February 14, 2013

NYT: Race does not exist

A philosophy professor opinionates in the New York Times:
The Enlightenment’s ‘Race’ Problem, and Ours 
By JUSTIN E. H. SMITH 
... Many who are fully prepared to acknowledge that there are no significant natural differences between races nonetheless argue that there are certain respects in which it is worth retaining the concept of race: for instance in talking about issues like social inequality or access to health care. There is, they argue, a certain pragmatic utility in retaining it, even if they acknowledge that racial categories result from social and historical legacies, rather than being dictated by nature. In this respect "race" has turned out to be a very different sort of social construction than, say, "witch" or "lunatic." While generally there is a presumption that to catch out some entity or category as socially constructed is at the same time to condemn it, many thinkers are prepared to simultaneously acknowledge both the non-naturalness of race as well as a certain pragmatic utility in retaining it.

It's like if all the most advanced thinkers agreed that witches don't exist, but that the career of witch-hunting remained lucrative and admired.
Since the mid-20th century no mainstream scientist has considered race a biologically significant category; no scientist believes any longer that "negroid," "caucasoid" and so on represent real natural kinds or categories. For several decades it has been well established that there is as much genetic variation between two members of any supposed race, as between two members of supposedly distinct races. This is not to say that there are no real differences, some of which are externally observable, between different human populations. It is only to say, as Lawrence Hirschfeld wrote in his 1996 book, "Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and the Child's Construction of Human Kinds," that "races as socially defined do not (even loosely) capture interesting clusters of these differences."

It's fascinating how even the people who write and edit for the New York Times on human genetics-related subjects don't actually read the New York Times's excellent reporting on human genetics.

Henry Louis Gates: "Exactly How 'Black' Is Black America?"

Back in 2002, I wrote a pioneering story on DNA testing for racial admixture based on the work of geneticist Mark Shriver: "How White Are Blacks? How Black Are Whites?"

Now, in The Root, Harvard African-American studies professor Henry Louis Gates continues on with his interest in ancestry testing, providing some updating for the preliminary data in my 2002 article. Gates writes:
* According to Ancestry.com, the average African American is 65 percent sub-Saharan African, 29 percent European and 2 percent Native American. 
* According to 23andme.com, the average African American is 75 percent sub-Saharan African, 22 percent European and only 0.6 percent Native American.  
* According to Family Tree DNA.com, the average African American is 72.95 percent sub-Saharan African, 22.83 percent European and 1.7 percent Native American. 
* According to National Geographic's Genographic Project, the average African American is 80 percent sub-Saharan African, 19 percent European and 1 percent Native American.

Presumably, the National Geographic project is trying harder than the commercial projects to get a representative, non-self selected sample, so that sounds like the best set of numbers to use as a rule of thumb.

By the way, the notion that African Americans are about 1/5th white was an assumption of physical anthropologists back around 1950. DNA testing has just confirmed what your lying eyes tell you.
* According to AfricanDNA, in which I am a partner with Family Tree DNA, the average African American is 79 percent sub-Saharan African, 19 percent European and 2 percent Native American. 
And for our African-American male guests, there has been still another astonishing fact revealed about their paternal ancestry -- their father's father's father's line -- through their y-DNA: A whopping 35 percent of all African-American men descend from a white male ancestor who fathered a mulatto child sometime in the slavery era, most probably from rape or coerced sexuality.

We can be confident of that because no woman in history was ever attracted to a higher social status man.
I find two things quite fascinating about these results. First of all, simply glancing at these statistics reveals that virtually none of the African Americans tested by these DNA companies is inferred to be 100 percent sub-Saharan African, although each company has analyzed Africans and African immigrants who did test 100 percent sub-Saharan in origin. Ranges, of course, vary from individual to individual. Spencer Wells, director of National Geographic's Genographic Project, explained to me that the African Americans they've tested range from 53 percent to 95 percent sub-Saharan African, 3 percent to 46 percent European and zero percent to 3 percent Native American.

So, in the National Geographic sample, every single self-identified African-American is majority black by ancestry, and thus is blacker than President Obama. In my article, the estimate was that 90% of self-identified African Americans were no more than 50% white. Gates ups that to 100%, which seems implausible.
And second, these findings show that the common claim that many African Americans make about their high percentage of Native American ancestry is a myth. Joanna Mountain broke down to me our low amounts of Native American ancestry in this way: "Eighty percent of African Americans have less than 1 percent Native American ancestry. Over 2.5 percent have between 2 percent and 3 percent. And of all African Americans who have at least 1 percent Native American ancestry, the average is 2 percent Native American." So much for all of those putative Cherokee roots on just about every black person's family tree, fabricated to explain why your great-grandmother had "high cheekbones and straight black hair"! Why there is such little evidence of genetic mingling between African Americans and Native Americans deserves a column of its own.

Shriver hadn't found any American Indian admixture in self-identified African-Americans, so what Gates reports sounds more plausible.

One possibility is that people of mixed black-Indian ancestry these days try to identify as Indian to get their cut of casino money. A hundred years ago, it was better to be Indian than black, then it became better to be black than Indian, but the casino law of the late 1980s may have shifted the balance again.

For example, I used to read that the first black man to play in the U.S. Open golf tournament was John Shippen in 1896, a caddy at Shinnecock Hills. But, recently, the Obama Administration declared the Shinnecocks an official Indian tribe, and they've been pursuing a casino ever since. The Cherokee Tribe recently kicked out thousands of members for being the descendants of the Cherokees' black slaves.
The results for Latinos, however, are quite different: "In our experience," Mountain says, "people who have both African ancestry [at least 10 percent, according to genetics] and a lot of Asian/Native American ancestry [at least 10 percent, according to genetics] are more likely to consider themselves Latino than African American."

George Zimmerman?
And what about the percentages of "black" or sub-Saharan ancestry in the white American community? That will be the subject of another column. But suffice it to say here that, according to Mountain, "The bottom line is that 3 percent to 4 percent of people likely to consider themselves as all 'white' have some African ancestry -- between 0.5 percent and 5 percent."

In 2002, Shriver estimated that only 70 percent of American whites had no black ancestors, but now Gates says the consensus is over 95 percent of whites have no black ancestors. I'm not sure which number I find more likely.

If you do math on Gates' figures, that comes out to a tiny percentage of black ancestry among self-identified white Americans. Let's calculate the upper limit: 4% of white individuals times 5% black ancestors = 0.2% black ancestry among whites. That's basically nothing. And that's the upper limit.

If you do the math on the midpoints -- 3.5% of individuals times 2.75% ancestry -- you get just under 0.1% as the best guesstimate of self-identified white Americans' black genes. That's extraordinarily negligible. I'm shocked by what a small number less than 1/1,000 is.

Of course, when Gates goes to write it up, he'll probably emphasize the exact opposite. People don't reason comfortably with numbers, just with absolutes.

Why the Afghan National Army is useless

Above is Sean Connery and Michael Caine training Afghan recruits in The Man Who Would Be King. (Thanks to snowpak for posting this on Youtube.)
Daniel Dravot: "Now listen to me, you benighted muckers. We're going to teach you soldiering, the world's noblest profession. When we're done with you, you'll be able to stand up and slaughter your enemies like civilized men."

But, training Afghans hasn't gone as well for the U.S. military as it did for Daniel and Peachey. Over the nearly dozen years American forces have been Nation Building in Afghanistan, we've seen funny videos of American military men trying to whip Afghan recruits into military or police shape with jumping jacks (first and second).

What's the problem?

Now, here's a Live Leaks video about how Afghan National Army volunteers are high on hashish practically all the time. But here's the fundamental explanation: An Afghan officer explains that his men are "all stupid and ignorant. They're all a bunch of delinquents. They're only here because they've been driven out of their villages for misbehaving."

Wrestling banned from the Olympics? Get rid of golf instead

Olympics organizers have long been concerned that the Summer Games are too gigantic, so they've decided to drop wrestling, a sport with a 2,700 year Olympic history, as of 2020. Granted, having two types of wrestling (regular and Greco-Roman) multiplied by the modern imperative of having women's versions of each is unwieldy. 

And the action is obscure for the once-ever-four-years spectator. With the sound off on TV, whenever there's a flurry of action, I can never tell whether my guy just scored or got scored upon. I attended wrestling at the 1984 Olympics, but I have fewer memories of it than of, say, weightlifting, which was awesome. (You know what else was dull? Basketball with Michael Jordan v. West Germany. All I remember is that the game started out with Uwe Blab as an unstoppable scoring machine, hitting three hook shots in a row. And then he stopped.)

Still, Olympic historian David Wallechinsky says 29 countries won medals in wrestling in 2012. It's exactly the kind of broad-based sport that deserves some Olympic glamour every four years.

Much of the criticism of this decision has focused on modern pentathlon as a better sport to evict. Personally, I always have high hopes for modern pentathlon because it's exactly the kind of sport I would invent: the idea is that you are a young officer in the Napoleonic Wars and you have to deliver a message first: you swim a river, shoot somebody, ride a horse, swordfight, and run. It would probably be cooler if the competitors shot at each other while riding horses.

Anyway, the sport I would ban from the Olympics is my favorite, golf, which is being added in Brazil in 2016. So few people in Brazil care about golf that they have to build a tournament-quality course from scratch. Gil Hanse is designing a Brazilian version of Rustic Canyon, the Ventura County muni I play more than any other.

But why golf in the Olympics? As far as I can surmise, it was only added because pre-disgrace Tiger Woods was on his patriotic kick when he had been thinking about giving up golf to join the Navy SEALs, and he wanted to hear the national anthem play while he got his gold medal.

Traditionally, professional golfers (other than Tiger) have been unenthused about adding golf to the Olympics. Why? First, because they are professionals and the Olympics is for amateurs. Granted, almost all the rules against professionals in the Olympics were junked long ago, but the Olympics remains amateur in the key sense that they don't pay prize money. 

Golf is Scottish, the Olympics, like tennis, are English.

Although the Olympics were revived by a French aristocrat, the Baron de Coubertin was a Jules Verne-like Anglophile who admired the sportingness of the English aristocrats. So amateurism was the founding principle of the Olympics. Similarly, Wimbledon was amateur-only until as recently as 1968. 

The Scots, however, worked out 150 years ago a two-track system for golf where the gentlemen could have their own Amateur tournament, while anybody could enter the Open. Hence the history of golf is almost wholly lacking in the hypocrisy and hysteria surrounding shamateurism in the Olympics and tennis.

The modern Olympics, going back to the 1984 L.A. Games, are American, driven by corporate marketing money. And that's fine, but golfers already get more of that than just about any other sport, so big deal.

Second, individual golf tournaments have higher degrees of randomness than most other sporting events. When American wrestler Rulon Gardner defeated that unbeatable Russian known as The Experiment that was great. When the world's 93rd best golfer comes in ahead of the world's #1, that's just standard operating procedure. Thus, the chance that the best golfer in the world will win a single four-round tournament on a glorified muni is not high. Flukish results are expectable enough to be unexciting.

So, ban golf.

More King Richard III Mania

From the NYT:
Tracing a Royal Y Chromosome 
By NICHOLAS WADE 
Researchers last week developed DNA evidence to help identify the remains of a skeleton found under a parking lot in Leicester, England, as those of Richard III, the last English king to die in battle, in 1485. But the researchers’ work is only half-done. They have made a strong but not conclusive link through the female line, and are now turning to the male side for corroboration.
... Chris Tyler-Smith, a geneticist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge, said the mitochondrial DNA type identified by Dr. King was “rare enough to be interesting, but not rare enough to be conclusive.”

Tyler-Smith is the Genghis Khan's Y chromosome guy. I scooped Wade on Tyler-Smith's discovery because Wade was tied up with the exploding space shuttle.
The Leicester team plans to investigate the paternal DNA of the remains. Kevin Schürer, a historian at the university, has already found four living descendants of John of Gaunt, the son of Edward III, who was Richard III’s great-great-grandfather. Dr. King has found that their Y chromosome, which is carried only by men, match, establishing that they are all true descendants of John of Gaunt. 
The Y chromosome DNA from the skeleton is very degraded, but Dr. King said she had found that she could amplify it and hopes to get enough to make a match with the living descendants.

Sailer in Taki's: "Mother's Baby, Father's Maybe"

From my column in Taki's Magazine:
A young English teacher at a public high school in New Jersey emails me: 
I’m just in my third year of teaching, so I get stuck with the remedial classes. I mean, what are you going to do? But the stress of dealing with bad behavior is wearing me down. I ask myself why the old teacher’s honors classes are full of well-behaved students, while mine are—I've got to say it—bastards
After dozens of parent conferences, maybe I’ve figured it out. My students are bastards. Literally. My remedial kids come from chaotic families. The honors teachers meet with Prof. and Dr. Smith. But I meet with Ms. Jones and her four misbehaving kids by three baby daddies, none of whom seem to be around. 
I used to think all those ancient putdowns of poor little illegitimate children were awful, and we’re so much better than they were back then. But, I’m starting to think they knew something we don’t.

Two out of five children are now born out of wedlock, so, uh…get used to it, America! 
But that raises the perennial question of what percentage of children born in wedlock were actually fathered by someone else. Few topics generate more heat and less light than “mother’s baby, father’s maybe.”

Read the whole thing there.

Nevin Scrimshaw, RIP: An architect of the Flynn Effect

From the NYT:
Nevin S. Scrimshaw, Pioneer Nutritionist, Dies at 95 
By DOUGLAS MARTIN 
Dr. Nevin S. Scrimshaw, a nutritionist who improved the health of millions of children in developing countries by creating low-cost vegetable-based foods for weaning infants, died on Friday in Plymouth, N.H. He was 95. 
To help protein-starved children in Central America, Dr. Scrimshaw created a gruel made of corn, sorghum and cottonseed flour that was nutritionally equivalent to milk. In India, he adapted the same principle to peanut flour and wheat. He then brought both products to market, where they sold for only pennies. 
Working in Central America, Dr. Scrimshaw also helped eliminate endemic goiter in children — a swelling of the thyroid gland that can lead to mental retardation, deafness and dwarfism. The ailment is caused by a mother’s iodine deficiency. 
Dr. Scrimshaw found that European and American techniques to iodize salt were ineffective with the crude, moist salt of Central America, so he came up with a new iodine compound that proved effective there. He then worked with governments in the region to require iodation of all salt for human consumption. 

Good man, cool name.

February 13, 2013

Darwinian anthropologists

The New York Times Magazine has a long article on the colorful author of The Fierce People:
How Napoleon Chagnon Became Our Most Controversial Anthropologist

I wrote about the role of personality in cultural anthropology last fall.

Perhaps anthropologists who become interested in Darwinian perspectives tend to be more masculine than those anthropologists who eschew Darwin in favor of Marx, Freud, Levi-Strauss, Gimbutas, or whomever? Besides Chagnon, I'd mention Robin Fox, Henry Harpending, and Carleton Coon. A delight in hunting might be a common denominator. (Darwin, himself, was an obsessive hunter when young, as was his cousin Galton.)

In general, the Darwinian tradition owes a lot to smart country boys, as I pointed out in a review of Edward O. Wilson's novel, Anthill. In contrast, Darwinism tends to strike urban intellectuals as suspicious, probably unnatural.

Emil A. Malick, RIP

From the Tulsa World:
Emil A Malick 
Emil A. Malick, age 96, resident of Bartlesville, died on February 9, 2013 at Jane Phillips Hospital. A Requiem Mass will be said at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church on Saturday, February 16, at 2 PM. The family has requested no flowers. Survivors include his son Terrence and wife Alexandra of Austin, Texas, and his daughter-in-law Ann and grandsons David and Michael of Tulsa, Oklahoma. 

Due to traffic, I missed the first 15 minutes or so of his son Terrence Malick's 2011 film The Tree of Life, by which point everybody in the audience who had arrived on time was getting pretty sick of the movie. So, I came in, fortunately, just as the film was finally focusing in from the Big Bang to growing up in the Oil Patch in an Eden-like 1950s small town as the son of a petroleum industry inventor, with Jessica Chastain ethereally beautiful as your mother and Brad Pitt giving the greatest performance of his career as your father. I wrote:
If you like this style (and I do, very much), The Tree of Life might call to mind other works about growing up, such as Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, or Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. Parts of it are that good.

Someday, if we're very lucky we may see a 90-minute Editor's Cut of The Tree of Life minus all of Malick's trademark distractions, leaving us with its magnificent understated core: the Book of Genesis onscreen, the Book of Job looming offscreen.

February 12, 2013

Richard III: Kingship and Kinship, Nepotism and Neposchism

Olivier as Richard III
My new Taki's column looks at Richard III, both the real king recently dug up from a parking lot in England, and Shakespeare's hunchback Machiavel:
As Richard’s supporters, the Ricardians, like to complain, history is written by the victors. And the victorious Tudors had the best writer ever, William Shakespeare, whose patroness, Queen Elizabeth I, was Henry VII’s granddaughter.

What was so bad about Richard III? I offer an explanation calling upon the Darwinian insights of William D. Hamilton and Robert Trivers.

Read the whole thing there.

How movies and videogames are more accurate about recent history than the newspapers

There has been a lot of talk in the news media about how Christopher Dorner's rampage is more or less payback for the bad old days of racism in the LAPD, as exemplified by Dorner's complaints about Rodney King and the Rampart Scandal. 

Rafael Perez
The Rampart Scandal was a huge whoop-tee-doo in the late 1990s that's a good example of how even Hollywood can be less prone to throwing all the facts into the Narrative Blender than the news media. The Los Angeles Times was much celebrated for epic reporting on racism in the Rampart Division, but mostly they just covered up that the four central very bad cops in Rampart were all diversity hires. Indeed, the Big Bad Four had intriguing connections of some sort to the legendary murders going on among famous gangsta rappers.

You might think that exploring the ties between rogue cops and some of the most notorious murders of the 1990s (Biggie and Tupac) would be a good way to sell newspapers, but selling newspapers has long been a lower priority than Shaping the Narrative.

The key figure in Rampart was Puerto Rico-born Rafael Perez, who got himself a short sentence by spilling (or concocting) the beans on dozens of other cops for minor stuff. This suited the LAT's agenda, even though it turned out in court to not amount to a hill of beans.

Oddly, enough, screenwriters saw through the L.A. Times' bias and did a better job of conveying the essence of the story in movies like Training Day, for which Denzel Washington won an Oscar as a bad cop. From my 2001 review of Training Day:
Further, how common are "gangsta cops" in reality? I called one of the LAPD's most prominent critics, "police misconduct" lawyer Winston Kevin McKesson, a protégé of superstar attorney Johnnie Cochran. He remarked that the plot "seems a bit over the top." McKesson said he's sued many cops for excessive force, but of those he's sued, none were "a complete crook." 
McKesson, though, has defended one cop who might indeed fit that description: Rafael Perez. When his theft of a million dollars worth of cocaine from the police evidence locker was finally uncovered, Perez, to win a reduced sentence, incriminated 70 fellow officers in his elite anti-gang unit. Yet, Perez ended up admitting that a large fraction of the worst abuses at Rampart - such as an attempted murder - were his own work, making him look less like a whistleblower and more like Rampart's criminal kingpin. 
Even though Ayer wrote the first draft of his script before the Rampart scandal broke, McKesson noted that there are now "striking similarities" between the character portrayed by Washington and his client Perez. For example, both are black and bilingual, even though McKesson estimates that only three or four out of about 1,000 black LAPD officers can speak Spanish.

Frank Tenpenny
Similarly, the Best Picture winner Crash was an oblique reference to Perez's running amok when assigned to Rampart's C.R.A.S.H. anti-gang program and instead using his badge to become a gangster. Thus, the scene where a white cop shoots a black undercover cop dead and the politicians offer Don Cheadle a promotion, but then Cheadle opens the trunk of the dead cop's car and finds $300,000 in cash -- that happened. (It may be connected, somehow or other, to the deaths of rappers Tupac Shakur and Biggie. Screenwriters have been fascinated and frightened by this murky chain of events for 15 years.)

Finally, the lead villain in the videogame Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Frank Tenpenny, is modeled on this line of cultural inheritance.

So, why can't journalists fictionalize no more than screenwriters?

The real Dorner question: Not why was he fired, but why was he hired?

Immediately after the New York Times headlined "Shooting Suspect’s Racism Allegations Resound for Some," the chief of the LAPD announced the department would re-investigate why Christopher Dorner was fired.

As usual, the opposite question from the one being obsessed over in the media seems more worthy of investigation: Why was this highly defective individual hired in the first place? Why did the LAPD, which is big enough to afford the most sophisticated screening processes, ever give this man a badge and a gun?

This Saturday, celebrate International Galton Day

Galton figured out for Scotland
Yard how to organize fingerprints 
As part of the ongoing canonization of Charles Darwin as the semi-divine saint of secularism, there is a movement to celebrate February 12 each year (the date he was born in 1809) as International Darwin Day in order to stick it to Creationists.

Darwin's half-cousin Francis Galton, who extended Darwin's work in a remarkable variety of ways, including developing key elements of statistical theory, was born 13 years and 4 days later on February 16, 1822.

While Darwin's image is increasingly sacrosanct, Galton is increasingly demonized as the scapegoat to carry all the sins associated with Darwinism.

In reality, neither man was a saint nor a devil. They are far more similar than different, both admirable representatives of Victorian Liberal culture.

So, I'll be raising a toast on Saturday to Sir Francis.

"Dorner Enflamed?"

TV right now has shots of a fire in or near a cabin where the cops think Christopher Dorner is holed up.

Reminds me of the March 1974 cop shootout at a house where the Symbionese Liberation Army (who were wanted for kidnapping heiress Patti Hearst) had holed up on a quiet street in L.A.. More than 9,000 shots were exchanged. Eventually, the cops' exploding tear gas canisters burned the whole house down. Pretty spectacular after-school viewing 39 years ago. (Here's a video.)

It was carried live nationwide, which was unusual in those days, which somewhat fits in with my theory from my pre-Dorner article on killers, "Monsters of Egotism," about why some crimes become canonical memories among Baby Boomers and others don't. Before video technology, there were occasional spectacular shootouts and the like, but a lot weren't captured on film. After the media excesses of the Lindbergh's Baby case, a gentleman's agreement among newspaper barons toned down the tabloid coverage, until the coming of advances in TV news technology.

February 11, 2013

Do violent video games encourage violence?

The New York Times' fine psychology reporter Benedict Carey considers the evidence, such as there is, in "Shooting in the Dark.

My guess would be that, all else being equal, violent video games do encourage violence, but what's not equal is that video games are such a massive time sink that they don't leave much of the day free to get off the couch and into trouble. On balance, they make the world less violent (if more pudgy).

I was paid to read mass murderer Anders Breivik's manifesto a couple of years ago. My impression is that his addiction to online strategy games such as World of Warcraft played a role in his desire to be a player in the real world, to win at 21st Century European history by setting into motion a series of events he had calculated would make him the architect of the new Europe of the second half of this century. 

Does that mean World of Warcraft is a bad thing? Perhaps, but what if World of Warcraft had been around to absorb the energies of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot, to deflect their ambitions to foresee and control history into a cyber fantasy world? 

Pope Benedict XVI, age 85, announces retirement

The Bishop of Rome's retirement, the first in 600 or so years, reminds me of an old trivia question: Who was the first Roman Emperor to retire?
This emperor was one of the hard men from Southeastern Europe who used their military skills to rebuild the Roman Empire after the chaos of the Third Century. His retirement palace in Split, Croatia remains in good condition after 1700 years, full of shops and restaurants. It was largely forgotten in Northern Europe, until British architect Robert Adam surveyed it in the 1760s.
Publication of Adam's book on this emperor's retirement palace had a major influence on the development of the craze for Neo-Classical architecture (e.g., Thomas Jefferson's design for the University of Virginia).

Answer under the fold:

Arts & Class in evolving Britain

A reader writes:
A few possible reasons for the phenomenon that Steyn mentioned of 1% a generation ago of British acts on the British pop charts having been privately educated to 60% today:
1.Well, the actual % of kids in private ed went up enormously under the Thatcher Terror of 1979-91 - almost doubled from about 5% to about 9%. The northern working class may not have done terribly well under Maggie, but the southern middle class most assuredly did. One can think of a lot of formerly petit bourgeious families who in previous generations might have eschewed the option on financial grounds, or because they thought that the snobby boarders were not for them: the Middleton family would be a paradigmatic example. 
2. The whole of the UK pop/theatre/cinema/dance/arty farty/ TV/luvvie sector is massivley skewed towards the London area: where most of the rich kids already be livin'. Number of kids in private Ed in surrey is probably about 25% - South Sheilds, it's probably 2.5%. Being proletarian and/or northern and/or /Celtic like the Beatles or Sean Connery or Richard Burton or Cilla, or the Kinks, or the Stones or the Who, just doesn't seem to be fashionable in Luvvieland like it was in the swinging sixties: all English actresses want to do these days is dress up in bodices and do Jane Austen. 
3. Quite a few of these kids seem to come from already established showbiz families who came from more humble beginnings, but made money out of rock n roll/acting etc in the 60s, 70s 80s -Lilly Allen would be an excellent example: does seem to be lot of nepotism and networking going on there. 
4. The public schools are there for a reason: to give their kids advantages. Zeitgeist is their middle name. Up till circa 1960, they were there to provide army and navy officers and colonial administrators. In the 80s (when I was in Uni - in some tutorial groups, the only non-privately educated kid there) everyone wanted to be Gordon Gecko (or at any rate the better spoken English character played by Terence Stamp ) which was regarded with horror by many of their parents, who didn't grasp that the empire wasn't there any more. These days, they seem to be deliberately targetting the creative/music/theatre sector as a place to send these upper middle class brats, which woulda been unthinkable in my day. 
5. The Cockneys are all in Spain, having abandoned London to get away from the Effnic majorities - as they are now in the inner city -  or they're hiding out from The Yard. 

February 10, 2013

Class and British pop stars

This evening's Grammy Award winners Adele (here's her James Bond Skyfall theme song) and Marcus Mumford of Mumford & Sons reflect the growing class divide among British entertainers. Mark Steyn wrote last year: 
Although fewer than 10 percent of British children attend private schools, their alumni make up over 60 percent of the acts on the U.K. pop charts. Twenty years ago, it was 1 percent.

Adele is the old kind of British pop star: daughter of a single mum and, apparently, a single mum herself now. 

But, it's hard to compete these days when you come from that deprived of a background.

Marcus Mumford, who recently married actress Carey Mulligan (another privately educated English celebrity), is the new kind of English rock star. His father is a theologian and evangelical entrepreneur:
John Mumford was installed as a Canon of Coventry Cathedral on Sunday 6th May. He is the Cathedral's new Canon Theologian and was installed at Choral Evensong and then preached at the Cathedral Praise Service. 
John Mumford is the National Director of Vineyard Churches in the UK and Ireland. He studied theology at St. Andrews and at Cambridge and John was ordained in Salisbury Cathedral in 1977, and served his title at Canford Magna, Dorset, before joining the staff of St Michael’s Chester Square, Belgravia, London. In 1987, John and his wife Eleanor planted and led the South West London Vineyard church until 2008 when they handed over the leadership of the church in order to concentrate more upon the oversight and development of the Vineyard movement, both nationally and internationally.

Marcus Mumford attended King's College School in Wimbledon, then studied classics at the U. of Edinburgh.