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http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#million.dollar.baby
Clint
Eastwood's lady boxer movie Million Dollar Baby: From my
American Conservative review, now available to electronic subscribers:
In
reality, women's boxing is a pseudo-feminist trashsport that briefly
flourished in the 1990s when impresario Don King noticed that Mike Tyson
fans got some kind of weird kick out of preliminary catfights between
battling babes.
Traditionally, society objected to women brawling because (to paraphrase
the answer the shady doctor in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless
Mind" gives to the question of whether his memory erasure technique
can cause brain damage), "Technically speaking, boxing is brain
damage."
If a man gets his head caved in during some pointless scrap, well, some
other man will just have to step in and do double duty carrying on the
species. But, women are the limiting scarce resource in making babies,
so each woman lost lowers the overall reproductive capacity.
That kind of proto-sociobiological reasoning is unthinkable today, yet
that hasn't brought about a feminist utopia. Instead, men employ gender
equality slogans to badger women into doing things guys enjoy.
Still, female fisticuffs have faded recently due to the supply side
problem of finding enough low-cost opponents for the handful of women
stars. While the number of male palookas who will fight for next to
nothing in the hope of becoming Rocky Balboa is ample, managers needing
fresh meat for their female champs to bash frequently have to hire
hookers and strippers to take dives -- and working girls don't work for
free.
"Million Dollar Baby" simply ignores all this and asks you to
believe that women's boxing today is a thriving duplicate of the men's
fight game of a half century ago, which allows Eastwood to make a
1955-style boxing movie.
This offers some almost-forgotten payoffs, but Eastwood doesn't have the
courage to make a genuinely out-of-fashion film.
The
rest of my review will be on newsstands in a week or so.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#gerrymander
Three
Cheers for Ah-Nold -- Last November, 153 Congressional and
legislative seats in California were being contested in the election.
Not a single one changed from one party to the other due to the extreme
gerrymandering in place to protect incumbents. Gov. Schwarzenegger has
announced that he's sick of this and wants an independent panel of
retired judges to draw district boundaries in the future.
Ah-Nold
is on the side of Truth, Justice, and the American Way because
gerrymandering has gotten increasingly accurate due to advances in
computer technology allows incumbents to protect themselves from
fluctuations in the will of the people.
Here's
an interview I conducted with the man who is perhaps the leading
academic expert on gerrymandering,
Dan Polsby of George Mason U.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/04DecB.htm#germs44
Why
did Germans outfight Americans, man for man, in 1944-45? Bloggers
like Brad
DeLong are up in arms that British war historian Max Hastings has a
new book out making the point that the outgunned German army fought very
well after Normandy.
The only problem is that Hastings is right.
The evolutionary psychologists Richerson and Boyd have written
extensively about the reasons for the slightly greater man-for-man
effectiveness of German soldiers in WWII (all else being equal,
according to Dupuy, 100 German soldiers were roughly equivalent to 120
British or American soldiers).
This is not to denigrate the Yanks and Brits, who fought awfully well,
especially compared to, say, the Italians. It's just when compared to the
Germans that noticeable differences are apparent. It's like saying
that Arnold Palmer wasn't quite as good a golfer as Jack Nicklaus:
undeniable, but hardly an insult to Arnie. It's the same reason it's
asinine to feel superior to the French for only going 1-2 against the
Germans from 1870-1940.
Richerson and Boyd largely attribute the difference to the paradoxical
fact that relationships between officers and enlisted men in the WWII
German army were more egalitarian (and even quasi-democratic) than in
the American army. You'll note that after Eisenhower, most of the
Presidents for the next three decades were ex-Navy officers -- it's
largely forgotten today in the nostalgic glow with which all aspects of
the Greatest Generation are bathed, but enlisted US Army soldiers tended
to return from WWII with much more resentment of stuck-up Army officers
than Navy sailors came back with resentment of
we're-all-in-this-together-boys Navy officers.
As evolutionary psychologists, Richerson and Boyd argue that the German
army did a better job of reproducing the conditions conducive to small
group cohesion and espirit de corps among hunting and raiding parties
during the "era of evolutionary adaptiveness." One notoriously
self-destructive technique used by the American army in WWII and Vietnam
was to rotate new men into established units as individuals. The
Germans, in contrast, had men who trained together fight together, and
thus they stuck with their platoon mates better than the randomly
assembled American units did.
There is no automatic reason a dictatorship should be better than a
democracy at organizing an army in this more effective fashion. It was
just an accident of history, partly having to do with Germany losing WWI
and thus being more serious about reform, partly with the Versailles
Treaty's limitation of the new German army to 100,000 men (so most of
the enlisted men between 1919-1933 were seen by the high command not as
cannon fodder but as officers-in-waiting, who would move up to officers
when the hated Versailles limitation was overthrown), and partly because
of Hitler's lower-middle class animus against the old aristocracy that
wouldn't let him become an officer despite his four years of courageous
service in WWI.
The U.S. Army learned a lot from having to fight the Germans and
improved in the decades afterwards.
On the other hand, you could argue that an ideologically radical
autocracy, like Hitler's (or Napoleon's), could be better at rooting out
aristocratic mindsets among the officer class than would a more
easy-going society with a representative government.
Certainly, Napoleon's troops tended to show higher espirit de corps than
did the enlisted men from the aristocratic parliamentary country of
Britain, in part precisely because Napoleon favored careers open to
talent, allowing obscure soldiers to rise through their own genius to
become Marshals.
Similarly, after Stalin murdered much of the established talent in the
Soviet Union in 1937-1938, he had to become very open to promoting
talents like Zhukov and Ustinov just to survive. Of course, over time a
new aristocracy develops (e.g., Napoleon promoted his siblings to be
submonarchs under him), and the late Soviet-style sclerosis sets in if
the autocracy endures. So, a democracy is likely to have a better track
record for meritocracy in the long run, but in the short run a ruthless
autocrat can unleash a huge amount of untapped energy in his country,
which helps explains how bad guys like Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin can
prove so frightening.
***
More
reasons the U.S. Army has improved: A recent Atlantic Monthly
article by Robert D. Kaplan quotes a colonel on how much the Army has
improved during his couple of decades of service. He attributed much of
the improved relations between officers and men to the recent spread of
evangelical Christianity, and the consequent decline in drinking. Since
officers and men are not allowed to drink in the same room, back in the
days when most free time was devoted to drinking, the ranks almost never
came in contact off duty.
Today, officers and men share more in common. I'd also add that since
the downsizing of the military in 1992, the IQ gap between officers and
enlisted has shrunk: For the last dozen years, about 65-70% of new
enlistees score over the national average on the IQ test the military
gives all applicants for enlistment. Only about 1% of new enlistees have
scored below the 30th percentile (around 90 on the usual IQ scale), so
officers and enlisted people can now communicate in a more egalitarian
fashion than in previous eras. I don't believe that the IQs of officers
have gone up as much -- the average SAT scores of West Point cadets are
now lower than, say, U. of Illinois freshmen.
By the way, you've probably heard of how awful was the quality of
enlisted personnel in the late 1970s, but you've probably never head of
the most direct cause: the "misnorming"
fiasco. The military's norms for scoring applicant's entrance tests
results on the new ASVAB (the 10 subtest exam of which four are the
highly g-loaded IQ-like tests used in The Bell Curve) were wrong
(too easy), and thus the military let in many applicants from 1976-1980
that they would have rejected if they had known how stupid they really
were.
The
Reagan-era reforms, such as higher pay, more Be All You Can Be
recruiting advertising, and more patriotism brought in a higher quality
of soldier, but for several years in the late 1970s, the military
couldn't figure out why its new recruits were so much more incompetent
on average than the recruiters said they would be.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/04DecB.htm#andamanhbd2
The
Andamanese and Human Biodiversity Conservation:
THURSDAY
AFTERNOON UPDATES:
Reports
remain confused about the fate of the pygmy negritos of the Andaman
islands, hit hard by the tsunami, especially the uncontacted tribe on
North Sentinel Island, but this almost-eyewitness account
sounds promising:
"Our helicopter pilot who flew over
[North Sentinel] island told me that he has seen several groups of Sentinelese on the beach and that when he dropped food packets they threw stones at the helicopter."
That
sure sounds like the Sentinelese we (don't) know and love! When somebody
offers to help them, they try to kill him. That attitude has kept them
free of Eurasian diseases all these millennia.
That
great picture of a steatopygous Andaman mom and how she carries her
toddler around is now on-line
here. There's another tremendous picture in Coon's Living Races
of Man (1965) (buy it here):
a portrait of a young pygmy negrito couple of Little Andaman Island, his
arm lovingly around her shoulders, the joy in each other's company
radiating outward. It's as happy a picture as you'll ever see. This
photo is now on-line
here,
That's
the point about human biodiversity studies: differences and
similarities.
There's
a book from 2003 about the Andamanese: "The Land of Naked People : Encounters with Stone Age Islanders"
by Scientific American staffer Madhusree Mukerjee.
*
Reports remain
uncertain about the fates of the wild tribes of stone age pgymy
negritos on the Andaman Islands, close to the epicenter of the
earthquake that was the source of the killer tsunami. Here are long
articles from the UK Independent,
the BBC,
and the UK Guardian,
and from MSNBC.
Also
struck hard were the Mongoloid Nicobarese tribesmen of the Nicobar
archipelago south of the Andamans. There is a modest amount of
information about them here.
Here's a Thursday afternoon update
on the ugly situation in the Nicobars.
If
any good could come out of this disaster, it would be to make the world
more aware of the importance of human biodiversity conservation.
Virtually nobody in the media gave a damn about the Andamanese until
this week. The health disaster that outside contact
has inflicted on the Jarawa tribe of Andamanese pygmy negritos over the
last half dozen years by exposing them to the outside world's germs was
almost completely ignored.
Also,
the very existence of the Andamanese, with their remarkable physical
features, was an affront to prevailing norms of political correctness
that demand that we "celebrate diversity" without actually
noticing diversity. As I wrote in VDARE,
"The men average 4'-10" and 95 pounds. The women have such pronounced
"steatopygia" that a mother who needs to carry her toddler on her back will have the child throw his arms around her neck and
stand on her remarkably protuberant, gravity-defying buttocks. (Unfortunately, Carleton Coon's
you-gotta-see-it-to-believe-it photo of this is not on line.)"
UPDATE:
That great picture is now on-line
here. There's another tremendous picture in Coon's Living Races
of Man (1965), a portrait of a young pygmy negrito couple, his arm
lovingly around her shoulders, there joy in each other's company
radiating outward. It's as happy a picture as you'll ever see.
We
never miss anything until it's almost gone. Well, now that the last
purely wild Andaman tribe, the Sentineli (a.k.a., Sentinelese,
Sentenelese, or North Sentinel Islanders -- nobody knows what they call
themselves), might be gone, the world has finally noticed that they
existed in the first place.
Here's
an excerpt from my 2002 interview
with George H.J. Weber, founder of Andaman.org.
In an era when we are routinely
encouraged to celebrate diversity, perhaps no group of humans on Earth
is more diverse yet less celebrated than the tiny but fierce Pygmy
Negritos of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean. They provide some
of the best examples of what modern humans were like when they first
emerged out of Africa dozens of millennia ago.
Wildlife biodiversity conservation is
a hugely popular cause today, but little thought is given to
preservation of human biodiversity, nor to protection of the few
remaining Stone Age cultures. Yet, the Andamanese Negrito tribes have
been decimated by contact with the modern world and its germs.
Fortunately, one remaining tribe on isolated North Sentinel Island
continues to drive off outsiders with swarms of arrows.
George H. J. Weber, a Swiss
businessman and independent scholar, is the founder of the Andaman
Association and creator of the encyclopedic andaman.org Web site, which
is the leading source for information on these almost unknown but
fascinating people...
Q:
What's been happening to the Jarawa tribe in the Andamans?
A: In the last few years ago, the Jarawa tribe has largely given up its
old hostility toward all outsiders. The result was predictable: a large
number of diseases have struck and violent crime is on the rise. The
latest reports received privately speak of 50 percent infection rate
with Hepatitis B among Jarawas (only a few months ago it was said to be
30 percent). Other diseases are rampant and one official has carelessly
let slip that there is AIDS among the Jarawa. Officially, of course, all
is well.
You had better heed local advice when meeting with Jarawa. Thanks to
grossly incompetent government policies in the past, you are likely to
meet them on the Andaman trunk road where they will hijack your bus and
not be satisfied with a handshake, but instead will demand goodies -- or
else. Such is progress in the Andamans.
Q: Why are Andamanese so vulnerable to the outside world?
A: They have been isolated from other people for a long time and have
never had a chance to develop resistance against outside diseases. The
Andamanese do have a limited immunity against malaria (a very ancient
human scourge), but the common cold or an ordinary flu, let alone
pneumonia, measles or venereal diseases, can be deadly to them.
Q: What's special about the North Sentinel Islanders?
A: They are the only Andamanese group that is today still as isolated as
all the Andamanese were in the past. That they live on a coral-fringed
island in stormy waters has protected them until now from those
do-gooders who would "bring them into the mainstream of Indian
society," as the nationalist phrase has it. For just what this
expression means in reality, the Jarawa situation provides an all too
clear illustration.
Q: Is their future safe?
A: "Missions of friendship" to the Sentineli have started only
a few years ago. Just as with the Jarawa, most were junkets for visiting
VIPs, camouflaged by being called "scientific." They were
hurriedly aborted after the Jarawa catastrophe burst over the guilty
administrators at Port Blair, the main city of the Andamans. At the
moment, the Sentineli are left alone again and all development plans
have been put on ice. May they long remain there.
UPDATE:
There's also a book from 2003 about the Andamanese: "The Land of Naked People : Encounters with Stone Age Islanders"
by Scientific American staffer Madhusree Mukerjee.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/04DecB.htm#orbach1
Jerry
Orbach, RIP: The 69-year-old actor, whose Det. Lennie Briscoe
character on "Law &
Order" was one of the most thoroughly likable in the history of
television, died today of prostate cancer at 69. He was also a
representative of a dying breed: the heterosexual Broadway musical song
and dance man. The Tony Award-winner originated the role of the narrator
in The Fantasticks and the tap-dancing sleazy lawyer in Chicago.
As the enchanted candlestick in Disney's animated classic Beauty
and the Beast, he sang the showstopper "Be Our Guest."
***
http://www.iSteve.com/04DecB.htm#dhansen1
A
detailed extension of my Marriage Gap theory of Red vs. Blue: Down
in Australia, Darvin Hansen gives a detailed
analysis of my finding that Years Married (especially, although not
solely, for whites) correlated to an extraordinary degree with Bush's
share of the vote in 2000 and 2004, and adds some new data.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/04DecB.htm#diamondhom
"Societies
don't die by accident - they commit ecological suicide" says an
article
trumpeting Jared Diamond's new book Collapse: How Societies Choose to
Fail or Succeed:
Diamond
studies four ancient societies across space and time: Easter Island in
Polynesia, the native American Anasazi tribe in what is now the
southwestern United States, the Maya civilization in Central America,
and the isolated Viking settlement on the coast of Greenland. Although
diverse in nature and context, these four societies experienced what
Diamond calls "ecocide," unintentional ecological suicide.
Contra
Diamond, in reality, most societies down through history died because
they were conquered. Generally speaking, not suicide, but homicide was
the fate of most extinct societies.
Diamond
cites the Maya, but I cite the Aztecs and the Incas. He cites the
Anasazi, but I cite the Cherokee, the Sioux, and countless others. He
cites the Easter Islanders, but I cite the Maoris, the Tasmanians, the
Australian Aborigines, the Chatham Islanders (exterminated by the
Maori), and so forth. He cites the Vikings in Greenland, but I cite the
Saxons in Britain and the Arabs in Sicily, both conquered by the
descendents of the Vikings. We can go on like this all day.
Diamond
used to be a terrific independent thinker, as shown in his 1993 book The
Third Chimpanzee (indeed, many of my examples come from this book).
But he sold out to political correctness, most profitably, in his
bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel.
Here's
my review of GG&S
from National Review in 1997:
Diamond
is not content, however, to merely write the history of the last 13,000
years. He also claims that his evidence is of great political
momentuousness because it shows that no ethnic group is inferior to any
other: each exploited its local food resources as fully as possible. For
example, after the Australian Outback explorers Burke and Wills
exhausted their Eurasian-derived supplies, three times they had to throw
themselves on the mercy and expertise of the local Stone Age
hunter-gatherers. These Aborigines, the least technically advanced of
all peoples, may not have domesticated a single Australian plant in
40,000 years, but in 200 years down under scientific whites have
domesticated merely the macadamia nut. Farming only pays in Australia
when using imported crops and livestock.
But, are indigenous peoples merely not inferior? In truth, on their own
turf many ethnic groups appear to be somewhat genetically superior to
outsiders. Diamond makes environmental differences seem so compelling
that it's hard to believe that humans would not become somewhat adapted
to their homelands through natural selection. And in fact, Diamond
himself briefly cites several examples of genetic differences impacting
history. Despite military superiority, Europeans repeatedly failed to
settle equatorial West Africa, in part because they lacked the malaria
resistance conferred on many natives by the sickle cell gene. Similarly,
biological disadvantages stopped whites from overrunning the Andes. Does
this make Diamond a loathsome racist? No, but it does imply that a
scientific-minded observer like Diamond should not dogmatically denounce
genetic explanations, since he is liable to get tarred with his own
brush.
The undeniability of human biodiversity does not prove that we also
differ somewhat mentally, but it's hard to imagine why the brain would
differ radically from the rest of the body. Consider the fable of the
grasshopper and the ant. The ant's personality traits -- foresight and
caution -- fitted him to survive his region's predictably harsh winters.
Yet, the grasshopper's strengths -- improvisation and spontaneity --
might furnish Darwinian superiority in a tropical land where the dangers
are unpredictable.
Like many, Diamond appears to confuse the concepts of genetic
superiorities (plural) and genetic supremacy (singular). The former are
circumstance-specific. For example, a slim, heat-shedding Somalian-style
body is inferior to a typically stocky, heat-conserving Eskimo physique
in Nome, but it's superior in Mogadishu (and in Manhattan, too, if, you
want to become a fashion model and marry David Bowie, like Somalian
supermodel Iman). In contrast, genetic supremacy is the dangerous
fantasy that one group is best at everything. Before the European
explosion began in the 15th Century, it seemed apparent that no race
could be supreme. Even the arrogant Chinese were periodically overrun by
less-cultured barbarians. The recent European supremacy in both the arts
of war and of peace was partly an optical illusion masking the usual
tradeoffs in talents within Europe (e.g., Italian admirals were as inept
as English cooks). Still, the rise and reign of Europe remains the
biggest event in world history. Yet, the era when Europeans could
plausibly claim supremacy over all other races has been dead for at
least the 60 years since Hitler, of all people, allied with Japan.
The historian who trumpets the political relevance of his work must
consider both the past and the future, which Diamond fails to do.
Surprisingly, ethnic biodiversity is becoming more important in numerous
ways. Until recently, one's location and social position at birth
closely constrained one's fate. But, as equality of opportunity grows,
the globalized marketplace increasingly exploits all advantages in
talent, including those with genetic roots. Pro sports offer a foretaste
of the future: many are resegregating themselves as ethnic groups
increasingly specialize in those games they're naturally best at. In
summary, Diamond may prove a better guide to the last 13,000 years than
the to next 13.
Only 7 of
those 13 years have gone by, but I'd have to say I'm way ahead of
Diamond at this point in forecasting the diverging paths of economic
development around the world: I was specifically thinking about South
Indian programmers and Chinese manufacturing engineers.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/04DecB.htm#2eagle
What
if all athletes took equal amounts of steroids? Many
libertarian-inclined commentators have proclaimed that rather than try
to ban steroids, sports leagues should "simply" allow all
athletes to take a "moderate" dose.
Of
course, this is utterly impractical. It's hard enough to ban steroids,
but from the perspective of surviving legal challenges from penalized
athletes, it's much more effective to have a blood test rule that says
one-molecule-and-you're-nailed than one that specifies X parts per
gazillion ... because that opens the door to endless arguments over
statistical margins of error. Further, it would just increase the amount
of steroids that cheaters would take to even more dangerously high
levels, with bizarre illnesses and girlfriends thrown down staircases in
'roid rages increasing concomitantly. If everybody was taking steroids
in 1996, how big a dose would Ken Caminiti have taken? He probably would
have survived only two years instead of eight after his steroid-fueled
MVP season.
Still,
a reader has some interesting observations about the effects of
this hypothetical system where everybody took the same amount:
Steroids
do not uniformly affect people. So the effect of universal use of equal
amounts would not be no effect, as you suggest. Rather, it would be
relatively helpful to people with lower levels of (natural) steroids,
who would benefit relatively more from a given dose. It would be
relatively hurtful to people with higher levels, who'd benefit
relatively less.
This may well help white and Asian athletes compete relative to black
athletes, if natural hormone levels are among the factors leading to
black dominance on the athletic field. Sports allowing fixed doping
levels might become whiter. A whiter sport might have many ramifications
from the business POV. I'd guess that MLB would jump at it, although,
clearly the racial angle will have them running scared so they'd find
some other public justification.
I'd suggest that part of the attraction for some commentators to steroid
use in the bigs is that it makes their fantasies of big-league play (for
themselves, or their sons, perhaps) seem more reasonable, since they
know themselves to be relatively low-T. Allowing the proliferation of
such fantasies might well be in the interest of MLB.
Equal-but-nonzero steroids might also allow women to compete. It also
may open the door to separate-but-equal thinking - that is, women might
be competitive if the various sport-governing bodies allow them to use
more steroids than men. (This seems farfetched on first reflection, but
the more I think about it, the more logical it seems from my
understanding of the leftist mindset.)
Also, one group in particular that has naturally lower levels of
steroids are older men. Bonds is an example - sabermetricians find that
baseball players on average peak about 28 or 29 (in terms of
stat-production), yet he's still kicking ass pushing 40. Allowing equal
levels of steroids would have the effect of prolonging the careers of
some players, making them more competitive vis-a-vis young men who've
naturally got plenty of juice but less skill. I've certainly heard the
DH rule praised for its side-effect of keeping in play old and beloved
(but slow) players. Juicing the game might have a similar effect -
again, good for MLB even if bad for the players collectively.
Much
of this already happens. For example, females get a bigger bang per buck
of steroids because they have fewer natural male hormones than do males.
That's why, as I pointed out in a National Review article "Track
and Battlefield" in 1997, the East German sports-industrial
complex was able to dope their female sprinters into beating our black
lady sprinters, but they failed completely at doping their male
sprinters into beating our black men.
Similarly,
doping has allowed some clunky white guys to make it to the major
leagues: as I pointed out in The
American Conservative last spring, Jason Giambi's brother Jeremy
is a good example of kind of slow white guy who couldn't make it without
steroids.
Still,
if everybody doped the same amount, there wouldn't be be all that much
change, as we see with Bonds. Not doping (presumably), he was the best
player of the 1990s. Doping, he is the best player of the 2000s.
Similarly,
Florence Griffith-Joyner was the fastest clean 200m woman in the world
at the 1984 Olympics and 1987 World Championships, but she finished
second to suspiciously muscular women both times. So, she showed up
looking like Wonder Woman in 1988 and made a joke out of the Seoul
Olympics.
A
lack of doping tests allowed doped women to artificially narrow the
gender gap in Olympic running events from 1976 through 1988, although
the difference was not huge -- about 10% to 20% of the gender gap in
speed.
Also,
you could also argue that the randomness of current cheating adds to the
drama of modern sports: For example, a Greek man wins the 200m dash in
the 2000 Olympics and his girlfriend gets the silver in the 100m dash.
After four years as the toast of Greece, with millions of Greeks
pointing to their performances as proof that the best blacks aren't
innately faster on average, the pair try to fake a motorcycle crash to
avoid the drug test at the 2004 Athens Olympics in their home country.
Now, that's interesting!
Think
how exciting it would be if Tiger Woods showed up on the PGA tour in
January as massively muscular as Barry Bonds (attributing the change to
his new bride's family recipe for Swedish meatballs) and started driving
Par-5s and holing putts for double eagles. TV ratings would triple! Golf
writers would make a fortune with articles about how Tiger added 200
yards to his drives by changing where the Vs in his grip point.
Anyway,
this whole discussion is theoretical, because there is no feasible
system for having everybody take just a little steroids. It's a joke of
an idea.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/04DecB.htm#pnand
Did
the Andamanese pygmy negritos survive the tsunami? The Times of
India speculates
on the fate of the most isolated uncontacted stone age tribe in the
known world, the North Sentinel Islanders in the Andaman chain,
northwest of Sumatra:
An
enormous anthropological disaster is in the making. The killer tsunami
is feared to have wiped out entire tribes — already threatened by
their precariously small numbers — perhaps rendering them extinct and
snapping the slender tie with a lost generation. Officials involved in
rescue operations are pessimistic, but still keeping their fingers
crossed for the Sentinelese and Nicobarese, the two tribes seen as
bearing the brunt of the killer wave. The bigger fear is for the
Sentinelese, anthropologically the most important tribe, living on the
flat North Sentinel Island. Putting their population at about 100,
officials say no body count is possible as the tribe had remained
isolated.
The Shompens, Great Andamanese and Jarawas are expected to have fared
better as they live on comparatively higher grounds. But their small
number could be working against them.
The
Great Andamanese were just about gone due to the introduction of
outsides disease when the English and Indians came in the 1850s. The
Jarawa thrived in the jungle until they began coming into town about
five years ago, and immediately started dying of pneumonia. The North
Sentinelese are on their own island, protecting them from germs, and
continue to drive off interlopers with showers of arrows.
North
Sentinel Island is surrounded by reefs that keep shipping away. Whether
that would be enough to stop the tsunami, I couldn't stay. Presumably,
the inhabitants have been there a loooong time, suggesting, perhaps,
that they've survived tsunamis before. We can only hope.
In
happier times, I interviewed
George Weber, founder of Andaman.org.
UPDATE:
A new report:
Ongi,
Sentinel, Jarwa tribes in Andamans are safe Wednesday, 29 December ,
2004, 01:23 New Delhi: The aborigines in Andaman and Nicobar Islands --
Ongi, Sentinel and Jarwa tribes -- are safe, Defence Minister Pranab
Mukherjee said on Tuesday.
While the Ongi people escaped the Tsunami disaster as they located at
slightly higher places, the inhabiting Sentinel and Jarwas have not not
been affected by the tidal waves, Mukherjee, who visited the Islands
along with Congress President Sonia Gandhi, told reporters. Describing
as highly exaggerated reports about the casualties suffered in the
Islands, Mukherjee said a joint secretary in the Home Ministry has been
asked to camp there to oversee relief and rehabilitation operations. He
also said that no date has been firmed up for the visit of Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh to the disaster zones.
Well,
that sounds promising, but whether the minister has solid information
or is just telling people not to assume the worst remains to be seen.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/04DecB.htm#lfbf
British
vs. French ex-Empires: As I discussed below, one of the most popular
papers in recent economics was "Law
and Finance," which argued that countries whose legal systems
derive from the British common law provide more protection of outside
shareholders than countries with French-derived law codes. Over time,
however, this useful little insight has bloviated
into a general explanation for the wealth and poverty of nations,
illustrating the tendency of modern economists to not see what is in
front of their noses.
A
reader writes:
I'm
curious to hear how they compare the relative performance of Taiwan and
Singapore, both with Chinese populations, the latter with a British
legal heritage and the former without such a heritage, but with almost
identical GDPs per capita today. There is clearly some benefit to be
derived from *not* being ruled by mainland China, but it seems to matter
rather less *who* colonized you (at least, between Britain and Japan).
I'm also curious to hear how they compare the relative performance of
Malaysia and Thailand. Their economic performance is fairly similar
(Malaysia is a bit ahead) but Thailand was never colonized at all.
(Thailand, by the way, is about 14% ethnic Chinese, not so wildly
different from Malaysia's 24%.)
It's interesting to look at the list below of countries in Africa, their
former colonial masters, and GDP per capita (PPP method, from the CIA
factbook), ranked by GDP per capita:
Country
Colonial Power $GDP per Capita
South Africa
Britain
10,700
Botswana
Britain
9,000
Namibia
Britain (prev German) 7,200
Tunisia
France
6,900
Libya
Italy
6,400
Algeria
France
6,000
Gabon
France
5,500
Swaziland
Britain
4,900
Egypt
Britain
4,000
Morocco
France
4,000
Lesotho
Britain
3,000
Equatorial Guinea
Spain
2,700
Ghana
Britain
2,200
Guinea
France
2,100
Angola
Portugal
1,900
Zimbabwe
Britain
1,900
Sudan
Britain
1,900
Mauritania
France
1,800
Cameroon
France (prev German) 1,800
Gambia
Britain
1,700
Senegal
France
1,600
Togo
France
1,500
Uganda
Britain
1,400
Cote D'Ivoire
France
1,400
Rwanda
Belgium
1,300
Djibouti
France
1,300
Chad
France
1,200
Sao Tome & Principe
Portugal
1,200
Mozambique
Portugal
1,200
Benin
France
1,100
Burkina Faso
France
1,100
Central African Repub France
1,100
Kenya
Britain
1,000
Liberia
USA (sort of)
1,000
Mali
France
900
Nigeria
Britain
900
Zambia
Britain
800
Guinea-Bissau
Portugal
800
Madagascar
France
800
Niger
France
800
Ethiopia
Italy (sort of) 700
Eritrea
Italy
700
Comoros
France
700
Congo, Dem Republic
Belgium
700
Congo, Republic
France
700
Burundi
Belgium
600
Tanzania
Britain (prev German) 600
Malawi
Britain
600
Sierra Leone
Britain
500
Somalia
Italy (and Britain) 500
You
can find pairings that look like they support the Legal Affairs
contention and pairings that look like they refute it. Ghana (fmr
British) is doing better now than Togo, Benin or the Ivory Coast (all
fmr French). But Nigeria and Sierra Leone (both fmr British) are doing
substantially worse than Cameroon and Guinea (both fmr French). And
Senegal (fmr French) and the Gambia (fmr British) look pretty much
identical. Algeria (fmr French) and Egypt (fmr British) each have Arab
populations, lots of sand and some oil. But Algeria is doing better
economically in spite of the fact that it's been more politically
unstable of late, and the fact that Egypt has the canal and massive
American support. The bottom four basket cases on the list, in economic
terms - Tanzania, Malawi, Sierra Leone and Somalia - were all at least
partly colonized by Britain.
Britain's most successful former colonies in sub-saharan Africa are
South Africa, Botswana and Namibia, plus Swaziland and Lesotho, which
were never precisely colonies. South Africa dominates the economy of the
region, and it is only 75% black African. Namibia is 87% black African
and Botswana's stats are not usefully broken out (they count white in
the category "other" and I don't know what else is in that
category; "other" is 7% of the country). So it's plausible to
attribute the outperformance of this entire region to South African
exceptionalism, which is surely related to the exceptional racial
breakdown of the country. Of the next batch - Ghana, Zimbabwe, Gambia
and Uganda - none has a non-African population above 2%. Meanwhile, the
most successful French former colonies in sub-Saharan Africa are Gabon,
Guinea, Cameroon, Senegal and Togo. Gabon is 1% French, but 11%
"other Africans and Europeans" and it has a tiny population,
so maybe it's an outlier and we should discount it [It's just an oil
spigot country.] The next four countries have non-African populations of
well under 2% - smaller, on average, than the four British successes.
And their average GDPs are pretty similar:
Country
Colonial Power Non-African %
Total Populat GDP per Capita (USD)
Ghana
Britain
<1%
20.8mm
2,200
Guinea
France
<1%
9.3mm
2,100
Zimbabwe
Britain
<2%
12.7mm
1,900
Cameroon
France
<1%
16.1mm
1,800
Gambia
Britain
1%
1.6mm
1,700
Senegal
France
1%
10.9mm
1,600
Togo
France
<1%
5.6mm
1,500
Uganda
Britain
1%
26.4mm
1,400
Do you see a pattern here? I don't.
Looks to me like the French legal heritage works about as well as the
British if you compare otherwise similar countries.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/04DecB.htm#Bluesm
Bluest
State Blues: Among the 50 states, Massachusetts ranked 50th in
Bush's share of the vote, 50th in Average Years Married among younger
white women, 49th in white fertility, and 50th in lack of housing price
inflation. Not surprisingly, the AP reports:
BOSTON
- Massachusetts was the only state in the nation to lose residents in
2004, U.S. Census data shows. The state lost an estimated 3,852 people
... in the last year, despite continuing growth in immigration to the
Bay State, the Boston Sunday Globe reported.
Paul E. Harrington, an economist at Northeastern University's Center for
Labor Market Studies, attributed the fall to a stagnant job market. He
said the decline could be an ominous sign for the state.
"Population loss is a pretty fundamental number," he said.
Offsetting the trend is a boost in foreign immigrants, Harrington said,
who are counted by the Census but often don't show up in job or
unemployment data. That suggests that these workers are being paid under
the table, which could create "long-term economic growth
problem," he said.
The population of the country swelled by almost 3 million, to nearly 294
million, from July 2003 to July 2004, the Census Bureau reported in its
annual population estimates last week.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/04DecB.htm#reggieist
Reggie
White, RIP: The New York Times obituary
of the great NFL defensive lineman and minister says:
"White created a stir in March 1998 with a speech to the Wisconsin State Assembly. In it, he referred to homosexuality as "one of the biggest sins in the Bible" and used ethnic stereotypes for blacks and whites."
In
reality, the Reverend White's much-denounced "ethnic
stereotypes" speech was one of the more thoughtful celebrations of
racial and ethnic diversity in recent years. Across
Difficult Country quotes the most vilified section of White's speech
in context:
Why
did God create us differently? Why did God make me black and you white?
Why did God make the next guy Korean and the next guy Asian and the
other guy Hispanic? Why did God create the Indians?
Well, it's interesting to me to know why now. When you look at the black
race, black people are very gifted in what we call worship and
celebration. A lot of us like to dance, and if you go to black churches,
you see people jumping up and down, because they really get into it.
White people were blessed with the gift of structure and organization.
You guys do a good job of building businesses and things of that nature
and you know how to tap into money pretty much better than a lot of
people do around the world.
Hispanics are gifted in family structure. You can see a Hispanic person
and they can put 20 or 30 people in one home. They were gifted in the
family structure.
When you look at the Asians, the Asian is very gifted in creation,
creativity and inventions. If you go to Japan or any Asian country, they
can turn a television into a watch. They're very creative. And you look
at the Indians, they have been very gifted in the spirituality.
When you put all of that together, guess what it makes. It forms a
complete image of God. God made us different because he was trying to
create himself. He was trying to form himself, and then we got kind of
knuckleheaded and kind of pushed everything aside.
I
attempted a more elaborate description of black advantages, the ones
that can't be measured by IQ tests, in my 1996 National Review
article "Great Black
Hopes" and in this long book review of Arthur Jensen's The g
Factor called "The
Half-Full glass," in which I declared myself a "Reggieist."
http://www.iSteve.com/04DecB.htm#silanes
Colonialism's
Surprisingly Weak Impact: Colby Cosh writes:
"'Using sophisticated mathematical models, a group of four economists has
proven...'--well, the stunningly obvious: that the best thing a country can possibly do for its economy (and probably its general well-being) is to go back in time and get itself subjugated good and hard by the British Empire."
Yet,
this doesn't seem that stunningly obvious to me: e.g., Zimbabwe (Where
the joke du jour is, "Q. What did we have before candles? A.
Electricity"), Burma, Iraq, Nigeria, Sudan, Pakistan ...
Maybe these are exceptions that prove the rule, but the rule is starting
to look awfully shaky.
In an article in Legal Affairs
by Nicholas Thompson about this theory advanced by "Rafael La Porta of Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes of the Yale School of Management, Andrei Shleifer of Harvard's economics department, and Robert Vishny of the University of Chicago's business
school" begins:
MALAYSIA AND INDONESIA COULDN'T BE CALLED TWINS, but they might be called siblings. The adjacent Southeast Asian nations possess similar natural resources and their citizens speak similar languages and follow similar strains of Islam. But Malaysia's economy is prospering while Indonesia's is floundering. Malaysia's stock market is far more vibrant than its neighbor's, and its average resident is three times richer...
Another explanation lies in the countries' legal systems, however. Malaysia was a British colony and its legal system is based on the common law: the set of rules, norms, and procedures that has guided the legal system of England and the British Empire for about nine centuries. Indonesia was a Dutch colony and its legal system derives from French civil law, a set of statutes and principles written under Napoleon in the early 19th century and imposed upon the lands he conquered, including the Netherlands.
According to research published by a group of scholars beginning in 1998, countries that come from a French civil law tradition struggle to create effective financial markets, while countries with a British common law tradition succeed far more frequently. While the scholars conducting the research are economists rather than lawyers, their theory has jolted the legal academy, leading to the creation of a new academic specialty called "law and finance" and turning the authors of the theory into the most cited economists in the world over the past decade.
C'mon,
the main reason Malaysia is better off than Indonesia is because about a
quarter of Malaysia's population are Chinese, who, according to
Malaysia's former President Mahathir Mohamad, are smarter and harder
working than the indigenous "bumiputras." Mahathir set up a
clever system of affirmative action for the majority that keeps them
from rioting against the Chinese while not burdening the more productive
group so much that they all leave Malaysia. In contrast, as Amy Chua
pointed out in World
on Fire, Indonesia is only 3% Chinese, and the ruling Suharto
family climbed in bed with the Chinese businessmen, so that when the
Suhartos were overthrown in 1998, the Chinese were attacked in populist
pogroms, many fled to Chinese-run Singapore, and the new
"democratic" government nationalized $58 billion worth of
Chinese-owned businesses, with the usual disastrous results for the
economy.
Just by spinning the globe, it's easy
to see that the correlation between the colonizer's legal system and the
ex-colony's economic success is relatively faint. It's quite possible
that in the esoteric area of financial markets law, the British heritage
is more useful than that of the Code Napoleon, but, obviously, that's
merely the icing on the cake of prosperity.
Obviously, a far more important factor is ideology. Vietnam did poorly
up until about a dozen years ago, not because it was a former French
colony but because it had a Communist economy. Ever since it turned to
capitalism, it has grown quickly. Similarly, despite its continuity in
common law judicial philosophy, India did not thrive after gaining
independence from Britain in 1947 because it also inherited the Fabian
socialism dominant in Britain at the time. On the verge of economic
collapse in 1991, India began liberating its economy and has grown
steadily ever since.
Overall, it's striking how little impact colonialism, despite all the
intense emotions it engendered, has had on the post-colonial world.
Consider Japan's ex-colonies: South Korea and Taiwan are success
stories, while North Korea is a disaster. Similarly, a half century of
American rule did not leave the Philippines with an economy has dynamic
as America's, or even as it neighbors in the region.
Paul Johnson pointed out that colonialism was an intensely visual
process, manifesting itself, for example, in painting the map of the
world in the red of the British empire, but much of its impact was on
the surface.
A less publicized factor that has become even more important since the
collapse of communist ideologies 15 years ago rendered the ideological
playing field a lot more level appears to be IQ. Something that strongly
correlate with level of prosperity is national average IQ. In their 2002
book, "IQ
and the Wealth of Nations," veteran academics Richard Lynn and
Tatu Vanhanen estimated, from studies published in scientific journals,
the average IQs for 81 countries. Despite the large amount of noise in
this IQ data, they still found a strikingly high correlation coefficient
of 0.73 between average IQ and average GDP per capita.
It's important to point out that all the obvious problems with
estimating average national IQ -- such as obtaining nationally
representative samples and finding culturally unbiased tests -- work to lower,
not increase, the correlation with average per capita income. So, the
correlation between income and the "true" average national IQs
is likely even higher than 0.73.
And it's not like there's nothing we can do about national IQ -- UNICEF
issued a report
early this year, "Vitamin & Mineral Deficiency: A Global
Progress Report," spelling out two steps that could raise 3rd world
national average IQs: put iodine in salt and iron in flour or other
staples. That helped eliminate "cretinism" and similar medical
problems lowering intelligence in the industrialized world a few
generations ago.
Of course, nobody picked up on this report in the press, because that
would require talking about IQ.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/04DecB.htm#1stamendment
The
American Prospect Can't Stand the Heat and Wants Everybody Else to Get
Out of the Kitchen: After publishing Garance Franke-Ruta's smear
of me, The American Prospect is now threatening legal action against
anybody who "reproduces" an old article accusing her of
racism. You've really got to read
this to believe their hypocrisy.
At
the time I wrote,
"I must confess that my eyes glazed over while reading about Franke-Ruta's and The American Prospect's alleged high crimes and insensitivities against Latinos. What I saw of it before nodding off seemed no more persuasive than what she wrote about me.
On the other hand, as Across Difficult Country asks, why should the benefit of the doubt be extended to Franke-Ruta if she won't extend it to me? Good question. It's often those who live in the glassiest houses who are most inclined to throw stones to distract from the fragility of their own abodes.
Well, it being the Christmas season, I shall give Franke-Ruta the benefit of the doubt anyway.
The
Winds of Change blog is flabbergasted by the
whole deal.
Speaking
of glass houses,, although Franke-Ruta wrote some obnoxious and absurd things about me (my response is at
http://www.iSteve.com/04DecA.htm#smear ), she shouldn't be silenced for her own political incorrectness.
In further defense of Franke-Ruta, let me point out that she is sometimes quite a bit more honest than most liberals about issues like race and crime. For example, in a 2002 review of Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine," she attacked the movie for roughly the same reason I did in my "Baby Gap" article (
http://www.amconmag.com/2004_12_20/cover.html ).
She wrote:
http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2002/11/franke-ruta-g-11-22.html
"My beef with Moore is this: He has managed to make a movie about gun violence in America -- where 53 percent of the gun murder victims are black -- without interviewing a single black victim of gun violence, or even asking black community leaders, who have spent decades successfully trying to combat the problem, for their insights. Instead, to explore a phenomenon that has devastated inner cities and is a horror primarily in urban areas -- nearly 70 percent of gun murders take place in cities, according to U.S. Deaprtment of Justice statistics -- Moore has made a movie that takes as its focal point the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colo., a type of crime (five or more victims) that represented one-tenth of 1 percent of murders that year and that occurred in a white, prosperous, suburban community...
"Young black men ages 14-24 make up only 1 percent of the U.S. population but around 15 percent of the murder victims. Nor are Moore's suburban white gun owners, no matter how ridiculous their fears, the reason that black Americans were six times more likely to be murdered than whites in 1999, and seven times more likely to commit
homicides."
Personally, I think The American Prospect could use more of the kind of honesty Franke-Ruta is showing in the two paragraphs I quoted above.
What she appeared to be doing by attacking me in such a frenetic and irrational manner is the old trick that when the wolves of political correctness are closing in on the sleigh, throw somebody even more politically incorrect to
the wolves to distract them. "When they came for Steve Sailer, I led them to him," etcetera
etcetera
Obviously, I don't appreciate her ploy, but I certainly don't think it's in American political discourse's best
interest for her to be devoured by the politically correct either.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/04DecB.htm#christmasong
A
Christmas Song Decline Theory: I like pop classic Christmas songs,
such as "Winter Wonderland" or "Chestnuts Roasting Over
an Open Fire" for a lot of reasons, including that Christmas is one
of the few time of the year when singing in public is tolerated these
days. So, like a lot of people lately, I've been wondering why there
haven't been any new hit Christmas songs in many years. One of my reader
theorized that this is because many of the Christmas standards that were
written in the golden age of secular pop Christmas songs between 1934
and 1958 were written by Jews (e.g., Irving Berlin's "White
Christmas)," but modern Jews find it ignominious to write Christmas
songs anymore. (The reader, in case you were wondering, is Jewish.)
"As a great Jewish songwriter sang, 'It ain't me, babe,'" she
wrote to me.
That's
an interesting theory, and it would be sad if it were true. It probably
also wouldn't be, as they say, good for the Jews, because Jews
like Irving Berlin helped transform Christmas from purely a Christian
holiday into one that was also a secular American holiday, promising
peace on earth for men of good will ... of all backgrounds.
I
wanted to test this theory, but since nobody of any background is
writing good Christmas songs anymore, it's hard to see if the ethnic
balance has changed. (Indeed, it's hard to come up with an objective
list of good songs of any kind from recent years -- e.g., the recent
Rolling Stone magazine top 500 songs list only included three from the
last half decade -- two by Eminem and one by Outkast).
However,
we live in an an age that still produces some decent Christmas movies --
2003's "Elf," for instance, hardly compares to "It's a
Wonderful Life" (but then what does?), yet it's still a modest
delight. The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles reports:
Both are written and directed by persons of the Jewish faith. “Elf” is directed (Jon Favreau), written by (David Berenbaum) and has stars (James Caan, Edward Asner) who are Jewish — a rare trifecta, particularly for a Christmas film — a feat that parallels the success of the 1954 “White Christmas” (Michael Curtiz, Norm Krasna and Danny Kaye, respectively).
Favreau,
by the way, is Italian on his father's side and Jewish on his mother's
side, and says
he "keeps a Jewish home."
2002's
"Santa Clause 2" was a funnier film than you would expect and
made a deserved pile of money because it featured G-rated jokes that
adults enjoyed. It's director, Michael
Lembeck, is Jewish, as would appear to be some of its many writers.
Nor
is it just the better sort of Christmas movie that features heavy Jewish
involvement: I haven't seen this year's "Christmas
with the Kranks" and "Surviving
Christmas," so I'll skip over evaluating how good they are, but
they both appear to have lots of Jews working on them in key creative
roles.
(On
the other hand, Robert Zemeckis, director of this year's slow-motion
Christmas hit "The Polar Express," is, to the surprise of
many, of Polish Catholic background. And the big three behind 2000's
"How The Grinch Stole Christmas," Dr. Seuss, Ron Howard, and
Jim Carrey, are not Jewish.)
So,
it looks like Jews in the film industry are still quite happy to make
secular Christmas movies. This analogy therefore, doesn't support my
reader's theory about the decline of Christmas songs. We'll just have to
keep looking elsewhere.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/04DecB.htm#steroidrats
Steroid
Rationalizations: A baseball blog called The Hardball Times writes:
Unlike,
I suppose, pretty much everyone, I don't consider steroid abuse to be
cheating at baseball. It's cheating at working out, it's probably
cheating other players out of playing time in some instances, and it's
certainly cheating those players and teams out of money -- but it's not
cheating at baseball. The positive effects of steroids are the same as
exercise, just dramatically increased. When you take steroids, the ball
doesn't jump over the fence on a bunt. Foul balls don't suddenly curve
fair, and you can't suddenly hit any ball anywhere at any time. It makes
you a better hitter, but you could achieve the same results with actual
hard work. The results in the gym are a fraud, the results on the field
are not, because the other team will be able to ascertain very quickly
your physical attributes, and play you accordingly.
Exactly
how can other teams play Barry Bonds accordingly? By buying their
outfielders seats in the bleachers?
And
how could anyone achieve the same results as Barry "with actual
hard work?" After the age of 35, Barry has enjoyed the three
greatest offensive seasons in baseball history. By taking steroids,
Barry can work out and more often than anybody who isn't taking
steroids.
I've
noticed that in the blogosphere, unsophisticated libertarianism and
hero-worship of manly athletes frequently combine to turn bloggers into
saps for steroid-abusers. Look how many bloggers have endorsed the idea
that, well, we shouldn't ban steroid use, just limit it to a safe,
moderate amount.
What
a stupid idea that is! The whole point of using steroids in baseball is
not to use the same amount as your competitors, but to use more. If you
all just used the same moderate amount, you'd all be better off using
none at all. If they implemented that rule, then to get an advantage,
you'd have to take the kind of massive jolts that the late Ken Caminiti
started taking in mid-season 1996. (Soon, Caminiti came down with
terrible depression when not full of steroids, which led him to
self-medicate by smoking crack, which led to his recent death in the
gutter at age 41.)
Further,
if they allowed any level of steroids, it would make it vastly harder to
catch cheaters, since each time they caught anybody it would end up in
an endless court suit over whether they actually had the illegal 101
parts per zillion in their blood stream or the legal 100 parts per
zillion. Now, all they have to prove is you had a single one of these
illegal molecules in your bloodstream ... and it's still hard to win the
court fights today.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/04DecB.htm#krapunion
What
is Rove really up to? A reader passes on an interesting
interpretation of why Bush and Rove want to flood the country with an
unlimited number of foreign guest workers at the minimum wage. They know
it won't generate votes for Republicans, but that's not the intention.
The goal is to destroy the unions, which are major sources of funds and
organizers for the Democratic Party, by providing a nearly-infinite
supply of strikebreakers.
A
historical analogy: Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers union was able to
significantly raise the wages of stoop laborers in the 1960s and 1970s
because the Eisenhower Administration deported about a million illegal
immigrants back to Mexico. Growers fought back against the UFW by
sending buses to Mexico and sneaking strikebreakers over the border, so
infuriating Chavez that he volunteered his union staffers to the Border
Patrol as auxiliary vigilantes. However, the 1982 economic collapse in
Mexico sent millions of illegal immigrants northward, crushing wages.
Now, the UFW is a dried husk and Chavez, bizarrely, is celebrated as the
patron saint of the reconquista, even though he used to turn in
illegal immigrants to the INS.
Yet,
the number of workers who are in private sector unions has shrunk down
so low that this obsession of Rove's seems outdated. Certainly, private
sector unionism hardly saps the strength of the economy to the same
extent as it did in, say, Harry Truman's day, when a big part of the
President's job was trying to head off or settle massive strikes.
Increasingly, unionized workers are government employees, who typically
are protected from illegal immigrants by laws requiring government
jobholders to be citizens.
The
AFL-CIO favors a less radical version of the Karl Rove Amnesty Plan,
suggesting that they view the political impact of KRAP very differently
than Rove does. The unions see two benefits. First, amnesty increases
the number of potential union members by bringing illegals out of the
shadows. Second, by threatening to destroy American wage levels, KRAP
will increase desperation among workers and make them turn to the unions
for protection from guest workers, just as the unions first became
hugely powerful during the Depression when the supply of labor was far
greater than the demand.
I
can't say whether Rove or the AFL-CIO is right about the political
impact of KRAP, but that there's disagreement between the two most
interested parties shows how much Bush and Rove just like to roll the
dice more than they like to figure the odds, as shown by invading Iraq
and by how they made it easier for Arab Muslim terrorists to hijack
airplanes in the first 8 months of 2001 as part of their pursuit of the
(almost nonexistent) Arab Muslim vote.
So
far, Rove's claim to be a genius is that Bush got elected by a -0.5%
margin and got re-elected by less than 2.5% of the vote -- pretty thin
evidence that Rove's the infallible seer of politics. A better
interpretation is that Rove is an inveterate gambler who has slipped
through by the skin of his teeth so far.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/04DecB.htm#ragtrade
While
we waste our time and treasure in Iraq: David Barboza reports
in the NYT:
DATANG, China - You probably have never heard of this factory town in coastal China, and there is no reason why you should have. But it fills your sock drawer.
Datang produces an astounding nine billion pairs of socks each year - more than one set for every person on the planet. People here fondly call it Socks City, and its annual socks festival attracts 100,000 buyers from around the world.
Southeast from here is Shenzhou, which is the world's necktie capital. To the west is Sweater City and Kid's Clothing City. To the south, in the low-rent district, is Underwear City.
This remarkable specialization, one city for each drawer in your bureau, reflects the economies of scale and intense concentration that have helped turn China into a garment behemoth. On Jan. 1, a new trade regime will end the decades-old system of country-by-country quotas that divide the world's exports among roughly 150 countries. Now, China is banking on its immense size and efficient operators to grab an even larger share of the world's clothing orders.
The garment industry has traditionally been the first rung
up on the ladder of industrialization, from England in the 1760s onward. If China monopolizes the garment trade, however, that will foreclose the first step up for the poorest countries in the world.
However, we'll be able to buy lots of cheap socks at Wal-Mart (at least
until the Chinese tire of propping up the rapidly becoming less almighty
dollar), and I guess that's what's really important.
***
More
of the Derb's Christmas Classics: To the tune of "Let It
Snow!":
Let Them Grow!
The steroid abuse is frightful
But the games are so delightful!
Since the ball players thrill us so —
Let them grow! Let them grow! Let them grow!
Now Giambi and Bonds are admitting
There's more than just skill to their hitting,
And baseball is just a freak show —
Let them grow! Let them grow! Let them grow!
***
http://www.iSteve.com/04DecA.htm#redheads
Whatever
happened to redheads? A reader writes:
I'm
a redhead and always get discouraged from keeping my natural hair color
when I constantly hear "blondes vs. brunettes". It makes me
feel invisible and I question if men just aren't attracted to redheaded
women. After reading your article though it seems that blondes and
redheads are clumped into the same category? I was wondering why that
is?
Good
question. I just watched Rosanna Arquette's meandering documentary
"Searching for Debra Winger," in which aging Hollywood
actresses kvetch about how they don't get any good roles after they hit
40 (The title comes from Debra Winger, a big star in her late twenties
with "An Officer and a Gentleman" and "Terms of
Endearment," who walked away from The Industry just before her 40th
birthday.). The movie could have been called "29 Blondes and Whoopi
Goldberg."
Yet, redheads were a very big deal in American popular culture (songs,
movies, television -- Lucille Ball never made it big until she dyed her
hair red) for much of the 20th Century and then something happened,
maybe in the 1960s.
Perhaps it had something to do with Americans paying more attention to
racial minorities. Just as the differences between Irish vs. Italians
seemed less important after the rise of interest in the 1960s in blacks
made black vs. white seem ever so more important than Irish vs.
Italians, then differences in hair color among whites might have seemed
less important. So, blondes simply became a general symbol for the kind
of hair colors that whites can have naturally, but other groups can't.
Or maybe it had something to do with the fad in the 1960s and 1970s for
women to get tanned. Since blondes can tan and redheads can't (to
generalize wildly), blondes were more fashionable in that era than
redheads. We've gotten over that fad for tanning, but for some reason,
the emphasis on redheads never returned, even though a lot of leading
actresses are redheads today (due to Hollywood's strong desire for
leading ladies to be fairer skinned than their leading men).
By the way, when Arquette hunts down Debra Winger in what looks like her
plush retirement, she's wearing her hair bright red, and it looks great.
Despite the paucity of starring roles for actresses over 40, all the
ladies in the documentary seemed to be still living in the lap of
luxury. These days, it doesn't seem like many ex-stars are hurting
financially. A big reason is that the LA real estate market has been
booming for most of the last 29 years, so even if you blow all your
ready cash, you still have the house in Beverly Hills that's worth $4
million dollars more than you paid for it. So, you can move to a $2
million dollar house in Santa Monica, then sell that when it goes to $4
million, and so on.
Also, if you are a leading lady, you can marry a rich man. So, I'm not
shedding too many tears for the 29 blondes.
Regarding
the natural history of redheads, they appear as far away as the Middle
East and the Canary Islands, but the farther west you go in Northern
Europe, the more common they are. Western Ireland has a remarkable
number -- I'd guesstimate 30% are redheads in County Kerry on the
Atlantic. In contrast, blondes get more common as you go north in Europe
(typically, golden blondes in the west, ash blondes in the east).
My
theory is that both redheads and blondes are sexually selected for in
women because they are more noticeable, which women generally want to
be. Blonde hair reflects the most light and red hair is the most
eye-catching of colors.
However,
there are downsides to both. Redheads seem to be associated with very
low melanin skin, which can cause big problems when the sun is bright.
Redheads get more common the farther out in the Atlantic you go because
the skies are more overcast, so the chance of a bad sunburn is less. In
contrast, blondes tend to tan better, so they are more common more
inland where the weather is less misty. On the other hand, while highly
reflective hair makes blonde women hard to ignore, it can be work
against blonde men who are hunters or warriors by making them visible
from a long way off. (You used to be able to spot the formerly
ultra-blond golfer Greg Norman from an enormous distance off at
tournaments from the sun glinting off his hair.) So, blonde hair isn't
very common where the sun is high in the sky because blonde men then
tend to lose the element of surprise.
***
Apparently,
William Safire doesn't want us to miss him when he's gone: That
would seem to be the most charitable explanation for his latest column,
"Wave
of the Future." Not to be outdone, the WSJ op-edsters
feature a column
by that George Washington of Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi. Meanwhile, for
American soldiers in the real Iraq that Safire and Chalabi helped lie us
into, horror.
***
Question:
How do I make money off my red-blue findings? Clearly, I've
uncovered more than any other investigator about the great public
question of the season: Why are red states red and blue states
blue?
But how do I make any money off this? Lectures? Consulting? Today, is my
46th birthday and I'm getting pretty depressed looking at my earning
prospects. Any suggestions?
***
Red-Blue
Housing War Stories:
Your
point about the difference between housing-price trends in Northwest DC
and DC's eastern provinces is certainly true. Chevy Chase, DC, is
child-friendly in a lot of ways, and there are plenty of kids here among
the couples who can afford the prices of both homes and private schools.
But the neighborhood is basically a land of $50,000 houses sitting on
$500,000 lots. The two-income families huddle together in the $50,000
houses, while their dogs get to play in the $500,000 lots. Plus, the
dogs get walked every morning and will see their owners early each
evening, since the commute to downtown jobs is so short. I think we must
have the happiest dogs in America.
But apart from the natural expense of living downtown in cities, there
has been some artificial destruction of livable places in a lot of
American cities. Washington has lost something like 40 percent of its
total population since the 1950s. It is not, overall, a congested city,
with insufficient land for more affordable residences. There are huge
tracts to the east that have been partly deserted and rendered
uninhabitable for middle-class whites and blacks, by crime, lousy
schools and rent controls on new apartments. This is the general
tendency of liberal places to render themselves more liberal by making
themselves even more dysfunctional.
Maybe another reason parents with kids don't like to live in dense
cities is the heavy traffic on all the surrounding streets, which can be
very risky for younger children. However, when kids reach their teenage
driving years, the city is probably less risky, since you can walk or
take the bus most places.
The
increased traffic is bad for bikes, so kids these days expect to get
driven everywhere, which is another stress of parenting.
***
New
Blogs: Over on the Links list to the left, I've highlighted in red
some blogs I've recently added. Check them out.
Also,
The Ambler, Kevin
Michael Grace, is back in business. I had nice phone call from him
tonight during which he told me many amusing and horrifying stories
about the music industry. You know how sometimes you hear a great old
song on the radio and you think to yourself: "Isn't it wonderful
that the songwriter who composed that song is still getting paid
royalties by ASCAP or BMI for bringing that thing of beauty into the
world"? Well, don't. The odds are that the royalties aren't going
to the songwriter but to some music industry creep who ripped the artist
off because he was young and eager. I was please to hear, however, that
Elvis Costello, while never a huge star, at least managed to hold on to
the cash flow from what he created.
***
Don't
get greedy! In my latest VDARE column,
I bragged that LaboratoryotheStates.com
found that my Average Years Married among white women measure correlated
with Bush's share of the vote not just at the extraordinarily high r =
0.91 level (r-squared = 83%) I reported for a linear equation, but at a
bizarrely high r = 0.95 (r-squared = 90%) when you take the log of the
statistics. A reader writes:
Beware
log-log plots; they almost always make correlations look better than
they should. You can correlate almost anything log-log. Try taking a
shotgun pattern in a target and plotting it log-log. You can sometimes
wind up with a nice linear plot.I'd be more comfortable sticking with
your puny (!) .91.
I
have to admit that I can't think of any reason the log correlation would
be more realistic than the linear one. Any thoughts?
***
More
reports from the trenches of the red-blue housing inflation gap:
One
point I think I think is really understated, is the degree to which the
Children vs. City Lifestyle is really made at a conscious level by
people in their late twenties and early thirties. Do I give up the Met
and theater or move to a place where my kids will have their own
bedrooms?
*
By
the way, as a resident of Massachusetts, I've seen and lived through the
housing price hyperinflation. In the past two years, we've seen
countless friends leave because of the combination of wanting to raise a
family and wanting to live in a nice neighborhood and house. And these
are very smart, educated and successful people that are leaving:
lawyers, people with Masters degrees, successful corporate managers. The
common thread is: young, not yet home owners, starting to have kids and
not a lot of capital built up yet. Most are moving back to where they
grew up -- not only is housing cheaper, but you get the grandparents to
help out. We know people that bought but with an income from two
professionals and then had kids. A few of the mothers have indicated
that they would like to stay home (a reversal of plans) with the baby,
but can't -- they wouldn't be able to then afford the mortgage. The
solution is just what you found.
***
Dave
Barry on Red-Blue:
The
nation suffered a wound during the recent presidential election as a
result of the rift between the red states - defined as "states
where 'foreign cuisine' pretty much means Pizza Hut" - and the blue
states, defined as "states that believe they are smarter than the
red states, despite the fact that it takes the average blue-state
resident 15 minutes to order a single cup of coffee."...
And as Americans, we must ask ourselves: Are we really so different?
Must we stereotype those who disagree with us? Do we truly believe that
all red-state residents are ignorant racist fascist knuckle-dragging
NASCAR-obsessed cousin-marrying roadkill-eating tobacco-juice-dribbling
gun-fondling religious fanatic rednecks; or that all blue-state
residents are godless unpatriotic pierced-nose Volvo-driving
France-loving left-wing communist latte-sucking tofu-chomping
holistic-wacko neurotic vegan weenie perverts?
Yes. This is called "diversity," and it is why we are such a
great nation - a nation that has given the world both nuclear weapons
and SpongeBob SquarePants.
And so today I am calling upon both sides in the red-blue rift to reach
out. Maybe we could have a cultural-exchange program between red and
blue states.
For example, a delegation from Texas could go to California and show the
Californians how to do some traditional Texas thing such as castrate a
bull using only your teeth, and then the Californians could show the
Texans how to rearrange their football stadiums in accordance with the
principles of "feng shui" (for openers, both goalposts should
be at the west end of the field).
Or maybe New York and Kentucky could have a college-style
"mixer," featuring special "crossover" hors
d'oeuvres such as bagels topped with squirrel parts.
***
Final
Results: Ruy
Teixeira links to Michael McDonald of George Mason University
and shows that Bush's win was a little narrower than the 3 points, 4
million votes we had assumed:
Bush 62,008,619 (50.74%)
Kerry 59,012,107 (48.29%)
Total (all candidates) 122,212,577
(Turnout Rate among eligible: 59.9%)
Margin of Victory: 2,996,512 (2.45%)
Judging
from both 2000 and 2004, the Democratic candidate will pick up several
tenths of a point after everybody stops paying attention and the conventional
wisdom ossifies about how big the margin was.
***
An
order of magnitude worse than 9/11? What are the odds that Vioxx,
Celebrex, and any other arthritis medicines might have killed ten times
more Americans than Osama bin Laden?
***
http://www.iSteve.com/04DecB.htm#Housingi
The
3rd Secret Behind Why Red States Are Red: My new VDARE
column reveals the third factor behind Bush winning a high share of
a state's votes: low inflation in housing prices. Bush carried the 26
states with the least inflation in home prices between 1980 and 2004,
while Kerry won the top 14 states with fastest growing housing
prices.
Note
that, tellingly, in second place as an indicator of GOP predilection, in
between Years Married and Total Fertility, is the growth in housing
prices between 1980 and 2004. The correlation coefficient is -0.82. The
negative sign means that the more housing prices have risen, the more
Democratic the state was.
For example, housing prices in Massachusetts, the most Democratic state
in the 2004 election, rose 516%, the highest home inflation in the
country. In Utah, the most Republican state, house prices were up only
162%.
Expensive housing retards family formation, which helps the Democrats.
Rising housing prices transfer wealth from young people to old people.
Importing more foreigners, as the Bush Administration suicidally wants
to do, drives up the price of homes by increasing demand. That makes it
harder for young voters to start down the road to homeownership,
marriage, babies—and committed Republicanism.
***
Question:
How do I make money off my red-blue findings? Clearly, I've
uncovered more than any other investigator about the great public
question of the season: Why are red states red and blue states
blue?
But how do I make any money off this? Lectures? Consulting? Today, is my
46th birthday and I'm getting pretty depressed looking at my earning
prospects. Any suggestions?
***
All
Politics Is Local: Red and Blue Housing Prices Version: A reader
writes:
It's
interesting to see your column played out in real life. Here in
Anchorage Alaska we have two bedroom communities on opposite sides of
the fence. To the south-east we have Girdwood.
It's a boutique community centered around a ski resort. Housing is
expensive and people there are very liberal (Kerry won the town 70%).
To
the North-west we have Wasilla.
It's a kind of frontier community, nothing was there 40 years ago, but
now it is the fastest growing town in Alaska. Housing is cheap. And the
voters...very conservative. Bush won 74% or so.
Anyway,
it's a very good comparison since the other factors (race, age,
location, etc) are nearly identical.
***
Tom
Wolfe's Portrait of the President as a Young Frat Guy: The main
villain in Wolfe's "I Am Charlotte Simmons" is a fraternity
brother named Hoyt Thorpe, whose depiction offers a lot of insights into
the molding of George W. Bush. Which is interesting because Wolfe voted
for Bush. He may be a jerk, but when foreigners are out to kill you, you
just might want to be led by a jerk, assumes Wolfe.
More
roman a clef aspects of "Charlotte Simmons:" The family
background of the President of Dupont, Frederick Cutler III, from an
ultra-assimilated Jewish family in the diplomatic corps, appears modeled
on John Kerry.
Dupont
basketball coach / demigod Buster Roth, whom the Jewish faculty members,
such as Jerry Quat, quickly determine is German, not Jewish, would be
modeled on Polish Catholic Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski (Coach K).
JoJo
Johansen, the only white starter on the Dupont team, is probably
inspired by Duke's JJ
Redick, although Redick's skills as a shooting guard are closer to
JoJo's white roommate Mike.
Also,
I'm surprised by how many people don't figure out that the college in
"I Am Charlotte Simmons" is obviously primarily Duke, where
Wolfe's daugther Alexandra graduated in 2002. Are there any other
schools with 1490 average SATs and national championship basketball
teams and a social scene dominated by fraternities and sororities? Here's
a Duke geology professor listing 14 similarities. I was also struck by
his response to the denunciations of the realism of Wolfe's portrayal of
elite college students:
How real is Wolfe's Duke? For that slice of the Duke undergraduate body that is represented by Wolfe, I'd say it's very real. I've been at Duke for 14 years now. This is my last year. Every year for the last several years, I've gone on a week-long field trip with Duke students. I've gotten to know Duke students pretty damn well. And about 30 percent of them bear an uncanny resemblance to Wolfe's Duke. The language that they use fits Wolfe's dialogue to a T. The ugly attitudes expressed by them in conversation fit the attitudes described by Wolfe. Wolfe's Duke is a dead on accurate description of about one-third of Duke's student population.
***
Need
your advice: I want to finally get myself a statistics package so I
can stop doing multiple regressions in Excel. What's your advice on SAS,
SPSS, STATA, etc.? Low price and ease of learning are high priorities.
***
"A
Series of Unfortunate Events" -- I don't have much to say about
the new Jim Carrey movie based on the bestsellers for kids by
"Lemony Snickett" about three orphans who mock-grimly triumph
over a hostile world that's a cross between Dickens and The Addams
Family. I took three 12 year old boys who had all read the books and
they all liked the film version but weren't blown away.
I
too thought it was decent; but it needed one more surprise climax.
It ends rather like "Jurassic Park
III," where the main characters are flying off to safety in
military aircraft, and you figure, "Okay, it looks like the
movie is coming to an end, but of course the helicopters are
going to be suddenly attacked by enormous bloodthirsty flying
pterodactyls right about ... NOW ... no, wait, ... NOW ... no? ...
huh, they're really making us wait for the surprise ending ... hey, why
are the credits starting? ... why are the lights coming on in the
theatre? ... why'd everybody go home? ... I demand my Pterodactyl
Attack!"
***
"Why
the Sailer Stomping Now?" asks a reader and I try to provide an
answer over at the VDARE blog.
***
"The Battle Hymn of the Multicultural Republic"
(Apologies to Julia Ward
Howe from John
Derbyshire)
Mine eyes have never noticed any difference at all —
Black, brown, or white; gay, bi, or straight; or thin or fat or tall;
Male, female, or transsexual — they’re constructions soci-al:
We must celebrate each one.
Glory, glory, there’s no difference!
Yet still, we’d better give some preference.
To enrich our own learning experience,
Till critical mass is here.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/04DecB.htm#CCCderb
Contemporary
Christmas Classics: There's strong feeling in
favor of The Pogues' "Fairy Tale of New York" from 1987, a
duet between poor Shane MacGowan (about whom Colby Cosh acerbically
notes, "He's been enjoying the last six months of his life for the
last 15 years") and and even poorer Kirsty
Macoll, about a drunken Irish immigrant:
It was Christmas Eve babe
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me, won't see another one
And then he sang a song
The rare old mountain tune
I turned my face away
And dreamed about you
He
tries to to patch things up with his spitfire girlfriend by bringing up
all the good times they'd shared, which sound like they took place in
1953:
Sinatra was swinging,
All the drunks they were singing
We kissed on a corner
Then danced through the night
(chorus)
The boys of the NYPD choir
Still singing "Galway Bay"
And the bells are ringing out
For Christmas day
It's
not coincidental that this, possibly
the greatest of all recent Christmas songs, explicitly refers to the
music of mid-century Manhattan when Tin Pan Alley, and its Christmas
song-writing minions, was at its peak.
UPDATE:
A reader points out:
"And
then he sang a song
The rare old mountain tune"
That should be:
"And then he sang a song
'The Rare Old Mountain Dew'"
"The Rare Old
Mountain Dew" is an old Irish folk song covered by among
others, the Dubliners in the sixties/seventies (not the current
"New Dubliners") and was also covered by the Pogues with the
Dubliners collaborating. Shane is at his peak vocal talent on the track.
It's a trivial correction, but the lyric adds resonance to the time and
place atmosphere of New York in the late forties / early fifties when
the Irish were still very much an "ethnic group."
Other
nominees include:
Father
Christmas - Kinks
2000 Miles - Pretenders
Christmas Must Be Tonight - Robbie Robertson
Merrry Christmas, Darling - Carpenters
Light of the Stable - EmmyLou Harris
The Rebel Jesus - Jackson Browne
Christmas Wrapping - Waitresses
Christmas With the Family - Robert Earl Keene
Christmas in Hollis - Run DMC
Christmas at the Zoo - Flaming Lips
And
here are John
Derbyshire's updatings of Christmas and other songs, such as
"The Seven Days of Kwanzaa," "God Rest Ye Merry
Democrats," and the admittedly unChristmasy Gilbert &
Sullivanesque "I Am the Very Model of the Modern Homosexual:"
I
am the very pattern of a modern homosexual:
I wear a suit and tie, I am impeccably respectable;
I live out in the suburbs with my partner, who’s a blogger; we
Are very nearly ready to commit to strict monogamy.
We party, but we always beg the neighbors to excuse the noise
Of after-midnight dancing to the music of the Pet Shop Boys.
We’re active in the local church, which is of course Episcopal
— ‘Piscopal — ‘Piscopal —
We help out with the youth group — I assure you there’s no risk at
all!
(All) They help out with the youth group, he assures us there’s no
risk at all.
You needn’t fear we’ll turn your kids, the whole thing is inborn,
you see.
It’s nothing we can help, so disapproval is just bigotry.
My hair is cropped, my goatee’s trimmed, my lisp is
undetectable;
I am the very model of a modern homosexual!
(All) His hair is cropped, his goatee’s trimmed, his lisp is
undetectable;
He is the very model of a modern homosexual!
My HIV I manage with a handy pharma-copeia;
With modern medications now we gays are in Utopia!
I shoot up with testosterone and work out till my limbs are sore;
My voice is deep, my chest is broad, I’m butch-er than a stevedore.
You’ll just have to get used to us, adjust the laws to suit our needs;
To take another attitude from adherence to worn-out creeds
Would mark you as intolerant! a basher! and a criminal!
Criminal! — Criminal! —
We’ll slander and defame you and you’ll find support is minimal.
(All) They’ll slander and defame you and you’ll find support is
minimal.
I
wonder which testosterone-shooting, Pet Shop Boys-loving, Derb-hating
individual the Derb was thinking of when he penned this? Nobody springs
to mind. I guess this question will just have to go down in literary
history as one of the great unsolved mysteries.
Getting
into the mood of this holiday season, a reader adds:
I
always vote Log Cabin and you know that I’m no liberal.
They’re always soft on Muslims and they don’t do things Imperial.
Old Abe he slept with men, you know, and smote Southerners most
biblical.
He could have been the model for the modern homosexual!
(ALL) Old Abe he slept with men, you know, and smote Southerners most
biblical.
He is an inspiration for the modern homosexual!
***
http://www.iSteve.com/04DecB.htm#CCCderb
Contemporary
Christmas Classics: There's strong feeling in
favor of The Pogues' "Fairy Tale of New York" from 1987, a
duet between poor Shane MacGowan and Kirsty Macoll, about a drunken
Irish immigrant:
It was Christmas Eve babe
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me, won't see another one
And then he sang a song
The rare old mountain tune
I turned my face away
And dreamed about you
He
tries to to patch things up with his spitfire girlfriend by bringing up
all the good times they'd shared:
Sinatra was swinging,
All the drunks they were singing
We kissed on a corner
Then danced through the night
(chorus)
The boys of the NYPD choir
Still singing "Galway Bay"
And the bells are ringing out
For Christmas day
It's
not coincidental that this, possibly
the greatest of all recent Christmas songs, explicitly refers to the
music of mid-century Manhattan when Tin Pan Alley, and its Christmas
song-writing minions, was at its peak.
Other
nominees include:
Father
Christmas - Kinks
2000 Miles - Pretenders
Christmas Must Be Tonight - Robbie Robertson
Merrry Christmas, Darling - Carpenters
Light of the Stable - EmmyLou Harris
The Rebel Jesus - Jackson Browne Christmas Wrapping - Waitresses
Christmas With the Family - Robert Earl Keene
Christmas in Hollis - Run DMC
Christmas at the Zoo - Flaming Lips
And
here's John
Derbyshire's updatings of Christmas and other songs, such as
"The Seven Days of Kwanzaa," "God Rest Ye Merry
Democrats," and the the admittedly unChristmasy Gilbert &
Sullivanesque "I Am the Very Model of the Modern Homosexual:"
I
am the very pattern of a modern homosexual:
I wear a suit and tie, I am impeccably respectable;
I live out in the suburbs with my partner, who’s a blogger; we
Are very nearly ready to commit to strict monogamy.
We party, but we always beg the neighbors to excuse the noise
Of after-midnight dancing to the music of the Pet Shop Boys.
We’re active in the local church, which is of course Episcopal
— ‘Piscopal — ‘Piscopal —
We help out with the youth group — I assure you there’s no risk at
all!
(All) They help out with the youth group, he assures us there’s no
risk at all.
You needn’t fear we’ll turn your kids, the whole thing is inborn,
you see.
It’s nothing we can help, so disapproval is just bigotry.
My hair is cropped, my goatee’s trimmed, my lisp is
undetectable;
I am the very model of a modern homosexual!
(All) His hair is cropped, his goatee’s trimmed, his lisp is
undetectable;
He is the very model of a modern homosexual!
My HIV I manage with a handy pharma-copeia;
With modern medications now we gays are in Utopia!
I shoot up with testosterone and work out till my limbs are sore;
My voice is deep, my chest is broad, I’m butch-er than a stevedore.
You’ll just have to get used to us, adjust the laws to suit our needs;
To take another attitude from adherence to worn-out creeds
Would mark you as intolerant! a basher! and a criminal!
Criminal! — Criminal! —
We’ll slander and defame you and you’ll find support is minimal.
(All) They’ll slander and defame you and you’ll find support is
minimal.
I
wonder which fan of the Pet Shop Boys the Derb was thinking of when he
penned this?
***
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my name is "Steve Sailer," people looking for me often spell my
name as Steve Sailor, Steve Saylor, Steven Sailer, Steven Sailor, Steven Saylor,
Stephen Sailer, Stephen Sailor, Stephen Saylor, Steven E. Sailer, Steven E.
Sailor, Steven E. Saylor, Stephen E. Sailer, SteveSailer and more. |
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