Feeling Blue?

Dunno if it's the temperature that is approaching zero where I live, and rapidly, I might add, or what, but I'm feeling (probably looking, too) a bit blue. So what better to lift the spirit than a bit of music from the son of Russian Jewish immigrant parents who wrote one of the most quintessential pieces of American music. How about none other than George Gershwin himself playing the George Gershwin composition Rhapsody in Blue. Solo. (In two parts, darn the technology.) But the playing will blow you away if you have never heard it before.

And We’ve Arrived

I riffed off of Mark Steyn's latest column in The Orange County Register just yesterday. While he examined the particular level of insanity of those who refuse to breed to save the planet, I asked how long it would be until some of them went further. Steyn found on already today. No, it is not retroactive birth control yet. But it's getting close.

Here's one for Jonah's Liberal Fascism files. Bigshot eco-panjandrum lays down the law:

Hillman, senior fellow emeritus at the Policy Studies Institute, says carbon rationing is the only way to ensure that the world avoids the worst effects of climate change. And he says that the problems caused by burning fossil fuels are so serious that governments might have to implement rationing against the will of the people.

"When the chips are down I think democracy is a less important goal than is the protection of the planet from the death of life, the end of life on it," he says. "This has got to be imposed on people whether they like it or not."

That item comes from Kate at Small Dead Animals. Who also posts this gem of a video. Back in April, Naomi Wolf, crying her name as it were, explained how to get a fascist America in ten easy steps. I countered that using the example of global warming. I think I was all too right.

UPDATE: Rich Horton isn't even sure it takes ten steps.

Profit Motive

A German Canadian (It seems they corrected the story) father has found, quite by accident, an interesting way to make a rather handsome profit. He can thank his pot-smoking son and the son's "delinquent friends" for the money he made. The father had scurried madly about to locate a "Guitar Hero III" game for the Nintendo Wii, which are in short supply. The game was meant to be a Christmas present for his son. But when he returned home, he made an unpleasant discovery:

"So I was so relieved in that I had finally got the Holy Grail of Christmas presents pretty much just in the nick of time. I couldn't wait to spread the jubilance to my son," the father wrote on the eBay website.

"Then, yesterday, I came home from work early and what do I find? My innocent little boy smoking pot in the back yard with two of his delinquent friends."

The man, a school teacher, who kept his identity private, said he sold the coveted video game to punish his son and discourage him from smoking dope.

The father sold the $90 game on eBay for $9,000 dollars. He may get his son a Barbie game as a consolation prize, so to speak. Now, if anyone needs that particular game and wants to pay me $9,000 for it, I just happen to know where one is. I'm just sayin'.

He Is Legend

Will Smith, that is. His latest movie is already a roaring success with an estimated $76.5 million in box office for the first weekend of its release. I Am Legend, based on the novel by Richard Matheson is getting enormous crowds pretty much wherever it is shown according to these numbers.

LOS ANGELES – For the last man on Earth, Will Smith sure has a lot of friends. The Warner Bros. tale "I Am Legend," starring Smith as a plague survivor who may be the last living human, debuted with $76.5 million, the biggest December opening ever and a personal best for one of Hollywood's top box-office champs, according to studio estimates Sunday.

"It's no wonder Will Smith feels so lonely. Everyone else on Earth is in the movie theater," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Media By Numbers.

Alvin and the Chipmunks came in second with some $45 million.  Note to Hollywood. This is how you make hits – not by trying to pump propaganda out, but by making entertainment.

For those of you who are not familiar with Matheson's classic, which is an old favorite of mine, there is good news. You can read the first 25 or so pages at Google Books. Then you can rush to buy it to see how it ends.

Basement Beasties

The Animal Uprising™ Has developed a new weapon in their assault on humanity. The troglodyte deer.

SAULT STE. MARIE, Mich. – When Jody Fabry descended the basement stairs to her seasonal home and saw broken glass on the floor, then spied what caused the mess, she didn't know who was more frightened — her, or the deer that was the culprit.

A young doe apparently got into the basement through a window, then couldn't get out. Fabry called officers to her home, but it was more difficult than it looked to remove the animal.

They finally had to chase the burglar around and around until it made an escape through the window. However, we here at Blue Crab Boulevard do not believe the deer came in through the window. Since no tunnel was found, either, that can only mean one thing: they're in the sewers. We highly recommend doing what we here at the Crabitat have done. Duct tape the toilet lids down. It's the only sensible thing to do. And don't go into the basement, there might be a deer down there. Send a friend down to check.

Winter Morning

Stopping The Spiral

Last year, a study was published that looked the the mutually beneficial spiral of death that media was enmeshed in with terrorists from all over the world. By publishing and publicizing the atrocities committed by terrorists, the media gets higher circulation, more readers or viewers, while the terrorists get the media coverage their acts are designed to generate. It is a sick, parasitic relationship. Dave Kopel, writing at The Rocky Mountain News points out that much the same thing occurs with the media coverage of killers and their killing sprees. The media coverage encourages copycat killers.

The way the media cover an event influences whether there will be repetitions. For example, if a fan runs onto the field during a baseball game, the broadcast cameras usually avoid showing pictures of the fan. The TV producers know that the fan on the field is seeking attention, and that, presumably, getting his picture on television will reward him. Moreover, broadcasting the man's antics would encourage copycats.

Killing time at a baseball game is a tiny misdeed, compared to killing people, but many media decisions have the effect of encouraging copycat murders.

Last April, The Denver Post published on its front page five "glamour shots" that the Virginia Tech murderer had taken of himself, and sent to NBC. On Wednesday, the Post ran a front-page picture of the young man who killed two at a youth missionary center in Arvada and two others at a church in Colorado Springs, along with very large-type excerpts from the killer's rantings. In the first sentence, the killer compared himself to the Virginia Tech killer.

The Post might has well have a run a sidebar: "Are you a hate-filled sociopath? Are you upset because you have an intense feeling of superiority to other people, even though you have accomplished little or nothing? Your hateful screeds will not meet our standards for publication as a letter to the editor. However, if you perpetrate a mass murder, we will put your picture on our front page, publish your writings there, too, and do our part to ensure that your name is remembered forever."

The above paragraph is not the formal policy of the Post and of much of the mainstream media, but it amounts to the de facto policy.

Kopel is right about this. The huge media frenzies surrounding events like this encourages some people to act out the same sick actions. Kopel's suggestions to fix or at least minimize the problem are common sense. Refuse page one publication of the killer's photo and any words he left behind. Refuse to run action photos of the killer – as the media did with a disgusting gusto in the Omaha mall shootings. Refuse to glorify the killer – call him a killer or a coward or a murderer. Will this and the other steps he outlines stop all copycats? Of course not. But it may stop some. Kopel even suggests running pictures of the dead killer in order to deglorify him. They used to do that in many areas of the United States, although I don't recall many pictures like that since the 1930s gangsters were displayed to the press. Maybe it has been done more recently, but it might make even a sociopath think twice. Death shots are not as fetching as glamor shots, after all. 

Kopel mentions Loren Coleman's investigations into the copycat effect. Maybe it is time for the media to pay attention to that research. If the media chooses to, it can break a lot of that parasitic, spiral of death relationship between themselves and the killers. Isn't it time they tried?

Getting Immigration Right

Amy Chua, a professor at Yale Law School and the daughter of immigrants, pens an op-ed in today's Washington Post about the need for America to get it right on immigration. Getting it right means not veering to either extreme position in the debate. I think she presents somewhat of a caricature of many of the people who are opposed to the situation we have on our hands at this moment, but she still makes some excellent points.

If you don't speak Spanish, Miami really can feel like a foreign country. In any restaurant, the conversation at the next table is more likely to be Spanish than English. And Miami's population is only 65 percent Hispanic. El Paso is 76 percent Latino. Flushing, N.Y., is 60 percent immigrant, mainly Chinese.

Chinatowns and Little Italys have long been part of America's urban landscape, but would it be all right to have entire U.S. cities where most people spoke and did business in Chinese, Spanish or even Arabic? Are too many Third World, non-English-speaking immigrants destroying our national identity?

For some Americans, even asking such questions is racist. At the other end of the spectrum, the conservative talk show host Bill O'Reilly fulminates against floods of immigrants who threaten to change America's "complexion" and replace what he calls the "white Christian male power structure."

But for the large majority in between, Democrats and Republicans alike, these questions are painful, with no easy answers. At some level, most of us cherish our legacy as a nation of immigrants. But are all immigrants really equally likely to make good Americans? Are we, as the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington warns, in danger of losing our core values and devolving "into a loose confederation of ethnic, racial, cultural, and political groups, with little or nothing in common apart from their location in the territory of what had been the United States of America"?

My parents arrived in the United States in 1961, so poor that they couldn't afford heat their first winter. I grew up speaking only Chinese at home (for every English word accidentally uttered, my sister and I got one whack of the chopsticks). Today, my father is a professor at Berkeley, and I'm a professor at Yale Law School. As the daughter of immigrants, a grateful beneficiary of America's tolerance and opportunity, I could not be more pro-immigrant.

Nevertheless, I think Huntington has a point.

Around the world today, nations face violence and instability as a result of their increasing pluralism and diversity. Across Europe, immigration has resulted in unassimilated, largely Muslim enclaves that are hotbeds of unrest and even terrorism. The riots in France last month were just the latest manifestation. With Muslims poised to become a majority in Amsterdam and elsewhere within a decade, major West European cities could undergo a profound transformation. Not surprisingly, virulent anti-immigration parties are on the rise.

Not long ago, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union disintegrated when their national identities proved too weak to bind together diverse peoples. Iraq is the latest example of how crucial national identity is. So far, it has found no overarching identity strong enough to unite its Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis.

I think that the number of people who are opposed to immigration on racial grounds is a very small minority, just as I think that the number of people who are in favor of in on racial grounds are a small minority. But Chua's ideas for fixing the current mess sound very familiar. Regular readers will recognize them as being very much in line with what I have been advocating for some time here: A high fence, a wide gate and a hearty welcome for those who play be the rules. The fact is that English should be our official language, but we can and should welcome legal immigrants into this country. Our admissions policies should favor talent and recognize that we do need a good mix of people from all over the world. But the melting pot is still a necessary framework for making America work. So is a strong border that lets us be in control of who gets in.

America has succeeded as a nation of immigrants because we have been able to assimilate wave after wave of people coming from all over the globe. While the new arrivals may always be more in tune with where they came from for many years, those immigrant's children have become Americans. That is how we should still be functioning. I would suggest reading all of Chua's piece. I think she gets the essentials correct.

Bolivia Headed For Civil War?

The four districts of Bolivia that produce most of the natural gas in that country have announced that they are now autonomous from the central government and vow to hold a referendum to authorize a complete separation from the rest of the country and especially from Evo Morales and his new constitution. That constitution, drawn up by a rump group of legislators loyal to Morales, would have imposed taxes specifically on those four "rich" regions.

Thousands waved the Santa Cruz region's green-and-white flags in the streets as council members of the Santa Cruz, Tarija, Beni and Pando districts made the public announcement.

The officials displayed a green-bound document containing a set of statutes paving the way to a permanent separation from the Bolivian government.

Council representatives vowed to legitimize the so-called autonomy statutes through a referendum that would legally separate the natural-gas rich districts from President Evo Morales' government.

The move also aims to separate the states from Bolivia's new constitution, which calls for, among other things, a heavier taxation on the four regions to help finance more social programs.

"The statutes will be ratified," said Oscar Ortiz, Santa Cruz senator. "With a public referendum, the people of our region will legitimize their will."

About 35 percent of Bolivia's 9.5 million people live in the four states, according to The Associated Press.

In the meantime, Bolivian network ATV showed what appeared to be armed, pro-government protesters creating blockades around the town of Yapacani, on the outskirts of Santa Cruz.

Some indigenous pro-Morales groups claim Bolivia's richer, white-ruled Eastern regions want to control the country's natural resources. Bolivia has South America's second-largest natural gas reserves, behind Venezuela. Most of it is produced in the Eastern regions.

This is a potentially lethal situation. Morales is exploiting both both class and racial divides while busily blaming the other side for doing the same. He is, of course, quite outspoken in his intent to redistribute wealth in accordance with the teachings of his hero, Hugo Chavez. In many ways, he is simply following the same playbook that was used in Venezuela. Because Morales is very much allied to Venezuela and because Chavez has bought a lot of military hardware recently, the rebellious districts may have a bad time of all this.