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July 2004 Archive

"The Manchurian Candidate" -- It would be a decent movie if you'd never seen the original. Unfortunately, if you have, it plays like a simple-minded rough draft of the script you cherish. The final pleasure of the first movie was that it double-crosses the ant-anti-communist liberals who were enjoying it as a satire on McCarthyism with its perfect plague-on-both-your-houses conceit: McCarthyism turns out to be a Commie front for the subversion of America.

In contrast, Jonathon Demme's remake is boringly lacking in twists, in part because he appears to be a True Believer in the liberal line. It's obvious from the second reel that the evil Manchurian (i.e., Halliburton) Corporation is behind it all, and that nothing interesting is coming. The movie plays like a humorless version of "Fahrenheit 9/11." The Saturday night audience only laughed about three times.

Denzel Washington takes Frank Sinatra's role as the good guy, but while Sinatra, who put the production together, was wisely content to recede a little into the background and let the wilder elements hog the spotlight, Denzel's role turns out to be the leaden centerpiece of this movie. Liev Schrieber does a fine job impersonating Laurence Harvey's zombie (and might even be better), but Meryl Streep is a disappointment in Angela Lansbury's role as what used to be the Red Queen. Sure, she looks like Mrs. Clinton, but, Meryl being a liberal, she modeled her performance not on the hyperambitious Hillary but on Republicans Karen Hughes and Peggy Noonan, and they just aren't evil enough to be fun. C'mon, Hughes and Noonan both left Washington for family-related reasons. And they're her role models? No wonder Lansbury blows Streep away.

The old version's cards and chess-obsessed art design was inspired by Lewis Carroll, which helps you accept that you're watching a brilliant contrivance, not an attempt at realism. Demme, sadly, goes for a grittier look that just underlines that he really believes all his moronic Halliburton nonsense.

Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post, the best reviewer today (his 2002 Pulitzer was the first given to a film critic since Roger Ebert's back in 1975), nails it better than I can, here.

By the way, if you like the original, you'll enjoy the hugely imaginative black comedy "Winter Kills," another political paranoia film based on a Richard Condon novel. Jeff Bridges plays the youngest, apolitical brother in a Kennedyesque clan who gets unwillingly drawn into investigating the myriad conspiracies that might have led to the assassination of his older brother, the President. With John Huston chewing the scenery memorably in the Joe Kennedy Sr. role. 

***

Kenyan runners' secret solved? In America's top professional journal for scientists, Science, Constance Holden reports:

Just as more aerodynamic cars get better gas mileage, the Kenyan build helps explain their fuel efficiency. A recent British TV documentary described the Kalenjin as possessing "birdlike legs, very long levers that are very, very thin [on which they] bounce and skip" along. Saltin's group has quantified this observation. Compared with Danes, the thinner calves of Kenyans have, on average, 400 grams less flesh in each lower leg. The farther a weight is from the center of gravity, the more energy it takes to move it. Fifty grams added to the ankle will increase oxygen consumption by 1%, Saltin's team calculates. For the Kenyans, that translates into an 8% energy savings to run a kilometer. "We have solved the main problem," declares Henrik Larsen of the Copenhagen center. "Kenyans are more efficient because it takes less energy to swing their limbs." Other scientists say the jury is still out on the Kenyan question. But "I think Saltin is probably the most correct that anyone is at the moment," says physiologist Kathryn Myburgh of the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, who is exploring the role of Kenyans' training.

Dr. Saltin's research confirms O.J. Simpson's 1977 observation on why blacks tend to be faster, which I cited many years ago:

"We are built a little differently, built for speed—skinny calves, long legs, high asses are all characteristics of blacks. That's why blacks wear long socks. We have skinny calves, and short socks won't stay up. I'll argue with any doctor that physically we're geared to speed, and most sports have something to do with speed."

As George Orwell said: "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." I'm sure there are other differences (narrower hipbones may help make for an efficient stride, too, for example, and no doubt there are important biochemical differences), but the thinner calves cause has been obvious for a long, long time.

The funny thing is that a 100 years ago, lots of whites were convinced that whites were naturally better athletes than blacks and one of the things they pointed to was blacks' "scrawny calves." Then, track became a formalized sport and by the 1930s it was becoming obvious that the fastest blacks were faster than the fastest whites. But when you think about it objectively, you see that evolution tends to adapt fast runners to having little mass near their feet and most of the propelling muscle up high -- horses being the classic example.

The article also notes the obvious difference between East African distance runners and West African sprinters:

Various studies have shown that West African athletes [i.e., tracing their ancestry back to West Africa, like O.J.] have denser bones, less body fat, narrower hips, thicker thighs, longer legs, and lighter calves than whites. But the differences between East and West Africans are even more striking. The fabled Kenyan runners are small, thin, and tend to weigh between 50 and 60 kilograms, whereas West African athletes are taller and a good 30 kilograms heavier, says Timothy Noakes, a prominent exercise physiologist and researcher at the University of Cape Town.:

Both groups of Africans  can achieve very low body fat percentages. The lowest I've ever heard of for a black athlete was 1.6% for Charles White, USC Heisman Trophy winning running back. Michael Jordan maintained a 3% body fat level, even after his comeback from baseball. The lowest I've ever heard of for a white man was 3.7% for Danny Farmer, an NFL wide receiver, who was a volleyball All-American in college in his spare time. Farmer's example shows that it's not being black per se that makes somebody good at sprinting and leaping sports, it's the physical traits that correlate with being black, especially low body fat percentage.

***

Kerry in a nutshell -- He voted against the First Gulf War and for the Second.

***

Unpatriotic non-conservatives: In response to the report below that neocon favorite Ahmed Chalabi is teaming up with America's Sh'ite Public Enemy #1 Mookie al-Sadr, a reader writes:

I wonder, now that the Neocon man in Iraq is allied with our arch enemy, if that makes Neocons unpatriotic non-conservatives? Wait, don't tell me, the Neocon answer is that it was Bush or the State Dept. that pushed Chalabi into Sadr's hands. But isn't that blaming America first?

***

IQs by State, 1960 -- You probably remember the notorious "Democratic states have higher IQs" hoax from last May. Well, here, thanks to Prof. Henry Harpending of the U. of Utah anthropology dept., might be the closest thing to a national sample of IQ scores ever: the Project Talent database of 366,000 9th-12th grade students. Unfortunately, it is 44 years years old. Nonetheless, it correlates reasonably with 2003 NAEP 8th grade achievement test scores (here are the 2003 scores). As you can see, in this list of kids' IQs back in the mid-1960s, of the top 10 smartest states, in 2000, Bush and Gore each won five. So, we're back to my original conclusion: red states and blue states are similar in average IQ, as are, on average, Republican and Democratic voters. 

Some caveats: These IQ scores are set with the national mean of the 366,000 high school students equal to 100 and the standard deviation set to 15. But, keep in mind that we are only beginning to explore this huge database, so take everything with a grain of salt.

There weren't adequate sample sizes from Alaska, Washington DC, and South Carolina, and I excluded South Dakota because the result was too different from North Dakota. (I think something might be confused about both South Carolina and South Dakota -- I'll try to find out more.)

Harpending also looked at whites only data (unfortunately, the majority of participants doesn't have a race recorded) with the smartest whites (which I suspect is all that white liberals care about -- feeling smarter than white conservatives) were (in descending order): Connecticut, Montana, Nevada (I bet that's not true anymore!), Idaho, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, and Virginia. The dumbest whites were in (in descending order): Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Kentucky. All of these states voted for Bush in 2000. I suspect, however, that air conditioning and the abolition of the caste system have some good for the test scores of whites in the south, especially in North Carolina. Here, for purposes of comparison, is the 2003 NAEP public school achievement tests for white 8th graders.

***

The Emasculation of Marriage: Originally, the term was "man and wife;" the came the more equal "husband and wife." In Massachusetts' today, the law is being rewritten to refer to "Spouse A and Spouse B," which is reminiscent of the Cat in the Hat's asexual helpers Thing 1 and Thing 2.

Few questions determine the character of a culture more than the youth's question: "What do I do to be a man?" Cultures where one common answer is "Get married" tend to be much more stable and harmonious than ones where it is not. Is it wise to reconstruct marriage so that it has nothing necessarily to do with being a man?

***

Was the Iraq Attaq politically necessary? A reader writes:

I think it's important to step back and try to imagine what would be going on right now if we hadn't invaded. Saddam would, no doubt, still be playing the WMD shell game with the UN inspectors, making the Bush administration look weak and impotent. Kerry and the dems would be exploiting this weakness (look at what Kerry was saying about Saddam as late as '02!), just as Clinton exploited Bush 41s tax increase. The media would be focused on all the "bad news" coming out of Afghanistan instead of Iraq, so Bush wouldn't have any "peace dividend" to speak of. And the public would have no idea how difficult an occupation of Iraq would be, given that their only exposure to the region was the relatively bloodless Gulf War of '91.

Why, the reason we didn't invade Iraq must be because of Bush and Cheney's oil ties. Hell, Michael Moore would probably have made a movie about it!

So, Bush would have alienated his base of Southerners and the descendants of Scots-Irish borderers from central Pennsylvania to Oklahoma, without gaining anything, because he "wimped out" on Iraq. He'd be lucky to be down by 10 points instead of even.

I think the pandering to hispanics is a regrettable tactic but is not necessarily designed to get more hispanic votes, because the highest concentration of hispanics do not reside in swing states. I think the target is white, suburban swing voters in swing states who don't want to think of themselves as racists, but as loving, compassionate, open minded individuals (consequences be damned!).

The fact that Presidential elections boil down to the muddle-headed thinking of a few undecided voters in a few key states is aggravating but represents the triumph of computer aided demograghic study, sophisticated polling and focus groups.

As the great Larry Holmes once said, "Opinions are like rear-ends, everyone's got one." Well that's mine.

A reader replies:

The reason there was public support for the war in the first place was because George W. Bush and his underlings deliberately hyped (if not outright lied about) Iraq's WMD's and connections to Al Qaeda. He and his advisors deliberately cherry picked half-baked intelligence and broadcast it far and wide. At the same time, they insinuated that anyone who demurred from this stupidity--i.e., experts on the MidEast and WMD's--were unpatriotic cowards and possibly traitors. By the time Hussein agreed to full inspections and was destroying even his legal weapons in his attempts to appease us, the inertia of Bush's mobilization made it impossible for the U.S. to pull back and not look like it was losing face. It was a case of watching the proverbial slow-motion car wreck. And all of it, from A to Z, can be laid at the doorstep of George W. Bush. He was the one who painted us into a corner, and he deserves all the blame....

I'd even go further and challenge the idea that Bush has gotten the little decisions right. This president has increased non-defense spending faster than Democratic presidents. He signed onto an education bill that had Ted Kennedy's blessing. He has doubled the National Endowment for the Arts' budget. He has signed into John McCain's Campaign Finance Reform act, even though he said he didn't think it was constitutional. He has implemented a massive increase in the welfare state through his prescription drug plan. His Justice Department filed an amicus curiae brief supporting the idea of making racial diversity a legitmate government priority. The only good thing I can say for him now is that he has refrained from appointing judges that are as fully evil and meddlesome as Democratic appointees.

Another reader replies:

Hispandering has little to do with the suburban mushy swing vote.  Mass immigration is the one area in which mushy suburban swing voters tend to take a hard line, especially with regard to illegal immigration.  Suburban swing voters are not rich women who employ illegals as nannies and cleaning crews.  Swing voters are less affluent and less educated than the average voter, and disproportionately harmed by mass immigration.

Right. We have this picture in our head of the swing voter as somebody so well informed he can't make up his mind, like Mickey Kaus taking ten but-on-the-other-hand columns in 2000 to finally decide he'll vote for Gore. Instead, the undecided voter typically is less informed and less educated. But one thing they do know is that they hate illegal immigration. 

Another key segment is the very-conservative-but-don't-always-vote group (because they stopped at the tavern on the way home from the mill, or forgot, or whatever). Getting them to turn out is crucial, and one issue that could get them out is cracking down illegal immigration.

Remember that not only did Bush's Open Borders plan puncture his image of infallibility with his base, but it keeps him from attacking Kerry's amnesty plan. Imagine what the late Lee Atwater, who crushed Dukakis in 1988 with a low-brow but high impact campaign, would do if he had Rove's job. He'd have kept Bush from coming out with his Open Borders proposal, and then wrapped amnesty around Kerry's neck to prove he's another out-of-touch Massachusetts liberal like Dukakis. Rove was Lee Atwater's protégé, but he isn't half the man Atwater was. Rove cares too much about what the nice people think to do what Atwater would have done to win.

***

Tom Cruise in "Collateral:" Don't look to me for incisive insights into John Kerry's speech because I went to see Michael "Miami Vice" Mann's upcoming movie "Collateral" instead. (Actually, I probably wouldn't have watched more than five minutes of Kerry even if I had been home.)

Your reaction to "Collateral," which debuts next Friday, August 6th, will probably depend on whether you dislike the silly premise (a million-dollar hitman, Tom Cruise, flies into LA to murder five witnesses in a big trial and forces a lowly cabdriver, Jamie Foxx, to drive him around all night as he murders people -- wouldn't it be safer to bring your own driver?) more than you like the film's expert execution.

How's Cruise as a bad guy? 

As Nicholas Stix points out:

Under the old system, the studio heads decided what roles would be offered to a performer ... [and] actors did not get to deal with the media. The studios told them what to say and where to say it. Studio publicity departments largely controlled the press, whom they fed a steady diet of phony stories about the stars, in exchange for reporters not hounding performers.

Under the new dispensation, many movie stars made poor script choices. And the notion that a movie star could create his own public persona proved to be fool’s gold, as the newly empowered media descended upon the uncontrolled, unarmed narcissists (see Seberg, Jean). With time, the cannier movie stars, such as Tom Cruise, employed their lawyers and publicists to reinvent the studio publicity system, whereby they would contractually control every aspect of their publicity campaigns, with only those media organizations getting puff interviews that got every question cleared in advance, and that promised in writing not to engage in journalism.

Since we don't know much of anything about the real Tom Cruise, it's fun to assume he must be deeply evil to enjoy such vast success. So, it's quite satisfying when he shows up as a Mephistophelean figure in dazzling gray -- gray suit, gray beard, even his hair is frosted gray with a half inch of dark roots showing (from a practical standpoint, it's a ridiculously conspicuous look for a hitman, but who cares?). He makes a superb villain -- for about 15 minutes. Unfortunately, villains work best in small doses and he's on screen almost as much as the nice guy hero, and the script doesn't give him many interesting lines, so the thrill fades.

***

Good grief, more Microsoft and IQ! A reader writes:

MS is notorious for being an extremely difficult company to figure out. It's not well organized, with divisions or units not being in synch and contradicting each other. Licensing for business users is confusing as hell -- talk to 10 different MS people about it and you'll get ten different answers. Here is where being too high IQ hurts them -- no one can understand their convoluted thinking. Where they have been successful is by being -- aggressive! It's the high testosterone, not the high IQ that has got Microsoft sitting on billions in cash. Well, it's a combination of both -- Gates famous competitiveness and how he hired other high T/IQ guys like Steve Ballmer -- that's been their secret. If it was just high IQ, they'd be Apple -- superior product but inferior market share. 

Another reader writes:

Microsoft is a marketing company that can turn on a dime because everyone in it is very, very bright. It is not a very good software house. Microsoft OSes are designed to work with Microsoft applications, which, with some exceptions, aren't that good. They make their money on the apps, not the OSes. In order to develop to Microsoft standards as a programmer (inside and outside of the company), you have to be a)bright and b)willing to deal with incredibly crappy design, poor standards compliance, things that are deliberately broken for marketing reasons, and so on.

He goes on to make an interesting point. As computers got faster, why did we move from slower but easier programming languages like COBOL (created by a woman, perhaps not coincidentally) to more difficult languages like C?

COBOL was designed so that low IQ people could write code that would run (sometime slowly, but it would run) essentially forever with no maintenance. I know more than a few people who were professional programmers who had some COBOL responsibilities that would save the COBOL work to the end of the day when they were tired and their brains were working more slowly so that they were "programming at COBOL speed" and could write code that verbose and sluggish without getting annoyed. And it worked. Or they would have a stiff drink and get back to the terminal. COBOL was designed so that a kid out of the motor pool in the Army could take a job shuffling punchcards and work his way up to programmer in a few years and do that for 30, then get a pension. I can probably find the original documentation for that; I have seen it on-line. That is not to say that a good (normally high IQ) programmer would do better in COBOL -- IBM said that 10x the work or the same work running 10x faster was a good rule of thumb -- but rather that programming is, after all, the development of a logical series of actions to get a result, and if you aren't really, really dumb and the requirements are limited, you can program as well as a really smart guy, just slower. I remember those days and those people, and frankly a lot of them did solid work, reliably, without complaint. I kind of miss that.

***

Microsoft & IQ: A prominent software executive writes regarding Gates' testimony to the importance of Microsoft outcompeting Goldman Sachs for the highest IQ employees:

Seems to me that considering the notoriously mediocre quality of Microsoft's products, the story is actually makes a very convincing case for the relative NON-importance of IQ, or at least that high IQ raw material can easily be trumped by broader factors, such as corporate strategy, culture, or whatever else it is that causes M-S products to be so mediocre.

You're assuming that Bill Gates wanted his Microserfs to deliver good software. I suspect, however, that he instead wanted them to make him the richest man in the world, and if they had to foist crummy software on the public to do it, that was a price Bill was willing to pay.

Another reader writes:

But I think Goldman Sachs does not pursue IQ in the same way the Microsoft does. Computer people all say exactly what Gates said --that when it comes to writing software, all that matters is gray matter. You're better off with one guy with an IQ of 150 than four guys with an IQ of 135 or 140. It's just that brutal.

I've known investment bankers, and they're smart, but I'd wager millions I don't have that the average IQ of a lawyer at Wachtell or Cravath is higher than the average IQ of someone at Goldman or KKR. To be a really good banker, you need to be smart, but mostly you need to be really shrewd and greedy. And that means a little crude and willing to take risks. People who go to law school tend to be risk-averse, by contrast, and like the idea of being part of an "honorable profession." NY corporate lawyers are almost all miserable because they regularly experience sitting in conference rooms with bankers who make more money than they do and are less intelligent.

When I was at MBA school a few eons ago, before anyone talked about The Decade of Greed, the investment banks' standard interview question was, "Do you care much about compensation?" and the right answer was "Enough to sell my sister to the Sultan of Brunei." They definitely liked high testosterone types: of my friends, the one who went to Goldman Sachs was an ex-Marine fighter pilot.

*** 

Kerry's Konfusion: Kerry said his favorite baseball player growing up was Red Sox Eddie "The Walking Man" Yost, but he didn't play for Boston. Mickey Kaus has been doing some elaborate metaphoring about how Kerry is playing it cautious, Eddie Yost-style, waiting for Bush to make mistakes. 

But, it was perfectly natural that Kerry got confused about who was his favorite player, because during Kerry's boyhood there were at least four guys named Eddie who walked a lot: Eddie Yost (who started with the Washington Senators in 1944 and peaked with a Barry Bonds-like 151 walks in 1956), Eddie Joost (who walked 149 time for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1949), Eddie Stanky (who got 145 walks for Brooklyn 1945 and 144 for the New York Giants in 1950), and Eddie Lake (who played for the Red Sox in 1945 and picked up 106 walks). I suspect thought that Kerry's really thinking of the Red Sox's aptly-named get-on-base specialist Johnny Pesky, who led the league in hits in 1942, 1946 (the Red Sox World Series year), and 1947, then became more of a walking man, averaging 101 walks from 1948-1950, despite averaging only two home runs per year. 

It was an era of guys named Eddie and Johnny with good batting eyes. What this has to do with Kerry's strategy, I dunno.

***

Mookie's back and Chalabi's got him! Remember how we were going to kill or arrest Shi'ite rebel Muqtada Sadr, but then we said, "Oh, never mind"? Well, guess who is teaming up with public enemy #1? The LA Times reports, our old pal Ahmed Chalabi is "reaching out to Iraq's most prominent anti-American Shiite cleric, Muqtada Sadr, whose followers come mainly from Baghdad's urban underclass and the impoverished south of the country. Political analysts here believe that the new approach will eventually win support from a significant segment of Sadr's followers if Chalabi chooses to run for office — and, as expected, Sadr chooses to wield his power from the pulpit instead."

***

Touchscreen Voting Helps Democrats. La Griffe du Lion says:

That GW Bush is president because of a group-cognitive gap is beyond dispute. I had previously estimated that without voter error in Florida -- all voters recording their true intentions -- Gore would have picked up a net of 77,000 votes. In fact, Gore lost the state by about 500 votes. Statewide, blacks in Florida had an 11.7% error rate in 2000; the corresponding white rate was 1.4%.

Things have changed dramatically. The IQ threshold for casting a proper ballot has been lowered in Florida (and presumably elsewhere) to the point where if you breathe you can cast a proper ballot. Gadsden county, Florida, for example, 58 percent black, had an error rate in the 2000 presidential election of 12.40%. In the 2002 gubernatorial race its error rate had been reduced to 1.00%.

***

Bill Gates on IQ: Rich Karlgaard, former editor of Forbes ASAP, reminisces in the WSJ:

Halfway through the flight [in 1993], Mr. Gates closed the book, shut his computer off and we talked. Out of nowhere, he told me that he had recently figured out who his competition was. It was not Apple, Lotus or IBM. He waited a couple of beats. "It's Goldman Sachs."

"Is this a scoop? Is Microsoft getting into investment banking?"

"No," he said. "I mean the competition for talent. It's all about IQ. You win with IQ. Our only competition for IQ is the top investment banks." During that trip, I must have heard Mr. Gates mention "IQ" a hundred times.

The obsession with smarts is embedded deep in Mr. Gates's thinking and long ago was institutionalized at Microsoft. Apply for a job and you'll face an oral grilling that probes for IQ. It is oral and informal because of Griggs v. Duke Power, the 1971 Supreme Court ruling that banished written IQ tests and "tests of an abstract nature" from job applications. [That's an overstatement -- written IQ tests can still pass legal muster, but defending them in court against an anti-discrimination suit is expensive and risky, so many firms encourage employees to give applicants subjective oral tests instead of objective written tests -- all in the name of being unbiased!] But Microsoft knows what it wants. It wants IQ. And Microsoft always has been savvy at getting what it wants.

Or at least it used to be. Today Microsoft is struggling to figure out what attracts and motivates the most talented employees within capitalism's free-agent system. The company had no such problem figuring that out in the 1980s and '90s. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer liked to call the old motivational carrot "The Deal." That arrangement worked like this: Come and work for Microsoft. Make do with a so-so salary but partake lavishly of options. Sure, you might be forced to grind away on 80-hour weeks for six or seven years. But you'll change the world and get rich -- wildly rich.

Microsoft's stock has been flat since 1999. The Deal is broken. Not only that, but most of today's change-the-world projects in computing live outside of Microsoft. These include open-source software, search engines, Web services, Flash video, WiFi, iPods, etc. For reasons of pay and excitement, Microsoft is losing its grip on a new generation of IQ.

Here's another quote from the days when America's richest man could be more honest. A November 25, 1996 Fortune article by Randall E. Stross, entitled "Microsoft's Big Advantage - Hiring Only the Supersmart," featured some surprisingly frank statements by Bill Gates that sound like The Bell Curve on steroids:

Gates is blunt. "There is no way of getting around [the fact] that, in terms of IQ, you've got to be very elitist in picking the people who deserve to write software." … Microsoft could teach its employees in specific skill areas, but it could not instill intelligence and creativity - those, Gates said, were "reasonably innate." The best programmers, in Gates's view, are people who are "supersmart." … His self-confessed "bias" in hiring - "toward intelligence or smartness over anything else, even, in many cases, experience."

***

NRO Gets It, Finally. From The Corner:

IRAQ AND THE ELECTION [Ramesh Ponnuru]
It seems to me that if President Bush had not invaded Iraq, he would be heading toward a comfortable re-election.

To say that Bush shot himself in the foot with his "Invade the World / Invite the World" policies hardly begins to imply how much the two big mistakes of his Presidency were completely acts of his own volition. Bush could have ended the Iraq Attaq buzz just by firing Wolfowitz, or maybe even only Feith. And who were these overwhelmingly powerful voices demanding Open Borders that Bush found himself unable to resist? Tamar Jacoby? Raoul Lowery Contreras?

The case against Bush is that in the biggest decision of his Presidency (whether or not to invade the wrong country), he made a stupid choice. And on what could have been the most important long term decision of his Presidency (immigration), he made a choice that, fortunately, was so stupid that the adults in Congress buried it ... at least until after the election. On the other hand, he did okay on most of the little decisions.

***

Kerry: A Clinton or A Carter? We could live with another Clinton, but another Carter would be bad. Of course, timing matters: Carter might have been tolerable in the Easy Nineties and Clinton probably would have been a disaster in the crucible of the Seventies. 

Colby Cosh says:

John Kerry's public life has been characterized by goopily inconsistent positions defended in a haughty yet puritanical manner; he's not only better than you, he was better than you last week when he argued the opposite way. There's a constant, tinfoil-on-teeth undercurrent of moral anguish there--he's like some kind of stoned saint, a slo-mo Savonarola. It all just seems like an ingeniously calibrated formula for never getting anywhere near the American presidency. The noun "folksiness" may be damaged goods, but etymologically it encapsulates precisely what Kerry lacks. So I'm eager to see his climactic speech. My poorly informed guess is that we are at the pinnacle of Democratic hopes right now. You have to unveil the product sometime.

A reader comments:

John Kerry's basic problem may simply be that he is not terribly smart, but he represents a party in which every leader must pretend to be brilliant and deep. George Bush does not have that particular problem. One of Clinton's real advantages is that he was smart enough not to feel compelled to advertise it. Or that he was forced to marinate himself in Arkansas for almost 40 years. If he had gotten into the Senate as he wished, he might have become insufferable.

***

"The Village" by M. Night Shamalamadingdong -- Pretty good, reasonably scary Twilight Zone-style horror-lite film for the whole family from Mr. Sixth Sense. I sensed what Shyamalan's Big Surprise would be in about the first five minutes, but that's because he plays fair with the audience: most of what's phony about the situation he sets up -- a village in 1897 where nobody ever leaves because of monsters in the woods -- is phony because it's a clue pointing you toward the Big Surprise at the end. 

There's an interesting racial angle, but I can't tell you about it without giving away the B.S.

In a season of boring butt-kicking babes, young starlet Bryce Dallas Howard is terrific as a blind girl who triumphs over What Lurks in the Woods without even punching anybody. She just uses her courage and brains.

I'm a little frustrated because for a few months now I've had an even better idea for a story about a village with scary things out in the woods, giving a twist to an idea of John Zmirak's. The first director I thought of for it was Shyamalan. So, I guess he'll never make it now that he's made his own "The Village."

***

More on Spike Lee's "She Hate Me" -- From my American Conservative review:

The now unemployed Jack is propositioned by his ex-fiancée, Fatima, who has become a lesbian. She and her girlfriend Alex, who both look like lingerie models, are willing to pay him $10,000 each to have him impregnate them. Fatima then lines up sixteen more lovely lesbians desperate enough for Jack's genes to also pay him ten grand apiece.

With so many lower cost suppliers available, Spike Lee never explains why any woman would offer $10,000 for any man's DNA, much less for Jack's. Once able to cast Denzel Washington, Wesley Snipes, and Samuel L. Jackson in one movie (1990's "Mo' Better Blues"), Spike can now only afford unimposing newcomer Anthony Mackie. He has that sub-four percent body fat level you see just in black guys, and Spike makes clear that his character has good IQ genes, too. Yet, Jack's a Gloomy Gus and is only about 5'-8" (although compared to Spike, he's practically Wilt Chamberlain).

Spike's knowledge of lesbians seems derived mostly from close perusals of the girl-girl layouts in old Penthouse magazines. As Fatima, kewpie-doll starlet Kerry Washington makes the least persuasive lesbian in non-porn film history - at least until Italian love goddess Monica Belluci (Mary Magdalene in "The Passion") shows up later.

We also learn from Spike the real reason lesbians don't like men when the assembled sapphists insist Jack drop his drawers. One glance, and they discard their turkey basters and demand he get them pregnant the old-fashioned way. Clearly, their problem is they've just never seen a real man before.

***

Musical question: A reader writes:

Latin America is normally given credit for being the source of several marvelous forms of popular music, e.g., rhumba, salsa and tango. The sad truth is that these styles were themselves derived from across the Atlantic, mainly from non-Spanish Africa. They arrived in Latin America courtesy of the Spanish slave trade ported to Cuba.

The famous Mexican folk song "La Bamba," for example, apparently comes from the Bamba district of Angola.

American Indian music from the U.S. is -- well, let's just say that when people talk about how they are big fans of "world music," they usually aren't talking about Native American music:

BOMP-bomp-bomp-bomb
BOMP-bomp-bomp-bomp
uh-yuh-yuy-yuh
uh-yuh-yuh-yuh.

On the other hand, the flute music of the Andean highlands (best known here from Simon & Garfunkel's "El Condor Pasa") is quite lovely. Does anybody know if that is pre-Columbian indigenous, or European, or African, or a post-Pizarro invention?

***

Barack Obama, Superstar: The LA Times reports:

[Democratic] Party officials point out that [Senate candidate] Obama has been married to the same woman for more than a decade, committed no felonies and avoided major scandal...

Well, if that doesn't make Obama a shoo-in for the U.S. Senate, I don't know what does. I mean, an average Joe like me could never be elected to the Senate, what with my 24-hour marriage to Britney Spears, my felony conviction for throwing the 1919 World Series, and the controversy surrounding my role as Michael Jackson's procurer. I'm sure you have an equally checked past.

Oh, yeah, I forgot: and he's black. Well, sort of. I mean his mom is a white girl from Kansas, and he was born in Hawaii, and his Kenyan dad ran off when he was two, and he was raised by his white family in Indonesia, of all places. As far as I can tell, he has about as much connection to the African-American experience as Thurston Howell III on Gilligan's Island, but he's the right color (cafe-au-lait), so his election to the Senate is a great moral crusade for civil rights. Or something.

***

"Strip Club Makes Commitment To Hire More Minorities"

TAMPA, FL—Richard Brainard, owner of Shakerz Gentlemen's Lounge, announced plans Monday to hire more minorities at his Kennedy Boulevard nightspot.

"We're looking for some Asians, mainly, but I think we could also use two or three Puerto Ricans and a light-skinned black girl," Brainard said. "Man, those Puerto Ricans can dance. Makes you wish you were 22 again, I'll tell you that."

Brainard said the new hires will help Shakerz better represent his community.

"We need a lineup that's a little more Tampa," Brainard said. "That means we need more Mexicans. Sometimes it's hard to find one with a decent pair, but that's not going to stop me. We're doing this because it's right, not because it's easy."...

Informed of the initiative, Florida Equal Opportunity Employment Commission spokesman Arthur Wright applauded Shakerz for "promoting racial equality throughout the adult industries of central Florida."

"We fully support Brainard's diversification efforts," Wright said. "Finally, someone is recognizing that it takes all kinds to entertain a broad cross-section of lonely, horny men with specific ethnicity-based fantasies. The interests of business and society can be one and the same."

In a move likely to please Wright, the owner of another area small business has already chosen to emulate Brainard's plan of action.

"We have a pretty good mix—customers are always asking for Latin girls and Asians—but now that I think about it, I guess we could use a couple new girls of color," Night Dreams Escorts manager Tony D'Ammagio said. "We're always looking for new girls."

-- From The Onion

***

Both Parties following "Sailer Strategy:" -- The hard-headed Ralph Z. Hallow reports in the Washington Times:

The party of John Kerry and John Edwards is improving its standing with minorities, but losing ground to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney among white evangelicals, a new survey found. Those findings are bad news for Democrats assembled in Boston for their national convention, because white evangelicals and born-again Christians far outnumber blacks and Hispanic combined.

"White evangelicals and born-again Christians are 26 percent of all registered voters — that's quite a big chunk — and the survey shows they are quite happy with Republicans," said Adam Clymer, political director of the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election Survey, which polled 3,715 registered voters nationwide July 1 to 21, with a margin of error of 1 percentage point. "Whatever percentage the turnout of your voters, if you get another 1 percent of evangelicals and born-agains, that's a lot more votes," Mr. Clymer said. "It makes a lot more difference than getting an additional 1 percent of blacks or Hispanics." 

The good news for Mr. Kerry and his party is that the Annenberg survey also shows Republicans are failing to make the big gains they hoped for among minorities, especially Hispanics, in the past four years. 

What might be more important to the electoral map, however, is that among registered white Protestants who described themselves as born-again or evangelical, Republicans now enjoy majority status, Mr. Clymer said. Both political parties have been going all-out to stir their voter base to turn out in record numbers on Nov. 2, but although blacks and Hispanics are key constituencies for the Democrats, together they account for only 17 percent of registered voters. In contrast, white born-again and evangelical Christians are fully 26 percent of all registered voters.
    And 51 percent of those white evangelical and born-again Christians now call themselves Republicans, up eight percentage points from four years ago, when 43 percent called themselves Republicans.
    Only 22 percent of white evangelicals say they are Democrats, down slightly from four years ago, when 24 percent said they were Democrats.
    For registered black voters, it's a wholly different partisan story, with 66 percent calling themselves Democrats and only 7 percent Republicans. That represents almost no change from the 65 percent to 7 percent ratio the survey reported in 2000. Actual black turnout for Democrat Al Gore in 2000 was higher, with 90 percent of black voters opting for the Democratic ticket, according to exit polls
    Among registered Hispanics, the fastest-growing component of the electorate, Democrats outnumber Republicans 45 percent to 24 percent. In 2000, only 39 percent of Hispanics said they were Democrats. The Democratic gain occurred despite Mr. Bush's proposals earlier this year to accommodate illegal immigrants and the American businesses that hire them.

It's good to finally see some numeracy in the press.

A reader responds:

While Rove's strategy maybe the best option, you got to wonder about the poor Evangelicals. If Bush wins, he'll immediately forget them after the election, assured they'll vote for him no matter what. If he loses (a distinct possibility), they'll be blamed for "dragging" the party to the right. Andrew Sullivan's already getting a jump on this. The only possible good that may come out of this election is if Bush loses and his loss is blamed on his two attempts to give illegal aliens amnesty. His father not only lost because of his broken tax pledge, but was also SEEN to lose because of it. Since then, the GOP won't even think about raising taxes. If Bush II's amnesty can be hung around a loss in the same manner, we might actually see some progress on the immigration issue.

***

The War Nerd: "Bush Bushwhacks the Marines:"

On the April 24-25 weekend, Bush and Rumsfeld flew to Camp David for a videoconference with the Brass in Iraq on what to do with Fallujah. The Marines were psyched, finally sure they'd get the chance to do what they were trained to do.

This is the key moment in the battle for Fallujah, and I suspect for the whole war. And in the end, it came down to one simple fact: Bush chickened out. He or his handlers decided they couldn't risk casualties on the scale this battle would take while they were going for reelection. Sometime that weekend, they decided the Marines weren't going to get the chance to win the battle. They were going to be called off in favor of some cheap PR face-saving strategy. Monday, April 26 -- and as far as I'm concerned, this goes down in history as Black Monday -- the announcement came from Bush that "the US has opted to delay the Fallujah offensive...in favor of joint patrols" of Marines and local Iraqi security forces.

"Joint patrols"! That was it! Bush went on TV to tell the suckers that, "the situation in Fallujah is returning to normal." Well, if "normal" is leaving the enemy in possession of the city, letting them ambush any Marine patrol they want, then Hell yeah, Fallujah was as normal as it gets....

I wanted to spit on the TV screen.

So the battle of Fallujah was over, and we lost...

This defeat -- this disgrace, more like it! -- has got our enemies all excited. "Fallujah" is a rallying cry now for Muslim crazies all over the world. It's like their Bastogne, their Alamo. It will go down in their histories as the turning point in the war, the moment when we faced off against them and we flinched first. And I'm not talking just about the war in Iraq, I mean the bigger, longer war we're supposed to be fighting.

The worst of it is, our troops fought brilliantly, damn it. No matter how ridiculous and contradictory their orders were, our Marines never flinched, never backed off, never showed fear.

It was our leader, our President, who chickened out, just like he did when it was his time to face combat in Nam 30 years ago. Once a chicken, always a chicken -- that's the lesson, I guess.

***

Mathematicians by Country -- The Derb sent me a map from the MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive showing famous mathematicians by country of birth. It uses a vastly larger list of famous mathematicians than Charles Murray's list of 191. In the MacTutor database, there are only eleven from Spain, and six were medieval Muslims or Jews. Only one Spanish mathematician was born since 1700. All of Latin America has contributed one top mathematician, and he died in Mexico City in 1700. That puts the whole of Hispanic America equal to Haiti in mathematical productivity.

In contrast, 49 famous mathematicians were born within the boundaries of modern day Ukraine, 40 in India (check out the life story of Ramanujan), 36 in Hungary, and 22 in Ireland.

I have to say that I don't really understand the Spanish-speaking world's lack of mathematical talent. How does a culture keep a natural born math nerd from fulfilling his math nerdness? Nothing could keep Ramanujan, a dirt poor and uneducated genius, from thinking about math. He only had one math book, so when he learned everything that was in it, he simply reinvented everything beyond it, plus quite a bit of new math. Granted, there aren't many (or any) Ramanujans, but how does Hispanic culture keep its best nerds from doing anything important in math?

Conversely, I've never thought of this before, but maybe Spanish culture's low output of outstanding achievers is in part caused by some kind of aversion to abstraction. Somebody might want to take Murray's database and look for the cornerstone field. My hypothesis is that in each country in each century, the number of significant mathematicians is the best predictor of how many other significant scientists that country and time will have produced. For the arts, I'm sure the relationship is much weaker, but I bet it's still there. A culture that produces great mathematicians is likely to have a more dynamic culture than one that doesn't. Anybody want to try to crunch the numbers?

***

"Lance Armstrong" -- Yeah, like were supposed to believe that's his real name, and not some All-American jock name he just made up. His actual name's probably Leslie Hafnagel.

UPDATE -- No need to send me more emails telling me that's his real name. I actually knew that and was just calling attention to improbable it is.

Would it be crude to say this cancer survivor gets more testosterone from one testicle than any man since Hitler?

***

What's wrong with Latin America? Alvaro Vargas Llosa, son of Peruvian novelist and presidential candidate Mario Vargas Llosa, said in a speech to the Independent Institute:

Let me sum up the last 500 years of Latin America in five words—or really five concepts. That’s a pretty challenging job, but I hope you’ll bear with me.

I would use five basic concepts to sum up really what the history of Latin America has been through pre-colonial, colonial, and republican times. I would use the word corporatism, state mercantilism—that’s two words, but let’s imagine it’s one word—privilege, bottom-up wealth redistribution, and political law.

I will define all five of them very quickly. Corporatism is really a system that looks at society not as a network of free, sovereign individuals, but basically as segments, as corporations, as groups of people in which individuals only achieve legitimacy through the collective entity.

State mercantilism is a system whereby the state decides who the winners and losers are in society. In other words, the closer you are to power—to political power—the better off you are in society, and the further away you are from power, the worse off you are in society.

Privilege, of course, is pretty much the same thing. It’s a system that, through the law, discriminates between some people and other people. That is, it’s basically a system that engineers winners and losers. And of course, the other word for privilege is discrimination. The state has engineered winners and losers, and by doing that it has also created discrimination.

Bottom-up wealth redistribution is basically the same thing with another name. It’s a system whereby most of the people create wealth for the benefit of those who are close to power, but it’s important to indicate that it is a bottom-up dynamic, because it means that the elites that were close to power put on a system that in a way could only survive if it enslaved the majority of people and put them to work for a privileged elite.

And of course, political law, which is the fifth concept, is the tool by which all of this was possible. The state used the law, which was not a principle that was above the state but which was really something that emanated from the state, from the political authorities, to create these divisions in society, and basically, these social classes.

... Now, that’s exactly what went on in pre-Colombian times with the Inca empire, with the Aztecs. There were many differences between these different empires, but basically they all organized society around these five guiding principles.

That’s exactly what happened when the Spanish and the Portuguese empires took over what we know today as Latin America. They perpetuated these five principles, except of course, there was a reshuffle of elite interests, and the people who benefited from this were different people, were outsiders. But the principles guiding the organization of society were exactly the same.

And when the republic came to life in the early 19th century, exactly the same thing happened. There was revolution, a lot of people were killed, some wonderful ideas were floated around, but what we were left with were essentially states and societies that were guided by these five principles.

Now in the 20th century, this got much worse.

***

Neocon Ally Christopher Hitchen's Elegy for Trotsky: "...the reissue of a majestic biography reveals him as he always was—a prophetic moralist" coos Hitch in the new Atlantic Monthly. There's not one mention in this disgusting review of the countless people murdered by this ideological gangster. As Paul Johnson wrote in Modern Times: "Had Trotsky come out on top, he would probably have been even more bloodthirsty than Stalin."

The neocons who welcomed Hitch into their fold because his characteristic bloodthirstiness seemed useful to them in promoting and defending the Iraq Attaq have a lot of explaining to do. See Paul Cella's eloquent meditation on the ironies of conservatives welcoming the Christianity-hating Christopher Hitchens while ignoring his equally articulate brother Peter, the Christian conservative, because he opposed the Iraq Attaq.

A reader comments:

I know thoughtful people have pointed out the irrational disparity between the amounts of opprobrium ladled out to Nazis and Communists time and again, but Hitchens' praise of Trotsky demands we raise the question again. Exactly what kind of reception could Hitchens expect if he wrote an article lauding Ernst Roehm, Hitler's Trotsky? To ask this question is to answer it, for we all know The Atlantic would not only have not published such an article (rightly), but it would have also fired the Hitch once the editor realized, with growing alarm, that the Hitch was not being ironic.

***

Another Poll Shows Bush's Hispandering Failing:

Results of The Miami Herald/Zogby International Hispanic Poll come as both campaigns wage aggressive outreach efforts to woo the fast-growing voting bloc that has the potential to swing key battleground states like Florida, New Mexico and Arizona - and help determine the next majority party. Kerry... holds a 60 percent to 32 percent lead over President Bush among voters who identify themselves as Hispanic. Kerry gained two points since a similar poll in April - within the poll's margin of error, but still a potential trouble spot for Bush, said pollster John Zogby, who conducted the survey of 1,003 likely voters.

The median result of the three exit polls in 2000 showed Gore beating Bush 62-35 among Hispanics, so this year is on track to be ever so slightly worse, like, say, 65-34. You have to be as big a genius as Karl Rove to think that that's worth trying to destroy your nation by implementing Open Borders.

***

Latin America: The Cul-de-sac of Creativity -- My new VDARE column documents the traditional dreary lack of creativity in Latin American cultures and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in the mother country of Spain, using data from the tables of significant scientists and artists in Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment. Because so many people demonize the deeply judicious and human Murray, let me point out that his tables simply reflect the consensus of expert opinion, what educated people already know.

For example, on the fact that Spain has not pulled its weight in Western Civilization for the last 300 years, consider the introduction to the famous book (and PBS series) Civilisation by Lord Kenneth Clark:

If I had been talking about the history of art, it would not have been possible to leave out Spain; but when one asks what Spain has done to enlarge the human mind and pull mankind a few steps up the hill, the answer is less clear. Don Quixote, the Great Saints, the Jesuits in South America? Otherwise she has simply remained Spain...

***

Darwin's theory of Sexual Selection: The problem with sexual selection is that it can't get too far unmoored from natural selection. In general, people find sexy in the opposite sex things that at least correlate with what natural selection is also selecting for.

If sexual selection was untethered by natural selection, then women would be born with high heels. There is nothing that makes a woman look sexier than putting on high heels. (You didn't know that? Just ask any woman -- she'll tell you.) Yet, for most of human prehistory, women didn't wear shoes, but women did not evolve bones that gave them high heels naturally, because built-in high heels would have been disastrous from a natural selection standpoint. Ooga the Cavebabe who was born with high heels would have been the slowest member of the tribe and thus the one that got eaten by the sabre-tooth tiger when everybody else ran away faster, and she got naturally selected as the sabre-tooth's dinner. (Here's Manhattan Transfer on the evolutionary history of the shoe, perhaps after a few Jamesons.)

Of course, you see occasional examples of excess sexual selection, like peacocks, but almost never in females.

***

Reader responses to "Pathetic Lack of Courage among Bloggers" (below):

I think most people don't actually believe in human non-biodiversity. Any five-year-old can see that people look different, and as Jon Entine and others have written in the mainstream press, human groups have differing athletic abilities that cannot be reduced to environmental differences. So: you're right. Of course you're right; human biodiversity exists.

But then: people start asking about intelligence, naturally. If groups can be different athletically, it stands to reason that they can also differ mentally (Bell Curve type stuff).

But you know all this. But what you need to do, IMVHO, is not keep beating people over the head with the truth, but convince them that the truth isn't so bad. It's not going to lead to Jim Crow of Auschwitz to accept that certain groups don't perform as well as other groups. Or is it? That's people's fear. You've got the obvious truth on your side, now you need to show people that the truth won't lead to something bad.

It's like on Law & Order when Lennie and Rey have got a suspect in the interrogation room, and they know he did it, he knows he did it, and he knows that they know he did it and they know that he knows that they know he did it. All the evidence is clear but still he denies it. So what happens? Lennie sends Rey out to get some coffee, and says, "Hey man, I know how it is. You didn't mean to do it. You just lost your temper, right? I would've done the same thing." And he convinces the guy that the truth will set him free.

Readers and bloggers and everyone else have been living under this false framework for a long time now, that there are no differences between groups. You've gotta show people what the new framework is gonna be under the truth, and that it will be better than the lies. I like your pieces on showing how underperforming groups can actually improve their IQ and performance if problems of nutrition, breastfeeding, etc. are confronted early on. One argument that I've used in online debates is this: I argue the commonsense line that the cause of poor Africano-American performance in school and work is caused primarily not by racism but by dysfunctional ghetto culture. Now people get all in a huff over this until I point out that white cultures can and have been dysfunctional, too, and improved by weeding out the dysfunction by changing their values. Examples are the old Irish and Italian immigrants, who used to have violent, self-destructive habits of behavior. I argue that ghetto blacks in the 2004 USA need to do precisely what earlier white groups did: self-improve by weeding out bad behavior. This seems to soften some people, since you show that it's not a racial thing -- it's a behavior thing that stretches across any racial group. Good behavior improves results. Duh!

So I'd suggest more pieces not showing that you're right about the existence human biodiversity, which you are, but 1) showing that public policy in a human biodiverse world would not lead to Jim Crow or Auschwitz and 2) most importantly, that acknowledging human biodiversity will improve the lot of those lower on the achievement scale. And yes, I know you've written a lot about this already!

Of course, then you'll have cultural relativists whining that ghetto culture is just as valid as any other culture and doesn't need to change. Of course, they'll write this from laptops in Bethesda...

And oh yeah, don't use my name with this if you happen to quote me.  I'm writing some XXX for the YYY & the money is good.  I know, I'm a pussy.

*

You wrote: "It's just sad that political correctness is so overwhelmingly dominant among bloggers."

I think you may have pointed out what a special disappointment Andrew Sullivan is in this respect, given that he once displayed genuine brass in publishing Murray and Herrnstein's thesis in The New Republic. What happened? Why did he abandon the subject just when it seemed we were poised for a real debate? Why did everyone, for that matter? Was there something bad in the timing?

Every time I read another credulous "No Child Left Behind" story in my local paper, I'm reminded of what a sleeping giant The Bell Curve is. So many intellectuals must harbor the obvious suspicions, yet the polite explanations and omissions invariably prevail. What will it take to get people to publicly admit what they privately suspect? My hunch is the break will come in the form of a marketable messenger, someone who fits a certain ethnic profile and who tempers the argument in a way that allows the hbd-deniers pretend it was their idea all along.

I'd cut Andrew some slack on this, since he's not in denial, he just doesn't mention IQ unless it's in the news -- e.g., when the Supreme Court outlawed executing killers with IQs below 70,