Judging Skaters and movie Directors: How could those Russian pairs skaters beat the Canadian couple? How could Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge earn a Best Picture Oscar nomination, but old Baz be denied a Best Director nomination? How come the Olympic judges hate Elvis Stojko, the skater with the most masculine charisma ever? I answer these burning questions here.
February 15, 2002
Judging Skaters and movie Directors
February 14, 2002
Salt Lake City Olympics "Bribery" Scandal
February 13, 2002
St. Valentine's Day and Eve Ensler
That's Steve Sailer "evolcon," not "evilcon," dammit!
February 12, 2002
Feminist Patriotic Chauvinism and the Winter Olympics
Feminist Patriotic Chauvinism - Ah, the Winter Olympics bring back memories of one of the funnier American fads of the last decade: the periodic whoop-tee-doos where we all swell up with national pride over an American women's team winning gold in some sport that practically no other county's women bother to play. Do you recall the vast outpouring of corporate image ads celebrating our Women's Ice Hockey Team's gold medal in the last Winter Olympics? Of course, there were only five other teams in the field, and three of them would have been slaughtered by a Boys 7 and Under Pee-Wee squad from Medicine Hat.
Or, think back to the ecstasy over the first Women's World Cup of soccer. We'd beaten the world! When it was pointed out that the rest of the world didn't much care about women's soccer, well, that just made us even prouder of how progressive our society is, compared to those notoriously oppressed women of Paris, Milan, and London, who haven't been taught to turn in their high heels for soccer spikes!
After each spasm of interest, the poor women athletes come home and set up a domestic pro league, which rapidly loses 99% of the public's interest, because, basically, the best women aren't anywhere near as good at sports as the best men, so what's the point in watching them unless they are kicking some foreigners' un-American butts?
But there's so much quick cash to be made from these frenzies of feminist patriotic chauvinism that you can expect to see them continually pop up in the future. I'm looking forward to the Women's Super Bowl, where our female football players will triumph over the evil women of Iceland 77-3 in the Finals. And there shall be great rejoicing upon the land.
February 11, 2002
Schwarzenegger's Collateral Damage.
My Review of Schwarzenegger's smart and geopolitically sober Collateral Damage.
Enormous Surprise: Arnold Schwarzenegger's movie about a fireman hunting down the terrorist who murdered his family is the #1 movie in the country! Who coulda thunk that the public would want to see such a thing? Well, for several months Hollywood didn't, for reasons that I dissected recently.
The critics have almost universally slammed Arnold's Collateral Damage, but for wildly contradictory reasons: It's outdated! It's too current! It's typical Arnold! It's not typical Arnold! It's too pro-American! It's too anti-American! It's a dessert topping! It's a floor wax! (Reviews are collected at RottenTomatoes.com.) Did anybody actually watch the movie before they decided what they were going to write? (I did - here's my review.)
The truth is that as an action movie, Collateral Damage won't make anybody forget Terminator 2. Still, despite staying within the bang-bang-boom-boom confines of the genre (a genre I, like many people, enjoy), it's the smartest, most even-handed Hollywood portrait of the Colombian nightmare since Clear and Present Danger. (Here's the review of a leftist critic who actually sort of gets it.) In fact, it's probably too thoughtful to make big bucks.
This demonstration that contemporary film critics are bigoted ignoramuses regarding the real world makes the news of the death of my role model, Richard Grenier, particularly saddening. In his legendary reviews in Commentary, Grenier demonstrated that movies were worthy topics for his vastly learned and skeptical intelligence. (Click here for his monumental demolition job on Gandhi.)
February 9, 2002
Homi Bhabha, Homi Bhabha, I just love to say that name
This fabulously rich Parsi from Bombay writes in such a tortured prose style to cover up his commonsensical dissent from the Edward Said-orthodoxy of his field. Unlike Said, who denounces Europeans who write about Arabs to cover up how embarrassed he is by his fellow Arabs, as a Parsi, Homhi Bhabha simply doesn't feel like purely a victim of colonialism. His remarkably intelligent race of Zoroastrians (they are to South Asia what Hungarian Jews were to pre-Holocaust Europe) did very well for themselves under the British as industrialists, although British racial snobbery was no doubt galling. In fact, a Parsi was elected to Parliament as a Tory M.P. from the English Home Counties in the 1890s! To Homi Bhabha, it's obvious that colonialism wasn't all bad, and that Said's model of the world is stupid. But he's too smart and too careerist to come out and say it clearly.
February 8, 2002
God Save the Queen on her 50th Anniversary
Queen Elizabeth's 50th Anniversary: The only time I ever sawn the Queen was in 1983. I had just arrived in San Francisco on business, and the TV news was trumpeting that President Reagan was going to have dinner with Queen Elizabeth at a Golden Gate Park museum. So, I grabbed a taxi and issued the Mother Goose-like command, "Take me to see the Queen!"
"Any queen in particular?" asked the cabbie. "This town's loaded with 'em."
I eventually landed on a street corner full of Irish protestors holding signs denouncing British rule in Northern Ireland. After a long wait, the biggest motorcade in the history of world rolled by, and there at the back was Elizabeth II, giving her famous little wave to all of us on the corner. I turned around to watch the furious Irish protestors, only to see them leaping up and down in joyous excitement, waving back with tears of adulation in their eyes. When she was gone, the embarrassed Fenians skulked off.
By the way, a lot of hyper-intellectual bilge has been written in the years since the Queen's 25th anniversary "explaining" the Sex Pistol's great single "God Save the Queen." The real reason Johnny Rotten (a.k.a., John Lydon) hated the Queen with such memorable passion was simple: he's an Irishman.
February 7, 2002
Edward Said, Jonah Goldberg, and "Orientalist" scholars
First, as is so common among multiculturalists, Said prefers to write about Europeans who wrote about Arabs, rather than writing about Arabs themselves, because Said is bored and embarrassed by his own people.
Second, many of these European scholars were not only not biased against Arabia, they were in fact "desperately in love with the Arab Muslim world," according to the great economic historian David Landes (click here for my review of his last book.) The British archaeologist turned Arab guerilla leader Lawrence of Arabia is only the most famous "sand-smitten" example.
Third, more than a few Orientalists were not only in love with Arabia, they were in love with individual Arab boys or men. Arab culture's tendency toward bisexuality made it particularly attractive to gay Englishmen. When asked why he had fought for Arab independence, Lawrence replied, ""Personal: I liked a particular Arab, and I thought that freedom for the race would be an acceptable present." This particular Arab was apparently Dahoum, a teenage waterboy. In The Source, James Michener suggested that British rulers in Palestine tended to emotionally bond with the Arabs because they both shared a taste for Brideshead Revisited-style male-male "romantic friendships." In contrast, the highly heterosexual Jews and Americans found each other on the same wavelength.
The essential problem with the European Union
February 6, 2002
New Frontiers in Multicultural Sensitivity
Why Canada admits so many immigrants:
February 3, 2002
Is Human Evolution Finally Over?
Is Human Evolution Finally Over? asks the British Observer. Of course not. Some genes are always being selected for and some against. For example, Palestinians are having three times as many children as Israeli Jews. Thus, the gene frequencies in the Holy Land are evolving at a dramatic rate, with massive real world consequences.
Of course, the rate of current gene change pales in comparison to what will be happening not far in the future when genetic technologies mature. (Already, there are children alive today whose embryos were scientifically selected for being genetically superior to their sibling embryos.) This will have massive political and social impact.
Francis Fukuyama's next book Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution will try to predict these consequences. Unfortunately, I fear Fukuyama will ignore the single best tool for estimating the impact of future differences in gene frequencies: looking at the impact of current genetic differences between individuals and groups. He's always played it safe (in career terms) by ignoring race, even to the point of silliness in his last book, which was about crime and illegitimacy!
To see how understanding genetic differences today sheds crucial light on the genetically engineered tomorrow, read my Thatcher Lecture and my "The Future of Human Nature." 2/3/02
February 2, 2002
Tom Brady's Wonderlic IQ score
Of course, IQ tests do a lousy job of measuring improvisational mental ability, which football players, especially the black ones, are particularly good at. (See my classic article "Great Black Hopes" for the full story.)
The Patriots are the underdogs, but they'd be favored if it was a debate tournament. Starting QB Tom Brady scored 126 (that's about what George W. Bush would score, judging from his 1206 SAT score), while backup QB Drew Bledsoe beat that with a 134 (Al Gore's IQ). 2/02/02
Richard Lynn's and Tatu Vanhanen's IQ and the Wealth of Nations
C'mon, you know you want to to read its tables! For instance, those snotty French who think they are so smart? How do they really score? Or, if you've been wondering why so many people in so many Arab countries believe in so much dumb stuff, Lynn's book offers the most direct explanation: generally speaking, they ain't rocket scientists. Not surprisingly, the Northeast Asian tigers lead the world in average national IQ. (Lynn's mediocre score for Israel seems open to question.)
For the correlation between national IQ and per capita GDP, Lynn reports the kind of high number that social scientists normally only dream about finding. If all you know about a country is its average IQ and whether it has a free market economy, you can predict its income level with a surprising degree of accuracy. Of course, this doesn't solve the chicken or egg question. Are they rich because they are smart or smart because they are rich? From what I've seen so far out of the book, it looks to me like both are true.
Culture also plays a role. Lynn lists underachievers with high IQs and low incomes (e.g., perennial screw-up Argentina) and overachievers (e.g., Barbados, with its veddy, veddy English cricket-centric culture that makes it the best-run black country in the world.).
February 1, 2002
Zora Neale Hurston
My review of Nicole Kidman's Birthday Girl.