December 18, 2010

Cities and Physics (but not People)

Physicist Geoffrey West explains in the NYT Magazine, "A Physicist Solves the City," that he  now understands cities:
In essence, they arrive at the sensible conclusion that cities are valuable because they facilitate human interactions, as people crammed into a few square miles exchange ideas and start collaborations. “If you ask people why they move to the city, they always give the same reasons,” West says. “They’ve come to get a job or follow their friends or to be at the center of a scene. That’s why we pay the high rent. Cities are all about the people, not the infrastructure.”
... As [Jane] Jacobs pointed out, the layout of her Manhattan neighborhood — the short blocks, the mixed-use zoning, the density of brownstones — made it easier to cope with the strain of the metropolis. It’s fitting that it’s called the Village.

In recent decades, though, many of the fastest-growing cities in America, like Phoenix and Riverside, Calif., have given us a very different urban model. These places have traded away public spaces for affordable single-family homes, attracting working-class families who want their own white picket fences. West and Bettencourt point out, however, that cheap suburban comforts are associated with poor performance on a variety of urban metrics. Phoenix, for instance, has been characterized by below-average levels of income and innovation (as measured by the production of patents) for the last 40 years.

Yet, what could account for the lower rates of patents in Riverside or Phoenix than in equally suburban Silicon Valley or North San Diego County?

It's a mystery!

December 17, 2010

The SCHEME Act up for a vote Saturday

The lame duck Senate is scheduled to vote on the DREAM Act, which is, in effect, a sneaky mid-sized amnesty, on Saturday.

The Ennui of the Left

As C. Van Carter of Across Difficult Country pointed out in the comments, Google's new Ngrams website lets you graph the frequency of usage of any of the hundreds of billions of words in Google Books. 

For example, this graph shows how staple words of leftist thought, such as "socialism," "racism," "sexism," "feminism," "discrimination," and "civil rights" have been in decline in published books over the last decade. Socialism peaked in usage around 1976, but most of the others enjoyed their peaks in the 1990s. (To be precise, discrimination had a peak around 1975 and a second one of equal magnitude around 1996. The other four words peaked in the 1990s.) 

Is this just a decline in the proportion of public affairs books published? (These numbers, by the way, are weighted by publications, not by sales.) I don't think so. In contrast, "capitalism" and "conservatism" have been relatively flat since about 1980, and "evolutionary psychology" skyrocketed from 1992 to 2004, then drifted slightly lower. "Darwin" was flat from 1960 to 1990, the shot upwards until about 2005.

That fits my general recollection of hanging around bookstores on my lunch hour: that their was a surge in DiversityThink in books around 1989 to 1995 (perhaps related to the collapse of socialism channeling leftist thought into other directions, perhaps related to the surge during the Crack Era of bad behavior among blacks creating a perceived need for more denunciations of white racism). This era was followed, however, by collective boredom and embarrassment.

The word "diversity" itself zoomed upwards starting in 1989, peaked around 1999, but has only dropped slightly since then. As a non-accusatory happy word, it doesn't inspire as much heretical thought as an accusatory word like "racism," so  it's more likely to endure in exhoratory prose.

We're now well into the Brezhnev Era of DiversityThink, when everybody is bored and cynical about the ruling ideology, but it still has 53,000 tanks, so most people assume it can't be all that off-base.

To get off topic, how about Nabokov v. Borges? Borges, whom Nabokov spoofed as "Osberg" in Ada, has been in the lead in English language books since the early 1960s.

How about Golden Age Sci- Fi writers: Heinlein, Asimov, and Bradbury? They seem to be mentioned: Bradbury first, Asimov second, Heinlein third.

December 16, 2010

Does everybody secretly hate graphs?

I'm reading the book Fault Lines by former IMF chief economist Raghuram G. Rajan of the U of Chicago economics dept. It's a pretty good read, but what struck me while flipping through it is that it's solid text: no quantitative graphics, no tables of numbers, just paragraphs. The sole thing to interrupt the flow of paragraphs across a couple of hundred pages is a poem by 18th century economist Bernard de Mandeville.  

That lack of tables and graphs can't be natural for an economics professor, can it? The publisher must have told him what statistician Andrew Gelman's publisher told him when he wrote Red State, Blue State, that each graph in the book cuts sales in half.

So, does everybody really hate graphs? If so, why does everybody who gives a presentation think they have to do it in Powerpoint? (As in Abe Lincoln's Gettysburg Address graph comparing New Nations -87 Years to Now.) Do audience members actually look at the graphs? Or do they just appreciate the chance during the work day to veg out in a dark room with a glowing screen? "Powerpoint: It's Almost Like Watching TV While Getting Paid!" 

Or did people used to like graphs until Powerpoint came along? 

Do the books that the people who sit next to you on the airplane read have graphs in them? A large fraction of people in airplanes are traveling to meetings infested by Powerpoint graphs: if there is a graph in their book, do they consider it work? 

I like graphs. I had Minard's now-famous graph-map of Napoleon's 1812 invasion of Russia up on my office wall for years. It worked as a sort of secret club handshake for people walking by. One out every zillion people who walked down the hall past my office would recognize it and introduce himself.

I find that graphs always take me about five times longer to finish creating than I expected. For example, in VDARE, I've got a graph that answers the obvious question (obvious to you and me, at least) about those PISA international school achievement test scores that everybody was pontificating upon last week. My graph shows where the PISA test scores of the four main racial/ethnic groups in the U.S. would fall compared to the national average scores for the 65 countries that took the test. 

A simple idea, right? Yet it took me forever to get the graph right so the answer is clear. (First, I had to find the American race numbers, which don't appear in any of the hundreds of pages of data posted by the OECD last week.) Then, I had to fiddle for hours to get the graph to look less confusing. 

I think it finally came out okay. But, if everybody out there secretly hates graphs, then I'll stop wasting time making them.
 

December 15, 2010

The Pointlessness of the Central Flaw in Current Thought

In the latest brouhaha over new Nixon tapes, I saw something in passing by Slate writer Jack Shafer that is illustrative of the most fundamental weakness in modern thought. So, let me set the stage for a bit before getting to the key bit that wouldn't even be noticed by a non-crimethinker.

Jack Shafer writes in Slate:
From his throne in hell, Richard Nixon commands our attention once again with newly released White House tapes from February and March 1973 that drop another tanker load of piss and bile on Jews. ...

After recounting various private remarks of Nixon about Jews, Shafer turns to consider the arguments of Nixon's Jewish defenders:
Nixon has never lacked Jewish defenders. Just six months ago, writer Ben Stein, the son of Herbert Stein, the head of the Council of Economic Advisers under Nixon, pooh-poohed the Jew-counting story that Noah has so determinedly tracked. Wrote Stein:
Now, bear in mind, Nixon was by far the best friend the Jewish people have ever had since Abraham. He had the most Jewish appointees to high offices, the most pro-Israel foreign and defense policy in history, saved Israel in the Yom Kippur War, put Russia at bay about helping Egypt in that war—was just the best friend Jews have ever had, including Jews themselves.

Alas, being actively pro-Israel doesn't automatically exonerate Nixon from anti-Semitism. For one thing, he and Kissinger were playing a global board game with the Soviets in those years, and the Soviets were backing Egypt. An Israeli defeat would have been an American defeat, too. For another, Nixon didn't want to go down in history as the American president who "lost" Israel and put the Jewish people in peril.

True, but Nixon and his chief domestic policy adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan of 1969-70 were also simultaneously playing a domestic board game with New York intellectuals in those years. Nixon and Moynihan had long conversations in 1969 about how they could promote a self-conscious neoconservative tendency among Moynihan's fellow New York intellectuals. Portraying Israel as a crucial bastion of the Cold War (a position that Ike and, perhaps, JFK would have regarded as objectively silly) was intended by Nixon and Moynihan to encourage at least some intellectual Jews to take the Cold War more personally, just as the British government had found it expedient to issue the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to appeal to Jewish opinion during Britain's struggle with Germany and Austria. Nixon's considered judgment was that he didn't need all the Jewish intellectuals on his side, just some of them, and he devoted a lot of effort to wooing them. As we can tell by reading Commentary and The Weekly Standard in 2010, Nixon and Moynihan had a fair degree of success with with wooing a vocal minority of Jewish intellectuals toward supporting an aggressive American foreign policy.
To be open-minded about Nixon, let's go ahead and put his support of Israel in the asset side of his anti-Semitism account.

What then to make of his long list of Jewish appointees? In a newspaper interview last year promoting his book, Why Are Jews Liberals?, Norman Podhoretz beat Stein to the punch on Nixon's defense of Israel but added that Nixon "was the kind of anti-Semite who thought that Jews were smarter than everybody else. That's why he had Kissinger. That's why he had Arthur Burns, Herb Stein. … A lot of Nixon's anti-Semitism is talk. ... His anti-Semitism consisted of resentment of Jews for being liberals and hating him. It's not the traditional kind of anti-Semitism." [Emphasis added.]

Podhoretz is half, maybe three-quarters right. Nixon did seem to believe Jews were exceptionally smart, although these views were obviously colored by the fact that most of his encounters with Jews in his adult life were with successful Jews. Did he similarly extrapolate from his encounters with successful Catholics that they were brilliant, too? Mormons? Cubans? Armenians?

This last paragraph is worth re-reading. Shafer is attempting to first construct, then debunk a socially acceptable Occam's Butterknife defense of Nixon's opinion that American Jews tend to be smart. Let me flesh out the argument:
How could Nixon have ever come to the conclusion that Jews tend to be above average in intelligence? Well, perhaps he was an unwitting victim of selection bias [as outlined at length by novelist Michael Chabon in the NYT last June], which caused him to be unintentionally wrong. See, Nixon employed brilliant Jews like Kissinger, so he must have wrongly inferred from how smart Kissinger was that Jews on average were above average in intelligence. On the other hand, he also employed brilliant Catholics like Moynihan. And yet he does not appear to have inferred from long talks with Moynihan that Catholics were notably above average in intelligence. Therefore, Nixon can't be convicted of merely a lesser charge of Anti-Semitism by Error. Nixon was instead guilty of Anti-Semitism in the Highest [contemporary] Degree: noticing that American Jews tend to be smarter than average! Case closed!

Of course, Occam's Razor would suggest that just maybe Nixon, who was on a national ticket five times, winning four times, actually had a decent empirical grasp of social realities. And, if Nixon had had any questions about average Jewish intelligence, he could have asked Moynihan, who, with Moynihan's co-author Nathan Glazer, was academia's leading expert on white ethnics.

Now, you could say that Shafer's assumption that Nixon noticing the overwhelming evidence for Jews being smarter on average renders him odious is just an example of the contemporary aversion to realistic thought epitomized by how calling something a "stereotype" is now assumed to automatically refute its empirical truth.

But, over the last decade and a half, the evidence keeps piling up that the Jewish IQ advantage is not just an example of what's wrong with intellectual life today, but the single most important cause for contemporary thinking going off the tracks.

While I was reading all the frenzied reaction to The Bell Curve sixteen years ago, I noticed that not much of it was actually coming from blacks. Thomas Sowell had a response, we know now that Barack Obama broke his Vow of Silence to comment on NPR upon The Bell Curve, and so forth, but those were mostly the exceptions. There really aren't that many black intellectuals that other intellectuals pay attention to.

Those most vocally enraged by The Bell Curve were white intellectuals, especially Jews. To them, the assertion that the average black IQ was equal to the average American IQ serves as the outer bulwark defending the inner sanctum: the belief that the average Jewish American IQ is equal to the average American IQ. If you let the peasants realize that blacks are on average could be less smart, eventually they'll figure out that Jews on average could be more smart, and then they'll be coming for us with pitchforks!

Of course, this dominant belief about smarts held by contemporary intellectuals is about 99% stupid. Practically everybody in America already realizes that Jews tend to be smarter. And, guess what, they're okay with it. Most Americans appreciate Jewish intelligence.

Consider the example of, say, Richard Nixon, a powerful and congenitally angry man who was well aware of the facts about Jewish intelligence. What was his response to this knowledge?

He searched out ways to do more favors for Jews.

So, the central, underlying flaw in the edifice of current intellectualizing is pointless. 

On the other hand, an intellectual climate that says, in effect, you can't be a genuine intellectual unless you publicly humiliate yourself by saying things like Nixon must have assumed Jews tend to be smart because he only met smart Jews has a lot of usefulness as a loyalty test. It's like a fraternity initiation in which they'll only let you in if you run around campus dressed as a marshmallow. It shows how much you want to be one of us. You won't let self-respect get in your way.


Alternative History Questions

Imagine this scenario: Imagine that Hitler and Stalin both died in, say, 1935 and replaced by unaggressive Euroweenies of the Gorbachev sort. Without Hitler's bad example, the leaders of the Japanese Navy arrest the leaders of the Japanese Army and Japan gives up the crazy idea of fighting America. Or imagine whatever you want (Edwin Starr Sr. records "War! What Is It Good For?" in 1938, if you like), as long as it leads to WWII and the Cold War never happening. By 1939, Europe and East Asia have already settled into their long post 1989 peace that we know from our world.

In that situation, would anybody have gotten around to inventing the atomic bomb? Who? When? (Something to consider is the question of whether, in this world, nuclear weapons were ever truly reinvented?)

Now, imagine another scenario in which it's 2010, but nuclear technology has remained at rudimentary 1930s levels ever since the 1930s. Everything else is the same about the world of 2010 -- They've got computers, lasers, titanium, Powerpoint, Twitter, whatever -- just that nobody ever got around to working on nukes. 

Then, some country in this Alternative Present decides to build an atomic bomb. With all the 21st Century advantages, would they do it faster than the Manhattan Project? Would they even set one off by 2020?

December 14, 2010

Northeast Asians outpacing Muslims at complicated tech stuff

From the New York Times:
North Korean Nuclear Ability Seen to Far Outpace Iran’s
By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has concluded that North Korea’s new plant to enrich nuclear fuel uses technology that is “significantly more advanced” than what Iran has struggled over two decades to assemble, according to senior administration and intelligence officials.

North Korea is smaller and much poorer than Iran, has no oil money, and is run by people who make the Iranian rulers look like George Washington for sanity.

Looking at 2009 PISA test scores (p. 155-157), North Korea didn't take the test, but 26% of South Korean 15-year-olds scored in the top two ranks of math tests, the fifth best performance out of 65 regions, behind only Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

Iran didn't take the test, but trying to find remotely similar countries, we see Turkey with a respectable 6%, Qatar 2%, and Jordan with under 1%. In science, 12% of South Koreans scored in the top two ranks versus 2% of Turks and vanishingly small percentages of most other Muslim countries. 

Moreover, unlike North Korea, Iran lets people emigrate. A lot of smart Iranians have wound up in Southern California. My wife knows an upper crust Iranian lady who arrived from Iran a decade ago and her son then majored in physics at Caltech. Probably a better decision for the family, all in all, than staying in Iran, having the son get drafted into the nuclear program, and then having the Israelis someday drop a bomb on his head. (In contrast to Iran, there hasn't been a notably large outflow of smart Turks from Turkey. If you've got some money, Turkey is a pretty okay place to live.)

And then there's an interesting game theory paradox to how hard you would work on building a Bomb in Iran v. North Korea if you were an engineer. If you actually got to the verge of a working Bomb, the Israelis would likely drop a bomb on your head, so better to putter around and give each other Powerpoint presentations forever. It's a living! The North Korean engineers aren't too worried about a pre-emptive strike because North Korea already has a deterrent in artillery and small rockets trained on Greater Seoul. The North Koreans have freedom to build a deterrent because they already have a deterrent.

This is all reminiscent of eight years ago when we were assured by The People Who Know that Saddam Hussein was this close to building his own Bomb using crack Iraqi scientists and engineers.

Sen. Webb: Germany, not China

If the United States wants to claw its way back to economic self-determination, it should look not at China for the route forward, but at Germany.

Such was the prescription issued Dec. 10 by U.S. Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), speaking at the Arlington Chamber of Commerce’s annual meeting.

Webb noted that Germany, while having a population just 8 percent of China’s, had a higher trade surplus, and is the world’s biggest exporter.

“They produce quality products that people want, they take care of their workforce - they are doing something right,” Webb said of the Germans, during a speech before about 320 Arlington business, political and civic leaders at the Sheraton National Hotel.

Webb’s politics long have been all but impossible to pigeon-hole ...

Webb has written enough books explaining where he's coming from, such as Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. In short, he's a romantic but realistic Scots-Irish ethnocentric American patriot. In Webb's view, his Scots-Irish kin aren't, on the whole, the smartest or richest or most exclusive Americans; they're just the most American Americans. So, what's good for America is good for the Scots-Irish and what's good for the Scots-Irish is good for America.

From that flows a number of positions that sound contradictory to everybody else in Washington, such as being for the military and against war (because his kin will do more of the dying than anybody else) and being for industry and for labor (because his kin want high wage factory jobs).

December 13, 2010

"The Fighter"

From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:
On Friday, I was shocked like the rest of America to learn that Richard Nixon had been taped in the Oval Office subscribing to a stereotype: “The Irish can’t drink.…Virtually every Irish I’ve known gets mean when he drinks. Particularly the real Irish.”

On Saturday, I went to see The Fighter, a first-rate biopic about the pugnacious family life of boxer “Irish” Micky Ward, “The Pride of Lowell.” The Fighter is only the latest in a long series of Oscar contenders, such as Good Will Hunting, Mystic River, and The Departed, about sozzled Greater Boston residents pounding the hell out of each other. In recent years, awards-season movies have featured working-class Irish giving each other fraternal concussions almost as often as upper-class English serving each other tea in a marked manner. Both The Town and The Fighter are good bets to join The King’s Speech as Best Picture nominees.

Read the whole thing there.


Does polygamy raise or lower IQ?

I don't have a definitive answer to that old evolutionary theory question, but I wanted to cite this one bit of data from that Iraqi terrorist who evidently tripped and blew himself up in Sweden:
In a recent profile he placed on an Islamic dating Web site, Muslima.com, the younger Mr. Abdaly appears as a tall, stern-looking, neatly dressed man standing in front of a white curtain, his dark hair cropped short, with a trimmed black beard.

“I am married since 2004,” he said on his dating profile, according to a translation of the original Arabic. He described himself as “very religious” and said that he had two daughters, aged three and one. “I want to get married again,” he said, “and would like to have a BIG family. My wife agreed to this."

December 12, 2010

Finns & Japanese

A Finnish-American reader writes:
Steve, have you ever investigated the connections between Finnish and Japanese culture? They are legion, and strange: Finns and Japanese are the two ethnic groups with the higest incidences of reversed-hemispheric brain activity, i.e. information from the right eye goes to the right side of the brain instead of the reverse (which is the usual way). There are some strange connections between Finnish and Japanese languages, although they come from quite different families. Doing a quick search for "finns and japanese" or "finnish japanese" yields interesting results, though few scholarly ones.

Also, the first foreign-born member of the Diet of Japan is a Finn, Marutei Tsurunen. And here's a webpage about him, which combines Finglish and Engrish in a very charming way.

You can't see it on a Mercator-projection map, but you can see it on a globe: Eurasia is narrower at high latitudes. From Vladivostok to Finland (or vice-versa) is about the same distance as from Vladivostok to the Caspian Sea. Probably more importantly, there were likely fewer people to have to fight your way past when wandering across the far north than at more habitable latitudes.

December 11, 2010

More Mandatory Finnish Content

Taksin Nuoret writes:
Ever since December 2001, when the results of the first PISA survey were made public, the Finnish educational system has received a lot of international attention. Foreign delegations are flocking to Finland, in the hope of discovering Finland's secrets.

The explanation widely accepted is that the Finnish educational system is better. For example, the following aspects have been pointed out:
  • Schools routinely provide tutoring for weak students.
  • Each school has a social worker ("koulukuraattori").
  • Substitute teachers are often provided when the teacher is ill.

Damn, why didn't anybody in the U.S. ever think of having substitute teachers? 

Anyway, Nuoret goes on to make the argument that perhaps Finnish is an easier language for kids to learn in than many other languages. He notes that Estonians, the other Finno-Ugric-speaking country, also do better than expected on PISA, and that Swedish-speakers in Finland do a little worse than Finnish-speakers on the PISA, even though Swedish-speakers have larger stock portfolios.

Arguments that one language is better than another for thinking about something have been around a long time. For example, maybe the poor reading performance in Latin American countries has something to do with the how it normally takes more letters and syllables to say something in Spanish than in English, as you can see by noting bilingual signs and the like. Puerto Ricans make up for the extra syllables in spoken Spanish by talking faster, but perhaps it's hard to read faster. I don't know.

We don't seem to have made much progress over the many years I've been listening to language theories like these at figuring out how to evaluate them. I like Nuoret's argument because he at least comes up with two pieces of evidence from the PISA results. That's only two pieces of data, however.  Yet that's still about twice the average amount of data presented in these types of discussions of whether one language is more efficient for thinking than another language.

December 9, 2010

"That's rape in Sweden!"

In Taki's Magazine, Jim Goad explains what Julian Assange of WikiLeaks is in the hoosegow for. 

Apparently, hell hath no fury like a feminist scorned.

Arizona v. Nevada

Why has Arizona moved to the right while Nevada is, at least relative to the rest of the country, moving to the left? My new VDARE column offers some explanations.

The DREAM amnesty

Mickey Kaus has been covering in Newsweek the maneuvering to pass the DREAM amnesty by the lame duck Senate (after it was passed by a lame duck House this week).  First, DREAM is potentially a huge amnesty:
because there are no penalties to lying on a DREAM application, and because once you file the application you get a work permit good for 10 years (while you comply with the Act's requirements), DREAM is basically a 10 year free pass to any illegal in a broad under-35ish age range who either qualifies or is willing to say he qualifies even if he doesn't.

Second, that Harry Reid postponed a vote today shows he's not just going-through-the-motions to prove his good intentions to Hispanic activists. Instead, he's trying to keep it alive in case it can become part of the tax cut extension compromise:
Delay offers the hope that something will break in his favor, that the ongoing big negotiations on taxes and spending will offer a moment of leverage to pry a recalcitrant Republican (or, more likely, Democrat) or two over to the DREAM side. At the very least, it offers the prospect that, once the big tax-cut-extension deal is done, Republican senators will consider themselves released from their "Wall of No" pledge not to give any other legislation priority.

Anthropologists say sayonara to science

Nicholas Wade reports in the New York Times:
'Science' Is Cut from Anthropology Group's Guiding Plan, Deepening a Rift

Anthropologists have been thrown into turmoil about the nature and future of their profession after a decision by the American Anthropological Association at its recent annual meeting to strip the word “science” from a statement of its long-range plan.
The decision has reopened a long-simmering tension between researchers in science-based anthropological disciplines — including archaeologists, physical anthropologists and some cultural anthropologists — and members of the profession who study race, ethnicity and gender and see themselves as advocates for native peoples or human rights.
... Until now, the association’s long-range plan was “to advance anthropology as the science that studies humankind in all its aspects.” The executive board revised this last month to say, “The purposes of the association shall be to advance public understanding of humankind in all its aspects.” This is followed by a list of anthropological subdisciplines that includes political research.

... Dr. Peregrine, who is at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, said in an interview that the dropping of the references to science “just blows the top off” the tensions between the two factions. “Even if the board goes back to the old wording, the cat’s out of the bag and is running around clawing up the furniture,” he said.

He attributed what he viewed as an attack on science to two influences within anthropology. One is that of so-called critical anthropologists, who see anthropology as an arm of colonialism and therefore something that should be done away with. The other is the postmodernist critique of the authority of science. “Much of this is like creationism in that it is based on the rejection of rational argument and thought,” he said.
The flames have been fueled by blogs, like one in Psychology Today by Alice Dreger, a historian and medical ethicist. Reporting on an American Anthropological Association meeting in New Orleans, she wrote, “Non-fluff-head cultural anthropologists are feeling utterly beleaguered in this environment that denigrates science and consistently promotes activism over data collection and scientific theorizing.”

This implied dichotomy between anti-science anthropologists who write about race, ethnicity, or gender and scientific anthropologists who don't study those topics is a bit misleading. The are also anthropologists who study race, ethnicity or gender scientifically (several of whom are on my blogroll). The work of Darwinian anthropologists of sex differences like John Tooby and of ancestral differences like Henry Harpending are the hidden key to this controversy. The anti-science anthropologists fear that if anthropology is allowed to be a science, then all sorts of politically incorrect scientific knowledge about humanity will emerge. The pro-science leaders try, publicily, to pooh-pooh those fears.

iSteve Finnish Content

Election expert Michael Barone writes about the midterms:
The Finnish vote. Around 100 years ago, Finnish immigrants flocked to the mines and woods of the country around Lake Superior, where the topography and weather must have seemed familiar. They've been a mostly Democratic, sometimes even radical, voting bloc ever since. No more, it seems. Going into the election, the three most Finnish districts, Michigan 1, Wisconsin 7 and Minnesota 8, all fronting on Lake Superior, were represented by two Democratic committee chairmen and the chairman of an Energy and Commerce subcommittee, with a total of 95 years of seniority.

Wisconsin's David Obey and Michigan's Bart Stupak both chose to retire, and were replaced by Republicans who had started running before their announcements. Minnesota's James Oberstar was upset by retired Northwest Airlines pilot and stay-at-home dad Chip Cravaack.

So here's a new rule for the political scientists: As go the Finns, so goes America.

Gus Hall (1910-2000), who was the perennial Communist Party USA candidate for President when I was a kid, was born Arvo Kustaa Halberg in the iron-mining belt of Minnesota and grew up speaking Finnish in his family of twelve. A lot of the Finnish Communists who subsequently lost the Finnish civil war of 1918 to von Mannerheim fled to America, so the CPUSA always had a sizable Finnish contingent. 

So, Obama managed to lose the hereditarily Communist vote.


Again: Who is rich?

My impression is that most Americans believe that to be rich you have to have a butler, like on Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

Worldlier Americans believe that to be rich, you have to have a private jet. For example, I suspect that Bill Clinton and Al Gore don't consider themselves rich, precisely because they are always having to bum rides off billionaires and dictators with private jets. (Or have they cashed in enough by now to buy their own?)

Ergo, almost no Americans see themselves as rich.