March 23, 2002

Catholic Church scandal and celibacy

As the Catholic priesthood's boy-fondling scandal runs its course, I suspect that calls to end the Church's 1,000 year old policy of priestly celibacy will mount. It's hard to tell from news coverage whether the victims are mostly pre-pubescent or post-pubescent boys, but even in the gay-intimidated current journalistic environment, it's clear we are talking about boys, not girls.

Clearly, the Catholic Church can no longer recruit many young heterosexual men to a life of celibacy the way it did in the glory days of the Irish-American Church in the first half of the last century. This strikes me as reflecting one of the big overlooked changes of the 20th Century - the spread of the idea that everyone would, should, and deserves to get married. I don't know the statistics, but I gather that throughout much of Western European history, a sizable minority of the population didn't marry. Even in Victorian England, there were lots of professions in which marriage was difficult - domestic servants, sailors, army officers, Oxford dons, and so forth.

Anthropologist Peter Frost has talked about how one of the distinguishing features of Western Europe, going back into barbarian times was late and non-universal marriage.

The 1950's, which seem to us like the bedrock era of unchanging stability, may have been the first time when the universality of marriage became economically feasible in the U.S.

All in all, this seems like a happy change. As I've argued before, monogamy (one man-one wife) may be at the heart of Western individualism and freedom. This trend spread that notion of sexual democracy even farther.

However, the spread of the notion that everyone should have an active sex life has obviously caused big problems for the Catholic priesthood. The Church doesn't like to move fast - it has seen lots of fads come and go. But this one seems permanent.

Ending celibacy would also set the stage for dealing with the issue of female ordination a few decades in the future. The Church can't afford female ordination now because it would turn the priesthood into an overwhelmingly gay male and lesbian-dominated institution, further alienating the straight male laity. But a few decades of building back up the proportion of straight men in the priesthood would put the Church in position to open the doors to women as priests.

True Homophobia

Shouldn't the term "homophobic" - literally, "fear of homosexuals" - apply to institutions like the New York Times and Newsweek? They are obviously intimidated about reporting facts about which the homosexuals in their newsrooms would ask, "Is it bad for the gays?" Star reporter Rick Berke of the NYT told a gay journalist group, "There are times when you look at the front-page meeting” of the Times and “literally three-quarters of the people deciding what’s on the front page are not-so-closeted homosexuals.”


Catholic Church scandal and the Boy Scouts


Perhaps the Catholic Church's boy-groping scandal will cause the New York Times to publicly reassess its condemnation of the Boy Scouts for discriminating against adult homosexuals who want to lead boys into the woods. I doubt it, though.

How to prevent anti-Semitic paranoia

How to prevent anti-Semitic paranoia: So, it turns out that Carl Cameron's five-part series that was briefly posted on FoxNews.com in December before being spiked was on to something when it reported Israelis were spying in the U.S.. At least, that's what The Forward, the fine Jewish newspaper of New York, reported in an article entitled, "Spy Rumors Fly on Gusts of Truth." Apparently, at least a few of the many Israelis arrested after 9/11 were Mossad agents keeping an eye on Muslim extremists in the U.S. (Too bad our spooks weren't.) The Forward denies that they had any inkling that 9/11 was going to happen.

It's confusing though, because the same reporter in the same issue of The Forward published another article called, "FBI Probe Defuses Israeli Spying Rumors." The argument in this one is that the scores of Israeli "art students" detained since 9/11 for spying on government agencies weren't Mossad agents, but were Israeli mobsters scoping out the DEA probably to help themselves deal more Ecstasy. (An earlier Forward article reported that Israeli organized criminals have cornered 75% of the American market for ravers' favorite drug.) These two stories are not necessarily fundamentally contradictory. There could have been two separate intelligence gathering operations going on - one run by Mossad, the other run by gangsters. Or, they could have been in some way linked, as the CIA and the Chicago Outfit were in the Castro assassination attempts. Just as I like to point out that the line between freedom fighter, terrorist, and gangster can be awfully thin, so can the line between gangster and intelligence agent, as so many KGB agents have shown over the last decade.

Obviously, I don't know what was going on. One thing I am certain about, though, is this: The mainstream press only encourages anti-Semitic paranoia when it shies away from publishing true stories about the activities of Israeli spies and gangsters. In particular, they are throwing red meat to the paranoid set when they post articles, then try to delete them. Don't they know that nothing disappears on the Web?

debate between Jonah Goldberg and myself?

Will there be a debate between Jonah Goldberg and myself on the scientific meaningfulness of race? To me, it sounds like a lot of fun. Jonah knows a lot about dog breeding - a field that features both close similarities and major differences with race in humans - so that could be a good starting point. Polite encouragement can be emailed to JonahEmail@aol.com.

The Time Machine

My review of The Time Machine.

Showtime


My review
of Robert De Niro and Eddie Murphy in Showtime.

Overlooked for 2002 Oscars


Who should be up for an Oscar but isn't?

Ward Connerly and Ron Unz: some unsolicited advice for Bill Simon

I solicited from California initiative heroes Ward Connerly and Ron Unz some unsolicited advice for Bill Simon about issues to campaign on against Democratic California Gov. Gray Davis: find out what they have to say.
Twin Questions - One fascinating finding is that identical twins, who are virtually 100% genetically the same, still tend to differ somewhat on IQ and personality measures. One particularly intriguing finding is that they seldom fall in love with the same person. Also, twins raised together aren't a whole lot more similar than twins raised apart. How come? I've got a few ideas, which I'll mention soon, but I'd like to hear yours.

Neo-centrist Mickey Kaus and VDARE.com

Neo-centrist Mickey Kaus has an excellent attack on amnesty for illegal immigrants on his site. I certainly don't mind quietly persuading influential people like Mickey, but it would be nice if they'd come out of the closet and publicly admit to reading VDARE.

Al Gore shaves off his beard


Al Gore shaves off his beard - The main purpose behind having a beard is to make your jaw look larger and thus more manly. (A beard can also serve to cover up jowls and a spotty complexion.) I have a weak jawline, so I look better with a beard. (At least, that's how I feel when I look at myself in the mirror.) The problem with this is that the whole world has figured out - on a subliminal level - that guys with mediocre testosterone levels grow beards to make themselves look studlier. So, everybody assumes that a man with a beard is just a professorial-type trying to cover up his wimpy chin. That's why when I was a corporate executive, I always shaved off my beard when I needed to look for a job. Granted, this let everyone see how unformidable my jaw was, but that was less damaging than covering it up with a beard and thus encouraging them to assume it was even less dominant-looking than it actually is.

(Allen Mazur did a great little study where he showed people pictures from the 1950 West Point Yearbook and asked them to guess which cadets rose to the rank of general. Having no other information, people tended to pick the young officers with the strongest jaws and other masculinely handsome features - and they turned out to be correct more often than not.)

This popular (and fairly accurate) prejudice against men with beards caused Gore no end of trouble over the last year, and needlessly, because he has an impressive jaw. (Of course, it didn't help that Al refused to engage in basic beard-care. Gore had the classic "Go to hell, World" scruffy beard, which, while understandable after all he went through, wasn't helping him look like 2004 Presidential timber.)

What Gore really needs to work on is his lisp. No, he doesn't have a lithp, he has a lisssssssp. As Harry Shearer of The Simpsons told me, Gore tends to make super-sibilant "s" sounds. Darryl Hammond on Saturday Night Live had Gore's lissssssp impediment down perfectly. This tends to be a gay male trait, although our lack of accurate terminology causes confusion over this: Very few gays lithp, but quite a few lissssssp. Lissssping plagues gay choirs. This speech impediment damaged Gore's image with the public, making him sound more prissy and less manly than Bush, despite all the objective evidence that Gore is highly masculine. If Gore didn't lissssp, he'd be President today.

Why demanding celibacy and chastity of priests no longer appears practical

I want to come back to this fascinating question of why demanding celibacy and chastity of priests no longer appears practical. Or, in other words, why until not that long ago did European Christian societies assume that lots of people were never going to marry? My guess is that until fairly recently, lots of people tended to be too hungry, tired, cold, and ill to feel particularly strong sexual urges. Sure, the healthiest always tended to be plenty lusty, but perhaps a sizable fraction didn't.

Andrew Sullivan's latest venting on the Catholic Church's youth-molesting scandal

Can anybody make sense out of Andrew Sullivan's latest venting on the Catholic Church's youth-molesting scandal? As usual, Andrew seems to have decided that it has something to do with the Church discriminating against gays, although by any reasonable standard it would appear the Church was too forgiving of priests who acted out on their gay impulses. Anyway, that's why Andrew is a superstar of personal web journalism - even when he's denouncing identity politics, everything ends up being about his own complex identity. And, basically, that's what people are interested in - personalities, not logic. Those of us who strive for objectivity and logical consistency in our observations about the world just aren't as humanly interesting as a walking mass of contradictions and sensitivities like Andrew.

New, Improved Oscars

New, Improved Oscars - Here's my article suggesting awards to reflect what modern Hollywood is really about: Best Carcinogenic Product Placement, Best Career-Enhancing Divorce, Least Unexpected Change of Sexual Orientation, etc.

Is the new version of E.T. worth going to a theatre to see?

Here is my review.

Minorities Get Inferior Medical Care, Even with Same Insurance plans, Study Finds

Minorities Get Inferior Medical Care, Even with same Insurance plans, Study Finds - NYT - Let me explain what's really going on, because the article of course fails to. It's too satisfied with abstract explanations like "racism." If you want good medical care, you can't leave it up to your doctor. You have to get on the Web and research what's wrong with you and what the possible treatments are. Then you have to stand up to your doctor and make him do what it takes to cure you. White people are a lot pushier with their doctors than black people, so they get better medical care.

For example, I had a horrible, convulsive cough for six weeks. I went to my doctor and he prescribed some stuff, but none of it worked. Then the coughing became debilitating - I'd suddenly start coughing, then gasping for air, then gagging, then vomiting. That kind of cuts down on your social life (although I was losing weight nicely on the Blow Chow Diet). So, I got on the Internet and figured out I had Whooping Cough (pertussis). My doctor didn't believe me - whooping cough is rare these days - but I had a stack of printouts showing that my symptoms were precisely those of whooping cough in adults. So, I eventually badgered him into giving me Erythromycin, the antibiotic for pertussis. Within two days, the coughing was under control (although it comes back when I overwork).

So, to improve health care for blacks, encourage them to probingly question their doctors and to do research on the web.

This illustrates something I try to do - relate big political, social, and racial issues to daily life. Too many journalists just use a prefabricated set of abstract concepts for thinking about race, and never examine how it actually plays out in the real world.

Hollywood's love affair with R-rated movies hurts the industry financially

For years, Michael Medved has insisted that Hollywood's love affair with R-rated movies hurts the industry financially. Following angry Congressional hearings in 2000 about how Hollywood marketed R-rated films to children, the industry finally started to de-emphasize them. Did this political meddling hurt the bottom line? Or was Medved vindicated? Here's my analysis of the box office data.

"Globalization Proves Disappointing" - IQ and the Wealth of Nations

"Globalization Proves Disappointing" reports the NYT. "Globalization, or the fast-paced growth of trade and cross-border investment, has done far less to raise the incomes of the world's poorest people than the leaders had hoped, many officials here say. The vast majority of people living in Africa, Latin America, Central Asia and the Middle East are no better off today than they were in 1989..." On the other hand, hundreds of billions in private investment have poured into China.

So, what's the story behind the story? Capital flows to where wages are low but IQ's are high - pre-eminently China, where the average IQ is two points higher than the U.S. already, according to Richard Lynn's IQ and the Wealth of Nations. China's IQ advantage is likely to grow greater in the future as the Chinese get better fed and educated. In contrast, these other regions (with the exception of the self-destructive Argentineans) average IQ's of 90 or less, sometimes considerably less.

This is not to disparage free markets - there's really no alternative. The point is simply that, at any point in time, humans will differ greatly in productive capacity, so not everyone benefits from economic competition to the same extent.

The Oscars & diversity

The Oscars & diversity: Halle Berry's acceptance speech - Why are actresses like that? Raymond Chandler explains. Plus, Denzel Washington & Ben Stein's Law. Here's my article.

Human Biodiversity Watch: Jennifer Connelly's diet

Human Biodiversity Watch: Jennifer Connelly's diet: Sure, she's got an Oscar now that she's starved herself down to the official shape for a prestige actress, but can she be healthier and happier looking like this today (above left) than when she looked like that (above right)? Perhaps the emotional instability of so many top actresses stems from their being famished all the time? Hunger doesn't make you a happy person.

National Geographic's green-eyed Afghan Pashtun refugee girl found

Image: Sharbat GulaThe new issue of National Geographic reveals that after 17 years, the magazine has found the subject of its most popular photo ever: that green-eyed Afghan Pashtun refugee girl. It's remarkable how much power that rare eye-color mutations hold over the human imagination.

Jennifer Connelly pictures: voluptuous and anorexic

Career Opportunities

The dress designers for bony actresses Jennifer Connelly and Gwyneth Paltrow continue to take abuse for how awful their clients looked at the Oscars.Jennifer Connelly at 2002 Oscars Yet, the real crime is what these women have done to their own bodies. One of America's wisest coeds wrote to me, "Carving a naturally fleshy body type like Jennifer Connelly's [left] down to the mannequin she is today [right] also plays hell with a woman's hormonal system. When a C-cup like Connelly loses so much weight that she barely has any breasts to speak of, her hormones are thrown perilously out of whack. This can cause mood swings, menstrual irregularities and it can even compromise the immune system. I suspect that this is why actresses like Calista Flockhart and Angelina Jolie adopt instead of tackily giving birth themselves. A woman who maintains a body fat percentage far below her genetically determined minimum fights a daily war with nature. Of course, bearing children is the most archetypal surrender to body fat. Get thee to an adoption agency. Could fat phobia be at least partially responsible for dropping birth rates?"

One of America's wisest socialists asked this question in response: "What is the relation between a woman's size and her reproduction rate? For most of human history it was probably pretty close to straight-line positive [i.e., the less malnourished she was, the more children she had]; but now in advanced nations I would guess that it is some sort of Bell Curve-like figure, with very fat and fashionably thin women having far fewer children than the averagely "overweight" women in between. (The mere fact that average women can be described as overweight is in itself interesting.)" Anybody know of any studies?

My dumb question: SDI and nuclear-tipped interceptors

My dumb question: It's exciting that the Pentagon's missile defense system prototype has three times in a row physically struck a dummy ICBM in tests over the Pacific. But why are we even trying to "hit a bullet with a bullet?" When you try to shoot down a flying object, you don't use a rifle, you use a shotgun or an anti-aircraft gun. So wouldn't it make more sense just to load anti-missile missiles with low fallout nukes and vaporize any incoming ICBMs that are in their general vicinity? Help me out here, folks.

Priests and celibacy - Reply

A reader replies: "The development of birth control has probably made priestly celibacy a less attractive option. If marriage no longer means having a large and demanding family, fewer men will want to become priests. I forget where I read this (Fukuyama? Tiger ? iSteve?), but if families are smaller, fewer parents will direct a child to become the priest or nun in the family. They'd rather have grandchildren. Of course another factor is that economic growth and the decline in discrimination against Catholics in mixed, or formerly occupied Catholic countries like Ireland and Poland means that there are more jobs available for educated Catholics."

My review of Robin Williams in Death to Smoochy.

My review of robin Williams in Death to Smoochy.

February 28, 2002

Women's Olympic figure skating and Cinderella's glass slipper

Women's Olympic figure skating is kind of strange: it's as if all the girls in the kingdom who want to be the Princess and live happily ever after with the Prince not only have to try on Cinderella's glass slippers, but then they have to dance in them down a freshly waxed marble staircase without falling on their keisters.

February 27, 2002

If you like watching women's skating, does that mean you're secretly gay?

A sports-talk show was debating this morning, "If you like watching women's skating, does that mean you're secretly gay?" One thing I've noticed about myself is that I often intensely enjoy watching feminine-effeminate pastimes like figure skating and Broadway musicals, but I don't spend all that much time thinking about them in-between seeing them. In contrast, I seldom enjoy golf while I'm playing it - my handicap is my swing - but in between rounds I've spent a truly massively useless amount of my life thinking about golf, especially golf course architecture. In fact, when I was changing careers in 2000, I intentionally didn't play for an entire year because when I do play, especially on a fine course, I can't stop thinking about golf for days or weeks afterwards.

This mental gap works in the opposite direction as well. Of all the art forms, golf course architecture is one of the biggest - as measured in objective terms such as dollars spent on it or acres covered by it (more than Delaware and Rhode Island combined). Yet, the rest of the art world pays zero attention to it, probably because it appeals almost solely to the kind of heterosexual guys who don't care much about other kinds of art. If you are interested in seeing how hardcore golf course connoisseurs think, check out the discussions at GolfClubAtlas, where you can read, for example, a 70 message thread about the aesthetic failure of the new fairway bunker on Riviera's 7th hole. The aficionados on the discussion group may seem way over the top, but that's how art forms progress - they require not just people who love good art, but also people who deeply hate bad art and want to stamp it out of existence.

February 22, 2002

Race and the Winter Olympics (Vonetta Flowers)

Race and the Winter Olympics: Since I've written so much over the years about racial patterns in winners of Summer Olympics medals, a reader asked me several weeks ago if I had anything to say about race in the Winter Olympics. I replied that the role where African Americans have the greatest natural advantage is "brakeman," the primary pusher of the bobsled. It's a job that requires that rare combination of sprinting speed and strength that blacks of West African descent tend to have more of than anybody else. Congratulations to Vonetta Flowers, who just became the first black Winter Olympics gold medallist ... as a bobsled brakewoman.

Despite all the gee-whiz commentary, there's nothing surprising about a sprinter/long jumper switching to bobsled - the Soviets did that all the time with their 100m men who were just below Olympic caliber. NFL players Herschel Walker and Willie Gault have competed in the bobsled, but the in-bred, soap-operaish family of American bobsledders didn't much appreciate rich black superstars parachuting into their penurious sport and hogging their quadrennial moment in the spotlight.

February 20, 2002

Decline of Women's Ice Hockey

Did you notice how Women's Ice Hockey, which set off such a frenzy of feminist patriotic chauvinism in 1998, was an utter dud in 2002? NBC broadcast just the last 6 minutes of the gold medal hockey game Thursday night (Canada beat the U.S. 3-2), while giving saturation coverage to the ladies' figure skating final, which is so popular because it serves, in effect, to crown the World's Top Princess (just as women's gymnastics in the Summer Olympics crowns the World's Top Pixie) . The collapse of interest in the U.S. Women's Hockey team continues a trend of faddish interest in women's teams fizzling in their return performances. In the 1996 Olympics, the U.S. Women's Softball and Basketball teams were the subject of vast hoopla, but in 2000 few fans were interested in them anymore. If this trend continues, the next Women's World Cup in soccer will be a massive let-down. Essentially, I see little evidence of long term interest in women's team sports except among lesbian fans and the kind of guy sports nuts who will watch anything on ESPN2.

February 17, 2002

Dragonfly, starring Kevin Costner

Dragonfly, starring Kevin Costner, is the perfect ghost story for people (e.g., me) who don't like ghost stories because they are too scary. Click here for my review.

Stanley Kurtz on Middle East

Who's having the best war among the punditariat? My nominee is Stanley Kurtz of the Hudson Institute for bringing a crucial anthropological perspective. Here he explains why Middle Eastern societies are so hard to reform - no matter who the government is, society consists of interlocking extended family networks. In an earlier column, he noted that extended families in the Middle East are so powerful because they are so inbred - an astonishing 1/3rd of marriages are between first cousins! Does anybody have Kurtz's email address?

Figure skating appeals more to women and gay men

Yes, I know lots of you couldn't care less about figure skating, but from a human biodiversity perspective figure skating is hugely instructive because it is that rare sport (assuming it is a sport) that appeals more to women than to men and to gay men than to straight men. It is the exception that proves a lot of rules.

Making figure skating judging more objective

The Figure Skating Powers That Be have announced that they are going to try to make their sport's judging more objective by giving credit for each move on a degree of difficulty scale. There's only one problem with this. Figure skating, as we know it, is essentially about being a princess, not a jock. The more they make it more of a sport like gymnastics and less of an art form, the less feminine it will become and thus the less feminine its champions will be. The danger is not so much that skating will crown as winners more burly women like Tonya Harding, who are strong jumpers, but then so was Charles Barkley. No, the risk is that skating will be overrun by more pre-pubescent girls like Tara "The Human Drill Bit" Lipinksi, the 15 year old who took the gold in 1998 with her high-RPM jumps.


The physical difference between a little girl and a woman is basically body fat. Women have higher body fat percentages than girls (more body fat is bad in just about any sport not involving massive heat loss like English Channel swimming or Iditarod dogsled mushing). And their weight is distributed farther from their vertical axis (i.e., they have T&A). Recall how skaters spin faster at the ends of their routines when they pull their arms in. It's basic physics. The same applies with T&A. A womanly beauty like Katarina Witt could never attain the RPM necessary to jump like the stick insect-like Lipinski. Gymnastics has been overrun by pre-pubescents for years (e.g., 14 year old Nadia Comaneci in 1976). That's why they had to set a minimum age of 16 for Olympics "women's" gymnastics. Unfortunately, that just means girls try to delay puberty with dieting, exercise, and drugs, with God-knows-what long term health effects. Ultimately, womanly grace is awfully hard to quantify, but we sure know it when we see it. It would be sad to penalize that in the name of making skating judging more objective.

Surprise! Many male figure skaters, especially in men's singles, are gay


I hope I'm not surprising anybody by stating that obviously a lot of male figure skaters, especially in men's singles, are gay. Here's a lesbian activist's list of publicly out skaters. (Obviously, it's missing a lot of theoretically still-closeted stars). The interesting thing is the dog that doesn't bark - the complete lack of out lesbian skaters. The same is true for gymnastics. In ballet, J. Michael Bailey of Northwestern, the leading demographer of homosexuality, found that more than 50% of male dancers (what my later mother-in-law called "ballerinos") are gay, but he was hard-pressed to find a single lesbian. The simplest explanation is the best: figure skating and ballet (and, to a lesser extent, gymnastics) are highly feminine pastimes, and thus appeal most to feminine (i.e., heterosexual) women and effeminate (i.e., homosexual) men. In general, despite the politicized assumption that gays and lesbians are alike, they are actually radically dissimilar on a host of dimensions. Here's my classic 1994 article "Why Lesbians Aren't Gay," with its notorious table of three dozen traits upon which they tend to differ markedly.

Judging skaters in the Winter Olympics

Judging Skating: An irony of the figure skating pairs controversy is that one of the flagrantly biased NBC announcers, Scott Hamilton, was the beneficiary of one of the most rigged decisions in skating history. Coming into the 1984 Games, Scott had been World Champion three years in a row. Everyone knew that if he won the gold, the personable (and heterosexual!) American would be a great ambassador for the sport. So, even though at Sarajevo Hamilton was sick and skated a weak final program, blowing off two triple jumps, he still was handed the gold. Similarly, Sale and Pelletier, the supposedly martyred Canadian pairs skaters, were only in gold medal contention because the judges decided to not penalize justly their catastrophic double fall at the climax of their short program. I sort of sympathize with this "cumulative" approach to judging, which tries to lessen the general problem with the Winter Games, which is that it's damn slippery out there. Thus, too many events turn on almost-random mistakes rather than on talent. The skating judges try to smooth out the results by voting for the competitors who have shown themselves the best over the years. Of course, on the other hand, that lends skating its aura of bogusness.

Today's questions: sex, race, and golf

Today's questions: sex, race, and golf - Does anybody out there have an explanation for a demographic phenomenon that has long puzzled me? A couple of times per week, I walk by the Studio City Golf Course's driving range. The ratio of white men to white women beating balls is about 10 to 1. Yet, for Asians, the ratio is only about 3 men for every 1 woman. Among blacks, in contrast, the M/F ratio is something like 100 to 1. (Lots of black guys take up golf, but seldom until they are 25 or older, so you never see them on the PGA Tour. But I've only seen about 4 black women golfers in my life!) I notice the same black>white>Asian M/F ratio everywhere else in golf, too. Any explanations? Also, are there any black caddies left on the PGA Tour? Why are almost all caddies white these days? Finally, why are there more blacks on the Senior PGA Tour (e.g., Jim Thorpe, Jim Dent, and Walter Morgan) than on the PGA Tour (1/4th of Tiger)?

Denzel Washington in "John Q"


Denzel Washington in "John Q" - HillaryCare agitprop meets Disease-of-the-Week TV movie meets action thriller Guy Movie. But is it good? My review here.

Jonah Goldberg denounces the Westminster Dog Show for eugenics!

Jonah Goldberg continues his streak of raising interesting topics but not being able to figure out much that's interesting to say about them. Now, he's denouncing the Westminster Dog Show for ... eugenics! "Repugnant thinking that’s died out for humans is thriving at the Westminster Kennel Club... I think Westminster is racist." Take a deep breath, Jonah, and try to remember that dogs wouldn't exist at all if prehistoric humans didn't eugenically manipulate wolves in order to create a new race of canids that wouldn't eat the baby. Further, the wonderful working dog breeds that Jonah salutes exist because of eugenics. For example, Newfoundlands were bred to possess a genetic-based urge to save drowning people. Ah, the unmitigated horrors of eugenics! The big problem with dog breeding today is that it's insufficiently eugenic. The kennel clubs have calcified. They are only interested in preserving the aesthetics of existing breeds, not creating new breeds with new functions as the politically incorrect 19th Century breeders did. It's easy to dream up new, improved races of dogs that would meet real needs. For example, my family can't own a dog because my youngest son is allergic to them. It's time for a massive program to create a new breed of dog that won't give asthma attacks to dog-loving kids . Or, there are some individual dogs that can fairly reliably sniff out cancer in people. They're better at it than my former doctor, who blithely let me reach the final stage of Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma undiagnosed. Let's create from them a breed of cancer-sniffing dogs.

February 15, 2002

Judging Skaters and movie Directors

Judging Skaters and movie Directors: How could those Russian pairs skaters beat the Canadian couple? How could Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge earn a Best Picture Oscar nomination, but old Baz be denied a Best Director nomination? How come the Olympic judges hate Elvis Stojko, the skater with the most masculine charisma ever? I answer these burning questions here.

February 14, 2002

Salt Lake City Olympics "Bribery" Scandal

Salt Lake City Olympics "Bribery" Scandal - Well before the scandal broke, I was doing research for a possible TV sitcom script about the International Olympics Committee. It was common knowledge even then - at least among anybody who cared to look - that IOC members were shaking down potential host cities for bribes. The economic reason is simple: the Olympics don't pay the athletes anything and they have no real competition. Thus, they can make huge profits (the LA Olympics reaped over $300 million way back in 1984). Not surprisingly, IOC members, who get to decide which city will get the Games, use their power to horn in and claim a share of the loot for their own accounts. So, if you want to eliminate corruption in the site selection process, the solution is simple: pay the athletes. That will lower the profits to be made from hosting an Olympics, which will make potential host cities less willing to share the (reduced) wealth with IOC extortionists.

February 13, 2002

St. Valentine's Day and Eve Ensler

St. Valentine's Day is coming, so of course the press is full of hype about that quasi-play-that-never-goes-away The Vagina Monologues. The author has been pushing for years to make St. Valentine's Day synonymous with "Vagina Day," on the highly logical grounds that they both begin with V (if you leave out the "St." part). Uh, folks in the media, has it ever occurred to you that St. Valentine's Day is a very big deal to elementary school children? Also, since when did the vagina become the feminist private part of choice? Aren't feminists supposed to instruct men to pay more attention to the clitoris? Exactly why is it crucial to increase society's vagina-awareness? There's a billboard on Ventura Blvd. near me with "Vagina Monologues" in letters 25' tall. Is this completely necessary? Are America's white male patriarchs insufficiently vagina-conscious? Don't Larry Flynt and his colleagues do their best to raise vagina-interest?

That's Steve Sailer "evolcon," not "evilcon," dammit!

Everybody's got to have a label these days: neocon, paleocon, whatever. But I'm not sure that mine is working out. A few years ago in National Review, John O'Sullivan described Charles Murray and myself as the first "evolutionary conservatives" - i.e., conservatives who actually know something about the science of human nature. "Cool," I thought. Still, this "evolcon" label has not proven a good career move for Chas and me. That's "evolcon," not "evilcon," dammit!

February 12, 2002

Feminist Patriotic Chauvinism and the Winter Olympics

Feminist Patriotic Chauvinism - Ah, the Winter Olympics bring back memories of one of the funnier American fads of the last decade: the periodic whoop-tee-doos where we all swell up with national pride over an American women's team winning gold in some sport that practically no other county's women bother to play. Do you recall the vast outpouring of corporate image ads celebrating our Women's Ice Hockey Team's gold medal in the last Winter Olympics? Of course, there were only five other teams in the field, and three of them would have been slaughtered by a Boys 7 and Under Pee-Wee squad from Medicine Hat.

Or, think back to the ecstasy over the first Women's World Cup of soccer. We'd beaten the world! When it was pointed out that the rest of the world didn't much care about women's soccer, well, that just made us even prouder of how progressive our society is, compared to those notoriously oppressed women of Paris, Milan, and London, who haven't been taught to turn in their high heels for soccer spikes!

After each spasm of interest, the poor women athletes come home and set up a domestic pro league, which rapidly loses 99% of the public's interest, because, basically, the best women aren't anywhere near as good at sports as the best men, so what's the point in watching them unless they are kicking some foreigners' un-American butts?

But there's so much quick cash to be made from these frenzies of feminist patriotic chauvinism that you can expect to see them continually pop up in the future. I'm looking forward to the Women's Super Bowl, where our female football players will triumph over the evil women of Iceland 77-3 in the Finals. And there shall be great rejoicing upon the land.

February 11, 2002

Schwarzenegger's Collateral Damage.


My Review of Schwarzenegger's smart and geopolitically sober Collateral Damage.


Enormous Surprise: Arnold Schwarzenegger's movie about a fireman hunting down the terrorist who murdered his family is the #1 movie in the country! Who coulda thunk that the public would want to see such a thing? Well, for several months Hollywood didn't, for reasons that I dissected recently.

The critics have almost universally slammed Arnold's Collateral Damage, but for wildly contradictory reasons: It's outdated! It's too current! It's typical Arnold! It's not typical Arnold! It's too pro-American! It's too anti-American! It's a dessert topping! It's a floor wax! (Reviews are collected at RottenTomatoes.com.) Did anybody actually watch the movie before they decided what they were going to write? (I did - here's my review.)

The truth is that as an action movie, Collateral Damage won't make anybody forget Terminator 2. Still, despite staying within the bang-bang-boom-boom confines of the genre (a genre I, like many people, enjoy), it's the smartest, most even-handed Hollywood portrait of the Colombian nightmare since Clear and Present Danger. (Here's the review of a leftist critic who actually sort of gets it.) In fact, it's probably too thoughtful to make big bucks.

This demonstration that contemporary film critics are bigoted ignoramuses regarding the real world makes the news of the death of my role model, Richard Grenier, particularly saddening. In his legendary reviews in Commentary, Grenier demonstrated that movies were worthy topics for his vastly learned and skeptical intelligence. (Click here for his monumental demolition job on Gandhi.)


February 9, 2002

Homi Bhabha, Homi Bhabha, I just love to say that name

I don't want to pick on Jonah Goldberg - he's an insightful and often funny guy - but in his string of attacks on post-modernists, he keeps missing the most amusing ironies. Here, he dumps on a Harvard professor with the wonderful Arabian Nights name of Homi Bhabha. Homi Bhabha (I just love saying that name) is a hot "post-colonial theorist" who has an even more muddled prose style than is normal for the breed. What Jonah doesn't realize is that Homi Bhabha is a fellow conservative. (Read this NYT article carefully.)

This fabulously rich Parsi from Bombay writes in such a tortured prose style to cover up his commonsensical dissent from the Edward Said-orthodoxy of his field. Unlike Said, who denounces Europeans who write about Arabs to cover up how embarrassed he is by his fellow Arabs, as a Parsi, Homhi Bhabha simply doesn't feel like purely a victim of colonialism. His remarkably intelligent race of Zoroastrians (they are to South Asia what Hungarian Jews were to pre-Holocaust Europe) did very well for themselves under the British as industrialists, although British racial snobbery was no doubt galling. In fact, a Parsi was elected to Parliament as a Tory M.P. from the English Home Counties in the 1890s! To Homi Bhabha, it's obvious that colonialism wasn't all bad, and that Said's model of the world is stupid. But he's too smart and too careerist to come out and say it clearly.

February 8, 2002

God Save the Queen on her 50th Anniversary

Queen Elizabeth's 50th Anniversary: The only time I ever sawn the Queen was in 1983. I had just arrived in San Francisco on business, and the TV news was trumpeting that President Reagan was going to have dinner with Queen Elizabeth at a Golden Gate Park museum. So, I grabbed a taxi and issued the Mother Goose-like command, "Take me to see the Queen!"

"Any queen in particular?" asked the cabbie. "This town's loaded with 'em."

I eventually landed on a street corner full of Irish protestors holding signs denouncing British rule in Northern Ireland. After a long wait, the biggest motorcade in the history of world rolled by, and there at the back was Elizabeth II, giving her famous little wave to all of us on the corner. I turned around to watch the furious Irish protestors, only to see them leaping up and down in joyous excitement, waving back with tears of adulation in their eyes. When she was gone, the embarrassed Fenians skulked off.

By the way, a lot of hyper-intellectual bilge has been written in the years since the Queen's 25th anniversary "explaining" the Sex Pistol's great single "God Save the Queen." The real reason Johnny Rotten (a.k.a., John Lydon) hated the Queen with such memorable passion was simple: he's an Irishman.

February 7, 2002

Edward Said, Jonah Goldberg, and "Orientalist" scholars

Jonah Goldberg in NRO defends the old European "Orientalist" scholars of Middle Eastern culture against the Palestinian-American literary critic Edward Said's celebrated attack on them as racists. But Jonah misses three key points.

First, as is so common among multiculturalists, Said prefers to write about Europeans who wrote about Arabs, rather than writing about Arabs themselves, because Said is bored and embarrassed by his own people.

Second, many of these European scholars were not only not biased against Arabia, they were in fact "desperately in love with the Arab Muslim world," according to the great economic historian David Landes (click here for my review of his last book.) The British archaeologist turned Arab guerilla leader Lawrence of Arabia is only the most famous "sand-smitten" example.

Third, more than a few Orientalists were not only in love with Arabia, they were in love with individual Arab boys or men. Arab culture's tendency toward bisexuality made it particularly attractive to gay Englishmen. When asked why he had fought for Arab independence, Lawrence replied, ""Personal: I liked a particular Arab, and I thought that freedom for the race would be an acceptable present." This particular Arab was apparently Dahoum, a teenage waterboy. In The Source, James Michener suggested that British rulers in Palestine tended to emotionally bond with the Arabs because they both shared a taste for Brideshead Revisited-style male-male "romantic friendships." In contrast, the highly heterosexual Jews and Americans found each other on the same wavelength.

The essential problem with the European Union

The essential problem with the European Union: It's not democratic, and it can't be - because Europeans don't speak a common language. Until they do, power will be in the hands of multilingual bureaucrats in Brussels, not of the people.

February 6, 2002

New Frontiers in Multicultural Sensitivity

New Frontiers in Multicultural Sensitivity: My 7th grader's Spanish teacher just announced that she does not want her students to develop correct accents because "some people think that would be making fun of my people." Man, I would have ruled if she had been my Spanish teacher, because I always sounded like W.C. Fields trying to speak Spanish. Unfortunately, my high school Spanish teacher, Mr. De Soto, had reactionary ideas about how the language of Cervantes and Borges should be pronounced. After I'd recite, he'd groan and call me "Super Gringo."