Oscar nominations by gender - Best Makeup and Hairstyling

The Academy Award for Best Makeup and Hairstyling sounds like the least masculine of all the categories, but men have earned about 72% of the nominations over the last ten years.

It turns out that the nominations tend to go less to romantic comedies where the makeup and hairstyling challenge is to make the 41-year-old leading lady look 29 and more to sci-fi, horror, and fantasy movies that employ nerdier boy genius inventor types.

The category wasn't regularized until 1981 following the impressive prosthetic work by Christopher Tucker for David Lynch's The Elephant Man. Before then, it had only been given out twice on a special recognition basis. The current movie Argo celebrates John Chambers (played by John Goodman) who won a special Oscar for Planet of the Apes. Chambers also had a long working relationship with CIA agent Tony Mendez conjuring up disguises for American spies. (Ironically, the dark, unobtrusive master-of-disguise Mendez is played, in something of a non-triumph of movie non-magic, by tall golden boy Ben Affleck.)

The most honored make-up artist is Rick Baker with seven Oscars, starting with An American Werewolf in London and including Men in Black. The target demographic for his creations are, roughly, 12-year-old boys.

Oscar nominations by gender - Costume

There have long been quiet but persistent complaints of discrimination against women fashion designers in the NY-Paris-Milan world of haute couture. This 2005 NYT article lays out the evidence than an Old Boys Club of male designers discriminates against women. 

We can test whether women are as discriminated against in the parallel but separate world of designing clothes for movies by looking at Wikipedia's lists of Oscar nominees. Best Costume Design nominations generally go for work on period films or fantasy films aimed at girls. For example, the current nominees are three 19th Century period films -- Lincoln, Anna Karenina, and Les Miserables versus two versions of Snow White: Mirror, Mirror (a film with a wild Eurasian aesthetic, centered on the Punjab) and Snow White and the Huntsman.

So, Costume Design Nominations aren't an apples-to-apples direct test of the sense of where fashion is headed next fall, like haute couture designers attempt to do. Instead, Hollywood honorees are designed for accurate and exquisite reproductions of past fashions, usually with some attempt to make them accessible to current tastes. Either that or some kind of timeless fairy tale fantasy.

Thus, Hollywood's top costume designers are conservative restorationists or fantasists, rather than on the fashion forward cutting edge like the Old Boys Club of New York design. And, to be a name in high fashion requires relentless self-promotion.

Still, these Oscar nominations allow a sort of oranges and tangerines comparison.

The Best Costume Design award was invented in 1948, and Edith Head quickly emerged as the most honored designer, garnering 35 nominations and 8 Oscars. (The character Edna Mode in Pixar's The Incredibles reminds many of Edith Head.) Before Head's rise to dominance in the later 1940s, the most famous Hollywood designers tended to be male, such as Adrian, who designed Dorothy's ruby red slippers. "Gowns by Adrian" was a prominent credit in many 1930s movies. Wikipedia explains that Head revolutionized movie dress design by actually listening to the leading ladies.

Head was known for her low-key working style and, unlike many of her male contemporaries, usually consulted extensively with the female stars with whom she worked. As a result she was a favorite among many of the leading female stars of the 1940s and '50s such as Ginger Rogers, Bette Davis, Sophia Loren, Barbara Stanwyck, Shirley MacLaine, Anne Baxter, Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, and Natalie Wood. In fact, Head was frequently "loaned out" by Paramount to other studios at the request of their female stars.

Over the last ten years, women have earned 80% of nominations.

So, designing clothes for Hollywood is much less male-dominated than designing clothes for the runway.

Oscar nominations by gender - Writing

As you know, I love lists of people assembled by other people for other purposes than my own. Lately I've been tabulating lists of Oscar nominees over the decades, which provide unanticipated insights into popularity, social approval, and accomplishment. 

For example, we can use Oscar nominations for Best Screenplay to track the progress of women. 

Over the last 10 years (2003 through the current 2012 nominees) women have earned 14% of the Best Adapted Screenplay nominations. This is up from 11% in the 1930s. 

In the Best Original Screenplay, women have earned 15% of the nominations over the last 10 years. In the 1930s, women earned 15% of this category's nominations, too. 

My vague impression is that women screenwriters were particularly influential back in the silent movie era before the end of the 1920s. For example, Frances Marion wrote scores of movies from 1912 onward, winning Oscars in 1930 and 1932. 

The coming of the talkies from 1927 onward, with their need for expertly-crafted dialogue, led to a large importation of New York playwrights. Herman J. Mankiewicz famously telegraphed Ben Hecht: "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.”

The New York men brought with them the more patriarchal tradition of the stage, where the playwright is king. In contrast, film is, by nature, a more collaborative medium, encouraging less domineering women to play an important role.

In contrast, Oscar nominations for the Production Directions/Art Direction/Set Decoration category went 100% to men in the 1930s. 

I'm not sure why that is, so I went to learn more about the leading set decorator, Cedric Gibbons of MGM, who received 39 Oscar nominations during his career. Wikipedia says about Cedric Gibbons:

He retired in 1956 with about 1,500 films credited to him: however, his contract with MGM dictated that he receive credit as art director for every MGM film released in the United States, even though other designers may have done the bulk of the work. Even so, his actual hands-on art direction may have been on about 150 films. 

In 1930, Gibbons married actress Dolores del Río and co-designed their house in Santa Monica, an intricate Art Deco residence influenced by Rudolf Schindler. They divorced in 1941, the year he married actress Hazel Brooks with whom he remained until his death at the age of 67. ...

Gibbons' nephew is Billy F. Gibbons, guitarist/vocalist for the rock band ZZ Top.

Well, that's interesting. Makes sense, too: ZZ Top has a better sense of art direction than almost any other American band. In fact, Billy F. Gibbons is so expert at the business of show biz that I can't find any copies of their famous 1983 music video Sharp Dressed Man online to illustrate my point.

The Wikipedia entry on the hirsute bluesman is a little more exact about the relationship between the two Gibbons:

Gibbons was born to Frederick Royal (Freddie) and Lorraine Gibbons in the Tanglewood suburb of Houston, Texas, United States. His father was an entertainer, orchestra conductor, and concert pianist who worked alongside second cousin, art director Cedric Gibbons, for Samuel Goldwyn at MGM Studios ... . While attending Warner Brothers' art school in Hollywood, California, Gibbons engaged with his first bands including The Saints, Billy G & the Blueflames, and The Coachmen.

I'm reminded of singer Bonnie Raitt, who was famous in the 1970s and 1980s for her authentic blues style. I'd always sort of assumed she'd grown up the child of sharecroppers in East Texas. Bonnie, it turns out, is the daughter of Broadway musical star John Raitt, the star of the first production of Carousel on Broadway in 1945. He starred opposite Doris Day in the 1957 movie musical The Pajama Game.

Neill Blomkamp's "Elysium"

Here's the plot description of Boer-Canadian director Neill Blomkamp's second movie (following "District 9"), scheduled for release in August:

In the year 2159, two classes of people exist: the very wealthy who live on a pristine man-made space station called Elysium, and the rest, who live on an overpopulated, ruined Earth. Secretary Rhodes (Jodie Foster), a hard line government official, will stop at nothing to enforce anti-immigration laws and preserve the luxurious lifestyle of the citizens of Elysium. That doesn’t stop the people of Earth from trying to get in, by any means they can. When unlucky Max (Matt Damon) is backed into a corner, he agrees to take on a daunting mission that, if successful, will not only save his life, but could bring equality to these polarized worlds.

I get the feeling that Damon might be surprised to find out what Foster thinks is Blomkamp's point.

The Spirit of the Age

Looking back over a long enough period of time, you can see how golf course architecture in America followed the same general stylistic evolutions as building architecture, enjoying a golden age in the 1920s and then enduring an eat-your-vegetables modernism in the 1950s and 1960s. It's not at all clear that Mies van der Rohe and Robert Trent Jones saw much connection between each other's work in 1950, but today it's obvious that the spirit of the age -- streamlining, simplicity, sleekness, and so forth -- pervaded the skyscrapers and golf courses of the Postwar Era.

But it's hard to tell what's going on in your own time. For example, prestige golf course architecture in the 21st Century is devoted to achieving a look of Old Money WASP Higher Scruffiness that's hard to equate with much else going on in the arts today, outside of the design of some recent college dormitories. (Golfers pay a lot of college tuition bills, so that may not be coincidental.) Above is the 16th hole designed by Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore at one of the first courses to debut in 2013, Streamsong-Red on an old phosphate strip mine in central Florida. 

Most golf course architects prefer to avoid discussing their style and instead talk about the functionality of their design (how it challenges the golfer, etc.). It could be that golf course architecture is evolving off in its own direction, divorced from the rest of the culture. Or, perhaps in a generation, we'll look at golf courses from the 2010s and be instantly reminded of, say, video games or hipster fashions or whatever from the 2010s because they all share common characteristics that will be glaringly obvious to people in 2043 even if they are baffling today.

A few months ago, I visited a half dozen of the newer golf courses in Palm Springs. It must be an uncomfortable time for golf course designers in Palm Springs because the current Mid-Atlantic steampunk (or whatever) look is so antithetical to the natural blank slate phoniness of Palm Springs. Southern California's low desert is a sprawling monument to post-War notions of design Modernism, now carefully tended to by a huge number of aging gay men formerly employed in Hollywood. It's about as far from the current aesthetic in golf design as is possible.

The most beautiful Palm Springs golf course was Desert Willow, a late 1990s design where Hurzdan and Fry went up into the mountains and brought down shrubs native to about 4,000 foot in elevation, then planted them alongside the fairways and watered the heck out of them to keep them alive in the low desert. (This is supposed to be "environmentalist.")

But, the most interesting development from an aesthetic standpoint was the newest, Escena, where Nicklaus, post-Crash, embraced the flatness and boringness of the desert in a tribute to Rat Pack-era modernism. (The steel and glass clubhouse appears to be a tribute to Frank Sinatra's house in Palm Springs.) I wouldn't be surprised that Nicklaus was originally intending to push around great piles of dirt, but then the developer suffered reverses in 2008, forcing a more modest, more old fashioned Modernist design philosophy.

I, for one, salute our new heavy-browed overlords

Harvard geneticist George Church's plan for reviving Neanderthals -- 

You would certainly have to create a cohort, so they would have some sense of identity. They could maybe even create a new neo-Neanderthal culture and become a political force.

-- is pondered by evolutionary theorist Gregory Cochran, who sees good money to be made in it.

Their minds might differ in interesting ways, and that could be profitable. People think of Neanderthals as stupid, mostly because they lost out to us, but we really don’t know whether they were or not. Their brains were certainly bigger than those of modern humans. For all we know, they were smarter.

Maybe our ancestors were just meaner than the Neanderthals.

Why L.A. lags in hipster fashions

I constantly read about hipsters, but I don't actually see many while walking down the street. I suspect that hipster styles and Los Angeles's climate just don't go together. 

The basic idea is to look like President McKinley wasn't assassinated and the whole 20th Century thing never happened. Back in the old days, people wore a lot of layers of wool because everybody lived in England or Cleveland or someplace and the coal for your stove wasn't free. To the eye of a Californian with central heating, everybody in sepia-toned photos looks awfully sweaty under all those clothes.

California was central to a major post-1960s revolution in how men dressed, as guys started to wear clothes light enough for the climate (e.g., the Silicon Valley casual look), even at the expense of giving up all those potentially fashionable coats and hats.

So, Southern California is just too warm most of the time for ironic old fashions best suited for Portland. Every so often on a cool winter's day here, I see somebody wearing some Portland-style hipster garb, but then the sun comes back out and it gets uncomfy for them.

A few years ago, my nonagenarian grandfather drove himself to Urban Outfitters and bought one of his grandsons a present of a wool cap, the kind of tweed thingie that Bobbie Jones' caddie at St. Andrews probably wore. When unwrapping the package, my son pretended to be enthusiastic about wearing his grandfather's fashion choice, until he saw it, and decided it was cool. He wore it everyday (and I started seeing pictures in the press of Brad Pitt wearing an identical one). But then February arrived and it got too warm for hipster clothes.

Basically, Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Rule of Proximity to the Canadian Border applies.

Teens without drivers licenses increasing

Agnostic posts a graph showing the percentage of teens with drivers' licenses has fallen steadily since its Fast-Times-At-Ridgemont-High peak. 

Generally, it's much harder to pass the driver's test now. Kids flunk it multiple times. Also, there are all sorts of restrictions on new drivers to prevent the kind of horrific stories you used to read in the papers about four 16-year-olds being killed in a one car accident celebrating the driver's 16th birthday.

Drunk driving is very expensive now. I recently overheard one intelligent looking youth explaining to his less acute looking friend that a single DUI would cost you about $10,000 all told -- a good round number to memorize.

I gather that bicycling is once again popular nationally, but it's hard to see that here in L.A., where bicycle riding is a tiny fraction of what it was during its peak in the 1970s. Too many accidents, I guess. I rode to school everyday for a couple of years in high school, taking only one day off after I got flattened by a car. But that was the 1970s, and good sense was not abundant.

Overall, kids just don't go out much anymore. They have glowing screens at home. 

The Definitive "Argo" Takedown

There seems to be talk that Ben Affleck's movie about hostages in Iran in 1979-80, Argo, will win the Best Picture Oscar (even though Ben didn't get a Best Director nod). 

I thought Argo was fine as a satisfactory example of the Married Couple's Date Movie, which has become rare. But as Best Picture? 

Noah Millman supplies the definitive Argo takedown.

Some facts about Raymond Chandler

Detective novelist Raymond Chandler, creator of the Philip Marlowe mysteries (such as The Big Sleep) is likely the most important literary figure in Los Angeles history. 

45 Calibrations of Raymond Chandler 

Peter Straub

1. Not long before his death, he wrote, "I have lived my life on the edge of nothing." 

2. Those who may speak honestly of the ambiguous but striking privileges granted by a life conducted on the edge of nothing tend to have in common that they have been faced early on with certain kinds of decisively formative experiences. Although it is never mentioned in considerations of his work, when he was six years old and living with his divorced mother in Nebraska, his alcoholic father, already more an absence than a presence, one day disappeared entirely. Also never mentioned is that in 1918 he was sent into trench warfare as a twenty-year-old sergeant in the Canadian Army and several times led his platoon into direct machine-gun fire. After that, he said later, "nothing is ever the same again." ...

23. He understood that he was both romantic and sentimental. 

24. After his first four books, he thought Philip Marlow was romantic and sentimental, too, and decided that on the whole Marlowe was probably too good to be satisfied with working as a private detective. ...

If Chandler wasn't so romantic and sentimental, he would have figured that out faster. The Tough Guy with a Heart of Gold might be the single most winning formula in novels and movies.

27. He was unfailingly generous to young writers. ...

31. He was ripely endowed with the capacities for both love and scorn, sometimes for the same thing. One reason he liked Los Angeles was that he thought it had the personality of a paper cup. ...

34. He invented a first-person voice remarkable for its sharpness and accuracy of observation, its attention to musical cadence, purity of syntax and unobtrusive rightness of word order, a metaphorical richness often consciously self-parodic, its finely adjusted speed of movement, sureness of touch and its capacity to remain internally consistent and true to itself over a great emotional range. This voice proved to be unimaginably influential during his lifetime and continues to be so now. Real earned authority sometimes has that effect.  

I'd be interested in just how fast Chandler became influential. You can see him being parodied in Bugs Bunny cartoons within a few years of his first novel.

35. None of his imitators, not even the most accomplished, ever came close to surpassing or even matching him. 

36. He wrote his English agent, Helga Green, that "to accept a mediocre form and make literature out of it is something of an accomplishment.... We are not always nice people, but essentially we have an ideal that transcends ourselves." 

37. Chandler devoted his working life to the demonstration of a principle that should be obvious, that genre writing declares itself first as writing and only secondarily as generic. Because this principle was not always obvious even to himself, he felt defensive about being a mystery writer....

40. He got better as he went along. Every writer presently alive wishes to do the same. 

41. Okay. Playback, his last book, really was pretty bad. On the other hand, after it he began a book in which Palm Springs was renamed "Poodle Springs."

Chandler didn't start writing for money until he lost his job as an oil company executive at 45, and published his first epochal first novel, The Big Sleep, in his early 50s. I think he peaked in his lyrical vein with his second novel, Farewell, My Lovely. Many, however, prefer his last major novel, The Long Goodbye, from his mid-60s, although that's less lyrical and more of a social novel (for example, this 1953 novel has four significant Mexican-American characters, including what may be the first example of the dignified Chicano police lieutenant whom Edward James Olmos has made a career out of playing).

Regression toward the mean and Francis Galton

It's difficult to hold in one's mind the notion that two opposed statements can be true at the same time: that the glass, for example, is both partly full and partly empty. 

The concept of regression toward the mean is one of the more paradoxical notions ever discovered. Although it's a fundamental aspect of everyday life, it took until Sir Francis Galton in the late 19th Century to be recognized. 

In 2005, Jim Holt wrote an excellent review in The New Yorker of a tendentious biography of Galton, putting Galton's historic achievement in proper perspective:

Galton might have puttered along for the rest of his life as a minor gentleman scientist had it not been for a dramatic event: the publication of Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species,” in 1859. Reading his cousin’s book, Galton was filled with a sense of clarity and purpose. One thing in it struck him with special force: to illustrate how natural selection shaped species, Darwin cited the breeding of domesticated plants and animals by farmers to produce better strains. Perhaps, Galton concluded, human evolution could be guided in the same way. But where Darwin had thought mainly about the evolution of physical features, like wings and eyes, Galton applied the same hereditary logic to mental attributes, like talent and virtue.

In other words, Galton's thinking evolved from qualitative to quantitative.

"If a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvements of the breed of horses and cattle, what a galaxy of genius might we not create!” he wrote in an 1864 magazine article, his opening eugenics salvo. It was two decades later that he coined the word “eugenics,” from the Greek for “wellborn.” 

Galton also originated the phrase “nature versus nurture,” which still reverberates in debates today. (It was probably suggested by Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” in which Prospero laments that his slave Caliban is “A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick.”) At Cambridge, Galton had noticed that the top students had relatives who had also excelled there; surely, he reasoned, such family success was not a matter of chance. His hunch was strengthened during his travels, which gave him a vivid sense of what he called “the mental peculiarities of different races.” Galton made an honest effort to justify his belief in nature over nurture with hard evidence. In his 1869 book “Hereditary Genius,” he assembled long lists of “eminent” men—judges, poets, scientists, even oarsmen and wrestlers—to show that excellence ran in families. To counter the objection that social advantages rather than biology might be behind this, he used the adopted sons of Popes as a kind of control group. His case elicited skeptical reviews, but it impressed Darwin. “You have made a convert of an opponent in one sense,” he wrote to Galton, “for I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work.” Yet Galton’s labors had hardly begun. If his eugenic utopia was to be a practical possibility, he needed to know more about how heredity worked. His belief in eugenics thus led him to try to discover the laws of inheritance. And that, in turn, led him to statistics. 

Statistics at that time was a dreary welter of population numbers, trade figures, and the like. It was devoid of mathematical interest, save for a single concept: the bell curve. The bell curve was first observed when eighteenth-century astronomers noticed that the errors in their measurements of the positions of planets and other heavenly bodies tended to cluster symmetrically around the true value. A graph of the errors had the shape of a bell. In the early nineteenth century, a Belgian astronomer named Adolph Quetelet observed that this “law of error” also applied to many human phenomena. Gathering information on the chest sizes of more than five thousand Scottish soldiers, for example, Quetelet found that the data traced a bell-shaped curve centered on the average chest size, about forty inches. 

As a matter of mathematics, the bell curve is guaranteed to arise whenever some variable (like human height) is determined by lots of little causes (like genes, health, and diet) operating more or less independently. For Quetelet, the bell curve represented accidental deviations from an ideal he called l’homme moyen—the average man. When Galton stumbled upon Quetelet’s work, however, he exultantly saw the bell curve in a new light: what it described was not accidents to be overlooked but differences that revealed the variability on which evolution depended. His quest for the laws that governed how these differences were transmitted from one generation to the next led to what Brookes justly calls “two of Galton’s greatest gifts to science”: regression and correlation. 

Although Galton was more interested in the inheritance of mental abilities, he knew that they would be hard to measure. So he focussed on physical traits, like height. The only rule of heredity known at the time was the vague “Like begets like.” Tall parents tend to have tall children, while short parents tend to have short children. But individual cases were unpredictable. Hoping to find some larger pattern, in 1884 Galton set up an “anthropometric laboratory” in London. Drawn by his fame, thousands of people streamed in and submitted to measurement of their height, weight, reaction time, pulling strength, color perception, and so on. ... 

After obtaining height data from two hundred and five pairs of parents and nine hundred and twenty-eight of their adult children, Galton plotted the points on a graph, with the parents’ heights represented on one axis and the children’s on the other. He then pencilled a straight line though the cloud of points to capture the trend it represented. The slope of this line turned out to be two-thirds. What this meant was that exceptionally tall (or short) parents had children who, on average, were only two-thirds as exceptional as they were. In other words, when it came to height children tended to be less exceptional than their parents. The same, he had noticed years earlier, seemed to be true in the case of “eminence”: the children of J. S. Bach, for example, may have been more musically distinguished than average, but they were less distinguished than their father. Galton called this phenomenon “regression toward mediocrity.” 

Regression analysis furnished a way of predicting one thing (a child’s height) from another (its parents’) when the two things were fuzzily related. Galton went on to develop a measure of the strength of such fuzzy relationships, one that could be applied even when the things related were different in kind—like rainfall and crop yield. He called this more general technique “correlation.” 

The result was a major conceptual breakthrough. Until then, science had pretty much been limited to deterministic laws of cause and effect—which are hard to find in the biological world, where multiple causes often blend together in a messy way. Thanks to Galton, statistical laws gained respectability in science. 

His discovery of regression toward mediocrity—or regression to the mean, as it is now called—has resonated even more widely. Yet, as straightforward as it seems, the idea has been a snare even for the sophisticated. The common misconception is that it implies convergence over time. If very tall parents tend to have somewhat shorter children, and very short parents tend to have somewhat taller children, doesn’t that mean that eventually everyone should be the same height? No, because regression works backward as well as forward in time: very tall children tend to have somewhat shorter parents, and very short children tend to have somewhat taller parents. The key to understanding this seeming paradox is that regression to the mean arises when enduring factors (which might be called “skill”) mix causally with transient factors (which might be called “luck”). Take the case of sports, where regression to the mean is often mistaken for choking or slumping. Major-league baseball players who managed to bat better than .300 last season did so through a combination of skill and luck. Some of them are truly great players who had a so-so year, but the majority are merely good players who had a lucky year. There is no reason that the latter group should be equally lucky this year; that is why around eighty per cent of them will see their batting average decline. 

To mistake regression for a real force that causes talent or quality to dissipate over time, as so many have, is to commit what has been called “Galton’s fallacy.” In 1933, a Northwestern University professor named Horace Secrist produced a book-length example of the fallacy in “The Triumph of Mediocrity in Business,” in which he argued that, since highly profitable firms tend to become less profitable, and highly unprofitable ones tend to become less unprofitable, all firms will soon be mediocre. A few decades ago, the Israeli Air Force came to the conclusion that blame must be more effective than praise in motivating pilots, since poorly performing pilots who were criticized subsequently made better landings, whereas high performers who were praised made worse ones. (It is a sobering thought that we might generally tend to overrate censure and underrate praise because of the regression fallacy.) More recently, an editorialist for the Times erroneously argued that the regression effect alone would insure that racial differences in I.Q. would disappear over time. 

Did Galton himself commit Galton’s fallacy? Brookes insists that he did. “Galton completely misread his results on regression,” he argues, and wrongly believed that human heights tended “to become more average with each generation.” Even worse, Brookes claims, Galton’s muddleheadedness about regression led him to reject the Darwinian view of evolution, and to adopt a more extreme and unsavory version of eugenics. Suppose regression really did act as a sort of gravity, always pulling individuals back toward the average. Then it would seem to follow that evolution could not take place through a gradual series of small changes, as Darwin envisaged. It would require large, discontinuous changes that are somehow immune from regression to the mean.  

Such leaps, Galton thought, would result in the appearance of strikingly novel organisms, or “sports of nature,” that would shift the entire bell curve of ability. And if eugenics was to have any chance of success, it would have to work the same way as evolution. In other words, these sports of nature would have to be enlisted to create a new breed. Only then could regression be overcome and progress be made. 

In telling this story, Brookes makes his subject out to be more confused than he actually was. It took Galton nearly two decades to work out the subtleties of regression, an achievement that, according to Stephen M. Stigler, a statistician at the University of Chicago, “should rank with the greatest individual events in the history of science—at a level with William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of blood and with Isaac Newton’s of the separation of light.” By 1889, when Galton published his most influential book, “Natural Inheritance,” his grasp of it was nearly complete. He knew that regression had nothing special to do with life or heredity. He knew that it was independent of the passage of time. Regression to the mean held even between brothers, he observed; exceptionally tall men tend to have brothers who are somewhat less tall. In fact, as Galton was able to show by a neat geometric argument, regression is a matter of pure mathematics, not an empirical force. Lest there be any doubt, he disguised the case of hereditary height as a problem in mechanics and sent it to a mathematician at Cambridge, who, to Galton’s delight, confirmed his finding.

Read more.

Keep in mind that Galton was born in 1822 and was in his later 60s by the time he published "Natural Inheritance." Indeed, the book "The Wisdom of Crowds" begins with an anecdote about a major conceptual breakthrough that Galton came up with when he was 85.

Demonization

Kevin Rudd, the Labor Party's Prime Minister of Australia from 2007-2010, writes in the Australian Financial Review:

Our National Demons Are Being Purged

What national demons? 

The last history of Australia I read emphasized that the central development in Australian history was getting Saturday mornings off from work so the working man could knock back a few on both Saturday and Friday evenings. Australia has the least demon-plagued history of any country on earth. 

Its success is testimony to the success of the British model.

Oh, of course, it's the horrors of the old policy that prevented the rich mineowners and landowners from importing millions of Asian coolies to work for subsistence wages. 

Crazy conspiracy theory

African Americans sure make up a lot of conspiracy theories. For example,

The Plan (Washington, D.C.) 

In Washington, D.C., The Plan is a conspiracy theory regarding control of the city. Theorists insist that whites (Caucasians) have had a plan to "take back" the city since the beginning of home rule in the 1970s, when the city started electing blacks (African-Americans) to local offices.[1][2] The "age-old" theory has quiet, but considerable support.

Apparently, there's this crazy theory among blacks in Washington that important people would pay a lot of money to live near the Capitol, White House, Supreme Court, and federal office buildings, except that they worry about muggings and "polar bear hunting" episodes. So, white people get together and talk about ways to get blacks to move out of D.C., like giving them Section 8 vouchers or getting an Asian lady to fire black teachers. When the blacks move out, property values theoretically go up.

Isn't that just insane?

Next those paranoid nutjobs might even say that eight white Senators have been meeting in secret to come up with a complicated plan to reward and encourage Hispanic illegal immigrants who are pushing blacks out of D.C. by taking the service jobs, when everybody knows that Senators Rubio and Menendez aren't white, they're Conquistador-Americans.

Great Davos conference titles of yore

Business journalist Edmund Conway blogs:

Davos titles of yore: 

2006 – The Creative Imperative
2007 – The Changing Power Equation
2008 – The Power of Collaborative Innovation
2009 – Shaping the Post-Crisis World
2010 – Rethink, Redesign, Rebuild
2011 – Shared Norms for the New Reality
2012 – The Great Transformation: Shaping New Models
2013 – Resilient Dynamism 

... Note: In the initial version of this post I wrongly called this year’s Davos official theme “Dynamic Resilience”. I was wrong: it’s “Resilient Dynamism”. 

(As several commenters noted, the title of every Davos conference could be Resilient Dynasticism / Dynastic Resilience.)

The next four Davos conference titles:

2014 - The Imperative of Collaborative Reality
2015 - The Power of Changing Transformations
2016 - Reshaping Creative Dynamism
2017 - The Shared Crisis of Innovation 

Or, they could slip an "Equating Model World Norms" in on you. You never can tell.

I always liked the Bilderbergers better. They at least have the dignity to deny that they are a conspiracy to run the world, whereas Davos Man wants you to believe it. Here's the latest list of Bilderberg attendees. Kind of a snooze, as are the titles of the topics at their 2012 conference:

Transatlantic Relations
Evolution of the Political Landscape in Europe and the US
Austerity and Growth in Developed Economies
Cyber Security
Energy Challenges
The Future of Democracy
Russia, China and the Middle East

Presumably, these are just facade titles for the real topics like "Welcome to the Hollow Earth," "Uri Geller Shows You How to Bend Spoons with Your Mind," "All Hail Our Dark Lord," "How Do We Publicly Admit Dan Brown Was Right?" and "Progress Report on Project Orbis Tertius." But at least my eyeballs don't fall out of their sockets while trying to read the Bilderberg topics.

White people aren't very good at getting away with murder

As we all learned from watching The Rockford Files, small towns are extremely homicidal and conspiratorial. Every week, as Ben Stein noted back in the 1970s, ace detective Jim Rockford would venture forth from Malibu to some backwoods hamlet where all the denizens were covering up some sinister rural plot, only to make it back to the safety of the L.A. city limits by the episode's end, case solved.

Thus, Audacious "Validating Stereotypes Since 2005" Epigone calculates the rate of unsolved murders by state. The top and bottom 10s, with a higher figure indicating a higher percentage of unsolved murders:

State	Unknown
1. District of Columbia	56.1%
2. Illinois	55.4%
3. Maryland	46.1%
4. New York	44.0%
5. California	43.9%
6. Massachusetts	43.8%
7. Rhode Island	42.0%
8. New Jersey	41.8%
9. Michigan	38.8%
10. Connecticut	37.1%
41. West Virginia	12.1%
42. South Carolina	10.6%
43. Maine	10.4%
44. Iowa	9.8%
45. South Dakota	9.2%
46. Montana	8.2%
47. Vermont	5.6%
48. North Dakota	4.5%
49. Wyoming	4.5%
50. Idaho	3.9%

An accompanying visualization is available here. (Java only)

Oh, wait, it's almost as if TV detective shows reflect the screenwriters' neuroses more than the demographic realities. Maybe there are two different kinds of stereotypes: populist (Bad) and media (Good).

Regression toward the mean and IQ

A reader sends me an Excel file for calculating expected IQs of children based on their parents' IQs. 

As I've been pointing out for a long time, these questions are of particular interest to the infertile and to lesbians. (I coined the term "lesbian eugenics" to summarize the issues that lesbian would-be mothers confront in picking a sperm donor, but it hasn't caught on. After all, as we all know, lesbians are Good and eugenics is Bad, so ... Does Not Compute!)

I am an avid reader of your site for ~10 years (not even sure since when) and wanted to email you about a Steve Sailer / Steve Hsu inspired analysis I did over the weekend ... The topics are intelligence, heredity and mating (I am 32 year old single male considering the best course of action).

The best course of action is probably to find somebody you like talking to because you are going to be doing that for a long time. But, all this stuff is definitely interesting.

This is is based on a presentation by Steve Hsu entitled "Investigating the genetic basis for intelligence".

On slide 19 of the presentation, with the header "Your kids and regression" Steve writes "Assuming a parental midpoint of n standard deviations above the population average the kids' IQ will be normally distributed about a mean which is around +0.6n with residual standard deviation of about 12 points." He also gives a helpful example immediately below "So, e.g., for n=4 (parental midpoint of 160 - very smart parents!), the mean for the kids would be 136 with only a few percent chance of any kid to surpass 160 (requires +2 standard deviation fluctuation)."

I've seen estimates of the "narrow sense heritability" of IQ ranging from 0.34 to 0.86. At the lowest figure, the two 160 IQ parents' children would average 120 and at the highest, 152. But, as my reader points out, for most values in the middle of that range, the implications he draws are still more or less true.

Another thing to keep in mind is that this assumes that the IQs of grandparents and earlier ancestors are unknown. In contrast, the Darwin-Wedgwood-Galton-Keynes-Benn-Vaughan Williams extended family seems to regress toward a higher IQ than 100, as do the Huxley-Arnolds.

Here are some implications the reader draws, assuming a 0.6 figure.

1) Mating insight

Many nerdy or high achieving men bent on reproducing are troubled by the fact that most intelligent women want a career and likely do not want to have children (or want to adopt orphan baby at age 50, once they have “made it”). Women who are slightly less intelligent may want to have families and even to have bigger families. The above Excel file lets one see the impact of say a man with an IQ of 140 marrying a woman with an IQ of 140 and having only one child (whose expected IQ would be 124) vs. that same man marrying a woman with an IQ of 120 and having three children. The second man's highest IQ child will have an expected mean IQ of 128 which is higher than the man who married the smarter woman but had only one child. Even if the smarter woman chooses to have two children the two smartest children out of the three children that the less intelligent woman had will have approximately the same expected IQ as the two children of the high IQ woman.

Takeaway - twenty IQ points is a lot: 120 vs. 140 is a big difference and it will be by definition much harder to find a woman with an IQ of 140+ (one in 261) vs. one with an IQ of 120+ (one in 11) and it will be much more difficult to persuade your wife to give up IQ 140-career track (Fortune 500 CEO, Ivey League tenured professorship etc.) than IQ 120-career track (nurse, high school teacher etc.) for changing diapers in the middle of the night. If one is concerned about having one or two competent kids to whom one can leave the family business to one might consider finding a slightly less intelligent woman who is willing to have a few kids. Of course there are other factors. Having more children means giving each child less attention but spacing births helps mitigate this and we know that nature dominates over nurture in this matter anyhow. Not to mention that having only one child can result in tragedy if god forbid something was to happen to it.

2) The speed of the regression to the mean.

If one starts with two parents whose IQs are 160 and looks at the average IQs across generations the speed of the regression to the mean is quite fast.

Parents 160, 160
Children average 136 (assume these mate with a 136)
Grandchildren average 122 (assume these mate with a 122)
Greatgrandchildren average 113 (assume these mate with a 113)

There is already a huge drop between the grandparents and the grandchildren. So in just 4 generations the regression to the mean has brought down the Nobel-prize-level grandparents to the pretty much average intelligence. (all this is of course "on average")

This might be a reason why the intellectual elite might want to pay more attention to making America a country where those with IQs of 110-115 can still live satisfying lives with good middle class jobs and publicly funded services. Chances are that most of their descendants will need those jobs and services only century from now; after all “fool and his money are soon parted” – even if dimmer kids inherit billions chances are that they will not have what it takes to keep the wealth in the long run.  

3) "Geniuses belong to the people"

Imagine that with two parents with IQs of 160 set out to produce one child with the same IQ. How many kids we can expect them to have before they succeed? They would have to have 44 kids to have one kid whose IQ would be 160 or higher on average! This is clearly impossible. And if they set standard to IQ 170 - they would require 434 kids!!! Thus geniuses are really borne out of a people and not out of any two particular parents. Having smart parents helps, a lot, but even then, the chances that your little one is going to be the next Newton are small. Very, very small. On the other hand, according to historians none of Newton’s paternal kinsfolk were able to even sign their names. 
4) "The advantage of the rich - buying IQ points through marriage?"

Say you have a family scion with an IQ of 160 who marries a woman with an IQ of 132 (so top 2%). And then their kid perhaps regresses but he leverages family fortune and name to marry a woman with an IQ of 132 and so on and so on. (Sure he might not be the smartest but he's rich so why not marry him). Assume other generations repeat the same trick. What happens?

In just three generations the IQ falls to 114 and stays there. The 132 woman helps keep it at 114 vs. falling back down but it doesn't go up.

Thus another conclusion, being multi-generational rich helps, you can buy intelligence and ensure that your kids are one standard deviation higher than the average. That is a lot, but it also allows for a lot of overlap between the populations. (Especially because never dipping under the IQ 132 threshold is an optimistic assumption - it assumes multi-generational saintly resistance to blonde bimbo's charms). Thus, richer kids are on average smarter but plenty of them are dumber than the average Joe. 

The Davos 2013 theme is "Resilient Dynamism"

Seriously.

What, did they use up "Dynamic Resilience" last year?

Actually, there seems to be much confusion in the press over whether the theme is "Resilient Dynamism," which, combined with the word "Davos," gets 77,200 Google hits, or "Dynamic Resilience," which, combined with "Davos," gets 21,900 Google hits.

So, the best guess is that there is more than a 77% probability that the current Davos slogan is "Resilient Dynamism" rather than "Dynamic Resilience."

But, who can say for sure?

Unemployment by state: it's good to be empty and far from Mexico or international airports

Here's the government's current unemployment rates by best 10 and worst 10:

Unemployment Rates for States Monthly Rankings Seasonally Adjusted Dec. 2012p
Rank	State	Rate
1	NORTH DAKOTA	3.2
2	NEBRASKA	3.7
3	SOUTH DAKOTA	4.4
4	IOWA	4.9
4	WYOMING	4.9
6	OKLAHOMA	5.1
6	VERMONT	5.1
8	HAWAII	5.2
8	UTAH	5.2
10	KANSAS	5.4

41	DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA	8.5
42	CONNECTICUT	8.6
42	GEORGIA	8.6
42	MISSISSIPPI	8.6
45	ILLINOIS	8.7
46	MICHIGAN	8.9
47	NORTH CAROLINA	9.2
48	NEW JERSEY	9.6
49	CALIFORNIA	9.8
50	NEVADA	10.2
50	RHODE ISLAND	10.2

At present, American prosperity is dominated by natural resources per capita, with low population states with lots of energy resources in the ground and not too many workers (i.e., not too close to the Mexican border and Mexico's "reserve army of the unemployed" and not too tied into global immigration) having the lowest unemployment, and highly urbanized states having the highest unemployment. 

Hopefully, this won't always be true. But, it is true that one of the big drivers of America's heritage of prosperity has been having a lot of valuable land per inhabitant, as was pointed  out by Benjamin Franklin in the 1750s. 

The more recent notion that American wealth doesn't have anything to do with having lots of wide open spaces seems to be mostly the product of the neuroses of the kind of economists who feel uncomfortable in the wide open spaces and, especially, feel uncomfortable around the kind of Americans who feel comfortable in the wide open spaces.

Obama to go to highest unemployment state to call for more immigration to fill the jobs Americans just can't get

No work has been done on the $4.8 billion Echelon casino
 project on the Strip in Las Vegas in 4 years and 5 months

From the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

Obama to kick off immigration reform push in Las Vegas 

BY STEVE TETREAULT 

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama will employ Las Vegas as the platform to begin a new push for immigration overhaul that would include a chance at citizenship for millions of undocumented residents, the White House said Friday. 

Obama plans to travel to Southern Nevada on Tuesday to promote an immigration overhaul, a cause that fell by the wayside during his first term. The president has reaffirmed the issue as a priority, and it has picked up bipartisan interest in Congress as well. 

After Obama huddled for a strategy session Friday morning with a half dozen Hispanic lawmakers, the White House said the purpose of the trip was "to redouble the administration's efforts to work with Congress to fix the broken immigration system this year." 

Obama told lawmakers the immigration reform was "a top legislative priority," the White House said. The president renewed a promise to Hispanics to move immigration to the front burner this year, a goal echoed by Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the Senate majority leader. 

The choice of Las Vegas to spotlight immigration was hardly unusual, as Hispanics in Nevada have grown to more than a quarter of the state's population, and Latino voters here backed Obama for re-election in November by a 70 percent to 25 percent margin over Mitt Romney. 

Not long ago, the choice of a state with 10.2% unemployment (which ties Nevada with Rhode Island for worst unemployment in the country) to announce a new pro-immigration push would have seemed "unusual" just from a PR standpoint alone. But, in recent years, mainstream discussion of immigration has increasingly dumbed down. These days, mentioning economics in connection with immigration policy is considered way too complicated. Instead, mainstream thinking about immigration policy is conducted solely in tribalist terms. There are lots of unemployed Hispanics in Nevada, so that's where Obama is going to tell the world he wants more of them.

... Details of the Senate proposals remained unclear, but the principles are expected to address a process toward legalizing the status of unauthorized immigrants already in the country, border security, verification measures for employers hiring workers, and ways for more temporary workers to be admitted into the country.

If you mention that Las Vegas has a terrible unemployment problem, such that, for instance, no construction workers have set foot on the site of Echelon Place (the old Stardust casino) in almost 4 and a half years, well, the gears would start turning and finally the all-purpose answer would spit out: that just proves we need more immigration! See, the big problem with America is that there aren't enough idiots to go to Las Vegas and lose their money, so we need to import more. What could possibly go wrong?

What's missing in Del Mar, CA?

I occasionally borrow from an extremely generous friend the cottage behind his house 75 yards off the sand in Del Mar in northern San Diego County. My wife recently pointed out to me two things that are much rarer on the Del Mar beach than most anywhere else in California.

Although the wealth of some of the inhabitants appears to be stratospheric (e.g., sport team owners), most of Del Mar's housing stock was built in the 1970s or early 1980s and thus is not glitzy by 21st Century standards. Several of the better sort of NFL quarterbacks are said to live there. Many of the homes near the beach seem to be inhabited only part time by rich people who own multiple homes. (By the way, security systems are unobtrusive but omnipresent, so don't get any ideas.)

The key that determines Del Mar's sociological make-up is that there is a reef offshore that keeps the surf from getting terribly dangerous, so it's ideal for people looking for a safe beach for their young children or grandchildren. Dogs are free to run off leashes on the northern stretch of Del Mar's beach, just south of the lagoon that leads to the famous horserace track. So, it is about as genteel / respectable as Southern California gets. The Romneys have a house a few miles to the south in La Jolla, and they would fit in in Del Mar: a rich, grandchild-oriented, outdoorsy family.

The public can pay to park and use Del Mar beach, but the daytrippers tend to be people who are sympatico with the locals. So, what are two things you don't see much of on the beach at Del Mar?

1. Pit bulls (instead, lots of retrievers)

2. Tattoos

Is Boston always like this?

I don't spend much time in Boston, but over the decades I've picked up a sense that young white people in that famous city are a little different in attitude, more territorial than the ones in the other cities I've known well (Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and, more marginally, New York and Washington). Last Saturday, I was in Boston's financial district next to Faneuil Hall late at night for the first time in 26 years. I noticed the same edge as in 1986, one I seldom pick up from crowds of young white people drinking in other expensive city centers. The Bostonians give off a proprietary vibe that says, "We own these streets."

Political scientist James Q. Wilson, another nice Catholic boy from SoCal, was struck by that Boston vibe when he arrived at Harvard in the late 1940s. George Will recently wrote about Wilson:

Political scientist James Q. Wilson grew up there; in 1967, the year after the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations,” he wrote a seminal essay on the political vibrations that produced California’s new governor: “A Guide to Reagan Country.” His conclusion was that Ronald Reagan represented the political culture of a region where social structure nurtured individualism. 

Southern Californians had, Wilson wrote, “no identities except their personal identities, no obvious group affiliations to make possible any reference to them by collective nouns. I never heard the phrase ‘ethnic group’ until I was in graduate school.” 

Eastern teenagers had turf. Their Southern California counterparts had cars, the subject of so many Beach Boys songs (“Little Deuce Coupe,” ‘‘409,” ‘‘Shut Down,” etc.). They hung out in places reached by car and with lots of parking, particularly drive-in restaurants. 

“The Eastern lifestyle,” Wilson wrote, “produced a feeling of territory, the Western lifestyle a feeling of property.” 

The East was defined less by cold weather than social congestion — apartments in ethnic neighborhoods. Southern Californians lived in single-dwelling homes and had almost no public transportation, so their movements within the city were unconfined to set corridors. 

Houses and cars — the “Sunday afternoon drive” was often just to look at others’ homes — strengthened, Wilson wrote, “a very conventional and bourgeois sense of property and responsibility.”

Be afraid, be very afraid

From the Washington Post:

Senators nearing agreement on broad immigration reform proposal 

By Rosalind S. Helderman and David Nakamura, Friday, January 25, 9:36 AM 

A working group of senators from both parties is nearing agreement on broad principles for overhauling the nation’s immigration laws, representing the most substantive bipartisan effort toward comprehensive legislation in years. 

The six members have met quietly since the November election, most recently on Wednesday. Congressional aides stressed there is not yet final agreement, but they have eyed next Friday as a target date for a possible public announcement. 

The talks mark the most in-depth negotiations involving members of both parties since a similar effort broke down in 2010 without producing a bill.
“We have basic agreement on many of the core principles,” Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), a member of the group, said this week. “Now we have to draft it. It takes time.” 

“The group we’ve been meeting with — and it’s equal number of Democrats and Republicans — we’re real close,” added Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), another member of the group. 

... “What has been absent in the time [since] he put principles forward is a willingness by Republicans to move forward with comprehensive immigration reform,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said Friday. “He hopes that dynamic has changed and there are indications what was once a bipartisan effort to push forward. . .will again be a bipartisan effort to do so.” 

Past efforts begun amid similarly high hopes have sputtered. But members of both parties increasingly see changes to the nation’s troubled immigration system as an area most likely to draw bipartisan agreement at a time when Congress is deeply divided on gun control, spending and taxes. 

The optimism is spurred by the sense that the political dynamics have shifted markedly since the last two significant bipartisan efforts failed. In 2007, a bill crafted in the Senate died after failing to win support of 60 members despite backing from then-president George W. Bush. Many Republicans, and some centrist Democrats, opposed that effort because it offered a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. 

In 2010, extended negotiations between Schumer and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) broke down without producing legislation. 

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a veteran of the 2007 effort who is part of the current working group, said Republican attitudes have dramatically shifted since the party’s defeat at the polls in November. Obama won more than 70 percent of the vote among Latinos and Asians, and a growing number of GOP leaders believe action on immigration is necessary to expand the party’s appeal to minority groups. ...

Also included in the new Senate group are Schumer, who chairs the key Senate subcommittee where legislative action will begin; Graham; Robert Menendez (D-N.J.); and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). Two others, Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.), have also been involved in some talks. 

Their timetable would aim for a bill to be written by March or April and potentially considered for final passage in the Senate as early as the summer. Proponents believe adoption in the GOP-held House would be made easier with a strong bipartisan vote in the Senate. 

The working group’s principles would address stricter border control, better employer verification of workers’ immigration status, new visas for temporary agriculture workers and expanding the number of visas available for skilled engineers. They would also include a call to help young people who were brought to the country illegally as children by their parents become citizens and to normalize the status of the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants. 

But obstacles abound. For instance, Rubio has said he believes immigrants who came to the country illegally should be able to earn a work permit. But he has said they should be required to seek citizenship through existing avenues, and only after those who have come to the country legally. 

Democrats and immigration advocates fear that approach could result in wait-times stretching for decades, creating a class of permanent legal residents for whom the benefits of citizenship appear unattainable. They have pushed to create new pathways to citizenship specifically available to those who achieve legal residency as part a reform effort. 

It is not yet clear if the Senate group will endorse a mechanism allowing such people to eventually become citizens — something Obama is expected to champion. Schumer said it would be “relatively detailed,” but would not “get down into the weeds.” 

A source close to Rubio said he joined the group in December at the request of other members only after they agreed their effort would line up with his own principles for reform, which he outlined in an interview with the Wall Street Journal three weeks ago. 

His ideas have since been embraced by conservatives, including some longtime foes of providing legal status to those who have come to the country illegally.
As a possible 2016 presidential contender widely trusted on the right, Rubio’s support could be key to moving the bipartisan effort. 

And while Rubio and other Republicans have said they would prefer to split up a comprehensive immigration proposal into smaller bills that would be voted on separately, the White House will pursue comprehensive legislation that seeks to reform the process in a single bill. 

“I doubt if there will be a macro, comprehensive bill,” said Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), who supported the 2007 effort. “Anytime a bill’s more than 500 pages, people start getting suspicious. If it’s 2,000 pages, they go berserk.” 

But in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Friday, Republican Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, strongly supports a single comprehensive bill, writing that “Congress should avoid quick fixes.” 

Schumer said Friday that a single package will be key for passage. “We’ll not get it done in pieces,” he said. “Every time you do a piece, everyone says what about my piece and you get more people opposing it.” ...

“The president needs to lead, and then the Republicans have a choice: Are they going to do what they did in the last term and just be obstructionists?” said Eliseo Medina, secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union, which spent millions recruiting new Hispanic voters this year. “Well, that didn’t work too well in November. Do the Republicans want the president not to get the credit? The best way to share the credit is for them to step up and engage and act together with the president. But it’s their choice. ”

The 2013 Amnesty won't be spun in the media like the 1986 Amnesty, which had an element of "Well, let's try this and see if it works." No, the 2013 Amnesty will be portrayed as a milestone in the ongoing surrender of evil white men to the morally superior vibrant new America.

Ta-Nehisi Coates celebrates the second Obama inaugural by denouncing how The Man is holding black folks down

At The Atlantic, the day after the second inaugural of a black President, Ta-Nehisi Coates explains how The Man keeps down the Black Middle Class:

The American Case Against a Black Middle Class 

... Black people have been repeatedly been victimized by the half-assed social contract. It goes back, at least, to Reconstruction.  

5) The half-assed social contract continues to this very day with policies under the present administration, like the bail-out of banks that left the homeowners whom the banks conned underwater. The results of the housing crisis for black people have been devastating. The response is to hector these people about playing video games and watching too much television. Or to tell them they've have "an achievement gap." It is sickening, dishonest, and morally repugnant. 

6) America does not really want a black middle class.

My impression is that what America really wants is a black upper class, full of decorative and symbolic figures to worship from afar: Barack and Michelle, Jay-Z and Beyonce, Chris Brown and Rihanna, etc.

Women in combat: James Cameron v. Kathryn Bigelow

If a debate were held on the subject of women in combat between the ex-spouses James Cameron (director of Aliens and Terminator 2) and Kathryn Bigelow (director of K-19, The Hurt Locker, and Zero Dark Thirty), who would be pro and who would be con?

L.A. Times: "Women in combat? Old news for lady warriors of the big screen"

From the Los Angeles Times:

Women in combat? Old news for lady warriors of the big screen

By Noelene Clark 

January 24, 2013, 3:55 p.m. 

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta is lifting the ban on women serving in ground combat units, a landmark decision that will open up some 230,000 military jobs to women. But this is hardly new territory for the ladies of the big screen, where females have been fighting on the front lines for decades. 

The picture gallery includes Meg Ryan in Courage Under Fire and Rihanna in Battleship.

That's not to say these fictional fighters are always on equal footing with their male colleagues. In some films the military heroines spend as much time battling gender barriers as they do fighting the enemy, like Demi Moore's muscled character in "G.I. Jane." ...

In the realm of science fiction, however, there are plenty of films in which nobody bats an eye at women in combat. Take tough-as-nails Pvt. Jenette Vasquez of the Colonial Marines, played by Jenette Goldstein*, in James Cameron's 1986 action thriller "Aliens."

No comment.

* An old buddy of mine had her under contract to star in his butt-kicking babe post-apocalyptic movie around 1989, but it didn't get off the ground. His screenplay was awesome, though: like Road Warrior on motorcycles with Mad Maxine as the heroine.

Anyway, the point is that that the Obama Administration is just acting out a James Cameron fetish of a generation ago. This policy shift would have seemed cool in the 1980s, but now that we finally all understand the nerdy fantasies underlying it, it just seems dorky and lame.

"Track and Battlefield:" Sailer and Seiler on Women in Combat from 1997

It was widely believed in the 1990s that women athletes were "closing the gap" with men athletes. (Look how fast Flo-Jo is!) In turn, this assumption of equalizing athletic performance was used to justify sending women into combat: obviously, prejudices about women warriors not being able to carry their fair share of their platoon's equipment were outdated. 

So, the 12/31/1997 article "Track and Battlefield" in National Review by sports physiologist Stephen Seiler and myself was kind of a bombshell. We demonstrated that, contrary to nearly universal assumptions, the performance gap between male and female runners in the Olympics was widening.  This was because the Fall of the Berlin Wall exposed the East German doping program and the Ben Johnson scandal at the 1988 Olympics slowed Western cheaters. In other words, the narrowing of the gap after 1976 had been largely due to women runners taking artificial male hormones. (This was published, by the way, the year before the McGwire-Sosa home run fiasco.)

Here's the last section of our article:

In conclusion, studying sports' gender gaps offers new perspectives on a host of contemporary issues seemingly far removed from athletics, such as women in the military. Ironically, feminists in sports have successfully campaigned for the funding of thousands of sexually segregated, female-only teams, while feminists in the media and Congress have compelled the Armed Forces (outside of the defiant Marines) to sexually integrate basic training and many operating units, even including some combat teams. 

Who's right? Female college coaches have some powerful reasons for believing that coed competition would badly damage their mission of turning girls into strong, take-charge women. For example, they fear that female athletes would inevitably be sexually harassed. Even more distracting to their mission than the unwanted sexual advances from male teammates, however, would be the wanted ones. This opinion is based on more than just lesbian jealousy: research on single sex vs. coed schools shows that teenage girls are more likely to develop into leaders in all-female groups, whereas in coed settings young females tend to compete with each other in coyly deferring to good-looking guys. Any hard-headed female basketball coach could tell you that merging her team with the school's men's team would simply turn two dedicated squads now focused on beating their respective opponents into one all-consuming soap opera of lust, betrayal, jealousy, and revenge. (Does this remind you of the current state of any superpower's military?) Yet, feminists utterly forget to apply their own hard-earned wisdom to the armed forces: on the whole, deploying young women in cramped quarters alongside young fighting men does not make the women into better warriors, it make them into moms. For example, the Washington Times reports that for every year a coed warship is at sea, the Navy has to airlift out 16% of the female sailors as their pregnancies become advanced. 

Reorganizing the military along the lines of the sexually segregated teams characteristic of contemporary college sports will do much both to more fully use the potential of women in uniform and to quell the endless sexual brouhahas currently bedeviling our coed military. Yet, the crucial issue remains: Should women fight? The main justification feminists give for a coed-izing the military is that lack of combat experience unfairly hampers female officers' chances for promotion. 

We can again turn for guidance to female coaches. The main reason they favor sexual apartheid on the playing fields is that in open competition males would slaughter females. It seems reasonable to conclude the same would happen on the battlefields. This may sound alarmist. After all, running's gender gap is a rather marginal-sounding 1/8th; surely, many women are faster than the average man, and, by the same logic, many would make better soldiers. 

First, though, as economists have long pointed out, competition occurs at the margins: runners don't race against the average Joe, but against other runners. And soldiers fight other soldiers. Second, while the moderate width of track's gender gap is representative of many simple sports that test primarily a single physical skill (the main exceptions are tests of upper body strength like shotputting, where the top men are as much as twice as strong as the top women), in free-flowing multidimensional sports like basketball where many skills must be combined, overall gender gaps tend to be so imposing that after puberty females almost never compete with males. Consider what traits help just in enabling you to dunk a basketball: height, vertical leaping ability, footspeed (to generate horizontal momentum that can be diverted into vertical liftoff), and hand size and hand strength (to dunk one-handed). Not one of these five individual gender gaps is enormous, but they combine to create a huge difference in results: almost everybody in the NBA can dunk compared to almost nobody in the WNBA. Basketball, however, is far more than slam and jam. Throw in the need for massiveness and upper body strength in rebounding and defense, wrist strength in jumpshooting, etc., and multiply all these male advantages together, and the resulting gender gap in basketball ability is so vast that despite the WNBA's state of the art marketing, it's actual product resembles an all white high school boys' game from a few decades ago. 

Strange as it seems today, back in 1997 the media acted as if the WNBA was cool.

Although the unique ease of our Gulf War victory encouraged the fantasy that technology has made fighting almost effortless, the chaos of combat will continue to demand a wide diversity of both physical aptitudes (like being able to hump a load of depleted-uranium ammunition) and mental attitudes (like the urge to kill) that interact to create a huge gender gap in fighting ability. 

While in theory it might be nice if we could accommodate ambitious female officers' need for combat experience by negotiating during wars with our enemies to set up separate all-female battles between our Amazon units and their Amazon units, this is where the analogy with sports finally breaks down: opponents in war don't have to play by the rules ... causing our women to be defeated, captured, raped, and killed. Still, if (as, in effect, so many feminists insist) female officers' right to equal promotion opportunities requires that they be furnished with female cannon fodder, there is one proven formula for narrowing the gender gap to give our enlisted women more of a fighting chance. Feminist logic implies that just as our military once imported ex-Nazi German rocket scientists, it should now import ex-Communist German steroid pushers.

JFK's First 6,000 Days

Anybody remember this 1977 National Lampoon issue based on an alternative history in which Jackie, not Jack, was assassinated on 11/22/1963?

Key events included (as I vaguely recall -- I can't find the contents online, so this is not a quote):

1964 - JFK withdraws U.S. troops from South Vietnam, ensuring America will enjoy peace and prosperity. 

1968 - JFK sends U.S. troops to Northern Ireland to liberate the oppressed Catholic minority, setting off the British-American war of 1968-1973.

I presume P.J. O'Rourke, who is a Prod, came up with that one.

How much did the existence of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish help deflect natural Irish-American competitiveness away from the Belfast conflict (1969-1997) and toward beating USC?

Hawley: "Do [Immigration] Restrictionist Policies Cost Congressional Republicans Votes?"

George Hawley, a political scientist teaching at the U. of Houston, has a trove of research papers on extremely relevant topics. For example:

Issue Voting and Immigration: Do Restrictionist Policies Cost Congressional Republicans Votes?  

Forthcoming in Social Science Quarterly 

Objective: I test the hypothesis that Latino voters were less likely to support Republican incumbents with strong anti-immigration records in the 2006 Congressional elections in comparison to Republicans with less restrictive records. I also test whether non-Hispanic white voters were similarly sensitive to incumbent immigration records when determining vote choice.  

Method: To examine these questions, I created hierarchical models in which incumbent immigration records, individual views on immigration, and an interaction between the two were used to predict vote choice in the 2006 midterm elections. Individual-level data were provided by the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study and incumbent immigration records were provided by NumbersUSA.  

Results: This analysis found little [or] no evidence suggesting that Latino voters are less likely to support Republican incumbents with anti-immigration records. There was evidence suggesting that vote choice among non-Hispanic white was influenced by incumbent records on immigration, but the effect varied according to the respondent’s own views on immigration.  

Conclusion: This study found no evidence that incumbent Republicans could increase their share of the Latino vote by embracing less restrictive immigration policies. In fact, doing so may cost them votes among non-Hispanic whites.

In other words, the conventional wisdom about Hispanics and Republican politicians is wrong.