June 30, 2011

DSK accuser not proving credible

From today's NYT:
The sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn is on the verge of collapse as investigators have uncovered major holes in the credibility of the housekeeper who charged that he attacked her in his Manhattan hotel suite in May, according to two well-placed law enforcement officials. 
Although forensic tests found unambiguous evidence of a sexual encounter between Mr. Strauss-Kahn, a French politician, and the woman, prosecutors do not believe much of what the accuser has told them about the circumstances or about herself. 
Since her initial allegation on May 14, the accuser has repeatedly lied, one of the law enforcement officials said. 
Senior prosecutors met with lawyers for Mr. Strauss-Kahn on Thursday and provided details about their findings, and the parties are discussing whether to dismiss the felony charges. Among the discoveries, one of the officials said, are issues involving the asylum application of the 32-year-old housekeeper, who is Guinean, and possible links to criminal activities, including drug dealing and money laundering.

Here's the beginning of my May 19th posting kicking around the DSK charges:
Is there enough evidence to convict Dominique Strauss-Kahn in court? I can't tell. Maybe on Friday at the Grand Jury hearing more will be revealed. I expected there to be more by now, though. 
From the outside, we have what looks like a He Said She Said case. The accuser is being kept anonymous, while the accused is the head of the International Monetary Fund. So, this being 2011, we naturally believe the accuser on the grounds that an anonymous person is likely more reliable than a famous international financial expert.  
In the case of this particular international financial expert, moreover, we have a long chain of rumors about him abusing women under his influence. DSK is an expert at misusing influence. On the other hand, a maid with a vacuum cleaner isn't somebody who thinks that maybe if she gives in to his advances, she'll get put in charge of the Portugal bailout.  
What facts have been revealed might be consistent with a variety of scenarios, none of which would reflect well on DSK. But not all of them would be consistent with outright stranger rape. For example, say he lays a few Benjamin Franklins on the table. Needing cash, the maid accepts them. A few minutes later, out in the corridor, she runs into her boss, who asks why her lipstick is a mess. Panicking about losing her job, she makes up a story about a naked presidential candidate jumping her and forcing her to make a mess of her lipstick.  
Well, maybe. And, keep in mind, that's probably the scenario that makes DSK look best (short of a gigantic movie-style conspiracy), which isn't very good. 

You know, as we saw with the Duke lacrosse case, on a personal level, it's generally a good idea to stay away from strippers and hookers. Yeah, it's unfair when they make up accusations against you, but, you're safest from phony rape charges when they haven't ever met you.

On a national level, it's generally not a good idea to let in to your country foreigners like this lady who seem only skilled at working the system. From today's NYT:
“It is a mess, a mess on both sides,” one official said. 
According to the two officials, the woman had a phone conversation with an incarcerated man within a day of her encounter with Mr. Strauss-Kahn in which she discussed the possible benefits of pursuing the charges against him. The conversation was recorded. 
That man, the investigators learned, had been arrested on charges of possessing 400 pounds of marijuana. He is among a number of individuals who made multiple cash deposits, totaling around $100,000, into the woman’s bank account over the last two years. The deposits were made in Arizona, Georgia, New York and Pennsylvania. 
The investigators also learned that she was paying hundreds of dollars every month in phone charges to five companies. The woman had insisted she had only one phone and said she knew nothing about the deposits except that they were made by a man she described as her fiancĂ© and his friends. 
In addition, one of the officials said, she told investigators that her application for asylum included mention of a previous rape, but there was no such account in the application. She also told them that she had been subjected to genital mutilation, but her account to the investigators differed from what was contained in the asylum application.

Will they kick her out?

This is not going down in the history books as an impressive performance by either the prestige or tabloid presses. Back in May, there quickly emerged questions about why this woman was living in an apartment building for AIDS sufferers (I read it in the Daily Telegraph -- the Brits tend to be better at scandal than us), but then those questions just went away because ... I guess everybody really, really wants to find the real life Great White Defendant like we've seen on Law & Order for 20 years.

On the other hand, the stuff in this article doesn't prove DSK didn't do it either. We just have a doubtful-sounding story from a doubtful-sounding accuser.

By the way, the prosecutors say they haven't found any evidence that a political conspiracy was behind it.

Okay, here's the punchline

Remember the news story about the straight guy softball fanatics who almost won the Gay World Series by pretending to be homosexuals? I couldn't quite come up with the punchline that all my experience told me was out there somewhere. Fortunately, commenter NOTA has supplied it:
"You know, I bet the lesbian softball league never has this problem...."

Here's my 1994 National Review article on Why Lesbians Aren't Gay, which starts with softball.

Not The Onion

The Great and the Good are getting together in Aspen right now at the Aspen Ideas Festival to tell each other how good and great they are. Financial blogger Felix Salmon asks:
Will the world ever have open borders? 
My favorite bit in this video comes towards the end, when I ask Charles [Kenny] about the wonderful tweet he sent out last Friday, after the gay marriage bill passed the New York senate.
"One day we’ll see legal discrimination by *place* of birth as evil as discrim. by other features of birth –gender, orientation, color."

Ah, Twitter ... Helping elite opinion on immigration become ever more bumperstickerish.

Remember when conspiracy theorists used to get all worked up about the secret meetings of the Bilderbergers? Personally, I found the idea of senior bigshots like David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger and Helmut Schmidt getting together in private to pull strings was reasonably reassuring. Thank God somebody knows what they are doing!

How naive I was ...

Now in the Davos Era, when much of this elite conspiring is done in public for self-promotion purposes, the terrifying truth becomes obvious: there is no Inner Party who actually knows how things work. There's no O'Brien or Mustapha Mond who can come on at the end of the dystopian novel to explain the sinister but logical and carefully thought through reasons for why things are the way they are.

Is there a single better question for determining whether someone has thought long and hard about how the world (and not just their own bailiwick where they made their bundle) really works (and exposes whose side they are on emotionally) than "Open Borders: Good Idea or Bad Idea for America?"

The single most effective school reform

Everybody in Washington is worked up over a WaPo article Young DC Principal quits and tells why about a public elementary school principal in an expensive white neighborhood, a white guy named Bill Kerlina, who quit after two years on the job. He's a white suburbanite True Believer:
Kerlina was also intrigued by then-Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee’s vow to close the black-white achievement gap. He joined a contingent of Montgomery educators who signed on with Rhee ...

The article is boring for awhile because it gingerly sidesteps around the racial stuff that's the point of most  article about DC schools, but normally, you have to read between the lines. Finally, at the end, we get to the good stuff: he was offended to discover that his bosses wanted him to work harder to persuade local white people to send their kids to the local public elementary school:
A few days before he quit, [Bill] Kerlina received his annual evaluation from Instructional Superintendent Amanda Alexander. It was a positive appraisal, school officials confirmed, and Henderson sent Kerlina a letter of reappointment. But Alexander raised a concern, he said: Why were there not more white families at Hearst? 

White people are pushing African-Americans out of D.C. for sometime now, but the sticking point has been when the kids are ready for school: Do you pony up exorbitant private school fees or move to suburbs like Fairfax and Montgomery County whose public school systems are welcoming to talented white kids? The awfulness of the black-dominated public schools in D.C. hasn't kept the white population from growing, but has kept it largely childless or rich.
The question is sensitive in the D.C. system, where only about a third of students attend neighborhood schools. It is especially sensitive in affluent and largely white areas of Northwest Washington. At Hearst, 70 percent of the 241 students come from outside the neighborhood. Most are African Americans. 
D.C. officials say they simply want more neighbors in neighborhood schools. But Kerlina took offense at Alexander’s question, which implied that as a white male, he should have been more successful at recruiting. The next day, in an e-mail to Alexander that he wrote but decided not to send, he laid out a taxonomy of Northwest parents in an effort to show the hurdles to recruiting more neighborhood families. 
The well-to-do private school families, “the majority” in the neighborhood, he wrote, were a lost cause. “I have not courted them and do not plan to do so, since they will never consider DCPS,” Kerlina wrote.  
Next were those afflicted with what he called “Murch and Eaton envy,” a reference to two much-in-demand Northwest elementary schools. He told Alexander that six in-boundary families had enrolled at Hearst for the fall but pulled out when slots at Eaton and Murch opened up. 
“I have been working with these families but it’s hard to change a culture of thoughts and ideas,” he wrote. 
Finally, he wrote, there were families with racial prejudices. He said this conclusion came from a series of conversations he had with prospective neighborhood parents “that delicately asked about the number of out-of-boundary families and made reference to the ‘diversity’ of Hearst.” 
“They will never come to Hearst because of the number of out-of-boundary black families,” he wrote. 
One way to lure neighboring families — restricting the number of out-of-boundary seats — would be a “horrible mistake,” Kerlina wrote, as “the diversity at Hearst is what makes it a great school.” 

Presumably, Hearst is a black-dominated school, so getting some more local white families to send their kids would, technically speaking, increase the diversity. But we all know that "diversity" doesn't mean diversity, it means, black, NAM, nonwhite, or just plain good
He offered another solution: Move the school toward “inquiry-based learning,” stressing group activities, hands-on projects and student curiosity. It’s standard practice, he said, at the private school across 37th Street NW. 
“The reason people spend [more than $30,000] a year to send their children to Sidwell is because they believe in inquiry-based learning,” Kerlina wrote. “DCPS does not — the approach is too scripted and doesn’t allow for students to think outside of the box.”

Well, I don't think that's the only reason people pay a lot of money to send their kids to school with the President's children. I don't even think that's the only reason the President pays $60,000 to send his children to school with the children of people who pay that kind of money to send their children to school with the President's children.

But there is one reason, and it's not something for which there is any obvious solution even if the DC school district wasn't corrupt, indolent, and incompetent. Rich white smart people tend to like more free-form education for their kids. On the other hand, what seems to work best for most black children is KIPP-style boot camp drilling on the fundamentals. This has been a continuing source of tension within, for example, the Berkeley school district. The white parents tend to be Berkeley professors and the like who live in the hills, and they prefer progressive "inquiry-based learning" for their kids. The black parents who are active in the Berkeley schools (obviously, not a large number, but people who deserve respect and solicitude) tend to be strivers who scraped together enough money to get their kids out of the Oakland school district by moving to the flatland of Berkeley, and they want for their kids the 3Rs, discipline, order, and bourgeois values. They have ambitions for their children like enlisting in the Army that are incomprehensible to white Berkeleyites like Rick Ayers of Berkeley H.S.

The most practical solution for public school reform is to break up big city school districts into small districts that compete for young, education-oriented families. Big city districts like DCPS or LAUSD have a monopoly on public schools in the city, so they aren't under much pressure to provide a good product. Small districts like New Trier (Wilmette, IL) or Arcadia (San Gabriel Valley, CA) know that young families moving to the suburbs have a lot of different suburban school districts to choose from, so they better be on the ball. And they don't have to be all things to all people. Arcadia, for example, has been taken over by Tiger Mothers, so its one medium-sized pressure cooker public high school now has 30 National Merit Semifinalists per year.

I sent my son to an LAUSD middle school in pleasant Sherman Oaks that turned out excellent. See, in the 1990s, the school's students had gotten so bad that, after a middle school student killed a neighbor, the locals, affluent white upper middle class people tired of being murdered by middle schoolers -- tried to get the school shut down. In desperation, LAUSD did something very unusual -- it assigned an outstanding principle to the school and let him do whatever he thought best. He put in place all sorts of programs to lure in middle class and above parents. The one complaint I have had is that my son's homeroom and science teacher, Mr. L., was so charismatic -- he had come quite close during his 1990s movie career to making the jump from villain's right hand man to leading man in Hollywood action movies (at the climax of one well-known 1990s sci-fi movie, my son's teacher fights a famous movie star for about five minutes until the hero finally chops his head off and then, for good measure, blows my son's teacher's head up with a nuclear bomb, causing my son to comment: "Well, no sequel for Mr. L." -- that every teacher he's had since has seemed a little deficient on the Teacher Awesomeness scale.

So, much of the motivation behind all these charter schools is an attempt to outmaneuver the system. But, it's a drag trying to constantly outmaneuver the system, especially if you have two or more kids. Say you get your first kid into a really exclusive program but then your second kid doesn't qualify? The nicest thing is to know that you can always send all of your kids to the local well-managed public school that reflects the nice demography of where you live. People in places like NW DC and urban Portland are increasingly figuring out how to solve the problem of keeping people they don't like out of living in their neighborhoods. So, why shouldn't they have their own school districts so they can afford to have families? Similarly, why shouldn't the better black neighborhoods in D.C. have their own district?

More Orientalism, Please

Ever since Edward Said's 1978 book Orientalism, nice Westerners aren't supposed to incorporate Middle Eastern motifs in their artworks, because that's racist. Or Orientalist, it's all about the same thing in the post-modern academic killjoy mind. Here, for example, is Rick Ayres, brother of Bill Ayres and recipient of a million clams from the Gates Foundation, denouncing Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific for Orientalism. (The Anglican Said had a different definition of Orient in mind, but no mind.)

In 18th Century Europe, however, Turkish Janissary military band music was wildly popular. Haydn's paternal grandparents were among the few survivors when their town was pillaged by the Turk in the 17th Century, but after the Turkish defeat in 1683 outside of Vienna and the peace treaty of 1699 removed the Turkish threat, a fad grew up for Turkish military music. Most of the percussion instruments in the symphony orchestra came from the Turkish music craze of the 18th Century -- e.g., in Haydn's 100th or Military Symphony, there's the hilarious intrusion of percussion instruments about 1:30 seconds into this video of the second movement, and from 4:40 onward in the rollicking finale
My favorite recent work of musical Orientalism is Led Zeppelin's 1975 song Kashmir, especially the 1994 live recording by Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, a Western orchestra and an Egyptian ensemble. This 9 minute video begins after the "I am a traveler through both time and space" opening verse, which is good because the instrumentalists are in better form than Plant's vocal cords. The Egyptian combo builds tremendous tension toward end, which Plant and Page resolve startlingly and satisfyingly.

As a self-conscious era of 19th Century Romanticism, Page especially recognized that Orientalism is composed of Western desire as much as Eastern truths, and rather fantastic desire at that. That's why the mystic epic they wrote about a slog through a parched desert [they got the idea for the song in Morocco] is named after a lush valley near the Himalaya ... Plant and Page are clever gents; they could find Kashmir on a map. Such a "mistake" tells us that their core myth is not the wisdom of the East, but the heretical imagination of the West, an imagination that finds itself in transport.

Kashmir was a rarity for Led Zeppelin. Most of their myth-making energies were turned West, however: Tolkien and other English folksiness, Vikings, Delta blues, San Francisco hippiedom, and Sunset Blvd. hedonism.

June 29, 2011

More straight white guys

From the New York Times:
The five ballplayers summoned before a protest committee at the Gay Softball World Series stood accused of cheating. Their alleged offense: heterosexuality. 
Inside a small room, surrounded by committee members and other softball officials, the players said they were interrogated about their sexual orientation. Confusion reigned. According to court records, one player declined to say whether he was gay or straight but acknowledged being married to a woman. Another answered yes to both gay and heterosexual definitions. A third asked if bisexual was acceptable and was told, “This is the Gay World Series, not the Bisexual World Series.” 
Ultimately, the committee ruled that three of the five were “nongay” and stripped the team of its second-place finish. 
That decision, at the 2008 competition near Seattle, provoked a federal lawsuit against the North American Gay Amateur Athletic Alliance, which governs the softball World Series, and compelled the alliance to change its rules.

Be a hot Muslim SWPL lesbian on the Internet or an ultra-competitive ballplayer in the Gay World Series, what can't a straight white guy do when he really sets his mind to it?

"Disparate Impact Realism"

Here's the abstract of a new law review article:
Disparate Impact Realism 
Amy L. Wax
University of Pennsylvania Law School
William & Mary Law Review, Forthcoming  
Abstract:       
In Ricci v. DeStefano, 129 S. Ct. 2658 (2009), the Supreme Court recently reaffirmed the doctrine, first articulated by the Court in Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 401 U.S. 424 (1971), that employers can be held liable under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act for neutral personnel practices with a disparate impact on minority workers. The Griggs Court further held that employers can escape liability by showing that their staffing practices are job related or consistent with business necessity. 

In the interim since Griggs, social scientists have generated evidence undermining two key assumptions behind that decision and its progeny. First, the Court in Griggs noted the absence of evidence that the selection criteria in that case (a high school diploma and an aptitude test) were related to subsequent performance of the service jobs at issue, and expressed doubt about the existence of such a link. But research in industrial and organization psychology (IOP) has repeatedly documented that tests and criteria such as those at issue in Griggs (which are heavily “g”-loaded and thus dependent on cognitive ability) remain the best predictors of performance for jobs at all levels of complexity. Second, Griggs and its progeny rest on the implicit assumption, reflected in the so-called 4/5 rule, that fair and valid hiring criteria will result in a workplace that roughly reflects the representation of each group in the background population. Work in psychometrics and labor economics shows that this assumption is unjustified. Because blacks lag significantly behind whites on measures of cognitive ability, most valid job selection criteria will have a substantial adverse impact on this group. The combination of well-documented racial differences in cognitive ability and the consistent link between ability and job performance generates a pattern that experts term “the validity-diversity tradeoff”: job selection devices that best predict future job performance generate the smallest number of minority hires in a broad range of positions. Indeed, the evidence indicates that most valid screening devices will have a significant adverse impact on blacks and will also violate the 4/5 rule under the law of disparate impact.  
Because legitimately meritocratic (that is, job-related) job selection practices will routinely trigger prima facie violations of the disparate impact rule, employers who adopt such practices run the risk of being required to justify them – a costly and difficult task that encourages undesirable, self-protective behaviors and may result in unwarranted liability. To alleviate this burden, the article proposes to adopt a new regime of “disparate impact realism” that abandons the 4/5 rule in favor of sliding scale ratios pegged to measured disparities in group performance and the selectivity of particular positions. Alternatively, the disparate impact rule should be repealed altogether. The data indicate that pronounced differences in the background distribution of skill and human capital, not arbitrary hurdles imposed by employers, are the principle factor behind racial imbalances in most jobs. Moreover, blacks lag behind whites in actual on-the-job performance, which indicates that employers are not unfairly excluding minorities from the workforce but rather bending over backwards to include them. Disparate impact litigation, which does nothing to correct existing disparities and distracts from the task of addressing them, represents a cumbersome, misplaced effort that could better be directed at the root causes of workforce racial imbalance.

"Bad Teacher"

From my movie review in Taki's Magazine of the hit comedy with Cameron Diaz playing a bad teacher:
The second least glamorous job in showbiz is teaching schoolchildren. It’s standup comedy for the risk-averse. The government employs truant officers to make sure you have an audience, and they can’t fire you if you’re not funny. 
For years, resentment of teachers has been mounting. Public-school teachers have health insurance and pensions, but they still can’t get American students to outscore Koreans. If only they’d work harder! 
Idealistic young teachers willingly sweat for their students, but once they have kids of their own, their priorities change. Hence, the most common solution that societies have come up with to get their educators—such as Jesuits, nuns, and Eton schoolmasters—to care passionately about other people’s children has been celibacy. (Of course, celibate teachers sometimes wind up caring a little too passionately for their charges.)

Read the whole thing there to find out the (slightly bowdlerized) least glamorous job in showbiz.

June 28, 2011

Stress and schizophrenia

From Nature News
City Living Marks the Brain: 
Epidemiologists showed decades ago that people raised in cities are more prone to mental disorders than those raised in the countryside. But neuroscientists have avoided studying the connection, preferring to leave the disorderly realm of the social environment to social scientists. A paper in this issue of Nature represents a pioneering foray across that divide. 
Using functional brain imaging, a group led by Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg of the University of Heidelberg's Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, showed that specific brain structures in people from the city and the countryside respond differently to social stress (see pages 452 and 498). Stress is a major factor in precipitating psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia. 
The work is a first step towards defining how urban life can affect brain biology in a way that has a potentially major impact on society — schizophrenia affects one in 100 people. It may also open the way for greater cooperation between neuroscientists and social scientists. "There has been a long history of mutual antipathy, particularly in psychiatry," says sociologist Craig Morgan at the Institute of Psychiatry in London. "But this is the sort of study that can prove to both sides that they can gain from each others' insights." 
Meyer-Lindenberg works on risk mechanisms in schizophrenia, and previously focused on the role of genes. But although a dozen or so genes have been linked to the disorder, "even the most powerful of these genes conveys only a 20% increased risk", he says. Yet schizophrenia is twice as common in those who are city-born and raised as in those from the countryside, and the bigger the city, the higher the risk (see 'Dose response?').

The article goes on to describe some brain scan experiment in which a lovely young science lady with lots of dark hair and dark eyes "scolds" subjects while they do arithmetic, which sounds like something out of an Austin Powers movie. I can no more make sense of brain scan experiments than I can make sense of recipes so I won't comment on the experiment.

But, there are a few problems with attributing schizophrenia to "stress." The first is that "stress," while it definitely exists, can be used as one of those all-purpose hand-waving explanations. That doesn't mean that it's wrong, but I tend to have a prejudice against it.

The second is that schizophrenia is so catastrophic from a Darwinian point of view -- it ruins the lives of roughly 1% of the population, but generally not until after their families have almost fully invested in their upbringing -- that it deserves some careful explanation.

Third, it's not at all clear to me that we stress out more over stuff that wasn't around during the evolutionary past. Lots of people stress out over snakes and spiders, but people seem to get fairly used to, say, driving 75 mph on the Ventura Freeway. A few weeks ago, I got a cell phone call from some family friends who had a flat tire on the freeway, so I drove over to stand upstream from them and glare at drivers while they were changing it by the side of the freeway. From that perspective, a few feet from cars roaring past, the entire idea of driving on the freeway seems like utter madness. I drove home very slowly on surface streets. But the next day I was driving 75 mph down the Ventura Freeway with no more thought in my head than: "How come I didn't like Led Zep as much in the 1970s as I do now? Black Dog is awesome!"

Fourth, if city life correlates with schizophrenia, why stress instead of infection as a potential cause? Disease burden was such a problem for city dwellers until quite recently that, for example, sub-Saharan Africa had very few cities. People in Africa had to live spread out in small villages or they'd get sick and die.

Matthew Yglesias Self Parody Edition

Workhorse liberal blogger Matthew Yglesias reads through my stuff all the time, then responds on his own blog in one of three ways:

- He'll often write the next day about a subject I've raised, but instead of focusing on the juicy stuff that interests me, will figure out some dry, technocratic, politically correct angle that won't get him in trouble.

- Being a logical person, he often responds to my reductio ad absurdum arguments by endorsing absurdity. For example, after I pointed out that a global Gallup Poll found that 165,000,000 adults in foreign countries said that they wanted to emigrate and America was their first choice, which obviously shows the craziness of the Open Borders dogma endorsed by lots of Washington pundits like Yglesias, he responded by calling a couple of times for 165,000,000 more immigrants. 

(This fits into a larger psychological issue troubling Yglesias: having grown-up in lovely, cultured Greenwich Village, but now living in violent, black-dominated D.C., he finds himself homesick for Manhattan [a perfectly natural feeling for a 30-year-old: most people imprint on where they lived during adolescence]. But rather than move home to lower crime Manhattan, where he'd be happier, he instead campaigns obsessively to turn the rest of America into Manhattan through massive immigration and building high-rises and making parking expensive. That, at least, would have the effect of pushing out of the big, expensive cities the African-Americans who beat him up in an anti-white hate crime in May -- after which poor Matt immediately blamed D.C.'s lack of population density!)

- He responds to my pointing out that much of the push for immigration is due to absurd Jewish paranoia about a white gentile majority oppressing them by saying But That's a Good Thing. For example, he normally posts a half-dozen items a week about how They Do It Better in Northern Europe, but today he's worked up over a progressive Dutch proposal for more humane treatment of animals. That's because requiring animals to be sedated as they are slaughtered would inconvenience devout Muslims. It's a slippery slope, you see. If you let those backward, vicious Dutch blonds get away with animals rights, the next things they will try to crack down upon are clitoridectomies, polygamy, honor-killing, wife-beating, gay-bashing, and arranged marriages of adolescent daughters to their first cousins back in the Old Country for purposes of immigration fraud.

Fortunately, in America, the right sort of people dominate discussion. Yglesias writes:
Something that’s definitely nice about the United States is that, though our political culture is hardly unaffected by bigotry or oft-violent nationalism, I’m pretty confident this would never fly here. The equivalent version of the opposition from Christian Democrats on ground of religious freedom would be much more robust, and secular Americans who couldn’t care less about the details of halal butchery still have an appropriate conception of ourselves as a potentially oppressed minority.

Diversity trumps even progressivism. Why? Because massive immigration from backwards cultures, even of Muslims, is self-evidently Good for the Jews. How do we know that? Because the gentiles, who are The Real Threat, think it's Bad for Them, so that's all the proof you need to know.

Ballplayers and age

Michael Sokolove is becoming my favorite sportswriter by combining the standard up close and personal reporting with the kind of big picture data synthesis that I prefer. He has a new article about New York Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter on his 37th birthday and the larger topic of aging in sports. 

Jeter, who signed a contentiously-negotiated 3-year $51 million contract in the offseason so he would get his 3000th hit with the Yankees, the only team he's ever played for, is a pretty terrible ballplayer this season, slightly worse than a generic "replacement-level" journeyman. Yet, that's kind of heartening in that it shows that Jeter, who has seemed like a class act during his long and remarkably consistent career, isn't juiced to the gills. (I'd add that Ichiro Suzuki, who is also 37, also appears to finally be in decline, too.)

That doesn't mean that Jeter never touched any steroids or HGH during his career, but, at minimum, if he did, he didn't let it go to his head like so many stars who flagrantly abused the stuff. 

Sokolove writes:
The mythology is that old-time players, who did not lift weights and knew nothing about nutrition, had mercilessly short careers. And that today’s players, who condition themselves year-round — often with the help of private trainers, the most up-to-date scientific methods, nutritionists and massage therapists — play longer and have more years of peak performance. It makes sense. It’s also not true. 
With more rigorous drug testing, a typical baseball career is beginning to look again as it did throughout the game’s history. Journeymen players stay in the game until their early- or mid-30s, and all-star-level players maybe a couple of years beyond that. A handful of superstars retain enough skills to make significant contributions into their late 30s. Those with the most talent almost certainly lose their skills at the same rate as lesser players, but they stay in the game for a long time because 85 percent of a superstar is still a very good player. 
The rotund, hard-living Babe Ruth was a productive player until age 39. Older baseball fans remember Willie Mays’s sad last years with Mets, when he was past 40 and couldn’t play anymore, and may assume that he hung on far too long. But at age 40, while still playing for the San Francisco Giants, Mays led the league in on-base percentage and stole 23 bases. 
Even the game’s greatest players, though, cannot defy biology. However long they play, their best seasons occur when they are still strapping young men in all their fast-twitch glory. 

Sokolove is being a little dogmatic. We've seen evidence of ballplayers in the past who extended their primes into their thirties by working out. Slugging shortstop Honus Wagner peaked in 1908 at age 34, probably because he lifted weights. Ruth got himself a personal trainer after his bad 1925 season and worked out during the winters, so he had his famous 60 homer season in 1927 at age 32.

What about more recent examples of late resurgences?

I could list some, but one of my readers has a theory that the impact of steroids on famous American sports statistics can be traced way, way back before Jose Canseco's 40-40 season in 1988. All those great seasons from the 1970s, 1960s, or even late 1950s that you think of as shining examples of a more innocent age? All on the juice, he asserts. After all, we know Olympic shotputters and the like were using steroids in the later 1950s, so why not professional athletes? 

QB John Hadl has said that the San Diego Chargers strength coach was handing out steroids in the locker room in 1965. Or how about The Juice? O.J. Simpson went from a pretty good high school player in 1964 to the most exciting college football player since Red Grange in 1967. How'd that happen? (When Ken Kesey read about O.J.'s little run-in with the law in 1994, he said: That sounds like a combination of cocaine and steroids.)

Growing up on the West Coast in the 1960s and 1970s, I assumed, like most people, that the outstanding performance of West Coast athletes was simply part of the general shift of money and talent to California. Maybe, but maybe there was also a Venice Muscle Beach / Hollywood / Castro Street gay / Olympic track & field steroids connection to West Coast pro athletes going on. 

I dunno. 

We do know that baseball players were using uppers by the early 1960s to be alert for ballgames. Having just brewed a pot of coffee to churn out this posting, however, I'm not feeling all that censorious about that. 

June 27, 2011

Lack of extradition treaties

As I wrote in VDARE a few years ago, in 2006 I served on the jury of a trial in downtown L.A. that sounds like I made it up: an Iranian immigrant used car dealer was so crooked that he'd been banned from the used car racket. So, he started another used car lot, but had his brother-in-law sign all the legal forms claiming to be the sole owner and operator. Then the brains of the operation collected $4 million in sales tax but sent only $2 million on to Sacramento. He used the other $2 million to build a Persian Palace in San Clemente filled with, in the words of South Park in their parody of 300, the kind of gold-plated crap that only a Persian would think is cool. Eventually, state auditors kept asking why the dealership sold all of its used cars for only half the market price, so the Mr. Big fled back to Iran, leaving the brother-in-law to stand trial as the legally responsible party. But the idiots on an L.A. jury, half of them immigrants, couldn't grasp what had happened, so he went free on a hung jury.

That got me to thinking about extradition treaties. The lack of an extradition treaty between the U.S. and the home country of immigrants is an incentive to engage in crime. Not surprisingly, the U.S. can't get crooks back from Iran. But what about other countries that were not always threatening to bomb? So, I looked up which countries America doesn't have an extradition treaty with. (In movies, crooks were always running off to Rio because for a long time Brazil didn't have an extradition treaty with the U.S., but now, apparently, we do.)

From Wikipedia:
The United States maintains diplomatic relations, but does not have extradition treaties with the following countries: 
Afghanistan, Algeria, Andorra, Angola, Armenia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brunei, Burkina Faso, Burma, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, the Central African Republic, Chad, China, Comoros, Congo (Kinshasa), Congo (Brazzaville), Croatia, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Laos, Lebanon, Libya, Macedonia, Madagascar, Maldives, Mali, Marshall Islands, Mauritania, Micronesia, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Mozambique, Namibia, Nepal, Niger, Oman, Qatar, Russia, Rwanda, Samoa, São Tomé & Príncipe, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Slovenia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Vatican, Vietnam, and Yemen,.[citation needed] [boldface mine]

Holy cow, no wonder the state is broke. That's like half the non-Mexican population of L.A., and about half the small businessmen.

The U.S. really, really ought to have an extradition treaty with Armenia. America did an excellent job turning the pre-1924 Armenian immigrants into solid citizens, but we're not doing so good with the latest wave of Armenian immigrants. There is plenty of human capital there, but we're just letting them abuse us because, compared to the old days, we are weak and stupid. Letting Armenians run scams in America and then scamper off to Armenia when the heat starts to catch up with them is like having a German Shepherd that's not housebroken. 

The Hot White Defendant beats the rap

It's always fun to look at the LAPD's Most Wanted list, in part because very few people on it look like the Great White Defendants on TV crime shows. Most of the real life Most Wanteds look like this guy on the left: i.e., Extremely Bad TV.

However, five years ago, I pointed out in a post entitled "The Hot White Defendant" that it did have one eminently televisable Most Wanted on it, 
Vannessa X, 5'9" and 125 pounds: 
The suspect is articulate and claims to work in fashion design. The suspect dresses in very expensive looking clothes and speaks with a French accent. The suspect speaks five languages fluently: English, French, Italian, Thai and Spanish. The suspect can also speak some Arabic. The suspect is known to frequent the following areas: The Fairfax District in Wilshire and Hollywood Areas; Hollywood; Ocean Front Walk in Pacific Area; and West Hollywood.

A reader pointed out that she's probably about 1/4 Thai.

Today, I received an email from a law office
My office represents Vanessa X. Ms. X was the subject of your blog entry on May 7, 2006, entitled “The White Hot Defendant.”  
Actually, my post was called "The Hot White Defendant" (a reference to Bonfire of the Vanities), but I kinda like your version better.
In your blog entry you discuss Ms. X's fugitive status.  In August, 2007, Ms. X appeared before the Los Angeles Superior Court. The grand theft charges against Ms. X were dropped due to lack of evidence linking her to any of the crimes committed.  
Unfortunately, she is still being affected by the unsubstantiated charges as whenever her name is entered into the Google search engine, your blog entry comes up in the first five hits.   This has greatly limited Ms. X's ability to gain employment as all potential employers that search her name think she is a wanted fugitive.

I am writing this email to request that you remove your entry regarding Ms. X's fugitive status so that she can move past that unfortunate period in her life.

Always happy to be of service. In fact, let me offer some career advice: Miss X should contact Cameron Diaz's people about selling the rights to her life story in case the star of Bad Teacher wants to follow up her momentum with more sociopath roles. Alternatively, I'd probably rather watch Miss X in Bad Teacher 2 than Cameron Diaz.

Update: A couple of things about the LAPD's Most Wanted list: It's not totally demographically representative of of who commits crimes in L.A.. Instead, it's representative of who doesn't get caught, which is dominated by immigrants in part because they are a lot more likely to flee the country and stay Wanted. In contrast, African-American homeboys aren't all that common on the Most Wanted list because, having nowhere to go, they tend to get caught.

Also, these aren't necessarily recent crimes. I recognize a lot of these people from when I wrote my post a half decade ago. For example, there's a blonde guy on there named Torvald wanted for a kidnapping at gunpoint from 18 years ago. Presumably, he's disappeared back to Norway or wherever.

June 26, 2011

NBA Draft 1st Round: 6 overseas whites v. Jimmer

In the first round of the NBA draft last week, we saw the same pattern as we've seen over the last decade in the NBA: a large majority of the top white guys grew up in foreign countries. Six of the seven white guys who went in the first round were from foreign countries. Jimmer Fredette of BYU, the collegiate scoring champ and player of the year, went 10th, winding up in Sacramento, while three overseas whites went ahead of him in the top 10.

Similarly, of the nine active white players who are in the NBA top 50 in career win shares, eight grew up abroad.

On the other hand, in the second (and last) round, four American whites (Kyle Singler, John Leuer, Josh Harrellson, and John Diebler) were picked versus three foreign whites. So, overall, out of the 14 whites drafted, nine were foreign and five were American.

This is a pattern that needs some explanation.

One short term reason for the 2011 draft is the Nowitzki Effect. A foreign white was the Finals MVP, so a couple of weeks later, lots of teams are looking for foreign whites.

But, long term, I can see two plausible explanations for this pattern: the first would be that star basketball players are merely genetic freaks with culture having no effect So, because there are more whites outside the U.S., there are more white genetic freaks from outside the U.S.

The second is that we are witnessing a classic example of disparate impact discrimination against whites within U.S. basketball. 

It's a nature-nurture question. How important is it for NBA stardom that there are more white guys outside the U.S. versus how important is that U.S. culture is more basketball-centric? 

One way to think about this is to look at the substantial success in the NBA of people from the two most basketball-centric cultures in Europe: ex-Yugoslavia. For example, out of the nine foreign whites drafted in 2011, four were from the ex-Yugoslavian republics, two from Lithuania, one from next-door Latvia, one from Turkey, and one from the Czech republic.

Ex-Yugoslavia and Lithuania have been outstanding at basketball as far back as I can recall. They have been highly over-represented, which suggests that nurture plays a role (although, those two places are pretty tall on average, which might be why they took to basketball so avidly).

In contrast, much of the Europe isn't well represented in the NBA: the British Isles (the only NBA player I can think of was John Amaechi, but he was awful, although that was because he was gay and hated sports), France (Tony Parker being the exception that validate the tendency  -- his father was a black American playing ball professionally in Europe), the Low Countries (7'4" Rik Smits being the best illustration of sheer height triumphing over a culture's lack of basketball orientation), Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Scandinavia, etc. 

In contrast, the Mediterranean countries have been crazy about basketball for a generation or two, although they weren't well represented in the NBA because they weren't that tall until the last couple of decades and because their leagues could pay decent money, especially Italy's league, to keep talent close to home. Ex-Yugoslavia and Lithuania were tall, crazy for basketball, and poor, so they;ve been disproportionately represented in the NBA. 

Taking all that into account, my expectation would be that there would be about as many top white Americans as top white foreigners. There used to be, but there haven't been for a decade or more. This suggests that tall white guys in America (e.g., 6-9" John Isner, now playing at Wimbledon) have been turning against basketball. 

Getting the joke

My new VDARE column looks at a number of recent news stories, such as the illegal immigrant reporter (from where, exactly?), the Mexican national soccer team's "home game" against the U.S. at the Rose Bowl, and so forth, that are pretty funny if you get the joke.

From Blue State to Red State via Section Eight

The problem with being poor in 21st Century America is not that you can't buy enough food or even buy enough flat screen TVs, it's that you can't afford to not live around other poor people. But, the government has a plan to solve that problem. From the Washington Post:
Housing vouchers a golden ticket to pricey suburbs 
By Stephanie McCrummen, Published: June 26 
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — It was clear that Liza Jackson’s luck had changed when she drove her pearl-white Dodge sedan, the one with the huge pink plastic eyelashes over the headlights, into Pinebrook, an eight-year-old subdivision where residents tend to notice cars with huge pink eyelashes. 
“There goes the neighborhood,” one homeowner said when she heard that her potential new neighbor had a federal housing voucher known as a Section 8. 
But Jackson could well be Pinebrook’s salvation, a means by which landlords can rent an empty, crime-magnet of a house to a tenant with a steady, government-backed check. 
From Jackson’s point of view, the dismal housing market appeared as a glorious reversal of fortune: Fresh swaths of suburbia were opening up to the very people it has so often excluded. 
She had seen one house, and now she rolled up to another, a tan three-bedroom with red shutters. She got out and looked around, a vaguely glamorous vision crossing the grass in a long, leopard-print dress. She peeked into the windows, making out what appeared to be vaulted ceilings. 
“Dang,” Jackson said approvingly. 
She put the house, a foreclosure turned rental, on her list of possibilities. ...
But as housing prices keep slipping and the economy remains shaky, there’s been another shift as more landlords view the approximately 2 million American families with a Section 8 voucher — which essentially subsidizes fair-market rent for people who can’t afford it — as among the best ways to fill an empty house. 
“It’s guaranteed money,” said David Benham, who owns several rental properties and is a founder of the Benham REO Group, which sells bank foreclosures to investors in 35 states. “It has a great accountability program with the renters. I love Section 8. I wish every one of my properties was Section 8.” 
So for a group of Americans previously blocked from certain neighborhoods by “not in my back yard” politics, high prices and a lack of rental options, this is a minor bonanza. Those with a Section 8 voucher, a key federal program for the poor, are a fraction of those who need it; waiting lists are full and years long. But they are a lucky fraction. In the recession-era economy, the voucher is becoming a golden ticket to almost anywhere, a point hardly lost on Liza Jackson, whose cellphone was now ringing Lil Wayne. 
“Yes?” she said, answering in the prim manner she described as her “white voice.” “I had called about the four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath? Yes. Liza. Like Minnelli.” 
Jackson and her daughter Sheena, 24, were saying goodbye to a cramped two-bedroom townhouse in Honolulu, a city she described as “not all it’s cracked up to be, if you’re black,” and “all high maka maka,” which is Hawaiian slang for unduly expensive. 
Jackson had planned the move for months, perusing rentals on Section 8 Web sites that offer everything from chic new condominiums in Miami to four-bedrooms in Phoenix, Las Vegas and Atlanta. Jackson decided on Charlotte, where she could get more square footage for her family, which included Sheena, Sheena’s 5-year-old son, Shamahrie, and her two dogs, Coco Chanel and Mamacita. She saved up from her job as a baker, shipped the car and booked a room at a cheap hotel off the Billy Graham Parkway. 
Now it was early June, and she and Sheena were at a briefing at the Charlotte Housing Authority office, a normally dreary place that was bustling like a booming real estate firm. 
By 8 a.m., more than two dozen hopeful people were streaming in, having taken overnight buses from New York, Baltimore, New Jersey and elsewhere, where they lived in public housing, or run-down neighborhoods, or places they hoped to escape. 
“I want to be around all this fresh air,” said Evelyn Lifsey, who was moving from a Staten Island public housing project. “My moving truck is on standby.” 
A housing counselor ended the briefing by handing out a list of Zip codes. 
“These are areas with better amenities, more jobs, better schools,” she said, encouraging people to scout them. 
Jackson received a folder with her voucher, a prized possession that people spend years on waiting lists to acquire. Jackson’s was $1,032, possibly more if utilities were included or if she found a place in a pricier Zip code. Her contribution was about $200 a month.... 
“I don’t want to live in some ghetto,” Jackson said in the brawny tone of her native Boston, and it seemed she would not have to. Soon, she and Sheena were zipping down Interstate 85.
It was a sunny afternoon in Charlotte, an ambitious city of mirrored skyscrapers and green suburbs whose last big wave of house hunters was full of bank employees, high-tech workers and other professionals. 
Now there was Jackson, who receives unemployment, and Sheena, who gets child support for Shamahrie. Riding along, they fielded calls from agents, some of whom seemed quite eager. ... 
If she was cramped in Honolulu, here she had higher standards. At least three bedrooms. Hardwood floors, preferably. An open kitchen. 
They wound their way to the first address, which turned out to be the sort of Section 8 offering typical of the boom years: a small, 1970s-era brick number with dirt patches in the front yard. 
“I’ll put ‘[Heck] no’ next to this one,” Jackson said, making a note. 
She hit the gas, passing two young men in shorts and tank tops. 
“Uh-oh, street punks,” Jackson said, further disqualifying the area. 
... They pulled into Linda Vista, a winding maze of 2,000-plus-square-foot homes. 
“This is quiet livin’,” Jackson said, rolling along. “I’d hate to see something ghetto in here.”

Just wait ...

To Wither and Die in L.A.

Los Angeles County, by far the country's most populous at about 10,000,000 people, consists, from south to north of the Los Angeles Basin, then the side by side suburban San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys, then the mighty San Gabriel Mountains, and then the dusty, windy high desert. The climate deteriorates the farther north you go in LA County because you get farther from the Pacific.

The high desert communities of Palmdale and Lancaster were once places where aerospace engineers could find big backyards for their big families. But the good jobs dried up and LA County has been exporting its poor blacks and Hispanics to the high desert via the Section 8 rental voucher program. The high desert communities have been trying to slow the onslaught, and that has LA County, which is who is trying to dump the NAMs in the desert in the first place, crying racism!

From the LA Times:
L.A. County looks into alleged racism in Antelope Valley housing-subsidy crackdown 
The county had been paying half the cost for Section 8 investigators in Lancaster and Palmdale. Supervisors postpone that funding after civil rights groups say the probes are biased against low-income minorities. 
Los Angeles County supervisors opted Tuesday to postpone additional funding for a subsidized housing enforcement program in Lancaster and Palmdale and called for an investigation into charges that the Antelope Valley cities are using the program to discriminate against low-income ethnic minorities. 
The county had been contributing half the cost of extra investigators in the two cities to ensure that landlords and tenants comply with the regulations of the federal Section 8 housing voucher program. But a lawsuit filed in federal court by the NAACP earlier this month charged that Lancaster and Palmdale are waging an "unrelenting war" against blacks and Latinos who receive public assistance. 
The lawsuit alleged that the cities conduct unfair surprise "compliance checks" of Section 8 residents, the majority of whom are black and Latino. Housing inspectors were often accompanied by armed Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies, and overzealous enforcement had cost as many as 200 local minority families their federal housing assistance each year in the Antelope Valley, the suit charged. 
At Tuesday's board meeting, Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich, whose district includes the Antelope Valley, made the motion to put off the decision to renew funding for the program until after county housing officials investigate the allegations. 
Lancaster Mayor R. Rex Parris said he was disappointed by the board's decision. He told supervisors that the Antelope Valley had been inundated by the county's poor and lacked sufficient social services to handle their needs. 
"This really isn't about race," Parris said. "Since the beginning of time kings have sent their poor into the desert and they have sent them there to wither and die. That is exactly what's going on today."

Here's my 2008 short story about renting to Section 8 tenants in the high desert.

June 25, 2011

Firewatchers: Much Ado about Very Little

With the press in a tizzy over the epochal importance of gay marriage in New York state, the Chicago Tribune has an unwittingly timely article on a past whoop-tee-doo that has quietly fizzled:
Female firefighters blazed a trail that few followed 
After 25 years, they are still rare in Chicago and suburbs 
Twenty-five years ago, Daniels was among the first group of 20 female firefighters hired in Chicago, a move that gave women entree to a macho profession that had been reserved primarily for white men. The women braved hostility, harassment and low expectations to prove they were capable of doing the job. Yet today, women remain barely visible in the firefighting ranks in the Chicago area and the nation. 
In Chicago, there are 116 women, representing just over 2 percent of the department of more than 5,000. Nationally, fewer than 11,000 women are career firefighters, making up 3.6 percent of the firefighter population, according to the U.S. Fire Administration. ... 
For most women, it was impossible to pass the physical test, which included timed exercises of hanging from a pole, climbing stairs carrying a 60-pound coiled hose and pulling a 150-pound dummy across a room without its feet touching the floor. ...
In the 1980s, the U.S. Justice Department urged the city, then led by Mayor Harold Washington, to hire more women and minorities as part of a 1974 consent decree governing minority hiring at the Fire Department. A new test was developed in 1985 that eased some of the demanding physical tasks and placed more emphasis on the written exam. The physical exam remains a barrier for some women in Chicago and the suburbs. 
The women in the 1986 class were given additional physical training before entering the fire academy. In an affirmative-action move, those who passed the test were placed ahead of men who scored higher, making some men even more resentful. The women were assigned in pairs to 10 stations. ... 
Most of the old fire stations in Chicago have been replaced or retrofitted to accommodate women. 
The same is true in the suburbs. In Schaumburg, for example, all of the firehouses have been built or remodeled with unisex washrooms and bunkrooms. Hoffman Estates has separate female locker rooms and other facilities for women, though the village has not hired a woman. 
One to 2 percent of applicants are women, but none has scored high enough on the entrance exam to make the hiring list, said Hoffman Estates fire Chief Robert Gorvett. 
"We openly acknowledge the fact that we're all white men," Gorvett said. "It's certainly not something we're proud of."

June 24, 2011

How far down does the Pakistani rabbit hole go?

The New York Times reports that Osama bin Laden's courier's cell phone has lots of interesting phone numbers on it. This article focuses on that of Harakat, a Pakistani militant group that fights in Kashmir and elsewhere, which sounds like a cutout organization for the Pakistan's CIA, the ISI. The NYT reporters have a couple of old Harakat insiders speaking off the record:
He and the other commander, who spent 10 years with Harakat, offered no proof of their belief that Bin Laden was under Pakistani military protection. But their views were informed by their years of work with the ISI and their knowledge of how the spy agency routinely handled militant leaders it considered assets — placing them under protective custody in cities, often close to military installations. 
The treatment amounts to a kind of house arrest, to ensure both the security of the asset and his low profile to avoid embarrassment to his protectors. 

A friend writes:
OK, so ISI was caching Bin Laden, probably using him when convenient, for example when [former Pakistan president] Musharraf wanted to knock off Benazir Bhutto. It already looked like that, now it seems almost certain. 

Well, that might be hard to prove. Presumably, the ISI is reasonably professional in its spycraft. And then there's the next line of conceptual defense: it's not the ISI, it's "rogue elements" within the ISI. And then there's the argument that the ISI is a rogue element within the government of Pakistan. (Or is the government of Pakistan more a front for the ISI?)
Remember when the Warren Commission was shared that the Soviets had ordered JFK murdered? Like, what were they supposed to do if they found that to be the case and it got out? Push the button? This is the real deal: hiding Bin Laden for years IS a casus belli. Even the Israelis couldn't get away with _that_.

Pakistan is more of an enemy than Iraq ever was, more than Iran. Of course neither of them ever did much to us. More even than Libya (I'm counting Lockerbie).

Pakistan is more of an enemy than anyone we're whacking in Afghanistan. But we'd have to admit that we were PAYING the people sheltering Bin Laden for the past six years: the Fools at the Top would have to admit that were wrong. That won't happen. We may continue to pretend to get along with Pakistan for years more, so that they will allow our logistics for Afghanistan, a pointless and expensive war. And, of course, to avoid admitting what utter, poisonous damn fools our leaders are.

And I wonder if this goes deeper yet. A real fair chance that Musharraf was in on it. And might they have been involved with Bin Laden earlier? Involved in 9-11 itself? You have to wonder. With friends like these.... 

June 23, 2011

Walmart discriminates against women because its male managers work really hard

In an op-ed in the NYT, UCSB historian Nelson Lichtenstein explains that the sex discrimination lawsuit against Walmart was intended to rectify the injustice that ambitious young men tend to work harder and make more sacrifices for the job than family-oriented middle-aged women:
Walmart's Authoritarian Culture 
There are tens of thousands of experienced Wal-Mart women who would like to be promoted to the first managerial rung, salaried assistant store manager. But Wal-Mart makes it impossible for many of them to take that post, because its ruthless management style structures the job itself as one that most women, and especially those with young children or a relative to care for, would find difficult to accept. 
Why? Because, for all the change that has swept over the company, at the store level there is still a fair amount of the old communal sociability. Recognizing that workers steeped in that culture make poor candidates for assistant managers, who are the front lines in enforcing labor discipline, Wal-Mart insists that almost all workers promoted to the managerial ranks move to a new store, often hundreds of miles away. 
For young men in a hurry, that’s an inconvenience; for middle-aged women caring for families, this corporate reassignment policy amounts to sex discrimination. True, Wal-Mart is hardly alone in demanding that rising managers sacrifice family life, but few companies make relocation such a fixed policy, and few have employment rolls even a third the size. 
The obstacles to women’s advancement do not stop there. The workweek for salaried managers is around 50 hours or more, which can surge to 80 or 90 hours a week during holiday seasons. Not unexpectedly, some managers think women with family responsibilities would balk at such demands, and it is hardly to the discredit of thousands of Wal-Mart women that they may be right. 

So, it's sex discrimination if you hire harder-working people to be managers and more of them turn out to be men? Sounds like that proposition has four votes on the Supreme Court.

It's kind of hard to argue that Walmart would have been more successful if only it had hired more women managers. What else would Walmart have done? Conquered Russia? Colonized Alpha Centauri?

One could make the argument that the point of disparate impact discrimination law is to redistribute wealth to blacks (the Slavery Tax) without hurting their feelings too much. Okay, But redistributing wealth to women who work for Walmart away from the (mostly female) customers of Walmart by making Walmart less efficient via colossal lawsuits seems vastly inefficient, except for the lawyers involved. Women who work at Walmart are quite likely to have menfolk who work at Walmart.
There used to be a remedy for this sort of managerial authoritarianism: it was called a union, which bargained over not only wages and pensions but also the kind of qualitative issues, including promotion and transfer policies, that have proved so vexing for non-unionized employees at Wal-Mart and other big retailers. 
For a time it seemed as if the class-action lawsuit might be a partial substitute.

Okay, now I'm really confused: Walmart was guilty of sex discrimination in its managerial ranks by not having a union? Since when is management unionized?

Sam Walton's theory was that a bunch of Ozark hillbillies could outmanage the city slickers by working harder and more honestly: especially by not letting Walmart managers become friends with the people they did business with.

Personally, as a former corporate type who made made some sales calls on Walmart in the early 1990s, I think Walmart's management should belong to a Corporate Types Union that would enforce rules of modern corporate niceness on Walmart managers like, yes, they will go out to lunch with suppliers and no they won't meet with suppliers only in their windowless interrogation cells.

June 22, 2011

Social Media v. Antisocial Media

Is Twitter the new disco music? So argues Virginia Heffernan, the NYT's perceptive new media columnist, saying that social media appeal to blacks, gays, and women, just like disco did in 1977. 

Yes, but what about the antisocial media? I ask in my new Taki's Magazine column. Roughly 1995-2005 may go down in history as the golden age of white guys' antisocial media. 

June 21, 2011

Feminists are easy to fool

In his response to the Supreme Court tossing out 5-4 the vast Walmart disparate impact discrimination lawsuit, Matthew Yglesias deftly threads the needle of placating feminists without actually embarrassing himself by positing:
"Imagine that general background social conditions in the United States are such that women will be disadvantaged in any male-run institution that doesn’t make a specific and deliberate effort to lean against that disadvantage."

Imagining is fun! What else should we imagine? 

To imagine that Walmart discriminates against female employees is to imagine that it discriminates in favor of male employees, which is to imagine that Walmart, evidently a Big Softie famous for leaving money on the table, overpays for male employees. 

But I don't have a big enough imagination to imagine that.

A simple request

As a Person of Height, I'd like to protest all the recent TV coverage of Dirk Nowitzki and LeBron James, which gives society the false impression that we People of Height are all a model minority of the agile and athletic, while ignoring our tragic challenge of coordination-challengement. But don't insensitively show us as we really are, either, because that would stereotype us as clumsy oafs! 

Hmmhmm, well, I could see how this could be tricky. Okay, the best all-around solution for society would be to put me on TV a lot. But not on live TV, because I might trip and fall down. No, I should be on lots of carefully edited TV. But wait a couple of days to start shooting until I get over this limp from when I tried to pick up three cans of beer at once and dropped one on my big toe. Then ... lots of me on (carefully edited and maybe with some cool CGI effects, too, to mask the awkward parts) TV! Or maybe just get Ryan Reynolds to play me in The Steve Sailer Show. Yeah, I think that's the least society could do.

Shooting fish in a barrel

Quoting Amanda Marcotte in illustration of Sailer's Law of Female Journalism (That the issue that will tend to most passionately engage non-self-aware female journalists is that society should be turned upside down so that she, personally, would be considered hotter-looking) is kind of a cheap shot because Ms. Marcotte notoriously combines self-absorption, lack of self-awareness, vast reserves of hate, and dimness, but sometimes I can't pass her up:
Boycotting the Hollywood Age Gap 
Well, I'm proposing a test of my own, to save myself the pain of seeing a movie that's advertised as being some kind of intelligent indie film but is yet another example of cliched sexist fantasies being passed off as realistic story-telling. Call it the "Marcotte Test": no more movies or shows where the hero is a decade or more older than his love interest.  And if she's under 25, the time span gets shortened to five years.  Exceptions will be made for anti-heroes whose attraction to younger women helps establish how deeply flawed they are as people (see: Don Draper).

Right. Women of the blogging class all watch Mad Men because Jon Hamm's character is so pathetically flawed.
I hate to be a hard ass about this, because I do believe that there are many happy romances between people who are more than ten years apart, but in reality, most people tend to partner off with those who are close in age to themselves. (The average age at first marriage is less than two years difference in the United States.)  And when people do expand beyond the few-year range, there is usually some discussion about the age gap, and some struggle to overcome it.  But if you only learned about love from Hollywood movies

Perhaps movies should come with a bold type notice from the Surgeon General: Warning: Don't only learn about love from Hollywood movies! (Also, don't attempt to use a broomstick to fly.)
you'd think that most women needed a man who was nearing or past puberty when she was born, and men are disgusted by women with whom they share generational touchstones with. Sorry, but I just don't know many dudes who say things like, "Yuck, I can't be with someone who was actually buying records when Kurt Cobain was still alive. We'd have way too much in common!" 
This test was developed while I was mindlessly reading the preview for the new Ewan McGregor movie "Beginners" in Entertainment Weekly.  It's supposed to be one of those quirky comedies about a man who faces some hard times and learns to grow up and find true love, but my enthusiasm for the movie drained when I realized that McGregor, born in 1971, was being paired off with MĂ©lanie Laurent, born in 1983.  If you want to make a romance a symbol of someone's maturation process, it seems uniquely stupid to make said romance with someone who was still pooping her diapers while you were starting to get your first real crushes. 
Once noticed in this movie

In other words, this 33-year-old professional pundit hadn't noticed that there tends to be an age gap between leading men and leading ladies in movies until a few weeks ago.
it began to bug me across the board: Ryan Reynolds is 11 years older than his love interest Blake Lively in "The Green Lantern."  

In other words, there's ample disparate impact evidence that Hollywood sex discriminates against younger male actors. Unless, like Shia LeBeouf, you remind Steven Spielberg of himself at your age, it's much harder to get cast as the male lead in summer blockbusters until after you've paid a lot of dues than it is to get cast as the female lead. Call the EEOC!
Ryan Gosling, who is 30,  is being paired off with 22-year-old Emma Stone in "Crazy, Stupid, Love". Even Tom Hanks in "Larry Crowne" is 11 years older than Julia Roberts.  I'm sure there are more that have passed my notice; these were just the highlighted movies in the magazine. 

Or how about in last winter's indie version of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, in which Michael Fassbender as Mr. Rochester is 12-years-older than 21-year-old Mia Wasikowska as Jane? Or how about all those mangled adaptations of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice where the actor playing Mr. Darcy is substantially older than the actress playing Miss Bennett? What woman ever liked 36-year-old Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy in the BBC version of P&P? Or what about how Hollywood ruined Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind by casting Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh? It's all the fault of Hollywood moguls for leaving out popular female romance novelists' commitment to gender equality in age just to stoke their own aging male vanity.
Again, none of this would bother me if it was dealt with honestly or was rare as it is in real life.  But when it sits on the screen with no acknowledgment or explanation, it leaves the impression we're supposed to think of the characters as peers, since they're still just close enough in age you can assume they're supposed to be the same age. Which, in turn, thwarts the onscreen image of what a woman actually looks like at any given age.  Ryan Gosling is allowed to be and look 30, but are we meant to assume that a woman around that age should look 22?  Are we really meant to believe that still-radiant Julia Roberts is the same age as puffy-eyed Tom Hanks?  What women look like at any given age is being subtly erased in movies when we're supposed to assume smooth-faced MĂ©lanie Laurent is roughly the same age as Ewan McGregor, whose face is replete with the lines of looming middle age.

Okay, now I get it, it's a double bankshot version of Sailer's Law. The problem with casting a 28-year-old actress opposite 40-year-old Ewan McGregor is that audiences will assume the beautiful 28-year-old is actually a beautiful 40-year-old, which will make the 33-year-old Marcotte seem less hot in comparison. I strongly doubt that audiences will do any such thing, but to alleviate Marcotte's worries, I propose:

Memo to Hollywood: the surest way to ease Armanda Marcotte's concerns that the women in movies are hotter than she is would be to cast Armanda Marcotte as the sexy lead in all your 2012 releases. Is that too much to ask?

"The Tribal Imagination" by Robin Fox

Roger Sandall writes in his review of anthropologist Robin Fox's The Tribal Imagination in The American Interest:
Fox begins this chapter by describing New York Times columnist John Tierney’s bafflement in September 2003 upon discovering that the lavish weddings regularly taking place in his Baghdad hotel were mostly marriages of first cousins who were the children of brothers. Questioned about this practice, the young people told Tierney, “Of course we marry a cousin. What would you have us do, marry a stranger? We cannot trust strangers.” 
... It is also a truth, Fox believes, that we ignore at our peril as we go stumbling about in far-away strange places where tribes rule with an authority denied the more-or-less absent state. The pride and latent violence of groups of mutually suspicious kindred must be the starting point, Fox says, for anyone venturing into this political landscape. Such men and women are not the free individual citizens of a recognized territorial jurisdiction; nor are they people with clearly defined and defensible legal rights with respect to the state, whether in Libya or Iraq or Afghanistan. 
... While primates have kin, they do not have in-laws. 
Unpacking this highly condensed formulation reveals a whole range of connected evolutionary phenomena: the dispersal of animal populations, the need for genetic variability and the origin of language, the last enabling social structures to form in time and space among men and women who have never seen each other and in some cases never will. Other primates don’t do this, and here LĂ©vi-Strauss was right. The uniquely human cultural fact that arose was something new, and it formed “the enduring relationship between natal kin separated by marriage but linked by kinship, by descent from a common ancestor.” 
All mammals ensure genetic variability through population dispersal. Fox argues that this observation applies as far back as “the emergence of self-replicating matter, and the crucial revolution that produced sex to replace cloning.” Sexual reproduction, plus dispersal, spontaneously produces the genetic variability natural selection needs to work on. If mammalian populations did not disperse, close inbreeding would result in a loss of such variability, and “hence mechanisms evolved to avoid it.” At the same time too great a dispersal—so great that separated bands lost contact with each other—meant that beneficial features of kinship association might be lost. So it is that “organisms breed out to avoid losing variability, but not so far out that they dissipate genetic advantages.” Not too close, but not too far; that was the evolutionary Golden Rule and, of course, the plinth of tribal society itself. 
Which brings us back to what was going on in that Baghdad hotel. In human terms, the Darwinian imperatives of dispersal, variability and natural selection eventually produced a social world in which marriage with cousins was preferred. Historically, that’s how it has been in most traditional preindustrial societies until quite recently. And for Fox it is an integral part of the tribal default system of humanity everywhere.

The last word on Florence of Arabia

From Mark Steyn (via ParaPundit and Razib)
From CNN to The Guardian to Bianca Jagger to legions of Tweeters, Western liberalism fell for a ludicrous hoax. Why? 
Because they wanted to. It would be nice if "Amina Arraf" existed. As niche constituencies go, we could use more hijab-wearing Muslim lesbian militants and fewer fortysomething male Western deadbeat college students. But the latter is a real and pathetically numerous demographic, and the former is a fiction – a fantasy for Western liberals, who think that in the multicultural society the nice gay couple at 27 Rainbow Avenue can live next door to the big bearded imam with four child brides at No. 29 and gambol and frolic in admiration of each other's diversity. They will proffer cheery greetings over the picket fence, the one admiring the other's attractive buttock-hugging leather shorts for that day's Gay Pride parade as he prepares to take his daughter to the clitoridectomy clinic. ... 
You can learn a lot from the deceptions a society chooses to swallow. "Amina Arraf" was a fiction who fit the liberal worldview. That's because the liberal worldview is a fiction.

June 20, 2011

Why are corporate profits so high compared to a generation ago?

From the Washington Post:
With executive pay, rich pull away from rest of America 
It was the 1970s, and the chief executive of a leading U.S. dairy company, Kenneth J. Douglas, lived the good life. He earned the equivalent of about $1 million today. He and his family moved from a three-bedroom home to a four-bedroom home, about a half-mile away, in River Forest, Ill., an upscale Chicago suburb. He joined a country club. The company gave him a Cadillac. The money was good enough, in fact, that he sometimes turned down raises. He said making too much was bad for morale. 
Forty years later, the trappings at the top of Dean Foods, as at most U.S. big companies, are more lavish. The current chief executive, Gregg L. Engles, averages 10 times as much in compensation as Douglas did, or about $10 million in a typical year. He owns a $6 million home in an elite suburb of Dallas and 64 acres near Vail, Colo., an area he frequently visits. He belongs to as many as four golf clubs at a time — two in Texas and two in Colorado. While Douglas’s office sat on the second floor of a milk distribution center, Engles’s stylish new headquarters occupies the top nine floors of a 41-story Dallas office tower. When Engles leaves town, he takes the company’s $10 million Challenger 604 jet, which is largely dedicated to his needs, both business and personal. ... 
Other recent research, moreover, indicates that executive compensation at the nation’s largest firms has roughly quadrupled in real terms since the 1970s, even as pay for 90 percent of America has stalled. 
This trend held at Dean Foods. Over the period from the ’70s until today, while pay for Dean Foods chief executives was rising 10 times over, wages for the unionized workers actually declined slightly. The hourly wage rate for the people who process, pasteurize and package the milk at the company’s dairies declined by 9 percent in real terms, according to union contract records. It is now about $23 an hour. ... 
While no company over this period of time — from the 1970s to today — can be considered completely typical, Dean Foods offers a better comparison than most because fundamentally it hasn’t changed. 
The dairy business is still the root of the company; it was on the Fortune 500 by the late ’70s and remains there today. It grew then and more recently through acquisition.
Moreover, both chief executives — Douglas and Engles — could boast records of growing the company and profits. 
From 1970 to 1979, while Douglas was the chief executive, sales at Dean Foods tripled and profits increased tenfold, to $9.8 million, according to company records. Similarly, from 2000 to 2009, sales at what would be Dean Foods had roughly doubled, and so had profits, to $228 million. (Engles became chief executive after the company he led bought Dean Foods in 2001 and adopted its name.)

I'm guessing from all this that the CEO's compensation as a % of corporate profits went up from about 3% in the 1970s to about 4% these days. So, there's no apparent economy of scale in CEO pay. 

That change from 3 to 4% is not insignificant, but the big change since the 1970s seems to me to be the huge growth in corporate profits. 

And that seems kind of odd. I paid a lot of attention to the business world from, say, 1979 into the early to mid 1990s, but the size of corporate profits these days seems hard to reconcile with economic theory.Adam Smith 101 says that more perfect competition will lead to lower profits.

You might think that regional monopolies and oligopolies that allowed higher profits than the risk adjusted cost of capital would have been worn down over the decades by increased competition caused by the huge improvements in shipping, communications, data processing, and globalization. But I don't see much evidence for that.

I'm not surprised that Apple has very high profit margins on innovative products, but why does, say, P&G do so well these days on toothpaste and detergent?

I mean, sure, we all know that corporate executives have been winning in the struggle with workers over pay. But why hasn't increased competition between corporations competed away the profits won away from employees?