William Saletan’s ongoing Maoist-style self-criticism for the crimethink of pointing out that James Watson knows more about the genetics of IQ than Watson’s critics continues in Slate:

Not Black and White: Rethinking race and genes.
By William Saletan

Five months ago, I wrote a series on race, genes, and intelligence. Everything about it hurt: the research, the writing, the reactions, the regrets. Not a day has gone by that I haven’t thought about it. I’ve been struggling to reconcile two feelings that won’t go away: that what I wrote was socially harmful and that I can’t honestly renounce the evidence I presented. That evidence, which involved the proposed role of heredity in trait differences by race, is by no means complete or conclusive. But it’s not dismissible, either. My colleague Stephen Metcalf summarized the debate better than I did: “It’s a conflict between science and science.”

When you find yourself in a dilemma this difficult, sometimes the best thing to do is let it sit in your head until you find a way to make sense of it within your value system. I think I’m beginning to find the answer that works for me: I was asking the wrong question.

In last fall’s series, I asked myself why I was writing about such an ugly topic. “Because the truth isn’t as bad as our ignorant, half-formed fears and suspicions about it,” I concluded. “And because you can’t solve a problem till you understand it.” I wrote my commitment on a piece of paper and leaned it against my computer monitor: The truth doesn’t care what you want.

Sometimes, with time and perspective, it’s the small, overlooked things that turn out to be big. In retrospect, I was consumed by the wrong word. The flaw in my approach wasn’t truth. It was the. Even if hereditary inequality among racial averages is a truth, it’s less true, more unjust, and more pernicious than framing the same difference in nonracial terms. “The truth,” as I accepted and framed it, was itself half-formed. It was, in that sense, a half-truth. And it flunked the practical test I had assigned it: To the extent that a social problem is genetic, you can’t ultimately solve it by understanding it in racial terms.

A study published two weeks ago in Nature Medicine illustrates the point. Gina Kolata of the New York Times explains what happened:

Doctors who treat patients with heart failure have long been puzzled by a peculiar observation. Many black patients seem to do just as well if they take a mainstay of therapy, a class of drugs called beta blockers, as if they do not. [Now researchers] have discovered why: these nonresponsive patients have a slightly altered version of a gene that muscles use to control responses to nerve signals. … As many as 40 percent of blacks and 2 percent of whites have the gene variant, the researchers report. The findings, heart failure specialists say, mean that people with the altered gene might be spared taking what may be, for them, a useless therapy.

In other words, racial observation turned out to be a temporary step toward a deeper genetic explanation. Most blacks don’t have the altered gene, and some whites do. Given these findings, prescribing or not prescribing beta blockers based on race rather than genes would be malpractice.

In a similar way, policy prescriptions based on race are social malpractice. Not because you can’t find patterns on tests, but because any biological theory that starts with observed racial patterns has to end with genetic differences that cross racial lines. Race is the stone age of genetics. If you’re a researcher looking for effects of heredity on medical or educational outcomes, race is the closest thing you presently have to genetic information about most people. And as a proxy measure, it sucks.

Okay, but the reason people get so irrationally upset when talk turns to race is because, much of the time, it’s not a proxy measure: “Watch what you say, mister–you’re talking about family here.” People care about what you say about their races for the same reasons they care about what you say about their families. And that’s not a metaphor.

To say that somebody is, say, white is not just a crude way of saying that they are unlikely to have the gene variant that makes beta blockers ineffective. It’s actually much more of a way of saying that on, average, they are more likely to be genealogically related to another white person than to a non-white person. In other words, a white person has more family ties to white people than to nonwhite people. And who you are related to matters, in all sorts of ways, genetic, sociological, political, and personal, ways both subtle and bleedingly obvious.

It’s irritating that after a full decade of my yammering away over and over again about a single insight that can clear up a remarkable amount of confusion in public discourse –that a racial group is an extended family that’s partly inbred–confusion reigns unabated.

Audacious Epigone figures out the demographic breakdown of the London Daily Telegraph’s list of top 50 most influential American political pundits.

This is not to say that the Telegraph’s list is accurate or inaccurate, just that it’s a list somebody made up for a different purpose than demographic analysis, which makes it useful for demographic analysis. These kind of “found subjective lists” have more prima facie plausibility for demographic analysis than when the demographic analyst makes up his own subjective list, since his interest in demographics is likely to bias his list in one way or another.

The most interesting finding, to my mind, was in the Religious/Ethnic background category, where Roman Catholics held a plurality (40% of the top 50 pundits). I guessed that most of the Catholics would be Irish, but I only count seven Irishmen/women (Matthews, O’Reilly, Hannity, Noonan, Sullivan, Bennett, Shields) out of 20 Catholics. (That’s leaving out Pat Buchanan, who is German Catholic on his mother’s side and Protestant Irish on his father’s side).

As usual in lists of achievers, Jews (27%) are represented about an order of magnitude more than their share of the population, but it’s such a small share of the population that they come in behind Catholics and Protestants (29%).

Men make up 86%. Whites account for 90%, blacks 10%, with nobody else on it (Michelle Malkin didn’t make the list, but people I’ve never heard of, like Rachel Maddow, did). Average age is 52.4.

It’s all about what you’d expect from other lists or just from looking at the First Class cabins on airliners–America is run by middle-aged white men.

With my attention paid at the pathetic pandering at the RNC, I somehow missed John McCain’s Cinco de Mayo celebration. In addition to the typical banalities about the contributions of Mexican Americans and great heroism of Mexican forces at the Battle of Puebla, he went a step further, stating there is a “special relationship” between Mexico and America. He also launched a Spanish language website, and announced that he’d speak before the National Council of La Raza (the Race.)

McCain told reporters, “everything about our Hispanic voters is tailor-made to the Republican message…I know their patriotism, I know the respect for the family, the advocacy for pro-life, I know the small business aspect of our Hispanic voters.”

A quick reality check:

Patriotism: Only 34% of Hispanics eligible for US citizenship choose to take the necessary steps to take it—less than any other immigrant group. Of that group, only a third of Hispanics who are American citizens consider themselves Americans first.

Respect for the Family: Half of Hispanic births in the US are out of wedlock.

Pro Life: Hispanics are 2.7 times more likely to have an abortion than whites.

Small Business: Hispanics make up 15% of the population and only 6.6 percent of all businesses.

John McCain is not trusted by informed Republicans who are concerned about border security and the National Question–and that’s an understatement! But I don’t think his new Spanish-language website is going to help him with Republicans who want an end to illegal immigration and don’t like pandering to the Hispanic lobby. The more McCain panders the more he stands likely to lose more of the Republican base, which is his weak spot anyway.
According to Reuters,

John McCain reached out to Hispanic voters on Monday as he sought to win over a constituency that has moved away from his Republican Party but could prove key in swing states in a close U.S. presidential election in November.The Arizona senator’s campaign launched a Spanish language Web site to mark the Mexican Cinco de Mayo festival and McCain told reporters that “everything about our Hispanic voters is tailor-made to the Republican message.”[McCain Woos Hispanics and Launches Spanish Web Site, May 5th, 2008 Reuters]

The Reuters article is quite short, but if you scroll down there are a number of interesting comments. You might even consider adding comments of your own.
On the National Question, choosing between McCain and Obama, or McCain or Mrs. Clinton, isn’t much of a choice.
Isn’t the time ripe for some kind of independent or Third Party challenge? (Not that we can endorse candidates at VDARE.COM, just making a comment).

Professor Norm Matloff sent this out to his email list:

From: Norm Matloff [Email him]

Subject: Salzman and Lowell published by Nature

The British journal Nature is one of the two or three most prestigious scientific publications in the world. Thus Hal Salzman and B. Lindsay Lowell have achieved quite a coup in having the findings of their study on American capabilities in math and science published in the journal, even if it is in the form of commentary.

Salzman and Lowell, you will recall, published a study for the Urban Institute a few months ago in which they debunked the myths that American kids are abysmal at math and science, that we are not producing enough people with degrees in those fields, that our average math/science scores are misleading because sadly we have not solved the problem of educating the underclass but the mainstream is fine, and so on. It is the most thorough, careful study related to the H-1B issue I’ve seen in years. See my postings on the study here and here.

The Nature column by Salzman and Lowell not only summarizes some of their previous findings, but also makes some points that are, I believe new.

One of these new points is striking: In absolute numbers, the U.S. has more top-scoring kids in math and science than any other country studied–by far. The authors point out that it is mainly these kids who become the innovators later as adults, and we’ve got an excellent supply of them. This is completely counter to what one constantly sees in the popular press.

Which leads to a point Salzman made in announcing his article to the Sloan Industry Centers e-mail discussion group: “We’d welcome reactions and particularly thoughts on why the S&E shortage claim is so strongly believed despite lack of evidence.” The answer, of course, is that the groups that stand to benefit from a public perception of an S&E shortage–the tech industry (who want an expanded H-1B work visa program for its cheap labor), the immigration lawyers (who want an expanded H-1B for obvious reasons), the education lobby (”Give us more money so we can remedy the shortage”) and so on hire the slickest PR people money can buy. They’ve been at it for years, to the point at which many people in Congress, the press and the public at large simply take it for granted that “Johnnie can’t do math.”

The Nature article is Making the Grade .[PDF]

In Slate:

Are We Getting Two for One? Is Michelle Obama responsible for the Jeremiah Wright fiasco?

By Christopher Hitchens

I think we can exclude any covert sympathy on Obama’s part for Wright’s views or style—he has proved time and again that he is not like that, and even his own little nods to “Minister” Farrakhan can probably be excused as a silly form of Chicago South Side political etiquette.

Why? Obama wrote thousands of sympathetic words about Wright’s views and style in 1995. If he has changed his mind since then (and in 2004 he said he hadn’t), it’s his responsibility to prove it to us.

And Obama wrote a couple of pages that were fairly sympathetic to Farrakhan, rejecting his black nationalism on practical, not moral grounds.

On p. 200 of his autobiography, Obama writes:

“If [black] nationalism could create a strong and effective insularity, deliver on its promise of self-respect, then the hurt it might cause well-meaning whites, or the inner turmoil it caused people like me, would be of little consequence.”

If nationalism could deliver. As it turned out, questions of effectiveness and not sentiment, caused most of my quarrels with Rafiq [a Black Muslim ally].

After a discussion of the failure of the Nation of Islam’s attempts to sell black-only toothpaste and other consumer products, Obama rejects Farrakhanism as being unable to “create a strong and effective insularity.”

Hitchens goes on:

All right, then, how is it that the loathsome Wright married him, baptized his children, and received donations from him? Could it possibly have anything, I wonder, to do with Mrs. Obama?

This obvious question is now becoming inescapable, and there is an inexcusable unwillingness among reporters to be the one to ask it. (One can picture Obama looking pained and sensitive and saying, “Keep my wife out of it,” or words to that effect, as Clinton tried to do in 1992 when Jerry Brown and Ralph Nader quite correctly inquired about his spouse’s influence.) If there is a reason why the potential nominee has been keeping what he himself now admits to be very bad company—and if the rest of his character seems to make this improbable—then either he is hiding something and/or it is legitimate to ask him about his partner.

I direct your attention to Mrs. Obama’s 1985 thesis at Princeton University…

A friend asked an old Chicago acquaintance of Obama about Wright a few months ago, and he blamed it on Michelle, but didn’t cite any persuasive evidence.

I spent a few hours last week looking for evidence to support this not implausible presumption, but couldn’t find anything in particular on Google. We know that Obama met Jeremiah Wright before he met Michelle Robinson. I’ve never heard that she was a member of Wright’s church when she met Obama in 1989.

The idea that Michelle would knowingly risk becoming First Lady out of personal, ideological, or racial loyalty to Rev. Wright seems implausible. My guess would be that Michelle would strangle baby pandas to get to the White House. She has a need for social dominance, which was unfulfilled in her educational career at intellectually elite schools that she got into because of affirmative action. In contrast, nobody cares if the First Lady isn’t all that smart — she’s the First Lady!

On the other hand, I haven’t seen any evidence that Michelle gave her husband any good advice on his Rev. Wright problem either. There is so much we don’t understand about them.

There’s is good news to report from the world of crime and punishment. A brutal Mexican rapist and murderer of two teenaged girls has been given his execution date: Jose Ernesto Medellin will meet Texas’ Old Sparky on August 5.

It is justice that is long overdue. Last fall, the Mexichurian in the White House took the side of Mexican criminals against American crime victims: Bush Crushes Justice for Victim Families. Bush’s unconstitutional interference in the judicial branch in collusion with the Mexican government set back the already slow appeals process. But a decision from the Supreme Court reasserted American sovereignty in courts within our boundaries: August execution set for Mexican national who killed 2 Houston girls (KVUE TV, Austin, May 5, 2008).

During Bush’s six-year tenure as Texas governor, 152 inmates went to the state’s death chamber, the nation’s busiest. But the president took the side of Medellin and 50 other Mexican nationals on death rows around the U.S. after an international court ruled in 2004 their convictions violated the 1963 Vienna Convention, which provides that people arrested abroad should have access to their home country’s consular officials.

It has been 15 years since the terrible crime, in which Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Pena were gang-raped, tortured and finally murdered. Jennifer was only 14; Elizabeth was 16.

A tip from the brother of one of the gang members led police to the arrests in the killings that shocked even crime-hardened Houston.

“This guy got to live 15 more years,” Adolph Pena, Elizabeth’s father, said outside the courtroom. “It is a long time coming.”

“I’m looking forward to watching (him) die,” said Randy Ertman, Jennifer’s father.

Justice for American families has been delayed for too long. It would have come sooner if the President cared less about Mexicans and more about Americans.