On GNXP.com, Greg Cochran points to an interesting graph of the genetic distribution of individuals of European descent along two “principle component” axes:

“This SNP study (and others) also shows that Ashkenazim are genetically distinct from other Europeans, which allows fairly accurate identification of group membership. Almost perfectly distinct, if you look at Ashkenazim whose grandparents are all Ashkenazi (the violet dots).”

The violet dots that cluster in the upper right amidst purple dots are Ashkenazi [Northern European] Jews with four Ashkenazi grandparents. The more scattered purple dots are self-identified Ashkenazi Jews with more mixed pedigrees. The green dots in the upper left corner are Irish (this may be the first racial graph I’ve seen in years where the color coding wasn’t intentionally randomized) and the light blue dots at the bottom are Greeks.

I don’t know what the two axes are–factor analysis is a creative tool, in which you’ve got to come up with the insights. The statistical mechanics won’t do it for you.

A half dozen or so years ago, during the debate over which city should host the 2008 Olympics, I was against China getting it, for all the reasons being bandied about today–lack of free speech, lack of democracy, oppression of Tibet, and air pollution. If the Chinese government wanted the Olympics so much, then they should be withheld until such time as they’ve earned them as a reward for their progress.

But, the Olympics were promised to Beijing, anyway, and the Chinese have since spent vast amounts of money getting ready for them. They haven’t improved on freedom, democracy, or Tibet, but they haven’t gotten worse, either. They’ve lived up their end of the bargain, such as it was.

Yet, now, enlightened opinion wants to punish China’s Olympics for all the same sins China was committing back when it was handed the Olympics in the first place. All the evidence suggests that this moral grandstanding by Westerners would just infuriate the Chinese people, who are always looking for reasons to be angry at the round eyes, and strengthen the Beijing government’s grip.

The runner-up city for hosting the 2008 Olympics was Paris. I blogged back in 2002:

Yet, just because French anti-Americanism is not our fault doesn’t mean it’s not our problem. We should be looking for low-cost ways to placate France’s wounded amour-propre. Backing Paris over Beijing for the 2008 Olympics would have been an easy one. I mean, Paris would have been a fantastic place to attend the Olympics, while Beijing’s air pollution is horrendous. It was a no-brainer, but we blew it.

Sure, afterwards the French would have bragged about how much better Paris was as the site of the Olympics compared to Atlanta in 1996 (which, no doubt, would have been true), but, so what? If we are going to be the sole superpower and “provide the world with adult supervision,” as one of my readers says, then we’ve got to grow up. Sure, it would be fun to appoint Jonah Goldberg ambassador to France, but if we are going to be the global hegemon, we’ve got to avoid juvenile p-ssing wars with our lackeys.

Barack Obama’s remarks to San Francisco supporters on all the various things that are the opiates of the masses in Pennsylvania reminded me that when I was about nine, just like the kid in the movie classic Christmas Story, I relentlessly nagged my parents into getting me a BB gun. But, living in a dense suburb, there really wasn’t much to do with a BB gun, so before I could put my eye out with it, I was on to nagging for other toys. Around my 13th birthday, some friends talked me into trying golf at the tiny par-3 course a few blocks away, and I was instantly infatuated.

I suspect golf took the place in my life that hunting would have filled if I had grown up differently. Golf is a suburbanized form of hunting. You wander around a landscape using a long stick to violently project a pellet into the distance. There’s a big overlap in the demographic among hunters and golfers — male and heterosexual — but golf tends to appeal more to the fastidious white collar class who shrink at the blood in bloodsports. We like to shoot birdies, but in the metaphorical sense that golf provides. (Let me be clear — I don’t have any emotional or moral aversion toward killing animals. It’s the gutting and cleaning of them after the fun part of shooting them that grosses me out.)

So, hunting has been in decline for a long time, with golf rising to replace it. (Obama, for example, is a slightly above average golfer, with a 16 handicap.) Now, golf is in decline, too, as the concept of “going outside” strikes the new generation as so Second Millennium. Why go outdoors when you can stay inside and shoot bad guys on your screen?

Still, while guys who like guns mostly like guns because they like guns, there is a functional dimension to the gun control debate that is omnipresent, but nobody wants to spell out: As I wrote in my Baby Gap article in 2004:

The endless gun-control brouhaha, which on the surface appears to be a bitter battle between liberal and conservative whites, also features a cryptic racial angle. What blue-region white liberals actually want is for the government to disarm the dangerous urban minorities that threaten their children’s safety. Red-region white conservatives, insulated by distance from the Crips and the Bloods, don’t care that white liberals’ kids are in peril. …

White liberals, angered by white conservatives’ lack of racial solidarity with them, yet bereft of any vocabulary for expressing such a verboten concept, pretend that they need gun control to protect them from gun-crazy rural rednecks, such as the ones Michael Moore demonized in “Bowling for Columbine,” thus further enraging red-region Republicans.

Still:

In sparsely populated Republican areas, where police response times are slow and the chances of drilling an innocent bystander are slim, guns make more sense for self-defense than in the cities and suburbs.

In contrast, in Britain, where there are fierce gun control laws, rural dwellers are constantly subjected to “Clockwork Orange”-style home invasions by urban criminals who drive out from the city. In contrast, due to gun ownership and, likely, the greater effectiveness of racial profiling in America, crime rates in the exurbs and rural areas tend to be very low. When Congressman Denny Hastert suddenly became Speaker of the House, and thus second in line of succession to the Presidency, the Secret Service came out to change the locks on his house in a far suburb of Chicago so nobody could let themselves in and steal national security documents. They discovered he didn’t have any locks on his house.