Minorities Get Inferior Medical Care, Even with Same Insurance plans, Study Finds

Minorities Get Inferior Medical Care, Even with same Insurance plans, Study Finds - NYT - Let me explain what's really going on, because the article of course fails to. It's too satisfied with abstract explanations like "racism." If you want good medical care, you can't leave it up to your doctor. You have to get on the Web and research what's wrong with you and what the possible treatments are. Then you have to stand up to your doctor and make him do what it takes to cure you. White people are a lot pushier with their doctors than black people, so they get better medical care.

For example, I had a horrible, convulsive cough for six weeks. I went to my doctor and he prescribed some stuff, but none of it worked. Then the coughing became debilitating - I'd suddenly start coughing, then gasping for air, then gagging, then vomiting. That kind of cuts down on your social life (although I was losing weight nicely on the Blow Chow Diet). So, I got on the Internet and figured out I had Whooping Cough (pertussis). My doctor didn't believe me - whooping cough is rare these days - but I had a stack of printouts showing that my symptoms were precisely those of whooping cough in adults. So, I eventually badgered him into giving me Erythromycin, the antibiotic for pertussis. Within two days, the coughing was under control (although it comes back when I overwork).

So, to improve health care for blacks, encourage them to probingly question their doctors and to do research on the web.

This illustrates something I try to do - relate big political, social, and racial issues to daily life. Too many journalists just use a prefabricated set of abstract concepts for thinking about race, and never examine how it actually plays out in the real world.

Hollywood's love affair with R-rated movies hurts the industry financially

For years, Michael Medved has insisted that Hollywood's love affair with R-rated movies hurts the industry financially. Following angry Congressional hearings in 2000 about how Hollywood marketed R-rated films to children, the industry finally started to de-emphasize them. Did this political meddling hurt the bottom line? Or was Medved vindicated? Here's my analysis of the box office data.

"Globalization Proves Disappointing" - IQ and the Wealth of Nations

"Globalization Proves Disappointing" reports the NYT. "Globalization, or the fast-paced growth of trade and cross-border investment, has done far less to raise the incomes of the world's poorest people than the leaders had hoped, many officials here say. The vast majority of people living in Africa, Latin America, Central Asia and the Middle East are no better off today than they were in 1989..." On the other hand, hundreds of billions in private investment have poured into China.

So, what's the story behind the story? Capital flows to where wages are low but IQ's are high - pre-eminently China, where the average IQ is two points higher than the U.S. already, according to Richard Lynn's IQ and the Wealth of Nations. China's IQ advantage is likely to grow greater in the future as the Chinese get better fed and educated. In contrast, these other regions (with the exception of the self-destructive Argentineans) average IQ's of 90 or less, sometimes considerably less.

This is not to disparage free markets - there's really no alternative. The point is simply that, at any point in time, humans will differ greatly in productive capacity, so not everyone benefits from economic competition to the same extent.

The Oscars & diversity

The Oscars & diversity: Halle Berry's acceptance speech - Why are actresses like that? Raymond Chandler explains. Plus, Denzel Washington & Ben Stein's Law. Here's my article.

Human Biodiversity Watch: Jennifer Connelly's diet

Human Biodiversity Watch: Jennifer Connelly's diet: Sure, she's got an Oscar now that she's starved herself down to the official shape for a prestige actress, but can she be healthier and happier looking like this today (above left) than when she looked like that (above right)? Perhaps the emotional instability of so many top actresses stems from their being famished all the time? Hunger doesn't make you a happy person.

National Geographic's green-eyed Afghan Pashtun refugee girl found

The new issue of National Geographic reveals that after 17 years, the magazine has found the subject of its most popular photo ever: that green-eyed Afghan Pashtun refugee girl. It's remarkable how much power that rare eye-color mutations hold over the human imagination.

Jennifer Connelly pictures: voluptuous and anorexic

The dress designers for bony actresses Jennifer Connelly and Gwyneth Paltrow continue to take abuse for how awful their clients looked at the Oscars. Yet, the real crime is what these women have done to their own bodies. One of America's wisest coeds wrote to me, "Carving a naturally fleshy body type like Jennifer Connelly's [left] down to the mannequin she is today [right] also plays hell with a woman's hormonal system. When a C-cup like Connelly loses so much weight that she barely has any breasts to speak of, her hormones are thrown perilously out of whack. This can cause mood swings, menstrual irregularities and it can even compromise the immune system. I suspect that this is why actresses like Calista Flockhart and Angelina Jolie adopt instead of tackily giving birth themselves. A woman who maintains a body fat percentage far below her genetically determined minimum fights a daily war with nature. Of course, bearing children is the most archetypal surrender to body fat. Get thee to an adoption agency. Could fat phobia be at least partially responsible for dropping birth rates?"

One of America's wisest socialists asked this question in response: "What is the relation between a woman's size and her reproduction rate? For most of human history it was probably pretty close to straight-line positive [i.e., the less malnourished she was, the more children she had]; but now in advanced nations I would guess that it is some sort of Bell Curve-like figure, with very fat and fashionably thin women having far fewer children than the averagely "overweight" women in between. (The mere fact that average women can be described as overweight is in itself interesting.)" Anybody know of any studies?

My dumb question: SDI and nuclear-tipped interceptors

My dumb question: It's exciting that the Pentagon's missile defense system prototype has three times in a row physically struck a dummy ICBM in tests over the Pacific. But why are we even trying to "hit a bullet with a bullet?" When you try to shoot down a flying object, you don't use a rifle, you use a shotgun or an anti-aircraft gun. So wouldn't it make more sense just to load anti-missile missiles with low fallout nukes and vaporize any incoming ICBMs that are in their general vicinity? Help me out here, folks.

Priests and celibacy - Reply

A reader replies: "The development of birth control has probably made priestly celibacy a less attractive option. If marriage no longer means having a large and demanding family, fewer men will want to become priests. I forget where I read this (Fukuyama? Tiger ? iSteve?), but if families are smaller, fewer parents will direct a child to become the priest or nun in the family. They'd rather have grandchildren. Of course another factor is that economic growth and the decline in discrimination against Catholics in mixed, or formerly occupied Catholic countries like Ireland and Poland means that there are more jobs available for educated Catholics."

My review of Robin Williams in Death to Smoochy.

My review of robin Williams in Death to Smoochy.

Women's Olympic figure skating and Cinderella's glass slipper

Women's Olympic figure skating is kind of strange: it's as if all the girls in the kingdom who want to be the Princess and live happily ever after with the Prince not only have to try on Cinderella's glass slippers, but then they have to dance in them down a freshly waxed marble staircase without falling on their keisters.

If you like watching women's skating, does that mean you're secretly gay?

A sports-talk show was debating this morning, "If you like watching women's skating, does that mean you're secretly gay?" One thing I've noticed about myself is that I often intensely enjoy watching feminine-effeminate pastimes like figure skating and Broadway musicals, but I don't spend all that much time thinking about them in-between seeing them. In contrast, I seldom enjoy golf while I'm playing it - my handicap is my swing - but in between rounds I've spent a truly massively useless amount of my life thinking about golf, especially golf course architecture. In fact, when I was changing careers in 2000, I intentionally didn't play for an entire year because when I do play, especially on a fine course, I can't stop thinking about golf for days or weeks afterwards.

This mental gap works in the opposite direction as well. Of all the art forms, golf course architecture is one of the biggest - as measured in objective terms such as dollars spent on it or acres covered by it (more than Delaware and Rhode Island combined). Yet, the rest of the art world pays zero attention to it, probably because it appeals almost solely to the kind of heterosexual guys who don't care much about other kinds of art. If you are interested in seeing how hardcore golf course connoisseurs think, check out the discussions at GolfClubAtlas, where you can read, for example, a 70 message thread about the aesthetic failure of the new fairway bunker on Riviera's 7th hole. The aficionados on the discussion group may seem way over the top, but that's how art forms progress - they require not just people who love good art, but also people who deeply hate bad art and want to stamp it out of existence.

Race and the Winter Olympics (Vonetta Flowers)

Race and the Winter Olympics: Since I've written so much over the years about racial patterns in winners of Summer Olympics medals, a reader asked me several weeks ago if I had anything to say about race in the Winter Olympics. I replied that the role where African Americans have the greatest natural advantage is "brakeman," the primary pusher of the bobsled. It's a job that requires that rare combination of sprinting speed and strength that blacks of West African descent tend to have more of than anybody else. Congratulations to Vonetta Flowers, who just became the first black Winter Olympics gold medallist ... as a bobsled brakewoman.

Despite all the gee-whiz commentary, there's nothing surprising about a sprinter/long jumper switching to bobsled - the Soviets did that all the time with their 100m men who were just below Olympic caliber. NFL players Herschel Walker and Willie Gault have competed in the bobsled, but the in-bred, soap-operaish family of American bobsledders didn't much appreciate rich black superstars parachuting into their penurious sport and hogging their quadrennial moment in the spotlight.

Decline of Women's Ice Hockey

Did you notice how Women's Ice Hockey, which set off such a frenzy of feminist patriotic chauvinism in 1998, was an utter dud in 2002? NBC broadcast just the last 6 minutes of the gold medal hockey game Thursday night (Canada beat the U.S. 3-2), while giving saturation coverage to the ladies' figure skating final, which is so popular because it serves, in effect, to crown the World's Top Princess (just as women's gymnastics in the Summer Olympics crowns the World's Top Pixie) . The collapse of interest in the U.S. Women's Hockey team continues a trend of faddish interest in women's teams fizzling in their return performances. In the 1996 Olympics, the U.S. Women's Softball and Basketball teams were the subject of vast hoopla, but in 2000 few fans were interested in them anymore. If this trend continues, the next Women's World Cup in soccer will be a massive let-down. Essentially, I see little evidence of long term interest in women's team sports except among lesbian fans and the kind of guy sports nuts who will watch anything on ESPN2.

Dragonfly, starring Kevin Costner

Dragonfly, starring Kevin Costner, is the perfect ghost story for people (e.g., me) who don't like ghost stories because they are too scary. Click here for my review.

Stanley Kurtz on Middle East

Who's having the best war among the punditariat? My nominee is Stanley Kurtz of the Hudson Institute for bringing a crucial anthropological perspective. Here he explains why Middle Eastern societies are so hard to reform - no matter who the government is, society consists of interlocking extended family networks. In an earlier column, he noted that extended families in the Middle East are so powerful because they are so inbred - an astonishing 1/3rd of marriages are between first cousins! Does anybody have Kurtz's email address?

Figure skating appeals more to women and gay men

Yes, I know lots of you couldn't care less about figure skating, but from a human biodiversity perspective figure skating is hugely instructive because it is that rare sport (assuming it is a sport) that appeals more to women than to men and to gay men than to straight men. It is the exception that proves a lot of rules.

Making figure skating judging more objective

The Figure Skating Powers That Be have announced that they are going to try to make their sport's judging more objective by giving credit for each move on a degree of difficulty scale. There's only one problem with this. Figure skating, as we know it, is essentially about being a princess, not a jock. The more they make it more of a sport like gymnastics and less of an art form, the less feminine it will become and thus the less feminine its champions will be. The danger is not so much that skating will crown as winners more burly women like Tonya Harding, who are strong jumpers, but then so was Charles Barkley. No, the risk is that skating will be overrun by more pre-pubescent girls like Tara "The Human Drill Bit" Lipinksi, the 15 year old who took the gold in 1998 with her high-RPM jumps.

The physical difference between a little girl and a woman is basically body fat. Women have higher body fat percentages than girls (more body fat is bad in just about any sport not involving massive heat loss like English Channel swimming or Iditarod dogsled mushing). And their weight is distributed farther from their vertical axis (i.e., they have T&A). Recall how skaters spin faster at the ends of their routines when they pull their arms in. It's basic physics. The same applies with T&A. A womanly beauty like Katarina Witt could never attain the RPM necessary to jump like the stick insect-like Lipinski. Gymnastics has been overrun by pre-pubescents for years (e.g., 14 year old Nadia Comaneci in 1976). That's why they had to set a minimum age of 16 for Olympics "women's" gymnastics. Unfortunately, that just means girls try to delay puberty with dieting, exercise, and drugs, with God-knows-what long term health effects. Ultimately, womanly grace is awfully hard to quantify, but we sure know it when we see it. It would be sad to penalize that in the name of making skating judging more objective.