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2004
The
Da Vinci Code vs. reality: Regarding the popular claim that
women had it better under paganism ... the Blowhards pointed me toward
this interview
with Rodney Stark, an agnostic who is a historian at the U. of
Washington:
Q.
You seem to argue that Christianity was an overwhelmingly good social
force for women.\
RS:
It was! Christian women had tremendous advantages compared to the woman
next door, who was like them in every way except that she was a pagan.
First, when did you get married? Most pagan girls were married off
around age 11, before puberty, and they had nothing to say about it, and
they got married to some 35-year-old guy. Christian women had plenty of
say in the matter and tended to marry around age 18.
Abortion was a huge killer of women in this period, but Christian women
were spared that. And infanticide—pagans killed little girls left and
right. We’ve unearthed sewers clogged with the bones of newborn girls.
But Christians prohibited this. Consequently, the sex ratio changed and
Christians didn’t have the enormous shortage of women that plagued the
rest of the empire.
I
wasn't aware that the sex ratio was tipped toward more males in
classical times due to infanticide of girl babies. If so, that could
explain the popularity of male homosexual behavior in Greece and Rome.
The only country in the world today with a lot more men than women is
Afghanistan. Perhaps as a consequence, the Afghan Pashtuns are notorious
buggers.
***
Edward
Gibbon on the Dangers of Guest Worker Programs:
"The
conduct which the emperor Probus had adopted in the disposal of the
vanquished was imitated by Diocletian and his associates. The captive
barbarians, exchanging death for slavery, were distributed among the
provincials and assigned to those districts (in Gaul the territories of
Amiens, Beauvais, Cambray, Treves, Langres, and Troyes are particularly
specified) which had been depopulated by the calamities of war. They
were usefully employed as shepherds and husbandmen but were denied the
exercise of arms, except when it was found expedient to enroll them in
the military service. Nor did the emperors refuse the property of lands
with a less servile tenure to such of the barbarians as solicited the
protection of Rome. They granted a settlement to several colonies of the
Carpi, the Basternae, and the Sarmatians, and by a dangerous indulgence
permitted them in some measure to retain their national manners and
independence. Among the provincials it was a subject of flattering
exaltation that the barbarian, so lately an object of terror, now
cultivated their lands, drove their cattle to the neighboring fair, and
contributed to his labor to the public plenty. They congratulated their
masters on the powerful accession of subjects and soldiers; but they
forgot to observe that secret enemies , insolent from favor or desperate
from oppression, were introduced into the heart of the empire."
***
Gibbon
on Why Bush Should Read Newspapers: President Bush famously remarked
that he only glances at newspapers because they are biased, unlike his
aides, who tell him all he needs to know. The Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire quotes the Emperor Diocletian:
"How
often," was he accustomed to say, "is it the interest of four
or five ministers to combine together to deceive their sovereign!
Secluded from mankind by his exalted dignity, the truth is concealed
from his knowledge; he can see only with their eyes, he hears nothing
but their misrepresentations. He confers the most important offices upon
vice and weakness, and disgraces the most virtuous and deserving among
his subjects. By such infamous arts," added Diocletian, "the
best and wisest princes are sold to the venal corruption of their
courtiers."
***
Bobby
Jones: Stroke of Genius -- My review will be in the May 24th
issue of The American Conservative,
which should be on newsstands a few days from now.
It's
a limited budget film that might well bore nongolfers -- since with
golf, you either get it or you don't -- but the fury of the critics
toward it is pretty amusing. Obviously, much of it reflects their anger
at Jim Caviezel, who plays the 1920s Georgia amateur, for starring in The
Passion, but the main public complaint is that the movie is
"reverential" and "hagiographic" in portraying Jones
as a prince among men. Why does the movie cover up his dark side? What
none of the reviewers seem to know is that Jones during his life was
universally acknowledged to be a secular saint. T
During
his 95-year lifespan, the late Alistair Cooke met countless prominent
people. Yet Cooke called Jones "one of the three or four finest
human beings I've ever known… A whole team of investigative reporters,
working in shifts like coal miners, would find that in all of Jones's
life ... he nothing common did or mean… Bob
Jones radiated goodness, yet without a smidgen of piety."
That
big time American golf hasn't yet succumbed like tennis to the
crappiness of the modern age (have you ever seen a pro golfer screaming
at an official?) is largely a tribute to the example Bobby Jones set.
***
Iraqi
restaurants, coming to a neighborhood near you! As the likelihood
grows that someday we'll have to airlift out Iraqis who collaborated
with us, we can look forward to a profusion of Iraqi restaurants across
America. I hope Iraqi cuisine is tasty, because that may be the only
thing we'll get out of our adventure. Of course, the neocons may
eventually wonder why they were so enthusiastic for a war that ended up
bringing lots of anti-Semites to the U.S.
***
How
to unify Iraq -- Get the Sunnis and Shi'ites to unite in an Arab
campaign to crush the Kurds. You could get the Turks and Syrians to
help.
***
Lawrence
Lessig's free book: The darling of libertarian bloggers, the
anti-intellectual property law professor Lawrence
Lessig has written a book "Free Culture: How Big Media Uses
Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control
Creativity," which he's giving away free on the Internet. This
would seem like a more principled stance if Lessig wasn't a highly paid
tenured law professor at Stanford who makes hundreds of dollars an hour
practicing law on the side, a job for which writing his books serve as
advertising.
As
a pixel-stained wretch who would like to someday make at least a
lower-middle class living writing books for pay, I say, "Forget
you, Larry. I want every penny that's coming to me, my kids, grandkids,
great-grandkids and on, unto the 7th generation."
It
makes no sense that web libertarians are for cutting down intellectual
property rights. Libertarians are supposed to be for property
rights. The reason Lessig's obsession is so popular with web
libertarians is because they are greedy people who want something for
nothing.
Here's
a proposal for Lessig to back: Let's eliminate the copyright on
pornography. It's about Day 10 of the pornography industry's HIV
shutdown out here in the San Fernando Valley, yet the world is not
suffering from any shortage of new pornography. That's because there's
plenty of old stuff to go around forever.
The
shutdown of the porn business is a good thing. Let's eliminate
the copyright on any new pornography so vendors would have less
incentive to make new stuff.
***
Innovation
in Penology:
A
short-staffed prison in Mexico has hired 42 of its most fearsome inmates
to act as guards. The convicts-turned-wardens will each be paid between
£20 and £100 a month. They will help the real guards keep control in
the overcrowded prison at Tepic. According to Mexican newspaper Reforma,
the prisoners chosen were those who instilled the most fear in their
fellow inmates.
UPDATE:
Well, it's not really such an innovation after all. It's called the
trusty system and it's been around forever.
***
How
to achieve one man - one vote democracy in Iraq in two easy steps:
Kill everybody except one man. Hold an election.
***
The
Passion v. The Da Vinci Code: It's fascinating to compare
the media's frenzied anger and niggling criticisms directed at The
Passion compared to its pandering to Dan Brown's bestselling
potboiler about how a Harvard professor of symbology (say what?)
discovers that Jesus was really married to Mary Magdalene and didn't get
crucified but instead went off to France (?) to have a passel of kids,
leading to the Catholic Church's vast, murderous 2000 year old
conspiracy to keep the truth censored and thus keep on keeping down
women and paganism.
There's
a lot of grist for anybody's mill there, but I want to discuss the
book's notion that the Catholic Church was intensely hostile to women
and all remnants of paganism. But compared to what? What other
monotheistic religion honored hundreds of women as saints? Made the
Virgin Mary the second most revered person of all? What other religion
made women writers like St. Theresa of Avila and St. Catherine of Siena
part of the canon of religious literature? What other religion
encouraged women to found and run giant hospitals?
Protestantism? Judaism? Islam?
And
hostility to paganism -- that's what the Protestants, Jews, and Muslims
complained about ... that Catholicism wasn't hostile enough towards
paganism. It's hardly a surprise that the Renaissance started in
Catholic Italy. Or that the Reformation was a reaction to the High
Renaissance in Rome. Here's a minor modern example: my younger son's
otherwise perfectly sane Lutheran school refuses to hold a Halloween
party because that's too pagan, so it holds a "Harvest
Festival." To a Halloween-loving Catholic like me, that sounds like
nuts, but it makes perfect sense to Lutherans.
***
Chile
ostracized for being "dull but virtuous" -- The NYT reports:
In
sharp contrast to Argentina, Bolivia and Peru, not to mention the rest
of South America, Chile these days looks "dull but virtuous,"
to borrow the title of a recent report by one Wall Street brokerage
house. This is a country where most people actually pay their taxes,
laws are rigidly enforced and the police only rarely seek bribes. That
is unusual for Latin America and probably should be cause for
celebration. Yet, it has the rest of the region looking at Chile as if
there is something wrong with it because it is not what the Brazilians
call "bagunça" or what the Argentines call "quilombo"
- passionately messy, turbulent and chaotic... Today, Chile is a
hypercapitalist state at a time when Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela,
Ecuador and Uruguay are all moving leftward and questioning free trade
and open markets.
One
thing to keep in mind is that Chile was democratic for 40 years before
Marxist Salvador Allende came to power in 1970. He lucked into office,
winning 38% in a three way vote. Two years later, with his opponents
trying to win two thirds of the parliamentarians so they could impeach
and convict him, he held on by taking 43% of the vote. So, bad luck
played a sizable role in Allende coming to power. He certainly never had
a mandate to flush Chile's economy down the toilet during a boom era (Allende
fell a month before the Arab Oil Embargo began.)
My
impression is that the racial divide is much less of a problem in Chile
than in nearby Peru and Bolivia. Most Chileans appear to be mostly white
with a little Indian mixed in, so the social structure is not as
caste-like as in the Altiplano countries, where in the highlands, most
white women are unable to bring a baby to full term due to lack of
oxygen. This means that large areas are populated primarily by Indians.
Of course, Argentina has an almost all-white population, and it's a mess
too.
UPDATE:
A reader writes:
"Dull
but virtuous?" Ah, the NYT and other major media have at least
found a way to grudgingly ease into the acknowledgment of what everyone
with a brain has known for years, that Pinochet's legacy, modern Chile,
has been, by far, the least screwed up country south of the Rio Grande.
Yes, the ethnic mixture of Chile helps, but it should have helped
Argentina as well. But Argentina was 'cursed,' so to speak, with
abundant resources per capita, which bred a political system based on
competitive looting of the country's vast wealth. Skinny, mountainous
Chile is land-poor and mineral-poor, so it has to work for a living.
One
interesting indicator: LanChile is the only functional airline in Latin
America, in some ways superior to America's major airlines. It provides
safe, on-time service in clean planes and makes a normal return on
investment. In the US, if an airline CEO tries to do that, the pilots
hit the eject button, as they have recently done at American, United,
Delta, Continental and US Airways. In Latin America, the penalties for
effective airline management can be worse. Federico Bloch tried to run
Central America's TACA Group of airlines as competitive businesses and
had been making noises recently about escaping the excessive controls
and forced bribes imposed by Latin governments on his airlines. Monday
morning, on his way to work, Bloch was gunned
into eternity.
***
Loyalty
Oath to Affirmative Action required of applicants to UCLA Medical
school! A reader sent me the following that he had to sign to apply to
UCLA Med:
We,
the faculty and students of the UCLA School of Medicine, in the spirit
of understanding and unity, believe that a diverse student body is an
integral part of our medical education and our development as
compassionate caregivers. We acknowledge the history of diversity at our
institution and understand the responsibilities we must assume in
becoming members of the School of Medicine.
Foremost
is the fostering of an environment where ideas can be freely exchanged
without fear of judgment or persecution.
[Hmmmhmmmh
... It sounds like the one idea that can't be freely exchanged without
fear of judgment or persecution is the idea that a diverse student body
is NOT an integral part of your medical education. Also, what the heck
is this "without fear of judgment" doing in a medical
school? If I stand up in class and answer that the hip bone is connected
to the funny bone, nobody is supposed to judge me?]
We
accept the charge to learn from our peers about the variety of
backgrounds we represent, as well as embrace the opportunity to share
our beliefs and values with one another. We agree to maintain the
highest degree of decorum and professionalism while discussing our
commonalities and differences. By adopting this philosophy towards our
diversity, we hope to ensure our development as culturally competent
physicians who will ably serve the variety of patients entrusted to our
care.
[The
notion that you'd become "culturally competent" by hanging
around with upper middle class black and Hispanic med students is
awfully lame.]
Adopted
May 1997 by the UCLA Medical Student Council
Adopted
November 1997 by the UCLA School of Medicine Faculty Executive Committee
[Why
was this passed in 1997? Presumably to intimidate potential
whistle-blowers who might raise a stink about UCLA violating Proposition
209, which the voters of California passed in November 1996.]
***
Good
News: Here's an update to my article in the May 10th American
Conservative, now on newsstands. The LA Times reports:
A
visiting psychology professor at Claremont McKenna College was formally
charged by prosecutors Monday in connection with an alleged hate-crime
hoax that had triggered antiracism protests and a one-day shutdown of
the Claremont Colleges in March. The Los Angeles County district
attorney's office charged Kerri Dunn, 39, with one misdemeanor count of
filing a false police report and two felony counts of insurance fraud.
Prosecutors
alleged Dunn had falsely reported that an unknown vandal spray-painted
her car with racist and anti-Semitic slurs on March 9, while she
attended a campus forum on racism. Officials also said Dunn submitted a
false insurance claim, never paid, for items supposedly taken from her
1990 Honda Civic and for damage to the car, which had its windows
smashed and tires slashed. Dunn is scheduled to surrender to authorities
at Los Angeles County Superior Court in Pomona on May 19, the date of
her arraignment.
***
The
Wisdom of the People: A poll
of 1311 Americans by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at
the U. of Maryland found:
Among
the 57 percent of respondents who said they believed Iraq was either
''directly involved'' in carrying out the 9/11 attacks on New York and
the Pentagon or had provided ''substantial support'' to al-Qaeda, 57
percent said they intended to vote for Bush and 39 percent said they
would choose his Democratic foe, John Kerry...
Virtually
all independent experts and even senior administration officials have
concluded since the war that ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda before the
war were virtually non-existent, and even Bush himself has explicitly
dismissed the notion that Baghdad had a hand in the 9/11 attacks. Yet
the March poll found that 20 percent of respondents believe that Iraq
was directly involved in the attacks -- the same percentage as on the
eve of the war, in February 2003.
Similarly,
the percentages of those who believe Iraq provided ''substantial
support'' to al-Qaeda (37 percent) and those who believe contacts were
minimal (29 percent) are also virtually unchanged from 13 months before.
As of March 2004, 11 percent said there was ''no connection at all'', up
four percent from February 2003.
Some
-- but surprisingly little -- change was found in answers to whether
Washington had found concrete evidence since the war that substantiated
a Hussein-al-Qaeda link. Thus, in June 2003, 52 percent of respondents
said evidence had been found, while only 45 percent said so last month.
As
to WMD, about which there has been significantly more media coverage, 60
percent of respondents said Iraq either had actual WMD (38 percent) or
had a major programme for developing them (22 percent). In contrast, 39
percent said Baghdad had limited WMD-related activities that fell short
of an active programme -- what Kay as the CIA's main weapons inspector
concluded in February -- or no activities at all.
Moreover,
the message conveyed by Kay and other experts appears not to be getting
through to the public, adds the survey, which found a whopping 82
percent of respondents saying either, ''experts mostly agree Iraq was
providing substantial support to al-Qaeda'' (47 percent) or, ''experts
are evenly divided on the question'' (35 percent).
I'm
still waiting for the poll that will find out what % of the public
believes that Iraq seized all those American hostages at the U.S.
Embassy back in 1979. I'm betting it's 40%.
***
The
Wisdom of Steve: C'mon, admit it -- Just like me, you also
assumed, deep down, that either you caught whooping cough from whooping
cranes, or that whooping cranes were going extinct from whooping cough.
Or, in my case, both.
***
New
VDARE.com column
at left...
***
Fallujah
and Najaf -- We're still dithering over the military dilemma I
outlined a couple of years ago in my review
of Black Hawk Down: go in light with infantry and take a lot of
casualties (like we did in Mogadishu in 1993) vs. go in heavy with tanks
and bulldozers and inflict a lot of collateral casualties on civilians
vs. don't go in at all? It's a tough call.
***
Kill
Bill, Vol. 2 tanks in 2nd weekend -- Bizarrely rapturous reviews
propelled Quentin Tarantino's so-so tribute to himself to #1 last
weekend, but word-of-mouth hammered it in its second weekend, causing it
to drop an ugly
59% in its second weekend (according to initial estimates). In
comparison, The Passion dropped 37% from weekend 1 to weekend 2.
***
Blacks
can't swim as well as other races -- At least not according to the North
Miami police department, which dropped its swimming requirement so it
could recruit more black officers -- at the request of black
politicians. The CNN article
points out that there is quite a lot of evidence that fewer blacks are
good swimmers. This is usually blamed on lack of swimming pools, but the
same pattern shows up in places like the South Carolina tidewater. A
friend down there says he went swimming every day in summer as a lad,
but never in a pool until he was 16. All the white boys went swimming in
the estuaries, but the black lads stayed on the shore and fished.
The
most likely explanation is that black youths in good condition tend to
sink rather than float, due to lower average body fat percentage and
denser bones (that's why blacks suffer less from osteoporosis). You can
swim fine even if you can't float, but learning to swim is much scarier,
so a lot of blacks don't ever learn.
A
friend in Milwaukee says that the dominant American Red Cross method of
teaching swimming is deeply flawed, especially for blacks. He has had a
lot of success teaching low body fat percentage black youths to swim
using the more reassuring "Norwegian Polar Bear" method. (Unfortunately, I can't find any links explaining this technique.)
But
this illustrates a more general point. We are not supposed to talk about
genetic differences between the races on the grounds that nothing can be
done about them. But the reality is that less can be done to ameliorate
any problems they cause if we don't talk about them. We can find lots of workarounds to problems like the
one that blacks face in learning to swim ... if we are allowed to put
our brains together. But the current regime of polite censorship makes
that very difficult.
UPDATE:
A reader writes:
Hey, black guys don't float as well as Wonder Bread white trash? I think
we learned that at Parris Island in 1967. There was a miserable skill we
all had to learn over three days called 'drownproofing.' Basically, it
was a technique for staying afloat in the middle of an ocean for a day
or two, without a life jacket, in case your ship went down and rescue
was not too swift. Of course, there was very little chance of this
actually happening by the late 1960s, but it was an opportunity to
inflict panic and agony, which the Marine Corps never passed up.
The technique relied on 1) completely suppressing the normal human
instinct to keep at least the nose above the water line through an
energetic dog-paddle and 2) absolutely obeying the instructions to
execute a very slow set of rhythmic motions that elevated the nose above
water about once per minute, perfectly fine for breathing.
I hated it and had a lot of difficulty doing it at first, even though I
had swum for more than a decade in neighborhood pools. Many of the black
recruits had never learned to swim in their lives, living in cities or
towns with no natural or artificial water. In addition, the DIs
explained up front, a lot of blacks were just not as naturally buoyant
as their flaccid, pale brethren.
Nonetheless, we would all learn to drownproof, the same way, over the
same three days. Easy or hard, it would be done. The DIs knew there is a
simple technique for overcoming the natural human fear of being
asphyxiated to death and sinking like a rock. Provide a greater fear.
Whenever anyone, white or black, started to get desperate, flail around
and make for the edge of the pool, the DIs would be standing there with
big, long poles, pushing them back toward the center of the deep pool.
Another DI would stand nearby, miming the correct motions for staying
afloat and screaming, "Do It," plus a lot of attention-getting
obscenities. Eventually, everybody got it right, often after a lot of
agony. So all objectives were accomplished.
This
raises another paradox: in a more liberal culture, such as America
today, the cultural differences between the races are likely to be
greater than in an authoritarian culture like the Marine Corps. Being
screamed at by drill Instructors gets blacks to overcome their fear of
sinking better than, say, watching Oprah.
***
Earth
Day -- As Greg Easterbrook has tirelessly pointed out, almost all
polluting chemicals (except greenhouse gases) are in decline in the
U.S., so much of what environmentalists holler about is now Chicken
Littleism. Of course, the reason pollution has declined so much is
because of a massive web of government regulations. So, conservatives
who use the decline in pollution to argue against pollution regulations
don't have a leg to stand on.
What
Easterbrook overlooks, however, is that when people complain about the
environment going to hell, they are usually talking about more than
chemicals. Typically, they are talking about increased crowding.
If
you want to get a sense of how ultra-environmentalist Northern
California uses environmental regulations to keep out hoi polloi, check
out a new housing development called The
Santa Lucia Preserve. After battles with the California Coastal
Commission and other Regulators from Hell, the developers wound up being
allowed only 300 homesites on 31 square miles (20,000 acres!) of some of
the finest land in the world, hidden between Carmel Valley and Big Sur.
That's one house per 67 acres. By law, 90% of the land will remain
undeveloped forever. Homesites start at $900,000 and run up to $4.5
million for this view
of the Tom Fazio golf course. Your house is extra.
***
NASCAR's
secret: Why is watching Chevy Luminas go around in an oval so
incredibly popular? I think the answer is staring us all in the face:
because white American guys (and American companies) always win.
Heck, the drivers are almost all British-Americans with a sprinkling of
German-Americans like the Earnhardts. (I looked at one list of NASCAR
champs and only one had a name that ended with a vowel).
Stock
car racing would make a great Chauvinistic Feminist women's sport at the
next Olympics. You know how the American public goes ape over some
women's team every couple of years -- like softball at the 1996 Olympics
or hockey at the 1998 Winter Olympics or soccer at the 1999 World Cup?
Our gals always crush a few teams full of midgets and cripples in the
opening rounds, then eke out the gold medal in the final over the only
other country in the world (always either Norway, China, or Canada)
whose women are at all interested in the game. (And then we lose all
interest whatsoever when our poor women come back in four years). Well,
folks, we're running out of sports where American gals would be assured
of gold, so after we act on my suggestion and add women's football to
the Olympics (allowing us to enjoy such heartwarming moments as hearing
the announcer say: "Final Score: USA 77 - Thailand 0"), it'll
be time to go to the limit and make Women's NASCAR an official Olympic
event. USA! USA! USA!
***
Our
new pal in Iraq -- Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN envoy whose plan for
remaking the Iraqi government is getting respectful interest from just
about everybody, has an interesting
past. Back in the mid-1950s, he was a diplomatic representative of
the FLN, the National Liberation Front of the Algerian rebels during
their ferocious eight
year long war of independence with the French (1954-1962). I'm sure
Brahimi's a great choice to help us out in the imperialism business.
***
South
Africa, ten years later -- The funny thing
about all the adulation directed at Nelson Mandela is that his greatest
act of statesmanship is almost unknown. You may vaguely recall that the
first open election in South Africa in 1994 was accompanied by huge
lines at the polling booths and scenes of chaos at vote-counting
centers. The media predicted it might take weeks to tabulate all the
ballots. Then, almost instantly, the final, official results were
announced, with no one objecting that that was logistically impossible.
Several
years later, The Economist explained what happened: The vote
counting was indeed chaotic and looked to go on indefinitely, but early
returns conclusively showed Mandela's African National Congress winning
a crushing victory that would give it the 2/3rd's majority needed to
write the new constitution all by itself. So, Mandela called together
the leaders of opposition parties and told them he was rigging the
results to restrict his own party to about 5/8ths of the seats so that
the new constitution would require some support from other parties to
pass. He also gave local control of the Cape province to the white-led
party and the KwaZulu province to the Zulu party. Not surprisingly, the
opposition was deeply grateful and while many within the ANC were angry,
they could hardly overrule Mandela.
The
future of South Africa will probably resemble that of Zimbabwe, but the
fact that destiny is still sort of in the future is a tribute to
Mandela.
***
Two
South African friends discuss crime: On
the other hand, in the experience of a lot of white South Africans, the
difference between Zimbabwe and South Africa is just that the Zimbabwean
government is more honest about what it wants criminals to do to whites.
Here's one South African's account of how life has become full of
interest:
Since
Christmas within the circles of friends and acquaintances we have had:
-
From our bible study group: one man tried to save the life of his
neighbour who was shot coming home from holiday -- he failed.
-
People arrived at another person's door after their car was hijacked --
they were too frightened to let them in until they could check that they
were genuine.
-
My mother in laws car was stolen from just outside our house - it was
only outside less than 15 minutes as she were waiting to leave.
-
My wife and my neighbour were attacked as they were standing outside the
gate chatting...they came after them with guns but fortunately my
neighbour heard them and chased them off.
-
My neighbour came home from a restaurant...his wife noticed a suspicious
car...which then drove into my neighbour's property and tried to hijack
them. A gun battle happened and the hijackers ran off---but my neighbour,
although unhurt, came very close to being shot, as seen from where the
bullet marks were.
-
Then on Friday, when they were out, they broke into the house through 2
security gates and helped themselves ( to add insult to injury they seem
to be using my mother in law's cars that they stole).
-
Other friends were broken into in the middle of the night and had a 3
hour vigil where the robbers took everything they could lay there hands
on -- fortunately they were not hurt and their daughters not
raped....but the robbers still showed their contempt by urinating on
their books and art work
The
police are black, bored and disinterested..just there to take case
numbers.
*
Another
South African replied:
The
trouble with "security measures" is that they trigger an arms
race between criminals and the general population. When enough people
get car alarms and immobilizers/gearlocks/etc., the criminals escalate
to carjacking. Likewise with burglar bars, home alarms, dogs from hell,
and personal weaponry: then they will ambush you at stop lights, in your
driveway, or by placing rocks in the road and nabbing you there. Even if
you carry an Uzi, they will get you sooner or later. Satellite tracking
services and secret codes only make things worse: they have to shoot you
to stop you from reporting the car stolen, or they have to torture you
to get the code.
The
law of personal security is that a measure is only effective when your
neighbours don't have it. Then they will be victimized instead of you. I
once lived next to a "dominee" (vicar) who had no security
measures of any kind. That set my mind at ease, since that made my own
mild measures (6 foot fence, ridgebacks, ...) effective. Of course, your
neighbours will rapidly catch up with you ...
This
is why the standard police response all over the world to crime (hide
your stuff, be careful) is self-serving claptrap. The only way to stop
crime is to apprehend and eliminate the criminals. Security measures
are, on a society-wide scale, totally ineffective. The state in South
Africa lost the ability to catch and imprison criminals around about
1993. It is now bandit country on large parts of the highveld/Reef. The
Cape is still OK for the most part, but the bandits will simply move
there when John and his family equip themselves with anti-personnel
mines and built-in flamethrowers in their car doors
***
NFL
IQs -- It's always fun to look at the IQ scores of pro football
draft prospects on the NFL's mandatory Wonderlic test. Here's the
latest, converted from the 50 question Wonderlic scoring system where 20
right answers = 100 IQ and each additional right answer is worth 2
points (adapted from AOL -- not on the Web):
Kickers
118 Average -- 5 Prospects
Centers
115 Average -- 21 Prospects
Quarterbacks
111 Average -- 21 Prospects
Offensive
Guards 109 Average -- 21 Prospects
Offensive
Tackles 108 Average -- 20 Prospects
Inside
Linebackers 107 Average -- 9 Prospects
Tight
Ends 104 Average -- 19 Prospects
Fullbacks
104 Average -- 7 Prospects
Punters
103 Average -- 6 Prospects
Running
Backs 102 Average -- 23 Prospects
Outside
Linebackers 100 Average -- 29 Prospects
Defensive
Ends 99 Average -- 30 Prospects
Defensive
Tackles 99 Average -- 31 Prospects
Wide
Receivers 99 Average -- 50 Prospects
Safeties
96 Average -- 25 Prospects
Cornerbacks
95 Average -- 30 Prospects
These
scores are about a half standard deviation (7.5 points) higher than
other NFL Wonderlic scores I've seen in the past. My guess is that the
players' agents have recently figured out how to "teach to the
test," helping their clients score better on this fairly important
measure of NFL potential. But, even with that exaggeration, there's not
much evidence that college football players are dumb, except in
comparison to the real students at the better sort of college like
Michigan or USC. Football is a complicated game.
Centers
typically score high because they are the "quarterbacks" of
the offensive line. On each play, they analyze the defense and call
audibles giving instructions to their fellow linemen -- see Mark
"Black Hawk Down" Bowden's recent Atlantic article
"A
Beautiful Mind" for details.
***
Formula
1 vs. NASCAR -- A reader writes:
The
most often noted difference between Formula 1 and NASCAR is the contrast
between the European elitism of the former and the more down to earth
American character of the latter. Most magazines and talkboards point to
these differences: in NASCAR the cars are relatively equal and not too
technologically complex; each driver/team has a relatively better chance
of winning a race; fans get to meet the drivers; the drivers look like
regular Joes, many of them overweight and balding; lots of dramatic
crashes and wheel to wheel racing - the latter contrived due to a WWF-like
caution flag system designed to make the racing artificially close; the
cars resemble the ones we drive to Wal-Mart in, etc.
For
these reasons most F1 fans see NASCAR fans as less serious about
motorsports and often attracted more to the communal aspects of being a
spectator than the sport itself. I tend to agree though as an
anti-elitist Ulster-Scot with a feeling of kinship to the American South
I reject the snobbish and bigoted views of so many F1 fans - North
American as well as European - who sneer at "inbred Bud-swilling
racist rednecks." Indeed a lot of North American F1 (and even Champ
Car) fans seem to think they are more sophisticated than their fellow
countrymen, especially if they follow NASCAR. Unfortunately this view
was reinforced by the recent negative reaction from the NASCAR community
to Toyota's, the first non-American manufacturer, plans to join the
series. Such a seemingly xenophobic attitude stands in stark contrast to
the internationalist enthusiasm of American F1 fans getting up early on
a Sunday to watch foreign teams - even Ford's team is British - and
foreign drivers racing mostly in Europe and Asia. That said, European F1
fans often lack such an internationalist spirit: many Italians see
Ferrari as a nationalist symbol; and Germans are fanatical about Michael
Schumacher while most British see him as the embodiment of everything
they hate about Germans, many of them even cheering when he was carried
off on a stretcher after his terrible crash at the 1999 British GP.
One
rarely mentioned difference between the two series - though I personally
wouldn't mention it to a group of Good Ole Boys - is the more feminine
nature of NASCAR's appeal. In NASCAR the overwhelming emphasis is not on
the cars or strategy but on the drivers with the personality factor
looming large. NASCAR fans usually have a very strong attachment to a
particular driver and want to get to know his personality and feel some
connection to him. While men are not immune to this it is something that
appeals more to women. Thinking back to when I lived in the UK I can't
think of a single female I knew who had any interest whatsoever in
Formula 1 yet something like half of NASCAR fans are female. I suspect
the proportion of female fans for other major sports, except perhaps
tennis, is significantly lower. It's illustrative that the only F1
driver to capture female attention in recent years was Eddie Irvine, a
man better known for his Irish brogue and time spent with models on his
yacht than his time behind the wheel.
Yes
F1 fans care about the drivers and wish they had at least some
personality - most sound like corporate spokesmen doing damage control -
but for most of us a driver's nationality, skills, and behaviour on the
track are of more importance than whether he's a nice approachable guy.
Other things that are of great interest to most of us watching F1 -
launch control, lap times, BMW versus Mercedes engines, Michelin versus
Bridgestone tires, the French versus British teams, German versus
British driver, and especially race strategy - just don't interest most
women. Perhaps F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone's recent complaints about
the lack of interesting personalities in F1 came after noticing NASCAR's
huge female fan base.
***
Bush
is ahead in 3 of 5
polls taken since April 12 -- Partly this reflects the fact that
the main thing Kerry had going for him was that he kept winning
primaries, and thus he seemed like a winner. Unfortunately for Kerry,
the primary season was so frontloaded that he hasn't won anything
lately, so he doesn't seem like a winner anymore, so now everybody's
wondering what was so great about the guy anyway.
But,
it also reflects the kind of bounce a President gets when he screws up
really badly in his foreign policy and the country rallies around him
because, while he may be a moron, he's our moron, dammit. JFK's approval
rating went up after the Bay of Pigs. That's how Jimmy Carter beat off
Ted Kennedy in the horrible spring of 1980. The problem for Carter was
that his reflexive support from the public peaked too soon and by the
general election, the country was heartily sick of him.
Politically,
Bush gives the impression that he's a dead man walking. The fraction of
the population that actually pays attention to public events is deciding
that Bush isn't cut out for the job, that he's a detriment to America.
That realization is likely to trickle through to the rest of the
electorate over the next half year. Of course, he only has to beat
Kerry, so there is some hope for him.
Still,
I hope that the President does the right thing by his country and party,
that he takes the courageous and self-sacrificial step that his father
failed to do in 1992 when it became clear Bush Sr. was too old and tired
to handle another term: retire. If Bush Jr. walked away now and let the
GOP choose a candidate (Bill Frist, I would guess), I think the GOP
could hold the White House in November and probably in 2008. Bush might
still eke out a win over Kerry, but four more years of this incompetent
would likely turn the country over to Hillary in 2008.
***
War
Nerd has a new column
on Iraq.
***
Whom
should Bush fire?" Noah Millman reviews the cases for dumping
Powell, Rice, Tenet, Rumsfeld, and Cheney and makes his pick, here.
*
A
reader draws an important distinction between Bush and Reagan:
It's
interesting to me that people always talk about whom Bush should fire
rather than the easier thing: fire Bush. Even Don Imus, who is
supporting Kerry, gives Bush a break and says that Rumsfeld, Cheney, et
al should be fired, that the President is a decent, honest man served
badly by his team.
I
sense a strong Reagan-element going on here with Bush -- because, like
Reagan, they assume he's too dumb to actually think of policy, they
don't hold him accountable for that policy. Plus, people like Bush as a
person (except for the core Bush is Hitler group on the left).
But
what's interesting is that appears that while Reagan's and Bush's
Teflon-ness rests on character and honesty and just plan
"likeable", their weaknesses appear to be of a different
character. Specifically, Bush lacks curiosity, knowledge and discipline.
His strength is with managing all the pieces that feed him that info.
Reagan, on the other hand, appears to have been much more knowledgeable
about his "key" subjects: namely, taxation and the fight
against communism. Reagan's weaknesses appear to have arisen because of
inattention, aloofness, or not being enough on the ball organizationally
[SES adds: also, being old and getting shot]. So while Bush runs a
tight, loyal ship, he depends on others for info. Reagan had deep
knowledge of his areas of focus (despite his intellectual credentials,
his letters, radio "writings" and other sources convince me he
read voraciously and thought a great deal about the Soviet question and
taxation), but was a hands-off manager that allowed others to free-lance
and get him in trouble.
***
Attention,
racing fans! I'm working on something that involves the contrast
between NASCAR and Formula 1. What would European F1 fans find baffling
about NASCAR and what would NASCAR fans find amusing about F1 fans?
***
Anybody
know Kerry's SAT scores? I'd like to recycle my ever popular
"How smart are the candidates?" article for 2004. Has anybody
heard any SAT, IQ, ACT, GRE etc scores for Sen. John F. Kerry?
***
Out
of Africa in 8 convenient maps -- Friedrich von Blowhard converts
Spencer Wells' population genetics history book "The Journey of
Man: A Genetic History" into eight
simple maps. A very helpful summarization.
***
Intellectual
Property -- An awful lot of bloggers write
at vast length, criticizing intellectual property laws as too
restrictive. I don't have any expertise in this area, but here are two
comments:
-
Copyright lengths were recently extended dramatically, in large part to
protect Disney's hold on Mickey Mouse. But the law should be able to
distinguish between Mickey Mouse -- a concept into which Disney has
continually invested many millions over the years right up to the
present -- and more common creative products into which no investments
have been made since they were first published. Thus, the law should
distinguish between constantly evolving products like Mickey Mouse and
static ones of the same vintage like Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. It
is reasonable that Disney maintain control over Mickey Mouse while
Mariel Hemingway could stop receiving checks from Grand-Papa's novel.
-
All the fuss in the blogworld over evil corporations extending
copyrights seems like a case of the guns of Singapore facing in the
wrong direction. From a strategic standpoint, the really big
intellectual property problem is that the Chinese are stealing us blind
by counterfeiting everything we own a profitable patent upon, yet this
vastly more important issue than Mickey Mouse gets little attention.
UPDATES:
Reader write:
I
fail to understand the "libertarian" opposition to
intellectual property (IP) rights as they are a form of property rights
and I was under the mistaken impression that "libertarians"
supported property rights. IP rights have grown in importance as
"knowledge" and "know how" have become more valuable
than hard assets. You are exactly correct that China and other
"developing" nations are stealing the United States (and
Europe) blind when it comes to IP rights. Would the libertarians view
the theft of someone's physical assets with such approval? Creativity
remains one of the areas where the USA and Europe maintain an advantage
against cheap labor developing nations. In this case, upholding the rule
of law makes sense both from a principled and self-interested viewpoint.
After all, there is no such thing as a free lunch and if the dilution of
IP rights continues we could see a reduction in the creativity that
libertarians claim to admire.
*
I
believe IP laws should not provide any sort of protections for a period
greater than about 20 years for any product. Modifications are no
different than creations and should not be protected any differently.
Just because an IP owner has created or acquired the rights to a
product, why should that owner be able to effectively extend the period
of protection by making a possibly trivial modification? So, rights on
the modification are OK, but rights should not be extended on the
modified.
I
believe there are too many losses to society by restricting the ability
to others to make use of what are effectively natural developments that
others would have similarly produced.
***
If
your stomach is strong, check out www.AwfulPlasticSurgery.com
for pictures of how even celebrities can turn out bad under the knife.
***
Six-speed
transmissions -- One prerequisite for good
gas mileage at the higher speeds that Americans ought to be allowed to
drive is a six-speed automatic transmission, so you can be in the
optimal gear while driving 100+ mph. Good
news: Ford and GM are teaming up to develop one to share between
them.
***
My
68 Amazon book reviews -- If you can't get enough of me, here
are the 68 book reviews I've posted on Amazon.
***
White
Bread -- One of the most common racial epithets that white liberals
use to denigrate other whites in their never-ending quest for status is
"white bread." The funny thing about the "white
bread" epithet is that it's black ghetto dwellers who are the
biggest consumers of white bread these days. I went into a supermarket
near the corner of Florence & Normandie where the 1992 LA Riot broke
out, and, sure enough, practically all the varieties of bread on sale
were white.
***
Dog
Bites Man! -- Kenyans
win both men's and women's division of the Boston Marathon. Kenyan Men
have won 13 of 14 Boston Marathons. The only time they didn't was the
year VDARE.com ran Jon Entine's article
on why Kenyans win. The funny thing is that the marathon is not the
Kenyan's best distance -- the 3000 meters is.
***
New
VDARE.com column
at left...
Responses
to it:
"I've
long noticed that liberals are often operationally conservative in some
ways or at least elitist. They live in places, such as Evanston, that
are full of historical preservation, they listen to the local classical
music radio station, attend the symphony and opera. In short, I find I
have more in common culturally with liberals than conservatives. Part of
this is due to the populist and rural base of conservatism but there is
more to it than that I think. One writer characterized liberals as
"talking left and living right." And I don't think its just
liberal guilt as I've never noticed that these people feel guilty about
much of anything."
I
don't believe in "white liberal guilt" either, except perhaps
in the case of the occasional older white Southerner. It just seems like
white liberals want to be seen as morally and culturally superior to
white hoi polloi on racial issues as a form of status competition.
*
That's
a fascinating analysis. I was raised in the beautiful Monterey Bay Area,
but have lived the last 20 years in the San Gabriel Valley, so I've
lived both North and South. The Leftism of the North always bothered me,
but as you say, that has resulted in a more pleasant environment for the
real American. Meanwhile the 'conservative', anything-goes South has
turned into another Tijuana or Mexico City. A man cannot live and eat
ideology. I'll take the relatively pristine, elitist, leftist N. Cal,
over the 3rd-world SoCal. I'm rightwing, but someday I hope to live in
N. Cal again.
(In
the North, the exceptions to this rule are the agricultural areas where
labor-intensive strawberries are grown. In such areas, high-density slum
Mexican housing is needed, to house all the strawberry pickers).
Indeed,
in the 1990s, hundreds of strawberry-pickers in the Salinas area were
discovered living in caves.
***
Question:
Why is Israel always referred to as "America's ally?" I
certainly understand why America is called "Israel's ally" --
the President endorsing Mr. Sharon at the precise moment when we are
trying to convince Iraqis to calm down, trust us, and stop killing our
boys is a definite example of America sacrificing its interests for
Israel. (This is not to say I'm against Sharon's Plan -- it seems fairly
reasonable -- but from America's point of view, the timing of Bush's
endorsement, as Mickey Kaus has noted, is awful.)
But
has Israel ever made any significant material sacrifice of its own
interests to help us out, such as sending troops to fight in Korea or
Vietnam? I'm sure Israel has helped us out with some intelligence work,
but has it ever been at a sacrifice to themselves? I don't expect Israel
to sacrifice for us -- until the last 25 years they had a very, very
narrow margin of safety, and even since Camp David it hasn't been all
that sizable. I certainly don't hold it against them that they don't do
much for us.
But
maybe they made some real sacrifices for us that I'm not aware of. If
so, please let me know and I'll print them.
Otherwise,
I'm going to assume that this is just an example of the wisdom of Ben
Franklin's adage that to get somebody to like you, get them to do you
a favor.
UPDATE:
A reader responds:
Well,
there's a lot of intelligence sharing, as you note. And during the Cold
War, they were an ally in that they were lined up mostly against states
that were allied with the Soviet Union. (And those states mostly went
into the Soviet orbit during a period of marked coolness between the
U.S. and Israel - the Eisenhower Administration.) Israel also ran a
bunch of errands for the U.S. that we couldn't acknowledge during the
Reagan Administration - stuff like running guns and money to the
Contras. There are Israeli (and Saudi) fingerprints on various parts of
Iran-Contra. That stuff didn't have any obvious direct benefits for
Israel. Israel offered to help out in the recent Iraq war, but the offer
was (for obvious reasons) declined. I'm not sure that if they offered to
send troops anywhere (which would not be the most sensible thing for
them to do - it's not like that have a huge manpower surplus) we'd agree
to take them, for the obvious political reasons.
***
Sci-Fi
novelist Orson
Scott Card
on gay "marriage:"
Supporters
of homosexual "marriage" dismiss warnings like mine as the
predictable ranting of people who hate progress. But the Massachusetts
Supreme Court has made its decision without even a cursory attempt to
ascertain the social costs. The judges have taken it on faith that it
will do no harm. You can't add a runway to an airport in America without
years of carefully researched environmental impact statements. But you
can radically reorder the fundamental social unit of society without
political process or serious research.
The
Dutch have legalized gay "marriage" (although it doesn't seem
terribly popular there). Why don't we wait one generation and see what
happens over there?
***
LINKS
FIXED: Frank K. Salter, the
sociobiological political scientist, has a couple of important new
academic books out. Here's the Amazon page for his Welfare,
Ethnicity, and Altruism: New Findings and Evolutionary Theory. The
other is the cheaper On
Genetic Interests: Family, Ethny, and Humanity in an Age of Mass
Migration, with a review by Hiram Caton
***
Islam
and Polygamy: William Tucker, one of the
writers who alerted me to the far-reaching importance of family
structure back in the 1980s, writes
in The American Spectator, that building a democracy in Iraq
is a fool's errand due to polygamy:
Islamic
cultures are different. Except for Turkey, the most fragilely
Westernized Islamic nation, there has never been a successful democracy
in the Moslem world. Islamic cultures haven't even achieved reproductive
equality, which is something that Western society has had since the
Greeks.
What
is "reproductive equality"? It revolves around that core value
of Western culture -- monogamy -- as opposed to that old
"heathen" custom, polygamy.
Islam
is the only major world religion that sanctions polygamy. Mohammad
allowed his followers to have four wives (the same number he had). About
12 percent of marriages in Moslem countries are polygamous. This is not
as bad as East and West Africa, where successful men often take more
than a hundred wives and where almost 30 percent of marriages can be
polygamous. But the solid core of polygamy at the heart of Islamic
culture is enough to produce its menacing social effects.
What
are those effects? Do the math. Into every society is born approximately
the same number of boys and girls. If they pair off in monogamous
fashion, then each one will have a mate -- "a girl for every boy
and a boy for every girl." In polygamous societies this does not
occur. When successful men can accumulate more than one wife, that means
some other man gets none. As a result, the unavoidable outcome is a
hard-core residue of unattached men who have little or no prospect of
achieving a family life.
The
inevitable outcome is that competition among males becomes much more
fierce and intense. Mating is an all-or-nothing proposition. Women
become a scarce resource that must be hoarded and veiled and banned from
public places so they cannot drift away through spontaneous romances.
Men who are denied access to these hoarded women have only one option --
they can band together and try to fight their way into the seats of
power.
AND
THAT IS WHAT happens, endlessly. The entire history of Islam is a story
of superfluous males going off into the desert (literally or
figuratively) and deciding that the religion being practiced by the
well-furnished elites of the cities is "not the true Islam."
They then burst back upon the cities, violently attempting to overthrow
the established authority. The Shi'ites, the Wahabis, the Assassins
(yes, that's the origin of the word), the Muslim Brotherhood -- all are
the fruit of this eternal warfare in Moslem societies between the
"ins" and the "outs."
The
only defense Islam has been able to construct for itself is to recruit
these unattached males, inculcate them into the religion, and convince
them that if they turn their violence and sexual frustrations outward¸
they will be rewarded with "70 virgins in heaven." This is how
the ranks of martyrs and suicide bombers are created. Martyrs and
suicide bombers are men who have internalized the fundamental axiom of
polygamous society -- that some men are expendable.
This
can be overstated. After all the Palestinians aren't very polygamous at
all. Yassir Arafat, for example, has one wife (and she's Christian).
Still, this fundamental Arab conception that life isn't a struggle for
freedom but for dominance is a major reason why the President just
doesn't get Iraqis, and is constantly surprised by their
ingratitude at his liberating them from Saddam. Polygamy definitely
plays a role in this. As does it's side effect: buggery of weaker males.
You can see why Arabs care so intensely about being the man on top --
it's an awful lot better than being the man on the bottom.
***
Speed
limits as a wedge issue: A Texan Democrat
reader writes that during the 1988 campaign, he came up with some policy
suggestions to help the Democrats seem less like they hate Middle
America. He got them to Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, then running for Veep:
"One
of those things was to drop Federal control of speed limits.
Bentsen liked it and brought it up to the Dukakis crowd and the New
England liberals went ballistic. Puzzled the heck out of
Bentsen, so he tabled that issue. I think that it would have done
what I suggested -- it would have and made Dukakis seem a little less
like Harold Wilson (just a little less), but what do I know? And
it apparently upset Dukakis and his people a great deal."
I
presume the latest Massachusetts liberal to run for President has
learned from his predecessor's many mistakes, but giving the states
speed limit freedom could well be a bridge too far for any Democratic
nominee, making it a terrific issue for Bush. Obviously, it's not a huge
issue, but look how Bill Clinton rode school uniforms to a second term
back in 1996. Bush's dad did an excellent job of making clear to people
who don't follow politics closely that Dukakis was way out in left
field, and Bush Jr. needs to get to work emulating him.
***
Genocide,
slavery, uncomfortableness: Colleges are
convulsed these days by charges that somebody made somebody else feel
"uncomfortable." For example, according to Tom Wood's
invaluable Americans Against Discrimination and Preferences (AADAP.org)
email list, the Georgetown Hoya student newspaper reported:
Georgetown’s
Faculty Senate passed three resolutions yesterday that responded to
recent allegations of racial intolerance in the university community.
The Faculty Senate passed one resolution that called for diversity
training at the New Faculty Orientation for tenured faculty and adjunct
and visiting professors, an educational pamphlet about cultural
sensitivity and the implementation of measures to allow students to
discuss insensitivity at department meetings and to file a complaint
with a department chair or dean.
Veronica
Root (MSB ’05), president of the Black Student Alliance, addressed the
faculty governing body about several incidents where students felt
uncomfortable in the classroom. Root described some specific incidents,
including one where her professor polled the class about ways to gain
admission to Georgetown and one student replied that being a minority
helped applicants, drawing laughter from the class and the professor.
“This began to affect my learning environment, and really hasn’t
been comfortable for me since then,” Root said....
The
discussion throughout the meeting centered on methods to address remarks
like the one Root highlighted about a joke made during a class. Ensuring
that professors know how to appropriately respond to similar incidents
in the future, Root said, would help reduce the belittlement she said
she had suffered.
Tempers
flared at one point when Mark Danielson, an associate professor of
biochemistry and molecular biology at Georgetown University Medical
School, suggested that the statement made in Root’s class raised a
valid point about affirmative action in college admissions, and that the
student could have also suggested that family legacy or wealth could
also help gain admission. While Danielson said that it might have been
out of line for students and the professor to laugh, he urged the
Faculty Senate to consider that Georgetown does support affirmative
action in admissions. But other faculty members disagreed with
Danielson, including History Professor David Goldfrank. “That kind of
racial slur is absolutely disgusting,” he said. “There’s something
really wrong that no one in the classroom thought to speak up.”
In
my new American Conservative
article on the Claremont Hate Hoax (almost all new material!), which
should be out on newsstands within a couple of days, I write:
"The
university's main concern appears to be to make students feel
"comfortable," a word that reappears constantly in Claremont
publications despite the obvious hopelessness of the project. The only
way to make 19-year-olds feel comfortable is to wait 30 years while they
sag into their well-padded maturities. Right now, they are teenagers and
their surging hormones have far more important emotions for them to feel
than comfort. Adults, however, who make careers out of encouraging kids
to mold permanently self-pitying identities around their transient
social discomforts have much to answer for."
***
If
you were watching the last episode of The Apprentice, you
might have been wondering about one of the two dream jobs Donald Trump
offered the winner: managing his new Trump National Golf Club in
Southern California overlooking the Pacific. The Donald proclaimed that
it would be better than Pebble Beach. Well, I played it before Trump
bought it and unless Trump has bought off every environmental regulatory
agency in the world, it won't ever be in Pebble's class. Still, it's an
enjoyable course and a wonderful addition to the LA area. The story
behind the course, including the 18th hole that fell into the Pacific
and bankrupted the family that spent 30 years trying to build a golf
course there, is fascinating and instructive one for what it says about
the politics of environmentalism. I wrote
it in 2001.
***
An
issue that Bush could win with! Give
Americans the freedom to drive as fast as Europeans. More specifically,
allow big flat empty states to raise their speed limits to 90 without
the National Highway Transportation Safety Agency suing them.
***
Porn
film industry hit by HIV
scare: That reminds me -- I have a
question: Why does the world need new porn films? There must be 100,000
hours of pornography on film. Even the most pathetic addict couldn't
watch it all in one lifetime. So why does the world need thousands of
hours of new porn every year? Are the porn industry's crack R&D labs
constantly inventing new sex acts? Or, as Elvis Costello claimed, is
there no such thing as an original sin?
I
understand that this is a supply driven market -- there are a lot of
women out there who want to star in dirty movies. But, this is clearly
not, generally speaking, a wise career choice. If the government shut
down the making of new pornography, there'd still be plenty of old
product for customers to buy, but there would be fewer women wrecking
their lives.
After
all, it's not unknown for an entertainment industry to go on for decades
with virtually no new product -- 99% of all the classical music
compositions bought this year will be from before 1970 or so.
***
Could
Bush and/or Clinton have prevented 9/11? Well, sure, if they knew
now what they knew then. But I think that's too high a standard to hold
Presidents to. I think the standard for evaluating Presidential
culpability for bad things should be whether or not I, Steve Sailer,
knew about it ahead of time. For example, I knew that invading Iraq was
asking for trouble. The last 12 months have proven to be a bigger
surprise to the President, despite all his advisors and intelligence
agencies, than to me. That's not good.
But,
I definitely did not know that Osama's minions were going to
knock down the WTC on 9/11. It was a complete surprise to me. I stayed
up late the night before writing a book review of a Kurt Cobain
biography.
Sure,
I didn't get The Memo and Bush did, but nobody back then knew that it,
out of the gazillion memos the federal government generates each year,
was going to be The Memo.
What
I did know was that Bush was taking a
chance by trying to win Arab/Muslim votes by cutting back on two
anti-terrorist policies: ethnic profiling at the airport and the use of
secret evidence against terrorist suspects -- i.e., testimony by
informers who would die if they appeared in court.
Ann
Coulter writes:
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