August 21, 2009

"Cold Souls"

Cold Souls (the title is a reference to Gogol's 1842 satire Dead Souls) is a slight metaphysical fiction movie with Paul Giamatti ("Sideways") playing Paul Giamatti. He's rehearsing to portray Chekhov's Uncle Vanya on Broadway, but all that plumbing the depths of the Russian soul is just making Giamatti more hangdog than ever. His agent points out an article in The New Yorker (unfortunately, not by Malcolm Gladwell -- the movie consistently misses chances to be funnier) about how Manhattan's elite are lightening their moods by having their souls extracted and put in cold storage at a clinic on Roosevelt Island. (According to Descartes, the soul is found in the pineal gland.)

Without his heavy soul dragging him down, Giamatti feels chipper, like I, a notably shallow-souled individual, do with nine hours of sleep: doot-de-doot-de-doot. But his soulless performance as Uncle Vanya is about as good as I could give. On the verge of getting fired, he discovers the clinic will also rent you souls, most of them smuggled out of impoverished Russia. He immediately puts his credit card down on a Russian poet's soul and knocks them dead on-stage.

Then he wants his own soul back, but the wife of the head soul-smuggler, a St. Petersburg soap opera actress, wants to rent an American Hollywood movie star's soul to help her make it big globally. Giamatti is the only American actor's soul on ice, so a Russian operative steals it from cold storage on Roosevelt Island. Unfortunately, nobody in Russia has heard of Paul Giamatti, so the thief tells the gangster's wife that it's Al Pacino's soul, which makes her very happy. Complications ensue as Giamatti flies to mid-winter St. Petersburg to retrieve his soul.

"Cold Souls" sounds like a cross between Charlie Kaufman's Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but the writer, Frenchwoman Sophie Barthes (no relation to the French intellectual) was thinking of Woody Allen movies like Purple Rose of Cairo and Sleeper, and wrote it for Woody. For an American, you have to come out of pre-1960s American highbrow/middlebrow culture, like Woody did, to automatically associate "soul" with Russian writers rather than with Motown singers.

There's little evidence of the role being tailored for Giamatti -- he appears to be playing a more generic, less funny version of the traditional Woody Allen character rather than himself -- which is a shame since he's an interesting fellow.

Giamatti is famously undistinguished looking, but he's actually a princeling of the American meritocracy. His father A. Bartlett Giamatti, the Dante scholar, was president of Yale and then (strangely enough) Baseball Commissioner, in which post he dropped dead of a heart attack during the stress of banning Pete Rose from baseball.

Cold Souls is not as well thought-out as Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine: for example, the soul extraction clinic is posh, while Kaufman's memory erasure clinic is downscale because memory erasure is a really bad idea (Jim Carrey: "Is there any danger of brain damage?" Tom Wilkinson: "Well, technically, the entire process is brain damage") that appeals mostly to losers.

So, don't expect a Kaufman-level of exploitation of the inherent opportunities in the premise. I smiled a lot through Cold Souls, but only laughed a few times. On the glass is half-full side, however, Cold Souls is a lot less dense than Kaufman's latest, Synechdoche, New York.

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

August 20, 2009

"The Hurt Locker"

You should definitely pay the extra dollar or two to see it in a state of the art movie theater with full sub-sonic audio system. Then, sit in the back row because you'll get what you pay for: this story of insanely courageous U.S. Army bomb-disposal guys in Iraq is loud.

I've loved director Kathryn Bigelow, who is like a 6'-tall real life version of one of James Cameron's butt-kicking babes (she's one of Cameron's countless ex-wives), since 1991's "Point Break," which featured a hat-trick of Hollywood's most cerebral-looking leading men -- Keanu Reeves, Patrick Swayze, and Gary Busey -- as surfing bankrobbers.

Bigelow's shtick is a little like Patti Smith's or Chrissie Hynde's in rock music a generation ago: being an admiring but slightly astounded outside observer of masculinity at its most unhinged.

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

NYT Mag Ethicist: OK to cheat goyim to punish lack of diversity awareness

Randy Cohen, who writes "The Ethicist" column for the New York Times Sunday Magazine is the gift that keeps on giving. C. Van Carter of Across Difficult Country points in a comment to Cohen's April 13, 2008 entry:

Years ago in Seattle I worked for an insurance company with just one Jewish employee, a good friend. He invented Jewish holidays, taking days off several times a year. As the only other employee at all familiar with Judaism, I could have finked on him or kept silent and been disloyal to my employer. I kept silent. Was that the right choice? — WALTER HENRY, DOWNEY, CALIF.

It was an acceptable choice. ... This is not to justify your friend’s actions. He lied to his boss and burdened his co-workers, who presumably filled in for him while he was out cavorting.

So says my head . . . but my heart says mazel tov! This imaginative scheme imposed a tax on ignorance, penalizing an employer for lacking even a cursory grasp of a world religion’s holidays. Such a plan could encourage all of us in our diverse, immigrant nation to learn more about our neighbors, or reward them with extra vacation time if we cling to our provincialism. Diwali — real or imaginary?

I do have some sympathy for your boss. When I was growing up, autumn’s Jewish holidays seemed to occur in such rapid succession that I half suspected our rabbi of inventing them to qualify for some kind of bonus.

Send your queries to ethicist@nytimes.com or The Ethicist, The New York Times Magazine, 620 Eighth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10018, and include a daytime phone number.

Something that has changed over my lifetime is the decline of "Is it bad for the Jews" thinking on the part of Jews about the behavior of other Jews. While "Is it good for the Jews" thinking by Jews about the behavior of non-Jews is going strong, the urge among Jews to chastise other Jews for bad behavior that might offend non-Jews has gotten rarer and rarer. (You can occasionally find manifestations in Jewish publications such as The Forward.)

You might think that Randy Cohen would have written something like, "To my fellow Jews: please do not cheat non-Jews (or Jews, either); especially, do not play tricks that call attention to your Jewishness. It's bad for the Jews." But, fewer and fewer Jews worry about other Jews making a bad impression anymore.

Here's an exception that validates the tendency: I vaguely recall a minor incident from early in this decade in which some British journalist (perhaps Toby Young?) was complaining because the New York Times had censored some phrase of his, such as "for Christ's sake" or something like that. The NYT copyeditor explained to him, roughly, "The New York Times is a Jewish-owned newspaper in a mostly Christian country. Thus, the copyediting policy of the New York Times is to not treat the name of Jesus Christ with casual disrespect."

I thought to myself, "Wow, that's really old-fashioned. You don't see much of that kind of thinking anymore." Of course, copyediting is a bastion of traditionalism.

That kind of prudence-based respect is largely gone. What you see now is a fair amount of public expression of Jewish anxiety about right-wing Christians coming after them with pitchforks and torches and such, but, the psychology is 180 degrees different from the copyeditor's. The people claiming to be terrified of being oppressed by Christians aren't acting like they are. Indeed, they act as if they hold their putative oppressors in contempt for being weak.

The simplest explanation for this sizable change is that Jews in America have gone from being the underdogs to the overdogs. But nobody is supposed to mention this historic shift in public.

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

August 19, 2009

NYT Magazine Ethicist on Golf: Who? Whom?

The New York Times Magazine features a weekly column entitled "The Ethicist" in which Randy Cohen dispenses ethical judgments from a contemporary perspective -- i.e., Who? Whom?

Is Golf Unethical?
By Randy Cohen

THE ISSUE

Last week in Berlin, the International Olympic Committee’s executive board voted to recommend that golf be included in the 2016 Games; the full membership will vote in October. In July, in Caracas, the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez denounced golf as “a bourgeois sport,” and officials have taken steps to close two courses. The joys or miseries of playing the game aside, when it comes to assessing golf’s underlying ethos, who is more persuasive, Chávez or the I.O.C.?

THE ARGUMENT

While it would be oversimplifying either to uncritically exalt or utterly damn the culture of golf, on balance Chávez has the stronger case. The golf community, like most others, is neither monolithic nor immutable, but the current customs and values of big-time professional golfers, those most likely to dominate Olympic play, seem remote from the Olympic ideal. ...

American golfers are even more homogeneous and more conservative than their global colleagues, Selcraig asserts, citing a Sports Illustrated survey of 76 P.G.A. tour players: 91 percent endorsed the confirmation of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.; 88 percent supported the invasion of Iraq; and 0 percent had seen “Brokeback Mountain.” Not science, perhaps, but not unrevealing.

As stated on an official Olympic Web site, “the goal of the Olympic Movement” — it is a movement, not just a gateway to a Wheaties box — “is to contribute to building a peaceful and better world by educating youth through sport practiced without discrimination … with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.” The culture Selcraig describes is more redolent of a gated community than amiable international populism.

That culture was discreditably displayed in 2002, when protests arose over the Masters Tournament being held, as ever, at the Augusta National Golf Club, a private club without a single woman member.

Lamentably, few male golf stars joined the protest. Tiger Woods was conspicuously willing to play at a sexually segregated club (and one that did not accept a black member until 1990). He had no particular duty to step up — no honorable person can play at a segregated club — but his inspiring personal history made his complacency especially sad. As of April, when the Masters again returned to Augusta, the club still had no women, a fact that should worry the golf-besotted I.O.C., which trumpets its determination “to enhance women’s participation in sport at all levels.”

Reactionary bastions like Augusta are not the whole story. ... Yet golfers appear to be a less diverse group, and a group less interested in diversity, than, say, soccer players or runners. As Chávez put it: “There are sports and there are sports. Do you mean to tell me this is a people’s sport?” He answered his own question: “It is not.”

Although not explicitly mentioned by Chávez or the I.O.C., golf entails questionable environmental ethics. ...

Every big-time sport has its disheartening elements. College basketball, a game I love, is marred by periodic recruiting scandals; academic mischief; the strange behavior of the N.C.A.A., its governing body; and Rick Pitino’s love life. Perhaps the only moments of grace and beauty and virtue in any game occur during actual play, and we should not look too closely at its broader culture and implicit ethics without expecting to be dismayed. But there are genuine differences between the ethos of one sport and another. It is hard to imagine the Duke of Wellington declaring, “The Battle of Waterloo was won in the corporate hospitality tents of the P.G.A. tour.”

Now, you might think that what would actually be most interesting from an ethical perspective about golf is that it's the most prominent sport in which players are required to referee themselves on the honor code. In 1984, I watched Arnold Palmer knock himself of contention on the next to last hole of the United States Senior Open by calling a penalty on himself that absolutely no one else saw or even could have seen. In sharp contrast, the culture of most other big time sports encourages players to cheat when the ref isn't looking.

As for the ethics of college basketball ...

The ethical issue for golf is whether it wants to lower itself to the level of the Olympics. I like the Olympics a lot, but their ethical history is a lot dodgier than golf's.

For example, the essence of the modern Olympics is that the stars of the show, the athletes, don't get paid. That makes hosting an Olympics potentially quite lucrative, as LA showed in 1984 by turning a $300 million profit, which makes the bidding to be a host city an ethical nightmare as IOC members shakedown host cities for bribes.

In contrast, since the 19th Century, golf (being a Scottish game) had a perfectly reasonable solution for amateur/professional quandaries that bedeviled more aristocratic sporting enterprises such as tennis until 1968, the Olympics into the 1980s, and The Ethicist's favorite, college basketball, today.

In golf, you could always choose to be either a professional or an amateur. It's your choice. Everybody could compete in the Open tournaments but only amateurs could compete in Amateur tournaments. This system continues today: earlier this year, Dallas Cowboys QB Tony Romo won $60,000 in a celebrity tournament, but donated the money to charity to preserve his right to play in the U.S. Amateur.

In the past, attempts to get golf into the Olympics have foundered on the lack of enthusiasm of golf pros for playing without getting paid. Golf is apparently now going to be in the Olympics primarily because Tiger Woods wants to be an Olympian. He has everything else he's ever wanted (except Jack Nicklaus's career major championship record, and he's fallen behind Roger Federer in major championships), so it's perfectly reasonable for him to look forward to representing his country in the Olympics.

As for golf in the Olympics overall, well, it's kind of silly. The Olympics are good for minor sports that aren't widely interesting enough to hold public attention without the Olympics. Adding Tiger Woods to the Olympics is just going to distract from obscure athletes' single shots at momentary fame. Moreover, golf is not the kind of sport like the 100m dash that's deterministic enough to make one gold medal every four years interesting. Too much luck is involved, even more than in, say, tennis. Thus, golf holds 16 major championships ever four years. Woods is by far the best golfer ever, but he's lost 38 of the 52 major championships held since he turned pro. So, the idea of one gold medal in golf every four years is just ho-hum dumb.

Making the Olympics the global amateur golf championship makes a fair amount of sense, although not from a business standpoint since it would just be a low-key event like the Walker Cup. Of course, "The Ethicist" would blow a gasket because amateur golfers tend to be The Wrong Kind of People.

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

What the University of California is up to

From an op-ed by Marc B. Haefele in the LA Times: "Is UC Opening the Door to Trouble?"
For 13 years, University of California officials have wrestled with a seemingly insoluble problem: how to sustain a student body that reflects the state's vast diversity without violating Proposition 209, the 1996 ballot measure banning race-based affirmative action.

The latest attempt to formulate a policy that is both legal and capable of increasing diversity is a controversial new admissions mandate that will take effect in fall 2012. ...

Currently, the top 12.5% of high school seniors in the state are guaranteed admission to a UC school -- something originally set out in the 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education. More recently, the top 4% of students at all schools in the state have been assured a spot. Under the new guidelines, only the top 9% statewide are guaranteed spots, as well as the top 9% at every high school. The theory is that this will guarantee more spots for students at underperforming high schools where opportunities are not as great and more of the students are underrepresented minorities.

In other words, George W. Bush's Talented Tenth of Texas plan is being imported (which he shoved through when the 1995 Hopwood decision temporarily banned racial preferences in Texas), except in California it will be the Excellent Eleventh.

An old college friend who is a surgeon in Austin, Texas came out to visit Southern California colleges recently with his high school kid. I told him that my opinion is that you ought to go to college where you're most likely to end up so that you'll have your college friends around you when you are in your 20s and need a social set. And if you start out in Austin, which everybody says is a wonderful small city to wind up in (Is that because it's more German-American than the rest of Texas's cities?), then why not go to the University of Texas at Austin?

But his kid is only at about the 85th percentile by class rank in high school, not the crucial 90th percentile. Granted, that's the 85 percentile at the kind of high school that an Austin surgeon who went to Rice sends his children to, but the quality of the student body doesn't matter under GWB's Talented Tenth plan.

Parents finally got the Texas legislature to cut that plan back a little recently, but now they are bringing it to California.
The new rules also will create a larger pool of students entitled to be considered for -- but not guaranteed -- admission. To be considered, applicants must still take required college prep courses, have a 3.0 grade-point average and take the basic SAT exam. But they will no longer be required to also take SAT subject tests, something the plan's designers hope will benefit black and Latino students, who are less likely to take the exams.

One of the ideas behind having students take three SAT Subject exams is that one can be a foreign language, which makes it a gimme putt for immigrants. (That's bad for blacks, though, because they despise all foreign languages other than French, especially Spanish.) But apparently Hispanics and blacks have a hard time remembering to sign up to take the tests.

Actually, one reason for dropping these three extra tests sounds reasonable, in kind of a stupid way: As the College Board's biggest client, UC forced all sorts of changes to the main SAT, like adding the little-liked Writing test, dropping analogies, and upping the hardness of the math. In other words, a lot of stuff that UC was tracking through SAT Subject Tests has now been incorporated in the main SAT itself, so it might make sense to drop the SAT Subject Test requirements. Of course, screwing around with the main SAT was probably a bad idea, but what's done is done.
But as is always the case when admissions policies change, there will be winners and losers. The plan's critics say it is unlikely to bring in more black and Latino students and that white applicants will be the biggest beneficiaries.

It's hard to see why since so many Non-Asian Minorities go to schools that are overwhelmingly NAM. I would think the Excellent Eleventh rule would bring in lots more NAMs than the current Terrific Twenty-Fifth program.

Of course, right now the UC system has about a 1000 open spots each year it can't seem to fill at its new UC Merced campus that Cruz Bustamante had located out in the middle of Damn All on the theory that if you stick a research university out among a bunch of strawberry pickers, the strawberry pickers will turn into researchers by osmosis. Or something. They could have built the latest UC school near Napa Valley or near San Luis Obispo or Escondido or Eureka or at the serene old Camarillo looney bin where Cal State Channel Islands went instead, but, no, the Latino Caucus made them stick it in the Central Valley where Davis already is and nobody wants to go.
More important, they allege, it will slash the UC eligibility of Asian American students, who benefit by the current larger guarantee of placement for top students statewide.

Sacramento's 10-member Asian Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus has proclaimed the plan to be outright discrimination against Asian Pacific Islanders. And many Asian Americans see the move as directly aimed at bringing down their numbers in California's universities.

Is this true?

Who knows?

I haven't seen much evidence presented for this popular theory, other than it's likely that Asians remember to sign up for three secondary tests when everybody else forgets. (You have to get UC applications in by October 31st, two months before Cal Tech applications, so lots of people forget.) Another possibility is that the Asian Caucus just figures that by raising a stink they'll remind people of their power, the way a baseball manager will yell and scream about an umpire's call not because he will get it changed but to get the next one shaded in his favor.

As I've said before, we no longer live in an Age of Ideologies where it's Capitalism vs. Communism, Democracy vs. Fascism. Like Francis Fukuyama said, Communism and Fascism lost. Instead, we now live in the Age of the Fine Print, where you have to read all the fine print to figure out whether some government action is out to get you.

Some people get Legislative Caucuses to read the fine print for them.

Others don't.

Will the Republican Party read the fine print for its supporters? Republican governor George W. Bush sure didn't.

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

August 18, 2009

Does "District 9" = Section 8?

My review of the South African-set hit sci-fi movie District 9 will likely be up at Taki's Magazine on Wednesday morning.

When it's up, you can read it there and comment upon it here.

And from a few years ago in Taki's Magazine, here's my review of Jimmy Carter's Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, in which I compare South Africa and Israel. (Part II about Israel here.)

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

Why no housing bubble / bust in Vermont?

The Wall Street Journal has a long article, Vermont Mortgage Laws Shut the Door on Bust -- and Boom, on how Vermont's old-fashioned skinflint mortgage regulations prevented excessive lending in that state. State regulations played a sizable role in the Bubble -- for example, Ohio has a lot more foreclosures than Pennsylvania due to differences in regulations. (Although without the expectation of continued massive Hispanic immigration, as in California, Florida, Nevada, and Arizona, home prices couldn't reach levels where losses mattered much in the big picture.)

In general, state laws on lending, which typically were devised back when "usury" was considered a bad thing, were more Mr. Potterish than federal laws and regulations, which, being more recent, were more George Baileyesque.

Vermont is, of course, the whitest state in the union, which means that, despite Vermont's liberalism, the bipartisan federal push for more minority lending through lower credit standards had little way to gain traction in Vermont. The federal government couldn't persecute anybody in Vermont for not lending enough to minorities or reward anybody with lighter regulation for pledging to lend more to minorities because there were no minorities in Vermont.

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

August 17, 2009

Wajda's "Katyn" finally released on DVD in the US

Famous Polish director Andrzej Wajda's Katyn, which tells the story of the massacre of Poland's natural leaders (such as his father) by the Soviets in 1940, has finally been released in the U.S. It's available for purchase from Amazon, and for rental by mail from Blockbuster Online and Netflix.

Here's my review from last year in The American Conservative.

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

Anti-Idiocratic Immigration

Jason Richwine of the American Enterprise Institute reviews the data suggesting that Mike Judge was right in Idiocracy: low IQ people tend to be surlier and more distrustful (presumably because they are easier to fool, like the prison guard who gets mad at Luke Wilson for telling him he got into the line going into prison when he should have gotten into the line going out of prison).

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

What kind of profiling was Bob Dylan subjected to?

Walking while being an old, weird American.

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

First full-blooded East Asian to win a major golf championship

For the first time, Tiger Woods (who is a quarter Chinese and a quarter Thai) failed to win one of golf's four major championships after leading after three rounds. He was beaten by 37-year-old Y.E. Yang of South Korea, the first full-blooded Asian winner of a major championship.

It's rather odd that it took so long for an East Asian to win a major championship, because East Asians were runner-ups in 1971, 1980, and 1985 (when T.C. Chen needed to hole a bunker shot on the 72 hole in the U.S. Open to force a playoff -- I was standing behind him at Oakland Hills in Michigan and couldn't see the hole, but could hear the thonk as the ball struck the flagstick, then saw Chen whirl around in regret as it rolled away from the hole). Looking at that trendline for second place finishes, you'd figure there would have been an Asian winner around 1989, but instead it took 20 years longer.

In contrast, Continental Europeans emerged as contenders in this Anglosphere-dominated game at about the same time, yet quickly broke through as champions.

South Korean women, like Swedish women, have done very well in ladies' golf, but that's mostly because those two countries invested a lot in training girl golfers.

So far, there's no particular pattern of any race being better or worse at golf. Success largely depends upon starting intensive practice at a young age. Malcolm Gladwell talks about how it takes 10,000 hours of practice to be great at anything, but to win a major championship in golf typically takes about 20,000 hours. For example, it took Tiger Woods 19 years of playing and Phil Mickelson 32 years. The shortest period between taking up the game and winning a major was Gary Player's seven years.

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

August 14, 2009

Who gets the "affordable housing?"

For years, I've been reading about deals where the government forces real estate developers to sell a certain percentage of lower priced units. Somewhat similarly, the Obama Administration recently forced Westchester County outside of NYC to buy or build "affordable housing" for minorities:

Westchester County entered into a landmark desegregation agreement on Monday that would compel it to create hundreds of houses and apartments for moderate-income people in overwhelmingly white communities and aggressively market them to nonwhites in Westchester and New York City.

The agreement, if ratified by the county’s Board of Legislators, would settle a lawsuit filed by an antidiscrimination group and could become a template for increased scrutiny of local governments’ housing policies by the Obama administration.

“This is consistent with the president’s desire to see a fully integrated society,” said Ron Sims, the deputy secretary of housing and urban development, which helped broker the settlement along with the Justice Department. “Until now, we tended to lay dormant. This is historic, because we are going to hold people’s feet to the fire.”

The agreement calls for the county to spend more than $50 million of its own money, in addition to other funds, to build or acquire 750 homes or apartments, 630 of which must be provided in towns and villages where black residents constitute 3 percent or less of the population and Hispanic residents make up less than 7 percent. The 120 other spaces must meet different criteria for cost and ethnic concentration.

Here's my question: who gets discount housing?

Clearly, it's supposed to go very heavily to blacks and Hispanics, but to which blacks and Hispanics? Whose friends and relatives get the nod?

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

Tangled Up in Blue

A commenter points to this AP news story:

Rock legend Bob Dylan was treated like a complete unknown by police in a New Jersey shore community when a resident called to report someone wandering around the neighborhood.

Dylan was in Long Branch, about a two-hour drive south of New York City, on July 23 as part of a tour with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp that was to play at a baseball stadium in nearby Lakewood.

A 24-year-old police officer apparently was unaware of who Dylan is and asked him for identification, Long Branch business administrator Howard Woolley said Friday.

"I don't think she was familiar with his entire body of work," Woolley said.

The incident began at 5 p.m. when a resident said a man was wandering around a low-income, predominantly minority neighborhood several blocks from the oceanfront looking at houses.

The police officer drove up to Dylan, who was wearing a blue jacket, and asked him his name. According to Woolley, the following exchange ensued:

"What is your name, sir?" the officer asked.

"Bob Dylan," Dylan said.

"OK, what are you doing here?" the officer asked.

"I'm on tour," the singer replied.

A second officer, also in his 20s, responded to assist the first officer. He, too, apparently was unfamiliar with Dylan, Woolley said.

The officers asked Dylan for identification. The singer of such classics as "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Blowin' in the Wind" said that he didn't have any ID with him, that he was just walking around looking at houses to pass some time before that night's show.

The officers asked Dylan, 68, to accompany them back to the Ocean Place Resort and Spa, where the performers were staying. Once there, tour staff vouched for Dylan.

The officers thanked him for his cooperation.

"He couldn't have been any nicer to them," Woolley added.

Well, sure, but he's just Bob Dylan, not somebody really famous like Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

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

Which sex was most responsible for the mortgage meltdown?

Christopher Caldwell, author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West has a pretty good essay in Time Magazine called "The Pink Recovery:"

One thing that seems bound to change is the relationship between the sexes. Since the recession began in December 2007, the vast majority of the lost jobs have belonged to men. ...

A lot of people see that as fitting punishment. There weren't any women among the high-profile malefactors in last fall's financial meltdown. Maleness has become a synonym for insufficient attentiveness to risk. ...

In Foreign Policy this summer, journalist Reihan Salam predicted that the "macho men's club called finance capitalism" would not survive the present economic ordeal.... Of course, nobody harped on this research back when housing prices were doubling and people were using their home-equity credit lines to buy third cars. But to paraphrase Richard Nixon's comment about Keynesians, we are all feminists now.

Okay, but, consider that at the base of the financial crash were people, typically couples, taking out home mortgages that they couldn't afford, mostly to either buy homes (generally sold to them by female real estate agents) they couldn't afford or to do home improvements they couldn't afford.

In the typical couple who has defaulted, which sex -- husband or wife -- on average do you think was more ardent for the granite countertop upgrade? Was it husbands or wives who tended to insist most on buying the larger house with the exercise room and enough space for relatives to stay over and the extra big dining room for hosting dinner parties?

Caldwell gently satirizes the conventional wisdom:

Although clichés about the "vulnerability" of women in the economy have been disproved by hard BLS data, we want to believe them. When women lose jobs, the victims are women. When men lose jobs, the victims are, um, women, because they have to make up for that lost male income.

Then, Caldwell goes on to illustrate one reason why he writes for Time Magazine and I don't:

Should we expect men to cede some control over an economy they have so thoroughly messed up? No. We have no examples of that ever having happened. What we have plenty of examples of--you can see variants of it all over the developing world--is economies in which women do all the arduous work while men sit around smoking and pontificating in coffeehouses and barbershops. For decades, policymakers have been attentive to the flaws of a patriarchal, middle-class, single-earner, nuclear-family-oriented model of family economics--and their attention remains fixed on it. Whether or not that model dominated American society as much as its critics claimed, we are now leaving it behind. Maybe there is a humane model that can replace it. We have not found one yet.

Good point.

Still, the reason Caldwell writes for Time and I don't is that if I were to write:

What we have plenty of examples of--you can see variants of it all over the developing world--is economies in which women do all the arduous work while men sit around smoking and pontificating in coffeehouses and barbershops.

Rather than gesture vaguely at "the developing world," I would actually then give an example. In fact, I would pick the best example: i.e., the largest region of the world where men are most inclined to have their womenfolk do most of what work gets done.

Caldwell's way is dull, not very informative, and potentially misleading to the handful of readers who actually stop and wonder what he means: Is he talking about, say, China? China is definitely developing. So, I guess he's talking about China. Do men not work very hard in China? I didn't know that. I guess men must not work very hard in China or it wouldn't say that in Time Magazine. You learn something new every day!

Now, you know and I know what part of the "developing" world Caldwell is primarily talking about here, and why it's relevant to America. (The reference to "barbershops" is a clue.) He's referring to Henry Harpending 101. But Caldwell has the good sense to keep his point misty and abstract-sounding so that few people will have much of an idea what he's talking about. Nicholas Wade, the NYT's genetics reporter, will get it, but Morris Dees of the $PLC hopefully won't.

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

How to make national parks more popular

Do what the Swiss do: make the mountains a little less wildernessy.

President Obama is visiting Yellowstone and Grand Canyon national parks this month to promote Free Weekends (part of his stimulus package). So far, free admission isn't doing much. The Washington Post reports, "Free Weekends Having Little Effect on National Parks."

Obama's got the economic equation backward. The National Parks need more expensive amenities to make them more accessible to our increasingly diverse (and increasingly sedentary and obese) population. This would require taking on the wilderness ideology that emerged in the 1960s and is becoming increasingly outdated.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the government view was that the most important thing was to protect the high country from the ever-growing hordes of nature-lovers wanting to trample it. But, in the 21st Century, the hordes of wilderness-wanderers aren't growing. To get people back to the National Parks, they don't need cheaper admissions (which max out at $23 per vehicle, which is cheap). They need more luxury.

For example, in the roadless high country of Yosemite National Park, above Tuolumne Meadows at around 10,000 feet in altitude, there has long been a circuit of about five High Sierra Camps, with tent cabins and dining halls, each a day's walk (6 to 8 miles) apart. So, you can take a five night hiking trip without carrying your own food and fuel, you can sleep in a bed, and have a hot shower (at three camps): it's $136 per person per night for food and lodging. This circuit is very popular with aging nature lovers who don't want to put up anymore with the rigors of sheer wilderness backpacking at high altitude. So you have to apply in a lottery each year in the autumn for the next summer. My aunt and uncle applied every year for about a decade, but never got chosen, and finally gave up when they got too old for high altitude hiking.

That's just sad.

Considering how popular this amenity is, you might think the National Park Service would have expanded it, adding more High Sierra Camps in Yosemite, and setting up similar circuits in Kings Canyon and Sequoia to the south. In truth, the more remarkable thing is that the NPS hasn't dismantled the High Sierra Camps. Ever since the 1960s, the dominant ideology in Sierra circles has been that pure wilderness is best and things like wooden floors for permanent tents are probably evil. So, we're lucky the National Park Service didn't burn down the High Sierra Camps.

Similarly, if the Grand Canyon were in Austria, there would be a gondola cable car ride to the bottom (and, more importantly, back up again -- trust me, from my experience at age 12, getting in the Grand Canyon is a lot easier than getting out of it).

My experience with the Palms to Pines aerial tramway that whisks you from Palm Springs to 8,500 feet up on the edge of the Mt. San Jacinto Wilderness is that the crowds at the top are, despite the high price ($23 per adult), much more diverse than the backpackers who clamber up from Idylwild on the other side.

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

August 12, 2009

"The Unbearable Whiteness of Ken Burns"

Over on Taki's Magazine, my Wednesday column is up about the upcoming PBS documentary by Ken Burns, who created the superb The Civil War in 1990:

The publicity machine is now gearing up for documentarian Ken Burns’s twelve-hour extravaganza, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, which will run for six straight nights on PBS starting September 27.

This being a Ken Burns series, the predominant theme of The National Parks will be “diversity.” So, if you go camping in a national park this month, check out the diversity of your fellow visitors. You’ll likely notice tourists from all over the world, including busloads of punctual Germans and amenable Japanese.

But, foreign tourists aren’t the right kind of diversity for Burns.

Although Burns has spent his career explaining stuff, he’s never quite figured himself out. That’s why, judging from his documentary’s preview materials, The National Parks is shaping up, after six years of work, as Ken Burns’ Worst Idea.

Please read it there and comment about it here.

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

August 11, 2009

Request for suggestions

I'm looking for practical suggestions for what the GOP can do to revive itself over both short and long run timeframes (e.g., 2009-2010, 2009-2020, 2009-2050).

Whether the GOP deserves revival is a question for another time.

P.S. Here's an interesting excerpt from a comment:
The only reason to gain political power is to exercise it to reward your supporters and punish your opposition. Someone who runs implicitly or explicitly on the platform that they will not exercise their power to help their supporters will never win an election under unlimited democracy.

It's easy to imagine Barack Obama nodding along to that, but then tsk-tsking over anybody coming right out and saying that lucidly what he believes.

As an exercise, translate the above paragraph into Obamaese, retaining both its meaning but also applying levels of plausible deniability.

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

August 9, 2009

Christopher Caldwell's "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe"

Here's my book review in VDARE.com:

Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West is an important and surprising book.

Granted, VDARE.com readers won't see much that's new. In essence, Caldwell's Reflections is a Brimelovian vindication of Enoch Powell, the brilliant Tory who warned against immigration in a prescient (and thus notorious) 1968 speech that began "The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils".

Caldwell points out in his opening pages (which you can read here):
"Although at the time Powell's demographic projections were much snickered at, they have turned out not just roughly accurate but as close to perfectly accurate as it is possible for any such projections to be: In his Rotary Club speech [on November 16 1968], Powell shocked his audience by stating that the nonwhite population of Britain, barely over a million at the time, would rise to 4.5 million by 2002. (According to the national census, the actual "ethnic minority" population of Britain in 2001 was 4,635,296.)"

Readers who get their views from the MainStream Media, though, will be startled by how gracefully—yet bluntly—Caldwell delivers an intellectually cohesive assault on the conventional wisdom of the diversity dogma.

Reflections is also a model for how a working journalist can transform years of old articles researched on scores of trips to Europe into a stylish book. Caldwell's solution is to enhance his prose style with aphorisms worthy of G.K. Chesterton.

For example, in Caldwell's original February 27, 2006 Weekly Standard article on Nicolas Sarkozy, The Man Who Would Be le Président, he discussed Sarkozy's call for affirmative action in France to appease riotous Muslims:
"It can be argued that France needs such measures desperately, … but, … Sarkozy shows a bit of the naiveté of, say, Hubert Humphrey in 1964 when he implies the program would be only temporary. … How long would the program last, then? Twenty years? 'No, twenty years is too long.'"

In his book, however, Caldwell adds this memorable dictum in reply to Sarkozy's Continental innocence about America's experience:
"One moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which affirmative action can't be ended because its beneficiaries are too weak to a world in which it can't be ended because its beneficiaries are too strong."

(I suspect that when Sen. Lindsey Graham decided to vote for Sonia Sotomayor, he was saying something like this to himself, just less elegantly.)

Read my whole review of Caldwell's book there and comment upon it here.

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