Obama Administration: Blacks are homicide offenders at almost 8x higher rate

With crime rates in the news again, let me just quote my April 2013 Taki's article on the data for anybody looking for an authoritative source for use in on-line debates:

At present, the best source for Obama Administration data on homicides by race is a 2011 PDF by Alexia Cooper and Erica L. Smith of the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics: “Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008.” ... From page 2: 

Based on available data from 1980 to 2008— 

Blacks were disproportionately represented as both homicide victims and offenders.…The offending rate for blacks (34.4 per 100,000) was almost 8 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000).

Obama Administration: Crime rising again

I posted this a month ago, but it's worth bringing up again with the current interest in crime. 

For Second Consecutive Year, Violent And Property Crime Rates Increased In 2012  

By Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs  

Published: Thursday, Oct. 24, 2013 - 7:05 am  

Violent and property crime rates rose for U.S. residents in 2012, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) announced today. These estimates are based on data from the annual National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) which has collected information from victims of crime age 12 or older since 1973.

It's not a huge change, but it's unsettling after we were getting used to the good news on crime during the first couple of years of the recession. You can read my discussion of the numbers here.

Slate: the Knockout Game trend is a myth

From Slate:

Sorry, Right-Wing Media: The "Knockout Game" Trend Is a Myth.

By Emma Roller 

I remember the summer of 2011, a story about a crowd of teenagers at the Wisconsin State Fair randomly attacking fairgoers went viral as a sign of a burgeoning race war. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel fanned the flames, calling the teenagers "rampaging youths" who caused "mob-like disturbances": 

"Then around the closing time of 11 p.m., witnesses told the Journal Sentinel, dozens to hundreds of black youths attacked white people as they left the fair, punching and kicking people and shaking and pounding on their vehicles." 

"Dozens to hundreds"? When witnesses can't differentiate between 24 and 100, should we really rely on them to speculate whether a crime was racially motivated?

In other words when the number of attackers is too many to count, we shouldn't listen to the victims and other witnesses. What do they know? Are you going to trust people with concussions? They're just wimps who got beat up. They're losers with memory loss. They probably had it coming.

One of the reasons the story gained so much traction could have stemmed from the fact that Milwaukee is the most segregated city in the country, and it validated white residents' fear that their black neighbors are dangerous.

Like I said, those racists had it coming.

Now, the false trend story of black mob violence has cropped up again, as it seems to do annually, in conservative media outlets. (McKay Coppins wrote about this phenomenon in BuzzFeed last year.) The new scare is the "knockout game," in which black youths supposedly attack innocent people just for fun. 

It's a respectable story now, finally, because it recently happened to some New York City Jews, and Jewish leaders are allowed to complain about hate crimes against their people.

Conservative pundits decry the MSM for suffering from political correctness and whitewashing crimes perpetrated by black people, but a more reasonable explanation for why most media outlets aren't devoting round-the-clock coverage to the knockout game is that—sorry, Sean Hannity—there is no hard data showing that it's a trend. 

An important clarification: the game definitely exists, and has been around for at least a couple of years.

It's not news if it's not a trend. If an earthquake levels San Francisco tomorrow, we shouldn't cover that because that's not a story because it's not a trend. Earthquakes are just something random that happens. They aren't increasing so you shouldn't notice them.

I'm not claiming the game doesn't exist. But the idea that it's reached epidemic levels, or that it's only being played by young black people, is a fallacy. As Alan Noble convincingly writes, "Analyzing data is not as simple as watching some YouTube videos and Googling 'knockout game.'" And when it comes to the knockout game's supposed popularity, the data is almost entirely anecdotal:

Here’s the fascinating thing about this “spreading” trend: nobody seems to have any evidence that it’s spreading, or that it’s new, or that it’s racially motivated, or that black youths are the ones typically responsible, or that whites are typically targeted. This hasn’t stopped Mark Steyn, Thomas Sowell, and Matt Walsh from describing this specifically as a crime committed by blacks against whites, CNN from claiming that it is “spreading,” or Alec Torres at NRO from say it is “evidently increasing [in] popularity.” 

This is precisely the type of story meant to animate the deepest recesses of our lizard brains—"Danger lurks around every corner! Identify your enemy!" At the epicenter of this narrative is Colin Flaherty, a writer for WorldNetDaily who probably has a Google alert set up for "black suspect." He's made it his life's work to report any single crime perpetrated by a black person in the U.S. against a white person. In a recent blog post, he lists as evidence six separate crimes in Philadelphia over the course of two years, which share nothing in similarity except for the fact that they involved black people. 

Imagine if another national "journalist" started doing the same for, say, any crime committed in Alabama, or any arson charge in the country. People would start to think Alabama was going through a crime epidemic, or that arson was becoming all the rage with criminals.

Like the white-racists-are-burning-down-black-churches-in-Alabama quasi-hoax that was a huge respectable story in the 1990s? (What happened then was this: there are a lot of churches in America, many of them closed most of the week, more than a few of them more or less abandoned. And every year hundreds of churches across the country catch fire, more than a few due to arson. Whether this arson is for more for functional reasons [e.g., nobody around most of the time], or because churches attract firebugs for psychological reasons [flames of hell?], or because some financially failing ministers unleash a little Protestant Lightning to collect fire insurance, is unknown. What happened was that the national media started paying selective attention to black churches being subject to arson, and soon we had an national crisis on our hands.)

Kind of like that black gay mayoral candidate in Mississippi who was dragged and set on fire by the homophobic white male Southern Republican Christian power structure.

That would be ridiculous, because it's ridiculous to assume that a few unrelated counts of arson make arson an epidemic. But when you inject race into the equation, it conveniently aligns with the assumptions of people who happen to be racist. That's the sort of twisted logic that justifies why more than half of the U.S. prison population is made up by black and Hispanic people, even though they comprise a quarter of the total population. 

Crime happens to every type of person, and is perpetrated by every type of person. What makes the false narrative of the knockout game—or any "black mob violence" story—crop up every year is the fact that some people will always believe the color of someone's skin predisposes him to commit a crime. When a few YouTube videos are able to convince terrified white folks that young black people are dangerous, they may as well assume that all cats can play the keyboard.

Seriously, as I've been pointing out for several years, the spread of video recording technology is having multiple effects on crime and our perceptions of crime.

It encourages some idiots to commit more crimes so they can post them on World Star Hip Hop for their idiot friends to watch.

But the Surveillance Society also works to discourage crimes. Recall the 2011 bus shooting in Philadelphia that was recorded on multiple high definition video cameras newly installed. The half dozen or so perps are readily distinguishable. In the long run, that level of surveillance ought to discourage crime as the lesson sinks in that you can't intimidate video cameras into not testifying against you in court.

But mostly, the spread of video just makes it harder for the media to limit our awareness of what really goes on in our country.

The overarching trend is that the spread of readily accessible information increasingly converts the prestige press into Gatekeepers who see their job as preventing the public from engaging in acts of pattern recognition.

Yglesias: I wasn't a victim of "Knockout Game" because I was only knocked down, not out

From Slate:

I Was a Victim of the Fake "Knockout Game" Trend 

By Matthew Yglesias 

True story. A couple of years back, I was walking home at night on North Capitol Street here in Washington, D.C., when two dudes randomly assaulted me before running away without stealing anything. At the time, I didn't think it was all that strange—I've lived in urban areas all my life, and plenty of people I know have been victims of anonymous street crime. The good news is that urban crime rates have been trending downward since I've been about 9 years old, so we're making important progress in this regard. 

The weird thing was that after I blogged briefly about this, a number of conservative bloggers, particularly those of a racist bent [me, of course], decided that this wasn't just one of many random acts of criminality that occur in the big city. No! It was an instance of "Knockout King," which I suppose was the 2011 version of 2013's more robust Knockout Game white racial panic. 

But to be clear about something—insofar as there's supposedly a "game" here where the contestant tries to knock someone out with one punch, that absolutely isn't what happened. I was knocked down, but definitely not out, and then after that I got kicked a bunch of times. If you're familiar with the phrase "don't kick a man while he's down," take note—it really hurts quite a bit to be kicked while you're down. In fact, this substantial deviation from the "rules" of the "game" is a lot of what made getting violently assaulted for no reason such a physically unpleasant experience. ...

People shouldn't minimize these concerns about urban violence, but it accomplishes nothing in terms of tackling them to concoct weird trends and games out of thin air.

I'm struck by how our society wants victims of black-on-white violence to play the macho tough guy in public, as Yglesias tries to do here, or as journalist Brian Beutler (who was shot during a robbery while walking with a journalist named Matthew) does here.

Being a crime victim is, among other things, being psychologically assaulted.

As I wrote immediately after Yglesias announced he'd been attacked:

Beyond physical injuries, well, I've never been the victim of street violence, but judging from the psychological trauma I've felt merely from being the victim of burglars -- the reminder of one's own insecurity, the insult to one's self-respect -- that aspect of crime shouldn't be overlooked. And being punched and kicked by strangers is far worse. 

Our culture has made much progress in better psychological treatment of women who are raped -- e.g., providing female cops to do the interviewing of the victim, counseling, support groups, and so forth. It helps crime victims to have your culture acknowledge the terrible thing done to you, and that it wasn't your fault.

But this balm is selectively dispensed upon our culture's usual Who? Whom? lines.

For youngish white male victims of black violence, the media's message is: Don't be a wimp. Walk it off, dude. Don't go crying about how it makes you feel. It's not part of a larger pattern, it's just something that happened to you personally. Nobody else cares about what happened to you because it's not a Thing we are supposed to talk about on TV, it's just your problem. Remember, what does not kill you makes you stronger, so, shut up and deal with it. 

Paul Collier: 10 building blocks for thinking about immigration

Economist Paul Collier, CBE, co-director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford, writes in the New Statesman:

As part of my research, I have come up with ten building blocks needed for reasoned analysis of migration. Some are straightforward; others are analytically tricky and you will need to chew on them. Indeed – with apologies for a self-serving remark – you will need to read the book.

Block 1 Around 40 per cent of the population of poor countries say that they would emigrate if they could. There is evidence that suggests this figure is not a wild exaggeration of how people would behave. If migration happened on anything approaching this scale, the host societies would suffer substantial reductions in living standards. Hence, in attractive countries, immigration controls are essential. 

Block 2 Diasporas accelerate migration. ... These links cut the costs of migration and so fuel it. As a result, while diasporas are growing, migration is accelerating. 

Block 3 Most immigrants prefer to retain their own culture and hence to cluster together. This reduces the speed at which diasporas are absorbed into the general population. The slower the rate at which they are absorbed, the lower the rate of immigration that is compatible with stable diasporas and migration. By design, absorption is slower with multicultural policies than with assimilative policies. 

Block 4 Migration from poor countries to rich ones is driven by the wide gap in income between them. ... Migrants are escaping the consequences of their systems but usually bring their culture with them. 

Block 5 In economic terms, migrants are the principal beneficiaries of migration but many suffer a wrenching psychological shock. ... 

Block 6 Because migration is costly, migrants are not among the poorest people in their home countries. The effect on those left behind depends ultimately on whether emigrants speed political and social change back home or slow it down. A modest rate of emigration, as experienced by China and India, helps, especially if many migrants return home. However, an exodus of the young and skilled – as suffered by Haiti, for example – causes a haemorrhage that traps the society in poverty. 

Block 7 In high-income societies, the effect of immigration on the average incomes of the indigenous population is trivial.

But, what about the costs of the indigenous population? What everybody is interested in is not incomes or costs, but their net: standard of living.

Block 8 The social effects of immigration outweigh the economic, so they should be the main criteria for policy. These effects come from diversity. Diversity increases variety and this widening of choices and horizons is a social gain.
Yet diversity also potentially jeopardises co-operation and generosity. Co-operation rests on co-ordination games that support both the provision of public goods and myriad socially enforced conventions. Generosity rests on a widespread sense of mutual regard that supports welfare systems. Both public goods and welfare systems benefit the indigenous poor, which means they are the group most at risk of loss. As diversity increases, the additional benefits of variety get smaller, whereas the risks to co-operation and generosity get greater. ... 

Block 9 The control of immigration is a human right. The group instinct to defend territory is common throughout the animal kingdom; it is likely to be even more fundamental than the individual right to property. ... It sometimes makes sense to grant the right to migrate on a reciprocal basis. Thousands of French people want to live in Britain, while thousands of Britons want to live in France.  

Block 10 Migration is not an inevitable consequence of globalisation. The vast expansion in trade and capital flows among developed countries has coincided with a decline in migration between them. 

These ten building blocks are not incontrovertible truths but the weight of evidence favours them to varying degrees. If your views on migration are incompatible with them, they rest on a base too fragile for passionate conviction.

Read the whole thing there. So far, after three days up, this long, important article has a grand total of 15 comments.

Charlotte Allen's "Silicon Chasm"

Charlotte Allen has another well-reported cover story in The Weekly Standard, following earlier ones on the SPLC and the White Privilege Conference. This one is "Silicon Chasm: The class divide on America's cutting edge."

The middle class is doing well in Silicon Valley, if you define the middle class to be people like my old Rice U. roommate Fritz, an engineer and former U.S. Navy officer who is head of quality control for a Silicon Valley firm that makes pacemakers and other more advanced life-and-death medical devices. Back in the 1990s, he and his wife tired of their 900 square foot house in the Valley, so they moved their family to Half Moon Bay on the foggy Pacific. Fritz does the long commute over the Santa Cruz Mountains. It's a fine middle class life, if you assume that the middle class starts at about Rice STEM grads and goes up from there.

America's future will be extremely confusing to journalists

The national press is getting itself worked up over a story of "racial profiling" out of Miami Gardens, FL. Below is a representative example out of Slate, but you can read much the same thing at NPR ("Miami-Area Police Force Accused Of Rampant Racial Profiling"), USA Today ("Miami-area police agency charged with racial profiling"), NY Daily News, the Atlantic, etc.

How "Zero Tolerance" Policing Helped Bad Cops in Florida Create a Civil Rights Nightmare

By Justin Peters

The Miami Herald has published a stunning, maddening story about alleged persistent police harassment of blacks in the city of Miami Gardens, Fla. (You should read the entire Herald story; it will raise your blood pressure and ruin your weekend, but you should still read it.) For years, police would come to a convenience store in a transitional neighborhood and hassle black customers and employees in the name of proactive crime prevention—regularly citing and arresting men for loitering or trespassing, even when they weren’t. 

One man, an employee of the store, was “stopped and questioned by Miami Gardens police 258 times in four years,” with almost all of these incidents happening on store premises. He was arrested 62 times for trespassing, and, again, these were arrests for being on the grounds of the store where he was employed.

You know, I think by the 61st arrest, much less the 62nd, it's not racial profiling anymore in the sense of being statistical. By then, it's gotta be kind of personal.

These incidents and others were recorded by video cameras installed by the store’s owner for the express purpose of documenting police misconduct: 

The videos show, among other things, cops stopping citizens, questioning them, aggressively searching them and arresting them for trespassing when they have permission to be on the premises; officers conducting searches of [storeowner Alex] Saleh’s business without search warrants or permission; using what appears to be excessive force on subjects who are clearly not resisting arrest and filing inaccurate police reports in connection with the arrests. 

How does something like this happen? Blame it on endemic racism, yes, and on bad apples in the police department—but also blame it on a short-sighted local crime-reduction policy that, in retrospect, was always, always ripe for abuse. The convenience store incidents began when police convinced the store’s owner to enroll in the department’s “Zero Tolerance Zone” program. In Miami Gardens, when a shop becomes a Zero Tolerance Zone, the owner signs an affidavit authorizing the police to enter the premises when the owner is absent and question, eject, and/or arrest all those whom they suspect of being up to no good. 

The website of the Miami Gardens Police Department notes that the program is “designed to reduce the number of individuals who are sometimes seen trespassing and loitering on private property without legitimate business.”

The fact that Miami Gardens police kept arresting that one particular employee even after it was very clear that he worked at the store is baffling, and obviously indicates that more was going on here than simple overzealousness. But the alleged police misbehavior is rooted in the idea that cities can keep their streets safer by keeping poor black men off of them, and that it's up to an individual cop’s discretion to determine what sort of behavior is and is not appropriate.

The “Zero Tolerance Zone” initiative sounds similar to the controversial stop-and-frisk programs that have been deployed in New York and other cities, where police officers are encouraged to routinely stop and question people on slim grounds—“suspicious behavior” is a favorite excuse—in hopes of seizing guns and drugs and stopping crime before it starts. ... . Inevitably, the people being stopped and questioned are minority residents of crime-ridden areas—police have no incentive to deploy these tactics in rich white neighborhoods with minimal street crime. ... 

This all comes down to the goddamn stupid, silly, racist “broken windows” theory of crime prevention that encourages police to treat the symptoms in hopes of curing the disease. ... As a long-term crime-prevention strategy, broken windows is intellectually bankrupt; as a short-term strategy, it is a recipe for civil rights abuses. If the allegations are true, the Miami Gardens story makes this all painfully clear.

I haven't actually been to Miami Gardens, so I have no idea what's going on at Mr. Saleh's 207 Quick Stop store, but I found this comment after the original Miami Herald article from somebody calling himself Abdur Rahman who uses a picture of Malcolm X as his commenting avatar:

"That store is a hangout for dope sellers and people who do not get up and go to work everyday. It is unsafe. A man was killed in the parking lot a just the other day. Most of us have kids and we tell our kids over and over to stay away from that store. If you want to be a thug or run a thug hangout, then don't get mad at the police."

Other suggestions have included that the cops are padding their arrest statistics, that the mayor must own the rival quickie mart next door, or that the owner got behind on his weekly payoff.

Something I've noticed about the modern media is that almost nobody actually believes in the "changing face of America" and all that. Sure, everybody talks about it, but nobody believes it's really happening. Instead, it is assumed, everywhere will always have a white majority.

Thus, of course a place called "Miami Gardens" is going to be majority white. Why would anyone doubt it? And even if you sort of wonder whether "Miami Gardens" really looks like Bedford Falls, well, how can you check?

I mean, what's a journalist supposed to do before writing an article about Miami Gardens, FL? Put on his fedora and take the street car down to the Carnegie Library to look up in a dusty Census book what the demographics of Miami Gardens, FL are? Who has time for that?

Oh, wait, sorry, you can now type "Miami Gardens demographics" into a search engine and it will take you right to the exact paragraph in the Wikipedia article on the 2010 Census.

It turns out that Miami Gardens is 2.6% non-Hispanic white, 22% Hispanic, and it's 76% black. The municipality, which was only incorporated in 2003, is the largest black majority city in Florida.

Let me give some general advice: if you come across a story about local government that seems kind of screwy, go look up the demographics.

Here are pictures of the Miami Gardens leadership:

Mayor Oliver G. Gilbert

Incoming City Manager Cameron Benson

Matthew Boyd

Paul Miller

Tiffany Britton

And here's a picture of storeowner Alex Saleh who is filing the civil rights lawsuit against Miami Gardens:

Alex Saleh, civil rights plaintiff

The future of America is shaping up in Florida: it will be diverse, full of interest, and extremely confusing to journalists.

Immigration "Reform" turned out to be a Paper Jaguar

The massive push of 2013 by much of the Establishment for the Schumer-Rubio immigration bill was a classic Hi-Lo Teamup against the middle, in which various elites cover their naked pursuit of their self-interest with the fig leaf that they are doing it to liberate some minority from discrimination, given near 100% air cover by the media. It's one of those recurrent patterns that's really obvious once you notice it (subprime catastrophe, anyone?), but you aren't supposed to notice it.

In The Atlantic, Molly Ball (kind of like MoneyBall, but not), is puzzled: all the Good People (e.g., the more PR-savvy billionaires, the diversicrats, etc.) were for Schumer-Rubio, and yet the Bad People somehow managed to live to fight another day.

What Happened to Immigration Reform? 

A powerful, well-organized coalition did everything it could, with no results. Now advocates are preparing to shift from lobbying to revenge. 

MOLLY BALL NOV 22 2013, 7:00 AM ET

Last week, John Boehner was having breakfast at his customary spot on Capitol Hill, Pete’s Diner, when he was approached by two teenage girls with a video camera. Clad in a baseball cap and fleece pullover, the speaker nervously fiddled with his ear as the pair told him of their undocumented immigrant parents’ fear of deportation. “I’m trying to find a way to get this thing done,” he told them. “It’s, as you know, not easy. It’s not going to be an easy path forward, but I’ve made it clear since the day after the election that it’s time to get this done.” 

Just a few hours later, Boehner, now wearing a suit, addressed reporters in the Capitol. On immigration, his tone was rather less encouraging. “The idea that we’re going to take up a 1,300-page bill that no one had ever read, which is what the Senate did, is not going to happen in the House,” he said. “And frankly, I’ll make clear we have no intention of ever going to conference on the Senate bill.”

For the broad, well-organized coalition of immigration-reform activists, that statement was a stunning blow. If Boehner keeps that pledge, he will have rendered moot the months of wheeling and dealing it took to get a massive, bipartisan bill through the Senate in June, forcing the upper chamber to start from scratch even if the House manages to get its act together and pass its own bill or group of bills—a prospect that appears increasingly unlikely. 

That Boehner could make encouraging noises when confronted by activists, then pour cold water on immigration's legislative prospects, neatly summarized the plight of the reformers, many of whom are coming to grips with the possibility that their efforts, despite politicians' apparent receptiveness, have come to naught. The reformers' official line remains one of optimism that the House will act, perhaps even before the end of 2013. But many activists have already begun to take a more aggressive tack, arguing that lobbying is over—it’s time for revenge. 

“We can’t force them to get to yes, but we can make them pay a price for getting to no,” said Frank Sharry. An immigration-reform advocate for decades, Sharry heads America’s Voice, the reform coalition’s main clearinghouse. He holds out hope that legislation could still pass the House in the waning days of 2013, he told me, but he and others are preparing to move into a new gear once the calendar flips—one in which their focus will shift to punishing House Republicans. “If this Congress isn’t going to pass immigration reform, let’s elect a Congress that will,” Sharry said. 

It is an emotionally wrenching juncture for a movement that, until recently, was riding high. “The reason there’s such a sadness is that we got very close,” said Joshua Culling, a conservative policy strategist who worked on immigration for Americans for Tax Reform [Grover Norquist's organization]. “The momentum for the better part of a year was on our side.”

Conservative commentators like Sean Hannity backed comprehensive reform; the Republican National Committee came out in favor; the Senate Gang of Eight successfully completed its work. The reform coalition, comprising tech executives and evangelical pastors, unions and human-rights groups, agriculture and law enforcement, libertarians and bleeding-heart liberals, kept Democrats largely united while winning over large swaths of the conservative movement. They kept up a blitz of grassroots pressure while their opposition was barely seen. 

And yet their incremental successes have failed, so far, to add up to the big goal: getting a law passed. ...  

The diverse coalition of immigration activists has managed to remain remarkably unified and even to grow over the past year. Their disappointment is grave. “On the left, you have a bunch of ‘Dreamers’ and undocumented folks who think of themselves as Americans and are still technically criminals,” Culling said. “On the right, you have people who care about the [Republican] Party and feel like this was our one opportunity” to change the way voters perceive the GOP. “Everyone was on board the week after the election, and we pissed it away again.” ... 

The carrot didn’t work, so it’s time for the stick. Sharry estimates there are five to 10 Republicans in the House who could be defeated if the Latino vote goes strongly enough against them—not enough to hand the House to Democrats, who are currently 17 seats from the majority, but enough to send a message. For most of the year, advocates, even those on the left, have sought to give Republican members room to maneuver rather than going on the attack. But that’s changing as the shift to campaign mode begins. 

Earlier this month, unions and immigrant-rights groups teamed up on what they termed an “escalation,” a batch of tough Spanish-language television ads in the districts of nine GOP congressmen. ...

FWD.us, the advocacy group founded by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg with the help of both Republican and Democratic strategists, has begun to take a tougher tack, switching from the supportive ads the group previously ran to spots that seek to remind politicians of their promises. ... 

Meanwhile, activists are stepping up pressure on the White House to unilaterally halt deportations. ...

At any given time, the immigration-reform community is engaged in a dizzying flurry of activism.

No, they are not. I've barely witnessed anything in the real world over the last year. For example, remember the massive Mayday demonstrations of illegal aliens in 2006? Well, the Mayday rallies in favor of the Schumer-Rubio bill in 2013 were flops.

For whatever reason, activists' herculean efforts appear to have run aground.

Herculean? This stuff is astroturf activism. It's a paper jaguar.

Latest Girl Power icon to surface in media promoting women in STEM is hot babe with great hair

Debbie Sterling, CEO of GoldieBlox

From the NYT:

Ad Takes Off Online: Less Doll, More Awl 

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER 

Who said girls want to dress in pink and play with dolls, especially when they could be building Rube Goldberg machines instead? 

That is the message of a video that has gone viral, viewed more than 6.4 million times since it was posted Monday on YouTube — an ad for GoldieBlox, a start-up toy company that sells games and books to encourage girls to become engineers. 

In the ad, three girls are bored watching princesses in pink on TV. So they grab a tool kit, goggles and hard hats and set to work building a machine that sends pink teacups and baby dolls flying through the house, using umbrellas, ladders and, of course, GoldieBlox toys. 

The ad has become a hot topic of conversation on social media, generating discussion about a much broader issue: the dearth of women in the technology and engineering fields, where just a quarter of technical jobs are held by women. 

“I’ve been so excited to watch this wave,” said Rachel Sklar, an advocate for women in technology and co-founder of TheLi.st, a digital media company for women. “It really does highlight that this gap is not that little girls aren’t interested in it, it really is a function of ‘you can’t be what you can’t see.’” 

Cindy Gallop, who started the United States branch of Bartle Bogle Hegarty, the advertising agency, said the ad also illustrated how advertising created by and for women and girls is powerful because women share so frequently on social media and control most purchases. Yet ad agencies are predominantly men, she said, and the men in ads are generally heroic and funny while women are sidekicks or homemakers. 

“I tell marketers and the ad industry, ‘When you want a video to go viral, this is what you do, you talk to women and girls and you talk to them in the right kind of way,’” Ms. Gallop said. “This ad is the absolute paradigm.” 

The ad is set to the tune of “Girls” by the Beastie Boys, a decidedly anti-feminist ballad with lyrics that the ad’s creators rewrote. 

The Beastie Boys sang, “Girls to do the dishes/Girls to clean up my room/Girls to do the laundry/Girls and in the bathroom/Girls, that’s all I really want is girls.” 

One of the actresses in the ad sings: “Girls build a spaceship/Girls code the new app/Girls that grow up knowing/That they can engineer that/Girls, that’s all we really need is girls/To bring us up to speed it’s girls/Our opportunity is girls/Don’t underestimate girls.” 

“I thought back to my childhood with the princesses and the ponies and wondered why construction toys and math and science kits are for boys,” Debbie Sterling, founder and chief executive of GoldieBlox, said in an interview. “We wanted to create a cultural shift and close the gender gap and fill some of these jobs that are growing at the speed of light.” 

In 2010, women earned just 18 percent of computer science degrees, down from 37 percent in 1985, according to the National Center for Women and Information Technology. Analysts say the low numbers are partly because girls are not encouraged to pursue science as often or as enthusiastically as boys. 

Ms. Sterling started the company two years ago, after graduating with a degree in product design from the mechanical engineering department at Stanford, where she was disappointed that there were not more women in her classes. She then worked in design and marketing. 

Brett Doar

... Brett Doar, an artist who specializes in making machines, created the Rube Goldberg machine.

Have you ever noticed that basically everything you are supposed to believe in these days -- feminism, diversity, etc. -- turns out in practice to just be another way for hot babes, rich guys, super salesmen, cunning financiers, telegenic self-promoters, and charismatic politicians to get even more money and power?

Perhaps old National Lampooners are penning Israel's new immigration rules?

You may be wondering where old National Lampoon writers can find work today. After all, they seem far too hostile and crass to be employed by such contemporary venues of non-inappropriate humor as The Onion. 

Fortunately, there remain jobs open to men of their personalities, such as writing Israel's immigration regulations. From The Guardian:

Israel to stop issuing birth certificates to babies born to foreigners 

Israel says it is not obliged to issue documentation and wants to stop foreigners using birth certificates to stay in country 

Israel is to stop issuing birth certificates to babies born to foreigners – a move targeted at migrants but will also encompass diplomats and other international workers. The absence of official documentation is likely to cause major problems when applying for passports and other identity papers. 

The plan was disclosed in state papers filed to the high court on Monday in response to a challenge to an existing policy of refusing to include the father's name in foreigners' birth certificates. As part of this policy, Israel also insists that only the mother's family name may be documented as the baby's last name. 

The Israeli government says it has no legal obligation to issue official birth certificates to foreigners, and intends to stop doing so to prevent foreigners using such documentation to claim the right to stay in the country. Instead, foreigners will be given hospital-issued birth notices, which are currently hand-written in Hebrew.

A reader explains:

Israel is no longer issuing birth certificates for ... "illegal infiltrators" as they call them in Hebrew. Even further, they are not listing the names of the purported fathers without DNA proof of fatherhood (at the alien woman's expense!).  

Thus, the wetback women, gentile servant girls and prostitutes who are imported to service the Israelis cannot use a bit of Jewish sperm to get impregnated and then stay in Israel as mothers of a half-Israeli (but not Jewish, since the mother isn't Jewish) child.   

As a lawyer, I really like the "handwritten" part. Sure, the hospital may have to give SOME kind of evidence under international law, but it doesn't have to RECORD the evidence in any sort of Israeli-maintained eternal electronic database as they do for Jews. If a mother cannot provide proof that SHE is an Israeli citizen then all she gets is a handwritten birth note.  

So the Israelis do the bare minimum to meet international law, yet any effort to USE the "certificate" (in Israel or elsewhere) can be immediately challenged:  

"Ma'am, all you have shown me is a piece of paper. I can't even read the handwriting. You say it was written by some hospital clerk in Tel Aviv, but they have no record of ever writing it. Unless you can come up with something better, or get this note authenticated by the appropriate Israeli authorities, I am afraid I am going to have to deny you benefits and deny a passport to this child you have with you." 

Or this: 

"Ma'am, you say you want to sue Mr. Moses Moskowitz for child support? You will need some proof that he is the father. Do you have a birth certificate? No? Just this little scribbled piece of paper that you say the hospital gave you? That's it? No DNA test results? Ma'am, you cannot sue anyone based on nothing more than illegible scribbles and an illegible signature on a piece of paper!" 

Now compare this to the State of California. In California, any woman giving birth can apply for money, name whoever she wants as the father (California requires she give a name), and the state will add her to the welfare rolls.  

The state then mails an official notice to a man matching the name she gave, thereby notifying him that he has two months to challenge her statements in court.  

If he doesn't respond in the two months, he is legally deemed the father and to have voluntarily waived his right to challenge paternity.  

[He did have Two ... Whole ... Months, after all!] 

California then steps in to collect money directly from him to offset the cash they give the mother. 

The Onion's hard-hitting satire of the Obama Administration

Reading through a 1970s issue of National Lampoon raises the question of the change in political satire. The most direct contemporary comparison for National Lampoon is The Onion, so let's look at all the Obama Administration-related headlines on The Onion's homepage on 11/22/13:

Terrified Obama Trapped Inside Healthcare.gov Website

Secretary Of Transportation Worried He’s Not Living Up To Legacy Of Claude S. Brinegar

• Folks, We Don't Usually Do This On The White House Tour, But Let's Go Tickle The President
  By John DeMarco

• Obama Has That Sex Dream About Nation Again

• Biden Frantically Hitting Up Cabinet Members For Clean Piss

White House Announces Sasha Obama To Now Be Played By Britney Walkins

How JFK would have liked to handle civil rights

"Pert 'n' perky, statuesque Angie Davis is more than meets the eye. 'Neath that natural "do" there beats a brain as big as all outdoors, which is where Angie, an assistant Poli Sci instructor at Lompoc Community College in California likes to spend her leisure time, surfing, sunbathing, or just plain walking."

Grand Fifth JFK Inaugural Edition, National Lampoon, February 1977

One of the subtleties of that 1977 National Lampoon edition celebrating JFK's fifth term is that it's willing to be a little dull to get across various metajokes. The overarching gag is that if Jackie Kennedy had been the one martyred in Dallas, Jack would have settled into the Irish politician's pattern of staying in power for roughly ever (e.g., Eamon de Valera, Richard J. Daley in Chicago, or James Curley, who was mayor of Boston on and off from 1914 to 1950); but JFK would have pulled this off by mobilizing the puerile energies of white baby boomers, rather like Chairman Mao's cult of personality did during his Cultural Revolution.

A subsidiary joke is that an all-powerful JFK would have handled the civil rights problem in America the way his fellow Irish Democrat Mayor Daley did in Chicago: by appointing every black with any ambition to a salaried government job, albeit a vaguely demeaning one. Thus, the following rather dry "People" page (click to enlarge) from a 1977 issue of government-sponsored Tar magazine ($0.75 or 3 federal magazine stamps) announcing various civil rights leaders being promoted from positions within the HOP federal agency to marginally higher-paying posts at SKIP and JUMP. For example, rather than being a controversial UCLA professor, Angela Davis is happy to have a paying job at Lompoc Junior College.

(By the way, the female energies that became feminism in our timeline are, in JFK's alternate universe, devoted to the worship of Presidential priapism.)

The other meta-joke on the page is that the Kennedy Administration has nationalized and merged the entertainment and sports industries, so that James Earl Jones, fresh off winning an Oscar for the Camelot-style musical The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass!, will now run back punts for the Oakland Raiders, filling a gap in the roster opened up when linebacker Richard Roundtree of Shaft fame was sold to the St. Louis Cardinals. Also, after PFC Cassius Clay became the last American soldier killed in Vietnam, the amenable Floyd Patterson was reappointed heavyweight champion, a title he has now held for 15 years by only fighting "welterweights and Japanese."

In contrast, JFK drafted the hardcore blacks like Eldridge Cleaver and Bobby Seale into his new Black Berets and set them to pacifying the ghettos:

They organized hot breakfast programs, hot lunch programs, hot car programs -- anything that would help. They ruthlessly enforced urban removal and community security. They engineered long, persuasive talks with landlords, merchants, cops -- anyone who wouldn't help. They moved hard and fast to save the ghetto from itself. Sure, there were protests -- from friend and foe alike. And there were casualties, as there are in any war. ... 

Since then, thanks to tough, aggressive business practices perfected in the service of their country, [Cleaver and Seale] have become millionaires many times over.

(Sounds like South Africa today.)

The only radical civil rights policy affecting suburban whites is "familial desegregation," which has taken 1,000 white children from their parents in places like Shaker Heights and handed them to black families in Watts. But, that is specifically the brainstorm of JFK's idiot brother Teddy (whom National Lampoon endorsed for President in 1980 on the grounds that President EMK would surely provide four years of Lampoon-worthy material that wrote itself).

And there are hints that Jack and Bobby (chairman of the Semi-Unofficial Committee of One, which deals with "life and death matters of national security") use Teddy's program primarily to take Jewish children hostage, perhaps to quell "Jewish dissent against the war for the Irish homeland" and to ensure that the "American press" will never again be "unduly dominated by Jews," according to Kennedy (formerly Look) magazine.

(By the way, I don't see much evidence that managing editor P.J. O'Rourke was relatively more involved in this issue than in others. This particular issue's editor was Tony Hendra, a former teenage monk who had done comedy with John Cleese and Graham Chapman at Cambridge.)

By the way, can you imagine The Onion today coming within an order of magnitude of what National Lampoon was doing three dozen years ago? It's not just a matter of The Onion's lack of courage, it's a matter of a decline in intellectual ability. The Lampoon issue takes on the difficult challenge of imagining how an Irish wardheeler with a veneer of media sophistication, an intuitive understanding of which way the wind was blowing, would have dealt with The Sixties. What has The Onion contributed at all to understanding the Obama Phenomenon?

The Megaphone in Action: NYT still at it over Dallas murdering JFK

From the front of NYTimes.com, this exercise in shamelessness:

Dallas Mourns a Day It Cannot Escape

By MANNY FERNANDEZ 2:14 PM ET

Thousands joined to honor President John F. Kennedy in a tribute leaders hoped would also help heal a city long stigmatized by his death.

DALLAS — This Texas city, long scarred by the guilt and shame of being the place President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, stood in silent tribute on Friday. ... 

It is a day that has forever haunted Dallas, and Friday’s ceremony was as much about moving on as it was about remembering. Never before has Dallas marked the assassination with such a large, costly event. 

John Angle, 23, a senior at Southern Methodist University, who was at the plaza Friday, said the city — though a far different place now — was still seeking redemption. 

“I think this is Dallas’s day to try to redeem itself to the world,” Mr. Angle said. ...

Few cities in the United States have lived under the kind of stigma that has marked Dallas for half a century. Labeled the City of Hate after the assassination, Dallas had been a hub of right-wing, anti-Kennedy extremists who attacked visiting public figures before the president’s visit. 

Next up: three articles in the NYT on how Manhattan murdered John Lennon.* Oh, wait, no, that's not going to happen ...

P.S., the Washington Post has been less hallucinatory, but today it follows the NYT's lead, too:

In 1963, the roots of a political extremism 

Bill Minutaglio 

ESSAY | A University of Texas professor describes a Dallas that was seething with hostility and suspicion toward the president.

--------
* Now that I think about it, a man inspired to kill by Holden Caulfield did have a fair amount to do with Manhattan's culture, as did the next big assassination attempt two months later by a man inspired to try to kill by Scorsese's Taxi Driver.

Cancer-sniffing dogs

The notion of using dogs to sniff out undetected cases of cancer in humans has been around for a long time. If you can find a tumor early, there's a higher chance of removing it surgically and putting and end it to it before it spreads.

It hardly seems implausible. When I had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1996, I developed such terrible bad breath that other people noticed something was wrong with me. Six rounds of chemotherapy later, my halitosis (along with my hair) was gone.

It's easy to find anecdotal evidence online from owners who swear Old Fido became agitated months before the oncologist discovered a tumor. That raises the question of whether dogs could be trained to notice cancer in strangers or if what they are noticing is changes in the smell of beloved owners.

From the NYT, a story about an organic chemist at the U. of Pennsylvania attempting to invent a mechanical bloodhound, as it were, to sniff out ovarian cancer, a particularly hard-to-detect cancer. 

What Does Cancer Smell Like? 

By VERONIQUE GREENWOOD 

Cancer cells, though they don’t alter human metabolism overall, can have altered metabolisms themselves. That means the substances they release could differ from those generated by healthy cells. This idea has been around for decades, but only very recently have biochemical and sensor technology advanced to the point where we can develop portable, hand-held sniffing machines. 

Electronic noses have the potential to detect even very small amounts of molecules — but they need to be programmed to look for specific signs wafting up from patient samples. ...

A work in progress, the electronic nose is, for now, an example of how modern medicine can look for answers in unusual places. The impetus that finally pushed Preti and his team to seriously investigate the possibility of cancer detection by smell traces its roots to a dog. In 1989, a letter published in The Lancet reported that a woman had come into the doctor’s office to have a mole looked at. She hadn’t noticed it until her collie-Doberman mix began to sniff the spot intently — even through her pants — and tried to bite it off when she wore shorts. The mole turned out to be an early-stage malignant melanoma, inspiring researchers to test whether dogs, whose smell machinery is at least 10,000 times as sensitive as ours, can tell healthy samples from cancerous ones. 

The results from the dog tests have been inconclusive, but to Preti, who has mulled the idea that hidden cancers could be detected from smell molecules since the 1970s, they suggested that there was a real possibility for a new diagnostic. “We think that they’re present very early in the carcinoma process,” Preti said of the scents. “The main question is: Can we be as sensitive as the dogs in picking these things up?”

Here's an article about the three puppies (two Labradors and a Springer Spaniel) at Penn who are being trained to detect ovarian cancer to help calibrate the mechanical nose.

While I'm all in favor of robot noses catching up with dog noses, why not also try to breed dogs to get even better at cancer-sniffing than they already are? (We're talking about fighting cancer, after all. Dog breeding isn't all that cheap, but the idea of testing 100 dogs, finding the best male and female, mating them, and continuing on from there in the usual manner (lots of inbreeding) isn't all that expensive compared to the hundreds of billions invested in fighting cancer in other fashions. 

Maybe there are reasons that wouldn't work. Perhaps all the possibilities in canine DNA have already been exploited. 

But, mostly, the idea of breeding dogs for functional reasons doesn't seem to come up much these days. I read through a lot of public comments on the topic of cancer-sniffing dogs, and breeding just doesn't occur to people.

The general issue seems to be that people these days conceive of dog breeding in terms of looks rather than function. There are some dog breeders who make a fair amount of money breeding and training excellent gun dogs, but they are more in the business of brands than breeds. 

Breeding today reflects the Spirit of the Age: Breed is only skin deep, you know. They're all the same on the inside. All that matters is looks.

I'm sure that livestock breeding continues apace to come up with cows that produce more milk and the like. But dog breeding has always been an amateur and semi-pro activity. Back in the Darwin-Galton age, it produced an unbelievable profusion of dogs for different functions. (Let me make clear that Darwin's and Galton's intellectual achievements were more the product of living in an age fascinated by the scientific breeding of animals than the progenitors of that age.)

It's an interesting example of how the zeitgeist can cripple a seemingly unrelated field.

Why they shouldn't let four-year-olds testify in court

Fifty years ago, I arrived at my friend Danny Rich's house after kindergarten.

"The President has been shot," he said.

"No," I corrected Danny, "The President has been shocked." I can recall my feeling of complete conviction on the matter. 

The evening before, my father had warned me that it was dangerous to stick a fork into an electrical outlet because I would get shocked. I don't recall ever wanting to stick a fork into a wall plug before, but since I had been told not to, I had been thinking a lot about doing it. So, of course President Kennedy had put a fork in an electrical socket. He was the President. He could do whatever he wanted and nobody could tell him "No." 

As I explained to Danny what had really happened, I could see a clear picture in my mind's eye of the President, with his big head of dark hair, down on all fours, sticking a fork into a White House electrical socket. In fact, I can remember it vividly today.

Was the President, you might ask, wearing pajamas with feet in them? Probably, but I wouldn't swear to that under oath.

Grantland: How not to talk about Brazilian soccer beheadings

In 1978, my father and I went to a soccer game at Rio de Janeiro's Maracana Stadium, which I knew about from the Guinness Book of World Records because 199,854 paying spectators had crowded in to watch Brazil lose the 1950 World Cup final match to Uruguay. (Maracana has been upgraded at vast expense to host the World Cup final next year.)

The Maracana Moat, RIP

Neither my father nor I had paid much attention to the threat of crime. We'd been traipsing all over Rio that day, walking through a favela in the early morning, taking city buses all over. When we wound up in the Maracana neighborhood, I suggested seeing if there was a soccer game at the famous stadium. Sure enough, Santos (Pele's old team) was visiting from Sao Paulo and their late afternoon game was just about to start. We paid $0.55 each, which got us below-field standing room next to the deep moat that discouraged spectators from expressing their disenchantment by storming the field and lynching the ref.

The sun went down while we were watching the game, so as a rare gesture toward prudence, we decided to take a cab back to our hotel at the beach. But, when we came out we found that there were no cabs around. Cabbies weren't crazy enough to go to the Maracana neighborhood after dark in 1978.

I was starting to get a little concerned, when a four-foot tall bodybuilder walked up and told us that American tourists shouldn't be wandering around here after dark. The short but extremely muscular Brazilian said he was a tour guide for a large group of Germans and we should ride back to Copacabana Beach on his bus. So, we got on with all his German clients.

On the bus ride, our rescuer asked where we were from and when we said Los Angeles, he said, "You'll probably think me a freak, but I've always wanted to visit Muscle Beach in Venice." This was 1978 when the ideal had been for several years to look like Bruce Dern. I was going to tell him that my impression was that in L.A. weightlifting was becoming big, very big, but I never said it -- maybe I got tripped up trying to remember how to pronounce the name of that guy, you know, the one with all the muscles and all the consonants in his name, S, w, z, n, r, etc. -- and ever since, I've felt bad that I couldn't reassure this very nice fellow that he wasn't a weirdo, he was on the cusp of the Next Big Thing.

A lot of things have changed since 1978, and I'm sure that when Maracana hosts the 2014 World Cup final, Steps Will Have Been Taken to make sure that tourists are perfectly safe. But what about all the other cities in Brazil where matches will be held?

But, don't even think about it. Thinking is bad.

ESPN gave sportswriter Bill Simmons his own magazine, Grantland, because Simmons, as one of my commenters once said, is a master at reproducing in text the feel of what a really good discussion about sports with your college buddies is like.  

But, Grantland publishes a lot of non-Simmons articles that sound like they were written by authors whom nobody would want to be buddies with. For example,

A Yellow Card 

As the 2014 World Cup looms, how should we talk about the problems in Brazil? 

By Brian Phillips 

So far in Brazil in 2013, there have been two soccer-related decapitations, which apparently might remind people that Brazil will host the World Cup next year, and the movie City of God was filmed in Rio, and, oh, yeah, there's a lot of crime in Brazil.

But, remember, Noticing Is Bad.

... How do you feel, hearing these stories? I don't mean how do you think you're supposed to feel; I mean how do you feel, in fact? Are you intrigued? Disturbed? Sad? Curious? Titillated, in the way that horrifying real-life stories can sometimes leave you titillated? You don't have to answer. Just think about it. 

Two points make a trend. Here are two gruesome stories about soccer-related beheadings in Brazil. On the surface, they have little in common. One is — best guess — about gangs sending a message. The other is about a local conflict that warped into mass insanity. But, well, 2014 is a World Cup year, and Brazil, you might have heard, will be hosting. The second decapitation story had barely hit the wire before a portion of the Western media lined up the horrors and drew the only logical conclusion: Tourists must be in danger. 

Of course, they couldn't just come out and say so. There's an art to these things. "Beheadings raise concern of violence in Brazil," USA Today announced in a headline.1 CNN declared that "experts say" (they don't quote any) that the concerns thus raised "might make fans think twice about bringing their families to Brazil." Bleacher Report furthered the mystery experts' speculations on the raised concerns, arguing that the violence "may" affect "the type of tourist that decides to come to Brazil to witness football's greatest tournament, with families unlikely to take young children." "How will this affect the World Cup?" was the golden thematic arch bridging countless articles about a story that's only indirectly tied to the World Cup at all, and after reading enough of them, you could almost appreciate the dead-soul directness of this Buzzfeedy link bait–shriek from PolicyMic, posted after the Pio XII decapitation: "This Horrific Video Will Completely Change Your View of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil."2 

This is all, of course, code language, and it's not especially subtle code language. 

It's a code that pops up again and again when a developing or newly industrialized country hosts the World Cup. The code works on three, possibly four, levels, and it makes me want to throw my desk through a brick wall, so I'll try to be as precise as possible about the various sleights of late-colonialist hand I think I can trace here. 

Take the following sentence; it's from USA Today, because of course it is, but it could be from anywhere. It goes: "The news of a second decapitation this year in Brazil has raised questions about whether such heinous crimes may deter foreign visitors considering a trip for next summer's FIFA World Cup." What is this sentence trying to do, apart from draw the brightest, straightest line between "the news of a second decapitation" and "next summer's FIFA World Cup"? Is it really aiming to tell you that Questions have been Raised about World Cup attendance? 

3 Maybe; but I submit that in this instance, the surface level of the code — "questions raised" — is just slippery journalistic-ethics-ese for "Hey, if you go to the World Cup you might get your head chopped off." That's the second level, the primal fear bit. It's not safe down there. Those people are crazy. And note that we've been led to this level by a turn of phrase insinuating the possibility of a World Cup disaster — ostensibly because of attendance problems ("deter foreign visitors"), but what you're actually imagining at this point is a bloodbath ("heinous crimes"). You're being invited to construct a fantasy in which several hundred thousand tourists less well-advised than USA Today readers like you make the trip down to Brazil and are slaughtered in their replica kits. That's the third level. Blood-spattered Wayne Rooney jerseys strewn throughout the streets.4 

And I'm sorry, but that's not the only fantasy you're being invited to construct.

The top level of the code is the one in which you feel yourself to exist within a protective bubble of law and security, outside which all is madness. Here in this Holiday Inn Express in Lincoln, Nebraska, you are safe; in South America, life is cheap. That is not simply a fleeting implication, my friends, that is a media strategy and a worldview, and it is not one in which you are encouraged to regard all your fellow humans as equals. 

Sidebar here: Murders involving decapitation are vanishingly rare in the United States (they are vanishingly rare everywhere), but they happen. In 2012, a New Jersey woman cut off her son's head and put it in the freezer before stabbing herself to death. In 2013, a 49-year-old school nurse was found headless in a South Florida sugar cane field. Two points make a trend. Concerns have been broached about whether Germans will still come to Disney World.

Of course, foreigners interested in visiting America destinations other than Disney World are concerned about crime Here's the Washington Post's summary of the French government's warnings to their nationals about where to avoid in the U.S.: "16 American cities foreign governments warn their citizens about," including this alert for visitors to Washington DC: "Le quartier Anacostia n’est pas recommandable de jour comme de nuit."

Second, two points do suggest which way the probability distribution might be shifted. The fact that this guy can't find two beheadings in the U.S. in this decade that are tied together thematically the way Brazil's soccer decapitations are suggests that decapitations aren't really a Thing in contemporary America, the way beheadings are a Thing are in, say, contemporary Mexico. (Of course, in Brazil, everything is related to soccer.)

The reality of course is that all these lectures about "How to Talk" aren't going to change the fact that, according to Wikipedia's list of the 50 cities in the world with the worst murder rates, Brazil has 13 of them. To put that in perspective, the U.S. holds down four positions in the Top 50, and if I gave you six or seven guesses, you'd probably get all four right: New Orleans, Detroit, St. Louis, and Baltimore. (Talk about stereotypes ...)

The return of the Hyperboreans

Greg Cochran writes at West Hunter about the new Nature article genetically linking American Indians and Europeans:

The way in which this seems to have happened in Europe is rather interesting: first you have the old Mesolithic hunters. They are then largely replaced by farmers from the Levant, some settling the southern coast of Europe and others moving up along the Danube - genetically  similar to modern Sardinians.   

A new wave [Indo-Europeans, surely] mostly replaces those farmers, and this new wave has a fair amount of ancestry from a group very similar to those original Mesolithic hunters.  So the amount of Mesolithic hunter ancestry among Europeans first goes way down and then goes up again. 

The return of the native strikes back. 

Those Mesolithic hunter-gatherers aren’t exactly a lost race, since they had plenty of descendants, but it seems that there are no longer any unmixed examples – although we really need to check out the Lapps. 

The problem is, they need a name.  “Ancestral North Eurasians” just doesn’t sing.  Neither does “Ancient Siberians”.  Personally, I like “Hyperboreans.”

As did the ancient Greeks, Nietzsche, and Robert E. Howard.

"Knockout Game" v. "Polar Bear Hunting"

The seemingly synonymous phrases for black-on-white random hate attacks on pedestrians, "Knockout Game" and  "Polar Bear Hunting," have both been around for awhile. I've tended to use them interchangeably. Yet, it turns out they are wildly different in popularity with the news media. From Google News:

"knockout game"
About 33,500 results (0.40 seconds) 

"polar bear hunting"
10 results (0.23 seconds)