A detailed symposium-discussion of Albion’s Seed in the April 1991 William and Mary Quarterly here: 
 
http://www.jstor.org/stable/i348326 
 
Including response by Fischer. It’s hard to tell how much of the critique is nit-picking vs. damaging.

Part of that is because BYU isn’t just an university but also a place where Mormons outside of the main Mormon belt of Utah, Idaho, Arizona and California can come and socialize with Mormons and encounter Mormonism in an more intellectual avenue.  
 
And meet other Mormons to marry, I assume…

That’s a great point.

However —

The statistics on the entering classes of these schools don’t show a huge amount of overachievement in their prior schools. Generally their test scores are indistinguishable from the rest of their cohort.

So maybe the charter schools do have some nefarious way of spotting kids who are smart but who underachieve in the public schools – but that’s not the same as picking kids who are already doing well. The student populations at “no excuses” or “paternalistic” charters are overwhelmingly NAM and low-income.

Chester “Checker” Finn observed that hard-ass paternalism is a trait shared by prep schools like Exeter, his alma mater, Catholic parochial schools, as well as the new charters, so there might be something to that.

References:
David Whitman on the new paternalism

YES Prep ; MATCH Charter ; KIPP Schools

PollaiUolo (not Pollaiolo)

van Gogh: post-Impressionist, not Expressionist

oil paint: commonly credited to the Flemish (not Norwegians)

Also, Michelangelo did some painting too. He would be famous even if he’d never sculpted.

Definitely onto something with class. But also think about the differences between the poster-buying public (more middle-class) and the museum-going public (more upper-middle-class). If there were comparative data for museum attendance, it would probably weight the more sentimental painters less (Monet, Renoir…).  
 
Then there are Murray’s own explanations, involving things the amount of general confidence in the future, confidence in the efficacy of individual action to solve problems, confidence in the legitimacy of the leading moral systems… The 19th c must have been a peak for these.

Re: Immigrants, corporate interests, etc….

That's all true, but as readers of this blog well know, CA's supply of buildable land with great coastal weather is finite, and sooner or later, there would have been a real estate issue with or without immigration.

Either "green" building restrictions and higher prices, or high-density development.

Are Iranian Jews anything like the Syrian Jews ("SYs") that Zev Chafets wrote about for the NYT magazine?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/magazine/14syrians-t.html

What about the Bukharian Jews who build "Bukharian palaces" in Queens?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/05/nyregion/05forest.html

This is getting a bit confusing. They all seem to have appalling nouveau-riche taste, even when the riches are no longer nouveau.

Boy, Steve's coverage of education sure is relentlessly demoralizing. Where to turn for consolation?

What about the famous study that suggested that students who were admitted to [Harvard?] but didn't attend, did about as well as those who were admitted?

That suggests that it really is IQ (plus bourgeois virtues, of course) that makes the most difference, and that the various gatekeeping institutions have diminishing influence over the long term.

That kid who winds up at Cal Poly instead of Berkeley, or Haverford instead of Yale, is going to do just fine in life.

Then there's this story praising DeWitt Clinton High in the Bronx for having so many Jewish students:

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/dewitt-clintons-remarkable-alumni/

A lengthy and detailed outline is here:

http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti/misctopic/leftover/whypoor.htm

TGGP, agreed on the relevance of “The Lost History of Christianity.” The decline of Christianity because of Muslim persecution has been going on for a long time.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R1LSR3LQKKN8KE/

“For all the reasons we can suggest for the…[Christian] decline…the largest single factor…was organized violence, whether in the form of massacre, expulsion, or forced migration” (141).

“It is astonishing…how readily the myth of Muslim tolerance has been accepted…the story…involves far more active persecution…than would be suggested by…believers in Islamic tolerance” (33, 99)

Reviews of Solomon's Rockwell biography:

Patrick Toner, "False Portrait"

Bruce Cole, "Painting a False Portrait"

I think the last paragraph here is a little unclear, so just in case any readers are confused:

The Harvard Lampoon is a satire magazine that made up the rock-throwing story. It didn’t actually happen.

But about architecture: Normally I think Steve’s wry mockery of modernist and po-mo architecture is a good corrective to academic and elite pomposity. Although I think he misses a lot this way.

(Steve, you should address the work of Louis Kahn: the Salk Institute, the Yale Center for British Art, the Andover Library, the Kimbell Museum. Or review “My Architect.” Kahn was a modernist who could actually be warm and human — in his architecture, not his appalling personal life.)

I love modernist architecture, but I have to say: Philip Johnson was a really mediocre architect. His talents lay elsewhere. I think everything he did was a rip-off of someone more original. I.e. his glass house is a rip-off of Mies’s Farnsworth House.

But Steve, take a look at Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion. Can’t you see just a little bit of beauty there?

Two out of five. Woo woo!

Here’s my assessment of each of the five questions:

#1 and #2. Very hard (wrong answers)

#3 and #4. Ridiculously easy (got those right)

#5. Hopelessly ambiguous (got it wrong, objected strenuously to the ref)

I’m the guy who got 2/5 on the last one. And even I can see clearly that the answer here is “A”. Make room, 5-year-olds…

More evidence for Joseph Bottum’s “Erie Canal theory of American history,” as detailed in his fascinating book, “An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America.”

http://www.the-american-interest.com/articles/2014/06/15/gospel-truths/

http://everythingthatrises.com/post/87225935110/the-erie-canal-main-stream-of-american-spirituality

OK, this is more about another recent mention of Jewish ethnocentrism by Steve — George H. W. Bush and the loan guarantees.

I was just reading up on this, and several accounts suggest that it was more of a victory for Bush I. After Bush complained about AIPAC’s lobbying Congress, Bush got his way and the loan guarantees were shelved. Then Shamir lost the election in Israel. Shamir insisted that the first loyalty of Jews everywhere had to be to Israel, but in fact the American Jews disagreed with this and stopped trying to pick a fight with the president.

All of this suggests a loss for the Israel lobby, rather than a win; and also suggests the limited, rather than unlimited, nature of Jewish ethnocentrism.

Or was Steve’s point solely that this ethnocentrism subliminally influenced the media coverage of Bush, turning him from Conquering Hero to Wimp? But I don’t know about that — the recession, the supermarket scanner and “no new taxes,” plus the Perot wild card, are more than sufficient to account for the loss. The loss of a few Jewish precincts in NY, NJ and FL was hardly enough to swing the election. Plus, Thomas Friedman, who was then the Times reporter on the topic, has always been pretty critical of the settlements.

To be clear, I agree with Steve in general that A) American Jews enjoy “immunity from criticism as a group” and B) that this has bad effects (as it would with any group). But any theory can be pushed too far.

What’s the deal with this letter?

http://cehg.stanford.edu/letter-from-population-geneticists/

About the extinction of religious minorities in the Middle East and more broadly:

Philip Jenkins’s book, The Lost History of Christianity, takes the very long view of that phenomenon, in the case of Christianity.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/j/p/jpj1/lost.html
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/march/24.52.html?paging=off

OT: from the Housing Bubble to the Law-School Bubble

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/08/the-law-school-scam/375069/

The InfiLaw schools achieved this massive growth by taking large numbers of students that almost no other ABA-accredited law school would consider admitting. InfiLaw was—and remains—up-front about this. Its self-described mission is to “establish the benchmark of inclusive excellence in professional education,” by providing access to a traditionally underserved population consisting “in large part of persons from historically disadvantaged groups.” Yet this means accepting many students who, given their low LSAT scores, are unlikely to ever have successful legal careers. In 2010, for example, two of the three InfiLaw schools admitted entering classes with a median LSAT score of 149, while the third had an entering class with a median score of 150. Only 10 of the other 196 schools fully accredited by the ABA had an entering class with a median LSAT score below 150.

Naturally, the Marginal Revolution post did not cite Steve, which is not an especially gracious move. It’s too bad that so many people who pay attention to Steve’s writings feel emotionally unable to acknowledge him as a worthwhile interlocutor.

To Mr. Anonymous who is offended by the W*** acronym:

I thought that mild self-deprecation was supposed to be English, and humorless fanaticism about “offensive” terminology was supposed to be … Levantine. This may be one reason why other commenters here seem not to believe that you are serious.

The observation of the warship named Wasp is quite apt. It’s hardly on the same level as a roach. Similarly, one may be described as having a “waspish” sense of humor in a complimentary way.

New York and white English/Dutch Protestants: Some interesting information can be extracted from Burrows and Wallace’s history Gotham. The old New Yorkers did tend to the Episcopalian, while many business-minded New England post-Puritans settled in Brooklyn, listening to Henry Ward Beecher preach at Plymouth Church and the Church of the Pilgrims. Anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock was from New Canaan, Connecticut.

Steve, was there something about Dutch Knickerbockers that inclined them to architectural criticism?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgomery_Schuyler
http://tclf.org/pioneer/mariana-van-rensselaer/biography-mariana-van-rensselaer

Finally, how could any discussion of W*** novelists not mention John Marquand and his book, The Late George Apley?
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/05/-martini-age-victorian/302954/

Did you see he actually tweeted a link to this post?

https://twitter.com/NickKristof/status/505846823287029762

OT: Pinker advocates a [CalTech-like] [g-loaded] pure standardized-test admission process:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119321/harvard-ivy-league-should-judge-students-standardized-tests

http://www.fastcodesign.com/3029477/norman-foster-on-designing-apples-5-billion-spaceship-campus

To be fair, they’ll have to figure out a way to cut .0000000004% of the price tag of their new Norman Foster-designed HQ.

OT: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/08/sports/basketball/bruce-levenson-atlanta-hawks-sale.html?_r=0

OT: http://www.politico.com/magazine/politico50/2014/

Time for some pattern recognition…

OT:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119200/updike-reviewed-william-deresiewicz

Updike knew who he was, and he knew 
who he wanted to be: an unembarrassed, unreconstructed middle-American. He shied away from nothing that he saw or learned in modern art or thought—not then, not ever—but the self-assurance that he carried with him out of Berks County made him proof against adopting the attitudes they entail. Atheism, alienation, and angst; elitism and cosmopolitanism; aesthetic 
austerity and experimentalism; political and spiritual extremism: these were not for him. Updike’s life and work are testaments to the idea that mid-American values, beliefs, and sensibilities are adequate to address and interpret modern experience. The conviction made him, and to many it has 
made him unforgivable.

OT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/magazine/the-death-of-adulthood-in-american-culture.html?_r=0

A. O. Scott seems like a smart guy laboring under the needless and self-contradictory conceptual handicaps of the dominant ideology.

Was that how the gay culture got going in San Francisco — all the sailors coming through?

OT: Ivy League dealers

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/books/the-short-and-tragic-life-of-robert-peace-by-jeff-hobbs.html
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/05/killed_in_apparent_drug-relate.html

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/9/30/brittany-smith-harvard-shooting-sentenced/

What percentage of all Ivy league students involved in drug-related shootings are black? Profiling at work!

I would like to see Steve or someone explore this more deeply. I’m sure it’s true but is it specifically a white/American/SWPL phenomenon? Surely there are organizations from other cultures or periods in history that did not turn out this way. Similarly, although our society has a left-wing elite (in the cultural-marxist sense), not every society does.

O’Sullivan’s Law states that any organization or enterprise that is not expressly right wing will become left wing over time. The law is named after British journalist John O’Sullivan.

But is it a problem that the Cromartie Index conflates measurements of virility and paternal investment? For example, what does it mean that Ryan Fitzpatrick (Wonderlic 48) or Matt Birk (Wonderlic 46) have higher CIs than McInally?

“Ryan is married to Liza and the couple has two sons, Brady and Tate, and two daughters, Lucy and Maizy”

“Matt and his wife, Adrianna, have three daughters (Madison, Sydney, and Ava) and two sons (Grant and Cole)”

“Birk is a two-time All-Pro, six-time Pro Bowl selection, and one-time Super Bowl champion.”

OT:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26044-iranian-woman-wins-maths-top-prize-the-fields-medal.html#.VCHo95RdXh4

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/pardis-sabeti-the-rollerblading-rock-star-scientist-of-harvard-135532753/?all

I bet Maryam Mirzakhani and Pardis Sabeti don’t have tattoos.

Edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, the book wasn’t the she-said-she-said some may have expected or wanted. Instead, women of color wrote candidly about their own racism and that of white feminists. Moraga wrote, ”We are afraid to look at how we have failed each other.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/09/opinion/editorial-observer-feminists-more-to-talk-about-than-shoes-and-lipstick.html

Janette and her husband, Juan, have a continuing argument about taxes. It is not about who is keeping track of the receipts or who should call the accountant. They are illegal immigrants, and what they cannot agree about is whether to file an income tax return.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/15/nyregion/tax-day-puts-illegal-immigrants-in-a-special-bind.html

According to recent reports from the Multilateral Investment Fund at the Inter-American Development Bank, the amount of money sent last year to Latin America from the United States increased about 18 percent, to more than $32 billion. And despite the tough economic times and new federal restrictions on sending money abroad, experts say they do not expect the volume of these remittances to decrease anytime soon.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/14/nyregion/14REMI.html

OT:

http://news.sciencemag.org/scientific-community/2014/10/twitters-science-stars-sequel
http://www.altmetric.com/blog/the-real-science-stars-of-twitter/

Some decried the lack of scientists of color or female scientists on our list—just four women made the top 50, for example—and noted that our search strategy, which started with a handful of Twitter celebrity scientists and looked at who they followed, likely biased our discoveries toward white males…Our list more than doubled in size and now includes a large number of newly added women. But few women cracked the revised list’s top 50—just seven—which now has a threshold of more than 33,000 followers, versus 11,600 in the original list.

OT: IMHO, Chait is one of the few liberals worth reading…

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/10/what-liberals-get-wrong-about-football.html

Over the last generation, the social experience of American youth has rapidly liberalized. The cultural mores of my school life largely resembled those of my parents’, but the socialization awaiting my children has transformed beyond recognition. Rather than allowing kids to “settle their differences” — i.e., allowing the strong and popular to prey upon the weak and vulnerable — authorities aggressively police bullying. Schools are rife with organizations to support gay students, something unimaginable not long ago. Nerdy and cool, once antithetical terms, now frequently describe the same things, like affinity for comic-book characters or technological savvy. American schools have mostly moved beyond a world where football players (and, correspondingly, cheerleaders) embody the singular hierarchical ideal of their gender. This is entirely to the good, a triumph of egalitarianism.

In fact, it is a sign of this advance that American society is now questioning whether football has any role within it at all. But it also marks a point where the advance of social liberalism has swung from the defensive (creating a place of respect and value for those who have long been excluded) to the offensive (suggesting that only a world conforming closely to down-the-line-liberal values is worth living in).

OT: IUD’s for everyone.

To paraphrase Steve Sailer, our elites are unified around the idea that what young inner-city girls need is birth control. Lots and lots of birth control…

http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21621689-how-make-families-more-stable-new-merry-go-round

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ruth-marcus-long-acting-birth-control-could-help-stabilize-generation-unbound/2014/09/23/01ba1c68-4355-11e4-b47c-f5889e061e5f_story.html

OT:

http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/10/you-want-to-be-a-male-feminist-maybe-dont.html

OT: Sarah Silverman runs afoul of WWT:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/13/sarah-silverman-equal-pay-video-backlash-transgender_n_5978038.html?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000046

Prediction: as a liberal Jewish female, she will be granted a temporary conditional pass, as this appears to be a first offense.

OK granted the truth of what the Vdare reader says about Houston, and the correctness of the VDare position.

But.

I think Kotkin and Brooks are talking about “Houston” as in the metro area. And, it’s not big news that a central city turns into Vibrant Diversity while whites in search of affordable family formation go to the suburbs. The “success of Houston” means that Friendswood, Sugar Land, Pearland, etc, are doing well.

http://www.bizjournals.com/houston/morning_call/2014/10/houston-suburbs-stand-out-on-list-of-best-texas.html

Here in Dallas, very few of the “urban lawyers” take the train. Sample opinion:

“Now this is also going to sound shallow, but what the hell, Dart also carries a stigma. The upward mobile execs in my office don’t take Dart, but instead, the 30k a year assistants with student loans.”

http://www.city-data.com/forum/dallas/1952309-moving-texas-need-advise-5.html#post31408078

It is indeed the local lawyers (+ journalists and bloggers) who are spearheading the “trolleys and bike lanes” urbanism here, but what that means in Dallas is: live within the city limits and the “vibrant diverse” Dallas school district (99% black/Hispanic), so you don’t have to get on the freeway to go to work, but you still are in a single-family home and still drive everywhere.

OT: not the onion

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/world/nairobis-latest-novelty-high-end-mac-and-cheese-served-by-whites.html

“Nothing, though, may signify that Kenya has arrived more than the sight of a white man with a bead of sweat trickling down his temple, hustling trays of drinks and sweeping up steak scraps with the edge of his hand…. It is often difficult to meet Western consistency standards in a place where the power goes out regularly and machete-wielding mobs occasionally barricade highways, interrupting the supply of fresh beef.

““I see job in Internet, I come Africa,” said Nenad Angelovski, the other Macedonian import, whose English was not nearly at the level of the Kenyan waiters. “I like Africa. I like adventure.””

They’re doing the jobs the Kenyans won’t do!

Her book looks… interesting…

Millions of years ago, humans just happened. Accidents of environment and genetics contributed to the creation of sentient beings like us. Today, however, people no longer “just happen;” they are created by the voluntary acts of other people. This book examines several questions about the ethics of human existence. Is it a good thing, for humans, that humans “happened”? Is it ethical to keep making new humans, now that reproduction is under our control? And given that a person exists (through no fault or choice of his own), is it immoral or irrational for him to refuse to live out his natural lifespan? All these questions are answered in the negative – not out of misanthropy, but rather out of empathy for human suffering and respect for human autonomy.

Sarah Perry is a housewife in San Antonio, Texas. She studied urban planning at MIT. Her book “Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide” will be released by Nine Banded Books in October.

http://qz.com/231313/children-arent-worth-very-much-thats-why-we-no-longer-make-many/

In the Ivy Leagueish universities, Af-Am Studies is definitely a response to 1960s student agitation, and obviously doesn’t do much for football success.

It would be interesting to see the Venn diagram: Afro-Am existing to placate student leftists ; Afro-Am existing to win football games ; is there any overlap?

Give credit where credit is due … they hired Ross Douthat!

Every time I read his column, I think “I can’t believe he is still at the New York Times,” but his career there is an extremely rare example of liberals actually valuing intellectual diversity.

OT:

Brunch – con
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/11/opinion/sunday/brunch-is-for-jerks.html?_r=0

Brunch – pro
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/olmstead/the-virtues-of-brunch/

hashtag: affordable family formation

OT: Jared Diamond, cultural imperialist

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/24/jared-diamond-bestselling-biogeographer-answers-critics

OT: affordable family formation

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/us/unequal-societies-give-an-incentive-for-pushy-parenting.html?smid=fb-share

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/10/american_melting_pot_how_slowing_down_immigration_could_help_us_build_a.2.html

Fun with the Gulen school network:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/11/education-inc/

http://www.npr.org/2014/11/05/361790018/a-french-best-sellers-radical-argument-vichy-regime-wasnt-all-bad

OT

Jonathan Chait, a sane liberal

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/11/salon-writer-condemns-arithmetic-as-racist.html

Wow, blast from the past. I graduated from high school in Cupertino 20 years ago, and if I recall, our mostly white and Asian honors/AP classes still seemed to be dominated by a common culture — certainly not much audible difference in accents.

Then this happened:

Suein Hwang, “The New White Flight,” Wall Street Journal 2005

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCAQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticles%2FSB113236377590902105&ei=obhcVKC5NIOkyQSSkoHABA&usg=AFQjCNHvb6oMsCMi1oqsKa2chwn5P6uqmQ&sig2=JFJwQZlwEO2FFr6A1-e4vQ

Speaking of that “new white flight,” I think it’s happened almost everywhere in the Bay and SoCal areas, with vanishingly few exceptions:

In the Silicon Valley area, Los Gatos High (70% white/10% asian, as compared to next-door Saratoga High’s 56% Asian), and in Orange County CA, Newport Harbor High (60% white, 1% Asian, vs. next-door Irvine, where Asians outnumber whites at all the high schools)

I kind of wonder why more Asian families haven’t moved to these school neighborhoods. Is it because, being white-dominated, Los Gatos and Newport Harbor are seen as having lax, dissolute, unambitious cultures?

OT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/18/us/by-using-executive-order-on-immigration-obama-would-reverse-long-held-stance.html

The most-liked comments by readers are almost all critical, including quotes from Obama’s own reasonable skepticism about unskilled illegals as expressed here:

http://dailycaller.com/2014/11/16/shock-flashback-obama-says-illegal-immigration-hurts-blue-collar-americans-strains-welfare-video/

When Snoop Dogg and Nick Cannon wanted to racially mock whites in whiteface, they chose “Todd” and “Connor Smallnut,” respectively.

http://www.ajc.com/news/news/national/snoop-dogg-dresses-whiteface-confuses-everyone/nhCs7/

Who/whom

That article links to E. O. Wilson’s memoir of Watson too…

https://www.msu.edu/course/lbs/333/fall/wilson.html

OT HBD:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/nyregion/how-game-theory-helped-improve-new-york-city-high-school-application-process.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

Without looking at the captions, how easy would it be to match the boffins’ names with their pictures? Roth, Pathak, Abdulkadiroglu

Time to buy a copy of Carleton Coon…

thinking back to the Chautauqua post… these are all really SWPLy places.

OT: Chris Hughes, gay mafioso — even the liberal Dana Milbank is upset with gay Hughes:

The same day the article appeared, Hughes lashed out in a group e-mail to staff because senior editor (and former Post reporter) Alec MacGillis had dared to propose writing a piece about Apple avoiding taxes just after Apple’s Tim Cook had come out of the closet. Hughes shot back that “Apple has acted squarely within the law” and that MacGillis’s argument would be “tone deaf.” MacGillis quickly backed off, but Hughes did not, writing twice more to defend Apple’s tax strategy and to call Cook “incredibly heroic” for coming out.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-the-new-republic-is-dead-thanks-to-its-owner/2014/12/08/ae80da42-7ee0-11e4-81fd-8c4814dfa9d7_story.html

OT: Steveosphere bait. How many contradictions and self-defeating assertions are contained in just these three sentences?

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/15/nyregion/at-rikers-a-roadblock-to-reform.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

Like Mr. Seabrook, the overwhelming majority of his members are black. They have risen to dominate the top ranks of the department, making it far more diverse than the Police and Fire Departments, where most of the leadership is white.

But current and former city officials repeatedly described Mr. Seabrook as the biggest obstacle to efforts to curb brutality and malfeasance at Rikers.

OT:

The future of America, ladies and gentlemen!

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/nyregion/raising-ambitions-the-challenge-in-teaching-at-community-colleges.html

Note the precise wording… “in an alley.” She is careful to make a statement that implies nothing one way or the other, about anything that may or may not have happened on any occasion when she was not in an alley.

I grew up in the Bay Area… everyone called it “Cal.”

I also remember reading a review of a biography of David Geffen, wherein his success was partly attributable to being the only non-stoned person in the room when negotiating decades/millions of royalties for the Eagles and people like that.

OT:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/03/i-met-god-shes-black_n_6406928.html

Dylan Chenfeld, a self-described Jewish atheist, is throwing his ideas into the mix.

“I Met God, She’s Black,” Chenfeld says in posters that he’s allegedly pasted all over Manhattan during the past few days.

The 21-year-old doesn’t claim to have invented the phrase, saying the trope has existed for quite some time. He’s just the one who decided to put it on a $30 T-shirt.

Note: this link seems to have been taken over by spam

http://www.isteve.com/2003_Los_Angeles_and_the_Apocalyptic_Imagination.htm

while this link is working OK

http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2003/11/05/Analysis-LA-the-apocalyptic-imagination/29791068064161/

http://www.socialmatter.net/2015/02/02/clash-of-civilizations-in-2015/

http://aeon.co/magazine/science/how-did-science-come-to-speak-only-english/

I love the site and the commenting system, and I especially appreciate the ability to hover/mouseover comment replies and see the popped-up comment that the latter comment reply is replying to, if that makes sense…

Supposing I am reviewing Steve’s comments here:

https://www.unz.com/comments/commenter/Steve+Sailer/

And I hover over the names of his interlocutors, I see what he is replying to. BUT: once the popped-up comments appear, I can’t get them to un-appear easily. I need to leave the window, then come back, or wiggle the mouse around, to get the pop-up to go away. It is sort of a mixed blessing for now…
(I am using Chrome, on Windows)

I’m confused.

Schanberg’s work is certainly staggering. But I don’t get the sense that he pays much attention to the need to rebut counter-arguments. For example, this site:

http://www.miafacts.org/

argues against the Schanberg position. Some of Schanberg’s key witnesses, like Dolores Alfond, come off looking worse than in S’s account.

Gary Owens, the black man’s white comedian

http://www.buzzfeed.com/kenbensinger/gary-owen-wants-to-be-more-than-black-americas-favorite-whit#.kdlMoENyP

OT

I haven’t googled it yet, but is Paul de Man related?

OT:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-personality-test-could-stand-in-the-way-of-your-next-job-1429065001

How long before the Eye of Sauron figures out what’s going on here?

What gives those firefighters the gall to punch down at poor Buddy just because he seems to have spent their money on personal luxuries for himself and on endowing a chair in his name for Henry Louis Gates at Harvard?

Every so often Steve comes out with a perfect one-liner. Very memorable.

Wait, is DeLong Jewish? If so, I guess I will have to scratch him off my mental list of “Gentile America-hating leftists.”

look up Simon Schama or E. H. Gombrich, as well as Kenneth Clark as mentioned by another.

For that matter, Glenn Lowry or Philippe de Montebello. Not a bad station in life.

I had the impression that slavery meant that investment in slaves was so lucrative, that buying slaves sucked up all the available investment capital in the south, and “crowded out” other investments.

“They’re at Red’s Park-Inn bar, an old, country-western dive in southwest Detroit. It could easily be in rural Tennessee. Hoods of race cars adorn the wood-paneled walls, and signs near liquor bottles say things like “Lord, if I can’t be skinny make my friends look fat.” The owner’s picture is embedded in a slab of polished wood someone made into a rustic clock and nailed above the bar. Not one but two placards warn players not to gamble on pool.

Outside, it’s a rough Detroit neighborhood. Inside, though, it’s a guarded slice of country life.”

http://www.detroitblog.org/?p=1475

Razib Khan pointed out a while ago that the number of Christian Asians has been going down. Apparently Christian Asians are more likely to vote GOP, and conversely — the same as with white people.

This was before the recent Pew study that found fewer [nominal] Christians in America now.

In What Hath God Wrought, Daniel Walker Howe briefly addressed the encounter between Yankees and “Butternuts” in southern Ohio. p. 139:

“Yankees believed in public education; Butternuts, in individualism and low taxes. Yankees thought the Butternuts lazy; the latter resented Yankee condescension…. Southerners believed the ‘Yankee was a close, miserly, dishonest, selfish getter of money, void of generosity, hospitality, or any of the kindlier feelings of human nature; northerners saw the Butternut as ‘a long, lank, lean and ignorant animal, but little in advance of the savage state; one who was content to squat in a log-cabin, with a large family of ill-fed and ill-clothed, idle, ignorant children.”

https://books.google.com/books?id=0XIvPDF9ijcC&pg=PA138&lpg=PA138
http://librarun.org/book/35533/179

The contrast between Scots-Irish and Germans is obvious and clear. But the Yankees and Germans were a bit more compatible, at least until WWI and Prohibition. So apparently Germans and Yankees settled in the same or similar places?

https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2013/12/29/colors-and-lights/

In the Upper Midwest, the distance between Yankeeland, the Midlands and Greater Appalachia is not far at all.

Razib has posted a lot on this:

https://www.unz.com/gnxp/the-genetics-of-american-settlers-vs-immigrants/
“Finally, the states of the old Yankee Empire of the northern Old Northwest have been totally demographically transformed by the massive waves of migration from Germany and Scandinavia.”

https://www.unz.com/gnxp/are-genes-the-key-to-the-yankee-empire/

By the time of Andrew Jackson an ascendant Democrat configuration which aligned Southern uplanders and lowlanders with elements of the Middle Atlantic resistant to Yankee cultural pretension and demographic expansion would coalesce and dominate American politics down to the Civil War. It is illustrative that one of the prominent Northern figures in this alliance, President Martin Van Buren, was of Dutch New York background.

But this is a case where demographics was ultimate destiny. Not only were the Yankees fecund, but immigrants such as the German liberals fleeing the failures of the tumult of 1848 (e.g., Carl Schurz) were aligned with their anti-slavery enthusiasms (though they often took umbrage at the anti-alcohol stance of the Puritan moralists of the age, familiarizing the nation with beer in the 1840s). The Southern political ascendancy was simply not tenable in the face of Northern demographic robustness, fueled by both fertility and immigration.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/umhtml/umessay6.html

Early migration to Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota from the east came disproportionately from New England and New York. That pattern was mightily reinforced by the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, which funneled Yankees and ex-Yankees from New York into the southern portions of the Upper Midwest. Each state in turn for a time dubbed itself “the New England of the West.” Yankees soon became a minority, but they long continued to sit atop economic and political hierarchies and to set the general tone. Yankee hegemony was evident in countless ways. The many varieties of New England-based Protestantism were seen as nondenominational, whereas Lutherans and Catholics were seen as sectarian. New England-style blue laws kept the Sabbath holy. The Grand Army of the Republic was an organization of Yankee Civil War veterans. For most of the nineteenth century, under this Yankee dominance, a mostly rural population eagerly went about the business of developing the transportation and banking systems that would allow the region to realize its thoroughly commercial ambitions.

From the outset, immigration was actively and even officially promoted in the Upper Midwest. Immigrants flooded in; for example, by 1880, 71% of Minnesota’s population was either foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents. Wisconsin was a magnet for German immigrants in particular. German influence was especially strong in Milwaukee, so much so that politics there had its own, often socialist, flavor. Islands and even small regions of immigrant settlement were, in effect, ethnic colonies, often promoting their particular religious and educational institutions in the name of preserving ethnic traditions. All three states were dotted with small, usually short-lived intentional communities pursuing utopian goals.

The new Republican party originated in the Upper Midwest in the 1850s, and the region remained a center of Republican power for most of the rest of the nineteenth century. Politics in the area adopted a moralistic tone, advocating strong antislavery sentiments if not initiatives to expand black rights. The Republicans always ruled by means of coalitions with immigrant populations, and so anti-immigrant nativism was seldom strident.

Finally, how can we not bring in the Mormons for comparison, discussed in 2008 by Razib and Steve:

https://www.unz.com/gnxp/different-american-conservatisms-mormons-and-southerners/

American Mormonism began as a religion of Greater New England. First in upstate New York, and later in northern Ohio. Its relocation to the Midwest was problematic for a host of reasons, but the fact that they were often neighbors of people whose origins were in the South and they were quite clearly Yankees probably exacerbated tensions.

https://www.unz.com/isteve/mormons-as-conservative-new-england/

In general, Mormonism functions as a sort of Swedish welfare state without the state for church members.

http://www.rogerebert.com/balder-and-dash/im-just-here-for-the-gasoline-an-overview-of-the-mad-max-saga

OT:

uh-oh…

http://www.foxbusiness.com/industries/2015/05/20/trouble-in-skies/

Generally true, but:

http://newresidentialcolleges.yale.edu/

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/marc-andreessen-dr-evil-silicon-valley/

They’re going to be new students:
“an undergraduate student body grown by 15 percent — that is, an increase of 200 students per class over the current base class of 1,350, which will bring the total undergraduate student body to 6,200
(an increase of 800 students in total). ” They will be “colleges 13 and 14,” adding to the twelve [Oxbridge-style] undergraduate colleges that already exist within Yale.

I saw that Princeton spent $135 million on Whitman College, to house 500 undergraduates. Enough to buy each of them a nice single-family home in Dirt Gap country.

It would be great if someone could translate this blog roll into a Twitter list.

I find it to be an enormous pain to check more than one or two blogs regularly, but the beauty of Twitter is that you can see what’s new with one click and a bit of scrolling.

In fact, Steve’s on my twitter list (“Bloggers”) and that’s how I find out when there are new posts here — much more efficient then checking this website every few hours.

http://www.badassoftheweek.com/christopherlee.html

Does anyone have another link to the list of 2015 CA National Merit semifinalists? That one is limited to DocStoc members.

I believe there are just a handful of high schools in coastal California that have remained majority-white: Los Gatos-Saratoga (in the Bay Area) and Newport Beach (in Orange County). What’s the reason? Is it just because they’re the wealthiest? But plenty of other wealthy areas have “gone Asian.” And what’s the National Merit representation in these places?

Stanley Kurtz has also been weighing in. He’s not optimistic.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/420896/massive-government-overreach-obamas-affh-rule-out-stanley-kurtz
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/07/08/obama-administration-to-unveil-major-new-rules-targeting-segregation-across-u-s/
https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/420623/washington-takes-zoning-board

OT
Jackie Fuchs and Kim Fowley, in the news again.

http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/the-lost-girls/

Trigger warning.

Harlem on My Mind, at the Met in 1969, might have been the first example of a big museum caving to PC protest.

https://journals.ku.edu/index.php/amerstud/article/view/3141
http://www.as-ap.org/content/landmark-introduction-harlem-my-mind-matthew-israel-0
https://books.google.com/books?id=dItWAJxHT2MC&pg=PA164&lpg=PA164

“John Canaday, then the senior art critic at The New York Times, called “Harlem on My Mind” a sociology exhibition rather than an art exhibition and believed he had no responsibility to review it. Because he believed it wrongly politicized the museum, Hilton Kramer, also in The New York Times, said the appearance of “Harlem on My Mind” signaled a crisis for art, and in his review called the show “an amateur exercise in social evangelism,” Hoving “impatient with the…often unmeasurable benefactions that a deep attachment to the art experience bestows on our spirit and on our emotions,” and concluded:

“There can be no doubt that in mounting the “Harlem on my Mind” exhibition, Mr. Hoving has for the first time politicized the Metropolitan and thereby cast doubt on its future integrity as an institution consecrated above all to the task of preserving our artistic heritage from the fickle encroachments of history.”(17)

In The Nation, Lawrence Alloway added that the Met (with the appearance of “Harlem”) was now becoming vulnerable to any special interests that decided to apply pressure; thus he made recommendations for other shows. He wrote, “How about: “Salon de Backlash,” an annual poor whites’ art show, “Swing with the Tongs,” a new look at old Chinatown; “The Mafia as Art Collectors;” “Ten Abstract Expressionist Teamsters;” and “Cop Art,” arranged for the museum by the Police Athletic League.”(18)15

I guess at that point, the NYT and the art scene, while already leftist, had not yet become PC?

Prayers for your daughter. My wife’s cousin has been in a similar situation.

that’s a major theme of Houellebecq’s in The Elementary Particles.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/us/politics/bernie-sanders-lags-hillary-clinton-in-introducing-himself-to-black-voters.html

needs more krazy glue…

Julian Castro. but I’d vote for Sanchez.

http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2015/07/28/if-you-care-about-california-then-you-should-care-about-salinas/inquiries/connecting-california/

http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/feature/salinas-californias-richest-poor-city/

I always am glad to mail an (old-fashioned) check to Steve. Far be it from me to offer business advice to a UCLA MBA, but I also have this nagging thought that he could bring in a lot more money by thematically repackaging the material that is already on this blog, in one-stop book or Kindle form. Give it a snappy title and a SWPL hipster cover design, and watch the sales take off.

One of the greatest strengths of Steve’s writing is its empirical support: as we know, every man is entitled to his opinions but not his own facts. Thus, simply publicizing the set of facts that many of us already know through Steve’s good efforts would be very powerful. “Bite-sized” books would be great for this.

The corresponding weakness of the blog form is that you have to dig through a lot of old material and do a lot of Googling to put together a complete set of facts. Those of us who are longtime readers have the facts in our heads, but someone landing on the front page lacks context.

If Steve is too busy (and it sounds like he is), I’m sure he could pay someone a couple of hundred bucks to put the material together for a trial run, and see how it goes. Maybe even a regular commenter (not me, I’m too busy too).

I think there’s a big market for “bite-sized” books that review a topic briskly and efficiently. Like the Very Short Introductions. http://www.veryshortintroductions.com/ These could be given as stocking-stuffers for our thoughtful and well-meaning friends who remain trapped within the epistemic bubble of progressive goodthink.

Here are some of the book titles / Kindle singles that I personally would buy from Steve for the going rate:

• Major Themes in Hollywood Cinema Seen In Light of the Filmmakers’ Extended Families
• Golf: An Ethnic History
• Everything You Know About Standardized Testing Is Wrong
• 101 surprising facts about race in America
• America’s 50 most beautiful golf courses
• 99 politically incorrect track and field statistics
• Diversity before diversity: 25 great diverse Americans who throve in an era of white supremacy
• 40 false presuppositions of today’s dominant intellectual worldview
• 75 surprising lessons you can learn about America from watching the movies
• Jewish Studies: 10 ways that the values of an ancient religion help to shape the modern worldview
The 25 Most Influential Jewish American Thinkers
• Southern California: America’s Vibrant Future
• Conservatism Inc.: 25 reasons why the Republican establishment is bad for middle-class America
• Just fix the schools: 10 reasons why our most popular ideas about education are misguided
• America’s Mexican future: What our neighbor to the south tells us about tomorrow’s way of life
• Dynasty: How the anthropology of kinship, inheritance, family and tribe informs all of our political and social issues
• Family formation: What single, childless New Yorkers can’t tell us about mainstream American values