Scoop

Like everyone else, we here at chuckling on-line magazine have been following the Sarah Palin phenomena. We've managed to infiltrate her organization in the midwest and have learned many disturbing new facts. Most disturbing of all, we can now report, is that her followers are organizing themselves, or perhaps being organized, into secret societies modeled after Christian organizations from the dark ages. They've even got a stupid vow, which initiates must recite when entering the order:

I swear that I am not now nor have ever been a liberal, that I do not accept the overthrow of the rightful American government by the pagan usurper, Barack Obama. That I do not accept gay marriage or the separation of church and state or the metric system. That I will not answer the census questions. That I will never again steal or drink or use illegal drugs or fornicate out of vice. And that I will give my life for my religion and Sarah Palin.

More tk. Lots more, I fear.

Domestic updates

Several times in the past few years we've sent our children to stay with relatives in France during summer vacation. Payback arrived last week in the form of three Parisian teenagers who will be living with us for the next six weeks. As if New York teenagers weren't shallow enough.

Just kidding. Though quite fashionable, they are good kids. The only problem so far is that one of them seems to have made all his fashion decisions based on gangster rap videos. The second day here he came out with his pants down below his butt showing off his boxer shorts while wearing a wife beater shirt, a thick gold chain around his neck and a NY Yankees cap tipped sideways. He had the look nailed, the only problem being it was a bit too precise. Of course we told him he had to pull up his pants while he's in our house. And we asked him to please not go around like that in our neighborhood. In Manhattan he can wear his pants around his ankles for all we care.

Are we old fogies? Maybe some, but for the most part I don't think so. My main concern is for his safety. People Brooklyn in generally don't want to see kids adverting themselves as thugs walking around their neighborhoods and it's not unusual for local toughs to do something about it. Brooklyn ain't Manhattan. Then there are the cops who are likely to hassle the gangster types. And I also fear that real ghetto kids might not take kindly to some French kid posing as a thug. Cause tough guy he ain't. After putting away his gangbanger costumes he busted out with a series of athletic wear ensembles. Better a pimp than a punk, I guess. Those French and their fashions. Just gotta laugh.

The girl, who is 15, bears a strong family resemblance to my wife. I've found that a bit uncomfortable, but I'm coping. I'm not one of those disgusting old guys that ogles young women. My daughter's friends, for example, are mostly attractive young girls and I don't need any self control not to ogle them. One time I walked in when they weren't expecting me and caught them dancing topless. I got a laugh off their embarrassment, but that was it. But none of them look remotely like my wife, unlike her little French niece. It's taking some effort not to look at her. Lola was pretty cute way back when.

Anyway, I was afraid having three teen visitors in our tiny New York apartment would be difficult, but it's gone all right so far. John Bob's had a lot of sleepovers and now he's away at camp for 10 days. Jane Bob is spending a month in France, so it's not that much more crowded than normal. This time she's not staying with relatives. She got in one of those education abroad programs where they study something and live with a family. Of course she's not writing much and hasn't called, but the few notes we've gotten indicate she's having the time of her life. A bunch of 17 year-olds running free in Paris? Yea, that would be fun. Now she's with the family in Arles and seems to be having a fantastic time there as well. About the time Jane Bob gets back I'm going to Quebec for a couple weeks, so I'll be free. But it's too bad for her French cousins that she's away. They're kind of lost and are spending most of their time playing the Wii.

Periodically, I've told you about the ever-ongoing changes to the businesses in my neighborhood. It's been a little slow lately. A dry cleaner took over a clothing store and dentist office that closed. His old shop is now for rent. A Russian bakery went out of business. I walked by there late the other night and five Chinese guys were playing poker. I don't know if they were workers remodeling or if it's now going to be an illegal poker parlor. I wouldn't be a bit surprised either way.

The big news here is that a local Mexican restaurant went rogue and turned into an illegal nightclub. Hundreds of people are in and out of there till four in the morning. There's dancing, bright lights and thumpa thumpa all night long. There's been at least one knife fight, a few women have been slapped around on the street, and the noise is pretty much constant from 2 am to 4:30. The worst of it is that taxis continuously pull up and honk. We can drown out most of it, but the honks pierce any white noise we throw up against them.

You might think that it would be easy to close down an illegal nightclub but that's not proving to be the case. The neighbors are up in arms. The neighborhood association has had numerous meetings and repeatedly contacted the police and elected officials. The authorities have been responsive. They learned that the restaurant's liquor license only goes till 10 pm and claim to be working to get that rescinded. The police say they have given the owner numerous summons's and at one point they jailed him for four days. But the day he got out it was open again and has been open ever since.

I'm not without sympathy. Guy's trying to make a buck in tough economic times. Apparently there's a great need for nightclubs among the Mexican population. Those people work hard doing the shittiest jobs around. Why shouldn't they be able to party? The answer is that if the guy wants to run a nightclub, he should open one in a non-residential neighborhood where it's legal.

Nobody round here quite understands why it's so difficult to shut the place down. How can someone just defy the authorities like that? If I sat up a table and start selling beer on the sidewalk it wouldn't be an hour before the police closed me down. And since he doesn't have a liquor license for a nightclub now, I'm skeptical that taking away his daytime license is going to have any effect. Why won't he just continue telling the cops and politicians and the neighbors to fuck off? Apparently he's making a lot more money than being illegal is costing him. But I don't really care about his reasoning. What's with the cops? Are they really such big helpless pussies when confronted with a Mexican who doesn't want to obey the law?

Picture of the day

How little I knew

The feature article* in this month's Harper's argues that Barack Obama is the next Herbert Hoover. Of course I've heard that he's the next Bin Laden, the next Hitler, the next Stalin and the anti-Christ if not Satan himself, so it's hardly surprising someone would throw Herbert Hoover into the mix. Hoover was, as we all know, the cold hearted architect of the Great Depression, a very bad person with no redeeming qualities and a typical big business Republican. Like you, I am sick of all that shit and passed over reading the article.

But this was Harper's and after reading everything else, I came back to it. And little did I know. Herbert Hoover was not at all like I thought he was. He's actually a lot like Obama, except far more interesting.

Orphaned and penniless by the age of nine, Hoover was raised by an exploitative uncle who considered him more chattel than son. He had no illusions about the America he grew up in, writing years later, “As gentle as are the memories of the times, I am not recommending a return to the good old days. Sadness was greater, and death came sooner.”

Removed from public school at fourteen to work as his uncle’s office boy, Hoover nonetheless learned enough at night school to make the very first class at the newly opened Stanford University, where he studied geology and engineering. He paid his own way by working as a waiter, a typist, and a handyman, and eventually running a laundry service, a baggage service, and a newspaper route. (Unsurprisingly, his favorite book was David Copperfield.) After graduation, he ran mining camps and scouted new strikes around the globe. It was an adventurous life; on one occasion he made a small fortune by following an ancient Chinese map and tiger tracks into a moribund silver mine in Burma. By the time he was forty, Hoover was worth $85 million in today’s dollars, and he retired from business to take up public life. “The ideal of service,” he would later write, was no burden on the striving entrepreneur but a “great spiritual force poured out by our people as never before in the history of the world.”

He had long lived up to his ideals. Caught in the siege of the Western delegations in Peking during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, only Hoover and his fearless wife, Lou, cared enough to sneak food and water to the Chinese Christians besieged elsewhere in the city. He first came to national attention after the start of World War I, when he led the effort to feed the 7 million people of occupied Belgium and France. He worked for free, donated part of his own fortune to the cause, and risked his life repeatedly crossing the U-boat–infested waters of the North Atlantic. His postwar relief efforts rescued millions more throughout Europe and especially in the Soviet Union; it’s unlikely that any other individual in human history saved so many people from death by starvation and want. Questioned about feeding populations under Bolshevik control, he banged a table and insisted, “Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!” In 1920, many people in both major parties wanted to run him for president, but he opted for the Republican cabinet. As secretary of commerce under Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, he was a dynamic figure, tirelessly promoting new technologies, work-safety rules, and voluntary industry standards; he supervised relief to Mississippi and Louisiana during the terrible 1927 floods and advocated cooperation between labor and management.

“We had summoned a great engineer to solve our problems for us; now we sat back comfortably and confidently to watch the problems being solved,” the journalist Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote of Hoover’s inauguration in March 1929, in words that might easily have been used in January 2009. “Almost with the air of giving genius its chance, we waited for the performance to begin.”

The article goes on to describe the similarities between Obama and Hoover's governing philosophies. It repeatedly makes the point that both of them understood what was happening better than everyone around them. It details how Obama is taking the same approach as Hoover did across a wide range of issues. It details how and why Hoover failed and argues that Obama is making the exact same mistakes. It's a depressing read. Makes way too much sense. Uncomfortable. I fear all too prescient. Worth reading, nevertheless. At least it was for me. Turned out I knew next to nothing about Herbert Hoover.

* Subscription required. Go ahead, subscribe. Harper's is easily the best magazine still publishing.

SOL birthday

And it's one, two, three...

What are we fighting for in Afghanistan? Does anyone even ask? Does anyone even give a damn?

The U.S. has reportedly launched an invasion of Afghanistan's Helmand Province. Helmand Province is roughly the size of West Virginia and home to 740,000 people, almost all of whom hate us. Why are we doing that?

The first major operation launched with the additional troops ordered to Afghanistan by President Obama is devised to clear Taliban havens across a strategic southern province — and then, in a marked departure from past practice, to leave clusters of Marines in small bases close to the villagers they were sent to guard and aid, according to senior military officers.

Why? Why do we want a presence in every little village in a dusty province half a world away? Isn't there some better way we could spend our money and energy?

“Essentially what they are trying to do is create and sustain a productive presence in Helmand Province, including both combat power and civil-engagement capabilities,” a senior military officer said.

Again, why? Even if 4000 troops can conquer and hold this province, why is it worth such a massive expenditure in lives and fortune?

The silence is deafening. Let's try Google. It has an answer for everything.


OMG. The all-knowing internet doesn't even know why we are fighting in Afghanistan. It's a mystery of our times.

Yea, I know, it supposedly has something to do with 9/11, but whatever the poor villagers of Helmand Province might have had to do with hijacking those airplanes has been lost to the mists of time. At this late date, we seem to be engaging in military operations just for the sake of engaging in military operations. Once a military operation starts, it has to continue until total victory has been achieved. Otherwise we've lost. What have we lost? That's not exactly clear.

Oh well, in these troubled times maybe it's best to have the military occupied in some hellhole half a world away. By all reports, the military is a very conservative institution and right wing Christianist extremists have been successfully infiltrating it. Maybe it's best they expend their energy trying to conquer and convert Afghanistan to right wing Christianity. With too much time on their hands they might try to conquer and convert us.

Picture of the day

Juneteenth 09

Picture of yesterday

Another self portrait (and apple stills sucks)

I finally got around to replacing my piece of shit computer. As mentioned previously, Apple is an evil monopoly and I once again call on President Obama to sic the trustbusters on them. Apple refuses to offer a simple inexpensive box that you can pop open and add hard drives and RAM. You either have to buy the highest of the high end Macs which adds up to $3000 minimum, or go with an underpowered little thing that requires the skills of a brain surgeon and a lot of research to upgrade.

Anyway, I eventually settled for cheapest Mac Mini with additional RAM and a firewire 800 hard drive to run the OS. It's OK, a bit zippier than the piece of shit G5 tower that died, but as you can see, it requires a lot of external crap and wiring. And being no brain surgeon, of course I fucked up the audio when installing the RAM, which voids the warranty. Fortunately, I've got a lot of computer crap laying around and that included an MBox that I can use for audio.

So it all ends well, for the time being, but my hatred of Apple is reaching pathological proportions. It's just not right that only one company manufactures personal computers. I'm not exactly what you'd call a rabid free marketer, but this is one area where government should get involved to ensure healthy competition.

A is for authoritarian

"God's laws are designed to protect people from themselves."

So says Mark Sanford (R) South Carolina, big red (A) in public. Yea, yea, another conservative hypocrite. Family values southern guy ditches his wife and kid for an affair with an exotic foreigner. Not such a hillbilly after all, eh? Yea, yea, I know, the term "hypocrite" in "conservative hypocrite" is redundant. We all know that.

I find the above quote from the governor much more interesting than his all-too-human fuckfest with a dusky temptress from a foreign land. Let he who hasn't either done that or fantasized about it cast the first stone. What separates conservatives and normal people on the scarlet letter question is the idea of control. I think we can all agree it's not a great thing to fuck around on your wife and mother of four kids and get busted all over the news cycle. The difference is that normal people think a person should exercise self-control in these matters while conservatives think government should intervene to smack down sexuality. Why? Because God commands that we do whatever it takes to keep people from enjoying sex. Sanford's little speech lays it out plain.

My knee-jerk reaction is to think that these hypocritical authoritarian fucks don't believe a word of their purported religion. Anyone who believes in an afterlife; anyone who believes that quality of a guy's eternal afterlife is decided by his ability to keep his dick in his pants would manage to keep his dick in his pants. Personally, I'd cut the damned thing off if it would guarantee me eternal bliss. Any sane person would.

Yea, yea, I know that the conservative pathology is more complicated than that, but they definitely believe in earthly authority, no ifs ands or buts. In the societies conservatives rule, societies such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, North Korea, et. al., the government beats the bitches in the street for any hint of sexuality. That's the ideal conservative society. That's what conservatives, people like Mark Sanford, need to control their hard on. They need for government to keep the bitches from tempting them. They need for the government to punish the ones who do. And God agrees, you can read it in a holy book, so it makes a lot of sense to people who believe that crap. That's why the conservatives of this world, Mark Sanford being today's poster boy, so diligently pursue state power. They can't control themselves so they want somebody else to do it for them. And when they're caught, they'll ask for and receive forgiveness, but you can bet they never gave any and probably never will.

Rainy day and mermaids

Notes on photography

Kafka on the shore

You may recall that I've been revisiting Haruki Murakami’s novels. I recently re-read ""The Wind-up Bird Chronicle." I just finished "Kafka on The Shore."

Read a serious review of Kafka here.

The first time through I thought Kafka was the much better novel. It was funny and all the supernatural stuff made sense. But now I think Wind-up Bird was better precisely because the supernatural stuff didn't all fit together neatly. The level of explication necessary to tie it all together in Kafka resulted in many stretches of ridiculous dialog. Still, it's a great page turner and worth reading.

I was more disappointed in the review I linked to above. It's an example of pretty much everything I hate about modern book reviews. After reading it, I was surprised to find that it was written by John Updike who is very well-regarded in this area. I guess that means one of us is shallow and scoreboard suggests it's not John Updike. Still...

In science news

Flaws in the ointment

Like I said, it's because all of the performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert... But listening to the D Major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of--that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect.

-- Haruki Murakami from Kafka on the Beach


Amanda Marcotte's review of the movie Up at Pandagon includes a slap at Pixar's Cars. I had only recently become aware that Cars was poorly reviewed as far-and-away Pixar's worst film and that a lot of people think it sucks. I was surprised by this because Cars is my favorite Pixar movie and the only one I ever had any desire to see more than once.

So in comments I asked what people thought was wrong with it? The typical answer, supplied by someone called junk science, is:

...the plot, character types, and pacing seem like so much paint-by-numbers feel-good Disney blandness compared to a wittier Toy Story or Monsters, Inc. Cars isn’t a bad movie, but it could have come from a lesser studio than Pixar, which is what I think bothers people.

OK. That makes sense and pretty much answered my question. But a couple other responses were worth reading for their other-than-mainstream perspectives. Mnemosyne writes:

I wasn’t too fond of Cars but my husband and most men I know really, really liked it.  It seemed to speak to them on some subconscious level about breaking through to a better, less traditional view of what being an adult man should/could be.  It’s one of the few movies out there where the male protagonist matures through his relationships with other people and not because of the adventures he encounters.  The traditional markers of male success aren’t just rejected, they’re actively subverted at the end of the film.  (Trying to avoid spoilers here, but I think you know what I mean.)

If that’s what men and boys are getting out of it, then I don’t really care that it didn’t speak to me.  Not every movie is about me. 

I thought that comment was very insightful. Do I like Cars because of a guy thing? I'm not particular into cars, often don't even own one, and would just about rather go to the dentist than watch a NASCAR race, which as far as I can see is nothing more than a lot of colorful boxes making an endless left turn in slow motion. I did like the fact that the protagonist matured through his relationship with others. That was the heart of the movie and in conjunction with the manner in which he matured (understanding that friends are better than fame and fortune) explains a good part of why I liked it so much.

RobW had a different take:

One of the central themes of Cars was the idea that individuals are born to their purpose and cannot escape being what they are, and what they all are is a collection of stereotypes.  The race car is the jock, the towtruck is the dumb redneck, the lowrider is the cholo, the only “black” characters are a Cadillac and SUVs with huge chrome rims (who, being from the city are naturally criminals- in the end we see the small town sheriff has them in custody doing hard labor and we’re supposed to laugh at them), etc. 
The smart and pretty Porsche totally falls for the race car despite the lack of any explanation why anyone would even tolerate the arrogant prick.  Because she’s a girl and he’s famous.  Then there’s the fangirls: Mazda Miatas, of course.

It is also a paean to nostalgia.  Modern is bad, the Old Ways are good, combined with the vicious racial stereotyping and reactionary message that you can only be what you are meant to be makes the film despicable, really.  Hell, the towtruck, ‘Mater, has a star turn at one point demonstrating, quite literally, the joys of going through life in reverse.  It seems you don’t need to know where you’re going, all you have to do is know where you’ve been- but this can only work if you never, ever, leave the familiar.

Oh yeah, and the happy ending: it seems the best thing that can happen to anyone is to gain the approval and support of a large corporation, the oh-so-benevolent-and-kindly OIL COMPANY of all things.  Run by a stereotypical Texan, naturally...

...So, it’s an entertaining movie for people unoffended by racial, cultural, gender stereotypes, who don’t think about its reactionary message, or who just don’t think.  Great conservative film, in other words.

RobW, I think, is a bit harsh. The idea that individuals are born to their purpose and cannot escape being what they are is not one of the central themes of Cars. It's one of the central aspects of cars. That's cars, not Cars.

Cars really are born to their purpose and don't have a lot of opportunity to be something else. A tow truck is a tow truck. A fire engine is a fire engine. They will never become race cars or minivans. I see nothing in the movie that argues the same is true for people.

As for the ethnic stereotyping, Rob makes a good point. Without thinking about it, I had liked the diverse cast of characters and the way they all got along so well. Social integration is a good thing, man. And it fit with the fictional universe of the movie. The army surplus guy is a jeep. The VW Kombi is a hippie. The low rider is a Mexican-American from East L.A. How else would you cast the low rider? They are not ashamed of their taste in cars in East L.A. But yea, how do you cast the African American woman? As a Cadillac? Uh oh, there is some negative history with that kind of stereotype. But anecdotal evidence suggests that a lot of African Americans like Cadillacs (as do geriatric white people) and don't seem particularly ashamed of it. I hesitate to call that vicious racial stereotyping. They didn't show her parked out in front of a shack.

And women fall for arrogant pricks all the time, both in real life and in film, so that's hardly unrealistic. Of course the part where the arrogant prick realizes the error of his ways and changes happens only in the movies, but Cars is a movie. What do you expect?

Perhaps Cars is a paean to nostalgia. I guess I just don't see that as necessarily a bad thing. The scene where the old neon lights of Route 66 come back to life is, I think, one of the better paeans to nostalgia in cinematographic history. It's a beautiful scene.

But enough defense against the fringe. The mainstream argument is that the story is paint-by-numbers feel-good Disney blandness.

First, I say leave Disney out of it. Cars is Pixar storytelling all the way and it tells pretty much the exact same story as Up. A socially isolated individual learns the benefits of friendship and community. All Pixar stories are painted-by-number. They are all textbook. They are all flawless from a technical storytelling perspective. Cars is just like all the rest.

That's my problem with Pixar. The flawlessness of their storytelling is their greatest flaw. You need only watch a few Studio Ghibli movies to see what I mean. Watch Howl's Moving Castle, Spirited Away, or even Totoro, and you'll see that they leave Pixar in the dust artistically. Kids like Pixar movies but they're not that crazy about them. I'm the one who always suggests going to see them. But after seeing Spirited Away, my kids begged me to watch Studio Ghibli movies. You'll love it, dad, it's great, over and over again for about a year until I finally gave in.

The big difference, I think, is that Studio Ghibli movies are the artistic vision of one man, Hayao Miyazaki. Sure his stories have flaws, but his idiosyncratic visions of flying machines, old ladies, Japanese mythology and other individualistic bric-a-brac raise them so far above Pixar's textbook stortelling that it's not even close. Pixar's stories seem the work of a committee. A very competent committee, granted, but a committee nevertheless.

Naw, that's a bit harsh as well. Pixar does excellent work. I'll end this with a couple quotes that, I think, better illustrate what I'm trying to say.

John Lasseter of Pixar:

(about making the movie Cars) I learned that the journey in life is a reward, It's about living every day to its fullest, and I knew that's what I wanted the film to be about.

Let me tell you a funny story. I took the family to see this film one weekend, I'll go to see almost any film that's good for the whole family. And so we're sitting there watching this film, which I won't name, and there are long stretches that are just not very entertaining. My little son - he was probably 6 at the time was sitting next to me, and right in the middle of this dull section, he turns to me and says, "Dad? How many letters are in my name?" I must have laughed for five minutes. I thought, Oh, man, this movie has lost this little boy.

We make the kind of movies we want to see, we love to laugh, but I also believe what Walt Disney said 'for every laugh there should be a tear'. I love movies that make me cry, because they're tapping into a real emotion in me, and I always think afterwards how did they do that?

Interesting, but again, I'll give Miyazaki the last word:

"Personally I am very pessimistic," Miyazaki says. "But when, for instance, one of my staff has a baby you can't help but bless them for a good future. Because I can't tell that child, 'Oh, you shouldn't have come into this life.' And yet I know the world is heading in a bad direction. So with those conflicting thoughts in mind, I think about what kind of films I should be making."

Perhaps this is why he tells children's stories. "Well, yes. I believe that children's souls are the inheritors of historical memory from previous generations. It's just that as they grow older and experience the everyday world that memory sinks lower and lower. I feel I need to make a film that reaches down to that level. If I could do that I would die happy."

I ask if he feels he's managed that already and he chuckles and shakes his head. Nor does he feel that film can be employed as a force for good. "Film doesn't have that kind of power," he says, gloomily. "It only exerts its influence when it stirs patriots up against other nations, or taps into aggressive, violent urges."

This is a black diagnosis indeed. But then, inexplicably, Miyazaki's mood lightens. Perhaps it's the sunshine, or the cigarette, or the fact that the interview is almost over. "Of course," he relents, "if, as artists, we try to tap into that soul level - if we say that life is worth living and the world is worth living in - then something good might come of it." He shrugs. "Maybe that's what these films are doing. They are my way of blessing the child"

Another self portrait

Today's top story

Picture of the day

I don't know who you are or why you come by here so I have no idea whether or not you are interested in the photography. I've always figured it would be in my best interest to expound on the photos. To explain my motivation for taking them. To explain what I see when I look at them. People enjoy that, I know. It makes you more likely to buy. Yet I find myself unable to do it. It's your business to interpret the photo yourself, or not. My advice is to click on it to enlarge, then spend a couple hours or more staring at it. Some kind of psychotropic substance and an appropriate soundtrack might be helpful in achieving the proper understanding. But that's your business. It's not my business what you think and I don't want it to be my business to tell you how to see.

But sometimes I wonder. What do you see when you look at this photo? I'm not going to explain it to you, but I'll tell you that getting it was not a trivial endeavor. Technically, it required an obscure combination of equipment and skill to achieve this look. Artistically, how many people are even trying to achieve it? Probably not many. I've spent many years figuring out how to take this particular photo. How to communicate this particular experience. But I can see how boring it might be at a glance. There could well be a reason why no one else is bothering to figure this out. Do people on the internets even give something like this a second look? I'm guessing no.

Deformative action pt. II

In comments below, ChrisV82 provides this chart which purportedly represents the admissions disadvantages and advantages for different groups in terms of SAT points. It's saying, for example, that being a recruited athlete adds 200 points to one's SAT score. Being an Asian lops off 50 points.



Jewish people are the group most conspicuously absent. Historically, Jews were pointedly excluded from elite universities. Today they make up a disproportionate percentage of the student body at elite schools, particularly in the northeast. I'd guess that if Jews were on the chart, they'd rate something like -150.

I do not know what the best system for college admissions would be. I guess in some ideal world (somewhere similar to France), all students would have the same curriculum in school, take the same tests based on that curriculum, then be admitted, or not, to universities based on the results. But we don't have anything close to an ideal system. We have thousands of schools teaching who knows how many different curricula and the test results track with parents income far more than anything else.

What is best for society? Should test taking ability be the most important criteria? If test taking doesn't produce diversity, should diversity trump test taking, at least for a small proportion of the student body?

Poor chuckling simply does not know. The obvious answer is to have enough good schools for everybody, but that particular solution doesn't appear to be on anybody's agenda.

So for now we'll have to leave it to the professionals. College admissions people feel that it's vitally important to have a diverse student body. Beyond easily identifiable ethnic groups, they also try for socio-economic diversity, for example giving advantage to children who are the first in their family to attend college, and international diversity. What are their reasons for this belief in diversity? Are there data that suggest that's the best way to go? Is it political? At this point, I just don't know, but now that I'm thinking about it will start asking the question.

But as long as the most privileged children in this country are getting a leg up, I don't see how anyone can seriously complain about historically disadvantaged groups, or poor kids, getting a leg up as well.