Google Reader going away

Kevin Drum rates three replacements.

Understanding the postwar era

I just stumbled upon a key stat in an ancient Time magazine:

Religion: More Catholics 

Friday, May 12, 1961 

U.S. Roman Catholics now form 24% of the population, compared to 19% a decade ago. According to the Official Catholic Directory for 1961, published last week, baptized Catholics number 42,104,899—13,470,021 more than in 1951.

This was a sizable issue at the time, and the resolution of it in the 1960s, as I explained in Taki's article a few months ago, opened up room for much that followed.

Who wrinkles fastest?

The English poet W.H. Auden at age 19:

Famously, Auden, the human Shar-pei, at about 65:

But what explains LeBron James' wrinkles?

What 70 IQ looks like

Candid_observer comments on the Trayvon-Zimmerman trial:

One thing that's remarkable about the testimony of Rachel Jeantel is that it puts on display a black whom one would simply never see under the standard media unspoken rules. Any depiction of a black who came across as so deeply ignorant, frankly stupid, transparently hostile, and flagrantly dishonest would be met with accusations of racism because it is so unflattering. One sees such blacks turning up in youtube videos of course, but I'm not sure I've seen any such in the media, even in news reports of crimes, which, I'm sure, are likewise sanitized for public view.

That's why Law & Order shows witnesses to cunning Park Avenue killings. The homicides they witnessed may not, technically, have happened, but they are a lot more interesting than the witnesses to actual killings.

Back in 2012, the press wanted this trial to be, to use Bonfire of the Vanities terminology, the triumphant culmination of "the hunt for the Great White Defendant," with George Zimmerman as Sherman McCoy, perfect for kicking off Obama's re-election campaign. Predictably, though, it's just turned into another Herbert 92X-style "piece a s---" case. (You can read Tom Wolfe's bravura description of Asst. D.A. Kramer's thoughts on pp. 105 to 108.)

This is reminiscent of the Supreme Court's 2002 decision that effectively banned the death penalty for murderers with IQs of 70 or below. In the extended families of Supreme Court justices, IQs of 70 or less are inevitably associated with a clear organic cases of mental retardation, such as Down Syndrome. But among African Americans, about 1/6th are no more than 70 IQ, just as about 1/6th are smarter than the average white American.

National News: Eva Longoria gets Chicano Studies M.A. at CSUN

As A. Conan Doyle pointed out, dogs that don't bark are hard to notice.

One way to notice lack of distinction is to keep an eye out for what I call the exception that proves the rule. Yes, I realize that everybody wants to make objections, logical or etymological, to my use of that old phrase. If you can come up with a better phrase let me know, but what I'm talking about is that one way to notice a general negative truth (e.g., Mexican-Americans aren't very noteworthy achievers, on average) is to notice when a big whoop-tee-doo is being made over somebody just for being exceptional. From the NYT, an unintentionally funny look at how desperate the press is for a Mexican-American leader.

An Emerging Hispanic Voice Defends Her ‘Maids’ 

By TANZINA VEGA 

LOS ANGELES — At a premiere party at the Spanish-colonial-style Bel-Air Bay Club last week for the new Lifetime show “Devious Maids,” the center of attention was not the five actresses who play the lead characters, Latina maids who cook, clean and scheme while looking after wealthy white families in Beverly Hills. 

Instead, the spotlight fell on one of the executive producers, Eva Longoria, better known for her own role as the wealthy Gabrielle Solis on “Desperate Housewives.” ... But then she changed the script, positioning herself as a Hollywood power player on Latino issues and a highly regarded political advocate. 

Now she finds herself in a position of having to defend her latest project against critics who say the show relies too much on the cliché of the Hispanic maid. 

“When people talk about stereotypical maids, these maids are anything but,” Ms. Longoria, 38, said over a long lunch at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood two days before the premiere party. She said future plot points would reveal more developed people. 

She was eager to counter the negative reactions to the show. “I think it’s important for us to have a dialogue of identity in our culture, and even though this show may not be your experience, it is a lot of people’s experience,” she said. Latinos, she added, “over-index in domestic workers: that is a fact, that’s not an opinion.” 

The ratings for the premiere of “Devious Maids,” at 10 on Sunday night, were modest. Going up against the season finale of AMC’s “Mad Men,” the show attracted 2 million viewers, slightly below the Lifetime show that preceded it at 9, “Drop Dead Diva” (2.2 million). 

Ms. Longoria’s rise as a media force has been paralleled by her political ascent. She stumped for President Obama in 2012, helping round up critical Hispanic voters, and she was a founder of the Futuro Fund, which raised $32 million for the campaign. She recently spoke at the Clinton Global Initiative in Chicago; left a few days later for Colombia to film a documentary for the Half the Sky Movement, an international women’s advocacy group; and signed on to a fund-raising drive for the political group Battleground Texas, whose goal is to raise money to “put Democrats back on the map” in the state, in the words of her message on the group’s home page.

I dropped by the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills last spring to see a friend from New York at Trader Vic's bar. I believe the prime pre-dinner speaking slots at the ex-con's Davos-style wing-ding were a choice between hearing Al Gore or Eva Longoria. (I may have this wrong, but I think the choice was Al or Eva.)

And in May she completed a master’s degree in Chicano studies from California State University, Northridge.

In contrast, to pick a random example, movie director Terrence Malick taught philosophy at MIT and translated Heidegger. But Christian Arabs in the New World (on Malick's father's side) tend to have their share of high achievers, so nobody much cares that Malick's a credit to his semi-ethnicity. But Eva Longoria getting an M.A. in Chicano Studies at CSUN is national news: the exception that proves my rule.

Hobbes: Bloomberg has been a great mayor

From the perspective of 17th Century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has been a great mayor. Leave aside for the moment all the distractions about banning Big Gulps and similar trivia. In Bloomberg's 12 years, he has made impressive progress at the fundamental duty of the state: to hold a monopoly on violence.

From the New York Times:

City Homicides Drop Sharply, Again; Police Cite New Antigang Strategy 

By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN 

The number of homicides on record in New York City has dropped significantly during the first half of the year — to 154 from 202 in the same period last year — surprising even police officials who have long been accustomed to trumpeting declining crime rates in the city.

In the first 178 days of 2013, the city averaged less than a murder a day, the first time the police can recall that happening for any sustained period.

The rest of the article has material of interest on Bloomberg's stop-and-frisk war on "the right people." Goldstein is a good police reporter.

... On the one hand, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Mr. Kelly have cited the declining murder rate as a vindication of their policing strategies, which rely heavily on the stop-and-frisk tactic.

On the other, stop-and-frisks have dropped off considerably in the last 15 months, suggesting that the drop in murders might have been a result of other factors. 

In the first three months of 2012, police records indicate, there were 203,500 stops. But in the first three months of this year, the police recorded fewer than 100,000 stops. 

... Noting how the latest reduction of violence coincided with a diminishing number of street stops, some civil rights lawyers have grown more vocal in questioning not only the legality but also the effectiveness of stop-and-frisk tactics. 

But police commanders point to what they say is the long half-life of the deterrent effect of stop-and-frisk, saying that criminals may decide to leave their guns at home because they have been stopped in the past, even if the odds of a stop have decreased in recent months. And the police say the decrease in violence has most likely led to a corresponding decrease in suspicious behavior, which results in fewer stops. 

So, is Mayor Bloomberg getting in much trouble for his recent comment defending the NYPD's racial profiling: "I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little"?

Or is it all going to blow over? I'll bet on the latter. We shall see ...

Good point

Ross Douthat writes in his New York Times column:

Democrats Get a Gift From the Roberts Court 

By ROSS DOUTHAT 

... First, Republicans faced an unexpected (though in hindsight, predictable) undertow of their own, as many conservative-leaning, working-class white voters looked at what Mitt Romney had to offer and simply stayed home.

Second, instead of declining as expected after the history-making election of 2008, African-American turnout may have actually risen again in 2012. When the Census Bureau released its turnout analysis last month, it showed blacks voting at higher rates than whites for the first time in the history of the survey. 

If you believe Chief Justice John Roberts Jr.’s more overheated liberal critics, last week’s Supreme Court decision invalidating a portion of the Voting Rights Act is designed to make sure African-American turnout never hits these highs again. ...

If so, though, the Roberts Court may have actually handed the Democratic Party a political gift. 

How so? Well, to begin with, voter identification laws do not belong to the same moral or legal universe as Jim Crow. Their public purpose, as a curb to fraud, is potentially legitimate rather than nakedly discriminatory, and their effects are relatively limited. As Roberts’s majority opinion noted, the voter registration gap between whites and blacks in George Wallace’s segregationist Alabama was 50 percentage points. When my colleague Nate Silver looked at studies assessing the impact of voter ID laws, he estimated that they tend to reduce turnout by around 2 percent — and that reduction crosses racial lines, rather than affecting African-Americans exclusively. 

A 2 percent dip is still enough to influence a close election. But voter ID laws don’t take effect in a vacuum: as they’re debated, passed and contested in court, they shape voter preferences and influence voter enthusiasm in ways that might well outstrip their direct influence on turnout. They inspire registration drives and education efforts; they help activists fund-raise and organize; they raise the specter of past injustices; they reinforce a narrative that their architects are indifferent or hostile to minorities. 

This, I suspect, is part of the story of why African-American turnout didn’t fall off as expected between 2008 and 2012. By trying to restrict the franchise on the margins, Republican state legislators handed Democrats a powerful tool for mobilization and persuasion, and motivated voters who might otherwise have lost some of their enthusiasm after the euphoria of “Yes We Can” gave way to the reality of a stagnant, high-unemployment economy. 

So a lengthy battle over voting rules and voting rights seems almost precision-designed to help the Obama-era Democratic majority endure once President Obama has left the Oval Office.

Good point, if I say so myself.

Also of interest is my June 2, 2013 VDARE article.

Google Dopedar

Google has disabled Google Gaydar, but you can still quantify the Undernews by just putting the word "Is" in front of a celebrity's name and seeing what are the most popular prompts.

Personally, I've never felt inclined to state my Google searches in the form of a question, but then I know a lot about the logic of searching. So, these "Is" prompts may bring up a lower stratum of Google users. Let's hope so.

In honor of Wimbledon, let's try tennis players:

"Is Djokovic"

brings up 

1. Is Djokovic doping

2. Is Djokovic married

3. Is Djokovic gay

1. Is Serena Williams married

2. Is Serena Williams a Jehovah's Witness

3. Is Serena or Venus better

4. Is Serena doping

1. Is Nadal gay

2. Is Nadal right handed

3. Is Nadal playing in the 2013 French Ope

4. Is Nadal on steroids

1. Is Federer gay

2. Is Federer injured

Doping or steroids doesn't come up in the top 10 for the Swiss great, who has already lost at Wimbledon.

1. Is Sharapova still engaged
2. Is Sharapova married
3. Is Sharapova engaged

How about baseball players? What could be more enthralling than rehashing once again last year's American league MVP race?

1. Is Miguel Cabrera on steroids

1. Is Mike Trout married

2. Is Mike Trout a Christian

3. Is Mike Trout on steroids

Movie stars?

1. Is Johnny Depp dead

This "is dead" thing seems to come up a lot with movie stars (Is John Goodman dead is popular, but so is Is James Garner still alive), but not with athletes or Presidents:

1. Is Barack Obama black

2. Is Barack Obama muslim

3. Is Barack Obama the antichrist

4. Is Barack Obama the devil

5. Is Barack Obama a mason

6. Is Barack Obama left handed

7. Is Barack Obama Osama bin Laden

8. Is Barack Obama a good president

9. Is Barack Obama getting impeached

For sheer minimalism, you can type in just "Is " and find out What the World Most Wants to Know:

1. Is anyone up

2. Is shingles contagious

3. Is today a holiday

4. Is it down

5. Is skype free

6. Is facebook down

7. Is anyone down

8. Is coffee bad for you

9. Is Khloe Kardashian pregnant

10. Is oatmeal gluten free

Trayvon trial showcases future of America

Commenter Portlander has been following the crackerjack battle of wits that is the murder trial of George Zimmerman, and observes, "This whole trial has been a peek at the US's post-racial future ..." 

It has not been an edifying experience, which may help explain why Portlander's a Portlander, and why the national prestige press has been losing interest rapidly. They really need Aaron Sorkin to punch up the witnesses' lines.

Portlander has watched the testimony of the prosecution's star Haitian-American ear-witness so you can jump right to the most scintillating repartee:

Alright, you all owe me. Here's the link to the video. Yuk-yuk's start a little after 7:00.

"Creepy white ... [something] ... creepy ass cracker" comes after 8:00. I can't make it out, but I'm told the [something] was "a creepy white assed kill your neighbors cracker." Is "kill your neighbors" a thing? What does that mean?

Update: New best guess is "Creepy white assed -- 'scuse my language -- cracker."

Sounds like Trayvon was already feeling a bit hostile toward George Zimmerman. Judging by his comments, was the fight started as a racist and/or homophobic hate crime on the part of Trayvon?

"Rapist" banter starts closer to 9:20. Lasts about 2 minutes. "[N-word] still following me" comes in at about 13:30. 

In general, the prestige press hasn't been terribly interested in the multi-racial lumpenprole world that is evolving in places like Florida and Texas: Idiocracy 500 years early.

It wasn't supposed to happen like this. It all sounds so much more sophisticated in theory. For example, David Brooks yesterday explained the conventional wisdom in the NYT:

A Nation of Mutts
By DAVID BROOKS

Over the past few decades, American society has been transformed in a fit of absence of mind. First, we’ve gone from a low immigrant nation to a high immigrant nation. If you grew up between 1950 and 1985, you grew up at a time when only about 5 percent or 6 percent of American residents were foreign born. Today, roughly 13 percent of American residents are foreign born, and we’re possibly heading to 15 percent. ...

Soon, we will no longer be an outpost of Europe, but a nation of mutts, a nation with hundreds of fluid ethnicities from around the world, intermarrying and intermingling. Americans of European descent are already a minority among 5-year-olds. European-Americans will be a minority over all in 30 years at the latest, and probably sooner. 

If enacted, the immigration reform bill would accelerate these trends. It would further increase immigration levels. According to the Census Bureau, roughly 20 million immigrants will come to this country under current law. The Congressional Budget Office expects another 16 million under the new provisions. 

It would boost the rise of non-Europeans. Immigration would be more global. Hispanics are now projected to make up 30 percent of the U.S. population by 2050. We would hit that mark sooner with reform. 

In other words, immigration reform won’t transform America. It will just speed up the arrival of a New America that is already guaranteed.

If you find yourself in a hole, dig faster.

... Let’s make some educated guesses about what the New America will look like. It will almost certainly be economically dynamic. Immigration boosts economic dynamism, and more immigration would boost it more. There would also be a lot of upward striving. Immigrant groups tend to work harder than native groups. They save more. They start business at higher rates than natives.

Oh, boy ... Notice how diversity is the enemy of making intelligent distinctions. The more diversity, the more things we aren't allowed to think about, such as the distinction in average behavior between legal and illegal immigrants. Starting a business of standing on the street corner selling oranges is not exactly the same as founding Intel.

... we’re seeing high rates of intermarriage. This creates large numbers of hybrid individuals, biracial or triracial people with names like Enrique Cohen-Chan.

This is largely an East Coast fantasy about the future. For my entire life, Los Angeles has had numerous Mexicans, Jews, and Chinese, but I don't recall seeing a name like this. Jews and Chinese are common (e.g., Amy Chua's kids), but the offspring of marriages of Jews and Mexican-Americans are vanishingly rare in Los Angeles.

Think about that. Jews and Mexicans shared the Boyle Heights neighborhood east of downtown L.A. a century ago: yet, there's not much mixing over the last four generations. The Mexicans are still stuck in Boyle Heights, but the Jews have moved on. The last old Jewish man in Boyle Heights died last January.

You'll notice that Brooks doesn't actually have an example of anybody prominent with a Mexican-American and Jewish names.

Yes, there are prominent Jews in Mexico City's elite, like historian Enrique Krauze and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, but I'm talking about Mexican-Americans and Jews getting together in Los Angeles. In case you are wondering, comedian Louis CK is relatively Mexico City elite on his half Jewish-half Mexican father's side (his parents met at Harvard).

The MayorBot is now online

The rich new mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, is 1/2 Jewish, 1/4 Italian, and claims to be 1/4th Mexican, and he might even be telling the truth about his paternal grandmother. Among other Mannequin-Americans, the Weitz Brothers (American Pie, and sons of fashion designer and race car driver John Weitz) have a Mexican-born grandmother who was a silent movie star in 1920s Hollywood, I'm trying hard to think of some other examples. Overall, there sure aren't many out of Southern California over the last century.

On the whole, this future is exciting. The challenge will be to create a global civilization that is, at the same time, distinctly American. Immigration reform or not, the nation of mutts is coming.

It sounds vibrant.

Google Reader going away this weekend

If you use Google Reader to follow iSteve, you'll need to replace it right away.

Here are some current articles:

CNET: How to export your Google Reader data Google Reader will cease to exist after July 1. If you haven't migrated to another news reader yet, you only have a few days left before it's too late to export your data out of Google Reader.

Wired: Where to Move Your Google Reader Subscriptions, and How 

Slate: How to Survive the Google Reader Apocalypse: A flow chart of alternatives

Remember, there are only 30 days in June, so July 1st is Monday, not Tuesday.

Xanax for Gay Summer Weddings

Here's the recent Saturday Night Live fake commercial for the new pharmaceutical spinoff brand, Xanax for Gay Summer Weddings. (If that link to the video doesn't work, try Hulu.)

Back in 2000, I wrote in National Review:

But could it be, instead, that fewer gay men want to be married than get married? Does gay marriage appeal more because sexual fidelity offers a role for a lifetime, or because a wedding provides the role of a lifetime?  ... 

So legalizing single-sex marriage isn't likely to prevent the next gay venereal epidemic. Yet, will gay weddings destroy society? Overall, I'm not terribly worried. Still, the fervor with which some gay grooms will pursue the perfect wedding will make straight men even less enthusiastic about enduring their own weddings. The opportunities for gays to turn weddings into high-camp farces are endless. For example, if two drag queens get married, who gets to wear white? And anything that discourages straight men from marrying would be widely harmful. While most straight guys eventually decide that being married is fine, the vast majority find getting married a baffling and punitive process. (You may have noticed that while Modern Bride magazine is now over 1,000 pages long, there is no Eager Groom magazine.) About the only comment a straight man can make in favor of his role is that at least it's a guy thing -- not a gay thing. But for how much longer?

And for the joke at the end of the SNL skit -- "Xanax for Gay Summer Weddings is not prescribed for lesbian weddings" -- see "Why Lesbians Aren't Gay" from 1994.

Bloomberg: "We disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little"

I often advise readers to learn lessons from the success of 21st Century New York City: do as they do, not as they say. But crime-fighting billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg is getting old and close to retirement, so today he just flat out said what he does. From the New York Post:

Bloomberg: 'We disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little' in stop-frisk checks 

By YOAV GONEN and JENSEN WERLEY 

Mayor Bloomberg claimed that people of color should be stopped and frisked more -- not less -- while whites are stopped too frequently. 

"I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little. It's exactly the reverse of what they say," Bloomberg said on his weekly radio show, in response to the City Council passing two bills aimed at reining in the controversial policing tactic. 

"I don't know where they went to school but they certainly didn't take a math course. Or a logic course.” 

... The mayor was referring to statistics showing that a majority of serious crimes in the city are carried out by young men of color. 

Eighty seven percent of all stops last year were for blacks or latinos, who constituted 90 percent of murder suspects, according to city stats. Only nine percent of stops were for white people, who made up 7 percent of all murder suspects. 

“People say, well you know, cops shouldn't be stopping so many of any one group,” he said. “The cops' job is to stop so many of groups fitting the description. It's society's job to make sure that no one group is disproportionately represented as potential perpetrators. 

"That's not the test. The test is are you stopping a disproportionate percentage of people who fit the description that witnesses or victims have come up with of crimes that have been committed.

Keep in mind that Bloomberg has been wildly popular with the media during his 12 years as mayor, in large part because of his success at keeping crime down and driving NAMs out of increasing amounts of New York. For example, there was a term limit, of the kind that has caused inconvenience to rulers like Erdogan and Putin, but was swept away by media acclamation to allow Bloomberg a third term. It also helps that Bloomberg employs a lot of journalists, whom he let spy on his clients through his $2,000 per month Bloomberg terminals.

Did Trayvon gaybash Zimmerman?

Back on March 31, 2012, I blogged:

Let's try thinking like Tom Wolfe: for maximum discomfiture. Here's a possibility that might come out at, say, a trial of George Zimmerman if Crump dares put the girlfriend on the stand and expose her to cross-examination: It's hardly implausible that Trayvon Martin might have worried that this strange man was following him in the dark for homoerotic purposes, and he might have mentioned that concern to his girlfriend over the phone. 

Then on May 18, 2012 I blogged:

From the New York Times: 

Martin Spoke of ‘Crazy and Creepy’ Man Following Him, Friend Says
By Serge F. Kovaleski  

... In the sworn interview recorded on April 2, which runs more than 22 minutes, the unidentified 16-year-old said Mr. Martin described a man who was “crazy and creepy” and on the phone, watching him from a vehicle before he started to follow him on foot. 

Keep in mind that the cops didn't get to talk to this unidentified girl until almost two weeks after attorney Benjamin Crump coached her through a talk with ABC News, and that there is no recording of this phone call (unless Echelon has it, of course). 

Now we know from her testimony that what Trayvon called Zimmerman was a "creepy ass cracker." Most of the attention has been focused upon the second Cr-word, but what about the first? What's the difference between "creepy ass cracker" and, say, "crazy ass cracker"? I'd say there's a notable difference. In this context, "crazy" would have no gay implication, while "creepy" suggests that Trayvon thought Zimmerman might be homosexual.

Indeed, as a commenter notes, when the young lady who was talking to Trayvon on the phone was asked to explain what this phrase meant, she replied, "Pervert."

From CBS:

Jeantel said Martin complained to her that a man he described as a "creepy ass cracker" was following him through the community as he was walking home from buying snacks at a 7-Eleven. "He kept complaining that a man was just watching him," Jeantel said.

Martin told her he wanted to try and "lose" the man and starting walking back home, leaving the area near the mailboxes, she said.

"So he told me the man was looking at him, and I had to think it might have been a rapist," Jeantel said.

The Trayvon case, with its semi-literate and not very satisfactory star witness, suggests why white liberal elites have been shifting their patronage from blacks to gays as their Favorite Victim Group.

Chechens acting Checheny

Remember that op-ed in the NYT about how the Real Victims of the Bomb Brothers were Chechen refugees? The brother of Paul Klebnikov, the Forbes man who reported on the late Marc Rich and numerous other examples of corruption in Russia until his assassination in 2004, wrote in to protest:

To the Editor: 

Oliver Bullough suggests that the radicalization of the Boston Marathon bombers and other people of Chechen origin is due to displacement and oppression. This reasoning may be applied to any number of violent extremists — from I.R.A. terrorists who fought to liberate Ireland, to Palestinian suicide bombers in the occupied territories. 

As someone whose brother was murdered by Chechen hit men, I find such explanations abhorrent. 

To rationalize terrorism is to invite more of it. 

PETER KLEBNIKOV
New York, April 20, 2013

"This Is the End"

The Los Angeles Apocalypse, when the Lotus Eaters of L.A. finally get what's coming to them, is a popular topic worldwide, and is a particular favorite of Angelenos. As local bestselling author Mike Davis says, Los Angeles is "the doom capital of the universe." For example, Jerry Pournelle told me recently that he continues to do very nicely off Kindle sales of his and Larry Niven's Lucifer's Hammer, the most logistically magisterial of all Los Angeles Apocalypse stories, in which a comet wreaks havoc on Lankershim Boulevard.

Seth Rogen's "This Is the End" is a movie comedy in which a half dozen actors (such as Jonah Hill and Craig Robinson) have to hole up in James Franco's Hollywood Hills mansion when The Rapture lifts all the good people to heaven, leaving Los Angeles a fiery wasteland tormented by demons and populated mostly by movie stars.

Assuming that they are merely victims of a huge earthquake and that the Army will soon rescue them, the stars -- with no personal assistants to advise them -- fail repeatedly at prepping. An ax-wielding Emma Watson (Hermione of the Harry Potter movies) briefly shows up, having impressively survived what she cogently argues must be the Zombie Apocalypse, but soon ditches the male losers.

The not very masculine actors spend most of their time smoking weed and arguing over their friendships like junior high school girls. (It seems trivial, but, actually, 9 figures  of money are at stake over whether Franco and Rogen decide to do Pineapple Express 2 together.)

Rogen once again somehow makes himself being reasonable while beset by psychopaths funny (although not as funny as an interview he and Barbra Streisand did last Christmas with Dr. Phil to promote their movie in which they play son and mother, an interview in which Babs was her usual megalomanical self and Seth tried, ineffectually, to return her to the level horizon of reason and self-awareness).

Only the 3/4ths gentile Jay Baruchel and the black Robinson notice the obvious parallels of what's happening to Los Angeles to the "Book of Revelation" in the New Testament, a tome with which Rogen, Hill, and Franco are blankly unfamiliar.

It's pretty funny.

New Republic: "Why Liberals Should Oppose the Immigration Bill"

Veteran Los Angeles-based liberal journalist T.A. Frank (who is, I just discovered, not the same person as veteran liberal journalist Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas) writes in The New Republic:

Why Liberals Should Oppose the Immigration Bill 

It's about low-wage American workers 

BY T.A. FRANK

The consensus among decent people in favor of the immigration bill making its way through Congress is so firm that expressing dissent feels a bit like taking the floor to suggest we chop down the Redwood National Park. People don’t want to hear it, and they also think you’re a nut. That makes this article one of the hardest I’ve ever had to write. It’s not that I’m afraid people will get angry; it’s that I can’t imagine anyone on my side (liberal) is open to persuasion. And, despite the vastness and complexity of the issue, I have to be brief: the Senate hopes to be done with things this week. 

Sometimes, though, you just have to embrace futility.

The country I want for myself and future Americans is one that’s prosperous, cohesive, harmonious, wealthy in land and resources per capita, nurturing of its skilled citizens, and, most important, protective of its unskilled citizens, who deserve as much any other Americans to live in dignity. This bill threatens to put all of that out of reach, because it fails to control illegal immigration. The problem is not that it provides 11 million people eventual amnesty (I don’t object to that, in theory); the problem is that it sets in motion the next waves of millions.  

That is not a fashionable concern, of course. Worrying about illegal immigration today is a lot like worrying about communists in government in 1950.  It’s not that the problem isn’t legitimate or serious (there actually were, we now know, a lot of Moscow loyalists working for the U.S. government). It’s that expressing your concurrence links you to a lot of demagogues and bad actors.  

Most of America’s college-educated elites are little affected by illegal immigration. In fact, it’s often a benefit to us in terms of childcare, household help, dinners out, and other staples of upper-middle-class life. Many therefore view the problem as akin, in severity, to marijuana use—common but benign, helpful to the immigrants and minimal in its effects on Americans or anyone else.  

I know, because it used to be my own view.

It's probably not a coincidence that this rare voice of liberal dissent comes from Los Angeles (as does Mickey Kaus's). We Angelenos live in America's future (except that when the future finally arrives in your part of America, you're not going to get Southern California-style weather to bask in or Hollywood-style starlets to ogle, so, lots of luck!).

But, Los Angeles tends to be a black hole of punditry. The NYC-DC axis that dominates opinion journalism doesn't have a clue what they are in for because, while there are more than a few smart people in Los Angeles, you can make far more money here off metaphor than off blunt analysis.

For example, here's a brief allegory from the local public radio station about Max Brooks, the author of the novel World War Z, and his father Mel tending the garden of Max's mother, the late Ann Bancroft:

Max doesn’t see himself giving up writing in favor of becoming an organic farmer, as much as he loves his work in the garden.  But he does now understand how his mother took joy in killing worms.  Then, he thought it was sadistic and wrong. “Now, I understand that sense of protection, when I see squirrels in Venice coming after my Japanese plum tree, if we lived in the country, you’d go in the pot as well,” he said. 

His father gets it too.  Now, the two bond over rat patrol at the compost bins on the side of the house.  Mel carries the stick, and Max carries the compost.  Being from New York makes scaring away the vermin a bit easier.

Sounds like Mayor Bloomberg's stop-and-frisk plan.

"World War Z"

This movie about Brad Pitt zooming around the world to fight zombies would be a good March release. But for June it's a little odd because even though it cost a fortune, it's not a blockbuster. Instead, it's a fairly effective smallish movie. Compared to Man of Steel, in which former superstars Kevin Costner and Russell Crowe play Superman's two dads, Pitt is just about the only recognizable face in the cast. Compared to Robert Downey Jr. exchanging Shane Black's carefully crafted witticisms with Sir Ben Kingsley in Iron Man 3, there's not much of the superfluous talent on display here that grown-ups have come to expect from big budget summer movies.

World War Z is a cross between the first turbo-zombie film, 28 Days Later, ending as that one begins, in a British medical facility, and M. Night Shyamalan's extraordinarily badly done allergy allegory The Happening (both The Happening and World War Z start with the heroes fleeing apocalyptic infection in Philadelphia).

Like most movies these days, World War Z features the might of the U.S. military, although perhaps in deference to the Bono-ish sensibilities of Angelina Jolie, Brad plays some kind of retired U.N. troubleshooter called back to U.N. duty to save the world. But, whatever, he's still Brad Pitt, Movie Star. The role isn't as terrific as his 2011 career year roles in The Tree of Life and Moneyball, but he's in his prime.

The plot makes very little sense. Electronic communications seem to have been disinvented, so Brad just has to fly around the world to find out what's going on.

The movie is vaguely based on the novel by Max Brooks, the extremely nervous son of Mel Brooks and the late Ann Bancroft. Zombies are a metaphor for every single thing that has made Max agitated while he obsessively watches 24 hour news channels.

Max is a huge fan of the emphasis on logistics in Tom Clancy novels, although that's downplayed in the movie.  (By the way, the all time king of logistics fiction is Frederick Forsyth, as in The Dogs of War.) At hippy-dippy Pitzer College, Max joined the ROTC. But, like Evelyn Waugh during WWII, he was disappointed to discover that the military didn't think he was much of a leader of men.

The best scene is when Brad flies to Jerusalem (Malta standing in as the location). Because they constantly snoop on the rest of the world's electronic communications, the Israelis figured out the zombie outbreak was coming early, allowing them to put up giant walls around the border of their country, which has kept the infection out, so far. The Times of Israel says, "The summer zombie blockbuster, which opened June 21 in the US, is the greatest piece of cinematic propaganda for Israel since ‘Exodus.’"

But then Palestinians grateful for being rescued by the Israelis break out in song, which attracts the attention of the zombies ... 

Zombies form a post-human pyramid
to clamber over Great Wall of Israel before the JDF
can gun them down.

Slate: "Racism produced the NBA’s most notorious draft bust"

From Slate:

The Darko Ages

How magical thinking and racism produced the NBA’s most notorious draft bust. 

By Jack Hamilton|Posted Thursday, June 27, 2013, at 8:45 AM

Ten years ago, a young man destined to transform the sport of basketball was drafted into the NBA. He hadn’t played a single minute in college and had appeared on the cover of a national magazine before turning 18. “He’s going to own the game,” one scout declared. 

Darko Milicic did not own the game. A decade after he was chosen with the No. 2 pick in the 2003 NBA Draft, he’s not even playing in the NBA. The only player drafted above him, LeBron James, is celebrating his fourth league MVP and second NBA title; the three taken after him—Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh, and Dwyane Wade—are likely bound for the Hall of Fame. ... 

Joe Dumars, white racist

How did so many of the league’s talent evaluators convince themselves of something that now seems so absurd? As Pistons GM Joe Dumars himself admitted last year, the Pistons didn’t know all that much about Milicic when they drafted him. “With Darko, we may have had two sources of information. That was it,” Dumars said. 

Darko was the dubious beneficiary of a hazy mixture of groupthinking and magical thinking, a pre–YouTube moment made of wishful scouting reports from distant lands and flavored by a hint of racism. Milicic was the idealized vision of the Euro prodigy, a fantasy of the young and impossibly skilled white big man that proved so elusive in reality that it was practically cryptozoological. ... And as one unnamed insider told ESPN the Magazine for its cover story on Milicic: “The brothers are gonna respect him.”

Ah yes, “the brothers.” In case the racial overtones of all this weren’t suitably naked, Darko offered a potent Great White Hope-fulness at a time when dominant white American big men had seemingly gone the way of Bill Walton’s right foot. The great imagined fear of the prep-to-pro era was that (black) American teenagers would use their talent to con generous NBA benefactors out of millions, only to turn their attention to dunk contests and rap albums as they destroyed the moral fabric of basketball. (The fact that the NBA finally banned American high schoolers the same year that it implemented its controversial dress code hardly seemed coincidental.)   ...

And Darko didn’t even have a totally terrible pro career—he logged serviceable years in Orlando, Memphis, and Minnesota, and for a long while his name graced one of the finest basketball blogs of all time. He just had a terrible career for a player drafted ahead of Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh, and Dwyane Wade, and as such is destined to spend eternity as the answer to a boringly easy trivia question.

As jody would say: two words: Hasheem Thabeet. The #2 pick in the 2009 draft, the 7'3" Tanzanian has been an even bigger bust, but is much less ragged upon than Darko. Thabeet signed a $15 million three year contract after his junior year at the U. of Connecticut. He started 13 games as a rookie, but has only started 7 games in the three seasons since. Through the same age, Darko started 185 games.

So, why is Thabeet just boring and forgotten (even though he started 4 games last season at age 25 for Oklahoma City), and Darko "notorious?"