The things that we most like to argue about are those that are most inherently arguable ...
As you may have noticed by now, I’m like that: clueless about most subjects that most people are most desperate to discuss. Who will win the Super Bowl? Will the stock market go up or down tomorrow? Will the health bill pass? Which party will win the next election?
Don’t ask me.
Those questions concern competitive institutions that are structured in ways that make their outcomes hard to foresee … and therefore captivating.
Paradoxically, that means that my being profoundly ignorant about these concerns wouldn’t keep me from making quick predictions that would be almost as accurate as if I did nothing else but study the subject.
Who will win the Super Bowl? Well, two minutes on Google leads me to a betting site that says the New Orleans Saints are +360, while the Indianapolis Colts are +385. (I don’t even know what those numbers are supposed to mean.) Here’s another site that has the Colts at 3:1 and the Saints at 4:1, which at least I understand.
So, there you have my fearless forecast: the Saints will meet the Colts in the 2010 Super Bowl, and one of them will win.
You heard it here first.My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
February 6, 2010
My November 18 Super Bowl Prediction
February 5, 2010
America's Drunkest Cities
Fresno, Calif. tops Men's Health magazine's list of America's "drunkest" cities while Boston, home to the "Cheers" bar where everyone knows your name, was deemed the "least drunk," besting even Salt Lake City.
I've been lied to by my Dropkick Murphys albums.
See full list, including grades for each city from A to F.The magazine, which will publish the list of 100 major cities in it's March edition, drew upon such data as death rates from alcoholic liver disease, booze-fueled car crashes, frequency of binge-drinking in the past month, number of DUI arrests, and severity of DUI penalties.
"Drunkest" cities:
- Fresno, Calif.
- Reno, Nev.
- Billings, Mont.
- Riverside, Calif.
- Austin
- St. Louis
- San Antonio
- Lubbock, Texas
- Tucson
- Bakersfield, Calif.
"Least drunk" cities:
- Boston
- Yonkers, N.Y.
- Rochester, N.Y.
- Salt Lake City
- Miami
- Newark
- Durham, N.C.
- New York City
- Fort Wayne, Ind.
- Manchester, N.H.
Maybe somebody should pitch NBC on doing a new version of "Cheers" set in Fresno? With the track record of fine profit-making judgment that NBC's current management has, they might go for it...
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
February 4, 2010
"Temple Grandin" on HBO
Here's a very positive review of the Temple Grandin film by Dorothy Rabinowitz in the WSJ.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Kathryn Bigelow v. James Cameron
Is it a coincidence that in Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker the name of the hero, a technical genius who loves his job more than his wife, is "James?" Bigelow's great theme over the last two decades is male obsessiveness, and who embodies that more than James Cameron?
Or is it a coincidence that Bigelow rather resembles a real-life version of Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley, that classic nerd’s heroine in Cameron’s 1986 sci-fi film Aliens? Like Weaver (whom Cameron also cast in Avatar), Bigelow is almost six feet tall. (Unsurprisingly, Cameron, to whom too much is never enough, digitally rendered Avatar’s butt-kicking blue babe to be ten feet tall.)
Both Weaver and Bigelow are well bred, lady-like, and attractive, but Bigelow is also an expert at blowing stuff up. When doing publicityfor Aliens and Avatar, the actress has had to bluff her way past all the fanboys who hope that Sigourney, who majored in English at Stanford, shares their techy obsessions.
Unlike Weaver, Bigelow is a real Ripley. For example, like the Explosive Ordinance Specialists specialists whom The Hurt Locker portrays, Bigelow disdains typical Hollywood gas fireball explosions. She strove to make her blasts “a very dense, black, thick, almost completely opaque explosion filled with lots of particulate matter and shrapnel.”
Bigelow can talk explosions and lenses all day long. And that’s what The Hurt Locker is: soldiers filmed in Baghdad-like Amman, Jordan through telephoto lenses that deliver the exact opposite of Avatar’s famously immersive 3D.
The telephoto effect compresses the apparent distance between the near and the far. For instance, in this typical street scene, if an Improvised Explosive Device were concealedwithin that hulk of the car behind the U.S. G.I., would he be within the blast zone? The viewer can’t even guess how far away the car is from the soldier due to the telephoto lens foreshortening distance.
Thus, this art house action flick transpires in a disorientatingly flat and cluttered pictorial space. Bigelow’s telephoto shots keep the viewer from being able to discern what’s safely far away from the three heroes and what’s close enough to kill them, much like the potentially lethal environment confronting the soldiers as they try to disarm IEDs of unknown magnitudes.
Read the whole thing there and comment upon it here.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
February 1, 2010
New York City's IQ Testing Mania
Now, Jennifer Senior has a long article in New York, The Junior Meritocracy, questioning the wisdom of handing out lifetime prizes at age four. Surely, she asks, wouldn't it be better to, say, test at age seven, when IQ testing is more accurate?
I'm familiar with a public high school program only open to kids with stratospheric IQs of 145 or higher. Within the school there tend to be two groups of kids: those who scored >=145 on an IQ test in 8th grade, who are really smart; and those who got into this program's feeder programs in third grade. The kids who are in this high school because they scored >=145+ in second grade tend to be smart, but often not outlandishly smart, simply because of the lower accuracy in testing at earlier ages and a tendency toward regression toward the mean over time. Testing 4-year-olds just exacerbates all this.
My guess is that testing at age 4, despite its high degree of arbitrariness, is popular with New York City parents because it lets them decide whether they will stay in Manhattan / Brooklyn or move to a suburb where the open enrollment schools have good students on average. If your kid gets into an exclusive public program or into a famous private school, then we'll stay in the city. Otherwise, Fort Lee, here we come!
The summer before he starts school is a pretty easy time to move a kid. After that, he'll have school friends, and he'll be old enough to complain more.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
"The Prince of Darkness"
It's the opposite of Dreams from My Father: Novak realizes the reader is mostly interested in accounts of what the big names he met over the years (from JFK through GWB) were really like, and limits himself to giving his side of various historical events he was involved in, such as the Valerie Plame affair, and recounting data about himself that is useful in understanding the media.
Although he dislikes summing up, Novak is candid that getting a scoop (and Novak probably got more Washington scoops, large and small, than anybody) depends upon serving the self-interest of whoever is doing the leaking. (Lead and Gold has more about Novak's book here.) Still, knowledge is better than ignorance.
For example, Novak reports how much money he made at various points in his life: e.g., when he works for the AP in Omaha in 1954, he made $68 per week. In a characteristic touch that I've never seen in any other autobiography, Novak almost always adjusts his income for inflation. That mythological-sounding $68 per week turns out to be the rather more prosaic equivalent of "$512 in 2006 purchasing power."
On the last page, Novak writes:
Memoirists often are explicit in reporting their skimpy salaries in their early years and become reticent when monetary success comes. Breaking that pattern, I will disclose that my adjusted gross income for 2004 reached a high of $1.2 million.
The dyspeptic Novak's general impressions are few but worth recounting. After leaving sportswriting, the first major politician he ever met as a political reporter, the governor of Nebraska, turned out to be "considerably less impressive than the athletic coaches who up until then had been my most intimate news sources. But so were nearly all the legislators. This first impression of the political class did not change appreciably in a half century of sustained contact. ... I did not find the caliber of politicians in Washington generally any higher than what I had encountered in Indianapolis and Lincoln."
The President who seems to have impressed the conservative journalist the most for general caliber is one he liked little politically: Bill Clinton. Strikingly, Novak's blunt opinions extended to himself. He recounts sitting next to Clinton for four hours at a Gridiron Club dinner during the Monica Lewinsky year. Clinton deftly talked to Novak about his passion, college basketball, but mostly talked to the guest on his other side, conservative press baron Conrad Black (who later went to jail over his finances), about Black's interest, FDR. Novak modestly writes:
That night, these two strong, complicated men enjoyed themselves talking about another strong complicated man. Beyond that, I think Clinton and Black liked each other because they both were intelligent, reckless, charismatic risk-takers. I simply was not in their class.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
"The Class"
“The Class,” a slice-of-life drama tracking a year in an inner city Parisian junior high school, has been greeted rapturously, winning the top prize at the Cannes film festival. The critical acclaim stems mostly from “The Class” not being Hilary Swank’s 2007 “Freedom Writers” or all those other tiresome Nice White Lady movies in which heroic teachers overcome “the soft bigotry of low expectations” and turn their charges into Nobel Laureates.
In contrast, this French film offers a refreshingly realistic depiction of the frustrations of teaching. It’s not wholly plausible—as in all school movies, there is only a single class in “The Class”—but it’s almost unique in suggesting that student quality matters.
“The Class” is based on an autobiographical novel by schoolteacher François Bégaudeau. In the manner of WWII hero Audie Murphy, who played himself in the film version of his memoir “To Hell and Back,” Bégaudeau portrays a teacher named M. Marin. “The Class” could be called “To Heck and Back” because “inner city” doesn’t mean quite the same thing in Paris as it does in Detroit. The French like their cities, so the riotous public housing projects are out in Paris’s dreary suburbs. The Parisian 14-year-olds in “The Class” aren’t gun-packing gangbangers, as in Hollywood movies. They’re just mouthy adolescents, lazy, not terribly bright, and full of ressentiment at the dominance of elitist French culture.
M. Marin’s French literature class is half-French and half-minority, with the unrulier Muslims, black and white, absorbing most of his attention. The smartest and most respectful student is a Chinese immigrant, while the worst troublemaker is Souleymane from Mali in sub-Saharan Africa. One well-spoken lad who hopes to win admission to the elite Lycée Henri IV goes largely ignored in the turmoil caused by his less intelligent classmates. They constantly monitor whether they are being disrespected, so they can get off task. Griping about being dissed is more fun than being forced to reveal to the other kids that they can’t do the work. Marin banters with them, but he’s too genteel to thrive amidst all the dominance struggles.
Now in his fifth year, Marin is no longer an idealist. When a naive colleague suggests that Marin should assign Voltaire’s Candide, he demurs, “The Enlightenment will be tough for them.” Marin tries to get the class to read The Diary of Anne Frank instead (which, in “Freedom Writers,” turns teacher Erin Gruwell’s slum students into prodigies of literary creativity), but it mostly annoys Marin’s heavily Muslim class.
The triumph of multiculturalist ideology is less complete in France than in most other Western countries. Having successfully assimilated European immigrants by immersion in the French language, the French tend to assume that these latest newcomers must eventually wake up and appreciate the inherent superiority of French culture. In his grammatical examples illustrating the imperfect subjunctive (which is employed solely in upscale written French), Marin uses only European names. (That’s a habit that has been drilled out of American teachers.) The students, however, subscribe to American ideas about multiculturalism. An obnoxious girl of North African descent objects to the teacher’s Eurocentric names as “Honkies, Frenchies, Frogs!”
And why do they need to learn the imperfect subjunctive, anyway? “It’s bourgeois,” the children argue, parroting generations of celebrated French leftist intellectuals, not realizing that you can’t get to be a celebrated French leftist intellectual unless you’ve mastered French grammar.
At a teacher’s meeting attended (bizarrely) by two bored student representatives who giggle in the back row, the faculty plots to suspend Souleymane. Marin urges mercy, arguing that Souleymane's not bad, he’s just reached his limits academically. The two students sit upright, scandalized that a teacher would suggest that any student is below average in intelligence. The next day, the girls start a brouhaha in class over this, which worsens when Marin responds using grammar too sophisticated for them to interpret correctly. In the ensuing melee, Souleymane unintentionally smacks a bystander in the eye.
After he is expelled, the classroom atmosphere improves. Still, by the end of the year, only the smart students have learned much.
“The Class” is filmed in that unattractive quasi-documentary style—claustrophobic close-ups on cheap digital video—that has become de rigueur for prestige films. There’s no music on the soundtrack, and almost no humor, either. The slow “real-time” pacing effectively conveys the boredom felt by many students, but the opportunity cost is that there’s no room for an engaging plot.
Rated PG-13 for language.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
January 31, 2010
The Edsall Strategy
Among the most interesting of the countless postmortems on Republican Scott Brown’s victory over Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts Senate race was veteran Democratic journalist Thomas Edsall’s Ghost Story in The New Republic on January 20, 2010.
Edsall’s article is one of the more realistic (if inadvertent) works of political advice the GOP has received—outside of the pages of VDARE.com. From a tsk-tsking Democratic perspective, Edsall outlines the inexorable logic of what Peter Brimelow calls the Sailer Strategy: as the non-white percentage of the electorate increases, the Republicans must (and can) win a growing share of the white vote.
Of course, the Republican leadership (such as it is) will find Edsall’s insights offensive rather than illuminating. They are less likely to appreciate them than to try to refute them, by more brilliant stratagems such as making Michael Steele head of the Republican National Committee.
Edsall writes:"As everyone knows, the United States is undergoing a profound demographic transformation. Non-Hispanic whites are likely to become a minority by the year 2042. This shift underlies the theory of a Democratic realignment: Pro-Democratic groups are growing while the pro-Republican white population is declining."
Edsall goes on, however, to note that just twelve months of the Obama Administration demonstrated to many white voters even in liberal Massachusetts that they might not be happy with their ordained future. Over the course of 2009, he says, "White, middle-class voters ceased to think of Obama as a protector of their interests."
Over the years, Edsall has repeatedly tried warned liberals that the diabolically clever Republican leadership is going to attempt to please the white majority by acting as "a protector of their interests."
That would make sense. But I’ll believe it when I see it. ...
Edsall wrote in Chain Reaction in 1992:"Together, the twin issues of race and taxes have created a new, ideologically coherent coalition by pitting taxpayers against tax recipients, by pitting the advocates of meritocracy against proponents of special preference, by pitting the private sector against the public sector, by pitting those in the labor force against the jobless, and by pitting those who bear many of the costs of federal intervention against those whose struggle for equality has been advanced by interventionist government policies. "
Personally, I’ve long felt that Edsall’s alarums sounded like an awfully good strategy for the GOP—politically, but also morally. After all, what’s the point of majority rule if not to benefit the majority?
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Presidential timber
If Obama’s father were white, he no more would have been considered Presidential timber than if the last President’s father had been named Smith.
He writes:
Surely, you meant "Presidential timbre."
I tried both phrases in a search engine, and found about 20 times more examples of "Presidential timber" than "Presidential timbre." Here's a debate between an English teacher and a Reuter's copy editor over the question.
My offhand guess would be that the phrase started out as "Presidential timbre," but all the lumber-related Presidential folklore -- Washington chopping down the cherry tree, Lincoln splitting rails -- led to a change in spelling over the years.
On the other hand, almost all cute etymological theories like this turn out to be wrong.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
January 29, 2010
State of the Union
His 2010 State of the Union ditched the mercifully forgotten light bulb screwing in boondoggle in favor of 57 new flavors of pork, along with an implausible “discretionary spending freeze”. Thus Obama’s appearance at a rally in Tampa on Thursday trumpeted a new brainstorm—handing over $1.25 billion for a Train to Nowhere.
Obama has called for the construction of a high-speed rail line that will run from the Orlando airport all of 75 miles to a To Be Announced destination in the sprawling Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater metroplex. (The current best guess for the Tampa Bay terminus seems to be “a little past Ybor City.”)
Think about it. (Obama hasn’t.) Rail travel works best connecting centralized cities. Orlando is hardly centralized. But Tampa Bay is likely the least suitable metropolitan area in America for an expensive new rail system: its center is salt water.
Q. After you drive to south suburban Orlando International Airport, park, and wait for the ObamaTrain, it accelerates up to 168 mph but then soon starts decelerating so it can grind to a halt somewhere near Tampa (meaning it will only average 86 mph), what do you do next?
A. You stand in line at the Hertz counter to rent a car to drive to your actual destination in the far-flung Tampa Bay exurbs. (For example, it’s 25 miles from downtown Tampa to downtown St. Petersburg.)
Wouldn’t it have been simpler and cheaper just to drive from Orlando?
More
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
The Allure of Megalomania
With James Cameron’s Avatar shouldering aside George Lucas’s original Star Wars and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight for second place on the all time movie box office rankings (behind only Cameron’s own Titanic), it’s a good time to note one of the odder twists in the evolution of popular film culture: the rise of the self-proclaimed do-it-all writer-director-producer.
Of the last thirty Best Picture nominees (2003-2008), ten had directors who also took screenwriting credits (including George Clooney for Good Night and Good Luck).
And of the top 30 box office hits of all time—a list dominated by recent films due to inflation—the director has also served double-duty as a screenwriter on 16.
The growing allure of the writer-director extends even to Lucas and Cameron, both of whom seem more intrigued by technological innovation than by fine-tuning dialogue. Lucas is notoriously tin-eared, while Cameron abstains from originality in plot and dialogue to—as he explains it—avoid confusing the audience.
After triumphing as the sole writer-director on the original Star Wars in 1977, Lucas took a public role for his 1980 sequel The Empire Strikes Back more like hypomanic producer David O. Selznick’s on 1939’s Gone with the Wind. Lucas handed the screenwriting credits to old-timer Leigh Brackett and young gun Lawrence Kasdan, and the directing credit to Irvin Kershner. Is it surprising that The Empire Strikes Back is widely considered the best of the five follow-ups?
Yet, when Lucas returned in 1999 with The Phantom Menace, the spirit of the age encouraged him to take sole credits for both writing and directing. And it showed.
Still, The Phantom Menace made plenty of money. People like the idea of the embattled genius coming back after 16 years away (or 12 years in Cameron’s case) with his deeply personal revelation. Ironically, a variant of the auteur theory—that dauntingly intellectual Parisian rewrite of Hollywood history intended to establish the primacy of the director as the “author” of the film at the expense of the actors, screenwriter, producer, and the rest of the crew—is becoming the standard way to make crowd-pleasing popcorn movies. The public adores identifying with megalomaniac filmmakers.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
ESPN fires writer for going there
That reminds me of the Two Minutes Hate directed at William Bennett about the same period of time after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans for referring to Steve Levitt's Abortion-Cuts-Crime theory on the radio. I wrote:
Ever since New Orleans, the hysteria among the political and media elite has been building: Who among us bigshots will crack first and allude to the elephant in the living room?
Also, I'm reminded of the 2003 incident when Michael Eisner fired ESPN columnist Greg Easterbrook for mentioning "Jewish [movie] executives" in denouncing a slasher film in his blog on the The New Republic:
Easterbrook was widely excoriated both for terminal unhipness and for supposedly resurrecting the myth that Jews control the media. Disney supremo Michael Eisner, however, did control Easterbrook's other employer, ESPN, which immediately fired him. Most commentators opined that Easterbrook had it coming.
All I can say is that if Walt Disney were alive today, he'd be spinning in his cryogenic preservation chamber.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
January 27, 2010
State of the Union open thread
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
January 26, 2010
LA Times' Homicide Report is back
One thing I noticed is that gunshot homicides predominate in gang war neighborhoods, such as Compton. In contrast, the tonier the neighborhood, the lower the proportions of gunshots and the higher the proportion of "stabbing" and "blunt force" homicides. At the highest levels of society, "other" is the homicide method a la mode. For example, please check out the homicide log for the Beverly Crest neighborhood (the part of Los Angeles in the Hollywood Hills above Beverly Hills).
The LA Times and Jill Leovy should be congratulated for providing this useful information. From the FAQ:
The website was created in January 2007 by Jill Leovy, a veteran Times’ writer, as a reported blog. Leovy, the author of nearly all the unsigned posts from 2007, launched the report as a way to balance the crime coverage of the Los Angeles Times. As a practical necessity, printed editions of The Times, like those of other metropolitan newspapers, give the most attention to the most unusual, and thus statistically marginal, homicide cases.
It is our goal to give readers a complete picture of who dies in homicides, where, and why -- thus conveying both the personal story and the statistical story with greater accuracy and providing a forum for readers to remember victims and discuss violence. ...
The new version of the report, which launched Jan. 26, 2010, merges the blog posts with a searchable database and interactive maps. The maps break down homicides by various categories, including race/ethnicity, age, neighborhood/city, gender, method of death and more. Readers can link to the original Homicide Report to read archived comments and the original posts. In some cases the content has been edited to fit into the new style and format....
Why does the Homicide Report give the race of victims and suspects?The Homicide Report includes information on race or ethnicity of each homicide victim, as well as the name, gender and age and the time, place and manner of death. A number of readers have asked why race is included. Some have criticized the practice.
Racial information was once routinely included in news stories about crimes, but in recent decades, newspapers and other media outlets stopped mentioning suspects' or victims' race or ethnicity because of public criticism. Newspapers came to embrace the idea that such information is irrelevant to the reporting of crimes and may unfairly stigmatize racial groups.
The Homicide Report departs from this rule in the interest of presenting the most complete and accurate demographic picture of who is dying in homicides in Los Angeles County.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Teddy Kennedy's Irish Sweepstakes
It's worth taking a look at a gateway website, which is reminiscent of Ed McMahon's old Publisher's Clearing House lottery junk mail:
Select Your Language >>
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Why do we have to have a lottery? Teddy went to Harvard (for awhile). Does Harvard let people in by lottery? Why is a lottery good enough for the United States of America, but not good enough for Harvard?
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
January 23, 2010
Why is crime down among Today's Youth?
Nearly three years after a father and daughter were set ablaze and the mother, Dhanak, had her throat slit, details surrounding one of Orange County's most notorious cases are surfacing.
[Iftekhar] Murtaza, 25, of Van Nuys, and his two friends – Vitaliy Krasnoperov, 24, of West Hollywood and Charles Anthony Murphy Jr., 25, of Mission Hills – remain behind bars.
The trio of suspects is accused of killing Jayprakash Dhanak, 56, and Karishma Dhanak, 20, the father and sister of Shayona Dhanak, Murtaza's former girlfriend. ...
The prosecutor, Senior Deputy District Attorney Howard Gundy, said a dispute over religion was at the core of the crime.
Shayona Dhanak's parents disapproved of her nearly three-year relationship with Murtaza, who was Muslim. Murtaza was angry with the Dhanaks, who are devout Hindus, for interfering with his relationship, according to court records. The couple broke up several weeks before the slayings.
Gundy said Murtaza wanted to kill Shayona Dhanak's family so she would have no one left but him.
One problem today's youth face in living up to the high marks set by past generations at committing a high volume of crimes is that they are so addicted to electronic communications that they leave digital trails everywhere, making it hardly worth their while to break the law. For example, the kid who stabbed seven times this woman my wife knows while stealing her cell phone and laptop, immediately called his gang friends with the stolen phone. The cops traced the calls and came down hard on the friends a few hours later, and they rolled over on him. He was arrested the day after his crime.
Similarly, these three guys in this story exchanged lots of text messages such as:
IFTEKHAR SaYz: shayonas parents made us breakup
crowseeker: (expletive deleted)
IFTEKHAR SaYz: dude I wantto kill them
crowseeker: how?
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
January 22, 2010
NFL 2009: The Year Only Passing Mattered
For example, the two top teams in yards per running play were the Tennessee Titans (8-8) and the Carolina Panthers (8-8), while two worst running teams per play were the Indianapolis Colts (14-2) and the San Diego Chargers (13-3).
A correlation with number of wins of 0.80 with yards per pass attempt is very high considering that's not even looking at defense or special teams play. In general, you wouldn't expect this high of a correlation because of diminishing returns: if your upcoming opponent has been passing, not running, its way to victory, then you'll try on defense to shut down their passing game at the cost of giving up more yards per run.
Now, A.E. has checked out the last eight NFL seasons, and 2009 turns out to be the extreme case in recent years:
| Year | Pass | Run |
| 2009 | .80 | .09 |
| 2008 | .48 | .15 |
| 2007 | .76 | .24 |
| 2006 | .44 | .10 |
| 2005 | .60 | .40 |
| 2004 | .56 | .45 |
| 2003 | .67 | .07 |
| 2002 | .50 | .11 |
So, passing has been more correlated with winning than running for each of the last eight seasons, but 2009 was definitely the Year of the Quarterback. I found myself writing a lot about NFL quarterbacks in 2009, so at least I was responding to a real phenomenon.
One issue is that there are only 256 regular season NFL games per year, so the sample size isn't enormous, and that's one reason for year-to-year swings.
Of course, when you get to the playoffs in January, especially in outdoor games in northern cities, passing can let you down, such as New England's passing attack getting whomped by Baltimore's running game outdoors in the Boston area in the first round of the playoffs.
A question is whether the NFL's popularity could diminish if the game stays a one-dimensional test of passing skills. Personally, the kind of football I liked best was college football in the late 1960s and 1970s when coaches frequently invented all new offenses (the Veer, the Wishbone, and so forth) and have a number of years of success before defenses would catch up. It was interesting to see teams with wildly different offensive styles on the same field, which you can still see in the college game. In the NFL, in contrast, the skill level has always been so high that gimmicky innovations seldom work.
On the other hand, it could be that fans just like passing more than running -- that the few seconds when the ball is in the air is just more exciting than the ball on the ground. Thus, the long term on-field trend in the NFL toward more skillful execution of passing plays is in the business interests of the NFL. There's worse situations a sports league can be in than that.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Invade the world, invite the world in action
As Max Boot might say, you can never have too much cannon fodder!
There's a fundamental tradeoff, however:
- Either, we let in Haiti's educated minority, but that just makes Haiti dumber, which isn't good for Haiti. And there isn't even much of an educated class left in Haiti after decades of brain drain by emigation. Wikipedia's article on Papa Doc says:
His rule, based on a purged military, a rural milita and the use of personality cult and vodoo, resulted in a brain drain from which the country has not recovered. ... Educated professionals fled Haiti in droves for New York City, Miami, French-speaking Montreal, Paris, and several French-speaking African countries, exacerbating an already serious lack of doctors and teachers. Some of the highly skilled professionals joined the ranks of several UN agencies to work in development in newly-independent nations such as Ivory Coast, and Congo. The country has never recovered from this brain drain.- Or, we admit uneducated Haitian peasants who can't earn much money in the U.S. and have a very high birth rate.
Which one will it be?
By the way, I hadn't brought this up before, but if the press is going to promote taking in lots more Haitians, we should at least mention something that Haitians brought us in the past:
October 29, 2007HIV went directly from Africa to Haiti, then spread to the United States and much of the rest of the world beginning around 1969, suggests an international team of researchers.
The findings settle a key debate on the history and transmission route of the deadly virus, the scientists say.
Even before HIV was identified as the cause of AIDS, Haiti's role in the disease epidemic had been hotly debated.
When AIDS was officially recognized in 1981 in the U.S., for instance, the unusually high prevalence of the disease in Haitian immigrants fueled speculation that the Caribbean island was the source of the mysterious illness.
Another theory held that the AIDS epidemic spread from the U.S. in the mid-1970s after Haiti became a popular destination for sex tourism.
Scientists led by Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, Tucson, tried to solve the puzzle by tracing back the family history of the virus subtype blamed for the epidemic in North America.
The findings suggest that native Haitians carried the disease back to their island from Africa soon after the virus's emergence there. (Related: "AIDS Origin Traced to Chimp Group in Cameroon" [May 25, 2006].)
The new study appears online this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
HIV is commonly transmitted through tainted blood transfusions, dirty needles, and unprotected sex. Infections often lead to a life-threatening condition in which the body's immune defenses are systematically disabled.
Two species of HIV can infect humans—HIV-1 and HIV-2. The former is more virulent, more easily transmitted, and accounts for the lion's share of global HIV infections. HIV-2 is less infectious and is largely confined to parts of Western Africa.
Based on differences in one of the nine genes that make up the virus, HIV-1 is placed in three major groups. The most prevalent, Group M, has eight geographically distinct subtypes.
Worobey and his colleagues looked at subtype B. Though it is found mainly in North America and Europe, the strain is present in the most number of countries.
The researchers analyzed tissue samples from five Haitian AIDS patients collected in 1982 and 1983. All five had then recently immigrated to the U.S. and were among the first recognized victims of AIDS.
A family tree constructed from the HIV-1 genes of the five Haitians and subtype B gene sequences from 19 other countries place the Haitian virus at the root of all branches.
"This is strong evidence that HIV-1 subtype B arrived and began spreading in Haiti before it did elsewhere," Worobey said.
It is generally thought that the virus arrived with Haitian professionals returning from Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) following a wave of nationalism there in the 1960s.
Using advanced statistical techniques, Worobey and his colleagues estimated that the subtype B strain reached Haiti sometime around 1966 and the United States around 1969.
"Until AIDS was initially recognized in 1981, the virus was cryptically [hiddenly] circulating in a sophisticated medical environment for the better part of 12 years," Worobey said....My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

