My book tour allowed me to finally spend a few days in Austin, Texas for the first time in my life. It was a lot of fun. I was funny at my dinner for three dozen on Thursday. On Friday I was a little dull at the more public evening for ~150, but, wow, Austin has a lot of terrific people asking tough questions.

Great town.

When I was at Rice University in Houston in the late 1970s, everybody told me I should go spend a weekend in Austin: “It’s much better than Houston,” said all the native Houstonians at Rice, students and faculty. Texans, as you may have noticed, tend to be ardent loyalists about their native soil, so all this testimony in favor of Austin from people from other parts of Texas impressed me. (As I’ve hoped you notice, I am not by nature a contrarian: I give a lot of weight to other people’s judgments.)

But I wound up only spending a couple of hours in 1979 at Austin’s pretty downtown Town (or Ladybird) Lake. They’ve dammed the Colorado River (not the Colorado River, by the way) and created a lake a couple of miles long and maybe a half mile wide, surrounded by a park, right next to all the skyscrapers. I counted nine skyscrapers under construction. Somebody told me that four of the ten tallest skyscrapers under construction in America are in Austin. But the need for more big bridges creates traffic problems.

And I spent a day in Austin in 1993 when Dell Computer flew me in for job interviews. That’s one of the times I came quite close to jobs at companies where the stock options would have been lucrative, along with Intel in 1982 and Microsoft in 1987. But I can’t say they were wrong to ultimately turn me down because I really am, at heart, a bookish intellectual rather than a hard-charging money-maker.

A good friend who worked for me in Chicago in the mid-1980s went to work for Microsoft and had a spectacular career, going skydiving with Bill Gates when my wife and I visited him and his terrified wife in 1988: “We can’t go to the zoo with you tomorrow because we have to jump out of an airplane with Bill Gates and we’re going to die.”

Gates had decided that his consort and the mother of his dynasty would need to be willing to parachute with him, but his girlfriend at the time, no fool, bargained that she’d only be willing if another woman jumped with her. Gates reviewed the company roster and settled on my friend and his bride.

I suspect he would have become the Chief Operating Officer of Microsoft in the 2000s under eventual CEO Steve Ballmer.

But he died in 1999 at age 37 of the same kind of cancer I had survived a couple of years before. (As died Joey Ramone, whom I shook hands with on a Greenwich Village sidewalk in 1982 while he was eating an ice cream cone with his mom. Is cancer infectious?)

My wife is convinced my friend worked himself to death at Microsoft, while I had the good sense, working at a less world-conquering start-up, to go see a couple of doctors about this lump in my armpit. (The first one told me I had probably just pulled a muscle so don’t worry about it. The second one worried and got me a scan.)

OK, I’m getting extremely off track about Austin.

Austin is quite picturesque by Texas standards. Texas in general is extremely flat, but Austin is modestly hilly, so it has a large fraction of the best golf courses in Texas. Austin is also around the Western edge of the green part of Texas so it has a lot of 30 foot trees. It doesn’t have magnificent trees like, say, Philadelphia or Atlanta, but it does have trees.

In terms of architecture, what I could see from walking up and down Sixth Street, Austin’s endless restaurant row, is that Austin has a few monumental old buildings like the huge state capitol and the U. of Texas bell tower (which launched America’s school shooting fad), a lot of recent five-over-one apartment buildings (I stayed on the 1600 block of 6th Street, which is all new five-over-ones), and a lot so 21st Century skyscrapers.

But the authentic look of Austin seems to be concrete block crud architecture. That judgement may sound harsh, but keep in mind that much of the charm of Austin is that real estate is cheaper than in Brooklyn, so the Dream of the 2000s Is Alive in Austin. I kept winding up at Whisler’s at 1816 6th Street, which consists of two hipster bars, about an acre of pictnic tables, and a food truck making superb hamburgers. I was definely the oldest person there.

What Austin does have is a lot of smart white people. I got about a 50% higher turnout in fairly small Austin than in huge Los Angeles.

While Austin is a blue town, it also ranks with Nashville and Atlanta as the cultural capital of Red State America, home to film directors like Terrence Malick, Mike Judge, and Richard Linklater.

Genetics pundit Razib Khan, who participated in my Friday night event with Jeremy Carl of the Claremont Institute, has lived in Austin for 7 years. He says Austin trails San Francisco for sheer brains, but it’s not bad. He suggests that the U. of Texas at Austin go wholly meritocratic on test scores (the rest of Texas’s public colleges can keep their preference for high GPA students from bad high schools), while Berkeley and UCLA are immolating themselves to be Woke. Also, Austin should build a subway under its Town Lake.

Austin is probably the latest town I’ve ever been in. On Saturday round 1 PM, I looked up hamburger restaurants on 6th Street, but the one I wanted to go to didn’ open until 2pm. Sure enough, 6th Street on Saturday was still empty at 1pm but jammed at 2pm.

Next week I’m off to Florida, then to the DC/WV area, then to NYC in early May. The NYC public event is already sold out and expected to be lit.

I’ve been joking for years about how Emma Lazarus has been transmogrified over the years into our one Uncancelable Founding Father:

The Zeroth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, as inscribed on the Statue of Liberty by Founding Father Emma Lazarus, is that everybody in the world has the right to immigrate to America and your so-called First Amendment doesn’t give you any right to object.

From the New York Times opinion page:

Immigrant Detention Should Have No Place in Our Society

April 14, 2024, 6:00 a.m. ET

By Ana Raquel Minian

Dr. Minian is a professor of history at Stanford who has written extensively about immigration to the United States.

… The United States was founded on the notion that it welcomes “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” but it is also a nation of prisoners.

Granted, I’m not a Stanford professor of history, like Ana Raquel Minian, but even I know that the United States was not founded on the 1883 poem The New Colossus.

Interestingly, virtually no authors in the English-speaking world cared about the now-iconic “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” line until the later 1930s. From Google’s Ngram:

The entire Huddled Masses cult seems to be a product of Casablanca Era America.

In 2017, I wrote in a review of the fine miniseries “The People vs. O.J. Simpson:”

I was going to say the O.J. Trial was a formative event for me, but it was more of a confirmatory one. For example, in the miniseries, which is mostly accurate although somewhat pumped up, Johnnie Cochran starts out advising the Dream Team that their ideal juror is a black man, but they need to be worried about allowing black women on the jury because O.J. married a white woman.

But then focus groups reveal that not even Johnnie Cochran is cynical enough: black women love O.J., especially now that that blonde bitch ex-wife is permanently out of the picture. Meanwhile, white feminist prosecutor Marcia Clark thinks loading the jury up with black women is a great idea. …

One theme of the mini-series is spelled out in a derisive comment by Marcia Clark: the prosecution’s secret weapon is that all the alpha male egos on the Dream Team will cause the defense to implode. Like virtually every single thing Marcia says in the show, this sounds reasonable and intelligent under the current conventional wisdom (after all, gender diversity is our strength, and who has heard of a team of highly competitive males ever sorting out their differences, establishing a functional hierarchy, and buckling down to win anything?), but turns out to be wrong. The seemingly chaotic defense team managed, if barely, to battle out their differences and adjust to circumstances, most notably in the internal coup in which Cochran replaced Shapiro at the top. In contrast, the more hierarchical prosecution was doomed by boss lady Marcia’s self-confidence in her own bad judgment, most notably about blacks, women, and, especially, black women.

On November 16, 1968, my dad and I went to the Museum of Science and Industry next to the L.A. Coliseum. When we came out, the football game between #1 USC and #13 Oregon State to determine who would go to the Rose Bowl was just starting, and the scalpers were getting desperate. So my dad was able to buy 2 tickets for whatever was in his pocket, which turned out to be $1.10.

But the seats were in the 89th and last row dead center in the end zone. I could stand on my seat and see our Pontiac Catalina in the parking lot. Yet, the seats turned out to be weirdly perfect for watching two All American running backs. Oregon State’s 250 pound Bill “Earthquake” Enyart dominated the early going with his strength and finished with 135 yards, which was excellent by 1960s standards.

But USC’s tailback, O.J. Simpson, who had recently helped set a world record in the 4×110 yard dash, was even better, carrying the ball 47 times for his college career high of 238 yards. USC won 17-13.

That’s probably not the first time I noticed human biodiversity — that both All-American running backs played tremendously, but the white star wasn’t quite as fast as the black superstar — but it’s one I can date precisely.

The survey question “is crime up”? and lead to lots of wrong answers, in part because even well informed people aware of trends don’t have dates firmly lodged in their heads.

The Washington Post has run a poll and congratulates itself on making its readers much more aware of the drop in violent crime from 2022 to 2023:

Go Biden!

But Washington Post readers are much more clueless than the average American about the huge rise in violent crime in the 2020s:

An embarrassing 11% of Post readers were aware that violent crime was worse in Biden’s 2023 than in Trump’s 2019. This is even despite an ongoing crime wave in DC.

And of course, calling 2019’s lower crime rate “pre-pandemic” rather than “pre-George Floyd” is tendentious.

From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:

The Return of Skepticism
Steve Sailer

April 10, 2024

McKinsey & Company, the famous management consulting firm, has published a number of wildly popular reports during the Great Awokening—such as 2015’s “Diversity Matters,” 2018’s “Delivering Through Diversity,” 2020’s “Diversity Wins,” and 2023’s “Diversity Matters Even More”—asserting that gender and ethnic diversity in corporate management is a magic bullet for making money.

McKinsey is a (highly) for-profit entity not otherwise known for doing disinterested scientific research just to advance the frontiers of knowledge. Then again, neither is McKinsey an investor trying to pick undervalued stocks. Instead, it makes its money telling the C-suite what the bosses want to hear.

But all that didn’t induce much news media skepticism about McKinsey’s reports…until recently as DEI has slightly receded in fashion.

Now, however, the conservative press is finally starting to publicize the old doubts of the business school researchers who live to find ways to outsmart the stock market. …

You might have wondered why, if McKinsey had actually discovered a major, enduring, and well-publicized violation of the notorious Efficient-Market Hypothesis (that it’s tough to consistently beat the stock market using public information), why day traders weren’t sitting at home counting pictures of corporate officers and board members by demographic categories, and getting rich by betting on the more diverse firms.

Note that you don’t have to believe in the Efficient-Market Hypothesis, which has been around more or less since finance economist Eugene Fama’s 1970 paper, but you very much ought to consider it when thinking about how to invest.

Read the whole thing there.

From Fox 26 in Houston:

By Abigail Dye Published April 7, 2024 8:55pm CDT

Man killed during staged robbery, documents state

HOUSTON – In January, FOX 26 reported on what police thought was a robbery turned homicide when a bystander shot the robber, but an investigation now shows that the robbery was fake.

22-year-old Rasshauud Scott was staging a robbery that two victims were in on when Jesus Vargas, a bystander, shot and killed him.

Court records say that Scott was working with William X Winfrey, who instructed Scott to stage the robbery in exchange for money.

The documents say the two victims were in on the robbery, so they could file for U-Visas. According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, a U-Visa is granted to victims of certain crimes to aid law enforcement in solving cases. It grants the victim temporary immigration status, including work authorization; temporary immigration status for qualifying family members of the victim; and the possibility of lawful permanent resident status.

Court documents say police found telegram messages between Scott and Winfrey coordinating the staged robbery.

Documents stating that the two had staged at least two robberies with the same method before, saying they did one the night before Scott was killed on Jan 26 on 4400 Lockwood Drive at the Swift gas station.

In that case, both victims submitted for U-visas and one of them received one.

Another documented case is from February 27, 2023 at 6601 Gessner Road. The documents say all three people who claimed to be victims applied for and were granted U-Visas.

Winfrey is now charged with murder in the killing.

This would make a good old-fashioned Coen Bros. Murphy’s Law movie, like Fargo.

As my wife said while we were watching Blood Simple as the couple’s foolproof plan misfired, “I hope we never have to turn to a life of crime.”

From Free Press:

I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.

Uri Berliner, a veteran at the public radio institution, says the network lost its way when it started telling listeners how to think.

By Uri Berliner

April 9, 2024

Berliner is in the business news section.

… Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.

2011 shows up on a lot of David Rozado’s graphs as the least woke year in the recent media, even better than 2010 and 2009. I suspect that the Democrats had a couple of positive accomplishments for the media to crow over in promoting Obama’s 2012 re-election — Obamacare and killing Osama — so the level of anti-core American hate was muted. Things started to slip in 2012 with the Trayvon Martin – George Zimmerman fiasco because white journalists tended to believe Black Twitter implicitly.

By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. …

From 2017-2019, NPR had RussiaGate to obsess over. But then that embarrassingly evaporated in 2019. At that point in August 2019 the NYT switched to its Plan B to dump Trump — Racism round the clock. Berliner doesn’t say that NPR did that, just that it went nuts over George Floyd in May 2020. CEO John Lansing (a Joe Biden-lookalike) announced:

In confessional language he said the leaders of public media, “starting with me—must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from white privilege in our careers. We must understand the unconscious bias we bring to our work and interactions. And we must commit ourselves—body and soul—to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions.”

He declared that diversity—on our staff and in our audience—was the overriding mission, the “North Star” of the organization. Phrases like “that’s part of the North Star” became part of meetings and more casual conversation.

According to an NPR press release last year, “The main goal of his tenure was uniting NPR and Member stations under the “North Star” of diversifying the newsroom, content, and audiences. Under Lansing’s leadership, NPR’s executive team has evolved to include more than 40% people of color, from 9% in 2019.”

In other words, I’m okay, Jack. I’m CEO. But you younger white guys are hosed.

Most visible was a burgeoning number of employee resource (or affinity) groups based on identity. …

They included MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latinx employees at NPR); NPR Noir (black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR; Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre (Jewish heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees at NPR).

… They became a priority for NPR’s union, SAG-AFTRA—an item in collective bargaining. The current contract, in a section on DEI, requires NPR management to “keep up to date with current language and style guidance from journalism affinity groups” and to inform employees if language differs from the diktats of those groups. In such a case, the dispute could go before the DEI Accountability Committee.

In essence, this means the NPR union, of which I am a dues-paying member, has ensured that advocacy groups are given a seat at the table in determining the terms and vocabulary of our news coverage. …

And this, I believe, is the most damaging development at NPR: the absence of viewpoint diversity. …

I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None. …

Because for all the emphasis on our North Star [Diversity!], NPR’s news audience in recent years has become less diverse, not more so. Back in 2011, our audience leaned a bit to the left but roughly reflected America politically; now, the audience is cramped into a smaller, progressive silo.

Despite all the resources we’d devoted to building up our news audience among blacks and Hispanics, the numbers have barely budged. In 2023, according to our demographic research, 6 percent of our news audience was black, far short of the overall U.S. adult population, which is 14.4 percent black. And Hispanics were only 7 percent, compared to the overall Hispanic adult population, around 19 percent. Our news audience doesn’t come close to reflecting America. It’s overwhelmingly white and progressive, and clustered around coastal cities and college towns.

From a Pioneer Works issue that tells you more than everything you could possibly want to know about the impact of Adderall on 21st Century writers:

Adderall House Style
How to know if a writer is on the stuff.
By Amber A’Lee Frost

… PARANOIA

“But what if he did, though?”

Paranoia is a common side effect of prolonged stimulant use, and when you’ve convinced yourself that someone is out to get you, it makes sense to find, expose and attack them. You rationalize your hostility as reciprocation, self-preservation, and self-defense. Paranoia also manifests in textual analysis.

Freud said there was little difference between the philosopher and the schizophrenic; both see a conspiracy in the text. A writer may convince themselves of these conspiracies by misinterpreting what they believe to be hidden evidence. On the page, this can manifest as outright accusations (these podcasts are all in cahoots to soft-launch fascism with Peter Thiel funding), or “deep reads” (Joker is a dangerous call to arms designed to activate mass shooter incels). Sometimes the conspiracies aren’t even malevolent; Business Insider published “43 Talor Swift songs, interpreted from a queer perspective,” trawling her lyrics for encrypted confessions of her lesbianism, indecipherable to all but her most insightful fans. Paranoia also tends to self-flatter.

Adderall inspires baseless suspicions and intensifies the desire to decode the uncoded; you can always find sinister signs and patterns if you’re looking hard enough.

“Ha-ha,” I say, while pondering whether to get that third cup of coffee.

From the review in the Washington Post of right-of-center novelist Lionel Shriver’s new book Mania:

The story takes place from 2011 to 2027 in an alternative America where, for most of that time, something called the Mental Parity movement holds sway. In the novel, the so-called last acceptable bias — discrimination against those considered, um, not so smart — is being stamped out. Words such as “intelligent” and “sharp” are forbidden, thus making problematic the question of how to refer to books like “My Brilliant Friend” and everyday devices such as “smartphones.”

Shriver’s choice to set her novel in an alternative timeline recent past is an interesting one. Her The Mandibles was set in a somewhat vague future, where society is in decay but could not be said to be quite post-apocalyptic like Brave New World or 1984, a bit like Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange or Walker Percy’s 1971 novel Love in the Ruins, which is set in a 1983 that rather resembles America in the 2020s.

It sounds like a Nurture version of Mike Judge’s Nature documentary Idiocracy.

Yet, imagining a plausible future can be exhausting to anyone above a certain age, and even the present is a distraction. Are you sure you understand 2024? I’m not at all sure. Maybe you should skim Twitter some more to make sure you are up to date on 2024 trends?

So why not set your novel in an alternative timeline in a recent past that you remember well, such as Shriver’s choice of 2011 to 2017?

I could imagine writing an alternative timeline novel of the Great Awokening (except that writing fiction is really hard).

… “Don’t ask where anyone went to school. Don’t tell anyone where you went to school, even if you went to Yale — well, especially if you went to Yale! … Don’t ever mention, or fish for, IQ, obviously, but also SAT and ACT scores or grade point averages. You’re even meant to keep your trap shut about how well you did on newspaper quizzes on the major stories of the week. And forget asking or telling about a performance on Jeopardy!”

Uh-oh, reminiscing about my performance on Jeopardy! is about 5% of my material …

… in 2015, the Democratic Party seizes on Donald Trump as their “shoo-in” candidate for, among myriad other reasons, the fact that “he never reads.”

Okay, that’s funny.