Dan Seligman, my role model as a quantitative journalist, has died at 84. Dan was the Bill James of public policy journalism.

I can recall sitting up all night in 1981, when I was supposed to be writing an MBA term paper at UCLA, with a shelf full of bound volumes of Fortune, reading years worth of his Keeping Up column.

The first time I ever spoke about becoming a professional journalist was 15 or 20 years ago when I mentioned to my wife that if Seligman ever retired from writing his “Keeping Up” column for Fortune, I’d make a good replacement.

Dan was the one of the first people I invited to join my Human Biodiversity email list ten years ago, and I was proud when he became a regular participant.

From the NYT:

Daniel Seligman, Longtime Fortune Columnist, Dies at 84
By DENNIS HEVISI

Yahoo! Buzz

Daniel Seligman, who with gentle wit, ornate syntax, statistical acumen and a decidedly conservative bent engaged readers of his “Keeping Up” column in Fortune magazine for more than two decades, died Jan. 31 in Manhattan, where he lived. He was 84.

The cause was multiple myeloma, his daughter, Nora Favorov, said.

Mr. Seligman, who later wrote for Forbes magazine and other publications, was an editor and writer at Fortune from 1950 to 1997 and wrote more than 400 “Keeping Up” columns in his last 21 years at the magazine. Among the array of subjects Mr. Seligman poked fun at were political correctness, affirmative action, overbearing bureaucrats and what he considered loony leftists.

He also disputed those who doubted the value of I.Q. tests, a topic he fully examined in his 1992 book, “A Question of Intelligence: The I.Q. Debate in America.”

Many of Mr. Seligman’s opinions were grounded in his own application of mathematics, and while he was an ardent anti-communist in his early years, he sometimes used statistics to criticize the right, as well. In a 1992 column he tweaked a fictitious Conservative member of the British Parliament who wondered why so many of his colleagues had been ensnared in sex scandals.

“Imagine,” Mr. Seligman wrote, “a jar filled with 600 marbles, 331 of them blue and 269 red (these being, respectively, the numbers of Conservative and Labor MPs last fall, before the wave of scandals broke).”

“An observer wearing a blindfold — this would be the media,” he continued, “reaches into the jar and pulls out six marbles. What is the probability that all six will be blue? The answer is 2.76 percent, meaning there is only one chance in 36 of the Tory monopoly on parliamentary sex scandals being attributable to chance.”

Statistical analysis laced Mr. Seligman’s writings about genetics, the link between mortality and socioeconomic status, the efficacy of using horse-race betting as a means of money laundering, and whether there is correlation between the income of lawyers and their physical attractiveness.

For 12 years, starting in 1966, Mr. Seligman held several high-level editing positions at Fortune. In 1988, he stepped down as associate managing editor, but continued to write “Keeping Up.”

Marshall Loeb, the managing editor at the time, wrote in the magazine that Mr. Seligman “uses elegance and trenchant wit to wage his never-ending battle against fustian thinking.”

Born in Manhattan on Sept. 25, 1924, Mr. Seligman was a son of Irving and Clare O’Brien Seligman. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his wife, the former Meg Sherburn; his son, William; his brother, Paul; his sister, Susan Cohn; and four grandchildren.

After serving in the Army in World War II, Mr. Seligman earned his bachelor’s degree from New York University. He wrote for The American Mercury, Commonweal and The New Leader before joining Fortune.

After leaving Fortune, Mr. Seligman became a contributor to Forbes magazine. Sometimes, based on his assessment of their statistical inaccuracies, he spoofed fellow journalists.

“After many years of observing media colleagues at work,” he wrote in 2002, “I would say most of them were standing behind the door when quantitative skills were handed out. They quote T. S. Eliot but are babes in the woods when it comes to correlations or the basic laws of probability. Even when the math is simple, they get bollixed up.”

In the early 1990s, when I got a Nexis account at work, I downloaded years worth of his columns. I thought I had had to delete them all at some point in the 1990s when my 300 meg hard disk ran out of room, but I just found a hidden-away copy on my hard drive. I will dig some up over the next week to show how much of my work is just an updating of what Dan was doing in the 1970s and 1980s.

Here’s Peter Brimelow’s 1993 interview with him. And here’s Charles Murray’s 1992 review of Dan’s IQ book, A Question of Intelligence, in Commentary.

Here’s the third (or maybe the fourth) editorial in the last week from the NY Times about the horrifying Nativist Menace:

‘The Nativist Lobby’

By The Editorial Board

The Southern Poverty Law Center on Tuesday released “The Nativist Lobby,” a report examining the connections among the three Washington-based organizations that have led the charge for restricting immigration to the United States.

They are the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the Center for Immigration Studies and Numbers USA — a lobbying group, think tank, and grassroots organizer, respectively.

All three groups are well known — you have probably come across their leaders denouncing immigration “amnesty” in news articles and on TV. The groups have the ear of conservative politicians all over the country, and their efforts have inspired many of the hard-line federal, state and local initiatives cracking down on immigrants and immigration. Numbers USA even took credit for a storm of blast faxes and phone calls to Congress that helped to kill a major immigration bill in 2007.

What is less well known, the report says, is what the groups have in common: histories connecting them to a retired Michigan eye doctor with a long-held interest in eugenics, racial quotas, and white nationalism.

The groups insist that they do not hold racist or extremist views. That’s good.

But the report argues that people should know about the groups’ history, something they and their allies don’t usually like to talk about. It calls them “fruit of the same poisonous tree.”

Many people who want stricter policies on immigration are not racist or extremist. Many care about seeing the law enforced, or are worried about overpopulation. But it’s also true that there are racist and extremist elements in the movement, and it is important to call them out.

Kudos to the S.P.L.C. for shining a light.
 

So, now we know what the NYT’s Two Minutes Hate of three editorials screeching about “nativists” was all about: it has been a marketing campaign for this new proclamation by the money machine that is the Southern Poverty Law Center (”Dedicated to Wiping Out the Last Vestiges of Poverty, Southern or Otherwise, in the Lifestyle of Direct Marketing Association Hall of Famer Morris Dees”).

When denouncing the “ties” of immigration realist groups, shouldn’t the New York Times Editorial Board at least mention its own ties to the SPLC? For example, Editorial Board member Adam Cohen’s “Professional Profile” on Spoke.com reads:

“Before joining the Times editorial board in 2002, he was [among other things] … a lawyer for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala.”

Thanks to Nicholas Stix on VDARE.com for finding that. (Here aresummaries of some of Cohen’s essays. And here, Hans Bader says, “If Adam Cohen did not exist, the Onion would have to invent him…”)

As the SPLC blog “Hatewatch” complacently commented when congratulating the NYT editorial board on its denunciation of Marcus Epstein(of all people) as a “white supremacist:”

We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.

 

Indeed.
 

It’s also easy to see why the Editorial Board had to keep banging the gong, rather than have the News department at the NYT write up this latest SPLC press release about that terrifying “retired Michigan eye doctor:” it’s notnews. The SPLC has been flogging the same story about Dr. John Tanton since at least 2002.

Here is part of Tanton’s March 11, 2002 reply to 18 bullying questions from the SPLC:

Here are several questions of my own:

1. I would like some assurances from an analysis of your staffing patterns that you do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, gender or national origin. Please supply a list of your staff and governing board complete with an analysis for these four pillars of non-discrimination, and correlated with salary level. In your opinion, to avoid the charge of discrimination, should the makeup of your staff mirror the city of Montgomery, the state of Alabama, the United States - or perhaps the world? What groups are over- or underrepresented? 
2. Please give me your reaction to the Harper’s exposé(November 2000) on the SPLC, charging your colleagues with veniality and hypocrisy, among other items. What is the social justification for your absolutely enormous endowment? These monies were evidently obtained from donors under false pretenses of actually doing something about Southern Poverty. Granted, based on your IRS 990 report, the SPLC has rescued its governing board and top staff from poverty. What have you done for the average impoverished Southerner, whose plight you have appropriated into your organization’s name? 
3. Finally: there is an old maxim that what we say about others tells more about ourselves that it does about others. In this connection, SPLC is given to accusing others of racism and hate crimes. Exactly how would you describe the emotion that motivates you? Is it Love for those who are different or who you perhaps perceive as “enemies?” Or is it more akin to Hate on your part? My analysis is that it comes much closer to the latter than the former. Certainly SPLC is chief among the hate-mongering groups in the United States, if not the world.

John H. Tanton

That’s just a bit of it. It’s a great read.

And here’s a summary of a Pulitzer-finalist investigative report into the abyss of abuse that is the SPLC.

Seems in my early Friday blog on new RNC Chairman Michael Steele I just got under the wire to be able to say:

But before attention shifts to watching if Steele behaves like a typical black politician with access to spoils, let us consider why Steele won, and why it is a disaster.

Steele’s Campaign Spending Questioned By Henri E. Cauvin The Washington Post Saturday February 7 2009 reports allegations by a convicted felon who just happened to have been finance chairman of Steele’s 2006 MD Senate Campaign. That sourcing, as Steele’s defenders rightly say, taints the allegations, but the last paragraph of the Post’s story is discomforting:

Over the years, money trouble has been a persistent problem for Steele. His first race for public office, a 1998 bid for the Republican nomination for state comptroller, ended nearly $35,000 in debt, much of it to his sister. He was fined twice by state officials for missing deadlines to file campaign finance reports and was in debt and had faced foreclosure in 2001…The state party threw Steele a financial lifeline, awarding him an unusual $30,000 consulting contract.

Turning to (hopefully) more important issues, Tom Sowell has a column showing uncharacteristic enthusiasm for Steel, on the perfectly sound grounds that he can actually speak:

Thomas Sowell: Forget race; Republicans need Steele NorwichBullein.com Feb 06 2009

A huge and perennial handicap for Republicans is they seldom have anybody who can articulate their case to the public. It’s hard to win with candidates such as Bob Dole and John McCain.

That’s why Gov. Sarah Palin was such a sensation in arousing the grassroots. She could talk!

This is absolutely true. And Steele appears to be a wordsmith. Is that comforting enough?

In a word, no. High verbal fluency is often found amongst Blacks, from street Rappers to Martin Luther King. It can lead whites into serious misjudgments. As J. Philippe Rushton wrote for us some years ago:

…African Americans—display high levels of social competence. They are outgoing, talkative, sociable, warm, and friendly. Psychometrically speaking, they score high on the Extraversion personality dimension. They are also …low in the Neuroticism dimension. This combination of high Extraversion and low Neuroticism results in a socially dominant personality profile….Blacks have a self-assured “bright” talkative, personality, which leads many people to over-estimate their abstract reasoning ability.

Like any other group, Whites look upon themselves as the norm. Whites tend not to speak up if they don’t know the answer to a question. Nor do they like to intrude on the privacy of others. They erroneously assume that, because Africans are talkative, they must know what they are talking about.

The RNC problem, I fear, is not that Steele is dimmer than his elected peers – most office holders in my experience are quite dim or, perhaps, very lazy intellectually. The problem to be feared is the MLK one – verbal fluency does not preclude remarkable social depravity, more so than with whites. Putting aside the sad case of Obama prototype Rhodes Scholar ex-Congressman Mel Reynolds, let us consider Obama’s former Pastor, the Reverend Dr Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.

Steve Sailer devotes Chapter 9 of America’s Half Blood Prince to a definitive analysis of Wright and Obama’s relationship with him:

Senator and Mrs. Obama donated $53,770 from 2005-2007 to Trinity, (VDARE.com –Wright’s Church) helping propagate…racist paranoia. (AHBP P181).

Sailer respects Wright:

A well-read intellectual who has dipped deeply into the scholarly
work of leftist black theologians and philosophers. (AHBP P163)

and he clearly is a formidable wordsmith:

…Rev. God Damn America.
Wright is a master at distilling his meaning down to an agitating
phrase, such as “U.S. of K.K.K.” (AHBP P98)

“It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away
more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a
year, where white folks’ greed runs a world in need, apartheid in
one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere…(AHBP P183)

and of course one cannot forget his masterly crushing of Obama’s effort to lie away his relationship with Wright

If Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would not ever
get elected… Politicians say what they say and do what they
do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on
polls … I do what pastors do; he does what politicians do.(AHBP,P186)

Unlike Steele (and Obama) Wright is has demonstrated considerable executive ability –in the building of his large congregation.

But he is not a respectable man

the 66-year-old Porsche-driving pastor seems still
very much in his prime: he spent 2007 conducting a passionate
adulterous affair with Elizabeth Payne, a married white woman
three decades his junior who worked for one of his protégés at a
black Dallas megachurch. The New York Post reported in
September 2008:

Wright has been married to his second wife, Ramah, for more
than 20 years. The preacher reportedly wooed Ramah away
from her first husband in the 1980s, when the couple came to
marriage counseling at Wright‘s Trinity United Church of Christ
in Chicago. (AHBP P170)

My prediction: before Steele’s term is out, the RINOs who foisted Steele on the Party will be seen to be the credulous fools they are.

This is a disaster for the GOP.

Read America’s Half Blood Prince!