18 April 2009

Long LA Times article on Greg Cochran

[Steve Sailer] @ 9:24 pm [Email author] [Email this article]  [Print this article] [Print this article]
Here’s Karen Kaplan’s profile in the Los Angeles Times of Gregory Cochran: “Jewish Legacy Inscribed on the Genes.” (It’s now the most emailed article on the LA Times website and the second most heavily viewed article.)

Gregory Cochran has always been drawn to puzzles. This one had been gnawing at him for several years: Why are European Jews prone to so many deadly genetic diseases?

Tay-Sachs disease. Canavan disease. More than a dozen more.

It offended Cochran’s sense of logic. Natural selection, the self-taught genetics buff knew, should flush dangerous DNA from the gene pool. Perhaps the mutations causing these diseases had some other, beneficial purpose. But what?

At 3:17 one morning, after a long night searching a database of scientific journals from his disheveled home office in Albuquerque, Cochran fired off an e-mail to his collaborator Henry Harpending, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

“I’ve figured it out, I think,” Cochran typed. “Pardon my crazed excitement.”

The “faulty” genes, Cochran concluded, make Jews smarter.

That provocative — some would say inflammatory — hypothesis has landed Cochran and Harpending in the middle of a charged debate about the link between IQ and DNA.

They have been sneered at by colleagues and excoriated on Internet forums. They have been welcomed to speak at a synagogue and a Jewish medical society. They were asked to write a book; that effort, “The 10,000 Year Explosion,” was published early this year.

Scientists are increasingly finding that propensities for human behaviors — for addiction, aggression, risk-taking and more — are written in our genes. But the idea that some groups of people are inherently smarter is troubling to many. Some scientists say it has such racist implications it’s unworthy of consideration.

“What are their theories about those on the opposite end of the spectrum?” asked Neil Risch, director of the Institute for Human Genetics at UC San Francisco, who finds the matter so offensive he can barely discuss it without raising his voice. “Do they have genetic theories about why Latinos and African Americans perform worse academically?”

The biological basis for intelligence can be a thankless arena of inquiry. The authors of “The Bell Curve” were vilified 15 years ago for suggesting genes played a role in IQ differences among racial groups.

And here’s Karen Kaplan’s LA Times’ article on John Hawks back in February.

VDARE.COM fundraiser temporarily suspended because of PayPal problem - many thanks!

[Peter Brimelow] @ 9:08 pm [Email author] [Email this article]  [Print this article] [Print this article]

PayPal hiccupped this morning and forced us to suspend our fund-raising campaign. This is a relief, in a way, because I hate stopping postings on VDARE.COM, although it does convey the seriousness of our struggle. But I do want to take this opportunity to extend a personal thanks to those of you who have rallied round. Not only are you helping us recover from losing a major donor, but you make us feel much better!

The Subprime Bubble in Living Color

[Steve Sailer] @ 2:54 pm [Email author] [Email this article]  [Print this article] [Print this article]
We’ve been reading about the subprime mortgage crisis for a couple of years, but I’d never seen a graph of subprime mortgage originations by ethnicity showing exactly who got the subprime home purchase dollars.

So, I decided to create some graphs myself. After all, my tax dollars pay for the massive federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act database (Table 11-3, to be precise). The government runs this system to make sure that minorities get enough mortgage money. I guess we can say:

Mission Accomplished!

Unfortunately, before 2004 the HMDA didn’t break out subprime loans (which it cryptically calls “Reported Pricing Data”). But presumably the subprime dollars originating were much lower before 2004. We can more or less date the beginning of the subprime explosion to President Bush’s October 15, 2002 White House Conference on Minority Homeownership, in which he gave a big wink to the mortgage industry to put the pedal to the metal on zero down and zero doc loans in the name of Bush’s goal of adding 5.5 million minority homeowners.

(more…)

“Spengler” Outs Himself

[Steve Sailer] @ 2:53 pm [Email author] [Email this article]  [Print this article] [Print this article]

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

I posted on October 27, 2006:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who do you have to sleep with in this town to get your blog compared to Montaigne’s Essays in The Economist?”

[Steve Sailer] @ 2:50 pm [Email author] [Email this article]  [Print this article] [Print this article]

Now we may have a clue to the answer to that old question in Johann Hari’s bedazzled tongue-bath of Andrew Sullivan, the Barry Bonds of bloggers.

If anybody is interested in why Sullivan is so super-confident in his judgment despite so often being wrong in public (as his mercurial changes of view demonstrate), he explained why in the NY Times Magazine way back in 2000: He had revitalized his flagging career in the late 1990s by getting a prescription for synthetic testosterone.

“Because the testosterone is injected every two weeks, and it quickly leaves the bloodstream, I can actually feel its power on almost a daily basis. Within hours, and at most a day, I feel a deep surge of energy. It is less edgy than a double espresso, but just as powerful. My attention span shortens. In the two or three days after my shot, I find it harder to concentrate on writing and feel the need to exercise more. My wit is quicker, my mind faster, but my judgment is more impulsive. …

And then after a few days, as the testosterone peaks and starts to decline, the feeling alters a little. I find myself less reserved than usual, and more garrulous. The same energy is there, but it seems less directed toward action than toward interaction, less toward pride than toward lust.

We’ll skip over the details of Andrew’s Lust Phase and get to his next mood swing:

… “Then there’s anger. I have always tended to bury or redirect my rage. I once thought this an inescapable part of my personality. It turns out I was wrong. … That was an extreme example, but other, milder ones come to mind: losing my temper in a petty argument; innumerable traffic confrontations; even the occasional slightly too prickly column or e-mail flame-out.”

Personally, I don’t like competing with a chemically pumped-up pundit anymore than I suspect that pitcher Greg Maddux liked competing with Roger Clemens over the last decade or so of their careers. But the bigger point is that the Atlantic Monthly should put a label on Sullivan’s blog that says:
Warning: Don’t take anything Andrew Sullivan says seriously. Remember that what you see here is the product not of careful thought and proven good judgment, but just of whatever phase of his hormone therapy Andrew happens to be in at the moment.

Immigrants and Rape in Norway

[Randall Burns] @ 8:51 am [Email author] [Email this article]  [Print this article] [Print this article]

A reader sent this to me:

Rolleiv Solholm writes in the Norway Post:

The Oslo Police have over the past three years investigated 41 cases of aggravated sexual assault, which resulted in rape. All of them were carried out by non-western immigrants to Norway.
……….
Most of the rapists have a Kurdish or African background, NRK reports.

[Immigrants behind most cases of aggravated sexual assault , Apr. 17, 2009]

It would clearly make sense for all immigrants to developed countries to be required to to purchase bonds that would indemnify victims of their criminal activities. I suspect the reported rapes are only the tip of a rather large iceberg.

Rape is not the act of an immigrant that loves their new homeland-but someone who simply doesn’t belong there in the first place. Norway is a wealthy country and could easily afford to generous settlements to resettle those who want to leave for any reason before tragedies like this happen.

Russians Arrested for Sturgeon Poaching near Sacramento

[Brenda Walker] @ 8:49 am [Email author] [Email this article]  [Print this article] [Print this article]

A couple years ago I wrote that immigrants are overrepresented among poachers because many cultures do not value species protection: Diversity Is Strength! It’s Also Poaching.

(In contrast, American hunters and fishermen are some of our best conservationists because they want their sports to continue.)

Russians are known to fancy sturgeon, and fish eggs of the species (aka caviar) can bring a poacher $150-200/jar on the black market (particularly among immigrants), and a whole fish can be worth $2000 to $4000. Unsurprisingly, Russian immigrants have brought a penchant for poaching sturgeon to northern California, and several criminal rings have been arrested since at least 2005.

The latest arrest was of seven Russian men residing in the Sacramento area who were taken into custody April 10 in Colusa County for poaching. (Around 75,000 to 100,000 recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union live in the area.)

Those arrested used juvenile salmon as bait for sturgeon and sold the illegal catches for profit, the state Department of Fish and Game said in a prepared statement. Most of the fish were taken from the Sacramento River in Colusa County, according to the department.
[Wardens reel in poaching suspects, Marysville Appeal-Democrat, April 11, 2009]

Sturgeon were quite plentiful in northern California a century ago, but now have been fished to dangerously low numbers.

The fish were sold illegally in Sacramento County, Laughlin said. “Sturgeon are on the verge of being listed as a protected species by the federal government,” Laughlin said. “The commercialization of wildlife could lead to the end of sturgeon in my lifetime, unless people like this are stopped.”

Sadly, California has only one game warden for each 198,000 residents, the lowest proportion in the United States, so the bad guys have a big advantage. Congratulations to the hard-working Fish and Game officers for catching these thieves who are thought to have been taking sturgeon for years.

The arrested men’s mug shots are below.

Top row, left to right, Andrey Bukaty, Serhiy V. Omelchuck, Sergey Sokalskiy; bottom row, left to right, Yevgeniy Leontyuki, Ivan Banatskyi