|
Email
me
iSteve
home
Search
engine users:
Just
hit Ctrl-F to find the word you are looking for.
For
other commentaries, go to:
iSteve.com
Exclusives Archives: Dec
16-31, 2004 Dec
1-15, 2004 Nov
16-30, 2004 Nov
1-15, 2004 Oct.
16-31,
2004 Oct.
1-15,
2004 September
2004 August
2004 July
2004 June
2004 May
2004 April
2004 Mar
2004 Feb
2004 Jan
2004 Dec
2003 Nov
2003 Oct
2003 Sep
2003 Aug
2003 Jul 2003
Jun 2003
May 2003
Apr 2003
Mar 2003
Feb 2003
Jan 2003
Dec 2002
Nov 2002
Oct 2002
Sep 2002
Aug 2002
July 2002
May-Jun 2002
Mar-Apr 2002
Jan-Feb 2002
Dec 2001
January
1-15, 2005 Archive
http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#ss.paying
Is
Social Security Paying for the War on Terror? A reader writes:
In
the past, in order to make an essentially pay-as-you-go transfer system
look a little more like what it claims to be, an actuarially sound
insurance system, Congress has had to 'reform' Social Security about
every 15 to 20 years. The aim is always to keep tax revenues and payout
in balance about 20 to 30 years in the future. But 20 to 30 years in the
future is always worse, in terms of the retiree-to-worker ratio. So any
tax-and-benefit scheme that balances this long-term future is going to
generate a substantial surplus in the short and medium term, essentially
subsidizing the chronic deficits on regular Federal expenditures and
taxes.
So, the practical effect of our eternally unreformed, but constantly
reformed, Social Security system has been to help 1) pay to win World
War II, 2) pay down the World War II debt, while 3) fighting the Cold
War, and now 4) fight the War on Terror.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#worst.of.both.worlds
Social
Security Reform and Congress: A reader writes:
Unlike
Iraq, Congress is not simply going to vote to let Bush have at the
Social Security system. The
reform bills are going to be debated over a longer period of time and
written in committees with chairmen used to exercising meaningful
decision-making authority, not simply rubberstamping Bush policies.
If a bill passes at all it will probably take at least 1-2
years, if not longer. By
the time it reaches implementation phase, the Bush administration will
be nearing its end.
The reform debate is going to have a larger effect on the members of
Congress than it will Bush. Dubya
will never have to face the voters again; any accomplishment on this
front will only go into the legacy scrapbook at his presidential
library. Social Security is
one of those rare issues that get incumbent congressmen kicked out of
office. Proposed benefit
cuts cost the Republicans a number of House seats in 1982 and their
Senate majority in 1986. Efforts
to rein in Medicare spending doomed a lot of Republican congressmen in
1996 and helped turn that year’s presidential race into an easy
Clinton romp when many had initially thought the GOP would be
competitive even with a candidate like Bob Dole.
This is also the kind of legislation that tends to pass only with
bipartisan support (think welfare reform) and can otherwise tank
spectacularly even if the president’s party controls both houses of
Congress (think Hillary’s health care plan).
Republicans are going to want cover from their Democratic
colleagues to mitigate the usefulness of the issue to their
general-election challengers. The
House is going to want cover from the Senate before going along with
anything that could be construed as a benefit cut.
Senate Republicans are going to need to pull in at least five
Democrats and hold onto all their moderates to be able to beat a
filibuster. If anything,
Congress is likely to err on the side of being too cautious.
Which doesn’t necessarily mean the end result will be good.
The Medicare prescription-drug bill and NCLB are fine examples.
Both were deeply flawed proposals from the beginning, but at
least contained some reforms for which a case can be made.
In Congress, most of the free-market reforms suggested by the
White House were stripped out and the bills were loaded up with new
government spending. They
both passed with bipartisan support and Bush, rather than objecting,
declared victory, held signing ceremonies and went home.
So,
we could end up with the worst of both the Democrats and the Republicans
in the bill. Or, we might get lucky and both parties in Congress and the
President work together for the common good like in the (unfortunately,
short-lived) tax simplification reforms of 1986.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#third.generation.celebrity
Request:
I'm looking for a third generation celebrity to use in an example.
or a number of years, I've been arguing for a new (but also very old)
perspective on what a racial group is: I find lacking both the "A
race for everybody and everybody in his race" thinking derived from
Linnaeus and the post-modern "Race does not exist" cant.
Instead, I find that the most useful way to conceiving of racial groups
is as a partly
inbred extended family.
Somebody was recently trying to debunk this by asking, "How may
racial groups are there in the world: three, six, one hundred?" My
answer is: "Whatever is useful and defensible in answering the
specific question you need to deal with at the moment. You should no
more expect everyone to belong to a single racial groups as you would
expect them to belong to a single extended family."
What I'd like to do is find a famous person, or the child of two famous
people, who has four well-known grandparent, in order to make the point
that everybody belongs to their mother's and father's extended families,
but also their four grandparents' extended families, and so on up the
family tree. For example, Arnold Schwarzenegger's kids are not only
Schwarzeneggers, but also, Shrivers and Kennedys through their mother.
While not bad, this is still a clunky example of how people belong to
multiple extended families because nobody is familiar with the maiden
name of the fourth grandparent, Arnold's mother.
So, I'm looking for a better example where all four grandparents' names
are familiar. Maybe a movie star, royalty, an heiress, an athlete, or
whatever. The actual third generation person might just be an obscure
child of famous parents and grandparents. So, what I need two famous
married people, each of whom are the children of famous people. Or
spring from four famous families like, say, the Vanderbilts, Du Ponts,
Tudors, or whatever, even if the individuals aren't all famous in their
own right.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#maureen.dowd.michael.douglas
Columnist
Maureen Dowd and actor Michael Douglas:- Reflecting on NYT op-edster/spinster
Maureen Dowd's never-ending series on how men are rotten
stinkers, as proven by the fact that none of her boyfriends, such as
vastly wealthy actor-producer-double Oscar-winner Michael Douglas (son
of Kirk Douglas), have ever married her. A reader wrote:
"There
are probably no more than a handful of men in the whole world who are
qualified (in Maureen's eyes) to become Mr. Maureen Dowd. And, son
of a gun, those ultra-high achievers always seem to have better
things to do than listen to feminist harangues. Life is so
unfair."
I
replied:
Maybe
I should write a series of columns about why I hate women because Catherine
Zeta-Jones (now Mrs. Michael Douglas) didn't marry me.
To
which he responded:
Excellent
idea. If life was fair, we would all be able to marry women who look
like Miss Zeta-Jones. The only possible explanation for why we can't is
that our legitimate male aspirations have been deliberately thwarted by
the Evil Matriarchy, acting out of sheer spite.
This is a major social problem, and someone needs to DO SOMETHING about
it. (But not us, we're the victims.)
--
Steve Sailer, www.iSteve.com
John Tierney vs. Maureen Dowd:
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
The NYT's new op-ed columnist John Tierney writes a column guaranteed to drive his feminist colleague Maureen Dowd nuts:
Of course, it's not hard to drive Maureen crazy, especially if the two of you were once an item, as Tierney and Dowd were a quarter of a century ago. Tierney is married now, but Dowd is an increasingly bitter spinster, whose taste for highly successful men has left her enraged at the male sex for not marrying her. She's also dated two-time Oscar-winner Michael Douglas, Carl Bernstein (of Woodward and Bernstein), and Aaron Sorkin (creator of "The West Wing".)
The Urge to Win:
For a quarter-century, women have outnumbered men at Scrabble clubs and tournaments in America, but a woman has won the national championship only once, and all the world champions have been men. Among the world's 50 top-ranked players, typically about 45 are men.
The top players, both male and female, point to a simple explanation for the disparity: more men are willing to do whatever it takes to reach the top. You need more than intelligence and a good vocabulary to become champion. You have to spend hours a day learning words like
"khat," doing computerized drills and memorizing long lists of letter combinations, called
alphagrams, that can form high-scoring seven-letter words.
Tierney goes on to offer some sensible evolutionary psychology explanations for why some men want to win this bad.
Maureen Dowd's siblings and the Baby Gap: Nicely illustrating my new article
"The Baby Gap: Explaining Red and Blue," snippy NYT columnist Maureen Dowd lets her ultra-Republican brother write her column for her. Maureen, of course, is an unmarried 52-year-old liberal woman who lives in Washington D.C. (average number of babies per white woman: 1.1; not coincidentally, Bush's share of the vote: 9%). The underlying theme running through her writing is her desperate effort to silence the little voice in her head that tells her she has wasted her life by not getting married and having babies.
Maureen comes from what I presume is a big Irish Catholic family (she's a 1973 graduate of Catholic U.) and her brothers and sisters are staunchly Republican. Her brother Kevin, a salesman, writes:
My wife and I picked our sons' schools based on three criteria: 1) moral values 2) discipline 3) religious maintenance - in that order. We have spent an obscene amount of money doing this and never regretted a penny. Last week on the news, I heard that the Montgomery County school board voted to include a class with a 10th-grade girl demonstrating how to put a condom on a cucumber and a study of the homosexual lifestyle. The vote was 6-0. I feel better about the money all the time.
Now, if only Kevin lived in suburban Virginia (a red state) instead of suburban Maryland (a blue state), the Dowd clan would fit my thesis perfectly.
Tuesday, April 23, 2002
Maureen Dowd and Bonobo Chimpanzee
Does any pundit come up with as many embarrassingly dumb columns as Maureen Dowd of the NYT? Here she announces that the solution to the Baby Bust is for humans to act like bonobo chimps, who supposedly "lead extraordinarily happy existences... There's no battle of the sexes in bonoboland. And there's no baby bust."
In NR back in 1999, I exploded the Bonobo Myth so beloved of feminists in my aptly titled
"Chimps and Chumps:" "A bonobo chimp troop resembles an omnisexual commune run by Madonna and Little Richard," complete with pedophilia. Bonobo life sounds about as appealing as a case of the clap. Further, they do indeed suffer a baby bust: "Bonobos are Darwinian duds. As appealing as their genetic programming may be to the students and faculty of Smith College, their genes have not succeeded in replicating themselves widely: there are fewer than 10,000 bonobos alive, no more than 1/20th the number of those testosterone-addled common chimps."
Dowd is just about the last True Believer in Anita Hill-Era Feminism left in big time opinion journalism. The major improvement in the American intellectual climate during the Nineties was the near complete collapse of feminism. Sure, the feminists have walled themselves into positions of power in lots of institutions, but almost none dare come out to argue their case anymore.
Dowd's main psychological problem is a near-pathological sensitivity over whether she made the right choice in pursuing career over family. Consequently, she obsessively browbeats female dissenters who don't validate her life choice. Since feminists hate to admit that not all women agree with them, Dowd tries to point the finger of blame at men, telling them they should act like a different species!
Dowd is only a lurid example of the general female tendency toward conformism. Women want to do what all other women are doing and they want all other women to do what they are doing. There's a fundamental evolutionary reason for this: an individual woman is simply more valuable in a Darwinian sense than an individual man, so they tend to be cautious and conformist. If an individual man tries something different from all other men in the tribe, and dies as a consequence, well, it's sad, but some other guy will step in an impregnate his woman for him. In contrast, if a woman dies from doing something eccentric, the tribe's reproductive capacity is permanently diminished.
So, Dowd's fanaticism is perfectly understandable. The only problem is that, as the remarkable Time cover story (a perfect sign of the moribund intellectual status of feminism) shows, Dowd's kind of self-absorbed reasoning has ruined the happiness of millions of women by depriving them of ever having a child.
http://www.iSteve.com/04DecA.htm#hotfl
Maureen Dowd's latest menopausal hot flash:
I've never said this out loud before, but I can't stand Christmas. Everyone in my family loves it except me, and they can't fathom why I get the mullygrubs, as a Southern friend of mine used to call a low-level depression, from Thanksgiving straight through New Year.
"You're weird," my mom says. This from a woman who once left up our Christmas tree until April 3, and who listens to a radio station that plays carols 24/7 all month.
My equally demonic sister has a whole collection of rodents dressed in holiday clothes that she puts up around her house... My mom and sister both blissfully sat through "It's a Wonderful Life" again on Thanksgiving weekend, while even hearing a mere snatch of that movie makes me want to scarf down a fistful of antidepressants - and join all the other women in America who are on a holiday high - except our family doctor is a Scrooge about designer drugs, leaving me to self-medicate as Clarence gets his wings with extra brandy in the eggnog.
I've given a lot of thought to why others' season of joy is my season of doom ... I think it has to do with how stressed out my mom and sister would get on Christmas Day when I was little. I remember them snapping at me; they seemed tense because of all the aprons to be sashed and potatoes to be mashed. (In our traditional Irish household, women slaved and men were waited on.)
It might be exacerbated by the stress I feel when I think of all the money I've spent on lavishing boyfriends with presents over the years, guys who are now living with other women who are enjoying my lovingly picked out presents which I'm no doubt still paying for in credit card interest charges.
Much of the appeal of feminism, like a lot of other 20th Century intellectuals' fads like Freudianism, consists of trying to persuade others to become as unhappy as you are. Nothing drives liberals crazier than seeing their less intelligent relatives grow up to be happier than they are. The great curse of Maureen's life is that she was the smart one in the family, the one who believed what smart people were supposed to believe, while her brothers and sisters believed all the politically conservative, socially traditional stuff that dumb people believe. Unfortunately, just like they predicted, they ended up happier than her.
Fortunately, she has her bully pulpit from which to try to lure others into her mistakes. It won't maker her any happier, but it will make her feel more fashionable.
Liberal
NYT columnist cites IQ study! Menopausal spinster Maureen Dowd's
continuing series "I
Hate Men (Why Oh Why Didn't A Man Marry Me?)" took a
predictable turn Thursday when she approvingly referenced an IQ study:
"A
second study, which was by researchers at four British universities and
reported last week, suggested that smart men with demanding jobs would
rather have old-fashioned wives, like their mums, than equals. The study
found that a high I.Q. hampers a woman's chance to get married, while it
is a plus for men. The prospect for marriage increased by 35 percent for
guys for each 16-point increase in I.Q.; for women, there is a 40
percent drop for each 16-point rise."
This
once again confirms Sailer's Law of IQ: "Liberals simultaneously
don't believe in IQ and believe their IQs are far superior to
the IQs of nonliberals."
Interestingly,
while Maureen couldn't figure out how to get her ex-boyfriend Michael
Douglas to marry her, Catherine
Zeta-Jones didn't have much trouble solving the puzzle. I'm sure
Maureen assumes her IQ is far superior to Catherine's, but Catherine
seems to have discovered how men work at a much younger age than poor
old Maureen.
A
reader writes:
Men
are often lampooned for for their cluelessness about women, but it goes
both ways. The difference is we never see women satirized for it
the way men are.
That
reminds me that the first article I ever published in a magazine (The
American Spectator back in October 1992) was a satire on feminist
cluelessness:
Report Cites Bias Against Women in Drug Rackets
"Aspiring Female Traffickers Lack Role Models," Notes Expert
By Steve Sailer
HANOVER, NH -- A new study reveals that while women have made gains in
the controlled substances industry, they still comprise only 14.6% of
all drug dealers. Even more disturbing, a "glass ceiling"
shuts women out of the top rungs of the profession. "You always
hear about 'Drug Lords' and 'Cocaine Kingpins,' but where are the 'Drug
Ladies,' and 'Cocaine Queenpins?'" demands Clarissa Spode,
Professor of Sociology at Dartmouth, and author of the groundbreaking
report, "Cracking Through: Diversity, Dignity and Drugs."
Dr. Spode faulted the media for purveying stereotypes that discourage
women from entering this fast growing and lucrative occupation. For
example, "Miami Vice" depicted in total only 127 female
"drug industry workers" compared to 1,711 men. "Even
worse, 103 of the women (81.1%) were portrayed as forsaking their
careers after sleeping with Sonny and/or Rico."
Other experts concur. "Gangster films in general have always been
virulently phallocentric," observes Reed College Film Professor
Charles Womyndaughter. His screenplay for a non-sexist mob movie --
"The Godparent" -- was treated with callous disregard by
Hollywood. "They said some quite insensitive things about it,"
he recalls.
Another authority, Dr. Arthur Cruttwell-Clamp, finds that American women
are socialized away from traits valuable in this demanding occupation.
"Too few women in our society have been taught how to laugh while
zapping a deadbeat customer with an electric cattle prod." He calls
on toymakers to introduce young females to a wider range of career
options. "Instead of 'My Little Pony,' your toddler should be
playing with 'My Little Uzi.'" Dr. Cruttwell-Clamp recommends that
parents combat traditional gender-typing by having their daughters pull
the wings off butterflies and burn ants with magnifying glasses for 30
minutes each day, then advance to tying stray dogs to the bumpers of
cars idling at stop lights.
All the experts indignantly dismiss biological conjectures purporting to
explain why males seem more violent than females. "Then why are the
Nuzwangdees of Guyana -- or is it the Wangduzees of New Guinea? Well,
anyway, I heard there's some tribe somewhere where more women than men
are into GrecoRoman wrestling, or is it Australian football?"
retorts Dr. Womyndaughter.
Media stereotypes victimize men as well. "Tragically, male dealers
internalize the media's image of them," muses Dr. Spode. "The
one man I talked to while preparing our report was hyper-masculine:
aggressive, dominating, reckless, ruthless, muscular ... and, yet,
strangely intriguing."
The researchers found chauvinism widespread within the drug industry.
"We originally expected gender equality in such a nontraditional,
multicultural business," recalls Dr. Spode. "As the evidence
of male domination mounted, however, we began searching for the Old Boys
Network that locked women out. But with a median life expectancy of 24,
we couldn't find many Old Boys. Fortunately, we came up with a crucial
conceptual breakthrough: the Young Boys Network." Dr. Spode adds
that females are seldom invited along on important male-bonding rites of
passage, like drive-by shootings.
Linda M., a spunky New Yorker, recounts how sexual harassment cut short
her promising career: "I started out in retail, on a corner in the
Lower East Side, but the other vendors were very crude, very 'macho.'
Whenever I walked by they made these weird sucking noises. So, I went
into wholesale to find a higher class of professional peer, maybe even a
mentor who could show me the 'ropes.' But my fellow distributors claimed
I was on their 'turf' and kept disrespecting me by dangling me out
windows by my ankles. So, I went home to Bensonhurst and opened a 'crack
house.' But my family and neighbors were not at all supportive of my
'un-ladylike' ambitions, so they formed a 'vigilante' mob and 'torched'
my house. I think they were trying to undermine my self-esteem."
Activists denounce the lack of government programs to meet the special
needs of mothers who are also drug dealers. "The very term 'Day
Care' reflects institutional insensitivity to those who work mostly
between midnight and dawn," points out Dr. Spode. "One mother
told me she would never deal drugs because she couldn't bear to think
what would happen to her children if she were killed or
imprisoned." Dr. Spode blames this inequity on Reagan
administration cutbacks. [More...]
More
at www.iSteve.com
***
http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#metrosexual
"The
Decline of the Metrosexual" -- I finally put online my October
20, 2003 cover story from The American Conservative about why, despite
vast media coverage, "metrosexuals" are seldom seen anywhere
besides Manhattan. An excerpt:
The
Tony Awards ceremony increasingly looks like an indoor gay pride parade.
One of the big winners this year was "Take Me Out," about a
gay baseball player which included three locker room shower scenes.
Obviously, there is a lot of gay talent on Broadway, but there isn't
enough to compensate for the huge decline in straight participation.
That's a big reason why the quantity and quality of Broadway plays has
declined so dramatically, or even theatrically.
Somewhere out there are straight youths with the gifts to become the
next Richard Rodgers, Bob Fosse, and Gene Kelly, but they aren't going
to go into musical theater now that all their buddies know the score
about Broadway. Instead, they'll show off their straightness by dressing
like slobs and listening to gangsta rap. When they grow up, they'll go
to Hollywood instead and help make movies about blowing stuff up.
They'll take their huge paychecks and buy yellow Hummers.
The aristocratic and religious arts that make up the high culture of
Western Civilization were part of a thousand year project to restrain
and redefine the unbridled masculinity of all those Conan the Barbarians
who poured into the old Roman Empire at the beginning of the Dark Ages.
The aptly named Vandals and their cohorts were slowly converted into
knights, who were supposed to know not only how to fight, but also how
to appreciate the finer forms of music, painting, sculpture, theater,
dance, conversation, and dress.
Inevitably, the arts attracted a higher proportion of male homosexuals
than did fighting, hunting, or plowing. But nobody particularly noticed
because all attention was focused on matters of class. If you wanted
your family to move up in society, you (or your children) needed to
learn something about the arts.
We Americans claim to be a classless society, so the social pressures to
study the traditional aristocratic arts were always less in America, and
are declining even more. Ballet schools, for example, need male dancers
to partner all the little girls who want to be ballerinas, but they've
given up on finding enough American boys. Instead, they try to recruit
lads from immigrant families from more class-ridden lands that are
attracted to the old snob appeal of ballet.
With the decline of overt interest in class, sexual orientation has
become a driving force in the arts.
If James Bond were introduced today, the New York Times would describe
him as a metrosexual rather than as a gentleman. I fear, though, that if
you called him a metrosexual, he would make a witty quip, flick some
invisible dust from his perfectly tailored lapels with his manicured
hands, and shoot you.
Straight flight raises a seldom-asked question about the push for gay
marriages, or, more precisely, gay weddings. The average young groom
finds preparing for his wedding to be a grueling, months-long odyssey
through an alien and threatening feminine landscape. At least though,
being a groom is a guy thing, not a gay thing. But if gay men become
some of the most flamboyant participants in weddings, will more of the
vast majority of straight men who aren't metrosexuals just decide to
skip the whole punishing process and stay single? If this drives up the
illegitimacy rate, society as a whole will suffer. [More...]
***
http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#house.of.flying.daggers
House
of Flying Daggers - The latest martial arts flick directed by
Zhang Yimou, the creator of the great Hero
(here's my review), goes into wide release on Friday. Zhang Ziyi is a
cutie as the blind kung-fuette, but I don't much like Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon-style movies much, and this one seemed fairly
ho-hum, being far less visually inventive than Hero. I got
bored about halfway through and went and watched A Very Long
Engagement for awhile, which looked good, but the plot -- a
complicated detective story in which the adorable Audrey "Amelie"
Tatou searches for her fiancé after WWI -- was incomprehensible if you
sneak in during the middle like I did. So, back to Flying Daggers,
but I had missed the climactic set-piece fight and the ending wasn't any
better than the beginning. Oh, well ...
***
http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#the.aviator
The
Aviator, in contrast, is a blast. Having been embarrassed a
couple of years ago when his leaden Leonardo DiCaprio drama Gangs of
New York got deservedly blown away at the box-office by Steven
Spielberg's simultaneously-released Leonardo DiCaprio soufflé Catch
Me If You Can, Martin Scorsese is back with a fun biopic about
Howard Hughes' golden years before his madness won out over his energy.
DiCaprio is too young-looking to play Hughes, but he's a wonderful light
leading man. And there's an admirable pro-free enterprise moral to the
final story about Hughes' fight after WWII, as owner of the upstart
airline TWA, to keep Congress from granting a monopoly on overseas
flights to the established Pan-Am. Through sheer will he fights off his
growing insanity long enough to rouse the public to prevent the special
interests from nationalizing trans-Atlantic routes.
The
Aviator features excellent casting of liberal icons Alan Alda and
Alec Baldwin as the sleaze dog villains they were born to play. And the
luncheon party scene where Kate Hepburn (Cate Blanchett) takes her
boyfriend Howard home to the Hepburn's mansion on Long Island Sound to
meet her insufferable family of snobbish socialists is a comic delight.
If
Scorsese had ended the movie with the triumphant scene where Howard gets
his colossal Spruce Goose white elephant seaplane airborne (albeit
briefly) in 1947, The Aviator would be packing them in at the
box-office, but he tacks on a five-minute downer of a coda reminding us
of Howard's enclosing madness.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#social.security.trust.me
In
defense of Social Security Privatization: A reader writes in
response to another reader's questions below:
-
Why
not have the government invest directly? No particular reason.
That's what Calpers does. That's what Clinton proposed, kind of
half-heartedly midway through his second term. Conservatives like to
argue that if the government invested in stocks then the Feds would
start "meddling" in the stock market. That's true, but the
opposite is true as well: if the solvency of Social Security
depended on the stock market, then the Feds would care a lot more
about stock market returns than they do even now.
-
Why
have the government choose the investments we can make? This is an
easy one: because most people are not financial professionals. Look,
in my 401k I've got a very limited selection of investment choices.
That's partly a matter of what our firm can get us in terms of a
deal from fund companies, but it's also a matter of protecting us
future retirees. Threre is a lot of room between "you must put
your money in an annuity run by the government" and "you
can invest your retirement savings in anything you like - pork
bellies, wildcatting for oil, a perpetual-motion-machine startup,
trips to Vegas." That middle ground is: you can invest your
money at your preferred level of risk tolerance, but you can only
invest in broadly diversified, market-like funds with low expenses.
What is so terrible about that? You of all people, concerned about
the left hand of the bell curve, should appreciate that the
less-sophisticated consumer deserves protection not only from con
artists and scammers but from his own poor instincts.
-
Why
not raise the retirement age a bit or slowly reduce benefits at the
high end? Because these solutions are not popular. But rest assured:
some kind of benefit cut will be a part of Bush's Social Security
reform, assuming any such reform passes (which is highly
questionable). This is the dirty little secret about Social Security
reform: 80% of the reason for switching to personal accounts is
marketing designed to mask a necessary reduction in benefits; the
other 20% is conservative ideology (which I happen to buy) that
ownership - whether of an annuity or of a block of assets (and,
contrary to your suggestion, there is no reason you couldn't in
principle purchase an annuity with your Social Security personal
account funds, and thereby hedge getting old; every major insurance
company provides such products) - builds character while
entitlements encourage dependency, sloth and irresponsibility. All
serious versions of Social Security reform involve giving people
personal accounts *in exchange* for having them sign off on a lower
benefit package from the government. Bush is hoping nobody notices
the trade-off.
Well
said. But you can see the underlying assumption here:
Sure,
Bush will sell this concept to the moron voters as a
get-rich-quick something-for-nothing scheme where all Americans will get
big rewards investing their retirement nest eggs in high risk stocks
(even though you and I know that reward correlates with risk), but the
actual implementation of the details of the law by Bush will be
sober, realistic, honest, and competent.
How
I'd like to believe that's true! But how much evidence is there that
Bush's actions generally turn out more responsible than his rhetoric?
Iraq? Immigration? Medicare drug benefits? Tax cuts during war time? No
Child Left Behind?
How
about Karl Rove? Do you trust him? Tom DeLay? Bush's latest crop of
economic "advisors"?
I
trust Arnold Schwarzenegger about as far as I can throw him, but I have
to admit that I'd trust a Social Security reform scheme from President
Schwarzenegger far more than I'd trust one from President Bush, given
their comparative track records.
Maybe
Bush will finally surprise us this time by for once putting in the work
to make his actual proposal better than it sounds. But that won't happen
unless there is a lot of Show-Me-the-Details skepticism on the
Right.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#social.security.IQ
More
on Social Security: A reader writes:
I'm
surprised you haven't mentioned IQ and privatization yet. How many
people really understand portfolio diversification? I have a degree in
Finance, and I've got my Financial Math book here with a huge equation
outlining how the correlation coefficient between asset A and asset B
affect the total risk of the portfolio, etc, etc...but I've gone through
grad school and I don't completely understand the math behind this.
How does Bush, Inc. expect the average American to understand portfolio
theory? Most stockbrokers don't fully understand it! Only a handful of
mathematicians and economists do. Good lord! No wonder Wall St. is
licking their chops at this proposal. Talk about a greater fool theory!
Have the Republicans completely lost their minds? The Wall Street
Journal reads like a talking points memo from the head of the RNC these
days.
Other
readers have pointed out that individuals can purchase annuities to
insure themselves against the horrible risks of living too long. But,
Social Security privatization isn't being sold on the basis of the
returns you could get from low risk / low reward annuities but on the
potential high rewards you could get from high risk stocks.
Another
reader says, "Follow The Money and you'll see why this issue is
being pushed now."
***
http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#milken.spiderman
Milken:
I was a big fan of Michael Milken in the 1980s but I eventually noticed
that his many defenders on the Op-Ed page of the WSJ were making two
arguments over and over again:
- What he did that was immoral wasn't illegal.
- And what he did that was illegal wasn't immoral.
I eventually just got tired of arguing both sides and gave up.
That said, Milken, unlike so many others, did serve a stiff
sentence for his crimes and has done a lot of philanthropy since he got
out of the jug. Further, his titanic career in the 1980s was built on
far more than just criminality. His problem was not that he was a bad
person but that he lacked the noblesse oblige that his talents demanded.
"With great power comes great responsibility" were not the
words he lived by. When when you are that smart and that energetic (my
favorite Milken story is that of the ambitious small-timer who after
months of pleading finally got an appointment with Milken at 5:30 am
Sunday, only to have Milken call back to say that he just realized that
was the Sunday you set the clocks back an hour at the end of Daylight
Savings Time, so could they reschedule for 4:30 am?), you have to hold
yourself to higher ethical standards than those of ordinary Joes.
Milken
is one of the major figures of our time and deserves a major biography
by a major biographer. Ron Chernow, that means you!
***
http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#milkenizing.social.security
Milkenizing
Social Security? A reader writes:
It
just doesn't make any sense. If the government's planning to borrow a
Trillion dollars, so that individuals can get better returns in the
stock market, why don't they just invest the money in the stock market
themselves and eliminate the middle men? If it's about
"choice" how come they're choosing which investments we can
make? If it's about "basic arithmetic" like John Snow's speech
writers have him saying, why not raise the retirement age a bit, or
slowly reduce benefits at the high end while keeping a floor?
It makes about as much sense as Iraq did. And I'm afraid it will be a
far worse slow motion train wreck. We can still pull out of Iraq at a
cost of mere hundreds of billions. This will be wasted trillions, gone
like you said into the pockets of investment bankers and CEOs.
Jeez, I used to think I was a conservative. I still think I'm a
conservative. What the hell is going on?
I
must confess that I haven't given a lot of deep, intense thought to
Social Security reform. But, then, do you really think Bush has either?
I just have a bad feeling about this.
I'm not saying that Social Security couldn't be reformed in an
intelligent manner, but I am saying that Bush and the mob of yes-men and
spinmeisters around him are the last people you should trust to come up
with the plan.
It reminds me of Michael Milken's junk bonds. I talked to Milken once. I
think he's really trying these days to be a nice guy and a fine human
being, but he still gives the impression of being the leader of the
hyper-intelligent reptiles from the planet Zwork. (I wonder if Oliver
Stone met Milken before he came up with the name "Gordon
Gekko" for Michael Douglas' character in Wall Street. It
sure fits.) Now, I've never met George W. Bush, but I did talk to
his brother Neil about a half hour before talking to Milken, and
"hyper-intelligent" was not the word that came to mind.
Anyway, there were two ideas behind Milken's "high yield"
bonds: interest payments are tax deductible and you don't have to jump
out the window anymore if you go bankrupt. So, you borrow a gazillion
dollars at ridiculously high interest rates and buy a company. If you
hang on somehow and keep paying the interest until you can cash out, you
become a gazillionaire through the magic of leverage. If you don't,
well, it's not like it's 1929 and you have to kill yourself just because
you are ruined. The creditors just have to take a haircut. Heck, if you
live in Texas, you can keep your mansion. Indeed, you just move on and
you'll probably be back in the game soon.
Before Milken, financiers felt that overly exploiting these two openings
was Just Not Done. But Milken said, Just Do It.
The problems with Milkenizing Social
Security, however, are that:
A. The tax deductibility of interest is irrelevant to federal government
borrowing.
B. If they bankrupt the U.S., well, some of us can't just move on. As
Patrick Swayze says in Red Dawn: "We live here."
C. And what's the reward for all this risk? If you pull off a junk bond
leverage buyout, you become rich beyond the dreams of avarice. But if
the Republican succeed with Social Security, what will they get: control
of the White House, the Senate, and the House? Oh, wait, they've already
got all that.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#maureen.dowd.zeta
Liberal
NYT columnist cites IQ study! Menopausal spinster Maureen Dowd's
continuing series "I
Hate Men (Why Oh Why Didn't A Man Marry Me?)" took a
predictable turn Thursday when she approvingly referenced an IQ study:
"A
second study, which was by researchers at four British universities and
reported last week, suggested that smart men with demanding jobs would
rather have old-fashioned wives, like their mums, than equals. The study
found that a high I.Q. hampers a woman's chance to get married, while it
is a plus for men. The prospect for marriage increased by 35 percent for
guys for each 16-point increase in I.Q.; for women, there is a 40
percent drop for each 16-point rise."
This
once again confirms Sailer's Law of IQ: "Liberals simultaneously
don't believe in IQ and believe their IQs are far superior to
the IQs of nonliberals."
Interestingly,
while Maureen couldn't figure out how to get her ex-boyfriend Michael
Douglas to marry her, Catherine
Zeta-Jones didn't have much trouble solving the puzzle. I'm sure
Maureen assumes her IQ is far superior to Catherine's, but Catherine
seems to have discovered how men work at a much younger age than poor
old Maureen.
A
reader writes:
Men
are often lampooned for for their cluelessness about women, but it goes
both ways. The difference is we never see women satirized for it
the way men are.
That
reminds me that the first article I ever published in a magazine (The
American Spectator back in October 1992) was a satire on feminist
cluelessness:
Report Cites Bias Against Women in Drug Rackets
"Aspiring Female Traffickers Lack Role Models," Notes Expert
By Steve Sailer
HANOVER, NH -- A new study reveals that while women have made gains in
the controlled substances industry, they still comprise only 14.6% of
all drug dealers. Even more disturbing, a "glass ceiling"
shuts women out of the top rungs of the profession. "You always
hear about 'Drug Lords' and 'Cocaine Kingpins,' but where are the 'Drug
Ladies,' and 'Cocaine Queenpins?'" demands Clarissa Spode,
Professor of Sociology at Dartmouth, and author of the groundbreaking
report, "Cracking Through: Diversity, Dignity and Drugs."
Dr. Spode faulted the media for purveying stereotypes that discourage
women from entering this fast growing and lucrative occupation. For
example, "Miami Vice" depicted in total only 127 female
"drug industry workers" compared to 1,711 men. "Even
worse, 103 of the women (81.1%) were portrayed as forsaking their
careers after sleeping with Sonny and/or Rico."
Other experts concur. "Gangster films in general have always been
virulently phallocentric," observes Reed College Film Professor
Charles Womyndaughter. His screenplay for a non-sexist mob movie --
"The Godparent" -- was treated with callous disregard by
Hollywood. "They said some quite insensitive things about it,"
he recalls.
Another authority, Dr. Arthur Cruttwell-Clamp, finds that American women
are socialized away from traits valuable in this demanding occupation.
"Too few women in our society have been taught how to laugh while
zapping a deadbeat customer with an electric cattle prod." He calls
on toymakers to introduce young females to a wider range of career
options. "Instead of 'My Little Pony,' your toddler should be
playing with 'My Little Uzi.'" Dr. Cruttwell-Clamp recommends that
parents combat traditional gender-typing by having their daughters pull
the wings off butterflies and burn ants with magnifying glasses for 30
minutes each day, then advance to tying stray dogs to the bumpers of
cars idling at stop lights.
All the experts indignantly dismiss biological conjectures purporting to
explain why males seem more violent than females. "Then why are the
Nuzwangdees of Guyana -- or is it the Wangduzees of New Guinea? Well,
anyway, I heard there's some tribe somewhere where more women than men
are into GrecoRoman wrestling, or is it Australian football?"
retorts Dr. Womyndaughter.
Media stereotypes victimize men as well. "Tragically, male dealers
internalize the media's image of them," muses Dr. Spode. "The
one man I talked to while preparing our report was hyper-masculine:
aggressive, dominating, reckless, ruthless, muscular ... and, yet,
strangely intriguing."
The researchers found chauvinism widespread within the drug industry.
"We originally expected gender equality in such a nontraditional,
multicultural business," recalls Dr. Spode. "As the evidence
of male domination mounted, however, we began searching for the Old Boys
Network that locked women out. But with a median life expectancy of 24,
we couldn't find many Old Boys. Fortunately, we came up with a crucial
conceptual breakthrough: the Young Boys Network." Dr. Spode adds
that females are seldom invited along on important male-bonding rites of
passage, like drive-by shootings.
Linda M., a spunky New Yorker, recounts how sexual harassment cut short
her promising career: "I started out in retail, on a corner in the
Lower East Side, but the other vendors were very crude, very 'macho.'
Whenever I walked by they made these weird sucking noises. So, I went
into wholesale to find a higher class of professional peer, maybe even a
mentor who could show me the 'ropes.' But my fellow distributors claimed
I was on their 'turf' and kept disrespecting me by dangling me out
windows by my ankles. So, I went home to Bensonhurst and opened a 'crack
house.' But my family and neighbors were not at all supportive of my
'un-ladylike' ambitions, so they formed a 'vigilante' mob and 'torched'
my house. I think they were trying to undermine my self-esteem."
Activists denounce the lack of government programs to meet the special
needs of mothers who are also drug dealers. "The very term 'Day
Care' reflects institutional insensitivity to those who work mostly
between midnight and dawn," points out Dr. Spode. "One mother
told me she would never deal drugs because she couldn't bear to think
what would happen to her children if she were killed or
imprisoned." Dr. Spode blames this inequity on Reagan
administration cutbacks. [More...]
***
http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#suicide
Privatizing
Social Security would lead to more suicide, euthanasia, and
murder:
A
feature of the current and much-denounced Social Security system is that
no matter how long you live, you still get a monthly check. As has been
mentioned before, one of the mysteries of life is that no man knows the
length of his days. The current "defined benefit" Social
Security system acts as an insurance program against what could
otherwise be the disaster of living too long.
The
popularity of "defined contribution" retirement plans like
401k's stem in large part from their being supplements to Social
Security. Say you retire at 65. You can spend the next 15 years blowing
your 401ks on world travel and golf, and feel comfortable that you'll
still have your Social Security check to fall back on so you won't have
to go live in a refrigerator carton if you happen to live past 80.
Or,
if you are less self-centered, from age 65 you can treat your private
retirement accounts as you children's patrimony and live frugally just
on Social Security.
In
either case, the existence of a fairly generous Social Security (and
Medicare) system takes away a lot of the anxiety about living too long.
Pro-life conservatives should contemplate some of the statistically
inevitable consequences of cutting back on that insurance.
A
reader writes:
The
big unnoticed/ignored (by “conservatives”-who-like-political-revolution
& “progressives”-who-like-cultural-reaction alike) income
support move is the shift from defined benefit to defined contribution
pensions for average workers.
(The move is in the opposite direction for CEO’s).
Previously, under defined benefit plans (Lockheed & Social Security)
workers got a guaranteed life-time annuity. The smart money has figured
that this is becoming one long free lunch.
Now defined-contribution pensioners will simply get what goes into the
pot (income deduction + booming capital gains + hot tips) less what goes
out of the pot (asset liquidation + busting capital losses + greater
fools & trips to Vegas) Lower income personal account holders will
not have sufficient assets to diversification, so will be more
susceptible to risk of local stock losses.
They will also be more susceptible to asset liquidation, owing to higher
marginal propensity to consume during low-income earning periods.
If the nation’s pension funds are put into play it does not take too
much nous to figure out that a few people will own most of the marbles
at the end of this game. Privatising pensions is so win-win for the Big
End of Town it is embarrassing.
Their existing share portfolios get a big price boost as personal
account money floods into equity markets. They get to keep their FICA
deductions which will be diversified into value shares (so their lazy
money goes into growth shares). They get to manage the accounts which
will give them beaucoup fees from churning. They get to clean up when
the little fish periodically get panicked into (peaks) and out of
(troughs) the market by large financial swells.
No wonder they are getting other agencies to act as spear carriers in
this moral obscenity.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#not.that.theres.anything.wrong.with.that
How
to get more work out of employees: A reader writes:
The
MLK Day proposal just need to be tweaked a little, or rather
supplemented. One hurdle to getting private companies to give paid
holidays is that there are getting to be so many holidays. Have you ever
heard of the Federal government repealing a holiday? No, Washington just
keeps adding more. This imposes economic costs.
Fortunately, a solution is now at hand. By coincidence, overwhelming
evidence has just been published that Abraham Lincoln was, uh, well,
let's just say he played for both Rebs and Yanks. So we simply rename
Presidents Day "Gay Leadership Day."
It will still be a Federal holiday, and maybe companies will even
continue to allow absence on our new Gay Leadership Day. But I will bet
that 98 percent of the guys in the office will show up for work, prompt
and eager, that day. In fact, job attendance on Gay Leadership Day may
be the highest during the whole year, with a surprising lack of flu
cases or other strange illnesses. Over the years, guys may even find
that it is the most fun day of the whole year to go to work, to get more
done and to enjoy their coworkers.
There we are: more holidays, recognition of an important bit of
Americana, and increased GDP. It's the perfect hat trick, courtesy of
Abe.
***
How
to make the MLK Holiday popular: It's
been 19 years since the Rev. Martin Luther King's birthday became a
federal holiday, and six years since New Hampshire became the 50th state
to make it a holiday for state workers. Yet, in 2004, 29 percent of
employers give their staffs the day off with pay, according to a survey
of 339 Human Resources executives by publisher BNA Inc.
Surprisingly, few non-black workers seem to mind. Not surprisingly, some
blacks feel that this apathy toward King's birthday is a sign of
disrespect. Black comedian Chris Rock said, "You gotta be pretty
racist to not want a day off from work."
Fortunately, one simple change in the holiday could end this racial
divisiveness and unite workers of all colors in demanding a paid holiday
honoring King. [Continued
here...]
***
http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#was.lincoln.gay
Reviewing
the Was
Lincoln Gay?"
controversy, Across Difficult
Country writes:
Should his portrait instead be on the three dollar bill?
Was Abraham Lincoln a homosexualist? According to a new book by written by C.A. Tripp, he was. Tripp is himself a homosexualist (a coincidence) and at one time was a researcher for the ‘sex scientist’ Alfred Kinsey...
For the sake of history, let’s examine the facts on both sides:
Evidence he was: Lincoln shared his bed with the captain of his bodyguards, David Derickson. Lincoln was often seen frequenting a popular public restroom in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington DC. Lincoln loved the theater. Young Lincoln was often referred to as ‘the rail-splitter’ (I don’t know what that means exactly, but it sure sounds kind of queer).
Evidence he wasn’t: What sort of homosexualist would appear in public looking like this?
Good
question. (The uncropped
photo is even funnier.)
More
seriously, it's hard to take these allegations as evidence of much of
anything since the proponents of the theory have yet to bring forward
any contemporary evidence that a single one of Lincoln's millions of
passionate political enemies had ever accused him of homosexuality. In
contrast, for example, it was widely rumored at the time that Sally
Hemmings' children were fathered by President Jefferson.
Without
TV back then, people spent a lot of time recounting personal gossip, so
rumors would have spread.
A
reader comments:
I
haven't read the book , but after reading some comments about it on the
blogosphere, it seems to me some of the arguments the book presents are
very silly. Regarding the issue of sharing a bed with someone (a not
uncommon practice at the time), let's remember that before the emergence
of the gay rights movement, heterosexuals were far less reluctant to
engage in non-sexual physical contact with other men than they would in
today's time, when such behaviour would appear to look gay. That's
certainly true in some institutions like the armed forces, where (not
accidentally) gays were explicitly banned until just a few years ago.
Liking the theater was also not exclusively a gay thing at the time (I
think you have written about straight flight in your columns before).
Writing bawdy poems about men marrying men hardly counts as gay behavior
(how many heterosexuals make gay jokes today?). So what is left? an
unhappy marriage?
***
http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#jodie.foster.eugenics
What's
truly interesting about Jodie Foster is not her sexual orientation,
but the feminist movie star's obvious obsession with eugenics. As I
wrote in "Feminist
Celebrity Eugenics" in 2000:
Feminist
heroine / single mother / glamour queen Jodie Foster apparently
undertook a more methodical search for the perfect sperm donor.
According to numerous reports
in the British press in 1998, she had proudly announced that after a
long hunt, she had had herself impregnated with the gametes of a tall,
dark, handsome scientist with an IQ
of 160.
While Miss Foster will neither confirm nor deny these articles, this
does not at all seem out of character. In her movies and personal life,
Miss Foster has often appeared to be loyally trying to reproduce her
unusual upbringing. According to her ne'er-do-well brother Buddy's
tell-all book Foster Child, Alicia Foster's nickname of
"Jodie" is a tribute to "Aunt" Jo, who was their
mother's pistol-packing live-in lesbian lover [Josephine Dominguez, or
"Jo
D"].
Jodie was a child prodigy who thrived in this environment, reading at 18
months, becoming the Coppertone Kid at three, and later on graduating
summa cum laude from Yale. Thus, her first directorial effort was
"Little Man Tate," in which she played a single mother raising
a seven-year-old genius. Similarly, her production company received
multiple Emmy nominations for "Baby Dance," a Showtime cable
movie with Stockard Channing playing a wealthy, high-powered woman who
wants a baby but can't get pregnant in the traditional manner. Not
surprisingly, Jodie named her firm Egg Pictures.
And Jodie is widely celebrated for her leftist activism. The last story
she would want circulating is one that makes her sound like Nazi film
directrix Leni Riefenstahl brainstorming with Himmler and Goebbels over
the specs for the Master Race's next generation. Especially because
Jodie actually is going to produce and star in an upcoming bio-pic
currently called "The
Leni Riefenstahl Project."
Whoever the father of Jodie Foster's baby really is, the general truth
is that, despite the strident egalitarianism of so many feminists, the
process of getting artificially inseminated inevitably turns women who
can't bear to be impregnated by a man into practicing eugenicists. They
have to ask themselves which sperm donor is genetically superior.
Leafing through fertility clinics' catalogs, they are forced to agonize
over such politically incorrect questions as, "Does Donor #543's
curly blonde hair and 6'-3" height mean he gives better seed than
Donor #361, who is only 5'-7" but has an SAT score of 1450?"
...
Now, eugenics has a terrible reputation. Much of its notoriety is well
deserved, since its most visible manifestations in the 20th Century were
governments murdering or sterilizing people they didn't like. Voluntary
eugenics, however, is too universal and too fundamental to human life
for us to continue to observe the taboo against discussing it in
print...
One benefit of thinking frankly about eugenics is that we can grasp its
practical limitations. Consider the alleged 160 IQ of little Charles
Foster's daddy. That's an extraordinary number: Only 1 out of about
30,000 Americans scores so high. Does this guarantee that, if the rumor
is true, the Foster family will be blessed with another prodigy?
Definitely not. According to psychologist Chris Brand ... the expected
boost in the kid's IQ from using a sperm donor with an IQ of 160 instead
of a one with the average IQ of 100 is only 12 points. And your mileage
may vary … and almost certainly will vary dramatically. (Another book
showing how to do these calculations is Daniel Seligman's delightful
introduction to the science of IQ, A Question of Intelligence.)
Now,
twelve IQ points (80% of a standard deviation) is nothing to sneer at.
It's the difference between the 50th percentile and the 79th percentile
on the Bell Curve. Still, I fear Jodie would find herself a tad
disappointed.
Why is the expected payoff of even such painstaking eugenic efforts as
this so small and so uncertain? Regression toward the Mean. We each
carry two sets of genes. You might have gotten lucky and gotten dominant
genes that granted you a huge amount of some desirable trait. But your
recessive genes are also a random selection from the average of your
ancestors' genes, weighted by their closeness to you on the family tree.
At the moment of your child's conception, you and your mates' four sets
of genes are completely reshuffled. Thus, the children of the highly
intelligent tend to have kids who aren't as bright as they are. That's
why royal dynasties are founded by usurpers with exceptional talents,
but quickly recede to nothing-specialness. In merciful contrast, the
exceptionally dim tend to have children who are a little smarter than
they are.
So, who will little Charles Foster take after the most? His Nietzschean
Superwoman mom? His handpicked dad? Or, just maybe, his Uncle Buddy?
***
http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#orthodontists.cartel
Why
isn't this a political issue? Orthodontists are incredibly
overpaid for an easy job (no late night phone calls). A reader
explains:
Regarding
your post entitled "What's the deal with orthodontists?"-- my
understanding of the situation is that Orthodontistry schools keep a
stranglehold on high prices by only admitting the top 1 (or some such
number) % of Dentistry school graduates, thus ensuring that the number
of orthodontists available is less than the market's demand for their
services. That's what the studious dental student husband of a friend of
mine told me, at least.
Apparently,
only 280
orthodontists are allowed to graduate every year, or less than one
per million Americans (I don't know how many retire each year, but the
net increase in orthodontists must be much lower). Further, the cartel
may persecute inventors who devise new labor-saving (and thus
income-reducing) braces, as was argued in the case of Viazis v. American Association of Orthodontists.
The
cost of the orthodontists' cartel per American family is huge: Let's
guesstimate that half of American kids get braces at an average cost of
$3,000 each, of which 50% is a premium extorted by the cartel. So, the
typical American family with two kids is being ripped off to the tune of
$1,500 each. (Even if your insurance pays for it, you are still paying
in reduced wages.)
Yet,
nobody cares. Why not?
***
http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#jodie.foster.lesbian
What
the public really wants to know: I've become addicted to
looking up which Google searches bring people to iSteve.com, and it's
helped me learn more about what the public really wants to know. It's
not a pretty sight.
For
example, I've written several times about how fortifying staple foods in
3rd World countries with micronutrients such as iodine and iron would a
cheap way to raise national IQs and thus help alleviate the crushing
burden of 3rd World poverty. Yet, I've never seen evidence that anyone
has ever used Google to search out information on that important topic.
In contrast, hundreds of people have come to iSteve.com following their
Google search on the words "Jodie
Foster lesbian."
***"
http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#humor.subversive
Is
humor subversive? I remarked below on how small-c conservative
New Yorker cartoons are. (A reader recalled his favorite: A
diner say to his waitperson, "Chris, do you mind if I call you
'Waiter?'") On the other hand, several readers pointed out how
movie comedies, from the Marx Brothers on, tend to be devoted to tearing
down formality. The only problem is that they've succeeded so well that
there is very little formality left in modern life, which is why so many
contemporary comedies include weddings, which is one of the few truly
formal occasions left in anybody's life anymore.
***
My
New VDARE column on Alberto
Gonzales is up. An excerpt:
The
likelihood of Alberto Gonzales being confirmed as Attorney General stems
in part from the Bush administration's readiness to play the Johnnie
Cochran-style race card. Republicans have increasingly taken to
slandering as racist anybody who criticizes a minority Republican. And,
of course, Gonzales would indeed be "the first Hispanic" etc.
etc.
Yet, what we haven't heard is much evidence that Hispanics particularly want
to be symbolized by a national embarrassment like Gonzales.
Would you?
The best you can say for Gonzales is that he's a tool. He's a classic
minion whose career over the last decade has consisted of concocting
legal rationalizations for whatever George W. Bush wants to do.
What Bush wants to do is why VDARE.COM has its own questions for
Gonzales—which the Senate appears unlikely to ask. Gonzales has been
an enforcer in Bush’s campaign to flood the country with immigrants,
legal and illegal, and re-engineer it with racial quotas.
Gonzales is so pro-illegal immigration that in his Senate testimony last
week he used what I've called the "ultimate euphemism"—that
illegal aliens are "lawful citizens."
That's not a slip of the tongue. Gonzales has a relentless prejudice in
favor of authoritarian lawlessness, which is why the President wants to
make him the nation's chief law enforcement officer...
And don’t believe the NRO crowd that only anti-American liberal wimps worry about little things like torture and tearing up the Geneva conventions. FBI G-men and military officers are also aghast at what Gonzales has done. Twelve high-ranking retired admirals and generals, including former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Shalikashvili, have criticized Gonzales in an almost-unprecedented open letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
After World War I, Winston Churchill forlornly reflected:
"When all was over, torture and cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and these were of doubtful utility."
I never thought I'd be nostalgic for the First World War. But the rapidity with which the Bush Administration, egged on by Gonzales, turned during their dramatically less desperate wars to torturing Afghan and Iraqi prisoners (70-90 percent of whom were arrested by mistake) makes the Great War look like a moral Golden Age.
[More...]
More
revealing Gonzales facts: The Washington Post reports:
Gonzales paints himself as a largely apolitical lawyer, who began leaning toward the GOP only after joining the prestigious Houston firm of Vinson & Elkins. He says he votes for the person, not the party, adding that he would have supported George W. Bush even if he had been a Democrat.
***
Some
of my recent film reviews:
The
Motorcycle Diaries - Che Guevara
biopic
Silver
City & Bush's Brain -
Chris Cooper as GWB
Hero
- Zhang Yimou, Jet Li
Bright
Young Things - Evelyn Waugh's Vile
Body
She
Hate Me - Spike Lee
The
Terminal - Steven Spielberg &
Tom Hanks
Napoleon
Dynamite & Maria Full of Grace
More
of my film reviews here.
***
http://www.iSteve.com/05JanA.htm#jewish.century
Yuri
Slezkine's The Jewish Century is finally getting the
serious reviews it deserves. Although this landmark book by UC Berkeley
history professor Slezkine was published by Princeton U. Press back in
August, it had gone almost unmentioned, except by me, until now.
Now
there's an appreciative review by David
N. Myers, professor of Jewish history and director of the Center for Jewish Studies at UCLA,
in the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. And the Jan. 31st
issue of The American Conservative has a positive review by
Albert S. Lindemann, history prof at UCSB (it's available to electronic
subscribers -- become one here!).
And
here's a new interview with Slezkine at Nextbook.
***
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/05JanA.htm#deaf.gays
A
clue to a cause of male homosexuality? A
reader writes:
I've
been reading your articles on homosexuality with interest as of late.
I'm 25 years old, gay, and have been out of the closet and therefore in
the gay community to some degree since the age of 16. One thing that I
have noticed that I have always thought people ought to do a study on is
the shockingly high number of people in the gay community who were born
deaf. I'm not the only gay person to make note of this; at least three
of my friends have had the same independent realization. One would never
imagine that, in a relatively small city such as Baltimore, a social
club for "gay deaf bears" could fill up a moderately-sized bar
with its monthly outings, but I saw this myself regularly when |
