set out to observe parents and children in their homes doing the things they ordinarily did�hanging out, talking, eating dinner, watching television. The results were mind-boggling: in the first years of life, the average number of words heard per hour was 2,150 for professors� kids, 1,250 for working-class children, and 620 for children in welfare families.

But the problem went further. Welfare parents in the study didn�t just talk less; their talk was meaner and more distracted...

In middle-class families, the child�s development -- emotional, social, and (these days, above all) cognitiv -- takes center stage. It is the family�s raison d��tre, its state religion. It�s the reason for that Mozart or Rafi tape in the morning and that bedtime story at night, for finding out all you can about a teacher in the fall and for Little League in the spring, for all the books, crib mobiles, trips to the museum, and limits on TV. It�s the reason, even, for careful family planning; fewer children, properly spaced, allow parents to focus ample attention on each one. Just about everything that defines middle-class parenting�talking to a child, asking questions, reasoning rather than spanking�consciously aims at education or child development.

But, of course, the current obsessiveness with managing their children's lives that affluent white parents display is a recent development. They sure weren't brought up that way. During the Baby Boom, their parents averaged four kids and didn't have time to drive them all over town. That's what bikes were for. 

Moreover, parents may not have been as child-centric in aggregate either. My impression is that adults back then went to more cocktail parties, played more bridge, bowled more, and the like. In the seven years of playing baseball in local park leagues, I don't believe either of my parents ever went to one of my games. (They did that out of principle, objecting to parents who put too much pressure on their kids in sports.) Today, it's typical for both parents to go to every game.

Yet, the Baby Boom kids of well-to-do parents generally didn't turn out to be illiterate crack dealers. I wonder why ...

Perhaps the modern middle class style will turn out to be better for kids. Or perhaps it will rob them of initiative. We shall see.

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Why the First Bush Administration Refused to Protect Our Borders: A former INS official named Mark Reed testified to Congress in May that back during the Bush the Elder's Administration:

I was present at a high level strategy meeting between representatives of Federal Law Enforcement, DOD [Department of Defense], and the State Department regarding the urgency of sealing the Mexican border to stop drug smuggling. When DOD stated that they were capable of detecting and interdicting any intrusion, but could not distinguish between groups of migrants from drug smugglers until interdiction, the dialogue became difficult. When DOD refused to entertain the idea that they should only detain drug smugglers upon interdiction, the meeting was abruptly terminated. The safety valve that illegal immigration provided toward the stability of Mexico seemed to be a more compelling national security priority than drug smuggling.

That's certainly interesting now that word has come from the LA Times that the latest Bush administration is dunning corporations to build a war chest to "marginalize" conservative talk radio and other pillars of the GOP for opposing the President's amnesty & open borders immigration plan.

It's not surprising that the Bushes look out for the interests of the Mexican ruling class, since the Bush family has had ties of financial and friendship ties with the Mexican kleptocrats going back decades. I first wrote about this little-covered connection for UPI back in February 2001, and then in more depth for VDARE in January 2004:

Some of the First Dynasty's favorites have been criminals on a scale so extravagant as to scandalize even the long-suffering citizenry of Mexico.

Take Jorge Diaz Serrano. Jonathan Kwitny reported in a long expos� in Barron's ("The Mexican Connection of George Bush," September 19, 1988, requires Dow Jones' subscription to access):

"Without breathing a word to shareholders in his Houston oil-drilling company, Zapata Off-Shore Co., George Bush in 1960 helped set up another drilling operation employing Mexican front men and seemingly circumventing Mexican law. And he did so in association with Jorge Diaz Serrano, a now-convicted felon who has become a symbol of political corruption in a country with no shortage of contestants for that dubious distinction. In helping to launch � Permargo, Bush and his associates at Zapata teamed up with Diaz Serrano and a Mexican associate in camouflaging the 50% American ownership of Permargo."

George H.W. stood by his old partner:

"�I have high regard for Jorge,� Bush was quoted as saying in People magazine in 1981. �I consider him a friend.�"

Diaz went on to bigger, if not better, things.

"Eventually, Diaz Serrano would take control of Permargo, before moving on to head Pemex, Mexico's government oil monopoly. Shortly after his five-year stint at Pemex, he would begin a five-year stint in jail, having defrauded the Mexican government of $58 million it is still trying to get back�"

Yet, today, Serrano seems like a quaint figure from Mexico's more innocent past. He was a public servant who merely feathered his own nest. Worse was to come.

The big difference between the nice clean corruption of the 1970s and today is the new pervasiveness of drug money, and its accompanying violence, among the Mexican elite...

The Bush family's most important Mexican friendship was with the Salinas family, whose scion Carlos ruled Mexico from 1988 and 1994, before fleeing to exile in Ireland to avoid being lynched by his furious countrymen. (For the lurid details on this depraved brood, see my article "Mexico's Corrupt White Elite.")

Julie Reynolds of El Andar noted, 

"Bush Sr. met Carlos Salinas�s father, Ra�l Salinas Lozano, back when the latter was Mexico�s commerce secretary. The families� friendship has continued through the years. Ra�l Salinas, the president�s brother, has told investigators that Jeb and Columba Bush joined him three times for vacations at his hacienda Las Mendocinas."

Jeb's host Raul, who was known as "Mr. 10%" in Mexico for demanding the Salinas family cut on all government contracts, is currently serving 27 years in the slammer for the assassination of PRI chairman Francisco Ruiz Massieu, his ex-brother-in-law. Raul's wife was arrested in Switzerland while attempting to withdraw $94 million in cash from their Swiss bank's safe deposit box.

Dubya's amigos in Texas, however, are not exactly migrant farm workers. As Julie Reynolds, assisted by Victor Almaz�n and Ana Leonor Rojo, wrote in El Andar:

"It was during those campaign years [of Bush the Elder] that George Junior bonded with many of his Latino allies in the state [of Texas] and made the friends he would later lean on when his political ambitions got into gear. By and large, the Latino alliances Bush touts so loudly these days are not social workers or school teachers, and they are certainly not working-class. Like most in W�s circle, they are Texas heavy-hitters who got rich from their astute blending of business and politics."

In a long, complex El Andar article entitled �LOS AMIGOS DE BUSH: The disturbing ties of some of George W. Bush�s Latino advisors," Reynolds amassed evidence to back her allegation that two of Bush's top Mexican-American backers in Texas are palsy-walsy with individuals linked to Mexico's feared Gulf narco cartel.

As George W. said numerous times in response to questions about illegal aliens, "Family values don't stop at the Rio Grande." (America, of course, does.) Here's one touching example of his assisting an undocumented worker in his struggle with the uncaring INS, as reported in El Andar by Reynolds and Eduardo Valle of Mexico City's El Universal newspaper:

"In the fall of 1991, George W. Bush asked his father, the President, to 'help out' on behalf of Enrique Fuentes Le�n. � Fuentes Le�n was living in the United States on a tourist visa that was about to expire."

What "family values" had brought this lawyer north of the Rio Grande?

"He had fled Mexico in 1989, after a highly-publicized case in which he was charged with bribing two judges in order to free a wealthy Acapulco businessman convicted of the rape and murder of a young child�"

"He remained free in the U.S. for three more years on an expired tourist visa, even though the Mexican government made an official extradition request on October 21, 1991. � By 1994, he had purchased more than $6 million in San Antonio real estate, and together with Texas publisher Tino Dur�n made moves to purchase the now-defunct San Antonio Light newspaper�"

When the INS was pestering Fuentes Leon in the early 90s, Duran, who calls himself "a friend and supporter of the Bush family," set up a meeting between the notorious fugitive and the future President of the United States to get him to intercede with the current President of the United States. Duran said:

"�I had sent him [George W.] a letter so he would know what it was all about, so he could decide if he wanted to help," Dur�n said. �And he called me and said, 'Sure, come on down and let�s talk about it.' �Enrique and I went down to his office and he called the President." George W. Bush asked President Bush if he could help Dur�n and 'his friend here.� Dur�n says President Bush then asked Dur�n to send him a letter and said he would direct the information to the State Department."

What happened next?

"Fuentes Le�n � was finally extradited to Mexico after a 1994 arrest for allegedly attempting to bribe an INS agent with $30,000� A courthouse employee said that Fuentes Le�n showed up every day in a $200,000 car, followed by 'around 25' other vehicles�"

How could he afford that? Fuentes Le�n is alleged by El Andar to be the "consigliero" of the Gulf narco cartel.

"Today, Fuentes Le�n is again imprisoned in Mexico. This time it�s for a case in which he is charged in relation to the kidnapping and death of Nellie Campobello, 85, a famous former ballerina whose 13 year-old grave was found last year. The title to Campobello�s house has mysteriously appeared under the name of Fuentes Le�n�s wife."

[More]

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Who is Duane "Dewey" Clarridge? The current scandal in Washington remains boringly focused on what Karl Rove said to whom when, because the Democrats conceive of Rove as the evil genius who has cost them election after election (when a more balanced assessment suggests that Rove, while energetic and ruthless, is far from infallible or irreplaceable). The more interesting questions revolve around who was responsible for the operations building up the fraudulent case for the Iraq War that later needed covering up.

For whatever it's worth, one reader has tossed out the name of Duane "Dewey" Clarridge (a.k.a., Dax P. LeBaron), a retired CIA deputy director who was pardoned by George H.W. Bush in 1992 after being indicted for lying to Congress during Iran-Contra. 

Clarridge has since done consulting work for Ahmed Chalabi, and helped draw up the 1998 plan for 5,000 "crack soldiers" from Chalabi's INC to invade Iraq with U.S. support, a scheme that Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni derided as the "Bay of Goats."

The LA Times reported 13 months ago that Clarridge was in Iraq, advising Chalabi.

Does anybody know anything more about Clarridge?

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Does Vicente Fox have something on George W. Bush? When I described to my wife the LA Times article reporting on how the President is building a war chest to launch a civil war within the GOP to drive out his own conservative base for opposing Bush's amnesty/open borders plan, she said, "I've always figured Fox has something on Bush. Like, maybe, after one of Bush's lost weekends in Matamoras, a hooker's body was found floating in the bay, an 11-year old transvestite hooker. And Fox might have bought the police file, figuring it might come in handy some day."

"That's raw, irresponsible, baseless speculation!" I responded. "But I kinda like it."

Or maybe Bush's campaign to demonize GOP conservatives as racists is payback for their (at least temporarily) denying him the opportunity to elevate his minion Alberto Gonzales to the Supreme Court?

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"K-Strategy Movies the Big Market Gap?" -- Two weeks ago I got an email from Jim Bowery with that curious header. He maintains a webpage that shows what are the most "underdistributed" movies each week -- i.e., films that aren't in enough theatres to optimize revenues. He wrote:

The underdistributed movie metric just went through the roof on the documentary "The March of the Penguins" [which is about the extraordinary efforts Antarctic penguins make to hatch their eggs and raise their youngsters].

It's rare to see the metric break 1000.

I suspect what may be going on here:

The K-strategy has been under systemic insult in the regions of the world that are ecologically most K-strategy. This is getting so bad that people are starved for K-strategy stories and Hollywood -- being part of the problem -- hasn't been able to really exploit this niche. [A "K strategy" is a biological term for parents having only a few offspring but investing heavily in each one, while an "r strategy" is having lots of kids and not investing much in each one.]

The prior movie that broke 1000 was De-Lovely which was a gay-bisexual niche movie.

The K-strategy niche is probably _much_ bigger.

This week, the penguin documentary spread to 695 theatres and made an estimated $4.3 million to crack the weekend's top 10. At $9.2 million total, it's now the #6 documentary of all time. The distributor thinks it could become the second highest grossing documentary of all time.

I haven't seen it yet, but I can endorse the last big bird documentary, "Winged Migration," which is quite funny in places.

***

Terry McMillan Loses Her Groove: In 1997, I wrote in "Is Love Colorblind?"

Despite these opportunities to meet white men, so many middle-class black women have trouble landing satisfactory husbands that they have made Terry (Waiting to Exhale) McMillan, author of novels specifically about and for them, into a best-selling brand name. Probably the most popular romance advice regularly offered to affluent black women of a certain age is to find true love in the brawny arms of a younger black man. Both Miss McMillan's 1996 best-seller How Stella Got Her Groove Back and the most celebrated of all books by black women, Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, are romance novels about well-to-do older women and somewhat dangerous younger men. Of course, as Miss Hurston herself later learned at age 49, when she (briefly) married a 23-year-old gym coach, that seldom works out in real life.

McMillan is currently divorcing the 23-year-younger Jamaican gentleman who inspired Stella. Newsweek interviews her.

Q. Are you disillusioned with marriage?

A. As everyone knows, I am currently going though a divorce.

Q. That must be very difficult. I'm sorry.

A. That's why my novel was late. He kept me distracted in hopes he could break me down. That was until the night I said, "Why don't you tell the truth about something for a change?" And he said, "You couldn't handle it." And I said, "Try me." And he said, "I'm confused about my sexuality." And I said, "What!" And he said, "I think I might be gay. No, I am gay. I am gay." I had a halogen lamp right near the chair where I read, and I said, "I would like to take this lamp and whop your face. But you know what, I'm not going to because you finally told the truth about something. And look what it turned out to be."

Q. Wow. That sounds like a passage right out of one of your novels.

A. He's a sociopath, a covetous sociopath. Think of Scott Peterson without the murder. That is how sociopaths are. They woo you, and they can convince you of anything. I couldn't put a finger on what he was doing. He cheated, lied and betrayed me. And when I complain about this, he calls me a homophobe.

Q. And yet your new book has a surprisingly hopeful view of long-term marriage. Why? 

A. The book was finished before all this happened. By the time it was in the catalog, I was so sapped and so pissed off, I didn't know what to do. My credit cards were maxed out. I almost went bankrupt. I was supporting him in his dog-grooming business. I was miserable, but he was happy as a lark. Now he's got his citizenship, he's coming after me for my money and he's writing a tell-all to capitalize on my fame.

Q. But you had a prenuptial agreement, didn't you? 

A. I was a multimillionaire. I married a 21-year-old who hadn't finished college. Of course I had a prenup. I wouldn't marry Eddie Murphy without a prenup. My lawyers are on Madison Avenue. I'm not stupid. I'm not paying him a dime. I'll go to jail first. I have a valid prenup. He's out of the closet. He's committed a crime. His citizenship should be revoked.

Q. What do you think of authors who've suggested that gay black men lead double lives because there is so little support for homosexuality in the African-American community? 

A. That's bull---t. They have an excuse for everything. It's difficult for them to come out but it's easy to lie, cheat and put my life at risk? They sneak around, hide behind a woman, in some cases women with children. I'm HIV-negative, but I get tested every month. Sometimes they just like sneaking around. It's cowardly. They shouldn't hide behind a woman.

Q. You sound angry and heartbroken. Are you? 

A. My heart was broken and not just because of the gay thing. It was the betrayal. The fact that he was doing this all along. All those years he was acting. It's an awkward situation to be in. Everyone asks, "Couldn't she see?" But they don't know how he behaved around me all those years. He spun a web that was so dense I couldn't see through it.

The Smoking Gun has all the divorce proceeding filings.

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"Jared Diamond: The New King of All Media" is my new VDARE.com column. I think it's the fairest assessment of the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel yet. Here's an excerpt:

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Have Rove and Bush gone nuts? The news that the Bush Administration is launching a massive campaign, in conjunction with Democratic politicos and funded by big corporations like Microsoft and Wal-Mart, to demonize the sizable majority of the Republican Party that objects to illegal immigration suggests that the pressures of the Washington scandals have gotten to Karl Rove and George W. Bush.

It's extraordinarily difficult to come up with a rational reason why the Bush Administration is planning to go to war against conservative talk radio: 

Tancredo succeeded in dominating the debate, Holt and Armey said, because of an echo chamber of conservative talk radio and other advocates for limiting the influx of Mexicans across the border.

Ironically, one of the designated leaders of Bush's campaign to "marginalize" GOP conservatives who oppose illegal immigration is former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, who in 2002 on "Hardball" called for the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from the West Bank. It's good to see Mr. Armey has his loyalties straight.

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Austin Bramwell on "Evolutionary Conservatives" -- The youngest member of National Review's five-man Board of Trustees writes in the new August 15th issue of The American Conservative:

Second, a loose network of what John O�Sullivan has called �evolutionary� conservatives attempts to understand politics in light of genetic science. Unlike many conservatives, evolutionary conservatives remain undaunted by the apoplectic reaction of liberals to Charles Murray�s The Bell Curve and Dinesh D�Souza�s The End of Racism. Steve Sailer, for example, the most talented evolutionary conservative, writes with rigor and imagination on such scabrous topics as race, IQ, voting patterns, and national identity. Though other writers treat these ideas as taboo, perhaps because they seem to undermine American ideals of equality and self-reliance, evolutionary conservatives pride themselves on preferring truth to wishful thinking.

This attitude enables them to understand affirmative action and identity politics in a way that others cannot. More timid conservatives believe that if only we embraced the American Creed with sufficient fervor, we would become a color-blind society at last. As Thomas Sowell observes, however, every country that has racial or ethnic groups of differing economic achievement has adopted a system of preferences. Race relations seem to have an irreducibly tragic dimension; identity politics may well be a permanent feature of all multi-ethnic societies, often, as in Bosnia, Rwanda or Sri Lanka (and, perhaps, Iraq) with calamitous results. Human biodiversity is important; we owe to ourselves to try to understand it.

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Bush announces his Suicide of the GOP initiative (not an Onion parody, sadly): From the LA Times:

Worried that the tone of the immigration debate is pushing Latinos away from the Republican Party, the White House is working with political strategists to ...

... quietly bury his divisive, unpopular 2004 Open Borders plan, right? 

Wrong! Bush now wants to go to war against his conservative base over immigration, fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with Democrats. Here's more from "Immigration Rising on Bush's To-Do List:"

... create a broad coalition of business groups and immigrant advocates to back a plan President Bush could promote in Congress and to minority voters in the 2006 elections.

The strategists say Bush is planning to make immigration a top priority as soon as this fall, once the focus on a Supreme Court vacancy has passed. The push is being planned to coincide with next year's campaigns for the House and Senate, in which Latino voters could be crucial in several states. It is part of a broader White House strategy to forge a long-lasting majority by drawing more minority voters.

Aiming for an air of bipartisanship, the White House-backed coalition, to be called Americans for Border and Economic Security, will be led by former U.S. Reps. Cal Dooley (D-Hanford) and Dick Armey (R-Texas). The chief organizer is one of the capital's most important White House allies: former Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie, who has hosted preliminary meetings at his Washington lobbying firm just blocks from the White House and has been advising the RNC on minority outreach.

The effort is designed to help Bush take control of an increasingly contentious debate that has threatened to split the Republican Party and undermine its outreach to Latino voters. Although the White House has not laid out details for a plan, in January 2004 Bush proposed a guest-worker program that would be open to many illegal immigrants already in the U.S. and to prospective workers abroad.

A guest-worker program is favored by many Latinos and by businesses, many of them major GOP donors that depend on a steady flow of workers from Mexico and other countries. The White House effort is aimed at satisfying these groups while promoting tougher border security enforcement. The latter focus is an attempt to mollify a vocal bloc of cultural conservatives in the GOP � some in the House leadership � who argue that undocumented workers present a security threat and take some jobs that could be filled by Americans.

Some Republican strategists worry that the more extreme voices in this camp are alienating Latino voters with anti-immigrant language, and one goal of the new coalition is to marginalize those voices. Organizers said the coalition could help the GOP avoid the kind of political damage caused in the early 1990s by the anti-immigration campaign in California backed by then-Gov. Pete Wilson.

The issue has presented a quandary for Bush, who backed off his earlier calls for immigration changes after conservatives rebelled. Now, the White House hopes to reinvigorate the drive for new immigration laws � but this time it wants to work in advance to ensure that the president is backed by a broad alliance of business and advocacy groups.

There are signs, however, that the administration effort is running into problems even as it begins: Several key business groups are hesitant to join the new coalition, questioning whether the administration can separate itself from the anti-immigration wing of the GOP that is promoting restrictive policies. And the party's leading voices favoring stricter limits on immigration, such as Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), remain undaunted � pledging to intensify their efforts.

Coalition organizers say that makes their work all the more timely.

"The politics of the Republican Party isn't going to change by itself. It needs help," said Terry Holt, a spokesman for Bush's 2004 reelection campaign, who works with Gillespie and is recruiting members for the new coalition. "Immigration needs advocates. And if those advocates engage, they can have a profound impact on the issue."

Referring to the Latino vote, which turned out in larger numbers last year for Bush than in his 2000 campaign, Holt added: "There are great opportunities for Republicans, and also dangers if we don't handle this properly."

Holt and Armey, who as House majority leader from 1995 to 2002 unsuccessfully challenged some of his fellow conservatives to soften their opposition to immigration, said the new group's message would seek to isolate players such as Tancredo, who leads a House caucus that backs stiff border restrictions.

Tancredo succeeded in dominating the debate, Holt and Armey said, because of an echo chamber of conservative talk radio and other advocates for limiting the influx of Mexicans across the border.

"There's two voices right now, and the noisy one is what I call the slam-the-borders crowd," Armey said. "The voice we want to speak with � and the one that will be in unison with President Bush � is the voice that echoes those marvelous words on the Statue of Liberty."

"To me, the Tancredo wing appeals to the more prurient character of our nature," Armey added. "We want to talk to the better angels of our nature."

Organizers say the new coalition is patterned after groups formed to press for Bush's overhaul of Social Security and his successful 2003 push for a Medicare prescription drug program � a new aspect of Republican strategy in which corporations and other interest groups are tapped to help move public opinion in favor of a policy initiative.

Corporations and advocacy groups with a direct interest in immigration � including those who need skilled high-tech workers, farm laborers and university teaching assistants � are being aggressively targeted for membership. Those being courted include Microsoft Corp., Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and groups representing academic institutions, restaurants, hotels, landscaping firms, hospitals and nurses.

Organizers say this is the first time an effort has been made to bring these disparate groups together to focus on immigration issues.

Admission into the new coalition costs between $50,000 and $250,000. The proceeds are expected to pay for a political-style campaign for an approach to immigration that combines heightened border security with a guest-worker program of some sort, creating an environment that the White House believes will be more favorable for Bush to step back into the fray.

Tancredo accused the administration of forging an alliance with business executives who view migrants as a path to greater profits.

"They know this has nothing to do with Hispanic votes," he said. "They're trying to cover what their real motive is, which is to supply [business] with cheap labor, to not close the spigot of cheap labor�. But they've lost in Congress. They've lost the public. And now they're in damage control."

Tancredo asserted that Bush was in a bad spot politically, caught between public opinion favoring restrictive immigration policies and corporate interests that want looser policies. He said the apparent plans being laid by the new coalition seem to contrast with the message Bush gave to House leaders during a recent White House meeting: that the borders must be secured.

"I think he is trying to figure out a way to triangulate here," Tancredo said.   [More]

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Luke Ford interviews Ronald Bailey, Reason Magazine's science writer on his new book Liberation Biology, here. I don't believe I've ever expressed an opinion on the stem cell controversy -- it sounds complicated to think through and everybody else has an opinion already so I don't think I could add any value. I'm not so optimistic about biotechnology as Bailey, but he's a solid guy, not just a libertarian ideologue.

Mickey Kaus called Luke the "human Echelon Project, for the prodigious amount of interviewing and transcribing he does of who's saying what around LA. Luke even interviewed me. But the bonus reason for reading Luke's blog is so you can then read the libelously hilarious "Luke Ford Fan Blog."

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Athletes as Genetic Freaks: 2Blowhards lists the genetic advantage of famous athletes like Lance Armstrong, Andy Roddick, and Michael Phelps (did you know Mia Hamm only sweats has a much as the average woman soccer player?), then reflects:

There really are (in some cases) biologically-based differences between (some) people. Heavens, but it feels good to be living in a world where such a thing can be said out loud without everyone within earshot getting hysterical. So let me say it again: There really are (in some cases) biologically-based differences between (some) people.

Wow, the sense of relief and expansiveness that I feel! I wonder if younger people have any idea what it was like to get an education in the '60s and the '70s, those decades of extreme Blank Slate-ism. We're all alike; all differences are purely cultural ... If you were trying to move in circles that fancied themselves to be "educated circles," you were obligated to bow down before these two claims. Anyone Who Was Anyone simply knew that they were true, after all. And Anyone Who Disagreed, ipso facto, deserved to be treated as a Nazi until he/she proved otherwise.   [More]

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Immigration to Britain: In recent years, a strong effort has been made to rewrite the history of Britain to make the current massive immigration appear to be as traditionally British as crumpets. For example, Wikipedia's article on "Immigration to the United Kingdom" begins:

The United Kingdom has had a long history of immigration, from the Beaker people of the 3rd millennium BC, to the waves of invasions by the Roman Empire, the Anglo-Saxons and Normans, to the settlement of people arriving from the Colonies in the 19th and 20th centuries and finally to modern immigration.

The history of immigration to the United Kingdom is, essentially, the history of the development of the United Kingdom itself, making it what it is today. It is fair to say that the ancestors of most people living in the United Kingdom today were immigrants at one time or another throughout history.

In reality, it now appears that until the last 50 years, there was remarkably little immigration into Britain since the immediate post-Ice Age period:

British Have Changed Little Since Ice Age, Gene Study Says
James Owen for National Geographic News

July 19, 2005 Despite invasions by Saxons, Romans, Vikings, Normans, and others, the genetic makeup of today's white Britons is much the same as it was 12,000 ago, a new book claims.

In The Tribes of Britain, archaeologist David Miles says around 80 percent of the genetic characteristics of most white Britons have been passed down from a few thousand Ice Age hunters.

Miles, research fellow at the Institute of Archaeology in Oxford, England, says recent genetic and archaeological evidence puts a new perspective on the history of the British people.

"There's been a lot of arguing over the last ten years, but it's now more or less agreed that about 80 percent of Britons' genes come from hunter-gatherers who came in immediately after the Ice Age," Miles said.

These nomadic tribespeople followed herds of reindeer and wild horses northward to Britain as the climate warmed. "Numbers were probably quite small�just a few thousand people," Miles added. These earliest settlers were later cut off as rising sea levels isolated Britain from mainland Europe.

New evidence for the genetic ancestry of modern Britons comes from analysis of blood groups, oxygen traces in teeth, and DNA samples taken from skeletal remains.

Ice Age hunter-gathers also colonized the rest of northwest Europe, spreading through what are now the Netherlands, Germany, and France. But Miles said differences between populations can be detected in random genetic mutations, which occurred over time.

The most visible British genetic marker is red hair, he added. The writer Tacitus noted the Romans' surprise at how common it was when they arrived 2,000 years ago.

"It's something that foreign observers have often commented on," Miles said. "Recent studies have shown that there is more red hair in Scotland and Wales than anywhere else in the world. It's a mutation that probably occurred between 8,000 and 10,000 years ago."

Britain's population in the late Stone Age may have much been larger than historians once supposed. For instance, scientists have calculated that it would have taken around 30 million hours to create Stonehenge.

"By the time Stonehenge was built you'd had about a thousand years of farming," Miles said. "The population's expanding, and people are getting together to form big labor forces to put up these big public buildings."

Population estimates based on the size and density of settlements put Britain's population at about 3.5 million by the time Romans invaded in A.D. 43.

It's not exactly clear why this history is relevant to current immigration policy, but lots of important, popular people think it's so relevant that it's worth lying about the facts, even though they are obvious to anyone with a cursory knowledge of British history. But, then, there are lots of important and popular people who don't seem to mind lying, and, indeed, think better of themselves for lying in a fashionable cause. In fact, the more blatant the lie, they appear to believe, the greater the moral credit they deserve.

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"The Left's War on Britishness" by Anthony Browne in the Spectator. 

One of the stranger scenes in Bridget Jones Diary is the entry for May 8th, 1995, when Bridget, whose heart is usually in the right place, tries to get her trendy friends to help her put together a party to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Victory-Europe day. But when she wants to decorate with Union Jacks, her friends think she's gone fascist, and the party never comes off.

Browne writes:

No, the real answer to why Britain spawned people fuelled with maniacal hate for their country is that Britain hates itself. In hating Britain, these British suicide bombers were as British as a police warning for flying the union flag.

Britain�s self-loathing is deep, pervasive and lethally dangerous. We get bombed, and we say it�s all our own fault. Schools refuse to teach history that risks making pupils proud, and use it instead as a means of instilling liberal guilt. The government and the BBC gush over �the other�, but recoil at the merest hint of British culture. The only thing we are licensed to be proud of is London�s internationalism � in other words, that there is little British left about it...

But self-loathing in a nation, like self-loathing in an individual, is alienating. Someone who despises himself inspires greater contempt than affection, and a country that hates itself cannot expect its newcomers to want to belong.

Only in the last few years has it dawned on the government how dangerous the Left�s war on Britishness really is. Labour ministers now queue up to declare that we need a new sense of British identity. But the ability to learn a few sentences in English and a knowledge of how to claim benefits do not create a national allegiance.

What is needed is something to make the people who live in these islands feel good about being British, but the war on Britishness has imposed a nationwide amnesia about our national story.

The historian Simon Schama wrote that �to collude in the minimisation of British history on the grounds of its imagined irrelevance to our rebranded national future, or from a suspicion that it does no more than recycle patriotic pieties unsuited to a global marketplace, would be an act of appallingly self-inflicted collective memory loss�. And as the American philosopher George Santayana warned, �A country without a memory is a country of madmen.�

Britain is one of the few countries where it is a source of pride to despise your country. We are all repeatedly taught the things to be ashamed of about Britain, but what about the things to be proud of?

The truth is that Britain�s self-loathing is as unique as it is unwarranted. Britain really is great. These small rainswept isles off the western end of the vast Eurasian landmass have contributed far more to the well-being of the rest of humanity than any other country, bar none.

Well, duh ...

Personally, I have no British ancestry, but if I may interject:

This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England. . . 

Thank you. I just wanted to get that off my chest. Browne continues:

Sometimes it takes a foreigner to open your eyes. A Norwegian diplomat told me long ago that he was taught at school, as British kids aren�t, that Britain gave the world industrialisation, democracy and football � its economic system, its political system and its fun.

That is just the start of it...

The problem for Britain is not that it has too little to be proud of, but too much.

Indeed.

That's a general problem today ... over the last 500 years, the levels of human accomplishment have been so radically uneven -- Caucasians over all others, Europeans over non-European Caucasians, Western Europeans over Eastern Europeans, and, more arguably, Brits over Continental Western Europeans -- that it seems pointless for living people to take pride in their ancestors' accomplishments because it would be like a man taking pride in men inventing 99% of the stuff worth inventing. 

It makes sense these days to celebrate the fact that a woman invented Wite-Out (the mother of Michael Nesmith of the Monkees, to be precise) but it doesn't make much sense to celebrate that a man invented Post-It notes, because men invented, more or less, everything. Likewise, it seems not just in bad taste, but pointless, to celebrate Western Europeans for all they've accomplished because they've accomplished so much. 

The downside, though, is that when you downplay traditions of greatness, and when you license envy and tell the most creative to be ashamed of their forebears for making everybody else in the world feel small, you tend to get less greatness in return. Culturally, we seem to be lacking in the confidence that produces greatness. 

The tragic irony is that no matter how many multiculti festivals the British government pays for and how much it denigrates its own past, the Pakistanis still know down in their bones that they come from an inferior culture, and it enrages them. On the other hand, these assaults on the pride of the natives by the elite has a corrosive effect on their will to create, and they sink further into drunken slothfulness.

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"Comprehensive Review" -- Before 1996's Proposition 209 outlawed the use of racial quotas in U. of California admissions decisions, picking applicants was simple: they just ranked the member's of each official ethnic group on test scores and GPA adjusted for class difficulty and selected from the top down until they filled each group's quota.

Now that it's unconstitutional to use racial preferences, the bureaucrats have instituted "comprehensive review" of applicants in order to reinstitute quotas surreptitiously by making the application process so complicated that nobody can figure out how they made their decisions. (The Latino Caucus in the state legislature demanded they get more Latinos into the UC schools than a colorblind system would produce.) One element of obfuscation is that each applicant must now submit an essay about how they have "overcome adversity." The purpose is for minorities to write about how they've been discriminated against so that the admissions committees can figure out if applicant named "John Jones" is black or white. Of course, it just encourages adolescents to dwell on their victimization, which adolescents love to do anyway.

This leaves the white and Asian kids with a problem: what adversity to write about? Well, if you've watched the Olympics on TV, you can probably guess: according to a UCLA professor, one out of three essays overall (and thus probably close to half of the white and Asian kids' essays) are about the death of a grandparent! 

"Everybody called my grandfather an angry old coot, and his neighbors got a restraining order against him after he kept throwing poisoned steaks to their barking dogs that woke him from his afternoon nap, and I hadn't actually seen him since I was eleven, but when he died at 86 on that golf course in Florida, the shock was so great that that's why I got that mediocre 2.75 GPA my second semester sophomore year, and I think if I hadn't been so traumatized I would have gotten better than that 540 on my European History SAT Subject Test."

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Tom Wolfe: Diversity = Dispersity on Campus: From Wolfe's novel I Am Charlotte Simmons (here's my review), in which Charlotte's friend Laurie describes diversity at North Carolina State:

Mr. Thom said there was certainly a lot written about multiculturalism and diversity in colleges these days. How did they manifest themselves in everyday life at Dupont?

"I don't know," said Charlotte. I just hear about them in speeches and things."

Laurie piped up again. "At State, everybody calls diversity dispersity. What happens is, everybody has their own clubs, their own signs, their own sections where they all sit in the dining hall -- all the African Americans are over there? ... and all the Asians sit over't these other tables? -- except for the Koreans? -- because they don't get along with the Japanese, so they sit way over there? Everybody's dispersed into their own little groups -- and everybody's told to distrust everybody else? Everybody's told that everybody else is trying to screw them over -- oops!" Laurie pulled a face and put her fingertip over her lips -- "I'm sorry!" She rolled eyes and smiled. "Anyway, the idea is, every other group is like prejudiced against your group, and no matter what they say, they're only out to take advantage of you, and you should have nothing to do with them -- unless you're white, in which case all the others are not prejudiced against you, they're like totally right, because you really are racist and everything, even if you don't know it? Everybody ends up dispersed into their own like turtle shells, suspicious of everybody else and being careful not to fraternize with them."

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UPDATED Below: Richard Lynn objects to my Jodie Foster example -- The co-author of IQ and the Wealth of Nations writes:

I think you have overestimated the effect of "regression toward the mean." The effects are quite small, as shown empirically in the Terman study of genius in which the IQs of the children were only about 5 points lower than those of the parents(133 vs 138, respectively). Theoretically, IQ is believed to be mostly determined by additive genes. If it were entirely determined by additive genes the average IQ of the children would be the same as that of the average of the parents. Thus Jodie Foster with her IQ of say 100 mated with a sperm donor with an IQ of 160 should have children with an average IQ of 130. Jodie Foster with her IQ of say 100 mated with Mr Average with an IQ of 100 should have children with an average IQ of 100. Regression occurs through non additive genes and environmental effects.

But wasn't the Terman study restricted to students who scored 130 and higher? William Shockley and another Nobel Prize winner famously missed the cut by a couple of points. Or perhaps I'm misinterpreting the point? Anyway, think of it this way, if your brother is 7 feet tall, how tall do you expect to be? Not 7 feet.

UPDATE: Greg Cochran fills in some details on the Terman study of highly intelligent children that began back before WWII. The average IQ of children in the study (the "Termites") was 151. The average IQ of their eventual spouses was 126. Thus, the average of the married couples was 138. The average IQ of their children was 133. This would suggest, crudely, a narrow sense heritability (parent to child) of 33/38 or 0.86, which would be fairly high even for a broad sense heritability (between identical twins). Other estimates of narrow sense heritability I've seen have been between 0.34 and 0.5, which would bring about more regression toward the mean. 

Anybody have other studies on narrow-sense heritability?

UPDATED: A reader writes:

   Have the IQ's of the children in the Terman study been
adjusted for the Flynn effect?  If not the estimated heritability
will be too high.
         Also I would expect that being raised by a high IQ parent helps a bit.

Good points.

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Bye-Bye Bandar: After 22 years as the Saudi ambassador to America, Prince Bandar is headed home. The Prince was bad for the U.S., using his extraordinary amiability and infinite supply of ready cash to exploit moral weaknesses in Washington higher-ups. That's why I'd been calling for him to be sent home for several years. (I would, however, love to read his memoirs someday. I suspect, though, that many important people in our nation's capital would not look forward to the publication of Bandar's autobiography.)

On the other hand, he was a tremendously talented ambassador, and his country was terribly lucky to have him. On the human level, his story is admirable: he is the son of a slave-girl (he's about as black-looking as Colin Powell).

A former State Dept. official emails:

The Saudis have outlawed slavery [although not until 1962, during the American civil rights era], but it still exists not only for black Africans, but also for Filipino housekeepers who are effectively abducted for long periods after arriving in Saudi with a work permit. As Christians, the Filipinos have no civil rights whatsoever.

He reminisces about his contacts with Bandar:

One trip in the mid-1970s, I was told I would do well to meet a young Prince Bandar bin Sultan, son of the Defense Minister and the fighter pilot/squadron leader of the Saudi Air Force�s crack attack wing. We met for several hours in his office and he told me that the Saudi military considered Iraq the biggest military threat in that bad neighborhood [the US Embassy was under the impression that the Shah of Iran was more dangerous than Saddam Hussein, so this was a surprise to me]. 

The very dark and athletic Bandar invited me to dinner at his home that evening, a rare event for a foreign diplomat who usually only saw Saudi royal family types from afar. That evening, over liquorless orange juice, Bandar and I spent hours discussing Saudi domestic policy and US-Saudi diplomatic relations. He told me the fascinating story of how he rose from the lowly lineage of a Sudanese slave mother and Minister of Defense father Prince Sultan to a position of some eminence----his shiftless full-blooded royal brothers were all playboys and had sinecure government positions. He explained that since Bandar had been shunned by his half-brothers as a child, he had hung around the alpha-male type adults in the household and overheard their political discussions until he had figured out a lot of the Saudi backstairs political scene through his native street smarts and curious mind. 

Sent to military school, he was the only senior prince who flew advanced jet fighters �"The plane does not know I am a prince.� 

Although in a moment of exuberance that night Bandar told me that he wanted to be king, he actually did better. His longtime service as Saudi Ambassador in DC and his affable intelligence gave him access to several presidents of the USA [Reagan, the two Bushes & Clinton] which he used to become actual friends with all of them except Reagan. As the son of a slave mother, Bandar could never come into the line of succession to become king, but his marriage to the daughter of former King Faisal assured him of a senior position in the Royal Family. 

Perhaps an anecdote related to me by XXX, sheds light on just how important Bandar became over the twenty-plus years he was Saudi Ambassador in DC. The story is that in 1990, after Saddam invaded Kuwait in the summer, there was a major problem in convincing the Saudis that the US military should be allowed to be positioned in the Islamic Holy Land [subsequent events in the mid-90s bore out the controversial implications of stationing �infidels� in Saudi]. 

Prez George HW Bush asked Bandar, who was totally committed to sending a US force to Saudi, how to get King Fahd, buffeted by senior royal princes distrustful of the US and also skeptical that the US would even honor Carter and Reagan�s promises to defend Saudi against an attack from anywhere, to agree to invite the Americans. Bandar asked GHWB to send Defense Secretary Dick Cheney [who brought along Colin Powell] with him to Riyadh for a meeting with the King. Bandar asked Cheney to bring along reconnaissance photos of jets parked on a military airfield---it didn�t matter from where. 

Bandar told Cheney and Powell that they should let him do the talking. XXX told me that Bandar had Cheney show the King the photos and that Bandar said that the airfield was in North Yemen and that the jets were Iraqi planes sent by Saddam to encircle Saudi Arabia. 

Bear in mind that the Saudis had seized a huge chunk of Yemen early in the 20th century and that about one Saudi out of four was of Yemeni heritage. North Yemen had defeated Egypt in a war in the �60s and the Yemenis were renowned as the fiercest fighters in the Arab world. Yemen also had made no secret that it wanted the territory back that the Saudis had ripped off fifty-some years before. 

When Fahd was shown the photo and told that the Iraqi planes were in Yemen, his immediate reaction was to invite the American military into Saudi Arabia. 

Of course, Saddam was quickly defeated by Schwartzkopf�s brilliant plan, but the American military remained long after the Gulf War was successfully concluded. Osama bin Ladin and the Saudi mujahideen who had fought in Afghanistan regarded US presence in the Islamic Holy Land as an abomination worse than the Crusaders� long stay in the Levant. Of the fifteen Saudis in the suicide attacks of 9/11, eleven were of Yemeni heritage, as of course is Osama bin Ladin. And of course, Prince Bandar�s success in convincing King Fahd to allow US troops into Saudi Arabia in the Cheney meeting that day had unintended consequences which will last for a long time.

Bandar's replacement as ambassador to Washington, Prince Turki Faisal was fired two days before 9/11 and doubts remain as to his knowledge of what was going to happen and when it was going to happen. The best explanation for the extremely rare occurrence of a senior royal official being fired is that Prince Turki had been paying off major terrorist organizations to prevent an attack on the Saudis.  It turned out that one or more of the huge payoffs, reportedly amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, were complete scams.  Another version is that the terrorists took the money and then committed hits against the Saudis anyway.  No one has successfully demonstrated that Prince Turki had any advance knowledge of 9/11.

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"Hustle & Flow" -- The much anticipated Sundance hit about the pimp who wants to be a gangsta rapper will be out Friday. From my review in the upcoming American Conservative (subscribe here):

Hip hop first hit the Top 40 way back in 1979 with the amusing "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugarhill Gang. At the time I thought, "What a cute novelty record -- I bet that style will be around for a year, maybe even two!" Little did I anticipate that decades of stylistic innovation by African-Americans were coming to an end, and that rap would turn out to be the black hole that entrapped black talent for, apparently, all eternity.

Hip-hop kept its goofy aura through the mid-80s (when the biggest selling rap record was "The Super Bowl Shuffle" by the Chicago Bears NFL team).

Then, gangsta rap emerged from Los Angeles and New York. By promoting the drug dealer's code of what a boy had to do to be a man, it helped spread the crack wars across the country. By 1993-94, the murder rate had quadrupled among black 14-17 year-old-youths born in the late 70s (which was after Roe v. Wade, as economist Steven D. Levitt conveniently forgot to mention while pushing his abortion-cut-crime theory in the bestseller Freakonomics).

Fortunately, the generation born in the 80s started to grasp that they could listen to gangsta rap without living it, but the damage had been done. In New York City today, there are 36 percent more black women than black men alive.

It says much about contemporary values that the Audience Award at the Sundance film festival was won by the indie crowd-pleaser "Hustle & Flow," the purportedly uplifting story -- "Everybody gotta have a dream" -- of a pimp striving to find redemption by becoming a gangsta rapper.

Perhaps we will next be treated to a heartwarming movie about a Gestapo agent aspiring to qualify for the Death's Head SS. If, as the hype claims, "Hustle & Flow" is the new "Rocky," well, then "Jeff Gannon" should be pitching Hollywood on his rise, such as it was, from militaristic manwhore to Bush Administration shill.

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18 Year Terms For Supreme Court Justices: Isn't it time that Supreme Court Justices got a single 18 year term? Winning a Presidential election would give you two and only two nominations during your four year term. Confirmation battles would be less vicious and you wouldn't have the unseemly sight of John Paul Stevens trying to hang on into his late 80s for a Democrat to win the 2008 election. Also, Presidents would have less incentive to name younger nominees in the hopes of getting three or four decades out of them. Nominate them at about 55 and pension them off at 73.

There would be some problems during the transition phase to the new 18 year system, and the issue would come up of what to do when a justice dies or retires early, but they are all solvable.

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Levitt's state-by-state abortion-crime correlations: Something that hasn't been mentioned much is what an uncertain reed the Freakonomics abortion-cut-crime theory is largely based upon: correlations between the abortion rates by state in the 1970s and the crime rates by state in the 1990s. Beyond all the other problems I've noted (such as the correlations only work for the decline in crime in the mid-1990s, and instead are reversed during the huge crime increase in the late 1980s and early 1990s), a massive weakness in his analysis is that people move. After two decades, a large fraction of the population is living in a different state. Even worse for Levitt's assumption, the odds that a grown child will be living in a different state than his mother was living in when she was pregnant with him are even higher.

Now, if all this movement was purely random, utterly unrelated to crime and abortion laws, then that would simply make any connection between abortion in the 1970s and crime in the 1990s harder to detect. But, we have good reason to assume that interstate migration is driven in part precisely by crime rates and by the general moral climate (of which the abortion rate is symbolic). 

This is an enormously complicated subject, but let me give one example. Consider New York and California, which Levitt repeatedly points to as states that legalized abortion early (in 1970) and had crime fall-offs earlier in the 1990s. If you look at white people, you'll see that NY and California continued to attract affluent whites who could afford to insulate their kids from crime and moral decay, while they shed large numbers of less well-to-do whites who were worried that they couldn't afford to provide their kids with a good upbringing. 

So, comparing the white populations of NY and California in the 1970s versus the 1990s is a classic apples and oranges comparison, and within each state, too. Among whites, the populations became increasingly affluent, older, and the family sizes shrunk. In contrast, the white populations of socially conservative (and thus low abortion) states became relatively younger and less affluent and thus more crime prone.

But that's just one dynamic. When you throw in the significant differences in the racial makeup of states over time, it all gets extremely complicated. But the key point is that there is no reason to assume that you can make safe apples to apples comparisons of the populations in states in the 1970s versus 1990s, as Levitt assumes you can.

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National Geographic on IQ Evolution:

Did Discrimination Enhance Intelligence of Jews?
James Owen for National Geographic News 
July 18, 2005

Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Leonard Bernstein, Saul Bellow, to name a few, all shared European Jewish ancestry. 

Known as Ashkenazim, this ethnic group is blessed with more than its fair share of talented minds.

But they are also prone to a number of serious genetic diseases.

Researchers now suggest that intelligence is closely linked to such illnesses in Ashkenazi Jews, and that the diseases are the result of natural selection.

The Ashkenazim are descended from the Jewish communities of Germany, Austria, Poland, and Eastern Europe that date back to the 10th century. Today they make up around 80 percent of the world's Jews.

Ashkenazim have the highest average IQ of any ethnic group, scoring 12 to 15 points above the European average. They are also strongly represented in fields and occupations requiring high cognitive ability. For instance, European-origin Jews account for 27 percent of U.S. Nobel science prize winners but make up only about 3 percent of the U.S. population.

But the group is also associated with neurological disorders, including Tay-Sachs, Gaucher's, and Niemann-Pick. Tay-Sachs is a fatal inherited disease of the central nervous system. Sufferers lack an enzyme needed to break down fatty substances in the brain and nerve cells. Gauchers and Niemann-Pick are similar, often fatal diseases.

Researchers at the University of Utah's anthropology department investigated a possible link between these genetic illnesses and above-average intelligence in Ashkenazi Jews. They suggest both are the result of natural selection for enhanced brainpower.

Because Jews were discriminated against in medieval Europe, they were often driven into professions such as moneylending and banking which were looked down upon or forbidden to Christians...

So if natural selection is responsible for above-average intelligence in Ashkenazi Jews, could the same apply to other ethnic groups?

Co-author Gregory Cochran said, "The logical place to look for something similar�an occupationally specialized, reproductively isolated group that might have been shaped by recent natural selection�would be India. In particular, the Parsis."

Parsis are descendents of the Zoroastrians who emigrated from Persia to India in the 8th century. As in medieval Jewish communities in Europe, Parsis marry almost wholly within their own group. They are also economically successful with a long history as traders and businessmen.

Parsis are also especially vulnerable to diseases not seen in their neighbors, including Parkinson's disease, breast cancer, and tremor disorders.

Modern-day Ashkenazim are now far more likely to marry outside their ethnic group. Cochran says he would expect that both a tendency for higher IQ and associated genetic disorders to become less marked over time.

The idea that some ethnic groups are inherently more intelligent than others is controversial, and researchers are divided on the issue.

The Human Genome Project, completed in 2000, suggested that humans are 99.9 percent genetically identical across all races. At the time, the project's findings were hailed as evidence that the human genome is color-blind.

But the journal Psychology, Public Policy and Law recently published a study that reviewed research into the differences in average IQ between Asians, whites, and blacks.

J. Philippe Rushton, from the University of Western Ontario, and Arthur Jensen, an educational psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, concluded these differences are 50 percent genetic in origin.

"Race differences show up by three years of age, even after matching on maternal education and other variables," Rushton said. "Therefore they cannot be due to poor education since this has not yet begun to exert an effect."

Writing in response to their findings, University of Michigan psychologist Richard E. Nesbitt said that "there is not a shred of evidence" in the research to suggest the IQ gap between races has a genetic basis.   [More]

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Assimilation: A reader writes:

1. The cause of assimilation is further damaged by the fact that the host society refuses to take any kind of serious pride in itself. If you were a Turk would you want to assimilate to a German identity that's become synonymous with evil itself over the past few decades? Likewise, why would any Mexican want to identify with a white culture that's been tarred with every pejorative? It's become more socially prestigious to remain a hyphenated American.

2. A real cause for worry when it comes to Mexican immigration is the recent Native Hawaiian bill that's in the Senate now. If it passes, you can bet more than a few Mexican Civil Rights groups will be looking to get their own "Native rights" bill passed on the premise that they were displaced in 1845 in the same way the Hawaiian were in the 1890s. Of course, their claims will have even less merit, but what does that matter when it comes to grievance legislation?

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Muslim immigration vs. Hispanic immigration: In the wake of the London bombings, lots of Americans are patting themselves on the back because, unlike those suicidal Europeans who let in tens of millions of Muslims, we sensible, hard-headed Americans lets in tens of millions of Latin Americans. Everybody knows that Muslims are maniacal hotheads while Latinos are happy-go-lucky little people who will be perfectly content to wash our cars for minimum wage for all eternity, right?

What is overlooked is that back when Europeans were letting in lots of Muslims as guest workers, it seemed like a good idea at the time. The Muslim immigrants appeared dutiful and submissive. Indeed, Britain's first generation of Pakistanis were easy to push around because they were physically small. But now their grandsons are strapping big louts who don't take no crap from nobody.

The point is: The future is unwritten. But there are certain patterns in history. They aren't sure things, but we ought to take them into consideration. One is that peoples change over time. Their expectations change. Just as African-Americans were considered such naturally content servants up through about 1960 that two major consumer packaged goods brands were named after black cooks (Uncle Ben's rice and Aunt Jemima's syrup), a people can get tired of being on the bottom of the pecking order, and their young men can lash out violently. As I wrote in "The Wind from the South" in June, a wave of anti-white populist activism is sweeping South America and headed for Mexico. Eventually, it will probably arrive in the U.S.

A reader writes:

It often seems to happen that second-generation immigrants, or rather, the homegrown children of immigrants, are more frustrated and angry than their parents. I can think of two reasons for that: 

1- They have more identity problems. The immigrants themselves may have adaptation difficulties, but they know who they are. For instance, a Turk who settles in Germany knows that he is not German but Turkish. His son may not know what he is, Turkish or German. Such ambivalence can be frustrating and frustration can easily lead to anger. 

2- The father may be poor but he is more likely to compare his economic situation with what he had in the old country. The son compares his situation with that of the other people in the new country, and if he is poorer than most, he may resent it. American blacks don't compare themselves with sub-Saharan Africans or Haitians but with other Americans.

The problem with stopping the inflow of Muslim immigrants is that it will be perceived as discriminatory by the Muslims that already in the country. For instance, if the Netherlands were to forbid the entry of new Muslim immigrants into the country, but not the entry of non-Muslim immigrants, then the 1 million Muslims who already are in the Netherlands will feel that as a slap in the face and argue that they are treated as second-class citizens and victims of religious discrimination. In light of this, it is preferable to drastically reduce all immigration, or else use criteria which cannot be construed as discriminatory, such as geographic proximity or linguistic similarity.

I doubt if such steps would assuage Muslim anger. They'll see right through such stratagems. And, anyway, they're angry right now.

I suspect that the key is to show strength. Trying to assuage them just arouses their contempt. 

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Israel on Birthright Citizenship for Illegal Aliens: John Podhoretz was highly offended when John Derbyshire questioned the reigning interpretation of the 14th Amendment that insists that the children of illegal aliens are automatically born U.S. citizens. I then asked whether Israel offered birthright citizenship to illegal aliens. A reader replies:

No, Israel does not offer birthright citizenship to the offspring of illegal aliens - or even to the offspring of legal resident aliens. Israel's citizenship laws are not dissimilar to those of much of central Europe - Germany, Hungary and other countries with large diaspora populations have citizenship rules that strongly favor members of such populations who choose to "return" to the mother country, and are otherwise quite restrictive. 

Germany, for example, has long offered an open door to "Volga Germans" whose ancestors had migrated from Germany to Russia at the invitation of Catherine the Great.

I have an amusing anecdote to relate in regard of Israeli notions of *American* immigration rules. I attended a presentation by an Israeli cabinet minister (from the Labor party) and one of the other attendees asked a question about immigration and residency - to make a long story short, her Israeli father was being cared for by a Filipino alien resident in Israel who, because of the restrictions of Israeli law, could not bring his wife over to join him, and she was questioning the justice of this decision. He replied in part by pointing out that Israeli law is much more generous than American law, as America promptly evicts anyone caught here illegally without so much as a hearing. I went up to him afterwords and asked him how his impression of America could be correct given that there are approximately 10 million aliens illegally resident in America. He simply didn't believe the figure.

I can certainly sympathize with the Israeli minister. If you had never heard the facts about America and illegal immigration, would you believe them when you were first told them?

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The First of Many? A friend has been predicting for a year or so that more than a few members of the current political class will wind up hot-footing it to Israel when the heat gets too intense. Today comes word from The Hill that a couple of small fish in one of the many burgeoning scandals have gotten out of the kitchen:

Two former associates of Jack Abramoff, the embattled lobbyist, left the country Monday night en route to a new life in Israel. [For the rest, click the "Permalink" below ...]

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La Griffe du Lion on what Larry Summers should have said: The Zorro of statisticians is back with a detailed explanation of "Sex Differences in Mathematical Aptitude." Here is his abstract:

Mathematics is a man's game. A gender gap appears early in life, blossoms with the onset of puberty and reaches full bloom by mid-adolescence. It indelibly shapes women's prospects for doing significant mathematics. In this account of cognitive sex differences, Prodigy shows how sex-differentiated ability in 15 year-olds accounts for the exiguous female representation at the highest levels of mathematical research. A female Fields Medalist is predicted to surface once every 103 years.

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WSJ: "More Immigrants, More Jobs: Keeping America's door open has kept America's economy booming." And besides, immigration has kept London's Underground tube system booming, too!

Sure, there have been "more jobs" for immigrants, but there hasn't been any growth in the number of jobs for American-born citizens during the entire 4.5 years of the Bush Administration, as Edwin S. Rubenstein has been pointing out for years. You call that booming?

Paul Krugman writes in "The Dropout Puzzle:"

Or maybe the figures on unemployment are giving a false signal.

Economists who argue that there's something wrong with the unemployment numbers are buzzing about a new study by Katharine Bradbury, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, which suggests that millions of Americans who should be in the labor force aren't. "The addition of these hypothetical participants," she writes, "would raise the unemployment rate by one to three-plus percentage points." ...

In fact, because older Americans, especially older women, are more likely to work than in the past, labor force participation should have risen, not fallen, over the past four years. As a result, she suggests that there may be "considerable slack in the U.S. labor market": there are at least 1.6 million and possibly as many as 5.1 million people who aren't counted as unemployed but would take jobs if they were available.

Of course, being Krugman, he refuses to mention the I-word as a major contributor.

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Now on VDARE.com: "Podhoretz, Junior versus Steve Sailer:"

I received an email from John Podhoretz reading:

"Please keep attacking me. It's how I know I'm not a bigoted, racist scum."

I'm not exactly sure what "a � scum" is, but, clearly, Pod No Like.

Peter Brimelow has observed how often a "racist" turns out to be merely someone who is winning an argument with a liberal. But with a neocon of Podhoretz the Lesser's quality, well, you don't even have to be arguing with him to be "a bigoted, racist scum."... 

Norman Podhoretz was somewhat anomalous among the first generation of neoconservatives, such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nathan Glazer, and James Q. Wilson, because he was trained as a literary critic rather than a social scientist. But like them, and like some 1980s neoconservatives such as Charles Murray, he had some audacious things to say about race.

In his 1963 essay in Commentary, "My Negro Problem�And Ours," the elder Podhoretz wrote:

"[F]or a long time I was puzzled to think that Jews were supposed to be rich when the only Jews I knew were poor, and that Negroes were supposed to be persecuted when it was the Negroes who were doing the only persecuting I knew about�and doing it, moreover, to me� [It] was the whites, the Italians and Jews, who feared the Negroes, not the other way around."

Thirty years later, the elder Podhoretz reflected on the controversy his article about "black thuggery" had caused:

"In 1963 those descriptions were very shocking to most white liberals. In their eyes Negroes were all long-suffering and noble victims of the kind who had become familiar through the struggles of the civil rights movement in the South, the "heroic period" of the movement, as one if its most heroic leaders, Bayard Rustin, called it. While none of my white critics went so far as to deny the truthfulness of the stories I told, they themselves could hardly imagine being afraid of Negroes (how could they when the only Negroes most of them knew personally were maids and cleaning women?). In any case they very much disliked the emphasis I placed on black thuggery and aggression.

"Today, when black-on-white violence is much more common than it was then, many white readers could easily top those stories with worse. And yet even today few of them would be willing to speak truthfully in public about their entirely rational fear of black violence and black crime. Telling the truth about blacks remains dangerous to one's reputation: to use that now famous phrase I once appropriated from D.H. Lawrence in talking about ambition, the fear of blacks has become the dirty little secret of our political culture. And since a dirty little secret breeds hypocrisy and cant in those who harbor it, I suppose it can still be said that most whites are sick and twisted in their feelings about blacks, albeit in a very different sense that they were in 1963. "

Time for John Podhoretz to email his father accusing him of being "a bigoted, racist scum!"   [More]

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Ignoring the Parable of the Talents:  As so often these days, Mark Steyn unleashes his vast skills in the service of obfuscation:

But in the real world there's only one scandal in this whole wretched business -- that the CIA, as part of its institutional obstruction of the administration, set up a pathetic ''fact-finding mission'' that would be considered a joke by any serious intelligence agency and compounded it by sending, at the behest of his wife, a shrill politically motivated poseur who, for the sake of 15 minutes' celebrity on the cable gabfest circuit, misled the nation about what he found.

Uh, Mark, the Niger yellowcake documents were forgeries. The UN's IAEA discovered they were fake with about 15 minutes of Googling -- they found that the Niger officials mentioned in the documents had been been out of power for years. 

There are a lot of scandals in this whole wretched business of the Iraq Attaq (and I suspect that Karl Rove's involvement is less culpable than that of some others - history may look kindly upon Rove as a voice of reason who kept the U.S. from also invading Syria right after Saddam's statue came down), but one obvious scandal that hasn't been drawing the attention it deserves is who created these forgeries, which surfaced via Italy's military intelligence service. The obvious usual suspect in any dubious activities involving both Italian intelligence and the Middle East, Michael Ledeen, has denied to me having any involvement in the forgeries, but he broke off the email discussion he initiated when I asked him if he would use his Italian contacts to search for the Real Forgers.

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Another Waster of his Talents: Niall Ferguson, the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, writes in the Daily Telegraph about one of the London Bombers:

He was born in Yorkshire in 1983... He was not poor; his father, an immigrant from Pakistan, had built up a successful takeaway food business, selling fish and chips and driving a Mercedes. He was not uneducated, assuming you regard a degree in sports science from Leeds Metropolitan University as education. Nor, I suspect, would he have failed the "cricket test" famously devised by Lord Tebbit as a test of cultural assimilation. An uncle says he was "proud to be British"...

I am afraid that many people - and not all of them supporters of the British National Party - will also see him as a proof that Enoch Powell was right when he seemed to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood" in his notorious speech of 1968. When, as happened last year, the editor of the impeccably liberal magazine Prospect asks whether open borders pose a threat to an open society, the rehabilitation of Powellism starts to look like a real possibility.

And yet this is to misunderstand what we are up against. For the crisis we face has nothing to do with the kind of innate racial incompatibilities Powell believed in. The saloon bar response - "Send them back and the seal the borders" - is not merely impractical; it completely misses the point.

Well, of course, Powell couldn't possibly have been right, because that would mean that ... all of us respectable folks who ostracized him and his ideas were wrong!

The settlement of Western Europe by Muslims is now an irreversible phenomenon; moreover, it seems bound to continue more or less inexorably, whether legally or illegally.

Except that Finland has very few immigrants. Why not? Because the Finns decided they wouldn't let them in! But in most of the rest of Europe, the prescient people, like Powell, were denounced by the nice people, like Ferguson, and driven out of influence. 

The most obvious response to the London Bombings is: "First, do no more harm." Stop letting in more people from Muslim countries. But men like Ferguson will work hard to keep us oblivious to the obvious. As George Orwell said:

"We have now sunk to a depth at which re-statement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men."

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Boris Johnson blames the bombings on ... Enoch Powell: Also in the Daily Telegraph, talented editor / Tory MP / loverboy Boris Johnson writes:

The disaster is that we no longer make any real demands of loyalty upon those who are immigrants or the children of immigrants. There are many culprits, and foremost among them is Enoch Powell. As Bill Deedes has pointed out over the years, the problem was not so much his catastrophic 1968 tirade [you can read Powell's speech for yourself here and see whether it was a "tirade" or not] against immigration, but the way he made it impossible for any serious politician to discuss the consequences of immigration, and how a multiracial society ought to work.

In the wake of Powell's racist foray, no one had the guts to talk about Britishness, or whether it was a good thing to insist - as the Americans do so successfully - on the basic loyalty of immigrants to the country of immigration.

There's nothing that makes people hate you more than being right. Tories like Johnson and Ferguson are still mad at Powell for being right 37 years ago about the current situation. Powell correctly observed in 1968:

"... people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: �if only�, they love to think, �if only people wouldn't talk about it, it probably wouldn't happen�. Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical."

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Why Foucault shouldn't be lumped with Derrida: My man in Istanbul has been thinking about why Darwin is not as popular in France and why Foucault is misinterpreted by both the Left and the Right in the Anglosphere:

Anglos, in contrast to the French, have managed to create globe-spanning empires and commonwealths. This put their [natural, as it is for all tribes] chauvinism to test: how do I get the Bantu to do my bidding in the British way?

The French very quickly gave up on their imperial ambitions. And even today, when they discuss "humanity" or "history", their main reference is at most the West continental Europe, but more often than not solely France - i.e. Netherlands of Belgium. That is, for them, humanity = the French.
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"Weekend of slaughter propels Iraq towards all-out civil war" writes James Hider in Baghdad for The Times of London:

IRAQ is slipping into all-out civil war, a Shia leader declared yesterday, as a devastating onslaught of suicide bombers slaughtered more than 150 people, most of them Shias, around the capital at the weekend.

One bomber killed almost 100 people when he blew up a fuel tanker south of Baghdad, an attack aimed at snapping Shia patience and triggering the full-blown sectarian war that al-Qaeda has been trying to foment for almost two years.

If they are going to hold a civil war, does that mean we get to go home?

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London bombings show Bush-Blair's Invade the World / Invite the World strategy not working out: On a purely logical level, it doesn't make much sense for Bush and Blair to believe in invading Arab countries while welcoming Arabs. Trying one or the other probably won't work terribly well, but doing both at once seems guaranteed to fail. 

The French tried it during the Algerian War -- they sent 500,000 Frenchmen to fight in Algeria ... and to alleviate the subsequent labor shortage, greatly increased their intake of Algerian laborers. Unsurprisingly, these immigrant cousins of the Algerians the French Army was torturing to stop the terror-bombing campaign in Algiers have not proved the basis of a happy, well assimilated class of new Frenchmen.

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War Nerd: "Nerf War and Real War: IRA vs. Al Qaeda" is the new column by Gary Brecher:

The IRA has been around for a long time, but by the late 1960s, when British troops reoccupied Northern Ireland, the leadership in Dublin had turned into a typical Western Communist party: all talk, no action. The guys on the street up North wanted to go back into action, but the Dublin committees said that wouldn't be cool with Marx. The hotheads up in Belfast told them to stick Das Kapital up Das Arse, dug up the guns they'd buried and started potting Tommies. They called themselves the "Provisional" IRA (PIRA), as opposed to the "Official" wing, and to formalize the split they had a nice little blood feud with the "Officials," with dozens of assassinations on both sides.
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City Journal on Freakonomics: A lie can go halfway 'round the world before truth gets its boots on. 

Steven Malanga writes in "Where Freakonomics Errs:"

But in economics, new theories based on innovative research are almost immediately tested to see if they can be replicated, and in Levitt�s case what quickly emerged were counterstudies that questioned his methods and conclusions. Professor Ted Joyce of City University of New York found that incidents of homicide by perpetrators in age groups too old to have been affected by legalized abortion declined faster than murders by younger perps. John Lott of the American Enterprise Institute and John Whitley of Adelaide University in Australia noted that research on the legalization of abortion suggested that it actually increased illegitimate births and single-parent families. They concluded that rather than decrease crime, legalized abortion probably contributed slightly to its increase.

Levitt has addressed some of these criticisms in academic journals, though not convincingly, to my mind. But in Freakonomics, he completely ignores this counterevidence and presents his own work as if it�s Scripture. Only a few reviewers, most notably the eminent sociologist James Q. Wilson in Commentary, have noted the way the book merely disregards the work of others.

But the flaws in Levitt�s notion of what caused crime to fall go beyond his theory of abortion. In Freakonomics he also dismisses the idea that innovative policing methods of the type that New York instituted during the Giuliani years had any effect on crime. This idea has been particularly attractive to reviewers of the book, prompting Lowenstein in the Times to crow that �[w]hile all the world was congratulating Rudolph W. Giuliani for reducing violent crime . . . the authors demonstrate that Hizzoner probably had little to do with it.�

Levitt bases this conclusion not only on his work on abortion but on another study he�s done, which attempts to correlate declines in crime with the expansion of a city�s police force. Looking at data from 1970 through 1992, Levitt concludes that adding to the size of your police force probably accounted for about 10 percent of the 1990s drop in crime. With that in mind, he rejects the idea that New York�s policing methods helped rein in crime because, once one adjusts for the growth in Gotham�s force, which Levitt says increased by 45 percent, the city�s reduction in crime is no greater than that of Los Angeles, a city that never incorporated the �broken windows� policing that Giuliani championed.

But there are serious questions about Levitt�s work here. For one thing, once you adjust the growth in New York�s police force for the expansion of its population during the 1990s and then compare it with per capita police rates in other cities (as even Levitt does in his other work), the numbers tell a different story. New York�s police force grew by 18 percent per capita during the 1990s, according to an FBI study, �Police in Large Cities.� This put the city behind police force increases in Newark, and in line with or slightly ahead of gains in cities like Baltimore, where the size of the force relative to the population rose by 20 percent, in Philadelphia by 13 percent, St. Louis by 10 percent, and Chicago by 9 percent.

What�s startling about this list is how little these increases in staffing paid off for most of these cities during the 1990s. While New York�s violent crime rate declined by 65 percent in the 1990s, most of these other cities saw only small decreases in crime, and in a few cases violent crime actually rose. Chicago, for one, ultimately passed New York as the place with the highest total of murders per year, even though Chicago�s population is only 38 percent of New York�s.   [more}

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My Prediction Coming True: Last September, I wrote: 

"... a second term for the Bush Administration is likely to resemble the second term of the Nixon Administration, with the scandals of the first four years finally bubbling to the surface."

I won't venture a guess at how at fault Rove is in Plamegate -- it would be a waste of time at this point to try to build a model of what actually happened, since there will be more revelations -- but the general point is that a lot of bad stuff was done to lie the country into this war, and scandals stemming from the this will slowly erode the Administration over the rest of its lifespan. If the old Special Prosecutor law hadn't been allowed to die toward the end of the Clinton Administration, nothing would be happening in Washington right now except scandals.

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Will Michelle Wie Boycott The Masters? The 15-year-old golf goddess  

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"RNC Chief to Say It Was 'Wrong' to Exploit Racial Conflict for Votes"  From the Washington Post:

By Mike Allen
Thursday, July 14, 2005; Page A04

It was called "the southern strategy," started under Richard M. Nixon in 1968, and described Republican efforts to use race as a wedge issue -- on matters such as desegregation and busing -- to appeal to white southern voters.

Ken Mehlman, the Republican National Committee chairman, this morning will tell the NAACP national convention in Milwaukee that it was "wrong."

"By the '70s and into the '80s and '90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out," Mehlman says in his prepared text. "Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong."

Mehlman, a Baltimore native who managed President Bush's reelection campaign, goes on to discuss current overtures to minorities, calling it "not healthy for the country for our political parties to be so racially polarized."

Mehlman went on to add that all white Southern GOP members of both Houses of Congress would resign tomorrow, along with the President, but not before passing a constitutional amendment disenfranchising white Southern voters. Mehlman concluded his speech by saying:

"And I, for one, welcome our new Democratic overlords. I'd like to remind them as a trusted Republican personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves."

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"Is this the future we really want? Different drugs for different races" is the headline on a Kenan Malik essay in the Times of London. Personally, as somebody whose life may well have been saved by a new medical breakthrough in 1997 (the Rituxan monoclonal antibody for lymphatic cancer), I think the first priority for patients is seeing that they simply have a future, and if different drugs for different races is a way to achieve that, so be it.

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Keeping Israel Jewish: Israel's Ha'aretz newspaper reports on some sensible-sounding immigration reforms being considered by the Israeli government:

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A Pod story -- A reader writes to say:

The account of John Podhoretz's firing of Hilton Kramer from the NY Post editorial pages isn't quite as Hanna Rosin presented it in that magazine piece you linked to. As Hilton tells it, back in '82, when he and Lipman were starting up The New Criterion, Pod Jr. got wind of it. He was just graduating (or recently graduated -- not sure of time line here) from Chicago. He jumped on a plane, flew to New York, arrived at Hilton's door, and asked for a job as senior editor of the new magazine. Kramer gently explained that he needed someone with actual editing experience, and turned him down. So when Pod took over the NY Post editorial page, first thing he did was fire Hilton.

Anybody else have any Pod stories? I hear there are a lot of them...

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"Please keep attacking me" emails John Podhoretz:

"It's how I know I'm not a bigoted, racist scum."

Such wit, such eloquence, such insight, such diction!
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Enoch Powell vindicated: The Washington Post reports today:

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Conservatives on Evolution: Ben Adler's article in The New Republic "Evolutionary War" has been getting a lot of publicity for asking various conservative pundits questions like, "Do you believe in evolution?"

Somebody should ask liberal pundits, "Do you believe in the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life?"

I bet not many would agree. Of course, in reality, that's the subtitle to Darwin's Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

Way back in 1999, I wrote two long essays for Toronto's National Post analyzing both sides in this debate, which I think still sum it up well:

Ironically, while the religious right engages in futile attacks on Darwin's theory of what animals evolved from, the left and center clamp down upon Darwin's theory of what humans evolved to. 

A Miracle Happens Here: Darwin's Enemies on the Right

Equality v. Truth: Darwin's Enemies on the Left

Of course, I haven't noticed that my essays had any impact on the debate whatsoever, so I guess I'll have to write another article. Not that anyone will pay attention to my good sense, but at least I might get a needed paycheck for it.

John Derbyshire wasn't asked but he sends along his responses:

---John Derbyshire (Tree House Builders For Truth, Justice, And Ethel Merman)

---Whether he personally believes in evolution: "Yes."

---What he thinks of intelligent design: "Bunk."

---How evolution should be taught in public schools: "Same as algebra."

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The Bush Economy in Action, or "Bush has been berry berry good to me:" From the New York Times:

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Making Jonah Goldberg seem like Lord Kenneth Clark: Many have wondered why the bumptious bully John Podhoretz, that living embodiment of regression to the mean, was invited into NRO's The Corner. Perhaps it was to make Jonah Goldberg seem as cultivated by comparison as the late art critic who hosted the great Civilisation documentary in the 1970s.

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Legal Immigration Trends: A reader summarizes the government's legal immigration statistics:

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Quality Control on the Fritz at the WaPo: In an op-ed in the Washington Post defending the Mexican cartoon of the black ape-boy Memin Pinguin, Mexican historian Enrique Krause writes:

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"The Beautiful Country" and "Broken Flowers" -- My reviews from the latest issue of The American Conservative (now available to electronic subscribers). Excerpts:

In this age of family break-up, the theme of separated fathers and sons underlies the summer's sci-fi popcorn movies, such as "War of the Worlds," "Batman Begins," and "Revenge of the Sith." It also drives two of the season's quieter releases for grown-ups, "Broken Flowers" with Bill Murray and "The Beautiful Country" with Nick Nolte.

Opening July 8th, "The Beautiful Country" is, indeed, a beautifully-filmed story about the Vietnamese son of an American GI. Because he's Amerasian, everyone in Vietnam mistreats him because they think he's ugly. You'll have to take that on faith, however, because the director (who is, oddly enough, Norwegian) couldn't find a Eurasian actor. The pure Vietnamese fellow he hired, Damien Nguyen, looks like all the other Vietnamese who are scorning him for his mixed features. "Colorblind casting" might work in theatre, but in film you have to get race right, especially when your movie is about heredity...

In "Broken Flowers," which opens August 5th, veteran minimalist auteur Jim Jarmusch has his most commercially promising film. 

With 1984's "Stranger than Paradise," Jarmusch began making glacially-paced exercises in sensory deprivation that bored you into the giggles. The highlight of "Stranger" was watching two dullards on a midwinter visit to Cleveland try, and fail, to figure out something to do. Go look at the frozen Lake Erie? Their lapses into hopeless silence lowered your resistance enough that when Eddie eventually dredged up the suggestion that maybe they could take in a Cavalier's NBA game, and Willie scornfully replied "The Cavs? They're like one and fifty!" well, just by contrast this dialogue seemed almost as brilliant as Captain Renault's "Round up the usual suspects" at the climax of "Casablanca."

"Broken Flowers," though, has a more elaborate and conventional plot. Murray plays an aging and depressive Don Juan named Don Johnston, whose latest girlfriend leaves him because he's uninterested in marriage and children, and, frankly, a bit of a blank. But then Murray receives an anonymous letter on pink stationery from an old flame revealing that after they broke up in the 1980s, she bore his son, and the young man has now gone on the road in search of his father.

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Pod the Lesser, Birthright Pundit: When John Derbyshire raised objections to the current but dubious interpretation of the 14th Amendment that guarantees American citizenship to the children of illegal aliens born in the U.S., John Podhoretz replied on NRO's Corner in his inimitable manner, "Sorry, pal. If you're born a Podhoretz, you get to make a living offering your opinions, no matter how big of a jerk and fool you are. Period. That's how it works, and thank God for it, otherwise a great deal of the money made in the 21st century by Podhoretz relatives would not have come to pass."

Wait a minute, sorry, what Pod Person 2.0 actually said was:

DERB'S "INTENTIONS OF THE PARENTS" EXCEPTION TO THE 14TH AMENDMENT [John Podhoretz]
Sorry, pal. You're born here, you're a citizen here. Period. That's how it works, and thank God for it, otherwise a great deal of the advances made in the 20th century by immigrant children to the United States would not have come to pass...

"MORE -- OR, RATHER, LESS -- ON BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP [John Podhoretz]
Boy, some people just can't stand the idea that some other people might become citizens in this country, eh? If the problem of birthright citizenship is not the citizenship itself, as Derb's e-mailer suggests, but the fact that the citizen can petition to get his family members made into citizens, then there's a simple expedient to fix that: You can change the law. Or you can try remembering that without immigration, there would be about 75 million people in the United States, a nation that now comfortably houses 300 million and could easily accommodate many more. Oh, and if any e-mailer e-mails me angrily AND USES CAPITAL LETTERS TO MAKE HIS POINT, that e-mail goes in the garbage can. As will slurs -- both open and subtle -- against Spanish-speakers, claims that "this wasn't the country my father fought for in WWII/Korea/Dominican Republic/Grenada," and the always popular "why should my tax dollars go and pay for." There's plenty of things my tax dollars go and pay for that I don't like. Welcome to democracy. You don't like it? Try to change it. Period."...

ANDREW, THE ISSUE IS CITIZENSHIP [John Podhoretz]
This effort to deny citizenship to those born in the United States because of their parentage is a mark of a passionate movement that is playing footsie with unreason. No "sensible" restrictive immigration policy that I'm aware of calls for the denial of birthright citizenship. That is lunacy. Mind the gap.

Of course, Pod Minor is completely confused about the issue, which is illegal immigrants' children, not the offspring of his ancestors, who were legal immigrants, but his making this error just shows how much of neocon thinking about immigration, if you can call it "thinking," is based on ethnic nostalgia and resentment of old slights toward ancestors, feelings that just seems to grow, perversely, in strength with the passing of the decades. (See my "Remythologizing the Melting Pot" review of Tamar Jacoby's book on immigration for details.)

I'm what you could call an Old Neoconservative, and the intellectual decline of the neocons over the years is painful to me. Norman Podhoretz has mutated into, essentially, an ethnic activist in the mode of Jesse Jackson. Pod Minor is the equivalent of Al Sharpton, although not as witty. 

Exactly why a no-talent ethnic bully like John Podhoretz thinks he can define what is and isn't conservative is a mystery, but the bigger conundrum is why he isn't laughed out of a career ... except, of course, for the obvious fact that he's, as they say in Little Italy, connected.

Update: 

Charlotte Allen even coined the term "podenfreude" to describe the enjoyable sensation one experiences while reading terrible writing.

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UPDATED: The London Bombings: James Fulford points out on the VDARE.com blog:

Mao spoke of Communist guerillas being a fish in a sea of peasants. Islamic terrorists need a sea of Muslims to swim in. That�s what they now have in the West.

The Financial Times writes:

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Michelle Wie misses men's PGA tournament cut by only two strokes. [For the rest, click the "Permalink" below ...]

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"The Five Billion:" My new VDARE.com column is up:

The Bush Administration officials announced in January 2004 that the President's guest worker plan will allow anyone in the world with a minimum wage job offer from an American employer to move here, and bring along dependents. Contemplating this, it struck me (among other things) that our leaders must be clueless about how many people actually might want to move to the U.S...

In fact, we have several pieces of evidence about what such an open borders plan might bring. 

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An interview with me about race: An alumni magazine interviewed me about one of their professors, a population geneticist. Here's part of the interview:

Homepage on Levitt's Freakonomics Abortion-Crime theory

James Q. Wilson reviews Levitt's Freakonomics abortion-crime theory in Commentary: From the new July issue of Commentary, not yet online:

During my many years of lecturing on crime, invariably the first two questions I would be asked were: "What do you think of the death penalty?" and "What do you think of gun control?"

No more. Now the first question is whether I believe that legalized abortion has cut the crime rate. For this I can thank Freakonomics, the weirdly named book by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner that has been high on the New York Times best-seller list for weeks now. My answer, by the way, is no: I do not believe the evidence shows a causal link between legalized abortion and our reduced crime rate.

Levitt, an acquaintance of mine, is an immensely talented economist whose restless mind has inquired into all sorts of fascinating topics....

Back to abortion and crime. Levitt's argument is that, with the legalization of abortion by the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, many fetuses were killed in America that would otherwise have led to the birth of unwanted children. Such unwanted children, receiving little affection and guidance, would have been more likely to commit crimes when grown. Ergo, their removal from the population had something to do with our lowered crime rates.

Why should we think such children would have been unwanted? Because, Levitt contends, they would have been born to thousands of poor, single, teenage mothers. Levitt conspicuously refrains from saying so, but a very large fraction of these poor, single, teenage mothers would have been African American: over 60 percent of all black children are born out of wedlock, and the abortion rate is roughly three times greater among black than among white women.

To prove that abortion reduced crime, Levitt and his coauthor on the original paper, John Donohue, examined crime rates 15 to 18 years after the Roe decision, and found a drop. Moreover, they pointed out that five states had already legalized abortion three to four years before the decision: in these early-legalizing states, crime rates fell sooner than in states that did not permit abortion until Roe.

You would never know it from this book, but not only have these claims been criticized, but several scholars have offered rival theories. On the issue of abortion rates alone, the economists John Lott and John Whitley have written that, even before Roe, many anti-abortion states allowed abortion if the life or health of the mother was at risk; in these states, there were at least as many abortions per 1,000 live births pre-Roe as in states that had made abortion legal. Why, then, attribute falling crime rates to legalized abortion?

Levitt and Donohue have rejoined that, in those states where abortions were still nominally illegal, it was well-to-do white women who mainly availed themselves of the loopholes in the system. But there is no evidence of this; to the contrary, black women were over-represented among those having abortions in such states.

Now look at homicide rates by the age of suspected offenders. In the late 1990s, roughly a quarter century after Roe, the murder rate was falling for offenders aged twenty-six and older -- a class of offenders much too old to have been affected by Roe one way or the other. As for the youngest offenders, those between sixteen and twenty, their murder rates had jumped up in the early 1990s, probably because of involvement in the crack cocaine trade. Again, no Roe effect.

George Akerlof, Janet Yellen, and Michael Katz have argued that legalized abortion actually increased the number of out-of-wedlock first births -- because the availability of abortion, along with the advent of new contraceptive devices, rendered sex "cost-free" for men but not necessarily for the women they impregnated. Were the children who were increasingly likely to be born to unmarried women "unwanted"? Perhaps they were, but we do not know; Akerlof and his colleagues have not given us sufficient evidence.

As of now, no one is entitled to decide who is correct in this matter, whether Levitt or any of his critics. But it is certainly premature to say that Levitt is right, and positively disconcerting to take the work of an enamored journalist that Levitt must be right.

On another controversial matter, however, Levitt is clearly right, and I am his victim. I once wrote that the proportion of juveniles in the population was going up and that therefore the crime rate would go up. Levitt correctly takes me to task for this unwarranted assertion, which was later proved wrong. His criticism reminds me of something my Ph.D. adviser once said, no doubt quoting someone whose name I have forgotten: social scientists should never try to predict the future; they have enough trouble predicting the past.

Touch� ... Levitt, of course, being a classic example of a social scientist who has failed to predict the past. When Levitt concocted his theory in 1999, he only looked at crime rates in 1985 and in 1997, and he forgot to look at crime rates by narrowly defined age groups. So, he completely overlooked the fact that, in direct contradiction of his theory, the first cohort born after legalization went on an enormous teen violence spree in-between 1985 and 1997. Ever since then, with his name and reputation linked to his half-baked theory, he has been hustling like P.T. Barnum to turn his slapdash hypothesis into conventional wisdom to preserve his marketability.

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Solving the Birthrate Implosion and Fixing Pensions: A reader has a plan:

Childlessness is a form of parasitism. Old people can only be supported by younger people. That means that childless seniors are supported by somebody else's children. The combination of publicly provided pensions and privately raised children means that people who profit most from children are those who don't have them. It is a case of private costs and public benefits. 

Of course, part of the costs of raising children are public, such as schools, and in Canada health care as well. Nonetheless, most of the costs of child-rearing are private. However, when a person who raised children and one who remained childless turn 65, both are equally entitled to social security. 

This is unfair. It would not be unfair if public pension schemes were funded plans, but they are simply pay-as-you-go systems. The premiums paid today are passed on to the seniors living today. Unfortunately, nearly every country set up a plan that creates the impression in the public's mind that they are paying into a fund and that they are simply getting their money back when they turn 65. It would have been preferable to finance old age pensions from general revenues and provide the same level for everybody, regardless of what they earned throughout their working lives. 

In light of the above, it would be a good idea to make the level of old age pensions dependent on the number of children that the pensioner raised. Seniors that raised 2 children to adulthood would get level 100. Those that raised 3 children or more would get level 125. Those that raised one child would get level 75, and those that remained childless would get level 50. That way everybody would get something, but those who contributed most to the formation of younger people would get the most. It should be pointed out that people who don't have to support children are in a much better position to accumulate assets that can help them finance their retirement.

Perhaps you should get credit for the difference between what your children are paying in taxes minus what they are costing the taxpayers in welfare costs. That way, you'd benefit financially from raising your kids to be productive members of society.

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Latin American Zillionaires: An Indian reader draws an analogy to South Asia:

India has extreme inequality and one of the reasons for it is that capital is a lot less mobile. People don't pay taxes honestly (partly because they can get away with it and partly because there was a time when Taxes were extortionately high). The result is that there is a huge pool of money swimming around which in India is called "Black money". "Black money" is a very broad term and includes all kinds of money - from the proceeds of crime to simply money on which Tax has not been paid. This money is obviously less mobile than legitimate money (which in India is called "White money") because it doesn't get channeled as easily into the economy.

The result is that there are vast fortunes of hidden wealth often behind the facade of middle class mediocrity. And because it is hidden wealth and the owners of the wealth do not trust anyone but their immediately family and cousins, the wealth tends to remain concentrated in the hands of those families in a way that prevents it from being used productively (which would give the opportunity to others to make money and become wealthy or better off).

So it is not uncommon for business families to be sitting on vast fortunes that are completely invisible to the Taxman. I suspect the same thing is in play in Latin America because a lot of the "wealth" in Latin America is from illegitimate businesses or activities.

The only way to create a better future for everyone in such countries is by reducing the size of the illegitimate economy and bringing as much wealth as possible into regular capital investments. But thats a hell of a lot easier said than done when you have centuries old traditions of not trusting anyone.

One of Mexico's worst problems is the difficulty the government has in finding taxable income. Vast amounts are hidden so the government sets tax rates high to get more out of what income it can find, which just encourages more people to evade taxes. So, the government doesn't collect enough money to pay for decent education.

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Exciting Medical Research: The Cochran-Ewald theory that many chronic diseases are caused by cryptic infections makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary standpoint, but, it is extremely hard to find the killer germs. Fortunately, Matthew Meyerson, a geneticist at Harvard and Dana-Farber is working on a new approach to looking for germs:

Discovery of pathogenic microbes: We have developed a genomic approach to discover microbial sequences in cryptic infectious diseases. In sequence-based computational subtraction, we generate and sequence libraries from diseased tissues. Sequences that match the human genome are removed computationally, leaving microbial sequences (Weber et al., 2002). We have recently generated several genomic representational methods to complement this pathogen discovery approach and are applying the methods to human disease samples.

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Make Poverty History: A Constructive Suggestion. Tony Blair and Sir Bob Geldof are working together to make a very big deal out of getting more aid for Africa out of the G8 countries this week.

Sub-Saharan Africa's single biggest problem is its average IQ of around 70. Since African-Americans score around 85, and they share about 80% of their genes with their African cousins, it's likely that the poor environment in Africa depresses the average IQ substantially. 

Probably the cheapest way to raise IQs in Africa is to attack diseases caused by a lack of micronutrients that are known to lower IQ, such as "cretinism," which is caused by lack of iodine. Western countries started fortifying salt with iodine and flour with iron back before WWII, and that quickly eliminated what had been a substantial problem here.

UNICEF sponsored a big study of the problem last year. I wrote about what we could be doing to help the Third World in this regard here and here. But nobody else in the media seemed very interested because they aren't supposed to write about black IQ. See, good people think it's more moral to let cretinism and the like ravage Africa than to mention IQ in polite society. Only evil people like me are so disreputable as to try to get the world to solve the problem.

A reader writes:

PS At least they stopped giving lactose-intolerant African children powdered milk. A huge UN program tried this in the 1950's, convinced racial differences in lactose processing were a myth, and tragically gave millions of kids fatal cases of dysentery.

By the way, does anybody remember Geldof's band, the Boomtown Rats? He seemed smart, funny, inauthentic, and insincere - I especially liked his faux-Springsteen pseudo-epics such as "Johnny's on the Street Again." They were awfully catchy, but their phoniness kept them from catching on big here in the US. Who would have guessed he would make a future career for himself in saintliness?

Update: Readers remind me of their only American hit, "I Don't Like Mondays," which Geldof turned into a gun control anthem.

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"Latino Power?: It Will Take Time for the Population Boom to Translate [into Votes]" writes Robert Suro of the Pew Hispanic Center in the Washington Post, confirming what I've been saying since 2001 ("Mexican-American Vote Smaller than Widely Thought"). Suro echoes my VDARE article in May debunking the "Latino Power" cover story in Newsweek.

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Birdie Kim wins Ladies U.S. Open with birdie: Seven Koreans named Kim qualified for the Ladies US Open golf tournament (or close to 5% of the field). One of the least known Kims was a young woman who changed her name to Birdie recently to distinguish herself from the hordes of Kims. She said "Eagle" sounded too much like a boy's name.

Sunday morning, LPGA officials had been enraptured because four American teenage amateurs were in the chase for the biggest title in women's golf. Foreigners have been winning too much on the LPGA tour for the popularity of the game in America. And everybody likes a cute teenage girl.

Fifteen-year-old Michelle Wie, the willowy 6-footer with the perfect complexion and doll's features who can drive the ball 300 yards, was tied for the lead starting the final round. Victory would have made her the most celebrated female athlete on Earth: an Anna Kournikova who wins, both an American and an extremely tall East Asian, who would be almost as popular in East Asia for her height as Yao Ming is. But, not yet: she skied to an 82.

Instead, 17-year-old blonde Morgan Pressel played terrifically, and stood in the 18th fairway tied with Birdie Kim who was in a deep bunker to the right of the green. Then, Kim holed out her sand blast from nearly 100 feet away to win one of the wilder tournaments in years. Young Morgan looked distinctly irate that Birdie's one in a thousand shot had gone in, costing her the U.S. Open at age 17. That bodes well for her future success -- it was often said of Arnold Palmer that he holed so many 30 footers to win on the last green because he sincerely felt he deserved to make them.

This tournament was unusual in the number of very young players in contention, but in general, females seem to win at younger ages than males. Sure, Tiger Woods won the Masters at 21 and Jack Nicklaus the U.S. Open at 22, but Palmer didn't win a professional major until he was 28, and Hogan didn't win one until he was 36 (although WWII got in the way).

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"The Wind from the South: Anti-White Populism" is my new VDARE column.

For several years, we have been pointing out that, despite rosy predictions that Latin American immigrants are "natural Republicans," a mighty storm is brewing in Latin America�and that it will eventually reach the U.S.

Recently, the rest of the media have started to notice that something is going on down south.

In "Indian movement seeks 'to expel white invasion,'" Martin Arostegui wrote in the Washington Times (June 24):

"SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia -- A growing indigenous movement has helped topple successive governments in Bolivia and Ecuador and, angered by the destruction of Andean coca crops, now threatens the stability of other countries where Indians are in the majority. Drawing support from European leftists and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the long-marginalized Indians are tasting political influence for the first time since the Spanish conquest and beginning to wrest power from South America's white elites. The leader of Bolivia's Movement to Socialism party (MAS), Evo Morales, talks about 'uniting Latin America's 135 Indian nations to expel the white invasion, which began with the landing of Columbus in 1492.'"

This marks a significant change. Latin American politics was long dominated by imported ideologies, such as Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s and laissez-faire in the 1990s. They were largely irrelevant because none of them dealt directly with Latin America's essential political problem: the enduring racial conflict originating in the Conquest of a half millennium ago.   [More]

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Max Boot says the insurgents are bound to lose in Iraq:

The rebels lack a unifying organization, ideology and leader. There is no Iraqi Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro or Mao Tse-tung.

Which means there is nobody to capture, kill, or negotiate a deal with. Remember how everybody expected the insurgency to end when we captured Saddam 18 months ago? (Well, I didn't, but the Big Boys all did.) It turned out he didn't have much to do with it.

The Shining Path rebellion in Peru and the Kurdish rebellion in Turkey both ended abruptly with the capture of their respective numero unos. The Afrikaaners could negotiate a deal with Mandela and know that his rebels would abide by it. 

We don't know for sure that nobody will eventually emerge from the insurgency as a charismatic leader -- Bonaparte didn't emerge until about six years into the French Revolution -- but we're probably worse off without a centralized command. Lack of centralization means the insurgency could go on irrationally long, with the worst hot-heads keeping it going with more atrocities setting off more reprisals, etc etc.

A reader writes:

Exactly. The error people make in dealing with Arab polities is to assume there is some �there� there when they negotiate with the leaders of Arab states.

In fact Arab states seem more and more like Potemkin polities, just a bunch of soldiers controlling some oil wells who have set up shop to impress international visitors but are not really in control of their people.

Arab societies are much more swarm-like � organized from the bottom-up by clans, rather than top-down by states. That�s why they seem ineffective in mobilizing their populi for war or economic development but good for stuff like weddings, mafias and guerilla war.

So regime change does not really change much, apart from the name on the shingle hanging on the street-front of the Potemkin state.

You still got the same people with the same families, only now you really pissed quite a few of them off because your �smart� bomb just blew up cousin Ahmed.

That�s why the US should not bother with nation-building or state-construction in the ME: if the Arabs can't do it, it does not seem likely that the US Army can do it whilst simultaneously fighting off legions of the irate cousins of Ahmed. (Boy do I feel sorry for the GI�s in Iraq.) [The high Sunday is forecast to be 112.]

The US�s continued presence in Iraq is just stirring up the hornets nest even more. If the US leaves the Suunis will probably go back to what they like doing best, throwing weddings and engaging in a little mafia activity. Hopefully, this will give them less incentive to participate in guerilla war and encourage them to turn on the opportunistic jihadis.

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Another triumph of democracy in the Middle East: The Washington Post reports:

The United States and its European allies are bracing for a tough new opponent in Iran with the election to the presidency of Tehran's ultra-conservative mayor, a relative unknown to the outside world whose campaign pledged to take a harder line in talks on Iran's nuclear program, according to U.S. and Western officials, as well as Iranian analysts.

The upset victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has alarmed U.S. and European officials over issues including the future of Iraq, the Middle East peace efforts and the impact on oil markets. Any prospect of ending more than a quarter of a century of tensions with Iran is also unlikely after Ahmadinejad begins his four-year term this summer, the officials said.

The unpleasant irony is that Iran was one place where the trend was our friend before we invaded Iraq, as a quarter century of fundamentalism had made many Iranians heartily sick of the mullahs. But putting 140,000 troops on Iran's border does not appear to have made Iranians like us more.

Michael Ledeen is in full blither here.

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Jonah Goldberg on the Cochran-Harpending theory: In his new syndicated column, Jonah gets the proposed mechanism wrong:

One paper by a respected independent researcher suggests that Jews from Northern Europe (a.k.a. Ashkenazi Jews) are more likely to get certain diseases, such as Tay Sachs, in part because Jews have been selectively breeding for intelligence for centuries.

No, the Cochran-Hardy-Harpending theory is that natural selection, not selective breeding (a.k.a., artificial selection), was at work -- smart medieval Jews tended to be richer and richer Jews tended to have more surviving grandchildren. It's fascinating how so many neocons prefer the alternative theory championed by Kevin MacDonald that medieval Jews consciously arranged and subsidized eugenic marriages for the brightest young rabbinical students. Perhaps the American Enterprise Institute will give MacDonald a chair to develop his apparently more appealing theory in greater detail.

But what's striking about Jonah's June 24th column is how similar it is to Richard Cohen's June 16th column "Aptitude Adjustment" in the Washington Post on the same topic. Cohen wrote:

I cannot be certain that Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard, has read the article [by Cochran et al]. But if he did, I bet he wondered why it is possible to suggest that certain Jews are smarter than other people but not remotely possible to suggest that women might not be as brilliant in science and engineering as men. When Summers did precisely that back in January -- when he wondered out loud about such matters as "intrinsic aptitude" -- he got his head handed to him. He was not, mind you, stating this as a fact -- just throwing it out along with other factors that might account for why men outnumber women on the science, engineering and math faculties of first-rate universities. What he did not do -- and this was his mistake -- was limit the possibilities to the only politically correct one: sexual discrimination of one sort or another.

But if Jews could adapt to their environment in a certain way, why couldn't women or men? After all, to the eye, there is no distinction between a Jew of European origin and a non-Jew of European origin -- or even a Jew of non-European origin. Yet to that same eye, there is plenty to distinguish a man from a woman. They have bodies designed for different things. If, as the Utah scientists propose, Jews adapted to their environment to produce better businessmen (and not better farmers or soldiers), then why couldn't men or women have adapted to their particular environments in a similar way? Maybe -- just maybe -- there's a link between not being able to express your feelings and solving Fermat's Last Theorem?

Eight days later, Jonah writes:

Here are some recent headlines from the world of science: "Researchers Say Intelligence and Diseases May Be Linked in Ashkenazic [Jewish] Genes" � New York Times

"Some Politics May Be Etched in the Genes" � New York Times

"Feminists Feed on Lawrence Summers's Flesh, Vital Organs; Pancreas Swallowed Whole, 'like a Cocktail Peanut.' " � New York Times...

O.K., I made the last one up. Feminists didn't actually feed on the president of Harvard University, but it's certainly been all-you-can-eat-at-Sizzler night, metaphorically speaking. In January, you might recall, Larry Summers raised the possibility � nay, the hypothesis! � that as a statistical matter biological differences may partially account for the disproportionately low number of women at the top ranks of science. In response, an activist feminist professor from MIT contracted a case of the vapors, and when she arose from her fainting couch she was on the Today Show complaining to a supportive Katie Couric about what a bigot Summers is... 

Which brings us back to the mortification of Larry Summers. Is it so unreasonable to assume there are greater genetic cognitive and behavioral differences between men and women than between, say, Jews and gentiles � never mind conservatives and liberals? If genes make us more open to some group mores, why can't they make one gender more open to one field of study? The animal kingdom is replete with enormous male-female disparities. Even among the branch of humans we call feminists, it's a widely held view that men and women think and behave differently.

To answer Cohen and Goldberg's question: maybe, maybe not -- it all depends. For some traits, the typical male-female difference is greater than differences in averages between racial groups, for other traits, such as skin color or average IQ, male-female differences are small (or non-existent) compared to racial differences.

Consider height. Among American whites, men tend to average about 5" taller than women. That's a little bigger than the kind of racial differences you typically see among well-fed peoples. On the other hand, there are outlier groups -- e.g., the Dinkas and Mbuti Pygmies -- where the average racial difference is quite a bit more than the average sex difference.

Racial differences can emerge for lots of different reasons, such as founder's effect, drift, and selection for various reasons. Sex differences within a racial group, however, are less likely to emerge due to random flukes, and they are less likely to be driven by environmental factors such as latitude, since boys and girls from the same latitudes grow up to marry each other. You need some particular reason for sex differences. Since fetuses start out as basically female and have to be masculinized in utero, which is a risky process that apparently leads to a lot of miscarriages, gratuitous sex differences are costly.

Thus, you find a lot of similarities between males and females, such as in average IQ. This doesn't mean Summers was wrong -- his subtle argument was about sex differences in IQ's variance rather than its average. But, it's just not a slam dunk to say that if a racial difference in IQ exists, then there must be a sex difference in IQ.

Something else to keep in mind is that the publicity given the Ashkenazi intelligence theory in the NYT and The Economist is hardly proof that the liberal establishment now welcomes discussions of racial differences in IQ. Instead, it all came down to two scientifically-literate and brave English reporters, Nicholas Wade at the NYT and the anonymous Economist scribe, who pushed for it. After several weeks, the story still has not been run as news by the AP or Reuters, other major newspapers, the newsweeklies, the TV networks, NPR, etc. etc. This blackout is despite Wade's story being the most emailed article in the NYT for an entire weekend.

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The cure or the disease? We constantly hear that for Europe to survive its low birthrates, it must take in even more immigrants. But, isn't it possible that high immigration depresses native birthrates? A reader writes:

The July Scientific American, p 25, (not yet on line, it seems) has an article by Rodger Doyle ([email protected]) citing economist Richard A. Easterlin of USC. He says that the baby boom resulted from the:

"unprecedented concurrence of three developments; an expansion of the economy, restricted immigration since the mid-1920s, and a relatively small cohort of new job seekers because of low fertility in the late 1920s and 1930s. This combination created unusually good job prospects for young people after World War II, and so feeling more prosperous than their parents, they married earlier and had more children."

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Stanford bioethicist prefers that blacks die of cardiac arrest rather than undermine his Race-Does-Not-Exist dogma by surviving on BiDil: The Associated Press reports:

Now that the FDA has for the first time approved a drug specifically for blacks, medical experts are sure to debate the implications, with some questioning the validity of medical research that focuses on race.

"There are many, many who claim these use of (racial) categories may not have any biological meaning, only social meaning, and basing medical decisions on them may be problematic," said David Magnus, director of the Stanford Medical Center for Biomedical Ethics.

For example, Magnus said, researchers could also look at whether a particular drug worked more effectively on Catholics than Protestants. The more categories explored, the more likely one can find data showing that one category of people is helped more than the others when it comes to a particular medicine, he said.

"But the more we know genetically, the more we know these social categories don't correspond to genetic groups," Magnus said...

Data clearly showed that BiDil had a positive effect on a population disproportionately burdened by cardiovascular disease, said Dr. Anne Taylor of the University of Minnesota Medical School and a lead investigator in the research of BiDil.

"African-Americans between the ages of 45 and 64 are 2.5 times more likely to die prematurely from heart failure than their non-black counterparts," she said. "FDA approval of BiDil represents an important leap forward in addressing this health disparity."

FDA officials say that in the case of BiDil researchers did not start out looking for a drug that worked better for a particular racial group. Two earlier trials of the drug on the general population of heart failure patients found no benefit, the FDA said, but they did suggest that BiDil helped the few blacks participating.

Based on those results, NitroMed Inc. of Lexington, Mass., launched a study of 1,050 blacks with severe heart failure. Half of them got standard heart failure drugs and a placebo; the other half got standard drugs plus BiDil. The study showed a 43 percent reduction in deaths and a 39 percent decrease in hospitalizations compared with a placebo, and the study was stopped ahead of schedule last year when doctors saw BiDil clearly was better.

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Australian columnist makes explicit the anti-black eugenic basis of Levitt's theory: Michael Duffy, who sounds like one of the more independent-minded Australian pundits, writes an important column in the Sydney Morning Herald on the Freakonomics' theory that abortion cut crime. Although he doesn't realize that crime first went up among the groups most affected by abortion, he lays Levitt's eugenic cards on the table:

For example, in the US black youths commit nine times more murders, relative to their population, than white youths. As, after 1973, the black fertility rate fell 12 per cent (it was 4 per cent for whites), this might be expected to reduce the homicide rate.

This is what most people have in the back of their minds when they accept Levitt's theory on faith: the old Howard Stern joke about "What do you call an abortion clinic in Harlem?  Crimestoppers!". As Stalin might have said if he'd read Freakonomics: "Death solves all problems: no black, no problem."

Levitt's implicit logic is seductive. But, it didn't work in practice: the first generation of black 14-17 year olds born after legalization committed 4.4 times more murders in 1993 than the last generation born before legalization committed in 1983.

The problem is that not all blacks are created equally likely to grow up to be murderers. As I pointed out in my Slate debate with Levitt way back in 1999, it appears that legalized abortion cut the birthrate of the more law-abiding blacks more than the birthrate of the more dangerous underclass blacks. The subsequent shortage of middle class and working class black kids appears to have tipped (as Levitt's buddy Malcolm Gladwell might say) black youth culture toward the underclass gangsta norms that came to predominate in the late 1980s and culturally fueled the catastrophic crack wars of 1990-1994. 

As Levitt himself documents in Freakonomics, becoming a crack dealer was an incredibly stupid career move -- the pay was no better than McDonald's, and the fringe benefits (going to prison and being murdered) were a lot worse. You needed a lot of cultural indoctrination to do something that dumb, and that's what black youth culture was providing at the time.

In Freakonomics, Levitt claims that Australia saw the same pattern of legalizing abortion lowering crime. Yet, Duffy writes:

I asked Don Weatherburn, director of the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, about Levitt's hypothesis. He says it's plausible, but there are other plausible hypotheses too. (Some can be found in the book The Crime Drop in America, edited by Alfred Blumstein and Joel Wallman.)

So what about Australia, which Levitt suggests has had a similar experience to America? Abortion was legalised here at about the same time as in the US, but Weatherburn says that most crime increased in Australia during the 1990s. He wonders if Australia's more generous welfare provisions meant that legalised abortion had a different impact here. Whatever the reason, our criminal class has remained free of the (unintended) eugenics Levitt says occurred in the US.

I've never offered an opinion on the impact of abortion on crime in other countries because I don't know much about their social structures. As you can see from how everybody falls for Levitt's misleading story about American crime history, it's hard to know what actually happened in your own country without actually digging into the detailed data. Levitt's logic might well be true elsewhere. But I'm coming to learn that anything Levitt says about abortion needs to be checked.

I tracked down an article summarizing one of the two papers Levitt cites in his footnotes as supporting his claim that abortion cut crime in Australia. You can read it here and see for yourself what it says. I read it as being inconclusive, but, hey, I'm not a bestselling glamour boy, so who should I believe: Steven Levitt or my lying eyes?

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The Babe Theory of Democracy: Babes or Babies?: Will Franklin is getting a lot of publicity for a long blog entry expounding the popular idea that pro-American democracy must triumph in Lebanon because all the hot babes go to the anti-Syrian demonstrations. Babes attract TV cameras and television rules the world, right?

The problem with the Babe Theory in Lebanon is that those hot babes aren't having enough babies. For generations, the stylish Christian women have been losing the Battle of the Cradle to the Shiite women, who are too covered up to have to worry about losing their babealicious figures from having babies. Thus, the Christians haven't allowed a new census in Lebanon since 1932 in order to cling to their gerrymandered half of the seats in the legislature. If there was real, one-person one-vote democracy in Lebanon instead of the "confessional gerrymander" there is now, the hot babes would be doomed.

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My Spring Movie Reviews: Here are three of my reviews of four films from The American Conservative:

The Interpreter (Sean Penn, Nicole Kidman)

Walk on Water (Israeli comedy with Lior Ashkenazi)

Melinda and Melinda (Woody Allen) & Look at Me ( Agn�s Jaoui)

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Thank God for George W. Bush! Alan Elsner reports in the Washington Post:

Richard Stana, director of homeland security and justice at the Government Accountability Office, told a House of Representatives subcommittee this week the number of notices of intent to fine employers for knowingly hiring unauthorized workers fell from 417 in 1999 to three last year.

Can you imagine how much worse the enforcement of the law of the land would have gotten if a raving liberal like John Kerry or Al Gore had beaten Bush? The number of employers fined for knowingly hiring illegal aliens might have been two ... or even one!

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Flynn Effect, We Hardly Knew Ye... After decades of rising raw scores on IQ tests given to military conscripts in Denmark and Norway, the scores stopped rising about a decade ago. This raised the question of whether the Flynn Effect had played out, or whether the increasing number of lower IQ immigrant youths was the cause. The original papers did not distinguish between the two groups, so that remained uncertain.

Modern Tribalist cited the Copenhagen Post:

Draftees with immigrant background stand a worse chance of passing the required intelligence test then ethnic Danes, the Danish Defence Academy said in a report on Monday. 
The report, which based its conclusions on 22,646 reviews of conscripts tested between September 2003 and June 2004, found that 28 percent of draftees with an immigrant background failed the military's intelligence tests, compared with only seven percent of ethnic Danes, national television news channel DR reported.

A quick use of the Normdist function in Excel suggests the passing score would be around an IQ of 78 (by law, the U.S. military can't induct anyone who scores under 80), and if ethnic Danes average 100, then youths of immigrant ancestry would average around 87, which sounds about in line with other reports on immigrants in Europe.

However, one of the authors of the first study on the end of the Flynn Effect in Denmark says that their next paper will break out ethnic Danes. They've seen falling raw scores among ethnic Danes in recent years.

So, it looks like the Flynn Effect might be coming to an end. Yet, we still don't understand its causes.

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The New Hillary Book: Everybody has decided to trash Edward Klein's new book about Hillary Clinton, but the summary of the salacious bits in Slate makes it sound fairly realistic, based on everything we know about the former First Couple from other sources:

- Bill cheated on her a lot.

- Hillary's interest in lesbianism in the 1970s was more theoretical, based on her feminist politics and insecurity about her attractiveness, than physical. 

- The "rape" in which Chelsea was conceived sounds less like a felony and more like the romantic and erotic highlight of Bill and Hill's otherwise tepid marriage, like the staircase scene in "Gone with the Wind."

- Hillary was sweet on handsome Vince Foster, who eventually killed himself, but whether the relationship was ever consummated is unknown.

- In her twenties, Hillary used to think she was ugly (as this photo suggests, her judgment was reality-based), and dressed dowdily to avoid attention, but now she takes care of herself and gets lots of Botox injections.

In other words, Hillary sounds about as bad, but not much worse, than most other recent Presidential nominees. 

But can't this great country of 300,000,000 come up with better candidates?

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"Yes" - The new film with Joan Allen and Sam Neill opens in LA and NYC on Friday. From my review in The American Conservative, which will be fully available to electronic subscribers this weekend.

Moli�re's Bourgeois Gentleman was famously delighted to learn he had been speaking prose all his life. Yet, as historian Jacques Barzun noted in From Dawn to Decadence, "His surprise is well-founded � What he spoke all his life was not prose, but speech. Prose is the written form of deliberate expression� It is as artificial as verse."

Nor should a modern gentleman assume he is speaking "dialogue," because what screenwriters are paid large sums to contrive is barely more authentic than quatrains. I recall a 1994 radio interview with Steve Barancik, the painfully shy writer of the snazzy film noir "The Last Seduction," which starred Linda Fiorentino as the ultimate femme fatale. The perky interviewer asked him if he comes up with all those killer replies in real life. "Well, sure," the author stammered, "In my car � on the � way home."

Cinema's visuals are constantly evolving, but its dialogue is deteriorating. Why write eloquent English when it's just going to wind up translated into Turkish and Tagalog to serve as wadding between detonations?

It's time for something different, and Sally Potter's film "Yes" is a gloriously reactionary step backwards.

Shortly after 9/11, Potter, who is best known for her 1992 adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, began composing a scene illustrating the clash of civilizations between an Arab immigrant and a wealthy Western woman. She recalled, "The argument between the two lovers came out onto the page, for the most part, in iambic pentameter (ten syllables per line)� Perhaps it was an instinctive attempt to let the characters speak to each other on screen about things which are hard to express in normal conversation."

The screenplay ended up as rhyme of the most conspicuous kind: couplets.

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Yeesh Alert: Starlets going blonde: As Kevin Michael Grace has pointed out, the definition of female beauty in our culture appears to be getting narrower, asymptotically approaching that of Hugh Hefner's seven interchangeable blonde girlfriends. For example, on the left is the old Jessica Alba. On the right, the New and Improved Jessica Alba

[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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New Crime-Fighting Superhero: Inspired by Freakonomics' enormous popularity, a reader proposes a new comic book hero:

"I can see it now: The Aborter �. By day, he's a mild mannered abortion clinic doctor by day, helping rid the world of unwanted babies... By night, he's on par with The Punisher, [ridding the world of unwanted people whose mothers were too selfish or religion-warped to have them aborted as fetuses]... He also has sonar vision (don't ask how that happened, you don't want to know!) that can also detect "bad seeds", while they're in the womb!"

He could punch holes in the top of unwanted people's skulls and vacuum out their brains.

UPDATE: From GaysForLife.com:

Of course, every superhero needs an archnemesis. I nominate "The Dark Fetus" - a.k.a. "The Blob (of Tissue)" - a shapeshifter who morphs seamlessly from a human being to a potential person and back at will, even occasionally winking out of existence entirely, depending upon the perceptions of her foe. Her crimes include forcing the residents of Gotham to grow up and take some responsibility for their behavior and, um, existing at the inconvenience of others. For this, she must be destroyed!!!

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The WSJ rips off my "Affordable Family Formation" series. In "Cheer Up, Conservatives! You're still winning," John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge write:

Last November, American conservatives were full of grand visions of a permanent revolution, with spending brought back under control, Social Security privatized, conservatives filling the federal bench, and a great depression visited on the lawsuit industry. Six months later, listening to conservatives is as uplifting as reading William Styron's "Darkness Visible." Larry Kudlow bemoans "the dreariest political spring." John Derbyshire worries about the "twilight of conservatism" as the Republicans go the way of Britain's Tories. For Pat Buchanan "the conservative movement has passed into history"--much as, some would say, Mr. Buchanan himself has done...

The biggest advantage of all for conservatives is that they have a lock on the American dream. America is famously an idea more than a geographical expression, and that idea seems to be the province of the right...

If the American dream means anything, it means finding a plot of land where you can shape your destiny and raise your children. Those pragmatic dreamers look ever more Republican. Mr. Bush walloped Mr. Kerry among people who were married with children. He also carried 25 of the top 26 cities in terms of white fertility. Mr. Kerry carried the bottom 16. San Francisco, the citadel of liberalism, has the lowest proportion of people under 18 in the country (14.5%).

So cheer up conservatives. You have the country's most powerful political party on your side. You have control of the market for political ideas. You have the American dream. And, despite your bout of triste post coitum, you are still outbreeding your rivals.

They don't mention, of course, of where they got this idea or data. It might raise a few red flags about the health of conservatism if they admitted that the mainstream Republican establishment's drink-the-KoolAidism means that all the interesting intellectual work on the right is being done by a demonized fringe.

They also don't mention that higher fertility among whites doesn't automatically ensure a growing slice of the electorate for the GOP: nonwhites, who on average favor the Democrats, have higher fertility than whites. Plus immigration is boosting the Democratic-leaning groups. I'm not sure who is going to win this struggle, but I don't think it's healthy for the country.

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Blond Men: A reader writes:

Your columns on blondes in Hollywood were spot-on, in my opinion, and I was heartened to see such observations in print. As a fair-haired, blue-eyed American male, I've found such prejudices in many places, including acting school, where I was told by a casting director I could play, among other roles, "the preppy loser who loses the girl to the dark and handsome stud" and the "German soldier." I was deemed "not sexy," but as I got older, I could become "wiser." LOL

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Who the heck could Heckman be talking about? Nobel Laureate economist James Heckman of the U. of Chicago says:

�In economics there's a trend now to come up with cute papers in an effort to be cited as many times as possible. All the incentives point that way, especially for young professors who seem risk-averse rather than risk-taking after they get tenure. In some quarters of our profession, the level of discussion has sunk to the level of a New Yorker article: coffee-table articles about �cute� topics, papers using �clever� instruments. The authors of these papers are usually unclear about the economic questions they address, the data used to support their conclusions and the econometrics used to justify their estimates. This is a sad development that I hope is a passing fad. Most of this work is without substance, but it makes a short-lived splash and it's easy to do. Many young economists are going for the cute and the clever at the expense of working on hard and important foundational problems.�

Personally, I have no problem with "cute" and "clever." I just object to "not true."

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The genetics of political attitudes: The NYT reports:

As found in previous studies, attitudes about issues like school prayer, property taxes and the draft were among the most influenced by inheritance, the researchers found. Others like modern art and divorce were less so. And in the twins' overall score, derived from 28 questions, genes accounted for 53 percent of the differences.

This is a general rule of thumb: inheritance accounts for about 50% of personality and cognitive traits. I call it the Half-Full Glass (or the Half-Empty Glass, depending upon what I'm trying to emphasize).

But after correcting for the tendency of politically like-minded men and women to marry each other, the researchers also found that the twins' self-identification as Republican or Democrat was far more dependent on environmental factors like upbringing and life experience than was their social orientation, which the researchers call ideology. Inheritance accounted for 14 percent of the difference in party, the researchers found.

"We are measuring two separate things here, ideology and party affiliation," Dr. Hibbing, the senior author, said. He added that his research team found the large difference in heritability between the two "very hard to believe," but that it held up.

The implications of this difference may be far-reaching, the authors argue. For years, political scientists tried in vain to learn how family dynamics like closeness between parents and children or the importance of politics in a household influenced political ideology. But the study suggests that an inherited social orientation may overwhelm the more subtle effects of family dynamics.

A mismatch between an inherited social orientation and a given party may also explain why some people defect from a party. Many people who are genetically conservative may be brought up as Democrats, and some who are genetically more progressive may be raised as Republicans, the researchers say.

In tracking attitudes over the years, geneticists have found that social attitudes tend to stabilize in the late teens and early 20's, when young people begin to fend for themselves.

Some "mismatched" people remain loyal to their family's political party. But circumstances can override inherited bent. The draft may look like a good idea until your number is up. The death penalty may seem barbaric until a loved one is murdered.

Family formation is a big influence. The researchers need to look at the big regional differences in voting, between Bush getting only 40% of the white vote in Massachusetts and 85% of the white vote in Mississippi. That's not just genetics.

Has anyone done longitudinal studies to see how voting changes as people move?

The researchers are not optimistic about the future of bipartisan cooperation or national unity. Because men and women tend to seek mates with a similar ideology, they say, the two gene pools are becoming, if anything, more concentrated, not less.

Razib has more at www.GNXP.com .

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"Hollywood's Other Obsession: Blond Bad Guys:" My new VDARE.com column is up:

Exactly why Hollywood hates blond men almost as much as it loves blond women is not clear... This prejudice against blond men would seem to be on a collision course with the tendency of movie moguls, such as Steven Spielberg, to marry blonde women, such as Kate Capshaw. This means the industry's hereditary elite will tend to become blonder over the generations. No doubt it will cause no end of father-son conflicts, keeping Beverly Hills psychiatrists prosperous for the rest of the century.   [More]

And who can forget "Lethal Weapon II" where the bad guys were Afrikaaner drug smugglers in the South African embassy? Fortunately, Mel Gibson seduced the beautiful blonde Boer babe away from dark side.

My all-time favorite blond bad guy is Gary Busey's Mr. Joshua in the original "Lethal Weapon." Busey has had a two-role career: Buddy Holly and Mr. Joshua, which shows a fair amount of range, but he hasn't made much of a mark in anything else. Of course, falling off a motorcycle onto his head hasn't helped.

A reader asks:

How far back does the blond bad guy motif go? Is it left over from WWII and the SS? Or were they doing this in the early 1930's as well? It would be kind of interesting if Hollywood was still doing its part to win the war against the Nazis.

But I would imagine that it is simply the flip side of your other article. If the leading lady has to be pale and blonde, and the hero has to be darker, well the villain has to stand out. We would not want the audience to pull a brain muscle in the theater.

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The War Nerd Defends Putin's African Cannibalism "Gaffe" -- In "Putin's Congo Roast," Gary Brecher explains the theory and practice of cannibalism as a military strategy during the current war in the Congo. Not appropriate reading if you have a queasy stomach. 

Vladimir Putin has jumped into the middle of the Dark Continent's darkest secrets. It happened at a photo op in Moscow, after Blair and the Russians had hammered out a deal to forgive more African debt...

Putin found a way to wipe the grin off Blair's face. He was getting noise about Russia's "human rights record" in the Q&A photo op, and he's not the kind of guy to put up with too much hassle from the press. That's not the kind of thing they teach you in the KGB. He popped up with what the Brits are calling "an astonishing outburst": "We all know that African countries used to have a tradition of eating their own adversaries. We don't have such a tradition or process or culture and I believe the comparison between Africa and Russia is not quite just."

Whoo-hoo! You Russians have guts! Nobody west of the Volga would ever say anything like that. Not in public, anyway. I wish I could see the footage of the seconds after the "outburst," just to watch Blair's face. There he is, Mister Smile, Mister Cool Britannia, now trying to be Mister Bob Geldof Bleeding Heart, standing next to this crazy Russian who just called Africans cannibals. Blair must've been tempted to do the old pulled-over-with-open-container routine: "Hey, officer, I'm just hitching! I don't even KNOW this Russian dude!"

The press invoked all the usual PC lies for their responses. It was interesting, because nobody actually said Putin was wrong. Just "insensitive." Somebody named Trevor-I mean, "Trevor"!-had a hissy fit and lisped, "What a preposterous thing to say. Putin is at best insensitive and at worst a downright racist."

Well, here's a news flash: Putin told the truth. Cannibalism is very common in African war zones. Trevor should read the news from places like Congo more carefully, like this story carried in the Economist a few weeks ago:

I'm going to skip over what happened to this poor Congolese woman who was grabbed by an opposing militia and get to Brecher's explanation of why cannibalism works as a tactic:

Cannibalism always increases in wartime. And though hardly anybody knows it, Congo is the site of the biggest war since 1945. Last time I reported on it the official death toll was 2.5 million. Since then another half million Congoans have died.

And a few of those have been eaten. The Congo war is pure primitive warfare: no battles, next to no combat, just massacres. Primitive warfare is one long civilian hunt. Most people try to deal with that by vanishing into the jungle. That's where they die-of malaria, or starvation, or an infected scratch, snakebite-anything but combat. The current estimate is that less than 2% of the deaths in this huge war have been from combat.

In wartime cannibalism is a weapon in itself, one of the most powerful of all. Because primitive war is about terrorizing people. How do you drive those enemy-tribe civvies into the jungle to die? You scare'em. So, what's the scariest thing you could think of? Killing people? Nah. Most Central Africans live hard, short lives. They're not scared of death, at least not as terrified as first-worlders.

What they fear more than anything is being eaten. Being eaten is the biggest, oldest fear in the world. Goes back to the days when it was us vs. the hyenas, and the hyenas usually won. Why do you think Jaws made so much money? You're in a million times more danger driving to Safeway than swimming in the ocean, but you're not scared driving, and you are scared swimming. It's not because Spielberg's such a genius, it's because that fear of being eaten is in our chimp brains.   [More]

Spielberg came back and made even more money with "Jurassic Park," which isn't about much of anything besides getting eaten.

For the same reason, Matt Drudge gives enormous play to headlines about animals munching on people.

Putin's gaffe reminds of how back in the 1970s, Conrad's book Heart of Darkness was a huge collegiate fad, culminating in the fearlessly sophomoric "Apocalypse Now," but academics couldn't bring themselves to explain what Kurtz was doing that was so horrifying.

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U.S. Open Winner Michael Campbell, who edged Tiger Woods by two strokes, is a New Zealander of mostly Maori and some Scottish ancestry.

Golf's a tough game. Last year, Retief Goosen played brilliantly and courageously in the final round at Shinnecock Hills under brutal conditions to beat a hard-charging Phil Mickelson and win his second U.S. Open. This year, he entered the final round with a three stroke lead and everybody practically conceding the steady Boer his third title. But, today he shot an 81 and lost by eight shots.

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The NYT runs another rave review of Freakonomics -- After Jim Holt's softball review last month, Roger Lowenstein says the same old same old all over again, accepting Levitt's abortion-cut-crime theory without demurral or the slightest evidence that he even spent fifteen minutes Googling the subject.

Aren't these NYT tongue-baths of Freakonomics getting a little unseemly? After all, the NYT now employs Levitt and Dubner to write a regular "Freakonomics" column for the NYT Magazine. Does the term "conflict of interest" come to mind? 

Okay, okay, I know a lot of economists are shocked, SHOCKED by my insinuations that some of the puffery associated with the Freakonomics fad is a bit self-interested, so forget I ever said that... I admit, it's utterly beyond belief that anyone associated with economics could ever be motivated by financial gain. It would violate all the laws of economics if economists weren't an exception to the laws of economics.

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Important article confirming science of human biodiversity: An old joke says that the difference between a psychotic and a neurotic is that a psychotic says "Two plus two equals five," while a neurotic says "Two plus two equals four, and I just can't stand it." In terms of public discussion of the science of race, we are slowly leaving the Age of Psychoticism and entering the Age of Neuroticism.

This article is from the "New York Times of Canada:"

The new science of race

By CAROLYN ABRAHAM

From Toronoto's Globe and Mail

Henry Harpending is about to titillate the world's conspiracy theorists with one of the most politically incorrect academic papers of the new millennium.

Why, he and his colleagues at the University of Utah asked, have Jews of European descent won 27 per cent of the Nobel Prizes given to Americans in the past century, while making up only 3 per cent of the population? Why do they produce more than half the world's chess champions? And why do they have an average IQ higher than any other ethnic group for which there's reliable data, and nearly six times as many people scoring above 140 compared with Europeans?

Prof. Harpending suggests that the reason is in their bloodline � it's genetic.

The 61-year-old anthropologist's explanation is not easily dismissed, but it crosses into the territory scientists fear most.

... Two U.S. journals refused the paper, an unusual experience for this widely published scholar. �We finally had to send the paper to England, where they're not so obsessed with political correctness,� Prof. Harpending said.

The danger of bolstering bigots is what has scientists so nervous. If a complex trait such as intelligence can be inherited, for instance, and you say one ethnic or racial group tends to have more of it than others, does it follow that another group has less?

Ever since the eugenics movement a century ago, which led to forced sterilizations in Canada and the United States to improve the racial stock of the human species, and then the horrors of Nazi Germany, such questions have been taboo.

Funny, I was always under the vague impression that Hitler was responsible for the horrors of Nazi Germany ... But now I've learned that it was all Sir Francis Galton's fault. Silly me.

University of Western Ontario psychologist J. Philippe Rushton was internationally condemned 15 years ago for claiming to discover differences in brain size, intelligence, sexual habits and personality between whites, blacks and �Orientals.�

Yet the role of race in genetics is a subject scientists now believe they can't ignore. The future of medicine may depend on it.

Oh, so, Rushton was right... Well, I'm sure the apology to him from international opinion must be in the mail.

In fact, a massive international effort, which includes many Canadian researchers, has been quietly under way for nearly four years to catalogue and compare the genetics of people with African, Asian and European ancestry.

It is called the Haplotype Project. You may not have heard a word about it before now. But by the end of this year, society may have to start facing its implications.

It was not supposed to be this way.

When the Human Genome Project was completed in 2000, its most touted result was that it showed no genetic basis for race. In fact, some scientists went so far as to dub race a �biological fiction.�

... The map indicated that humans as a species are 99.9 per cent genetically identical � that, in fact, there are greater differences between two frogs in a pond than between any two people who find themselves waiting for a bus....

It was a message of harmony: Hardly a hair of code separates us.

But five years later, one of scientists' main preoccupations has become to chart the genetic variations between and within racial groups � to parse that 0.1 per cent. These differences arise through mutations, which all begin as one-time flukes, but become more prevalent in a particular place if they offer a survival advantage, carriers have more children or they result in a trait a society finds desirable.

Now, teams are panning for gene types to help explain why West Africa produces the fastest runners in the world. A University of Toronto researcher is hunting the gene types that account for skin colours.

A Pennsylvania State University scientist is teasing out the biology behind other variable physical traits, such as height or hair texture.

More crucially, it has become obvious that the 0.1 per cent may add up to the difference between sickness and health.

In Canada, researchers from McMaster and McGill Universities are breaking down heart disease by nationality to understand the interplay of genes and environment. The answers may explain why South Asians suffer high rates of high blood pressure, why heart attacks hit Middle Eastern men 10 years earlier than Europeans, or why the Chinese seem to boast the trimmest waistlines in the world.

The genes discussed in Dr. Harpending's team's paper, meanwhile, are known to be the ones that account for the high Ashkenazi rates of breast cancer, the neurological disorder Tay-Sachs and other conditions. The mystery is why these traits have persisted at high rates over generations. The Utah group's conclusion (to be published in the Cambridge University Press Journal of Biosocial Science) is that the diseases are a tragic side effect of genes selected for their role in boosting brain function.

Given the explosion of research in race and genetics, Francis Collins, a former leader of the Human Genome Project, had to admit in the journal Nature Genetics last fall that �well-intentioned statements� about the biological insignificance of race may have left the wrong impression: �It is not strictly true that race or ethnicity has no biological connection. It must be emphasized, however, that the connection is generally quite blurry.�

Alan Bernstein had warned him. In the fall of 2000, the president of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research heard Dr. Collins speak at Harvard about there being no significant differences between races. �That's going to come back at you,� he said.

According to Dr. Bernstein, 0.1 per cent is actually far from an insignificant difference in the genome's chemical sequence. In fact, he said, the genetic distance between humans and gorillas is not much greater. �It's silly to try and be politically correct about it.� What matters, Dr. Bernstein said, is to treat it scientifically.

I pointed that out years ago in VDARE.com, quoting Harpending and Cochran to show the Human Genome flacks were yanking our chains.

The most organized effort to do that to date is the International Haplotype Project. Scientists in Canada, the United States, Britain, China, Japan and Nigeria are spending $185-million to chart the genomes of people from Tokyo, residents of Beijing, the Yoruba in Nigeria and Americans of Western and Northern European descent � 270 people in all.

Using these maps to find genetic differences between ethnic groups could lay the groundwork for new treatments and cures. It might help predict a person's response to a given drug, and allow for tailor-made medications with fewer side effects. It could bring the medical advances genetics has long promised.

On the other hand, the knowledge may raise more questions about the meaning of racial differences than anyone cares to answer.

Actually, a few people believe that the truth is better for the human race than lies, ignorance, or wishful thinking. Not many, I'll grant you, but a few ...

..."From one drop of blood, you can do hundreds of thousands of tests,� Dr. Tom Hudson enthused.  From one drop of blood you also can discern the ethnic background of the person being tested with fairly good certainty.

So it is here, where technology has shrunk costs to just pennies per test, that major sections of the Haplotype Project's �HapMap� are being generated.

The project was born in the summer before Sept. 11, 2001. At first, it seemed destined for obscurity. Scientists at the University of Toronto, McGill and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had been hunting gene mutations that increased the risk of Crohn's disease in 200 Toronto-area families of mostly European heritage � British, Polish, French and Greek.

In the process, they stumbled on a remarkable discovery. The genome's three billion chemical letters appear to be arranged in blocks � like paragraphs in a text. Some are longer, some shorter, but all have fairly clear beginnings and ends.

The pattern seemed to make sense. In the genetic mix and mingle of conception, the mother's and father's DNA are passed down to the next generation in these kinds of heritable chunks. Researchers estimate there are 100,000 such blocks in each person's genome.

What's more, gene mutations within those blocks seem to fall in the same places, even in different families. It's like a library in which every book contains a typo in the first paragraph on the second page, or the fourth paragraph on every fifth page. The misprints might be different, Dr. Hudson explained, but they occur in the same locations. For finding genetic mutations, the pattern seemed as good as an index: Instead of scanning the whole book, you could flip straight to page 2 or page 5.

The discovery seemed to cry out for a new map of the human genome, one that would show the haplotype blocks and highlight each paragraph in the book of life.

�Everyone knew this was important,� Dr. Hudson said. �But there was no big press release.� Coming out a month after Sept. 11, the discovery of haplotype blocks attracted little initial attention. But for scientists it couldn't have come at a better time.

Traditional methods to find mutated genes in family studies and remote populations had hit a wall. Yes, they could find the lone mutation that led to a rare disorder such as Huntington's disease or cystic fibrosis. But trying to find the dozens of mutations that increase the risk of common diseases like cancers or asthma would simply require too many patients and too much data crunching.

With a haplotype map, they would be able to search the genomes of huge numbers of people with a particular disease, in search of a common typo in a particular paragraph.

First, however, the HapMap researchers had to find out if their theory would apply to the genomes of people around the world. The maps provided by the Human Genome Project would offer little help, because they had been rough compilations based on various people, with little regard for ethnic background.

In large measure, one person: Craig Venter.

The next question was, whose genomes should they use?

When HapMap scientists met in Washington in 2002 to discuss the issue, Dr. Hudson � a 44-year-old, buttoned-down geneticist much more comfortable with technical issues than social ones � was taken aback at the incendiary debate that broke out. It was the kind of battle that seems bound to become more frequent as scientists continue to explore this sensitive area.

�As Canadians, we are not used to the high emotions around race, as they are in the U.S.,� he said. In that two-day meeting and others to come, African-American community leaders, ethicists and philosophers unleashed their fears and frustrations.

�There were two points of view,� Dr. Hudson recalled. �One of them is, �You're only going to be studying Caucasian chromosomes, clearly, because you only want to find tests for North Americans and U.S. people with money.' �

But if Africans and other populations were included in the map, there was serious concern that any differences found in their genomes might leave them open to another tier of discrimination, perhaps from health-insurance companies.

Gregory Cochran and I have kicked around the issue some, and we don't figure genetic discrimination in health insurance will be a major threat: typically, if an individual's immune system is strong at resisting infection X, it's weak at resisting infection Y, so it would be hard to predict a person's future health from knowing his genome. (This assumes Cochran's theory that most diseases aren't directly genetic in origin.) Thus, a law outlawing genetic discrimination in health insurance wouldn't have a massive downside, even to insurance companies.

In the United States, where the mortality rates for a range of diseases are higher among blacks than whites, such disputes are common. For example, scientists and sociologists continue to argue over whether African Americans' high rates of hypertension are due to genes or to environment.

Knowledge of racial differences in genes is a good thing: it tells blacks that they should be extra careful to limit salt intake, that they should get checkups for prostate cancer, that they should imitate Jews with their Tay-Sachs disease testing and find out if they are heterozygous for sickle-cell anemia, etc.

One contentious theory suggests African Americans descend from those slaves who were able to survive the dry and hungry trip from Africa thanks to a genetic quirk that enabled them to retain moisture and salt � which also can contribute to high blood pressure.

This is one of those theories, now being pushed by Steven Levitt's prot�g� Roland Fryer, where the direction of the effect is correct but the magnitude is insignificant. Sure, lots of blacks died from diarrheal diseases on the Middle Passage and ones who retained salt better were more likely to survive, but diarrheal diseases were also a major killer in West Africa for hundreds of generations before then, and continue to be so today. African-Americans' genomes are much more selected for salt retention by their ancestors living in hot, sweaty Africa for thousands of years than by the one generation that came over on the ship.

But others say it is due to diet and stress. As New York University sociologist Troy Duster told The New York Times last fall, �If you follow me around Nordstrom's and put me in jail at nine times the rate of whites and refuse to give me a bank loan, I might get hypertensive.�

In the end, the HapMap team decided to include African chromosomes, along with those from Japan, China and the United States. It was a diverse enough sampling to tell them if the haplotype theory would hold up, but selective enough for their limited budget.

At the same time, ethicists joined the project to ensure that all DNA donors would be aware of the risks of participating � namely, that any dramatic genetic differences the project discovered could end up stigmatizing their communities.

�Certainly,� Dr. Hudson said, �there's enough examples already of racism in the world � before genetics, during genetics and after genetics � that there's no doubt someone would try to use the information for genetic discrimination.�

Despite the long and ugly social history of race, there is no clear-cut definition for the term. 

Actually, there is an extremely simple but useful definition of a racial group: "a partly inbred extended family."

Is a person's race defined by skin colour, that most visible of markers? By language, country of birth, the food they eat or the religion they practice? Not even scientists can agree.

It's all relative: it's who your relatives are. Everybody has lots of relatives, so everybody belongs to multiple racial groups, just as everybody belongs to multiple extended families. If you want something more clear-cut than that, well, too bad, you aren't going to find it because that's the nature of sexual reproduction.

�If you have a [genetic] sample from Nigeria, can you really say that it represents Africans? Is that the same as African Americans? [In some studies], Jews are white, sometimes they're not. Sometimes they're compared to Caucasians,� said Celeste Condit, a professor of speech communication at the University of Georgia who specializes in biomedical issues.

�The scientists have been irresponsible for not developing a language for this,� 

That is very true, which is why I've developed the definition for them. 

An ethnic group, by the way, are people who share common traits that are often passed down within biological families, but that can also be spread other ways -- e.g., language, religion, cuisine, etc.

These definitions of mine match well with how the U.S. Census Bureau uses "race" and "ethnicity" on the Census form.

Prof. Condit said. �Usually scientists are very careful in developing their technical vocabulary. But it's hard to describe the geographic dispersion of people properly � and they have these easy [racial] terms in their heads.�

Of course, geneticists already know that since people have ancestors from all over the world, no one fits neatly into any one racial box. We are all of us mixed, even if our complexions suggest otherwise. There also can be greater genetic differences within racial groups than between them.

You hear this all the time -- I run into people saying stupid things based on this like, "A black man and a white man are more genetically similar than two whites." -- but it's based on an apples to oranges comparison. What is actually true is that the individual genetic differences between two members of one racial group can be greater than the average difference between two racial groups. When phrased correctly, it turns out to be a pretty boring statement, which doesn't say what the race-deniers hope it says.

But since no one now has the resources to uncover the secrets in every patient's DNA, both science and medicine are using �race� as an easy, if dangerous, shortcut.

�Until we can scan the genome of every individual,� said Tim Caulfield, director of the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta, �race has become this rough proxy.�

Yet HapMap researchers are indeed finding that the genetic lines between their groups are terribly blurry. In fact, the block structures are similar in all of them.

�Humans as a species are just so young there hasn't been enough time for the genome to alter that dramatically,� Dr. Hudson said. (Frogs, on the other hand, have a few more millennia behind them than people.)

As expected, they are finding the most variations in the DNA of donors from Africa, where modern humans are believed to have arisen 150,000 years ago. It is thought that the rest of the planet's populations are all descendents of a small group who only wandered out of Africa roughly 60,000 years ago, so there has been less time for those genes to mutate in the rest of the world.

You find the most variation in Africa in neutral genes (a.k.a., junk genes), genes that aren't subject to Darwinian selection because they have no function, they just occasionally mutate. Too many people, such as Malcom Gladwell, get hung up on the misconception that Africans are more diverse in terms of functioning genes, when there isn't much evidence for that. I suspect that when we eventually figure out what all the active genes do, it will turn out that South Asia, not Sub-Saharan Africa, has the highest level of functional genetic diversity. I explained this back in 2000 in "Seven Dumb Ideas about Race."

What they do know, Dr. Hudson stressed, is that the mutations they are cataloguing � the 10 million or so most common ones � appear to exist in all populations. Just not at the same frequencies.

It's all relative. Humans have a hard time dealing with the relativistic nature of nature. We want hard and fast laws, dammit! But reality is what it is.

�Almost all the differences you see in people in North America are differences you see in Africa, are differences you see in Asia,� he said. �It's very rare to have something you only see in [one place].� And when you do, he said, it's uncommon even in that population.

One stunning example is a gene variant that makes 1 per cent of Caucasians (and an estimated 10 per cent of Ashkenazi Jews) immune to HIV infection. It blocks receptors on the surface of cells where the AIDS virus would otherwise enter. Scientists suspect the trait was passed down from Europeans who survived medieval smallpox plagues thanks to the same mutation.

Another variant known to be fairly exclusive to a particular people is the �Duffy null� mutation in people from sub-Saharan Africa. Penn State genetic anthropologist Mark Shriver explained that it likely became prevalent there because it offered protection against a particular type of malaria, �but it didn't spread widely outside of Africa.�

Yet Dr. Shriver, who by all outward appearances is a white man, happens to carry it. A scan of his genome suggests that while he is predominantly European, he is also about 11 per cent West African and 3 per cent native American.

When I interviewed Shriver three years ago, he claimed his tests showed he was 22% black. It made for a great story, but I shouldn't have fallen for it, because that meant that one of his grandparents was 87% black, yet passing as a white man, which seems implausible. I'm glad to see he has refined his estimate. But let that be a warning to not take autosomal genetic test estimates on faith. (I discuss the strength and weaknesses of Shriver's tests here.)

�Race just doesn't exist in a critical line,� he said. �It's more of a gradient.�

Dr. Shriver applauds the information flowing in from the HapMap project (which is freely available on-line), calling it �a revolutionary tool� for science. But others are not so impressed.

�Basically, it is a total waste of money,� Columbia University geneticist Joseph Terwilliger said. Dr. Terwilliger argued that by focusing on the most common genetic mutations, the project would overlook the most specific differences to be found in any group. It would make �populations look systematically more similar to one another than they really are.�

In other words, there's even more racial genetic diversity than the HapMap will find.

Medically important traits � such as the HIV-resisting gene type � could be missed if researchers do not deliberately hone in on the rarer quirks in each particular racial group. �Different populations have enormous differences,� Dr. Terwilliger said. �If this were not true, then there is no way we can determine how we are related and how populations migrated historically.

�You cannot put people neatly in a small number of meaningful categories like black, white or Asian. That said, Koreans and Chinese are genetically vastly more similar than either are to Germans.�

As I discussed recently in VDARE.com, there's nothing ultra-special about "continental-scale racial groups," such as Caucasians than makes them the only size of racial group worth discussing. It's just that intercontinental travel was long difficult, so people tend to inbreed within their continent. But there are perfectly reasonable smaller groups, and larger super-continental groups too (such as East Asians and Amerindians). 

The controversy around the scientific meaning of race is already spilling over from the lab to the medical clinic. Researchers continue to debate definitions, but the age of race-based medicine is upon us.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the world's first �ethnic� medication last fall, a heart-failure drug for African Americans known as BiDil. Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca is developing marketing plans for a lung-cancer drug that flopped in Caucasians but seems to work for Asians.

No one yet fully understands the actual genetic traits that make these drugs effective in these groups. And scientists have every reason to believe people other than blacks or Asians may carry these traits. But for now, prescriptions for such medications are to be based on little more than physical appearances and questions about a patient's heritage.

And this, Prof. Condit argued, could lead to significant risks. Doctors may end up denying a drug to Caucasians who might benefit from it, because it is touted to work only in South Asians. Or they might prescribe a pill to a black person who actually would benefit from some other treatment. (For example, research has found that as many as 30 per cent of African-American men have a white male ancestor, a fact attributed to the sexual politics of slavery.)

Prof. Condit has tried to bring the inherent dangers of race-based science to the attention of the researchers involved. She has published journal articles, held focus groups and arranged meetings that few scientists leave their labs to attend. Without careful consideration and communication, she warned, modern medicine could set race relations back decades.

She offered this scenario: Imagine a drug marketed only for blacks, a simple pain reliever, prescribed in the millions. Now imagine that, like a certain now-notorious pain medication, it turns out to have the horrible side effect of increasing the risk of heart attacks. Result: Tens of thousands of North American blacks � and only blacks � die.

�What happens if you get a Vioxx situation with one of these drugs? And the likelihood of this happening is very high,� she said. �But until there's a catastrophe, people don't want to deal with it. You are playing with fire.�

Those watching the field of modern racial genetics explode are already concerned.

Okay, so the idea is that if a drug that's approved only for blacks turns out to be bad, then paranoid racist blacks will decide that it was all part of the white man's plot. But, of course, if drugs that would save black lives are kept off the market causing blacks to die because of Prof. Condit's assumption that blacks are so paranoid and racist that they would react stupidly if one drug turns out bad, then, well, blacks would have good reason to feel paranoid. Instead, why don't we just save patients' lives and ignore the paranoid cranks?

�If genes predispose groups to certain diseases or health conditions, might we also find information that hints at more socially loaded conclusions?� the University of Alberta's Tim Caulfield wondered.

Last summer, Prof. Caulfield was surprised to read an article in the prestigious journal Science titled, �Peering Under the Hood of Africa's Runners.� It noted that all but six of the 500 fastest times for the 100-metre dash have come from sprinters of West African descent, which includes most U.S. blacks. Kenyans, meanwhile, dominate world records in long-distance races.

Prof. Caulfield was shocked, SHOCKED to read in a scientific magazine that West Africans are better sprinters and Kenyans better distance runners!

According to the report, Swedish physiologists trying to penetrate the �Kenyan mystique� compared runners from Africa and Scandinavia on treadmill times, lung capacity, heart rates and body weights. Limb measurements indicated that the Kenyans carried 400 grams less flesh on each calf. The report referred to their �birdlike legs,� explaining how Kenyan runners squeeze more power from their oxygen intake, since �they need less energy to swing their limbs.�

Research on West Africa's sprinters, meanwhile, revealed a body type of heavier �fast-twitch� muscles, versus the lighter �slow-twitch� muscles of endurance runners, as well as denser bones, narrower hips, thicker thighs, longer legs and lighter calves. Efforts are now under way to decode the genetics behind all these traits.

Like Prof. Harpending's paper on Ashkenazi Jews, the report on African runners presented a positive picture of its subjects, albeit a stereotypical one. Yet it seemed eerily reminiscent of ugly 19th-century efforts to gauge racial differences with calipers and cranial measurements.

Maybe it's time too stop demonizing the great physical anthropologists of the past.

Prof. Caulfield, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy, was mostly concerned about where such research would lead. Already, he said, an Australian company is cashing in on the notion that some people are born to run, offering to test a child's genes for fast- or slow-twitch muscles � �so you know which sport to put your kid in.�

What an amazing waste of money. Why don't you just watch and see whether your kid is a faster or slower runner than the other kids at various lengths? You need a genetic test for that?

While he said he loathes the idea of restricting scientific research in a free, democratic society, Prof. Caulfield described the race-based search for disease genes as a Pandora's box.

Studies are sure to appear on genes linked to complex characteristics in racial groups, such as athletic or cognitive ability or even criminal behaviour. But these traits, he stressed, are anything but a simple story of genetics.

�It's like beauty,� he said. �Being beautiful will involve the interplay of thousands of genes and social factors that dictate at a given time what is beautiful. It's a very complex story, it involves culture, socio-economic class, experience. . . . So how do you handle that information?�

Like other information, in the free marketplace of ideas.

As Penn State's Mark Shriver put it, �It's not that genes for IQ, athletic ability and musical ability don't exist. But you just can't tease apart the affect of environment in shaping these abilities.�

No, it's difficult (you need expensive tools like twin and adoption studies), but you can make a lot of progress toward finding out the truth.

If people are starting to overestimate the role genes play in shaping human health and behaviour � and underestimate the huge impact of experience, environment and social forces � Columbia's Joseph Terwilliger said that scientists must share the blame.

How about first sharing the blame for lying to us about how race didn't exist?

�In many ways, scientists over-hyped the information in the genome, or at least what we know about it, to the point where now people are getting unnecessarily nervous about societal implications,� he said.

�The fact is that to get the funding they sold genetic determinism, which of course is nothing close to reality. And now they are paying the price.�

As Cochran pointed out years ago, the Human Genome hypester got the truth exactly backward -- they implied that genes cause most diseases but denied that genes cause differences in capabilities among races.

This year, the journal American Psychologist devoted an entire issue to the impact race and genetics could have on its field, raising a list of the difficult questions ahead. It included three papers on the controversial issue of intelligence, including one commentary arguing that genes should get more attention in studies of racial intellectual differences.

That was "Under the Skin," written by the late David C. Rowe while he was dying of cancer, and intended as his last paper.

For Dr. Harpending, who admitted he would never have �even muttered in public� his theories about Ashkenazi Jews and intelligence were he not a senior professor with tenure, this type of conversation cannot come soon enough.

�There is this massive disconnect between public and private discourse; between what's said in the public arena and what your neighbour tells you [about racial groups] over the fence,� he said. �Some of those things are wrong and bigoted, but some of those are right.�

Perhaps. But would Prof. Harpending dare match his Ashkenazi study with one of India's lowest Hindu caste, the so-called untouchables, who like European Jews have historically been an isolated society � except, in this case, relegated to centuries of cleaning latrines?

�One is the mirror image of the other, I suppose,� he admitted. �I would personally find that distasteful. But if I had a theory about it, I would hope that I would publish it.�

If the race debate in science seems sticky now, it's only going to get worse.

"Worse" is apparently used here to mean "more public, better-informed, and with less demonizing of the honest."

This summer, scientists from all over the world are gathering to discuss plans for yet another map of the human genome. This one is based again on a discovery involving Canadian research � and in scientific terms, it is hard to overstate its significance.

Geneticist Steve Scherer, a senior scientist at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, working with colleagues at Harvard University, discovered last August that the basic model of simple genetic inheritance science has clung to for 100 years is wrong: Mom and dad don't always make equal genetic contributions in the creation of a child's genome.

Instead, some people might end up with three, four or even more copies of a gene from one parent, instead of the single copy of each gene scientists thought each parent always contributed.

The implications could be huge. There might be greater genetic differences between individuals � and certain populations � than anyone imagined. Certainly, there are more than the HapMap is charting, Dr. Scherer said.

Might one ethnic group, for example, carry an overload or an underload of genes for a particular trait?

�I think it was premature to say that the difference between people might only be 0.1 per cent,� Dr. Scherer said. �Based on what we know now, it is probably in the 0.2 per cent range. And in the end it may even be as high as 1 per cent.�

Dr. Scherer spent two days last August fielding media calls when the news first broke. He did most of the interviews by phone, but in a few cases it was easiest to respond by e-mail.

Then came a call from his Harvard collaborators informing him that one of those e-mail interviews had been with a writer who worked for a neo-Nazi website. The writer spun the news as scientific proof of genetic differences between races � without even misquoting or twisting Dr. Scherer's words.

The horror, the horror of being quoted accurately! Perhaps if the mainstream press didn't constantly tell us not to believe our lying eyes that race exists, individuals wouldn't listen to wackos as much.

�As a geneticist,� the 41-year-old Dr. Scherer said, �it's your worst nightmare.�

The politically correct might think about cutting off your funding. That's a big reason that population geneticists like the great Cavalli-Sforza have been blowing smoke for so long about race not existing, when C-S proudly puts on the cover of his magnum opus his summary map showing the main races of the world.

The HapMap's Tom Hudson in Montreal has had the same one. A colleague recently referred him to an Internet hate site that declared the HapMap would finally prove the biological basis of race.

Any bets on which one is being smeared as a "hate site"? A Google search on "HapMap" shows GNXP.com coming up as the first website other than official institutional ones. I think it's time to change the term from "hate site" to "hated site," since it's the people who are calling Gene Expression a "hate site" who are the true haters.

There is a lot of hate in this world, and a remarkable fraction is directed toward truth-tellers. As Cochran says, they don't hate you for lying, they hate you for telling the truth.

�It made me queasy, because they actually name the name of my friend, my colleague in Boston. And they actually say, �He's going to prove us right.' �I didn't understand what I was reading when I first read it,� Dr. Hudson said. �I never read something that was so disgusting.�

"Disgusting" apparently means "honest."

It wasn't an isolated incident.

Morris Foster, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma and one of the HapMap's leaders, said researchers are tracking racist sites for references to the HapMap, which logs 20,000 downloads a week from its public database. They have amassed quite a collection.

Not only do the hate[d] sites keep abreast of what HapMap information has become available (such as recent data on Japanese and Nigerians), but they anxiously await findings that will help unveil genetic traits linked to such things as crime and cognitive ability by race.

�Once it is scientifically demonstrated,� one web contributor writes, �that will be the beginning of the end for the Marxist-egalitarian argument over race. Personally, I can't wait.�

Can you imagine? There are twisted, sick individuals out there who don't agree with the "Marxist-egalitarian" view! Here is the comment thread in which that supposedly reprehensible quote was placed. I sure can't find any hate.

Even Western Ontario's infamous J. Philippe Rushton has seized upon modern genetics as an opportunity to make his case again, in the company of Arthur Jensen, a University of California psychology professor who argues that race determines IQ.

This month, the unpopular scholars have the lead article in the journal Psychology, Public Policy and Law, presenting 60 pages of evidence arguing that genes explain 50 per cent of the IQ differences between races, in which Asians rank higher than whites and whites higher than blacks. (The publisher, the American Psychological Association, invited scientists to rebut the paper in the same issue.)

And yet, despite all the social hazards of modern genetics, Dr. Scherer said scientists should not �have to fear discussing their results of their research, so long as they are open-minded and listen to criticisms and comments from others, including the public.

�I always wonder what Darwin would have done in today's world.�

The ultimate test, Dr. Harpending pointed out, lies not with researchers, but with the public.

He described projects under way involving genes potentially associated with controversial behaviours such as sexual promiscuity, adultery and family abandonment.

�A number of things are coming down the pipe,� he said, �that we are going to have to figure out how to cope with as a decent and moral society.�

Carolyn Abraham is The Globe and Mail's medical reporter.

[More]

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Tom Cruise announces he has proposed to Katie Holmes: My guess is that Cruise is normally hypomanic -- that desirable state where you have tremendous energy while still maintaining self-control (Teddy Roosevelt is the classic hypomanic). But, now Cruise appears to have slipped from hypomanic into a manic phase in which, after years of playing the publicity game like a master, he can't resist self-destructively responding to adverse public reactions by constantly upping the ante.

Hopefully, while he's in this phase, he won't do something truly destructive, like giving all his money to the Scientologists.

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If Stephen Jay Gould were alive today, he'd spinning in his grave: Gould devoted a lot of space in his 1981 bestseller denouncing IQ research The Mismeasure of Man to claiming that 19th century researchers into the relationship between brain volume and smartness cooked their data.  For some reason, lots of people have considered this a crushing rejoinder against 21st century IQ science. In truth, the old scientists didn't cheat, but even if they did, that doesn't seem much more relevant to today's research than asserting that modern astronomy is fraudulent because astronomers used to believe the sun went around the earth.

Well, it turns out that Gould was not only irrelevant, but wrong -- [For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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How to be a celebrity: First, be an African-American or a white American. 

Forbes has published its top 100 global celebrities listing for 2005, which ranks celebrity's "power" on pay and web, press, and TV coverage.[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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DNA Ancestry Testing too politically incorrect for neocons: In an unsigned editorial, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board asks:

Is DNA testing just snake oil?

... there is no DNA test that can magically pinpoint anybody's distant or "deep" ancestry, Zulu or otherwise. Even so, many Americans--including some who would rather die than have the FBI know what books they bought--are busy sending their genetic blueprint to companies and organizations that offer ancestry tests...

As impressive as that may sound, a geneticist we asked said it was gobbledygook and basically meaningless. So is much of the ancestry testing game. As true scientists in the field of genetics know, human beings are very similar genetically, and the variations that do exist can be found in virtually all populations. The best that could honestly be said to test-takers is, for instance, that they might have an ancestral connection to a certain region of the world. Given the limits of current hard science, DNA testing can offer less reliable information than old-fashioned genealogy and family trees.

That's regrettable especially in the case of Americans whose ancestors arrived as slaves, leaving no helpful records at Ellis Island or elsewhere. But there may be an upside to not paying for testing, too. No matter how much confidentiality the companies promise, there is no way to be sure that your sample won't be used in unauthorized ways.

Maybe by hackers, the same way they steal and sell your credit-card information. Maybe someday by others with more sinister designs. Dr. David Valle, a professor with the McKusick-Nathans Institute for Genetic Medicine at Johns Hopkins, notes that while "human variation is something that many of us treasure and celebrate...history has many examples where human variation has been used for very evil purposes."

I suspect that this is intended in a round-about way to discredit the Cochran-Harpending hypothesis of Ashkenazi intelligence without actually deigning to mention it in the WSJ: if everybody's genes are the same, then Ashkenazi Jews couldn't possibly be a hereditary group, and their genes couldn't be any different from anybody else's, right?

Genetic racial testing is an interesting and rapidly improving, but by no means flawless, technique. I've written quite a bit about what it can do and can't do:

- Here's my interview with Howard U. geneticist Rick Kittles who sells Y-chromosome (direct male line) and mitochondrial DNA (direct female line) tests to African-Americans.

- Here's my quick blog item on AncestrybyDNA's autosomal test that can tell you your overall racial admixture.

- Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes offers female line testing of Europeans.

- The most famous example of Y-chromosome testing: the discovery that Genghis Khan is the direct male line ancestor of 16 million Asian men: Have the Genes of the World's Greatest Lover Been Found?

- Q&A w/ Jon Entine on Exploring Jewish History through Genes

The New Genetic Understanding of Race:

Part 1: Race Is Not So Black or White

Part 2: How White Is the Average Black? How Black Is the Average White?

Part 3: What Happened to Mexico's Blacks?

- Q&A w/ Jon Entine on Exploring Jewish History through Genes

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"Nobody knows anything:" Slate summarizes a 55 page meta-analysis by three B-School profs on the economics of the movie industry, but misses the key questions of "How can you tell whether a movie is going to be good or not? And how can you tell whether it's going to be a hit or not?" Consider Ron Howard's last three movies: 

A Beautiful Mind -- Good / Hit

The Missing -- Not good / Not a Hit

Cinderella Man -- Good / Not a Hit

[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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Richard Cohen on Ashkenazi Intelligence: In "Aptitude Adjustment" in the Washington Post, Cohen writes:

[The New York Times article] said that scientists at the University of Utah had linked certain genetic diseases found only among European Jews with "natural selection for enhanced intellectual ability." In other words, Jews are smarter because over about a thousand years they adapted to discriminatory practices that limited their livelihood to a restricted range of commercial occupations. Those who succeeded tended to have more children and so, over time, European Jews in general improved their intelligence.

Some scientists find the theory credible; some do not. As for myself, I am immeasurably comforted by it. Jews are smart. This does not mean that all Jews are smart and that no Jews are dumb. It only means that, in general, the proposition holds. Among other things, American Jews -- about 2 percent of the population -- make up 27 percent of this country's Nobel laureates. Something's going on here.

I cannot be certain that Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard, has read the article. But if he did, I bet he wondered why it is possible to suggest that certain Jews are smarter than other people but not remotely possible to suggest that women might not be as brilliant in science and engineering as men... But if Jews could adapt to their environment in a certain way, why couldn't women or men?...

The reason the Utah study of Jews produced no outcry is that it suggested Jews were, like the children of Lake Wobegon, above average. The reason Summers got into trouble is that he wondered if, so to speak, women were below average. But if one is possible, why not the other? The answer escapes me -- and it cannot be, as we all know from the Utah study, because I'm dumb.

Indeed.

But one other reason for the lack of organized outrage is that Gregory Cochran has no money, while Larry Summers presides over a $20 billion endowment, out of which he has already promised to pay $50 million, with assurances of more to come.

And here's syndicated columnist Linda Seebach on the theory.

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They Saved Einstein's Brain! Interesting article from the LA Times on McMaster U. psychologist Sandra Witelson, who has been dissecting hundreds of brains (after their owners no longer need them, I'm glad to report). She finds strong sex differences. Does that mean Larry Summers can take back the $50 million in other people's money he's promised to make up for his gaffe?

By the way, Dr. Witelson has chopped up Einstein's brain and finds it to have been, no fooling, a "one in a billion brain."

Back when I was a kid, while Einstein's brain was still floating in a jar undissected, and you could only look at the outside of it, my fourth grade teacher explained that Einstein's brain was extra-wrinkled, which shows that every time you learn something new, you get a new wrinkle in your brain. But the new article is unaccountably silent on the Wrinkled Brain Theory.

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Batmania: Random notes:

- Notice how the Gotham City muggers are blond?

- This time, Gotham City looks more like Chicago than New York, with all the liftable bridges over the river and the art deco Wayne Tower looks like a bigger version of the Board of Trade building at the end of Lasalle St. A lot of the underground road footage was shot on Lower Wacker Drive, a rather ominous-looking shortcut under the Loop that I took to work every day for years. However, Chicago is lacking in blond muggers.

- As a boy, Christian Bale starred in Steven Spielberg's 1987 "Empire of the Sun," which was a rare box office dud for Spielberg ($22 million domestically, but I thought was one of the greatest movies ever made. Bale plays an English lad living in the wealthy European suburb of Shanghai on December 7, 1941 who is interned in a brutal camp by the Japanese. Objectively, he's a pitiful victim of the war, but he finds World War II to be a blast. Spielberg took the script by Tom Stoppard and augmented Stoppard's trademark "surreal realism" -- a style Stoppard invented in "After Magritte" where a seemingly impossible tableau is later explained. For example, the remarkably memorable scene that begins with Bale's Japanese friend on the other side of the fence singing a Shinto hymn and climbing into his Kamikaze was largely Spielberg's invention. Stoppard couldn't imagine spending the money the scene cost, but Spielberg came up with the most Stoppardian segment in any of the many movies Stoppard has worked on.

- Gary Oldman doesn't have much to do as the only honest cop in Gotham City, but he gives a seminar in acting solely through facial expressions when he is pressed into driving the Batmobile. Oldman was great way back in 1986's "Sid and Nancy" (he beat out Daniel Day-Lewis for the role of Sid Vicious), but Chloe Webb was even better. But there aren't a lot of roles for funny-looking girls (other than as Danny Devito's girlfriend in "Twins"), so her career never amounted to much. Too bad Tim Roth turned down the role of Johnny Rotten.

- Practically the entire cast of "Batman Begins" is from the British Isles, other than Katie Holmes, Morgan Freeman, and Ken Watanabe. The British are still just better than we are at the kind of classy showmanship that this kind of film demands.

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Pod the Lesser out to anathematize the Derb again:

TO SUM UP, THEN... [John Podhoretz]
...Mr. Derbyshire a) blames the administration for not being serious about nuclear proliferation, b) expects a pullout from Iraq and a civil war, c) is happy Michael Jackson has been acquitted and d) supports euthenasia.

What magazine's website is this again?
Posted at 04:26 PM

An increasingly boring one, ever since Pod Jr., that human exemplar of regression to the mean, showed up to impose the Party Line.

John Derbyshire's civil but devastating reply is here.

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"Batman Begins" -- A quite respectable summer blockbuster, although perhaps a little lacking in inspiration when compared to Tim Burton's original in 1989.

Batman features the usual color-coding by the male actors' hair color. Christian Bale as the Dark Knight has dark hair of course. You can tell that Rutger Hauer as the chairman of Wayne Industries is going to turn out to be bad because he's blonde. Liam Neeson as Bruce Wayne's mentor in the ninja arts is in-between in hair color, so you can't tell for sure if he'll be good or bad.

Morgan Freeman plays a computer nerd, making him the latest and perhaps least likely in a long line of black male computer nerds in movies (such as Ving Rhames in "Mission Impossible"). But at least that's better than Morgan Freeman playing a saintly janitor, because here he gets to use his wicked sense of humor. Michael Caine is also quite funny as Alfred the butler.

I hadn't realized before seeing the movie why everybody was giving Tom Cruise such a hard time for publicly dating Katie Holmes, who plays a district attorney (I mean, other than the usual with Tom): she looks like she's 14. She is one creepy-looking little gal.

As for the usual with Tom -- is he gay or not? -- I have no idea. Most people over the age of 25 or so develop enough gaydar to be able to tell from all the little mannerisms that tend to distinguish a straight man from a gay man. I've never seen Cruise seem gay, but he is an excellent actor, and he has that amazing energy, which might allow him to play the role of a straight man 24/7. Further, he used to have the PR muscle to mold his image the way the old studios molded their contract stars' images, but a year ago he fired his very scary PR flack Pat Kingsley and appointed his sister to run his PR, and that family loyalty appears to be backfiring for him now. 

As for rumors, normally I assume that where there's smoke, there is probably fire. The one big exception I've found, however, is that rumors that extremely handsome men are gay often don't pan out. A lot of them just turn out to be gay fantasies. Remember when Tom Selleck was supposed to be gay?

So, I'm totally agnostic on the question.

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Best estimate yet of Hispanic-American IQ: [For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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"From Bauhaus to Golf Course: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of the Art of Golf Course Architecture" -- My major essay from the April 11th issue of The American Conservative (subscribe here) is now online, complete with 25 pictures and links to scores of more pictures to explain what I'm talking about.

Colby Cosh recommends "From Bauhaus to Clubhaus."

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Peter Frost: Fair Women, Dark Men: The Forgotten Roots of Color Prejudice -- I review this important new book in my VDARE.com column. 

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War Nerd: "Mr. Big Unplugged" --

The more I hear about how Zarqawi's behind all the trouble in Iraq, the more it reminds me of a bad cop movie. Every cop movie has the same plot: they track down Mister Big and the crime ring gets broken...

[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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I'm glad to see Angelina Jolie has a hit: She's gorgeous, talented, charismatic (and half crazy), but she has recently been reduced to playing supporting roles. For example, she stole the show in "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" as the eyepatch-wearing commander of a British flying landing strip (don't ask) with her perfect rendition of a 1940s Royal Navy officer's clipped accent. Yet, Jolie didn't show up for the first hour of the movie. The female lead instead went to a lame Gwyneth Paltrow, who was as dull as Jolie was fun, perhaps because Jolie's olive-colored skin tone, which she inherited from her French-Canadian model mother, was darker than leading man Jude Law's complexion, and that's an unspoken no-no in Hollywood. (You'll note Brad Pitt dyed his hair black for "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" so he wouldn't be too outdarked by Jolie.)

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Jewish Intellectuals Endorse Kevin MacDonald's Theory of Jewish Eugenic Breeding: In The American Spectator, Jay D. Homnick denounces the Cochran-Harpending-Hardy theory for suggesting that Jews got smart via business instead of via eugenic breeding for scholarship:

[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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Charismatic Intellectual Leaders: As I've said before, I am not dismissive of the Kevin MacDonald-Neocon theory of eugenic breeding for scholarship among medieval Jews. I just think that now that MacDonald's theory has become the favored alternative among Jewish intellectuals to the Cochran-Hardy-Harpending theory of greater survival among the children of the wealthy, it's time for the MacDonald theory's supporters to show how much quantitative evidence can be assembled in its favor. It's not enough just to indicate that the direction was favorable for the evolution of intelligence, but some effort must be made to show that the magnitude of the eugenic affect was large enough to matter.

Still, there is a sense in which the MacDonald-Neocon theory of eugenic breeding to produce argument-winning rabbis has some intuitive plausibility in that Ashkenazis don't seem adapted just for business success but also for the kind of intellectual combat that is sometimes inimical to making money. I'm not sure that we see that combination in other middle man minorities with a talent for business, such as the Armenians. This Ashkenazi tendency is probably just cultural, but it sure is long lasting.

[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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"Mass murderers -- can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em!" In a Chicago Tribune article about Chai Vang, the 36-year-old Laotian Hmong immigrant who murdered six hunters in Wisconsin, I found this nugget:

"After living in refugee camps in Thailand, he was relocated to St. Paul in June 1980. After working in trucking jobs in California, he said he moved back to Minnesota in 2000. Vang also said he had been married three times and had seven children."

An Open Letter to the Women of the World: I know there's something about dangerous wackos like this fellow that sets your hearts to going pitty-pat, but, really ... Have you ever thought about how much better this world would be if, when meeting a potential homicidal maniac, you didn't always act upon that urge to have his baby?

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Affordable Family Formation at work in the Lonely Hearts columns: John Kass writes in The Chicago Tribune:

Kevin J. McGraw, a student of finches and other birds, is working toward his doctorate in evolutionary biology at the esteemed Cornell University in New York...

It's all in his latest study, "Environmental Predictors of Geographic Variation in Human Mating Preferences," published in Ethology, a European scientific journal.

But if you don't have the latest copy of Ethology handy, let's just call his study by an earthier, more precise title:

What do women really want in a guy, anyway?

[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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More on Ashkenazi intelligence: A reader writes:

[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

                               ***

Milton Friedman on Bush: Here's an important interview with the 92-year-old grand master economist (via ParaPundit):

[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

***Parapundit***

Slapdash Steve Levitt Rides Again: I'm starting to realize that you can't trust anything economist Steven D. Levitt says in his bestseller Freakonomics without checking it out on Google for yourself. A reader called my attention today to Levitt's statement on p. 139:

To be sure, the legalization of abortion had myriad consequences. Infanticide fell dramatically.

When I originally read this a few months ago, I thought to myself: "How could anyone possibly doubt that?"

[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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Hillel Halkin on Cochran-Harpending in neocon NY Sun: A reader writes:

[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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Ashkenazi vs. "Sephardic" intelligence: Because the Cochran-Harpending theory applies only to Jews whose ancestors spoke Yiddish, it raises the issue of the long term gap within Israel between the educationally dominant Ashkenazis descended from Northern European Jews and the faster-reproducing non-Ashkenazis, who are traditionally called "Sephardic" Jews, even though a large fraction of them are descended from Jews who were never in Spain.
[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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UPDATED: Galton's Theory of Dysgenic Celibacy: The publication of the Cochran-Harpending natural selection theory of Ashkenazi intelligence has stimulated a revival of the popularity of its main competitor, the eugenic theories tracing back to Sir Francis Galton. Darwin's half-cousin, who coined the term "eugenics," pointed out that since the Catholic Church was the main "career open to talents" in the medieval world, the celibacy rule for priests, monks, and nuns might have lowered the intelligence and morality level of Christian Europe.

[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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Remind me again: why do we want the USA to become more like Latin American? The Washington Post reports:

[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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Good article from Jewish Telegraph Agency: The JTA is the venerable Jewish news wire service. 

What we've seen so far in the first six days since the Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence genes story broke in The Economist and the New York Times is extremely gingerly handling in the mainstream press combined with more positive response in the explicitly Jewish press. Judging from the Google News search engine, even though Nicholas Wade's NYT report was the most emailed article in the nation's leading newspaper all weekend, only a single other newspaper picked it up. The AP hasn't dared touch it yet, nor have the newsweeklies.

In contrast, the Jewish Telegraph Agency's report is quite balanced:

Study on Ashkenazi genes sparks intrigue, debate - and reflection 

[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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John F. Kerry's plastic surgery: That awful Herman Munster college picture of Kerry that the Boston Globe maliciously used yesterday reminded one reader:

[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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Now we know why Garance Franke-Ruta smeared me last year: so she could steal my ideas without attribution! When David Brooks cited a statistic from my "Baby Gap" article last December about how Bush had carried 25 of the top 26 states in white total fertility, Franke-Ruta of The American Prospect wrote a classic anti-Sailerist diatribe trying to anathematize me as unfit to ever be read by anyone. I responded to her in my next article, where I also revealed the even more stunning "Marriage Gap" -- Bush carried the top 25 states in average years married among white women ages 18-44.

I sensed that Franke-Ruta was not attempting to silence me solely out of simple-minded political correctness. No, she had displayed some heretical streaks herself, such as attacking Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" for the same reason I did. As she wrote: "black Americans were six times more likely to be murdered than whites in 1999, and seven times more likely to commit homicides." It's a classic operation of the marginally politically incorrect when they feel the hot breath of the wolfpack of the politically correct on their necks to try to gain credit by hurling someone more honest than themselves from the sleigh.

But I wasn't devious enough to figure out that she was trying to keep other people from reading me so she could steal my ideas without others noticing! Her new, long posting on TAPPED begins:

THE PARENT GAP. Another big gap in voting patterns is the so-called "parent gap," which is actually a marriage and parenthood gap, as single moms tend to be strongly Democratic. [More]

Here's my recent "Affordable Family Formation" essay summarizing my articles on the "Baby Gap," "Marriage Gap," "Mortgage Gap," and "Dirt Gap."

A reader writes:

Is "Garance Franke-Ruta" a real name? It sounds more like an unpleasant minor character from a Waugh satire, of the type who ends up getting eaten by cannibals.

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More on the "Acting White" study: In response to my posting below about Fryer and Torelli's study showing that Hispanics lose more same-race friends the higher their GPA than do blacks, a college professor writes:

Your post on educational attitudes among Hispanics and blacks is consistent with my impressions in in the classroom. Apathy towards learning seems widespread among Hispanics. 

[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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My article on John F. Kerry's IQ Validated: Last year I showed on VDARE.com that Kerry's score on the Officer Qualification Test he took when he joined the Navy was no better and probably slightly worse than the score George W. Bush made when he took the Air Force's equivalent test. When Tom Brokaw asked Kerry about my study, which John Tierney wrote about in the NYT, Kerry told him, "I must have been drinking the night before I took that military aptitude test.� 

Today, Michael Kranish reports in the Boston Globe:

During last year's presidential campaign, John F. Kerry was the candidate often portrayed as intellectual and complex, while George W. Bush was the populist who mangled his sentences.

But newly released records show that Bush and Kerry had a virtually identical grade average at Yale University four decades ago.

[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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Aversion to "Acting White" Worse Problem for Hispanics than Blacks: The Washington Post reports:

[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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New VDARE column: "Genes. Disease, and IQ" --

[More]

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Nicholas Wade in New York Times on the Cochran-Hardy-Harpending Theory of Ashkenazi IQ

Researchers Say Intelligence and Diseases May Be Linked in Ashkenazic Genes 
By NICHOLAS WADE

A team of scientists at the University of Utah has proposed that the unusual pattern of genetic diseases seen among Jews of central or northern European origin, or Ashkenazim, is the result of natural selection for enhanced intellectual ability.
[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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Bombshell: Here is the PDF of the blockbuster paper "The Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" by Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending, which is getting heavy coverage in The Economist and the NYT. Here's the abstract:

This paper elaborates the hypothesis that the unique demography and sociology of Ashkenazim in medieval Europe selected for intelligence. Ashkenazi literacy, economic specialization, and closure to inward gene flow led to a social environment in which there was high fitness payoff to intelligence, specifically verbal and mathematical intelligence but not spatial ability. As with any regime of strong directional selection on a quantitative trait, genetic variants that were otherwise fitness reducing rose in frequency. In particular we propose that the well-known clusters of Ashkenazi genetic diseases, the sphingolipid cluster and the DNA repair cluster in particular, increase intelligence in heterozygotes. Other Ashkenazi disorders are known to increase intelligence. Although these disorders have been attributed to a bottleneck in Ashkenazi history and consequent genetic drift, there is no evidence of any bottleneck. Gene frequencies at a large number of autosomal loci show that if there was a bottleneck then subsequent gene flow from Europeans must have been very large, obliterating the effects of any bottleneck. The clustering of the disorders in only a few pathways and the presence at elevated frequency of more than one deleterious allele at many of them could not have been produced by drift. Instead these are signatures of strong and recent natural selection.   [More]

The New York Times should run their story on it Friday morning. And here is The Economist on the Cochran-Harpending-Hardy theory of the evolution of the high average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews:

The evolution of intelligence
Natural genius?

Jun 2nd 2005, From The Economist print edition

The high intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews may be a result of their persecuted past

THE idea that some ethnic groups may, on average, be more intelligent than others is one of those hypotheses that dare not speak its name. But Gregory Cochran, a noted scientific iconoclast, is prepared to say it anyway. He is that rare bird, a scientist who works independently of any institution. He helped popularise the idea that some diseases not previously thought to have a bacterial cause were actually infections, which ruffled many scientific feathers when it was first suggested. And more controversially still, he has suggested that homosexuality is caused by an infection.

[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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Hollywood's Politics: My cover story in The American Conservative's new June 20th edition (now available to electronic subscribers) explains the convoluted and sometimes surprising politics of the movie industry. Here's an excerpt:

[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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Mickey Kaus blogs on Slate.com:

Steve Sailer has boiled down the explanation for why some states become red and others become blue to three simple words. ("God" is not one of them.) ... His equation sure works for San Francisco. ... 6:01 P.M.

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John Derbyshire on Madame Bovary's Ovaries:

It is 41 years now since zoologist William D. Hamilton worked out the evolutionary mathematics of kin altruism, demonstrating that even behavior that seems to belong to the moral and educational superstructure of human nature can be explained by natural selection. Sociobiology was on the march.

That march did not, of course, go unopposed. The political Left was outraged at the suggestion that our nature might have something to do with our biology, and therefore might not be infinitely malleable. Could there, then, be no �New Soviet Man�? No withering away of all behavioral sex differences? No elimination of all preference for one�s own kin or ethny over those more distantly related? Perish the thought! The Left rallied under charismatic generals like the late Stephen Jay Gould, and battle was joined.

The current state of the conflict is a sort of wary stalemate. The Left has conceded that the fundamental science behind sociobiology is indisputable, so that unyielding all-points opposition in the style of Gould is no longer tenable. Accredited human-science professionals John Tooby and Leda Cosmides have worked up �evolutionary psychology,� a low-tar version of sociobiology omitting all those elements that are obnoxious to the egalitarian Left, so even the most politically correct human scientist can now utter phrases like �assortative mating� and �parental investment� without blushing. In any case, the Left still firmly controls the Humanities, and thereby the commanding heights of Academia. This, they feel, gives them police power over how much may be said aloud about the biological roots of human behavior. It also gives them the right to punish those who say too much � people like the hapless Larry Summers.

This carefully policed armistice is the context in which Madame Bovary�s Ovaries should be read. David Barash is a professor of psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle; Nanelle Barash is his daughter, an undergraduate studying literature and biology at Swarthmore. In this collaborative effort, father and daughter take us through some well-known works of world literature to point out the basic facts of biology that underlie their stories. The general drift of the book is illustrated by the opening sentences of a paragraph in Chapter 5 (�The Biology of Adultery�): �It isn�t just Emma Bovary who is especially likely to be unfaithful when her mate has suffered a decline in status. A recent study of black-capped chickadees, for instance, found that . . .�

... It�s fun, in a mild way, but somewhat wearying to read at book length...

The authors� real problem here is that they are trespassing very close to the boundaries of what may be written about for the general public. Of injunctions like the Golden Rule, they say: �They are especially important since . . . when those others are truly �other� � that is, unrelated � there is a powerful yet subtle pressure to behave more selfishly.� But perhaps our awareness of kinship does not end with our actual known kin, but extends to . . . people who . . . look . . . like ourselves? Eeeek! Here you see the difficulties of explaining a theory when parts of it have been fenced off as unsuitable for public display.   [More]

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Nicholas Wade in New York Times on the Cochran-Hardy-Harpending Theory of Ashkenazi IQ

Researchers Say Intelligence and Diseases May Be Linked in Ashkenazic Genes 
By NICHOLAS WADE

A team of scientists at the University of Utah has proposed that the unusual pattern of genetic diseases seen among Jews of central or northern European origin, or Ashkenazim, is the result of natural selection for enhanced intellectual ability.

The selective force was the restriction of Ashkenazim in medieval Europe to occupations that required more than usual mental agility, the researchers say in a paper that has been accepted by the Journal of Biosocial Science, published by Cambridge University Press in England. ["The Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence"]

The hypothesis advanced by the Utah researchers has drawn a mixed reaction among scientists, some of whom dismissed it as extremely implausible, while others said they had made an interesting case, although one liable to raise many hackles.

"It would be hard to overstate how politically incorrect this paper is," said Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard, noting that it argues for an inherited difference in intelligence between groups. Still, he said, "it's certainly a thorough and well-argued paper, not one that can easily be dismissed outright."

"Absolutely anything in human biology that is interesting is going to be controversial," said one of the report's authors, Dr. Henry Harpending, an anthropologist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

He and two colleagues at the University of Utah, Gregory Cochran and Jason Hardy, see the pattern of genetic disease among the Ashkenazi Jewish population as reminiscent of blood disorders like sickle cell anemia that occur in populations exposed to malaria, a disease that is only 5,000 years old.

In both cases, the Utah researchers argue, evolution has had to counter a sudden threat by favoring any mutation that protected against it, whatever the side effects. Ashkenazic diseases like Tay-Sachs, they say, are a side effect of genes that promote intelligence.

The explanation that the Ashkenazic disease genes must have some hidden value has long been accepted by other researchers, but no one could find a convincing infectious disease or other threat to which the Ashkenazic genetic ailments might confer protection.

A second suggestion, wrote Dr. Jared Diamond of the University of California, Los Angeles, in a 1994 article, "is selection in Jews for the intelligence putatively required to survive recurrent persecution, and also to make a living by commerce, because Jews were barred from the agricultural jobs available to the non-Jewish population."

The Utah researchers have built on this idea, arguing that for some 900 years Jews in Europe were restricted to managerial occupations, which were intellectually demanding, that those who were more successful also left more offspring, and that there was time in this period for the intelligence of the Ashkenazi population as a whole to become appreciably enhanced.

But the Utah researchers' analysis comes at a time when some geneticists have suggested natural selection is not the reason for the Ashkenazic diseases after all. Two years ago, Dr. Neil Risch, a geneticist now at the University of California, San Francisco, proposed a different genetic mechanism known as a founder effect, which occurs when a population is reduced for a time.

He found that all the Ashkenazic diseases had similar properties, including having arisen within the last 1,100 years. Therefore they had all arisen through the same cause, he argued, which must be founder effects, because it was unlikely that all could be due to natural selection. Last year, Dr. Montgomery Slatkin of the University of California, Berkeley, came to much the same conclusion for different reasons.

The Utah team agrees with Dr. Risch that the diseases all arose in historical times from the same cause but say natural selection is more likely because none of the non-disease Ashkenazic genes they tested showed any sign of a founder effect. They say the clustering of four of the diseases in the same biochemical pathway could only have arisen under the influence of natural selection, and calculate that the odds of a founder effect producing such a cluster are vanishingly low.

The four diseases, all of which are caused by mutations that affect the cell's management of chemicals known as sphingolipids, are Tay-Sachs, Niemann-Pick, Gaucher, and mucolipidosis type IV. A second cluster of diseases affects repair of DNA.

Turning to the possibility that some infection was the cause of the selective effect, the Utah researchers noted that Ashkenazim and Europeans lived together in the same cities and were exposed to the same microbes. If disease were the agent of selection, the Utah team argues, the European population would have developed a similar genetic response.

Ashkenazi Jews occupied a different social niche from their European hosts, and that is where any selective effect must have operated, the Utah researchers say. From A.D. 800, when the Ashkenazi presence in Europe is first recorded, to about 1700, Ashkenazi Jews held a restricted range of occupations, which required considerable intellectual acumen. In France, most were moneylenders by A.D. 1100. Expelled from France in 1394, and from parts of Germany in the 15th century, they moved eastward and were employed by Polish rulers first as moneylenders and then as agents who paid a large tax to a noble and then tried to collect the amount, at a profit, from the peasantry. After 1700, the occupational restrictions on Jews were eased.

As to how the disease mutations might affect intelligence, the Utah researchers cite evidence that the sphingolipid disorders promote the growth and interconnection of brain cells. Mutations in the DNA repair genes, involved in second cluster of Ashkenazic diseases, may also unleash growth of neurons.

In describing what they see as the result of the Ashkenazic mutations, the researchers cite the fact that Ashkenazi Jews make up 3 percent of the American population but won 27 percent of its Nobel prizes, and account for more than half of world chess champions. They say that the reason for this unusual record may be that differences in Ashkenazic and northern European I.Q. are not large at the average, where most people fall, but become more noticeable at the extremes; for people with an I.Q. over 140, the proportion is 4 per 1,000 among northern Europeans but 23 per 1,000 with Ashkenazim.

The Utah researchers describe their proposal as a hypothesis. Unlike many speculations, it makes a testable prediction: that people who carry one of the sphingolipid or other Ashkenazic disease mutations should do better than average on I.Q. tests.

The researchers have identified two reasonably well accepted issues, the puzzling pattern of diseases inherited by the Ashkenazi population and the population's general intellectual achievement. But in trying to draw a link between them they have crossed some fiercely disputed academic territories, including whether I.Q. scores are a true measure of intelligence and the extent to which intelligence can be inherited.

The authors "make pretty much all of the classic mistakes in interpreting heritability," said Dr. Andrew Clark, a population geneticist at Cornell University, and the argument that the sphingolipid gene variants are associated with intelligence, he said, is "far-fetched."

In addition, the genetic issue of natural selection versus founder effects is far from settled. Dr. Risch, whose research supports founder effects, said he was not persuaded by the Utah team's arguments. Dr. David Goldstein, a geneticist at Duke University who was not connected with either Dr. Risch's or the Utah study, was more open on the issue, saying Dr. Risch had made "quite a strong case" that founder effects could be the cause, but had not ruled out the possibility of selection.

Dr. Slatkin, though favoring a founder effect over all, said he agreed with the Utah team that this would not account for the cluster of sphingolipid diseases.

As for the Utah researchers' interpretation of Jewish medieval history, Paul Rose, professor of Jewish studies at Pennsylvania State University, said, "I think that some of their conclusions may be right though they still need a lot of work to be persuasive to historians and others."

Dr. Gregory Cochran, the first author on the Utah team's paper and a physicist who took up biology, said he became interested in the subject upon learning that patients with a particular Ashkenazic disease known as torsion dystonia were told by their physicians that "the positive thing is that this makes you smart."

"When you're in a hurry and have strong selection, you have a lot of genes with bad side effects," he said. The Ashkenazi Jewish population seemed to fit this pattern, he said, since they married only inside the community, making selection possible, and they had an urgent need for greater intelligence. Evolution had therefore selected every possible mutation that worked in this direction, despite their harmful side effects when inherited from both parents. "In a sense, I consider this a very boring paper since it raises no new principles of genetics," Dr. Cochran said.

***

Bombshell: Here is the PDF of the blockbuster paper "The Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" by Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending, which is getting heavy coverage in The Economist and the NYT. Here's the abstract:

This paper elaborates the hypothesis that the unique demography and sociology of Ashkenazim in medieval Europe selected for intelligence. Ashkenazi literacy, economic specialization, and closure to inward gene flow led to a social environment in which there was high fitness payoff to intelligence, specifically verbal and mathematical intelligence but not spatial ability. As with any regime of strong directional selection on a quantitative trait, genetic variants that were otherwise fitness reducing rose in frequency. In particular we propose that the well-known clusters of Ashkenazi genetic diseases, the sphingolipid cluster and the DNA repair cluster in particular, increase intelligence in heterozygotes. Other Ashkenazi disorders are known to increase intelligence. Although these disorders have been attributed to a bottleneck in Ashkenazi history and consequent genetic drift, there is no evidence of any bottleneck. Gene frequencies at a large number of autosomal loci show that if there was a bottleneck then subsequent gene flow from Europeans must have been very large, obliterating the effects of any bottleneck. The clustering of the disorders in only a few pathways and the presence at elevated frequency of more than one deleterious allele at many of them could not have been produced by drift. Instead these are signatures of strong and recent natural selection.   [More]

The New York Times should run their story on it Friday morning. And here is The Economist on the Cochran-Harpending-Hardy theory of the evolution of the high average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews:

The evolution of intelligence
Natural genius?

Jun 2nd 2005, From The Economist print edition

The high intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews may be a result of their persecuted past

THE idea that some ethnic groups may, on average, be more intelligent than others is one of those hypotheses that dare not speak its name. But Gregory Cochran, a noted scientific iconoclast, is prepared to say it anyway. He is that rare bird, a scientist who works independently of any institution. He helped popularise the idea that some diseases not previously thought to have a bacterial cause were actually infections, which ruffled many scientific feathers when it was first suggested. And more controversially still, he has suggested that homosexuality is caused by an infection.

Even he, however, might tremble at the thought of what he is about to do. Together with Jason Hardy and Henry Harpending, of the University of Utah, he is publishing, in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Biosocial Science, a paper which not only suggests that one group of humanity is more intelligent than the others, but explains the process that has brought this about. The group in question are Ashkenazi Jews. The process is natural selection.

Ashkenazim generally do well in IQ tests, scoring 12-15 points above the mean value of 100, and have contributed disproportionately to the intellectual and cultural life of the West, as the careers of Freud, Einstein and Mahler, pictured above, affirm. They also suffer more often than most people from a number of nasty genetic diseases, such as Tay-Sachs and breast cancer. These facts, however, have previously been thought unrelated. The former has been put down to social effects, such as a strong tradition of valuing education. The latter was seen as a consequence of genetic isolation. Even now, Ashkenazim tend to marry among themselves. In the past they did so almost exclusively.

Dr Cochran, however, suspects that the intelligence and the diseases are intimately linked. His argument is that the unusual history of the Ashkenazim has subjected them to unique evolutionary pressures that have resulted in this paradoxical state of affairs.

Ashkenazi history begins with the Jewish rebellion against Roman rule in the first century AD. When this was crushed, Jewish refugees fled in all directions. The descendants of those who fled to Europe became known as Ashkenazim.

In the Middle Ages, European Jews were subjected to legal discrimination, one effect of which was to drive them into money-related professions such as banking and tax farming which were often disdained by, or forbidden to, Christians. This, along with the low level of intermarriage with their gentile neighbours (which modern genetic analysis confirms was the case), is Dr Cochran's starting point.

He argues that the professions occupied by European Jews were all ones that put a premium on intelligence. Of course, it is hard to prove that this intelligence premium existed in the Middle Ages, but it is certainly true that it exists in the modern versions of those occupations. Several studies have shown that intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, is highly correlated with income in jobs such as banking.

What can, however, be shown from the historical records is that European Jews at the top of their professions in the Middle Ages raised more children to adulthood than those at the bottom. Of course, that was true of successful gentiles as well. But in the Middle Ages, success in Christian society tended to be violently aristocratic (warfare and land), rather than peacefully meritocratic (banking and trade).

Put these two things together�a correlation of intelligence and success, and a correlation of success and fecundity�and you have circumstances that favour the spread of genes that enhance intelligence. The questions are, do such genes exist, and what are they if they do? Dr Cochran thinks they do exist, and that they are exactly the genes that cause the inherited diseases which afflict Ashkenazi society.

That small, reproductively isolated groups of people are susceptible to genetic disease is well known. Constant mating with even distant relatives reduces genetic diversity, and some disease genes will thus, randomly, become more common. But the very randomness of this process means there should be no discernible pattern about which disease genes increase in frequency. In the case of Ashkenazim, Dr Cochran argues, this is not the case. Most of the dozen or so disease genes that are common in them belong to one of two types: they are involved either in the storage in nerve cells of special fats called sphingolipids, which form part of the insulating outer sheaths that allow nerve cells to transmit electrical signals, or in DNA repair. The former genes cause neurological diseases, such as Tay-Sachs, Gaucher's and Niemann-Pick. The latter cause cancer.

That does not look random. And what is even less random is that in several cases the genes for particular diseases come in different varieties, each the result of an independent original mutation. This really does suggest the mutated genes are being preserved by natural selection. But it does not answer the question of how evolution can favour genetic diseases. However, in certain circumstances, evolution can.

West Africans, and people of West African descent, are susceptible to a disease called sickle-cell anaemia that is virtually unknown elsewhere. The anaemia develops in those whose red blood cells contain a particular type of haemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen. But the disease occurs only in those who have two copies of the gene for the disease-causing haemoglobin (one copy from each parent). Those who have only one copy have no symptoms. They are, however, protected against malaria, one of the biggest killers in that part of the world. Thus, the theory goes, the pressure to keep the sickle-cell gene in the population because of its malaria-protective effects balances the pressure to drive it out because of its anaemia-causing effects. It therefore persists without becoming ubiquitous.

Dr Cochran argues that something similar happened to the Ashkenazim. Genes that promote intelligence in an individual when present as a single copy create disease when present as a double copy. His thesis is not as strong as the sickle-cell/malaria theory, because he has not proved that any of his disease genes do actually affect intelligence. But the area of operation of some of them suggests that they might.

The sphingolipid-storage diseases, Tay-Sachs, Gaucher's and Niemann-Pick, all involve extra growth and branching of the protuberances that connect nerve cells together. Too much of this (as caused in those with double copies) is clearly pathological. But it may be that those with single copies experience a more limited, but still enhanced, protuberance growth. That would yield better linkage between brain cells, and might thus lead to increased intelligence. Indeed, in the case of Gaucher's disease, the only one of the three in which people routinely live to adulthood, there is evidence that those with full symptoms are more intelligent than the average. An Israeli clinic devoted to treating people with Gaucher's has vastly more engineers, scientists, accountants and lawyers on its books than would be expected by chance.

Why a failure of the DNA-repair system should boost intelligence is unclear�and is, perhaps, the weakest part of the thesis, although evidence is emerging that one of the genes in question is involved in regulating the early growth of the brain. But the thesis also has a strong point: it makes a clear and testable prediction. This is that people with a single copy of the gene for Tay-Sachs, or that for Gaucher's, or that for Niemann-Pick should be more intelligent than average. Dr Cochran and his colleagues predict they will be so by about five IQ points. If that turns out to be the case, it will strengthen the idea that, albeit unwillingly, Ashkenazi Jews have been part of an accidental experiment in eugenics. It has brought them some advantages. But, like the deliberate eugenics experiments of the 20th century, it has also exacted a terrible price  [Link to Economist article]

Clearly, this theory has enormous implications for understanding diseases, population genetics, the genetics of intelligence, history, business, and intellectual life.

A few comments:

One small study showed that sufferers of torsion dystonia, an Ashkenazi hereditary disease, average an IQ of 121 compared to 111 for other Ashkenazis.

Contrary to this Economist article, Cochran et al are hardly the first to suggest an evolutionary cause for higher IQs among Ashkenazi. Their theory however is much more quantitative and closely specified. Most of this speculation in the past has focused on two somewhat different theories. 

Norbert Weiner, the founder of cybernetics, pointed out in his autobiography that he was the offspring of a very long line of rabbis. Weiner suggested that the traditional Ashkenazi system where a marriage would be arranged between the smartest boy in the community's rabbinical school and the daughter of the richest merchant so that the young scholar could afford to raise a large family would have the impact of spreading the genes for high IQ. (This is often contrasted with Francis Galton's theory that rules requiring, or at least demanding, celibacy among Catholic clerics, who were likewise often recruited from among the smartest Catholic boys, would tend to lower IQs among gentiles.)

Cochran's view is that, while the effect would be in the right direction, the number of rabbis was simply too few relative to the number of bankers, merchants, and estate-managers to have a sizable effect. Nonetheless, I think Weiner's hypothesis should be investigated further. The profile of Jewish intelligence isn't just for great skill at business, but also at less immediately practical areas of intellectual speculation and argumentation. There are other groups that show lots of business skills, such as Armenians and the Overseas Chinese, without producing anywhere near as many intellectuals. This latter could simply be a cultural trait, but I don't consider Weiner's theory completely disproven.

Another evolutionary theory is called "winnowing-through-persecution" and has been argued by historian Irvin A. Agus. This seems to have two components: the first is that smart tended to survive various persecutions better than the dumb and the second is that the less intelligent tended to convert to Christianity. Cochran's readings in Jewish medieval history suggest than in central and eastern Europe, conversions from Judaism to Christianity by anybody, rich or poor, were extremely rare. In the 19th Century, however, it's clear that conversions to Christianity were more common among the Jewish elite: converts included Marx, Disraeli, Heine, and Felix Mendelssohn. Also, as the paper points out, the Gypsies were certainly persecuted but that didn't seem to make them smarter.

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Did Deep Throat help create Kwanzaa? Mark Felt, who helped bring down Nixon over the Watergate break-in, was himself convicted in 1980 of instigating illegal break-ins of suspected Weathermen terrorists (he was later pardoned by Reagan). 

Felt was heavily involved in the FBI's COINTELPRO operation, which, among other things, subsidized black radical Ron Karenga as an alternative to the Black Panthers. (Karenga's boys eventually killed a Panther in a dispute over who would run UCLA Black Studies department.) Karenga invented Kwanzaa. Which raises the question: Did Deep Throat help create Kwanzaa? I haven't been able to find any direct evidence that Felt worked on the Karenga project, but it's fun to speculate.

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True Conspiracies: What is solidly grounded is this: although you'll hear a lot of bloviating about how Felt was a hero for resisting the "politicization" of the FBI under Nixon, keep in mind that Kennedy and Johnson also wanted to bring the FBI under control of elected officials, but their personal corruption meant they couldn't act against J. Edgar Hoover, who had plenty on them in his files to bring them down. After Hoover died, Nixon got up the courage to appoint someone from outside Hoover's coterie as the new Director of the FBI. But Felt, who had been Hoover's #2 and was passed over for the top job, quickly got his revenge on Nixon.

Ever since Oliver Stone's 1991 movie "JFK," conspiracy theories have been deeply out of fashion among respectable people. Yet, some fraction of history actually does consist of covert conspiracies, although the conspiracy theories that become popular (Hoover killed Kennedy) are generally less accurate than the ones that nobody cares about (Hoover's heir helped bring down Nixon). Back in early 2001, I made up a list of conspiracy theories that turned out to be, more or less, true.

The National Security State naturally generates conspiracies, and the run-up to the Iraq War will probably go down as the most fertile generator of conspiracies in American history.

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That's Not a Bug... From WorldNetDaily:

On the heels of a Middle East tour last week by Laura Bush to promote women's rights in the region, the female members of Israel's Knesset have petitioned the first lady to lobby for the release of imprisoned Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, in part citing Pollard's inability to have children while jailed.

That's not a bug, that's a feature of the Pollard Imprisonment Program.

To pay for his coke habit, Pollard sold America's ultimate secrets -- the locations of the Trident nuclear deterrent subs -- to the Israelis, who then traded them to the Soviets. Why would we want more little Pollards?

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The Hitchens Brothers-at-Arms: Reading this hilariously twisted dialogue between the estranged Hitchens Bros. -- Trotskyite-Neocon Christopher and Tory-Anglican Peter -- makes me worry that I had too happy a childhood ever to have the ambition to claw my way to the top of the punditry heap. From The Guardian:

Ian Katz (Moderator): Christopher. You've talked slightly with your tongue in your cheek about regretting the competition for your mother's attention and you said in one interview with the Times: "Mothers aren't supposed to have favourites, are they? But boys know. And to know that your mother loves you most, more than anyone, more than your father, more than your brother, which I always did know ..." Did you have a firm conviction that you were favourite?

Christopher Hitchens: No, what I was expressing there and badly, too, [was] an ambition, I hoped it was true but I am sure it was not. I don't usually use this term as a compliment but she was very even handed. Impartial. What I'm really saying there I think would be obvious to anyone who has even scanned the more accessible works of Sigmund Freud, is that had I been an only child, I could probably have handled it, to have mummy to myself and then of course to kill daddy and marry mummy. I thought I had all my ducks in a row, and suddenly to have to go to some nursing home and bring home a bundle was a shock and I may never have got over it. Took up smoking at around that time.

Peter Hitchens: I don't know about the parenting but there was a story, although I can't remember anything about this, of Christopher having been discovered gleefully releasing the brake of the pram in which I was lying ...

CH That's when I took up drinking ...

PH There was another occasion when Christopher was sitting on the edge of a flower bed, admiring the blooms, when he saw a sinister shadow, growing, and it was me staggering up behind him with a rake. I have no memory of that ...

CH I do! I remember that very well. I've never moved so fast in my life. What I've left out, because what everybody prefers in some way to talk about is mama, is the personality of our father... And I was always pretty sure that Peter was much more like him than I was, and I think I suspected that he slightly preferred Peter. And I can live with that.

IK People have often posited a competition between you, and they've generally implied that you, Peter, were living in Christopher's shadow - though you of course are columnist of the year now and one of the grandest commentators in the country ...

CH I had NO idea, well done! Bloody good! I don't belong to the prize-winning fraternity. I always get nominated, but I never win.

IK Did it occur to you when you won that award [Peter], did you think, "Ahh, that's one up on him!"

PH Never. I always get asked whether I'm worried about living in my brother's shadow ... you might try asking that the other way from time to time.

IK I want to ask one last personal question. The idea of this meeting today was more about brotherhood than politics. One thing that you, Christopher, have talked about in the past, is your mother's suicide when you were, I think, a student. Can I ask how formative an experience was that, and how did it change the dynamics of your family?

CH Yes, you can, but I would rather you hadn't. I wasn't a student, I was working in London. I'd just got a job with the New Statesman when I was woken up with the news that my mother had taken her own life. It was a terrible moment in my life which turned into a terrible week...

IK Peter, I've not heard you talk about this before, do you want to add anything?

PH No.

IK Are you two friends?

PH No. There was an old joke in East Germany that went, Are the Russians our friends or our brothers? And the answer is, they must be our brothers because you can choose your friends.

CH The great thing about family life is that it introduces you to people you'd otherwise never meet.

IK One last question from the audience.

Audience member You've been casting furtive glances at each other throughout the whole event but you've never yet made eye contact. Would you for this final moment, look each other in the eye?

CH You don't know what we've just been through. We were asked by James Naughtie to do an on-radio handshake, [and] I thought it was a handshake made for radio.

Audience member So will you do it?

[CH and PH look briefly at each other]

PH They want everything to be all right.

CH They want a happy ending - that's their problem.

I've pointed out that what might look like ideological clashes on the surface are often actually just rationalizations for ethnic clashes between extended families, but the Hitchens Brothers represent an interesting case of an ethnic clash between brothers within a nuclear family. Peter was the favorite of their English father, Christopher of their Jewish mother. Christopher is still an atheist, but as Paul Johnson pointed out in his "History of the Jews," it's been common down through the centuries for young atheist intellectuals to become more focused on Jewish ethnic interests as they age, without necessarily becoming theists. The conversion to the ideology of neoconism of Christopher, who, despite his hatred of religion, has taken to dropping in to synagogues as he travels to express his ethnic solidarity, is a good example of this venerable tendency toward gerontocratic ethnocentrism.

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J. Edgar's Revenge: Hoover Loyalist Brought Down Nixon Administration: For decades, vast controversy swirled around the JFK Assassination, with tens of millions believing the Kennedy Administration was ended by the FBI and/or CIA. In contrast, almost nobody cared about unraveling the mysteries of the end of the Nixon Administration, even though it was always much more plausible that Nixon, rather than Kennedy, was brought down by the FBI and/or CIA.

Now we have confirmation of what was long the most plausible identity for Deep Throat: Mark Felt, the number 2 man at the FBI and a longtime loyalist to J. Edgar Hoover, who died in May 1972. Felt resisted Nixon's appointee as new head of the FBI, Nixon loyalist L. Patrick Gray, and leaking to Woodward and Bernstein was a natural way to bring down Nixon.

A reader writes:

Oh, God, I must be careful what I wish for. We here in Washington are now going to be subject to a week of front-page gas-bagging by Bradlee, Woodward, Bernstein and all their media sidecars on the glory days of their youth, when they at least seemed brave and important, but really just had more hair.

It does seem to me that "traitor" is a bit strong for Felt. I would reserve that rhetoric for really powerful people, such as certain Supreme Court justices of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It seems that Felt himself felt he was something of a personal rat. If a principle is vital enough to be worth betraying all the usual obligations of trust one has to the people one works with and for, doesn't that argue that one should step forward to take responsibility for the ratting? Felt was not going to be sent to the Gulag, whatever the self-romanticization of the whistle-blower Left. He knew that.

So Gray was slipping info to the White House, and Felt was slipping info to the Post, and every GS-9 in Washington was enjoying himself immensely gossiping around the water cooler or Mr. Coffee pot, and we got about seven years of obsessing over bureaucratic minutiae, a much more open government, but also a government that was much less effective in carrying out its basic obligations in foreign policy and domestic law enforcement and other critical functions. And that world, of a government that blabs endlessly about itself, but often doesn't do much useful or well for citizens, is still largely with us.

Thanks, Ben.

Colby Cosh says Richard Nixon was "the last son-of-a-bitch to be struck down, and from beyond the grave at that, by J. Edgar Hoover."

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Laura Bush vs. Hillary Clinton in 2008? With talk mounting of the two First Ladies running against each other for President in 2008, one reader was inspired by my suggestion that an arranged marriage between dynastic heirs George P. Bush and Chelsea Clinton could meld our discordant red and blue into a harmonious royal purple. He updated Richmond's speech in Shakespeare's Richard III about the marriage to end the War of the Roses:

Inter their bodies as becomes their births:
Proclaim a pardon to the soldiers fled
That in submission will return to us:
And then, as we have ta'en the sacrament,
We will unite the blue rose and the red:
Smile heaven upon this fair conjunction
That long have frown'd upon their enmity!
What extremist hears me, and says not amen?
America hath long been mad, and scarr'd herself;
The doctor blindly spinned his client's gaffe,
The consultant plotteth revenge in ye War Room
The leader useth his aide as a cigar
All this divided Red and Blue
Divided in their dire division,

O, now, let George P and Chelsea
The true succeeders of each royal house,
By God's fair ordinance conjoin together!
And let their heirs, God, if thy will be so.
Enrich the time to come with smooth-faced peace,
With smiling plenty and fair prosperous days!
Abate the edge of traitors, gracious Lord,
That would demand both parties make borders secure,
And make America less inclusive
Let them not live to taste this land's increase
That would with insensitivity wound this fair land's peace!
Now civil wounds are stopp'd, peace lives again:
That she may long live here, God say amen!

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UPDATED: John Tierney vs. Maureen Dowd: The NYT's new op-ed columnist John Tierney writes a column guaranteed to drive his feminist colleague Maureen Dowd nuts:

The Urge to Win:

For a quarter-century, women have outnumbered men at Scrabble clubs and tournaments in America, but a woman has won the national championship only once, and all the world champions have been men. Among the world's 50 top-ranked players, typically about 45 are men.

The top players, both male and female, point to a simple explanation for the disparity: more men are willing to do whatever it takes to reach the top. You need more than intelligence and a good vocabulary to become champion. You have to spend hours a day learning words like "khat," doing computerized drills and memorizing long lists of letter combinations, called alphagrams, that can form high-scoring seven-letter words.

Tierney goes on to offer some sensible evolutionary psychology explanations for why some men want to win this bad.

Of course, it's not hard to drive Maureen crazy, especially if the two of you were once an item, as Tierney and Dowd were a quarter of a century ago. Tierney is married now, but Dowd is an increasingly bitter spinster, whose taste for highly successful men has left her enraged at the male sex for not marrying her. She's also dated two-time Oscar-winner Michael Douglas, Carl Bernstein (of Woodward and Bernstein), and Aaron Sorkin (creator of "The West Wing".)

A reader writes:

I think Tierney's theory of why men are better at scrabble is wrong. i am a female who plays competitive scrabble and i know some division 1 players, its not competitiveness or drive to win that females lack, its high-nerd memorization facility, the same male drive that makes young boys memorize reams of ludicrous baseball statistics for no other reason than they CAN.

I'm an oddball female, i memorize whole books, lists, star wars and star trek geek factoids and now ive just turned that skill/drive to memorize things to scrabble, no matter how much you WANT to be good at scrabble, if you cannot and do not WANT to commit those lists to memory you will never be able to compete with those who do. and if you want to see how psychotically nerdy top ranked scrabble players are, watch the movie "word wars" if you can ever get your hands on it, Joel Sherman is probably the poster boy for your "nerds vs. big men" essay

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I forget: Do we want democracy in Pakistan or not? Here's a story from Reuters:

Six KFC Workers Burned To Death In Karachi Violence

Six employees of American fast-food franchise KFC were burned to death in Karachi during a riot that followed a suicide attack on a mosque in the southern Pakistani city, rescue workers said on Tuesday. Angry Shi'ites set fire to the restaurant after the mosque attack in which five people died on Monday night...

More than 100 people have been killed in tit-for-tat attacks by majority Sunni and Shi'ite militants in the past year. Most of the attacks have been blamed on Sunni militant groups with links to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network which have been angered by Pakistan's support for the war on terrorism.

Analysts say the Sunni militants have revived long standing sectarian rivalry as a means to destabilize President Pervez Musharraf's government.

Shi'ite mobs often target symbols of U.S. influence after sectarian attacks as they accuse the government of failing to act to prevent religious violence.

The attack on the KFC outlet came just minutes after attack on the Karachi mosque.

Let me see if I have this straight: To protest Pakistan's dictator's support for America, Sunnis blow up Shi'ite mosques. In revenge, the Shi'ites burn down Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets because they are symbols of America. Makes perfect sense, at least by the standards of the Islamic world.

Don't you get the feeling that the only thing that could possibly bring these people together enough to get along in a democracy would be their mutual loathing of America?

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The Presidents Fight Germs the Alcohol Gel Way: From an article about President Bush's valet:

When President Bush shakes 1,000 hands, Blake Gottesman is ready with the Purell... Part Sherpa, part butler, part air traffic controller, Mr. Gottesman, 25, is the president's personal aide. It is a job steeped in the minutiae of carrying Mr. Bush's Altoids, Sharpie markers and hand sanitizer...

When Bill Clinton ran for President in 1992, he had persistent laryngitis from all the respiratory infections he got from germs he picked up while shaking hands. In 1996, however, Clinton was in fine health because he rubbed his hands with alcohol sanitizer (like Purell) after every meet-and-greet. Bush, who takes excellent care of his health, apparently does the same.

Why don't you?

And why don't restaurants put hand sanitizer dispensers on each table, and fast food restaurants put it on the counter?

A reader writes:

I have Purell on my desk at work but I take a terrible ribbing for it. One former co-worker thought I would damage my health because I wouldn't get exposed to enough germs and therefore wouldn't develop "immunity" as he thought others did! I started using it when I used to run a lot and kept getting colds. Regular use cut down my getting sick significantly. One trick at restaurants is to take along sealed alcohol "pads" (sold in drug stores for use by diabetics prior to self-injections). Alternatively, smaller portable Purell containers about the size of a key chain are sold similar to those used by medical personnel... or at least the medical personnel are supposed to use them per a government directive.

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Let's Just Declare America a Hereditary Monarchy and Get It Over With: The AP writes:

Lynne Cheney Boosts First Lady for President

WASHINGTON � Forget Jeb or George Prescott or any of the other political men in the Bush family. Lynne Cheney says the next Bush president should be a woman.

Cheney said some people think former first lady Sen. Hillary Clinton should run for president, but she's looking to the current first lady, Laura Bush, instead.

Let's bring harmony to the country by arranging a dynastic marriage between George P. Bush and Chelsea Clinton and their firstborn can found the Bushton Dynasty, which will rule us unto the seventh generation.  To prevent any inferior genes from the citizenry from intruding into the royal gene pool, in the tradition of the Ptolemaic dynasty that produced Cleopatra, brothers and sisters of the Bushton line would then be mated with each other to generate our perfect overlords.

To paraphrase Kent Brockman on The Simpsons when he thinks Earth is being invaded by Space Ants: I, for one, welcome our new hereditary overlords.

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My new VDARE.com article: Newsweek puts new left-liberal LA mayor Antontio Villaraigosa on a cover headlined "Latino Power," but runs a clich�-ridden story about how "Latino Power" is good for ... the Republicans!

Fortunately, new Census Bureau data on who actually voted in 2004 is out, and it provides an important perspective. I write:

In 1997, Peter Brimelow and Edwin S. Rubenstein's article "Electing a New People" first laid out the math of how importing Democratic-leaning immigrants works against the Republican Party in the long term. The inexorable conclusion: it is in the GOP's self-interest to cut immigration.

Pro-mass immigration enthusiasts on the right, however, inverted this logic to argue that Hispanics were already such an irresistible force that the only salvation for the Republicans was more of the hair of the dog that bit them. The GOP must win over the Latino vote by opening up the borders even farther.

This quickly became conventional wisdom in the news media.

My contribution from 2000 onward has been to make two criticisms:

First, I noted that opening the borders wider was not the royal road to the hearts of Hispanic voters. Because Latino voters bear so much of the brunt of the immigration wave in lower wages and overwhelmed schools, they are far more ambivalent about immigration than their self-appointed ethnic "leaders" claim. The Latino leadership wants more warm bodies from south of the border to make themselves look more important. But Hispanic voters want better lives for themselves and their children. This was validated last November when the successful anti-illegal immigration initiative Prop. 200 won 47% of the Latino vote in Arizona.

Second, I pointed out that, even if Hispanic citizens were indeed desperate for more immigration, the much-heralded future of Latino political dominance hasn't quite gone through the formality of taking place yet. Hispanic voting clout is more limited and growing more slowly than the media assumes. There is still time to limit immigration.

For example, in 2001 I was the first to show that while the press universally claimed that Hispanics comprised 7 percent of the electorate in 2000, the Census Bureau's 50,000 household telephone survey of voters, which is the gold standard for understanding who votes, reported they made up only 5.4 percent of the electorate.

Not that facts matter much these days.

Two years later, Michael Barone claimed:

"� Hispanic immigrants are the fastest-growing and politically most fluid segment of the electorate. They were 7 percent of voters in 2000 and could be 9 percent in 2004, most of them in big states."

Barone truly is one of America's leading experts on voting behavior. His biennial Almanac of American Politics is an awe-inspiring 1,800 page trove of data for political junkies.

But Barone's factually-challenged cheerleading for immigration is unworthy of him. And that's why I've criticized him frequently over the years. It's easy to beat up on amateurs, but for me to score so many points off the top pro means I've had to be right about the impact of immigration on voting. And the only way I've been able to be correct so much more than a master like Barone, who has fifty times my experience and contacts, is if Barone is opening the door by kidding himself about what the numbers say.

So, in May of 2004, I wrote in VDARE.com:

"I hereby declare that, in the tradition of the famous bet between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich, I will wager $1,000 that the Hispanic share of the 2004 Presidential vote�according to the November 2004 Census Bureau survey�will be closer to my prediction of 6.1 percent than to Barone's prediction of 8.5%."

Barone didn't take me up on the bet, which is too bad because I could definitely use the money.

Last week, the Census Bureau revealed its results: the 2004 Hispanic vote totaled only 6.0 percent, even less than my forecast of 6.1 percent and a long way from the 9 percent Barone speculated about...

Many commentators have attributed Bush's better showing in 2004 compared to 2000 to Hispanics. Dick Morris, a campaign consultant for Vicente Fox and Bill Clinton, wrote in the New York Post:

"George W. Bush was re-elected on Tuesday because the Hispanic vote, long a Democratic Party preserve, shifted toward the president's side."...

Bush pulled 11.6 million more votes in 2004 than in 2000, the majority of that growth due to higher overall turnout. By my calculations, over 80 percent of those 11.6 million additional votes, or 9.5 million, came from non-Hispanic whites.

Whites provided almost ten times as many incremental Bush votes as the next most important ethnic contributor to his growth, Hispanics, at 0.97 million extra votes.

As I've said for years, there's a distinct possibility that Karl Rove knows that his minority outreach talk is mostly a smokescreen to distract the media from his Strategy That Dares Not Speak Its Name: majority inreach.   [More]

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A long review of Slezkine's The Jewish Century in the New York Review of Books: It's quite complimentary, but the historian reviewing it, Orlando Figes, gets nervous about UC Berkeley historian Slezkine writing about Jewish participation in the Bolshevist regime. 

So, Figes wonders whether we can label non-religious Jews as Jews at all. Of course, this line of thought rapidly turns into the old PR spin problem of Trotsky and Einstein: how do you define Jewishness in such a way as to semantically exclude the mass-murdering Trotsky while still including the admirable Einstein? Or Richard Feynman, or any number of other famous non-religious Jews whom most Jews consider, quite reasonably, to be heroic figures of the Jewish people? Maybe it can be done, but it would be a lot simpler just to admit that Jews are human beings like everybody else, among whom are found saints and villains, victims and victimizers.

Then the reviewer goes so far as to drop this dopey depth charge of a rhetorical question in his attempt to discredit Slezkine: "Is it sensible or acceptable to ascribe common features to an ethnic group at all?" Well, if the members of an ethnic group didn't have common features, then they wouldn't be an ethnic group, now would they? What kind of of stupid question is that?

It's impossible to imagine the New York Review of Books asking such a moronic question in regard to, say, the Northern Irish situation, or any other ethnic subject -- only in a Jewish context does such a self-evidently self-contradictory question get raised as if it's the devastating last word on the subject.

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King of Swaziland weds 11th bride: Thulani Mthethwa of the AP reports

Swaziland's King Mswati III has taken another young bride, his 11th wife since he ascended to the throne in 1986...

She already is expecting their first child, which would add to the 24 children so far fathered by the 36-year-old monarch...

Mswati has set his sights on two more 17-year-olds, Nothando Dube and Xolile Titi Magagula, who quit school to prepare for the marriage and their royal duties. According to Swazi tradition, a woman has to become pregnant before the king can marry her. But there are rumors that Dube is already expecting.

Mswati, Africa's last absolute monarch, is frequently criticized for the lack of democracy, his lavish lifestyle and his luxury cars while many of his 1 million inhabitants live in poverty. Even South Africa, which is normally supportive of its African neighbors, has kept at a distance from the monarch.

He has also been accused of setting a bad example in a country with the world's highest prevalence of HIV/AIDS, with 42.6 percent of pregnant women attending antinatal clinics testing positive for the virus, according to a 2004 survey.

Mswati's father, King Sobhuza II, who led the country to independence in 1968, had more than 70 wives when he died in 1982.

The ruling dynasty of Swaziland is long-lasting in part because the kings wisely choose their multitudious brides from all the various tribes and clans, so practically everybody in Swaziland is related to the royal family.

That raises an important question about the survival prospects of a much more pivotal dynasty: Saudi Arabia. There are currently something like 6,000 royal princes, all direct descendents of the man who put his name on the country, King Ibn Saud. This lusty gentleman stretched the Koranic limit of four wives by constantly divorcing wives after they had given birth to sons and marrying new wives, but continuing to support his old wives. What I don't know about the royal family today is whether they continue to out-marry in order to build ties of blood with the commoners or whether they mostly marry their first, second, and third cousins in the royal family. The survival of the dynasty may hinge on that question.

One explanation I've heard for why the English aristocracy survived while the French aristocracy got guillotined is that the English were fairly open to marrying wealthy social climbers (e.g., Winston Churchill's father was the second son of a duke but his mom was the daughter of a self-made American millionaire and his wife, who was 1/4 Iroquois Indian), so there were a whole lot of upper middle class people who were related to the aristocrats. In contrast, the French nobility were increasingly inbreeding, so the emotional gap between the Second and Third Estates was much greater.

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Hollywood's Politics: My cover story in The American Conservative's new June 20th edition (now available to electronic subscribers) explains the convoluted and sometimes surprising politics of the movie industry. Here's an excerpt:

Keep in mind that Hollywood's relationship with the outside world is tenuous. It's a self-absorbed community and its politics are for show, serving functions within the industry that aren't always obvious to outsiders. Today's liberal monoculture is in large part an outgrowth of the compromise resolution to the ancient struggle between studio executives and screenwriters that culminated in the endlessly discussed but little understood blacklist of Marxists in the 1950s.

One of the blacklist's main roots has disappeared down the memory hole because it doesn't the burnish the heroic image created to flatter the Communist victims.

A 1919 theatre strike won the playwrights of the Dramatists Guild the right to retain copyright in their works. To this day, dramatists own their plays and merely license them to producers. Further, they have the right to approve or reject the cast, director, and any proposed changes in the dialogue. Contractually, a playwright is a rugged individualist, an Ayn Rand hero.

With the introduction of the talkies in 1927, Hollywood began importing trainloads of New York dramatists. Salaries were generous and the climate superb, but the dramatists found the collaborative nature of moviemaking frustrating, even demeaning. Screenwriters were employees in a vast factory, which owned their creations. The studios could, and generally would, have other hired hacks radically rewrite each script, all under the intrusive supervision of some mogul's half-literate brother-in-law.

In the 1930s, Hollywood's Communist Party, under the command of its charismatic commissar, screenwriter John Howard Lawson, improbably but enthusiastically championed the intellectual property rights of script-writers. The ink-stained wretches thought the Marxist concept of "alienation" described their plight. They felt just like the once psychologically fulfilled hand-craftsmen forced into becoming dispossessed factory drones who cannot recognize their creativity in their employer's output.

Insanely ironic as it seems now, many screenwriters became Communists because they despised the movie business' need for cooperation. How turning command of the entire economy over to a dictatorship would restore the unfettered joys of individual craftsmanship was a little fuzzy, but, hey, if you couldn't trust Stalin, whom could you trust?

The possibility of studios blacklisting writers first surfaced in the 1930s when the moguls' cartel turned aside the leftist screenwriters' push to align themselves with the Dramatists League by threatening to fire union supporters. "It wouldn't be a blacklist because it would all be done over the telephone," Jack Warner explained.

Decades later, after the formal Blacklist era, this labor-management conflict was eventually resolved by a tacit compromise. The blacklisted writers were elevated in the collective memory to the role of martyrs. Their leftism (but not their Stalinism, which was conveniently forgotten) was enshrined as the appropriate ideology of all respectable movie folk.

In return, the producers damn well hung on to their property rights in screenplays.

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Latest on the Flynn Effect: A friend sent me five recent studies on the Flynn Effect of rising raw IQ scores.

- Raw IQ scores stopped going up among draftees in Denmark and Norway about a decade ago and have fallen somewhat. It's hard to say whether this means the Flynn Effect is over there, or whether increasing numbers of immigrants have lowered IQs. Somebody should study draftees' test scores in Finland, where there has been far less immigration.

- IQ scores tend to go up along with average height, although that's not always true.

- Much of the Flynn Effect is on the visuospatial aspects of IQ tests.

- More of the growth has been at the low end of the range than at the high end.

-  Veteran teachers in Australia don't think students are getting any smarter, but their colleagues in Singapore, where conditions have improved much faster, do.

- Nobody yet seems to have studied the role of decreasing lead in the environment on the Flynn Effect, but that sounds promising.

- The first study of the Flynn Effect in a 3rd World nation showed a rise of 11 IQ points among small children in a village in Kenya from 1984 to 1998. (I've long argued that the very low IQ scores found among Africans can't be all genetic.) In this village, conditions improved in various ways over those 14 years, such as calorie intake going up by 20%, more schooling, more television, etc. Unfortunately, as is common in studies of black IQs these days, the study doesn't tell you what the actual IQ scores were: I'd guess they were something embarrassingly low like 67 going up to something less awful like 78. But, nonetheless, good news.

A reader writes:

I think all this data is neatly explained by the following two suppositions:

1. IQ is positively correlated with head size.

2. Head size is negatively correlated with surviving birth and early infanthood.

Here is my "Just So" story. Throughout human history, there has been a large variation in head size, and large heads often meant problems during birth, leading to either the child or mother dying in childbirth. As advances in medicine lowered infant death rates, more big-headed babies survived to adulthood. This is driving the Flynn effect.

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French voters say "Non" to EU Constitution: In a heavy turnout, the proposed charter for the European Union superstate was rejected by solid proportions of French voters, thoroughly depressing the elites of France and Europe.

I think Alexander Solzhenitsyn explained best why this is a happy day in his 1970 Nobel Prize lecture:

... the disappearance of whole nations would impoverish us no less than if all people were to become identical, with the same character and the same face. Nations are the wealth of humanity, its generalized personalities. The least among them has its own special colors, and harbors within itself a special aspect of God's design.

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The Flynn Effect Conundrum Summarized: A reader writes:

Either the Flynn effect is an artifact of testing, or it measures a real difference in IQ over time.

If it is an artifact, then something is very wrong with IQ testing. Tests that cannot measure IQ across time in the same culture to within an sd (17 point difference between 1947 and 2001) cannot, it seems to me, be trusted to measure differences across cultures, which might lead one to wonder how well they measure differences between individuals.

If the difference is real, then the American IQ in 1947 was lower than that of blacks today. This suggests that a low IQ is no impediment to managing a technoindustrial society and being perhaps the world's leading scientific power. (Was the national IQ about 70 in 1900, 55 in 1850?)

If the difference is real, it cannot well be accounted for by evolution, since the less intelligent notoriously breed faster than the intelligent now and in any event, given that most people live to the end of their reproductive years, the selective pressure is hard to see. A standard deviation in fifty years is remarkably fast evolution, no?

In which case, again if the difference in IQ is real, there has to be something going on instead of, or in addition to, standard evolution. What?

In either case, artifact or real difference, the implications seem to be large. Yet the results of IQ tests seem to me to track well with observable performance, both in groups and individuals. Most curious.

Indeed.

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Courage: 

Little Known Indian Tribe Spotted in Brazil

A Brazilian Indian tribe armed with bows and arrows and unseen for years has been spotted in a remote Amazon region where clashes with illegal loggers are threatening its existence.

The tiny Jururei tribe numbers only 8 or 10, and is the second "uncontacted" group to be threatened by loggers this month, after a judge approved cutting in an area of the jungle called Rio Pardo. Accelerating rainforest destruction threatens the tribes. Deforestation in 2003-04 totaled 10,088 square miles, the most in nearly a decade, official figures show.

"The Indians have had conflict with loggers, who are cutting toward them from two different directions," Rogerio Vargas Motta, director of the Pacaas Novos national park, told Reuters.

He photographed Jururei huts on a recent helicopter flyover of the remote park to catch land grabbers. One Jururei shot three arrows at the helicopter as it flew overhead, Vargas Motta said.

Can you imagine the courage it takes for a Stone Age man to try to fight a noisy, vicious-looking helicopter rather than to run into the bush and hide?

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Will "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith" have legs? My wife took the boys to see the latest Star Wars movie at the 7:10 pm showing on Friday night, its ninth day in release. She said the theatre was almost empty and the few viewers sat there like lumps. Watching it was much more depressing than the first time she saw it in a theatre jammed with excited fanboys who cheered each character's introduction.

The studio's "estimate" is that Friday's box office was down 54% compared to the first Friday, and that at $15.5 million for the day, it slightly trailed the uninspiring-sounding remake of "The Longest Yard" with Adam Sandler pretending to be Burt Reynolds. A drop of 54% is bad, but not as disastrous as, say, "The Hulk," which dropped about 60% from the first to second weekends. In contrast, "The Passion of the Christ," after a big debut tended to drop only about 3/8ths of its business each weekend, so it had good legs.

Obviously, "Sith" is going to make a boatload of money, but it will be interesting to see if it pays a price for Lucas's dreary filmmaking.

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"We need to have this debate," says rioting lawyer in a pro-illegal immigration mob. Funny way to encourage debate, says me, by acting like those protestors in Afghanistan. From the LA Times:

An activist opposing illegal immigration who drove his van into a crowd of protesters in Garden Grove will not be charged, police said Thursday, prompting anger from detractors.

A van driven by Hal Netkin hit several people protesting an appearance Wednesday night by James Gilchrist, whose Minuteman citizen patrol last month monitored the Mexican border in Arizona for illegal crossers.

Netkin, 69, is a former secession candidate for City Council in the San Fernando Valley whose websites oppose illegal immigration and the proliferation of Mexican government-issued identification cards.

Netkin was released after police watched a videotape that showed protesters surrounding the vehicle, banging on it and refusing to move, said Garden Grove Police Lt. Mike Handfield. About 300 protesters at the scene were "trying to intimidate him and refused to let him pass," Handfield said. By night's end, five demonstrators had been arrested...

James Lafferty, director of the National Lawyers Guild in Los Angeles, said he was among those struck by Netkin's van. He said staging protests at Gilchrist's events was necessary, even if it increased his profile.

"I'm glad there were people there saying something [Wednesday night]. We need to have this debate," said Lafferty, who said he was not injured. "We can't just stand and watch this."

Protesters said they arrived at the Garden Grove Women's Club about 6:30 p.m. after receiving an e-mail saying Gilchrist was to speak to the California Coalition for Immigration Reform, which presented him with a trophy for his border campaign.

Police said the sign-waving protest began calmly but grew agitated when Netkin tried to enter the parking lot. In addition to surrounding his vehicle, protesters broke the window of another vehicle, Handfield said.

The protesters blocked the entrance and tossed soda cans and cans packed with marbles at police and attendees, Handfield said. They kicked, banged and threw rocks at cars; some wore latex gloves and hoods so they wouldn't be identified by police, Handfield said. Some attendees decided not to enter the building because they feared violence.

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Robot Report: As I mentioned on VDARE.com in "myRobot," back in the winter my wife bought a Roomba robot vacuum cleaner from iRobot so that we could get a rabbit for our older son without giving our fur-allergic younger son a permanent asthma attack. The plan worked perfectly until the robot broke down. But iRobot sent us a new one for free, and it's vacuuming the living room as I write.

There is something psychically satisfying about the feeling of on-going accomplishment you get while having your robot do housework while you waste time. The only thing I can compare it to is growing a beard. At the end of a day dithered away, you can always say, "Well, at least my beard has grown in a bit, so the day wasn't a complete loss!"

I suppose some people feel that way about having their servants work for them while they lounge, but I suspect I wouldn't enjoy it, though. Humans are paid by the hour, so every moment of their presence would remind me of my depleting bank balance. In contrast, Roomba is a sunk cost of $200, and his only variable cost is electricity for recharging him. 

(By the way, like me, most Roomba owners apparently refer to their robot as "he" or "she" rather than "it.")

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Why isn't this man in jail?

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Mickey Kaus blogs on Slate.com:

Steve Sailer has boiled down the explanation for why some states become red and others become blue to three simple words. ("God" is not one of them.) ... His equation sure works for San Francisco. ... 6:01 P.M.

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War Nerd on "Iraq: Guerilla Evolution"  - Brilliant, as usual. Why isn't the War Nerd on television every week explaining what is going on in Iraq? (Other than that he might not, technically speaking, exist... and that didn't stop Max Headroom.)

Now comes stage two of the insurgency: the flag-waving fools are gone, and it's the survivors in control -- guerrilla evolution, survival of the practical guys who want to win instead of dying gloriously. You see the same pattern with insurgencies in Algeria, Chechnya, Colombia: the martyrs get killed off, and the cold-blooded guerrilla operatives take over.

These guys know that there's only one way to win a guerrilla war: blinding the enemy by killing his spies, his native police force, anybody who cooperates with him. That's what's been happening in Iraq for months now, and nobody understands it. All they notice is that attacks on US troops are down.

Of course they are; they didn't work. Killing US troops was the insurgents' Plan A: "If we put enough bloody GIs' bodies on US TV, the cowardly Yankees will run away!" It was a reasonable idea, considering we pulled out of Somalia after losing only 18 men. But what the insurgents didn't realize was that Americans had toughened up after 9/11. Casualties didn't faze us like they used to. By election time the Iraqi insurgents had killed 1100 GIs, but Bush still won.

Time for Plan B. Plan B is classic guerrilla doctrine: "the long war," where you attack the invaders' local allies, not the foreign troops themselves. The idea is, if you wipe out Iraqi collaborators, the US is just a blind giant. He'll stick around for a while, stumble over the countryside wrecking stuff, but sooner or later he'll get sick of stubbing his toes and go home.

So the insurgents are ignoring the hunkered-down, heavily fortified American bases and hitting the key, soft targets: the Iraqi police. And damn, are they killing a lot of those boys! On one day, May 9, 80 Iraqi police were killed. On average, five cops a day are dying. It's safer selling Bibles door-to-door in Peshawar than strolling through Baghdad in an Iraqi cop suit.

The insurgents' other strategy is using foreign and Iraqi-Sunni suicide bombers against Shia and Kurdish civilians, hoping to set off a civil war. This doesn't seem to be working as well. It rarely does. Just look at Beslan: the Chechens killed all those kids hoping to draw the Ossetians into an all-out war, but all the raid did was ruin whatever was left of the Chechens' rep.

The Kurds and Shia aren't retaliating. Why should they? The whole US-funded military machine is doing that for them. Besides, their casualties in the bombings have been mighty small by Iraqi standards.

The Shia are sitting pretty, laughing at us while they wait for us to leave. Thanks to our obsession with the "democracy" thing, the Shia, who are 62% of the population, are guaranteed to win -- and in the meantime, we're footing the whole bill for their takeover! Sweeeet! Why should they shoot back and queer a great deal like that?

So with the civil-war strategy failing, everything comes down to a long, slow guerrilla war between our cops 'n' soldiers and their suicide bombers and assassination squads. It's going to be an Iraqi vs. Iraqi war from here on. US ops, like the Marines' big search-and-destroy sweep in Anbar, are just sideshows. Sure, they flushed a few foreign guerrillas who fought to the death, yelling about Allah like idiots. But in a guerrilla war, foreigners are hopeless. The game is about fitting in, avoiding detection, and foreigners just can't compete.

That goes for us too. We're never going to be able to pick out the bombers from the shoppers in Baghdad. It all depends on whether we can propagandize, or just bribe, enough Iraqis into doing that for us.   [More]

Today in Iraq, the expected high is a spring-like 105 degrees.

One of the oddities of the Iraqi insurgency is that no charismatic leader has emerged from among the Iraqi Sunnis, at least that we know of. We hear a lot about the foreigner Zaraqawi, who is, I hope, dying slowly and painfully at present, but virtually no Iraqis.

Sometimes, a man arises from the chaos to meet the moment. Bonaparte being the most famous example. We could be in real trouble if the insurgents develop a strong leader. On the other hand, a leader would give us somebody to negotiate with. It's not beyond imagination that a settlement could be arrived at in Iraq, but right now there is nobody to negotiate with.

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Colby Cosh will be happy that pretty Carrie won "American Idol." He really doesn't like the Blood Sweat and Tears-loving Bo.

I defer to my wife's judgment on all matters vocal. My wife picked Carrie out as the likely winner a couple of months ago. She thinks these finalists might have been the weakest pair of singers out of all four years, but that it was still a good season. It was a lot closer than last year, when Fantasia, a sort of black Judy Garland with a great voice and absolute emotional transparency, ran away from the field.

One of the great things about "American Idol" is that you don't have to possess Madonna-like drive, assertiveness, and ruthlessness to do well, as you normally do in the music business. Natural talent will get you a lot farther on "American Idol" than in the real world of music, where whom you'll sleep with plays a big role. (Nobody much cared that judge Paula Abdul was exposed as sleeping with a male contestant a couple of years ago, but it would presumably destroy the show if one of the two male judges was caught in a scandal. A lot of judge Simon Cowell's appeal is that he'll tell pretty but talentless girls to get out of the business for their own good, which is not what powerful men in the music industry are known for always doing when confronted with hot babes desperate for a break.) For example, the first year's winner Kelly Clarkson had gone out to LA for a year, but had totally failed to get anywhere, so she went home discouraged to Texas. But she still had near-Whitney Houston / Mariah Carey quality pipes, so she triumphed on the show.

And the show will provide a lot of help in improving your presentation, as they did with Clay Aiken a couple of years ago, who started out looking pathetic (but sounding good) and ended up almost winning as the second coming of Barry Manilow.

"American Idol" is one of those rare healthy TV fads, like "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" was six years ago, although "Idol" looks set to last longer.

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The Decline of the Conservative Intellectual: Ross Douthat of www.TheAmericanScene.com writes about how much intellectually stronger the conservative books were around 1990, even though they sell a lot more in 2005:

But all in all, I think it's safe to say that the Right of the 1990s and early Oughts has produced an (often dispiriting, for a young Turk like me) excess of talented journalists, but hasn't done nearly so well when it comes to raising up a new crop of major-league intellectuals. Why, the most controversial, conversation-starting conservative book of the last two years was probably Who Are We?, by Samuel Huntington - and Huntington is 1) quite old and 2) a Democrat.

I responded:

I quite agree. The extinction of the "Public Interest" periodical is symptomatic of the decline of the heroic first generation of neoconservatism -- typically, domestically-oriented social scientists -- into a second generation of foreign affairs-oriented propagandists.

One major intellectual problem on the right is that the alliance of convenience between neoconservatives and the Religious Right over support for the Likud Party has caused the neoconservatives to miss out on the great intellectual excitement of the time: the rise of Darwinian analysis of human behavior. Commentary, for example, repeatedly runs articles arguing against Darwin's basic theory of 1859.

This keeps the neoconservatives from recruiting fresh talent. The most obvious example is the spectacularly talented Steven Pinker, whose 2002 book "The Blank Slate" was probably the most important/influential big book of this decade so far.

The first generation of neoconservatives would have been crazy for Pinker, but the current generation is leery of him because he is a Darwinian, and that fact sets off complicated "Is it good for the Likud Party?" calculations in their minds about whether publishing Pinker in their journals will endanger the Religious Right's support for Likud (although I doubt that the creationists would even notice).

Commentary still has good people writing for them like Dan Seligman so all is not lost, but the opportunity cost is very large.

The Decline of the Liberal Intellectual: Matthew Yglesias of the liberal American Prospect magazine saw my comment on why neoconservatives missed out on Steven Pinker and his Crimethink! alarm went off. He blogged:

In Ross' comments, the always-intersting Steve Sailer agrees this has happened and blames the Jews.

Fortunately, some commenters called Yglesias out:

Not at all what Sailer said.

And:

Matthew is flat-out LYING about Sailer's comment.

Yglesias then wrote:

UPDATE: Slightly kidding about Sailer. He doesn't blame the Jews per se, he blames the influence of the Israel lobby on the contemporary American right. I'd be mad if I blamed something on the influence of the Israel lobby on the contemporary American right and someone characterized that as blaming the Jews. So, apologies on that score, I just don't find his theory very plausible.

Human beings have a strong tendency toward mindless knee-jerk hatred, and in today's climate, much of it gets directed toward people who tell new and/or uncomfortable truths. It's so much easier and more satisfying than trying to understand new ideas. 

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Free speech down the tubes in Europe: Paul Cella notes this alarming news story about Oriana Fallaci, who was the greatest interviewer in the world back in the 1970s. She would bully and seduce (I don't know how literally) male newsmakers like Henry Kissinger into telling her amazing secrets in an attempt to impress her.

�Fallaci charged in Italy with defaming Islam.�

ROME (Reuters) - A judge has ordered best-selling writer and journalist Oriana Fallaci to stand trial in her native Italy on charges she defamed Islam in a recent book.

The decision angered Italy's justice minister but delighted Muslim activists, who accused Fallaci of inciting religious hatred in her 2004 work �La Forza della Ragione� (The Force of Reason). 

It's highly reminiscent of my blog item from last year:

French Court Declares Voltaire Obsolete:

"Former French actress Brigitte Bardot was fined 5,000 euros (6,000 dollars) by a Paris court for writing a book in which she declared disgust with her country's tolerance of Islam."

Whatever happened to: "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"? Oh, well, I guess Diversity Sensitivity is more important than freedom of speech.

Seriously, diversity, in practice, is the enemy of free speech.

A reader writes:

The Italians obviously are amateurs.  They should take a lesson from Belgium, where the courts last year shut down *an entire political party.*  The offending political organization was Vlaams Blok, which violated Belgian standards of decency by opposing immigration.

When opinion polls revealed that Vlaams Blok had become the most popular political party in Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium), the courts decided to put a stop to its activities by declaring the party to be racist.  Reportedly, the political establishment in Brussels felt "uncomfortable" with the Vlaams Blok message.  Reason enough to shut them down, don�t you think? 

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"Affordable Family Formation" to finally gain some traction in the media? A top blogger promises he's going to link to my summary on VDARE.com of why red states are red and blue states are blue ... Real Soon Now. You can read my revised version here. I really do think it explains the regional patterns in the last two Presidential elections better than anything else out there. I suspect it hasn't gotten much press yet because it is too objective an explanation for voting patterns, not partisan enough. It doesn't claim that either red states or blues states are superior to the other. But they are very different in terms of affordability of marriage, children, and home-buying, all things that make people more likely to become Republican family values voters.

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Crooked Timber on Steven Levitt Superstar: Levitt, the author of "Freakonomics" and the enormously popular theory that abortion cut crime is turning into a hero to academics everywhere who hope to follow this economics professor into bestselling authordom and media celebrityhood. That's a big reason why his theory that legalizing abortion lowered the crime rate has been getting such gullible approval. 

A reader writes:

They're having a fawnfest over Levitt at Crooked Timber [a site run by left-of-center academics].  I'll let you read it, I was gagging just trying to wade through the intro.

My article "Pre-emptive Executions" in The American Conservative points out the sizable empirical and theoretical holes in Levitt's abortion-cut-crime assertion. And my latest debunking of his theory is here.

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Neocon-Gate: The Movie: Reports say that the FBI will also charge Douglas Feith's boy Larry Franklin with having 83 classified documents in his house. 

Wouldn't this make a great movie, the story of how a few poorly-paid but courageous and patriotic FBI agents try to root out espionage and treason despite the opposition to their investigation of everybody who is anybody in Washington D.C.?

Dana Milbank gives a cinematic depiction of the awesome clout of the leading opponent of the investigation, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in the Washington Post:

How much clout does AIPAC have?

Well, consider that during the pro-Israel lobby's annual conference yesterday, a fleet of police cars, sirens wailing, blocked intersections and formed a motorcade to escort buses carrying its conventioneers -- to lunch.

The annual meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has long produced a massive show of bipartisan pandering, as lawmakers praise the well-financed and well-connected group. But this has been a rough year for AIPAC -- it has dismissed its policy director and another employee while the FBI examines whether they passed classified U.S. information to Israel -- and the organization is eager to show how big it is....

Another fact sheet announced that this is the "largest ever" conference, with its 5,000 participants attending "the largest annual seated dinner in Washington" joined by "more members of Congress than almost any other event, except for a joint session of Congress or a State of the Union address." The group added that its membership "has nearly doubled" over four years to 100,000 and that the National Journal calls it "one of the top four most effective lobbying organizations."

"More," "most," "largest," "top": The superlatives continued, and deliberately. In his speech Sunday, the group's executive director, Howard Kohr, said the "record attendance" at the conference would dispel questions about AIPAC raised by the FBI investigation.

"This is a test, a test of our collective resolve," Kohr said of the "unique challenge" presented by the FBI probe, "and your presence here today sends a message to every adversary of Israel, AIPAC and the Jewish community that we are here, and here to stay." (The official text has two exclamation points after that sentence.) Kohr, without mentioning the fired staffers, told participants that "neither AIPAC nor any of its current employees is or ever has been the target."

As yesterday's session showed, the scandal isn't keeping the powerful from lining up to woo AIPAC. The morning brought Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the evening brought congressional leaders, and at a luncheon "debate" in between, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and informal administration foreign policy adviser Richard N. Perle tried to one-up each other in pro-Israel views.

I should call up Dreamworks and get a meeting to pitch my story idea. I'm sure they'd go for it!

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Can we please spell it "Koran?" The Koran-flushing brouhaha has brought to light the multiple spellings of the Islamic holy book used by American journalists. Newsweek seems to spell it "Qur'an" and Slate.com uses "Quran" -- and they are both owned by the Washington Post. To ease Google searches, could everyone please just spell it the way most Americans have spelled it for decades: Koran. It's also the easiest to pronounce and remember.

Of course, the point of changing the spelling in English is to confuse the non-elite, in order to make the elite feel superior. As I wrote three years ago in "The Name Game: Inuit or Eskimo?"

Considering how hard it is for English-speakers to correctly pronounce words even from other European languages that share our basic alphabet, asking Americans to accurately transliterate words from radically different phonetic structures would appear close to hopeless.

It's become common, for instance, for Western journalists to refer to the "Qu'ran" instead of the traditional spelling of "Koran," but virtually no American understands what sound the apostrophe in "Qu'ran" stands for. Nor could many even produce that sound properly...

Millions of people permanently lose the thread. Unlike academic specialists, they have other, more personally important things to think about than the changing names of distant ethnic groups. Thus, they never make the mental connection that the mysterious new Inuit their children are studying in school are actually those Eskimos that they liked reading about when they were the same age, or that these new-fangled Roma aren't Romans or Romanians, but are actually the Gypsies who play that wonderful violin music.

In breaking news:

As many as 25 people died and dozens more were injured during riots in Afghanistan today which erupted over what one Muslim cleric called "the U.S. media's desecration-by-misspelling" of the name of Islam's most holy book.

Indeed, American editors have failed to reach consensus on how to render the holy book's name. Some spell it with a 'K' others with a 'Q' and -- perhaps most offensive to Muslim sensibilities -- some insert a meaningless apostrophe in the middle of the word...

The cleric, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue, denied that the latest uprising on the Arab street was simply part of the 'regularly-scheduled annual riot season'.

"Our previously-scheduled generic riots have been preempted by these special, issue-oriented violent mobs," he said. "Americans have nobody to blame but themselves for inflaming the passions of these peaceful religious people."  -- Scrappleface.

A reader writes:

Look who's talking. What's wrong with the old spelling "Moslem"?

Right. That was the cool, modern way to spell it when I was kid in the 1960s. Only old dead guys like Sir Richard Burton spelled it "Muslim." I don't know what happened. Somebody must have decided they could get one-up on everybody else by changing the spelling back to the old one, just like somebody changed the spelling to "Moslem" to make Burton and Co. look like old fogeys.

Maybe we should go back to "Mahometan," like Edward Gibbon used.

A reader adds:

Gibbon is good, but I prefer "Saracen."

Another reader notes:

My donkey says it's "Musselman" and when I called him a jackass he kicked me. You are sowing confusion and contention among the faithful (readers).

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Unaffordable Family Formation in San Francisco: Baghdad by the Bay is the foremost example of the Dirt Gap in action: a seven mile wide mountainous peninsula surrounded by salt water almost inevitably translates into a limited supply of housing and high prices: 

Child Population Dwindles in San Francisco

By LISA LEFF, Associated Press Writer

Anne Bakstad and Ed Cohen are starting to feel as if their family of four is an endangered species in San Francisco. Since the couple bought a house five years ago, more than a dozen families in their social circle have left the city for cheaper housing, better schools or both.

The goodbyes are so frequent that Carina, age 4 1/2, wants to know when she is going to move, too. Eric, 2 1/2, misses Gus, his playmate from across the street.

"When we get to know people through our kids, we think to ourselves, `Are they renters or owners? Where do they work?' You have to figure out how much time to invest in people," Bakstad said. "It makes you feel like, `Where is everyone going? Stay with us!'"

A similar lament is being heard in San Francisco's half-empty classrooms, in parks where parents are losing ground to dog owners, and in the corridors of City Hall.

San Francisco has the smallest share of small-fry of any major U.S. city. Just 14.5 percent of the city's population is 18 and under.

It is no mystery why U.S. cities are losing children. The promise of safer streets, better schools and more space has drawn young families away from cities for as long as America has had suburbs.

But kids are even more scarce in San Francisco than in expensive New York (24 percent) or in retirement havens such as Palm Beach, Fla., (19 percent), according to Census estimates.

San Francisco's large gay population � estimated at 20 percent by the city Public Health Department � is thought to be one factor, though gays and lesbians in the city are increasingly raising families.

Another reason San Francisco's children are disappearing: Family housing in the city is especially scarce and expensive. A two-bedroom, 1,000-square-foot starter home is considered a bargain at $760,000.

A recent survey by the city controller found 40 percent of parents said they were considering pulling up stakes within the next year.

Determined to change things, Mayor Gavin Newsom has put the kid crisis near the top of his agenda, appointing a 27-member policy council to develop plans for keeping families in the city...  And voters have approved measures to patch up San Francisco's public schools, which have seen enrollment drop from about 62,000 to 59,000 since 2000...

"We are at a crossroads here," said N'Tanya Lee, executive director of the nonprofit Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth. "We are moving toward a place where we could have an infrastructure of children's services and no children."

Other cities are trying similar strategies. Seattle has created a children's fund, like the one in San Francisco. Leaders in Portland, Ore., are pushing developers to build affordable housing for families, a move Newsom has also tried.

For families choosing to stay in San Francisco, life remains a series of trade-offs. They can enjoy world-class museums, natural beauty and an energy they say they cannot find in the suburbs. But most families need two or more incomes to keep their homes, and their children spend most of their days being cared for by others.

"We have so many friends who are moving out and say how much easier life has been for them," Bakstad said. "If we can make it work in the city, we would love to stay. In a way, the jury is out."

As I pointed out in "Affordable Family Formation," the adults moving out to find affordable housing and schooling for their children are more likely to become Republican family values voters than the ones who stay and don't have children because they like the San Francisco lifestyle so much. 

Now, some people move to San Francisco specifically because they don't have family values (e.g., a lot of gay men move there). But other people end up in a city because when they got out of college, that's where they got the best job offer. And people naturally put down roots wherever they are and adopt some of the local norms. An interesting question would be: What's the impact on your likelihood of getting married and on your average number of children if you take a job first in SF or NYC vs. Atlanta or Dallas?

That leads to a more general question that I'd like your advice upon: The extraordinarily high correlations between measures of family formation (such as the marriage rate and the birth rate) and Bush's share of the vote in the last two elections are obviously the result of two effects. More conservative people move to cheaper areas to have families, and, people who are living in more liberal, more expensive areas are less likely to go down the family path and become family voters because of the cost and culture of their urban area. But, how do I estimate the size of the two effects? My gut feeling is that correlations are driven 50% by people moving and 50% by people not moving and being affected by their locality.

But what is a good approach to quantifying this breakdown?

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Finally, a non-boring filibuster-related idea: The fight over the Senate filibuster rules has been one of the dullest and most bogus in recent memory, with commentators on both sides shamelessly parroting arguments that they would scoff at if the partisan balance in the Senate were reversed. 

However, Mickey Kaus says something interesting today in regard to the new compromise resolution:

Why, after all, are so many people in Washington attached to the Senate's "right to unlimited debate"? Is it because the filibuster--which effectively requires a supermajority to pass anything through the Senate-- guarantees "freedom of speech, freedom of debate and freedom to dissent in the United States Senate." (Sen. Byrd's modest version.) Or is it because the filibuster, and the exaggerated power it gives to both minorities and individuals, is the basis for much of the Senate's--indeed Washington's--corrupt cash economy? Without the filibuster, after all, senators in the minority party wouldn't be nearly as big a deal. They couldn't block legislation--so lobbyists wouldn't need to bribe them with campaign contributions. And honest, self-protective corporations wouldn't have to pay so many of these lobbyists to bribe them with campaign contributions.

Even most majority party senators would see some of their power drain away if the Senate became more like the House, organized efficiently along party lines so the majority could exercise its non-filibusterable power. Individual majority senators would be less like princes to be wined, dined and fawned over and more like party backbenchers. Corporations and interest groups wouldn't need to spend a lot of money bribing them either. And why would Boeing and GM want to pay for an army of ex-Senate aides to sweet-talk all 55 Republicans when one aide with the ear of Bill Frist would get the job done? ...

Still, I'm not sure it is so awful that there's more waste involved in influencing the Senate than there is in influencing the House, where all you need to do is pay off Tom DeLay.

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UPDATED: Finland's Secret: The Washington Post has sent two reporters to Finland for several weeks to find out why Finland has "the world's best educational system, produces such talented musicians and architects, and has more cell phones per capita than Japan and America." They are writing a blog about their findings.

Sitting here in my pajamas in America, I could have saved the Washington Post all the expense. The most important reason why Finland is so Finlandy is because it is full of Finns.

[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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The Hummer's Little Secret: I finally sat in one of those super-colossal GM Hummer SUVs and discovered something amazing: they are tiny on the inside. I'm 6'-4", and I felt more comfortable in a Mini Cooper.

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Asian Voters in Canada: Combining two recent themes, here's a comment from "Matra" on the Majority Rights blog:

[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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"Vibrant" = Cant: Have you noticed that whenever some writer uses the words "vibrant" or "vibrancy" he is almost guaranteed to be yanking your chain? It's just like how for so many years the phrase "in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate" always preceded utter bilge.

Through the magic of Google, I found that I have published the word "vibrant" (in a non-mocking sense) once, for which I profoundly apologize to all my readers.

In contrast, Google says that the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com has used "vibrant" 84 times. Here are some examples I gleaned from Google without subjecting myself to actually reading these WSJ opinion pieces:

"...President Bush is determined to keep the dynamism vibrant, and to encourage and empower the poor to take part in it, rather than to suggest they are ..."

To use "keep the dynamism vibrant" and "empower the poor" in one sentence, hoo boy, that's some fancy writin'! (By the way, what kind of "dynamism" is not "vibrant?" "Listless dynamism?" "Lethargic vibrancy?")

"... The Iraq I saw was a society on the move, a vibrant land with a hardy people experiencing the first heady taste of freedom..."

... and that is to reveal Baghdad as it truly is, a vibrant city, able and ready to welcome the world business community, ...

So, when your windows rattle in Baghdad, that's not a car bomb or IED going off, that's just the local vibrancy manifesting itself.

Back home in the USA, things are a-quivering, too:

... The new creative class craves a vibrant nightlife, outdoor sports facilities and neighborhoods vibrant with street ...

... We have a vibrant Islamic community of emigrants from across the world. ...

... Like California, New York City can boast a vibrant immigrant community and is a magnet for ...

Whenever I read about "vibrant immigrant neighborhoods," I wonder exactly which ones the writer has been to, if any. Come to the vast immigrant neighborhoods of San Fernando Valley and check out the vibrancy: there isn't any. They're boring, tacky, and low-brow. There's no culture beyond the video store. It was like that before, too, but 35 years ago we expected the place to improve a little with time, not regress.

And sometimes the political is personal:

But as times have changed, so have I. Today, as the father of two stunning daughters, and husband of a vibrant, sexy and successful wife who has ...

Perhaps this gentleman's vibrant wife will induct her stunning daughters into the intimate secrets of personal vibration and soon all three will be happily vibrating away.

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Watching Foreign DVD's with the Sound Off: My wife was trying to fall asleep while I was watching the rip-snorting Brazilian gangster movie "City of God," so I turned the sound off. Hey, it's in Portuguese, so I'll just read the subtitles, right? No problem.

Well, it turned out to be a big problem because with the sound off, I could hear the voice in my head reading the subtitles ... and I'm a terrible actor. 

I provided about as persuasive line readings as Rick Moranis did in that scene in Mel Brooks's "Star Wars" parody "Spaceballs," where, as the Darth Vader-character Dark Helmet, Moranis is playing with his Spaceballs action figures, doing both voices:

Dark Helmet: [In Dark Helmet voice] And now Princess Vespa, I have you in my clutches, to have my wicked way with you, the way I want to.

[In Vespa voice]: No, no, go away, I hate you! And yet... I find you strangely attractive.

[In D.H. voice]: Of course you do! Druish princesses are often attracted to money and power, and I have both, and you *know* it! 

[In V. voice]: No, no, leave me alone! 

[In D.H. voice]: No, kiss me.

[In V. voice]: Oh, oh, oh! Ohhhh, your helmet is so big! 

The best part of seeing "Spaceballs" in the theatre was when Mel Brooks as Yogurt (Yoda) explained the Secret of the Universe:

Yogurt: Merchandising, merchandising, where the real money from the movie is made. Spaceballs-the T-shirt, Spaceballs-the Coloring Book, Spaceballs-the Lunch box, Spaceballs-the Breakfast Cereal, Spaceballs-the Flame Thrower.

And while Yogurt was holding up each item on the screen, the four-year-old boy behind me was solemnly telling his daddy:

I want that one ... and I want that one ... and I want ...

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The End of Canada? As a constitutional republic? As a state?

[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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My New VDARE.com column:

Asian �Natural Republicans� Vote 74% Democratic�Any More Bright Ideas?

[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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Standard of Living by State: Here's a table of the monetary standard of living by state, as calculated by median income for a family of four divided by the Accra's cost of living index. Minnesota has the highest standard of living, at least in terms of things money can buy (i.e., not weather). At the bottom are...

[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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Book Ideas: Thanks for all the ideas for which book I should write first and keep them coming! Here's one from somebody with a close-in perspective

Don't think of the book as hitting much more of a target than one of your articles. Many nonfiction thought/policy books (of the popular rather than academic kind, anyway) these days are essentially expansions of snazzy articles -- readily-identifiable topic, great angle, a couple of terrifically catchy phrases. "The Tipping Point." "South Park Republicans." "The Long Tail." Crunchy Cons. Bobos. One thing -- of course, one thing that has enough validity so readers actually say, "Hey, yeah, I notice that too!"-- that you can get people talking about for five minutes.

It's sad that this is what most bookwriting has become. But it isn't dumb -- it's one of the few ways a book (and a book author) can poke through the media fog for a few minutes. The key realistic thing to understand is that your goal is to get people talking about the book -- which means that you want reviews, features and interviews, and to get those you have to have that one resonant thing that'll give the writers and interviewers an easy 10 second pitch. Ah, I get it -- and then they've snagged their readership. Most of these books have more of a life as a media event than they do as traditional books. 

There's a certain kind of book that creates a terrific stir in the press but that doesn't actually sell very well... But that's OK for the author -- he got his advance, he's now a book author, and he's got the cred you get from 1) getting a book published and 2) getting your topic and your angle taken seriously and chatted about. That can turn into lectures, panel appearances, etc -- which often means more money than the book, as well as an elevated stature. You're no longer a wannabe (so far as the game goes), you've arrived. And that has its benefits.

The super key thing to avoid is thinking of a book as a place where you put it all -- all your observations and thoughts. No one wants that, at least not in a commercial sense. It'd be a lovely monument to your genius, but the publisher (and the public) could care less.

Important to remember that there are multiple levels of sales going on. You have to sell your idea to your agent. The agent has to sell it to an editor. That editor has to sell it to her boss. Both of them have to sell it to their sales force and their publicity staff. The sales and p-r people have to sell it to the bookstores and the press. Eventually everyone hopes to reach the public. Two points: publishing a book is a long process. And, because there are so many levels of sales involved (and because there's so much media fog out there), you pretty much *have* to polish your subject and your angle on it to a real sharp gleam. You don't want your book to be a nonstarter, just because you feel you have more to say.

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Which Book Should I Write? Reader Recommendations Requested: I'm soliciting your suggestions for what should be the topic of my first book. Please think about: What would you buy? What would the public buy? What would get published? What would get reviewed and publicized on TV?

E-mail me

A reader replies:

If you want to sell your book, ask yourself, what do people want to believe? I remember reading about this Japanese author who wrote a book claiming Japanese brains were hard-wired differently and so had great difficultly learning foreign languages. It was a run-away best seller. But complete nonsense of course.

But it ingeniously fed two things Japanese want to believe. 1. Japanese are exceptional 2. It's not your fault that you can't learn English (Japanese are atrocious at learning English).

I know this is cynical advice, but....gotta sell your book.

Now you just gotta figure out what people here want to believe that doesn't compromise your integrity too much. Your only problem is that you specialize in telling people exactly what they don't want to believe.

A whole lot of people desperately want Freakonomics' abortion-cut-crime theory to be true so they can assuage their consciences that they weren't just sliding out of a sticky situation, they were ... fighting crime! Yeah, that's the ticket!

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Wealth and IQ: A reader writes:

  I recently heard on television a college professor and author speaking enthusiastically in favor of affirmative action.  When asked about disparity between white and black I.Q.'s   even when family household income is controlled for, he replied something along the lines of "You are controlling for the wrong factor.  If instead of income you control for family household wealth black and white I.Q.'s are identical."  Without any specialized knowledge or training, I have nonetheless followed the affirmative action controversy over the years and don't ever remember hearing this before or hearing this particular tack taken by any of its proponents  Do you know if it is true? 

This comes up now and then, so let me try to explain how this sleight of hand works:

The implication is that wealth serves as an environmental effect that changes IQ by 15 points (the one standard deviation difference between whites and blacks). But, there's no evidence from any adoption or separated twin study that says that net worth has much impact on adult IQs, so the alleged causal mechanism is not true. Indeed, most of the environmental variation in IQ does not appear attributable to anything measurable in the environment -- it might have more to do with random infections or bumps on the head or developmental differences.

What he's trying to do is find a selection effect where he can select blacks who are, say, two standard deviations above the black mean for IQ and compare them to whites who are one standard deviation about the white mean and then, hesto presto, discover that they are equal in IQ.

Net worth is particularly suited to playing this game. Blacks have a much harder time than whites accumulating wealth (they inherit less, their houses don't appreciate as fast because they tend to live in crime-ridden black neighborhoods, and they save less of their income), so blacks with high net worth are much more elite relative to other blacks than whites with the same positive net worth. So, that's how you get them as having equal IQs.

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Bombshell Scientific Paper Coming Up: Population genetics, IQ, race, history, religion, medicine, evolution, all in one package. Massive scientific crimethink. The news will break some time between now and mid-July. 

Some of you have seen earlier versions of it. It will be interesting to see how much play it gets in the press. It could provoke a furor or it could be covered up.

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Villaraigosa elected mayor of LA: A reader writes:

[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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Sailer Responds to Levitt's Response: Having gotten softball reviews from the national press, Steven D. Levitt's hometown newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times, finally called his bluff on his abortion-cut-crime theory. Perhaps that's why he has now deigned to answer some of his critics. 

[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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Gregory Cochran's "New Germ Theory" Vindicated: "More Diseases Pinned on Old Culprit: Germs" says the New York Times:

[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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My new VDARE.com column: Thomas Sowell�s �Black Redneck� Theory -- Ingenious, But Insufficient

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Last Winter's Movie Reviews: Here are my American Conservative reviews of movies from a few months ago (to read them while people are still talking about these movies, you need to subscribe):

Head-On and Up and Down (European immigration films)

Bride and Prejudice (Jane Austen goes Bollywood)

The Aviator and the Oscar Race (and why men rule Hollywood)

Hotel Rwanda (Don Cheadle, Tutsis v. Hutus)

All my film reviews since 2001 are here.

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President Vicente Fox on African-Americans: The AP reported: 

President Vicente Fox came under criticism Saturday after saying Mexicans were willing to take jobs "that not even blacks want to do in the United States."

Fox's remark Friday came a day after Mexico announced it would formally protest recent U.S. immigration reforms, including the decision to extend walls along the border and make it harder for illegal migrants to get driver's licenses.

I've been writing about the economic clash between African-Americans and illegal immigrants for years:

Who? Whom? Mass Immigration vs. African-Americans

Presumed Alliance: Black vs. Brown

Black vs. Black, but not Black vs. Brown, at Harvard

You may find my article on the genetics of Mexicans and, particularly, on the apparent disappearance of African-Mexicans, "Where Did Mexico's Blacks Go?," of interest. 

My three part series from 2000 on the whites and Indians in Mexico is, in the view of number of Mexicans who have sent me emails thanking me, the first clear explication of the central conundrum of Mexican political and social life: Why after almost 500 years of interracial marriage is Mexico's ruling class still so European-looking? Fox, for example, is about seven inches taller than George W. Bush and close to a foot taller than the average Mexican:

Part 1: Mexico's Corrupt White Elite

Part 2: Mexico's Insidious Color Continuum

Part 3: How Latino Intermarriage Breeds Inequality

Also of interest might be:

Will Vincente Fox be Dubya's Yeltsin?

Free Marketeer Fantasies about Fox

Mexican White Elite's Smoking Gun Found

Mexico's Talleyrand: Fox's First Foreign Minister

A Marshall Plan for Mexico

Let's Nation-Build in Latin America, not MidEast

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Chicago Sun-Times Review Blows Away 4th Grade Quality Book Report on Freakonomics in New York Times Book Review:  
[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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Elvis Levitt: A reader with experience as an inner city social worker points out that Steven D. Levitt is the Elvis of Economics in more ways than one:

[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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"Crash," starring Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Sandra Bullock etc: My review in The American Conservative will be available to electronic subscribers this weekend. Here's an excerpt (as in most of my online excerpts from my reviews, I don't include my detailed opinion of the quality of the movie -- for that you have to subscribe). On iSteve.com, I usually just excerpt something having to do with an issue the movie deals with:

[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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"Star Wars: Episode 3 -- Revenge of the Sith:" It debuts on May 19th, but I saw it last Thursday. This shows that Lucas thinks he has a winner on his hands compared to "Episode 2 -- Attack of the Clones," which I, as a critic, wasn't allowed to see until a few hours before it was released to the public.

How is it? As Abraham Lincoln would have said, people who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.

[For the rest, click the "Link" below ...]

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Steve Sailer interviewed by Luke Ford on Race:

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