First Lady can't stop talking about her test scores

Continuing a pattern that's at least a half-dozen years old, from today's Washington Post:

Michelle Obama’s extended interview with rapper Bow Wow and singer Keshia Chante, which aired Tuesday night on Black Entertainment Television, yielded a few new details about the first lady’s teenage years. ...

3. Obama wanted to be a pediatrician, but she wasn’t that great at math and science. “So I switched to law, because my mother told me I like to argue a lot.” ...

5. Asked to look at old photos and reflect on what she would say to her younger self, she replied: “I was thinking maybe I’m not smart enough. Maybe I’m not bright enough. Maybe there are kids that are working harder than me. I was always worrying about disappointing someone or failing. And the thing that I would tell that girl is don’t worry about failure, because failure is the key to success. And you are smart enough to sit at any table and compete and to have your voice heard.”

There is a lot of conspiracy theorizing about why the President has never "released" his test scores, although I'm not aware than anybody has ever directly asked him what he scored. (When he was finally asked about his college GPA in 2011, he answered immediately.) One possible explanation for Mr. Obama's reticence about his LSAT score is that if he mentioned it, Mrs. Obama would never forgive him.

One irony about Mrs. Obama is that her main accomplishments in life are so traditionally feminine: she married well, bore her husband two fine children, and has never, as far as I can tell, been the subject of the slightest hint of scandal about her fidelity. Her expensive education primarily succeeded in bestowing upon her the highest MRS degree in the land: First Lady.

On the other hand, her response to all this good fortune is intermittently graceless, as if she sees herself as competing with her husband. Most notably, her initial response to his 2008 election was to plan to publicly separate from him: to have Barack go live stag in the White House while she stayed behind in Chicago with the girls for their 2009 spring semester at school.

Were American Indians part-European 10,000 years ago?

Nicholas Wade reports in the NYT:

24,000-Year-Old Body Is Kin to Both Europeans and American Indians 

By NICHOLAS WADE 

The genome of a young boy buried at Mal’ta near Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia some 24,000 years ago has turned out to hold two surprises for anthropologists. 

The first is that the boy’s DNA matches that of Western Europeans, showing that during the last Ice Age people from Europe had reached farther east across Eurasia than previously supposed. Though none of the Mal’ta boy’s skin or hair survive, his genes suggest he would have had brown hair, brown eyes and freckled skin. 

On the other hand, not that much of the ancestry of modern Europeans goes back to the Ice Age hunter-gatherers of Europe, but instead to farmers expanding out of the Fertile Crescent. (I think that's the current understanding -- it changes frequently.) All this stuff is complicated and subject to revision and further complications.

The second surprise is that his DNA also matches a large proportion — some 25 percent — of the DNA of living Native Americans. The first people to arrive in the Americas have long been assumed to have descended from Siberian populations related to East Asians. It now seems that they may be a mixture between the Western Europeans who had reached Siberia and an East Asian population. 

The Mal’ta boy was aged 3 to 4 and was buried under a stone slab wearing an ivory diadem, a bead necklace and a bird-shaped pendant. Elsewhere at the same site some 30 Venus figurines were found of the kind produced by the Upper Paleolithic cultures of Europe. The remains were excavated by Russian archaeologists over a 20-year period ending in 1958 and stored in museums in St. Petersburg. 

There they lay for some 50 years until they were examined by a team led by Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen. Dr. Willerslev, an expert in analyzing ancient DNA, was seeking to understand the peopling of the Americas by searching for possible source populations in Siberia. He extracted DNA from bone taken from the child’s upper arm, hoping to find ancestry in the East Asian peoples from whom Native Americans are known to be descended. 

But the first results were disappointing. The boy’s mitochondrial DNA belonged to the lineage known as U, which is commonly found among the modern humans who first entered Europe some 44,000 years ago. The lineages found among Native Americans are those designated A, B, C, D and X, so the U lineage pointed to contamination of the bone by the archaeologists or museum curators who had handled it, a common problem with ancient DNA projects. “The study was put on low speed for about a year because I thought it was all contamination,” Dr. Willerslev said. 

His team proceeded anyway to analyze the nuclear genome, which contains the major part of human inheritance. They were amazed when the nuclear genome also turned out to have partly European ancestry. Examining the genome from a second Siberian grave site, that of an adult who died some 17,000 years ago, they found the same markers of European origin. Together, the two genomes indicate that descendants of the modern humans who entered Europe had spread much farther east across Eurasia than had previously been assumed and occupied Siberia during an extremely cold period starting 20,000 years ago that is known as the Last Glacial Maximum. 

The other surprise from the Mal’ta boy’s genome was that it matched to both Europeans and Native Americans but not to East Asians. Dr. Willerslev’s interpretation was that the ancestors of Native Americans had already separated from the East Asian population when they interbred with the people of the Mal’ta culture, and that this admixed population then crossed over the Beringian land bridge that then lay between Siberia and Alaska to become a founding population of Native Americans. 

“We estimate that 14 to 38 percent of Native American ancestry may originate through gene flow from this ancient population,” he and colleagues wrote in an article published Wednesday in the journal Nature. 

A European contribution to Native American ancestry could explain two longstanding puzzles about the people’s origins. One is that many ancient Native American skulls, including that of the well-known Kennewick man, look very different from those of the present day population. Another is that one of the five mitochondrial DNA lineages found in Native Americans, the lineage known as X, also occurs in Europeans. One explanation is that Europeans managed to cross the Atlantic in small boats some 20,000 years ago and joined the Native Americans from Siberia. 

Dr. Willerslev thinks it more likely that European bearers of the X lineage had migrated across Siberia with the ancestors of the Mal’ta culture and joined them in their trek across the Beringian land bridge.

Na-Dene tribes (red)

I've always had the vague impression that the Na-Dene-speaking Native American tribes, such as the Apache and the Navajo, whose ancestors appear to have arrived from Siberia many thousands of years more recently than those of earlier American Indian tribes, are more East Asian-looking than the Native American mainstream.

That's easy to explain away on the grounds that the Na-Dene speakers were isolated in Western Canada and then some moved down into the American southwest about 600 years ago, so they interbred less with Europeans than did, say, Mohawks or Cherokees. Nonetheless, I don't think that's the whole story.

Eighteenth Century American commentators such as Benjamin Franklin tended to see East Coast American Indians as not being as different from Europeans as they perceived sub-Saharan Africans to be. Maybe they were on to something?

In contrast, the 20th Centural physical anthropologist Carleton Coon surmised that the fundamental racial division was caused by the mountains of central Asia (e.g., the Himalayas). Thus, he grouped blacks and Europeans as more closely related to each other than to East Asians and Native Americans. 

That turned out to be a big mistake, as genetic research produced the Out-of-Africa theory that argued that the fundamental difference was between sub-Saharan Africans and everybody else. 

In general, down through history, Americans tended to express Franklin's viewpoint rather than Coon's. Thus, for example, having Pocahontas as an ancestor was a mark of distinction treasured by Virginia's finest families, while any black ancestors were hushed up.

Comments on the new find from Dienekes, Razib 1, and Razib 2.

P.S., Somebody should alert Senator Elizabeth Warren that she was 100% correct all along. She does have Native American ancestors after all! It's just that her tribe shoulda took that right turn at Lake Baykal for the Bering Strait instead of that left turn for Europe.

Obama to WSJ: Let's do piecemeal immigration deal!

From the transcript of a new interview between the President and the WSJ editorial board:

SEIB [WSJ Washington Bureau Chief]: Some of the CEOs here had a working group earlier today, the mission of which was to address the question of how do you stay competitive. Interestingly, at least to me, their first priority — first priority was this: immigration reform. The U.S. needs immigration reform to retain talented workers educated in the U.S. and attract talent to the U.S. Immigration reform could provide an instant jolt to the U.S. economy, which we need. I know you agree with that statement, but it’s hard to see that happening right now. You’ve got the Senate off on one track. It’s passed a comprehensive bill the House won’t even agree to take up. Democrats want to do comprehensive reform; Republicans want to do step-by-step reform. It’s a poisonous political atmosphere. Can you make it happen? 

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I am actually optimistic that we’re going to get this done. I’m a — but I am a congenital optimist. I would have to be; I’m named Barack Obama; I ran for president. So the — (laughter) – 

SEIB: And won. 

PRESIDENT OBAMA: And won twice. 

(Laughter.)

Why is that funny?

I mean, other than that the President's repartee seems a little demented? He wants us to know he "won twice"? Is that really not widely known in the circles in which the Chief Executive travels?

Psychology researchers have recorded conversations that included much laughter and then had them transcribed and ... virtually nothing anybody said was actually funny. Most conversational laughter is a sort of fear reflex to disarm uncomfortable situations. If you are the President and have drones and the NSA at your disposal, I guess you get especially boffo laughs all the time.

So look, keep in mind, first of all, that what the CEOs here said is absolutely right. This is a boost to our economy. Everywhere I go, I meet with entrepreneurs and CEOs who say, I’ve got, you know, these terrific folks; they’ve just graduated from Caltech or MIT or Stanford; they’re ready to do business here; some of them have these amazing new ideas that we think we can commercialize, but they’re being dragged back to their home countries, not because they want to go but because the immigration system doesn’t work. 

The good news is that the Senate bill was a bipartisan bill. And we know what the component parts of this are. We’ve got to have strong border security. We’ve got to have better enforcement of existing laws. We’ve got to make sure that we have a legal immigration system that doesn’t cause people to sit in the queue for five years, 10 years, 15 years, in some cases 20 years. We should want to immediately say to young people who we’ve helped to educate in this country, you want to stay? We want you here. 

And we do have to deal with about 11 million folks who are in this country, most of them just seeking opportunity. They did break the law by coming here or overstaying their visa. And they’ve got to earn their way out of the shadows, pay a fine, learn English, get to the back of the line, pay their back taxes, but giving them a mechanisms whereby they can get right by our society. And that’s reflected in the Senate bill. 

Now, I actually think that there are a number of House Republicans, including Paul Ryan, I think, if you ask him about it, who agree with that. 

They’re suspicious of comprehensive bills, but you know what? If they want to chop that thing up into five pieces, as long as all five pieces get done, I don’t care what it looks like, as long as it’s actually delivering on those core values that we talk about. 

SEIB: Democrats have been pretty suspicious that all five pieces, once it’s done – 

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, and — and — and — and that’s the problem. I mean, the key is — you know, what we don’t want to do is simply carve out one piece of it — let’s say, agricultural jobs, which are important, but is easier, frankly, or the high-skilled jobs that many in your audience here would immediately want to do — but leave behind some of the tougher stuff that still needs to get done. We — we’re not going to have a situation in which 11 million people are still living in the shadows and potentially getting deported on an ongoing basis. 

So we’re going to have to do it all. In my conversations with Republicans, I actually think the divide is not that wide. So what we just have to do is find a pathway where Republicans in the House in particular feel comfortable enough about process that they can go ahead and meet us. 

This, by the way, Gerry (sp), I think is a good example of something that’s been striking me about our politics for a while. When you go to other countries, the political divisions are so much more stark and wider; here in America, the difference between Democrats and Republicans — we’re fighting inside the 40-yard line, maybe –

I'll say.

"Nebraska:" Bruce Dern, Alexander Payne, and Bob Nelson

From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:

Will Nebraska, Alexander Payne’s modest masterpiece starring 77-year-old Bruce Dern as a taciturn ex-mechanic who stares like a senile prairie dog, somehow edge out frontrunner 12 Years a Slave for the Best Picture Oscar? 

If it does, we’ll never hear the end of it. How often since Obama’s reelection have we been reminded that it’s long past time for stale pale males to exit the stage for the more vibrant? 

Yet, annoyingly, old white guys keep doing things that can’t be overlooked.

Read the whole thing there.

Also, eight seconds of Bruce Dern screaming at Jane Fonda.

Thank God we don't have anybody to fight

From Politico:

Army PR push: 'Average-looking women'

The memo refered to the photo above, advising avoiding photos that 'glamorize' women in combat. |  

By KATE BRANNEN | 11/19/13  

The Army should use photos of “average-looking women” when it needs to illustrate stories about female soldiers, a specialist recommends — images of women who are too pretty undermine the communications strategy about introducing them into combat roles. 

“In general, ugly women are perceived as competent while pretty women are perceived as having used their looks to get ahead,” wrote Col. Lynette Arnhart, who is leading a team of analysts studying how best to integrate women into combat roles that have previously been closed off to them. ... 

“There is a general tendency to select nice looking women when we select a photo to go with an article (where the article does not reference a specific person). It might behoove us to select more average looking women for our comms strategy. For example, the attached article shows a pretty woman, wearing make-up while on deployed duty. Such photos undermine the rest of the message (and may even make people ask if breaking a nail is considered hazardous duty),” Arnhart said. 

She wrote that a photo of a female soldier with mud on her face that news agencies used last spring “sends a much different message—one of women willing to do the dirty work necessary in order to get the job done.” ...

After POLITICO first reported on the e-mail in Tuesday’s Morning Defense, critics seized upon Arnhart’s guidance as proof that today’s Army culture has a long way to go before women will be treated as equals. 

Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) tweeted that it was “another example that @USArmy just doesn’t get it as it debates if pretty girls should be used in pamphlets.” 

Since political discourse is now conducted in 140 character bites, I don't exactly know what the Congresswoman meant. But, clearly, "just doesn't get it" is an effective rhetorical device these days.

We are told that "society's" obsession with how women look is what prevents women from, say, performing Audie Murphy-like heroics on the battlefield, but it sure seems like women want to talk about how women look, even if, as in the case of the Congresswoman, they don't have anything to say.

NYT: Latina lesbian sheriff helps City of Hate atone for JFK assassination

Whereas the New York Times' previous hallucination about how rightwing Dallas murdered JFK was labeled "Opinion," this new one is supposed to be reporting. The main difference is that this "news story" eventually does get around to mentioning the name "Lee Harvey Oswald."

A Changed Dallas Grapples With Its Darkest Day 

By MANNY FERNANDEZ 

DALLAS — When President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade left the airport here shortly before noon on Nov. 22, 1963, the man seated in the lead car was the county sheriff, Bill Decker, 65, a storied Texas lawman who led the hunt for Bonnie and Clyde. Fifty years later, the badge belongs to Lupe Valdez, 66, the daughter of Mexican migrant farmworkers. She is the only sheriff in America who is an openly gay Hispanic woman. Voters re-elected Sheriff Valdez, a Democrat, to a third term last year. 

Dealey Plaza – where the darkest day in Dallas history unfolded 40 minutes after the motorcade began – looks eerily similar to what it was then, the sixth-floor corner window of the former Texas School Book Depository still cracked open slightly. But Dallas itself is almost as different as Bill Decker is from Lupe Valdez. 

And the tension between past and present has unleashed a wave of citywide self-reflection a half-century later in a distinctly American place that is part Dallas Cowboys, part Texas excess and part urban melting pot, where the public school students come from homes where 70 languages are spoken. Painful, embarrassing memories of the angry anti-Washington culture that flourished here 50 years ago – and now seems a permanent part of the national mood – have resurfaced, confronting Dallasites daily. 

Blocks from Dealey Plaza, the windows of restaurants and the lobbies of hotels are plastered with posters reading “Love” – a nonprofit group’s campaign, using artwork by schoolchildren and others, to counter the City of Hate label given Dallas after the assassination. As the city prepares for the biggest event it has ever held to mark the assassination on Friday – led by Mayor Michael S. Rawlings, a committee of civic leaders raised about $3 million in private donations for the ceremony – the focus has been on the city’s legacy as much as Kennedy’s. 

“I’ve learned a lot about my city through this,” Mr. Rawlings said. “The world is peering into Dallas and saying, What’s that place all about right now, 50 years later? We’ve grown a lot, and we’ve changed a lot. The main story about Dallas is it took that punch and turned that tragedy into motivation to go to the next level.” 

In the early 1960s, a small but vocal subset of the Dallas power structure turned the political climate toxic, inciting a right-wing hysteria that led to attacks on visiting public figures. In the years and months before Kennedy was assassinated, Lyndon B. Johnson, his wife, Lady Bird, and Adlai E. Stevenson, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, were jostled and spat upon in Dallas by angry mobs. In sermons, rallies, newspapers and radio broadcasts, the city’s richest oil baron, a Republican congressman, a Baptist pastor and others, including the local John Birch Society, filled Dallas with an angry McCarthy-esque paranoia. 

The immediate reaction of many in Dallas to the news that Kennedy had been shot was not only shock but also a sickening sense of recognition. Moments after hearing about the shooting, the wife of the Methodist bishop told Tom J. Simmons, an editor at The Dallas Morning News, “You might have known it would be Dallas.” 

For months, a city that had long been proud of its image of wealth and success has been exploring this ugly past, a past it once sought to play down and even ignore. A letter co-signed by Mr. Rawlings inviting the public to a recent symposium bluntly asked, “Were we somehow to blame?” The Dallas Morning News – whose publisher in the 1960s, Ted Dealey, used to refer to the N.A.A.C.P. as the National Association for the Agitation of the Colored People – has not spared Mr. Dealey from its 50th anniversary coverage. Last month, it called Mr. Dealey’s face-to-face ridiculing of Kennedy, which came in 1961 at a White House luncheon, a “rude display.” 

Time has given Dallas enough distance – the majority of residents were either not born or were living elsewhere 50 years ago, and the white-hot figures have either died or moved away. But more important, Dallas has been comfortable publicly grappling with its past in part because what it was then is so different from what it is now. 

In 1963, Dallas was the 14th-largest city in the country, with a majority-white population of nearly 700,000, a provincial place whose mostly white, mostly male establishment set the agenda. In 2013, Dallas is the nation’s ninth-largest city, with a majority-minority population of 1.2 million. It is home to the first black district attorney in Texas and the largest urban arts district in the country. Most of the suburbs in the Dallas-Fort Worth region are solidly Republican and bastions of Tea Party conservatives, but Dallas itself leans Democratic. Though President Obama lost Texas in the 2012 election by nearly 1.3 million votes, he handily won Dallas County. 

“Dallas is like our country – we are a work in progress,” said Ron Kirk, who served as the city’s first black mayor from 1995 to 2002. “When you look back and reflect on some of the rhetoric that filled our city streets, you do realize that that can target us all, and the actions of a few have the ability to reflect back on all of us.” 

The extremism in Dallas in 1963 still thrives in Texas today, though less so in Dallas itself. Back then, commentators on the radio program sponsored by the oil baron H. L. Hunt said that under Kennedy, firearms would be outlawed so people would not “have the weapons with which to rise up against their oppressors.” 

This past February, in West Texas, the sheriff in Midland County, Gary Painter, said at a John Birch Society luncheon that he would refuse to confiscate people’s guns from their homes if ordered by the Obama administration and referred to the president’s State of the Union address as “propaganda.” 

Other Texas politicians in recent years have embraced or suggested support for increasingly radical views, including Texas secession, Mr. Obama’s impeachment and claims that the sovereignty of the United States will be handed over to the United Nations. And, of course, it is not just in Texas. 

“I recently met a retired autoworker in Detroit who told me that I could change my book title to ‘America 2013,’ and the story would be the same,” said Bill Minutaglio, a former Dallas reporter whose new book, “Dallas 1963,” written with Steven L. Davis, examines the far-right fringe in the city. He said “modern demonizing politics in America” in some ways took shape in Dallas in the 1960s. 

He added, “It is as if the lessons in Dallas have not been learned 50 years later.” 

Lee Harvey Oswald

It only took the NYT 1,119 words to get around to mentioning the guy who actually killed Kennedy.

was a Marxist and not a product of right-wing Dallas. But because the anti-Kennedy tenor came not so much from radical outcasts but from parts of mainstream Dallas, some say the anger seemed to come with the city’s informal blessing. 

“It was, I think, a city that was tolerant of hate and hate language,” said John A. Hill, 71, who in 1963 was student-body president of Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “There were people who spoke out against that, but in general city leaders were indifferent to that toxic atmosphere.” 

In the 1970s, there was a strong push to tear down the shuttered Texas School Book Depository. A handful of leaders, including Wes Wise, then the mayor, succeeded in preserving the redbrick building, which the county bought in 1977. The top two floors were later turned into a museum. Now, more than 320,000 people each year stand next to Oswald’s sniper’s perch on the sixth floor and peer out the windows at Dealey Plaza below. 

“When you think about an effort to tear down the building in the ′70s, you can really get a sense of how far Dallas has come in accepting and internalizing this deep tragedy,” said Stephen Fagin, associate curator of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, which opened in 1989. “This is the journey Dallas has taken, from assassination to commemoration, moving from memory to history.” 

Now its first five floors are occupied by county offices. One who often has county business there is Sheriff Valdez. 

After becoming sheriff in 2005, she struggled in her first three or four years to change the culture of the department, some members of which were hostile to the notion of a Latina lesbian sheriff. “It depends on who you asked,” she said, when asked of the initial reaction. “If you asked some of the good old boys, I can’t repeat the phrases that were said.” 

But the department has changed tremendously since 2005, she said. Just as Dallas has changed since 1963. “That was 50 years ago,” Sheriff Valdez said. “My goodness. I hope we’ve changed some.”

Never again can we allow a vast conspiracy of white men to assassinate a liberal President, as the White Male Power Structure of Dallas murdered JFK. The government must continue to elect a new people less dangerous to the government than the old.

Dr. Vibrant notices diversity v. community trade-off

At the Atlantic, fashionable geographer Richard Florida (or, as I call him to minimize confusion with the state of Florida, "Dr. Vibrant") finally stops being oblivious to the obvious:

The Paradox of Diverse Communities
RICHARD FLORIDA7:00 AM ET80 COMMENTS

Urbanists and planners like to imagine and design for a world of diversity. Diversity, we like to think, is both a social good and, as I’ve argued, a spur to innovation and economic growth. 

But to what degree is this goal of diverse, cohesive community attainable, even in theory? 

That’s the key question behind an intriguing new study, “The (In)compatibility of Diversity and Sense of Community,” published in the November edition of the American Journal of Community Psychology. The study, by sociologist Zachary Neal and psychologist Jennifer Watling Neal, both of Michigan State University (full disclosure: I was an external member of the former’s dissertation committee), develops a nifty agent-based computer model to test this question. 

Their simulations of more than 20 million virtual “neighborhoods” demonstrate a troubling paradox: that community and diversity may be fundamentally incompatible goals. As the authors explain, integration “provides opportunities for intergroup contact that are necessary to promote respect for diversity, but may prevent the formation of dense interpersonal networks that are necessary to promote sense of community.” 

Their models focus on the emergence of the “community-diversity dialectic” based on two simple principles: homophily – the tendency of people to bond with others like themselves – and proximity – the tendency of people to bond with those nearby. Their models look at how the strength of these basic tendencies affect the evolution of neighborhoods comprised of two distinct populations (say by race, class, ethnicity and so on). In these simulated neighborhoods, the possible levels of integration ranged from 0 percent (totally segregated) to 50 percent (totally integrated). 

In the images below, the authors show three sample neighborhoods with low, medium, and high levels of integration. Notice how much denser the resulting social networks are (in the bottom row) in the highly segregated neighborhood at far left. (You can also play around with an interactive version of the model on Neal’s website, adjusting the levels of homophily, proximity, and integration yourself). 

... The graph below, from the study, plots quite plainly the negative relationship between community cohesion and diversity. 

These findings are sobering. Because homophily and proximity are so ingrained in the way humans interact, the models demonstrated that it was impossible to simultaneously foster diversity and cohesion “in all reasonably likely worlds.” In fact, the trends are so strong that no effective social policy could combat them, according to Neal. As he put it in a statement, “In essence, when it comes to neighborhood desegregation and social cohesion, you can't have your cake and eat it too.” 

... Jane Jacobs liked to say that great cities are federations of neighborhoods. It’s exactly what I see in vibrant cities like New York or Toronto. When I asked Neal about this, he sounded a more optimistic note: “Their patchwork of segregated communities allows for both diversity and cohesion. We usually view segregation as problematic, but when it comes in the form of a patchwork of neighborhoods and enclaves that each have their own character, it may actually ‘work.’” 

For this reason, urbanists and local policy makers might be better off refocusing their efforts away from the unachievable ideal of diverse and cohesive neighborhoods and toward creating cohesion across the various neighborhoods that make up a city. 

In his watershed book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam distinguished between two types of social capital: “bonding,” which occurs within like-minded groups, and “bridging,” which occurs between them. If, as the Neals’ study shows, we can’t make our neighborhoods more diverse and cohesive at the same time, perhaps the primary, over-arching, and achievable objective is to reinforce the bridging ties between them. Given the growing economic, cultural, and political divides within our cities and across the nation as a whole, working to strengthen the “bridges” between communities may be a far more realistic approach than attempting the impossible task of trying to make everywhere more diverse.

I wrote about Putnam's research six years ago here.

Sleep

I pay quite a bit of attention to sleep because, among other reasons, my productivity as a blogger correlates fairly strongly with how much sleep I've gotten over the last three nights. For example, I've come to realize I don't need eight hours of sleep per night, I need eight and a half.

Benedict Carey, a fine human sciences reporter for the NYT, writes:

Sleep Therapy Seen as an Aid for Depression 

By BENEDICT CAREY 

Curing insomnia in people with depression could double their chance of a full recovery, scientists are reporting. The findings, based on an insomnia treatment that uses talk therapy rather than drugs, are the first to emerge from a series of closely watched studies of sleep and depression to be released in the coming year. 

The new report affirms the results of a smaller pilot study, giving scientists confidence that the effects of the insomnia treatment are real. If the figures continue to hold up, the advance will be the most significant in the treatment of depression since the introduction of Prozac in 1987. 

Depression is the most common mental disorder, affecting some 18 million Americans in any given year, according to government figures, and more than half of them also have insomnia.... 

The study is the first of four on sleep and depression nearing completion, all financed by the National Institute of Mental Health. They are evaluating a type of talk therapy for insomnia that is cheap, relatively brief and usually effective, but not currently a part of standard treatment. 

The new report, from a team at Ryerson University in Toronto, found that 87 percent of patients who resolved their insomnia in four biweekly talk therapy sessions also saw their depression symptoms dissolve after eight weeks of treatment, either with an antidepressant drug or a placebo pill — almost twice the rate of those who could not shake their insomnia. Those numbers are in line with a previous pilot study of insomnia treatment at Stanford. 

In an interview, the report’s lead author, Colleen E. Carney, said, “The way this story is unfolding, I think we need to start augmenting standard depression treatment with therapy focused on insomnia.” 

... Doctors have long considered poor sleep to be a symptom of depression that would clear up with treatments, said Rachel Manber, a professor in the psychiatry and behavioral sciences department at Stanford, whose 2008 pilot trial of insomnia therapy provided the rationale for larger studies. “But we now know that’s not the case,” she said. “The relationship is bidirectional — that insomnia can precede the depression.” 

... Several studies now suggest that developing insomnia doubles a person’s risk of later becoming depressed — the sleep problem preceding the mood disorder, rather than the other way around. 

The therapy that Dr. Manber, Dr. Carney and the other researchers are using is called cognitive behavior therapy for insomnia, or CBT-I for short. The therapist teaches people to establish a regular wake-up time and stick to it; get out of bed during waking periods; avoid eating, reading, watching TV or similar activities in bed; and eliminate daytime napping. 

I guess the idea is that your bed shouldn't be your electronic command and control center, it should be just for sleeping.

The aim is to reserve time in bed for only sleeping and — at least as important — to “curb this idea that sleeping requires effort, that it’s something you have to fix,” Dr. Carney said. “That’s when people get in trouble, when they begin to think they have to do something to get to sleep.” 

This kind of therapy is distinct from what is commonly known as sleep hygiene: exercising regularly, but not too close to bedtime, and avoiding coffee and too much alcohol in the evening. These healthful habits do not amount to an effective treatment for insomnia. 

In other words, while they can't hurt, they often can't help.

Still, there are a lot of subtle things some people need to be aware of, such as what flavor of ice cream before bed. I can no longer eat anything chocolate within, perhaps, five or six hours of bedtime.

Dr. Andrew Krystal, who is running the CBT-I study at Duke, called sleep “this huge, still unexplored frontier of psychiatry.” 

“The body has complex circadian cycles, and mostly in psychiatry we’ve ignored them,” he said. “Our treatments are driven by convenience. We treat during the day and make little effort to find out what’s happening at night.”

Girl-on-girl catfights

I'm guessing these are the same girl, just with and without heels, push-up bra, etc.

John Tierney writes in the NYT:

A Cold War Fought by Women

By JOHN TIERNEY

How aggressive is the human female? When the anthropologist Sarah B. Hrdy surveyed the research literature three decades ago, she concluded that “the competitive component in the nature of women remains anecdotal, intuitively sensed, but not confirmed by science.”

Science has come a long way since then, as Dr. Hrdy notes in her introduction to a recent issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society devoted entirely to the topic of female aggression. She credits the “stunning” amount of new evidence partly to better research techniques and partly to the entry of so many women into scientific fields once dominated by men. 

The field of evolutionary psychology (i.e., the study of sex differences) is a product of academic gender diversity. For example, the name was made up by the husband-wife team of John Tooby and Leda Cosmides.

... Now that researchers have been looking more closely, they say that this “intrasexual competition” is the most important factor explaining the pressures that young women feel to meet standards of sexual conduct and physical appearance. 

... To see how female students react to a rival, researchers brought pairs of them into a laboratory at McMaster University for what was ostensibly a discussion about female friendships. But the real experiment began when another young woman entered the room asking where to find one of the researchers. 

This woman had been chosen by the researchers, Tracy Vaillancourt and Aanchal Sharma, because she “embodied qualities considered attractive from an evolutionary perspective,” meaning a “low waist-to-hip ratio, clear skin, large breasts.” Sometimes, she wore a T-shirt and jeans, other times a tightfitting, low-cut blouse and short skirt. 

In jeans, she attracted little notice and no negative comments from the students, whose reactions were being secretly recorded during the encounter and after the woman left the room. But when she wore the other outfit, virtually all the students reacted with hostility. 

They stared at her, looked her up and down, rolled their eyes and sometimes showed outright anger. One asked her in disgust, “What the [expletive] is that?” 

Most of the aggression, though, happened after she left the room. Then the students laughed about her and impugned her motives. One student suggested that she dressed that way in order to have sex with a professor. Another said that her breasts “were about to pop out.” 

The results of the experiment jibe with evidence that this “mean girl” form of indirect aggression is used more by adolescents and young women than by older women, who have less incentive to handicap rivals once they marry. Other studies have shown that the more attractive an adolescent girl or woman is, the more likely she is to become a target for indirect aggression from her female peers. 

“Women are indeed very capable of aggressing against others, especially women they perceive as rivals,” said Dr. Vaillancourt, now a psychologist at the University of Ottawa. “The research also shows that suppression of female sexuality is by women, not necessarily by men.” 

Stigmatizing female promiscuity — a.k.a. slut-shaming — has often been blamed on men, who have a Darwinian incentive to discourage their spouses from straying.

As I've been saying for a long time, contemporary feminism is quite simple:

• If men are at fault for you not being able to do whatever it is you want to do, blame men.

• But if women are at fault, blame society or American culture or the media or institutional sexism or whatever.

But they also have a Darwinian incentive to encourage other women to be promiscuous. Dr. Vaillancourt said the experiment and other research suggest the stigma is enforced mainly by women. 

“Sex is coveted by men,” she said. “Accordingly, women limit access as a way of maintaining advantage in the negotiation of this resource. Women who make sex too readily available compromise the power-holding position of the group, which is why many women are particularly intolerant of women who are, or seem to be, promiscuous.” 

It's cartel behavior: How are we going to keep the price up if you keep giving it away?

It's also cartel behavior intended to keep down the cost and time invested in appearances. Hair care, for example, can chew up a lot of a woman's day. If you are a woman, would you rather live in a culture where all the women wake up a half-hour early to do their hair (e.g., Italy, Dallas) or one where everybody sleeps in (e.g., Sweden, Boston)? The latter, certainly.

But what if you were the only woman who got up a half-hour early? You'd be like the one Beyonce in a world of Rachel Maddows! That would be totally worth it! But what if everybody gets up a half-hour early? Well, then you could get up an hour early! And so on ...

So, cartels form of women who agree to limit their competitiveness over men. But they have to be constantly checking for cheaters.

The black market in films

At year end, organs of responsible cultural opinion devote much attention to the question of whether Hollywood has spent the year oppressing or empowering African-Americans. Yet, the movies actually made and watched by African-Americans themselves seldom get mentioned in these thinkpieces. So, it's worth stopping to notice what African-Americans will pay to see.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Although “Thor” hung on to the No. 1 spot at the box office this weekend, the big story was a stellar opening for “The Best Man Holiday,” which trounced all expectations to debut with a studio-estimated $30.6-million.

From Box Office Mojo on the opening weekend performance of TBMH, a sequel to the popular The Best Man from 14 years ago:

According to Universal's exit polling, an overwhelming portion of the audience was African American (87 percent). The audience also skewed older (63 percent above 35 years of age) and female (75 percent). They awarded the movie a rare "A+" CinemaScore, which suggests word-of-mouth will be strong. At this point, it seems safe to assume that The Best Man Holiday will earn at least $80 million by the end of its run.

Judging from the trailer above, The Best Man Holiday  is not terribly different in setting from, say, Whit Stillman's Metropolitan: bourgeois friends gather in Manhattan for the end-of-year social whirl. (I suspect that the characters in The Best Man Holiday, however, spend less time than the characters in Metropolitan articulating their forebodings about how many more generations can this go on before the trust funds are dissipated.) 

The upper half of African-American tastes in movies today tend to be pretty similar to the mass market's during the Depression: they like to watch rich black people. I like black bourgeois movies myself.

For example, last year's hugely profitable buppie hit, Think Like a Man, made $91 million domestically off a $12 million budget. Buppie movies make very little overseas, but they can be made for a moderate budget ($17 million for TBMH), so the profit potential is solid.

But, they generate minimal buzz among whites. From the Los Angeles Times last year:

After “Think Like a Man” opened at No. 1, one studio president decided not to mention the film during the studio’s Monday morning production meeting, curious to see how long it would take to surface as a topic of conversation. 

Fifteen minutes into the meeting, no one had mentioned the film. When the studio boss finally brought it up, asking who had seen it over the weekend, the room was silent. None of the all-white staff had bothered to go see it. 

By the way, The Best Man series is written and directed by Malcolm D. Lee, who is said to be Spike Lee's more commercial cousin, although I can find no pictures of them in the same frame together, perhaps because at over 6'3", Malcolm must be much more than a foot taller than Spike.

Arne Duncan: "White suburban moms" getting too uppity

From the Washington Post:

Arne Duncan: ‘White suburban moms’ upset that Common Core shows their kids aren’t ‘brilliant’ 

BY VALERIE STRAUSS

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told a group of state schools superintendents Friday that he found it “fascinating” that some of the opposition to the Common Core State Standards has come from “white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.” 

"Single moms" = Good
"Suburban moms" = Ungood
"White suburban moms" = Doubleplusungood

Yes, he really said that. ...

Whichever side you fall on regarding the Core’s academic value, there is no question that their implementation in many areas has been miserable — so miserable that American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, a Core supporter, recently compared it to another particularly troubled rollout:

You think the Obamacare implementation is bad? The implementation of the Common Core is far worse. 

... Duncan has repeatedly said the new Core-aligned standardized tests — being designed by two multistate consortia with some $350 million in federal money — would be light years ahead of the current tests. As it turns out, neither the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium nor the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers have had enough time or money to develop truly “game-changing” exams in terms of how they can really measure the broad range of student abilities ...

A bunch of other interesting WaPo articles by Valerie Strauss on education here.

50th anniversary of the death of Jackie Kennedy

Who can forget this tragic frame from Abraham Zapruder's home movie shot in Dallas on 11/22/63, moments before the First Lady was run over by the press bus? 

And who can forget the highlights of Jack Kennedy's five terms in the White House?

- August 1964: the Kennedy-Connally ticket elected by acclamation as Goldwater-Miller withdraw in sympathy.

- The withdrawal of all American soldiers from Vietnam in 1964? (Too bad about the last American troop killed in action, Pfc. Cassius Clay.)

- The Cultural Revolution of 1965 when Chairman Jack mobilized the energies of America's youth with his Spare Change zero interest loans and Head West federal gas stamps for anyone under 25 wanting to check out the scene in San Francisco?

- The successful nationalization and federal coordination of the music industry?

- JFK's galvanizing speech at the Woodstock festival declaring war on Great Britain to liberate the Catholics of Northern Ireland and give America's young people a war of their own?

- The failed protest movement by elderly WASPs?

- The fourth Kennedy-Nixon presidential debate in 1976?

You can relive all these fond memories, and many more, in the

Grand Fifth Term Inaugural Issue

JFK's First 6,000 Days

of the February, 1977 edition of National Lampoon

And from the Letters-from-the-Editor column:

NYT: "Dallas’s Role in Kennedy’s Murder"

From the New York Times, leapfrogging loyalties at their most lunatic:

The City With a Death Wish in Its Eye 

Dallas’s Role in Kennedy’s Murder 

By JAMES McAULEY

FOR 50 years, Dallas has done its best to avoid coming to terms with the one event that made it famous: the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. 

That’s because, for the self-styled “Big D,” grappling with the assassination means reckoning with its own legacy as the “city of hate,” the city that willed the death of the president.

It will miss yet another opportunity this year. ... 

But once again, spectacle is likely to trump substance: not one word will be said at this event about what exactly the city was in 1963, when the president arrived in what he called, just moments before his death, “nut country.” ...

Those “men of Dallas” — men like my grandfather, oil men and corporate executives, self-made but self-segregated in a white-collar enclave in a decidedly blue-collar state — often loathed the federal government at least as much as, if not more than, they did the Soviet Union or Communist China. ... 

For those men, Kennedy was a veritable enemy of the state, which is why a group of them would commission and circulate “Wanted for Treason” pamphlets before the president’s arrival and fund the presciently black-rimmed “Welcome Mr. Kennedy” advertisement that ran in The Dallas Morning News on the morning of Nov. 22. It’s no surprise that four separate confidants warned the president not to come to Dallas: an incident was well within the realm of imagination. 

The wives of these men — socialites and homemakers, Junior Leaguers and ex-debutantes — were no different; in fact, they were possibly even more extreme. 

(After all, there’s a reason Carol Burnett pulls a gun on Julie Andrews at the end of the famous “Big D” routine the two performed before the assassination in the early 1960s. “What are ya,” she screams, pulling the trigger, “some kinda nut?!”) 

In the years before the second wave of the women’s movement, many of these women, affluent but frustrated in their exclusive neighborhoods like Preston Hollow and Highland Park, turned to politics as a means of garnering the validation they were otherwise denied. With time and money at their disposal, they would outdo their husbands, one another and even themselves. ...

And in the annals of my own family history, it was my charming grandmother, not some distant relation without a Neiman Marcus charge card, who nevertheless saw fit to found the “National Congress for Educational Excellence,” an organization that crusaded against such things as depictions of working women in Texas textbooks and the distribution of literature on homosexuality in Dallas public schools. 

In a photograph taken not long after the assassination, my grandmother smiles a porcelain smile, poised and lovely in psychedelic purple Pucci, coiffure stacked high in what can only be described as a hairway to heaven. Her eyes, however, are intent, fixed on a target — liberalism, gender equality, gays. 

Dallas is not, of course, “the city that killed Kennedy.” Nor does the city in which the president arrived 50 years ago bear much resemblance to Dallas today, the heart of a vibrant metroplex of 6.7 million people, most of whom have moved from elsewhere and have little or no connection to 1963. 

But without question, these memories — and the remnants of the environment of extreme hatred the city’s elite actively cultivated before the president’s visit — have left an indelible mark on Dallas, the kind of mark that would never be left on Memphis or Los Angeles, which were stages rather than actors in the 1968 assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. 

For the last 50 years, a collective culpability has quietly propelled the city to outshine its troubled past without ever actually engaging with it. ...

But those are transient triumphs in the face of what has always been left unsaid, what the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald once called the “dark night of the soul,” on which the bright Texas sun has yet to rise. The far right of 1963 and the radicalism of my grandparents’ generation may have faded in recent years, they remain very much alive in Dallas. ... 

This year Dallas has a chance to grapple with the painful legacy of 1963 in public and out loud. Unfortunately, that’s unlikely to happen, although the city did quietly host a symposium on whether it really deserved to be labeled “the city of hate” earlier this month. 

But when the national cameras start rolling on Nov. 22, Dealey Plaza, the abandoned, almost spectral site of the assassination and now of the commemoration, will have been retouched in a fresh coat of literal and figurative white paint. Cosmetics seem to be all we can expect.

I was under the impression that President Kennedy was assassinated by a Communist named Lee Harvey Oswald; evidently, I was misinformed. Instead, it must have been a giant right-wing conspiracy.

In the January 14, 2008 issue of The American Conservative, John O'Sullivan, who wrote about the failed 1981-1984 assassinations attempts on Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher in his 2006 book The President, The Pope, and the Prime Minister, reviewed James Pierseon's new book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism:

"Piereson's first original (and brilliant) insight is his recognition that what transformed American politics was not the assassination itself but how it was interpreted. 

"Kennedy was slain by a devout communist, one-time defector to the Soviet Union, and admirer or Fidel Castro who had kept in touch with Soviet diplomats after returning home from the USSR and was trying to re-defect to Cuba. A common-sense interpretation of the crime would have portrayed Kennedy as an anti-communist martyr of the conservative cause in the Cold War. Such a view would have made the Cold War -- rather than civil rights -- the central issue in U.S. politics... But such an account would have also been contrary to the emerging "spirit of the age," which dictated to commentators a very different analysis. 

"Before anyone knew the identity of Kennedy's assassin, his death was at once and widely attributed in media speculations to 'extremists' and 'bigots' on the Right. ... But that conviction hardly changed once it became known that the assassin was a communist. To be sure, the newspapers dug into Oswald's career as a defector very thoroughly. But the editorials and opinion columns, their television equivalents, and the comments of the liberal and cultural leaders repeatedly and passionately blamed the assassination on something called 'extremism,' which was disconnected from America in general and to the radical Right in particular. ... It soon became conventional wisdom that all Americans bore a share of the blame for the bigotry, intolerance, and hate that had struck down the president. John F. Kennedy in death became a martyr for the cause of civil rights -- a cause to which in life he had shown a prudent political coolness. ... 

"Piereson's second great contribution is to establish that Mrs. Kennedy herself, in the very depths of her grief, was signally responsible for inventing and spreading this misinterpretation and lifting it to the level of myth. 

... These questions were answered when Mrs. Kennedy learned that the lone Oswald had killed her husband. She then complained, "He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It had to be some silly little communist. It even robs his death of any meaning." 

"Even before the misinterpretation had become current, she had intuitively grasped both its main features and the unfortunate fact that reality did not quite measure up to them. In her arrangements for the funeral and her selection of those speaking at the various memorial services, she ensured that the misinterpretation would be the dominant theme. Finally, by dictating to Theodore White the story that Kennedy had often ended his day listening to songs from his favorite musical, "Camelot," and by insisting that it must remain in White's article over the skepticism of his editors at Life magazine, she lifted the misinterpretation to the level of myth... 

... "Observers attentive to purely political signs -- votes, laws, opinion polls -- were inevitably late to notice this cultural shift. But a woman of fashion, who was also politically knowledgeable, was able to sense it from the surrounding atmosphere. ... 

"To their surprise, however, as the radicals [in the late 1960s] rushed forward with their battering rams, the liberals opened the gates and surrendered. How could they resist? If America had killed Kennedy, the liberalism was merely a smiley face painted on a System of racist and sexist oppression. ... For a decade or so after November 1963, liberalism and its institutions were convulsed by disputes, entering the maelstrom as pragmatic, patriotic, and problem-solving bodies, and emerging from it as perfectionist, utopian, anti-American ones, secretly anxious to punish the American majority for its sins rather than solve its problems."

"Immigration Economics" by Borjas coming in 2014

This year's immigration "debate" revealed once again that, with the exception of economists who actually study immigration, most economists don't know anything about the topic and don't even think that the basics of economics (e.g., supply and demand, ceteris paribus, etc.) apply to immigration.

Harvard immigration economist George J. Borjas will be publishing his magnum opus next June:

Immigration Economics 

George J. Borjas 

Millions of people—nearly 3 percent of the world’s population—no longer live in the country where they were born. Every day, migrants enter not only the United States but also developed countries without much of a history of immigration. Some of these nations have switched in a short span of time from being the source of immigrants to being a destination for them. International migration is today a central subject of research in modern labor economics, which seeks to put into perspective and explain this historic demographic transformation. 

Immigration Economics synthesizes the theories, models, and econometric methods used to identify the causes and consequences of international labor flows. Economist George Borjas lays out with clarity and rigor a full spectrum of topics, including migrant worker selection and assimilation, the impact of immigration on labor markets and worker wages, and the economic benefits and losses that result from immigration. 

Two important themes emerge: First, immigration has distributional consequences: some people gain, but some people lose. Second, immigrants are rational economic agents who attempt to do the best they can with the resources they have, and the same holds true for native workers of the countries that receive migrants. This straightforward behavioral proposition, Borjas argues, has crucial implications for how economists and policymakers should frame contemporary debates over immigration.

Future class-action lawsuits and apologies

One of the joys of cycling

The government has had a fair amount of effectiveness in recent years with safety campaigns against smoking and riding in a car without buckling your seatbelt. Other safety campaigns have seemingly evolved more organically, such as the backyard trampoline going out of fashion. 

On the other hand, it's considered smart, cool politics for politicians to encourage bicycle riding.

Bike paths with their own right-of-way are a wonderful urban amenity. When I lived in Santa Monica three decades ago, I rode the Venice Beach bikepath a couple of times per week. I used to ride to Chicago's Loop down the lakefront bikepath most weekends during the warmer months. I didn't ride anywhere else in Chicago, however, because I'm not nuts. 

Unfortunately, retrofitting bicycle lanes with right of way on top of existing street grids can be immensely expensive.

Moreover, the trend toward gentrification is even worse for safe cycling than the old trend toward suburbanization. Bicycling to school down broad Riverside Drive in leafy Sherman Oaks in the 1970s was dangerous, but, leaving aside improvements in helmets, bicycling down a 19th Century street in crowded Silver Lake in the 2010s is more so.

Yesterday evening I drove from the Arclight movie theater in Hollywood (we saw Nebraska) through Silver Lake, Mayor Garcetti's old council district, to the gentrifying arts district of Atwater Village, north of downtown, where my wife was seeing a production of Cyrano de Bergerac with friends. For various GPS-related reasons we took Franklin Blvd. through Silver Lake, which is a two-lane street barely wide enough for two cars to pass without smacking side mirrors. 

Being a trendy place, Franklin in Silver Lake has lots of bike lane markers painted on the asphalt. Being a trendy place, Franklin is also lined on both sides bumper-to-bumper with parked cars so there is no actual separate space for a bike lane whatsoever. To avoid hitting oncoming or parked cars, you have to drive with the passenger seat of your car directly over the bike lane logos. Councilman Garcetti perhaps could have gotten the city to outlaw parking on Franklin to make room for cyclists, but he liked getting re-elected, so he didn't. Bicycles and parking spaces are a zero sum game, so it's more fun to act Pro-Bycycle just by painting logos of a happy cyclist right in the middle of traffic.

Since, contra Freud, most human beings lack a death wish, the number of bicyclists was fortunately tiny, perhaps 0.2% of all traffic going down Franklin Blvd. Nonethless, the two cyclists who were on Franklin caused no end of anxiety. In most places in Los Angeles, cyclists (who primarily consist of guys with too many DUIs and/or illegal aliens) just ride on the sidewalks, on the sensible grounds that pedestrians are softer objects to crash into than SUVs. But in Silver Lake, there were actually two cyclists who took all the government's bike path propaganda seriously and insisted on riding in the street.

Driving through bicycle-friendly Silver Lake is kind of like getting stuck on a busy two lane highway in Mexico behind a truck full of chickens. The only way to get past the cyclists was to slow down to their 10 miles per hour. (Whatever happened to bicyclists dashing about on aerodynamic Italian racing bikes? Compared to modern bicycles, the Singing Nun rode a speedster.) Then, when a narrow gap opened in the oncoming traffic, floor it and charge out into the oncoming lane, then slash back in to your legal half of the street without, hopefully, nipping the front tire of the cyclist. Unlike the chicken truck, however, cyclists feel free to re-pass you when you are stuck at a redlight, so then you have to do it all over again.

I found these statistics on the website of a personal injury law firm, so I won't vouch for their authenticity. Still ...

- U.S. Department of Transportation statistics show that more than 8,000 bicyclists died and 700,000 were injured in motor vehicle-related crashes in the past decade. 

- More than one-third of all bicycle fatalities involve riders 5 to 20 years old, and 41 percent of nonfatal injuries occur to children under the age of 15. 

- Each year, more than 500,000 people in the US are treated in emergency rooms, and more than 700 people die as a result of bicycle-related injuries.

My recollection was that cycling became immensely fashionable in Los Angeles during the "ten speed" craze of the early 1970s. It was kind of a post-hippie thing. I insisted upon biking to high school everyday, and was only flattened by a car once. 

After awhile, though, people noticed that bad things sometimes happened to cyclists (for example, the head coach of the Lakers, Jack McKinney, suffered a near fatal head injury in a cycling accident during the 1979-80 championship season, and got fired). And automotive traffic continued to worsen as population density increased, so in the later 20th Century cycling became this thing that people paid lip service to, but didn't actually do, at least not to the extent they did in the 1970s.

Now, though, there is a lot of political pressure to encourage cycling, and negligible media attention on the dangers. But, this too shall pass.

A France-Israel-Saudi Arabia alliance?

One of the more interesting diplomatic developments in response to the Obama Administration's opening to Iran is the French Socialist government's sudden attempt to woo Israel and its de facto allies, the Persian Gulf Sunnis, out of the American orbit. 

From DebkaFile, a shadowy organization devoted to stirring the pot:

Hollande and Netanyahu to consider forming a joint French-Israeli-Arab front against Iran

DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis November 16, 2013

French President Francois Holland and Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius arrive in Jerusalem Sunday, Nov. 17. Their talks with Israel’s leaders are likely to determine how France, Israel and Saudi Arabia respond to the Obama administration’s current Middle East moves, with critical effect on the next round of nuclear talks taking place in Geneva Wednesday, Nov. 20 between six world powers and Iran. 

France will be given the option of aligning with the Middle East powers - Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt - which challenge President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry’s race for détente with Tehran. 

If he accepts this option, the next decision facing President Hollande will be whether, how and when this grouping is willing to consider resorting to military action to preempt a nuclear-armed Iran. This option has been abandoned by Washington, a decision succinctly articulated Tuesday, Nov. 12, by White House Press Secretary Jay Carney: 

“The American people do not want a march to war,” he told reporters. Therefore: “…spoiling diplomatic talks with Iran would be a march to war.” 

Ergo, opponents of a US-Iranian deal – Carney omitted mention of Iran’s military nuclear program to leave US negotiators a free hand for easy terms – are pushing for war. 

Hollande and Netanyahu will have to decide between them whether to create a joint French-Arab-Israeli military option to fill the gap left by Washington’s abdication from the war choice and, if so, whether, how and when to exercise it. 

Foreign Minister Fabius, whose vote torpedoed the original US proposal for Iran at the first Geneva conference, analyzed the implications of Obama’s policy in a lecture this week marking the 40th anniversary of the French Policy Planning Staff, which largely shapes Paris government foreign and defense policies. 

He said: “The United States seems no longer to wish to become absorbed by crises that do not align with its new vision of its national interest. Because nobody can take the place of the United States, this disengagement could create major crises left to themselves. A strategic void could be created in the Middle East, with widespread perception of Western indecision.” 

The self-evident corollary to this diagnosis is that by foregoing resistance to the US-Iranian understanding, France, Saudi Arabia and Israel would share America’s responsibility for the major crises erupting in the region, which none of them would be able to control.

In case you are wondering about the Socialist involvement, the French left was traditionally more pro-Israel than the French right. The French government was Israel's mentor in developing nuclear weapons in the 1950s. (Another example of 1950s France-Israel cooperation was their conspiracy, with Britain, to attack Egypt in 1956.) In the 1960s, however, the rightist Charles De Gaulle started to wonder, "Why is this in France's national interest?" So, De Gaulle pulled the plug on nuclear cooperation.  (However, recent rightist president Nicolas Sarkozy identified most closely with his Salonikan grandfather, so the Gaullist tradition of standoffishness toward Israel has been declining).

France would always love to regain its rightful status as the leading Great Power, but it may well be feeling the need for a partner in its challenge to the U.S. In the long run, France reviving its 1890-1917 alliance with Russia might make sense, especially as a Russia-Israel alliance is not wholly implausible. For example, the Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, a Moldovan-born leader of ex-Soviet Israeli voters, is a huge admirer of Vladimir Putin. 

By the way, Lieberman is now in his second stint as foreign secretary after an interruption due to a corruption scandal. Typically, countries appoint as foreign minister fairly suave, high-tone individuals, such as classical pianist Condi Rice or yachtsman John Kerry. In contrast, Lieberman is a former bouncer. It's kind of like America appointing as Secretary of State radio talk show host Michael Savage, which would be fun.

Now, I realize that we are accustomed to assuming that everything involving Israeli foreign policy is a matter of the utmost seriousness, and therefore my analogy that Israeli foreign policy has certain resemblances to American college football (You don't see Alabama in a hurry to sign a peace treaty with Florida, do you?) hasn't been widely popular. So, I expect even less agreement with my new analogy of Israeli foreign policy to professional wrestling, with Avigdor Lieberman as the heel you love to hate. But just keep it in the back of your mind ...

And if Netanyahu and Lieberman were to form an alliance with France and Russia, then the Israeli Left might eventually respond by making an alliance with its traditional cultural role model, economic superpower Germany. Germany hasn't swung all that much weight on the world stage since the Recent Unpleasantness (and instead must make do with manufacturing Audis, BMWs, Mercedes, Porsches, and VWs), but it's not so recent anymore. Bygones can suddenly turn into bygones, especially if Responsible Opinion in the media suddenly swings in that direction.

This notion that in the future, world politics will sort of be Israeli politics writ large may seem unrealistic, but the history of recent American Presidential campaigns (remember Newt Gingrich's surge in 2012? How about George H.W. Bush's sudden collapse in 1992?) suggests that it's not out of the question.

Bait and Switch, higher ed style

A press release from the University of Southern California:

USC leads nation in international students for 12th year 

By Merrill Balassone 

For the 12th year in a row, USC accounted for more international students than any other American institution of higher education, according to the annual Open Doors report released on Nov. 11 by the Institute of International Education. 

During the 2012-13 academic year, USC hosted 9,840 international students, according to the institute. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Purdue University were ranked second and third, respectively, in the report. 

Chinese students represented the largest segment of USC’s international population with 3,771. Students from India were the second-largest group with 1,806.

I suspect a sizable fraction of USC's foreign students have an image in their heads of what Southern California is like from viewing Baywatch reruns and the like. And then they arrive at USC in lovely South-Central L.A. ...

Australia's Camp of the Saints

The New York Times Magazine has a long adventure story by reporter Luke Mogelson about his infiltrating a group of mostly Iranian economic illegal immigrants in Indonesia who are trying to sneak into Australia by boat. 

Of course, in the article the Iranians are called "refugees" and "asylum-seekers" as if they were Niels Bohr in his sailboat slipping away from the Nazi occupation of Denmark. If you read the article closely, however, the Iranians mostly seem to be seeking refuge from the general cruddiness of life in a country chock full of Iranians:

A majority, I was surprised to discover, were not Afghan but Iranian. Most were from cities and the lower middle class. They were builders, drivers, shopkeepers, barbers. One man claimed to be a mullah; another, an accomplished engineer. Their reasons for leaving varied. They all complained about the government and its chokehold on their freedoms. A few said they had been targeted for political persecution. They bemoaned the economy. International sanctions — imposed on Iran for refusing to abandon its nuclear program in 2006 and later tightened — had crippled their ability to support their families. They were fathers who despaired of their children’s futures, or they wanted children but refused to have them in Iran. The most common word they used to describe their lives back home was na-aomid — hopeless.

The strong desire of Australian voters to avoid a slow-motion Camp of the Saints on their shores has been a major factor in elections in this century, one that the American national media have mostly professed bafflement about.

What never gets brought up in this long article is: "Why Australia?" I mean, aren't there other countries closer to Iran than Australia for Iranians to take "refuge" in?

The handy website Air Miles Calculator shows that the distance from Imam Khomeini International Airport in Tehran to the airport of Australia's largest metropolis, Sydney, is 8037 miles. 

How many countries are less than 8,000 miles from Tehran?

As its ancient history of civilization suggests, Iran is more or less in the center of the world, with the vast majority of all countries closer to it than the major immigrant destination cities of Australia. So, it would make more sense to ask how many national metropolises are more distant from Tehran than Sydney is.

The answer is just a small number of countries in the western or southern parts of Latin America and in the Pacific. Even Sao Paulo in southern Brazil is closer to Tehran than Sydney is.

Below is a sample of Great Circle distances from Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport to the airports of:

Baku, Azerbaijan: 355 miles
Grozny, Chechnya: 622

Dubai: 746
Beirut: 897

Tel Aviv: 964
Tashkent, Uzbekistan: 1,061

Istanbul: 1,270
Berlin: 2,176

Oslo: 2,464
Paris: 2,610
Dublin: 3,001
Lisbon: 3,274

Casablanca: 3,305

Seoul 4,088
Nuuk, Greenland: 4,407
Dakar, Senegal: 4,444

Johannesburg 4,522
Tokyo: 4,819
Cape Town, 5,240
Anchorage, Alaska: 5,664

New York: 6,133

Toronto: 6,165
Vancouver: 6,588

Sao Paulo: 7,557

Los Angeles: 7,606

Monterrey, Mexico: 7,820
Bogota: 7,951

Sydney: 8,037

Honolulu: 8,089
Mexico City: 8,184
Stanley, Falkland Islands: 8,869

Santiago, Chile: 9,183

Auckland, NZ: 9,350
Easter Island: 11,172

Whether Pitcairn Island is nearer or farther than Easter Island is hard to tell because it doesn't have an airport.

Every single one of the more than 40 Muslim-run countries in the world is closer than Australia. Of course, Iranians aren't terribly welcome in the Persian Gulf due to worries that they'd undermine the country. Here in Los Angeles, which is closer to Tehran than Sydney is, there are large numbers of Iranians. And while they are constantly striving to get their in-laws and second cousins into America, I've never noticed much desire among L.A.'s Persians for the gates to be flung open for the Iranian masses to follow in their footsteps. 

At the very end of the article is a single sentence that, perhaps, sheds some light on one technical reason for why Iranians want to go to Australia:

Moreover, unlike with Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, no agreement exists between Iran and Australia allowing for the forcible repatriation of asylum seekers whose applications are unsuccessful. 

But, the main reasons are that Australia is lightly populated, and set up by and still (mostly) run by Northern Europeans.