One of the more controversial LA area questions over the last decade was whether or not Latino and black gangs were fighting a low-level ethnic cleansing struggle in the mixed ethnicity slums, as blacks often alleged. Civic leaders, such as LAPD chief William Bratton vociferously denied it, as well they might considering potential repercussions.

Slowly, the story is coming out in court cases. My guess is that the answer will turn out to be: Yes, but only in certain times and places, often depending upon the whim of local gang leaders.

From the LA Times’ ace crime reporter Sam Quinones:

Six Florencia 13 gang members sentenced to life in prison
Court action may close the door on a rampage that began in 2004 and evolved into what some residents saw as a race war.

By Sam Quinones

The sentencing of six Florencia 13 gang members to life in prison appears to bring to a close a prolonged and terrifying spate of violence in the Florence-Firestone district allegedly brought on by orders from a prison gang member in solitary confinement 700 miles away.

Beginning in 2004, the unincorporated Los Angeles County area north of Watts [unincorporated parts of LA County are patrolled by LA Sheriffs rather than LAPD] was the site of one of the region’s worst gang sieges since the early 1990s, evolving into what some residents felt was a race war.

The violence left dozens of people dead, including many with no gang affiliation, and required enormous county resources to combat. …

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I’m wondering whether the NFL passing game is evolving in the direction the placekicking game has already gone. Kickers today get no credit whatsoever for making extra points and very little for making field goals under, say, 45 yards. You mostly hear about them when they miss.

Quarterback strategies and execution are now starting to reach a similar point where the big story of the Super Bowl was the lone interception thrown in the game.

There’s always the Washington Post’s XX featurette for heaping mounds of Taking Everything Personally:

To Be Young, Gifted, and White in Hollywood

• By Nina Shen Rastogi

The blogosphere is a-twitter about Vanity Fair’s latest “New Hollywood” cover. Specifically, its stark lily-whiteness. As Dlisted put it, this year’s annual Annie Leibovitz shot “makes a BYU class picture look like a Benetton ad.”

Bloggers have pointed out a few obvious, non-white actresses who could have been included, like Gaby Sidibe, who is featured in the portfolio inside the magazine, but not on the cover.

The star of Precious weighs 300 pounds. No woman is going to be drawn to make an impulse purchase of a fashion and lifestyle magazine because there’s a 300 pounder on the cover.

There’s also Zoe Saldana, who starred in the two biggest sci-fi movies of the year, Star Trek and Avatar.

This Dominican-American is really good in Avatar as Manute Bol’s big blue sister, or whatever she’s supposed to be. On the other hand, would anybody who saw her in Avatar recognize her? (more…)

I wrote in Taki’s Magazine last November:

The things that we most like to argue about are those that are most inherently arguable …

As you may have noticed by now, I’m like that: clueless about most subjects that most people are most desperate to discuss. Who will win the Super Bowl? Will the stock market go up or down tomorrow? Will the health bill pass? Which party will win the next election?

Don’t ask me.

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From USAToday:

Fresno, Calif. tops Men’s Health magazine’s list of America’s “drunkest” cities while Boston, home to the “Cheers” bar where everyone knows your name, was deemed the “least drunk,” besting even Salt Lake City.

I’ve been lied to by my Dropkick Murphys albums.

The magazine, which will publish the list of 100 major cities in it’s March edition, drew upon such data as death rates from alcoholic liver disease, booze-fueled car crashes, frequency of binge-drinking in the past month, number of DUI arrests, and severity of DUI penalties.

“Drunkest” cities:

1. Fresno, Calif.
2. Reno, Nev.
3. Billings, Mont.
4. Riverside, Calif.
5. Austin
6. St. Louis
7. San Antonio
8. Lubbock, Texas
9. Tucson
10. Bakersfield, Calif.

“Least drunk” cities:

1. Boston
2. Yonkers, N.Y.
3. Rochester, N.Y.
4. Salt Lake City
5. Miami
6. Newark
7. Durham, N.C.
8. New York City
9. Fort Wayne, Ind.
10. Manchester, N.H.

See full list, including grades for each city from A to F.

Maybe somebody should pitch NBC on doing a new version of “Cheers” set in Fresno? With the track record of fine profit-making judgment that NBC’s current management has, they might go for it…

On Saturday night at 8pm, HBO is putting on a biopic with Claire Danes playing Temple Grandin, the high-functioning autistic animal sciences professor who is so interesting from a sort of sci-fi point of view, like HAL 9000 come to life. Her view, however, is that autistic people tend to have brains that function not like computers but like animals — they can’t see the forest for the trees. Animals are constantly spooked by small visual details that don’t bother non-autistic humans because we barely notice much of what goes on around us that isn’t relevant to our main trains of thought.

Here’s a very positive review of the Temple Grandin film by Dorothy Rabinowitz in the WSJ.

From my new Taki’s Magazine column about the ex-spouses who are contending for the Best Director Oscar:

Read the whole thing there and comment upon it here.

For years, I’ve been pointing out  the irony that so many of the New York City media types who are always pooh-poohing the entire concept of IQ in the press are simultaneously paying lots of money to have tested the IQs of their four-year-olds (four-year-olds!). Almost every prestigious private elementary school in NYC requires that applicants for kindergarten take the Wechsler IQ test, and the public gifted and talented schools use the more achievement test-like Otis-Lennon. It’s a pretty hilarious irony.

Now, Jennifer Senior has a long article in New York, The Junior Meritocracy, questioning the wisdom of handing out lifetime prizes at age four. Surely, she asks, wouldn’t it be better to, say, test at age seven, when IQ testing is more accurate?

I’m familiar with a public high school program only open to kids with stratospheric IQs of 145 or higher. Within the school there tend to be two groups of kids: those who scored >=145 on an IQ test in 8th grade, who are really smart; and those who got into this program’s feeder programs in third grade. The kids who are in this high school because they scored >=145+ in second grade tend to be smart, but often not outlandishly smart, simply because of the lower accuracy in testing at earlier ages and a tendency toward regression toward the mean over time. Testing 4-year-olds just exacerbates all this.

My guess is that testing at age 4, despite its high degree of arbitrariness, is popular with New York City parents because it lets them decide whether they will stay in Manhattan / Brooklyn or move to a suburb where the open enrollment schools have good students on average. If your kid gets into an exclusive public program or into a famous private school, then we’ll stay in the city. Otherwise, Fort Lee, here we come!

The summer before he starts school is a pretty easy time to move a kid. After that, he’ll have school friends, and he’ll be old enough to complain more.

I recently read The Prince of Darkness,the 2007 autobiography of the late Washington reporter and TV commentator Robert D. Novak, who died last August. It’s a quite distinctive memoir that nicely conveys Novak’s love of ferreting out individual facts–it’s a book that will prove useful to future historians of politics and the press in understanding how reporters got scoops and what their incentives were–and his aversion to the kind of Big Picture synthesizing that’s the norm in an autobiography.

It’s the opposite of Dreams from My Father: Novak realizes the reader is mostly interested in accounts of what the big names he met over the years (from JFK through GWB) were really like, and limits himself to giving his side of various historical events he was involved in, such as the Valerie Plame affair, and recounting data about himself that is useful in understanding the media.

Although he dislikes summing up, Novak is candid that getting a scoop (and Novak probably got more Washington scoops, large and small, than anybody) depends upon serving the self-interest of whoever is doing the leaking. (Lead and Gold has more about Novak’s book here.) Still, knowledge is better than ignorance. (more…)

I never got around to posting my old review from The American Conservative of the 2009 French movie “The Class.” So, for completists:

“The Class,” a slice-of-life drama tracking a year in an inner city Parisian junior high school, has been greeted rapturously, winning the top prize at the Cannes film festival. The critical acclaim stems mostly from “The Class” not being Hilary Swank’s 2007 “Freedom Writers” or all those other tiresome Nice White Lady movies in which heroic teachers overcome “the soft bigotry of low expectations” and turn their charges into Nobel Laureates.

In contrast, this French film offers a refreshingly realistic depiction of the frustrations of teaching. It’s not wholly plausible—as in all school movies, there is only a single class in “The Class”—but it’s almost unique in suggesting that student quality matters.

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