Venture capitalist Paul Graham has blocked me for hurting his feelings by pointing out how implausible is his friend's story of scoring an ultra-rare perfect 1600 on the SAT in 1983, but not realizing how great he'd done until the 2020s. Typically, fewer than ten kids in the world scored perfect 1600s in any year (e.g., 9 in 1991). And those few tended to be exceptionally curious and sharp about reading College Board tables translating their SAT scores into percentiles.

"The Odyssey" is about how Bronze Age travel was so slow that it takes Odysseus ten years to traverse the 675 nautical miles home from Troy to Ithaca, and Menelaus needs a couple of years to get back to Sparta.

So how did a Kenyan, a South Asian, and various Chinese get there? stevesailer.net/p/christopher-…

Lots of peoples are good at holding grudges for an inordinately long time, but you have to respect the Jewish ability to get _other_ people to care about trivialities like this four decade old ethnic grudge against Roald Dahl for getting angry over Israel's 1982 Lebanon invasion.

https://twitter.com/nypost/status/2036277103998488777

stevesailer.net/p/two-tall-eng…

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a strong believer in Affirmative Action for thee but not for me when it came to hiring her law clerks. She needed the best to outsmart Scalia.

So, she hired one black clerk, Paul Watford, out of her 159 clerks.

1 out of 159. Should Supreme Court justices be as ruthlessly meritocratic and colorblind in hiring law clerks as Ruth Bader Ginsburg was, or should African-Americans be handed by quota, say, 5% representation in such an influential job?

Fundamentally, race isn't about skin color (albinos aren't all the same race), it's about who your ancestors tend to be. Up through 1492, for example, people on different sides of the Atlantic Ocean tended to have highly different family trees for tens of thousands of years. Not surprisingly, the scientific study of race, like virtually all other fields of science, has its lumper v. splitter disputes. But, in the big picture, so what? 21st Century genetic analysis has tended to confirm 18th Century Enlightenment caliper-based racial lumpings.

One problem for American immigration policy is that India now has a massive and growing ethnocentric Hindu Nationalist movement, which has ruled India in recent years. This means that immigrants from India are no longer as assimilationist as they were two generations ago.

https://twitter.com/malmesburyman/status/2002416646753808807

Indian immigrants in the 1970s-1980s tended to come from the Anglophile elites, who looked to the West for models (sometimes the wrong solutions, such as Fabian socialism). Recent Indian immigrants tend to be ethnocentric Hindu Nationalists who see little reason to assimilate.

@nntaleb You should inform the World Bank that their "Harmonized Learning Outcomes" database of national school achievement test scores, which correlate spectacularly with earlier national IQ test score databases must be Fake News because reasons:

datacatalog.worldbank.org/search/dataset… @nntaleb Here's my essay explaining the World Bank's Harmonized Learning Outcomes" database for 174 countries, which correlates closely with the various national IQ score databases assembled by Lynn and Vanhanen plus others:

takimag.com/article/a-litt…

How dare the Trump Administration deport somebody with such kindly, innocent eyes back to Jamaica where he spent his first 23 years of his life just because he kidnapped somebody during his first year in the United States? Look at what an unfashionable meal this convicted kidnapper is forced to have with his family back in Jamaica! It's a Human Rights Violation that's he's not eating sushi at Sushi Noz in Manhattan.

The single most useful thing Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson could do to get liberals back on a more realistic track would be to publicly point out what they privately know: "The race gap in intelligence? It's real, and we have no clue how to eliminate it, but we can live with it." "What we can probably do is improve schooling somewhat for all races, but that would almost certainly boost Asians and whites as much as blacks and Hispanics. But that's okay. If everybody got better educated, that would make America better."

@burrrgers @wolfstrength I was a 6 year old at Heathrow Airport in 1965 when a young man with hair down to his collar, the average length in 1972, walked in. "Look, it's a Beatle!" screamed a girl.

The jet-setters surged toward him.

It turned out to be Peter Noone of Herman and the Hermits. @burrrgers @wolfstrength I don't know anything about women's hairstyles, but I suspect men's hairstyles haven't been changing as fast anymore as they did between 1964 and 1974.

Democrats need to realize that they became so egregiously hate-filled toward whites, men, straights etc. during the Great Awokening that they are now paying the price by having a lot of their sinecures and grants taken away by the normally nice people whom they demonized. Most normies we're tolerant of a moderate amount of discreet affirmative action, useless NGO spending, and soft-major nonsense until beginning in 2013 and peaking in the "racial reckoning" of 2020-2023, the left went nuts with overt racist, sexist, and genderist hatred.

@Paracelsus1092 The idea that Sutton Hoo was the burial site of Anglo-Saxon heroes rich from fighting Persia for Byzantium fits with the Pirenne Thesis that the real Dark Ages in northern Europe began with the rise of Islam that cut off Europe from the advanced civilizations of the Near East. @Paracelsus1092 Shortly after the death of the Prophet in 632 AD, Islam ripped into the exhausted Byzantine and Persian empires who had bankrupted themselves fighting a long war. Perhaps the wealth of Constantinople had been paid out to mercenaries from as far as Sutton Hoo in England?

The Good Life in Gov. Wendell Anderson's Minnesota (August 1973)
vs.
The Not So Good Life in Gov. Tim Walz's Minnesota (May 2020):

When I was in high school in the 1970s, Minnesota and Wisconsin competed for the reputation as the most well-ordered state in the Union.

Now, they compete to be the state that generates the most Steve Sailer Content.

Who has punched superb character actors in New York City? Steve Buscemi just got punched by, apparently, this guy: Michael Stuhlabarg got punched by this guy:

@alecrogers1968 @amortowles It would be a better argument to contend that "A Gentleman in Moscow," like, say, "The Master and Margarita," has fantasy elements that make it more conducive to historically unrealistic diversity casting than would be, say, "Darkness at Noon" or "First Circle." @alecrogers1968 @amortowles For example, I didn't object much to the diversity casting in "Wonka," a children's musical set in a vague time and place, than I would be to diversity casting in, say, "Middlemarch" or "Brideshead Revisted."

Washington Post: We Had to Destroy the Democracy to Save It.

The Post reports on how in Europe, the secret police are putting under surveillance political parties that are growing by advocating policies popular with voters.

This is to "save democracy."

unz.com/isteve/we-had-…
One of the many threats to democracy in Europe, according the Washington Post news section, is that political parties are increasingly debating immigration policy instead of having a gentleman's agreement not to discuss it.

washingtonpost.com/world/2024/03/…

A standard response to complaints about immigrant crime is that the migrant murder rate is is lower than the native born rate. (Of course, the trick here is that few Americans know that blacks accounted in 2021 for 60.4% of known murder offenders & 55.0% of homicide victims.) But imagine that the 15,000 U. of Chicago students commit 3 murders / year. When Chicagoans complain that the U. of C. is bringing in 3 murderers annually, the college president scoffs analogously that his admittees' murder rate is 20% lower than Chicago's, so why the kvetching?

A new preprint attemps to debunk all the noticing since the 1990s that sub-Saharans tend to have more really fast runners than other races:

"Revisiting Stereotypes: Race and Running"

@tadesouaiaia, @thebirdmaniac

Tade Souaiaia, Nabie Fofanah, Rawle DeLisle, Sheena Mason

arxiv.org/abs/2403.02358 The all-time fastest marathoners as of today include: 1 Japanese, 1 black Brazilian, 2 North Africans, and the rest East Africans (46 Ethiopians and 44 Kenyans).



Here are top 30 fastest marathoners of all time at the moment: unz.com/isteve/has-the…

From my new Taki's column:

These different types of mass shooting suggest the need for different types of gun control: point of sale vs. point of use. Only a tiny fraction of mass shootings are carried out with long guns that the shooter bought legally.
takimag.com/article/the-ka… Instead, blacks, who are the perpetrators and victims of nearly 75% of mass shootings with 4 or more dead or wounded, typically get their handguns through friends and acquaintances on the black market.

takimag.com/article/the-ka…

@whstancil The weight of slavery, Jim Crow, and redlining suddenly got vastly worse on African Americans the week that George Floyd died, causing despairing blacks to experience a historic increase in weekly deaths by car crash and homicide as the cops depoliced:

takimag.com/article/unnece…
@whstancil Or, @whstancil, are you arguing that am I saying that African-Americans experienced genetic mutations on May 25, 2020 that within days made them on average dramatically shootier and worse drivers?

My recollection instead is that The Establishment encouraged a "racial reckoning."

@whstancil You aren't supposed to talk about it in polite society so progressive reformers only make the problem worse, but young black men have a colossal problem with shooting each other, even compared to comparably poor young Hispanic men. @whstancil Strikingly, both poverty and race influence crime rates. according to Harvard economist Raj Chetty's landmark study of 21 million Americans, both family income while he was growing up and race have a lot to do with the odds a man is in prison at age 30:

takimag.com/article/americ…