So there I was with my 17-year-old son, showing him how to change a wheel. I share a car with him, and one of the tires had gone flat overnight.

Off with the hubcap, out with the jack. Loosen the lugs before raising the chassis, otherwise the wheel’s just going to turn on you….

Changing wheels is, I told the lad, a basic life skill. I wished I had a dollar for every time I’d done it. Thence I fell into geezer reminiscing.

“I got a flat once on the FDR Drive going into Manhattan. Changed the wheel right there among all the dirt and trash on the 24-inch-wide FDR verge, New York City traffic zipping past my elbow in the rain. I was on my way to meet a girl. When I got there I was all look-at-what-I-did! guy style, pleased with myself because I’d done something difficult, dangerous, and useful. I was like, ‘Hey, Honey, guess what: I got a flat on the FDR and…’ She of course was all let’s-talk-about-us girl style: ‘You’re late! Typical of you!...’ So I’m trying to tell her my story of courage and resourcefulness, and she’s just: ‘You’re late! You don’t really care about me….’”

My son, who has his own way of getting to the essentials, asked how old the girl was, and the conversation went off on a tangent. I believe I got the main point across, though: Guys have our way of thinking, women have their way. There’s a lot of overlap, of course—I mean, we can both do crossword puzzles and so on—but some key areas of the female brain are wired differently from ours.

This is rank heresy under the reigning dogma of Absolute and Unquestionable Human Equality. Even as you read this I am probably being denounced somewhere by agents of our Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice as an unfit parent and a corrupter of the young.

Whatever: I shall proceed on the understanding that the reigning dogma of A&UHE is a stinking, wormy pile of intellectual dog crap that contradicts all human experience and scientific evidence. Everyone on board with that? Excellent.

So let’s talk about the “sexual harassment” panic that is currently gripping the West. The source of this collective hysteria is of course our society’s detachment from reality, the winds of A&UHE blowing us ever further into the Gulf of Enstupidation.

Far out ahead of our other major institutions in the race to total, metaphysical stupidity about sex differences is the US military. If you doubt this, I refer you to the Department of Defense Fiscal Year 2012 Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military. The report is in two parts: Vol. 1 (729 PDF pages) and Vol. 2 (765 pages). To make sense of some sections, however, you’ll need to refer to the 309-page Workplace and Gender Relations Survey of Active Duty Members (WGRA) for the same year.

I realize that 1,803 pages is rather a lot, but the thing comes with a five-page Executive Summary, and you do want to help “establish a military culture free of sexual assault” (page 17), don’t you?

{pagebreak}

So I’m going to leave you to browse those 1,803 pages for yourself—enjoy!—and to learn such things as (page 23):

Estimates derived from the rates of [Unwanted Sexual Contact] in the 2012 WGRA suggest that there may have been approximately 26,000 Service members who experienced some form of USC in the year prior to being surveyed.

My work here aims to be constructive: to apprise the US military of some true facts that might assist them in pushing back against the USC tsunami:

(1) When you want to get anything done, there is much to be said for institutional segregation by sex. An American friend recently asked me how, in spite of having a not very scholarly temperament, I come across as well-educated. I put it down to having attended an all-boys’ school from my 11th to my 18th birthdays. I really don’t see how teenage boys can learn anything with girls in the classroom.

(2) If healthy young adult males and females are assembled in units dedicated to a common purpose, in sex proportions much different from 50-50, and walled off from the general population, then strong sex-related emotions—notably sexual jealousy—will inevitably manifest themselves, corroding unit effectiveness.

(3) Women are strongly attracted to higher-status men. If male officers are in command of units containing women, human nature is placed under severe strain.

(4) Men who join the military are responding to widespread, innate male urges—the urge to break things and kill people, for example. Women who join the military are, by contrast, outliers in their sex. They are eccentric and prone to behave eccentrically. As a designated victim group, they are especially susceptible to the associated pathologies, e.g., victim hoaxes for attention, spite, or cash reward.

(5) The terms “sexual harassment” and “sexual assault” are ambiguous and open to manipulation by unscrupulous lawyers. It is not, for example, the case that sexual intercourse comes in precisely two clearly distinguished varieties, consensual and nonconsensual. There is an entire continuum of consent, ranging from forcible kidnapping/rape, to drunk-and-I-don’t-know-what-I-was-thinking, to licensed connubial bliss. (In this context I once asked a respectably married lady friend whether in her days of premarital freedom she had ever taken a man to bed and regretted it afterwards. She: “Afterwards? How about during?”)

(6) I hate to distract the attention of our senior military brains away from their labors on “Strengthening Military-Civilian Community Partnerships to Respond to Sexual Assault” (page 43) toward the distasteful business of fighting wars, but there may be some of that in our future, and it may bear some hard thinking all by itself—if not perhaps 1,803 pages’ worth.

As a science geek from way back—Andrade and Huxley were favorite childhood companions—I try to keep tabs on that side of things. This can be disheartening. To quote from that intergalactic bestseller We Are Doomed:

Scientific objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought, restricted to small cliques whom the generality of citizens regard with dislike and mistrust. Just as religious thinking emerges naturally and effortlessly from the everyday workings of the human brain, so scientific thinking has to struggle against the grain of our mental natures. There is a modest literature on this topic: Lewis Wolpert’s The Unnatural Nature of Science (2000) and Alan Cromer’s Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science (1995) are the books known to me, though I’m sure there are more. There is fiction, too: in Walter M. Miller, Jr.‘s 1960 sci-fi bestseller A Canticle for Leibowitz, the scientists are hunted down and killed…then later declared saints by the Catholic Church.

In a society such as the modern West, where intelligence is declining, where fertility trends are dysgenic, where cognitive elites enforce assent to feel-good ideological claptrap and the mass of citizenry is absorbed in frivolities, science hovers always on the edge of extinction. Saint Leibowitz was martyred following a nuclear Armageddon; on present evidence the Armageddon won’t be necessary. We’ll be barbecuing scientists for the fun of it when reality TV and smartphones begin to pall.

Even science writers seem keen to help at piling up the faggots. John Horgan, for example, who once wrote a book titled The End of Science, is now doing what he can to hasten that end: On the Scientific American blog the other day he called for a ban on research into race differences in IQ. (For a take on this by the irascible but indispensable Greg Cochran, see here.) 

Under these sorry circumstances I feel obliged to do what I can to help keep the guttering flame of dispassionate empirical enquiry alight for at least a while longer. In that spirit I recommend to you a forthcoming book titled The Newton Awards by Michael Hart and Claire Parkinson, now available for preorder from the publisher.

The original idea of the authors was to expand the concept of Nobel Prizes to all areas of science, technology, and math, and to award once prize per year from 1600 to 2000 AD for achievement in those fields. This couldn’t be made to work exactly as planned. For the first 275 years of the period there weren’t enough advances for one prize a year; for 1976-2000 there isn’t yet enough perspective for good judgment. So only for 1876-1975 is there one Newton Award per year; elsewhere the awards are for 5- or 10-year periods.

The authors end up with 140 Newton Awards for the 400-year span, to 172 named awardees. Some awards go to more than one person (e.g., the Wright brothers); some persons get more than one award (e.g., Edison for the phonograph, light bulb, and distributed electricity).

The selections seem to me to be pretty good, though as a gun enthusiast I thought there should have been a mention for small-arms technology—the Minié ball, perhaps, or breech loading. (Military inventions aren’t ignored: Nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles get awards.) 

Political correctness is eschewed completely, which probably accounts for the book being put out by a small publishing house. Every one of the awardees was a white European raised in Europe or one of the British-settler nations (Canada, the USA, Australia, New Zealand). Just four nations have more than ten awards each: the USA, Britain, Germany, and France.

{pagebreak}

This agrees with Peter Watson’s apologetic remarks in The Modern Mind (2000) that:

Whatever list you care to make of twentieth-century innovations, be it plastic, antibiotics and the atom or stream-of-consciousness novels, vers libre or abstract expressionism, it is almost entirely Western.

Worse still, practically all the inventing and discovering has been done by men. Only three gals show up in Hart and Parkinson’s lists, and all are joint awardees with a man: Irène Joliot-Curie (with husband Frédéric) for artificial radioactivity, Gertrude Elion (with George Hitchings) for the anti-leukemia drug 6-MP, and Jocelyn Bell (with Antony Hewish) for the discovery of pulsars.

That darn stereotype threat! Don’t be looking for reviews of The Newton Awards in any major outlets. Being literary editor of some niche magazine isn’t as much fun as working for the Heritage Foundation, but it’s just as vulnerable to the Thought Police. 

Reading through these achievements, a number of things come to mind. For example: What part is played by luck in these greatest discoveries and inventions? Practically none, is the overall impression. Some breakthroughs were achieved when the scientist was looking for something else or for nothing in particular; but the confirmation, elaboration, and explanation of what had been found was still creative intellectual work of the first order.

The discovery of cosmic background radiation by Penzias and Wilson in 1965, for example, was certainly fortuitous: They weren’t looking for it, only trying to calibrate an antenna. Their diligence in isolating the unexpected phenomenon, though, and their collegiality in bringing in astrophysicists to provide theory, got them a well-deserved Nobel Prize.

Similarly with Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who discovered microorganisms in 1674. The authors:

As Leeuwenhoek had not been deliberately searching for microorganisms, some books suggest that he was merely lucky. Our view is quite different. His discovery was a result of his carefully constructing scientific instruments of unparalleled quality, and then spending a great deal of time making observations with them. The combination of skill and hard work is the very opposite of luck.

Science and creative technology have, across the modern period, been the great glories of Western civilization. As that civilization yields up its lands to non-European peoples and ideologies of magic and unreason, pause to take a backward glance at the astonishing things we once accomplished: Order a copy of The Newton Awards.

Queen Elizabeth II

Probably it’s just my simpleminded arithmomania, but years ending in the numeral three seem to be more memorable than average, both publicly and personally, for reasons high or low.

In 1953 the public became the personal. This was the year of the Coronation, the first public event to impinge on my consciousness.

We kids all got Coronation mugs—my sister still has hers. There was a street party with free cake and desserts. Most people were happy for the pretty new Queen, although my Dad, a sour republican, took it all as one more opportunity to grumble about “those bloody Germans.”

England was bursting with children in 1953: My elementary school overflowed, so that my class was decanted to an annex in a local church hall. England was still a real nation, too, not yet a flophouse and welfare office for all the world’s beggars, thieves, and lunatics. We were named after kings, queens, and Bible characters. The street games we played were centuries old. That a citizen might be arrested for carrying the nation’s flag was beyond inconceivable in 1953.

Coronation aside, the public world came filtered through the tabloid newspapers my parents favored. Tabloid headliner of the year was John Christie, who had murdered at least eight women. Christie was arrested in March, tried in June, and hanged in July. Justice was brisk back then. Abundant, too: Twelve other people were hanged that year in England, one a female.

1963 was the year when sexual intercourse began, according to Philip Larkin. Sex certainly had top billing in the public sphere.

For me personally, Larkin got it precisely right. Sex didn’t come easy, though: I had to walk for it.

My partner in exploration and I were both living at home. Neither of us had a car. I would spend evenings with her in her parents’ living room—talking, reading, listening to music, and writhing with lust—until the parents went to bed at ten-thirty. Then we would copulate on the living-room carpet, whose color for some reason I remember with perfect clarity: a fetching pale shade of cerulean.

By the time we finished, the town’s meager bus service had shut down for the night, so I had to go home on foot. Her house and mine were on opposite sides of the English country town we both inhabited: four miles as the sated lover stumbles. I didn’t mind. To this day I have found nothing so conducive to a good night’s sleep as a long post-coital walk.

One minor additional inconvenience was a certain aid to male sexual hygiene that my fastidious mistress would not allow me to deposit in her family’s garbage. Nor in neighbors’ hedges: She made me promise to walk at least the length of the street before I discarded the thing.

On one occasion I still had it when, halfway through the walk home, I passed the town’s General Hospital. King Edward VII had dedicated the place, and there was a bust of him on an inscribed plinth in an alcove set into the hospital wall. Feeling irreverent and perhaps having internalized my Dad’s republican scorn, and the streets being perfectly deserted, I fixed the unwanted item, loaded with its pale cargo, over His Majesty’s nose. Then I staggered on homewards whistling a happy tune—quite possibly indeed one from The Beatles’ first LP, which had come out that spring.

1973 is best forgotten. I spent much of my late twenties in the grip of a shameful psychological affliction whose symptoms have been described by much better writers than me. The year 1973 was the lowest trough of the thing, a chronicle of wasted time.

But even in this misery there was a silver lining: I came to the USA for the first time and fell in love with the place. I went back to England five years later, but I think that from 1973 on it was foredoomed that I would die an American.

{pagebreak}

1983 was an interesting year. I learned a lot. The first half I spent teaching college in China, which was then still struggling out from under Maoism’s great rotting corpse. The joy of the work was my students, who were much brighter, funnier, and more optimistic than I thought they had any cause to be. They were more diverse in character, too. Solzhenitsyn noted the paradox that the varieties of human personality, good and bad, exhibit more strongly under totalitarianism, while freedom leads to leveled conformity.

I returned to an England transformed. The monetarist medicine of the early Thatcher years had been digested, the victory over Argentina had given patriotism a boost, and the Iron Lady had won her second general election. People I’d known a year or two earlier as clock-watching corporate drudges and public-sector drones were starting businesses. That woman mattered.

In 1993 Nellie Muriel Derbyshire was born, and my life as a parent began.

The Clinton presidency began a few days later. If you want to tell me the Clintons are scum-sucking bottom-feeders, I won’t disagree. But those eight years were pretty nice, the nation more relaxed than before or since. You could even say true things about race without a screeching mob of schoolmarms coming after you.

In 2003 the USA invaded Iraq; I forget why. I published Prime Obsession, still my favorite among my own books, just on the Elvis principle.

Interviewer: “Of all your hits, which one is your favorite?”

Elvis: “Uh, ‘Teddy Bear.’”

Interviewer: “Why is that your favorite?”

Elvis: “Uh, that’s the one that made the most money.”

2013: Personally, this will likely be the year of the Empty Nest. Publicly…oh, dear.

According to The Economist, the United States was the best place in the world to be born into back in 1988. Today, the United States is only tied for 16th place.

I have watched one great nation decline; am I fated to see another? I pin my hopes on 2023.

Frank Borzellieri

It has been nearly a hundred years since Sir James Frazer completed his tremendous work of anthropology The Golden Bough. The book scandalized many Christians, suggesting as it did that the theme of a divine person sacrificed and then reborn has been common since deep antiquity and across all agricultural societies. That theme, argued Frazer, often found expression in the annual killing of a king at harvest time, his spirit then resurrected in the spring.

Cultural Marxism, the current state religion of the West, seems to be reverting to that notion of an annual sacrifice, though with only two percent of us employed in agriculture nowadays, we’re not adhering very strictly to the proper seasonal schedule. Nor, alas, have we yet figured out the resurrection feature.

All that came to mind while I was watching Jared Taylor’s interview with Frank Borzellieri.

Borzellieri (“borza-lerry”) was principal of a Catholic elementary school in New York City for the school years 2009-2011. Before that he was Dean of Discipline at a Catholic high school in the city. His record in both jobs was spotless, and that is astonishing when you consider that both schools were heavily NAM and Frank is white, so that the faintest scintilla of a hint of prejudice on his part or even a careless word would have cost him his job for “racism.”

On July 31, 2011 the New York Daily News published a story about Frank under the headline “White supremacist principal running Bronx school with majority black and Latino students.”

The story was a routine piece of Cultural Marxist character assassination by a reporter named Corrine Lestch, who, like the rest of her foul hypocrite breed, lives in a tony Whitopia (average list price for homes in her zip code: $781,657). Breathlessly Ms. Lestch informed her readers that Frank Borzellieri had written for American Renaissance, which she tendentiously described as “white supremacist.” (According to its mission statement, AR advocates “the study of all aspects of race, whether historical, cultural, or biological.”) Frank had, she further swooned, “a history of controversial writings and campaigns.” That was true enough, if you take “controversial” to mean “hostile to Cultural Marxist goals.” Frank had, for example, tried to get a homosexual activist removed from classroom teaching.

Ms. Lestch supplied disapproving comments about Frank from teachers she did not name, parents she did not name, a principal she did name but whose school she misidentified, and the thuggish money racket known as the Southern Poverty Law Center. The New York Archdiocese fired Frank the day after the article appeared, and his ecclesiastical employers shunned him thereafter. He told me that a six-page letter to then-Archbishop Timothy Dolan went unanswered.

Eight months later, in 2012, I myself was the goat for having pushed back against black journalists preening their cherished victimhood at the time of the Trayvon Martin affair. Then, one year on from that, Jason Richwine was hauled up to the sacrificial slab on account of a Ph.D. dissertation that mentioned (gasp!) different race profiles in IQ scores.

It’s getting to look uncannily like a pattern, isn’t it? Who will be the 2014 goat?

In all three cases the goat had some association with an organization keen to maintain its credibility with what we Dark Enlightenment types call The Cathedral. In Borzellieri’s case the supplicant organization was the Roman Catholic Church (proprietor of many actual cathedrals); in mine it was National Review; in Jason Richwine’s it was the Heritage Foundation. All three of these organizations, hearing the mob’s rising ululations, fell to the ground, curled into a fetal position, and squealed: “Take the goat! But for pity’s sake don’t call us ‘racist’!”

{pagebreak}

The similarities thus stated, there are important differences to be noted. My own defenestration was all too foreseeable; in fact I foresaw it. Jason Richwine was a casualty in one skirmish of the Cold Civil War: the Cultural Marxist effort to Brazilify the USA via mass immigration.

Frank Borzellieri’s case stands out in a number of interesting ways. He had spoken and written frankly, though temperately, on race and immigration during his pre-teaching career from 1993-2005. He had last spoken at an American Renaissance conference in 2002 and last written for the magazine in 2006. The quotes that sent Ms. Lestch reaching for her smelling salts—“diversity’s a weakness,” etc.—were from a 2004 book.

The main reason Frank gave up writing was that from 2006 on he was, at his own expense, and while working full-time in school administration, pursuing first one then two (simultaneous) master’s degrees in his new career field. He was awarded both degrees with high distinction. This guy does nothing by halves.

Thus Frank embarked on his serious career as a Catholic educator with a long paper trail behind him. A colleague brought that paper trail to the attention of Frank’s superiors at the school where he was teaching in 2007. Those superiors—the school’s principal and pastor—asked the Censor Librorum of the Archdiocese (this guy) to review Frank’s writings for doctrinal error. None was found, so Frank’s contract was renewed.

At this point you might be thinking that it would be a good idea if Conservatism, Inc. were to appoint a Censor Librorum of their own to certify contributors’ freelance writings or Ph.D. dissertations as doctrinally pure. They’d save themselves a lot of trouble, right?

Not necessarily. In Frank Borzellieri’s case the nihil obstat was transubstantiated into Scotch mist as soon as Ms. Lestch at the Daily News murmured the holy incantation “white supremacist.”

Frank Borzellieri is now unemployable in the field he studied for years to enter, and his student-loan debt is mounting. Sympathetic lawyers are helping him sue the Daily News for defamation. Frank remains a devout Catholic, which, given the cowering pusillanimity of his superiors in the New York Archdiocese, is a remarkable testimony to faith in the song, not the singer.

Watch that video and help Frank Borzellieri if you can.

John Harvard statue, Cambridge, Mass.

People who live among words, books, and ideas, and who are scholars, or hobnob with scholars, or dream of being scholars, occasionally need reminding of the social world’s true contours.

Human society is just a magnification, a multiplication, of individual human nature, concerning which I laid out the essentials in that epochal best seller We Are Doomed:

The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b. who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.

The Jason Richwine business has illustrated all over again for those who needed the reminder that even a society as technically sophisticated as ours is a great dark slough of ignorance and passion in which the small voices of reason and calm empirical inquiry must struggle to be heard above the bellowing of the night beasts.

Richwine was the Heritage Foundation analyst who resigned after it was made public that he’d been awarded a Ph.D. from Harvard University on the strength of a dissertation titled “IQ and Immigration.”

For anyone who doubted that Pathos holds the whip hand over Logos in the public arena, the Richwine affair has been instructive. In dealing with social deviance, not much has changed across the centuries. We have cut back on the harsher kinds of penalties, but otherwise there’s been little progress since the trial of Socrates, who, like Jason Richwine, “failed to acknowledge the gods that the city acknowledges.”

Should you want something more up-to-date for guidance, the charming lady who calls herself “hbd* chick” recommends Malleus Maleficarum, the fifteenth-century treatise on witchcraft (an old favorite of mine, full of good psychological insight).

Concerning witch hunts in general, hbd* chick notes that:

They are rituals of a sort in which social (and sometimes physical) boundaries are defined—witch-hunts are, at these critical moments, extravagant ways of working out who’s in the in-group and who is not, and woe to anyone who is not.

The witch-hunters are rarely satisfied with only one victim, though. When the chief caster of spells has been identified and burned, there may still be accomplices lurking in the woods.

Thus Ana Marie Cox in the London Guardian says: “The real criminals here would seem to be Harvard.” Ms. Cox presumably means the three Harvard professors who signed off on Jason Richwine’s dissertation—you know, those spell-casters who poisoned the well water and caused two-headed calves to be born.

I actually agree with Ms. Cox about the identity of the real criminals here, but I disagree with her on the nature of the crime. Professors Borjas, Zeckhauser, and Jencks do indeed have charges to answer, though I believe they are charges of cowardice in the face of the enemy.

When David Weigel at slate.com asked Borjas to explain his endorsement of Richwine’s dissertation, the professor went into Butterfly McQueen mode. He don’t know nuthin’ ’bout birthin’ babies!

I have never worked on anything even remotely related to IQ, so don’t really know what to think about the relation between IQ, immigration, etc….I don’t find the IQ academic work all that interesting. Economic outcomes and IQ are only weakly related…the focus on IQ is a bit misguided.

So why did he sign off on a thesis titled “IQ and Immigration Policy”?

{pagebreak}

Prof. Zeckhauser showed a bit more spine—about one and a half vertebrae:

None of his advisors would have accepted his thesis had he thought that his empirical work was tilted or in error. However, Richwine was too eager to extrapolate his empirical results to inferences for policy.

Jon Wiener of the leftie magazine The Nation was most vexed by Christopher Jencks, the third member of the dissertation committee. Prof. Jencks, Wiener tells us, has been “for decades a leading figure among liberals who did serious research on inequality.” But not that kind of inequality!

When Wiener put the question to him, Prof. Jencks took discretion to be the better part of valor:

Why would Christopher Jencks decide that that dissertation was worth a Harvard Ph.D.? I asked Jencks whether he would comment. He replied “Nope. But thanks for asking.”

I assumed that Harvard professors eminent enough to be sitting on a dissertation committee would be tenured. To be on the safe side I checked this point with Bob Weissberg, who has spent most of his life in universities and once had tenure himself. By the same chemistry that enables Protestants and Catholics in Belfast to distinguish one another by sight, Bob can spot a tenured academic at a hundred yards. Yes, he said, all three are tenured.

That means they have nothing to lose by taking a clear stand for disinterested scholarship, for the reputation of their college, and for their own names. Why didn’t they stand up for Richwine against the mob?

The entire justification for academic tenure is that it allows the best intellects among us to roam freely in their research without any need to fear political consequences.

Eminent professors at distinguished universities are the guardians of our civilization, front-line troops in the never-ending war against barbarism. For the Richwine Three to desert their posts like this is civilizational high treason.

The Chinese scholar Sima Qian spoke up for a friend who had earned the wrath of the Emperor. Thus further infuriated, the Emperor ordered Sima Qian to suffer the penalty of castration, and this penalty was carried out.

We live in gentler times, thank goodness. Profs. Borjas, Zeckhauser, and Jencks are in no peril of castration for their offenses against State Ideology. But really, in their cases, what difference would it make?

I keep getting surprised by my own naïveté.

The case here is that of Anthony D. Weiner, who until two years ago was the US Representative from a Jewish/white-ethnic/black district of Brooklyn.

Rep. Weiner became ex-Rep. Weiner after Tweeting suggestive pictures of himself to female e-acquaintances and then lying about the matter. He resigned his seat, sub-editors at the New York tabloids showered so many puns and double entendres on the city that the Sanitation Department had to clear them from the streets with snow plows, and those of us who’d never seen eye-to-eye with Weiner (sorry, it’s contagious) assumed we had heard the last of him—that his premature withdrawal (sorry, sorry) from public life would be permanent.

Weiner’s appeal had always been lost on me, though I only knew the man from having occasionally seen him on TV. His policy positions were conventionally Jewish-left-liberal, except that he delivered them in a particularly grating way. His specialty was whipping himself up into a bogus fury decorated with bellowing mock indignation, a thin-lipped exophthalmic glare, and jabbing finger motions that could have punched through drywall. On the rare occasions a politician is justified in simulating anger, I prefer a calmer style drawn soft-voiced from a well of stillness.

And Weiner had never had any working life outside politics, a thing that always raises my suspicions of a candidate’s character. If you have no other way to support yourself than by chasing votes, who knows what you won’t say or do to stay in the arena? Weiner had never shoveled concrete for a living, or stocked warehouse shelves, or sold haberdashery over a counter, or taught a roomful of fidgeting kids, or proofed newspaper copy, or programmed computers. Having done all those things, and being inclined to self-righteous smugness about my breadwinning versatility, I looked down on the guy as a loser.

Woe to the smug! The loftiness of man shall be bowed down, and the haughtiness of men shall be made low! Earlier this year, as reported by Radio Derb, we heard that Weiner has thrust himself into (really sorry) the New York City mayoral race.

Given the manner of Weiner’s leaving Congress, he didn’t seem very electable. As the New York Post opined, Weiner’s road to the mayoralty would surely be “long and hard.” Possibly so; but at the end of April Weiner was holding his own (look, you try writing with a straight face about this guy) in the polls.

That wasn’t what brought my naïveté home to me, though. I’d been supposing that Weiner, being out of politics, had no income; and that having no income, he was being supported by his wife, a high-level flunky in the court of Hillary Clinton. I’d been quietly enjoying the thought of Tantrum Tony sitting listless at home, wondering whether he should sign up at trade school for a course in bricklaying while waiting for Mrs. Weiner to bring home the family paycheck.

The full extent of my cluelessness was revealed to me last week by a story in The New York Times. “Weiner Makes Lucrative Name in Consulting,” said the headline.

It did not take Mr. Weiner long to embark on a new career after he left Congress on June 16, 2011. On July 7, he quietly incorporated a new firm, Woolf Weiner Associates, named for his great-grandfather, an Austrian immigrant to the Lower East Side.

Consulting? What does this guy know about business?

{pagebreak}

Executives at [his client companies] described Mr. Weiner as a quick and nimble student of their businesses with an innate sense of how to navigate the rhythms and personalities of government.

Does this pay well?

He and his wife…disclosed last week that they had a combined income of $496,000 in 2012, most of it from Mr. Weiner’s work.

Good grief! That sure beats bricklaying. What accounted for my naïveté, though? What had I forgotten?

Probably this: that in a rich, too-big, over-governed nation, Acts of Congress with 867 or 906 pages imposing costs and regulations on businesses need professional legislators to decipher them for those businesses.

Also this: that an ex-congressman married to a senior aide to the US Secretary of State (who is also wife to an ex-president) is removed forever from the humdrum sphere of making a living.

If you are well seasoned in politics—Weiner has clocked up 26 years—you step off that stage into a gilded world where people stuff money into your pockets as you walk by. Weiner’s boss-in-law, Mrs. Clinton, is worth somewhere between $13-26 million. People pay her $200,000 for a speaking appearance.

And that’s small potatoes. Bill Clinton has somewhere north of $80 million. Al Gore made $100 million just in January, though that was a good month. Tony Blair just got paid $600,000 for two half-hour speeches in the Philippines.

These people, please note, all belong to the Party of the Little Guy in their respective nations: Democrat and Labour. Is the other side coining it, too? You bet: Dick Cheney gets $75,000 a speech, “plus first class travel for an entourage of three.” But the other side is supposed to act like that.

I guess we shouldn’t complain. There’s a market and they’re filling it. No doubt the National Multi Housing Council got their $200,000 worth from Mrs. Clinton when she addressed them on April 24. She’s so wise! Likewise with Tony Blair’s speech (“The leader as nation builder in a time of globalization”) to that telecom firm in Manila. Similarly with Anthony Weiner’s advice to Parabel, a firm that “harvests an algae-like crop used for food and fuel.”

But were we governed any worse back when ex-presidents returned to their law practices (Coolidge) or fell back on their army pensions (Truman), while disgraced congressmen sank into middle-class obscurity?

My favorite jailhouse sex scene is the one in The Longest Yard. Burt Reynolds is in the Florida state pen. A fellow inmate boasts of his powers as a fixer. “I can get you anything in here! I can get you laid in here!”

Burt is skeptical, so the fixer sets him up on some petty mission to the warden’s office. No one is there but the secretary, Bernadette Peters. She locks the doors and starts undressing Burt.

Burt (at 1:11 here): “You do this very often?”

Bernadette: “I’m just as far from Tallahassee as you are, honey.”

Life’s been imitating art all over recently. The big story here was the one out of Baltimore City Detention Center, where a prisoner named Tavon White, awaiting trial for attempted murder, has allegedly fathered five babies by four female prison guards and had carnal knowledge of at least nine more. Mr. White’s domination of his custodiennes extended well beyond the leg-spreading department: They were reportedly smuggling in contraband for him and helping his business enterprises.

The Baltimore story is only one of many. New York cop-killer Ronell Wilson (whose hairstyle seems to be inspired by the Mandelbrot Set) has been having the leg over with one of his guards, Nancy Gonzalez. Ms. Gonzalez gave birth to Wilson’s son a few weeks ago. She named the child Justus. “I took a chance because I was so vulnerable and wanted to be loved, and now I am carrying his child,” explained Ms. Gonzalez prior to delivery. Ahhhhhh.

That story came shortly after a similar case at a maximum-security facility in Fishkill, New York, where corrections office Tyshinia Love Brewster confessed to being six months pregnant with an inmate’s baby.

We of the fogey tendency, always a decade or two behind the times in noticing social changes, are surprised to learn that women are now serving as guards in men’s prisons. I consulted with a journalist friend, a crime reporter who is knowledgeable about these things. He rolled his eyes at my ignorance. “Derb, the average corrections officer in New York nowadays is a 200-pound black woman with a GED.” Good grief! And yes: A 2007 report showed women as 37 percent of adult correctional personnel. In Baltimore it’s over 60 percent.

It’s madness, of course. But it’s no more insane than putting women on submarines or calling homosexual shackups “marriages” or giving settlement rights to twenty-odd million illegal aliens when fifteen percent of citizens are on food stamps. We’ve been going collectively mad for years. After that initial brief surprise at the latest manifestation of lunacy, one sinks quickly back into apathy. Legalized polygamy? Blind air-traffic controllers? Green cards for all the women of Afghanistan? Whatever. Lunacy fatigue has set in.

It’s hard to ignore (though of course you should try) a certain common demographic thread running through these stories of knocked-up prison guards. Is this a black thing?

To some degree it’s bound to be. Black men are way overrepresented in prisons. Black female guards naturally feel racial solidarity with them. Many must have internalized the dominant liberal narrative about these soul brothers being victims of a cruel racist system. Further, most of the guardettes appear to come from black neighborhoods that have been depleted of males by the very fact of so many being locked up. They’re putting out for their caged charges on the Willie Sutton principle: This is where the men are.

{pagebreak}

Black women in any case seem to give it up more easily than nonblacks. “Nearly half (48%) of non-Hispanic black teen girls get pregnant at least once before age 20—nearly twice the national average.”

That said, it’s not just a black thing. Meet Montana State inmate Michael Allen Murphy, as white as you please, and irresistibly pleasing to some subset of females up there in the Treasure State. At any rate, Murphy persuaded several female prison officers to fellate him. He even seduced the house psychiatrist. (Physician, heal thyself.)

What’s going on here? The manosphere has an answer. Women are no longer dependent on men for support. Liberated from this bondage, they flock to alpha males—those gifted with the pickup arts. Humdrum good-provider beta males and clueless, lovelorn omegas are left out in the cold. Here’s the Lion of the Manosphere:

[H]ow alpha was Tavon?...On the streets, who knows for certain what quality of women he could get, but given his proven skill at seducing female prison guards to do his bidding, it’s a good bet he was probably pulling better quality outside than his available selection within prison…[But] even if Tavon was boffing ugly women, that’s still thirteen ugly women who decided to pass on loving, intimate relationships with omega or even lesser beta freemen for illicit harem duty with an attempted murderer in jail…[P]oor omegas and betas…they’re not just competing with free alphas, they’re competing with alphas ostensibly removed from societal circulation.

The tendency of women in this regard is surely not news. Lord Byron was “Mad, bad and dangerous to know,” thereby owning two of the three adjectives traditionally used to describe prison inmates: “the sad, the bad, and the mad.” Carmen went for the swaggering bullfighter, breaking the heart of poor beta José. Tannhäuser‘s confession that he’s been frolicking in the Palace of Love just makes Elisabeth even steamier under the silk, leaving poor beta Wolfgang plucking forlornly at his harp. Chicks dig jerks.

Out at the tail of the distribution are chicks who dig psychopaths. Bonnie thought the world of Clyde. Scott Peterson, after murdering his wife, was swamped with marriage proposals. Now we hear that the surviving Boston bomber has a female fan club. Shrinks have a word for it: hybristophilia.

Speaking as a beta provider with zero inclination to criminality, I find it all depressing. Would I have had a richer, more fulfilling life as a jerk? Possibly: but hey, at least I’m not in jail.

Image of American inmate courtesy of Shutterstock

Longfellow Bridge, Boston

The Boston Marathon bombing story came garnished with an unusual number of ironies, coincidences, and historical echoes.

Irony. Item number 27 in Christian Landers’s book Stuff White People Like is “Marathons.” Sample from the accompanying text:

To a white person, the absolute pinnacle of fitness is to run a marathon. Not to win, just to run. White people will train for months….They will then set goals like running in the Boston Marathon….

Where’s the irony in that? Well, check out item No. 7 in Landers’s book: “Diversity.”

To be fair, though, Landers adds some qualification to No. 7:

White people love ethnic diversity, but only as it relates to restaurants.

Since neither of the Tsarnaev brothers, nor any of their family members, is a restaurateur, possibly this one doesn’t count. It does sort of tie in with the location of the bombings, though.

Irony. The bombings occurred in zip code 02116. Not knowing the first thing about Boston, I shall have to rely on the stats in city-data.com (which is sometimes out of date). Whaddawe got?

Population is 21,508, of which 21 percent are foreign-born, with China and Hong Kong accounting for 36 percent, so there’s a Chinatown in there. Ice People 79 percent, Sun People 15 percent. Median age 33, low-ish for the state. Average household 1.7 persons, way low. Median household income $69,000, but average AGI $208,000, so there are some rich folks pulling up that average. (The median of the four numbers 2, 4, 6, 1,000,000 is 5; the average is 250,003.) The “household income distribution” is W-shaped: some poor, more rich, lots in the middle.

I’m getting a picture. Old Euro-ethnic neighborhood with gentrification, single hipsters, domestic help, Chinese.

And this is of course Massachusetts. Zip code 02116 is in congressional district 8, which went for Obama 58-41 last November. That’s Barack Obama, the guy whose political career was launched in the living room of terrorist bombers Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. There’s your irony.

Mind you, that 58-41 for the district is a tad less than Massachusetts overall, which went 61-38 for Obama. Why? Probably because of Euro-ethnic Reagan Democrats. I see 13 percent of persons in zip 02116 declare their first ancestry as Irish.

Irony. Irish-Americans, along with a cast of characters that included Colonel Gaddafi, Yasser Arafat, and the KGB, were keen supporters and financiers of the 1966-1999 terror-bombing campaign by the so-called Irish Republican Army (a name insulting to the Irish Republic, which has a perfectly good professional army not involved in terrorism).

The most authoritative account of that campaign lists the IRA and its affiliates as responsible for 636 civilian deaths (Table 20), though it does not tell us how many were caused by bombs in public places. For an on-the-spot account of what such bombings meant, I recommend—though only for those with strong stomachs—Kevin Myers’s Watching the Door, which I reviewed here.

As an Englishman living in the USA during the mid-1970s peak of those killings, I knew from other expats which bars to avoid when I didn’t feel like being insulted or socked on the jaw. There were places where well-nigh any bar was out of bounds: New York’s Woodside, Rockaway, and North Bronx, and anywhere in central Boston. Those were the places where Noraid raised most of their funds. Don’t be spendin’ it on bandages, now!

{pagebreak}

Coincidence. If I were in charge of the universe, nobody at all would have their legs blown off by terrorist bombs. Unfortunately things are arranged otherwise.

A sense of proportion is never out of place, though. It subtracts nothing from our proper sympathies for the three murdered and dozens maimed in Boston to remember that similar horrors are woven into daily reality.

To jog our memories, a fertilizer plant in Texas blew up just two days after the Boston explosions, killing 14 and sending 160 to the hospital.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports 4,609 “fatal occupational injuries” from 2011, with a corresponding number of workers maimed or disfigured. Thirty to forty thousand Americans die in motor vehicle accidents every year, again with untold thousands more crippled, blinded, etc. 

Irony. Name of the boat in which Suspect 2, Dzhokar Tsarnaev, was found hiding: Slipaway II.

Coincidence. In the 2010 British comedy movie about terrorism, Four Lions, the main target of the terrorists is the London Marathon.

It’s possible that the Tsarnaev brothers were inspired by Four Lions. If so, they must have watched a version with subtitles. Even I, born and raised an English prole, had trouble understanding the Paki-chav accents. Five minutes in, my wife, a fluent though non-native English speaker, turned to me and asked: “What language is this?”

Irony. The prole-hating white Tutsi classes were of course on their knees praying to saints Abraham, Martin, and John that the Boston bombers would turn out to be white clingers.

Well, they were at any rate Caucasian.

“I presume your Loved One was Caucasian.”
“No, why do you think that? He was purely English.”

—Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One

Echoes. “George Orwell” said it took him thirty years to recover from having been named Eric. The effect of one’s name on one’s personality development has been much mused on, to no conclusions that I know of.

This comes to mind because the elder Tsarnaev brother was named after Tamerlane, one of the baddest badasses in all of history.

Jason Goodwin tells us that after beating and capturing the Ottoman Sultan Bayezit in 1402:

Tamerlane used his captive magnanimously until Bayezit’s prickly hauteur proved too much for him, and he was placed in a cage, too small for standing upright, and dragged in the wake of Tamerlane’s retinue. His wife Despina was made to serve naked at the victor’s table….Perhaps no-one was sorry when Bayezit eventually dashed out his brains on the bars of his cage.

They don’t make conquerors like that anymore.

Image of Boston courtesy of Shutterstock

Jamie Foxx

We all had a lot of fun at the American Renaissance bash the other weekend. A disproportionate amount of the fun was provided by vlogger Paul Ramsey, whom I recommend for consideration when your next corporate function, birthday party, or bar mitzvah comes around.

At one point Paul mocked the little knot of anti-racist protestors camped outside the hotel. How, he asked, could this fairly be called “protest”? What did they think they were doing—sticking it to the Man? “Yo, guys: You ARE the Man!”

True enough. Time was, protest meant brave dissenters standing in proud defiance against the massed forces of Establishment power. Nowadays those massed forces believe exactly what the protesters outside our hotel believe, and they propagate it with unflagging zeal through the institutions they control: the media, business, labor, the big political parties, all branches of all federal, state, and municipal government (including the military), and all universities, colleges, schools, kindergartens, and playgroups.

The local media made the point, leaving no doubt that their sympathies were with the protestors, and ours should be likewise if we know what’s good for us. The news announcers put on their most solemn it’s-painful-to-report-this-but-duty-demands faces and quoted the Southern Poverty Law Center scam (twice!) as if it were some kind of impeccable authority, like the International Standards Organization, on metrics of “hate.”

Paul’s remark got me wondering, though. What’s wrong with kids today? Don’t they want to vex their parents? Épater la bourgeoisie? Kick against the pricks? Be transgressive?

Mildred: “Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?”
  Johnny: “Whadda you got?”

Part of the fun of being young used to be the feeling that you were struggling for world mastery against a cohort of closed-minded old farts with a mentality hopelessly stuck in the past. (What Orwell called “pedants, clergymen and golfers.”) Well, if it’s that old-fart cohort you’re looking for, check out your local Ivy League university or cable TV studio. Those places are stuffed to the rafters with them. 1963 is in the past, isn’t it?

And these protesting youngsters believe every single thing the old farts believe! Their transgressions reach no further than their awful beards. The white American middle classes of today may be the most conformist population that ever lived, banking and turning in unison, old and young together, like a school of fish.

Even if these young protestors wanted to be transgressive, they wouldn’t know how. Let’s face it: Being transgressive isn’t what it used to be. Every time I encounter it nowadays, it turns out to be dismally lame.

As an opera fan, I wondered for a while whether I should explore the transgressive delights of Regietheater (“director’s theater”). Then I read Heather Mac Donald‘s survey and decided this was something I could skip without any esthetic loss:

An American tenor working in Germany remembers another Fledermaus with a large pink vagina in the center of the stage into which the singers dived.

Zzzz. That director wasn’t even trying. You want transgressive? I got transgressive.

{pagebreak}

• A production of Shakespeare’s Othello in which the Moor, to his squealing masochistic pleasure, gets chained to a post and thrashed with a bullwhip by Desdemona.

• A play about feminist icon Virginia Woolf in which she dumps her drab husband, lesbian lover, and intellectual friends to go keep house for an alpha male philistine who kicks her when she’s late putting his dinner on the table.

• A remake of The Birdcage is which it turns out that the acceptably gay Robin Williams character has been kidnapping little boys and buggering them in the club’s basement.

To any youngsters seeking to get political transgressivity on the move again, here’s a suggestion: Try racism. What could be more guaranteed to make mom swoon and dad go purple with rage?

No, no, not burning crosses on people’s lawns. The word “racism” long since overflowed that little pond and inundated the surrounding lowlands. I’m talking about racism as defined in Ed West’s excellent new book that I just finished reading. Location 925 in the Kindle edition:

Today the term racism has come to mean almost any recognition of race…and of difference (or average differences) between groups.

It sure has. The last time I got called a racist (Yes! It happens!) was when I overheard someone say that the decline of Detroit was caused by liberalism. “No it wasn’t,” I said, “It was caused by blacks.” Perfectly true,  but apparently racist. Pretend not to notice!

Since racism as defined is transgressive, why isn’t it cool? A number of answers come to mind.

• Racism can’t possibly be cool because it is the most evil and depraved system of thought ever to be countenanced by sentient beings in the entire 13.82-billion-year history of the cosmos. Except that…

• Racism is considered cool when it’s directed against white people. I bet Tim Wise (“Old white people have pretty much always been the bad guys, the keepers of the hegemonic and reactionary flame”) gets invited to all the coolest parties. I bet the coolest kids on campus are the ones running Dr. Shakti Butler’s ethnomasochist boot camp. (“The term [i.e. ‘racist’] applies to all white people.”) When Jamie Foxx boasted on Saturday Night Live that he got to kill all the white people in his new movie, the super-cool audience of young urban sophisticates burst into applause. The coolest Chief Executive to ever grace our republic is the one who sat in the pews for twenty years listening to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright babbling about how “white folks’ greed runs a world in need.”

I suspect, though, that as with most questions about human nature, the correct answer to this one can be found in biology:

Anti-racism is a mating display. It says: “Look at me! I have such earning power I can live where I like! I don’t have to worry about feral underclass blacks or Salvadoran gangbangers! I can strike a pose of lofty indifference to matters of race! Drop your knickers right now!”

Baroness Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher had some direct impact on my life in three ways that I can recall.

One. In January 1979, four months before she assumed office as prime minister, I left England for a trip to the Far East. I was quite affluent at the time (sigh…) and was planning a long nonworking stay out there, so I needed to take money out of the country. This was NOT ALLOWED under postwar Britain’s bureaucratic managerial state. A Briton wishing to take money abroad had to take his passport to a bank, tell them how much he was taking, and write this in on the passport for the bank to certify. If the Customs Service at his point of departure happened to search him and found more cash on him than was listed in his passport, he was liable for prosecution.

Unbelievable? I have documentary evidence. Here is the relevant page from my British passport of that time. It shows that on the January 1979 trip I had registered to take £300 out of the country. Caught with more, I’d be breakfasting on Her Majesty’s porridge for a year or two. That was characteristic of the system under which we lived. Britain in 1979 was halfway Sovietized.

I did what everyone did: I stuffed wads of high-denomination bills into my shoes and underwear. Those were the days before rigorous airport security screening. The chances you’d be searched by Customs were small, and people accepted the risk. It meant that the bills, by the time you got to spend them, has acquired a certain, ah, bouquet, but it was worth it to get out of Britain for a few months.

One of the first things Margaret Thatcher’s government did was to remove exchange controls. It was a small thing but a blessing for ordinary people like me. (For the rich there had always been ways to move money across borders. Governments of any party rarely inconvenience the rich.)

Two. The normal living accommodation for working-class Britons in the postwar years was the “council house” or “council flat.” (A flat is an apartment. Hence the ESL teacher’s favorite illustration of a sentence that means entirely different things in British and American English: “I’m mad about my flat.” The Brit is thrilled with his apartment; the Yank is angry at losing a tire.) These were properties the local municipality or county owned and rented out to poor people. 

My parents got lucky. They reached the front of the council-house line—there was always a waiting list for these properties—in 1948. That was during the socialist government voted in at the end of WWII. The government’s Housing Minister was a flaming Welsh orator named Aneurin Bevan, who had declared that nothing was too good for the working man. The council houses built under his patronage were really nice houses.

I grew up in one such house, and my parents were still living in it, and still paying rent to the town, when Mrs. Thatcher came in. Early in her administration she got a law through Parliament allowing council-house tenants to buy their property at a discount depending on the length of time they’d been resident. At 33 years my folks qualified for the maximum discount of 50 percent. I financed the purchase of their house at £12,000. Thus in March 1982 my parents, aged 82 and 70, lived in a property they owned for the first time in either of their lives. (That house would sell today for $190,000-$200,000.)

{pagebreak}

Another win for the little people. And this was Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher, the heartless tool of moneyed interests?

Three. My grandparents on both sides were coal-mining people. It was filthy, lousy work, but when everyone else in the village was doing it and there were babies to be fed, it was what the men did. By bearing the hardships together, people drew strength from each other and found meaning in their lives.

The socialist government nationalized the coal mines in 1946, with inevitable results. By the early 1980s the industry was over-unionized and under-productive. It needed some dramatic downsizing.

That, however, meant the destruction of those old mining communities, the ones in which my grandparents had lived and labored. I could see the necessity of it, and I supported Mrs. Thatcher in the great miners’ strike of 1984-5.

Not all my relatives agreed, and there was civil war in the family. My favorite aunt—she died just a few days ago at age 95—took up placards on behalf of the striking miners. I, meanwhile, had become an enthusiastic Thatcherite. I had actually joined the Conservative Party and was out on the streets campaigning for them. My aunt was derisive, calling me “Terrible Tory Twit.” We kissed and made up eventually, but it was painful at the time. She’d been a second mother to me in my childhood.

Now my aunt’s gone, closely followed by the woman she hated. A great many other people hated the Iron Lady, too. They have been holding celebratory street parties in Britain’s leftist precincts. It seems nasty and vindictive to mock a dead person like that. We’ll all be dead some day, don’t they know? They I suppose would say that Mrs. Thatcher was cruel when she gutted those old close-knit communities.

The two things don’t balance, though. In romantic relationships, as every cheerleader knows, you have to be cruel to be kind. Political leadership works the same way. Capitalism, like dentistry, is a matter of creative destruction. There is nothing creative in the Thatcher-haters’ cruelty. It’s just purposeless malice.

Still, I understand. There is a sense in which human beings are natural socialists. (Karl Marx called the condition of prehistoric man “primitive communism.”) Properly run, though, capitalism under a sensible political order—monarchical or republican—maximizes human fulfillment and liberty. Margaret Thatcher was its champion. May she rest in peace. You too, Auntie.

Here is an old Soviet-era joke, from the subgenre in which dimwitted peasant Khruschev plays Costello to smart seminarian Stalin’s Abbott.

Stalin and Khruschev are touring the East European satellites in Stalin’s personal locomotive.

They are sitting in the carriage chugging along when Khruschev leans over to Stalin and says: “Comrade Yosif Vissarionovich, help me please. I never know which one of these countries is which. Where are we now?”

Stalin: “What time have you got?”

Khruschev, looking at his watch: “Ten AM.”

Stalin: “Well then, according to the schedule this must be Czechoslovakia.”

Time passes. Again they are back in the carriage chugging along. Again Khruschev asks Stalin: “Where are we now?”

Stalin: “What time have you got?”

Khruschev, looking at his watch: “Four PM.”

Stalin: “Then this is Hungary.”

More time passes. Again Khruschev leans over to Stalin: “I’m sorry to be a nuisance, Comrade, but I’ve lost track again. Which country are we in now?”

Stalin: “What time have you got?”

Khruschev pulls back his sleeve to check the time. “My watch! It’s gone!”

Stalin: “Ah, then this must be Romania.”

This joke is a slur on the noble Romanian people, whose hospitality I once briefly enjoyed. My wife also reminds me that her first dentist in the USA was Romanian, and a very fine dentist he was and apparently still is. The stereotype of Romanians as a nation of thieves is, ethnic Romanians are not shy to tell you, the fault of the Gypsies, who are especially numerous in that neck of the woods.

Here I must insert the usual disclaimer for the benefit of readers too feeble-minded to grasp sophisticated mathematical concepts such as “average” and “variation.” I am sure—I have no doubt whatsoever—that there are many worthy and talented persons of the Gypsy ethnicity.

Gypsies in the generality, however, are bad news, working as little as they can while stealing as much as they can. Romanian Gypsies seem to embody the negative side of Gypsyhood in a particularly concentrated form. In Britain, to which they have had some limited access since Romania joined the European Union in 2007, they have specialized in stealing entire houses while the homeowners were on vacation.

(“Anti-racist” hysteria has reached totalitarian levels over there, so the fact of the thieves being Gypsies is rarely mentioned. If you talk to British people, however, you will learn that, as the Brits say, “even the dogs in the street know it.”)

At the beginning of next year, just nine months from now, that limited access becomes unlimited. Romanian Gypsies will then be just as British as the British, or at least as British Gypsies.

Except that they won’t. I lived for 35 years in Britain and don’t recall any news stories about Britons—no, not even British Gypsies—stealing the houses of vacationing fellow citizens. The “squatting” phenomenon has been around for a while, but it targets abandoned or long-unoccupied buildings.

I am speaking here of human group characteristics at the ethnic or national level. Although a deeply unfashionable topic nowadays, peculiarities of national character used to supply much of our humor, from Shakespeare’s comic Welshmen to late-20th-century Polish jokes. National Lampoon did a fine compendium of the underlying stereotypes at about the last moment when it was possible to do so without being hauled off to the Ministry of Love for interrogation.

{pagebreak}

The concept of national character may be making a comeback, at least in Europe. One recurring theme in commentary on the troubles of the euro this past five years has been the difficulty of yoking the continent’s north and south in a single banking and fiscal system. This, it has been argued, made no more sense than the idea of Silvio Berlusconi being a conceivable Prime Minister of Denmark. A northern fiscal union might have had a chance, people say, with the currency of course named the neuro.

Veteran British commentator Max Hastings was working this theme just the other day, writing about the Cyprus crisis:

It always appeared absurd for the Germans, who — like the British — obey rules, pay taxes and tell the truth in financial documents, to form a financial union with the southern Europeans, who do none of those things, and are never likely to.

It may just be that big nations or unions are not a very good idea, except for purposes of self-assertion. Professor Bauer, in his fine book about the Chinese soul, passes the following remark:

Because of the unification of the empire [in 221 BC] and its division into provinces, the sense of intimacy due to the smallness of a single state gave place overnight to the feeling that one was living in a gigantic dominion governed by a distant capital.

The subsequent history of the Chinese Empire leaves one wondering whether developments might have been happier if East Asia, like post-Roman Europe, had remained a collection of competing small feudal states.

Prof. Bauer’s words might return an echo from the Britons of today, contemplating next January’s influx of Romanian and Bulgarian Gypsies, or from the Cypriots of today gathered forlorn outside their shuttered banks, perhaps even from the Americans of today….

But hold on there. I just used the phrase “the Chinese soul.” Do nations have souls, as different from one another as the individual human sort? Some distinguished people have thought so: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for example:

Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colors and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention.

Solzhenitsyn was not as wise as the leaders of the West today, who would have told him with weary patience that persons everywhere are perfectly fungible, while national borders are absurd relics of parochial nativism and misguided economic protection.

How fortunate we are to have such wise leaders!

A couple of months ago here on Taki’s Mag I reviewed responses to geek website edge.org‘s Annual Question. The 2013 question was: What should we be worried about? The leadoff answer was from evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller, who thought we should be worried about Chinese eugenics. I expressed some skepticism.

Leaving aside my skepticism, which is still intact, and leaving iceberg-avoidance prospects for another time, what exactly are the ChiComs up to?

There is no short answer to that question. This is really complicated stuff. The accounts given in the better-quality US news outlets aren’t bad, but if you want to understand what’s going on, you have to invest a little time in getting to grips with the fundamentals.

How much time is “a little”? Well, 1h33m32s has to be close to the minimum. That’s the length of this excellent presentation given by Steve Hsu at Michigan State University last month called “On the Genetic Architecture of Intelligence and Other Quantitative Traits.” You can even shave five minutes off that: The emcee (who’s not identified but looks like cognitive-science boffin Taosheng Liu) makes a lengthy meal of introducing Steve.

I can’t claim that the following notes are a substitute. I simply want to point up some highlights and offer a helping hand to the math-challenged.

That word “quantitative” is a good start. A trait is quantitative if it can vary smoothly across a range (such as height), as opposed to a yes-no trait such as earwax texture (sticky or crumbly) or hairiness of elbows. Height is a handy notion to help you remember what “quantitative” means here. And as Steve says at 11m40s, if the idea that some people are intrinsically smarter than others is intolerable to you—as it is to most well-socialized 21st century Americans—you can substitute “height” for “intelligence” in the rest of the lecture, because intelligence is a quantitative trait, too.

The diagram at 12m22s (slide 3 here) is very informative. The collection of all your genes is your genome; the collection of all your traits is your phenome—how you appear to the world (from Greek phainein, to appear). When, one day, we are possessed of perfect knowledge, we shall understand how our genome shapes our brain structure, how our brain structure shapes our mentation, and how our mentation shapes our abilities, which are part of our phenome.

We are far from that yet, but we can take a shortcut—what Steve calls “a cheap statistical hack” (12m37s) and “just a little bit of math” (1h24m15s)—from the genome to the phenome. Just assemble a large number of subjects with some interesting oddity in the phenome (e.g., they are very smart or tall) and try to find corresponding oddities in their genomes. That’s called a GWAS, a Genome-Wide Association Study.

That’s what these researchers are trying to do, with intelligence as the focus of interest. Previous attempts have been dry wells. As Steve says at 39m56s: “At the genome-wide level of significance so far there are no hits.” That does not mean that genes have nothing to do with smarts. We know from twin studies (30m40s and more pointedly—“It’s almost all genetic!”—at 1h12m18s) that intelligence is highly heritable, so that genes must be implicated. What it does mean is that we haven’t yet used big enough samples, as Steve explains very elegantly at 40m49s. That’s what they’re trying to do.

{pagebreak}

It’s tough because there are a lot of genes involved. Earwax texture is determined by only one gene, eye color by a dozen or so, and height by hundreds. Each one of those hundreds contributes a teeny bit to shaping the trait, but the most powerful one we know affects no more than three or four millimeters of height. Intelligence is probably like this, but more so: The more genes involved, the less effect per gene.

If you are either kind of creationist, or if your specialty is some pseudoscience such as economics—James Heckman gets unhorsed by Steve at 1h27m32s—you will scoff at all this. (For pity’s sake, don’t send me creationist email, I beg you.) But if you respect empirical inquiry and don’t mind a bit of math, this genes ‘n’ smarts project is worth your attention.

And even if you’re not interested in it, it’s interested in you—and in your kids, your grandkids, and your civilization. Answering a question at 1h19m35s, Steve goes into the Idiocracy zone.

And now modern life has probably flipped the sign, so…everybody can reproduce now, and the smartest people seem to have the most trouble. I’m 46 and I have 7-year-old kids, and I only have two….Anybody, if they wanted to, could have five kids nowadays….

Thence (1h20m15s) to what I am going to christen Neo-Social Darwinism, AKA “survival of the richest”:

In economic history there’s good data on wills and family records in China, medieval Germany and medieval England. You can see that in those days economic success was incredibly correlated with reproductive success…so there was very strong selective pressure even in recent history. But that’s all gone now.

Ron Unz turned his plow into this field over at The American Conservative a few days ago. Ron’s piece is titled “How Social Darwinism Made Modern China: A thousand years of meritocracy shaped the Middle Kingdom.” Well, maybe it did and maybe it didn’t (I had things to say in a follow-up piece); just be sure you’ll be seeing a lot more on these themes over the next few years. As a primer in the underlying science, an hour and a half with Steve Hsu will be time well spent.

Nelson Mandela is home from the hospital. The guy is 94 years old and not in bad shape—perhaps illustrating the black-white mortality crossover.

Mandela and I go back a long way. When I started my university education in the fall of 1963, the Student Union at my college was dominated by a leftist faction headed by an economics major named Roger Lyons, who went on to a long career in the British labor movement. The big issue at the Student Union that fall was Lyons’s campaign to elect Mandela honorary union president.

This was gestural. Mandela was already in jail and had surely never heard of the University College, London Student Union. He was the leftist cause of the day, though, and thus he was elected honorary president. To their credit, the college Conservative (as in “Tory”) Society put up a creditable rearguard action, arguing that Mandela was a communist terrorist. They were, of course, right. 

Reflecting fifty years later, I marvel at how little change I have seen across large regions of human life. When we are not reflecting, we tend lazily to think that change is continuous, that life in 2013 differs from life in 1963 to the same degree that life in that latter year differed from life in 1913. This is not at all the case.

There is steady change at a low, superficial level, to be sure: Toothpicks and bar soap give way to dental floss and shower gel. At any level much above that, though, the common rule is that a short burst of dramatic change will be followed by decades of stasis.

Consider male clothing fashions. The necktie I wore to a minor local function last night was one my mother gave me for my sixteenth birthday in 1961. True, I am not a fashion plate, but nobody noticed the tie. It’s a plain four-in-hand tie, not a bow tie, puff tie, ascot, kerchief, stock, cravat, or ruff. It took us five centuries to get from the ruff to the necktie, but nothing much was changing for most of those years, and nothing much has changed since the necktie arrived in my grandfather’s time. Karl Marx and Thomas Kuhn got that much right, at least: Most change is sharp, revolutionary, and discontinuous. In between changes, we coast.

In large social and political matters, we have been stuck in a rut since the early 1960s, as Mandela-olatry illustrates. That slight Thatcher-Reagan detour notwithstanding, managerial socialism is still the ruling economic orthodoxy for practical purposes. If Paul Krugman were to be indisposed, we could have the cryogenics lab revivify J. K. Galbraith to write Krugman’s New York Times columns; nobody would notice the difference. One thing that makes geezers such as me weary of politics is that today’s orthodoxies are the same as those of our student days, only now there is no elite opposition. 

In the battlefields of sex and race, there is a willed desire to keep the reference frames unchanged. Sandra Fluke desperately wants us to believe in a patriarchal plot to keep the gals corralled into the realm of kinder, kirche, and küche. Sheriff Rainey may have gone to his long home, but in the minds of professional blacks, his spirit walks among us daily. What would they do for a living otherwise?

{pagebreak} 

The other lazy assumption about social change is that it all goes in one direction. Here there is actually a case to be made; but if there is indeed a slow-rising monotone across the centuries, there are some mighty harmonic waves imposed on it. 

There has recently been a modest rash of news items about habitable planets in orbit around other stars. This started just before Christmas and put me in mind of a story from my sci-fi-soaked adolescence: J. T. McIntosh’s 200 Years to Christmas. (You can buy it in book form.) 

The story belongs to the multigenerational starship subgenre within sci-fi that scorns easy copouts about warp drives, Lorentz time dilation, or wormholes in spacetime. In these stories, to get to other solar systems you only have to plod along through interstellar space for a few centuries, with generations living and dying on the ship. This allows for some interesting sociological explorations.

200 Years to Christmas is by no means a stellar [sic] example of the subgenre. (For a better one, try Brian Aldiss’s Non-Stop.) It has serious literary shortcomings even by sci-fi standards. It does, though, contain one interesting idea.

Where societies develop at all, as they have among European peoples this past millennium, their morality passes through distinct phases. In England the easygoing flamboyance of the late Tudors and early Stuarts gave way to Cromwell’s Puritans, who yielded to the license of the Restoration, which was muted somewhat by the First Great Awakening, then degenerated into Regency libertinism, which was smothered by the Victorians. (Much of the fun of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels is watching Fraser’s hero surf the transition from the second-last to last of those eras.)

The interesting idea in 200 Years to Christmas is that among a starship’s limited, isolated population (this one has around 800 souls), these phases will occur more quickly—“every five to fifteen years,” McIntosh tells us—and will be more intense, as a short pendulum swings faster than a long one.

We see the starship’s inhabitants at the halfway point in their 400-year journey—hence the title—and watch as they pass from a Gay Phase (this was 1959, remember; the current bastard meaning of “gay” had not yet escaped into general usage) of wild partying to a puritanical Revival. The social dynamics are drawn accurately.

Some people backed Revival because they believed in it, some because they were afraid to oppose it, some because all their friends were doing it, some merely because they couldn’t see any reason why they shouldn’t.

In that respect at least, human nature’s fundamentals never change.

Image of pendulum courtesy of Shutterstock

It’s been three months: time for another potpourri of unrelated items.

Assholes. To make up for not reading half as many books as I’d like to, I read about books. An excellent resource is the London Literary Review, of which I remain a faithful subscriber notwithstanding the fact that the bastards haven’t sent me a book to review FOR 22 YEARS.

In the February issue they review a book with the arresting title Assholes: A Theory by philosophy professor Aaron James. From the review, which is by Michael Bywater:

James fingers, among others, Donald Trump, Silvio Berlusconi, Simon Cowell and Mel Gibson. He claims, plausibly, that George W. Bush wasn’t an asshole, but was in thrall to a lot of them, most notably the asshole’s asshole, Donald “Asshole” Rumsfeld….We live under what he terms asshole capitalism: a proposition with which few would argue.

I certainly wouldn’t argue with it, though I would argue with the choice of verb in the first sentence there.

Parsifal at the Met. If you think business and politics are plagued with assholes, check out high culture. Paul Johnson covered some of this ground in Intellectuals, showing us what intolerable assholes Shelley, Tolstoy, Hemingway, et al. were. Johnson’s 416 pages are barely enough to cover just the literary side of the field, though. Picasso was an artistic asshole, Sir Isaac Newton a mathematical one. And then there was Richard Wagner, who discovered and explored entire new continents of assholery.

Wagner’s on my mind because I went to see Parsifal on Saturday at the New York Met. The orchestra and singers were superb, but the director should be run out of town on a rail. His sets were minimalist—bare soil and rock. This makes nonsense of the libretto (“Here in holy forests,” Act One) and the stage directions (“Tropical vegetation; most luxuriant wealth of flowers,” Act Two), all of which were written by Wagner himself. If it’s OK to mess around with Wagner’s stage directions, why isn’t it OK to do the same with the music? Why not have the orchestra play while blindfolded or wearing boxing gloves? Pshaw!

Some nitwit at the Huffington Post calls those sets “thought-provoking.” The thought they provoked in me was that the spectacle would have been more atmospheric if they’d staged the thing in a Walmart parking lot.

Parsifal in 150 words. Most operas have longueurs, but Wagner has more than the average. (“Wagner has great moments but dull quarter hours.” —Rossini.) During those boring stretches I amuse myself by mentally condensing the plot of the thing into a few stanzas of doggerel.

Parsifal concerns the medieval Knights of the Holy Grail and Holy Spear. Here are four and a half hours of opera condensed to less than 150 words. You’re welcome.

Act One
Knights guard Grail, the Spear’s gone missing:
Stolen while the Prince was kissing,
Then used to give him wound that’s cruel,
Which none can heal but virgin fool.

Female messenger is mocked.
Swan gets shot; the knights are shocked.
Knights assemble, worship Grail.
Shooter joins them, hears Prince wail.

{pagebreak}

Act Two
Spear’s in wizard’s castle tower.
And messengeress is in his power.
He tells her to use charms upon
The teenage fool who shot the swan.

She tries her best, but kid gets smart;
He’s immune to all her art.
Grabs the wizard’s holy Spear —
Wizard, castle disappear!

Act Three
Years pass. Fool gets back to knights.

Grail’s power denied, they’re sorry sights.
Racked by wound, Prince wants to die.
Begged to show Grail, he won’t comply.

Messengeress sees fool can save her.
Bathes his feet; he shows her favor.
Fool heals Prince’s wound with touch.
Christian allegory, much?

Worries. Following my January 17th column titled What, Me Worry? I got a few emails from readers wanting to know what, if anything, I really do worry about.

As a temperamental fatalist I can’t be much of a worrier, but I do occasionally find my dark tranquility disturbed by thoughts of calamities that might befall me. As a trained statistician I instinctively rank those calamities by probability, which saves me fretting about asteroid strikes, terrorist nukes, or decimating plagues. All of those are certainly possible, but there are way-higher-probability things just as personally devastating to worry about.

My top three would be: (1) death or maiming of wife or child in a car crash; (2) having a stroke; (3) losing all my savings in a financial calamity. The first is far too common—around 34,000 deaths in the USA last year, five Gettysburgs or ten 9/11s. For the second, there’s some family history. The third is worry-worthy for anyone who believes, as I do, that human events are smarter than human beings and will catch us out eventually.

Horsemeat. It’s been in the news. Why do people mind it? The most sensible man his wife ever met (according to her) had an opinion:

It is not very easy to fix the principles upon which mankind have agreed to eat some animals, and reject others; and as the principle is not evident, it is not uniform. That which is selected as delicate in one country, is by its neighbours abhorred as loathsome. The Neapolitans lately refused to eat potatoes in a famine. An Englishman is not easily persuaded to dine on snails with an Italian, on frogs with a Frenchman, or on horseflesh with a Tartar.
—Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland by Samuel Johnson

Reactionary wisdom. When some new fad comes up, we of a reactionary temperament give it a few years to run its course. If it shows no signs of doing so, we grudgingly incorporate it into our lifestyles.

My reactionary wisdom has been vindicated regarding Facebook:

Facebook has made the startling admission that teenagers are becoming bored with the social networking giant.

Thank goodness. Now I’ll never have to bother with the fool thing. Teen enthusiasms occasionally have staying power—Elvis, Monty Python—but that’s not the way to bet.

The war between the sexes is fought on many fronts, some of them very far away.

There’s a report from one of those fronts in the January 2013 issue of The China Journal. The writer is Katherine A. Mason, billed as “Lecturer in Health and Societies in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.”

Her topic is banqueting, more specifically toasting—a key feature of Chinese social life. In a low-trust society such as China’s, “social life” includes all work relationships. Bonds within and between “work units” are formed and maintained by getting drunk at banquets. Only thus, it is believed, can one establish true sincerity—a central concept in Chinese life since the Age of Philosophers.

Thus one of Ms. Mason’s Chinese respondents tells her that:

In China, if you want to do anything, you need to talk first. There are a lot of opportunities for talking, but timing is everything…[The] opportune moment is usually when you’re drunk, falling-down drunk…or even losing consciousness, at least when your consciousness is not so good—at these times the distance between people is very short. And then when you tell him something, he’ll think, “this is my friend,” and he’ll remember.

The toasting ritual is described in gruesome detail:

The host opened by leading a toast of everyone at the table. After a suitable period, the host then toasted the highest-ranking guest for the first time, standing up and saying nice words about their friendship and the bright future of their partnership, and both emptied their glasses. Then the rest of the people at the table toasted the guest. After toasting the guest of honor, each person at the table had to toast each other person at the table individually, usually starting with other important guests, the primary host and other leaders, and working their way to less important guests or colleagues. Once a banqueter toasted someone, that person was then obliged to toast back. If the banqueter toasted the person twice, the other person generally had to toast the banqueter twice, and so on.

As a general rule, in toasting someone else, it was essential to empty one’s glass.…

All this is being done with stuff that is, just scanning the excellent selection of Chinese liquor in my cabinet here, from 100 to 112 proof. (Western liquor is typically about 85 proof.) There is a common belief that the Chinese are not great drinkers. This is nonsense. You haven’t made any connection with Chinese culture until you’ve toasted yourself blotto at a Chinese banquet. Then “the distance between people is very short,” true sincerity emerges, bonds of guanxi are formed or strengthened, and things can get done.

Ms. Mason’s problem is that this is all very male. Women have been flooding into the professions in China during the past twenty years. Because of these well-established drinking rituals, they are encountering a glass—perhaps that should be “bottle”—ceiling:

Neither willing nor, in many cases, physically able to imbibe alcohol in the manner of men, women found their ability to advance in their careers and to pursue their own health and happiness to be hampered by the overwhelming imperative to drink.

As in the Wild West, British India, and marriage, the gals are civilizing the men by shaming their male-bonding rituals out of existence:

In the urban centers of the Pearl River Delta, women working in government-affiliated public health work units regularly participated alongside men in banquets and toasting rituals. By drawing attention to the unhealthy and undesirable aspects of banqueting for participants and its negative effects on their work and their careers, however, these women redefined heavy alcohol consumption as a morally deficient act.…

{pagebreak}

The men are fighting back, though:

Their [i.e., female public health professionals] efforts met with only limited success…while the women opened up a space for alcohol to play a diminished role in the building of guanxi, they did not eliminate the perceived necessity, for both sexes, of banqueting.

Ms. Mason describes some of the stratagems Chinese professional women use to avoid drinking—mixing tea with their liquor when no one’s looking, and so on. (This particular genre of deceit has some history outside China. Robert Graves, in Good-Bye to All That, tells us that his German grandfather, “as student at the university ‘drunks,’ had a habit of pouring superfluous beer into his eighteen-fortyish riding boots when nobody was watching.”)

Her piece also has a heroine, Dr. Wu, “the head of a large department.” Dr. Wu is quite the Calamity Jane:

Wu’s advancement was widely seen as resulting directly from her prodigious drinking capabilities, and often she was invited to sit at the “leaders’ table,” due to her “high capacity for alcohol.” I frequently saw her drink more than a dozen shots of liquor at lunch, go back to her office and work, and then repeat the same exercise, with greater volumes of liquor, in the evening.

The bad news is that the Chinese have taken to automobiles in a big way, with corresponding public campaigns against drunk driving. This may kill off banquet toasting rituals as it killed off the English country pub, or the self-driving automobile may arrive in time to save the day for untamed masculinity.

Ms. Mason’s piece is the more amusing for being written in a tone of mild indignation and in the plonking diction of academic feminism—“gendered norms,” “embodying emotion,” and the rest. For me at least this added a flavor of unintentional humor to the article. How can you not smile to read of Ms. Mason “grasping with my body women’s experience of banqueting”?

Temperamentally I am with the guys here, but I suppose the women will win this one, as they win them all sooner or later. The world will then be safer and more sober, but less fun. Isn’t that what women are for?

(Housekeeping note: If you emailed me at any time in the past nine months, I may owe you an apology: see here.)