National mass shooting toll since 1980s = Chicago's 500 homicides in 2012

Mother Jones has a useful graph:

So, the total number of fatalities from mass shootings since some point in the 1980s is roughly the same as the total number of homicides in Chicago this year (500). 

On the other hand, most of the victims in Chicago are minorities. Most have criminal records. Indeed, a large fraction of the Chicago victims are drug dealers who might well have been the shooters themselves if only they'd shown more initiative (or better marksmanship).

Mass shooting victims, in contrast, are almost all random innocents. Indeed, the most recent mass shooters might be engaged in some kind of competition to come up with ever more outrageous samples of innocents, such as moviegoers or small white children.

By the way, you can see the collapse in mass shootings after the school shooting outside San Diego that I covered in early 2001. I argued at the time that we would see more and more such copycat crimes. Yet, the following year, 2002, was the only one with no victims since 1985. 

Mass shootings are unlike most other kinds of violence in that there's no particular logic to their causes other than desire for notoriety and copycatism, both murky motivations. If the authorities let criminals, say, get away with carjackings, then there will be more carjackings. It's only rational. Yet, the rationality of these crimes makes deterrence more feasible. A variety of outrageous crimes -- carjacking, kidnapping, home invasion, even mugging -- have been increasingly deterred in recent decades.

But nobody ever gets away with a mass shooting.

Which means that, by definition, deterring mass shootings is difficult.

So, we need to prevent them. But the methods proposed for preventing such unusual and cloudy crimes -- putting a brave marksman cop in every school, taking away 300 million guns, locking up the weird, arming kindergarten teachers, etc. -- are not terribly confidence inspiring. Since nobody knows for sure what to do, this makes mass shootings ideal for arguing over. Everybody gets to expound on their favorite prejudice -- stomp on rednecks, hire gun lovers to sit in schools, or whatever -- without much connection to what will happen next.

New Year's Eve-impaired judgment panhandling drive

There are a few ways to support my work:

First, you can make a tax deductible contribution via VDARE by clicking clicking here.

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Girlthink

From the Washington Post:

Why we love ‘Les Miserables,’ despite its miserable gender stereotypes 

By Stacy Wolf, Published: December 28 

Stacy Wolf is a professor of theater at Princeton University and the author of “Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical.” 

“Les Miserables” should have feminists like me up in arms. The musical takes the female characters from a 150-year-old novel about a French rebellion and makes them bit players — even though they figure prominently in the book (and in the marketing for the musical and movie). They exist not to drive the plot but to sacrifice for the men, the real stars of the show. 

But I can’t help it: I love “Les Miz.” As a theater historian who studies gender and sexuality in the American musical, when women are abused or marginalized on stage, I notice. Yet “Les Miz” never fails to move me.

Les Miz's pounding music gave me a headache when I saw the Broadway touring company a couple of decades ago. My main memory of the three hours is my increasingly frantic search during intermission for a drug store on Michigan Avenue that could sell me a bottle of aspirin. But, don't let my experience bias your enjoyment!

... And the fact that viewers are flocking to a movie full of outdated gender roles reminds us that, though we’ve seen gains in gender equity in politics and pop culture in the past few decades, old stereotypes still persist — and, somehow, we still love them. 

I live with this contradiction of outdated gender roles within pop culture every day. Looking at culture through a feminist lens doesn’t mean that you don’t have fun or sing along. It means that you can also see what’s missing or what’s politically troubling. 

In 1987, when “Les Miz” opened on Broadway, it was part of a cultural moment that Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Susan Faludi labeled the “anti-feminist backlash.” Its popularity at the time wasn’t surprising: The late 1980s weren’t kind to ambitious women. Television didn’t allow single mothers — such as Murphy Brown and Kate and Allie — to live successful, fulfilling lives. They all failed personally or professionally. ...

Audiences in the late 1980s accepted such gender slights, but what about now? Samantha Barks, who plays the rejected Eponine in the new movie, told the New York Times that she receives tweets every day from girls who say they relate perfectly to the character’s longing: “Why am I always Eponine?” they write. 

Despite bigger, stronger and more complex roles for women in television and film and on stage, the smaller, diminished tragedies of “Les Miz” still resonate with viewers in 2012. 

Why? Largely because they’re familiar. 

The female stereotypes in “Les Miz” are deeply embedded in our culture — the mother who sacrifices herself to the death, the two women who love the same man, and the woman who desires a man in a different class. These characters are readily available, always recognizable and appealing in their familiarity. ...

There’s a deep well of nostalgia for “Les Miz,” especially among women who came of age when it was on Broadway or on tour — even though it doesn’t reflect our feminist politics. ... 

We understand ourselves and our identities because of the stories we’re told. When we hear the same stories about people — women, gays, the poor, Asians or African Americans — over and over, we start to believe them. If our culture tells us that women should sacrifice themselves for their children or for men’s careers, we find it unremarkable that the women of “Les Miz” do just that. ...

But for anyone who thinks critically about gender, it’s unsettling. 

Thankfully, we’re no longer stuck in a 1980s anti-feminist backlash. Depictions of women in today’s pop culture are varied and complex. The “Bridesmaids” characters dare to be outrageous, funny and obscene. Carrie Mathison on “Homeland,” even on the verge of nervous collapse, is tough and brilliant, as is sharp-shooting Katniss Everdeen in “The Hunger Games” and misogynist-killing Lisbeth Salander in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.”

Those are some fine movies!

These women are strong, clever and, yes, vulnerable. 

swolf@princeton.edu 

Okay, okay, Obama won by demonizing the Republican War on Women, just like Bill Clinton won in 1992's Year of the Woman, when we had to put up with lowbrow feminists like Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf being treated as the second coming of John Stuart Mill.

But, the election's over, so can the feminists please now go back to their university sinecures until the Democrats need them in the next election, and stop boring the rest of us with their self-indulgent lack of logic?

Classic from the files: Why do car salesmen dress like that?

About a decade ago, Edmunds.com paid journalist Chandler Phillips to get sales jobs at a couple of L.A.-area new car dealerships and then write "Confessions of a Car Salesman" about what he'd learned. I stumbled upon this during the long debate initiated by Malcolm Gladwell when he responded incredulously to Judge Richard Posner and me objecting to his contention in his bestseller Blink about why car salesmen charge blacks and women more. Gladwell contended that car salesman discriminated against blacks and women in price negotiations only because they didn't realize they were unconsciously discriminating even though it was costing them money. Posner in The New Republic and I in VDARE argued in negative reviews of Blink that car salesmen tend to be jerks who have a pretty good idea of how to weasel more money out of people. 

In defense of Gladwell's position, you have to admit that car salesmen don't dress in a manner calculated to inspire trust. Phillips writes:

What [car salesmen] think is cool is viewed by the public as tacky and obvious. For example, why do they insist on wearing white shirts and silk ties? Or what about gold watches, rings and chains? Who wears that stuff anymore? Don't they realize they are turning themselves into walking cliches? The only answer I came up with was that, as a salesman, I spent all my time with other salesmen. They were my friends. Believe it or not, I tried to fit in, to belong. So I began to develop an interest in gold ties, white shirts and dress shoes. I even grew a goatee because a lot of the guys had beards. And I put gel on my hair and combed it straight back.

On the other hand, Phillips hints at car salesman lore that fits the Informed Jerk model better:

Since I was still a "green pea" the other salesmen tried to push me to wait on undesirable ups — the undesirable customers who the salesmen thought wouldn't or couldn't qualify to buy a car. My manager had, at one point, described the different races and nationalities and what they were like as customers. It would be too inflammatory to repeat what he said here. But the gist of it was that the people of such-and-such nationality were "lie downs" (people who buy without negotiating), while the people of another race were "roaches" (they had bad credit), and people from that country were "mooches" (they tried to buy the car for invoice price). 

I'll repeat what Michael, my ASM, told me about Caucasians . He said white people never come into the dealership. "They're all on the Internet trying to find out what our invoice price is. We never even get a shot at them. I hate it. I mean, would they go (to a mall) and say, 'What's your invoice price on that beautiful suit?' No. So why are they doing it here?"

Presumably "lie downs" are African-Americans. The study by Ian Ayers of Yale Law School that Gladwell brought up as evidence that salesmen were unintentionally discriminating showed that black law students couldn't negotiate as low a price as white law students. 

The rest of the sentence is a little ambiguous, but I'm guessing that "roaches" are Mexican-Americans (although Mexicans could be the bad negotiators and blacks the bad credit). I suspect that "mooches" "from that country" does not mean from Mexico, but is more likely referring to hard-nosed Asian immigrants such as Koreans.

In Phillips' experience, the American brand dealership he worked at second was less obnoxious, while the popular Japanese dealership was pretty much plain evil. That's been my experience over the years with a certain gigantic T-y-t- dealership in the San Fernando Valley. They ripped my deaf octogenarian father off for a ridiculous interest rate when he could have paid cash for his Corolla. Mostly, though, they seem to exist to psychologically intimidate Mexicans into paying too much.

Dress for Bias

Back in 1980, I read John T. Molloy's advice book Dress for Success. It was aimed at the large number of men who don't particularly care about looking good, but who don't want to look bad. It was nearly unique in that Molloy had done simple social science research before offering his fashion advice to men in the business world. What kind of unspoken prejudices do the public hold about men's clothing?

For example, he asked the cops at a New York commuter train station if they'd ever arrested a pickpocket wearing a tie. No. 

He then tried bumming train fare home to Connecticut by claiming to have lost his wallet. When dressed in a suit and a tie, he was remarkably successful, with some commuters even giving him extra money to buy a newspaper to read on his way home. When wearing a suit but no tie, he did okay. When dressed casually, he did poorly. 

He reported that his research showed that the hierarchy of suits in terms of perceived trustworthiness and favorability was blue > gray > brown > green. To the public, a man wearing a blue suit was seen slightly more favorably than a man wearing a gray suit. A maroon tie was best. In contrast, men dressed in (and my memory is murky here) green suits and/or bowties were assumed to be embezzlers, college professors, or alcoholics. Perhaps a green suit and a bowtie was assumed to be worn only by academics embezzling the departmental petty cash for cheap gin? 

All in all, it was very helpful stuff for a young man. 

'Dress for Success' Book Leads to Discrimination Suit
By Christopher Cornell
Friday, July 1, 2005

A former salesman for the Philadelphia Eagles Radio Network has been awarded $614,000 by the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission in a discrimination case that began after his supervisor handed out copies of a book, New Dress for Success, by John T. Molloy. 

In May 2001, supervisors at the radio network, which is affiliated with WYSP FM in Philadelphia, distributed the book to all its salespeople, including Shawn Brooks, 34, then the only African-American salesperson on staff. 

The book is a collection of advice on how to dress for business success, and in a chapter directed at minorities, it advises blacks selling to whites not to wear "Afro" hairstyles or African-style clothing. It also advises Hispanic salespeople  o "avoid any hair tonic that tends to give a greasy or shiny look to the hair; this also triggers a negative reaction." 

Brooks was offended by the contents of the book, and when he deemed the response to his complaints insufficient, he resigned and filed discrimination charges with the commission. 

Brooks found sympathetic ears at the commission. After reviewing the book, commission Chairman Stephen A. Glassman called it "the most egregious case of published documentation on stereotyping and bias toward race, gender and religion in the workplace the commissioners have seen in a long time." 

Viacom Inc. and Infinity Broadcasting, the network's parent companies, have appealed the ruling to a state appellate court.

Here are some offending quotes:

(i) “If you are black selling to white Middle America, dress like a white. . . . This clothing conveys that you are a member of the establishment and that you are pushing no radical or other feared ideas.”  

(ii) “Blacks selling to whites should not wear Afro hairstyles or any clothing that is African in association.  If you are selling to corporate America, it’s very important that you dress, not as well as the white salesman, but better than them.  You have to wear suits, shirts and ties that are expensive and more conservative than your white co-workers.”

(iii) “If you are white selling to blacks, you will fare much better if you dress in non-establishment patterns.  Black America is essentially divided into two camps, establishment and anti-establishment, and the divisions are not dictated by income alone. . . . Almost all members of Northern ghettos who are in the lower socioeconomic groups are understandably antiestablishment. . . . The black establishment includes all blacks who have made it along with almost all Southern, rural blacks, no matter what their position.  Southern blacks do not consider themselves disenfranchised . . . .”

(iv) “When selling to middle class blacks, you cannot dress like a ghetto black . . . .”

(v) “It is an undeniable fact that the typical upper-middle-class American looks white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant.  He is of medium build, fair complexion with almost no pronounced physical characteristics.  He is the model of success; that is, if you run a test, most people of all socioeconomic, racial and ethnic backgrounds will identify with him as such.”

(vi) “The two groups who have the most problems with their appearances are black men and Hispanic men.  It is unfortunate but true that our society has conditioned us to look upon members of both groups as belonging to the lower classes, and no matter how high a minority individual rises in status or achievement, he is going to have some difficulty being identified by his success rather than his background.  But clothing can help.”

Here's more on this case from Michael Smerconish, including an interview with Molloy about it, and some ironies.

I don't know what the eventual outcome of this discrimination case was. Typically these extremely egregious cases get sanded down in the appeals process. If I were Brooks' lawyer, I'd advise him to be happy with a settlement offer of, say, $100k.

P.S. Doing some more research, I find this 2009 Third Circuit Court of Appeals decision affirming the trial court's summary judgment against the plaintiff. In other words, assuming the case didn't go on to the Supreme Court, the black guy lost completely. It only took eight years and a 16-page decision of the second highest level court in the land.

My impression is that these kind of initial decisions giving absurd amounts of money to blacks for exigent degrees of discrimination constitute a kind of urban folklore among  black people, encouraging them to be on the lookout for a lawsuit that could make their fortune.

The fact that many of the most ridiculous charges of discrimination eventually get dismissed or get settled for pennies on the dollar is not widely known. It's not considered news. Blacks find it depressing. The occasional white populist like Smerconish finds it boring. Elite media doesn't find it fits the Narrative. And there is almost no will in America to shame individual blacks for these kind of violations of civil society.

Second, consider the "chilling effect" of this eight year long lawsuit. Justice William Brennan of the Warren Court popularized the phrase "chilling effect" as something we must be vigilant against in making sure that laws don't suppress free speech. The chilling effect of anti-discrimination efforts on free speech is pretty obvious if you stop and think about it, but almost nobody ever does.

As I've pointed out many times, much of what we think of as speech in the U.S. is paid for by businesses, and businesses are loath to associate their names with anybody who could be cited in a discrimination lawsuit. For example, Malcolm Gladwell is a role model to a generation of journalists (e.g., Jonah Lehrer) because of his ability to profit lavishly from both the prestige press  and from corporate speaking engagements. Corporations know that they won't get in legal trouble hiring Malcolm Gladwell to speak to their salesmen, but they could hiring somebody "controversial."

Therefore, I was hoping to see in the 3rd Circuit decision a ringing chastisement of the plaintiff for his suit's chilling effect on free speech. Instead, we get:

Although Brooks was understandably offended by the contents of the book he was instructed by Zurzolo to read and follow, the record is clear that Zurzlo did not know about the book’s offensive passages and that employees were quickly informed that the book did not reflect the views of the company or their supervisors.  Given this, the distribution of New Dress for Success does not represent sufficiently severe harassment to support a Title VII hostile work environment claim.

If I were a manager at a deep-pocketed corporation, from this I'd draw the lesson that black and Hispanic employees are "understandably offended" by Molloy's findings, so, to be safe, our corporation better not have anything to do with Molloy. Granted, the court decided that handing out the book alone is not enough for a $614,000 payout, but it doesn't help.

Urban Baby

A reader commends to me the discussion site UrbanBaby.com for the displaying the id of upper crust white new mothers and mothers-to-be as they confront realities associated with reproduction, causing them to think inappropriate thoughts. For example, on the most popular list is:

I am affiliated with a large university. Every time a crime happens on/near my campus (if the victim is a university affiliate), the campus security department sends an email to all affiliates with a description of the crime and a description/photo of the perpetrator(s). I have been affiliated with this university for over a decade and have received several such emails a month. In every single instance, the perpetrator(s) are young black males. My question: How do I avoid fearing/stereotyping young black males when I am out on the street? Most of these perpetrators have not been caught. Some of the crimes are quite violent. 

This sets off a long discussion, with points made that 

- readers surmise that this campus must be Columbia, or Yale, or U. of Chicago, or U. of Illinois Chicago, or Penn, or Northwestern, or Loyola. A few readers slyly imply that it's somewhat futile to try to identify which unique campus has this unique problem.

- that white male fraternity boys commit a lot of crimes on campus (although if the Urban Baby reader who wrote in is getting black out drunk at fraternity parties, then she and her Urban Baby have a whole 'nother level of problems); 

- "You don't know what you're talking about. Black people are more likely to be charged and convicted for crimes. This does not mean they commit more crimes. You need to work on your critical thinking."

- "Keep in mind, a white guy shoot and killed 27 people two weeks ago."

- "And another white guy shot up a mall just before that. And another white guy shot up a movie theater a little while ago."

- "But how about the Midwest and Kentucky? Plenty of scary white people there. You seem really uninformed."

- "This post made me think of Sandusky..."

- "How about all those white priests! Just saying."

Anyway, I've always wanted to turn this discussion around and discuss how non-criminal black males signal to white people on the street that they aren't violent. A lot of white people would probably like to stereotype more accurately, but our society makes almost zero effort to educate well-intentioned whites in how to do it.

Brent Staples of the New York Times Editorial Board wrote a famous essay about how filled with rage it made him when a woman walking alone down the street at night worried that he might be an Angry Black Man. As he got older, he decided, though, that it would be best for all concerned if he tried to alleviate tension proactively by whistling selections from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. This essay is now cited frequently to demonstrate the terrible cross black men must bear: for example, a recent book by Claude Steele was entitled Whistling Vivaldi.

My guess is that a large fraction of younger black men like to send clues that they aren't thugs. For example, in the 1990s, after Spike Lee's "Malcolm X" movie came out, it seemed like wearing glasses became a bit of black male shorthand for "I'm black and I've been to college." But, I don't keep up with that sort of thing as much anymore. 

And it's difficult for general clueless white people to look up on the Internet signifiers of black harmlessness without being able to read way between the lines. You could probably watch a whole lot of Key & Peele shows and make up lists of class markers among blacks, but anybody who wrote up a table for the straight-forward education of well-meaning whites would get in trouble. 

Moreover, blacks police blacks who don't act thug enough. For example, Washington Redskins' Heisman trophy-winning star rookie QB Robert Griffin III got dumped on for not being black enough, even though he looks about 98% black, and so far seems like a credit to any race. So, if nice white people started to figure out what the signals were, blacks would razz the ones who showed them, making them unpopular.

Moreover, white people love to ironically espouse thuggish black fads like hoodies, a sort of KKK hood for convenience store robbers.

Mexicans have equivalent thug fashions, but, fortunately, white people find Mexican narco fashions, in the rare moments when they notice them, retarded-looking:

Notice that when that Mexican-American lady-singer, Jenny Rivera, died in a plane crash in Mexico this month, it was only slowly noticed by America's white media that she was a huge star in narcocorridas. It turns out her father is a big name as a producer in that field. 

From the LA Times:

Jenni Rivera, the Mexican American pop music singer who died in an airplane crash this weekend, came from a family that wielded an enormous influence on Mexican popular culture in Los Angeles. 

Her father, Pedro Rivera, is a pioneering entrepreneur among the business class that grew from, and grew strong in, the Mexican immigrant consumer market in the cities of southeast Los Angeles County. 

Among his achievements, Pedro Rivera was among the first to release the records of Chalino Sanchez, a skinny young immigrant from Paramount, who, in death, would become the godfather of the Mexican narcocorrido or narco-ballad. 

Pedro Rivera formed Cintas Acuario from a Long Beach storefront. The company rode the immense narcocorrido wave that followed Sanchez’s slaying in 1992 with a series of anthology cassettes -- Corridos Perrones -- with bands and singers posing with AK-47s, flashy cars and songs suggesting the musicians’ drug-mob connections. 

That's all news to me, as it is to white people everywhere. There are practically no SWPLs in the United States who are into narcocorridas, not even ironically. When some rapper gets shot, everybody at Brown U. swoons from the exciting tragedy of it all, but nobody cares about the Mexican equivalent.

It's not that white people were never interested in this kind of music. For example, Marty Robbins' El Paso was a huge hit in 1959. But, they moved on.

On the whole, it's good for Mexicans that white people don't find them cool.

Chicago's 500th homicide of 2012

During the post-2008 economic slowdown, crime has generally ebbed. But, Chicago remains an aberration, reaching its 500th homicide of 2012 this week, more than the much larger city of New York. 

What are the most plausible theories for what is going on in Chicago?

Why is the Hitlermobile still fashionable in 2013?

Volkswagen recently butched up its girly New Beetle of 1997-2011 to make it look less like Daddy's Little Princess's off-to-college present and more like a Wehrmacht steel helmet:

Today, the latest Volkswagen Beetle resembles what Hitler would have come up with if he'd had a second testicle.

In reality, Hitler didn't actually design the Volkswagen Bug. He  just gave Dr. Porsche the specifications (carry a family of five at 62 mph, and sell for under 1000 marks) and a lot of enthusiastic suggestions.

Of all production cars in the 21st Century, the Volkswagen Beetle has, by far, the oldest body style. It's recognizably the same shape that was delivered to Hitler on his 49th birthday in 1938. That's particularly interesting because -- although the original rear-engined car was manufactured in Mexico up through 2006 -- for the last decade and a half, the VW Bug sold in the U.S. has been all new under the sheet metal, with a front engine and front-wheel drive. But VW has gone to great pains to keep the silhouette recognizable as the same beetle-like one that Hitler loved three quarters of a century ago. Even as Volkswagen has flipped the current front engined Beetle back and forth from a feminine style to now a masculine style (on the sensible grounds that girls will buy guy cars, but guys won't buy girl cars), they've kept the overall look recognizably Hitlerian.

I wonder if Porsche ever asked Hitler why Germany, a densely populated country well-served by rail and lacking in petroleum resources, truly needed a mass market car seemingly best suited for a continent-sized and resource-rich country like America. Hitler might have replied, "You get me the car, I'll get you the continent." Then, again, Porsche wasn't really the question-asking type, or so he explained to the Allies in 1946.

This is not to say that the VW Beetle caused the War. Yet, in Hitler's mind, it was one of the pieces of his plan.

To der fuhrer, the Volkswagen Beetle was the physical embodiment of National Socialism. In the long run, the VW Bug was what it was all going to turn out to be about, the German masses finally on wheels, sporting about in all that lebensraum from the Rhine to the Urals. The Beetle, or as Hitler called it, the Strength-through-Joy car, was an integral part of his vision of a New Order for Europe, in which happy Germans would motor at high speed down the autobahns to vacation on their newly conquered Crimean beaches. As Hitler explained to his long-suffering tablemates:

The Germans must acquire the feeling for the great, open spaces. We must arrange things so that every German can realise for himself what they mean. We'll take them on trips to the Crimea and the Caucasus. There's a big difference between seeing these countries on the map and actually having visited them. The railways will serve for the transport of goods, but the roads are what will open the country for us. ...

The Volkswagen—and I think our war experiences justify us in saying so—is the car of the future. One had only to see the way in which these Volkswagen roaring up the Obersalzberg overtook and skipped like mountain goats round my great Mercedes, to be tremendously impressed. After the war, when all the modifications dictated by war experience have been incorporated in it, the Volkswagen will become the car par excellence for the whole of Europe, particularly in view of the fact that it is air-cooled, and so unaffected by any winter conditions.  

In theory, being closely associated with Hitler is a downer from most marketing perspectives. For example, consider the term "eugenics," which was associated for about a century with the British Darwinian tradition, and with Anglo-American progressivism. Inspired by Galton's vision of increasing eugenic awareness, scientists who were eugenics enthusiasts made major breakthroughs in fields as disparate as genetics, psychology, evolutionary theory, statistics, psychometrics, and electronics. For example, it's not a coincidence that what's today Silicon Valley was a center of IQ research and eugenics promotion (e.g., the Termans) from the early 1900s into the 1970s. And, yet, somehow, Stanford didn't invade Poland.

But, since the 1970s or 1980s, eugenics has been as closely associated in the popular mind with Hitler as the Charlie Chaplin mustache, even though the connection between eugenics and World War II is certainly no more direct than between the VW Bug and WWII.

But, the past is mutable. To propound the central role of eugenics had to wait for a generation to pass so that those who actually remembered the era were in decline in numbers and energy. 

In contrast, in the late 1950s, the Volkswagen company hired Bill Bernbach's advertising firm to write a long series of brilliant ads to make the Beetle seem cute rather than sinister, to wash away the memories of all those pictures of Hitler with his Beetle. In 1999, Advertising Age named Doyle Dane Bernbach's  "Think Small" ads the greatest ad campaign of the 20th Century.

Marketing matters.

Two-part interview with me in the Washington Times

In the Washington Times, Joseph Cotto interviews me:

Part One

Part Two

End of the Year Panhandling!

Your response to my fundraiser in early October was so encouraging that I'm going to wedge in a second drive for 2012. 

There are a few ways to support my work:

First, you can make a tax deductible contribution via VDARE by clicking clicking here.

Second, you can make a non-tax deductible contribution by credit card via WePay by clicking here. 

Third: You can mail a non-tax deductible donation to:

Steve Sailer

P.O Box 4142

Valley Village, CA 91607-4142

Thanks.

Environmentalism adds to inequality

Part of my project of noticing what's in front of one's nose is to finally incorporate real estate into intellectual discourse, front and center Most people spend a lot of time thinking about where they'd like to live and and how much it would cost, the interesting implications of this natural human obsession were largely ignored in high-end intellectual discourse in the later years of the 20th Century. Too mundane, or something.

In this century, we see a few academics start to tug at various corners of this over-arching web of causality.

Much of the current Red-Blue divide in how states vote for President evolved only over the last generation. The Gap now closely correlates with housing prices by state: e.g., the expensive San Francisco Bay area votes Democratic and the cheap Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex votes Republican.

But, differences in housing prices were not so striking in the past. For example, homes in Los Angeles were no more expensive than the national average up through 1975. 

An article in the Harvard Magazine overlooks the political implications, but does track history of differences in housing prices to a divergence in land use regulation in the 1970s:

Immobile Labor 

by Ashley Pettus 

January-February 2013 

FOR 100 YEARS, the United States experienced a steady decline in income disparities between the richest and poorest states—with Mississippi and Alabama, for example, beginning to catch up to the more prosperous Connecticut and New York. But this equalizing trend ceased after 1980. Why? According to Daniel Shoag, assistant professor of public policy at the Kennedy School’s Taubman Center for State and Local Government, housing prices explain a large part of the puzzle. In a recent working paper coauthored with doctoral candidate in economics Peter Ganong, Shoag found that land-use restrictions in high-income locales have created barriers to entry for less-skilled workers, exacerbating inequality and threatening labor mobility—a key component of a healthy economy. 

Economists have long viewed the leveling of U.S. regional incomes as a prime example of “convergence”—the principle that, in a market system, poor economies will grow faster than rich economies as capital moves in search of greater productivity gains. Yet this “capital mobility” theory doesn’t explain why the nation’s wealth gap stopped closing 30 years ago, leaving poor states still a sizable distance behind. 

Shoag and Ganong posited that something more than mobile capital had to be involved to account for the end of the convergence effect. By digging into census records, they found that a pattern of directed labor migration (people moving to more productive places in search of higher earnings) could explain 40 percent to 75 percent of the century-long growth in economic equality among states. As more workers moved into higher-income areas, wages there began to fall, and human capital began to even out, while in the areas that were losing workers, wages began to rise, drawing more people into the workforce and increasing average incomes. “When this directed migration stopped,” Shoag explains, “income convergence also stopped.” 

He and Ganong suspected that housing markets might explain why people stopped moving. What they found startled them. “Of course, rich places have always had higher housing prices than poor places,” Shoag notes, “but after 1980, the slope doubles.” The steep rise in housing costs in places like New York City, Boston, and San Francisco has had a direct impact on migration patterns and, hence, on convergence. Even though highly skilled workers in fields like finance or high tech have continued to move to these cities, low-skilled workers no longer have an incentive to do so because the higher cost of living now outweighs the likely income gains. Instead of poorer people moving to New York, pushing down wages there, while bidding up wages in poor areas, and skills equilibrating across places, “What you now get is skill sorting,” Shoag explains. “High-skilled people continue to move in, while poor people start moving out.”

What caused housing markets to change? The researchers created an index of regulation that could predict the flexibility of housing supply in different states in response to demand. Using an online database, they measured the number of times the phrase “land use” appeared in appellate court cases by state and year, and found that land-use restrictions became more common nationwide in the 1970s, but that not all states became strict regulators.

The Have places (e.g., Northern California) had gone heavily for land use regulations while the Have Less places (e.g., Northern Texas) had not.

The frequency of “land use” references in a state’s legal history proved a good predictor of whether a state would develop a high-regulation housing economy with constrained supply. By measuring regulation levels, Shoag and Ganong were able to test their hypothesis: they found that regulations limit housing supply by reducing the number of permits for new construction, and raising prices. This lowers net migration, and thus slows human-capital convergence and income convergence.

It's worth noting an important distinction in regulations on land use between new construction (which are enforced with severity) and land use regulations on existing construction (which often get a wink and a nod). Recall how The Edge of U2 has hired half the ex-legislators in Sacramento in his struggle to build five houses on a ridge in Malibu. In contrast, 20 miles away in Northridge, a resident of an illegal boarding house holding 17 people in a one family home murdered four other people.

Americans, used to having a certain standard of living, move out of regions with strict regulations against new construction and unenforced limits on overcrowding existing construction. Foreigners, who will live 17 to a single family home, move in.

The authors have yet to investigate why increased regulation took hold in certain states, but they do know that land restrictions preceded the concentrations of wealth.

Land use regulations tended to take off first in places like Northern California where you have a combination of really nice land hemmed in by deep water, lots of local high-end wealth producing businesses, and a post-Puritan tradition conducive to elitism.

From the working paper:

During the period of strong convergence prior to 1980, population flowed from poor to rich states, and changes in population were also well-predicted by initial income. Figure 3 plots the relationship between the twenty year changes in log population and initial log income per-capita for the period 1940-1960. Over those decades, a doubling in initial income per capita was associated with an 1.6 percentage point higher annual growth rate in population. Four states – Arizona, California, Florida, and Nevada – had high average incomes and grew extremely quickly.

Hey, those states that grew both in population and wealth in the good old days --  Arizona, California, Florida, and Nevada -- where have we ever heard of them before? Oh, yeah, they are Michael Lewis's Sand States, the one's where the popping of the Housing Bubble set of the current recession. Funny how new arrivals in the Sand States did so well in 1960-1980, but not so hot in the 21st Century. I wonder what changed?

In the last thirty years, this pattern has largely disappeared. ... As an example, from 2000 to 2010 Utah’s population grew by 24% wheareas Massachusetts’s populaion grew by just 3%. This occured even though per capita incomes in Massachusetts were 55% higher in 2000.

And, funny thing is, people in Massachusetts like getting richer without getting more crowded. They like improving the quality of newcomers. Now, it's hard to fit Massachusetts' successful policies of snobbism in with Massachusetts' loudly proclaimed ideology of equality, but such is the way of the world.

The jobs Americans just will do

The NYT is worried that the energy boom in eastern Montana has created too many high-paying jobs for Americans. This time, instead of the natural gas rotting in the ground, the problem is that some local teens are passing up junior college to make $40,000 or $50,000 per year:

Pay in Oil Fields Is Luring Youths in Montana 

SIDNEY, Mont. — For most high school seniors, a college degree is the surest path to a decent job and a stable future. But here in oil country, some teenagers are choosing the oil fields over universities, forgoing higher education for jobs with salaries that can start at $50,000 a year.

It is a lucrative but risky decision for any 18-year-old to make, one that could foreclose on his future if the frenzied pace of oil and gas drilling from here to North Dakota to Texas falters and work dries up. But with unemployment at more than 12 percent nationwide for young adults and college tuition soaring, students here on the snow-glazed plains of eastern Montana said they were ready to take their chances. 

... Even gas stations are enticing students away from college. Katorina Pippenger, a high school senior in the tiny town of Bainville, Mont., said she makes $24 an hour as a cashier in nearby Williston, N.D., the epicenter of the boom. Her plan is to work for a few years after she graduates this spring, save up and flee. She likes the look of Denver. “I just want to make money and get out,” she said. 

But school officials in eastern Montana said more and more students were interested in working for at least a year after graduation and getting technical training instead of a four-year degree. 

Last year, one-third of the graduating seniors at Sidney High School headed off to work instead of going to college or joining the military, a record percentage.

Uh-oh ... One out of three high school graduates gets a job.

... Meanwhile, enrollment at Dawson Community College in Glendive, about an hour from Sidney, has fallen to 225 students from 446 just a few years ago, as fewer local students pursue two-year degrees. 

Obviously, the solution is to get undocumented workers to do the jobs Americans just will do. Remember, cheap labor and diversity are the solutions for whatever problems you've got, even if they aren't problems.

India starts to notice that pervasive infant malnutrition is a "national shame"

To a lot of Westerners, India seems cooler than China because it is diverse, democratic, and "postnational," while 21st Century China resembles a homogenous, authoritarian, competent, boring un-Davosy 19th-20th Century nationalistic country. And what could be uncooler than that?

On the other hand, there are reasons why nationalism was popular around the globe from the 18th Century onward, and is still hugely popular with the masses, as the World Cup and Olympics demonstrate almost everywhere (except India). 

Nationalism was basically about winning (or at least not losing) wars, and Europeans (such as Prussians) started to notice that having healthy, educated masses was conducive to not getting conquered. Europeans' colonial subjects started to get the lesson, too. 

For a variety of reasons, though, India lagged so far in nationalism that it now strikes many Westerners as futuristic. Even caste seems less backward to upper middle class Americans today than it did a generation ago: You mean there's a system where I could grandfather my kids and grandkids into my status and not have to worry that Tiger Mothers' spawn will outcompete them? Interesting. Tell me more ...

But, there are downsides to a lack of nationalism, as well.

From the Washington Post:

India wakes up to child malnutrition ‘shame,’ begins to make progress 

By Simon Denyer, Updated: Wednesday, December 26, 8:04 AM 

BANSWARA, India – Stung by the realization that it faced a child malnutrition crisis worse than in most African countries, India is finally waking to the scale of the problem. 

Progress is still slow and political will still patchy, but there are signs that a new approach to fighting malnutrition is just beginning to reap dividends. 

Efforts to improve rural health and education have combined with an expansion of a child welfare program that employs nearly 2 million village health workers to focus on maternal and infant health and nutrition. A rural jobs plan has helped raise wages in the countryside and new programs are educating adolescent girls, nearly half of whom will marry before age 18, about feeding and hygiene. 

There are indications it could be starting to pay off. An independent survey of malnutrition in 100 of India’s least-developed districts released in January showed the first signs of progress, with the proportion of underweight children falling to 42 percent, a drop of 11 percentage points. 

... Maharashtra is home to India’s financial capital, Mumbai, and is the country’s economic powerhouse. Still, malnutrition rates did not begin falling significantly until the state government started showing the political will to tackle the problem head-on. 

Nationally, the wake-up call came in 2007 with the realization that a decade-and-a-half of buoyant economic growth had scarcely dented child malnutrition rates, which remained higher than the average in sub-Saharan Africa. Nearly half of Indian children under age 5 were stunted and underweight for their age, a government survey released that year showed, permanently impairing their mental and physical development. 

But in a country where many middle-class Indians find the subject of malnutrition rather boring, it took the idea that India was underperforming — not just compared with Africa but also with neighbors like Bangladesh — to embarrass the government into action. In 2007, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called it a “national shame” and a failed strategy began to be reevaluated.

The notion of a "national shame" is old-fashioned, but it can be effective. If you are behind Bangladesh, you really need to get to work.

The family’s situation is just one illustration of what nutritionists call a perfect storm of factors driving India’s malnutrition crisis. Many children are born to teenage, anemic, malnourished mothers; feeding practices are poor; and the environment they live in, a crowded country where 600 million people have no access to toilets, is rife with fecal matter. 

Health programs were largely missing infants in the first two years of their lives, when malnutrition usually sets in and causes permanent mental and physical damage, Aguayo said. 

Fewer than half of Indian children start nursing within their first 24 hours, receiving water rather than the early, antibody-rich breast milk that helps protect against infections, and most spend their first few years subsisting on protein- and vitamin-poor diets of just rice or bread. The fact that economic growth has still not trickled down to the poorest communities and the low status of Indian women are also major factors. 

In Banswara, village health workers blame rampant malnutrition on the prevalence of child marriages. Sundari, Jitendra’s mother, got married at the age of 13 to a man she describes as a “good for nothing drunkard.” She said she spends most of her day cooking, washing, cleaning and fetching firewood or water for her in-laws, or trying to earn money as a day laborer in local fields. 

Even now, India’s progress in fighting malnutrition fails to impress many experts. 

Save the Children and World Vision recently ranked India alongside the Democratic Republic of Congo and Yemen at the bottom of a global Nutrition Barometer for its commitment and performance. 

While the nation frets constantly about whether economic growth and the stock market are up or down, the government has not collected data on child malnutrition since 2004 — something Purnima Menon of the International Food Policy Research Institute calls “mind-boggling.” ...

Spending comes easily to the government, critics say, but setting up mechanisms to monitor performance and raise accountability seems far less instinctive. 

Most of the evidence from Overseas Indians of various backgrounds suggests that India is underperforming relative to its genetic potential. (The big exception are the Gypsies, who with a 1,000 years in Europe to get up to speed, have managed to develop a culture that is the inverse of European peasant culture.)

Quentin Tarantino's next movie: "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion National Park"

Coming in the Summer of 2016: 

In late 2008, following the horrifying defeat of gay marriage at the polls in California, fiances Samuel L. Jackson and Michael Madsen (the ear-cutting Mr. Blonde from Reservoir Dogs) uncover the secret plot by which Utah Mormons control the California media. In response, Jackson-Madsen assemble a team of gay lovers denied their sacred right to marry (couples hoping to head to the altar include Harvey Keitel-Robert DeNiro, Bruce Willis-Robert Forster, Steve Buscemi-Bo Svenson, Tim Roth-Eli Roth, Kurt Russell-Mickey Rourke, and Danny Trejo-Rutger Hauer). In a 75-minute finale that has audiences cheering wildly, the AR-15-toting heroes gun down each of the 360 members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir execution-style, pausing only for long, insightful discussions about the old Kung Fu TV show.

Sidney Award

From the NYT:

The 2012 Sidney Awards I 

By DAVID BROOKS 

At the start of the 1980s, about 5 percent of Harvard students were Asian-American. But the number of qualified Asian-American applicants rose so that by 1993 roughly 20 percent of Harvard students had Asian heritage.

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But, according to Ron Unz, a funny thing then happened. The number of qualified Asian-Americans continued to rise, but the number of Asian-Americans admitted to Harvard fell so that the student body was about 16 percent Asian. Between 1995 and 2011, Harvard’s Asian-American population has varied by less than a percentage point around that 16.5 percent average. Not only that, the percentage of Asian-Americans at other Ivy League schools has also settled at a remarkably stable 16 percent, year after year. 

This smells like a quota system, or at least that was the implication left by Unz’s searing, sprawling, frustrating and highly debatable piece, “The Myth of the American Meritocracy,” in The American Conservative. It wins the first of the 2012 Sidney Awards, which go to the best magazine essays of the year. 

You’re going to want to argue with Unz’s article all the way along, especially for its narrow, math-test-driven view of merit. But it’s potentially ground-shifting. Unz’s other big point is that Jews are vastly overrepresented at elite universities and that Jewish achievement has collapsed. In the 1970s, for example, 40 percent of top scorers in the Math Olympiad had Jewish names. Now 2.5 percent do. The fanatical generations of immigrant strivers have been replaced by a more comfortable generation of preprofessionals, he implies.

It was moderately brave of Brooks to devote a paragraph to the other aspect of Unz's article, the Jewish side.

He's been wanting to go there for some time. (Here are a couple of columns I wrote in 2010 in response to a Brooks: column on "The Power Elite: First and second, in which I elaborate the concept of noblesse oblige.) As I pointed out earlier this year in response to a Brooks column contrasting the behavior of current "meritocratic" elites with old WASP elites:

Now, you know and I know that what he's trying to do here, under the guise of talking about "meritocrats," is to get through to his fellow American Jews that they need to stop conceptualizing themselves so overwhelmingly as History's Greatest Victims and start developing a sense of noblesse oblige about this country in which they have become predominant, in which they dominate the worldview of the educated classes. ... 

In career terms, obviously, Brooks' euphemistic approach is better than my plain-spoken one. And it would be easy to argue that my frankness is too abrasive, that Brooks' vague euphemisms are better for getting our mutual message out. 

But, here's the rub: What evidence is there that Brooks' readers grasp what he's talking about at all? I've read through a fair fraction of the 527 comments on his column, and I don't see many (if any) examples suggesting that Brooks' readers comprehend his underlying message. 

What goes unsaid eventually goes unthought. 

And I noticed one comment from a sympatico observer:

Unz is right. University admissions offices are run by bigots who think the Civil Rights Acts do not apply to them. They aren't even embarrassed about it; it isn't a matter of a sub rosa thumb on the scale. It is official announced policy at almost every university in the country to engage in racial discrimination among applicants (and job candidates). There are offices and staff whose proclaimed purpose is to ensure that bigotry pervades every decision that is made. 

Jonathan Katz
Professor of Physics
Washington University
St. Louis, Mo. 63130

As you may recall, back when the Gulf of Mexico oil spill was the biggest story of all time, the Obama administration put together a team of superbright scientists to advise, but Katz was quickly discovered to hold politically incorrect views about, among much else, what caused the spread of AIDS in America in the 1980s (he did not blame Ronald Reagan!). The Party of Science and Reality immediately fired him.

No crying on Christmas

Looking through old Christmas morning pictures, I appear to be happily brandishing some kind of weapon in virtually every single one of them. 

Merry Christmas!

Government jobs and veterans preferences: the military-governmental complex

Foseti, who has a nice job with the federal government in D.C., writes how to think about pay for government jobs here. 

In passing, he mentions how important being a veteran has become for your chance of getting hired by the federal government. This is a topic that's really off the usual radars, but strikes me as having sizable implications that I haven't seen explored anywhere. It's a little bit like how in Canada, the really good government jobs are reserved for people who are fluent in both French and English, which has had all sorts of effects on politics and culture.

One tiny aspect of this is that it makes Washington Redskins rookie quarterback Robert Griffin III, who was a military kid growing up (both parents were sergeants) and has the kind of well-spoken, respectful aspect common among military caste African-Americans, well-suited for a career in D.C. Just as Magic Johnson was perfectly suited for L.A., Griffin seems perfect for a metropolitan area where a surprisingly high percentage of the male fans who can afford NFL season tickets have a military background. It's very hard staying on top as a quarterback in the NFL, but if Griffin can perform on the field, he's got it made as the face off the field in the D.C. metro area.

Theodore Dalrymple on the latest shooter

Essayist Theodore Dalrymple is also psychiatrist Dr. Anthony Daniels. I've been to a couple of conference cocktails parties where he's stepped to the side to take calls from patients or loved ones of patients, and his long distance bedside manner is superb. I made sure to stay far enough away where I couldn't listen in to exactly what he was saying, but close enough to pay attention to his tone, and I couldn't have been more impressed with the concern with which he responds to his callers. He's a superior individual.

From City Journal:

THEODORE DALRYMPLE 

Newtown’s Unanswerable Questions 

It is not likely that psychiatrists could have prevented the massacre. 

21 December 2012 

The horrific massacre of the innocents in Newtown was bound to result in a search for preventive action so that nothing like it could ever happen again, and hence also for its real or final cause. To ward off fatalism, we tell ourselves that the massacre could, and therefore that it should, have been prevented; or alternatively, that it should, and therefore that it could, have been prevented. But as the cacophony of opinion demonstrates, the world is an irreducibly complex place. Agreement about what ought to have been done has all too predictably not been reached. ...

First, he was of age (20) to refuse to see a doctor if he so wished, and he might very well have so wished. By all accounts, there were no grounds on which psychiatric attention could have been forced upon him. He was strange, he was socially isolated, his mother worried about him; but he was a good student and had committed no acts that would have justified compulsory treatment, as would have been the case if (for example) he had attacked someone under the influence of delusion. 

I've pointed this out before, but the number of people who are in some fashion mentally unbalanced at some point in their lives is a lot higher than most people would think. It's definitely higher than I assumed when I was young.

Second, even if he had agreed to consult a psychiatrist, there is no certainty that the psychiatrist could have done anything for him and thus averted the disaster. Nor would the psychiatrist necessarily have had any reason to suspect a mass killing as a possible outcome in this case; the best predictor of future behavior is, after all, past behavior, and the killer had (as far as has been revealed) no history of violence. Further, the psychiatrist would probably have seen several, perhaps many, similar cases that did not end in mass killing—an outcome that after all remains rare. The Newtown killing might have taken a psychiatrist by surprise as much as anyone else. 

In fact, psychiatrists are no better than others at predicting violence by disturbed people, except possibly among the psychotic. ... 

Not long ago, I was asked to participate in an inquiry into a spate of murders committed by psychiatric patients. The killings seemed to be statistically abnormal (recalculation showed that they were not). We were asked to determine whether there was a single type of act, or omission, by the psychiatric services common to all the murders which might help explain them.  ...

Yet, except in one case, I found no evidence that the low standard of practice had actually resulted in a preventable killing, despite the immense power of the retrospectoscope—the medical instrument that provides us with wisdom after the event and that sometimes does lead to improvements in practice that saves lives, though at other times it provides us only with scapegoats. In this instance, I should have been provided with, say, 20 medical records, among them those of the killers, without knowing the outcome of the cases, and asked to decide blindly which resulted in murder, and why. ...

The behavioral expression of a psychiatric condition takes place in a social and cultural context. 

This context is perhaps propitious to young mass killers (quite apart from the effect of imitation or emulation). In an article in Le Monde, a professor of sociology at Strasbourg University, David Le Breton, quotes a German schoolboy who killed 15 people in a school in Winnenden in 2009: “I’m fed up, I’ve had enough of this meaningless life which is always the same. Everyone ignores me, no one recognises my potential.” This reeks of resentful, narcissistic grandiosity, the result of an imperative to be an individual at a time when individuation is more difficult than ever.

Here's a new theory: maybe it's Wikipedia's fault. You can now look up every goddam mass shooting you want these days in Wikipedia. I wasn't familiar with the Winnenden massacre in German, but now, having read up on it in Wikipedia, I am. 

In particular, I wonder if there's an urge to Up the Ante due to people being able to study up on what did and did not grab the media's attention in the past, and allow potential shooters to test out their creative brainstorms against the historical record on Wikipedia. Shoot people at a nursing school? Boring. It's been done. Dress up as the Joker and shoot people at a Batman movie? Now we're talking. That should get attention. 

The more you can check up on Wikipedia, the more you can make yourself exceptional. How many people do I have to shoot to be assured of going national? How many people do I have to be a cause celebre? Who are the best kinds of people to shoot? All this is researchable on Wikipedia. 

Lots of people 10 to 15 years ago shot up high schools, so that got dull. Then, college shooting got big, but they've been kind of boring lately, too. So, shooting little children is exactly the kind of thing that is so rare that it will cause a vast crisis and get you lots of attention. Sure, there will by copycats, but that will get boring too.

But, in retrospect, the Joker guy should have waited until after the election. Before the votes are counted the Democrats/media don't want to make a big deal about gun control because they want to keep white gun fans bored with the election. Afterwards, however, as with Arizona in January 2011, the media is on tenterhooks for a good shooting they can use.

But don't implicate the media too directly, like with the The Dark Knight Rises shooting, because the media protects the media. The best is to be enough of a blank screen for the media to project its latest obsession, but not so blank that you are too boring.

So, what should be done about this? Ban Wikipedia? No. 

It makes sense to look at gun control as a way to slow down and discourage the more disorganized lunatics. Obviously, with 300 million guns out there it's impossible to stop the most indefatigable. The worst shooting in this decade took place in the richest Scandinavian country, Norway, for example. Nor can you stop fully people who have rational reasons for acquiring guns for their criminal enterprises, a vastly larger cause of homicide than mass shooters. But, a lot of the few people who are that evil are also lazy, so putting bureaucratic hurdles in their way might discourage some. 

Throwing people in the loony bin can also work, but in both cases it makes sense to test out proposed policies using Dalrymple's idea of giving experts like him ten cases of guys who went on to be killers and ten who didn't and seeing how accurate they are and guessing what works and what doesn't.

Finally, do we have to give so much publicity to this little bastard? How many others are getting jealous and thinking about how to top him?

Bloomberg, gun control, and stop and frisk

Following my Taki column, Ross Douthat has a good NYT column on New York's Mayor Bloomberg:

The leading gun control chorister was Michael Bloomberg, and this was fitting, because on a range of issues New York’s mayor has become the de facto spokesman for the self-consciously centrist liberalism of the Acela Corridor elite. Like so many members of that class, Bloomberg combines immense talent with immense provincialism: his view of American politics is basically the famous New Yorker cover showing Manhattan’s West Side overshadowing the world, and his bedrock assumption is that the liberal paternalism with which New York is governed can and should be a model for the nation as a whole. 

It’s an assumption that cries out to be challenged by a thoughtful center-right. If you look at the specific proposals being offered by Bloomberg and others, some just look like reruns of assault weapon regulations that had no obvious effect the last time they were tried. Others still might have an impact on gun violence, but only at a cost: the popular idea of cracking down hard on illegal handguns, for instance, would probably involve “stop and frisk” on a huge scale, and might throw more young men in prison at a time when our incarceration rates are already too high.

In other words, Bloomberg has a comprehensive strategy to maximize real estate values in New York City by pushing out as many "young men" = youths = ... and otherwise neutralize their ability to cause homicidal problems as much as possible. Chicago under Mayor Emanuel is trying much the same thing, but is so far botching the execution, with the remaining Chicago youths shooting each other in numbers large enough to put some second thoughts into gentrifiers.  

As Mayor Rahm might say, never let a crisis go to waste. It would be nice to not let the crisis of an uptick in the number of spectacular suicide terrorist shootings go to waste in the long term game of undoing the Great Migration and gentrifying the supercities. Obviously, these media frenzy shootings constitute a tiny percentage of all gun deaths, but white on white mass shootings are too mediagenic to allow to go to waste. 

Let's use Google News to see how many other pundits are noticing the organic connection between Bloomberg's enthusiasm for gun control and for stop and frisk:

mayor bloomberg "gun control"

brings up 24,200 news articles of recent weeks.

But Google News

mayor bloomberg "gun control" "stop and frisk"

Seven out those 24,200 mention "stop and frisk:"

Search Results

1. Bloomberg, LaPierre and the Void New York Times-Dec 22, 2012 The leading gun control chorister was MichaelBloomberg, and this was fitting, because on a range of issues New York's mayor has become the de facto ... for instance, would probably involve “stop and frisk” on a huge scale, ...

2. Guns, Race and America's Collective Psychosis CounterPunch-Dec 21, 2012 ... “Up w/Chris Hayes” praised Mayor Bloomberg for his gun-controlpolicies. Nothing about his stop and frisk Gestapo policy, which led 640,000 ...

3. Michael Bloomberg, Dianne Feinstein, Dan Malloy and More ... Daily Beast-Dec 16, 2012 Gun control should be Obama's "number one priority,"Bloomberg added. ... mayor also defended his city's controversial “Stop and Frisk” policy, ... Gun control should be Obama's "number one priority," Bloomberg added. Don’t think Bloomberg is going liberal yet, the mayor also defended his city's controversial “Stop and Frisk” policy, which disproportionately targets black and Latino residents, calling it "proactive policing." "We send our police officers to problem places where there are problem people," Bloomberg said.

4. New York Gun Control: After Newtown Shooting, Renewed Pressure ... Huffington Post-Dec 17, 2012 blockquote> This video, posted to YouTube by Mayor Bloomberg'soffice, ... target="_hplink">racial biasin the NYPD's stop-and-friskpolicy.

What we don't know about Joe Lhota Capital New York-Dec 20, 2012 He'd also have a real shot at winning over thatBloomberg-loving, ... Lhota can't be taken entirely seriously as a potential mayor yet is that the public, ... has on education policy, stop-and-frisk, gun control and U.S. policy in the ...

ABC News

Media, politicians obscure social roots of Connecticut shooting World Socialist Web Site-Dec 17, 2012 The focus on gun control is, in part, aimed at evading discussion of the more ... out most clearly by New York's billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, ... rights associated with the “stop and frisk” policy of aggressive searches of...

San Francisco Chronicle

The Connecticut Massacre And America's Culture of Violence Black Star News-Dec 19, 2012 Some politicians are now saying gun control must be addressed to stop ... Mayor Michael Bloomberg is now speaking out on anti-gun initiatives. ... NYPD including the racist Stop-and-Frisk procedures, which target Black men...

So, three leftist sites, a few wrap-ups, a few miscellaneous, and Ross. Will anybody grasp what Ross is even talking about?

In general, white people in American love to hate each other so much that it is very hard for them to empathize with each other, even over something as obvious as that gun control makes more sense in the city than in the country.