"Hiring Of Norm Chow A Proud Moment For Asians Or Hawaiians"

"Hiring Of Norm Chow A Proud Moment For Asians Or Hawaiians" -- From TheBrushback.com

NASHVILLE, TN--Last week’s hiring of Norm Chow by the Tennessee Titans represents a landmark victory for Asian or Hawaiians or whatever Chow actually is. Few minority groups have publicly praised the hiring, but one thing is for sure: It’s a victory for someone Asian-ish.

“This is another example of the NFL’s commitment to diversity,” commissioner Paul Tagliabue said in a statement released yesterday. “Asians, Hawaiians, or possibly even Samoans have reason to celebrate today. Norm Chow is going to represent one or more of those groups as an assistant coach in the NFL. Someday maybe he will be a head coach, and then we’re really going to have to figure out what he guy is.”

Titans head coach Jeff Fisher said the team was happy to have Chow on board, regardless of his race, color, or creed.

“I’m extremely excited about this hiring,” Fisher told reporters. “Norm has been on our radar for some time now. His innovative play calling and keen eye for detail are qualities that have been missing from our offense the past few seasons. And of course, we here at the Titans are always proud to promote diversity, whether you’re talking about African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hawaiians, Koreans—no, wait, Koreans are Asian, too—Indians, Arabs, or um…I don’t know…Canadians. It’s just really good to have different nationalities in the league for some reason...”

Said one AFC general manager: “I think, for some people, there is a perception that Asians are not adept at coaching football on the professional level. But what if Chow isn’t even Asian? From the looks of him, he could be any number of races. I’m not sure if there is a negative perception of Hawaiians. How about Samoans? Who knows? This is all too confusing for me. Back in my day, everybody was white and race wasn’t even an issue—except for the Irish, those potato-eating savages.”

What's Missing from the Oscars

"Hollywood Catches Case of the Oscar Blahs" says the NYT. Basically, nobody is terribly excited about the Best Picture nominees, such as "Finding Neverland," which I snuck out of halfway through to go watch "The Aviator" again.

Message to Hollywood: If you wanted people to be interested in the Oscar broadcast this year, all you had to do was nominate for Best Picture and Best Director a certain low budget subtitled movie in Aramaic and Latin that made $370 million.

I wrote in The American Conservative:

2004 wasn't quite as weak as the Best Picture nominees would suggest. Three of last year's four most impressive directorial achievements failed to win Best Picture or Best Director nods. Zhang Yimou's visually overwhelming "Hero" was ineligible on a technicality. Brad Bird's "The Incredibles" was shunted into the Best Animated Feature category (although he received deserved Best Original Screenplay recognition).

And, of course, the most audacious and triumphant film of 2004, the picture that Quentin Tarantino called "one of the most brilliant visual storytelling movies I've seen since the talkies," Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" was turned away out of blatant ethno-religious animus. (Gibson is crying all the way to the bank, no doubt.)

These lapses allowed for a trio of second-raters to contend for Best Picture. "Finding Neverland," the story of how J.M. Barrie came to write Peter Pan, is a snooze, and the Ray Charles biopic "Ray," starring an inspired Jamie Foxx, is less than the sum of its admittedly formidable parts.

Some readers objected because I broke with the media conspiracy covering up the subject of Clint Eastwood's critically-celebrated, but shallow and manipulative "Million Dollar Baby." But I didn't want subscribers unknowingly to encourage attendance by any of their disabled, aged, or infirm loved ones, who might well think they were being advised to hurry up and die.

So, that leaves Alexander Payne's "Sideways" and Martin Scorsese's sympathetic take on Howard Hughes' happier days, "The Aviator." "Sideways" reworks that staple of teen sex comedies, the buddy road trip genre, for grown-ups. It succeeds.

While "Sideways" is an excellent small movie, well worth its $12 million budget, "The Aviator," which cost $112 million, is an excellent huge movie. In basketball, an agile 6-footer always loses to an equally agile 7-footer, and the same deserves to be true in this Best Picture race because "The Aviator" is a blast, almost three hours of quick, intelligent entertainment.

I fear "The Aviator" is a little too quick and too intelligent for most audiences, including Oscar voters. It's a very high bandwidth movie, featuring a huge number of historical characters.

Scorsese works hard to help you keep the story straight. For example, at the movie premiere where Howard Hughes is standing around alone, feeling awkward while his date Katharine Hepburn schmoozes Louie B. Mayer, a new character played by Kate Beckinsale walks past Howard and says to him, "Don't worry, baby, she's just doing her job." As she's walking away and Howard wonders who this beauty is, you can hear a radio announcer in the background excitedly saying that the starlet Ava Gardner is here tonight. And then another character off the distance greets her and repeats her name. So, Scorsese is giving us two chances to figure out who this mystery woman is. Yet, I doubt if that's enough to get through to most movie-goers, especially since 90% of the under-25 half of the potential audience has no idea who Ava Gardner is.

Every so often, Hollywood spends a fortune making a huge, spectacular, expert movie just for the top 5% or 10% of the audience, and ends up losing a bundle. Last year it was Master and Commander and this year it's The Aviator. All I can say is: "Thanks."

Women and Gay Men Both Bad at Map-Reading

Women and Gay Men Both Bad at Map-Reading

Homosexual men share the same relatively poor map reading skills as heterosexual women, according to a study.

Earlier research found men better than women at finding their way around a "virtual reality" maze, relying on geometric cues while women rely more on landmarks. Yesterday Dr Qazi Rahman and colleagues from the University of East London reported in Behavioural Neuroscience that homosexual men used more landmarks during map reading than did heterosexual men, adopting a blend of male and female navigational strategies.

They investigated map reading by 20 heterosexual men, 20 homosexual men, 20 heterosexual women and 20 lesbians. The group memorised routes and was then asked to provide directions on how to get from one place to another.

Amusingly, the Telegraph (mis)titled the article "Gay men share women's talents for map reading." In an era when a President of Harvard quakes in fear of being accused of being insensitive about women's talents, then I guess a lowly headline writer should be forgiven.

Actually, I wouldn't have guessed that gay men are poor on average at map-reading, since some are awfully good at visual skills, such as the recently deceased gay Nazi architect Philip Johnson. In general, it's hard to predict on which traits gay men tend to be more feminine than straight men and on which they tend to be similar, as I pointed out in "Why Lesbians Aren't Gay."

Stephen Jay Gould's Theory of Intelligence Explained

My older son has been reading Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea (If only DD had come up with a D word like "Design" or "Development" instead of "Idea"!). So, he has become interested in the debate between evolutionary psychologists who view intelligence as a multitude of "domain-specific modules" (e.g., the Cheater Detection module) and mainstream psychometricians who emphasize the importance of the g factor for general problem solving ability. (The two models aren't necessarily contradictory; in fact, they are almost certainly complementary, as I wrote in "The Half Full glass.")

My son mentioned that the late Stephen Jay Gould hated the g factor theory, famously denouncing it as the "rotten core" of The Bell Curve. But, he noted, Gould also hated evolutionary psychology. "So, if Gould thought intelligence wasn't general and he also thought it wasn't specific, what else could it be?

Good question.

Single-Handedly Reviving the Case for Estrogen Therapy

Hot Flash! Susan Estrich, Dukakis' campaign manager in 1988, has her "Stop the Bias" blog up to further hysterically denounce Michael Kinsley's stewardship of the the LA Times op-ed page. I posted the following helpful comment:

"Dear Susan:

"Since you publicly suggested that Kinsley's Parkinson's disease is rotting his brain, you might be interested in my medical advice for you: the next time you get a hot flash, please, step away from your keyboard and immediately see your doctor about hormone replacement therapy. Sure, it's dangerous for your heart, but your current hysteria is fatal to your reputation. And it's not doing the reputation of women in general any good either."

By the way, isn't it about time Kinsley and Larry Summers teamed up to start The Triple L Society: Liberals who Like Logic. It would be a "No Gurls Allowed Club" for liberal men who enjoy indulging in an occasional syllogism without being shouted down by harpies.

And Nancy Hopkins' Thinks She's Oppressed Dept.

If you have a high speed connection, definitely check out "The Man of the Year" awards.

Hunter S. Thompson vs. the Pope

You'll note that, especially among his fans, there wasn't a lot of sadness over Thompson shooting himself. The unspoken attitude seemed to be that we could now fondly remember his brief era of brilliance without having him around in the flesh to remind us of the embarrassing and interminable second half of his life.

In contrast, the Pope refuses to go into a seemly retirement where his physical pain and decrepitude would be hidden away so as not to disturb our peace of mind. According to an impressive Newsweek article, his attitude is: Suffering is part of life. I'm dealing with it, and it won't kill you to learn to deal with watching other people's inevitable suffering either.

Protocols of the Elders of Patriarchy

Protocols of the Elders of Patriarchy: A reader writes:

"I notice that women make up about half of all law and med students. Does this mean that the patriarchy is keeping the glamour jobs like mechanical engineer for itself, and relegating the girls to low pay, low prestige jobs like lawyer and doctor?"

Exactly. We of the Council of the Elders of Patriarchy have determined that while we can afford to power share with women at minor outposts of power such as the Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School, and Harvard Business School, so long as we hang on to the Harvard Math department, WE SHALL RULE THE WORLD! HA HA HA HA!

A reader adds:

"And prison! Damned if we'll let them get any more of a foothold into our near-monopoly on incarceration. We'll just have to discriminate twice as much if that's what it takes to keep them out of jail."

"We're Different. Get Over It"

Canadians can read my long Larry Summers op-ed in the National Post today (Thursday) on paper:

Not surprisingly, however, by showing weakness, Summers just encouraged the feeding frenzy. The majority of the Harvard faculty (which has most of the power in tenure decisions) remains up in arms against Summers' sexist allegation that they don't actually discriminate much against women. Granted, it makes no logical sense for the professors to flex their feminist credentials by denouncing Summers' chauvinistic claim that they aren't that biased against women, but academic disputes are seldom academic. Instead, they are mostly about money and power.

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Invade-the-World-Invite-the-World Personified

Neocon Max Boot explains in the LA Times his latest brainstorm about how to turn the Republic into an Empire:

Uncle Sam Wants Tu: The military could ease its manpower shortage by letting foreigners join up.

I note that there is a pretty big pool of manpower that's not being tapped: everyone on the planet who is not a U.S. citizen or permanent resident...

The military would do well today to open its ranks not only to legal immigrants but also to illegal ones and, as important, to untold numbers of young men and women who are not here now but would like to come. No doubt many would be willing to serve for some set period in return for one of the world's most precious commodities — U.S. citizenship. Open up recruiting stations from Budapest to Bangkok, Cape Town to Cairo, Montreal to Mexico City. Some might deride those who sign up as mercenaries, but these troops would have significantly different motives than the usual soldier of fortune.

Hey, great idea, Max! It worked like a charm for the Roman Empire in the 5th Century AD.

Last year I wrote, "One main breakdown could be between those who want to hammer the rest of the world into being just like America and those who fear that trying to do that will only end up making America just like the rest of the world." Boot is a particularly sinister exemplar of those whose overweening ambition would just end up making America as God-forsaken as the rest of the world.

Here's a better idea: If we can't find enough American citizens to start more stupid wars, then let's not start them.

India vs. China

Is India more of a competitive threat to America's economy than China? You would think that's true considering how many more articles you read about outsourcing a few hundred thousand white collar jobs to Indian than the loss of millions of blue collar jobs to China. A reader offers a different perspective:

The article below fits with the dual paradigm of China and India. This is the model where China dominates "blue collar" trade via manufacturing and India targets "white collar" trade via services. There is only one problem with this theory. It is wrong. The reality is very different. A few notes:

1. China's success in manufacturing trade dwarfs India's results in knowledge industries. China's goods exports are roughly 20 times larger than India's service revenues. There is simply no comparison.

2. China's economic growth has dwarfed that of India. China has sustained 8-10% GDP growth for decades, since the shift to capitalism started. India has only attained similar rates of growth in the last few years. It is not yet clear if India can sustain its growth because of how narrowly based it is. Note that the narrow base in this case is agriculture, not information services. India's recent growth spurt has been rural, not urban.

3. China has created vastly more jobs than India. The migration of Chinese workers from the hinterland to the coastal cities is the largest movement of people in the history of the world, all in the last 20 years. And those Chinese workers aren't living in shantytowns, selling cigarettes, and looking for a real job. By contrast, India's IT sector employs roughly 1 million workers.

4. Many countries have created equal or better educational systems than India. China, with 16 million university students, is only one example. Tawain, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, etc. have all attained higher levels of literacy and higher education than India.

What then can be said about India's quite real successes in knowledge work? Essentially, they are a product of failure. The knowledge industries aren't a failure of course. However, their success is a consequence of the failure of India's economy to "soak up" its college graduates in a broadly based developing economy. For example, Korea produces any number of brilliant engineers. However, in Korea Samsung, Hyundai, LG, SK and a zillion smaller companies provide lucrative employment opportunities for these folks. In India, you either get a job with Wipro, Infosys, etc. or you starve.

To state this directly, India's success in IT is a reflection of India's failure in manufacturing. Why has India failed in manufacturing? There a number of reasons. However, the post-WWII socialist government of India imposed draconian restrictions on private investment, supposedly to protect small scale village producers (look up "homespun" and "License Raj" for some tragic examples). These restrictions have only been very slowly and partially removed. A good article on the subject can be found here. India has also failed to create the physical infrastructure needed for development as a consequence of low national savings and high budget deficits.

It is worth noting, that most (almost all) Indian's agree. They reject the idea that India can develop via services and deeply envy China's success in manufacturing. A common statement is "we must either import China's goods or China's methods". However, India has failed to undertake the reforms needed to make either choice possible.

King of the Blackfellows

King of the Blackfellows: I'm reminded of story in William Manchester's famous Pacific War memoir Goodbye, Darkness, in which, decades after WWII, he visits a Melanesian island where the natives, who called themselves "Blackfellows" had a fervent cargo cult left over from WWII when they witnessed American officers pick up a telephones and call for planes full of desirable cargo. So, the Blackfellows carved wooden phones, hacked landing strips out of the jungle, and even built tall control towers, just like the Seabees had done, but when they called on their wooden phones, frustratingly, no planes full of cargo ever came.

Around 1965, the Blackfellows heard that the #1 man in America at picking up the telephone and giving orders was President Lyndon Baines Johnson, so they somehow scraped together the money and bought LBJ a one-way plane ticket to Melanesia. They sent it to the White House along with a formal invitation to become King of the Blackfellows. Sadly, LBJ never came. Manchester contends that LBJ would have delighted his new subjects, and personally would have enjoyed being King of the Blackfellows far more than he enjoyed the last three years of his Presidency.

New York Times won't print critical letters

I did not know that: A friend writes:

The NY Times is actually (I think) pretty much unique in having an official policy against ever printing a letter that disputes the accuracy of a Times story. Their rather doubtful reasoning is that any inaccuracy should be dealt with through a correction rather than a letter.

I discovered this surprising aspect a few years ago when one of their stories dealing peripherally with some of my own activities mischaracterized me... Naturally, I sent a letter politely pointing out their mistake, thinking there was a reasonable chance it might be published.

Instead, a few days later I was very much surprised to receive a personal call from the reporter involved, who explained their absolute policy against printing correction letters and also the long and complicated steps I'd have to go through to attempt to get a formal correction issued (and since so few corrections are ever issued, it was clear such a result would be a huge black mark against his personal career at the Times). Since the fellow seemed quite apologetic, the mistake had merely been a careless one, and my mention was only peripheral, I gladly let him off the hook.

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The best defense is a good offense

Larry Summers as Agent Provocateur? The Ambler writes:

Three years ago, Summers took on the Black Studies scam. That ended with Summers grovelling. Did he learn anything? Not a bit of it. We all know how his dust-up with the bearded ladies will end. Summers could not have done a better job making life worse for white males at Harvard if had been an agent provocateur.

Iraq: 3 ethnic groups don't go into 2 oil regions

Strong analytical article on Iraq from Patrick Cockburn in the UK Independent:

Americans and rebels begin talks on timetable for withdrawal from Iraq

American officials are talking to negotiators from the anti-US resistance in Iraq, whom they have denounced in the past as foreign fighters and remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime.

Insurgent leaders and Pentagon officials have confirmed to Time magazine that talks have taken place for the first time in the heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad.

The Sunni guerrillas want a timetable for a US withdrawal, first from Iraqi cities and then from the country as a whole. American officials aim to see if they can drive a wedge between nationalist guerrillas and fanatical Islamist groups.

Abu Marwan, a resistance commander, is quoted as saying that the insurgents want to "fight and negotiate". They are modelling their strategy on that of the IRA and Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland. This means creating a united political organisation with a programme opposed to the US occupation.

US military commanders are now dubious about the chances of winning an outright military victory over the Sunni rebels who have a firm core of supporters among the five million-strong Sunni Muslim community. The US military has lost 1,479 dead and 10,740 wounded in Iraq since the invasion began in March 2003.

The talks so far are tentative but they indicate a recognition on the part of the US that it will need a political solution. Those willing to sit down with US diplomats and officials are "nationalists" composed primarily of former military and security officers from Saddam's Hussein's government.

The Iraqi resistance is highly fragmented and regionalised. Groups often only exist in a single city. In guerrilla warfare this may be an advantage since no command structure can be penetrated or disrupted.

The speed with which the insurgents became so effective after the American invasion is explained by many of the fighters being professional soldiers, and their being unemployed after the Iraqi army was dissolved in May 2003.

The Islamist groups, of which the most notorious and heavily publicised is that led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, have no intention of talking and have threatened to kill those who do. The cells behind the devastating suicide-bombing campaign are openly sectarian, targeting the Shia Muslim community as they pray or march in religious processions.

The fundamentalist militants believe that Iraq is an ideal location to fight the US. They have local sympathisers and can use the long, open borders with Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria which are impossible to police. They are also well financed in a deeply impoverished country.

The slaughter of Shia civilians by suicide bombers has made it very difficult for the resistance to claim that it is a nationalist insurgency representing all Iraqis against the occupation. After six months of suicide bombings orchestrated from Fallujah against young army and police recruits, most Shia Muslims in Baghdad were delighted when the US Marines largely destroyed the city last November.

A problem for the US and the interim Iraqi government is that it is unclear if self-declared leaders of the resistance possess the authority that they claim. No less than 38 Sunni groups have said that they have carried out attacks on US forces. Many have only a shadowy existence.

There are signs that the different groups are trying to combine militarily and politically. Just as the US Marines were storming Fallujah in November the fighters in the largely Sunni Arab city of Mosul united to take it over. When the US Army counter-attacked, they did not stand and fight but melted away. Some nationalist groups in Mosul went out of their way to show that they were not sectarian by freeing a Christian businessman held by kidnappers. But, when the US Army damaged two mosques, another resistance cell responded by blowing up two Christian churches.

The new Iraqi government about to take office after the election on 30 January will be ambivalent about talks between the US and the resistance. A Shia-Kurdish administration is unlikely to have much sympathy with Sunni fanatics and former Baath party officials who persecuted them for years.

The new Iraqi army reflects this political make-up, being reliant on Kurds and Shias. It is too weak to withstand the onslaught of the insurgents without the backing of the US Army. It will therefore be impossible for the US to withdraw as the resistance demands.

As I've been arguing for awhile, probably the best solution would be to split the "nationalist" Sunnis from the small number of foreigners by promising to withdraw, team up with the "nationalist" Sunnis to hunt down and exterminate the outsiders, then skedaddle. (Of course, they aren't real nationalists, they are Sunniists.)

But now democracy is going to get in the way of sensible realpolitik, since the winners in the election like to see Sunnis die, but, as we saw at Fallujah, they don't seem willing to take the risk of killing them themselves, so their attitude toward us seems to be, "Let's you and him fight."

The fundamental problem is that there are three main groups in Iraq but only two oil regions, so somebody is likely to wind up without oil at some point. And since the GDP per capita of Iraq not counting oil is roughly sub-Saharan, well, that encourages each group to try very hard not to wind up the odd man out with no oil.

There may well be a good solution to this chess puzzle, but I haven't figured it out yet.

But, we'd never to listen to somebody who was right!

Former weapons inspector Scott Ritter claims U.S. "cooked" Iraqi election results during the two week delay between the elections and revelation of the results, dropping the Shi'ite share from actual 56% to the reported 48%:

Asked by UFPPC's Ted Nation about this shocker, Ritter said an official involved in the manipulation was the source, and that this would soon be reported by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist in a major metropolitan magazine -- an obvious allusion to New Yorker reporter Seymour M. Hersh.

I have no evidence on this one way or another, but the much-denounced Ritter has been right before when he was a rare voice speaking the truth that there were no WMDs in Iraq. As I speculated a couple of weeks ago, this wouldn't necessarily be immoral on our part: Sistani might have signed off on lowering his own coalition's share, as Nelson Mandela did in South Africa in 1994 in a statesmanlike gesture.

Imprisonment rates by race by state

New VDARE column: Mapping the Unmentionable: Race & Crime

Republic of Virtue

Not-So-Free Republic: The news that Jim Robinson is once again purging immigration restrictionist voices from what he ironically calls "Free Republic" is no surprise around here. Way back in 2000, my psephological analysis "GOP Future Depends on White Vote" for some reason got VDARE.com permanently banned from the Republic of Jim. And he doesn't let anybody cite iSteve.com either. As a reader says, he should rename it "Republic of Virtue."