Month: November 2011

We all know the story to one degree or another. The financial sector set up a system that encouraged mortgage initiators to prefer subprime loans to prime loans. They stopped asking for any documentation proving an ability to pay back home loans. They sought out unsavvy borrowers and steered them to riskier loans because they got bigger bonuses that way. The garbage loans were packaged up into derivatives and given deceptively high credit ratings. Then those derivatives were sold to unwitting customers who lost tons of money when they went bad. Meanwhile, the big banks bet against their own financial products even as they marketed them as safe investments. When the house of cards fell, the government had no choice but to save the banks because our economy can’t function without a banking system. Then the bankers took the money and paid themselves big bonuses while millions lost their jobs, their homes, and their retirement security.

There are a few bankers who are honest about what happened.

As a regional vice president for Chase Home Finance in southern Florida, [James] Theckston shoveled money at home borrowers. In 2007, his team wrote $2 billion in mortgages, he says. Sometimes those were “no documentation” mortgages.

“On the application, you don’t put down a job; you don’t show income; you don’t show assets,” he said. “But you still got a nod.”

“If you had some old bag lady walking down the street and she had a decent credit score, she got a loan,” he added.

Theckston says that borrowers made harebrained decisions and exaggerated their resources but that bankers were far more culpable — and that all this was driven by pressure from the top.

“You’ve got somebody making $20,000 buying a $500,000 home, thinking that she’d flip it,” he said. “That was crazy, but the banks put programs together to make those kinds of loans.”

Especially when mortgages were securitized and sold off to investors, he said, senior bankers turned a blind eye to shortcuts.

“The bigwigs of the corporations knew this, but they figured we’re going to make billions out of it, so who cares? The government is going to bail us out. And the problem loans will be out of here, maybe even overseas.”

One memory particularly troubles Theckston. He says that some account executives earned a commission seven times higher from subprime loans, rather than prime mortgages. So they looked for less savvy borrowers — those with less education, without previous mortgage experience, or without fluent English — and nudged them toward subprime loans.

These less savvy borrowers were disproportionately blacks and Latinos, he said, and they ended up paying a higher rate so that they were more likely to lose their homes. Senior executives seemed aware of this racial mismatch, he recalled, and frantically tried to cover it up.

Theckston, who has a shelf full of awards that he won from Chase, such as “sales manager of the year,” showed me his 2006 performance review. It indicates that 60 percent of his evaluation depended on him increasing high-risk loans.

In late 2008, when the mortgage market collapsed, Theckston and most of his colleagues were laid off. He says he bears no animus toward Chase, but he does think it is profoundly unfair that troubled banks have been rescued while troubled homeowners have been evicted.

I kind of regret that I didn’t spend most of the last decade living in a series of multi-hundred thousand dollar homes. I did sell two homes, making a great return both times. That’s the only reason I was ever able to become a blogger. But that was just an accident, or good fortune. It wasn’t an investment. It was life unfolding in a fortuitous way. I never lied about my income to get a mortgage. And I was never stupid enough to get suckered into lousy terms.

When it came time to save the system, the Fed wound up giving the banks the equivalent of $25,000 for every American citizen. I wonder what would have happened if they had just given the people that $25,000 instead. I suppose we would have all descended into some kind Mad Max war of all-against-all. Most of us would have died and become food for those who survived. Believe me, I understand that the too-big-to-fail concept isn’t some kind of joke. The banks had to be saved. But I don’t see any reason why the people cannot exact their revenge now, at their leisure. Of course, it’s not too late to send us our checks.

Hi, I’m Steve M. Since 2002 I’ve been blogging at No More Mister Nice Blog, and BooMan has recently arrived at the conclusion that my grumpy, occasionally snickering responses to the decades-long domination of American politics by the Reagan/Murdoch/Rove/Fox-ocracy would be a good fit here. So I’ll be taking advantage of his kind nature with some posts here, while still blogging at NMMNB. Thank you, BooMan, and I’ll try not to break anything.

Once upon a time, America, a land of ponies and cheap gasoline, made the higher education of its citizens a priority, whether they be rich and privileged, poor and desperate or simply the children of the working middle class. America had some of the best universities and colleges in the world, many of them supported by state governments and almost all of them subsidized by the federal government, with chap loans, grants and other programs that made it possible for any qualified individual high school graduate to afford the cost of getting a college degree. This helped lead to an explosion of the middle class, staggering economic growth, and a nation with enough Gross Domestic Product that it could spend TRILLIONS of DOLLARS on costly wars, costly and unnecessary weapons programs and the single largest military establishment the world has ever known without batting an eyelash.

Somewhere over the past three decades, however, the idea that providing higher educational opportunities to America’s children was a good thing regardless of the class in which they were born went by the way side. As governments reduced their commitment to higher education in order to reduce taxes on the wealthiest Americans, and even in many instances on upper middle class Americans who, though they had benefited greatly from government assistance in obtaining their own college degrees that forever changed their lives for the better, the cost of higher education skyrocketed.

Oh, everyone still believed that their children should go to college, and employers still demanded that college degree as a prerequisite for better paying jobs, but for many reasons — the greed of corporations who sought more profits through employing people in other countries and saw no reason why they should have to pay for educating a work force in their own, individual selfishness, or the the fear that someone else’s kid (and likely a “minority”) was getting a better deal than their own children — led to the popular opinion that government support for higher education was at best unnecessary and at worst, a bad thing that “redistributed wealth” from those who had “made it on their own” to those who did not deserve the same opportunities to which they had been given.

Indeed, the entire idea of higher education as a good investment in our nation;s younger generations was demeaned and discounted. So it should come as no surprise that college costs rose at a rate far in excess of inflation, whether the colleges were private institutions or public ones. And as those costs rose and rose every year due to lack of financial support by our society, America’s institutions of higher education began to fall behind those in other nations, even as more and more graduates took out more and more loans to fund their education. The result was inevitable: a generation of young people who have either been denied the benefits of a college degree altogether, or who went into massive debt only to find that their college degrees have become, in many instances not worth the cost of the effort, time and most of all expense that went into acquiring them:

Student loan debt outpaced credit card debt for the first time last year and is likely to top a trillion dollars this year as more students go to college and a growing share borrow money to do so. […]

“In the coming years, a lot of people will still be paying off their student loans when it’s time for their kids to go to college,” said Mark Kantrowitz, the publisher of FinAid.org and Fastweb.com, who has compiled the estimates of student debt, including federal and private loans.

Two-thirds of bachelor’s degree recipients graduated with debt in 2008, compared with less than half in 1993. Last year, graduates who took out loans left college with an average of $24,000 in debt. Default rates are rising, especially among those who attended for-profit colleges.

In the past, their was a consensus in America that every qualified American high school graduate deserved the chance to better themselves through obtaining a college degree. It was a policy that benefited our economy and millions of Americans, especially WWII veterans and their children, the so-called baby boomers. Now however, many of these people have forgotten the educational opportunities of which they took advantage, and have brought into the propaganda that government investment in future generations is “socialism” and somehow unfair. They rail against parasites stealing their tax dollars (though the tax burden on Americans, particularly well-off Americans, has never been lower) and falsely claim that in the old days they achieved their successes all by themselves.

Thus, it should come as no surprise to anyone that today’s college graduates are far from sanguine about the benefits of a college education that our politicians now openly contend needs less and less funding by government (so that wealthy persons, real or fictional can profit even more) even as our soured economy continues to teeter on the edge of disaster.

“Three in four Americans now say that college is too expensive for most people to afford,” [Education Secretary Arne] Duncan said. “That belief is even stronger among young adults — three-fourths of whom believe that graduates today have more debt than they can manage.”

And the conservative pundits wonder what the Occupy Wall Street Movement wants. I can tell you one thing it wants: a government that benefits real hard working people, not unindicted criminals on Wall Street whose institutions received bailouts and secret loans while students went ever deeper into debt. They want a government that supports them and not the multi-national corporations that have benefited the most from the assault on education, and the failure to invest in the most precious of all our national resources: our children.

We, my generation, may parent’s generation, and the politicians (all too often beneficiaries of government assistance in the past and corporate cash in the present) who are mere lapdogs to the real rulers of our country have failed our young people. They should be mad as hell about what their country is doing to them, as should any parent trying to find the means to afford college for their children.

The widespread anger over rising college costs came into sharp focus Monday at two student protests. In New York, City University of New York students and their supporters held a raucous street protest, with signs saying “CUNY must be free” and “Abolish the board of trustees,” as trustees approved a series of $300 annual tuition increases extending through 2015.

And in California, Cheryl Deutsch, a U.C.L.A. graduate student who leads the union representing student workers, confronted the university’s regents to extended applause when she said that as bankers and financiers, real estate developers and members of the corporate elite, they were not representative of the people of California. “You are not representative of the students of U.C. You are the 1 percent,” Ms. Deutsch said.

Yes, Cheryl, they are the 1% and they would see your dreams and tour world burn if it would mean one penny more in their pockets.

Let me end on a personal note. I have a 16 year old daughter. She takes all honors and Advanced Placement classes in math science, history, Latin and English. She carries an A average in all of her classes, and achieved the highest mark on her World AP History exam last year. She also studies art, plays the piano, participates in numerous clubs after school and has participated with me as a volunteer in an interfaith program to help homeless families find jobs and homes again, while receiving support (food and shelter) from people like — her.

Yet, she has severe anxiety attacks over her prospects of going to college. Because both her parents are disabled, and our income is limited, she worries that unless she can obtain a full tuition scholarship she will be stuck going to a community college at best. I tell her not to worry, that we will find the means to fund her education, but she does not fully believe me. She wants to be a biochemical engineer, by the way

I have a son who graduated with dual degrees in Psychology and Japanese with a grade point average of 3.7 who cannot find a job and sees his only option as returning to graduate school in the hopes of obtaining a higher degree in a field that will provide him with a career. He was fortunate in that he did earn a tuition scholarship for his undergraduate studies at a major university, but he will have to work and take out loans to afford graduate school as we do not have the means to fund his future educational expenses.

And I? I worry that regardless of whatever education they receive, they may have to emigrate to find a decent paying job, for our economy is not producing jobs as it did back when income inequality was low during the fifties, sixties and seventies. I worry that both will be able to afford decent healthcare, particularly since the health care reform act that requires insurance companies to cover people with pre-existing conditions is endangered.

I have great kids. I also live in a society that has turned its back on them and millions like them. I watch them struggle despite their intellectual gifts and wonder how much harder it must be for others of their generation who have less advantages than they do and greater burdens. For we, as a nation, have failed them. And I see no solution in sight for their plight. We have wasted and ruined the lives of our best and brightest so that the greed and gluttony and lust for power of evil people can be fed.

I salute each and everyone of them who are out there in the streets protesting what our nation has become, and demanding that something be done about the many injustices in our failed society. As I write these words, I know many of them are suffering from physical harm meted out by law enforcement and from slanderous charges and verbal abuse from our diseased corporate media, merely for standing up for themselves and our rights through the use of non-violence. They deserve better.

A new Pew survey finds this:

In Congressional districts represented by Tea Party lawmakers, the number of people saying they disagree with the movement has risen significantly since it powered a Republican sweep in midterm elections; almost as many people disagree with it as agree with it.

… The number of people who disagree with the Tea Party has also risen among the general public, according to the most recent of the polls in the Pew analysis, taken this month. Among the public, 27 percent said they disagreed with the Tea Party and 20 percent said they agreed — a reversal from a year ago, when 27 percent agreed and 22 percent disagreed.

In Tea Party districts, 23 percent of people now disagree with the Tea Party, while 25 percent agree. A year ago, 18 percent of people in those districts disagreed with the Tea Party, and 33 percent agreed.

In another poll in the Pew analysis, conducted in October, 48 percent of people in Tea Party districts said they had a negative view of the Republican Party, while 41 percent said they had a favorable view. The favorable rating had dropped 14 percentage points since March.

That drop was steeper than it was among the general public, where the percentage of people with a favorable opinion of the Republican Party had fallen to 36 percent, from 42 percent in March.

This comports with what we’ve seen anecdotally in states like Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida where Tea-affiliated governors have faced strong backlashes for their assorted idiocies. The more people are exposed to Tea Party ideology and tactics, and what that actually means for their lives, the less they like it.

And where, in the last three months, has that exposure been brightest? Certainly August’s debt ceiling fiasco opened a lot of eyes. But at least as corrosive, and over a much longer term, has been the sustained buffoonery of the Republican presidential candidates and pseudo-candidates who’ve rushed to wear the Tea Party mantle: Trump, Palin, Bachmann, Perry, Cain, and now Gingrich. The more they talk, the more people even in heavily Republican districts are repulsed. Unlike the 2008 Democratic primary season – in which a fairly strong field of candidates, headed by Obama and Hillary Clinton, strengthened the Democratic brand – the Republican campaign so far is not helping the GOP. The entire field is catering to a base that is increasingly disliked by everyone else – including other Republicans.

This is why there will be no populist insurgency in 2012 challenging the rule of the GOP’s money people. This is why Mitt Romney will be the presumptive nominee by February. In the minds of the people that matter, he already is, and the only force within the GOP that could challenge him has peaked and is losing its power.

Of course, there has always been and will continue to be a populist right wing within the GOP, and it will keep making noise in the presidential and congressional races next year. But it’s hard to see a path where the kind of negatives the Tea Party is now racking up even in Republican base districts can be reversed to the point where, as in 2010, GOP incumbents and favored nominees are being toppled en masse.

The question at this point is: where do 2010’s Tea Party supporters go? Not many will go to Obama in 2012, but will they reconcile themselves to Willard, or turn away in disgust at the whole process? And what will the impact be on volunteer enthusiasm and grass roots donations? On downticket races?

Votes are up for grabs. This would be a good time to have a Democratic party leadership that is willing to contest everywhere, including heavily Republican states and districts. The Obama campaign did that beautifully in 2008. In 2010 Congressional races, it didn’t happen so much, and the slate of Democratic Congressional challengers in 2012 still has some major gaps.

There is still going to be a hugely funded effort in 2012 to paint Barack Obama, and by extension his party, as evil incarnate. But don’t confuse it with the Tea Party. That’s over.

It looks like #occupy tent cities are out.  Here is an alternate idea.

Occupiers can organize themselves to be present at occupy sites 99 at a time, walking slowly in lines and columns through the site, always on the move.  As the front line exits one side of the park, or field, or whatever, a new line enters from the opposite end.

The technology exists to organize such events.

This type of occupation would be noticeable but avoid many of the problems previous incarnations have fostered.  

Occupiers can invest as much or as little time as they care to: recycling through the procession many times a day, or joining a few times a week, or even just once.

Imagine the entire parade coming to a halt at an arranged hour, each individual turning 90 degrees, participating in a “general assembly,” after which the group continues its journey.

And it would be possible for people not involved in the procession to organize other activities: finding safe places for homeless to encamp, communicating with police and government officials, recruiting and organizing participants.

Just an idea . . .

Mayor Nutter busted up the #OccupyPhilly encampments last night at about one in the morning. It wasn’t any great surprise. He had set a 5pm deadline on Sunday for the protesters to leave or face arrest. There was a little drama for a few hours as the protesters wound themselves around Center City, and then about 44 of them were arrested as dawn approached. Now they will try to figure out how to keep the movement going.

There’s been talk that the attention-grabbing encampments and accompanying sit-ins and marches have already served the purpose of kickstarting Occupy, so the next phase of the movement should involve giving up the protest sites and migrating to the Internet, where information can be more efficiently disseminated and the movement’s energy redirected into more pragmatic pursuits like voter education and mobilization.

Chris Faraone—a reporter with The Boston Phoenix who’s been covering Occupy Boston and has spent time at a dozen more Occupy sites around the country the past two months—disagrees. “Whether it’s occupation-camping mode or not, I see a physical presence being the watermark of this movement,” says Faraone. “People really need to get together in person to make plans for these events and marches, which I really think are working. I think it’s now in the back of these CEOs’ minds that, ‘Fuck, 3,000 people are gonna show up at my office.’ The head of Bank of America in Boston does not like the fact that 500 people show up at his house once a week. That kind of thing isn’t gonna happen if you move everything to the Internet.”

More realistic answers came from veterans of the Philly protests.

“It gets pretty fuckin’ cold in the winter, so good luck if you can’t have any kind of shelter,” says Roman Reznichenko, who spent a week at Occupy Philly in late October. He adds that there are transportation issues, too. “If you’re not camping down there, you gotta get there and I know I couldn’t afford that,” he says. “I know a lot of [Occupiers] who are from Jersey or out in the sticks and they don’t have the money to go back and forth every day.”

And if the encampment itself has been part of the message, then having to pack up shop every night could kill the momentum. “Out of sight is out of mind,” says Zuccotti Park mainstay John Nicholson, a 25-year-old EMT worker. “The press isn’t gonna cover it nearly as much without the camping and some of the drama that’s gone along with that, so if people aren’t devoted to sticking around all night and keeping it going and challenging them when they say you can’t be there, then this could all fade away pretty fast,” he says.

For the record, the Philly police and the mayor have had a cordial and respectful attitude toward the Occupiers. And they deserve credit for dispersing the camps without firing teargas or wading into the crowds with billy clubs. And no pepper spray!! See? All that heavy-handed crap is unnecessary. (You can view 293 photos from last night here). There were a few instances of bike-cops getting too aggressive and causing injury, and horse-cops stomped on at least one woman’s feet. But compared to how New York and Oakland have behaved, it was almost without incident.

Los Angeles busted up their Occupy encampment last night, too. The weather in LA will present no obstacle to setting up camp somewhere else.

Where do you think the Occupy movement is heading?

Sen. Rand Paul introduced an amendment to the Defense Appropriations Act that would have struck the Authorization to Use Military Force in Iraq from the books. It got thirty votes. The Roll Call might surprise you. I know I’d be inclined to support such an amendment. But there may be some reasons why it would make things needlessly difficult. I honestly didn’t listen to a second of the debate, so I don’t know why senators like Sheldon Whitehouse, Jack Reed, and Barbara Mikulski opposed it. I take it that the Pentagon and the Intelligence Community didn’t want the AUMF repealed, but I don’t know how good of an argument they had.

A more important amendment was introduced by Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado. It received thirty-eight votes. You can read about the debate here. Anyone who voted against Udall’s amendment is a gutless coward who doesn’t deserve your support. Here are the cowardly bedwetting Democrats :

Bob Casey (D-PA), Kent Conrad (D-ND), Kay Hagan (D-NC), Dan Inouye (D-HI), Herb Kohl (D-WI), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Carl Levin (D-MI), Joe Lieberman (ID-CT), Joe Manchin (D-WV), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Ben Nelson (D-NE), Mark Pryor (D-AR), Jack Reed (D-RI), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)

They’re all more afraid of Gitmo detainees than they are concerned about the integrity of our system of justice.

I understand the fascination with certain white people wanting to justify their political agenda through insisting that African Americans are genetically pre-determined to be less intelligent than whites. Andrew Sullivan is perhaps the most well known media figure who continues to promote this view over and over:

[The study of intelligence] has been strangled by p.c. egalitarianism. The reason is the resilience of racial differences in IQ in the data, perhaps most definitively proven by UC Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen:

“Jensen is still greatly respected by many traditional intelligence researchers,” Garlick says. “By ‘traditional intelligence researchers,’ I mean researchers who still value IQ and continue to do studies that evaluate the effectiveness of IQ in predicting outcomes, or studies that examine possible mechanisms that may cause differences in IQ. However, due to the unpopularity of Jensen’s findings, this group of researchers is now very small.

“The major move in response to Jensen’s findings hasn’t been rigorous and compelling research to try and disprove his hypotheses and findings. Rather, it has led to an exodus of researchers away from the area, and a drying up of grant funding and research positions for researchers interested in IQ.”

Andrew Sullivan fails to acknowledge that the conclusions reached by the authors of the Bell Curve have been shown to be insufficient to show a genetic component between IQ and race (two nebulous concepts in and of themselves).

In The Bell Curve Herrnstein and Murray argue that a youth’s intelligence (IQ) is a more important determinant of social and economic success in adulthood than is the socioeconomic status (SES) of his or her parents. Herrnstein and Murray base this conclusion on comparison of effects of IQ score (measured at ages 15 and 23) and the effects of an index of parents’ SES from models of economic status, marriage, welfare use, involvement in crime, as well as several outcomes for young children. Reviewers of The Bell Curve have questioned whether Herrnstein and Murray’s estimates of the effects of IQ are overstated by their use of a rather crude measure of parents’ SES. Comparisons of siblings in the Herrnstein and Murray sample, a more complete and accurate way to control for family background, reveal little evidence that Herrnstein and Murray’s estimates of the effects of IQ score are biased by omitted family background characteristics (with the possible exception of outcomes for young children). However, there is evidence of substantial bias due to measurement error in their estimates of the effects of parents’ socioeconomic status. In addition, Herrnstein and Murray’s measure of parental SES fails to capture the effects of important elements of family background (such as single-parent family structure at age 14). As a result, their analysis gives an exaggerated impression of the importance of IQ relative to parents’ SES, and relative to family background more generally. Estimates based on a variety of methods, including analyses of siblings, suggest that parental family background is at least as important, and may be more important than IQ in determining socioeconomic success in adulthood.

You see, if you look at raw data you can come to all sort of conclusions. For example, did you know that Unitarians are the smartest religious people, and Pentacostals the dumbest, in America? Well if you go by IQ and SAT scores, there’s no comparison. But even more interesting, is that studies show liberals and atheists are more intelligent than other groups and this difference has been shown to be statistically significant:

More intelligent people are statistically significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history. Specifically, liberalism and atheism …

Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) support Kanazawa’s hypothesis. Young adults who subjectively identify themselves as “very liberal” have an average IQ of 106 during adolescence while those who identify themselves as “very conservative” have an average IQ of 95 during adolescence.

Similarly, religion is a byproduct of humans’ tendency to perceive agency and intention as causes of events, to see “the hands of God” at work behind otherwise natural phenomena. “Humans are evolutionarily designed to be paranoid, and they believe in God because they are paranoid,” says Kanazawa. This innate bias toward paranoia served humans well when self-preservation and protection of their families and clans depended on extreme vigilance to all potential dangers. “So, more intelligent children are more likely to grow up to go against their natural evolutionary tendency to believe in God, and they become atheists.”

Young adults who identify themselves as “not at all religious” have an average IQ of 103 during adolescence, while those who identify themselves as “very religious” have an average IQ of 97 during adolescence.

Does this mean there is an gene for intelligence among atheists and liberals that conservatives and highly religious people lack? I doubt it. Just as I doubt Northern Blacks have a gene that makes them more intelligent than Southern Whites:

[B]lack northerners scored higher on IQ tests than white southerners when soldiers were recruited and tested during WWII[.] (Bergen Evans, The Natural History of Nonsense (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), ch. 14, “The Skin Game.”)

Even Conservative favorite (and African American) economist and writer, Thomas Sowell finds little evidence that race or ethnicity genetically determines intelligence:

When European immigrant groups in the United States scored below the national average on mental tests, they scored lowest on the abstract parts of those tests. So did white mountaineer children in the United States tested back in the early 1930s… Strangely, Herrnstein and Murray refer to “folklore” that “Jews and other immigrant groups were thought to be below average in intelligence.” It was neither folklore nor anything as subjective as thoughts. It was based on hard data, as hard as any data in The Bell Curve. These groups repeatedly tested below average on the mental tests of the World War I era, both in the army and in civilian life. For Jews, it is clear that later tests showed radically different results—during an era when there was very little intermarriage to change the genetic makeup of American Jews.

Yet, here we are, still arguing about race as determining intelligence. Despite the fact that the greatest proponents of this “theory” deliberately manipulated their data to fit their hypothesis, or in the case of the most renowned psychologist of the 20th century who promoted these ideas, Cyril Burt ( a “scientist that Arthur Jensen at Stanford, the new banner holder for racial superiority praised to the skies) falsified his data, and was a complete fraud:

A year after Burt’s death, Princeton psychologist Leon Kamin began to scrutinize his statistics and found major flaws. For one thing, in three different studies of different numbers of identical twins, Burt reported the same statistical correlation of IQ scores to the third decimal point, which is incredible. There were similar flaws in Burt’s reports dating back as far as 1909. Arthur Jensen insisted that if Burt had been trying to fake his data he would have done a better job of it.

In 1976 London’s Sunday Times reported the shocking fact that Burt’s two field investigators and co-authors of his studies, Margaret Howard and J. Conway, were nonexistent. These two phantom experts had often signed reviews praising Burt and attacking his enemies in the British Journal of Statistical Psychology during the 15 years when Burt was its editor. Burt’s housekeeper admitted to the Sunday Times that she knew he used pseudonyms. It seems clear that Burt had solemnly reported nonexistent tests and studies, and had signed fictitious names to articles he published.

Funny how people cling to their prejudices about white superiority over blacks on the basis of intelligence, and are willing to credit the “Bell Curve’s” brand of “science” even though they dispute the far less disputed and better scientific data and analysis that supports Evolution, Climate Change and the Big Bang. To paraphrase an old adage, you can lead a bigot to the truth but you can’t make him or her accept it if it conflicts with their own practically immutable biases. Arthur Jensen, by the way, just like the fraud Cyril Burt who he idolized, believed that intelligence was 80% inherited. He had the data after all, even if he and his fellow ideologues, such as Murray and Shockley, the authors of the Bell Curve, didn’t have a clue how to properly analyze it.

The research on IQ and race by Arthur Jensen, William Shockley, Herrnstein and Murray (The Bell Curve) and others have not found any significant correlations between race and intelligence. They have found correlations between race and IQ, which has been used to support the notion that some races are intellectually inferior to others. Not surprising is the fact that different researchers using different data get different results. Richard Lynn and James Flynn came to quite different conclusions regarding Asian IQ, for example.

Data showing that the Japanese had higher I.Q.s than people of European descent, for example, prompted the British psychometrician and eugenicist Richard Lynn to concoct an elaborate evolutionary explanation involving the Himalayas, really cold weather, premodern hunting practices, brain size, and specialized vowel sounds. The fact that the I.Q.s of Chinese-Americans also seemed to be elevated has led I.Q. fundamentalists to posit the existence of an international I.Q. pyramid, with Asians at the top, European whites next, and Hispanics and blacks at the bottom.

Here was a question tailor-made for James Flynn’s accounting skills. He looked first at Lynn’s data, and realized that the comparison was skewed. Lynn was comparing American I.Q. estimates based on a representative sample of schoolchildren with Japanese estimates based on an upper-income, heavily urban sample. Recalculated, the Japanese average came in not at 106.6 but at 99.2. Then Flynn turned his attention to the Chinese-American estimates. They turned out to be based on a 1975 study in San Francisco’s Chinatown using something called the Lorge-Thorndike Intelligence Test. But the Lorge-Thorndike test was normed in the nineteen-fifties. For children in the nineteen-seventies, it would have been a piece of cake. When the Chinese-American scores were reassessed using up-to-date intelligence metrics, Flynn found, they came in at 97 verbal and 100 nonverbal. Chinese-Americans had slightly lower I.Q.s than white Americans. (Gladwell 2007)

Dear Andrew Sullivan, with all due respect, you are an ignorant man, and not qualified to judge the matter of whether intelligence is an inherited trait. You’ve been bamboozled by white supremacist hustlers out to make a quick buck off the prejudices of others. People should know their limits. You clearly refuse to accept that, on this subject, you don’t know what the hell you are talking about.

Assuming for the moment that Herman Cain will shortly end his fake campaign for president in order to make some effort at repairing his domestic life, am I right in assuming this is bad news for Mitt Romney? Isn’t his best hope to have as many opponents as possible so that the conservative vote will be split up into many pieces? Or is he better off that he doesn’t have to face someone who might have beat him?