INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE UPDATE: Boy, the email’s just pouring in on this one. Charles Oliver responds to an earlier emailer:

The writer who said he can’t think of any famous couples consisting of a white man and a black woman has to be blind or he just refuses to see things that don’t fit his worldview.: David Bowie-Iman, Diahann Carroll-Vic Damone, Lena Horne-Lennie Hayton, William Cohen-Janet Langhart, Mariah Carey-Tommy Mottola, Robert DeNiro and every woman he’s has every dated, Naomi Campbell and most of the men she has dated. Matthew McCougnehey-Janet Jackson, Robin Givens-Svetozar Marinkovic, Roxie Roker-sy Krazitz (she was on The Jeffersons and they are the parents of Lenny Kravitz), Whoopi Goldberg and Ted Danson and Frank Langella, Diana Ross-Gene Simmons (I believe both of her husbands were white as well), Traci (first black on Baywatch) Bingham and her husband.

There’s certainly a lot more. Those are just the ones I thought of off the top of my head.

Yeah, though I have a few quibbles: David Bowie (as another reader noted) might plausibly be considered a “white alien” — and as for Mariah Carey, well, she’s black only by courtesy of a rather strict application of the “one drop” rule. Which brings me to a story:

My brother, who looks like a taller, skinnier version of me, was once asked by a Nigerian on a bus in Nigeria if he was black. Uh, no, my brother replied, looking surprised. Well, the Nigerian replied, we can’t tell — all these Americans come over here and say they’re black, but they look white to us.

MAX POWER tries to demonstrate the linkage-clout of InstaPundit with a comparison of traffic referred to him by mentions here, on Kausfiles, and at The American Prospect. InstaPundit wins overwhelmingly: 2000, to 30, to 15.

But what “Max” doesn’t mention is that my link said that his pseudonym “sounds like a porn star.” I’m willing to bet that neither Kaus nor TAP said anything quite so likely to make people click through.

THEY’RE NOT PEACE ACTIVISTS — they just want the Israelis to lose. That’s the gist of Chris Seamans’ post on an oped from a self-described peace activist.

MEGAN MCARDLE looks at number of guns versus amount of crime and even has cool graphics.

HERE COME THE CHRISTIAN BLOGGERS. I think he’s left out some, but I don’t tend to sort people that way so I’ll have to think a bit to see if I can remember who it is.

UPDATE: Well, there’s Amy Wellborn, for one.

PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH says that Desmond Tutu is an idiot for characterizing Israel’s positions as apartheid-like.

Tutu, in all honesty, was always overrated. What I see here is not so much idiocy, but the desperate desire of a guy who hasn’t gotten a lot of public approbation in a while, and wants it back. He’ll get it, too — though mostly from people whose approbation is nothing to wear with pride.

I’VE ALWAYS SAID that all the twaddle about “journalistic ethics” was just that. Now here’s proof.

I’M NOT A TEASE, any more than Richard Nixon was a crook. Hey, wait a minute. . . . Anyway, reader Steve Carroll sends this plaintive request on the topic of interracial marriage:

I’m anxious to see a selection of what your readers had to say about that interracial marriage post. You nailed it exactly, in my opinion. It especially drives me crazy to see references to “our women” from racial groups. Anyways, you teased that you would post more about the topic later. Just add my vote to those interested in seeing that.

Okay. Here are some samples of the email I got — not as much as I got about Scientific American, but far more than I’ve gotten defending Yasser Arafat. Reader John Chang wrote:

I don’t think there’s any sort of racist assumption on the part of Raspberry.

I think the dynamics of marriage between black women and men reflect the other dynamics that are currently in play in society. I won’t try to go into all the details here, but while black men are much more likely to marry non-blacks (and are often more desired by non-black women), black women are more likely to indicate a desire to marry black men. Conversely, non-black men will often place black women lower on their choice of dating prospects. I know this sounds a bit ridiculous, but this sort of stuff does take place. It’s very similar to the dynamics that take place within the Asian-American community, where the women are much more likely to marry whites than the
men (for whatever personal or cultural reason, which I choose not to delve into at this time).

Another reader who prefers to remain anonymous writes:

Intelligent people seldom marry outside their race because it makes very little sense to do so. The fact of the matter is that only a tiny minority of the population as a whole is in favor of interracial marriage and as a result discrimination is a big problem. Marrying someone who is obviously not of your race is like making the decision to devote your life to becoming a world renowned concert pianist and then taking a hatchet and hacking off your left pinky — it makes no sense given the current prevailing attitudes of all races.

The majority of people who marry outside their race do so, unfortunately, to make a statement; “look at me, I’m colorblind and I’m putting my marriage where my mouth is”. Most of these people are nitwits employed by universities who see racism everywhere.

The first part — about prejudice — may be true. But if this sort of consideration really determined matters of the heart, would anyone be gay? The second part, about “making a statement,” is just wrong. There were some marriages like this back when I was a kid, but the shock-value, or the PC-value, of interracial marriages is largely nil. Indeed, my experience is that as a white guy you’re as likely to get flak as praise for dating nonwhites — especially from nonwhites. Stuart Buck writes:

Maybe Raspberry’s is neither racist nor implying that black women are racist. He may just be realistic about the prospects of black women marrying white men. In my experience, black-white couples are overwhelmingly likely to involve a black man marrying a white woman. One web article claims that in 1990, black-white couples featured a white husband only 28% of the time. Think of famous couples or black men who date/marry white women: Clarence and Virginia Thomas, Sidney Poitier and his wife, Halle Berry’s parents, Mariah Carey’s parents, Edwin Moses, Kobe Bryant, Montel Williams, Wesley Snipes, O.J. Simpson — the list goes on and on. Whereas I simply can’t think of any famous white men married to or dating black women. There may be a few, but none come to mind.

As an empirical matter, this may be true. But if black women are failing to marry — and if, as William Raspberry says, this is a terrible thing for society — then should we simply accept these prejudices (for that’s what they are, really)? I’m not saying that we should force people to marry, of course, but Raspberry might tell these women that it’s better to marry a good man who’s not black than to stay single. Or maybe he doesn’t believe that. Which takes us back to my original question.

UPDATE: Reader Tom Gates writes:

The comment from the anonymous person who said that people marry outside their race doesn’t make sense, or to make a statement made me laugh because the person is displaying profound ignorance and/or stupidity.

I grew up in Hawaii, and the MAJORITY of marriages are inter-racial. I married my Japanese-American wife because she was beautiful, and I fell in love plain and simple. Pick your combo among the major ethnic groups (AJA, “haole” or Caucasian, Chinese, Hawaiian, other Pacific Islanders, etc.), and you’ll find most marry out their ethnic group. The only exception is the Chinese, and I can’t remember the University of Hawaii study which examined this. In California, the trend is like Hawaii.

Some practical problems that arise are when the Feds or your local school district attempt to pigeon-hole your child based on ethnicity, and the kids get to alternate ethnicity every year or so! I speak from experience, and it can lead to some funny discussions.

Yeah, if anything I would say there’s probably a mild built-in preference for “exoticity” (that is, difference) among a lot of people, which makes good evolutionary sense of course.

STILL MORE ON SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: A reader writes:

As a 30+ year subscriber to Scientific American, I think the decline can be explained in one sentence: The main articles used to be exclusively written by scientists about their field of expertise, but now most are written by journalists. They have gone from being a journal where scientists exchanged information on the state of the art to just another glossy magazine about science. In addition, the editorial slant has gotten more and more pronounced as they evolved from written by scientists to written by journalists. In the 70s, an article in SciAm was considered a major publication event in the career of an academic – an acknowledgement that you were at the top of the heap in your field.

And reader Larry Thacker serves up this historical nugget:

Your Scientific American post jogged my memory about a TV show I recently watched about airplanes or Boeing. The show mentioned the folks at Scientific American Magazine and their thoughts about the future of the airplane back in the early 1900’s. I can not remember the shows name, the cable channel, or the exact quote, but thanks to google I was able too find this small quote: “To affirm that the airplane is going to revolutionize the future is to be guilty of the wildest exaggeration …” –Scientific American Magazine, 1910

Yeah, that’s of a piece with their nanotech article from a few years back. To be fair, they’ve backtracked considerably on their nano-ridicule since then, in light of the response they got. I expect they’ll do the same thing here, though probably without admitting any errors along the way.

Reader Carl Raymond Crites was one of many noting that John Rennie (who responded to Lomborg and questioned his credentials) doesn’t have much in the way of scientific credentials himself. According to this interview in The Moment, “Mr. Rennie has a background in biology. He has worked in biological research, but he decided that he enjoyed explaining science more than doing research. Since then, he has worked in scientific publications, and he became editor-in- chief of Scientific American last year.” His sole degree appears to be a bachelor’s degree in biology from Yale. Crites notes:

My seventeen year old daughter is graduating from high school this month at the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science at the University of North Texas at Denton TX. For two years part, of her curriculum has including working as a laboratory assistant to her physics professor, Dr. Duncan Weathers . Dr. Winters uses Resonance Ionization Spectroscopy for sputtering analysis. John Wong, of The Moment, could honestly say that Abigail has a background in mathematics and science and that she has worked in physics research.

As to the degeneration of Scientific American over the years, the comments of your readers Andy Freeman, Kevin Thompson, and George Zachar are absolutely on point. Interesting to me is that the decay began about two decades ago when John Rennie and some of his like-minded colleagues came on board the editorial staff. They included Timothy M. Beardsley, Marguerite Holloway, John Horgan, and Gary Stix. It was at about this time that the magazine began to feature fewer reports of research by bona fide scientists and engineers (e.g., Roman Aqueducts and the North Atlantic Current and the Ice Age) and instead the readers were treated to the distilled wisdom of the “science writers” such as Rennie, Stix, Holloway, et al. As your readers correctly point out, the magazine developed a “green” agenda and a markedly left wing bias to almost all the reporting. I can add little to the comments that your readers have made. For more than twenty years I read and saved every issue. I finally bailed out about ten years ago.

I would mention an interesting point made by Wong in the 1995 article in The Moment that I cited above. In response to Wong’s question as to who are the main readers of Scientific American, Rennie answered, “Surprisingly, only about 4% of the readers are research scientists.” It might be surprising to Rennie and his journalistic colleagues but it should not be to any of your readers who had formerly looked to the publication for objective information on scientific matters presented by credentialed scientists and engineers.

Not very impressive.

MIKE GODWIN EXPLAINS why Hollywood wants to hack your computer.

CAIR IS ATTACKING DANIEL PIPES, and you can read Daniel Pipes’ response here. I’ve got to say, after CAIR’s dishonest poll — and its even more dishonest explanations of what it did with the poll — I don’t believe much of anything I hear from these guys, and I don’t think they have much credibility generally.

MICHAEL MOORE has lost it, writes former Moore fan Michael Mallon in The Vancouver Sun:

You are invited far too frequently, in Moore’s recent books and films and TV shows, to cheer the man on. Once again, good marketing — a working-class hero is something to be — but often, queasy viewing or reading. In all his work, the blue-collar act often shades over into dangerous anti-intellectual class warfare, especially repugnant coming from someone who lives in a $1.27-million US apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and sends his kid to private school. . . .

Isn’t that what the other side is supposed to be doing? Generalizing, simplifying, pretending to be jes’ one of the common folks? You might argue that when you fight with wolves like General Motors and the Republican Party you must use all tools at your disposal. After all, by any means necessary, said Malcolm X, and the left needs as many strong, charismatic voices as it can get in these days of Bush and Campbell and Le Pen. But Moore’s failings undermine his credibility, and end up undermining the credibility of all voices of protest.

Gee, undermining the credibility of all voices of protest? I thought that was Chomsky’s job. I guess the CIA’s disinformation budget must have gone up, if Moore can afford that apartment. . . .

LOMBORG UPDATE: I’m still getting email but one point that someone made is worth noting now: Lomborg’s critics show the same concern with credentials as Michael Bellesiles’ defenders did.

INSTAPUNDIT makes the Japan Times!

NOT SO FAST: Martin Sieff writes that a Le Pen victory, while unlikely, is not as near-impossible as most pundits are making it sound.

THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN POSTS have generated a lot of email. (So did the interracial marriage post, but more on that later). It was about 90% unfavorable to Scientific American. Here are a couple of examples. Reader Ross Nordeen writes:

To clearly see how bad Scientific American has become, one only has to look at the disparity in the treatment of two people, Paul Ehrlich and Bjorn Lomborg. Ehrlich, who has been wildly wrong about so much, received a fawning profile in the October 2000 issue while Lomborg is subject to repeated attacks for the sin of writing a balanced book on the environment.

Yeah, Ehrlich has a track record that puts him squarely among the “creation scientists” in terms of his legitimate ability to claim the title of “science” for his work, but he does continue to get respect from a lot of people who should — and I suspect, do — know better. Reader Kevin Thompson says:

I agree with Andy Freeman about the decline of this once-great publication. I received a gift subscription as a young boy in the late 1960s, and devoured every issue. I learned a lot of fascinating things. I still remember a neat drawing of how rapidly-rotating neutron stars can produce radio waves.

Alas, over the subsequent decades, Scientific American has become less and less about science. I remember one issue in the last year which had only one (1!) article about real science. The rest were about specific technologies or social issues. During this same period, the non-science content has not only grown (why does an article about injuries due to small arms in war-torn countries belong here?), but displayed an increasingly liberal bent.

The liberal bent started with the steady beat of nuclear disarmament. It has expanded to regurgitate liberal dogma on global warming, anti-religious bias, reasons why missile defense technology won’t work or is a bad idea, the joys of conservation, and, of course, the twin catastrophes of ecological destruction and overpopulation. I distinctly remember one editorial responding to a complaining letter with the statement that Scientific American should serve as a vehicle to promote social issues. After more than thirty years as a subscriber, I reluctantly decided not to renew my subscription this year. The content I loved is gone, and the new content does not do justice to the title.

Reader George Zachar writes:

I’m a longtime SciAm subscriber. They’ve gone whole hog for global warming, as highlighted by their pitched battle with Skeptical Environmentalist author Bjørn Lomborg. They also do a lot of cultural relativist stuff, root cause-y sociology, articles blaring “the [fill in the blank] is threatened with extinction”, predictable-outcome gun control pieces, etc. etc. Sciam is also a willing outlet for press releases by politically correct programs (AIDS research, eg) looking for funding.

My non-cancellation is clearly the triumph of hope over experience.

On the other hand, reader Aaron Bergman writes:

“Churlish”? How would you like it if someone from a field completely unrelated to yours tells you you’re full of crap based on doing some internet research? The sheer hubris of Lomborg is amazing. What’s depressing is that so few recognize it. You cannot make an informed critique of science based solely on secondary sources.

Why are people so surprised when someone who hasn’t gone through any education in a field proceeds to call the vast majority of its practitioners corrupt or naive? Do you dispute the completely thorough refutation of pretty much everything Lomborg has written, or would you rather keep attacking the messenger?

Well, the piece didn’t look like a thorough refutation of Lomborg to me. And I don’t think this is a very fair characterization of Lomborg’s work: since he’s a statistician, examining statistical data, I don’t really see that he’s out of his field, nor is his work any more riddled with citations to secondary literature and websites than, say, Stuart Pimm’s latest book. And Scientific American’s attitude throughout — including its rather nasty demand that he remove its criticisms from his website response — has not been the attitude of a disinterested seeker of truth.

But hell, I’m a lawyer. Everybody offers their opinion on what the law is or ought to be. And I can deal with that. And as a lawyer, I’m pretty good at telling when people are blowing smoke. I’m an agnostic on global warming; I had a lengthy airplane conversation with a pretty famous atmospheric chemist from Berkeley (I’m blanking on his name at the moment) who made a convincing case, but I’ve heard some convincing refutations, too. What I can say with certainty is that the public argument over global warming has long since become one of orthodoxy treating its critics with disdain. That doesn’t prove that the orthodox are wrong, of course. But such a degree of defensiveness bespeaks a lack of confidence in the data.