And here's my review of Il Divo, a fine biopic about one of Berlusconi's predecessors, the extremely different Giulio Andreotti.
You can get your full range of Italian stereotypes right here.
I confess that all the psychometric technical stuff often makes my eyes glaze over! I commented to someone recently that I think that’s why the focus of my own blogging has been geared more (much more!) towards mating patterns and altruism and the nature of extended families and clans rather than IQ. I mean, who marries whom and which families fight with each other? It’s like following a big soap opera! (~_^)
“Remarkably prolific, he worked out of Los Angeles, and was known for his love of science fiction … Though his buildings were often quite stark and sterile in their appearance (owing largely to the science fiction of the era), they were noted for their functional style with a certain flair that made them unmistakable. He took pride in the concept of designing for the future.”
Black Males Not Applying to Med School
By David Pittman, Washington Correspondent, MedPage Today
Published: February 10, 2013
Fewer black men are applying to, accepted to, and attending U.S. medical schools despite an increase in the number of overall applicants and uptick in matriculation among other minorities, a report found.
Black applicants were the second most populous demographic behind whites in the late 1970s. There were more black applicants than Asians and Hispanics combined.
But in 2011, first-time African-American applicants were surpassed by Asians and Hispanics, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) said.
Compared with 1977, the number of Hispanic applicants more than tripled in 2011 (3,459 versus 955) while first-time Asian applicants went from 966 to 8,941 when comparing 1977 to 2011.
The number of first-time applications from blacks grew a mere 36% (2,361 in 1977 to 3,215 in 2011).
In fact, black women outnumbered black men applicants in 2011 nearly two to one, the AAMC said.
"Black or African-American males are applying to, being accepted to, and matriculating into medical school in diminishing numbers, which speaks to the increasing need for medical schools to institute plans and initiatives aimed at strengthening the pipeline," stated the report, called "Diversity in Medical Education."
"In response, initiatives have been launched throughout the country in hopes of reversing this trend and producing more graduates. Medical schools are already investing in pipeline programs, but it is clear that additional targeted efforts are necessary," according to the report.
While first-year enrollment was up 18.4% overall from 2002 to 2012 as the AAMC said last fall, that hasn't translated into a great number of more black men.
Non-whites accounted for nearly half of U.S. medical school applications in 2011, the AAMC said. The number of applications from whites has dropped roughly 26% since the late 1970s.
I also don’t vote for anyone whose name I can’t pronounce. Quvez---? Quzen---? Quyzenay? Her parents really put her in a hole by giving her that name -- Alphabet Wallis.
Django Unchained will go into my fifth slot -- it’s a fun movie, but it’s basically just Quentin Tarantino masturbating for almost three hours.
HISPANICKED GOP ELITE: THEY'LL RESPECT US IN THE MORNING
February 20, 2013
Don't anyone tell Marco Rubio, John McCain or Jeff Flake that nearly 80 percent of Hindus voted for Obama, or who knows what they'll come up with.
I understand the interest of business lobbies in getting cheap, unskilled labor through amnesty, but why do Republican officeholders want to create up to 20 million more Democratic voters, especially if it involves flouting the law? Are the campaign donations from the soulless rich more important than actual voters?
Without citing any evidence, the Rubio Republicans simply assert that granting 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens amnesty will make Hispanics warm to the GOP. Yes, that's worked like a charm since Reagan signed an amnesty bill in 1986!
True, Romney lost the Hispanic vote, but so did John McCain, the original Rubio. (McCain lost Hispanics by 67 percent compared to 71 percent who voted against Romney.)
President George H.W. Bush created "diversity visas," massively increased legal immigration and eliminated the English requirement on the naturalization test. In the 1992 election, he won 25 percent of the Hispanic vote -- less than what Romney got.
Although Hispanic politicians, spokesmen and TV networks benefit from Rubio's mass legalization scheme, there's no evidence that Hispanic voters care very much about it.
Amnesty never shows up in polls as a top concern of Hispanics. It's a top concern of employers, not workers -- which isn't going to do much to help Republicans shed that "Party of the Rich" image. After Reagan signed an amnesty bill in 1986, unemployment among Hispanics skyrocketed when, suddenly, there was increased competition for low-skill jobs. That's precisely why businesses want amnesty, not because of their deep concern for the plight of the underclass.
How's this for an idea: Why don't Republicans remind Hispanic voters that the more low-skilled immigrants who are admitted, the lower their wages will be? That at least has the virtue of being untried.
N.F.L. Tries New Method for Testing Mental Agility
By JUDY BATTISTA
INDIANAPOLIS — For decades, hundreds of college players have gathered each year at the N.F.L.’s scouting combine, where their strength is tested, their speed is timed and, in a test to measure their intelligence, they are asked questions like “When a rope is selling 20 cents per 2 feet, how many feet can you buy for 30 dollars?”
That query is part of the Wonderlic Personnel Test, a 12-minute, 50-item quiz that has been used by N.F.L. teams since the 1970s. It is, however, infamously unreliable in predicting football success — forgettable players have scored high, stars low —
and there have been quiet concerns that its reliance on knowledge taught in school might result in a racial bias.
So the players at this week’s combine are facing a new segment in their extended job interviews: an hourlong psychological assessment designed to determine and quantify the nebulous qualities that coaches have long believed make the most successful players — motivation, competitiveness, passion and mental toughness — and to divine how each player learns best.
The new test, like the Wonderlic, is mandatory for the more than 300 players who attend, and it will be given for the first time Friday.
While many coaches and general managers consider the Wonderlic particularly useful in evaluating quarterbacks and offensive linemen, positions that are believed to demand the greatest intellect because of the need to decipher complex defenses, the hope is that the new test, called the Player Assessment Tool, will give teams clearer insight into a broader range of players.
“I knew players who didn’t score well on the Wonderlic but had great instincts,” said Ernie Accorsi, a former Giants general manager, who was consulted during the creation of the new test. “I had a player once, this guy played in a good league in college, but the psychological testing indicated he didn’t handle pressure well. You know what? He didn’t, as it turned out. The Wonderlic can’t tell you that.”
The new test was devised by Harold Goldstein, a professor of industrial and organizational psychology at Baruch College in New York. He worked with Cyrus Mehri, a lawyer in Washington who leads the Fritz Pollard Alliance, which monitors the N.F.L.’s minority hiring practices.
| Cyrus Mehri and the late Johnnie Cochran |
Personality tests have been a staple in other industries, and some N.F.L. teams have used them during their scouting efforts, which often take months.
But last fall Goldstein and Mehri began the process of producing the first such test for the entire league. They asked a group of general managers what qualities they wanted in a player. They came up with 16 aspects thought to be predictors of N.F.L. success, including learning agility and conscientiousness.
The test closely resembles those given to firefighters, Mehri said, because they, like football players, must be able to quickly assess a situation and decide how to proceed under stress.
The goal was to eliminate the impact of prior knowledge — subjects taught in school, like math, in which racial and socioeconomic factors may have an influence.
To determine their personalities, the test will ask players a series of questions about their preferences and behavior. To evaluate their cognitive abilities, it might tell them to look at four diagrams and figure out how they relate. Then, to measure how quickly they can adjust their thinking, the items they are comparing might change, forcing the players to determine their relationships anew.
To see how they learn best, the test will present questions in verbal and graphic form. Players will have an hour to take the exam on a computer.
... The league did not allow players and agents to see the test in advance, angering some agents. The N.F.L.’s goal was to minimize the kind of preparation that players do for the Wonderlic: reviewing past exams in an attempt to boost their scores.
“This is the Super Bowl of their college career, the culmination of everything they have worked for,” the agent David Canter said. “You don’t want them to be prepared for it?”
Damien Woody, a former offensive lineman for the New England Patriots, the Detroit Lions and the Jets, said he did not prepare for the Wonderlic, though he was determined to do well. He said others essentially shrugged it off, wondering what it had to do with football.
At least in the first year of the new test, Woody said, the element of surprise could be a factor.
“It might give you a sneak peek,” Woody said. “This will be the year it’s most beneficial because after this year I’m sure guys will try to train for it. This year, you’re going to get guys at their most vulnerable position.”
Charlie Rose: "And immigrants has [sic] been America’s strength."
Lee Kuan Yew: "Absolutely … But, mind you, immigration of the highly intelligent and highly hard-working, very hard-working people. If you get immigration from the fruit-pickers [chuckles for several seconds at the idea], you may not get very far!"
Lack of immigration reform threatens California farmers
Growers have difficulty fielding adequate crews to harvest crops; Washington has a shot this year at providing meaningful relief.
Except for illegal immigrants, no group has more at stake in the national fight over immigration reform than California farmers.
"It doesn't pay to plant a product if you can't harvest it," notes Mark Teixeira of Santa Maria, who says he had to let 22 acres of vegetables rot last year because he couldn't find enough field hands to gather the crop. "That hurts."
As security has tightened along the California-Mexican border, the flow of illegal immigrant labor into the nation's most productive agriculture state has slowed significantly, farm interests say. ...
Any time some demagogic politician bellows about rounding up all the illegal immigrants and shipping them back to their own country, it sends chills up farmers' spines.
Roughly two-thirds of the state's crop workers "are not properly documented," says Rayne Pegg, who heads the federal policy division of the California Farm Bureau.
Remember when farm owners were loudly complaining to any available journalist that there was a nationwide farm labor crisis due to overly restrictive immigration policy?
Well, they're still saying that. But now they are also worried that proposals to create a "path to citizenship" for immigrants currently living illegally in the United States might also create a farm labor shortage. As it turns out, the farm lobby is worried that once we legalize these immigrants, they won't want to work on farms anymore.
There's good reason for the farm lobby to worry about this. Once authorized to work in the U.S., many farm workers will no doubt seek employment in less onerous conditions. This happened after the last immigration amnesty in 1986. Unless a new wave of illegal immigration follows, farm owners would truly have to compete in the broader — legal — jobs market. Wages would have to rise or farms will have trouble attracting workers.
The farm lobby has a not-quite-novel solution to this situation: mandatory farm labor.
The Wall Street Journal explains:
The tight labor market explains why farm groups are pressing Congress to include, in any immigration overhaul, provisions that would ensure a steady flow of workers and prevent an exodus of newly legalized laborers from the sector.
Under one possible scenario, agriculture workers would earn permanent legal residency by working a certain number of days on farms each year; those who worked longer would get a green card sooner.
| Dinah Shore, Burt Reynolds, and Nancy Reagan at a state dinner in 1984 |
Born Frances Rose Shore in Winchester, Tenn., in 1916, she majored in sociology at Vanderbilt and served as president of the Alpha Epsilon Phi sorority and the Women’s Student Government Club. She was selected “band sponsor” (an early version of homecoming queen) and founded the Athenian Sing, an a cappella singing contest among fraternities and sororities that continues to this day as a campus-wide talent competition. She also sang on the WSM [Nashville AM] radio show Rhythm and Romance, whose theme song was the 1926 standard “Dinah.” Shore put her own stamp on the song and appropriated its title for her professional name. ...
In a survey of the top 50 stars in the history of the medium, TV Guide ranked Shore at No. 16.
| "Uh, Rahm, would you mind not standing so close that I can hear the fierce beating of your heart?" |
We understood we belonged to a minority that had suffered in the past and was still subject to discrimination and exclusion. However, change was coming fast. Jews were quickly becoming accepted into the white majority, and our parents taught us that nothing that really mattered was beyond our reach and we had little to fear as we moved through the world. We were safe in this assumption except, ironically enough, when Rahm was “black.”
Rahm and Ari had my mother’s skin coloring. Both brothers needed just a few days in the sun to turn the color of café au lait. By the end of the summer the two of them were almost chestnut brown. With curly black hair and a broad, flat nose, Rahm could easily pass for an African-American.
We got most of our ultra-violet rays at Chicago’s Foster Avenue Beach, which became our regular summer hangout. In yet another demonstration of her confidence (today it might be called child neglect), our mother would send us off alone to spend entire summer days playing in the lake and on the sand. I led the troop down Winona, through the Foster Avenue underpass, which let us safely cross Lake Shore Drive, and then into the park, where the beach stretched northward for a quarter-mile or so.
In this time before cell phones, our mother did not need to hear from us every half-hour to be reassured that we were O.K. As the hours passed, she somehow assumed we were fine, and for the most part, her confidence in us, and in the city, was well placed. Exceptions arose when some stranger decided to call Rahm and Ari “n******” and demand that we get off the beach.
"He was always this Italian guy people didn't want to accept. When he tans he gets really dark. My mother told me that when he worked in Florida he was asked to sit in the back of the bus."
The new T arrived yesterday. I’m impressed by its heft. As I looked through the magazine, I was surprised at Deborah Needleman’s choices. There is a complete absence of any people of color in articles or fashion shoots. I assume the ads cannot be controlled, but I saw only one African-American and one Asian-American among the thousands of models in the ads. The T doesn’t look like my neighborhood or America. [T Magazine’s New Editor Pledges to Make Future Issues More Diverse])
Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, with Gloria Swanson as a silent-screen legend plotting a comeback and William Holden as her toy boy, remains one of the most famous movies ever. Yet Sunset Boulevard’s origins in an Evelyn Waugh novel have been forgotten. This cultural amnesia is curious since the reactionary novelist and the refugee writer-director are still two of the more talked-about figures of the mid-century.
| Raquel Welch in 1,000,000 B.C. |
Newspaper articles, morning TV, dozens of books, and self-help advocates promoting slow-food or no-cook diets, barefoot running, sleeping with our infants, and other measures large and small claim that it would be more natural, and healthier, to live more like our ancestors. A corollary to this notion is that we are good at things we had to do back in the Pleistocene, like keeping an eye out for cheaters in our small groups, and bad at things we didn't, like negotiating with people we can't see and have never met.
I am all for examining human health and behavior in an evolutionary context, and part of that context requires understanding the environment in which we evolved. At the same time, discoveries like those from Sverrisdóttir's lab in Sweden make it clear that we cannot assume that evolution has stopped for humans, or that it can take place only ploddingly, with tiny steps over hundreds of thousands of years. In just the last few years we have added the ability to function at high altitudes and resistance to malaria to the list of rapidly evolved human characteristics, and the stage is set for many more. We can even screen the entire genome, in great gulps of DNA, looking for the signature of rapid selection in our genes.
To think of ourselves as misfits in our own time and of our own making flatly contradicts what we now understand about the way evolution works—namely, that rate matters. That evolution can be fast, slow, or in-between, and understanding what makes the difference is far more enlightening, and exciting, than holding our flabby modern selves up against a vision—accurate or not—of our well-muscled and harmoniously adapted ancestors.
Recognizing the continuity of evolution also makes clear the futility of selecting any particular time period for human harmony. Why would we be any more likely to feel out of sync than those who came before us? Did we really spend hundreds of thousands of years in stasis, perfectly adapted to our environments? When during the past did we attain this adaptation, and how did we know when to stop?
If they had known about evolution, would our cave-dwelling forebears have felt nostalgia for the days before they were bipedal, when life was good and the trees were a comfort zone?
... If we do not look to a mythical past utopia for clues to a way forward, what next? The answer is that we start asking different questions. Instead of bemoaning our unsuitability to modern life, we can wonder why some traits evolve quickly and some slowly. How do we know what we do about the rate at which evolution occurs? If lactose tolerance can become established in a population over just a handful of generations, what about an ability to digest and thrive on refined grains, the bugaboo of the paleo diet?
Breakthroughs in genomics (the study of the entire set of genes in an organism) and other genetic technologies now allow us to determine how quickly individual genes and gene blocs have been altered in response to natural selection. Evidence is mounting that numerous human genes have changed over just the last few thousand years—a blink of an eye, evolutionarily speaking—while others are the same as they have been for millions of years, relatively unchanged from the form we share with ancestors as distant as worms and yeast.
What's more, a new field called experimental evolution is showing us that sometimes evolution occurs before our eyes, with rapid adaptations happening in 100, 50, or even a dozen or fewer generations. Depending on the life span of the organism, that could mean less than a year, or perhaps a quarter-century. It is most easily demonstrated in the laboratory, but increasingly, now that we know what to look for, we are seeing it in the wild. And although humans are evolving all the time, it is often easier to see the process in other kinds of organisms. ...
It's common for people to talk about how we were "meant" to be, in areas ranging from diet to exercise to sex and family. Yet these notions are often flawed, making us unnecessarily wary of new foods and, in the long run, new ideas. I would not dream of denying the evolutionary heritage present in our bodies—and our minds. And it is clear that a life of sloth with a diet of junk food isn't doing us any favors. But to assume that we evolved until we reached a particular point and now are unlikely to change for the rest of history, or to view ourselves as relics hampered by a self-inflicted mismatch between our environment and our genes, is to miss out on some of the most exciting new developments in evolutionary biology. ...
Steve Jones, a University College London geneticist and author of several popular books, has argued for years that human evolution has been "repealed" because our technology allows us to avoid many natural dangers. But many anthropologists believe instead that the documented changes over the last 5,000 to 10,000 years in some traits, such as the frequency of blue eyes, means that we are still evolving in ways large and small. Blue eyes were virtually unknown as little as 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, when they apparently arose through one of those random genetic changes that pop up in our chromosomes. Now, of course, they are common—an example of only one such recently evolved characteristic. Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending even suggest that human evolution as a whole has, on the contrary, accelerated over the last several thousand years, and they also believe that relatively isolated groups of people, such as Africans and North Americans, are subject to differing selection. That leads to the somewhat uncomfortable suggestion that such groups might be evolving in different directions—a controversial notion to say the least.
BRUSSELS—Heavily armed robbers broke into the national airport here and stole more than 120 packages of diamonds from a Swiss-bound flight Monday night, in one of Europe's most brazen and valuable tarmac holdups in a decade, Belgian prosecutors said Tuesday.
Shortly before 8 p.m. Monday, two black vehicles with blue lights resembling police transport pulled up to a Helvetic Airways Fokker 100 jet plane, operating for Swiss International Air Lines, that had just been loaded, according to Belgian prosecutor Ine Van Wymersch and other people familiar with the events.
Eight masked men with machine guns held the ground staff, crew and passengers at gunpoint as they forced security workers to open the plane's cargo door. The men selectively removed at least 120 packets of diamonds, Ms. Van Wymersch said. The vehicles then sped away. No shots were fired and nobody was hurt in the theft, she said.
Ms. Van Wymersch declined to place a value on the stolen gems. Another person familiar with the events said the jewels are worth at least $350 million.
Jerry Seinfeld (light blue shirt, sans toupee) has really been working on his triceps and tan lately
|
‘Fast & Furious’ Stresses Social Side of Fandom
By BROOKS BARNES
LOS ANGELES — Despite selling $1.8 billion in tickets, Universal’s “Fast & Furious” car-racing series is Hollywood’s equivalent of a second-class citizen.
It does not dazzle with computerized special effects like “Transformers” or feature rising young stars like “The Hunger Games.” It lacks the cultural cachet of “Harry Potter.”
“We feel like underdogs most of the time,” said Vin Diesel, who leads the “Fast & Furious” cast.
What “Fast & Furious” does have — and it has gone largely unnoticed — is an astounding online following. Its Facebook page has 24.9 million “likes,” more than any active film series except “Avatar.” Mr. Diesel has 39 million Facebook fans; among actors, only Will Smith has more.
That kind of passion is making the next installment, “Fast & Furious 6,” one of the most anticipated movies of the summer. After an online promotional stunt coordinated by the studio to coincide with a Super Bowl ad, “Fast & Furious 6” is setting up one of the biggest box-office races of the year: Mr. Diesel and crew against “The Hangover Part III.”
“We measured the various ways audiences talked about these films online, and ‘Fast 6’ blew everything else away,” said Ben Carlson, Fizziology’s president.
Second: You can make a tax deductible contribution via VDARE by clicking here. (Paypal and credit cards accepted, including recurring "subscription" donations.) UPDATE: Don't try this at the moment.
Third: send money via the Paypal-like Google Wallet to my Gmail address (that's isteveslrATgmail.com -- replace the AT with a @). (Non-tax deductible.)
Here's the Google Wallet FAQ. From it: "You will need to have (or sign up for) Google Wallet to send or receive money. If you have ever purchased anything on Google Play, then you most likely already have a Google Wallet. If you do not yet have a Google Wallet, don’t worry, the process is simple: go to wallet.google.com and follow the steps." You probably already have a Google ID and password, which Google Wallet uses, so signing up Wallet is pretty painless.
You can put money into your Google Wallet Balance from your bank account and send it with no service fee.
Or you can send money via credit card (Visa, MasterCard, AmEx, Discover) with the industry-standard 2.9% fee. (You don't need to put money into your Google Wallet Balance to do this.)
Google Wallet works from both a website and a smartphone app (Android and iPhone -- the Google Wallet app is currently available only in the U.S., but the Google Wallet website can be used in 160 countries).
Or, once you sign up with Google Wallet, you can simply send money via credit card, bank transfer, or Wallet Balance as an attachment from Google's free Gmail email service. Here's how to do it.
(Non-tax deductible.)
Fourth: if you have a Wells Fargo bank account, you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Wells Fargo SurePay. Just tell WF SurePay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). (Non-tax deductible.)
Fifth: if you have a Chase bank account (or, theoretically,other bank accounts), you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Chase QuickPay (FAQ). Just tell Chase QuickPay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address (steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). If Chase asks for the name on my account, it's Steven Sailer with an n at the end of Steven. (Non-tax deductible.)
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