June 28, 2009

"Milk"

For the record, here's the full-length version of my American Conservative print-only review from last winter of the Oscar-winning biopic "Milk:"
Last November, Barack Obama’s name on the ballot brought to the California polls unusually large numbers of fans of Tyler Perry’s “Madea” movies, who stuck around to vote against gay marriage. Shocked, California’s liberals quickly settled upon more suitable villains to blame: Mormons! The small, besieged community of Hollywood bravely resolved to speak truth to Mormon media power by giving the Best Actor Oscar to Sean Penn in “Milk.”

The Academy even handed “Milk” the Best Original Screenplay award, although some of the drab script is lifted from “The Times of Harvey Milk,” which the Academy honored as Best Documentary back in 1984.

“Milk” is a repetitious biopic about the 1970s political career of the self-proclaimed “Mayor of Castro Street” as Harvey Milk grinds through five election campaigns on his way to becoming “America’s first openly gay elected official.” Director Gus Van Sant (best remembered for 1989’s “Drugstore Cowboy”) manages to make even San Francisco look unattractive in his haste to get back to the gerrymandering at Milk’s camera shop.

By the way, what kind of camera store is used as a political clubhouse? Camera shops are normally the worst meeting halls imaginable because they’re crammed with fragile and expensive merchandise. Yet, Milk’s “Castro Camera” is depicted as a shell with little inventory other than orange Kodak film boxes. (My guess: it was mostly a drop-off for amateur photographers who wanted their gay porn pictures developed discreetly -- an easy little business that left Milk with plenty of time on his hands for politics.)

A great tragic story could be made about how Milk’s gay liberation movement unleashed its own nemesis. Within two decades of Milk’s arrival, gay rights had transformed Castro Street into the plague spot of the Western world, with AIDS killing its 10,000th San Franciscan in 1993.

Mentioning a little thing like how industrial scale promiscuity set off the worst American health catastrophe of the last generation wouldn’t be On Message, however, and “Milk” sticks to its political talking points with the same tenacity as its namesake did. The bathhouses where the disease was spread aren’t shown. The movie is so politically prim that there’s only a single minute on the entire soundtrack of 1970s disco music.

Left out is almost everything that could add context and flavor, such as Milk’s alliance with Jim Jones’s Maoist Peoples Temple cult. Just ten days before Milk and Mayor George Moscone were murdered by working class politician Dan White, 907 ex-San Franciscans drank the Kool-Aid in Jonestown.

The acclaim that has greeted Penn’s supposedly precise impersonation of Milk is ironic because the 1984 documentary is readily viewable on Youtube, conveniently demonstrating how differently Milk and Penn read the same lines.

At least on TV, the suave candidate displayed only a hint of his native Long Island accent, while Penn plays him as an annoying noodge. And, oddly enough, the real Milk was better looking than the movie star. Penn, who in the 1980s would add slabs of muscle for roles as rapidly as Mickey Rourke did for “The Wrestler,” is now, at only 48, as wrinkled as a Shar Pei puppy.

Most strikingly, if “Milk’s” screenplay weren’t so relentlessly hagiographic, Sean Penn would be on the hot seat over his stereotypical caricaturizing of a homosexual. Penn’s performance is so flamingly effeminate that you have to wonder whether he got Castro Street’s Harvey Milk confused with Broadway’s Harvey Fierstein.

During television appearances, Milk came across as a calm, moderately masculine presence, with only slight gay mannerisms. In contrast, Penn’s histrionic act sets your gaydar clanging like the meltdown siren at a nuclear power plant. That’s important, because Penn’s decision to play Milk as utterly unable to pass for straight robs Milk’s story of much of its interest. The real man, who had served without incident as a Naval officer, chose to come out of the closet.

Perhaps Milk was as histrionic in private as Penn portrays him as being in public. I don’t know. If so, shouldn’t there be some mention in the script that his public persona was a facade? Watching Milk wrestle with his conscience over whether to drop his on-camera butch act might at least have provided the film with some hint of self-conflict. As it is, when Josh Brolin (who is outstanding, as usual) eventually appears as the financially and mentally shaky White, it’s a relief to see finally a three-dimensional character.

Rated R for language, some sexual content and brief violence.

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

Fire Dept. Diversity Promotions, Chicago-Style

In VDARE.com on Sunday evening, I'll have a column pointing out the multiple ironies in Slate's 5000 word article last week deploring the excessively objective and lamentably non-random 2003 New Haven fire department test (since discarded, with the approval of Sonia Sotomayor) on which Frank Ricci earned a promotion.

In the meantime, here's a great John Kass column from the Chicago Tribune on February 14, 2009 (or as the day is known in Chicago history, St. Valentine's Day) that's highly relevant to the Ricci case. The background is that in the 1990s, Chicago spent a fortune on devising the perfect unbiased police and fire promotion civil service tests. When the test creation process was complete, everybody in Chicago agreed that, finally, a non-discriminatory test had been perfected. Of course, it turned out that whites ended up earning 95% of the scores high enough for promotion, so a political firestorm ensued. For a while, Mayor Richard M. Daley stoutly defended a test on which no expense had been spared, but eventually he caved in and announced that some of the top scorers would get promotions but other worthies would get promotions too, based on "merit" in order to bring "diversity" to leadership positions. This "merit" system was extended to firefighters.

A much more sophisticated system than the simple-minded one under which Frank Ricci earned a promotion, no? So much more thoughtful and nuanced! Who cares about Civil Service laws against political hackery and nepotism when the concept of diversity is at stake?
In what squeaky-clean city would a fire department lieutenant known as “Matches,” convicted of multiple arsons—including one sparked at an elementary school—feel that he’s still entitled to his taxpayer-funded pension of $50,000 per year?

Oh, don’t pretend you don’t know the city.

It’s Chicago, which must be the epicenter of political reform now that Mayor Richard Daley’s guys are running the White House and the U.S. Census, and are about to wet the beaks of federal road and bridge contractors.

It’s also the same city where you’ll need 28 quarters in your pocket just to park for two hours at a metered space, thanks to Daley’s new parking deal. But perhaps the only Chicagoan with pockets thick enough for that many quarters is none other than the famous John “Quarters” Boyle himself.

Years ago, Quarters was convicted of stealing millions of dollars in quarters from the state toll roads. After his punishment, he received a cushy city job. Daley told me politics had nothing to do with it, but all the while Quarters was getting out the vote with The Coalition for Better Government, a pro-Daley patronage army of payroll hacks, tough guys and felons.

Sadly, Quarters is now back in federal prison, this time for taking more than $200,000 in bribes in the mayor’s Hired Truck scandal. But Quarters is keeping his mouth shut. And as he sits tight, his brother wants a pension.

Oops! I’m such a chumbolone that I forgot an important detail: The convicted bribe-taker John “Quarters” Boyle and the fire lieutenant/arsonist Jeffrey “Matches” Boyle are brothers. That’s the Chicago Way.

In 2006, Matches Boyle was sentenced to six years behind bars after pleading guilty to setting multiple fires on the Northwest Side and in neighboring Park Ridge. Matches pleaded guilty to eight fires, but admitted to setting more than 20 others.

What’s fascinating—since Chicago is the epicenter of reform—is that while he was busy as an arsonist, he was also busy applying for a promotion to fire lieutenant.

There were 200 more-qualified firefighters ahead of him on the list, but Matches magically jumped ahead of all of them and received what Daley’s City Hall calls a “merit” promotion in 2002. If that’s not reform, what is?

Here's a picture of Matches Boyle, beneficiary of one of Mayor Daley's "merit" promotions that were instituted in the name of Diversity. As you may have noticed, however, Mr. Boyle is a Person of Pink. (In fact, 30% of Chicago's "merit" promotions went to whites.) But Matches does come from a fine Democratic Machine family, and, in the final analysis, isn't that what really counts?
Matches served only one year and nine months of his six-year stint. And now, despite losing his job and burning the words “convicted arsonist” onto his résumé, he’s demanding another miracle: He wants the Firemen’s Annuity & Benefit Fund of Chicago—the group that handles the pensions—to fork over his $50K per year. His rationale?

According to his lawsuit against the fund filed in Cook County court last month, Matches insists his convictions had nothing to do with his job as a fire lieutenant. Why? He didn’t set the fires while on duty. He started them on his free time. ...

Matches’ crime spree came to an end after the 2005 Super Bowl, when Matches, drunk and upset over losing $3,000 on a football bet, decided to make himself feel better by setting fire to Brandy’s Restaurant on Harlem Avenue. Local police recognized him from a security tape, and notified detectives from the Chicago Police Bomb and Arson Unit.

The detectives picked up Matches, and according to the police report, they asked him if he liked movies. Matches said he sure did like movies, so the detective asked if he’d “be interested in viewing a video of an arson in progress.”

They rolled tape showing a man pushing a Dumpster, with contents blazing, up against the restaurant. The firebug bore a unique resemblance to Matches, which caused Matches to bow his head and issue the immortal words: “OK, you’ve got me. That’s me.”

According to the reports, Matches told police that he had a drinking problem, was upset over bad football bets and his father’s death, and that journalists were writing mean things about his brother, Quarters. (I’m just thankful he didn’t burn down the Tribune Tower on deadline.)

According to transcripts of a benefit board meeting last year, Matches was asked what he learned as a Chicago firefighter about how different materials ignite, and at what temperatures.

The hotter it got, the more it would burn,” Matches said simply.

Consider how much more socially uplifting is the story of Matches' merit promotion compared to those of nerdy "fire buffs" like Frank Ricci who spent all those hours poring over fire fighting manuals so that they could "earn" promotions based on disparately impacting Civil Service tests of objective knowledge.

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

Minor style changes

Yeah, it's still the ugly old iSteve blog you've come to know and put up with, just with a serif font (Georgia) instead of Arial and some color tweaks.

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

June 27, 2009

The Secret History of the Stonewall Riot

In "Stonewall at 40," Frank Rich celebrates in the NYT the June 28, 1969 Greenwich Village drag bar riot that symbolically launched the gay liberation era:
On Monday, President Obama will commemorate Stonewall with an East Room reception for gay leaders.

Rich never mentions, and I suspect that Obama won't either, that the catalyst for the riot was Judy Garland's funeral the previous day, and that most of the rioters were cross-dressers.

Rich goes on:
After the gay liberation movement was born at Stonewall, this strand of history advanced haltingly until the 1980s. It took AIDS and the new wave of gay activism it engendered to fully awaken many, including me, to the gay people all around them. But that tardy and still embryonic national awareness did not save the lives of those whose abridged rights made them even more vulnerable during a rampaging plague.

Uh, I think a big chunk of history has been shoved down the Memory Hole here. The 1970s were not a time when gay liberation "advanced haltingly;" in reality, the 1970s were when all effective legal restrictions on industrial scale homosexual promiscuity were utterly ended in precisely those cities -- e.g., San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York -- where AIDS broke out most virulently in the early 1980s.

Gay liberation caused the AIDS epidemic.

What's even more striking is that this huge historical event of the recent past has been so distorted that, according to Google, nobody in the history of the Internet has ever before posted the words:

"Gay liberation caused the AIDS epidemic"

Instead, we're all supposed to believe AIDS was caused by discrimination against homosexuals in the military, the absence of gay marriage, and/or Ronald Reagan. Indeed, it's precisely because the evidence for cause and effect is so overwhelmingly clear that the pressure to lie and to submit to others' lies is so intense.

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

The Great Divide

Popular liberal economics commentator Barry Ritholtz has posted what struck me originally as a curious response to Connie Bruck's New Yorker article on Angelo Mozilo, which touched in surprising measure on the sizable role that minority lending played in Countrywide's debacle. Ritholtz writes:

Yet another example of how the sub-prime market was a creature of the profit motive, and not government mandates.

There is this fascinating little anecdote in Connie Bruck’s Angelo’s Ashes — about Angelo Mozilo’s experiences in Florida as a dark skinned NY Italian, and how that impacted his later venture into minority lending (early 90s) amnd subprime lending (middle 90s):

“The new company [Countrywide] sent Mozilo first to Virginia Beach and then to Orlando. He had never lived outside the Bronx, and years later he told friends that it had been difficult to be a darkskinned Italian-American in these communities. In Virginia Beach, the local club where businesspeople congregated refused to admit him, and in Orlando he had trouble selling mortgages until he met a group of Jewish homebuilders who couldn’t get financing. As his sister, Lori, told me, “Angelo said, ‘Nobody wants to work with you. Nobody wants to work with me. Let’s do it together.’

He was always this Italian guy people didn’t want to accept.” She went on, “When he tans he gets really dark. My mother told me that when he worked in Florida he was asked to sit in the back of the bus.”

And just what might have this done to Angelo’s world view later on? Alex, I’ll take pop psychology for $100:

Despite Mozilo’s ideals, Countrywide did not have a strong record of lending to minorities. In 1992, shortly after Mozilo became chairman of the Mortgage Bankers Association, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston issued a report stating that it had found systemic discrimination by mortgage lenders against African-American and Hispanic borrowers. Robert Gnaizda, former general counsel of the Greenlining Institute, a nonprofit organization focussed on minority rights, sent the report to Mozilo and other mortgage bankers. “I received a harsh response from Mozilo,” Gnaizda told me.

Privately, however, Mozilo was appalled. He ordered that all Countrywide’s records on rejected minority applicants be sent to him, and he retroactively approved about half of them. Then he dispatched African-Americans, posing as prospective borrowers—he called them “mystery shoppers”—to Countrywide branches, and concluded that they were indeed treated differently from white borrowers.

Countrywide opened new offices in inner-city areas, created counselling centers, and loosened some lending standards, to include borrowers with less than pristine credit histories. Between 1993 and 1994, the company’s loans to African-American borrowers rose three hundred and twenty-five per cent, and to Hispanics they increased a hundred and sixty-three per cent. In 1994, Countrywide became the first mortgage lender to sign a fair-lending agreement with the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

“Countrywide went from close to the bottom in lending to minorities to near the top,” Gnaizda said. “I remember Mozilo telling me, ‘I don’t want to narrow the gap in lending to minorities, I want to end it.’ ”

Eventually, subprime loans became too attractive a business for Countrywide to resist. In September, 1996, it created a new subsidiary for these loans, called Full Spectrum Lending; if the loans performed poorly, the Countrywide brand would not be tarnished. “It was a careful entry, considered closely by those at the top of the company,” a former high-level Countrywide executive recalled. “We sat together and asked each other, ‘Would you make this loan with your money?’ ”

To offset the credit risk posed by subprime lending, the company required borrowers to make a substantial equity investment, ranging from fifteen to thirty-five per cent. . .”

It was the Private sector that saw a profit opportunity and went for it. They made the loans. The government’s role was to provide rhetoric . . .

This is representative of the quality of public debate over what caused the mortgage meltdown. In public, there are only two sides: the liberal (Corporate Greed!) and the libertarian (Government Interference!).

In contrast, the real divide is between the overwhelmingly dominant Diversity Dogmatists, liberal and libertarian, versus the tiny number of Diversity Heretics. Personally, I don't oppose government regulation of the mortgage business to prevent over-optimistic borrowers and lenders from causing defaults down the road, so I'm not a libertarian on this. But, in this case, the federal government was (and still is) regulating in the wrong direction: toward more risk.

Would minorities have ended up getting vast amounts of overly optimistic loans anyway even if the government had been neutral on the question? Perhaps -- the Diversity Dogma is so entrenched in our society that supposedly hard-headed businessmen like Mozilo believe it just as much as the politicians -- at least judging from their public statements. And, in the long run, few people have the strength of character to be hypocritical enough to act prudently when acting on the "ideals" you constantly extol (but don't actually believe) can you make a lot of money in the short run.

Finally, even if government and business had been sensible, the brute fact of population change in California, replacing middle class people with peasant class people, would have caused massive problems in generating enough productivity to repay debts.

But this way of thinking is so foreign, so unthinkable that almost nobody understands the catastrophe that just happened to us.

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

Interview with Richard Nisbett at HBD Books

Here's a probing interview with Richard Nisbett, author of Intelligence and How to Get It, at HBD Books.

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

It's time for your Ricci case predictions

Supposedly, the Supreme Court will announce its decision in Ricci v. DeStefano on Monday.

What are your predictions?

Also, feel free to make predictions about how the Sotomayor hearings will play out.

And if you feel an urgent need to refresh yourself on all the wisdom I've been dispensing on the topics of "Ricci" or "Sotomayor," just click the Labels below.

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

"Slumdog Millionaire"

Traditionally, I post on iSteve teaser excerpts from my movie reviews when I write them, then post the whole thing here months later after the DVD comes out. So, here's last winter's full-length American Conservative review of the Oscar Best Picture-winner "Slumdog Millionaire:"
After sweeping the Golden Globe awards, “Slumdog Millionaire,” the plucky movie about an uneducated underdog from the slums of Bombay who wins 20 million rupees on the local version of the quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, has become the Oscar race overdog.

Seven-year-old Jamal and his older brother Salim are orphaned in 1992 when Hindu nationalist mobs torch their Muslim slum in Bombay. (Or “Mumbai,” as the Shiv Sena politicians who fomented these pogroms renamed the city in 1996. Although trendy Westerners all use “Mumbai” now, no locals call their famous film industry “Mullywood.”)

In their Dickensian struggle to survive, the brothers, along with a pretty foundling girl named Latika, scavenge in a vast garbage dump. They are lured away to an “orphanage” run by a Fagin-like impresario of child beggars who blinds his best prospects to make them more pitiable. Fortunately, they escape to peddle snacks on India’s famous trains and guide gullible Western tourists around the Taj Mahal. As adolescents, they finally make it back to Bombay to try to rescue Latika from the pimp. Salim becomes a hit man, while Jamal sticks to humble but honest work.

Six years of economic growth later, Jamal, now delivering tea in an outsourced call center, finds Latika enslaved as the moll of his brother’s mob boss. (I suspect this plot twist was hoary when Jimmy Cagney was young …) To make enough money to run off with his beloved, Jamal goes on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. There, as fate, karma, or kismet would have it, he finds he knows the answer to each trivia question because it had already come up at a memorably dramatic moment in his life.

Jamal’s run of good fortune entrances India, but the evil game show host (who resembles a subcontinental version of comedian Dennis Miller), doesn’t care about his booming ratings. Before the final round, he has Jamal arrested and tortured to find out how he’s cheating. By recounting his life in flashback, Jamal convinces the police captain of his true-heartedness and returns for the final showdown question.

Unfortunately, “Slumdog’s” success in the year-end awards largely reflects a lack of competition. The film contains, in theory, most of the elements of a crowd pleaser, but the actual product turns out to be less enjoyable to watch than a good episode of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

One problem is aesthetic. The specialty of eclectic British director Danny Boyle (“Trainspotting”) is cranking the kinetic energy onscreen up to 11. He revitalized the zombie genre with “28 Days Later” by having the rotting undead sprint after their terrified prey like Usain Bolt. Granted, turbocharging dilapidated zombies didn’t make much sense, but it was exciting. Similarly, Boyle’s directorial razzmatazz made a young lad’s life in an English exurb look eventful in the underrated “Millions.”

Bombay, however, doesn’t need to be juiced with the latest video fads. As Salman Rushdie has noted, Indian cities induce sensory overload (most famously conveyed by the bravura opening chapter of Kipling’s Kim). A more stately approach, such as David Lean’s in “A Passage to India,” would have been more watchable. Boyle comes up with one useful innovation—floating subtitles onscreen next to the character speaking (about one-third of the dialogue is in Hindi). Overall, though, the combination of the teeming masses of India’s “maximum city” and Boyle’s zap-pow digital dynamics is exhausting.

Worse, the script is as on-the-nose as the dog comedy “Marley and Me.” Sadly, Boyle and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy didn’t trust their gimmick. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire has been a hit around the world because its slow pacing (the opposite of Jeopardy!) allows viewers to think along with the contestant as he talks out his thought processes. Thinking is fun.

“Crash” (an equally contrived but more interactive film) allowed viewers a half minute to rewind the plot in their heads and figure out for themselves the climactic conundrum of why nobody was killed when the angry Iranian shot the Mexican locksmith’s angelic daughter at point-blank range.

Sadly, “Slumdog Millionaire” doesn’t encourage any thinking about earlier scenes. Instead, each quiz question is followed by a lengthy flashback ending with The Answer. For example, after “Who invented the revolver?” comes Jamal’s recollection that concludes with his gangster brother waving a gun around and shouting, “The man with the Colt .45 says shut up!”

Okay, we get it.

Rated R for some violence, disturbing images and language.

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

Double or Nothing

If Obama is serious about persuading Israel to pull its settlements out of the bulk of the West Bank in order to allow the Palestinians to have their own state there instead of having to live like prison inmates under the thumb of the Israeli Army guarding the settlements, then here's a suggestion for a simple proposal that would strike a lot of people as a square deal:

Double or Nothing

In other words, if Israel pulls out of all but the fringes of the West Bank, then the U.S. would double its annual aid to Israel. If it doesn't, then Israel gets nothing from the U.S.

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

"Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star"

I just realized that my review of David Spade's 2003 movie "Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star" has not been available on the Internet for the past half decade. I also just realized that in those years, nobody, including me, has ever missed it. Still, it seems kind of timely, so, for the iSteve Completists out there, here it is:
I certainly hope you don't feel like I do, but a part of me believes that anybody who was ever a star somehow deserves to never have to work again in a non-celebrity capacity. I hope I'm alone in experiencing involuntary repugnance at the thought of former television personalities having to do honest work, but I fear I'm not.

We Americans like to kid ourselves that we have a strong Work Ethic, but since perhaps the Gold Rush of 1849, we've instead had the world's leading Get Rich Quick Dream. I think we'd rather hear that somebody we once idolized has choked on his own vomit in a crackhouse (ah, the tragic price of fame!) than learn that he's writing COBOL code in Cincinnati (ugh, the boring ignominy of anonymity!).

Fortunately, even after they're washed up, our American celebrities have so many opportunities to cash in by letting us bask in their reflected glory that they seldom let us down quite that much. For example, I've long followed the charmed life of Mike Eruzione, the amateur hockey player whose sole achievement was scoring the winning goal to beat the Soviets in the 1980 Olympics, just to see if he'll ever have to get a real job. After 23 years, he's still going strong as a motivational speaker and professional guest at charity golf tournaments.

What about child stars? Adorable little girl actresses, like Elizabeth Taylor and Drew Barrymore, often grow up to be adorable young women, but boy entertainers frequently fail dismally to become permanent celebrities.

Boys are less mature than girls while growing up, so producers have a hard time finding talented-enough normal lads who can, literally, act their age on screen. Therefore, they search out undersized, undersexed older boys who can play younger than their real ages. Similarly, impresarios putting together boy bands look for high-pitched singers who will seem like unthreatening "practice boyfriends" to adolescent girl fans.

Unfortunately for them, being late to reach puberty is not what audiences look for in adult leading men and rock stars. Many male child stars are quickly surpassed by their more manly peers and are left with no marketable skills, twisted Hollywood values, an all-consuming hunger to get back into the limelight, and a certain aura of freakishness.

Although he didn't get on television until his mid-20s, David Spade -- the snippy little blond receptionist on the sitcom "Just Shoot Me!" -- has perfectly cast himself in the not-too-bad comedy "Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star."

There's not much of a market on TV for fairly androgynous heterosexuals, but what there is, Spade has had cornered since he started on Saturday Night Live in 1990. (His career peak was probably the 1995 comedy "Tommy Boy" with the late Chris Farley.) In his stand-up act and this movie he co-wrote with SNL scribe Fred Wolf, Spade emphasizes both his innate lack of masculinity and the effeminizing effect of being in showbiz -- the jealous gossiping and obsession with your looks.

Dickie Roberts is a 35-year-old valet parker whose TV show was canceled 23 long years ago, causing his mother to leave him. He's paying the rent by getting pummeled by 3'-4" Emmanuel Lewis of "Webster" fame in celebrity boxing matches.

Dickie hopes to make his comeback in a hotly anticipated Rob Reiner movie. (Apparently, this is a period piece.) But Reiner won't let him audition, saying, "Dickie, you're not a real person." To learn how people with healthy upbringings feel, Dickie hires a suburban family to let him live for a month as one of their children.

Like a lot of movie comedies, "Dickie Roberts," especially in its first half, isn't as funny as a strong sit-com. One reason is that "Dickie Roberts" was written by just two people, while TV shows bring far more manpower to bear on joke writing.

Moreover, promising sit-coms have longer to gel. For instance, "The Simpsons" organization evolved into the most perfect script writing machine ever, but not until after the show's uneven first year. Thus, movie comedies are generally more slapdash than the sit-coms that make it to syndication.

In the second half, as Dickie develops a warm relationship with his temporary siblings, there's an unexpected turn away from satire and toward a sentimental family film. Oddly enough, as the movie gets soppier, it actually gets funnier. Still, it's too tawdry for children and too childish for adults.

Like a lot of comedies, if you were to stumble upon this movie flipping channels one evening, you'd probably be entertained. It's not "Tommy Boy," but it's not awful either. Unfortunately, if you have to talk somebody into going to the theatre to see it with you, you'd worry too much about whether your companion hates it to enjoy it.

Rated PG-13 for crude and sex-related humor, language, and drug references.

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

June 26, 2009

The White Michael Jackson ...

... was Donny Osmond of the Osmonds, who was a regular on network television from age five.

The Mormon Osmond Brothers had a Jackson 5 sound-alike #1 hit with "One Bad Apple" released when Donny was 12 going on 13 in late 1970. (An older Osmond, Merrill, does the lead singing, but little Donny's soprano kicks it into overdrive.) Osmond said Michael Jackson later told him that the Jackson 5 had been offered "One Bad Apple" first, but chose to record "ABC" instead. (Neither song has as exciting a chord progression as the Jackson 5's first hit "I Want You Back," but, then, what song does? Now that I think about it, I'm not sure that the Jacksons' version of that song by Berry Gordy and other Motown insiders does full justice to the potential of the material. British pub-rockers Graham Parker and the Rumour used a rather different arrangement of "I Want You Back" as their concert closer, and somebody might do well right now with their own cover.)

At age 18, Donny had a hit Sonny & Cher-type TV series with his sister Marie, which, when you think about it, is pretty weird in a sort of William and Dorothy Wordsworth kind of way.

Osmond always got a lot of grief for not being quite as talented as Michael Jackson, but, then, who was?

In retrospect, you have to give Donny Osmond a lot of credit for staying reasonably sane all these years.

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

June 25, 2009

Michael Jackson, RIP

Here's something I wrote about Michael Jackson in 2005:

We're the same age, and his troubles reminded me than when we were eleven and I was still in my he-man-girl-hating phase (I invited girls to my 6th and 7th birthday parties, but for the next four or five years after that couldn't recall what madness had ever made me like girls), I felt sorry for him because his family wasn't letting him enjoy his "latency period" (as the Freudians called it). I figured, even then, that forcing him to sing love songs to girls at that age would lead to trouble. (In contrast, I highly approved of his hit "Ben," from the movie "Willard," which was a much more age-appropriate love song to a pet rat )

Jacob Weisberg, the editor of Slate, feels the same way today (not about girls, I mean, but about Jackson's upbringing). In "Arrested Development," he writes:

People tend to throw up hands at Michael Jackson's multifarious bizarreness. But is it really so strange? The boy was forced to work by a cruel and physically abusive father starting at the age of 7. (If he'd been sent into a factory or coal mine, instead of onstage, we'd have more compassion for him.) As a boy, he was denied what even most abused and underprivileged children have: school, friends, and play.

Instead, Michael was made into a performing sexualized freak, a boy whose soprano voice kindled passion in grown women. He was made to witness adult sexuality at an age when it can only have been terrifying and incomprehensible to him. By 10, he was performing in strip clubs and hiding under the covers in hotel rooms while his older brothers got it on with groupies. At 11—the age at which his psyche seems frozen—he was a superstar. "My childhood was completely taken away from me," he has said. Almost everything that seems freakish about him can be explained by his poignant, doomed effort to get his stolen childhood back.

P.S., Dennis Dale at Untethered on Michael Jackson.

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

Me: How Multiculti Closed the Generation Gap

My weekly culture column is up at Taki's Magazine:

Although increasing ethnic diversity is widely assumed to make the arts more “vibrant,” the triumph of the ideology of multiculturalism appears to have instead helped cause pop music to stagnate stylistically.

There’s a fundamental connection between the growth of ethnic pride and the decline of generational rebellion, because to rebel against your forefathers is to rebel against your race. Thus, for a group of young black musicians to issue a manifesto pointing out that 30 years of rap is plenty would be racial treason. Although long exhausted musically, hip-hop has become so emotionally entwined with African-American identity that we’re all stuck with it.


You can read it there and comment on it here.

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

Eric Holder: That 88-year-old kook will be our Marinus van der Lubbe

Obama's attorney general Eric Holder continues to use that 88-year-old nut who shot the poor security guard at the Holocaust Museum as his personal Marinus van der Lubbe in pressing for new federal Hate Crimes legislation.

WASHINGTON -- Attorney General Eric Holder urged Congress Thursday to pass a new hate crimes law which would allow the federal government to prosecute cases of violence based on sexual orientation, gender or disability.

Holder, who testified at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, cited the recent killing of a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. The alleged assailant is a white supremacist.

Yeah, we desperately need a federal statute because, apparently (if I'm understanding Holder's logic correctly), murder is currently legal in most states and the District of Columbia. That's why that 88-year-old maniac was just let off with a stern warning. We must plug the murder loophole now!

As far as I can surmise, the point of this legislation is to get around the Constitution's ban on double jeopardy by giving prosecutors two tries at politically unpopular defendants: first at the state level, then at the federal level. (Recall the fate of the cops who beat up Rodney King.)

Lawmakers at the hearing debated the possible impact of the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act. The bill - named after a gay man killed in Wyoming in 1998 - would allow federal prosecution of violence committed because of the actual or perceived gender, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity of the victim.

For more than a decade, Democrats have sought to update the hate crimes law, which already makes it a federal crime to attack someone because of their race, creed or color.

Republicans at the hearing questioned whether the change would expand federal power unnecessarily into cases already being prosecuted by state and local officials. They also questioned why certain victims of violence should be singled out for particular types of protection.

"That's part of the problem. Some are protected groups and get special protection under this law," said Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. "You argued your case. I've listened to it and I'm not persuaded." According to FBI data, the number of hate crimes per year is relatively unchanged in the past 10 years. In 1998, the FBI reported 7,755 hate crime incidents, and in 2007 the bureau reported 7,624.

About half of all hate crimes are motivated by racial bias. The other two most frequent hate crimes are those motivated by religion or sexual orientation.

Holder said the statistics show hate crimes against Hispanics have increased four years in a row.

You know, that just might have something to do with the overall number of Hispanics increasing four years in a row. Also, there has been an increase in Hispanic-on-black gang violence lately, so black retaliation shows up as a hate crime against Hispanics.

Does the government even track hate crimes committed by Hispanics, or do they get lumped in with whites, which is the practice with most crime statistics?

Sessions and a Democratic lawmaker, Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois, both voiced concerns that the bill could be used to prosecute a church leader who speaks out against homosexuality, if a member of their congregation then assaults a gay person.

"This is a bill to hold people accountable for conduct, not for speech," Holder insisted.

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

Iran 2009 v. Mexico 2006

I haven't been paying much attention to Iran, so don't take my word for it, but it seems to be playing out a lot like the disputed election in Mexico in 2006: the party in power says they won the election, the party out of power says they cheated and that they're going to demonstrate until they turn blue, and eventually they turn blue and give up and go home, and the party in power stays in power.

At least, the Washington Post headlines suggest such a scenario:
Hope Fades for Iranian Protesters
Numbers dwindle after government crackdown against demonstrators, but their anger remains.
- Thomas Erdbrink

Keep in mind that I haven't actually read these articles and probably won't get around to reading them, so I don't know what I'm talking about, but it all sounds a lot like the PRD's months of mass demonstrations in Mexico City's Zocalo from early July 2006 into September, along with mass acts of civil disobedience, before they eventually gave up.

The question that interests me is why almost nobody who is anybody in America cared about Mexico in 2006, but everybody was supposed to care about Iran in 2009.

Indeed, how many elections in that general part of the world, centered around the old Byzantine Empire, have we Americans been told to get excited about in this decade? There was the Ukraine Orange thing, and the purple finger whoop-tee-doo in Iraq, and the whiskey sexy election in Lebanon, and the Rose Revolution in Georgia, and the mob violence in Serbia where the nonviolent democrats burnt down the Parliament building and seized power. And now Iran.

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

Newsweek v. Evolutionary Psychology

Like all of us, Newsweek's Sharon Begley isn't getting any younger. And she's not getting any happier either about that tenet of evolutionary psychology that asserts, in her scoffing words in the current issue of Newsweek:
Men attracted to young, curvaceous babes were fitter because such women were the most fertile; mating with dumpy, barren hags is not a good way to grow a big family tree.

So, she spends 4300 words renewing her long-running attack on Evolutionary Psychology in:
Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around?
The fault, dear Darwin, lies not in our ancestors, but in ourselves.

... Evo psych took its first big hit in 2005, when NIU's Buller exposed flaw after fatal flaw in key studies underlying its claims, as he laid out in his book Adapting Minds.

I don't think it's too unfair to claim that Begley enunciated her most personal objection to evolutionary psychology in her 2005 review of David J. Buller's book in the Wall Street Journal:
Besides, if you scrutinize the data, you find that 50-ish men prefer 40-something women, not 25-year-olds, undermining a core claim of evo psych.

So that's why 45 year old strippers make so much more money than 25 year old strippers!

I give economists a hard time sometimes, but they all know this very useful concept -- "all else being equal" -- that Begley seems unfamiliar with, even though it's obviously essential to putting evolutionary psychology's assertions in proper perspective.

The really funny thing is that Begley has never figured out that David J. Buller’s attack on mainstream Evolutionary Psychology comes from an even more politically incorrect direction than does EP. Buller focused on two weak links in EP:

1. The brain evolved a wide variety of domain-specific modules.

2. The human race evolved a single human nature back during the Stone Age, with only sex differences being the only differences among humans of interest or importance.

And those premises are indeed weak, but their weakness has major implications that Begley would not want to mention in public.

1. Evolutionary psychology has tended to ignore the key insight of the last 105 years of psychometrics: the existence of a g factor, a general intelligence factor. This is not to say that there aren’t domain specific mental modules, just that the g factor glass is not just half empty, it’s also half full, and thus needs to be included in evolutionary psychology, or, indeed, any form of psychology.

2. Similarly, standard EP has tended to gloss over the fact that The Era of Evolutionary Adaptation has extended up to the present. Indeed, as Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending argued recently in The 10,000 Year Explosion, the coming of agriculture likely accelerated the rate of genetic change. But continued Darwinian selection after the dispersal of the human race out of Africa to quite different environments on different continents raises ticklish issues about human biodiversity that can be career killers in modern America. (Just ask James D. Watson!)

Considering how much eminent thinkers such as Watson, Arthur Jensen, and Charles Murray have been abused for their frankness in recent decades, it was perfectly reasonable for the founders of evolutionary psychology to shy away from these issues. After all, their taking on Feminist Orthodoxy at the peak of its power two decades ago was enormously brave.

Nonetheless, the future evolution of evolutionary psychology will depend upon finding solutions for these two shortcomings in its fundamental approach. (While somehow avoiding getting Watsoned.)

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

June 24, 2009

The numbers on affirmative action in admissions at Duke U.

A recent paper, "Does Affirmative Action Lead to Mismatch: A New Test and Evidence" by four economists (Arcidiacomo, Aucejo, Fang, and Spenner) has some inside info from the Duke U. admissions department on Duke students, including SAT scores and freshmen grades. The table on p. 14 shows the standard rank order -- Asian, white, Latino, black -- on most of the various measures that the Admissions department worries about, as well as freshman grades. The overall results aren't surprising:

Asian: SAT 1464, freshman year GPA 3.40
White: SAT 1417 (s.d. 100), freshman year GPA 3.33 (s.d. 0.46)
Latino: SAT 1349, freshman year GPA 3.13
Black: SAT 1281, freshman year GPA 2.90

An SAT gap between whites and blacks of 136 points is not particularly large. (The Bell Curve lists SAT gaps from the early 1990s for 26 well-known colleges, ranging from 95 points at Harvard, the apex predator in the black recruitment game, to 271 at Rice, which is a small school that competes in big time sports, so a high proportion of Rice's black students are also jocks.) Perhaps Duke's famous basketball team raises its profile in the black community, letting it do well in recruiting strong black students (e.g., its black basketball players tend to be from upscale backgrounds, like Grant Hill and Shane Battier, plus Italian-speaking Kobe Bryant and his 1100 SAT score were headed to Duke from Lower Merion HS until the Lakers picked him straight out of high school).

The standard deviation for white students on the SAT (100) is about half of what it is for whites overall, so the 136 point racial gap is equal to 1.36 standard deviations. In contrast, the GPA gap is only about 0.94 standard deviations, probably due to to blacks taking easier courses.

The economists are concerned about investigating whether or not affirmative action admissions to Duke could hurt the NAM students by tossing them in over their heads. To my mind, it all depends on something they don't look at: intended major. If you just want a soft major, then you should of course take any opportunity presented to you to attend an elite private college with a huge endowment. High tuition colleges don't flunk out many people, so about the worst that could happen to you is that you spend four years feeling like Michelle Obama or Sonia Sotomayor, worried that people can tell that you got in on affirmative action and angry at them for noticing. But, really, cry me a river ...

On the other hand, if you want to major in something hard like mechanical engineering, then maybe you shouldn't jump in too far over your head.

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

Sanford and Ensign

Compared to the GOP sex scandals of the last few years, the brouhahas involving the two Republican politicians are surprising, since they involve women.

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