January 11, 2002
January 9, 2002
Argentina and The End of History
Argentina and The End of History - Francis Fukuyama famously observed at the end of the Cold War that - at the highest levels of ideology - there was nothing to argue over anymore: capitalism and democracy were obviously better than any alternatives. From now on, history would get ever duller because everybody knew that capitalist democracy was the solution.
Of course, history hasn't exactly ended yet. What's becoming clear is that there was a fatal flaw in Fukuyama's model. He forgot to ask: "What if large parts of the world are simply not competent enough to make capitalist democracy work?" Consider Argentina, a nation blessed by nature at least abundantly as Canada. A nation so trendy in social values that plastic surgery is more common in Buenos Aires than in Los Angeles. A nation where, after decades of bad choices, the political elite had for the last decade been the world's truest believers in neoliberal economics. Yet, Argentina has once again has collapsed into economic and political chaos. 1-9-2002
January 3, 2002
A Not-So-Beautiful Mind
A Not-So-Beautiful Mind - As an apparent frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar, A Beautiful Mind demands more scrutiny than critics have so far given it. Ultimately, it reveals less about the delusions of mathematician John F. Nash than it does about the delusions of the modern hack screenwriter. Read the rest of my review here. 1/3/2002
January 2, 2002
529 Plan, Tax Savings, and right half of the bell curve
Here in California, you can shelter up to $229,000 in a 529 account. You don't have to pay federal taxes on your earnings while they accumulate, and, starting today and running until at least 2010, you don't even have to pay taxes on earnings when you withdraw them to pay for college expenses for your child. Oh, you say your kid isn't the college-type, but you are saving money to buy him an 18-wheeler to drive when he gets out of the Marines, and you'd like to use a 529 plan? Sorry, but too bad. If you want the tax break, you should have had a smarter kid. Click here for an FAQ giving the unbelievable details. 1/1/02.
December 31, 2001
Have you ever heard a Kwanzaa song?
December 29, 2001
December 27, 2001
Bush Family and the Corrupt Mexican Rich
December 24, 2001
December 16, 2001
Tom Clancy - The Bear and the Dragon
Why have so few rock groups been racially integrated?
Christmas vs. Winter Solstice Holiday
Q. I'm a Multiculturalist Pagan. I want to celebrate the shortest day of the year at the exact same moment as all the indigenous peoples on Mother Earth. Exactly when will that moment occur?
A. Never. Unlike Christianity, pagan religions are local. This causes practical problems for politically correct American pagans who want to use the seasons of the sun to commemorate the unity of humanity under nature. Their problem is that nature treats humans very differently depending upon where they live. For example, while Dec. 21 is the shortest day for the Inuit (i.e. Eskimos), it's the longest day for Australian Aborigines. And for Africans living on the equator, it's just another twelve-hour day like all the others. In truth, Winter Solstice celebrations are (gasp) Eurocentric! Or, to be precise, "Nordocentric."
December 13, 2001
Why do Caucasians differ so much in hair color?
Blonde and red hair are favorable mutations for women because they make men notice them more. Fair hair reflects more light than dark hair, so it catches the eye more. Women like shiny jewelry for the same reason.
But, why then doesn't blonde or red hair become universal? Well, it would lose scarcity value if all women had it. But, also, while it's good for your daughters, under pre-modern conditions it was bad for your sons. It tended to hurt males at hunting and war. I recall attending a golf tournament on a sunny day and standing behind the green when a friend asked, "Which players are coming next?" I glanced at the tee 500 yards away, and said, "I can't tell who all is in the next group, but you can definitely see the sunlight glinting off Greg Norman's hair." The Australian pro Norman, who is no doubt of partial Nordic descent judging by his name and appearance, has extremely blonde hair. Fortunately, by now Northwestern Europeans have largely beaten their swords into golf clubs, but in days of yore, Norman's hair would have served disastrously as a beacon calling attention to his presence. Of course, in the Nordic homelands there aren't many terribly sunny days.
Thus, blonde hair becomes more common the farther in Europe you go north, where the sun is low in the sky and the land heavily forested and therefore shady. Within Northern Europe, red hair becomes more prevalent the farther west you go, where, due to the Gulf Stream, the weather is extremely misty. (I'd guess that the Western Irish are around 1/3 red-haired.) So, in Northwest Europe, you can have lots of blondes and redheads because lack of direct sunlight meant that highly visible hair worked well for women, without much penalizing their men folk when hunting or raiding.
In line with this theory, in movie love scenes, the actress almost always has lighter hair and skin color than the actor. This suggests that we still associate fairness with the fair sex. 12/13/01
December 9, 2001
Why do conservative intellectuals attack Darwin?
Why do conservative intellectual magazines keep shooting themselves in the foot by attacking Darwin? The magazine with the least to be embarrassed about is National Review. Although it has printed some dopey Creationist stuff, under both former editor John O'Sullivan and current editor Rich Lowry, it has also printed my neo-Darwinian analyses, Still, National Review Online editor Jonah Goldberg offers an important clue into why normally sophisticated conservative editors give the anti-Darwin crowd a platform, in his response to Michael Lind's NYT attack on the Religious Right's influence over the conservative press:
"Let us not forget that Marx and Freud were once established scientific fact as well. And, moreover, let’s see Lind’s friends at Dissent run a negative article about Marx, Freud, or Darwin."
In other words, Jonah thinks that Darwin is sacrosanct on the Left. I suspect this view is common among Right editors. In reality, the Left absolutely hates what Darwin said about human nature. See my NR essay on Edward O. Wilson's Sociobiology for the details. 12/9/01
Christopher Jencks on Immigration
December 7, 2001
Andrew Sullivan and armed pederasts
THE TALIBAN'S DON'T ASK, DON'T TELL: All the rest of NATO may have given up on policing their militaries for homosexuals, but the United States can rest easy knowing that one military that still supports U.S. policy is the Taliban. Any consorting with beardless young men in the army is strictly forbidden. This story from the Daily Telegraph tells of a weird and fastidious obsession. - 12/5/2001 11:17:09 PM
Uh, Andy? Please tell us you didn't realize that "consorting with beardless young men in the army" is a euphemism for military men sexually violating 13-17 year-old boys under their command. It's an old Afghan custom. James Michener's informative 1963 novel Caravans refers to it frequently (Here's an amusing excerpt describing Kabul's butch-femme warrior couples, who are the product of Afghan men seldom seeing what a real woman looks like). Call me "weird and fastidious," but on this one issue, I've got to come down on the same side as the Taliban against the alliance of Andy Sullivan and the armed pederasts. 12-7-01
December 5, 2001
What Russia's Putin wants
First, Russia's major long-term major external threat is a Chinese invasion of Siberia. The situation in the East is getting dicier every decade. The Chinese population will expand to about 1.5 billion before stabilizing. The Russian population is 142 million and dropping with no bottom in sight. Illegal immigration from China to Siberia is slowly tipping the balance with Siberia.
The main hope for the Russian economy is discovering more natural resources, but each new oilfield or mine in Siberia is an added inducement for a Kuwait-style invasion by the People's Liberation Army. Putin knows his army is terrible and he doesn't have the money to make it much better. And he wants to cut way back on his nukes to save money, at a time when the Chinese are expanding their nuclear war fighting capabilities. Presumably, he'll keep enough nukes to deter the Chinese, but no head of state sleeps well when the main thing preventing invasion is the presumption that he, personally, will initiate an exchange of ICBMs that will result in the deaths of millions of his own people.
There's got to be a better way.
So, if you are Putin, why not start acting like Russia already has a mutual defense pact with the mighty USA? American has been attacked, so Russia is going to its aid. Putin is hoping to build up the presumption that if Russia is attacked by China, therefore America will go to Russia's aid.
Second, I suspect, Putin wants America favor the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation. His major internal threat is from Muslims inside Russia. The defining problem of the Muscovite state over the last half millennium has been the lack of natural borders on the great Eurasian plain. Whereas mountainous Switzerland can remain both small and independent, in the East, size matters. The barriers to expansion are low, but so are the barriers to dissolution. The Russians were content to let Chechnya have its autonomy after the First Chechen War, but constant kidnapping raids by Chechen gangsters into the Muslim but loyal Russian region of Dagestan outraged the Russian people, making possible Putin's Second Chechen War.
Our 1999 attack on Yugoslavia over Kosovo terrified the Russians. Here was the U.S. violating the national sovereignty of a Slavic, Eastern Orthodox-run state (remind you of anybody?), breaking an internationally recognized country apart, handing a big chunk of its lawful territory over to the control of Muslim gangsters and facilitating their ethnic cleansing of the native Slav population, all because America didn't like the tactics being used by the legal government to put down an internal rebellion. Tactics that were no worse than what Putin shortly thereafter found necessary in Chechnya (or, for that matter, that Turkey found necessary in Kurdistan.) This example that American foreign policy can be driven more by the volatile emotions of elites rather than by our national interest suggests that Russia needs to appeal to America's emotions by coming to its aid now.
Third, we're likely to see the revival of the ancient rivalry between Moscow and Istanbul. Turkey's GNP is about two fifth's as large as Russia's, so it's no longer all that one-sided. Plus, the Turks are much tougher warriors than most Middle Eastern Muslims (remember Gallipoli?).
You may have seen the interesting WSJ op-ed by a Turkish writer proposing that the U.S. subsidize Turkey in exporting its version of secularism to the Islamic world. What the Turkish writer wanted in return was the U.S. favoring Turkey extending its sphere of influence to the former Soviet but ethnic Turkish states of Central Asia. The U.S. has long seen Turkey as just about the best that you can hope for from a country with an Islamic population. It's not at all inconceivable that we will shift our Middle Eastern aid from such troublesome "allies" as Egypt, Jordan, Israel, and Saudi Arabia to the much more satisfactory Turkey. Putin is trying to head this Turkish threat off by making these Russian puppet governments in Central Asia cooperate with the U.S. so that we support Putin's hegemony over these potentially oil-rich countries.
Liberal Creationism versus Darwinism
I think a lot of my readers are turned off by my reliance on Darwinian logic. So, one of these days I'm going to need to write a full-blown article about "liberal creationism" that will put it all in perspective.
In general, the more sophisticated religious creationists admit that the various kinds of Darwinian selection (artificial, natural, and sexual) work. They don't deny that, say, germs are rapidily evolving under the impact of antibiotics. None of them have a problem with believing that artificial selection can create new breeds of dogs or pigs or whatever. They call this "microevolution" and it's okay with them. What they refuse to believe is that new species can emerge (what they call "macroevolution").
Now, I believe that the concept of "species" is vastly overrated in importance (e.g., lions and tigers can get together and make perfectly fertile little ligers and tions, so are lions and tigers different species or just different races? And, ultimately, what difference does it make?) So, the differences between microevolution and macroevolution seem unimportant to me.
Still, since most of my interests and all of what passes for my expertise are in human subjects rather than lions and tigers, I can pretty much live with smart Creationists who accept microevolution. If you tell me that the modern human species was flat out created ex nihilo 100,000 years ago, and that humans have been genetically diversifying ever since according to the processes of selection, we can go a long way together toward understanding things like race. (I can't of course deal with people who think the Earth was created in 4004 BC and Noah's flood killed the dinosaurs and dug the Grand Canyon - although the concept of racial diversification is at least introduced in the Genesis account of the sons of Noah.)