Posted on March 1, 2001

O Tempora, O Mores! (March, 2001)

American Renaissance, March 2001

The Jackson Follies

The Chicago Sun-Times has published a remarkable set of articles describing how Jesse Jackson shakes down white-owned companies in the name of “minority participation” with the effect of making his already-rich black friends-and family-even richer. He has discovered that companies are most vulnerable when they want to merge because large mergers often require federal approval. In the communications business, in particular, Rev. Jackson has had the help of Federal Communications Commission Chairman William Kennard, a Clinton appointee who agrees that mergers should be vetted to make sure they benefit minorities.

The Sun-Times series shows that Rev. Jackson repeatedly tried to block mergers until the merging companies made fat contributions to his Citizenship Education Fund (CEF), the very entity that recently made suspect payments to the mother of Rev. Jackson’s out-of-wedlock child. Typical of the reverend’s antics was the SBC/Ameritech merger. In May 1998, Rev. Jackson urged President Clinton to block the merger. The next year SBC and Ameritech gave $500,000 to CEF and promised to hire a minority firm to manage its pensions, and Rev. Jackson pronounced the merger “in the public interest.” In April, Ameritech announced it would sell its cell phone business to a partnership that includes Rev. Jackson’s old buddy Chester Davenport. Later that year, the FCC approved the merger.

The GTE/Bell Atlantic merger worked the same way. In December 1998, Rev. Jackson said the merger must benefit minority customers and businesses. The next year Bell Atlantic and GTE gave the CEF $1,000,000. GTE then put up the vast majority of the $3.3 billion to buy Ameritech’s cellular business, while Jackson buddy Chester Davenport got a seven percent stake and the title of “Chairman” for just $60 million or less than two percent of the purchase price. In May 1999, Rev. Jackson blessed the merger and the FCC approved it in July.

The AT&T/TCI merger worked the same way. Only after AT&T pledged $425,000 to CEF and gave a black bond-dealing house (that just happened to have close ties to Rev. Jackson) $750,000 worth of business did the FCC approve the merger. When CBS merged with Viacom the deal somehow wouldn’t go through until Viacom promised the CEF $680,000.

CEF has been raking in about $14 million a year and though the Sun-Times doesn’t comment on its activities, others have noted that its IRS filings are riddled with dubious entries. “There are red flags all over this,” says Cleta Mitchell, a Washington expert in non-profit tax law. One New York Post columnist wonders whether the IRS is deliberately turning a blind eye while the Jackson empire flouts the laws. [Rod Dreher, Does IRS Let Jesse’s Group Violate Tax Law? New York Post, Feb. 7, 2001, p. 26.]

When the CEF gets merger payoffs, another black who just happens to benefit is Percy Sutton, owner of Inner City Broadcasting. Mr. Sutton has been a Jackson pal for years and was finance chairman of the reverend’s 1988 campaign for President. Rev. and Mrs. Jackson were among the original investors in Inner City, and in 1988 their shares were reliably reported to be worth $250,000-now, probably about $1 million. Rev. Jackson is working hard to persuade Viacom to sell its UPN television network to Mr. Sutton but refuses to say what effect this will have on his personal holdings.

The Sun-Times tells another edifying story about how Rev. Jackson’s sons Yusef and Jonathan ended up owning an Anheuser-Busch beer distributorship in Chicago. There are only about 700 distributors and since they have a monopoly on Anheuser-Busch products in their territories they are enormously profitable. They usually stay in families for generations and almost never change hands. The story dates back to 1982, when Rev. Jackson launched a “this Bud’s a dud” boycott of Anheuser-Busch because it had only three black distributors. The company obligingly set up a $10 million fund to help non-whites buy distributorships. As an interesting sidelight, a black-owned paper in St. Louis, where Anheuser-Busch is based, reported that Rev. Jackson had demanded $500 each from black businessmen to help support the boycott. The reverend sued the paper but dropped the suit when a judge ruled that the paper could inspect the Jackson organization’s financial records.

In 1998 the River North distributorship in Chicago ended up in Yusef’s and Jonathan’s hands. They refuse to say how much they paid but public records show they took out a $6.7 million loan from NationsBank. Somehow this managed to cover a business Anheuser-Busch had spent $10.5 million to build. These days Anheuser-Busch is mum about how many non-whites own distributorships and now that his boys have one, Rev. Jackson doesn’t seem to care anymore. Interestingly, Yusef and Jonathan refuse to say how many minority employees they have. [Chuck Neubauer and Abdon Pallasch, Jackson’s Protests Benefit His Family, Friends, Sun-Times, Feb. 4, 2001. Tim Novak and Chuck Neubauer, Jackson Sons Quiet on Hiring, Sun-Times, Feb. 4, 2001.]

The Jackson gravy train may be about to jump the tracks. There must be considerable head-shaking in corporate boardrooms at the news that the right reverend took his pregnant mistress along with him on his mission to cure William Clinton of promiscuity back in the Monica Lewinsky days. A Republican FCC may cooperate a little less in the holdups, too, but it remains to be seen whether the new administration has the spine to audit the Jackson gang to see where the money really goes.

Bastardy in High Places

Jesse Jackson is not the only prominent black to be making babies by accident. Willie Brown, mayor of San Francisco, is about to have a child with his chief fund-raiser, a 38-year-old white divorcée named Carolyn Carpeneti. Miss Carpeneti, who has accompanied the mayor on a number of trips, received $380,000 for fundraising during the last mayoral campaign. Mr. Brown, 66, has been separated from his wife Blanche for 20 years. He says he plans neither to divorce nor to remarry. [Willie Brown Fathers Child With Aide, AP, Jan. 19, 2001.]

Murder in Black and White

It is well known that young men commit the most murders and that young black men are particularly murderous-but exactly how murderous? A reader has called to our attention a Department of Justice web page that presents racial calculations of the kind that almost never see the light of day. For every year between 1976 and 1999, it lists the percentages of the population accounted for by white males, aged 14-24, and by black males of the same ages. It then cites the percentage of all homicides committed by these two groups. The results are eye-opening. Since 1992, blacks of the most homicidal ages have accounted for only 1.1 percent of the population but in 1999 they committed 27 percent of the murders. That means they kill at 24.5 times the national rate. It was in 1993 that the 1.1 percent were friskiest, accounting for 33.2 percent of all killings.

Whites aged 14-24 account for 6.1 percent of the population and in 1999 committed 18 percent of the murders, which means they killed at just under three times the national average rate. Simple arithmetic tells us blacks of the most dangerous age kill at eight times the rate of the most murderous whites, which is the proportion that holds for both populations as a whole. In fact, since the Department of Justice’s figures for “whites” include Hispanics, they inflate the white murder rate, so the racial differences are even greater than their figures suggest. [FBI, Supplementary Homicide Reports, 1976-1999.]

White Foolishness

Matthew Robinson is a Ph.D. criminologist who has taught criminal justice at Appalachian State University in North Carolina for seven years. He recently sent AR an email message in which he claimed that the figures in our celebrated report The Color of Crime are wrong. We wrote back politely saying we craved correction and this is how he replied:

Murder is a behavior defined by legislators, who happen to be predominantly wealthier, older, white, males (so the ways they kill people are not considered murder — one example is corporate violence — how many of the Ford and Firestone executives are black?)

When considering all forms of intentional and negligent killing (including corporate homicide), the vast majority of killers are white, and their killings are perpetrated on people of all races.

It is unusual for one’s critics voluntarily to make themselves look ridiculous so we wrote back to ask if Dr. Robinson were having a joke with us. He is entirely serious.

‘Got Me a White Bitch’

On January 25, during the morning rush hour in New York City’s Penn Station, a 38-year-old black woman named Janice Pasterisa approached a white woman and asked the time. As the white glanced at her watch, Miss Pasterisa slashed her in the face with a four-inch blade. She was soon cornered by four police officers but turned to attack them, too. After she was finally subdued, she is reported to have said “I got me a white bitch, and I’m proud of it.” It took 30 stitches to close the wound in the face of her victim, whose name was not disclosed. (Ikimulisa Sockwell-Mason and Rocco Parascandola, Crazed Slasher Held in Penn Sta. Attack: Cops, New York Post, Jan. 26, 2001.]

Momma Was a Hooker

Now that the state of Florida has banned racial preferences in admissions, colleges are thinking up new ways to get non-whites. The University of Florida had decided to require a student essay about an important event. Nowhere in the instructions are applicants told to tell hard luck stories but the word quickly got out that the university wants to hear bad news. The theory is that someone who has had troubles is a better applicant than someone who has had a happy childhood, and the hope is that the troubled will be non-white. People who read the essays, which are graded one through six, are instructed to ignore race but to be on the lookout for children who didn’t know their fathers-a choice form of non-white adversity. Plenty of whites come from broken homes these days, so mere divorce doesn’t get much sympathy. Childhood trauma also counts for more than grammar or spelling. [Karla Schuster, UF Seeks Diversity in Adversity, South-Florida Sun-Sentinel, Jan. 15, 2001.]

Higher Education?

In its latest issue, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that:

A total of 41,140 Ph.D.’s were awarded by 392 American universities in 1999, down 3.6 percent from the previous year . . .

Over all, for American citizens, the number of minority doctoral recipients increased by 5.1 percent. Asian-Americans and American Indians showed the largest increases-12.8 percent and 15.9 percent, respectively. The number of black Ph.D.’s increased by 7.6 percent, while the number of Hispanic doctoral recipients decreased by 7.4 percent.

What does this story leave out? The figures for whites. If the total number of Ph.D. degrees awarded was down 3.6 percent and the numbers for minorities are up, it means only one thing: Whites got fewer degrees. The publication doesn’t tell us how many fewer, presumably because it doesn’t care.

The same issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on an article by Stephen Steinberg in the winter issue of New Politics. Mr. Steinberg, who teaches urban studies at Queens College of the City University of New York says the expression “race relations” doesn’t do justice to the problem. He says we should talk about “racial oppression” instead. He also says we should say “occupational apartheid” rather than “discrimination.” He adds that it is an “abysmal failure of sociological imagination” not to have come up with better language to describe the effects of white racism. [Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb. 9, 2000.]

Watch Whom You Date

Young homosexuals have grown up knowing how AIDS is transmitted, but are still getting the disease at high rates. According to a recent study, 12 percent of homosexuals between the ages of 23 and 29 have AIDS and, charmingly, only about one third know it. Many homosexuals have gone back to the most risky form of business-anal sex without a condom-presumably because they think new drugs can hold the disease in check. The infection rates among young homosexuals by race are exactly what one would expect: Asians-three percent; whites-seven percent; Hispanics-15 percent; blacks-30 percent. Blacks now account for more than half of the estimated 40,000 new cases of AIDS every year. Blacks as a group are 10 times more likely than whites to get AIDS, and 10 times more likely to die from it. Many black homosexuals have sex with women too, and infected black women outnumber infected white women four to one. Joe Pressley of the New York AIDS Coalition says one 15-year-old black girl told him, “Don’t tell me nothin’ about no AIDS because that won’t impact me. And if I was to get it, all I’d have to do is take a pill in the morning and I’ll be O.K.” [Daniel Haney, AIDS Rampant Among Young Gay Blacks, AP, Feb. 5, 2001. Bob Herbert, An AIDS Epidemic Surges Among Black Americans, New York Times, Jan. 12, 2001.]

Mexican Merry-making

Mexicans in New York City form relatively non-criminal gangs that take out their violence mostly on each other. Police note that Mexican immigrants do not deal drugs, run prostitutes, or launder money. Most work hard at manual labor, but in their off hours they gather in groups with names like the Mexican Boys, the Wild Chicanos, or Los Niños Malos. They develop intense rivalries and like to beat each other up. In 2000 police recorded 49 stabbings, shootings, and assaults involving Mexican gangs, and 10 deaths. In 2001 the Mexicans were going at each other harder than ever and by January 20 of 2001 there were already three deaths. “When they come across someone they don’t like, they pull out a knife or a gun,” a police spokesman explains. [Larry Celona and Bill Sanderson, Upsurge of Gang Killings by Mexicans Puzzles Cops, New York Post, Jan. 21, 2001.]

Unsung Teenage Victims

Christal Jones was a white teenager who grew up in Burlington, Vermont. At some point she let herself be lured to New York City by tales of bright lights and excitement. She ended up a prostitute for José Ritchie Rodriguez, a pimp who managed to trick at least 10 country girls into sex slavery. Mr. Rodriguez, who goes by the name “Romeo,” liked to have his name tattooed onto the backs of his teenagers, so Miss Jones got a Romeo tattoo. In February, she was found smothered to death in a seedy brothel in the Bronx. [Philip Messing, Bronx Teen Sex Slave Died by Smothering, New York Post, Feb. 7, 2001.]

In California, a group of Hispanics tortured and killed a white Delano teenager in what the local prosecutor calls “the worst murder crime scene I’ve ever seen.” Jorge Vidal, Keith Serialez, and Gerardo Zavala have been arrested for lying in wait for Eric Jones, age 17, to teach him a lesson for allegedly trying to steal Mr. Vidal’s car. The men took Mr. Jones to a garage where they beat him and used electric cord to shock him. Then they cut off his clothes with scissors and buggered him with what press reports call “a foreign object.” They turned up a car radio to drown out Mr. Jones’ screams. One man stabbed Mr. Jones in the back with a screwdriver and others wrote unreported comments on his skin with a blue magic marker. By this time all three men decided they would have to kill Mr. Jones to keep him from talking. They stuffed him into the trunk of a car, drove him out into a lonely part of Tulare County, where one of the men shot him at least nine times. Mr. Jones’ ordeal lasted nearly two hours. [Jennifer Fitzenberger, Slain Teen Put Through Torture, Fresno Bee, Feb. 1, 2000.]

Indians to the Rescue!

David Yeagley is a Comanche Indian and a humanities professor at Oklahoma State University. He thinks whites have gone soft and are giving the country away to foreigners. “I’m trying to come to the rescue here and say to the white man, look, don’t destroy everything you have. If you don’t want the country, give it back to me! Don’t give it away to someone else.” “White guilt,” he says, “is the biggest flaw in the American psyche.” Dr. Yeagley says whites no longer instill the necessary fighting spirit in their children and says they should feel proud of their ancestors’ achievements just as he feels proud of his. Of the Comanches, he says: “They were the lords of the south plains. They kicked out all the other Indians. They had no tolerance for other Indians, no tolerance for white people, no tolerance for anybody except themselves.” [Richard Poe, A Comanche Patriot Tries to Save the White Man, NewsMax.com, Jan. 17, 2001.]

No Shortage of Blacks

In April 2000, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management sent to Congress its annual report, “Federal Equal Opportunity Recruitment Program,” which covers October 1997 to September 1998. It says 17.1 percent of the federal work force is black, compared to 11 percent of the comparable civilian work force. No fewer than 62 percent of the workers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission are black compared to a figure of 6.4 percent for comparable jobs in the private sector. At the General Services Administration, the figures are 28.2 percent versus 7.2 percent, and for the Office of Personnel Management itself, they are 26.7 percent versus 7.5 percent.

Everywhere the Same

Although blacks account for about two percent of the British population aged 10 and over, they accounted for 28 percent of the robbery arrests during 2000. This means British blacks are about 19 times more likely to be arrested for robbery than are other Britons, a figure even higher than the ten-fold difference in the United States. In London, where 7.5 percent of the population is black, 57 percent of arrested robbers were black. Needless to say, as in the United States, excuse-makers say the figures reflect only police racism. [Philip Johnson, 28 pc of Robbery Arrests are Black People, Says Report, Telegraph (London), Jan. 19, 2001.]

Meanwhile, the British town of Oldham reports a sharp rise in racial attacks on whites. “During the past 12 months, 572 racial incidents have been investigated by police — which is a record level,” says Eric Hewitt, Chief Superintendent of Oldham police. “Out of these attacks, 60 per cent of the victims were white.” He says the most common attacks are by gangs of five to 20 Pakistanis or Bangladeshis who seek out lone white men. So far there have been no deaths, but Mr. Hewitt is worried: “While these gangs are hitting victims over the head with bricks or stabbing them, there is a serious risk that someone will be killed and this cannot be overstated.” When Asians do not actually attack whites they often shout abuse at them and drive them out of the neighborhoods. Many whites are now afraid to leave their homes. [Samantha Mannion, Huge Rise in Race Attacks on White Men, Oldham Evening Chronicle, Jan. 31, 2001.]

The Obvious is so Hard to See

When they write about foreign countries, mainstream authors sometimes show a grasp of reality that completely eludes them when they look at the United States. Below are excerpts from a recent article in Foreign Affairs:

If you look around the Balkans today you’ll see that democracy movements are tentatively sprouting in the two ethnically pure Balkan states that caused the most trouble during the Bosnian war: Serbia and Croatia. And democracy is least alive and well in the place where NATO and U.S. troops are present, namely multi-ethnic Bosnia (and Kosovo).

[F]ive years and $5 billion in aid have done little to produce a new generation of Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Croats who could live together in a self-sustaining multi-ethnic democracy.

Why? Because democracy means the willingness to have your group or party be outvoted and have power go to the competing group or party, observed the Johns Hopkins University foreign affairs expert Michael Mandelbaum. To do that, though, the party or group that loses has to trust the new majority and believe that its basic interests will still be protected and that there is nothing to fear from a change in power.

Bosnia can be democratic and self-sustaining, but only if the country gives up being unified and multi-ethnic. Or Bosnia can be multi-ethnic, democratic and unified, but not self-sustaining. NATO would have to hold it together forever. [Thomas Friedman, Not Happening, Foreign Affairs, Jan. 23, 2001.]

Coming Soon to a Neighborhood Near You

As they have for some years, immigrants continue to bring tuberculosis. TB had been essentially eradicated here but Third-World immigrants are bringing in new strains that resist the usual antibiotics. Since 1993, the US-born population has had TB at a rate of 5.8 cases for 100,000, but the foreign-born has had more than five times that rate: 32.9 per 100,000. The rate for the foreign-born is expected to climb to 50 in two years. Immigrants from Vietnam are most likely to be infected, with a rate of 138, followed by Haitians at 119. Tuberculosis is spread by air-borne germs, and the average carrier infects about 20 people. Only a minority of these get immediate, full-blown TB; the rest harbor the disease in a “latent” state, which can become active later. Immigrants coming legally to America are supposed to produce chest X-rays that show they are healthy, but there is a brisk overseas trade in phony X-rays. Needless to say, the million or so illegals who come in every year don’t even bother with phonies. [August Gribbin, CDC Report Links TB, Immigrants, Washington Times, Dec. 13, 2000.]

Clever, Those Chinese

Every year some 24,000 Chinese students come to universities in the United States. Many of them prepare for standardized tests at the New Oriental School in Beijing. The Educational Testing Service (ETS), which administers standardized exams, recently warned university admissions officers all around the country to be skeptical of scores of Chinese applicants on the Graduate Record Examination and the Test of English as a Foreign Language. It appears that New Oriental has been stealing test questions and slipping them to students. Scores of Chinese applicants were suspiciously high from October 1999 to September 2000, but ETS has been having trouble with New Oriental for years. In 1996, 1997, and 2000 ETS confiscated unauthorized material.

There are many ways to steal test questions. Sometimes they are photocopied at a test administration center or simply taken right out of the center. People who take the test can be hired to copy down questions during the exam or during a break. ETS is now suing New Oriental for copyright infringement.

Life in the New America

President George W. Bush’s appointment of Roderick Paige as education secretary may have won points with the racial head counters, but it has set the stage for all-American ethnic warfare back where Mr. Paige comes from: the Houston, Texas, school district. Mr. Paige was the first black superintendent of a district that is now 54 percent Hispanic, and immigrants were hoping for one of their own when Mr. Paige got the nod back in 1994. Hispanics have the usual complaints-there aren’t enough Spanish-speaking teachers and the district doesn’t do enough to keep Hispanics from dropping out-and are unlikely to take it quietly if the new superintendent is not Mexican. Tatcho Mindiola, director of the Center for Mexican-American Studies at the University of Houston, says, “If the district does not go out of its way to sincerely search for a Mexican-American superintendent they are going to catch a lot of grief.” The New York Times, which reported this story, takes it for granted Hispanics should lobby for ethnic interests rather than ability and experience. [Jim Yardley, Houston School Chief to Test Hispanic Will, New York Times, Feb. 7, 2001.]

Born to be Fat

German researchers have found a gene-the GNB3 825T allele-that can make you fat. It appears to be a “thrifty” gene that helped cavemen survive food shortages, but it is not often needed today. Ninety percent of blacks, 50 percent of Asians and 30 percent of whites carry at least one copy of this gene, and 60 percent of blacks, 20 percent of Asians and 10 percent of whites carry two copies. Eight percent of young Germans who did not have copies of the gene were found to be obese while four times as many who had two copies were fat. The researchers found that only two hours of exercise a week is enough to counteract the effect of the gene and avoid getting fat. [Daniel Haney, ‘Caveman’ Fat Gene May Trigger Obesity, Diabetes, AP, Dec. 16, 2000.]

It’s in the Genes

Researchers have discovered a genetic mutation that explains why Mexicans-and Mexican-Americans in particular-suffer from so much Type 2 diabetes. People get this form of diabetes after they become adults, and Mexican-Americans are nearly three times more likely to get it than other Americans. The mutation is also more common among blacks than whites.

Type 2 or “adult-onset” diabetes was once largely restricted to people over age 40, but obesity brings it on much earlier and it is now found in children as young as 12. Mexicans in America are fatter than Mexicans in Mexico, and therefore get the disease more often. The gene and its mutation are consistent with a 30-year-old theory about “thrifty” genes that are benign in lean times but have damaging effects when people eat too much. [Thomas Maugh, Mutated Gene Tied to Diabetes in Some Groups, Los Angeles Times, Sept. 27, 2000.]

Preferences for Whites?

For years racial and death-penalty activists have been claiming-implausibly but very loudly-that there is racial discrimination in death sentencing. In federal cases, U.S. attorneys must run potential death-penalty cases by a special committee at the Department of Justice and then the U.S. Attorney General finally decides whether the prosecutor should seek capital punishment. According to a 2000 study, prosecutors asked the department to let them go for the death penalty for 36 percent of eligible white criminals, compared to only 25 percent of blacks and 20 percent of Hispanics. Janet Reno in turn recommended capital prosecution for 38 percent of eligible whites, 25 percent of blacks, and 20 percent of Hispanics. There may or may not be good reasons this, but one death penalty expert says it could be affirmative action. “It’s entirely plausible that the department would overreact because of criticism of the racially disproportionate population on the federal [death] row,” says Kevin McNally of the Resource Counsel Project in Kentucky.

A lawyer has accordingly decided to claim that his murderer client got an unfair capital charge because he is white. In 1997 Coleman Johnson of Newport News, Virginia, killed 24-year-old Tammy Baker with a pipe bomb because she was eight months pregnant with his child, and he didn’t want to pay for support. Defense lawyer Gerald Zerkin says the government must now prove it wasn’t making racial quotas when it sought the death penalty. [Bombing Suspect Claims Death Penalty Sought Because He’s White, AP, Dec. 17, 2000.]

Download The g Factor

In 1996, there appeared an excellent little book on IQ called The Factor, by Christopher Brand of Edinburgh, Scotland. (His book is not to be confused with the likewise excellent and more comprehensive volume of the same title by Arthur Jensen-reviewed). Mr. Brand’s book had been on the market only a few days before the British press discovered that it dealt frankly with race, and began to shriek about “racism.” Publisher John Wiley and Sons promptly withdrew The Factor from stores and destroyed all copies. Since then, the book has had a meager samizdat existence, but thanks to the Internet it is now available to everyone. It can be downloaded for free, in HTML format, from https://www.douance.org/qi/brandtgf.htm#pres. The site is French/English bilingual but English-speakers should be able to find their way around and can download the text in English. As the web page says, The Factor is “short, clear and complete, not censured, and scientific.” The electronic version has also been brought up to date in light of recent research..

Who’s Happy?

There is actually a branch of social science called “happiness research,” though it has tended to go by more sedate-sounding names like “quality of life studies” or “life satisfaction.” Basically, it boils down to asking a lot of people how happy they are, and comparing how they reply with how they live. Michael Hagerty is a professor at University of California at Davis and an ardent student of happiness. He has analyzed decades of happiness research to find out where the happy people live. In a comparison of 20 countries he found that far and away the happiest were the Danes, followed by the Dutch, the Norwegians, and the Luxembourgers. Prof. Hagerty explains: “For the most part, the top-rated countries are small and homogeneous.” As for Denmark, he says:

“People there have a similar world view and a similar religion, so that it’s easier for them to communicate and to understand each other’s motives. They don’t have race problems, they don’t have crime problems, and they have political freedom.”

Prof. Hagerty says the happiest part of the United States is what he calls the “the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) region” — Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi, followed by the “west north central” states of Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas. He says one of the most important ingredients of happiness is close ties with family and friends, and that these are more common among people who live in the heartland.

In a different finding he also says that once people get past the poverty level, more money does not make them happier. [Keay Davidson, Science Tracks the Good Life, Chronicle (San Francisco), December 24, 2000 , p. A1.]

Demography Marches On

According to the Census Bureau, by 2010 21 percent of American children will be Hispanic, 14 percent will be black, and only 59 percent will be white. Nickelodeon, the television channel watched by the largest number of children under 12, has gotten a jump on the demographics by launching a new program called “The Brothers Garcia.” It is about a model family with a father who is a history professor, a mother who runs a beauty salon, and four children ages 9 to 14. The entire cast and “creative team” are Hispanic, which is a first for an English-language program for American television. Fox and the Disney channel, who were caught napping, promise similar fare early this year. [Dale Russakoff, Keeping Up With the Garcias, Washington Post, Sept. 23, 2000, p. A1.]