November 21, 2013

Knockout Game: What not to notice

Recently, Jewish leaders in New York have called attention to the pattern of black youths engaging in violent hate crimes against visibly Jewish people walking down the street in Brooklyn, such as a 78-year-old lady. This is finally bringing respectable media attention to the long-running phenomenon of Polar Bear Hunting or Knockout Game: random black hate crimes against whites without even bothering to steal anything, as happened to Matthew Yglesias in 2011.

Fortunately, NYC's NPR station is here to tell us what not to notice:
The Brian Lehrer Show 
Is the News Media Over-Hyping "The Knockout Game?" 
Thursday, November 21, 2013

Dr. Butts
"The Knockout Game" is a phenomenon where teens assault strangers by trying to knock them out with one punch. Is this a new trend? Is the media making it worse? Jeffrey Butts, director of the Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at CUNY assesses the patterns behind this story and how it's being addressed by the media. 
What We Learned  
It's All About the Video - Jeffrey Butts says while this is not a new phenomenon, it's getting attention now because there are videos. 
Are These Hate Crimes? - Butts says this is way too early to be attributing this to hate crime. Victims are wide-ranging.  
For Teens, This May Not Seem Like Big Deal - Butts suggested that for teens, if violence is a normal thing in your life, punching someone may seem like a minor infraction, and that the media attention is partly responsible for spreading this meme.  
Does Race Matter? - Several listeners called in to suggest that these crimes seem to racially motivated and mainly a black on white thing. Butts says, "In any kind of criminal behavior,  people tend to focus on the race and ethnicity of both the victim and the perpetrator. I think it's just inappropriate to draw inferences from a few cases or even from a dominant pattern because that encourages you to think about this as a racial behavior. I think it's more about the age of the perpetrators; it's probably more about social class."

Hitchens on Ed West's "The Diversity Illusion"

Peter Hitchens blogs in the Mail on Sunday:
A Review of 'The Diversity Illusion' by Ed West 
... There’s also this very important point (p.158): 
‘The universalist idea of the nation being a collection of people with ‘similar value’ or interests is itself less liberal than the traditional nation state. Clubs made up of people sharing similar interests are voluntary associations where membership depend on like-minded views.

‘But most people do not choose their nations, any more than they choose their families, and where they do, as in the United States, the society has to exert strong pressure to integrate. England’s self-image as a land of eccentrics may be rather exaggerated, but not entirely so; that being English meant not having to conform along political, cultural and religious lines was a strength derived from its traditional homogeneity. The bond of the nation, irrational though it was, was strong enough to make people submit to the will of the common good without the need for authoritarianism.

‘Vastly diverse countries, in contrast, must force that submission on the people, whether through legislation, illiberal policing or other areas of greater state intervention’.

Or social pressures to conform.

For example, consider a well-loved age of eccentricity and rapid change in culture and fashion: Britain in the 1960s, the era of John Lennon, John Cleese, Carnaby Street, Mrs. Peel, Austin Powers, and so forth. By the logic of modern diversity worship, this entire era couldn't have happened since Britain wasn't terribly diverse. How could Paul McCartney learn to sing like Little Richard without massive immigration of Little Richard's relatives? (And of course once Little Richard's relatives show up in large numbers, then it wouldn't be fair of McCartney to steal Little Richard's style, would it?)

Yet, it happened.

Thus, I'm not terribly surprised when rich Sixties Survivors in Britain show the gumption to speak up against mass immigration, whether for economic or cultural reasons:

- Roger Daltrey of the Who's recent denunciation of the Labour Party for selling out his old mates' jobs.

John Cleese saying "London is no longer an English city. That's how it got the Olympics."

Hitchens goes on:
And of course, who better-placed to construct a ‘benevolent’ new authoritarianism than the new Left, whose belief in their own goodness authorises them to do things which they would fight if others did them?

The connection between open borders and authoritarianism is a fascinating one, which I had until recently seen as a simple practical connection. West explains why it is so much more than that, and why an increasingly diverse society is likely also to be a narrower and more repressive one.

... The book is often mordant,   (for instance , on p.149) ‘All the arguments for multiculturalism- that people feel safer, more comfortable among people of the same group, and that they need their own cultural identity – are arguments against immigration, since English people must also feel the same. If people categorised as “White Britons” are not afforded that indulgence because they are a majority, do they attain it when they become a minority?’.

It is unusual in understanding the nature of the modern left, as so very few conservatives even begin to do. Because it is written by a child of the modern anti-racist age who has no colonial guilt, and was rightly brought up to believe that racial prejudice was a grave wickedness, is far less coy about the subject that the various liberal epiphanies on the same topic.

Please read it. It will, at the very least, help you to think about this important subject.  

What changed on 11/22/63

As I wrote last year in Taki's Magazine:
One counterintuitive reason for the tumult of the mid-to-late 60s [that followed JFK's assassination] was the evaporation of the long-simmering Protestant-Catholic divide which had provided a stable multigenerational anchor for social tensions. 
The instant enshrinement of the martyred Catholic president in the pantheon of American heroes did much to mollify Catholic resentments over being considered fringe Americans. (Back then, being thought a normal American was praise, not denigration.) Meanwhile, the enthusiastic adoption by Catholic women of oral contraceptives (which the FDA approved in 1960) reassured Protestants that they weren’t going to lose the War of the Cradle to the Vatican. 
In turn, this closure of the biggest fissure in the white majority opened a space for the Generation Gap. People need divisions around which to organize themselves, and in that mostly racially and ethnically homogeneous era, age differences briefly became central. (In more diverse cultures, such as 21st-century America, people cleave more to their kin.) 
Of course, one racial gap was crucial to the story of the 60s. The assassination of the domestically cautious JFK put the ambitious LBJ into power with a mandate to push through civil rights and welfare programs to punish the right-wing racists who had murdered Kennedy. Chief Justice Earl Warren expressed the hopes and dreams of the Establishment when he declaimed on 11/22/63, “A great and good President has suffered martyrdom as a result of the hatred and bitterness that has [sic] been injected into the life of our nation by bigots….” 
It turned out that JFK had been murdered by a communist who had defected to the Soviet Union. When Jackie Kennedy learned the unwelcome truth, she lamented, “He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It had to be some silly little communist. It robs his death of any meaning.” 
But that wasn’t a popular realization, so everybody who was anybody mostly ignored Lee Harvey Oswald and went on acting as if it had been Strom Thurmond up in the Texas Book Depository with the mail-order rifle. 
President Johnson announced his Great Society in May 1964 and signed the Civil Rights Act in July. The era’s first black riot followed a couple of weeks later. LBJ won by a landslide in November, and vast riots ensued in Watts in 1965 and Detroit in 1967. 

November 20, 2013

The Conspiracy Theories of 2013

Much of the appeal of conspiracy theories is that they tend to be more complicated than the truth, thus allowing you to show off that you are the smartest guy in the room. For example, I would imagine that Oliver Stone felt pretty proud of himself after creating a state-of-the-art three-hour movie showing that JFK was assassinated by a conspiracy of both the entire military-industrial complex and a clique of eccentric French Quarter homosexuals, including Joe Pesci in an apricot-colored toupee as a defrocked monk upon whom the military-industrial complex's vast plot depends. (I probably shouldn't have to warn you about Joe Pesci clips by now, but Joe's language is NSFW).

They said it couldn't be done, but Ollie did it!

Similarly, consider today's popular conspiracy theories about American social realities. For example, what's the explanation for the high crime rate and low intellectual achievement rate seen among African-Americans? 

The less than scintillating Occam's Razor answer is simply: Well, that seems to be kind of how blacks on average are.

Visible Invisible Knapsack
I mean, after all, it's been like that for a long time, it's like that everywhere in America, and it's like that most places in the world. Billions and trillions of dollars have been spent to Close the Gap, but, year after year, nothing much happens.

But, what's the fun of that

Instead, the rewards come for people who dream up Invisible Knapsacks * and Stereotype Threat and White Privilege, all controlled by the shadowy White Male Power Structure. Concocting the most baroquely implausible conspiracy theory proves you are the smartest guy in the room.
--------
By the way, I don't get the Invisible Knapsack metaphor. I assumed it was saying that blacks were weighted down by invisible knapsacks on their backs (just think of how high LeBron could jump without that invisible knapsack holding him down). But, my assumption appears to be backward -- the invisible knapsack instead lifts whites people up because it contains an anti-gravity device. Or something. To be honest, I'm not really clear on the concept. But, whatever it is, it seems to be popular.

CBC: The g Factor glass isn't half full, it's half empty!

From the Canadian Broadcasting Company last year:
IQ myth debunked by Canadian researchers 
Human intelligence consists of different components, researchers say 
Dec 19, 2012  
A study from researchers at Western University say that there is little evidence for the concept of general intelligence. Instead, human intelligence is made up of multiple and distinct components. 
An individual's IQ score — long-held as the standard measure of human intelligence — is not a valid way of assessing brainpower, say Canadian researchers. 
A team from Western University is debunking the concept of general intelligence, saying that there is no single component that can account for how a person performs various mental and cognitive tasks.  
Instead, human intelligence is made up of multiple and distinct components, each of which must be looked at independently. 
'We have shown categorically that you cannot sum up the difference between people in terms of one number.' 
The study, published today in the journal Neuron, included the largest online intelligence survey on record, which recruited more than 100,000 participants. 
... The results showed that how people performed at the tests could only be explained with at least three distinct components: short-term memory, reasoning and verbal ability. 
No single measure, such as an intelligence quotient, or IQ score, could account for how well, or how poorly, people did.
IQ test: Which way's table tilted?
The concept of a general intelligence factor dates back to at least 1904, when psychologist Charles Spearman suggested that there was a correlation between seemingly unrelated tasks, such as memorization, reading and performing arithmetic. 
He called this link the 'g' factor, or general factor, and proposed that is accounted for an individual's performance across different mental tasks. Various intelligence tests, using a wide variety of methods, were developed throughout the 20th century as a way to evaluate children, students, military recruits and even potential hires. ...
"We have shown categorically that you cannot sum up the difference between people in terms of one number, and that is really what is important here," said Owen, adding that further tests still need to be done.

Democrats ponder how best to help GOP stab American workers in the back

Five times in this century, Republican special interests, such as plantation owners, have pushed for amnesty to reward past illegal immigrants and to encourage future ones. One big problem the Republican brain trust has repeatedly faced, however, is that the word "amnesty" polls poorly among law-abiding American citizens. So, they've preferred hand-waving words like "reform" to hide their amnesty plan.

Why they come here
But, that, automatically opens the door to the Democrats redefining the essence of the "reform" as a "pathway to citizenship," a bit of high-minded sounding rhetoric that polls well.

Clearly, illegal immigrants come here because they love the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.

Coincidentally, "pathway to citizenship" has the advantage of increasing the number of Democratic voters in the middle run. 

After more than year of Democrats advising Republicans that putting illegal aliens on the path to citizenship was -- would we lie to you? -- in the best electoral interests of GOP politicians, enough Republican House members have apparently put their foot down to kill the chances of the Path to Citizenship passing in the next six weeks. 

But the future is long. So, now, Democrats are talking about amnesty without a path to citizenship (at least not in this bill). After all, now they tell us, illegal aliens don't care about being American citizens. They just want to live here. So, the Democrats are now falling back on Plan B: amnesty with helotry. This would drive an even bigger wedge between the interests of GOP politicians and the interests of voters, so it could be a slam dunk in Congress.

From the NYT:
Illegal Immigrants Divided Over the Importance of Citizenship 
By JULIA PRESTON 
Glendy Martínez is waiting anxiously to see if Congress will ever pass legislation to allow immigrants like her without papers to stay in the country legally. But frankly, she says, she does not care if it will include any promise of citizenship. 
With the earnings from her job in a Houston hair salon, Ms. Martínez, 30, is supporting one child born in Texas and three others she left behind in her home country, Nicaragua. 
“So many people back there depend on those of us who are here,” she said. “It would be such a help if we could work in peace and go back sometimes to see our children.” 
As President Obama looks for a way to salvage a broad overhaul of the immigration system, he opened the door this week to a piecemeal series of smaller bills as a way of getting past the objections of the Republican-run House, which refused to take up the comprehensive measure that the Senate passed in June. 
But as far as Ms. Martínez and many other immigrants are concerned, one of House Republicans’ sharpest disagreements with the Senate and the White House — over a path to citizenship for those here illegally — should not be that hard to resolve. 
“For many undocumented people, citizenship is not a priority,” said Oscar A. Chacon, executive director of the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities, a network of immigrant organizations that includes many foreigners here without papers. “What they really care about is a solution that allows them to overcome their greatest vulnerabilities.” 
The Senate bill includes a 13-year pathway for 11.7 million illegal immigrants that ends with a chance to naturalize. President Obama and other supporters of that measure insist that any alternative would create a disenfranchised underclass. Many House Republicans reject the Senate path as rewarding immigrants who broke the law. But a growing number of Republicans say they remain ready to work on immigration and could consider legalization, if it did not involve any direct route to citizenship. 
For foreigners like Ms. Martínez — those who cannot get a driver’s license in most states and live with gnawing worries about being fired or deported — that would be enough. They aspire to become Americans but would easily settle for less if they could work and drive legally, and visit relatives outside the United States. ...
In the House, several dozen conservatives reject any legalization, calling it amnesty for outlaws. 

Only controversial (i.e., crazy) people call it "amnesty." But if it's not going to be a "a path to citizenship" anymore, and we're all agreed to never ever call it "amnesty," what do we call it?
But Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio and other House leaders continue to urge Republicans to show they can fix an immigration system that is broken. Many Republicans say legalization, along with tough border and workplace enforcement, is the only practical way to deal with unauthorized immigrants who have settled in the country. 
Mr. Boehner said the House will take up the issues next year in smaller bills framed by principles being devised by the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Representative Robert W. Goodlatte of Virginia. Mr. Goodlatte has said that he wants to “find the appropriate legal status for unlawful immigrants,” but that he would not grant them any special path to becoming Americans. Mr. Obama on Tuesday told The Wall Street Journal in an interview conducted before business executives, “If they want to chop that thing up into five pies, as long as all five pieces get done, I don’t care what it looks like.” 
Republicans point to low rates of naturalization among some legal immigrants — 36 percent among Mexicans who are eligible, according to the Pew Research Center — to say that citizenship is not vital for those groups. Some Republicans also worry that by offering citizenship, they could be creating millions of future Democratic voters. 
Several Republicans are trying to come up proposals their caucus could accept. Mr. Goodlatte and the majority leader, Representative Eric Cantor, also from Virginia, have been working on a bill with a path to citizenship limited to young undocumented immigrants. 
Representative Darrell Issa of California, the powerful chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said he had been writing a hybrid bill that would give illegal immigrants a six-year provisional status, allowing those with family ties here to naturalize eventually through regular channels, and creating a long-term guest worker program for others.

Thanks, Darrell.
Representative Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida is proposing earned citizenship for a broader group. And three Republicans have signed on to a bill by House Democrats with a pathway mirroring the Senate’s. 
Speaking on Tuesday to Hispanic evangelicals in Washington, Representative Luis V. Gutierrez, a Democrat from Illinois who is an ardent defender of a broad overhaul, urged supporters to be ready to compromise with Republicans and accept legalization only for some immigrants to protect them from deportation.

Well, if Rep. Gutierrez is for it, it's gotta be good.
Among Latinos, a growing electorate that both parties want to court, sentiment is strong. In a recent national survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, 67 percent of Latinos said immigrants here illegally should be allowed to become citizens if they met certain requirements, while 17 percent said they should only become legal residents.

So, the Democrats can just use it as a way to keep stirring up racial animus: "Those evil old white men don't think you are good enough to become American citizens!" etcetera etcetera You might think that Republicans would eventually catch on, but, evidently, this gag never gets old.

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.

November 19, 2013

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.

November 18, 2013

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.

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.

November 17, 2013

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


of the February, 1977 edition of National Lampoon