The critically acclaimed art-house film Monster's Ball

The critically acclaimed art-house film Monster's Ball has a wonderfully self-parodying premise: Racist prison guard Billy Bob Thornton learns to appreciate black people by sleeping with Halle Berry! Unfortunately, "Monster's Ball" is not a comedy. The movie - complete with its suggestion that the cure for ethnic animosity is hands-on racial sensitivity training from Hollywood's most exquisite starlet - is supposed to be taken seriously. Very seriously. Click here for my review. 1/10/2002

revolt of the range rover republicans - Why do homeowners so often favor the Democrats' conservationism over the GOP's anti-environmental brand of conservatism? Why are conservative intellectuals clueless that attacking ecological protection scares off what should be the GOP's natural constituency: the propertied classes? Click here for the answers. 1/15/02

Pathans, pederasty, fueds, brigandage, and smuggling

Back in December, I noted that gay pundit Andrew Sullivan was tsk-tsking over the fact that the Taliban and the U.S. military both had what he called a "weird and fastidious" policy against military men sexually violating young males under their command. For those with strong stomachs, click here for the details from the Times of London on this charming Pathan custom that is now coming back out of the closet.

The larger point is that the reason the Pathans welcomed the Taliban in 1996 is because they knew they have a royally screwed-up culture - one largely dedicated to not just pederasty, but also blood feuds, brigandage, smuggling, and tax evasion. They wanted to change. That's the good news. The bad news is that the best idea they could come up with for fixing their culture was religious totalitarianism. Does anybody have any suggestions for how the Pathans can change for the better? Email me at SteveSlr@aol.com

The most optimistic analogy I've dreamed up for the Pathans is the Scottish Highlanders, who also lived in Bronze Age clans devoted to raiding and feuding up through 1745. Then, however, they followed Bonnie Prince Charlie on his almost-successful invasion of England. Outraged by this 9/11-like provocation, the English subsequently used overwhelming force to modernize the Highlands. A century later, Celtic Highlanders like Thomas Babington Macaulay were at the forefront of British civilization. 1/14/02

Black Hawk Down

Black Hawk Down - Click here for my review.

Argentina and The End of History

Argentina and The End of History - Francis Fukuyama famously observed at the end of the Cold War that - at the highest levels of ideology - there was nothing to argue over anymore: capitalism and democracy were obviously better than any alternatives. From now on, history would get ever duller because everybody knew that capitalist democracy was the solution.

Of course, history hasn't exactly ended yet. What's becoming clear is that there was a fatal flaw in Fukuyama's model. He forgot to ask: "What if large parts of the world are simply not competent enough to make capitalist democracy work?" Consider Argentina, a nation blessed by nature at least abundantly as Canada. A nation so trendy in social values that plastic surgery is more common in Buenos Aires than in Los Angeles. A nation where, after decades of bad choices, the political elite had for the last decade been the world's truest believers in neoliberal economics. Yet, Argentina has once again has collapsed into economic and political chaos. 1-9-2002

A Not-So-Beautiful Mind

A Not-So-Beautiful Mind - As an apparent frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar, A Beautiful Mind demands more scrutiny than critics have so far given it. Ultimately, it reveals less about the delusions of mathematician John F. Nash than it does about the delusions of the modern hack screenwriter. Read the rest of my review here. 1/3/2002

529 Plan, Tax Savings, and right half of the bell curve

Happy New Year (for some people) - I've long pointed out how we lucky members of the right (i.e., upper) half of America's IQ bell curve use our cleverness to exploit the left half. One grotesque example is the college expense tax break called the "529 Plan." It gives huge tax savings to people whose kids are going to college, but offers nothing to people who are trying to save in order to establish their kids in a trade.

Here in California, you can shelter up to $229,000 in a 529 account. You don't have to pay federal taxes on your earnings while they accumulate, and, starting today and running until at least 2010, you don't even have to pay taxes on earnings when you withdraw them to pay for college expenses for your child. Oh, you say your kid isn't the college-type, but you are saving money to buy him an 18-wheeler to drive when he gets out of the Marines, and you'd like to use a 529 plan? Sorry, but too bad. If you want the tax break, you should have had a smarter kid. Click here for an FAQ giving the unbelievable details. 1/1/02.

Have you ever heard a Kwanzaa song?

Bye-Bye Kwanzaa - What's fascinating about Kwanzaa is that its relentless advance in official recognition is solely a product of the Left's "march through the institutions." African-Americans who aren't part of the bureaucracy themselves don't seem to care much about it - at least they don't care enough to write Kwanzaa songs. Have you ever heard a Kwanzaa song? To find out if any actually exist, I logged on to an MP3 song file-sharing network. (Note to the Recording Industry of America Association's mongoose-like lawyers: This was purely for journalistic research purposes.) I found 4055 tracks with "Christmas" in the file name, a huge proportion of them performed by blacks. In contrast, there were only 11 copies of Kwanzaa songs, and, judging by the titles, they didn't seem to reflect much originality and/or respect for the holiday. Most of the files were copies of either "I'm Dreaming of a Black Kwanzaa" or "The Twelve Days of Kwanzaa" (there are actually seven days). 12-31-01

Here's my win-win solution to the otherwise endless disputes over school sports teams that use Indian tribe names.

Bush Family and the Corrupt Mexican Rich

A story that the mainstream media has completely missed is the Bush family's 40 year long history of private dealings with some pretty odiferous powerbrokers from the Mexican elite. Only investigative reporter Julia Reynolds of the little bilingual Mexican-American literary mag El Andar has poked her nose into it. Maybe there's nothing more to it than what she's dredged up so far. Still, if nothing else, she's come up with some colorful Bushian anecdotes. http://www.isteve.com/2001_El_Andar_Bush.htm

Ali Alert: How in the world do you make the life of Muhammad Ali dull and depressing? Ali was an illiterate beige racist (a middle-class "paper bag" colored mulatto, he hated whites and despised working class blacks, such as the noble Joe Frazier, whom he repeatedly called a "gorilla"), but he still deserves better than Michael Mann's catastrophic dud. See my review.

Tom Clancy - The Bear and the Dragon

Praise for Tom Clancy - A few days after Sept. 11, I bought Tom Clancy's novel from 2000, The Bear and the Dragon, as a relatively painless way to learn the current state of American war-fighting technology. It ends with a detailed description of how 21st Century American air power pulverizes a Chinese armored invasion of Siberia. I finished it and said, "Okay, we're obviously going to crush the Taliban from the air. No problemo." (My biggest worry then became that the Taliban would hand over Osama to us before we could devastate them, which we had to do in order to encourage the other regimes to not allow anti-American terrorists to operate from their territories.) Thus, I was incredulous when so many pundits decided around Nov. 1st that the Taliban were winning. "Don't they know anything about our current air power? Don't they read Tom Clancy novels?" A week later, of course, the fearsome Taliban threw down their weapons and ran for the hills. The answer to both questions about our commentariat I realize now is "No. They didn't know anything about military technology and one reason was because they hold Clancy in contempt." Well, now the joke's on them.

Why have so few rock groups been racially integrated?

Why have so few rock groups been racially integrated compared to jazz bands? After all, Benny Goodman featured an integrated orchestra in the Thirties. Before the civil rights revolution, black and white jazz musicians put up with all sorts of nonsense in order to play together. When Charlie Parker's band toured the segregated South in the Forties, they told local sheriffs that their white trumpeter Red Rodney was actually a black man named "Albino Red."

Christmas vs. Winter Solstice Holiday

Christmas vs. Winter Solstice Holiday:

Q. I'm a Multiculturalist Pagan. I want to celebrate the shortest day of the year at the exact same moment as all the indigenous peoples on Mother Earth. Exactly when will that moment occur?

A. Never. Unlike Christianity, pagan religions are local. This causes practical problems for politically correct American pagans who want to use the seasons of the sun to commemorate the unity of humanity under nature. Their problem is that nature treats humans very differently depending upon where they live. For example, while Dec. 21 is the shortest day for the Inuit (i.e. Eskimos), it's the longest day for Australian Aborigines. And for Africans living on the equator, it's just another twelve-hour day like all the others. In truth, Winter Solstice celebrations are (gasp) Eurocentric! Or, to be precise, "Nordocentric."

Why do Caucasians differ so much in hair color?

Why do Caucasians differ so much amongst themselves in hair color, while everybody else (with the exception of some blonde Australian Aborigines) has dark brown hair? Here's my theory, which has been getting some favorable responses.

Blonde and red hair are favorable mutations for women because they make men notice them more. Fair hair reflects more light than dark hair, so it catches the eye more. Women like shiny jewelry for the same reason.

But, why then doesn't blonde or red hair become universal? Well, it would lose scarcity value if all women had it. But, also, while it's good for your daughters, under pre-modern conditions it was bad for your sons. It tended to hurt males at hunting and war. I recall attending a golf tournament on a sunny day and standing behind the green when a friend asked, "Which players are coming next?" I glanced at the tee 500 yards away, and said, "I can't tell who all is in the next group, but you can definitely see the sunlight glinting off Greg Norman's hair." The Australian pro Norman, who is no doubt of partial Nordic descent judging by his name and appearance, has extremely blonde hair. Fortunately, by now Northwestern Europeans have largely beaten their swords into golf clubs, but in days of yore, Norman's hair would have served disastrously as a beacon calling attention to his presence. Of course, in the Nordic homelands there aren't many terribly sunny days.

Thus, blonde hair becomes more common the farther in Europe you go north, where the sun is low in the sky and the land heavily forested and therefore shady. Within Northern Europe, red hair becomes more prevalent the farther west you go, where, due to the Gulf Stream, the weather is extremely misty. (I'd guess that the Western Irish are around 1/3 red-haired.) So, in Northwest Europe, you can have lots of blondes and redheads because lack of direct sunlight meant that highly visible hair worked well for women, without much penalizing their men folk when hunting or raiding.

In line with this theory, in movie love scenes, the actress almost always has lighter hair and skin color than the actor. This suggests that we still associate fairness with the fair sex. 12/13/01

Why do conservative intellectuals attack Darwin?

Why do conservative intellectual magazines keep shooting themselves in the foot by attacking Darwin? The magazine with the least to be embarrassed about is National Review. Although it has printed some dopey Creationist stuff, under both former editor John O'Sullivan and current editor Rich Lowry, it has also printed my neo-Darwinian analyses, Still, National Review Online editor Jonah Goldberg offers an important clue into why normally sophisticated conservative editors give the anti-Darwin crowd a platform, in his response to Michael Lind's NYT attack on the Religious Right's influence over the conservative press:

"Let us not forget that Marx and Freud were once established scientific fact as well. And, moreover, let’s see Lind’s friends at Dissent run a negative article about Marx, Freud, or Darwin."

In other words, Jonah thinks that Darwin is sacrosanct on the Left. I suspect this view is common among Right editors. In reality, the Left absolutely hates what Darwin said about human nature. See my NR essay on Edward O. Wilson's Sociobiology for the details. 12/9/01

Christopher Jencks on Immigration

The left wing New York Review of Books just ran a terrific two part series on immigration by distinguished Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks called "Who Should Get In." It's striking, although it really shouldn't be surprising, that starting from nominally opposite ends of the political spectrum, he and I reach almost identical conclusions about what's in the best interests of American citizens. Jencks' last sentence is, "Fifty years from now our children could find that admitting millions of poor Latinos had not only created a sizable Latino underclass but—far worse— that it had made rich Americans more like rich Latin Americans." In May, I wrote in VDARE.com, "The unexplored problem with massive mestizo immigration is that by creating a beige servant caste, it slowly turns the wealthier native-born Americans into a white master caste. Maybe we'll be able to withstand the temptations inherent in this kind of society better than the whites of Latin America, who were thoroughly corrupted by them. The history of the American South, though, suggests that rich white Americans aren't immune to the sinister blandishments of luxurious living based on a surplus of cheap laborers of dusky hue."

Andrew Sullivan and armed pederasts

Andrew Sullivan's fuel-injected rise to the top of the heap of personal web punditry has been an inspiration to all of us with similar ambitions to grab the world by the lapels. He's churned out an enormous amount of lively prose ever since he began mainlining testosterone. Injecting the manly molecule, however, doesn't always leave him in the mood for careful thought. Well, that's the most charitable interpretation I can come up with for this:

THE TALIBAN'S DON'T ASK, DON'T TELL: All the rest of NATO may have given up on policing their militaries for homosexuals, but the United States can rest easy knowing that one military that still supports U.S. policy is the Taliban. Any consorting with beardless young men in the army is strictly forbidden. This story from the Daily Telegraph tells of a weird and fastidious obsession. - 12/5/2001 11:17:09 PM

AndrewSullivan.com

Uh, Andy? Please tell us you didn't realize that "consorting with beardless young men in the army" is a euphemism for military men sexually violating 13-17 year-old boys under their command. It's an old Afghan custom. James Michener's informative 1963 novel Caravans refers to it frequently (Here's an amusing excerpt describing Kabul's butch-femme warrior couples, who are the product of Afghan men seldom seeing what a real woman looks like). Call me "weird and fastidious," but on this one issue, I've got to come down on the same side as the Taliban against the alliance of Andy Sullivan and the armed pederasts. 12-7-01