February 5, 2014

Time: Chinese woman says calling Amy Chua racist is racist

Chen, not Chua
From Time Magazine:
Why the Tiger Mom’s New Book Makes You Nervous 
When it comes to discussing success in America, we're still afraid to talk about race 
By Vivia Chen Jan. 31, 2014
   
Amy Chua is an easy whipping post. After all, she’s the iconic Tiger Mom who blithely bragged about her extreme parenting methods in her book 2011 Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Overnight, she became the archetype of the nightmare Asian mom, hell bent on raising uber-achievers at all cost. 
I thought Battle Hymn was a humorous, breezy read, but many people (who probably never read the book) were outraged. ... This time, though, Chua is condemned not just as an arrogant elitist and abusive mother but something else: racist. 
Suketu Mehta writes in TIME that the book represents “the new racism—and I take it rather personally.” Mehta adds that “the language of racism in America has changed . . . It’s not about skin color anymore—it’s about ‘cultural traits.’” 
In a follow-up to Mehta’s article, Anna Holmes argues that the “new racism” in The Triple Package is just a continuation of “the same old racism.” Her verdict on the book: “It’s the same old garbage, in a slightly different, Ivy League-endorsed disguise.” 
The tenor of a lot of the criticism has been angry, hostile and extremely personal (Chua seems to get singled out much more so than her husband). And, I think, racist. The fact that some of the slings come from minority group members doesn’t make the criticisms less vicious. 
What gives the attacks a distinct racist tinge is that Chua is reduced to a stereotype—a Dragon Lady, of sorts. This time, though, the Dragon Lady is not the evil seducer of old Fu Manchu movies, but the new evangelist of racial superiority. Maureen Callahan writes in the New York Post: “[Chua] used her heritage and all the worst stereotypes of Chinese women — cold, rigid Dragon Ladies.” ...
Chen is the creator and chief blogger of the Careerist and a senior reporter at the American Lawyer. The views expressed are solely her own.
   

The NYT ramps up Phase 2 of immigration ploy

Once the GOP agrees to amnesty, they will self-emasculate their base's favorite moral argument: "What part of 'illegal' don't you understand?"

But that won't get the media to stop telling Hispanics that Republicans are evil white men who hate Latinos because look how they didn't give the undocumented the vote! That campaign of anti-white agitation will then go on for years until the GOP gives in on The Path to Citizenship, too.

Thus, the New York Times prepares Phase 2 of the immigration campaign:

From Shadows to Citizenship

INTRODUCTION

All In for Citizenship rallyImmigration activists last spring called for a special path to citizenship. Alex Wong/Getty Images
One of the contentious points in negotiations over comprehensive immigration reform is a House Republican proposal that would allow for a form of legal status to immigrants who are in the United States illegally, but would not include a clear path to citizenship.
But is it sensible to make citizenship hard to obtain for someone who is allowed to live and work here after years of residence? Would it be in the national interest for them to have the rights and responsibilities of citizenship?
READ THE DISCUSSION »

Time: Amy Chua is racist (as are Samuel Huntington, Thomas Sowell, Adam Carolla, Madison Grant, Jason Richwine, and some lady from the Congo)

In Time Magazine, an Indian-American novelist, author of Maximum City, a book about Bombay (which he resents calling by its new Hindu nationalist name of Mumbai), lists numerous people whose racism you should be shocked by. Below is Mehta's article, with his Google Voice annotations.
The 'Tiger Mom' Superiority Complex 
By Suketu Mehta 
From time to time, every Indian American finds an email in his or her inbox, wearing a font of many colors, like the one my grandfather once sent me: "Take a Pride--Being an Indian. 38% of Doctors in U.S.A. are Indians. 36% of NASA employees are Indians. 34% of MICROSOFT employees are Indians.

And 100% of the CEOs of Microsoft! Boo-yah! In-di-a! In-di-a! In-di-a!
"India invented the Number System. Decimal Point was also invented by India. Sanskrit is the most suitable language for computer software ..." 

Of course, that was just my grandfather's ethnocentrism speaking. Not me!
On my desk now is a book-length version of such an email: The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America, by Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld. You may remember Chua as the "Tiger Mom" whose 2011 memoir about the rigors of Chinese parenting set off waves of anxiety among aspirational American parents who had been raised with Dr. Spock's permissive child-rearing attitudes. Her new book, co-authored with her husband, widens its aim, purporting to explain why not just Asians (like Chua) but also seven other groups--Cubans, Jews (like Rubenfeld), Indians (like me), Nigerians, Mormons, Iranians and Lebanese--are superior when it comes to succeeding in America. 
The book claims that these groups thrive because of three traits: a superiority complex, insecurity and impulse control. The ones lacking the "Triple Package" are African Americans, Appalachians, Wasps and pretty much everybody else. 
Does such thinking shock you?

I should hope so.
If not, it may be because it has become so insidiously commonplace over the past decade as a new strain of racial, ethnic and cultural reductivism has crept into the American psyche and public discourse. Whereas making sweeping observations about, say, African-American or Hispanic culture--flattering or unflattering--remains unthinkable in polite company, it has become relatively normal in the past 10 years to comment on the supposed cultural superiority of various "model minorities." I call it the new racism--and I take it rather personally. 
I am an American, Calcutta born. I'm writing a book about immigrants in New York, dedicated to my two American sons. I want them to know why we came here and how we found our place in this new land. I want them to know about the teachers at the Catholic school in Queens who called me a "pagan," and the boy there who welcomed me to the school by declaring, "Lincoln shoulda never let 'em off the plantations," and the landlord who welcomed us to the country by turning off the electricity.

In other words, the most important family memories that my sons are having inculcated in them is that they are Victims of Whites. That's the most important legacy to instruct your children in in the 21st Century.
I also want them to know why their family did well in the end. We worked hard, yes, and we read books and went to the right schools and are "well settled," as our relatives back in India describe us. But we also benefited from numerous advantages--from cultural capital built up over generations to affirmative action to an established network of connections in our new country--none of which had anything to do with racial, ethnic or cultural superiority.

None, I tell you, none!

By the way, why do we Indian immigrants get affirmative action? I could never figure that out. Are you people crazy or something? I'd say thanks, but then you might start figuring out how nuts it is.
When my family went to America, we left behind a system in which people are often denigrated because of their caste, religion, language or skin color.

Not us, actually. The Mehtas are Gujarati diamond merchants from Bombay. Perhaps we're Jains (who dominate the diamond trade) or maybe Parsis (like conductor Zubin Mehta) or Brahmins or merchant caste, but whatever Amy Chua-type Market Dominant Minority I am, I try to keep my privileged ethnicity obscure here in the Colonies States so I can be the Voice of All India to you poor dumb Americans. It's a living.
The U.S., of course, has its own deeply troubled history with regard to race, but its path has tended toward more equality. 
Recently, though, the language of racism in America has changed, though the plot remains the same. It's not about skin color anymore--it's about "cultural traits." And it comes cloaked in a whole lot of social-science babble. The new racialists are too smart to denigrate particular cultures. Instead, they come at things the other way. They praise certain cultures, hold them up as exemplary. The implication--sometimes overt, sometimes only winked at--is that other cultures are inferior and this accounts for their inability to succeed.

When everybody knows it's really their Bad Karma.
The U.S.--like Brazil or England--likes to think it has moved beyond race. After all, we elected a black President, twice. But in reality, the terrain of race-baiting has simply shifted. The condescension once aimed squarely at African Americans now also claims as its targets Latinos, Muslims and--in a novel twist--large swaths of whites. And the people doing the condescending might be black or brown themselves. 
A Congolese immigrant whom I met in the course of researching my book told me about the African Americans she knows at the supermarket where she works. "We are really different," she said about her community, as opposed to African Americans. "They don't have African values. They don't have the values to be black." 
I asked her what that means. 
"To be black," she explained, "means you get married and you don't have children before." The American blacks at her supermarket, she said, need to go to college. "They ask if you want to have marijuana. It's just normal for them. It's easy for them to say that 'My ancestors were oppressed.'" 

Let me be clear that I, Suketu Mehta, didn't say this. An extremely black woman from the Congo said it, not me. She may have been an extremely black woman lesbian pre-op transgender immigrant from the Congo for all I know. In other words, don't blame me for what she said. I'm a person of color myself. I would never ever think that maybe she had a point about African Americans, with whom I stand in utter solidarity from my Manhattan high rise apartment provided to me free by NYU, where -- did I mention? -- I'm a professor. I'm not endorsing the shameful thing she said, I'm just reporting it so we can all cluck in approbation over it.
A book like The Triple Package, even if it takes pains to argue in nonracial terms, is an example of this sort of ethnocentric thinking writ large. And it is only the latest in a long line of books--spanning more than a century--arguing for the superiority of this or that American group over others. The roots of alleged superiority have changed over time from race to class to IQ to religion and now to culture. 
In 1916 Madison Grant wrote The Passing of the Great Race, which purported to demonstrate the racial and cultural superiority of Northern Europeans over Southern Europeans.

I'm annoyed that Time wouldn't give me the column inches to work in a clever reference to Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby here.
The book was influential in drumming up popular support for passage of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which barred Asians from immigrating to the U.S. and established quotas for Southern and East Europeans, to keep out Jews.

Which caused the Holocaust.
Decades later, an influential 1959 article by Bernard Rosen

Presumably, not a Jew. I mean, I wouldn't passively-aggressively quote some utterly obscure Jewish person saying something politically incorrect 55 years ago, now would I? I mean, who would write a gigantic passive-aggressive put-on like this article appears to be? I'd have to have grown up in some place like Queens and really resent Jewish domination of the New York literary world to go out of my way to find somebody who isn't a famous Jewish thinker to poke fun at for my own private satisfaction while you can't prove I'm criticising Jewish thinking. Are you implying that this article is just a hoax to see what I could get away with without any editors at Time actually getting the joke?

I mean, Rosen could be a Teuton, right?
declared that "Protestants, Jews and Greeks place a greater emphasis on independence and achievement training than southern Italians and French-Canadians." ...

And that was obviously wrong because TBD
This line of argument expanded in the 21st century. In 2004 Samuel Huntington, the Harvard professor who became famous for his book The Clash of Civilizations, warned against Latino culture in a Foreign Policy cover story bearing the title "José, Can You See?" In his book published the following year, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, he explained the differences between Anglo and Latino culture by quoting a Texas entrepreneur on "Hispanic traits ... that 'hold us Latinos back': mistrust of people outside the family; lack of initiative, self-reliance, and ambition; low priority for education; acceptance of poverty as a virtue necessary for entrance into heaven." 

Of course, that's wrong because the 50 million Latinos in America provide only two members of the Forbes 400 while the few million South Asians provide six members. Boo-yah! ... Which just shows how racist America is.
In 2009 an article by Jason Richwine

Shouldn't somebody fire that guy?
, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute

Up to a point, Lord Copper.
, caught the attention of my people with its title, "Indian Americans: The New Model Minority." East Asians continue to excel in the U.S., he noted, but Indians are clearly the latest and greatest model. Why? "Exhibit A is the spelling bee." Success in spelling and other similar cognitive tasks, according to Richwine, proves that we are smarter than whites as well as Ashkenazi Jews--a happy finding for my father, who spent a lifetime in the diamond market, where they have a big presence. Richwine's conclusion: immigration policy should favor these model minorities over, say, Mexicans. 

Obviously, I, Suketu Mehta, utterly disagree with this finding. But I think you should know about it ... just so you can be mad at Richwine. I'm not trying to plant any ideas in your head or anything about how brilliant we Indians are. I'm totally not into saying that us Indian Americans are smarter than you Ashkenazi Jews, but I think you should know that this horrible Jason Richwine person said it. Get 'im. For me. For the children!
Then there is Stanford University's Thomas Sowell, who in Migration and Cultures: A World View identified six model "middleman minorities" who exemplify the entrepreneurial virtues he thinks the U.S. desperately needs. Last year he took the argument to another level, writing that there are some cultures that are just incompatible with Western values, primarily (surprise!) Muslim culture. 

Where are these maniacs coming from recently? Back in the 1970s you'd never hear any vicious racist nonsense like this! What? Sowell's just repeating his 1978 book Ethnic America?

Who knew?
These bromides don't just come thundering down from the ivory tower. They're all around us in casual conversation about group accomplishment and group blame. Typical was a recent podcast by the comedian Adam Carolla,

I heard that Carolla grew up in practically the same neighborhood as that horrible Sailer person.
in which he interviewed San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. Newsom noted that half of Latino and African-American families in California don't have access to a checking account or ATM. 
"What's wrong with them?" asked Carolla. "I want to know why those two groups don't have access ... Are they flawed? ... Do Asians have this problem? ... They were put in internment camps. Are they at the check-cashing places?" 

They own them. No, I didn't say that.
"Look at the history," Newsom responded. "It's naive to suggest that those things don't matter." 
"How about the Jews?" asked Carolla. "No problems in the past? ... Why are the Jews doing well? ... Why do some groups do so much better? I'll tell you why: they have a family who puts an emphasis on education." He may have been speaking lightly, but Carolla's words show how easily the line can blur between cultural praise and cultural denigration. 
Of Ethnicity and Reality 
... The new American racism, however, is turning the clock backward. While Chua and Rubenfeld are not the only ones peddling this pernicious line of thought, their book is likely to make them prominent spokespeople for it. So it's worth taking a close look at the "evidence" they marshal for their argument. Too often they--and their compatriots--ignore the realities of American history to make their half-baked theories stick. 
The authors attempt to barricade themselves against charges of racism by protesting that the Triple Package has nothing to do with race or IQ; it's about ethnicity. So not all blacks are losers--look at Nigerians and Liberians! They are so well represented in the Ivy League! But the authors fail to acknowledge that Africans and Afro-Caribbeans are beneficiaries of affirmative action, won through the civil rights struggles of African Americans.

Which makes what I just said about quotas A-OK. We shall overcome ... Sing it!
What's more, African Americans are not in a bad way because of lack of racial pride

In fact, have you noticed that African Americans seem to have plenty of self-esteem? I'm just sayin' ...
or a problem with their impulses.

I would never say that.
Their challenges as a community trace back centuries; they were brought here in chains, their women raped

Not by me, personally, but your tastes may vary.
and their families deliberately broken. 

Take that, Chua! Let no one ever say that a Chinawoman can out BS an Indiaman.
This is what President Obama was talking about in his remarks after the Trayvon Martin verdict

That Zimmerman guy, I have to say, a year of hiding indoors really did his complexion a world of good. "Wheat-colored" we'd call it in the marriage market personal ads.
, when he said, "I think it's important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn't go away." 

Because History!

Look at all those instructive historical epics, such as 12 Years a Slave, Django Unchained, and Lee Daniels' The Butler. It used to be that blacks caused problems for themselves because of white racism, but now the country has elected some nonentity comfortable-in-his-own-skin Constitutional scholar President because he's black so awesome, so now ... Because History.

In summary, don't blame me: Us Indians just got here!
Time and again, when examining the claims of the new racialists, we find other, deeper, often more complex explanations for why the children of some groups do better than others. 
As Nancy Foner, a leading immigration scholar

Here's the extended Foner family family tree of leftist academics and Marxist labor organizers. Three of her four Foner uncles were blacklisted during the McCarthy era. By the way, I was hoping that Nancy would introduce me to the movie star Gyllenhaal Siblings, but she explained that they are her cousin Eric's ex-wife's children by her second husband, so I'll just have to figure out another way to get my screenplay into Jake's' hands: Maybe I'll tell him, "'The Prince of Persia' changed my life!" D'ya think?
, points out in an essay, "Today, the way East Asian--as opposed to black or Hispanic--immigrants fit into New York's racial hierarchy makes a difference in the opportunities they can provide their children." Because they are not black, she notes, "East Asian (and white) immigrants face less discrimination in finding a place to live and, in turn, send their children to school." That translates into greater access to heavily white neighborhoods with good public schools.

Well, that clears that up. For example, that's why Stuyvesant is about 70% Asian: it's near Wall Street, which is heavily white.
Moreover, even if they attend school with native-born blacks and Latinos, they do not feel a bond of race with native minorities--making them less likely to become part of a peer culture found among some disaffected inner-city black and Latino youth.  

In other words, Asians youths are less likely to join criminal gangs. So, it doesn't have anything to do with culture.
Cubans, meanwhile, are in favor over other Latinos among the new racialists, since they appear to do better in America than groups like Mexicans. But as City University of New York's Philip Kasinitz, an expert on ethnic assimilation, notes, "If Mexicans threw out the top 10% of their population into America, you'd be singing a different tune about Mexicans."

Maybe we should try only taking the top 10% of Mexicans? Speaking of Talented Tenth Mexicans, maybe Alfonso Cuaron would like to direct my screenplay as his Gravity follow-up? I could add some long tracking shots for Lubezki to film. Heck, I could make the plot about the oppression of illegal alien Mexicans in a post-apocalyptic England. What was that movie about, anyway? But I don't care: if Cuaron wants to direct, I'll slap in a maid, gardener, busboy, whatever. I'm cool.
And among Cubans, there's a subset that hasn't done well: the "Marielitos," who immigrated in 1980 when Fidel Castro emptied the island's prisons and told the inmates they were free to head to America. They were much darker in complexion than the first wave of Cubans, and they have not done anywhere near as well as their light-complected compatriots. What does this suggest? First, that if you were doing well in the country you're leaving, you'll do well in the country you're going to, and vice versa. Second, that lighter-skinned people tend to fare better than darker-skinned people when they immigrate to the U.S.,

Or any country ... Except for those damn Tamils. Have you ever noticed how pushy Tamils are? Don't they know their place?
even if they're from the same country.

Here's something I didn't actually know about the Marielitos until I started getting just plain hateful emails after my Time article appeared: a sizable fraction of the Marielitos were career criminals or lunatics emptied out of Cuba's penal institutions by Castro and dispatched on boats as a giant middle finger guffaw at the expense of Castro's archenemy.

I'll grant you that's not common knowledge, but apparently there is this obscure art film called Scarface directed by the exquisitely tasteful Brian De Palma, written by the Oxford professor of history Oliver Stone, and starring an understated character actor named Al Pacino as Tony Montana that obliquely referred to that history:
But how is some Indian like me to supposed to know about obscure American stuff like that? It's racist to expect Indian immigrants to know American history just because we're paid to write long articles in Time Magazine about it. Do you know anything about Indian history? I sure don't. I mean, You sure don't.
What about Jews? Scholars like Stephen Steinberg in The Ethnic Myth have pointed out that the success of immigrant Jews was largely due to the fact that they arrived in the U.S. with "industrial experience and concrete occupational skills" well suited to the booming urban economies of the new world.

That's why so many Jewish-Americans these days have good paying jobs as factory foremen.
Not, as Chua and Rubenfeld posit, because "Jews maintained for millennia the idea that they were God's chosen people."

Well, that clears that up once and for all.
... Lastly, what shall we make of Indians--who, aside from Chinese, are perhaps the new racialists' favorite model minority? Indians in America are, as Chua and Rubenfeld note, "by any number of measures, the most successful Census-tracked ethnic group in the country." 
Well, if Indians are so great, what explains India? The country is a sorry mess, with the largest population of poor, sick and illiterate people in the world, its economy diving, its politics abysmally corrupt. For decades, those who could afford to get out did. The $1,000 that it takes to purchase a one-way ticket to the U.S. is about a year's salary for the average Indian. If India shared a border with the U.S. and it were possible for its poorest residents to cross over on foot, we would fast cease to be the model minority, and talk-show hosts would rail against us just as they do against Mexicans. 

You mean to say that legal restrictions on immigration are actually good for the American public? Maybe we shouldn't take the rest of the world's "huddled masses?" No, I'm just kidding. U-S-A! U-S-A! Statue of Liberty FTW!
The groups Chua and Rubenfeld and the other new racialists typically pick out as success stories are almost without fail examples of self-selection. Forty-two percent of Indians in the U.S. ages 25 and older have a postgraduate degree. But only about 20% of those they've left behind in the motherland even graduate from high school, and 26% of the population is illiterate. It's the same with Nigerians: the ones who are here represent a vastly richer and better-educated subset of the country's population as a whole. 

So Africans really aren't that smart on average? Is that what I'm trying to tell you? No, absolutely not. You should be ashamed of yourself for even thinking that. What kind of racist are you?
Further, the authors pay almost no attention to the role of networking, which accounts for so much of the success of groups like Jews, Cubans and Indians. Part of the reason so many immigrant groups thrive is that when they arrive in the U.S., they already have an uncle who runs a store and cousins who are tutors, doctors or lawyers who can help them negotiate the new country. 
When my family immigrated in 1977, we didn't do well because of delayed gratification or cultural superiority or a chip on our shoulder. We did well because my uncle in Detroit, an engineer, brought us over on the family-reunification bill, not in shackles or in steerage. When my father started his diamond business on 47th Street in Manhattan, there was a network of Indian diamond merchants who could show him the ropes.

Oh, come now, the diamond industry is notoriously meritocratic and wide open to any individual with a little moxie.
My sons, in turn, will benefit from my connections. 
Much of The Triple Package focuses, naturally enough, on immigrants in New York City--then and now the immigrant capital of the country, if not the world. So you could profitably browse a gold mine of a book just put out by the NYC department of city planning, The Newest New Yorkers, a compendium of figures about the diverse groups that make up my hometown. 
Chinese Americans in New York City, it turns out, earn less than other groups lacking the Triple Package. The median household income of Chinese in the city ($42,766) is lower than that of Ecuadoreans ($46,126), Haitians ($48,175) and Pakistanis ($50,912). The New York City group with the highest percentage of high school graduates isn't Chinese or Indians; it's Ukrainians (94.4%). But rarely are we treated to encomiums about the cultural superiority of the Borscht Mom.

Like the Brooklyn Nets are owned by a simple Slavic farm boy who was just better than anybody else at growing potatoes. Or something. I wasn't really paying attention. I leave that to bad people like Amy Chua. Did I mention how much you should hate her?
America's Real Exceptionalism 
The pity is that this book, and this entire line of argument, is taken seriously--among my relatives

Whom I totally disagree with.
Ha-ha-ha
 , for instance, --when all the scholars I've consulted laugh at it. 
"Every one of the premises underlying the theory of the Triple Package is supported by a well-substantiated and relatively uncontroversial body of empirical evidence," the authors assert. "Give me a break," said Foner, who is one of the authorities cited in the endnotes. "There is a large body of literature showing that the most important factor predicting success among the children of immigrants is parents' human capital." That is: skills and education, from family to family and individual to individual. 

And family has nothing to do with culture. Or genes. Neither nurture nor nature matters. Don't even think about children inheriting genes from their parents. No Indian has ever thought about blood ancestry. You can't hear this Indian thinking about biological inheritance. I'm putting my fingers in my ears and chanting so you can't hear me think about that.

Nyah Nyah Nyah.
 

February 4, 2014

The Atlantic: Beards are racist

From The Atlantic:
The Racially Fraught History of the American Beard 
“Washes and razors for foofoos," scoffed Walt Whitman. But the story of 19th-century facial hair is more tangled than modern nostalgists may realize.  
SEAN TRAINOR

Let me declare what many already know: 2013 was a landmark year for men’s facial hair. From flamboyant beards to the proliferation of “old-fashioned” shops, evidence of the trend abounds, embracing groups as diverse as the Boston Red Sox, the men of Movember, and the Robertsons of Duck Dynasty. In dens of hipsterdom, one can hardly throw a PBR without hitting a waxed moustache. ... 
But one characteristic distinguishes this revival from previous ones: Today’s facial-hair enthusiasts share an affection for the ornate practices of the 1800s—the exuberant beards and ostentatious moustaches, as well as the elegance and “manliness” of the shops where those styles were cultivated.
What follows is the lost story of American facial hair. Like countless other histories, it is rife with contradictions. It begins with white Americans at the time of the Revolution who derided barbering as the work of “inferiors.” It continues with black entrepreneurs who turned it into a source of wealth and prestige. And it concludes with the advent of the beard—a fashion born out of desperation but transformed into a symbol of masculine authority and white supremacy.

Then there's a whole bunch of stuff about black barbershops (it doesn't seem to occur to the author that lots of white people lived in areas without many black barbers) and how Indians can't grow beards (according to stereotype, of course). I can't quite follow the theory, but then there's:
"(Incidentally, Victorian Englishmen were going through a beard revival of their own at that time, though for different reasons.)"

Rather than promoting two complicated theories of how Americans and Brits came up with the same look at about the same time for separate reasons involving African-Americans and American Indians in America but presumably not in England, isn't it more plausible that provincial Americans like Abraham Lincoln were mostly following fashions being set in Dickens' London, the richest, most progressive, most dominant city in the world around 1860?

In general today, youngish white people are getting more into their ancestors' material culture: "The Dream of the 1890s Is Alive in Portland" and all that. 

Of course, much of what's attractive about styles from before the Great War, the Depression, and WWII is the self-confident sense of superiority (after 1945, you can sense the feeling that Western man just didn't deserve nice things). Which will be justification for countless more Atlantic articles worrying over: Are handlebar mustaches racist or not? (Answer: Yes.)
  

World War 3

From my new column "World War 3" in Taki's Magazine:
With the 100th anniversary of World War I upcoming and old enmities between America and Russia resurging in contemporary form—for example, Glenn Beck recently said, “I will stand with GLAAD against…hetero-fascism” in Russia—due to the approach of that gayest of sporting events, the Winter Olympics, I thought it worth taking a look back at the war that didn’t happen: the one between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. 
So I dug out my battered copy of Sir John Hackett’s 1978 sci-fi novel, The Third World War: August 1985, which scared the hell out of me when I received it as a Christmas present on December 25, 1979, the day the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. ... 
This bestseller is little remembered today, although its dry, logistics-oriented tale pleading for more defense spending has enjoyed an odd afterlife by inspiring Max Brooks’s zombie apocalypse novel World War Z that became last summer’s Brad Pitt blockbuster (which has provided me with no end of punning titles such as “World War G” and “World War T”).

Read the whole thing there.

I hadn't consciously been aware that Max Brooks was so influenced by Sir John's book, but it all made sense on a Plate of Shrimp level, hence all my World War G / World War T riffing.

A lot things turn out to be less random than you'd think. For example, Hackett has the Soviets finally stopped by West German reservists at a river in the Netherlands, just as Hackett's brigade was stopped by Germans at a river in the Netherlands when they parachuted in during Operation Market Garden in September 1944.

By the way, one of the great works of British boys' literature, Richard Adams' talking rabbit novel Watership Down, is an allegory of the paratroopers' terrified retreat from the bridge too far.
 

Did lead poisoning cause crime boom?

EPA graph of blood lead levels near Smelterville, ID
An economist named Rick Nevin has been promoting for a number of years the theory that rises and falls in the crime rate are closely tied to lead pollution. In a 2007 post entitled "Lead Poisoning and the Great 1960s Freakout," I looked at the evidence and found it mixed (why, for example, didn't Japan have any substantial loosening of social order?) but intriguing. Blogger Kevin Drum has taken up pushing the theory. (I responded here.)

My suggestion, both from the perspective of disinterested research and as a PR strategy, has been for Drum to focus upon specific locations that were severely polluted by lead due to mining, industry, or dumping. The EPA maintains a handy list of some of the worst lead pollution Superfund sites. What has happened to crime rates in these locales over time? For instance, correlate the EPA graph above with crime rates in Smelterville and see what you get.

To give a literary example, the single most insanely violent novel I've ever read is Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, which is based upon his experiences as a Pinkerton man in Butte, Montana, a center of violent strikes and repression. Butte was the biggest, most polluted mining town in the United States, with substantial lead and gigantic copper mining activities right in the middle of town. Did metal poisoning contribute to the craziness of action described in Hammett's book? 

On the other hand, my Uncle Al, an accountant, was born in Butte 90 years ago, and has been just about the sanest guy I've known. 

I've tried reading up on lawsuits by residents of lead towns against the big polluters, and crime doesn't seem to come up much in the testimony. Typically, the plaintiffs argue that the energy levels of themselves and their children are depressed.
  
So, I remain uncertain. But, my point is that there is much data available that nobody seems to have studied carefully.

P.S., An Economist notes:
Butte was primarily a copper mine. Lead was produced. However, copper and zinc were the primary products. The dominant ore in Butte as copper porphyry. By contrast, the ore processed at Bunker Hill was quite different. From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Valley,_Idaho)

What were Neanderthal genes good for?

Many years ago, Gregory Cochran began pushing the idea that modern humans have some small percentage of Neanderthal inheritance, and that humanity as it exists today acquired by interbreeding with Neanderthals certain useful gene variants that had been evolving separately in cold Europe. Both predictions appear to be true, and now studies are looking at which fitness-enhancing gene versions were picked up wholesale from Neanderthals.

At West Hunter, Cochran reviews some new data:
Exactly which kinds of Neanderthal alleles would give advantage was less obvious.  I suspected that Neanderthals would be resistant to local pathogens, and that such genetic defenses could easily pay off in modern humans moving into Eurasia.  It looks as if some of that happened – there is a good chance that some common HLA alleles in Eurasians originated in Neanderthals, and some Neanderthal variants involved with defense against viruses have become common. 
I thought that anatomically modern humans might have picked up alleles that dealt better with the big swings in day length characteristic of northern latitudes.  In an earlier talk, Sakararaman  mentioned a common Neanderthal version of the CLOCK gene in Europeans, but that doesn’t show up in the paper, so maybe that turned out to be a mistake. 
It looks as if both Europeans and East Asians have picked up Neanderthal versions of  several keratin filament genes, involved in hair and skin formation. Not fixed, but pretty common.  This might have something to do with the non-kinky hair found in most Eurasians. 
Some of these common Neanderthal alleles may have some effect on the central nervous system, but as usual, we have such a poor understanding of gene function that it’s hard to tell. A Neanderthal variant of TANC1 is common in Europeans, and that gene is thought to regulate dendritic spines and excitatory synapses.  Looking at the broader question, an unusual number of selected Neanderthal alleles were found that are associated with major depression. So maybe those alleles affected mood regulation. Perhaps depression is part of a strategy for dealing with long winters. 
There are gene deserts in which you find very few Neanderthal alleles, presumably because those alleles didn’t work well in modern humans. There is a dearth of testes-associated gene,  not too surprising because they evolve particularly rapidly and are therefore more likely than average to be incompatible with a sister group that diverged some time ago.  The area around FOXP2 is such a desert:  Neanderthals were perhaps worse at speech, or any rate different in some way that didn’t mesh. 
There are some signs of reproductive incompatibility with modern humans, but obviously not enough to prevent adaptive introgression. David Reich suggests that Neanderthals were “at the very edge of being biologically incompatible”.  I doubt that, for two reasons.  First, the known cases of species intersterility in primates all took longer to develop. Bonobos and chimps manage, and they’ve been separated something like 800,000 years. In addition, there is evidence that African hunter-gatherers (Bushmen and Pygmies)  picked up some genetic material from an unknown archaic group, one that split off considerably earlier than Neanderthals, something like 900,000 years. ...
In our book, we suggested that the big bang of the Upper Paleolithic,  the dramatic increase in cultural complexity seen in Europe some 40,000 years ago, might have been triggered, at least in part, by an influx of adaptive Neanderthal alleles. Right now, from the evidence in these papers, I’m not seeing a strong case for that. Of course we only understand what half these genes are doing,  so the fat lady hasn’t finished singing, but  we may well be wrong.  Of course that dramatic increase in cultural complexity did happen, and for that matter, it is still true that average IQ scores are quite low in sub-Saharan Africa and its diaspora.  But IQ scores are also low in populations such as Australian Aborigines that have about the same amount of Neanderthal admixture as other people outside of Africa – so at minimum the story is  more complicated.
     

WSJ: Tom Perkins was on to something

A commenter writes:
- Steve Sailer: Some people don't criticize billionaires out of fear of anti-Semitism. 
- Critics of Steve: Only a crazy, conspiracy theorist Jew-hater racist sexist like you would say that. 
- WSJ: animosity towards top 1% is driven by anti-Semitism. 

From the Wall Street Journal:
Ruth Wisse: The Dark Side of the War on 'the One Percent' 
Stoking class envy is a step in a familiar, dangerous and highly incendiary process.

By RUTH R. WISSE 
Feb. 3, 2014 7:37 p.m. ET 
Two phenomena: anti-Semitism and American class conflict. Is there any connection between them? In a letter to this newspaper, the noted venture capitalist Tom Perkins called attention to certain parallels, as he saw them, between Nazi Germany's war against the Jews and American progressives' war on the "one percent." For comparing two such historically disparate societies, Mr. Perkins was promptly and heatedly denounced.

Would Kleiner Perkins' Perkins' attempt to play the Kristallnacht Kard have gone over better if he weren't a Norwegian-American? He seems to think so, and quickly argued that his late Jewish partner Eugene Kleiner would have agreed with him and he was motivated by white knight feelings toward his ex-wife Danielle Steele in her battle with San Francisco's bureaucracy.
But is there something to be said for his comparison—not of Germany and the United States, of course, but of the politics at work in the two situations? The place to begin is at the starting point: with the rise of anti-Semitism, modernity's most successful and least understood political movement. ...
The parallel that Tom Perkins drew in his letter was especially irksome to his respondents on the left, many of whom are supporters of President Obama's sallies against Wall Street and the "one percent." These critics might profitably consult Robert Wistrich, today's leading historian of anti-Semitism. His "From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews, and Israel" (2012) documents the often profound anti-Semitism that has affected socialists and leftists from Karl Marx to today's anti-Israel movement of boycott, divestment and sanctions.  
... My point is broader: Stoking class envy is a step in a familiar, dangerous and highly incendiary process. Any ideology or movement, right or left, that is organized negatively—against rather than for—enjoys an inherent advantage in politics, mobilizing unappeasable energies that never have to default on their announced goal of cleansing the body politic of its alleged poisons. 
In this respect, one might think of anti-Semitism as the purest and most murderous example of an enduring political archetype: the negative campaign. That campaign has its international as well as its domestic front. Modern anti-Zionism, itself a patented invention of Soviet Communism and now the lingua franca of the international left, uses Israel just as anti-Semitism uses Jews, directing grievance and blame and eliminationist zeal against an entire collectivity that has flourished on the world scene thanks to the blessings of freedom and opportunity. 
Herein lies a deeper structural connection. On the global front today, the much larger and more obvious beneficiary of those same blessings is the democratic capitalist system of the United States, and the ultimate target of the ultimate negative campaign is the American people. Anyone seeking to understand the inner workings of such a campaign will find much food for thought in Mr. Perkins's parallel. 
Ms. Wisse, a [actually, The Martin Peretz] professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard, is the author of "Jews and Power" (Schocken, 2007) and "No Joke: Making Jewish Humor" (Princeton, 2013).

Dr. Wisse was one of Larry Summers' few outspoken defenders at Harvard after his 2005 "gaffe" about women mathematicians.
 

February 3, 2014

Andrew Sullivan as role model: Gay boys 'roiding up

From WNEW:
Steroid Use Much Higher Among Gay and Bi Teen Boys

CHICAGO — Gay and bisexual teen boys use illicit steroids at a rate almost six times higher than do straight kids, a “dramatic disparity” that points up a need to reach out to this group, researchers say. 
Reasons for the differences are unclear. The study authors said it’s possible gay and bi boys feel more pressure to achieve a bulked-up “ideal” male physique, or that they think muscle-building steroids will help them fend off bullies. 
Overall, 21 percent of gay or bisexual boys said they had ever used steroids, versus 4 percent of straight boys. The difference was similar among those who reported moderate use — taking steroid pills or injections up to 40 times: 8 percent of gay or bi teens reported that amount, versus less than 2 percent of straight boys. The heaviest use — 40 or more times — was reported by 4 percent of gays or bi boys, compared with less than 1 percent of straight teens. 
The study is billed as the first to examine the problem; previous research has found similar disparities for other substance abuse. ...

The nationally representative study is an analysis of government surveys from 2005 and 2007. It involved 17,250 teen boys aged 16 on average; almost 4 percent — 635 boys — were gay or bisexual. Blashill said it’s likely more recent data would show the disparities persist. 
Dr. Rob Garofalo, adolescent medicine chief at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago, said the differences aren’t surprising, since it is known that gay youth often have “body image issues.” But he said, “It is still shocking. These are dramatically high rates.” 

Here, from 2000, is Andrew Sullivan's loving depiction of the effect of prescription testosterone on himself.

By the way, there's a sense that in our culture gay men are less waspishly witty than they used to be and are now more earnest and dull. It's hard to measure, but I'd guess you'd find more people who would agree with that statement than with the opposite. Might this cultural trend (assuming it exists) have something to do with the dumbing down side effects of butching up to be more attractive to other gay men?
      

Here we go again ...

From the New York Times:
Race Gap on Conventional Loans

African-American and Hispanic borrowers have been largely shut out of the conventional mortgage market, according to a new report from Zillow and the National Urban League. Citing 2012 loan data reported under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, along with results from a Zillow poll of 700 mortgage applicants in December, the analysis found that whites accounted for about 69 percent of all conventional mortgage applications. The share of applications filed by blacks was under 3 percent; Hispanics represented only 5 percent.

100 - 69 - 3 - 5 = 23% of new conventional mortgages going to whom?
Black and Hispanic borrowers are far more likely to apply for low-down-payment loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration. About 57 percent of black applicants and 60 percent of Hispanic applicants applied for F.H.A. loans, compared with 30 percent of white applicants. 
Access to financing that requires as little as 3.5 percent down is key for minority applicants, who on average have lower incomes and credit scores than whites, said Stan Humphries, Zillow’s chief economist. They also have far lower rates of homeownership, which makes it harder to accumulate wealth over time and across generations. “Higher down-payment requirements have had the biggest impact on minority applicants for conventional mortgages,” Mr. Humphries said. “They just don’t have the savings nonminority groups have.” 
And their conventional mortgage applications are more likely to be denied. One in four black applicants were turned down, compared with one in 10 white applicants, the report said. 
As conventional lending standards have tightened, F.H.A.-backed loans have become crucial to maintaining credit access in minority communities. But at the same time, Mr. Humphries said, F.H.A.’s dominance among such borrowers hints at a problematic trend: “a different path to financing based on your race and ethnic group.” 
And the F.H.A. path can be costly. Although F.H.A.-backed loans offer the initial advantage of less money down, their mortgage insurance premiums are considerably higher than premiums on conventional loans. 
Julia Gordon, the director of housing finance and policy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research group, has concerns about what she calls “the dual housing market,” and says she believes the conventional market ought to be making lower-down-payment loans more widely available. “Like all the other separate-but-equal arrangements,” she said, “this is not good for consumers or the market or for taxpayers. We are seeing creditworthy people who should be able to get loans in the conventional market but can’t.” 
Ongoing discussions in Washington about how to wind down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should include a commitment to ensure that lenders make credit available equitably, she added. 

With apologies to Wordsworth and Milton:

                     Las Vegas, 2014
MOZILO! thou shouldst be lending at this hour:
    Exurbs have need of thee: they are a fen
    Of prudent finance: kitchen, bath, and den,
Fireplace, the heroic wealth of marble shower,
Have forfeited their late-lost subprime dower
    Of higher leverage. We are low-debt men;
    O raise us up, return to us again,
And give us zero down liar loan power!
Thy face was like an Orange, and golfed a lot;
    Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like TV:
    Pure flapdoodle, correct politically,
    So didst thou at Sherwood Country Club play,
In devout PCness; and yet thy stock
    The lowest return on investment did pay.
 
Here's the original:

                     London, 1802
MILTON! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
    England hath need of thee: she is a fen
    Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
    Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
    O raise us up, return to us again,
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power!
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart;
    Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
    Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
    So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
    The lowliest duties on herself did lay.
         

February 2, 2014

Philip Seymour Hoffman, RIP

I'm still looking for online video of Philip Seymour Hoffman's Tex Avery-sized reaction shots to taking snorts of moonshine in The Master. These outtakes of another line aren't bad, though.

Hoffman was the greatest actor in English-language movies about a decade ago. He would have made the ideal Ignatius J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces.

Back in 2005 I called him "the American Alec Guinness," but that was imperceptive. He was almost always conspicuous in character roles. I can remember watching Scent of a Woman in 1992 and wondering who is playing the other high school kid. Hoffman tended to cause elbow-nudging among audiences: Hey, look, it's what his name. This is going to be good! (Guinness was conspicuous too, of course, as is his heir Gary Oldman -- nobody goes into acting to be inconspicuous -- but Guinness wasn't conspicuously conspicuous.)

Lately, you could see a few problems. Before starting an article, I make up a page of random notes where I just jot down observations without attempting to fit them together. From my notes for my review of the recent Hunger Games sequel:
Philip Seymour Hoffman looked like he was needing the Big H to get through his dialogue.

Fat actor life expectancy:

P.S. Hoffman 46
James Gandolfini 51
Chris Farley 33
John Candy 43
John Belushi 33

Now my wife is worried about John Goodman. Oliver Platt, too. But, there's also:

Jackie Gleason 71
W.C. Fields 66
Sydney Greenstreet 74
      

Anti-Human Nature

Another from the Edge forum on obsolete scientific ideas:
Peter Richerson 
Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of California-Davis; Visiting Professor, Institute of Archaeology, University College London 
[Anti-]Human Nature 
The concept of human nature has considerable currency among evolutionists who are interested in humans. Yet when examined closely it is vacuous. Worse, it confuses the thought processes of those who attempt to use it. Useful concepts are those that cut nature at its joints. Human nature smashes bones. 
Human nature implies that our species is characterized by common core of features that define us. Evolutionary biology teaches us that this sort of essentialist concept of species is wrong. A species is an assemblage of variable individuals, albeit individuals who are sufficiently genetically similar that they can successful interbreed. Most species share most of their genes with ancestral and related species, as we do with other apes. In most species, ample genetic variation ensures that no two individuals are genetically identical. Many species contain geographically structured genetic variation, as the modern humans do. A few tens of thousands of years ago, our genus seemed to have comprised of at a couple of African "species" and three Eurasian ones, all of which interbred enough to leave traces in living genomes. Most species, and the populations of which they are composed, are relentlessly evolving. The human populations that have adopted agriculture in the Holocene have undergone a wave of genetic changes to adapt to a diet rich in starchy staples other agricultural products, and to an environment rich in epidemic pathogens taking advantage of dense, settled human populations. Some contemporary human populations today are subject to new selective pressures owing to "diseases of abundance." The evolution of resistance to such diseases is detectable. Some geneticists argue that genes affecting our behavior have come under recent selection to adapt to life in complex societies. 
The concept of human nature causes people to look for explanations under the wrong rock. Take the most famous human nature argument: are people by nature good or evil? In recent years, experimentalists have conducted tragedy of the commons games and observed how people solve the tragedy (if they do). A common finding is that roughly a third of participants act as selfless leaders, using whatever tools the experimenters make available to solve the dilemma of cooperation, roughly a tenth are selfish exploiters of any cooperation that arises, and the balance are guarded cooperators with flexible morals. This result comports with everyone's personal experience, some people are routinely honest and generous, a few are downright psychopathic, and many people fall somewhere in between. Human society would be entirely different if this were not so. The human nature debate on the topic was sterile because it did not attend to something we all know if we stop to think about it. 
Darwin's great contribution to biology was to abandon essentialism and focus on variation and its transmission. He made remarkable progress even though organic inheritance was a black box in his day. He also got the main problem of human variability right. In the Descent of Man, he argued that humans were biologically a rather ordinary species with a rather ordinary amount of geographical variation. Yet, in many ways, the amount human behavioral variation is far outside the range of other species. The Fuegans adapted to a hunting and gathering life on the Straits of Magellan were sharply different from a leisured gentleman naturalist from Shrewsbury. But these differences mainly owe to different customs and traditions, not mainly to organic differences. He also realized that the evolution of traditions responded to selective processes other than natural selection. Traditions are shaped by human choices a little like the artificial selection of domesticates, with natural selection playing a subordinate role. 
In his Sketch on an infant Darwin described how readily children learn from their caregivers. The inheritance of traditions, customs, and language is relatively easy to observe with the tools of a 19th Century naturalist compared to intricacies of genetic inheritance, which is still yielding fundamental secrets to the high tech tools of molecular biology. Recent work on the mechanisms underlying imitation and teaching has begun to reveal the more deeply hidden cognitive components of these processes and the results underpin Darwin's phenomenological account of tradition acquisition and evolution. 
In no field is the deficiency of the human nature concept better illustrated than in its use to try to understand learning, culture and cultural evolution. Human nature thinking leads to the conclusion that causes of behavior can be divided into nature and nurture. Nature is conceived of as causally prior to nurture both in evolutionary and developmental time. What evolves is nature and cultural variation, whatever it is, has to the causal handmaiden of nature. This is simply counterfactual. If the dim window stone tools give us does not lie, culture and cultural variation have been fundamental adaptations of our lineage perhaps going back to late australopiths. The elaboration of technology over the last two million years has roughly paralleled the evolution of larger brains and other anatomical changes. We have clear examples of cultural changes driving genetic evolution, such as the evolution of dairying driving the evolution of adult lactase persistence. Socially learned technology could have been doing similar things all throughout the last 2 million years. The human capacity for social learning develops so early in the first year of life that developmentalists have had to design very clever experiments to probe what infants are learning months before language and precise imitative behavior exist. At least from 12 months onward social learning begins to transmit the discoveries of cultures to children with every opportunity for these discoveries to interact with gene expression. In autistic children, this social learning mechanism is more or less severely compromised, leading to more or less severely "developmentally disabled" adults. 
Human culture is best conceived of as a part of human biology, like our bipedallocomotion. It is a source of variation that we have used to adapt to most of the world's terrestrial and amphibious habitats. Using the human nature concept, like essentialism more generally, makes it impossible think straight about human evolution. 

As F. Scott Fitzgerald might have said if he had been a little more sober: the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to notice that this bathtub gin bottle is both part empty and part full at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
      

Anti-Anti-Anecdotalism

Another Edge egghead contribution on Which idea should be retired from Science:
Nicholas G. Carr 
Author, The Shallows and The Big Switch 
[Anti-]Anti-anecdotalism 
We live anecdotally, proceeding from birth to death through a series of incidents, but scientists can be quick to dismiss the value of anecdotes. "Anecdotal" has become something of a curse word, at least when applied to research and other explorations of the real. A personal story, in this view, is a distraction or a distortion, something that gets in the way of a broader, statistically rigorous analysis of a large set of observations or a big pile of data. But as this year's Edge question makes clear, the line between the objective and the subjective falls short of the Euclidean ideal. It's negotiable. The empirical, if it's to provide anything like a full picture, needs to make room for both the statistical and the anecdotal. 
The danger in scorning the anecdotal is that science gets too far removed from the actual experience of life, that it loses sight of the fact that mathematical averages and other such measures are always abstractions. Some prominent physicists have recently questioned the need for philosophy, implying that it has been rendered obsolete by scientific inquiry. I wonder if that opinion isn't a symptom of anti-anecdotalism. Philosophers, poets, artists: their raw material includes the anecdote, and they remain, even more so than scientists, our best guides to what it means to exist.

I employ lots of anecdotes, data, academic studies, stereotypes, appeal to authorities, consensus, lone geniuses, fiction, the whole gamut of potential evidence.

In general, I think people aren't terribly good at distinguishing between the two main reasons why a bit of anecdotal evidence would be memorable to more than one person: either it's illustrative of a dog-bites-man pattern or it's a man-bites-dog story that is interesting for its rarity, an exception that proves the rule (i.e., supports the general pattern by being famously exceptional).

It's not terribly hard to notice which one it is, but you've got to look. But I don't see much in our culture that tells people to try to distinguish along this dimension. Does it even have a name?
  

An old fashioned Super Bowl

The first few decades of Super Bowls were almost uniformly awful games, depressing blowouts, with the few close ones mostly featuring lots of turnovers. Recently, they were pretty good, but welcome back to what my younger days were like. Oddly enough, the terribleness of most of the first 30 or so Super Bowls didn't stop them from getting ever more popular. Almost every year was the triumph of hope over experience.
   

Malta less of a pushover than America

From the New York Times:
Give Malta Your Tired and Huddled, and Rich 
By DAN BILEFSKY   JAN. 31, 2014 
PARIS — Having been besieged by the Ottomans, and ruled over the centuries by foreign invaders from the Greeks to the Romans to Napoleon, the tiny Mediterranean island nation of Malta has seen plenty of unwelcome interlopers. 
But now, it seems, these foreigners are quite welcome — if they are willing to hand over 1.15 million euros, or $1.55 million, to buy a Maltese passport. 
Motivated in part by economic stress, and in part by what some call crass opportunism, the idyllic island 50 miles south of Sicily is selling citizenship for $880,000 in cash and $677,000 in property and investments to applicants 18 or older willing to pay the price. ...
Being a citizen of Malta, which is part of the European Union’s passport-free zone, will confer the right to travel among the union’s 27 other member states without border formalities. A newly minted Maltese citizen will also be able to live and work in another European Union country, and will gain the right to visa-free travel to 69 non-European Union countries, including the United States. 
Critics accuse the government of pawning the national birthright. So far, those said to be interested in the passports include a former Formula 1 champion, a Chinese billionaire, an international pop star, a member of a prominent Persian Gulf royal family, an American press magnate and a South American soccer player, according to The Times of Malta, a daily newspaper. 
While all European Union countries have the right to peddle citizenship to whomever they want, the practice is relatively rare and the union’s justice commissioner, Viviane Reding, expressed dismay last month, telling the Maltese that European citizenship “must not be up for sale.” 
Others fear that the proud and picturesque island — with 411,277 citizens, one of the world’s most densely populated countries — risks following in the footsteps of fellow European Union member Cyprus, which has come under criticism for attracting tycoons looking for a convenient place, preferably one with sun and sand, to protect their assets from tax collectors. 
Under pressure from European Union officials in Brussels, Malta this week agreed to require foreigners seeking to buy Maltese passports to be residents for at least one year. It has also vowed to carefully vet applicants. Yet initial plans to limit to 1,800 the number of passports granted have been scrapped. 
For all the fuss and red-faced reprimands of Brussels bureaucrats, Malta is just one of several countries seeking to woo rich foreigners by offering residency or citizenship. 
Cyprus recently slashed the amount of investment required to be eligible for citizenship, to $4.06 million from $13.5 million. ...

In contrast, the United States hands out EB-5 visas to investors who pay zilch to the government, and just invest $500,000 (in "targeted" areas) or $1,000,000 anywhere in businesses, typically construction projects. While Maltese taxpayers get $880,000, American taxpayers get nothing.
 

So far ...

So far, I'm not far off for once in a sports prediction:
My Super Bowl prediction: Manning to regress toward mean

Fanatical NFL bettors lack diversity

Here's a long NYT Magazine article by James Vlahos, "The Super Bowl of Sports Gambling," profiling a dozen or so competitors in a giant Las Vegas contest to see who can beat the point spread the most over the 2013 NFL season, picking at least five games per week. The winner was a Chicago yuppie who beat the point spread more than two-thirds of the time. 

The article cites some opinion polls showing a surprisingly high degree of sports gambling among American women, but I have to imagine that's mostly office pools and other social betting. None of the intense football bettors in the article are women. If you go to a casino, you see plenty of older women hitting the slot machines hard, but having a serious sports gambling habit, whether betting against the point spread or playing fantasy football seriously for money, strikes me as about as all male of a phenomenon as anything in American life. But perhaps I'm wrong.
   

The Republicans' war on self-esteem

More from that wonderful Charles Blow column in the NYT, "The Masculine Mistake," about how having sisters and daughters makes men more Republican:
The Republican Party is in danger of becoming a man cave of cavemen and the women who can abide them. 
The House speaker, John Boehner, has gone so far as to have sensitivity training for Republican members because, as he put it, “some of our members just aren’t as sensitive as they ought to be.” 
And the masculinity shaming has not been confined to Republican men. Some Republican women have been equal-opportunity offenders. 
At the height of the anthrax scare in 2001, Ann Coulter wrote a piece for the conservative site Townhall titled “The Eunuchs Are Whining,” in which she referenced liberals as “mincing pantywaists” and proclaimed that “women — and I don’t mean to limit that to the biological sense — always become hysterical at the first sign of trouble.” 
This last-bastion-of-bare-chestedness is a politically ill-fated one in a country quickly evolving to value all of its citizens equally.

We can tell how fast America is evolving by the fact that nobody will bother watching that tackle football game scheduled for today. Whoever heard of Richard Sherman? And notice how athletes and movie stars are much slimmer and less brawny today than they were back in the primitive macho 1950s when muscleheads like Jimmy Stewart ruled the screen.

Anyway, here's the most Recommended comment to this column, the one that gets to the heart of what's motivating Charles Blow's readers:
Rima Regas  
Democrats need to drive home the fact, and it is a fact, that Republicans have been waging a war on the self-esteem of a growing number of segments of the US population

Here's my graph of who voted for Obama and who voted for Romney based on Reuters-Ipsos' panel of over 40,000 voters: