How they do security at Ben Gurion airport

Basically, Israeli airline security consists of Larry David-style suspicious staring into everybody's eyeballs (although that never seems to work for Larry, because everyone else on Curb Your Enthusiasm is even stronger willed than he is).

Commenter Cordelia points to this excellent article from the The Star of Toronto:

What Israel can teach us about security
At Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, screening is done in 30 minutes. The key? Look passengers in the eye

... "It is mind boggling for us Israelis to look at what happens in North America, because we went through this 50 years ago," said Rafi Sela, the president of AR Challenges, a global transportation security consultancy. He has worked with the RCMP, the U.S. Navy Seals and airports around the world.

"Israelis, unlike Canadians and Americans, don't take s--- from anybody. When the security agency in Israel (the ISA) started to tighten security and we had to wait in line for – not for hours – but 30 or 40 minutes, all hell broke loose here. We said, `We're not going to do this. You're going to find a way that will take care of security without touching the efficiency of the airport.'"

Despite facing dozens of potential threats each day, the security set-up at Israel's largest hub, Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport, has not been breached since 2002, when a passenger mistakenly carried a handgun onto a flight. How do they manage that?

The first layer of actual security that greets travellers at Ben Gurion is a roadside check. All drivers are stopped and asked two questions: How are you? Where are you coming from?

"Two benign questions. The questions aren't important. The way people act when they answer them is," Sela said.

Once you've parked your car or gotten off your bus, you pass through the second and third security perimeters.

Armed guards outside the terminal observe passengers as they move toward the doors, again looking for odd behaviour. At Ben Gurion's half-dozen entrances, another layer of security is watching. At this point, some travellers will be randomly taken aside, and their person and their luggage run through a magnometer.

"This is to see that you don't have heavy metals on you or something that looks suspicious," said Sela.

You are now in the terminal. As you approach your airline check-in desk, a trained interviewer takes your passport and ticket. They ask a series of questions: Who packed your luggage? Has it left your side?

"The whole time, they are looking into your eyes – which is very embarrassing. But this is one of the ways they figure out if you are suspicious or not. It takes 20, 25 seconds," said Sela.

Lines are staggered. People are not allowed to bunch up into inviting targets for a bomber who has gotten this far. ...

Five security layers down: you now finally arrive at the only one which Ben Gurion airport shares with Pearson – the body and hand-luggage check.

"But here it is done completely, absolutely 180 degrees differently than it is done in North America," Sela said.

"First, it's fast – there's almost no line. That's because they're not looking for liquids, they're not looking at your shoes. They're not looking for everything they look for in North America. They just look at you," said Sela. "Even today with the heightened security in North America, they will check your items to death. But they will never look at you, at how you behave. They will never look into your eyes ... and that's how you figure out the bad guys from the good guys."

The goal at Ben Gurion is to move fliers from the parking lot to the airport lounge in 25 minutes tops.

And then there's intelligence. In Israel, Sela said, a coordinated intelligence gathering operation produces a constantly evolving series of threat analyses and vulnerability studies.

"There is absolutely no intelligence and threat analysis done in Canada or the United States," Sela said. "Absolutely none."

But even without the intelligence, Sela maintains, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab – who allegedly tried to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day – would not have gotten past Ben Gurion's behavioural profilers.

So. Eight years after 9/11, why are we still so reactive?

Sela first blames our leaders, and then ourselves.

"You can easily do what we do. You don't have to replace anything. You have to add just a little bit – technology, training," Sela said. "But you have to completely change the way you go about doing airport security. And that is something that the bureaucrats have a problem with. They are very well enclosed in their own concept."

So, airport security in Israel is handled much like immigration in Israel: for the benefit of the majority.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Is the NBA rigged?

I got Bill Simmons' The Book of Basketball for Christmas. If you read the countless footnotes, it has lots of interesting stuff: who's gay, which superstars were on cocaine in the 1970s-80s (although which weren't probably would have been a more concise list), and how Simmons' American-Born All-Time All White team (starters: Bill Walton, Larry Bird, Rick Barry, Jerry West, and John Stockton), chosen at Malcolm Gladwell's request, would do against his All-Time All Black team (starters Bill Russell, Moses Malone, Julius Erving, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson):

The blacks might be too loaded: I can't imagine Kobe-Oscar-Kareem coming off the bench. ... Check out the Whites again. Barry is the only prick on the team. Their passing skills would have been off the charts. ... For a 7 game series, the blacks would be a -400 favorite because of the hypercompetitive Russell-Jordan-Magic trio. But you know what? I'd bet on the whites at +350 if only because of the odds. You don't know how much this kills Jabaal Abdul-Simmons [his name for his black alter ego]. Footnote 86 on p. 537

I suspect Simmons' Boston Celtics bias is getting the better of him here: his [American] All-Time All-White team has six Celtics out of ten players: Bird, Walton (1986 Celtics), John Havlicek, Dave Cowens, Kevin McHale, and Bob Cousy. (Pete Maravich was the 10th man.)

Simmons also picks out an All Foreigner team with starters Hakeem Olajuwon, Tim Duncan, Dirk Nowitzki, Steve Nash, and Drazen Petrovic. I think the really interesting figure there is Arvydas Sabonis, the 7'-3" Lithuanian who didn't get to the NBA until he was 30, but who in winning the 1988 Olympic gold medal looked like Bill Walton, if only Walton were bigger and had a deadly outside jumper.

But, on p. 345, slightly less than halfway through this immense book, Simmons writes in Footnote 98, in reference to a bad call in favor of the New York Knicks in the 1994 playoffs:

98. A shady call and more evidence that the NBA was determined to get New York in the '94 Finals. Let's just say that from 1993 to 2006, the NBA may have dabbled in pro wrestling tactics a little. I tried to sweep it under the rug in this book because that's what people do when they're in love with someone: they lie for them. And I love the NBA.

That's not much, but at least that's more than Bill James put into his 1000-page Baseball Historical Abstract of 2001 about steroids.

How plausible is Simmons' implication? Imprisoned NBA ref Tim Donaghy claims he made a bundle off betting using his knowledge of other ref's biases and David Stern's directives. (He claims he didn't fix games he bet on himself, but that sounds dubious.)

On the other hand, considering that San Antonio, a minor league TV market, has won four NBA titles over the last dozen years, it can't be completely rigged.

What else can be rigged besides refereeing? Trades? The Los Angeles Lakers always seem to come up with crucial players out of trades (while the Los Angeles Clippers never do).

How does the NBA compare for honesty to the NFL, MLB, and the NHL?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Now that Obama has approved airport profiling ...

... of travelers from 14 countries (13 of them heavily Muslim), will progressives retract all the dumb arguments they've made over the years about how profiling can't even work in theory?

Probably not.

The New York Times hosts a debate over profiling:

The Obama administration has announced that it will subject citizens of 14 countries, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, to intensive screening when flying to the United States (the rule will also apply to those passing through those countries). This means treating people differently depending on where they come from or what passports they hold.

Does it make sense to concentrate security efforts on more limited populations — through profiling, behavioral or otherwise? Is profiling effective, compared to other strategies?

The first contributor says:

Bruce Schneier is a security technologist and author of several books on computer security, including “Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.”

Terrorists can figure out how to beat any profiling system.

There are two kinds of profiling. There’s behavioral profiling based on how someone acts, and there’s automatic profiling based on name, nationality, method of ticket purchase, and so on. The first one can be effective, but is very hard to do right. The second one makes us all less safe. The problem with automatic profiling is that it doesn’t work.

Terrorists don’t fit a profile and cannot be plucked out of crowds by computers. They’re European, Asian, African, Hispanic, and Middle Eastern, male and female, young and old. Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab was Nigerian. Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, was British with a Jamaican father. Germaine Lindsay, one of the 7/7 London bombers, was Afro-Caribbean. Dirty bomb suspect Jose Padilla was Hispanic-American. The 2002 Bali terrorists were Indonesian. Timothy McVeigh was a white American. So was the Unabomber. The Chechen terrorists who blew up two Russian planes in 2004 were female. Palestinian terrorists routinely recruit “clean” suicide bombers, and have used unsuspecting Westerners as bomb carriers.

In reality, as sportswriter Damon Runyon said, "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet."

Without an accurate profile, the system can be statistically demonstrated to be no more effective than random screening.

Actually, the link says the opposite, as I'll show below.

And, even worse, profiling creates two paths through security: one with less scrutiny and one with more. And once you do that, you invite the terrorists to take the path with less scrutiny. That is, a terrorist group can safely probe any profiling system and figure out how to beat the profile. And once they do, they’re going to get through airport security with the minimum level of screening every time.

Sure, as long as Al-Qaeda can recruit Mexican grandmothers to be suicide bombers as readily as it can recruit young men with Muslim names.

As counterintuitive as it may seem, we’re all more secure when we randomly select people for secondary screening — even if it means occasionally screening wheelchair-bound grandmothers and innocent looking children. And, as an added bonus, it doesn’t needlessly anger the ethnic groups we need on our side if we’re going to be more secure against terrorism.

A recurrent theme of mine is how the demand for denial of average IQ differences spills into seemingly unrelated issues, like airline security, causing widespread intellectual stultification. The modern liberal mind thinks in black-and-white Manichean terms, rendering it unarmed for dealing with a probabilistic universe.

It's hard to deal with liberal arguments because they tend to be so Gladwellian in their mental rigidity. Here we are, more than eight years after 9/11, and this "expert" picked by the NYT for his wisdom can't imagine any profiling system smarter than he is.

Schneier seems to be assuming that profiling means that 100% of attention would be devoted to people in category X and 0% to people in category Y. The weird thing is, that's common among progressives. They really just don't get it. The conventional wisdom is a form of unilateral cognitive disarmament.

He's like a pitching coach who tells a baseball pitcher, "Your fastball is above average, your slider average, and your change-up below average, but if you only throw your fastball, they'll expect it, so you should choose your pitches randomly, throwing one-third of each."

Obviously, when stated in those terms, it's easy to see the fallacy: there are superior methodologies in-between all fastballs and total randomness. If your fastball is relatively more effective than your other pitches, you want to throw relatively more fastballs. But you still want to "mix 'em up," as every pitching coach from Babe Ruth League onward as told pitchers.

Why can't Americans be as smart about public policy as they are about sports?

Thus, if you read the article Schneier links to behind his phrase "statistically demonstrated," you'll find it's merely a debunking of a braindead "100% fastballs" profiling method:

Press then examines the effect of what he terms a strong profiling strategy, one in which a limited set of screening resources is deployed solely based the risk probabilities identified through profiling. It turns out that this also works poorly as the population size goes up. "The reason that this strong profiling strategy is inefficient," Press writes, "is that, on average, it keeps retesting the same innocent individuals who happen to have large p_j [risk profile match] values."

The very next paragraph of the article linked to by Schneier explains that non-braindead profiling is the best method:

According to Press, the solution is something that's widely recognized by the statistics community: identify individuals for robust screening based on the square root of their risk value. That gives the profile some weight, but distributes the screening much more broadly through the population, and uses limited resources more effectively. It's so widely used in mathematical circles that Press concludes his paper by writing, "It seems peculiar that the method is not better known."

Peculiar, indeed. But as Napoleon supposedly said, "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Obama: Profile Nigerians

The Obama Administration has now announced there will be extra checks on passengers from 14 countries, 13 of them with large numbers of Muslim:

Nigeria has criticised new security measures for passengers flying to and from the United States as unfair and said they amounted to discrimination against 150 million people.

The US government has announced that travellers from 14 countries, including Nigeria, are to be subjected to extra checks including body pat-downs, after a young Nigerian was accused of trying to blow up a US jet on Christmas Day.

But Nigeria Information Minister Dora Akunyili said that Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation, did not have a history of terrorism and such a move could not be justified.

"It is unfair to include Nigeria on the US list for tighter screening because Nigerians do not have terrorist tendencies," Ms Akunyili said.

"It is unfair to discriminate against over 150 million people because of the behaviour of one person."

The Nigerians have a point. Nigerians have certain notorious tendencies, as your Spam email folder attests, but blowing themselves up to kill Americans has not been notable among them. America has been quite popular in West Africa over the last decade -- America has higher approval ratings in black Africa than any other large portion of the world.

There have been intermittent clashes between Muslims and Christians within Nigeria for decades, but it has seldom spilled over out of the country.

It would make more sense to focus on Nigerians with Muslim names than Nigerians in general. A Nigerian named Goodluck Jonathan is probably not an Al Qaeda recruit, so patting him down all the time would be a waste of limited security resources.

If Barack Hussein Obama can't propose profiling people with Muslim names, who can?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Final NFL statistics: Diversity

Let's take a look at the final 2009 NFL statistics. As you'll recall, there was a huge hub-bub in the media in the 1990s and 2000s about the need for more black quarterbacks.

And yet, in the long run, it has turned out to be that black quarterbacks are represented in the NFL at about their share of the American population, not close to their share of the NFL population, as sportswriters insisted was only logical.

Now, you might think that this evidence that blacks and whites appear to be fairly equal on a per capita basis in talent for the top job in American sports would be celebrated by the press as a triumph for diversity and equality, but nobody seems to be paying any attention to it. Hmmhmmhmm, it also might make you suspect that when people say they are for "equality" and "diversity" they aren't being sincere.

There are a lot of different ways to rate quarterbacks. The official "passer rating" includes yards per attempt, completion percentage, touchdown percentage, and interception percentage (but not yards gained rushing, yards lost being sacked, and fumbles). The average passer rating has been slowly going up over time. In 2009 it was 81.3 versus 75.1 in 1999, 73.3 in 1989, and 67.8 in 1979. (After a strong start in 2009, it faded as bad weather set in and wound up marginally lower than 2008's 81.5. But there were more outstanding quarterbacks this year, with five over 100 versus only one last year.)

Among the 32 NFL quarterbacks who averaged at least 14 pass attempts per game in 2009, the highest passer rating belonged to Drew Brees of New Orleans, followed by 40-year-old Brett Favre of Minnesota, who looked like he was going to give us another late season flurry of interceptions, but then righted ship and finished with an impressive 33 touchdowns to only 7 interceptions.

Six black quarterbacks were among the 32 busiest. Donovan McNabb of Philadelphia once again proved the best, finishing 12th in the league in passer rating. Three black quarterbacks wound up around the median -- Jason Campbell of Washington at 15th, veteran David Garrard of Jacksonville at 17th, and, revitalizing his career, Vince Young of Tennessee at 18th. Considering the amount of competition for the job, you've got to be pretty good to be about the average NFL starting quarterback.

Josh Freeman, a 21-year-old in Tampa Bay, had a predictably dire rookie season at 30. And third-year man JaMarcus Russell was last at 32. (A white quarterback named Derek Anderson of Cleveland was significantly worse than Russell -- including getting to start the next three games after going 2 for 17 on October 11 -- but Anderson didn't quite have enough pass attempts to make the cutoff.)

So, there was one somewhat above-average black starting quarterback in McNabb, three average ones, and two well below average ones.

Obviously, a quarterback's statistics are heavily dependent upon his supporting cast, but 2009 was hardly anomalous. In 2008, for instance, black quarterbacks ranked 13th, 14th, 19th, 20th, and 26th.

The peak year for black quarterbacks was 2003, the year of the Rush Limbaugh brouhaha, when black quarterbacks ranked 1st, 3rd, 7th, 16th, 21st, 24th, 26th, and 32nd. But that now appears to have been a bit of a fluke. Black quarterback talent seems to be proportional to black representation in the overall population, not to the black representation in the NFL as was widely assumed by pundits denouncing Limbaugh.

What about that 2009 New York Times Idea of the Year that "Black Quarterbacks Are Underpaid" because nobody recognizes their enormous rushing contributions? Well, David Garrard did lead quarterbacks in rushing in 2009, but only with 323 yards.

And black quarterbacks tended to get sacked a lot, with Campbell, McNabb, and Garrard in the top 10 in Sacked Yards Lost. Only Vince Young seemed to combine rushing offense with ability to avoid being sacked. And Garrard, Campbell, McNabb, and Freeman were in the top 10 in most fumbles.

The Era of the Black Rushing Quarterback (a.k.a., the Quarterback of the Future) seems to be more or less over. That doesn't bode well for the NFL career of U. of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow, a white running quarterback who might have had the greatest college career ever. The NFL just grinds up running backs -- here's LaDainian Tomlinson's yards per carry average from age 27 through 30: 5.2, 4.7, 3.8, 3.3. So, combining the two roles of quarterback and running back mostly seems to physically beat down athletes before they are old enough to learn how to play quarterback effectively in the NFL.

On the rushing side, Chris Johnson of Tennessee dominated, with 2006 yards. In terms of Diversity!, there is almost zero diversity when it comes to running with the ball in the NFL, not that the media care in the slightest. As far as I can tell, the white guy with the most rushing yards was Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers in 63rd place with 316 yards.

One thing you notice looking at pictures is that NFL runnings are black not just in the sense of sociological self-identification but in terms of skin tone (e.g., I checked out Frank Gore's picture because that's not clearly a black name like, say, LaDainian Tomlinson). When you get down to 44th ranked Justin Fargas of Oakland, you finally come upon an African-American who is probably at least half white. (His Caribbean dad, Antonio Fargas, played "Huggy Bear," the pimp-informant on Starsky and Hutch, and I believe his mother is white. Fargas went to my old high school. I showed up for my 20th reunion Homecoming game at halftime, but he was already done for the night with four touchdowns -- Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be NFL running backs.)

Among receivers, overall, there was more diversity than among running backs. Whites and Hispanics are fairly well represented at tight end (e.g., Dallas Clark of Indianapolis caught 100 passes for 1106 yards and Tony Gonzales of Atlanta had his 11th straight season with at least 750 yards), but few other teams are following New England's lead in giving non-black non-tight end receivers a lot of playing time. Yet, Wes Welker, a New England receiver who is listed as a wide receiver although the term slot receiver would be more accurate, had an outstanding year despite missing 2.5 games. He led the league in receptions with 123, and was second in total yardage (1348) and in first downs (71).

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Yemen

In yet another example of the workings of the bipartisan wisdom that “Because we must invite the world (it’s unthinkable not to), we therefore must invade the world to be safe,” Washington has responded to Nigerian Underwear Bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s fizzled attempt to blow up a plane headed to Detroit on Christmas by escalating American involvement in Yemen.

Senator Joe Lieberman declaimed, “Iraq was yesterday's war, Afghanistan is today's war. If we don't act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow's war.”

President Barack Obama sent General David Petraeus to Sana, the medieval capital city of Yemen, more than 7,000 feet up in the densely populated but isolated highlands of that remote country, to help coordinate America’s role in the Yemeni government’s war on its rebels.

The logic of invite the world, invade the world is simple: Because we are so helplessly vulnerable to Muslim terrorists flying to the U.S. and blowing stuff up, we must tighten American hegemony over the entire Muslim world, even unto the highlands of Yemen, until they learn to stop resenting us.

The bombings of Muslim countries will continue until Muslim morale improves!

Yet, before getting bogged down in another high altitude, tribal Muslim country, one of even more negligible strategic significance than Afghanistan, perhaps we could step back for a moment and ask: Do we really have to invite the world? Did we have to wave Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab onto that Detroit-bound plane with a friendly, non-discriminatory smile?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

My VDARE.com column on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab

From my new column on VDARE.com:

We have it on the authority of John Brennan, Obama Administration counterterrorism advisor appearing on the Fox TV network today, that there was “no smoking gun” that should have alerted US intelligence agencies to the attempted Christmas Day suicide attack.

So that’s OK, then!

I mean, who could have guessed?

Who could have imagined that somebody named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab would try to blow up a plane headed to Detroit on Christmas Day?

And how could we expect airline security to notice Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was smuggling a bomb onto the plane when there were all those grandmothers and little children to search?

Who could possibly have known?

I mean, besides his dad, the chairman of the board of one of Nigeria’s biggest banks, who told the U.S. embassy in Lagos on November 19 to watch out for his Muslim radical son.

I’m not sure I want to know how the Underwear Bomber’s father made his fortune in Nigeria. But, clearly, he’s the kind of man who should be taken seriously when warning about his own son’s extremism.

Two days after terrorism attempt, Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano told ABC News, the “system has worked really very, very smoothly".

Two points stand out:

- More than eight years after 9/11, we still don’t have an effective computer system for tracking potential terrorists trying to board airplanes.

(Recall how President Obama has been boasting for a year about how his administration is going to cut medical spending by spearheading a computer system to track all your health information. What’s your over-under date on when that gets finished? I’ve got dibs on 2033.)

- It’s increasingly obvious that neither Bush nor Obama has wanted an effective airport security system.

Effective security would impose a “disparate impact” on guys with names like “Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab” (or, for that matter, “Barack Hussein Obama”). Both Presidents actively worked against profiling and disparate impact. Why? Because noticing patterns is just plain wrong.

Stupidity is our strength!

Since September 11, 2001, whenever somebody with a name like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab commits terrorism, I’ve been writing virtually the same article about the American ruling class’s pathological prejudice against profiling.

How big a calamity is it going to take to make them wake up, stop randomly dissipating prevention efforts, and instead focus on those most likely to commit terrorism?

For example, look at this typically hysterical reaction to retired Lt. General Thomas McInerney’s recent advocacy of profiling: Former Lt. General "Goes There": Calls for all Muslim men between 18-28 to be strip searched, by Joseph Marhee, Examiner, January 3, 2010. (“McInerney is deliberately using inflammatory and incendiary proclamations to incite hostilities. It is simply unacceptable and irresponsible for someone of his public profile to advocate such blatantly unconstitutional and socially dangerous rhetoric into the mainstream.” Yawn).

In contrast, naïve Nigerians have tended to assume that of course their countryman’s shame will bring more suspicion and searches down upon themselves. Thus Nigerian vice president Goodluck Jonathan lamented: "A Nigerian has created an additional problem for us by wanting to blow up an aircraft … That means that those Nigerians who travel out of this country will be subjected to unnecessary harassments and searches."

How unworldly the vice president of Nigeria is! Goodluck Jonathan simply isn't aware that in 21st century America, it’s considered shameful to notice such patterns. Learning from the past is simply inappropriate.

I've come up with a couple of new air security policy recommendations in the later part of the article.

Read the whole thing there and comment upon it below.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Meryl Streep at 60

At age 60, Meryl Streep has become the most commercially consistent actress in Hollywood. Having started out largely as a screen tragedian, Streep appears to be having a blast these days making movies like Mama Mia and the Devil Wears Prada. She'll get her 16th Oscar nomination for Julie and Julia for her ridiculously entertaining Dan Ackroyd-ish impersonation of chef/giantess Julia Child.

In Julie and Julia, the usually amusing Amy Adam gets stuck with the disastrous role of a contemporary ninny of a blogger -- Which genius decided blogging was a cinematic career? -- whose boring modern life only serves to annoyingly keep Streep off-screen for half the movie. In general, you don't want to take a role playing a contemporary character in a film with extensive flashbacks to pre-1960s people -- modern characters are too casual to make the kind of imposing impression that old time characters can make. But you especially don't want to play opposite Meryl Streep as Julia Child.

Movie stars tend to emerge from tumultuous upbringings. (For example, I don't know how many current stars spent a couple of years living in hippie communes as children.) Streep, in contrast, has always seemed like the supremely professional product of a proper upbringing. This perhaps made her less sympathetic when she was young in a sort of Jack Nicklaus-Peyton Manning way, but she's enjoying the benefits of an improbably long career today.

Streep by the numbers:

15 Oscar nominations (and counting)
4 children
1 husband
0 rehabs

(Here's Woody Allen publicly lecturing Scarlett Johansson a couple of years ago on how she ought to imitate Meryl Streep's life, not Lindsay Lohan's.)

Streep might even get a 17th Oscar nomination for her middle aged lady fantasy movie "It's Complicated," a kind of Philadelphia Story "comedy of remarriage" for women of a certain age.

Depression-era movies about rich people, like Philadelphia Story, are known as "white telephone movies" because only millionaires could finagle a non-black telephone out of the Bell monopoly back then. Perhaps the contemporary equivalents made by Nancy Meyer (writer director of the aptly named What Women Want with Mel Gibson) could be called Viking range movies because they are heavy on high-end kitchen appliance porn.

The last 60ish leading lady to be on top of the box office was, I'm guessing, 250-pound Marie Dressler, who was born during the Johnson Administration (the Andrew Johnson Administration). Most very early talkies are close to unwatchable, so Dressler is remembered today mostly for 20 seconds with Jean Harlow in 1933's Dinner at Eight.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"The Darwin Show"

Harvard historian Steven Shapin has a long article in the London Review of Books, The Darwin Show, about the apotheosization of Charles Darwin over the last year in service of various contemporary causes, including global warming.

One thing I would add is that the modern cult of beatifying Charles Darwin is dependent upon demonizing his younger half-cousin Francis Galton. Everything politically correct is attributed to Darwin, while everything politically incorrect is attributed to Galton. In reality, Galton was hugely influenced by Darwin, and Darwin, in turn, was influenced by Galton (here's the lengthy index entry for "Galton, Mr." from Darwin's The Descent of Man). Galtonism was seen by both men as the natural evolution of Darwinism.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Hypnosis

A reader asks:

"What or who did you use to bring yourself under hypnosis?"

I had some New Agey lady hypnotism therapist hypnotize me. My wife found her. I was pretty paralyzed by feelings of doom at the time (right after my diagnosis with lymphatic cancer in late 1996), so I don't remember how my wife found her.

There wasn't anything very exciting about being hypnotized. The hypnotist just spoke in a dull, repetitious manner until I was lulled into a state where I was more receptive to suggestions. Then she told me this story I had made up for her about how I was 80 years old and playing the 17th hole at Ballybunion with my sons and grandson. For the rest of the day, I'd feel like I was going to live to 80, which helped me function better. The next day I'd feel lousy, so I'd go back a couple of times per week.

After awhile, my depression lifted permanently, so I stopped going.

I have no idea if hypnosis would work for people on average, but it had a clear and immediate effect on me in that particular situation. Granted, that's purely my subjective feelings, but that's what I wanted to alter: my subjective feelings.

And, yes, I had the hypnotist try to get me to do amusing tricks under hypnosis like in an old nightclub act, but that didn't work. She declared me "moderately suggestible."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Obama's mental health breaks

In The New Republic, Michelle Cottle gets herself worried about the political imagery of the President's golf habit:

Bunker Mentality
Barack Obama's dangerous obsession with golf

During the 2008 race, Obama’s golf outings drew less notice than his battles on the hard court. But, now that he’s firmly ensconced in the Oval Office, the sticks have come out of the closet as Obama constantly looks to squeeze in a few holes ...

But just because other presidents have done it doesn’t mean there aren’t political risks involved. In the popular imagination, golf is the stuff of corporate deal-cutting, congressional junkets, and country club exclusivity. And, unless a president is very careful, a golf habit can easily be spun as evidence of unseemly character traits ranging from laziness to callousness to out-of-touch elitism.

I've mentioned before how most careers in 21st Century America are more or less in marketing, and how journalism is slowly turning into Marketing Criticism.

Various explanations have been floated for Obama’s embrace of golf ...

The most reasonable is mine: that Obama has made it to the top, so now he's doing what men who have made it to the top in the Anglosphere and the Far East frequently do: play a lot of golf. (Why men like to play golf I've explained at length here.)

I would guess that he'll become more addicted to golf as he plays more great golf courses. Right now, his taste in golf courses appears to be rather indiscriminate, happily playing whatever lame layout is at hand. But eventually, like Bill Clinton, he'll learn that some golf courses are better than others, and then the Presidential helicopter will be descending upon Ballybunion (the small town on the west coast of Ireland that is home to Bill Clinton's favorite golf course and the world's first statue of Bill Clinton -- the other Clinton statue is in Kosovo), Sand Hills in remote Mullen, Nebraska, the National and the like.

The more interesting speculation about Obama and golf is that, like George W. Bush, he sure seems to take a lot of mental health breaks, such as when he disappears for a smoke.

Bush is an alcoholic, so that's one explanation for his constant exercising: to stay on the wagon. But what's Obama's reason for his schedule?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

I guess the recession must be over

On New Year's Eve, the tuxedo rental shop on the corner was so sold out that they had stripped all the mannequins in the windows and rented out the dummies' tuxes.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Positive Thinking

From the New York Times, "Seeking a Cure for Optimism:"

Recently, a number of writers and researchers have questioned the notion that looking on the bright side — often through conscious effort — makes much of a difference. One of the most prominent skeptics is Barbara Ehrenreich, whose best-selling book “Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America,” published in the fall, maintains that thinking positively does little good in the long run, and can, in fact, do harm.

“Happiness is great, joy is great, but positive thinking reduces the spontaneity of human interactions,” Ms. Ehrenreich said. “If everyone has that fixed social smile all the time, how do you know when anyone really likes you?”

There are quite a few distinctions that need to be made regarding the general concept of positive thinking. For example, there's the difference between internal and external cheerfulness, and between private and public optimsim.

Having finally seen the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man last night, which is like a less funny version of Curb Your Enthusiasm in which mild-mannered physics professor Larry Gopnik is relentlessly abused by the spontaneity of human interactions with people like Ms. Ehrenreich, I'd say that a little social smiling isn't such a bad thing.

About a year ago, my younger son's high school hosted a talk by radio rabbi Dennis Prager. He said that young people all want to help humanity, but that the surest, most effective way to help humanity is for you to act less whiny and more cheerful toward the people around you. Every single student at the school thought that was the worst idea ever -- Shouldn't you be authentic and therefore wallow in the horrors of having your oppressive parents ask you to empty the dishwasher? -- except, to my astonishment, my kid, who thought that Prager had a great idea. And he has been easier to live with ever since (and easier than I was to live with at that age).

So, thank you, Dennis Prager.

A study published in the November-December issue of Australasian Science found that people in a negative mood are more critical of, and pay more attention to, their surroundings than happier people, who are more likely to believe anything they are told.

“Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, cooperation and reliance on mental shortcuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking, paying greater attention to the external world,” Joseph P. Forgas, a professor of social psychology at the University of New South Wales in Australia, wrote in the study.

In other words, don't marry a stand-up comedian.

Psychologists and others who try to study happiness scientifially often focus on the connection between positive thinking and better health. In the September 2007 issue of the journal Cancer, Dr. David Spiegel at Stanford University School of Medicine reported his efforts to replicate the findings of a 1989 study in which he had found that women with metastatic breast cancer who were assigned to a support group lived an average 18 months longer than those who did not get such support. But in his updated research, Dr. Spiegel found that although group therapy may help women cope with their illness better, positive thinking did not significantly prolong their lives.

I have no idea if the Placebo Effect is real or not. But I do know that when I had cancer in 1997 and was, not surprisingly, pretty much paralyzed by depression, a half-dozen hypnotism sessions helped me get my mood up enough to research the alternative treatments and choose, correctly, among the three on offer. The point of hypnotism is to lull you into a relaxed state where your skepticism is low enough that you'll believe a pep talk. (I crafted a personalized pep talk for my hypnotist to give me when I was under.) It worked for me, in the sense that it helped me get back to the point where I could make important decisions, such going with the clinical trial in which I became the first person in the world with my specific form of cancer to be treated with what's now the world's most lucrative cancer drug, Rituxan.

Ms. Ehrenreich, who was urged to think positively after receiving a diagnosis of breast cancer several years ago, was surprised by how many readers shared her visceral resistance to that mantra. She created a forum on her Web site for people to vent about positive thinking, and many have. “I get so many people saying ‘thank you,’ people who go back to work after their mother has died and are told, ‘What’s the matter?’ “ she said. Likewise, there are “corporate victims who have been critics or driven out of jobs for being 'too negative.'"

The far, far bigger issue is the mandatory Happy Talk among the intellectual elite. You might think that people at the level of James D. Watson and Larry Summers might be allowed a Happy Talk-free zone about social issues so that the ruling elites could stay informed, but the opposite is true.

So, we wind up with disasters like the Sand State Mortgage Meltdown.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Tiger Woods and Kobe Bryant

Sponsors are dropping Tiger Woods as an endorser, which suggests to me that some brave marketer could make out like a bandit in the long run by signing Woods cheaply right now to a ten year deal.

After all, look at Kobe Bryant, who is now #10 on the 2009 Forbes Celebrity 100, between #9 Brad Pitt and #11 Will Smith. Bryant currently makes $24 million per year in endorsements, even though he spent 2004 on trial for rape (he got off because the woman, who reached a secret civil suit settlement with him, ultimately wouldn't take the stand against him in the criminal trial). Even though the rape trial, which he would attend during the day in Colorado, then jet to Laker games in the evening, was a huge publicity brouhaha less than six years ago, it has effectively vanished down the media hole. In LA, the only thing bad you ever read about Kobe these days is that he used to squabble with Shaq. There are countless articles about "how Kobe has matured" but they are all about him not being so much of a ball hog anymore. The whole being tried for rape thing has vanished. Winning an NBA title in 2009 changes the past in ways the Ministry of Truth never dreamed of.

Bryant and Woods have fairly similar personalities: intensely competitive, smart about their sports, foolish about marriage, etc. (Bryant married young without a prenup -- his agent didn't attend his wedding). At some point, Woods is going to realize that he's no good at "working on his marriage" and all those other distractions, but he is good at hitting golf balls. So, he's going to go hit a whole bunch of golf balls. Then he's going to go out and win a whole bunch of tournaments. And then, once again, he's going to get paid a whole bunch of money by marketers because, in the big picture, there really isn't much difference between sports fans and the kind of women Tiger likes.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Did you have too much taxable income in 2009?

Probably not.

But, in case you did, I just wanted t0 mention that I didn't.

Today, New Year's Eve, you can make tax deductible credit card contributions to me here (then, under "Steve Sailer Project Option" click on the "Make a Donation" button); or fax credit card details here (please put "Steve Sailer Project" on the fax); or you can snail mail checks made out to "VDARE Foundation" and marked on the memo line (lower left corner) “Steve Sailer” to:

VDARE Foundation
P.O. Box 211
Litchfield, CT 06759

Second: any old time of the year, you can send me an email and I'll send you my P.O. Box address.

Third: You can use Paypal to send me money directly, either by just using any credit card or if you have a specific Paypal account.

If you want to use your credit card, click "Continue" on the lower center-left to fill in your credit card info. If you have a Paypal account fill in your Paypal ID and password on the lower right of the screen.

I'll try to get the Amazon donation link working in a day or two, but, in the past, Amazon has been limited to $50 (hint, hint) and tends to stop working as soon as I've collected more than a pittance.

Thanks. I appreciate it, deeply.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Ancestry question being eliminated from Census

From the Detroit Free Press:

Ethnic groups say 'white' isn't enough on the 2010 census

Arab Americans, others fear loss of benefits if ancestry not accounted for

By Niraj Warikoo

... But the 2010 census form -- in a departure from 2000 and previous decades -- will not contain a question asking people about their ancestry, prompting concern among metro Detroit's diverse ethnic communities. Many in the sizable Arab-American population in metro Detroit -- who have faced a host of challenges during the past 10 years -- are particularly concerned.

... With her light-brown skin and Islamic headscarf, Khadigah Alasry of Dearborn said she doesn't see herself as white.

But the Arab American is officially classified as such by the U.S. government, which says that anyone with roots in the Middle East -- including north Africa -- is white.

"That's just weird to me," said Alasry, 23, born to immigrants from Yemen.

It's also weird for thousands of other Americans who say they don't fit into traditional categories of race in the United States. As the 2010 U.S. census prepares to tabulate millions of Americans, the issue of racial and ethnic identity is being debated as groups push to get their voices heard.

The census is conducted to get accurate population statistics that are used to determine the number of congressional seats and amount of government funding, and to ensure that minorities are not discriminated against.

The concern is acutely felt in metro Detroit, home to the highest concentration of Arab Americans and Chaldeans -- Iraqi Christians -- in the United States, according to 2000 census figures.

Having the ancestry question is important because terms like "white" and "black" are vague and don't offer much detail, said ethnic advocates. ...

Since the 2000 census and 9/11, many Arab Americans say they have experienced bias. On the other hand, they also are being recruited for federal jobs and invited to participate in conversations with top U.S. leaders as the government finds itself involved in conflicts across the Middle East and the Muslim world.

But Arab Americans -- who make up about 1.5% of Michigan's population, based on the 2000 census -- won't be counted as such in 2010. Census officials say part of the reason was to streamline and shorten the form so that more people fill it out.

Two of the 10 questions will ask about a person's race -- white, black or Asian -- and whether the respondent is Hispanic. Arabs are considered white.

"It's unfair because we are not treated as white in society and by the government, but we also don't qualify as minorities to get the benefits of some programs" such as minority contracts, said Imad Hamad, regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. ...

Whites and blacks are not given the choice to further specify what their backgrounds might be. In the past, one out of six households would receive a long form with 53 questions, one of them asking about ethnic origin.

"We're aware of the problems with the census," Gary Locke, secretary of the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, told a crowd of Arab Americans in Dearborn. "But we still need you to participate."

Locke and census officials said the ancestry question will be retained under the American Community Survey, which is done every month. But that survey reaches a much smaller percentage of the population than the full census.

Arab Americans and Chaldeans have varying views on the issue of race, said Andrew Shryock, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His research showed that religion can affect racial identity, with Arab-American Christians much more likely to see themselves as white than Arab-American Muslims.

Arab Americans and Chaldeans are 10 times more likely to identify their race as "other" as compared with the general population, according to the Detroit Arab American Study, a survey in 2003 of 1,000 Arabs and Chaldeans in metro Detroit.

"I'm often told by Arab Americans that they check 'white' on official forms but do not feel that they are 'white white,' " Shryock said.

In 1997, Mostafa Hefny, an Egyptian-American Detroiter, filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Office of Management and Budget -- which classified Arabs as white in 1977 -- in order to be classified as black. In the lawsuit, Hefny said, because of his dark skin and kinky hair, he was more African than blacks such as former Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer. The case was dismissed in 1998.

Race, ethnicity and the census

Race: On the 2010 form, question No. 9 asks a person to indicate his or her race. Choices are "White," "Black, African-Am, or Negro," "American Indian or Alaskan Native," and several Asian categories such as "Vietnamese," "Asian Indian," and "Chinese."

Hispanic: "Hispanic" is not considered a race, according to the U.S. census. On the 2010 form, question No. 8 asks if the person is "of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin" followed by several boxes to check. Some of the choices include "Yes, Mexican, Mexican Am, Chicano," "Yes, Puerto Rican," and "Yes, Cuban."

Ancestry: On the long form in 2000, given to one of every six people, respondents were asked to list up to two ancestries, such as Irish, Polish, Lebanese, etc. But the census tabulated only those ancestries from Europe and the Middle East. Ancestries from other regions of the world -- such as Asia and Africa -- were classified as races.

This question was eliminated for the 2010 census.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer