Introducing the ketchup beer

I have to admit I love the new Miller Chill -- it's every bit as girly as, say, Corona, but it really tastes good. And it's got the lime already in it, so when you order it you don't have to be the guy with a piece of fruit on his beer glass. I noticed it was "chelada style," whatever that meant.

So I was pretty excited when I saw Budweiser's new "Bud Light & Clamato" chelada beer at a 7-11. I bought one.

When I got it home, at first I thought it was interacting poorly with the ketchup on a hamburger I'd eaten. But it turns out that clamato is a tomato juice; while both beers are "cheladas," Chill sticks with the basic lime and salt.

I dumped the Bud out after a few sips. Ick.

This is funny

It turns out that the "pay what you want" digital release of Radiohead's record has poor sound quality. It's mainly a promotion to get people to buy the CD next year.

Also, this statement is a little disingenuous:

No one seemed to understand why Radiohead decided to release Rainbows at 160 kpbs, though guitarist Jonny Greenwood told Rolling Stone, "We talked about it and we just wanted to make it a bit better than iTunes, which it is, so that's kind of good enough, really. It's never going to be CD-quality, because that's what a CD does."

This comparison is true in terms of the kilobytes-per-second rating, as iTunes downloads are normally 128 kbps. But iTunes files are AAC, not MP3, and they're a little higher quality in other ways.

For those who aren't familiar with the technology of audio file compression, here's a quick primer. The kbps rating indicates how much data the file has per second of music; more data means more clarity, but it also means bigger files, so people can fit fewer high-quality songs on their iPods.

The other important thing is the frequency spectrum -- CDs carry overtones that are far higher than what the human ear can hear directly, but one can certainly tell the difference when those frequencies aren't there. There's a theory that the high frequencies somehow affect frequencies the ear can hear. MP3s and AAC files cut down on the spectrum to different degrees, with AAC files handling noises above 16 kHz "much better" than MP3s do.

More on race and beauty

Awhile back I commented on Kanye West's remark about "mutt" women making good rap video actresses. I decried the terminology but noted it's a fact that biracial people are perceived as more attractive in social science research.

Apparently Mexico's beauty standards are different, according to a new piece from Allan Wall:

In Mexican show biz, whites are predominantly represented in the movies, TV and pop music.

One of Mexico's biggest cultural exports these days is the telenovela, a genre akin to the soap opera. In these series, which are exported worldwide, the principal characters tend to be white and the dark-skinned actors portray servants. Like in real life, in other words.

Last Saturday, October 6, Mexico held its annual Miss Mexico beauty pageant (known here as "Nuestra Belleza Mexico") ... I invite you to look at this photo gallery of all the Miss Mexicos since 1994. Note that they are all white, some are blonde.

This runs contrary to some speculation I had re: Kanye. I wrote:

I suspect...that people are attracted to a tan-ish look between pale Caucasian and dark African. This would explain why (A) white people like tans, (B) black people like their lighter-skinned folks and (C) biracial people are hot.

(I should have written "tend to" in each of those three list items. But that's clear in the context of the original post.)

Also, people often get confused about why there's definitely a "Hispanic" look even though Hispanic isn't a racial category. Wall explains the situation well:

According to the CIA World Factbook, 60% of Mexico's population is mestizo (European/Indigenous), 30% is indigenous, and 9% is white.

...

Of course, the term "mestizo" is somewhat slippery. It includes individuals of mostly European ancestry and  a little Indian blood, or vice versa.

The Mexican white-mestizo-Indian spectrum is a continuum. Technically speaking, the "mestizo" classification includes every Mexican with any white/Indian mixture—whether that's 99% white and 1% Indian or 99% Indian and 1% white.

So there are mestizos at the white end of the spectrum who can pass as whites and for all practical purposes are white. At the other end of the spectrum, there are mestizos who are, racially speaking, indigenous.

For educational purposes I would add that many Latin American countries had large numbers of black slaves, further complicating the racial picture in Central and South America. The region has basically the same history as the U.S. -- Europeans taking land from American Indians and bringing African slaves -- only with a different resulting balance.

Metal that sounds like itself

YouTube has a series of clips putting metal songs that sound alike side-by-side. Some are truly remarkable, others a bit of a stretch.

The thing that annoys me is that the series frequently accuses Megadeth songwriter Dave Mustaine of ripping off early Metallica. Well, that's because Dave Mustaine was in early Metallica . Most egregious is comparing "The Four Horsemen" to "The Mechanix" -- they are literally the same song, just one done the way Mustaine wanted it and the other the way the Metallica guys did when he left. You can't rip yourself off.

Uh oh.

Allegations that school shooters were Marilyn Manson fans have been baseless in the past, but this isn't good:

Armed with two revolvers and wearing black clothing, black-painted fingernails and a Marilyn Manson T-shirt - the shock rocker Coon said he chose to worship instead of God - Coon shot two teachers and two students. One teacher remained hospitalized Thursday.

Parenting tip

This attitude --

"I know how powerful my kids are," she says. "When they want something, forget it -- all the resistance in the world isn't going to help you."

--is a self-fulfilling prophesy. Even if it helps activists fight global warming.

Where have I seen this before?

From the Young America's Foundation:

Seven students at your institution [George Washington University] falsely attributed the "Hate Muslims? So Do We!!" fliers to The George Washington University chapter of Young America's Foundation. When the fliers initially surfaced you said, "There is no place for expressions of hatred on our campus. We do not condone, and we will not tolerate the dissemination of fliers or other documents that vilify any religious, ethnic or racial group."

We agree. Vicious personal attacks levied on students are intolerable, and should not go unpunished. The question remains: what will you do about such blatant character assassination now that the truth is out? How will you demonstrate that you don't "condone" or "tolerate" the dissemination of hate.

To be clear, liberal radicals on your campus accused conservative students of engaging in racist activities, and to buttress those baseless claims, these same radicals manufactured actual racist activities to pin on the young conservatives.

In my own college experience, a student did a similar thing, albeit more to prove that racism was still alive than to pin the act on a specific conservative group:

(Xander) Saide, a freshman in the School of Communication, filed a police report on Nov. 5 and claimed that the words "Die Spic" had been written on his wall. Three days later, he told police that he had been attacked from behind and held at knifepoint while walking to his dorm. Saide told the Daily Northwestern that attackers had threatened him and said "Spic, we didn't run away this time."

It turned out -- after he wrote an op-ed for the daily campus newspaper and gave a tearful speech at an anti-racism event -- he made it all up.

We work better when you don't pay us

The Freakonomics blog has an interesting interview with the Craigslist guys.

I don't buy this, though:

JIM [Buckmaster]: Investigative journalism at traditional media outlets has been hurt badly by financial prosperity. The bigger and more successful the media companies get, the more likely they are to be dominated by bottom-line business managers, and from a business standpoint it makes no sense to alienate the most powerful persons and institutions, who by definition are those most in need of investigative reporting. Hence the lack of tough questions from well-funded media, leading to a misled public and situations like this disastrous war in Iraq.

If a newspaper has plenty of money, won't it be more willing to burn an advertiser for a good story? If a paper is hurting for cash, it's well advised to (A) treat advertisers well on its news pages, (B) refrain from alienating even potential advertisers and (C) sacrifice integrity in favor of profit overall. Broke businesses worry about money more than rich ones do.

I think basic history supports this point, though Buckmaster obscures it -- he compares the funding of the MSM to that of the non-MSM on a recent issue ("the lack of tough questions from well-funded media" on Iraq), rather than looking at the trend in MSM funding over time and comparing it to trend in investigative reporting.

Bottom line: Investigative journalism died off as the media got less money, not more.

The racist drug war

This American Prospect article repeats a bunch of the standard-issue liberal talking points about the drug war (which I'm all for ending anyway). It alludes to the argument that the sentencing gap between powder and crack cocaine is racist:

Current guidelines, as enacted by Congress, say that someone convicted of crack possession ought to be treated the same as someone caught with 100 times more powder cocaine. So even as crack was ravaging poor neighborhoods with crime and sickness, the harsh sentencing guidelines were, at the same time, emptying those neighborhoods of young men and women who were being sent to jail for much longer periods than if they had been caught with the same amount of powder cocaine.

One can argue the guidelines are out of date, but they came into being because when crack was introduced, gangs went on a huge murder spree fighting over it. They were not fighting over powder cocaine. So the government came down hard on crack, not because it's a stereotypically black drug but out of a legitimate concern over crime.

Then there's the irrelevant "drug users vs. drug incarceration" comparison, courtesy Jim Webb of all people:

"Although African Americans are 14 percent of drug users, they are 37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses and 56 percent of persons in state prisons for drug offenses," Webb said. "…We have reached a point where the principal nexus between young African American men and our society is increasingly the criminal justice system."

Yes, roughly equal proportions of whites and blacks do drugs. But whites tend not to join drug-dealing gangs. Drug dealing, as opposed to using, is more likely to result in arrest and, once an arrest takes place, more likely to put the culprit in prison. (White drug users also might use less often, use different drugs and/or do a better job of not getting caught.) Again, there's no real proof of racism here.

Good relativism, bad relativism

Megan McArdle approvingly runs this quote from Bryan Caplan:

Critics of multi-culturalism often mock its proponents for (a) cultural relativism and (b) disrepecting Columbus. The problem, as I've explained before, is that Columbus was a pioneer of slavery and barbarism. The only way to excuse his behavior is to say "Oh, you can't judge Columbus by our standards. In those days, people thought that slavery was OK. Everyone was doing it." If that excuse makes sense to you, you're a cultural relativist. Change your heroes, or change your meta-ethics!

She adds:

if you applied the same standards to Victorian America as the "Arab culture is rotten to the core" folks do to the Middle East, the revered pioneer ancestors who built America suddenly turn into . . . a bunch of sick monsters whose culture was rotten to the core.

To a certain degree she's right -- I'm a cultural relativist in that I think each culture has unique positives and negatives (which don't necessarily add up to the same number), and that I'm fine with any culture existing on its own territory.

But I think there are some important problems. One, in Columbus's day, pretty much no one made the argument that slavery and barbarism were wrong. People do make anti-female circumcision arguments today -- morals have improved over the years, and some cultures have not kept up. Relativism across time is different than relativism across geography, especially in an age when information flows across geography.

Two, cultural relativism really has two different definitions. One is that we should look at each culture one its own terms, the kind of relativism I'm sympathetic to and the kind that's here applied to Columbus. But the other is that all cultures are equal in all ways, which is empirically false. That's the kind of relativism conservatives tend to get irritated with -- as Dinesh D'Souza noted, Columbus sailed an ocean to meet American Indians, not the other way around, and that's a significant fact about the triumph of Western innovation. It's "bad relativism" to pretend that's not the case.

Fractured liberalism

Over at Slate, Sara Mosle has an interesting piece about Albert Shanker, a civil-rights activists and teachers-union leader who supported school choice, opposed racial preferences and fought against local control of schools. When he opposed local control in a black neighborhood, he was derided as a racist, but since then no evidence has surfaced that he was wrong.

Though he's not widely known, he had an immense impact:

In the process, Shanker transformed American education. His efforts significantly boosted teacher salaries, equalized pay between men and women, assured minimal standards in schools (not least by capping class sizes), and forced the National Educational Association, the nation's most powerful teachers' union, to embrace collective bargaining.

For all the article's merits, though, I think this passage is incomplete:

Earlier and more clearly than most of his contemporaries, Shanker foresaw how "identity politics" would eventually tear apart the Democratic Party. It would rob liberals of the moral power of the argument for a colorblind society. It would fracture liberalism along racial, ethnic, and gender lines, pitting blacks not only against whites, Jews, and women, but also every other ethnic or minority group, as each stepped forward with separate, and competing, grievances. The special-interest sparring would prevent working-class Americans from ever making common cause on an agenda of economic betterment, to the detriment of all. Shanker all but begged liberals, through the 1970s and '80s, to concentrate on more bread-and-butter issues, to little avail.

This is true to a point, as there is significant intra-Democratic debate on racial issues (blacks aren't particularly fond of illegal immigration). But to a large degree, identity politics are the glue that holds the party together -- this doesn't prove Shanker was wrong, as in theory the organization could have found another glue, but it's a significant hurdle for the argument.

In 2004, Kerry beat Bush by a 77-point gap for the black vote, a 49-point gap for the Jewish vote, a 9-point gap for the Hispanic vote and a 14-point gap for the "other" vote . Identity politics may create some tensions, but they haven't "fracture[d] liberalism" at the ballot box yet.