In light of the Obama phenomenon, take it as you wish:

The Way It Is
Bruce Hornsby & The Range

Standing in line marking time–
Waiting for the welfare dime
cause they cant buy a job
The man in the silk suit hurries by
As he catches the poor old ladies eyes
Just for fun he says get a job

Thats just the way it is
Some things will never change
Thats just the way it is
But dont you believe them

They say hey little boy you cant go
Where the others go
cause you dont look like they do
Said hey old man how can you stand
To think that way
Did you really think about it
Before you made the rules
He said, son

Thats just the way it is
Some things will never change
Thats just the way it is
But dont you believe them

Well they passed a law in 64
To give those who aint got a little more
But it only goes so far
Because the law don’t change another’s mind
When all it sees at the hiring time
Is the line on the color bar

[found via a post to PEN-L by Jim Devine]

Also available for download.

Pinker while pimping his book in Seed Magazine throws in this insight:

Seed: Steven Pinker on Swearing and Violence

Contrary to the popular belief that we are living in horrifically violent times, rates of homicide in the West have plummeted ten- to a hundredfold over the centuries. The sociologist Norbert Elias noted that this pacification process, correlated with other changes in everyday manners. Starting in the Late Middle Ages, people stopped blowing their noses onto the dining room table, urinating onto curtains, defecating in public, and giving their eight-year-olds advice about prostitution. Taboos on speaking about excretion and sexuality were part of this development. Ellis lumps these trends into a “civilizing process,” in which the formation of states and complex social networks forced people to exercise their superego (today we would say their prefrontal cortex) to inhibit their first impulses.

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Doing their best to propagate the loutish Bela Karolyi’s rants about the age of female Chinese gymnasts, the NYT throws out this excellent bit of analysis:

Chinese Grab Gold in Gymnastics; U.S. Is Second - NYT

The Chinese gymnasts lack curves, have an average height of 4 feet 9 inches and weigh an average of 77 pounds. [...] The women on the United States team, generally more muscular and shapely than the Chinese, are an average of 3 ½ inches taller and 30 pounds heavier.

I am guessing it is something as benign as misplaced nationalism that prompts the perverts at the NYT to wonder about the curves and shapeliness of young teenage girls. Fortunately, the lack of curves or shapeliness on the part of US, Chinese or other young female athletes will fail to make an impact on other sports fans … I hope!

Fortunately, the NYT redeems itself with this Op-Ed:

The Throwback - Creep Show - NYT

But most of all I will watch the enormously popular women’s gymnastics competition. The performances are incredible and fearless, but it isn’t the athleticism that draws me in. In fact I can’t think of any competition in the Olympics, or all of SportsWorld, more creepy and disturbing: these largely shapeless girls in their leotards and flaxen-waxen hair and bouncy-wouncy ponytails. “They look like girls from the neck up,” I was told by Joan Ryan, whose 1995 book, “Little Girls in Pretty Boxes,” blew a sky-high lid off the sadomasochistic training regimens that young female gymnasts were being subjected to. She continued: “From the neck down they look like prepubescent boys.”

During the Olympics, when a female gymnast finishes an event and hugs her coach, often a man three times her age, I cringe at what I believe is the unsavory stench of the sport in general — children under the wing of men who based on lengthy documentation have proven to be abusive, relentless, intolerant, humiliating and, in some instances, accused of sexual misconduct. “These girls will do anything for these guys,” Ms. Ryan told me. “They have such control over them.”

Which also reminds us that if indeed we are looking for soft-porn masquerading as a sport, there is the ever popular beach volleyball (what next, strip volleyball?):

I will watch women’s beach volleyball, not because it’s a sport, but because skimpily-clad leggy women rolling in sand does put me in a state of excitement right up there with mud wrestling (no doubt the next sanctioned Olympic sport given NBC’s need for strong television ratings and the correct calculus that soft-core porn under the guise of sport does have its benefits).

And goes on to document what this race to the extreme entails:

Former United States Olympian Dominique Moceanu, who at the age of 14 was part of the 1996 team that won the overall Olympic gold, called for the ouster of Marta Karolyi, the coordinator of the women’s Olympic team, in a recent appearance on the HBO show “Real Sports.”

Moceanu told me she feels the training methods of Marta Karyoli and her legendary husband, Bela, are obsolete, outdated and center on intimidation. As a result, injuries are often ignored; Moceanu suffered a lower-leg stress fracture right before the Olympics in 1996 and says Marta Karolyi initially scoffed even though she collapsed twice one day while trying to train. But seeing as Marta Karolyi has helped produce 13 gold medals for the United States at world championships since 2001, don’t count on any changes, in particular if the women’s team finds itself drenched in gold in Beijing.

“Why is winning the only thing that matters?” asks Sey. “There must be some national crisis of self-esteem for us to push so hard for these medals. Otherwise why would you need it?”

From the ATP web site, a couple of images.

I guess the hope is to turn the above, into the below:

The Ranger’s blog and its readers (do read the comments section of the post) illustrate the critical different between an informative and interesting nature program vs what is on offer from National Geographic (or for that matter, Discovery Channel), including video samples. See: The Ranger’s Blog - Post details: Spider vs. Bee… BBC vs. National Geographic.

[ Link ]

Excerpts:

Braveheart: dancing peasants, gleaming teeth and a cameo from Fabio | Film | guardian.co.uk

Edward I expresses a desire to enforce high taxes on the rich. Apparently, in Gibson’s world, this makes him evil. In case you need even more evidence, on a whim he reinstates ius primae noctis, allowing English nobles to interrupt Scottish weddings and shag the bride. Not only fictional, but profoundly ridiculous.

<…>

After his lady love is murdered by the English, Wallace pretends to surrender. At the last minute, he whips out a concealed nunchaku. Wait, what? Glossing over its implication that medieval Scotland imported arms from China, Wallace’s rebellion gathers pace at the Battle of Stirling Bridge, which the film has inexplicably set in a field. Rather than, you know, on a bridge. For pity’s sake. The clue’s in the name.

We are used to rot on this side of the pond, where the choice is between an outright organ of a political party or celebrity claptrap that passes for journalism. But the updated version of “on the Internet nobody knows you are a dog“, it seems, is that on a blog nobody knows you are a doggone fool. Here is some commentary on Obama’s visit to the UK from the mighty BBC’s website:

BBC NEWS | The Reporters | Justin Webb

He shook hands with the policemen outside 10 Downing Street!
This is presidential? No way Ronald Reagan would have done it. Was it a nicely Democratic touch or a nervy moment for a man so exhausted that he would have shaken hands with anyone who presented him or herself?

Marvellous! Splendid commentary!

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In a predictably excellent essay reviewing The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould (Ed: Steve Rose) and Punctuated Equilibrium by Gould, Lewontin offers two valuable reminders. One is the essential and important difference between a “public intellectual” like Gould who works to disseminate knowledge of his field to the general public and someone like Dawkins who (my words) is after slick overarching ideas that can be turned into bestsellers or service personal aggrandisement. The second, perhaps more important (and quoted below) is a reminder of the nature of scientific activity:

Free Expression: The Triumph of Stephen Jay Gould, By Richard C. Lewontin

There is hardly a chapter in the main body of The Richness of Life that does not repay a careful reading. Of all the essays in it the one that is most important to the public understanding of science is “Measuring Heads: Paul Broca and the Heyday of Craniology,” for it deals with an issue that is so discomfiting for scientists that they avoid it when they can. Despite the myth of detached objectivity that scientists propagate, their motivations are as messy as everyone else’s. In particular, they have political, social, and personal concerns that may influence what they do, how they do it, and what they say about it. Putting aside deliberate fraud, of which we have an embarrassment of examples, the gathering of data, their statistical representation, and their interpretation offer many opportunities for unconscious bias toward conclusions that we already “knew” to be true.

In particular, scientists have repeatedly reported that whites have larger brains than blacks. Gould shows that when the preserved brain is measured before the race of its former owner is revealed, this difference disappears completely. Similarly, claims of larger heads of professionals as compared to laborers are not statistically significant because of very large variation from individual to individual. What is important about this essay is not that it reveals what we already know to be true about the existence of racism and sexism, but that it shows how any claim that something is “scientifically demonstrated” should be treated with the same skepticism that we invoke when there is any reason to think that the investigator has something to gain, either ideologically or professionally, as we do when financial gain is involved.

[ Link ]

There is an interesting phenomenon to be seen these days, every time there is some controversy. It is quickly morphed into a controversy about the response to the original one! That happened with the Muhammad cartoon issue, where the publication of some silly cartoons aimed at infuriating Muslims (the same populations that are oppressed by the North in real ways) was morphed into outrage over Muslim response to it. Similarly, the clown Imus says something despicable about Rutgers University women’s basketball team members and within a day the “national conversation” is about misogyny in hip-hop and rap lyrics.

In that grand tradition comes the response from professional blowhard and occasional biologist Richard Dawkins on the James Watson controversy (Watson being the famous co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, using data stolen from a female colleague unacknowledged for her contribution, who has stuck an eighth or ninth foot in his mouth with his musings on black people and their capabilities):

Disgrace: How a giant of science was brought low | The Observer

In the end, Watson’s decided to return home, so no meetings occurred, a move that has dismayed many scientists who believed that it was vital Watson confront his critics and his public. ‘What is ethically wrong is the hounding, by what can only be described as an illiberal and intolerant “thought police”, of one of the most distinguished scientists of our time, out of the Science Museum, and maybe out of the laboratory that he has devoted much of his life to, building up a world-class reputation,’ said Richard Dawkins, who been due to conduct a public interview with Watson this week in Oxford.

Dawkins’s stance was supported by Blakemore. ‘Jim Watson is well known for being provocative and politically incorrect. But it would be a sad world if such a distinguished scientist was silenced because of his more unpalatable views.’

In case you are misled by the righteous indignation of Dawkins and Blakemore, Watson is not being “silenced” but ignored, and rightly so for this is what he said by way of justifying his “unpalatable view”:

people who have to deal with black employees find this not true

Even if we are to follow Dawkins’ demand that we lend an ear to a bigot, his reasoning deserves the trashbin given the unscientific nature of it.