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February
8-14, 2005 Blog Archive
www.iSteve.com/05FebB.htm#derbyshire.shiite.fight
The
Derb asks in an email:
Here's
a thing I have been wondering about, in the context of a possible Iraqi
civil war: Are Shias any good as fighters?
I ask because I am not clear how the Sunni minority managed to maintain
its grip over the Shia majority in Iraq for all those decades. **And** I
have been wondering for some time why the Iran-Iraq War was such a
stalemate, when Iran's population is nearly 3 times Iraq's (70m vs.
26m).
Modern Arabs are supposed to be hopeless at war. (Moshe Dayan famously
replied, when asked the key to success in modern warfare: "Fight
Arabs.") Could it be that the Shias, both Arab and Persian, are
even less warlike than Sunni Arabs?
Any
thoughts?
The
Spectator notes:
Strictly
speaking, the last war of aggression launched by an Iranian monarch was
in 1739, and since that time, the Iranian state has largely been on the
defensive.
***
www.iSteve.com/05FebB.htm#iraq.election.results
How
convenient:
"Iraq's
majority Shiite Muslims won nearly half the votes in the nation's
landmark Jan. 30 election, giving the long-oppressed group significant
power but not enough to form a government on its own, according to
results released Sunday."
When
you spend two weeks supposedly counting the votes, well, you ought to
come up with something this convenient. So, did Sistani agree to being
assigned 48% of the vote, or not? A big question.
***
www.iSteve.com/05FebB.htm#film.reviews.sailer.2003
My
Film Reviews: First Half of 2003: It
was a lousy six months for movies, with the exception of Brazil's City
of God, but I suspect there's a negative correlation between the
quality of the movie and of my review. Certainly, bad movies give me
more room to be funny:
Alex
& Emma -
Kate Hudson, Rob Reiner, Dostoevsky - 2
Hollywood
Homicide - Harrison Ford, Ron Shelton
- 5
The
Italian Job
- Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron - 8
The
In-Laws -
Albert Brooks, Michael Douglas - 5
The
Matrix Reloaded
- Keanu Reeves, Wachowskis - 2
Better
Luck Tomorrow
- Asian-American indie drama - 6
X2:
X-Men United - Huge
Jackman, teeming freaks - 4
People
I Know - Al Pacino, Kim Basinger
- 5
A
Mighty Wind
- Christopher Guest, Eugene Levy - 7
Anger
Management
- Adam Sandler, Jack Nicholson - 3
Phone
Booth -
Colin Farrell, Joel Schumacher - 6
Head
of State
- Chris Rock, Bernie Mac - 3
Bend
It Like Beckham
- My Big Fat Sikh Heading - 5
The
Hunted - Tommy Lee Jones, Benicio Del Toro
- 4
Tears
of the Sun
- Bruce Willis, Monica Belluci - 4
Jungle
Book 2 -
John Goodman, Haley Joel Osment - 3
Oscar
Race 2002 - Wrap-up
Shanghai
Knights
- Jackie Chan, Owen Wilson - 5
The
Recruit - Al
Pacino, Colin Farrell - 4
25th
Hour - Edward
Norton, Spike Lee - 7
City
of God -
Brazilian gangster classic - 9
***
www.iSteve.com/05FebB.htm#mandela.1994.election
Will
the Iraqi election results ever be counted? It has now been over 12
days since the election, yet we've only heard fragmentary results from
the national balloting, suggesting that a lot of behind-the-scenes
maneuvering is going on. I presume that the U.S. is trying to get the
Grand Ayatollah to concede to a "Mandela." In the first open
election in South African, back in 1994, Nelson Mandela took the early
returns showing his ANC winning a massive landslide to his opponents and
said he'd rewrite the results to give his party a smaller majority than
they had actually won and allowing the opposition white and Zulu parties
to "win" provincial power bases, in return for their
cooperation in writing the new constitution. If they didn't, the ANC
would just write the constitution themselves. The opposition leapt at
this generous offer.
The
U.S. is probably hoping for equal statesmanship from Sistani in agreeing
to an artificial divvying up of seats, including representation for
moderate Sunnis. The voting results would then be fabricated to support
the deal. But, I have no idea whether Sistani would go for it, nor what
his life expectancy would be if he did.
***
www.iSteve.com/05FebB.htm#urban.planning.crime
The
Old Suburbanists Strike Back: Readers respond to the New Urbanist
defense of Portland (below):
Regarding
the preference for a private yard. First I'd refer that reader to
an article at Reason on-line entitled Crime-Friendly
Neighborhoods by Stephen Town and Randal O'Toole, which
will introduces such concepts as "defensible space" to address
how private yards help to reduce crime while, for instance, alleys tend
to increase crime. I'll let them draw their own conclusions, but I'll
suggest that the reason higher densities seem to work reasonably well in
Portland is more than likely linked to their point about minorities
being pushed to the suburbs. Portland's "gentrification"
of older neighborhoods has most likely all but eliminated
lower-income areas from around those neighborhoods, which has the
(politically incorrect) effect of reducing crime. In short, if you
don't perceive that you need a defensible space buffer around your home,
you won't feel as compelled to relocate your family from a higher
population density locale.
*
Thanks
for writing the Feb. 6 column. That's what we did, we lived in 'Norfeast
DC' with our two daughters and when they were 3 and 6 there were 3
murders within two blocks of our house so we skedaddled 30 miles out to
the suburban Howard County where everyone is perfect and boring and
peeceewhipped, but thankfully ...not a criminal. I have got to say you
have a lot of courage saying the things you do in print. You have got to
get a lot of grief for it. Thanks for saying the stuff about black
crime, I have always been amazed that that little undeniable fact is
mentioned as seldom as it is (7x or 9x murder rate of whites).
*
Regarding
your item about why families desire large yards when most children won't
use them, well, it seems as if the trend these days is away from large
yards - consider the McMansion, shoehorned into the smallest possible
lot. In places where new houses are being built with sizeable yards, it
may be a result of zoning codes that mandate large lots as a way of
keeping property values high. Finally, some people may prefer
large yards as a way of showing off their landscaping/gardening skills.
*
I
woulda killed for a big back yard when I was a kid of 12. For one thing,
you can put the dog back there. And keg parties.
*
And
when I was a kid in the suburbs, I really envied the kids from reruns of
"Family Affair" -- you know, with Mr French -- their New York
highrise and neighborhood really exciting to me growing up in suburban
Orange County. Seriously, I think it is a shame that many of the
youngest kids of professionals are missing out on the museums, orchestra
concerts, concentrations of playmates that can be found outside
'structured' activities.
Of course, we all know why young portand couples with kids can stay in
the urban environs, it is one of the few in US that is still
overwhelmingly white.
The
bottom line seems to be that various schools of urban planning succeed
or fail mostly because of the two things they don't like to talk about:
their impact on the cost of housing, which in turn impacts the quality
of residents (e.g., law-abiding or not law-abiding), and the quality of
residents is pretty much the whole ballgame. For example, for a few
years I lived in a Le Corbusier-style high rise in Chicago that was
almost identical physically to the much denounced Le Corbusier-style
high rises in Chicago's hellish public housing projects like nearby
Cabrini Green. Yet, my highrise was pleasant and harmonious and nobody
murdered anybody in it while I was there. Of course, the reason my
highrise was 100% less lethal than Cabrini Green's was that mine charged
fairly high rents and thus was full of yuppies like myself, while
Cabrini Green was free, if you were poor, and thus was full of poor
people.
That's
one reason I talk about immigration policy so much. That's the single
easiest way for government policy to have an impact on the quality of
the residents of our country. When we're looking to buy or rent a place
to live, we obsess over the quality of the residents of different
neighborhoods (that's what "Location! Location! Location!" is
all about.) Yet, the Establishment doesn't want to think about trying to
influence the quality of residents of our country by picking and
choosing the best immigrants.
***
www.iSteve.com/05FebB.htm#evolutionary.psychology.peripheral
Attention,
evolutionary psychologists: Evopsych researchers assume that back in
caveman days we evolved various mental modules. I think I've found one
that's getting ever more useful as more people talk on the cell phone
while they drive.
I
try to walk about three miles a day. The big danger in crossing streets
on foot is that somebody making a turn just won't see you until he's hit
you. This seems to be especially true for people trying to make fast
right turns. When they are on the phone they are particularly unlikely
to see you stepping off the curb. So, what I do when I see someone
coming and I can tell he doesn't have his eyes on me is to raise my arm
and point my index finger directly at the driver's eyes. His peripheral
vision picks up my motion and some part of his brainssends to his
consciousness a Code Red alert: "Awwwwooooggaa! Potentially hostile
individual pointing weapon at me!" It gets his attention every time
(although I wouldn't recommend using it in parts of town where drivers
tend to be well armed and have itchy trigger-fingers). You should
recommend it to children and the elderly as a way to making crossing
streets safer.
***
www.iSteve.com/05FebB.htm#New.Urbanist.Portland
The
New Urbanists strike back: Readers reply:
Just
have to write a quick defense of my home town of Portland. I read that
page you linked to with all the transit and planning lingo. Yes it's
true Portland is quite insistent about planning and
"livability" and defends its "urban growth boundary"
to the hilt -- the law that says certain densities shall not exist
outside of an arbitrary line, so as to keep growth and density confined
to a smaller area.
Does it work? I would say it works for those who are fans of this
aesthetic. Portland has experienced pretty good growth over the past few
years, attracting an outsized number of young (and yes, usually
childless) professionals to it from bigger metropolises all over the
country. Thus, Portland has retained a sort of small town European
charm, I would say -- it sprawls in places, but there's enough stuff
downtown and in inner core neighborhoods that you don't need to go to
the sprawl if you don't want to. However, I can attest that a few of
these young professionals my age are now starting to reproduce as they
hit their early to mid 30s -- but have yet to flee to the suburbs. The
main reason is because they have all the amenities they need within a
reasonable distance, and hardly ever have to come into contact with
minorities. In fact, neighborhood after neighborhood in the 1990s has
been "reclaimed" and gentrified and turned from a ghetto-ish
situation into a nice "artsy" district. Thus, we now have a
small and shrinking ghetto, and any hispanics are largely combined to
the suburbs where most of the young hipsters don't go (in fact, most
meth use, the city's biggest crime issue, is confined to the suburbs
instead of the central city now because the suburbs are so cheap
compared to the central city). The biggest visible minority is Asian,
which is the "acceptable" minority, as we all know. It's very
funny -- as much as Portlanders talk about how much they love
"diversity," their city council is composed of five white
males!
*
Why
are big yards so important for families, when few children over the age
of six would be caught dead in their own? Wouldn't it be better for them
to shrink the yards and bring their friends, and everything else,
closer, as the Victorians did? Why is a rarely-used private yard better
than a giant shared backyard, like Fairmount Park in Philadelphia? And
if space is so important, how come my maternal ancestors were more than
twice as fecund in Brooklyn, Queens and even Manhattan than their
descendants are in spacious Texas and Florida?
***
www.iSteve.com/05FebB.htm#Democrats.encourage.loneliness
How
Democratic Politicians Encourage Loneliness: Because marriage and
children tend to incline people toward voting Republican, Democrats try
various ploys to keep people unmarried and childless (i.e., more prone
to loneliness as they age). For example, a reader writes:
Current
Federal policy (to a large extent based on claims of fighting air
pollution) strenuously encourages *increased* housing density [which
raises the cost of the single family homes with yards that most
Americans consider a prerequisite for having a family]. To the extent
that increased density predicts increased Blue-ness (Democrat political
success) Republicans might to wish to revamp this policy.
Basically, the Feds withhold highway funds from states and locales that
don't use their zoning powers to discourage the construction of detached
single-family homes and boost construction of high-density housing. The
Feds also--counterproductively--withhold highway funds from locales with
excessive air pollution, even when highway-building would help alleviate
the very pollution complained-of [by dispersing the population over a
larger, less-polluted area].
The Feds also give grants to NGO's, states, and locales to promote
high-density development and "transportation alternatives," an
ungrammatical euphemism for "wasting public money on little-used
light-rail and bike-path systems."
By
the way, here's an amusing glossary
of planner-speak from Portland, where the basic purpose of its
famous urban planning appears to be to keep Republicans from
reproducing.
***
www.iSteve.com/05FebB.htm#best.nanny.license
From
SaveOurLicense.com:
Debra Saunders writes:
THE
AD THAT ran in Daily Variety last week -- signed by the usual members of
the "entertainment community," including Ed Asner, Danny
Glover and Mike Farrell -- asked Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to sign
Senate Bill 60, a bill to allow illegal immigrants to obtain California
drivers' licenses.
Not that the ad ever used the word "illegal." Instead, it used
Hollywood award-speak to tell the story of Rosanna Perez,
"Nominated: Best Nanny in a Supporting Role," who, because of
California law, has to take the bus from her home in East Los Angeles to
her job in the Westside.
They should have dubbed the ad: Let my illegal nanny drive my SUV.
"We give them access to our homes. We trust them with our children.
It seems absurd to me to not grant them the respect they deserve,"
Farrell explained to Copley News Service.
For
some reason, I'm reminded of what Tonto said in response to the Lone
Ranger's comment on being surrounded by bloodthirsty Indians of
"Looks like we've reached the end of the line, old friend."
"Who's
this 'we' you're talking about, paleface?"
***
www.iSteve.com/05FebB.htm#eq.iq
EQ
vs. IQ: Without having read the zillion selling book, I've always
found this Emotional Quotient stuff to be both highly plausible and a
conceptual mess.
For example, you can rank people on a scale of how well and how quickly
they understand and can manipulate other people's emotions with displays
of your own emotions. Autistics fall at one end of the scale and, say,
Barbara Walters and Oprah Winfrey at the genius end. There's some
correlation to IQ -- the famous autistic college professor Temple
Grandin can figure out other people's emotions to some extent through
sheer logic, and I'm sure Barbara and Oprah have quite high IQs, but
it's also different enough than it's reasonable to think of as somewhat
separate from IQ.
But then a lot of this EQ stuff you read is just advice to think more
rationally and coolly about your own emotions, and your ability to do
that is obviously highly correlated to IQ. It's good advice, in the mode
of Ben Franklin and Alexander Pope, but it doesn't fit much at all with
the first, Barbara-Oprah, meaning of EQ.
***
www.iSteve.com/05FebB.htm#white.liberal.race
The
Sailer One-Point Plan for Racial Goodwill: Readers respond:
There's
a kind of White liberal archetype. Like the ultra liberal
Vermont/Oregon/Madison, Wisconsin National Public Radio types who are
over the top "liberals" on racial issues yet live in the most
white bread areas on planet earth.
For them blacks exist mainly as a touchstone to determine their own
moral correctness vis-à-vis other White people. It's a variation on the
movie theme of the Magical Negro who arrives to sprinkle the pixie dust
of joy/wisdom and salvation on depressed/confused or conscience ridden
White people.
You're never going to get through to these kinds of White people when
discussing racial issues.
Their racially narcissistic ego can't give up on viewing the world as
being made up of 3 basic types of people:
1. Bad Whitey = Republicans, right wingers, racists, sexists,
homophobes, social Darwinists, Christians, NASCAR lovers, et al.
2. Good Whitey = Democrats, liberals, feminists, gays,
"antiracists", et al.
3. Good "People of Color" (unless they're Republicans or
cops).
That's it. So once the issue is RACE the issue becomes which category
does the speaker/writer/agent fall into.
*
Your
one-step plan to end racism only works for middle-class kids. What about
all the working-class white kids who already attend public schools with
lots of blacks. Presumably they get into fights lots of times. Do they
turn out to be any more racist than their middle-class counterparts in
private and parochial schools? Or even better, than their working-class
counterparts in rural white areas? Surely there are studies on this?
***
Intelligent
Design: Two of my articles from 1999 are highly relevant to the
current controversy:
A Miracle
Happens Here: Darwin's Enemies on the Right
Equality
v. Truth: Darwin's Enemies on the Left
***
www.iSteve.com/05FebB.htm#Fight.Club.Atta.911
More
on "Fight Club:" The 1999 Brad Pitt - Edward Norton fable
about underground bare-knuckle brawling clubs evolving into a private
army of anarchist terrorists is one of the more intellectually
stimulating movies of recent years. Readers write:
The
great James
Bowman demolished Fight Club some years ago: for some of the
same reasons you now criticize it. He hinted at the most devastating
critique, which is that the filmmakers' view of masculinity is totally
impoverished, insofar as they seem to believe that the quintessential
male feature is animal violence when in fact, as most of our great
cultural artifacts attest, the quintessential male feature is the desire
to create, the desire for a man to, as Chesterton once put it, impose
"his will upon the world in the manner of the charter given him by
the will of God."
*
Bowman
makes the usual conservative mistake of throwing out the baby with the
bath water: "I think the film is vile, therefore I'm not going to
waste any more grey matter wondering why so many young men worship the
film."
*
I
think the genius of "Fight Club" is precisely in how it
resolves its "revolution": by pointing out how ridiculous it
is... I think it actually gives some insight to "movements"
like Al Qaeda - Osama Bin Laden's fantasies of a global caliphate, in an
Islamic context, have the same attraction to disaffected males that
Tyler's [Pitt's] nihilism does in the movie.
In fact, part of the true genius of the movie is the fact that most
viewers completely misunderstand it - they see Tyler as a true prophet,
and miss the fact that the Narrator has to reject him and his fantasies
in order to grow up... It might be the most misunderstood work
since "The Catcher in the Rye", in which Holden in the last
few pages comes to realize that he can't maintain his adolescent
rebellion forever, and that he can't keep kids from growing up by acting
as a "Catcher in the Rye" (which image is based on Holden's
misunderstanding of a Robert Burns poem - something that is pointed out
to him in the novel) I guess any such work will be seen by adolescent
fantasists as confirming their view of the world - since, from the
fantasist's perspective (like the conspiracists') , EVERYTHING does...
*
Fight
club is the ugliest spirited movie I have ever seen. I didn't buy into
the macho teenage crap from the opening scene. It is an evil movie with
evil values.
Because there are no acceptable masculine outlets for young men they
turn to the most violent and reprehensible ones. If all
expressions of masculinity are unacceptable, then why not go for the
most violent and ugly.
*
In
regards to your review of Fight Club: While I agree with your
conclusion, I'm wondering if one can overlay another theory on top of
yours: the growth of the service sector economy. It seems to me that men
have an underlying distaste for being service-oriented employees, shall
I say, "system administrators." Men seem to prefer
"task-oriented" jobs that don't entail endless hours of
brown-nosing and hand-holding. Women, of course, seem to love being
administrators, which seems to explain why Ed schools are packed to the
gills with them.
*
I
saw it a few days after 9-11. For a New Yorker, the ending was a bit
tough to take so soon after the WTC was destroyed. Knocking down office
towers didn't feel "cathartic" in late September 2001.
But the movie was amazing. And I don't think it was dishonest at all
about what these guys are revolting against:
TYLER
[Pitt]
If you could fight anyone, who would you fight?
JACK [Norton]
I'd fight my boss, probably.
TYLER
Really?
JACK
Yeah, why, who would you fight?
TYLER
I'd fight my dad.
JACK
I don't know my dad. I mean, I know him, but he left when I was like six
year old. Married this woman, had more kids. He did this like every six
years. Goes to a new city and starts a new family.
TYLER
He was setting franchises. My dad never went to college, so it was
really important that I'd go.
JACK
Sounds familiar.
TYLER
So I graduate, I called him a long distance and asked: "Dad, now
what?", he says "Get a job".
JACK
Same here.
TYLER
When I turned twenty five, my yearly call again "Dad, now
what?", he says "I don't know, get married!"
JACK
I can't get married, I'm a thirty-year-old boy!
TYLER
We're a generation of men raised by women. I'm wondering if another
woman is really the answer we need.
And
the guy with the breasts [Meat Loaf plays a bodybuilder who gets
testicular cancer from steroids]? It's not like the fact that the movie
is a fantasy of masculine revolt against a feminine civilization is
exactly hidden under the surface of a movie about hating consumerism.
Fight Club is not Supersize Me.
And watching the movie not long after 9-11 was clarifying. Mohammed Atta
*was* a Space Monkey, after all: a nerdy little guy who compulsively
shaved his body hair, revolting against feminized, alienating modernity
in the name of a primal masculinity, and doing so through an act of
horrific violence comprehensible only as grotesque theater. Fight Club
was prophecy: the goddamned Space Monkeys started World War IV.
*
Masculine
leadership charisma and the young male urge to form hierarchies of
purpose, whether for destruction or creation, is one of the most
important subjects in world history, but we lack a vocabulary to talk
about it these days. So, when a movie comes along that takes on the
subject directly, it can be electrifying.
I'm
reminded a little of the movie that I tend to think was the greatest
film of the 1980s, even though it was one of Steven Spielberg's rare box
office bombs: "The Empire of the Sun." It's about the horrors
of the Second World War as told from the perspective of a young English
boy interned by the Japanese outside Shanghai, to whom the war isn't
horrible at all: it's a blast.
Lt.
General James Mathis recently got into hot water for saying:
"Actually,
it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot...It's fun
to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like
brawling." The general went on to say: "You go into
Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because
they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood
left anyway...So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them anyway."
Thank
God we have men like this on our side. Too bad the other sides have lots
of guys like this as well.
***
www.iSteve.com/05FebB.htm#Republicans.Democrats.Dirt.Gap
How
the Parties Could Manipulate the Dirt Gap: A reader responds:
*
Are you sure the Dirt Gap isn't an awkward proxy for population density?
I realize the difficulty of teasing the "true" density based
on inhabitable land from a reported density which may be calculated
with, say, the area of lakes within MSA boundaries in the denominator.
Could R's help themselves politically by encouraging the dispersal of
urban populations? (For one thing, this line of thought suggests once
again that R's should limit immigration, since most immigrants end up in
high-density areas. It also suggests that R's should build roads.)
Density is part of it, but
it's hard to measure in a meaningful way, as a link this reader sent
later points out. For example, this same reader then sent me a link
to government density statistics that show, well, that the
government has a lot of work to do on density. For example, Los Angeles
came out as the most densely populated standard metropolitan statistical
area
in the country, while Chicago was 20th. Even weirder, Oxnard, CA, an
exurb of LA out in Ventura County came in #10, well ahead of Chicago,
even though Oxnard still has some farms left. LA (and Oxnard) have
almost no urbanized areas comparable to either Chicago's towering
high-rise apartment lakefront or its vast stretches of three story six
flats. Almost all of LA looks like a suburb, but a dense suburb with a
lot of five houses to an acre tracts, whereas Chicago has lots of
suburbs zoned to one house per acre.
Anyway, I don't think inner urban density is necessarily related to the
Dirt Gap, but is more tied to when the city was built -- i.e., before or
after automobiles. Both Cleveland and Cincinnati are very old cities
with dense pre-automobile neighborhoods, but the latter's suburbs can
expand in 360 degrees and it's more Republican than Lake Erie-limited
Cleveland. My reader continues:
I
think that Democrat politicians like to make their areas more Blue. They
make their electoral districts more blue by gerrymandering. I suggest
that they make their geographic areas more blue by zoning.
Water (mountains) aren't the only barriers to housing expansion in the
modern political era. For example, I live in King County, Washington
near the city of Seattle. Seattle is very much constrained by water, and
there are various water and mountain areas in the County. But King
County has much unbuilt area close to Seattle which is *politically*
off-limits to housing development.
The Democrat politicians elected by high-density Seattle (and its
satellites) have literally outlawed suburban- density development in the
County, and to a large extent in the State as a whole. This benefits
them by preventing the evolution of Republican-voting suburbs of the
sort that used to be so powerful politically in California's Orange
County. (Political constraints on road expansion are also important
here.)
If Republicans wanted to foster populations likely to support them
politically, perhaps they could support better compensation for
"regulatory takings" (that is, make it harder for state/local
governments to outlaw suburban development). They could accomplish that
at the Federal level. At a State level, Republicans could support
County-splitting (or things like the San Fernando Valley secession from
LA) to help free potentially Red areas from the choking grip of slum-
and bohemia-based Blue politicians. (Perhaps Republicans could also use
Federal power to override local Blue opposition to road building, though
that would require big changes in the "Interstate Highway"
program.)
I'm mindful of your view of environmentalism in California (especially
in the North). It seems to me that "environmentalist"
Republicans powerful enough to keep their home areas at very low
densities aren't much use to national Republicans, because at those low
densities there aren't many votes in a given area. What I mean is,
national Republicanss would probably prefer a suburb of quarter-acre
homes with a mean of, say, 5 R-voters per acre to a virtual nature
preserve like coastal Monterey County with maybe 0.1 R's/acre (which I
calculate very roughly from voter registration in the coastal
districts--all but district 3 on this map).
Perhaps Republicans could encourage suburban-density housing by
manipulating Clean Air regulations. The air is typically much worse in
densely populated areas. But current Clean Air rules don't really
promote population dispersal because increasing population in a less
polluted area makes it more polluted, and any pollution increase is a
no-no. But suppose the Republicans made some ratio of population to
pollution the Clean Air figure of merit... since the relationship
between density and pollution is non-linear, Clean Air regulations could
favor suburban-densities to minimize overall population exposure to air
pollution. I realize this is a very complicated question, given the
problems of geography and weather which factor into air pollution; so I
offer it just as an example of the sort of political tactic Republicans
could investigate for viability.
***
www.iSteve.com/05FebB.htm#fight.club.consumerism.feminism
"Fight
Club" -- I finally got around to seeing the 1999 Brad Pitt -
Edward Norton fable about underground street fighting clubs that evolve
into a anti-consumerist anarchist/militarist movement under Pitt's
charismatic leadership. It reminded me of a conversation with one of my
sons when he was three and he was going on and on about Batman and
Superman. My wife interjected, "But, do Batman and Superman fight,
or are they friends?" My toddler gave her his "Silly woman,
don't you understand anything about us men?" look and replied,
"They are friends and they fight."
"Fight Club " made only $37 million at the box office, but
generated wild enthusiasm in the younger and higher IQ male segment. It's currently
rated the 38th best movie of all time on IMDB.com, a poll that's
dominated by smart younger guys. The comments on IMDB are of the "Best
movie ever, changed my life" ilk.
It's exhilarating stuff for awhile, although movies that hypothesize
novel revolutionary political movements typically fall apart in the last
act because nobody can figure out how to put the genie back in the
bottle. Frank Capra said that "Meet John Doe," with Gary
Cooper as the half-witting spokesman for a populist, quasi-fascist mass
movement manipulated by corporate bigwigs, was the most exciting movie
he ever made ... up until the ending, which completely defeated him.
I believe they shot five different endings of "Meet John Doe"
and weren't satisfied with any. "Fight Club" somewhat
successfully distracts attention from this problem by throwing in a
whole new psychological wrinkle toward end.
One thing that stood out was a certain lack of honesty about what all
these guys who join Pitt's private army are angry at society over. The
movie claims they are rebelling against consumerism, but clearly that's
just a politically correct placeholder for their anger at the
feminization of society. It's not men who are buying all that stuff Pitt
complains about.
***
www.iSteve.com/05FebB.htm#alfie.alexander.incredibles.benning
My
Fairly Recent Movie Reviews: From late last year's American
Conservative, with 1 to 10 rankings:
Oceans'
Twelve - George Clooney, Steven
Soderbergh - 7
Alexander
- Oliver Stone, Colin Farrell - 4
Polar
Express and The
Incredibles - Tom Hanks, Brad Bird - 5, 9
Alfie
-
Jude Law, Marisa Tomei - 3
Being
Julia,
Stage Beauty, Team America: World Police - 5, 5, 6
***
www.iSteve.com/05FebB.htm#sistani.israel.antle
Getting
our $200 Billion Worth in Entertainment Value: On Sistani.org,
the invaluable website of the Grand Ayatollah whom we've expended $200
billion to put in charge of Iraq, a reader found the following Q&A:
Question:
Is purchasing Nokia mobile allowed or not?
Answer: His permissible in it say. But if the prvfic gues to Israel, it is not allowed to purchase it.
I'm
not exactly clear what a "prvfic" is [profit?], but I don't
think the neocons are going to get Iraq to get in bed with Israel
anytime soon, as they had long hoped that Ahmed Chalabi would do (as Douglas
Feith's law partner, West Bank settler Marc Zell revealed).
W.
James Antle writes in Men's News Daily:
As the votes are tallied and the results continue to roll in, the religious Shiite political party linked to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani appears to be headed for a big win. The ticket associated with U.S.-backed Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is trailing badly. Key Shiite leaders are now speaking openly of imposing some version of Islamic law on the country.
Let’s be frank: This is almost exactly the opposite of what most war supporters intended to achieve in Iraq. Put aside for a moment your affection for President Bush and your enthusiasm for the Republican Party. Would you have wanted to go to war to replace a secular state with one ruled by clerics?
Yes, Dick Cheney insists he doesn’t see any theocracy looming on the Iraqi horizon. Maybe the newly elected government will prove capable of bringing the Sunnis back into the fold. There is some debate about whether Sistani and other Shiite clerics are actually as close to Iran as is often assumed. Hardly anybody, outside the stubborn insurgency, misses Saddam Hussein. It won’t be all that difficult for the new government to be an improvement over the Baathists of old.
None of this, however, adds up to a big picture of what we are trying to accomplish in Iraq or how this intersects with the broader global war on terror...
A lot of conservative thinking in the post-9/11 war on terror has been mired in past conflicts. Norman Podhoretz has described the struggle against international terrorism as “World War IV,” preceded by the Cold War as World War III. And the Cold War seems to be the frame of reference most conservatives use in analyzing the anti-terror war.
The analogy runs roughly like this: Militant Islam, or Islamism, has replaced communism. George W. Bush is reprising the role of Ronald Reagan, the leader who will finally prevail in our nation’s central geopolitical struggle. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech was his Evil Empire moment and the stirring rhetoric of his second inaugural address was his “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
This easy appeal to the recent past is one reason conservative Republicans are so reluctant to turn on President Bush even when the rest of the world opposes him and actual events don’t appear to go his way. After all, many of the same liberals and Europeans derided the 40th president as a know-nothing cowboy whose bellicosity put the world at risk of nuclear war...
Conservatives would serve them better with a more thoughtful response than merely re-fighting the last one.
***
www.iSteve.com/05FebB.htm#gap.map.red.blue.baby.marriage.mortgage
The
Gap Map: I've used Mapinator
to illustrate on one convenient page my first three articles explaining
the red
state -blue state vote gap: the Marriage
Gap, Baby
Gap, and Mortgage
Gap. (The Dirt
Gap is coming up later.)
I
scaled all four maps using the same scaling rule, from the next to
lowest to the next to highest states.
***
www.iSteve.com/05FebB.htm#maps.mapinator.red.blue.baby.gap
Maps
of Imprisonment Statistics by Race: Ethan
Herdrick, who is in the data map creation business, has graphed the
NCIA's 1997 statistics on rates of imprisonment by state per 100,000
individual whites, Hispanics, or blacks. Some interesting, little known
patterns emerge. Each ethnic group is on its own scale of yellow (good)
to purple (bad).
The
NCIA data is the best effort I've seen to solve the notorious problem
with government crime rate data of lumping Hispanics in with whites in
order to make the black to white ratio look a little less awful. Still,
some of the states don't break out Hispanics at all, so they appear in
black, and others don't do a trustworthy job. Still, this is better than
anything else you've seen.
UPDATE:
Using Ethan
Herdrick's EZ-2-Use "Mapinator" program, I created these two
maps showing the black to non-Hispanic white imprisonment ratio and the
Hispanic to non-Hispanic white imprisonment ratio.
And
here's another Mapinator
graph showing the three ethnic groups' imprisonment ratios using the
same yellow to purple color scale for each.
For
Hispanics, you'll notice what appears to be a mulatto vs. mestizo vs.
white imprisonment gap, with Puerto Ricans and Dominicans apparently
being more likely to be in prison than Mexicans and Central Americans,
with the Cubans the least likely. Or that could be related to
urbanization.
***
www.iSteve.com/05FebB.htm#imprisonment.rates.race.state
"Sailer's
One-Point Plan for Lessening Prejudice Against Minorities"
is my new VDARE column.
By
the way, I've put my important 2001 article "Imprisonment
Rates Vary Wildly by Race" and the incarceration
statistics by race by state that it's based on up on iSteve.com.
This data originally collected by the
liberal National Center on Institutions and Alternatives does the
best job I know of fixing the common problem with crime statistics of
lumping many Hispanics in with whites (unlike almost all other
government statistics, where Latinos are carefully broken out).
One
interesting fact is that Democratic-voting Blue States tend to imprison
a higher ratio of blacks to whites than Republican-voting Red States. In
ultra-liberal black-ruled Washington D.C., for example, blacks are 56
times more likely than whites to be in the slammer. In South Carolina
and Mississippi, the ratio is only 6 to 1. This strongly suggests that
racial discrimination by whites can't account for the overall 9 to 1
national black-white ratio in likelihood of being in jail.
***
www.iSteve.com/05FebB.htm#censorship.paul.mccartney
The
Horrors of Censoring the Arts: Last year at the Super Bowl Halftime
Show, we were dazzled by the brilliance of those two Artistic Geniuses
for the Ages, Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake. This year, due to the
backlash of stultifying red state prudery that Frank
Rich has denounced in the NYT about 27 times, we were forced
to endure somebody named Paul McCartney singing some song called
"Hey Jude" that might not even have a disco remix.
Also,
2005's Super Bowl commercials were better aesthetically than last year's
stinkers, almost certainly due to the increased censorship.
As
a football game, the Super Bowl was less boring than most. Philadelphia
had a small advantage in first downs and total yards, but looked like
they got outcoached. Bill Belchik and Tom Brady (IQ of 126 on the NFL's
mandatory Wonderlic IQ test) show the uses of matching a smart coach and
smart quarterback together.
Here's
Colby Cosh on the whole white
quarterback - black quarterback thing.
***
www.iSteve.com/05FebB.htm#jose.canseco.typhoid.mary.steroids
"The
Typhoid Mary of Baseball" -- The NYT
writes:
"According
to a report yesterday in The Daily News, Canseco contends in his book,
"Juiced," that he injected [70 homer slugger Mark] McGwire
with steroids in the bathroom stalls of the A's clubhouse. The two were
teammates in Oakland from 1986 until Canseco was traded to Texas in
1992...Canseco had promised to name names in his book, and he did not
stop with McGwire. The Daily News reported that Canseco claims to have
taught [Ivan] Rodriguez, Rafael Palmeiro and Juan Gonzalez, who were
teammates from his years in Texas, to use steroids."
Back
in 1993, a baseball player agent whose brother was a major-leaguer told
me that "Jose Canseco is the Typhoid Mary of baseball,"
because when he'd show up on a team, soon his new teammates started to
inflate like him.
You may recall that Rafael Palmeiro came up with the Chicago Cubs in
1986, but was traded to Texas after 1988 when rookie Mark Grace emerged
as the Cub's first baseman of the future. Grace enjoyed a fine
old-fashioned career, hitting .303 with a career high of 17 home runs.
Palmeiro, however, turned into a modern-style monster in Texas, hitting
47 homers in two separate seasons, and now has 551 for his career, 30
more than Ted Williams and 226 more than Joe DiMaggio, all without
anybody ever thinking Palmeiro was a great player.
On the other hand, all three of the
Texas Rangers Canseco named were good players before Canseco arrived, so
I'm not convinced. Maybe they would have developed without him. But I am
suspicious.
There's an interesting political angle: In last year's State of the
Union Address, President Bush used his bully pulpit to denounce steroid
use in sports. Bush, however, was the co-managing director of the Texas
Rangers in 1992 when they acquired Canseco. Bush's partners didn't trust
him enough to give him substantive power in running the team, using him
as a front man. But, Bush claims, he did have responsibility for signing
off on all trades, so he apparently approved the acquisition of Canseco,
even though Canseco had been notorious as a steroid user since at least
the 1988 post-season when Fenway Park fans showered him with chants of
"Ster-oid! Ster-oid" and he responded by striking a Mr.
Universe pose in the outfield. (The details on Bush and Canseco are in
my "Out of
the Park: Baseball & Steroids" article in the April
12, 2004 American Conservative.)
***
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