February 10, 2010

Norman Finkelstein's Amazing Jawline

Not being terribly interested in the Israel-Palestine conflict, I haven't paid much attention to the endless Alan Dershowitz-Norman Finkelstein controversy, in which OJ's old lawyer, secure in his Harvard tenure, pillories the pro-Palestinian Finkelstein from post to post.

So, I'd never seen a picture of Norman Finkelstein, until I idly clicked on the review ("Is This a Man Who Sheds Light, or Simply Sets Fires?") of a documentary about him in today's NYT. To my surprise, Professor Finkelstein turns out to be a remarkably formidable looking 56-year-old, who could be credibly cast as the colonel of an elite commando squad in a big budget war movie.

Novelists used to be obsessed with the correlation between looks and personality. Dashiell Hammett, for example, goes on at great length in The Maltese Falcon describing Sam Spade's looks, which turned out to be the exact opposite of Humphrey Bogart's: Hammett's Spade was a 6'-3" blonde Scandinavian. In a world where images were expensive, conjuring up images through words were part of what a writer was paid for. It's still a part of high-end literary writing, but for the modern day equivalents of meat and potatoes novelists like Hammett, it's a losing proposition: the idea is to get Leonard DiCaprio and Tom Cruise into a bidding war for the movie rights to your novel, not to dissuade anybody from thinking they could play the part.

But, it was also that old time novelists believed there was a link between looks and personality. I've never paid that much attention to the idea, in part because I have a hard time decoding the facial terminology that old writers used, so I tend to skim over those long sections. For instance, Hammett writes:
Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down-- from high flat temples--in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.

I just can't call up a coherent image from these sentences, but, evidently, a lot of readers used to be able to do that.

(By the way, Hammett looked just like another alcoholic novelist, William Faulkner. Who was copying whom?)

How much research been done on questions of the correlation of looks and personality? For example, just from the pictures of Dershowitz and Finkelstein, could people guess at better than random chance which one would take the popular and which one the unpopular side of a political controversy?

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

"Algebra for All" Working as Should Have Been Expected

As a society, we reward people for making predictions about things that we find interesting to contemplate: Colts or Saints? Will the stock market go up or down tomorrow? Not surprisingly, we don't much punish people for being wrong about their predictions in these nearly random situations that so intrigue us.

Unf0rtunately, that lack of accountability extends to systems that aren't at all as smooth-operating as the NFL playoffs, the systems that we find boring and depressing to think about. So, we allow magical thinking to run amok. For example, a few years ago the Gates Foundation pressured the gigantic Los Angeles Unified School District into making it a requirement for graduating from high school that students pass Algebra I, Geometry, and Algebra II, a course so far over the cognitive capabilities and needs of a large fraction of perfectly nice kids who deserve to go through life as high school graduates that they might as well get a letter from Bill Gates telling them to drop out now and beat the rush.

The notion that students who haven't mastered fractions yet should be taking algebra is the kind of idea that can flourish only in areas of society that are deeply crippled by taboos.

From Education Week:
"Algebra-for-All" Push Found to Yield Poor Results

Spurred by a succession of reports pointing to the importance of algebra as a gateway to college, educators and policymakers embraced “algebra for all” policies in the 1990s and began working to ensure that students take the subject by 9th grade or earlier.

A trickle of studies suggests that in practice, though, getting all students past the algebra hump has proved difficult and has failed, some of the time, to yield the kinds of payoffs educators seek.

Among the newer findings:

• An analysisRequires Adobe Acrobat Reader using longitudinal statewide data on students in Arkansas and Texas found that, for the lowest-scoring 8th graders, even making it one course past Algebra 2 might not be enough to help them become “college and career ready” by the end of high school.

• An evaluation of the Chicago public schools’ efforts to boost algebra coursetaking found that, although more students completed the course by 9th grade as a result of the policy, failure rates increased, grades dropped slightly, test scores did not improve, and students were no more likely to attend college when they left the system.

• A 2008 paper by the Brookings Institution suggested that as many as 120,000 students nationwide were “misplaced” in algebra programs, meaning they had test scores on national exams that put them about seven grades below their peers in algebra classes. Further, it said, states with a high proportion of students taking algebra in 8th grade didn’t necessarily outperform other states on national math assessments.

“Simply sticking students in courses without preparing them ahead of time for the class does not seem to work as an intervention,” said Chrys Dougherty, the author of the Arkansas and Texas analysis, published last month by the National Center for Educational Achievement, in Austin, which is owned by the test publisher ACT Inc. “It seems to work with adequately prepared students, but not for the most challenged students.” ...

What Mr. Schmidt found was that the learning gains were greatest for students who moved from either a general math class or a prealgebra class into a full-blown algebra class.

His findings are in keeping with a larger body of studies from the 1990s and early 2000s that suggested algebra was, for many students, the primary gateway to advanced-level mathematics and college. The problem was that too many students—particularly those who were poor or members of disadvantaged minority groups—were turned away at the gate, screened out by ability-grouping practices at their schools. ...

“For the high-achieving kids, there was a big change in the classroom composition, so that changes the quality of classes,” said study co-author Elaine M. Allensworth, the interim co-executive director at the consortium, an independent research group based at the University of Chicago. “That means you have to have teachers who can teach to all classes, and it also means you don’t have an elite group of students who may be getting better advising in smaller classes.”

Can't have that! What elite groups of students who get better advising ever contributed to humanity?

“Meanwhile, the kids who weren’t taking advanced classes before are taking them now,” she said, “but they’re not very engaged in them. They have high absence rates and low levels of learning.”

As the trends became evident, the school system in 2003 began requiring 9th graders who scored below the national median on standardized math tests in 8th grade to take an algebra “support” class in addition to a regular algebra class. Students who scored higher continued to take a single period of algebra.

For the Chicago consortium’s study, the researchers compared outcomes for students just above and below the cutoff for the “double dose” classes.

Worried about the potential for reintroducing tracking, the district also provided professional-development workshops and other resources to the teachers of the support classes, according to Ms. Allensworth.

“Because teachers had more time and resources, the instructional quality in those classes improved quite a bit,” she said. “But the classes ended up concentrating more students with attendance and behavioral problems.”

In the end, the study found, failure rates increased for both the targeted students and for their peers in single-period algebra classes. On the other hand, algebra test scores rose substantially for the students in the double-dose classes.

“The district thought [the double-dose initiative] was a failure because it did not improve pass rates, but our analysis showed that test scores improved a lot,” Ms. Allensworth said.

Part of the problem, the Chicago researcher said, is that schools have little guidance on how to structure algebra programs to serve all students.

Because it's hard to do. It's easier to teach tracked classes, but that's out of fashion ... unless you call them AP classes. Then they are the height of fashion.
Tom Loveless, the author of the report from the Washington-based Brookings Institution on “misplaced” math students in algebra, said the issue is even more complex.

“No one has figured out how to teach algebra to kids who are seven or eight years behind before they get to algebra, and teach it all in one year,” said Mr. Loveless, who favors interventions for struggling students at even earlier ages.


Giving the dumb kids more time to learn the times tables by rote would be a good idea for a start.

Nationwide, research findings may diverge because testing content varies—the TIMSS test has more algebra content than many state exams taken by 8th graders—and because course content varies from classroom to classroom.

“If you take what’s called algebra class, and you look at the actual distribution of allocated time, you find that many of those teachers spend a very large portion of that year on basic arithmetic,” said Mr. Schmidt, who is a distinguished university professor of education at Michigan State’s East Lansing campus. His research on U.S. classrooms has found, in fact, that nearly a third of students studying algebra are using arithmetic books in their classes.

As well they should.

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

Heart disease and IQ

From Reuters:
Low intelligence among top heart health risks

LONDON (Reuters) - Intelligence comes second only to smoking as a predictor of heart disease, scientists said on Wednesday, suggesting public health campaigns may need to be designed for people with lower IQs if they are to work.

This works both ways: sickly people tend to less smart in the first place (maybe some have lower IQs because their heart and circulatory system don't deliver enough blood to the brain?), and being sick and/or old cuts your IQ. So, it is the duty of smart people in the medical industry to think hard about to make everything simpler for patients. Instead, a lot of practices in medicine (like those pages of tiny type in magazine ads for prescription drugs listing side effects) are done to appease smart lawyers rather than to make life better for baffled patients.

Similarly, as the recent cases of patients being fried by overly large doses of radiation therapy and scanners show, programmers need to build in safety measures to keep low IQ and/or sleep deprived medical personnel from messing up.

Research by Britain's Medical Research Council (MRC) found that lower intelligence quotient (IQ) scores were associated with higher rates of heart disease and death, and were more important indicators than any other risk factors except smoking.

Heart disease is the leading killer of men and women Europe, the United States and most industrialised countries.

According to the World Health Organisation, cardiovascular diseases and diabetes accounted for 32 percent of all deaths around the world in 2005.

It is well known that people with poorer education and lower incomes often face higher risks of ill health and a range of diseases. Studies have pointed to many likely reasons, including limited access to healthcare and other resources, poorer living conditions, chronic stress and higher rates of lifestyle risk factors like smoking.

The MRC study, which analysed data from 1,145 men and women aged around 55 and followed up for 20 years, rated the top five heart disease risk factors as cigarette smoking, IQ, low income, high blood pressure, and low physical activity.

The researchers, led by David Batty of the MRC and Social and Public Health Science Unit in Glasgow, Scotland, said there were "a number of plausible mechanisms" which might explain why lower IQ scores could raise the risk of heart disease -- in particular a person's approach to "healthy behaviour."

Judging by the number of people I see jogging in the most expensive parts of town, versus the few joggers in the rest of town, I often wonder whether "energy" -- both physical and mental -- has a sizable general factor.

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

February 9, 2010

"The New Dating Game"

The Weekly Standard's cover story The New Dating Game by Charlotte Allen has much of interest:
... the percentage of married people ages 35 to 44 has declined precipitously over the last 40 years: from 88 percent of men and 87 percent of women in 1960 to 66 percent of men and 67 percent of women in 2005. Since first marriages after age 45—when a woman’s fertile years are finished—are statistically rare, almost everyone who is ever going to marry is already married by that age. The percentage of children growing up in fatherless families—a chief risk factor for social pathologies—has risen concomitantly: from 9 percent of all households with children in 1960 to 26 percent today. On the plus side of the ledger, these negative trends don’t affect the college-educated as severely. College-educated women have significantly higher rates of marriage and lower rates of divorce than women without college degrees. The bad news is that such women, who tend to marry late, have far fewer children. In 2004, according to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, 24 percent of women ages 40 to 44 with bachelor’s degrees were childless, in contrast to 10 percent of women without a high school diploma. Marriage is slowly becoming a preserve of the elite, who pay a price in severely reduced fertility. ...

Some argue, though, that it is actually beta men who are the greatest victims of the current mating chaos: the ones who work hard, act nice, and find themselves searching in vain for potential wives and girlfriends among the hordes of young women besotted by alphas. That is the underlying message of what is undoubtedly the most deftly written and also the darkest of the seduction-community websites, the blog Roissy in DC. Unlike his confreres, Roissy does not sell books or boot camps, and his site carries no ads. He also blogs anonymously, or at least tries to. (Purported photos of Roissy circulating on the Internet show a tall unshaven man in his late 30s with piercing blue eyes and good, if somewhat dissolute, looks.) ...

If Roissy has anything resembling a mentor, it is F. Roger Devlin. Trained as a political philosopher—he has a doctorate from Tulane—Devlin holds no academic post, and his oeuvre, besides a published version of his doctoral thesis on Alexandre Kojève, consists of a series of essays and reviews concerning relations between the sexes for the Occidental Quarterly, a paleoconservative publication whose other contributors tend to focus obsessively on the question of which ethnic groups belong to which race.

“The sexual revolution in America was an attempt by women to realize their own [hypergamous] utopia, not that of men,” Devlin wrote. Beta men become superfluous until the newly liberated women start double-clutching after years in the serial harems of alphas who won’t “commit,” lower their standards, and “settle.” During this process, monogamy as a stable and civilization-maintaining social institution is shattered. “Monogamy is a form of sexual optimization,” Devlin told me. “It allows as many people who want to get married to do so. Under monogamy, 90 percent of men find a mate at least once in their life.” This isn’t necessarily so anymore in today’s chaotic combination of polygamy for lucky alphas, hypergamy in varying degrees for females depending on their sex appeal, and, at least in theory, large numbers of betas left without mates at all—just as it is in baboon packs. The aim of Mystery-style game is to give those betas better odds."


By the way, Devlin recently reviewed at VDARE.com Tatu Vanhanen's The Limits of Democratization: Climate, Intelligence, and Resource Distribution.

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

Running Amok "My Way"

From the NY Times:

The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling “My Way” in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.”

The killings have produced urban legends about the song and left Filipinos groping for answers. Are the killings the natural byproduct of the country’s culture of violence, drinking and machismo? Or is there something inherently sinister in the song?

Yeah, it appeals to jerks and losers -- e.g., Sid Vicious's 1978 post-Sex Pistols cover version of "My Way" (video here, and here's Gary Oldman's version from Sid and Nancy).

By the way, Wikipedia asserts: "In the Philippines it was believed that Vicious' version was inspired by deposed dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos, where in the first part of the song Vicious attempted to imitate the voice of the late dictator." I suspect this Manila Urban Legend says more about Filipinos' obsession with "My Way" than it does about the late Mr. Vicious, whom I can't imagine had much of an idea who Ferdinand E. Marcos even was.

Whatever the reason, many karaoke bars have removed the song from their playbooks. And the country’s many Sinatra lovers, like Mr. Gregorio here in this city in the southernmost Philippines, are practicing self-censorship out of perceived self-preservation.

Karaoke-related killings are not limited to the Philippines. In the past two years alone, a Malaysian man was fatally stabbed for hogging the microphone at a bar and a Thai man killed eight of his neighbors in a rage after they sang John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”

There's an old tradition in Southeast Asia of men suddenly "running amok." Wikipedia writes:
Although commonly used in a colloquial and less-violent sense, the phrase is particularly associated with a specific sociopathic culture-bound syndrome in Malaysian culture. In a typical case of running amok, a male who has shown no previous sign of anger or any inclination to violence will acquire a weapon and, in a sudden frenzy, will attempt to kill or seriously injure anyone he encounters. ...

W. W. Skeat wrote in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica:

A Malay will suddenly and apparently without reason rush into the street armed with a kris or other weapons, and slash and cut at everybody he meets till he is killed. These frenzies were formerly regarded as due to sudden insanity. It is now, however, certain that the typical amok is the result of circumstances, such as domestic jealousy or gambling losses, which render a Malay desperate and weary of his life. It is, in fact, the Malay equivalent of suicide. The act of running amuck is probably due to causes over which the culprit has some amount of control, as the custom has now died out in the British possessions in the peninsula, the offenders probably objecting to being caught and tried in cold blood.

Always trust content from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.

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

February 8, 2010

Ethnic cleansing in South Central L.A.?

One of the more controversial LA area questions over the last decade was whether or not Latino and black gangs were fighting a low-level ethnic cleansing struggle in the mixed ethnicity slums, as blacks often alleged. Civic leaders, such as LAPD chief William Bratton vociferously denied it, as well they might considering potential repercussions.

Slowly, the story is coming out in court cases. My guess is that the answer will turn out to be: Yes, but only in certain times and places, often depending upon the whim of local gang leaders.

From the LA Times' ace crime reporter Sam Quinones:
Six Florencia 13 gang members sentenced to life in prison
Court action may close the door on a rampage that began in 2004 and evolved into what some residents saw as a race war.

The sentencing of six Florencia 13 gang members to life in prison appears to bring to a close a prolonged and terrifying spate of violence in the Florence-Firestone district allegedly brought on by orders from a prison gang member in solitary confinement 700 miles away.

Beginning in 2004, the unincorporated Los Angeles County area north of Watts [unincorporated parts of LA County are patrolled by LA Sheriffs rather than LAPD] was the site of one of the region's worst gang sieges since the early 1990s, evolving into what some residents felt was a race war.

The violence left dozens of people dead, including many with no gang affiliation, and required enormous county resources to combat. ...

U.S. District Judge David Carter sentenced Florencia member Francisco Flores, 24, to life in prison on Wednesday, saying that he "preyed on victims because they were black and for no other reason," according to a U.S. attorney's office news release. ..

Their trial, which took place in federal court in Santa Ana in 2008, grew from an indictment of 104 Florencia gang members on charges that included racketeering, conspiracy to sell drugs and murder.

Of those indicted, 94 have pleaded guilty or have been convicted. Four more await trial; two have died and four are fugitives.

The case showed the remarkable power the Mexican Mafia prison gang holds over Southern California Latino street gangs. Prosecutors alleged that Mexican Mafia member Arturo "Tablas" Castellanos essentially created a crime wave in the Florence-Firestone district.

Castellanos was not indicted because he is already serving a life prison term in a maximum security cell in Pelican Bay State Prison. He hasn't been on the streets since 1979.

Yet he wrote letters, introduced as evidence at the trial, that presumed to control a street gang, most of whose members had never seen him.

Castellanos ordered gang members to stop rampant infighting; to tax drug dealers in their neighborhoods, as well as prostitutes, fruit vendors and vendors of phony ID cards in nearby Huntington Park; and to funnel the proceeds to him and other mafia members. He also ordered the gang to attack the local Crips gang, whose members are black.

"The Mexican Mafia has a powerful grasp on these [Latino] gangs," said Peter Hernandez, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the case.

"The prison system is a segregated place. Those rules and letters from Castellanos attempted to adhere those prison rules to the street," he said.

As Castellanos' letters appeared on the street in the fall and winter of 2004, Florencia 13 erupted in a spate of violence against African Americans.

"They just went out and started shooting" at black people, Hernandez said.

East Coast Crips responded with shootings of their own, often targeting Latinos who were not gang members.

Few actual gang members died. Instead, residents said, they lived amid a race war.

Tapped cellular phone calls introduced as evidence at the trial tracked Florencia members driving the streets looking for people to shoot.

Black men, in particular, reported not walking to the store for groceries or riding bikes.

Florence-Firestone, with a population of 60,000, had 43 homicides in 2005.

In contrast, there have only been three homicides in Florence-Firestone neighborhood over the last seven months, so the situation there is much improved.

And here's Quinones's latest, on the testimony of a different Mexican Mafia leader, one who must have watched The Godfather trilogy a lot. I bet he identified with Al Pacino's character:
Real tried to break from his family and go straight, even receiving First Communion alone at 17, he said. But, "every time I try to get out, they pull me back in.

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

Are quarterbacks getting too good?

I'm wondering whether the NFL passing game is evolving in the direction the placekicking game has already gone. Kickers today get no credit whatsoever for making extra points and very little for making field goals under, say, 45 yards. You mostly hear about them when they miss.

Quarterback strategies and execution are now starting to reach a similar point where the big story of the Super Bowl was the lone interception thrown in the game.

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

LA County Homicide Rates

Here's an excerpt from the middle of my VDARE.com column:

One way of getting around these various methodological problems in thinking about racial differences in crime: look closely at homicide victimization rates of 15-29 year-old males. This approach can seem unkind because it assumes there is some correlation between the odds of getting killed and the odds of causing trouble. But among young men, unfortunately, that assumption has some validity.

Over the last two weeks, I’ve read the LA Times’ write-ups on hundreds of young male victims, and tracked down additional details on many of them elsewhere on the Internet, such as from their MySpace pages. It’s depressing work, but it puts human faces on the statistics.

Many of the victims were wholly innocent, such as the Long Beach engineer who chased teenaged thieves stealing his iPod into an alley, where they shot him down. Some, such as black high school football star Jamiel Shaw Jr., were apparently murdered at random due to their race as part of the low-intensity ethnic cleansing struggle in South Central L.A.

On the other hand, more than a few of the 1,257 male 15-29-year-old homicide victims appear to have been knuckleheads shot down by cops during crimes or by rival gangs as payback, or who lost their lives in fights they started.

Most killings in L.A. County involve acquaintances rather than strangers. Perhaps due to the spread of pervasive video surveillance in stores, robbery killings are now down to a small fraction of the total number of victims, and a very small sliver of young male victims.

This means that victimization rates of young men can give us some clue about crime rates.

Among 15-29 year-old males killed since the beginning of 2007, I count:

* Hispanics: 794 victims out of 611,789 young men in the 2006-2008 Census estimates
* Blacks: 380 victims out of 96,676 young men
* Non-Hispanic Caucasians: 47 out of 247,173
* Asians: 28 out of 129,716
* Pacific Islanders: 8 out of 3,510
* American Indians: 0 out of 6,088
* Total L.A. County: 15-29 year old males: 1,257 out of 1,108,268

A few technical notes: I’m counting 22 Spanish-surnamed victims as Hispanic even though the county coroner listed them as white, plus four others where there is evidence that they identified ethnically as Latino.

Not surprisingly to anybody who follows the local police blotter, 14 of the 47 Caucasian victims were of West Asian descent, and nine of those 14 Armenians. Only 1.7 percent of the population of Los Angeles County is Armenian, but some of them are a bit lively, rather like Sicilians in a Scorsese movie: enterprising and affluent, but with an Old World code of honor. Suspects in killings of Armenians are often described as vanishing into the night in BMWs or Lexuses. Judging by the Old Country first names of the Armenian victims, most were immigrants or the children of immigrants rather than from the pre-1924 wave of Armenian immigrants.

Using the Census Bureau’s estimates of the numbers of 15-29-year-old males in L.A. County in 2006-2008, we can calculate—relative to non-Hispanic whites—the homicide victimization rates among young men:

* Whites: 1.0 times the white rate (by Census definition)
* Asians: 1.1x the white rate
* Latinos: 6.8x
* Pacific Islanders: 12.0x
* African-American: 20.7x
* Total L.A. County: 6.0x

Read the rest here.

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

February 7, 2010

What Female Journalists Really Care About XLIV

There's always the Washington Post's XX featurette for heaping mounds of Taking Everything Personally:
To Be Young, Gifted, and White in Hollywood

The blogosphere is a-twitter about Vanity Fair’s latest “New Hollywood” cover. Specifically, its stark lily-whiteness. As Dlisted put it, this year’s annual Annie Leibovitz shot “makes a BYU class picture look like a Benetton ad.”

Bloggers have pointed out a few obvious, non-white actresses who could have been included, like Gaby Sidibe, who is featured in the portfolio inside the magazine, but not on the cover.

The star of Precious weighs 300 pounds. No woman is going to be drawn to make an impulse purchase of a fashion and lifestyle magazine because there's a 300 pounder on the cover.

There’s also Zoe Saldana, who starred in the two biggest sci-fi movies of the year, Star Trek and Avatar.

This Dominican-American is really good in Avatar as Manute Bol's big blue sister, or whatever she's supposed to be. On the other hand, would anybody who saw her in Avatar recognize her?

Nobody gives credit to acting performances in special effects blockbusters, but it's probably technically harder to act well in a huge movie than in a low budget film where you get to act with other people and do more lines per day on the set. A big challenge in acting is adrenaline management. It's easiest in the theater where you just have to be on from 8 to 10pm each evening. You can arrange your day to peak then. It might be hardest in technically complicated films where its hard to foresee when they'll finally be ready for you back on the set after a long day of the crew twiddling with technology. On the other hand, maybe part of Cameron's new techniques are ones to make it easier on actors?

Yes, Saldana was featured on the cover of the 2008 Hollywood issue—behind the gatefold, natch, along with Alice Braga and America Ferrera—but then, they put ScarJo on the cover of the Hollywood issue THREE YEARS in a row. (2004, ‘05, and ‘06.) And can I make a retroactive vote for Charlyne Yi? Admittedly, I don’t think she glams up all that often, but the prospect is so delicious.

Hmmhmm, why would Nina Shen think Charlyne Yi should be put on magazine covers?

Try to play this game too long, though, and you run out of steam. After all, as Dodai Stewart points out on Jezebel, it’s not as if Hollywood is exactly teeming with hotly-tipped [excuse me?] young actresses of color. Maybe it’s just a numbers thing, and those of us who feel angry at VF really are just shooting the messenger. Most American movie ingénues, after all, are white, pretty, and thin. But it’s a chicken-and-the-egg kind of scenario. Is Hollywood to blame for not putting more actresses of color in its movies? Or are magazines like VF to blame for perpetuating the idea that young, worthy actresses are naturally thin, pretty, and Ivory soap-white?

Or maybe the overseas market, which now accounts for a large majority of American box office, is to be blamed? Maybe the Japanese, the world's #2 movie market, just like looking at Scarlett Johansson more than they like looking at Charlene Yi? (And in foreign markets where American films are dubbed into the local language, audiences don't have to listen to Scarlett's grating voice.)

Or maybe actresses of color should be blamed for not being, on average, glamorous and talented enough to sell as many movie tickets? Nah, by definition, it couldn't be that!

As momentarily satisfying as it feels, I also don’t feel entirely comfortable cherry-picking actresses of color and then waving them around, yelling, “Here’s one you could have put in there!” It makes it sound like we’re pushing for a kind of tokenism, some quota-based notion of “diversity,” when really it’s just sad that someone could look at an image like that and not see race written all over it.

I was chatting with a friend about the brouhaha today, and she was reminded of this line in Adam Gopnik’s recent New Yorker obit of J.D. Salinger:

In American writing, there are three perfect books, which seem to speak to every reader and condition: “Huckleberry Finn,” “The Great Gatsby,” and “The Catcher in the Rye.”

Now, I happened to hate The Catcher in the Rye, and The Great Gatsby left me cold when I finally read it, years and years after I should have. So maybe Gopnik and I have different literary tastes. That’s all fine and good; I’m not obligated to buy his assertion that these are “perfect” novels. But the notion that these books should “speak” to me and my “condition”—that I will naturally find something resonant and familiar in the experiences described therein—makes me feel strangely claustrophobic. (And I can only imagine what a black person who finds Huck Finn deeply problematic is supposed feel.) It’s not that I think Gopnik should have added some books with minority characters to that short list. It’s just upsetting to be reminded that “white and male” is still seen as some kind of universal solvent—a category that everyone else can be dissolved into.

Damn white males have just written too many good books. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

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

February 6, 2010

My November 18 Super Bowl Prediction

I wrote in Taki's Magazine last November:

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 5, 2010

America's Drunkest Cities

From USAToday:
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.

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:

  1. Fresno, Calif.
  2. Reno, Nev.
  3. Billings, Mont.
  4. Riverside, Calif.
  5. Austin
  6. St. Louis
  7. San Antonio
  8. Lubbock, Texas
  9. Tucson
  10. Bakersfield, Calif.

"Least drunk" cities:

  1. Boston
  2. Yonkers, N.Y.
  3. Rochester, N.Y.
  4. Salt Lake City
  5. Miami
  6. Newark
  7. Durham, N.C.
  8. New York City
  9. Fort Wayne, Ind.
  10. Manchester, N.H.
See full list, including grades for each city from A to F.

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

On Saturday night at 8pm, HBO is putting on a biopic with Claire Danes playing Temple Grandin, the high-functioning autistic animal sciences professor who is so interesting from a sort of sci-fi point of view, like HAL 9000 come to life. Her view, however, is that autistic people tend to have brains that function not like computers but like animals -- they can't see the forest for the trees. Animals are constantly spooked by small visual details that don't bother non-autistic humans because we barely notice much of what goes on around us that isn't relevant to our main trains of thought.

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

From my new Taki's Magazine column about the ex-spouses who are contending for the Best Director Oscar:
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 publicity for 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 concealed within 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

For years, I've been pointing out that the irony that so many of the New York City media types who are always pooh-poohing the entire concept of IQ in the press are simultaneously paying lots of money to have tested the IQs of their four-year-olds (four-year-olds!). Almost every prestigious private elementary school in NYC requires that applicants for kindergarten take the Wechsler IQ test, and the public gifted and talented schools use the more achievement test-like Otis-Lennon. It's a pretty hilarious irony.

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"

I recently read The Prince of Darkness, the 2007 autobiography of the late Washington reporter and TV commentator Robert D. Novak, who died last August. It's a quite distinctive memoir that nicely conveys Novak's love of ferreting out individual facts -- it's a book that will prove useful to future historians of politics and the press in understanding how reporters got scoops and what their incentives were -- and his aversion to the kind of Big Picture synthesizing that's the norm in an autobiography.

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"

I never got around to posting my old review from The American Conservative of the 2009 French movie "The Class." So, for completists:
“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

From my new VDARE.com column:
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

A reader objects to my statement in VDARE.com:
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