Showing posts with label Vibrancy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vibrancy. Show all posts

February 21, 2012

Vibrancy Alert!

Adam Nagourney reports in the New York Times:
Los Angeles Mayor Sets Sights on a Bigger Stage 
... None of which is to say that Mr. Villaraigosa has recaptured the electric popularity that he enjoyed in the flush of his initial election, as a mayor of Mexican descent in a city with a vibrant and expanding population of Mexican-Americans.

June 28, 2010

"My Own Private India"

In Time, Joel Stein writes a column packed with traditional iSteve themes:
I am very much in favor of immigration everywhere in the U.S. except Edison, N.J. The mostly white suburban town I left when I graduated from high school in 1989 — the town that was called Menlo Park when Thomas Alva Edison set up shop there and was later renamed in his honor — has become home to one of the biggest Indian communities in the U.S., as familiar to people in India as how to instruct stupid Americans to reboot their Internet routers.

My town is totally unfamiliar to me. The Pizza Hut where my busboy friends stole pies for our drunken parties is now an Indian sweets shop with a completely inappropriate roof. The A and P I shoplifted from is now an Indian grocery. ... There is an entire generation of white children in Edison who have nowhere to learn crime. ...
I called James W. Hughes, policy-school dean at Rutgers University, who explained that Lyndon Johnson's 1965 immigration law raised immigration caps for non-European countries. LBJ apparently had some weird relationship with Asians in which he liked both inviting them over and going over to Asia to kill them.

After the law passed, when I was a kid, a few engineers and doctors from Gujarat moved to Edison because of its proximity to ATT, good schools and reasonably priced, if slightly deteriorating, post–WW II housing. For a while, we assumed all Indians were geniuses. Then, in the 1980s, the doctors and engineers brought over their merchant cousins, and we were no longer so sure about the genius thing. In the 1990s, the not-as-brilliant merchants brought their even-less-bright cousins, and we started to understand why India is so damn poor.

... Unlike some of my friends in the 1980s, I liked a lot of things about the way my town changed: far better restaurants, friends dorky enough to play Dungeons & Dragons with me, restaurant owners who didn't card us because all white people look old. But sometime after I left, the town became a maze of charmless Indian strip malls and housing developments. Whenever I go back, I feel what people in Arizona talk about: a sense of loss and anomie and disbelief that anyone can eat food that spicy.

To figure out why it bothered me so much, I talked to a friend of mine from high school, Jun Choi, who just finished a term as mayor of Edison. Choi said that part of what I don't like about the new Edison is the reduction of wealth, which probably would have been worse without the arrival of so many Indians, many of whom, fittingly for a town called Edison, are inventors and engineers. ...

Unlike previous waves of immigrants, who couldn't fly home or Skype with relatives, Edison's first Indian generation didn't quickly assimilate (and give their kids Western names). But if you look at the current Facebook photos of students at my old high school, J.P. Stevens, which would be very creepy of you, you'll see that, while the population seems at least half Indian, a lot of them look like the Italian Guidos I grew up with in the 1980s: gold chains, gelled hair, unbuttoned shirts. In fact, they are called Guindians. Their assimilation is so wonderfully American that if the Statue of Liberty could shed a tear, she would. Because of the amount of cologne they wear.

And here is a another good column by Joel Stein: "How Jewish Is Hollywood?"

September 25, 2009

Vibrant Diversity

You can't get much more diversely vibrant than this story from the Washington Post:

Two more suspects were arrested Friday in the beating death of a District pizzeria owner whose slaying was linked to an immigration scam, police said.

The victim, Shahabuddin Rana, 44, who was found dead Aug. 18 inside his Pizza Mart in Northeast Washington, had agreed to pay a woman $500 a week to marry his brother, a Pakistani national, then reneged on the deal after the wedding, police said.

Police identified the suspects as Leon Robinson, 25, of Northeast Washington, and Isaiah Genus, 26, of Southeast Washington. Both were charged with first-degree murder. The alleged wife-for-hire, Shanika Robinson, 26, of Capitol Heights, was charged with first-degree murder last month.

The three are accused of killing Rana inside his pizzeria, in the 2300 block of Fourth Street NE, after he refused to continue paying Robinson to stay in the sham marriage, which police said was intended to help Rana's brother get a green card.

In a court affidavit, police said Rana became upset when he learned that Robinson "was having sexual affairs" with other men. The affidavit says that Rana informed Robinson that she would not be getting paid anymore.

Police allege that after beating Rana, the three set his body on fire and stole cigarettes, cigars and about $2,000 in cash from the pizzeria ...

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

June 29, 2008

I'm not making this up

Here's an editorial from the Dallas Morning News that I swear I'm not making up:

Editorial: So much vibrancy to build on

The trick is getting diverse groups to building [sic] a community together

The beauty of the neighborhoods that run from Jefferson Boulevard toward Wynnewood Village is how they mirror Texas' future – and capture the state's biggest challenge. Plurality will become the new reality, creating an ethnic vibrancy but making it hard to build a community out of so many different kinds of people.

You see this reality writ large in this stretch of Oak Cliff, where middle- to upper-middle-income, mostly Anglo folks live alongside poor, working, mostly Latino families. You find tree-lined, prosperous neighborhoods like Elmwood and Wynnewood, along with blocks of proud working-class neighborhoods. The hodgepodge of backgrounds and incomes coalesces into a vibrancy that North Texas neighborhoods often miss.

Vibrancy is what happens when longtime Cliff dwellers bump up against the surge of gay couples fixing up their Wynnewood homes not so far from Latino families imbuing Jefferson Boulevard with a gritty mercado atmosphere.

Vibrancy is what happens when white-collar professionals and blue-collar laborers sit shoulder-to-shoulder at restaurants like the Charco Broiler, Tops Cafe and El Ranchito.

Bridging Dallas' North-South Gap: A campaign by The Dallas Morning News editorial board to lift the southern part of Dallas.

And vibrancy is what happens when agencies like Casa Guanajuato serve immigrant families a few blocks from historic, big-steeple churches like Cliff Temple Baptist.

The trick is building a community so everyone wins – rather than turning it over only to the poor or the affluent. Striking a balance will require smart economic strategies, improved schools and an attentive City Hall.

Consider Jefferson Boulevard, which many consider the spine of Oak Cliff. There are about 160 shops along its 11 blocks between Zang Boulevard and Edgefield Avenue. But 18 of those shops pawn merchandise, offer ready cash or loan money. Another 20 sell outfits for brides, quinceaƱeras or parties. And 15 stores provide styling for hair or nails – or, if you're in the mood, a tattoo.

Undoubtedly, a market exists for dresses for that big occasion, ready cash or looking nice. But a thriving boulevard needs a broad range of stores to attract a broader range of shoppers. Retail feeds off other retail. And Jefferson lacks that element. Along this stretch, for example, there's only one diversified department store.

In other words, the gays actually find Jefferson Blvd. to be not vibrant, but tacky.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

July 22, 2007

Making the San Fernando Valley more vibrant

The eastern half of the San Fernando Valley has had a big influx in just the last few years of people from a big swath of the planet running from, roughly Moscow to Yemen. Lots of them are good eggs, but a few have definitely made the place more, uh, colorful. For example, there was this gang who kidnapped and murdered five fellow ex-Soviet immigrants from a luxurious house in the hills of Encino.

And now, from the LA Times:

Yana Kovalevsky made a colorful entrance. Not long out of the hospital, she hobbled into her neighborhood Starbucks for an interview on a purple-and-pink-striped cane. A blond-and-brown-streaked wig roosted on her head.

Under the wig, her scalp was a patchy landscape. A traumatic shedding had left the locks that once cascaded to her elbows struggling to regrow.

She needed the cane because a nerve-pinging disorder that somehow combined pain and numbness had turned her legs to rubber.

Last February, during a visit to their native Russia, Kovalevsky, a 27-year-old North Hollywood social worker, and her physician mother became critically ill from the effects of thallium. Their ordeal made worldwide headlines because thallium is a rare poison usually associated with political assassins and murderous inheritance seekers, not with the likes of Yana and Dr. Marina Kovalevsky.

It remains unknown how they came to ingest the tiny but potentially lethal amounts of the heavy metal. Among the other unanswered questions is who targeted them and why — if the poisoning was intentional, as mother, daughter and their doctors now believe. ...

A decade and a half before they were poisoned, the Kovalevskys had been an unheralded part of another international story — the emigration of Soviet Jews. They had followed Marina's brother Dr. Leon Peck, a fellow physician, to the United States. Peck had been a refusenik for 10 years before he received a visa to leave Russia in 1988. The Kovalevskys got out in 1991, settling in Los Angeles and then moving to Louisiana, where Marina, 50, completed a medical residency. They returned to California, where Marina established a family practice out of a West Hollywood storefront.

She is now back at work and has declined to be interviewed, pleading for privacy. Yana said her mother's reticence hardened after FBI agents investigating the poisoning queried her about the Russian American medical community, which has been a focus of insurance fraud inquiries.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

May 23, 2005

"Vibrant" = Cant

Have you noticed that whenever some writer uses the words "vibrant" or "vibrancy," he is almost guaranteed to be yanking your chain? It's just like how for so many years the phrase "in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate" always preceded utter bilge.
Through the magic of Google, I found that I have published the word "vibrant" (in a non-mocking sense) once, for which I profoundly apologize to all my readers.
In contrast, Google says that the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com has used "vibrant" 84 times. Here are some examples I gleaned from Google without subjecting myself to actually reading these WSJ opinion pieces:
"...President Bush is determined to keep the dynamism vibrant, and to encourage and empower the poor to take part in it, rather than to suggest they are ..."
To use "keep the dynamism vibrant" and "empower the poor" in one sentence, hoo boy, that's some fancy writin'! (By the way, what kind of "dynamism" is not "vibrant?" "Listless dynamism?" "Lethargic vibrancy?")
"... The Iraq I saw was a society on the move, a vibrant land with a hardy people experiencing the first heady taste of freedom..."

... and that is to reveal Baghdad as it truly is, a vibrant city, able and ready to welcome the world business community, ...
So, when your windows rattle in Baghdad, that's not a car bomb or IED going off, that's just the local vibrancy manifesting itself.

Back home in the USA, things are a-quivering, too:
... The new creative class craves a vibrant nightlife, outdoor sports facilities and neighborhoods vibrant with street ...

... We have a vibrant Islamic community of emigrants from across the world. ...

... Like California, New York City can boast a vibrant immigrant community and is a magnet for ...
Whenever I read about "vibrant immigrant neighborhoods," I wonder exactly which ones has the writer has been to, if any. Come to the vast immigrant neighborhoods of the San Fernando Valley and check out the vibrancy: there isn't any. They're boring, tacky, and low-brow. There's no culture beyond the video store. It was like that before, too, but 35 years ago we expected the place to improve a little with time, not regress.
And sometimes the political is personal:
But as times have changed, so have I. Today, as the father of two stunning daughters, and husband of a vibrant, sexy and successful wife who has ...
Perhaps this gentleman's vibrant wife will induct her stunning daughters into the intimate secrets of personal vibration and soon all three will be happily vibrating away.