Russia and Ukraine

From my new column in Taki's Magazine:

In 2014, the global winds are blowing in favor of conservative nationalism. For example, the reason Obama is subsidizing what’s increasingly a right-wing rebellion in Ukraine isn’t because that's who he prefers, but because that’s who showed up to fight.

Read the whole thing there.

    

From North of Sochi

Greg Cochran closely reads the new paper "Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans" and predicts that the giant team that put it together has an even bigger news paper coming on the geographic origins of Indo-European speakers, which has been one of the great controversies.

So they must have a paper in the works – one with strong conclusions, if they’re that worried about someone scooping them.  They were too obvious – they need a course in maskirovka. They have got to be looking at ancient DNA from relevant populations: from Kurgan burials, from Russia north of the Caucasus, Tocharian mummies, etc.  They’re going to need strong evidence, and a baseball bat, to get linguists to pay attention.  Looks to me like we”re going to get at least half of the story (the European end) of  the Indo-European expansion out of this, and probably we’ll learn something about Indo-Aryan end as well. 

I will predict this: they’ll pussyfoot about the likely historical process, which undoubtedly was awesomely bloody. The Balkans looks to be where this started, and there a fairly sophisticated agricultural population (with very advanced metallurgy for the time) seems to have been utterly squished.

I don't know about the prehistory, but the history of Bulgaria has largely been one of the locals getting squished, so maybe it was also like that before anybody wrote things down. In the comments, Henry Harpending notes:

Re the Indo-European advantage: consider that Mare’s milk has 190 Calories of fat and protein per gram and 250 Calories of lactose. Five kg. per day from one mare feeds two lactose tolerant children with 2200 Calories and fewer than one non-LT child with only 950 Calories. This is a huge nutritional advantage in an occasionally Malthusian ecology. My bet (hypothesis) is that the early IE people were horse people and that instant doubling of the food supply from a new gene was essentially the cause of the IE expansion. You can’t argue with calories.

    

Cochran adds:

The Indo-European invasion is a bit unusual in that it is not agriculturalists displacing foragers. More like agro-pastoralists (with an emphasis on pastoralism, probably) displacing straight farmers. 

Raising cattle probably preadapts for warfare through constant rustling. Valuable portable assets.

A commenter amends:

Or Aggro-Pastoralists, given the carnage they may have inflicted.

By the way, the Sioux Indians expanded radically to the west after they got guns and horses and white man diseases weakened their more densely populated Indian rivals:

Between approximately 1685 and 1876 the western Sioux conquered and controlled an area from the Minnesota River in Minnesota, west to the head of the Yellowstone, and south from the Yellowstone to the drainage of the upper Republican River. This advance westward took place in three identifiable stages: initially a movement during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries onto the prairies east of the Missouri, then a conquest of the middle Missouri River region during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and, finally, a sweep west and south from the Missouri during the early and mid-nineteenth
century. Each of these stages possessed its own impetus and rationale. Taken together they comprised a sustained movement by the Sioux that resulted in the dispossession or subjugation of numerous tribes and made the Sioux a major Indian power on the Great Plains during the nineteenth century

Not a perfect analogy to the proposed Indo-European expansion, but interesting.
    

"Extreme Park Crashes Taking Outsize Toll on Women"

From the NYT:

Extreme Park Crashes Taking Outsize Toll on Women  

By JOHN BRANCH FEB. 18, 2014 

... Most of the accidents have occurred at the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park, site of the snowboarding and freestyle skiing events like halfpipe, slopestyle and moguls. 

And most of the injuries have been sustained by women. 

Through Monday night, a review of the events at the Extreme Park counted at least 22 accidents that either forced athletes out of the competition or, if on their final run, required medical attention. Of those, 16 involved women. The injury rate is higher when considering that the men’s fields are generally larger. 

The question, a difficult one, is why. 

The Winter Games have always had dangerous events. But the Extreme Park, as the name suggests, is built on the ageless allure of danger.

As Lance Murdock, professional daredevil, told Bart and Lisa Simpson, "It's always good to see young people taking an interest in danger."

All of the events there have been added to the Olympic docket since 1992, each a tantalizing cocktail of grace and peril. 

But unlike some of the time-honored sports of risk, including Alpine skiing, luge and ski jumping, there are few concessions made for women. For both sexes, the walls of the halfpipe are 22 feet tall. The slopestyle course has the same tricky rails and the same massive jumps. The course for ski cross and snowboard cross, a six-person race to the finish over jumps and around icy banked curves, is the same for men and women. The jumps for aerials are the same height. The bumps in moguls play no gender favorites. 

“Most of the courses are built for the big show, for the men,” said Kim Lamarre of Canada, the bronze medalist in slopestyle skiing, where the competition was delayed a few times by spectacular falls. “I think they could do more to make it safer for women.” 

Compare the sports with downhill skiing, in which women have their own course, one that is shorter and less difficult to navigate. Or luge, in which female sliders start lower on the track than the men. Or ski jump, in which women were finally allowed to participate this year, but only on the smaller of the two hills. 

The Olympics have a history — sexist, perhaps — of trying to protect women from the perils of some sports. 

But equality reigns at the Extreme Park, even to the possible detriment of the female participants. 

“When we practice, we don’t practice on the same jumps as the men,” said J. F. Cusson, ski slopestyle coach for Canada and a former X Games gold medalist.

Slopestyle is the event that Bob Costas was derided as an old man for comparing to something out of the Jackass movies: it's like a mountainside skateboard park.

Another new wrinkle is that skiers are now doing the crazy stuff that snowboarders have been doing, and skis are much faster than boards, so they go faster and higher. (The advantage of snowboards is that they are slow, so you don't need as big a ski mountain to have fun on, so more people can snowboard more locally and thus more often.)

“They’re too big for them. But when they compete, they have to jump on the same jumps, so they get hurt. It’s a big concern of mine.” ...

In some of the events, like the halfpipe and moguls, athletes can decide how fast or high they want to go. But in sports like slopestyle and snowboard and ski cross, they have to maintain a certain speed to launch themselves a certain distance to negotiate the course. Slowing down can be just as dangerous as going fast, and few medals are earned with the brakes on. 

Olympic organizers want to build courses and competitions that are the equal, at least, of the Winter X Games, where most of the Extreme Park events gained wide popularity. But the invitation-only X Games have small fields, often 10 or fewer of the world’s best. The Olympics, by design, want larger fields with a wide cross-section of countries. The drop-off in talent between top athletes and the bottom of the field can be drastic.

Especially on the women's side. In most women's sports, the marginal competitors are pretty weak.

There were concerns about slopestyle, which made its Olympic debut here, from the beginning. Men and women worried aloud about the course during training, complaining mostly about jumps bigger than many had seen before. The American snowboarder Shaun White said the course could be “intimidating,” and then pulled out of the competition, worried that an injury would spoil his chance to compete in the gentler confines of the halfpipe.

Let's pause on that: Too intimidating for the Snowboarder Formerly Known as the Flying Tomato ...

I watched men's ski slopestyle (skis are faster than snowboards, so the jumps are immense) and the only way they could have made that even more entertaining was if they had allowed competitors to fire shoulder-mounted Stinger surface-to-air missiles at each other.

“There’s a lot of consequence on that course,” Charles Reid of Canada said.
But the men managed to negotiate the slopestyle course with just one Olympic-ending injury. The women had far more difficulty. 

... The slopestyle course did present options, including two ramps at each of the three big jumps, one slightly smaller than the other. About half the women’s field used the smaller jumps in qualifications (none of the men did), and a few of the 12 finalists used the smaller jumps, but that did not prevent injuries. 

“I see it every contest,” Cusson said. “Unless they are forced to hit the smaller side, the best ones will always go for the bigger jumps. They want to prove to everybody that they are capable. And then all the other girls will follow.” 

While men are now attempting triple flips, women are not to the point of doing doubles. Cusson believes that the smaller jumps are sufficient for the tricks that women are doing. At last year’s world championships in Norway, Cusson required his team to use the smaller jumps to limit injuries. Some women were upset, afraid that their scores from judges would be lower without the greater risk. But Canada finished first, second and fifth in the competition. 

“If all the girls did it, if they all hit the smaller jump, the problem would be solved,” Cusson said. 

But most women grew up in a time when they view themselves as capable as men. 

Women are just built less ruggedly. Here's Michael Sokolove's book Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women's Sports.

On the positive side, the helmets they wear are the bicycle kind that you throw away after an impact rather than football helmets which have to last a long time. And sports surgery has improved radically over the years. What proportion of top sports surgeons live in Aspen or Park City or other winter wonderlands?
 

Good Smoking v. Bad Smoking

I was driving through the Hollywood Hills on Laurel Canyon yesterday, which now is bedecked in signs announcing that smoking is banned in the canyon. There's been a drought for a year and a half, so somebody tossing a smoldering butt out the window might send the small patches of indigenous forest left up in flames, and some of the increasingly seedy houses along the two-lane winding highway, too. 

The most interesting sign was on the little (and extremely expensive) convenience mart in the depths of Laurel Canyon. In the spirit of Frank Zappa, the sign emphasized that the smoking ban included "spliffs," which, these days, needs restating. With marijuana legalization ongoing, dope smoking is being transformed in the (weed-addled) popular mind from a vice to something that's good for you (you couldn't buy it at a Medical Marijuana dispensary if it wasn't medicine, right?) and no doubt the environment as well.  Similarly, all the cultural opposition to smoking shouldn't apply to dope smoking. It's totally different. It couldn't cause a brushfire. It's good smoking, not Bad Smoking.

As the marijuana legalization movement strengthens, you can see hints of how hard it is to hit the libertarian sweet spot where something is simultaneously legalized but remains rare and distasteful. People, especially young people, pick up messages from society about what is winning and what is losing more than they pick up nuanced messages. Smoking tobacco is losing so it seems reasonable to ban smoking it even in your own car while driving through a brushfire zone. Smoking marijuana is winning, so it doesn't seem like the ban on smoking in Laurel Canyon applies to dope.

For example, legalizing pornography leads to a situation in which participants are referred to not as "performing whores," but as "porn stars." Above a certain IQ level, the emphasis in that phrase falls ironically on the first term, but to a fair number of teenage girls with two-digit IQs, the "star" part sounds most intriguing.

   

Chua defends Noticing

Michael Smerconish, who scored the highest (i.e., least elite) of any journalist who publicly took Charles Murray's Coming Apart class quiz, interviews Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld. Chua says:

"Now we do state facts, and I think that's what makes people uncomfortable. You know, we say things like, 'Asian American SAT scores are 140 points above the average.' That's a fact. Or Indian Americans have a national household income of almost double the national average. Mormons are hitting it out of the park

I'd characterize Mormons as more singles and doubles hitters than homer sluggers.

, and we say: 'Look, they're doing something different from mainstream America. Let's look at them.' Let's look inside - people don't know what goes on - and learn from them, and, honestly, I think if we can't just state a statistic without being accused of racism, then we are not going to be able to learn and make any improvement."

  

German exhaustion

Because we English-speakers won the Big One, we don't pay much attention to Germans anymore, although that wasn't true of Americans in the past such as Mark Twain. But the Germans still have much influence upon us. It was only recently, for example, that I noticed how much of the 1960s hippie movement was derived from earlier German sources.

Many fin de siècle Germans were indefatigably obsessed with their exhaustion, which they tirelessly combated with strenuous new "life reform" regimens. Anna Katharina Schaffner writes in the Times Literary Supplement on "German Burnout:"

Martynkewicz marshals an impressive range of evidence to establish that numerous German bourgeois and bohemians living around the turn of the twentieth century felt physically and emotionally drained by the demands of what they perceived as an ever more complex modernity. Perceptive case studies include the “tired colossus” Otto von Bismarck, the diet-obsessed Friedrich Nietzsche, the sharp and ascetic Cosima Wagner, the depressed Protestant Max Weber, and the fitness fanatic Franz Kafka, as well as Gustav Meyrink, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke and many other key figures of German modernism. 

Rilke’s famous dictum “Du mußt dein Leben ändern” ["You must change your life"]

I liked on the Larry Sanders show when Hank the sidekick says thankfully to guest Jeff Goldblum: "Jurassic Park ... that movie ... changed my life."

neatly sums up the resolute attempts of these characters to counter their exhaustion-related disease by subscribing to various tenets of Lebensreform (lifestyle reform). It is one of the many strengths of this fine study that the intricate connection between these salvation-promising reform movements and exhaustion is so cogently demonstrated: Martynkewicz shows that the fin de siècle did not just produce exhaustion, but also saw the advent of numerous strategies to counter and even to prevent its effects. “In times of weakness and illness”, he writes, “the longing for salvation and redemption, as well as for saviours, spiritual guides, prophets, trainers and dieticians, multiplies.” Among the prophets we encounter are the naturopath Ernst Schweninger, whose allegedly miraculous regime was said to have transformed the “obese and miserable dotard” Bismarck into a strong and “elastic” young man; the raw food advocate and deviser of Bircher muesli, Max Bircher-Benner; his colleague Heinrich Lahmann; and the endocrinologist Eugen Steinach, who performed and popularized dubious and later discredited rejuvenation operations. 

Other practices that were frequently mobilized to counter exhaustion include nudism, vegetarianism, macrobiotics, gymnastics, yoga, gardening and expressive dancing. Martynkewicz discusses the thriving sanatorium culture (famously satirized in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain), as well as a phenomenon called “Europe-fatigue”, manifest in an escapist idealization of the Orient’s exotic otherness, as seen, for example, in Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. Das Zeitalter der Erschöpfung goes on to engage with a range of famous declinist thinkers such as Oswald Spengler and, above all, Nietzsche, who articulated a sense of “belatedness” and bitterly complained about the decadence, degeneracy and weakness of their contemporaries.

I suspect you could add Hitler to that list as a late fin de siècle figure unflagging in his worries that race-poisoning was exhausting the Germans.

Of course, from the perspective of other times and places, late 19th and 20th century Germans seem notably inexhaustible. 

And that pretty much uses up my mental energy on the subject. Time to go watch some TV.

   

New York Times = Daily Mail when Whites Behave Badly

From the front pages of DailyMail.co.uk and NYTimes.com.

The Daily Mail specializes in police blotter stories, while the New York Times abstains from them ... unless it's a white guy victimizing a black. Then, a local story from a thousand miles away becomes Front Page News in the NYT.

    

The wind is at the back of Open Borders

From Marginal Revolution:

The Moral Is the Practical 

by Alex Tabarrok on February 15, 2014  

Tyler concedes the moral high ground to advocates of open borders but argues that the proposal is “doomed to fail and probably also to backfire in destructive ways.” In contrast, I argue that the moral high ground is tactically the best ground from which to launch a revolution.  

Contra Tyler, the lesson of history is that few things are as effective at launching a revolution as is moral argument.  ...

In more recent times, civil unions have gone nowhere while equality of marriage has succeeded beyond all expectation. The problem with civil unions, and with the synthetic and marginalist approach more generally, is that even though it offers everyone something that they want, it concedes the moral high ground–perhaps there is something different about gay marriage which makes it ok to treat it differently–and for that reason it attracts few adherents. ... 

The moral argument for open borders is powerful. How can it be moral that through the mere accident of birth some people are imprisoned in countries where their political or geographic institutions prevent them from making a living?

Personally speaking, my children's births weren't accidents. In general, the higher the proportion of non-accidental births in your community, the better.

Indeed, most moral frameworks (libertarian, utilitarian, egalitarian, and others) strongly favor open borders or find it difficult to justify restrictions on freedom of movement. As a result, people who openly defend closed borders sound evil, even when they are simply defending what most people implicitly accept.

Alex is referring to me sounding evil. His link goes to Bryan Caplan saying:

Think about it like this: Steve Sailer's policy views are much closer to the typical American's than mine.  Compared to me, he's virtually normal.  But the mainstream media is very sweet to me, and treats Steve like a pariah.  I have to admit, it's bizarre.

 

Only in your dreams ....

From the New York Times:

Football’s Loving Culture 

By NICHOLAS DAWIDOFF    FEB. 14, 2014 

... The very nature of football, focused as it is on strength, virility, grace and manly bonding, has an obvious homoerotic component for those who play and for those who watch. 

As I pointed out in 1994 in "Why Lesbians Aren't Gay," the existence of popular gay sex fantasies about manly men who are actually secretly gay -- "How could they resist each other? I couldn't!" -- isn't actually evidence that they are gay.

Tragically, we have a lot of real data about male homosexuality by profession from AIDS deaths in the 1980s and 1990s. There was at least one among former NFL players (and there are rumors about at least one more who died young), but there are a lot of former NFL players. In contrast, there aren't many famous male figure skaters but a high proportion died of AIDS, such as both the 1972 and 1976 Olympic gold medalists. (See the 11/17/92 article in the New York Times: "AIDS deaths tear at figure-skating world.")

A lot of gay males might fantasize about being effeminate skaters like Jason Brown or Johnny Weir, but not about being with them. It's more fun for them to fantasize about all the homoerotic energy there must be in the team shower with Antonio Cromartie.

         

V-Day

From the University of North Carolina Daily Tarheel:

Vagina Monologues will be performed this weekend in Spanish and English 

By Breanna Kerr | The Daily Tar Heel 

Two women who have never met are performing in this year’s bilingual production of “The Vagina Monologues” for the same reason: to encourage women to embrace their bodies. 

“Don’t be afraid to say the word ‘vagina’ anymore!” said junior Ashleigh Curry, the narrator in the English production of Eve Ensler’s famous play. ... 

“We forget about the vagina — all of us — but ‘The Vagina Monologues’ has a way of putting it up in your face,” she said.

       

Tyler Cowen tries to arbitrate between Bryan Caplan and me

See Marginal Revolution.

Slopestyle

To dissuade Bart from attempting a foolhardy leap, Lisa Simpson takes him to the hospital to see the ruined body of his hero, professional daredevil Lance Murdock:

Lisa: My brother's gonna jump Springfield Gorge on a skateboard. 

Lance Murdock: Could you leave me with the kids, please? Let me start by saying ... good for you, son! It's always good to see young people taking an interest in danger. Now a lot of people are going to be telling you you're crazy, and maybe they're right.  But the fact of the matter is: 

Bones heal.   

Chicks dig scars.   

And the United States of America has the best doctor-to-daredevil ratio in the world!

     

Big genetic atlas paper

Nicholas Wade reports in the NYT:

Tracing Ancestry, Researchers Produce a Genetic Atlas of Human Mixing Events 

By NICHOLAS WADE    FEB. 13, 2014

... Now, geneticists applying new statistical approaches have taken a first shot at both identifying and dating the major population mixture events of the last 4,000 years, with the goal of providing a new source of information for historians. 

Some of the hundred or so major mixing events they describe have plausible historical explanations, while many others remain to be accounted for. For instance, many populations of the southern Mediterranean and Middle East have segments of African origin in their genomes that were inserted at times between A.D. 650 and 1900, according to the geneticists’ calculations. This could reflect the activity of the Arab slave trade, which originated in the seventh century, and the absorption of slaves into their host populations. 

The lowest amount of African admixture occurs in the Druse, a religious group of the Middle East that prohibited slavery and has been closed to converts since A.D. 1043. 

Another mixing event is the injection of European-type DNA into the Kalash, a people of Pakistan, at some time between 990 and 210 B.C. This could reflect the invasion of India by Alexander the Great in 326 B.C. The Kalash claim to be descended from Alexander’s soldiers, as do several other groups in the region.

A lot of things peoples say about themselves aren't completely made up.

The genetic atlas of human mixing events was published on Thursday in the journal Science by a team led by Simon Myers of Oxford University, Garrett Hellenthal of University College London and Daniel Falush of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Having sampled genomes from around the world, they found they could detect about 95 distinguishable populations. 

Though all humans have the same set of genes, their genomes are studded with mutations, which are differences in the sequence of DNA units in the genome. These mutations occur in patterns because whole sets of mutations are passed down from parent to child and hence will be common in a particular population. 

Based on these patterns, geneticists can scan a person’s genome and assign the ancestry of each segment to a particular race or population. 

The team led by Dr. Myers has developed a statistical technique for identifying the chromosomal segments with particular precision. This enables them to perform a second feat, that of assigning a date to the one or more mixing events that have affected a population. 

... One of the most widespread events his group has detected is the injection of Mongol ancestry into populations within the Mongol empire, such as the Hazara of Afghanistan and the Uighur Turks of Central Asia. The event occurred 22 generations ago, according to genetic dating, which corresponds to the beginning of the 14th century, fitting well with the period of the Mongol empire.

... Dr. Myers and his colleagues have detected European ancestry that entered the Tu people of central China between the 11th and 14th centuries; this, they surmise, could be from traders traveling the Silk Road. 

They find among Northern Italians an insertion of Middle Eastern DNA that occurred between 776 B.C. and A.D. 550, and may represent the Etruscans, a mysterious people said by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus to have emigrated from Lydia in Turkey. 

The Etruscans apparently turned into the Tuscans (e.g., Florence). They've always had a lot of style.

The Myers group has posted its results on a web page that records the degree of admixture in each population. The English, however, known to be a rich medley of Celts with invaders such as the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes and Norwegians, carry the notation “No strong evidence of admixture.” Dr. Myers said his method cannot yet detect genetic mixing between very similar populations, as was the case with the English and their invaders from Scandinavia and Northern Germany.

 
Dienekes has more here:

While reading this study, it is important to remember its limitations. Two are immediately obvious: (i) admixture events can only be detected for the last few thousand years, as this method depends on pattern of linkage disequilibrium which decays exponentially with time due to recombination, and (ii) detection of admixture seems to depend on the presence of maximally differentiated populations from the edges of the human geographical range; for example, the Japanese appear unadmixed even though they are clearly of dual Jomon/Yayoi ancestry. On the other hand, the method does detect the admixture present in the San at a similar time scale. 

The case of Northwestern Europe appears especially striking as none of the populations from the region show evidence of admixture. This may be because the mixtures taking place there (e.g., between "Celts" and "Anglo-Saxons" in Great Britain) involved populations that were not strongly differentiated. Alternatively, population admixture history may have preceded the last few thousand years and is thus beyond the temporal scope of this method.

 
Here's a companion website.
 

Why so few above average black QBs?

Here's a graph from a gigantic Deadspin compilation on the subject of black NFL quarterbacks. It's of the distribution of quarterback seasons by yards per pass attempt (which is probably the single best traditional statistic for assessing passing performance) versus that season's league average. White quarterbacks are distributed in a bell curve, while there are a lot of fair to middling black quarterbacks, but a clear shortage of ones more than 5% better than the league. 

This chart doesn't include running yards, which blacks are better at compiling. So, the two groups are more similar in overall effectiveness. But it does deflate the not implausible assumption that blacks ought to be better passers because they are more dangerous runners, so the defense have to look out for the QB taking off downfield.

My guess would be that the game has gotten so sophisticated that it's now hard to become a consistently well-above average NFL passer if you haven't been focused on passing and nothing much else since you were about 13 years old. 

And that sort of means that you need your Dad coaching you or hiring QB tutors for you, instead of just listening to your coach. Your coach's conflict of interest is that he needs to win this weekend's game more than he needs to develop you as an NFL pocket passer. Most black guys who have played quarterback in the NFL were just about the best runners on their high school teams. So, if you want to leave the pocket, put the ball under your arm and run to victory, well that's okay with your coach even if it develops habits in you incompatible with being a Manning/Brady in the NFL. (Among other things, it's not fair to your teammates to prioritize your development over the team winning.)

I don't know that that's true, but it seems like something that could be tested with enough high school data.

  

Demographics behind Winter Olympics advertising

Here's a question about the Winter Olympics: what percentage of competitors don't have at least one parent who is big into some winter sport?

Part of the appeal of the Winter Olympics to advertisers is that a huge number of moms watch it, in part because they like seeing the successful products of nice families who engaged in a lot of (not inexpensive) family fun together.

The commercials are so mom-oriented that they can drive viewers crazy, although marketers seem to be doing a little better job this time of preparing variations on the commercials instead of just repeating the same one over and over. (I can still almost repeat the 1972 Summer Olympics Irish Spring soap commercial word for word -- of course, that was the plan. Now that I think about it, I probably have some Irish Spring soap in the closet today, right next to the Ricola cough drops I've been buying since watching 500 repetitions of their Swiss alpenhorn ad (1:03) on CNN during the Gulf War.)

For example, above is a long Kellogg's breakfast cereal commercial about teenage ski jumper Sarah Hendrickson. First, she explains that there's no such thing as "a recreational ski-jumper," and then her father explains that his longest ski jump was only 60 meters. Then we learn that she first got into ski-jumping as a child because her brother did it.

And here is Sarah's Visa credit card commercial with voice-over by Amelia Earhart that's another in a long line of what I call Patriotic Feminist advertising:

You see, among American corporations, there has long been a huge demand for Feminist Barrier Shattering to incorporate into TV commercials. The problem is that almost all the barriers were shattered a long time ago. Fortunately, there are a few obscure holdouts, such as ski-jumping, that can be still hunted down and slain with great publicity. Some European ski-jumping muckety-mucks were quoted worrying publicly about lack of depth of competition among women, women getting badly injured, and, privately, about anorexia, which has been problem among male jumpers. 

There's nothing that Corporate America loves more than American women challenging European sexism, as the periodic women's national team soccer fads have demonstrated.

One reason for this sounds paradoxical: female athletes in obscure sports, the ones that aren't part of public school sports programs like basketball, almost always have fathers in their lives, at minimum paying a lot of bills, and often living out their sporting ambitions through their daughters.

In contrast, daughters of today's much valorized Single Moms tend to be more focused upon becoming as much like Kim Kardashian as possible.

And, though they'd never ever admit it in so many words, advertisers aren't all that interested in the Single Mom market because they have less money to spend.

[This is the point where I got thrown off track by looking up skier Julia Mancuso's family background.]

The sweet spot for advertisers is married women with children whose husbands make six figures.

So the Winter Olympics are ideal for advertisers because so many of the sports are the kind that affluent families partake of.

But a problem for advertisers is that they really, really like to put at least one African American into each ad, no matter how improbable, but sports that draw from prosperous intact families seem kind of racist to blacks. So if that black speedskater from Chicago doesn't hurry up and win something, advertisers are going to be hurting for the 2018 winter games. But they'll come up with something.

The actual details of these inspiring Patriotic Feminist stories where enlightened Americans overcome Norwegian sexism aren't important. For example, Sarah Hendrickson did indeed have a horrible crash awhile ago and has yet to fully recover. (Olympians get drug tested more than NFL players, so they don't make as fast recoveries as football players have recently been doing: e.g., Lindsey Vonn isn't at these Olympics more than a year after her big injury.)

And, if you watch the VISA commercial of Hendrickson's stick figure flying, it's pretty clear that she's got some kind of anorexia-like problem that's interfering with her recovery from her knee injuries (just like those horrible sexist Europeans said).

Of course, as we saw during the 2012 Summer Olympics, nobody notices nuthin' about how odd various celebrities look.

Summer Olympians tend to be ultraspecialized in shape, except for the occasional pole vaulter or decathlete. Because the competition is less fierce for the Winter Olympics, at least for now the athletes tend to be more good-looking sportsmen and sportswomen in the old-fashioned mode. Which advertisers don't mind.

   

Skier Julia Mancuso's drug kingpin father

A Mancuso family reunion
at Lake Tahoe *

I was working on a theory about the family background of American Winter Olympians, and decided to look up Julia Mancuso (b. 1984), who has won more medals than any other American woman ski racer. The NBC profile of her said she has always spent a lot of each year in Hawaii ever since she was a child. She appears to have a couple of dozen relatives and friends with her who have taken time off from whatever it is they do to fly to Russia to root her on. So, I decided to look up her family background on Wikipedia:

Mancuso of Italian descent, was born in Reno, Nevada, and grew up in the Lake Tahoe area as the middle of three sisters, between older sister April and younger sister Sara. Her father, Ciro Mancuso, was arrested and convicted of running a $140 million marijuana smuggling operation when Julia was five years old.[17] Her parents divorced in 1992, and her mother said that Julia "took everything out on the slopes."[17] After his release from prison in 2000, Julia and her father became close.[17] 

Ciro Mancuso's welcome home party *

Mancuso's sentence was greatly reduced because of his cooperation with the government in cases against other alleged organization members and Mancuso's lawyer Patrick Hallinan. As a result of his assistance to the government, Mancuso was allowed to keep $5 million in proceeds from his trafficking business.

Her father Ciro Mancuso was a prominent enough drug dealer to get his own Wikipedia page:

The son of immigrants from Italy, Mancuso was a real estate developer before venturing into the lucrative narcotics business. His smuggling operation began in the late 1960s, when he teamed up with a group of college friends from Tahoe Paradise College. At first, they only sold marijuana at their college, but soon the business grew. ... Mancuso soon realized that there was more profit to be made selling cocaine and integrated it into his marijuana operation. 

It took the government twelve years to build a case against Mancuso.[3] Anthony White, assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Nevada, brought charges against Mancuso in 1990 and it was hailed as one of the largest drug conspiracy cases in state history. The indictment alleged that Mancuso used a multi-state cocaine and marijuana smuggling operation to buy ranches, mountaintop retreats, beach-front estates and anything else he might want.[4]

Ciro and Uncle Fredo discuss Mancuso family business

Mancuso was sentenced to nine years in prison on June 27, 1995[5] His sentence was greatly reduced because of his cooperation with the government in cases against other alleged organization members and Mancuso's lawyer Patrick Hallinan.[1] As a result of his assistance to the government, Mancuso was allowed to keep $5 million in proceeds from his trafficking business.[6] Hallinan was subsequently acquitted of obstruction of justice and drug conspiracy charges.[7] Mancuso's property in Hawaii was seized by the federal government and sold; the $800,000 proceeds were forwarded to the California and Nevada law enforcement agencies that pursued him.[8] 

His daughter, Julia Mancuso, is a current member of the U.S. Ski Team. She won the gold medal in the giant slalom at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy,the silver medal in the downhill at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada, and the bronze metal in the women's combine event at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. After his release from prison in March 2000,[9] Ciro Mancuso again became involved in Julia's skiing career.[10] Father and daughter have maintained a close relationship, and she credits him with helping her in her ski career, particularly when it comes to setting her up with a trainer in Maui.[11] He was in the crowd cheering his daughter to victory as he and other relatives waved their "Super Jules" flags.[12]

  

I'm not sure how I'm going to fit that into my upcoming theory, but I couldn't resist passing it on.  

----------
* Just kidding: the photos are stills from The Godfather, Part II.
    

Maybe that wasn't the ultimate Slate headline

Instead, how about this new one?

 

Up'Ards v. Down'Ards

Like the World Cup, much of the appeal of the Olympics as a spectator event comes from nationalism. Despite numerous predictions over the decades that in the future athletes will compete for the corporations they endorse, there has been almost zero development in the direction of Team Nike v. Team Coke contests. Nobody would watch.

Territorialism remains the dominant emotional impulse among spectators. (For example, in golf the chief spectating evolution over the last generation has been the rise of the America v. Europe Ryder Cup team event.)

On the other hand, the desire for victory is so great that spectators will typically accept as their representative any talented ringer who dons the local colors. hbd chick points out that practically nobody on either Super Bowl team came from anywhere near the cities they represented. 

As I get older and the male urge to pick a side, any side, diminishes, my interesting in cheering for hired gladiators falls away. The last time I fanatically rooted for a local pro team was a couple of decades ago when a good friend's younger brother was the leader of the team. 

In the last decade, I got interested in local high school football again. But my interest fell away as recruiting increased among San Fernando Valley teams. For example, my old high school wound up with a quarterback who lived 40 miles away in Claremont in the far San Gabriel Valley, requiring his parents to drive 160 miles per day to deliver him to this top football program. Out in the countryside, that wouldn't seem too outlandish, but in a metropolis of 17 million people, it's a little much.

As you get older, the sheer number of people you've met continues to increase and you come to be more interested in the web of connections. (For example, lyric poets tend to evolve into social novelists as they age.) But the structures of modern American sports (e.g., the pro drafts almost completely randomize players geographically) militate against that.

hbd chick goes on to say:

what DOES make sense to me (as far as any sports game could) are sporting events built around real groups — groups of people that have some sort of ties to one another: 

- ashbourne’s royal shrovetide football match where the game is between the town’s “up’ards” and “down’ards,” i.e. individuals actually born in the town to the north or the south of the local river.

From Wikipedia:

The Royal Shrovetide Football Match occurs annually on Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday in the town of Ashbourne in Derbyshire, England. Shrovetide ball games have been played in England since at least the 12th century from the reign of Henry II (1154–89). The Ashbourne game also known as "hugball" has been played from at least c.1667 although the exact origins of the game are unknown due to a fire at the Royal Shrovetide Committee office in the 1890s which destroyed the earliest records.[1][2][3][4] One of the most popular origin theories suggests the macabre notion that the 'ball' was originally a severed head tossed into the waiting crowd following an execution.[5] ... 

The game is played over two days on Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday, starting each day at 2.00 pm and lasting until 10.00 pm. If the goal is scored (in local parlance, the ball is goaled) before 5.00 pm a new ball is released and play restarts from the town centre, otherwise play ends for the day. Despite the name, the ball is rarely kicked, though it is legal to kick, carry or throw it. Instead it generally moves through the town in a series of hugs, like a giant scrum in rugby, made up of dozens if not hundreds of people. When the ball is goaled, the scorer is carried on the shoulders of his colleagues into the courtyard of The Green Man Royal Hotel, and into the small bar, known as the Boswell Bar.[31] 

The two teams that play the game are known as the Up'Ards and the Down'Ards (local dialect for "upwards and downwards"). Up'Ards traditionally are those town members born north of Henmore Brook, which runs through the town, and Down'Ards are those born south of the river. Each team attempts to carry the ball back to their own goal from the turn-up, rather than the more traditional method of scoring at/in the opponents goal. There are two goal posts 3 miles apart, one at Sturston Mill (where the Up'Ards attempt to score), the other at Clifton Mill (where the Down'Ards score). ... 

The actual process of 'goaling' a ball requires a player to hit it against the mill stone three successive times. This is not a purely random event however, as the eventual scorer is elected en route to the goal and would typically be someone who lives in Ashbourne or at least whose family is well known to the community. The chances of a 'tourist' goaling a ball are very remote, though they are welcome to join in the effort to reach the goal. When a ball is 'goaled' that particular game ends.

The game is played through the town with no limit on number of players or playing area (aside from those mentioned in the rules below). Thus shops in the town are boarded up during the game, and people are encouraged to park their cars away from the main streets.

Does anybody remember the name of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves story in which Bertie gets roped into taking part in one of these kind of ancient village ballbrawls?