October 30, 2010

October is the tensest month

October has long struck me as the busiest, most serious month of the year. It's not just the sports calendar that peaks in October, although baseball, which is a snooze most of the year, is the obvious metaphor. In my experience in the corporate world (not in retail, and at firms where the fiscal year was the same as the calendar year), October tended to be the month in which the big decisions were made that determined whether or not this would wind up being a good year or not. Nothing was settled in August, September was devoted to increasingly serious sparring, and by mid-November it was getting to be too late to make a difference in the current year.

In the comments, a farmer in New Zealand described the impact on him of October (or, to him, April):
"The darkness and the bitter cold"

Even though the winters are not too cold and there is no snow here at 36 south latitude, they can be miserable with over 1000mm of rain .
 
My farming ancestors are from Sweden , Scotland and England. Farming engenders a low-level background anxiety and reaches a peak in the autumn , when the shortening days and lower light levels have an almost physical influence on me as a farmer.

The anxiety is much heightened as I do the mental inventory of stock feed for the winter, food in the deep freeze for the family, completion of summer tasks, enough firewood to see us through the winter etc. Some days I am literally running at this time of year, and as one gets older , there is certainly more awareness of one's genetic make-up and deep history and the resulting drives.

October 29, 2010

Playing Video Games

From the LA Times:
At least one in every four stars like the sun has planets about the size of Earth circling in very close orbits, according to the first direct measurement of the incidence of such planets, researchers said Thursday.

That means that our galaxy alone, with its roughly 200 billion sun-like stars, has at least 46 billion Earth-size planets orbiting close to the stars, and perhaps billions more circling farther out in what scientists call the habitable zone, said astronomer Andrew Howard of UC Berkeley, a coauthor of a paper on the subject published in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

200,000,000,000.

So, as Enrico Fermi asked, where is everybody?


Tim Lincecum's Excellent Adventure

Why does the San Francisco Giant's star pitcher Tim Lincecum always remind me of Keanu Reeves's character in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure?

Japan 1601-1852

One big question that I haven't seen asked much is whether, if Europe hadn't "taken off" around 1400-1500, would Japan have ever become the first scientific and industrial country, and, if so, how long would it have taken?

Something that Charles Murray's 2003 book Human Accomplishment made clear was that most of the world's major civilizations outside of Europe were in cultural stasis or decline by 1500, before the arrival of Europeans. If you ask Chinese, Indian, or Arab scholars to list the most important scientists and artists in their history, their lists start to peter out over the last millennium. This is rather like how the ancient Classical world's accomplishments start to slow down after the peak in the 400s BC. The New World's accomplishments seem to have peaked with the Mayans, who invented writing, but then started to lose it.

As a conservative, I have to admit that these trends tend to be due to conservatism: reverence for past accomplishments and satisfaction with the current life start to undermine the hunger for new achievements. (The Ancient Egyptians were the first to illustrate this tendency, making rapid progress about five millennia ago, then being mostly content to maintain their high relative level of civilization for thousands of years until Alexander's conquest.)

The main exception to this pattern of stasis outside of Europe was Japan. In 1601, Japan began a policy of isolationism, which lasted for 250 years. During this period, Japanese cultural accomplishments continued steadily. To take one example, the tracking of sports statistics, a minor but telling aspect of modernity, seems to go back to late 18th Century sumo wrestling. Similarly, the most famous Japanese picture in the world today, Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa, is from around 1830. So, Japan was continuing what looks like steady progress in a world in which backsliding was the norm. Thus, when the West rudely intruded in 1853, Japan was able to modernize itself with remarkable speed, avoiding Western conquest until the development of the atomic bomb.

Japan in 1601-1852, however, was not taking off, accelerating, the way Europe did, with Britain increasingly in the lead, especially with the Industrial Revolution. Japan was much farther behind the West in 1852 than in 1601.

Interestingly, Japan's geographical position off the coast of East Asia is rather similar to the British Isles' favorable position off the coast of Western Europe. If we assume the English (like their offspring in the New World) benefited enormously from the island privilege, what Shakespeare hailed as:
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war

Japan, then, was the most likely place outside Europe for the right combination to come together for humanity to break free from the Malthusian Trap.

So, without the West, would Japan have yet achieved science and the Industrial Revolution?

October 28, 2010

Conspicuous Assumption

Economist Thorstein Veblen introduced the term "conspicuous consumption" in 1899 to describe the nouveau riche. The term "conspicuous assumption" might describe much of modern writing about humanity, although this article by geographer Ian Morris goes out of its way to stand out:

Many reasons have been given for the West’s dominance over the last 500 years. But, Ian Morris argues, its rise to global hegemony was largely due to geographical good fortune.

... Most people, at some point or another, have wondered why the West rules. There are theories beyond number. Perhaps, say some, westerners are just biologically superior to everyone else....

Explaining why the West rules calls for a different kind of history than usual, one stepping back from the details to see broader patterns, playing out over millennia on a global scale. When we do this the first thing we see is the biological unity of humanity, which flatly disproves racist theories of western rule.

Our kind, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa between 200,000 and 70,000 years ago and has spread across the world in the last 60,000 years. By around 30,000 years ago, older versions of humanity, such as the Neanderthals, were extinct and by 10,000 years ago a single kind of human – us – had colonised virtually every niche on the planet. This dispersal allowed humanity’s genes to diverge again, but most of the consequences (such as the colour of skin, eyes, or hair) are, literally, only skin deep and those mutations that do go deeper (such as head shape or lactose tolerance) have little obvious connection to why the West rules. 
 
Lactose tolerance is not obviously relevant? Here's a bit about a non-Western set of conquerors from Wikipedia:
China is particularly notable as a place of poor tolerance, whereas in Mongolia and the Asian steppes horse milk is drunk regularly. This tolerance is thought to be advantageous, as the nomads do not settle down long enough to process mature cheese.

Morris goes on:
A proper answer to this question must start from the fact that wherever we go – East, West, North, or South – people are all much the same.

... Humans are all much the same, wherever we find them; and, because of this, human societies have all followed much the same sequence of cultural development. There is nothing special about the West.

... Humans may all be much the same, wherever we find them, but the places we find them in are not. Geography is unfair and can make all the difference in the world.

... So what do we learn from all this history? Two main things, I think. First, since people are all much the same,

As for the title of Morris's article, "Latitudes not Attitudes," I'm reminded of a more perceptive observer's conclusion:
It's those changes in latitudes,
changes in attitudes, nothing remains quite the same.

As I wrote in my review of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel 13 years ago:
Diamond makes environmental differences seem so compelling that it's hard to believe that humans would not become somewhat adapted to their homelands through natural selection.

October 27, 2010

My H.L. Mencken Club speech

From VDARE, here's the opening of my speech last weekend to the H.L. Mencken Club in Baltimore, in which I try to do a quick summing up of my epistemological approach:
I’m glad to be back addressing the H.L. Mencken Club.

Richard Spencer has asked me to speak on the topic “Can HBD Trump PC?” So let me begin by explaining what those acronyms mean.

PC stands for “Political Correctness”. HBD is short for “Human Biodiversity”.

In an intellectually healthy world, of course, the study of “human biodiversity” wouldn’t be imperiled by the reign of Political Correctness. Instead, HBD would be recognized as a necessary complement to the study of human cultural diversity. To a student of the social world, human biodiversity and human cultural diversity ought to be complementary tools, like a straight right and a left jab are to a boxer, or like words and numbers are to a thinker.

In 21st Century America, however, noticing reality is often, by unfortunate necessity, a political act. As George Orwell pointed out, “To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle”.

Should HBD be a field of study … or a political movement … or both?

Let’s consider the term “Political Correctness” first. This is an old New Left phrase. I first recall hearing it about 30 years ago in an interview with Joe Strummer of The Clash, in which the punk rock star lamented how stultifying the demands of Political Correctness were even for a lifelong leftist like himself. (Despite Joe’s Old Left proletarian façade, Strummer’s father, a British diplomat and secret agent, had been a close friend of Kim Philby.)

We’re often told that Political Correctness is a trivial matter of using the latest name for minority groups, but I always do that. That’s less Political Correctness than politeness.

No, PC is vastly more far-reaching. It enervates American intellectual discourse on many levels.

As John Derbyshire noted last night [in a speech on "Men Versus the Man, 100 Years On"], the best depiction of how Political Correctness functions is from the appendix to George Orwell’s 1984:
“Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments …, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.”

What Orwell got wrong, though, is that inculcating crimestop doesn’t require an army of men watching you from your TV.

Instead, you watch your TV—and learn from it what kind of thoughts raise your status and what kind lower your status.

It’s a system of Status Climbing through Stupidity.

Every so often, a celebrity is fired to encourage the others: NPR dumped Juan Williams this week for admitting that passengers in Muslim garb on airplanes make him nervous. Earlier this month blowhard Rick Sanchez was sacked by CNN for responding sarcastically to his interviewer’s suggestion that Jews are an oppressed minority in the media. (As one wag commented, Sanchez got fired for the first story he ever got right.) 

Read the whole thing here and comment upon it below.


Islamophobia

Robert Wright explains the roots of American Islamophobia in the New York Times. See, we just don't have enough exposure to Muslims.
The good news is that bridging does seem to work across religious divides. Putnam and Campbell did surveys with the same pool of people over consecutive years and found, for example, that gaining evangelical friends leads to a warmer assessment of evangelicals (by seven degrees on a “feeling thermometer” per friend gained, if you must know).

And what about Muslims? Did Christians warm to Islam as they got to know Muslims — and did Muslims return the favor?

That’s the bad news. The population of Muslims is so small, and so concentrated in distinct regions, that there weren’t enough such encounters to yield statistically significant data. And, as Putnam and Campbell note, this is a recipe for prejudice.

So, in Europe, where there are many millions of Muslims, they must be much more popular than they are here in America. Right, Mr. Wright?

My general impression from comparing areas that are home to Muslims and nonMuslims is that Islam seems to contribute to a chip on the shoulder attitude on the Muslim side. Armenians are pretty friendly, but Chechens, well, I'm glad a lot of Chechens hasn't started moving into my neighborhood ... yet.

Western tourists prefer Bali, the Hindu island in Indonesia to the many Muslim Islands.

Are there other examples of this tendency?

October 26, 2010

How Barack Obama is like Joan Jett

The following is from a Huffington Post blog from 2008, but it's still pretty interesting. The author is entertainment industry lawyer Jackie Fuchs. After graduating summa cum laude from UCLA, she went to Harvard Law School at the same time as Barack Obama. Previously, however, as a teenager under the name Jackie Fox, she had been the bass player in the notorious all girl rock group The Runaways. The most memorable thing about The Runaways when I saw them in 1977 was rhythm guitarist Joan Jett. As a non-singing rhythm guitarist, she was kind of a fifth wheel in the band, but she radiated so much I-Love-Rock-N-Roll charisma that she upstaged the lead singer and lead guitarist. I wasn't surprised that Joan became a stadium rock star in the 1980s and even outacted Michael J. Fox and Gena Rowlands in the 1987 movie Light of Day

Jackie Fuchs/Fox writes:
... Barack Obama reminds me of Joan Jett. They are the only two people I've ever known who have affirmatively chosen to give themselves a larger-than-life persona and then grew to fill it. I saw this a little better with Joan, given that she was a younger age when I knew her than Barack was when I knew him.

Joan in late 1975 was a perfectly ordinary Valley girl. You would never have looked at her and thought you were seeing a future rock star. If you'd even noticed her at all you probably would have thought she was a bit of a mouse. She had brown hair cut in a competent, if unremarkable, shag and she had that slouched-over bad posture that seems to be the working uniform of the shy. In the early days of the band Kim Fowley was always yelling at her to stand up straight.

When I saw the Runaways play as a three-piece band at the Whiskey, I thought they weren't terribly interesting. Both Joan and Sue Thomas (the future Michael Steele of the Bangles) were ordinary and unassuming. The only member of the band that really stood out was Sandy, and she was stuck behind her drum kit. The response to the band was a bit lackluster and it's no surprise to me that Kim decided that the band needed more of a visual standout up front.

By the time I auditioned for the band they had added Cherie and Lita, both of whom grabbed your attention immediately. Joan kind of faded into the mix, and I doubt that the addition of a fifth band member, especially one who was tall, smiled and wore skirts, helped on that front. Cherie was blonde and beautiful in a sulky, fragile way, and Lita had enough personality for ten girls, not to mention lots and lots of curves. Plus they were the lead singer and lead guitarist, respectively, the two instruments that soloed on every song. Who was going to notice a shy, brown-haired rhythm guitarist with bad posture?

I don't remember which came first, the persona or the black hair, but they pretty much went hand-in-hand. One day Joan just decided to become a bad-ass rock star. She dyed her hair black, bought a leather jacket, and started scowling. She turned her slouch from that of a shy person to that of a rocker who wears her guitar slung just a bit too low. She started standing at the front of the stage and doing the most talking in interviews. It was a noticeable and calculated transformation and if it seemed a bit silly and over-the-top at first, it has served her well over time. Act like a rock star long enough, do it unfailingly and well enough, and you become one. ...

I do have to wonder sometimes if that's the Joan that was always there hiding under the shyness and brown hair, like the butterfly hidden inside the caterpillar, or whether she had to give up a significant part of Joan Larkin in order to become Joan Jett. And if so, was it worth it or does transforming yourself like that make it impossible for a question like that even to make sense?

When I met Barack Obama, in our first year of law school, he had already put on his big-time politician act. He just didn't quite have it polished, and he hadn't figured out that he needed charm and humor to round out the confidence and intelligence. One of our classmates once famously noted that you could judge just how pretentious someone's remarks in class were by how high they ranked on the "Obamanometer," a term that lasted far longer than our time at law school. Obama didn't just share in class - he pontificated. He knew better than everyone else in the room, including the teachers. Or maybe even he knew he didn't know, but knew that the leader of the free world had to be able to convince others that he did. Looking back now I can see that he had already decided that he was a future president, and he was working hard at filling that suit.

I wonder -- was there a moment in his life when he did the presidential equivalent of dying his hair black and putting on a leather jacket? I'm betting there was, but he'd already done it by the time I met him. I'm sure Barack as a child was perfectly ordinary, just like Joan was. Until the moment he decided that he was a star. The Barack with whom I went to school wasn't the Barack that debuted on the national stage at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, but the president suit was already on, even if it was still too big for him.

In law school the only thing I would have voted for Obama to do would have been to shut up. When he made that speech [2004 Democratic Convention keynote address] almost exactly four years ago, I wanted to vote for him. For something, for anything. Now, as his vision of himself becomes a real possibility, though, I find that he may have filled out that suit all too well. It's hard to see the humanity underneath. Even the humor feels calculated now. And again, just like with Joan, I have to wonder - is he so focused on the goal that he has to live that persona every moment of every day?

October 25, 2010

Freakonomics: The Movie

From my review in Taki's Magazine:
The new documentary Freakonomics harkens back to the good old days of 2005. Remember when economists, having permanently perfected the economy, graciously allowed their attention to wander to crime fighting, sumo wrestling, baby naming, and other fields not traditionally enlightened by their insights? University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt teamed up with journalist Stephen J. Dubner to compile one of the Housing Bubble era’s biggest airport-bookstore bestsellers: Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explains the Hidden Side of Everything. Levitt and Dubner have now recruited some prominent documentarians to anthologize five disparate chapters of Freakonomics.

The most entertaining is the segment by Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) on those not fully thought-through first names with which some African-Americans have saddled their babies ever since the late 1960s’ Black Pride movement. For example, scholars have counted 228 varietals of “Unique,” including “Uneek” (a fine name for a future rodent exterminator). ...

Are black children’s lives permanently damaged by all this parental originality? In 2005, Levitt and Dubner rather callously concluded that, in effect, if your parents named you “M’qheal” rather than “Michael,” your bigger problem is likely your last name. You are evidently descended from some mighty poor decision-makers.

Spurlock, however, adds a useful coda from another social scientist who mailed out résumés under white and black first names that were otherwise identical. Job applications bearing Ghetto Fabulous monikers are more likely to go straight into Human Resources Departments’ circular files. So, African-American parents: For the sake of your kids’ careers, please resist your whimsical urges. (Somebody should study the impact of the science-fictiony first names that Mormons dream up, such as D’Loaf, Zanderalex, and ElVoid.)

Read the whole thing there.

In other pop-sociology movie news, check out VideoGum's 2009 article "Malcolm Gladwell's Blink Vying for Legendary Worst Movie of All Time Status," including an important update on who is now attached to star in Blink. (Try to guess!)

Affordable Family Formation in New Guinea

The conclusion of a New York Times article "Riches May Not Help Papua New Guinea" on the influx of money into the New Guinea highlands from an Exxon natural gas pipeline:
Earlier, he had held up a warning: a local village chief who had squandered a $120,000 windfall.

A short drive away, Hamon Matipe, the septuagenarian chief of Kili, confirmed that he had received that sum four months earlier. In details corroborated by the local authorities, Mr. Matipe explained that the provincial government had paid him for village land alongside the Southern Highlands’ one major road, where the government planned to build a police barracks.

His face adorned with red and white paint, a pair of industrial safety glasses perched incongruously on a head ornament from which large leaves stuck out, Mr. Matipe said he had given most of the money to his 10 wives. But he had used about $20,000 to buy 48 pigs, which he used as a dowry to obtain a 15-year-old bride from a faraway village, paying well above the going rate of 30 pigs. He and some 30 village men then celebrated by buying 15 cases of beer, costing about $800.

“All the money is now gone,” Mr. Matipe said. “But I’m very happy about the company, ExxonMobil. Before, I had nothing. But because of the money, I was able to buy pigs and get married again.”

Here's a video of part of the amazing 1983 documentary First Contact with footage of the arrival of Australian explorers in the highlands of New Guinea around 1930. When the first airplane flew over the central spine of New Guinea, the pilot was amazed to discover that there wasn't just one mountain range, but two parallel ones with a fertile valley between them, home to about a million agriculturalists, previously unknown to the rest of the world.

"America's One Child Policy"

Catching up on things I should have noted earlier, here's a fine article on demographics and affordable family formation by Jonathan V. Last in The Weekly Standard. (The one suggestion I'd make is that I think Last understates the Hispanic Total Fertility Rate: 2.3 is more like the American-born Hispanic TFR, not the total Hispanic TFR.)

The War on Pattern Recognition

In Slate, Shankar Vedantam of the Washington Post informs us how Science explains why Juan Williams is made nervous by Muslims on flights:
We Are All Juan Williams
Associating minorities with crime is irrational, unjust, and completely normal.
Juan Williams told Bill O'Reilly that he gets nervous at airports when he sees Muslims. For this, Williams has been roundly denounced as a bigot. But Williams' association between innocent Muslims and the perpetrators of the 9-11 attacks was less about bigotry—at least, bigotry conventionally defined—than about his mind working normally. To live in America in the post-9/11 age and not have at least some associations between Muslims and terrorism means something is wrong with you. 

I am not suggesting that associating ordinary Muslims with terrorists is either rational or right. It's neither. But the association arises via a normal aspect of brain functioning, which is precisely why so many people entertain such beliefs—and why those beliefs have proved so resistant to challenge.

The left is wrong to wish the association away only by pointing out how unfair it is, because that denies the reality of how our minds work. The right is wrong to believe the association must be accurate merely because it is widespread. 

See, it's all the fault of evolution:
Our ancestors constantly drew conclusions about their environment based on limited evidence. Waiting for causative evidence could have proved costly, whereas extrapolating causation from correlation was less costly.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 were unusual. (Even if you take all the terrorist attacks in the world, they are still unusual.) In seeking explanations for those events, our minds are drawn to other unusual things linked to them—especially at the group level. ...
Muslims are only the latest victim of illusory correlations in the United States. African-Americans have long suffered the same bias when it comes to crime. In every country on earth, you can find minority groups that get tagged with various pathologies for no better reason than that the pathologies are unusual and the minorities are minorities.

Whenever people who strongly believe in illusory correlations are challenged about their beliefs, they invariably find ways to make their behavior seem conscious and rational. Those who would explicitly link all Muslims with terrorism might point to evidence showing that some Muslims say they want to wage a war against the West, that a large preponderance of terrorist attacks today are carried out by Muslims, and so on. This is similar to our longstanding national narrative about blacks and crime. 

But even if blacks and whites do not commit crimes at the same rate, and even if Muslims are overrepresented among today's terrorists, our mental associations between these groups and heinous events are made disproportionately large by the unconscious bias that causes us to form links between unusual events and minorities. ...
People in Thailand will associate white American tourists with pedophilia even though many more acts of pedophilia are committed by Thais. But white Americans are a minority in Thailand, as are acts of pedophilia. So you will hear Thai people shout until they are blue in the face about individual anecdotes showing white Americans who are pedophiles. (The same is true of gay men and pedophilia in the United States.)

There's this obscure Thai cultural concept that might be helpful in understanding the irrational bigotry of Thais' views of single white male tourists in Thailand: it's called "on average." The Thais think that single white guys who have spent thousands of dollars to visit, out of all the places in the world, Bangkok, might, on average, be different from the average Thai who happened to be born in Bangkok.

See, they get the joke.

What we really need is an in-depth analysis of the systematic causes of anti-empirical bias in elite discourse.

The first is the professional deformation that journalists and fictional storytellers experience in their hunt for non-boring Man Bites Dog stories.You make more money coming up with interesting stories about anomalies than for pointing out the same old same old.

The second is the Platonic Temptation among intellectuals to think only in terms of absolute categories: e.g., Vedantam projects his own bias against thinking probabilistically when he claims, without citing any evidence, that there are "Those who would explicitly link all Muslims with terrorism..."

The third is The Smartest Guy in the Room Syndrome: the presumption that the more moving parts and unlikely assumptions in your theory, the smarter you must be to hold it all together in your head, so, therefore, you win.

"Fighting Fire with Quotas"

Heather Mac Donald writes in City Journal about the Vulcan Society disparate impact lawsuit and the Fire Department of New York.

October 23, 2010

Am I banned in China?

I never seem to get much in the way of emails or comments from people saying they are currently in China. A long-time reader reports that he couldn't access my website on his recent trip there. So, am I banned in China or can you read me in China?

P.S. Physicist Steve Hsu points out there are ways of tunneling through the Great Firewall using an encrypted proxy server.

My nostalgia sweetspot

Aviation art is this remarkable little corner of the art world. Quite a few representational painters make a decent living painting war birds from days gone by.

I was at an Arby's in Orange County on Monday, where the owner had put on the wall paintings by a fellow named Stan Vosburg depicting Southern California in 1944-1948, with an emphasis on locally manufactured warplanes and on affordable family formation, such as mpressing the Night Shift (note to pilot: flirt equally with the babe in the Barbara Stanwyck slacks carrying the tool kit; you do not want to get on her bad side in she has to repair her plane); Twin Tails and Carrot Tops featuring my Dad's old plane, the P-38 Lighting; I Shooting Star of the 94th featuring what looks like a young me shooting at the Shooting Star jet; and The Spider and the Fly featuring the ominous P61 nightfighter. It's all about a half generation before my time, but I can relate.

Kicking Axis butt and kicking off the SoCal Baby Boom.

October 21, 2010

Border Fence Not Only Invisible, But Also Ineffectual, and, Soon, Nonexistent

From the LA Times:
The Department of Homeland Security, positioning itself to cut its losses on a so-called invisible fence along the U.S.-Mexico border, has decided not to exercise a one-year option for Boeing to continue work on the troubled multibillion-dollar project involving high-tech cameras, radar and vibration sensors.

The result, after an investment of more than $1 billion, may be a system with only 53 miles of unreliable coverage along the nearly 2,000-mile border.

Anti-Intellectualism in American Academic Life

Patricia Cohen reports in the New York Times:
For more than 40 years, social scientists investigating the causes of poverty have tended to treat cultural explanations like Lord Voldemort: That Which Must Not Be Named.

The reticence was a legacy of the ugly battles that erupted after Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant labor secretary in the Johnson administration, introduced the idea of a “culture of poverty” to the public in a startling 1965 report. Although Moynihan didn’t coin the phrase (that distinction belongs to the anthropologist Oscar Lewis), his description of the urban black family as caught in an inescapable “tangle of pathology” of unmarried mothers and welfare dependency was seen as attributing self-perpetuating moral deficiencies to black people, as if blaming them for their own misfortune.
Moynihan’s analysis never lost its appeal to conservative thinkers, whose arguments ultimately succeeded when President Bill Clinton signed a bill in 1996 “ending welfare as we know it.” But in the overwhelmingly liberal ranks of academic sociology and anthropology the word “culture” became a live grenade, and the idea that attitudes and behavior patterns kept people poor was shunned.
Now, after decades of silence, these scholars are speaking openly about you-know-what, conceding that culture and persistent poverty are enmeshed.
“We’ve finally reached the stage where people aren’t afraid of being politically incorrect,” said Douglas S. Massey, a sociologist at Princeton who has argued that Moynihan was unfairly maligned.

Is that pathetic, or what?

Of course nurture plays a role in poverty. 

It's now 2010, not 1965 anymore, so the discussion should be over the magnitude of the role of nature, not over whether nurture is important.

This article is part of the battle between the the New Centrists against the Aging Leftists. The New Centrists have much of the money (e.g., Gates Foundation billions), so they'll probably win. 

So, it's worth understanding what motivates the New Centrists. Besides the billionaires, what about the foot soldiers?

A big part of this New Centrist obsession (e.g., Waiting for "Superman") with changing the culture of NAMs is motivated by job-seeking on the part of Nice White People. The private sector, with its stock options, used to be cool, but now private sector jobs are in short supply. The public sector, with its jobs with defined benefit pensions and health insurance, is where it's at in 2010. Moreover, violence is down among NAMs, so a lot of Nice White People are thinking they'd like one of those lifetime tenure jobs with benefits and and a pension reforming NAM children. Of course, people already have those jobs, so the people who don't have them are raising a stink about how the people who do have them are discriminating against NAMs by not turning them into Nice White People and thus should be fired ... and replaced by a new set of Nice White People.

Things you can't say anymore, Part MCXVII

From the LA Times:
National Public Radio terminated the contract of commentator Juan Williams after he said on Fox's "The O'Reilly Factor" that people wearing Muslim garb on airplanes made him "worried" and "nervous."

But, what if he said that seeing the blue-eyed, blond all-American jihadi terrorists on last night's episode of Law & Order: Los Angeles made him "worried" and "nervous?"

October 20, 2010

Vor v zakone

A reader writes:
But anyway, you've stumbled onto a fascinating subject.  I looked up the wikipedia entry, and it has some of the basics of the legend -- the 'scab' or 'bitch' war during & after WWII (really afterwards; the idea was that any vory v zakony who served in the army against the Germans were traitors, etc., and so were picked off in the camps in the 1950s), the basic code, and so on.

It leaves a lot out, though.  For example, if you talk to old dissidents like Vladimir Bukovsky, the vory v zakony were heroes:  the only people who lived by any moral code at all in Soviet times.  Not just in refusing to work for the State, taking care of the poor, and so on, but in-- and this completely goes against the new LA-style- refusing luxury and ostentation.

There was a VERY strict code of behavior, sort of mafia-cum-Stoic-cum-Christian asceticism.  A vor v zakony might have been wealthy, but he would never show it; and he would always share the wealth.

Some of this sounds like humbug, but people like Bukovsky absolutely revered the Vory v zakony -- they were the ones who kept people alive in the GULAG camps, right into the 1970s and 1980s.

Bukovsky doesn't really know the end of the story, since he came to the West in 1976.  But if you believe Stephen Handelman's book on the Russian mafia, Comrade Criminal (he interviewed scores of Vory and other mafiosi in the late 1980s and early 1990s), the Vory v Zakony were basically wiped out circa 1991, right at the time of the Soviet collapse.  Wiped out by the nomenklatura criminals:  ie CP members who cashed in on export contracts, bought KGB muscle, and fought a brutal gangland war, basically the state mafia wiping out the last of the independent nonstate vory v zakony.

I don't know whether this is true, but it would make a great novel or movie!
 

All we have to do is fix ...

The LA Times reports:
Seventy percent of students seeking degrees at California's community colleges did not manage to attain them or transfer to four-year universities within six years, according to a new study that suggests that many two-year colleges are failing to prepare the state's future workforce.

Conducted by the Institute for Higher Education Leadership & Policy at Cal State Sacramento, the report, released Tuesday, found that most students who failed to obtain a degree or transfer in six years eventually dropped out; only 15% were still enrolled.

In addition, only about 40% of the 250,000 students the researchers tracked between 2003 and 2009 had earned at least 30 college credits, the minimum needed to provide an economic boost in jobs that require some college experience.

There were also significant disparities in the outcomes of black and Latino students. Only 26% of black students and 22% of Latino students had completed a degree or certificate or transferred after six years, compared to 37% of whites and 35% of Asian Pacific Islanders.

In these kind of educational achievement statistics, the main way to avoid being completely bored is to check whether whites or Asians win in the upper division and whether blacks or Latinos win in the lower division.
The findings point to a troubled college system that needs drastic revamping, said study coauthor Nancy Shulock, executive director of the higher education institute.

"It's not an understatement to say that the future of California is at stake," Shulock said. "Unlike other developing countries with which California and other states have to compete, each generation is getting less educated and attaining fewer higher degrees. The gaps are large and critical and when you look at the future face of California, they are the ones for whom we're not delivering much success."

My dad got an AA degree in aeronautical engineering from Pasadena JC in 1938, but I imagine it now it takes at least four years to get a degree in engineering. Presumably, the subject is just more complicated now.

My wife took a few courses at the local community college a half decade ago and was more than impressed with what she'd gotten for $78 per semester. She thought the instructors were about as good as she'd experienced at the U. of Illinois or at Northwestern U. The classroom learning environment was fine: the classes would start out large, but students would soon stop coming and by the last 2/3rds of the course, class sizes were quite reasonable. Unlike in high school, where discipline is a big problem, the students were well-behaved and non-distracting because the ones who didn't want to be there quickly stopped being there. The courses were reasonably rigorous and did a good job in helping her brush up on the field she was interested in.

I don't know what else I can say: California's community college problem doesn't appear to have much to do with the community colleges, per se. 

Is there any good software for checking prose style?

In the mid-1990s, Microsoft added a feature to Word that checks not just spelling but also grammar and prose style. It was rather rudimentary, but promising. The idea of using the brute processing power of the computer to point out potential stylistic infelicities was a good one. In fact, Microsoft hired James Fallows of The Atlantic to dream up new ideas for Word. 

But Microsoft soon had a near monopoly on word processing software, and subsequent improvements in Word have been grudging. I haven't seen Word 2010, but it doesn't appear they've done much to improve the self-editing process. I don't expect my computer to rewrite my stuff, but it doesn't seem too much to expect in 2010 that it can find more of the weak spots that I've overlooked.

Does anybody have any experience with third party software? Looking around on the Internet, it appears that the most heavily promoted product, White Smoke, might be a scam. (What does the name of the company imply? That it will help you write more graceful thank you notes after you've been elected Pope?) Judging by its well-written website, Editor from Serenity Software would appear to have potential.

The Microsoft model in the past, as a Silicon Valley executive explained to me in 1995, was to acquire third party makers of add-in software by making a lowball offer while simultaneously threatening to drive the target out of business if they didn't play ball. I clucked sympathetically at the executive's tale of Microsoftian nefariousness, but as a customer, it sounded pretty good to me.

October 19, 2010

The Land of the Defunct Empires

From my column in VDARE:
The F.B.I.  announced charges last week against 73 Armenian gangsters, almost  half of them in the  Los Angeles area, for running the largest Medicare fraud in history.

Or—to be strictly accurate—the largest the FBI yet knows about.

The indictment alleged that most of the defendants were "were Armenian nationals or immigrants and many maintained substantial ties to Armenia." They laundered their ill-gotten gains in Las Vegas casinos and/or couriered them back to Armenia.

Michael J. Gaeta, head of the New York F.B.I. office’s Russian Organized Crime Squad, explained: “New York and the U.S., to them it’s a big pot of gold, and they’re coming after it. And with the world getting smaller, it’s much easier for them to do it.”

Among the arrested: Armen Kazarian of the pleasant LA suburb of Glendale, who drives a $350,000 Rolls Royce Phantom. Kazarian is only the second “vor” (the ex-Soviet equivalent of a godfather) yet charged in the U.S. 

I’d never previously heard the term “vor” but I must say, it has a ring to it—like capo di tutti capi or Keyser Söze.

Why was Kazarian in this country in the first place? He was granted asylum in the U.S. in 1996. But he subsequently returned frequently to Armenia to oversee his transcontinental criminal doings.

Naturally, this got me thinking about TV crime dramas.

Law & Order has been the most successful drama in American television history. Counting its countless spinoffs, about 900 hour-long episodes have aired. L&O’s two-decade old formula has been to take a scandal from the news, add a murder, and then show that the richest, whitest, and most conservative character dunnit.

This year, however, NBC shut down the New York-based flagship show and substituted Law & Order: Los Angeles. ... The Wednesday, October 20 episode “Sylmar” will explore the national security threat posed by ... blue-eyed, blonde Americans who espouse extremist Islam:
Deputy District Attorney: “An All-American jihadi terrorist cell …”

Assistant District Attorney: “With enough explosives to take down the Staples Center!”

You can't make this stuff up. (Or, at least, I can't.)

Read the whole thing there and comment upon it below.


Clint Eastwood's "Hereafter"

From my review in Taki's Magazine of the drama starring Matt Damon:
The octogenarian Eastwood’s late success has held out hope to aging baby boomers that experience, guile, and a sense of perspective will help them get by when they can no longer outwork the young bastards.

Read the whole thing there.

Hints of Obama's Personality

Peter Baker writes in The Education of the President in the NYT Magazine:
Insulation is a curse of every president, but more than any president since Jimmy Carter, Obama comes across as an introvert, someone who finds extended contact with groups of people outside his immediate circle to be draining. He can rouse a stadium of 80,000 people, but that audience is an impersonal monolith; smaller group settings can be harder for him. Aides have learned that it can be good if he has a few moments after a big East Room event so he can gather his energy again. 

I'm like that. I get worn down by human contact, too. But, then, I haven't wanted to be President of the United States since I was nine years old.
Unlike Clinton, who never met a rope line he did not want to work, Obama does not relish glad-handing. That’s what he has Vice President Joe Biden for. 

I knew Biden had to be good for something.
When Obama addressed the Business Roundtable this year, he left after his speech without much meet-and-greet, leaving his aides frustrated that he had done himself more harm than good. 

Obama is not a large man. Most people aren't. But, still ...

If you can divide people up into Morning People and Night People and High Energy and (relatively) Low Energy (all celebrities are above average in energy), then Obama is a Low Energy Night Person. That seems kind of odd in a President. Clinton was a High Energy Night Person, Bush II a Low Energy Morning Person. I would guess that most CEO's tend to High Energy Morning People.

The President's great-uncle was the deputy head librarian at the University of Chicago's giant library: a worthy career, and one that Obama seems roughly cut out for.

On the other hand, Obama seems to like meeting people who tell him he's great:
But as Obama gets back on the campaign trail, aides have noticed his old spirit again. He particularly enjoys the so-called backyard sessions on the lawns of supporters. “That’s the happiest I’ve seen him in a long time,” an aide said.

He sounds a little depressed. If the economy turns around, though, he could come back strong in 2012. 

Late in the article there's a doozy of a clause inside a sentence:
One prominent Democratic lawmaker told me Obama’s problem is that he is not insecure — he always believes he is the smartest person in any room and never feels the sense of panic that makes a good politician run scared all the time, frenetically wooing lawmakers, power brokers, adversaries and voters as if the next election were a week away. 

Wait a minute? Did that just say "he always believes he is the smartest person in any room?"

Obama is a smart enough guy to be President -- he's good at explaining both sides of a problem -- but I can't recall any anecdotes about him ever  thinking up the solution to any problem. Are there any?

If Reagan or FDR or Washington ever caught themselves thinking "I'm the smartest guy in this room" their immediate reaction would have been: "Uh-oh, I'd better get some smarter guys in here, pronto!"

October 17, 2010

Are Europeans all Middle Easterners?

For quite a number of decades, it has been apparent that agriculture was first invented in the "Fertile Crescent" of the Middle East, then spread into Europe. But that raised the question of how agriculture spread: did Middle Easterners colonize Europe or did existing European hunter-gatherers pick up Middle Eastern techniques? A couple of decades or so ago, geneticists entered this debate. L.L. Cavalli-Sforza argued that most Europeans today are descended from Middle Eastern farmers. Bryan Sykes responded that most Europeans are descended from indigenous hunter-gatherers who switched to farming.

The latest view is that Cavalli-Sforza was even more right than he claimed. Matthias Schultz writes in Der Spiegel in "How Middle Eastern Milk Drinkers Conquered Europe:"
At around 5300 BC, everyone in Central Europe was suddenly farming and raising livestock. The members of the Linear Pottery culture kept cows in wooden pens, used rubbing stones and harvested grain. Within less than 300 years, the sedentary lifestyle had spread to the Paris basin.

The reasons behind the rapid shift have long been a mystery. Was it an idea that spread through Central Europe at the time, or an entire people?

Peaceful Cooperation or Invasion?

Many academics felt that the latter was inconceivable. Agriculture was invented in the Middle East, but many researchers found it hard to believe that people from that part of the world would have embarked on an endless march across the Bosporus and into the north.

Jens Lüning, a German archaeologist who specializes in the prehistoric period, was influential in establishing the conventional wisdom on the developments, namely that a small group of immigrants inducted the established inhabitants of Central Europe into sowing and milking with "missionary zeal." The new knowledge was then quickly passed on to others. This process continued at a swift pace, in a spirit of "peaceful cooperation," according to Lüning.

But now doubts are being raised on that explanation. New excavations in Turkey, as well as genetic analyses of domestic animals and Stone Age skeletons, paint a completely different picture:
  • At around 7000 BC, a mass migration of farmers began from the Middle East to Europe.
  • These ancient farmers brought along domesticated cattle and pigs.
  • There was no interbreeding between the intruders and the original population.
Mutated for Milk

The new settlers also had something of a miracle food at their disposal. They produced fresh milk, which, as a result of a genetic mutation, they were soon able to drink in large quantities. The result was that the population of farmers grew and grew.

These striking insights come from biologists and chemists. In a barrage of articles in professional journals like Nature and BMC Evolutionary Biology, they have turned many of the prevailing views upside down over the course of the last three years. ...

In a bid to solve the mystery, molecular biologists have sawed into and analyzed countless Neolithic bones. The breakthrough came last year, when scientists discovered that the first milk drinkers lived in the territory of present-day Austria, Hungary and Slovakia.

But that was also where the nucleus of the Linear Pottery culture was located. "The trait of lactose tolerance quickly became established in the population," explains Joachim Burger, an anthropologist from the University of Mainz in southwestern Germany who is a member of the Leche team.

There's a good accompanying graphical map here.

Of course, all this raises even more questions, such as in regard to the recently surmised Neanderthal introgression

Having seen opinion shift several times on this topic over the last decade and a half, I look forward to future developments.

This lactose tolerant-centric view of the pre-history of Europe may provide some posthumous vindication to Raymond D. Crotty, an Irish dairy farmer turned economist, who emphasized the importance of the mutation to facilitate dairy farming as crucial to the dense populating of Northern Europe.

P.S. John Hawks comments here. Razib comments here.

P.P.S. Greg Cochran comments in the Comments.

October 15, 2010

Will Mozilo get off easy with SEC?

E. Scott Reckard of the LA Times, who was a leader in reporting on the SoCal-centric subprime scandals, reports that Angelo Mozilo, former boss of Countrywide Financial, is trying to settle with the Securities & Exchange Commision without admitting wrongdoing before his civil trial on stock fraud charges starts Tuesday:
Details of the settlement couldn't immediately be determined, although defendants in SEC cases generally settle them without admitting or denying wrongdoing.

The SEC's lawsuit, filed in June 2009, also accuses former Countrywide President David Sambol and former Chief Financial Officer Eric P. Sieracki of securities fraud. It wasn't clear whether they, too, were close to settling the lawsuit.

Mozilo attorney David Siegel, Sambol attorney Walter Brown and Sieracki attorney Shirli Weiss did not return calls seeking comment. A spokesman for the SEC's enforcement division declined to comment.

Securities fraud expert John Coffee, a professor at Columbia Law School, said a settlement could help Mozilo in fighting other civil cases arising out of the Countrywide collapse.

"Any verdict in favor of the SEC would permit private plaintiffs to free ride on it and utilize those findings in their cases," Coffee said.

A settlement, on the other hand, often doesn't require a plaintiff to admit to any wrongdoing. Coffee said it would allow Mozilo to "deny everything in other litigation."

A criminal investigation of Mozilo remains open, people with knowledge of the probe said. If the SEC case is settled, federal prosecutors will not see how the evidence against Mozilo plays out in a civil trial — which could factor into their decision on whether to bring charges. Criminal charges carry a higher standard of proof.
 
My reading of the history of the Housing Bubble is that Mozilo was something of a prime mover among corporate tycoons in that his attempt to push Countrywide's share of the mortgage market from 10% to 30% was a key factor. He wasn't just responding to the market, he had a strategic plan to push the market. The only way to get there was to take risks on marginal borrowers. 

There were always marginal firms in that business, but Mozilo wasn't an obvious crook, fool, moonshooter, or small-timer. He'd had a good business record helping build a huge business, but when his boss David Loeb stepped down and Mozilo moved up to CEO, he was overenthusiastic.

My impression is that Mozilo was fairly sincere in thinking these marginal borrowers had been underestimated.
Still, some nine figure fines and some jail time for some big names would help get the incentives less out of whack. The latter is really the only thing that can get through to financiers. Everybody figures the government can't take all your money away, you can always sock enough of it away to live on in luxury, but jail time gets people's attention.

October 14, 2010

Documentgate

This latest national crises over foreclosures, with banks putting a freeze on evictions because of shoddy paperwork, is interesting because most of the examples cited in the newspapers are clearly not injustices against homeowners but merely lawyers seizing on technicalities. For example, the NYT's "From this House, a National Foreclosure Freeze," makes no attempt to say that the lady who has been living in the house without paying a dime for two years has any moral claim to more free housing or that better paperwork handling would have led to any other outcome.

On the other hand, raising the fixed costs of housing transactions by enforcing costly paperwork procedures is probably a good idea in the long run. It would make flipping and, thus, housing bubbles a little less likely.

October 13, 2010

Congratulations to Chile

It's in the tradition of Peru's 1997 rescue of 71 of the 72 hostages  held in the Japanese ambassador's residence by terrorists.Take your time and do it right.

What's the right number of writers?

The question of Who Really Wrote Shakespeare's Plays? got me thinking about the optimal number of writers for different types of writing. 

For example, the recent scientific paper asserting that modern humans had some Neanderthal genes had 56 authors. In other genres, however, one or two people (a writer and an editor, say) does most of the work. In the more show-bizzy types of writing (e.g., movies and musical comedies), writing teams are fairly common, and everybody and his brother chips in bits of business.

For example, my wife was in a dinner theatre production of a Neil Simon play once, so I made up a half dozen new jokes for her, which got just as big laughs as Simon's did. (But this can change over time in a genre: for example, New York playwrights won a lot of legal control away from producers and directors in a 1919 strike. Contractually, I'm not positive we were allowed to alter lines, but I can't imagine an old showman like Neil Simon objecting.)

Thus, it's plausible that quite a few lines in the Shakespearean canon weren't envisioned solely by Shakespeare or Oxford or Bacon or whomever, but were made up by various actors, investors, script doctors, and miscellaneous hangers-on. (We're pretty sure that various minor Shakespearean plays were co-written, but I would guess that even the masterpieces have material invented by others during rehearsals and performances.)

There's some quantitative data available for comparisons across different genres of the amount of teamwork. The Pulitzer Prizes are a good source for comparisons. The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, first awarded in 1918, has always been won by a lone individual. In contrast, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama has been won by teams of more than one individual 13 times, typically for musicals or comedies (e.g., George S. Kaufman won twice with varying partners). So, Pulitzers for Drama go mostly to individuals, but there are enough exceptions to notice the difference between Drama and Fiction

Pulitzer Prizes won by teams: 
Letters and Drama:
Fiction: 0
Drama: 13
Poetry: 0
General Nonfiction: 2
History: 5 (or 6, if you count one book finished posthumously by another historian)
Biography / Autobiography: 4 (all biographies, I presume)

Journalism:
Commentary: 0
Criticism: 0
Feature Writing: 0
Investigative Reporting: 31 (with the award switching from mostly individuals to mostly teams around 1972, the year of Woodward and Bernstein)

Oscars:
Best Original Screenplay: 23
Best Adapted Screenplay: 21

Emmys
Comedy: From 1955 to 1978, the award was for an entire series: 19 of 24 times it was won by teams (Carl Reiner won twice as an individual for the Dick Van Dyke Show). In the last 31 years, the award has been for a single episode, with 13 of 31 going to teams.

Drama: 16 of the last 31 (for single episodes) have gone to teams.

A few observations:

- Who knows who really contributed what behind the scenes? For example, it recently emerged that the stripped-down style of the hugely influential short story writer Raymond Carver was more or less invented by his editor Gordon Lish by crossing out most of the sentences in his manuscripts. For the Oscars, the Writers Guild offers a credit-dispute resolution process, in which they'll go through different drafts line-by-line to figure out who gets a statue. Of course, nonwriters can have a huge impact on screenplays. For example, Annie Hall (which won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Woodie Allen and Marshall Brickman) was filmed as a murder mystery. Allen's film editor eventually convinced him to cut out most of the plot and patch with  voiceover to turn it into the romantic comedy we know today.

- Dialogue-dominated genres seem to tend toward teams more than prose-dominated genres

- Older genres (e.g., poetry) seem more individualistic than newer genres (e.g., TV writing)

October 12, 2010

"Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps"

 From my column in Taki's Magazine:
A cinematic development I hadn’t expected is Oliver Stone evolving into a director who makes movies that are fair, responsible, and forgettable. His sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, with Michael Douglas returning as reptilian financier Gordon Gekko, falls squarely into all three categories. ...

Surprisingly, Stone has taken some of the criticism to heart. Thus, his recent history-inspired films have been less contrived than, say, The Social Network. Stone’s 2008 biopic about George W. Bush, W, which used mostly public utterances as private dialogue, plausibly blamed the Iraq War on the younger Bush’s Daddy Issues, something Stone knows all about.

Stone’s new movie fictionalizing 2008’s Great Crash is informative and reasonable, with the conspiracy-theorizing kept to the margins. The financial industry, Stone sagely concludes (echoing his old-fashioned stockbroker father whose 1985 death inspired the first Wall Street), should raise capital for industry, not indulge in speculation.

Yet even the most desperate advertising copywriter wouldn’t adorn a movie ad with the quote “Informative and Reasonable!” in 72-point type. And if Oliver Stone won’t indulge in malicious speculation about Wall Street, to whom can we turn? ...

Money Never Sleeps at least does continue Stone’s practice of middlebrow free association, as if he were perusing Wikipedia on acid. Just as Gordon “Greed Is Good” Gekko’s name is a mashup of the lizard and Gordon Getty, once the richest man on the Forbes 400, Josh Brolin’s handsome villain is called “Bretton James,” an apparent concoction of Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and 1944’s Bretton Woods trade conference that set up the IMF and the World Bank, so you know he's rich and connected.

Read the whole thing there.

October 11, 2010

Ask Them

From my new VDARE.com column:
It’s time for Republican candidates to address Hispanic voters directly over illegal immigration.

As a general rule, human beings respond more constructively to being challenged than to being pandered to. Hence, GOP candidates should forthrightly ask for the support of Hispanic voters in opposing illegal immigration.
“My Democrat opponent expects you to vote for him because he assumes that on the issue of illegal immigration, you vote as Mexicans, as Salvadorans, as Colombians, or so forth. In contrast, I expect you to vote as patriotic American citizens because more illegal immigration is bad for American citizens. As President Kennedy said: ‘And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.’”

Would this work? Would appealing to Hispanic voters as patriotic Americans rather than as entitled ethnics convert some to voting Republican?

Maybe—maybe not.

But how could it be worse than the Rove rout?

More importantly, a straightforward appeal to Hispanic patriotism would subvert the MSM’s dominant trope that being against illegal immigration is somehow shameful. 

Read the whole thing there.