Dawkins or Hitchens: Who will convert first?

Which aggressive atheist will convert first: Hitchens or Dawkins? Various people, including Orrin Judd, have suggested that the most likely resolution to Christopher Hitchens' intense hatred of Roman Catholicism will be his conversion to that religion, although I suspect Hitchens is more likely to convert to the Judaism of his maternal ancestors. He already has taken to visiting synagogues on his travels.

Now, an article in the Times of London by Bryan Appleyard suggests that atheist cheerleader Richard Dawkins will someday convert to Anglicanism:

First, [Dawkins] is one of the strangest men I’ve ever known. We go back a long way. Our relationship started well, descended into hate-hate, recovered somewhat to love-hate and, latterly, has drifted into respectful acceptance.

He is a highly strung, frequently petulant man. I’ve seen him storm out of an amiable dinner because he didn’t like the music and I’ve heard of him muttering to his companion, when a lady cleric entered the room, that dog collars are always a sign of low IQ. But when relaxed, he is charming, deferring politely to opinions with which he disagrees and displaying a conscientious desire to understand.

On these occasions, he has the air of an eager-to-please country vicar, an air enhanced by the discreet serving of tea by his wife Lalla Ward and further emphasised by the large, rectory-like house they now occupy just outside Oxford city centre.

Dapper as ever in jacket, chinos and boat shoes, and looking 20 years younger than he actually is (63), this time he greets me with warm familiarity. Things are looking up. The rectoryness of the house vanishes inside. It is beyond the reach of any vicar I know — beautifully and expensively decorated and furnished with a vast flat-screen television in the living room.

Dawkins has done well for himself. He is endowed by Charles Simonyi, formerly of Microsoft, as Oxford’s professor of the public understanding of science and his books leap off the shelves.

...But the importance of Dawkins, though based on the brilliance and popularity of his writing, is mostly to do with what he represents. He is Darwin’s enforcer. Darwin discovered evolution through natural selection, but, a quiet man with a religious wife, he did not engage in the ensuing public debates. Dawkins does, combining evolutionary theory with anti-Bush, left-wing politics, expressed through the occasional article but mostly through pithy, angry letters to newspapers.

Dawkins is the supreme meta-establishment thinker, the eloquent defender of the dominant but seldom expressed world view of our time — aggressive atheism and secularity, soft leftism, scientism and faith in progress. To his fans, he is reason incarnate. And so if Dawkins says George W Bush is an idiot, which he frequently does, then Dubya must, rationally, be an idiot. But, in fact, reason has nothing to do with it.

“I’m not particularly proud of being visceral, but I am admitting it. My attacks on George Bush have nothing to do with science or the scientific method. I just can’t stand the man’s style, the way he swaggers and struts and smirks and the way he looks sly and deceitful and the way Americans can’t see it. I’m irritated by the way they think he’s just a regular guy you can have a drink with.”

Anti-Americanism keeps intruding in the new book. There is a very irrational paragraph on nuclear strategy that stoops to lampooning Bush’s pronunciation — “nucular” — and even an anti-foxhunting footnote which, I point out to him, is utterly illogical. He agrees.

"Oh, okay, fair enough. But I’ve always been against foxhunting. I was brought up in the country on a farm and throughout my childhood we were passionately against foxhunting and we always refused to allow the hunt to cross the boundaries of the farm.”

The intrusion of these irrationalities — combined with the peculiarities of his character — indicate that the dominant image of Dawkins in the public mind as the patron saint of contemporary reason is wrong. In reality, outside evolutionary theory, he is as much driven by prejudice, faith and conviction as the rest of us. Some — notably the late Stephen Jay Gould — have argued that the same is true within Dawkins’s evolutionary theory. His “selfish gene ” approach is, to his critics, little more than a thought experiment that distorts and simplifies the complex reality it aspires to define.

All of this, to me at least, makes the human reality of Dawkins much more interesting than the public persona. Even his anti-religiousness is not quite what it seems. His language is steeped in the vocabulary of Anglicanism. I once offered a bet that he would be converted on his deathbed but found no takers. Dawkins assures me I would lose. I’m not so sure.

One million visitors to iSteve.com

Welcome, 1,000,000th visitor to iSteve.com! I don't know who you are, but Monday will see the 1,000,000th "unique visit" to iSteve.com since I started using Sitemeter, but I can't remember how long ago that was. (So, maybe we should just forget I ever mentioned it.)

At the current pace, I should be able to get a million visits in 2005 alone, but I'd really like to go for, say two million. So, if you can spread the word, I'd appreciate it.

Hunter S. Thompson, RIP

Hunter S. Thompson, RIP -- I reread Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for about the 7th time a few months ago. I didn't see any reason to reassess my old judgment that it ranks with A Confederacy of Dunces as the most laugh-out-loud-funny American book of the second half of the 20th Century. As a work of prose style, it is an indisputable masterpiece.

I realized, though, that I had never noticed before that nothing much ever physically happens during the course of the book. Almost everything of interest is just going on inside Thompson's violent, paranoid mind. As a child, I was in Las Vegas perhaps the same week Thompson was, and we may even have been at Circus Circus the same night -- I remember the Korean Kittens trapeze act that he riffs on -- and I suspect that to bystanders his outward behavior wasn't all that much more outrageous than mine was.

UPDATE: Thompson and Tom Wolfe were always lumped together, but Thompson's journalism was almost always about what was going on inside his own head, while Wolfe, despite his trademark white suit, remained far in the background, seldom mentioned in his own work, except in coy lines like "Carol Doda turned toward a man in a Borsalino hat." As a sober, industrious, deeply sane man, Wolfe's career achievement towers over Thompson's, but Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas might be the best book either of them wrote.

Toward the end of Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Wolfe pointed out that the hippie movement of the 1960s had two sides to it: the vegetarian pacifist Maharishi meditation side and the All-American crank-it-up-to-400-horsepower and let's-take-this-show-on-road side of Ken Kesey, whose novels were heavily influenced by superhero comic books. Thompson, of course, with his love of Harley-Davidsons, Smith & Wessons, and the NFL (that's what Thompson and Nixon talked about during their one interview), came out of the tradition of All-American excess.

NFL Quarterbacks' Wonderlic IQ scores

IQ scores of quarterbacks: Here's a listing of top college quarterbacks' scores on the NFL's mandatory Wonderlic test going all the way back to Steve Young's 126. (A rough conversion system is a Wonderlic score of 20 = 100, and each answer more or less adds or subtracts 2 IQ points). If you ever wondered why Brian Griese is such an overachiever in the NFL, take a look at his 138 IQ combined with having an Hall of Fame QB as his dad. That guy understands playing quarterback.

Sailer's 2002 articles on race

Chronicles of Racial Confusion and Complexity: Here are some of my 2002 UPI articles on race:

The Diva of Diversity: Halle Berry's Oscar Speech

Who Exactly Is Asian-American?

The Name Game: Inuit or Eskimo?

Denzel Washington as an Afrocentrist Hannibal of Carthage?

The Success of the Parsis Threatens Their Survival

How Racially Tolerant Are the British?

The New Understanding of Race:

Part 1: Race Is Not So Black or White

Part 2: How White Is the Average Black? How Black Is the Average White?

Part 3: What Happened to Mexico's Blacks?

Lawrence Summers and Patricia Hausman

Patti Hausman on how men and women think differently, complete with convenient blue and pink bar charts. (Don't you hate how most other contemporary social science graphs go out of their way to make themselves difficult to read, with the blacks being denoted by white bars, the whites by gray bars, and the Latinos by black bars, as in the Thernstroms' last book? The graphmakers wouldn't want to reinforce the stereotype that blacks are, uh, blacker than whites!)

In her address to the National Academy of Engineers, Patti admitted:

Most of the physical sciences bore me silly. Efforts to attribute my apathy to "masculinist bias" in the curriculum amuse me no end... Reinventing the curriculum will not interest me in learning how my dishwasher works. It is a thing and things bore me. People are another story. I find them fascinating.

Personally, Patti and I are on the same wavelength: I have a feminine mind in that I am far more interested in people than machines, but I have an extremely masculine categorizing / system-building mind in how I think about people.

One curriculum reform I've advocated for a long time is educating young people that calculus isn't the only kind of math that is useful in the real world. I was lousy at calculus, so I stopped taking math my freshman year in college. Finally, my senior year I took a statistics course and found -- "Voila, this is interesting. I can use this to understand people rather than my dishwasher."

Now, most people who write about society are far more interested in people than dishwashers, yet the Larry Summers brouhaha has exposed, once again, the remarkable statistical innumeracy of our chattering class. So, let's work harder to educated people in statistics.

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Summers, himself, is obviously a stat-head who thinks, like me, in terms of bell curves, as these excerpts from his much-denounced speech indicate (Summers' methodology makes me wonder if he ever locks his office door and reads La Griffe de Lion):

The second thing that I think one has to recognize is present is what I would call the combination of, and here, I'm focusing on something that would seek to answer the question of why is the pattern different in science and engineering, and why is the representation even lower and more problematic in science and engineering than it is in other fields. And here, you can get a fair distance, it seems to me, looking at a relatively simple hypothesis. It does appear that on many, many different human attributes-height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability-there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means-which can be debated-there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined.

If one supposes, as I think is reasonable, that if one is talking about physicists at a top twenty-five research university, one is not talking about people who are two standard deviations above the mean. And perhaps it's not even talking about somebody who is three standard deviations above the mean. But it's talking about people who are three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean in the one in 5,000, one in 10,000 class.

Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out. I did a very crude calculation, which I'm sure was wrong and certainly was unsubtle, twenty different ways. I looked at the Xie and Shauman paper-looked at the book, rather-looked at the evidence on the sex ratios in the top 5% of twelfth graders. If you look at those-they're all over the map, depends on which test, whether it's math, or science, and so forth-but 50% women, one woman for every two men, would be a high-end estimate from their estimates. From that, you can back out a difference in the implied standard deviations that works out to be about 20%. And from that, you can work out the difference out several standard deviations. If you do that calculation-and I have no reason to think that it couldn't be refined in a hundred ways-you get five to one, at the high end.

Now, you know and I know exactly what he's talking about and why it makes perfect sense because we think about people in terms of bell curves and standard deviations all the time. but for most Harvard professors and other people who lack useful mental tools for understanding the human world, their mental processes didn't extend beyond a single word:

"Crimethink!"

So, partly the problem Summers is up against is educational, but in large part it's moral: Typical academics tend to believe, deep down, that God made the universe just to boost the self-esteem of people like themselves, and that anything that disturbs their egos therefore can't possibly be true.

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Summers also brings up the massive difference between male and female average tastes:

There may also be elements, by the way, of differing, there is some, particularly in some attributes, that bear on engineering, there is reasonably strong evidence of taste differences between little girls and little boys that are not easy to attribute to socialization. I just returned from Israel, where we had the opportunity to visit a kibbutz, and to spend some time talking about the history of the kibbutz movement, and it is really very striking to hear how the movement started with an absolute commitment, of a kind one doesn't encounter in other places, that everybody was going to do the same jobs. Sometimes the women were going to fix the tractors, and the men were going to work in the nurseries, sometimes the men were going to fix the tractors and the women were going to work in the nurseries, and just under the pressure of what everyone wanted, in a hundred different kibbutzes, each one of which evolved, it all moved in the same direction.

So, I think, while I would prefer to believe otherwise, I guess my experience with my two and a half year old twin daughters who were not given dolls and who were given trucks, and found themselves saying to each other, look, daddy truck is carrying the baby truck, tells me something.

Summers gets lambasted for relying on anecdotal evidence about his daughters, but you can see that it follows the massive, multigenerational experiment of the kibbutzim, where feminist true believers set up entire cultures to inculcate gender quality, and each one failed.

Something he doesn't address, but is particularly interesting is that a higher proportion of math and mechanics-oriented women are likely to be androgynous and/or lesbian. (Exemplified by the new UC Santa Cruz supremo Denece D. Denton claiming to "speak truth to power" to Summers while arranging for her lesbian lover to get a new $192k per year job at taxpayer expense).

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Also, Arnold Kling has some sensible things to say about the Larry Summers brouhaha on TechCentralStation.

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Here's a new website called Harvard Students for Larry.

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A rare essay worth reading on the WSJ's OpinionJournal.com site: Tom Wolfe's obituary for Hunter S. Thompson:

He proved to be one of those tall, rawboned, rangy young men with alarmingly bright eyes, who more than any other sort of human, in my experience, are prone to manic explosions.

For a younger generation, Michael Richard's Kramer on "Seinfeld" is the model of the tall, rawboned, rangy man with alarmingly bright eyes.

We were walking along West 46th Street toward a restaurant, The Brazilian Coffee House, when we passed Goldberg Marine Supply. Hunter stopped, ducked into the store and emerged holding a tiny brown paper bag. A sixth sense, probably activated by the alarming eyes and the six-inch rise and fall of his Adam's apple, told me not to ask what was inside. In the restaurant he kept it on top of the table as we ate. Finally, the fool in me became so curious, he had to go and ask, "What's in the bag, Hunter?"

"I've got something in there that would clear out this restaurant in 20 seconds," said Hunter. He began opening the bag. His eyes had rheostated up to 300 watts. "No, never mind," I said. "I believe you! Show me later!" From the bag he produced what looked like a small travel-size can of shaving foam, uncapped the top and pressed down on it. There ensued the most violently brain-piercing sound I had ever heard. It didn't clear out The Brazilian Coffee House. It froze it. The place became so quiet, you could hear an old-fashioned timer clock ticking in the kitchen. Chunks of churasco gaucho remained impaled on forks in mid-air. A bartender mixing a sidecar became a statue holding a shaker with both hands just below his chin. Hunter was slipping the little can back into the paper bag. It was a marine distress signaling device, audible for 20 miles over water.

...Yet he was also part of a century-old tradition in American letters, the tradition of Mark Twain, Artemus Ward and Petroleum V. Nasby, comic writers who mined the human comedy of a new chapter in the history of the West, namely, the American story, and wrote in a form that was part journalism and part personal memoir admixed with powers of wild invention, and wilder rhetoric inspired by the bizarre exuberance of a young civilization. No one categorization covers this new form unless it is Hunter Thompson's own word, gonzo. If so, in the 19th century Mark Twain was king of all the gonzo-writers. In the 20th century it was Hunter Thompson, whom I would nominate as the century's greatest comic writer in the English language.

Wolfe's being a little too kind to the dead: Thompson's reputation rests on one short masterpiece, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, one solid, innovative, but not all that funny book on the Hell's Angels, one major article on the Kentucky Derby, bits and pieces of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, and other miscellaneous matter. In terms of prime pages, that's not much more than John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces by itself, or, for that matter, the funniest 400 pages excerpted from Wolfe's body of work. Compared to the lifetime output of Wodehouse and Waugh, well, us colonials aren't in the big leagues.

Still, Thompson did write Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and nobody else ever before wrote anything like it in the history of the English language, and maybe nobody will ever again.

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By the way, are you as sick as I am of gun nuts like Thompson and Kurt Cobain (whose three biggest hits off Nevermind all mention guns) shooting themselves and leaving a horrifying mess for their loved ones or servants to find and clean up? I know you think it's your Second Amendment right and all that, but, please, show a little consideration.

Rum, sodomy, and the lash redux

"A New Course by Royal Navy: A Campaign to Recruit Gays," reports Sara Lyall in the NYT:

LONDON, Feb. 21 - Five years after Britain lifted its ban on gays in the military, the Royal Navy has begun actively encouraging them to enlist and has pledged to make life easier when they do.

The navy announced Monday that it had asked Stonewall, a group that lobbies for gay rights, to help it develop better strategies for recruiting and retaining gay men and lesbians. It said, too, that one strategy may be to advertise for recruits in gay magazines and newspapers...

The new effort continues a pattern of changing official attitudes in the navy - once derided as running on rum, sodomy and the lash, in a phrase usually attributed to Winston Churchill.

Uh, Sarah, I'm not sure how best to break this to you, but "rum, sodomy, and the lash" appears to be the Royal Navy's new official attitude toward what future British tars are expected to be engaged in below decks.

Can Shias 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.

Iraq's 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.

2003 Movie Reviews

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

Will Sistani Agree to a "Mandela"?

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.

Old Suburbanists vs. New Urbanists

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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

An evolutionary psychology domain-specific module

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.

Portland's Secret: Urban Renewal via Negro Removal

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?

The Politics of 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.

Let my illegal nanny drive my SUV

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?"

EQ: Contradictory or Banal?

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.