July 15, 2011

It's not really about what everybody says it's about

A Place to Stand notes James Delingpole's reaction to the sudden freakout in Britain over the half-decade old scandal involving one of Rupert Murdoch's tabloids hacking into voice mail accounts:
Because the purpose of Murdoch’s BSkyB bid is essentially so that he can set up a UK version of America’s most popular news channel Fox News.

On Jerry Pournelle's site, Neil Craig explains the business/political background 
This is purely my opinion, but I believe the story, which has been quietly a well known secret for years with almost all papers, including the Guardian, which broke this, hacking at some time or another, is now such a major storm. The BBC's virtual monopoly of British broadcasting is being threatened by Murdoch’s expansion of his control of Sky, the satellite broadcaster, so they are pushing this story hard. 
Last night (Thurs) the BBC news was almost entirely devoted to the hacking story story; followed by Question Time where all the questions selected by the BBC except for 1 in the last 3 minutes were the same; followed by Andrew Neil on the same. 2 1/2 hours on this story and virtually none on the rest of the world’s news That would be justified if we were seeing a breaking news story like 9/11, but for nothing less. 
Broadcasting in Britain is essentially a monopoly of the BBC and people they approve of. This monopoly is legally committed to “balance,” but is in fact the propaganda arm of the British state (along with the Guardian, which survives on government advertising). Murdoch’s attempt to buy all of Sky would weaken that monopoly slightly. 
I do not consider it a coincidence that this scandal, which journalists of all newspapers have been guilty of for years, has suddenly broken on Murdoch’s head alone."

Campus news

From City Journal:
Less Academics, More Narcissism 
The University of California is cutting back on many things, but not useless diversity programs.
by Heather Mac Donald 
California’s budget crisis has reduced the University of California to near-penury, claim its spokesmen. “Our campuses and the UC Office of the President already have cut to the bone,” the university system’s vice president for budget and capital resources warned earlier this month, in advance of this week’s meeting of the university’s regents. Well, not exactly to the bone. Even as UC campuses jettison entire degree programs and lose faculty to competing universities, one fiefdom has remained virtually sacrosanct: the diversity machine. 
Not only have diversity sinecures been protected from budget cuts, their numbers are actually growing. The University of California at San Diego, for example, is creating a new full-time “vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion.” This position would augment UC San Diego’s already massive diversity apparatus, which includes the Chancellor’s Diversity Office, the associate vice chancellor for faculty equity, the assistant vice chancellor for diversity, the faculty equity advisors, the graduate diversity coordinators, the staff diversity liaison, the undergraduate student diversity liaison, the graduate student diversity liaison, the chief diversity officer, the director of development for diversity initiatives, the Office of Academic Diversity and Equal Opportunity, the Committee on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Issues, the Committee on the Status of Women, the Campus Council on Climate, Culture and Inclusion, the Diversity Council, and the directors of the Cross-Cultural Center, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center, and the Women’s Center. 
It’s not surprising that the new vice chancellor’s mission is rather opaque, given its superfluity. 

This expansion in the Diversity budget at UCSD follows that campus's 2010 noose hoax.

In other campus news, everybody in college (especially private colleges) gets As or Bs. The D is almost extinct and the C is endangered.
My question is: Does grade inflation really matter? Who wins and who loses from grade inflation?

It appears that A- is the new B, B+ is the new C, and B is the new D. That wouldn't seem like much of a problem, at least if everybody had gotten the memo. 

Perhaps the losers are parents whose views of GPAs are from pre-1968. Junior brings home a 3.00 GPA and they think he's doing pretty good, so they send in another check for another $50,000 worth of diversity hysteria college for Junior, but they don't realize that a 3.00 is more like a 1.00 in the bad old days. This is the 2010s, where everybody and everything that has to do with college is "amazing." (I went to a college-related event tonight and heard the word "amazing" at least a couple of dozen times.)

Look, Junior is happy with his grades, the college is happy, the deluded parents are happy, and Nintendo is happy that Junior has time to play several hours of video games per evening during the academic year. Everybody is amazingly happy, so why are you complaining?

But what happens after another generation of grade inflation?

I guess we'll need new varietals of A, like how bonds are rated, where A is pretty ho-hum, compared to Aa- or Aaa.

July 14, 2011

The Obamas and the deep state

In the "The Chosen One" in The Claremont Review of Books, Angelo M. Codevilla, professor of international relations at Boston U., tries to flesh out the idea I've been kicking around for a couple of years: that Obama's family background comes out of CIA-supported international leftism.
His mother's parents, who raised him, seem to have been cogs in the U.S. government's well-heeled, well-connected machine for influencing the world, whether openly ("gray influence") or covertly ("black operations"). His mother spent her life and marriages, and birthed her children, working in that machine. For paradigms of young Barack's demeanor, proclivities, opinions, language, and attitudes one need look no further than the persons who ran the institutions that his mother and grandparents served—e.g., the Ford Foundation, the United States Information Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency—as well as his chosen mentors and colleagues. It is here, with these people and institutions, that one should begin to unravel the unknowns surrounding him. 
Two new books deal with Barack Obama's paternal and maternal families. British journalist Peter Firstbrook's The Obamas takes us all the way from the origins of East Africa's Luo tribe to Barack's father's relationship with Barack's mother. Generally fact-filled, it gives vivid portraits especially of Barack, Sr.'s, father, Onyango, who tried to raise a son as upright as he and was deadly disappointed when that son turned out to be a wastrel in the train of Tom Mboya, political leader of Kenya's Luo. The closer the book gets to the present, however, the less trustworthy it becomes. For example, it tells us that Mboya organized the 1959 airlift of 280 Africans to study in America, bypassing the U.S. State Department. Nonsense. This was high U.S. policy and touted as such at the time. The CIA considered Mboya one of its most important covert action agents. The people chosen by him and the CIA to go to America were his flunkies. But the book is irrelevant to understanding the current president of the United States because his African family had only a biological influence on him. Indeed, Barack Obama's African-ness is, as we shall see, strictly the product of his imagination.

No, Obama wrote about how, while he was in Indonesia, his mother emphasized to young Barack his biological father's heroic example. There is a lot of effort by commentators on the President's life to downplay the significance of his having a black father. The chief exceptions to this pattern are myself, David Remnick, and the President.

I would add that Obama Sr.'s bravery in being the anchor witness in the trial of the Kikuyu gunman hired by, no doubt, Kikuyu big men close to the British-affiliated Kenyatta to assassinate the American-affiliated Luo Mboya was likely appreciated by CIA. 
The maternal family that raised Barack Obama, which is highly relevant to our understanding, is the subject of New York Times reporter Janny Scott's A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother. But though this book tells us that grandmother Madelyn Dunham's favorite color was beige, that Stanley Dunham and daughter Ann (Barack, Jr.'s, mother) shared a certain impulsiveness, and contains interviews with and personal information on countless of Ann's high school friends, it sheds no light on what the Dunhams were doing with their lives that led their daughter to take a practical interest in international affairs. 
Magically, Ann Dunham goes from peeking her shy 17-year-old head out of Mercer Island, Washington ("a young virgin," writes Janny Scott), to intimacy with a very foreign person, and a few years later with another, and then to work in one of the Cold War's key battlegrounds. Meanwhile her mother, about whose professional activities the book says nothing, becomes a bank executive. Did Ann speak any foreign language? Had the Dunhams ever taken any trips abroad? The book does not say. A Singular Woman gives the impression that Ann's Indonesian husband, Lolo Soetoro, was just a geographer drafted into the army, a minor, unwitting part of the bloody campaign that wrested Indonesia from the Communists; and that Ann's work in that country was anthropological-humanitarian, as if for her U.S. policy were irrelevant. It certainly was not for her employers—the U.S. government and contractors thereof. 
Self-styled investigative journalist Wayne Madsen reports that Madelyn Dunham, the mother of Barack's mother, Ann Dunham, who became vice president of the Bank of Hawaii soon after her arrival there, was in charge of escrow accounts. Madsen's credibility is certainly checkered. But if he is correct about which department she headed, Madelyn Dunham must have supervised the accounts that the U.S. government used to funnel money to its "gray" and "black" activities throughout Asia. Among the conduits of the CIA money through these accounts to secret CIA proprietaries was a company—Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham & Wong—some of whose officers were serving CIA officers. This is a company whose 1983 IRS audit the CIA stopped. Vice President Madelyn Dunham, in charge of these very matters and hence necessarily "witting" (as they say at Langley), would have had to be more than a small cog in the machine. People do not rise to such stations from one day to the next. 
Again, if Madsen is correct, two photos belie the portrait of her husband Stanley Dunham, Barack's grandfather, whom young Barry called father, as an insignificant furniture salesman. 
One, in the early 1950s, shows Stanley with his daughter, Ann, wearing the insignia of Beirut's elite French language school, Notre Dame de Jamhour. Was the family ever in Lebanon? How did Dad get the sweater? U.S. government influence operations are a likelier explanation than the furniture business for any Lebanese connection in the 1950s. 

Eh ...

If I tried to make up a conspiracy theory about my own family background and the CIA, I could come up with a bunch of loose ends that Wayne Madsen would find persuasive, but don't add up to much.
Another photo, published in a Honolulu newspaper in 1959, shows Stanley Dunham escorted by uniformed U.S. Navy officers, greeting Barack Obama, Sr., as he arrived in Hawaii from Kenya. Because Obama was among 80 other Kenyans whom CIA had chosen for sojourns in the U.S. to influence them, it is logical that he and others like him would have been placed around the country in the hands of trusted handlers. The greeting photo suggests that Dunham may well have been one of these, and hence that the Kenyan did not meet Dunham's daughter, Ann, in a classroom. This would fit the chronology: Classes started on September 26. Ann was pregnant by early November. Obama was housed at the University of Hawaii's East-West Center facility funded by the Asia Foundation, itself funded by CIA. 
Anyone and everyone knew that Barack Obama, Sr., and others like him had been brought to America to be influenced. How big a part of his attractiveness to her, and hence how big a reason for the pregnancy that produced Barack, Jr., was the foreign affairs angle? The hagiographies, including A Singular Woman, suggest that foreign affairs were the farthest thing from her mind. Yet Ann's second child was born in a marriage to another such person at the East-West Center. The Indonesian government had sent Lolo Soetoro to the East-West Center as a "civilian employee of the Army."

In Indonesia and Kenya, the U.S. was not, initially implicated in trying to maintain European colonialism. The Truman administration had been unsympathetic to Holland's attempts to regain control of the Dutch East Indies after WWII. The Brits' anti-Mau-Mau campaign in Kenya in the 1950s was seen by Washington as their problem. With the coming of independence, the U.S. played a dual game of keeping Kenya out of the Soviet orbit and of trying to lessen British neo-colonial economic ties for the advantage of American business.
But when the shooting started, Soetoro went on active duty, it seems as a colonel. This was arguably the CIA's most significant covert operation, the replacement (between 1965 and 1967) of Indonesia's dictator Sukarno with the Suharto regime that lasted until 1999. Few people on the face of the earth did not realize how important a struggle this was. Suggesting as does A Singular Woman that a very intelligent, very married Ann Soetoro was innocent of and indifferent to the political implications of the struggle she was involved in is incredible. 
After the overthrow, Ann ran a "micro-financing" project, financed by the Ford Foundation, in Indonesia's most vulnerable areas. Supervising the funding at Ford in the late '60s was Peter Geithner, whose son would eventually serve hers as U.S. secretary of the treasury. In addition to the Ford Foundation, the list of her employers is a directory of America's official, semi-official, and clandestine organs of influence: the United States Information Agency, the United States Agency for International Development, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank. While running a project for five years in Pakistan, she lived in Lahore's Hilton International. 
Nothing small time, never mind hippyish. 
In sum, though the only evidence available is circumstantial, Barack Obama, Jr.'s mother, father, stepfather, grandmother, and grandfather seem to have been well connected, body and soul, with the U.S. government's then extensive and well-financed trans-public-private influence operations.

I would add that both Barack Obama Sr. and Lolo Soetoro worked, at some points, for U.S. oil companies operating in their home countries. 
In the 1950s and '60s few cared where, say, the State Department or foundations such as Ford ended and the CIA began. The leading members of the U.S. government's influence network moved easily from public to private stations and vice versa. Here are a few examples. Howard P. Jones, U.S. ambassador to Indonesia between 1958 and 1965—arguably the chief planner of the coup that removed the Sukarno regime—became chancellor of the University of Hawaii's East-West Center. Ann Dunham's second husband, Lolo Soetoro, returned from the East-West Center to Jakarta to help in the struggle that the coup had begun.


Dreams from My Father hints that Lolo was tormented by memories of what he had seen and done during his active service in the Army during the bloody post-coup purges, and that his subsequent alcoholism stemmed from that.
Another of Ann's employers, the Ford Foundation's international affairs division, was led by Stephen Cohen, who had come to Ford from the directorship of the International Association of Cultural Freedom, previously known as the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which organized countless left-leaning American academics into a corps (lavishly financed by the CIA) to promote social democracy around the world, and to staff many of the councils on foreign relations that spread around America in the 1950s. Among the participants were countless actual and future college presidents, including Richard C. Gilman, who ran Occidental when young Barack Obama enrolled there in 1979. In those years, any number of companies were CIA fronts, including Business International Corporation, which gave young Obama his first job after graduation from college. Perhaps these are only coicidences. More importantly, U.S. international corporations in general had countless officers who were proud cooperators with U.S. covert activities abroad. Any serious attempt to sketch this network would result in something like an x-ray of the American ruling class's skeleton. 
The point here is that this network was formed precisely to help the careers of kindred folk, while ruining those of others, and to move the requisite money and influence unaccountably, erasing evidence that it had done so. Exercising influence abroad on America's behalf—the network's founding purpose—never got in the way of playing a partisan role in American life and, of course, of taking care of its own. 
As I pointed out in my book Informing Statecraft (1992), when Congress first authorized the U.S. government's various influence activities abroad it worried loudly and mostly sincerely that these activities might "blow back" onto American political life: The U.S. government, so went the widely accepted argument, might have to say and do all sorts of things abroad, train and deploy any number of operatives in black arts on the whole country's behalf, knowing that these activities and operatives might well be distasteful to any number of Americans at home. Because the U.S. government must not take a partisan part in U.S. domestic life—so went the argument of an era more honest than our own—it must somehow isolate its foreign influence network from domestic life. But preventing blowback was destined to be a pious, futile wish, especially since many of those in the influence network were at least as interested in pressing their vision of social democracy on America as they were in doing it to other countries. 
Foremost among these was Cord Meyer, who ran CIA's covert activities in "international organizations" beginning in 1954. Between 1962 and 1975 he directed or supervised all CIA covert action. Meyer explained what he was about in his book Facing Reality (1980).
Meyer and his upscale CIA colleagues considered themselves family members of the domestic and international Left. They believed that America's competition with Soviet Communism was to be waged by, for, and among the Left. Their strategy was to fight the Soviet fire by lighting and feeding socio-political counter-fires as close to it as possible. This meant clandestinely giving money and every imaginable form of U.S. government support to persons as far to the political and cultural left as possible, so long as they were outside Soviet operational control. American leftists were best fit to influence their foreign counterparts this way. Paradigmatic was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which spawned and fed many "voluntary" organizations at home and abroad with U.S. influence and money. Its director, Michael Josselson, was so little distinguishable from the Communists, his leftism so anti-American, that the U.S. chapter of CCF disaffiliated in protest. Alas, CIA's fires eventually went out of control and singed American life. 

So, there's some fun stuff here, but it's not overwhelmingly persuasive. Still, it's quite reasonable to say that the milieu that the President emerged from was the pro-American international left that was looked favorably upon by CIA and other American establishment organs.

Similarly, I could make up a list of CIA or generally "deep state"-connected people I or my family had some relations with. It's quite an extensive list now that I think about it. For example, my wife's uncle, an Air Force colonel, spied in East Berlin during the Cold War. My wife has a cousin whose base is in suburban Virginia, but whose career takes her and her husband to extremely odd, but strategic locations around the world. It's understood that you don't ask them direct questions about where they work.

It doesn't really add up to a hill of beans in terms of direct causality. On the other hand, it does suggest a certain milieu I came from -- conservative military-industrial complex. Practically everybody I know with deep state ties is on the right wing side of the deep state. That is informative about me, about my predilections and loyalties, just as understanding that Obama came from a milieu with pervasive connections to the left-wing of the American deep state is informative about him.

And, Obama is a helluva lot more ambitious and manipulative than I am, so it seems plausible that he's gotten more out of his connections than I ever tried to do.

Once again, it's more realistic to look upon CIA less as the master conspiracists pulling the strings of intricate plots than as a big player in the international equivalent of the Municipal Favor Bank dramatized in The Wire and Bonfire of the Vanities.

As for Obama's domestic career after he left Business International, a sometimes CIA front, and moved to Chicago ... My guess is that this was something of a rebellion against the easy path open to him in the international sphere. His three years in Chicago's slums were disappointing to him so he got back into the elite sphere, applying to Harvard, Yale, and Stanford law schools (and no other). But he wanted to return to Chicago and become mayor, a job that exemplified "power," a word that comes up throughout Dreams. That proved unfeasible in 2000 when local black voters decided he wasn't black enough, leading to depression and the realization that his ambitiousness could be satisfied without having to prove his blackness to black voters. 

Still, if you asked a bunch of sophisticated CIA executives in 1961 like Meyer to mock up a model of who they'd like to see elected President in 2008 to maximize their legacy, they couldn't have come up with a more perfect protege for themselves than a thoroughly establishmentarian half-black whose family comes out of the international left. 

July 13, 2011

Of course, smoking all that crack didn't help

Foseti calls my attention to Matthew Yglesias's post that begins (actually, no kidding):
I had of course heard the Legend of Marion Barry before moving to Washington, DC, but something that’s been striking to observe since his return to the city council is the almost shockingly poor quality of his policy thinking, completely apart from any concerns about corruption or the like. 

Of course, self-parody is a possibility.

Expressive Philanthropy

Economist Arnold Kling write at EconLog:
In the non-profit sector, it is up to donors to provide discipline. But donors, I would argue, tend to be interested in expressive philanthropy rather than in results. ... I am inclined to think that with non-profits, you get what you pay for. With donors caring about expressing themselves, the non-profit industry is bound to evolve toward satisfying donors' desire for self-expression. That does not mean that it will produce no good results.

The concept of expressive philanthropy might help explain the vast trove piled up by the Southern Poverty Law Center (which is now over a quarter of a billion dollars) in its Cayman Island and other accounts. No matter how fast Mrs. Dees tries to spend the loot Mr. Dees hauls in (and she tries really hard, as these five dozen photos of the Dees's palace that poverty bought show), the money just keeps piling up. 

People give huge amounts of money to the SPLC to show how much they hate the Ku Klux Klan. (You can hardly expect the SPLC to explain to the rich rubes that the KKK barely exists anymore, except perhaps for informers hired by the FBI and SPLC.)

Who knows? Maybe all the random Third World knick-knacks that Mrs. Dees decorates their house with weren't bought by her. Maybe they are actually gifts that grateful people have given Morris over the years. I was at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley this week, which has this wonderful collection of the incredible stuff that other countries gave President Reagan on his state visits. "Dear President Reagan, Here is a hippopotamus carved from an elephant's tusk. Please don't drop bombs on us." 

But why would somebody give Morris Dees a luxury rickshaw to put by his pool? "Dear Mr. Dees, Here is an objet d'art made out of a ton of used horseshoes. Please don't sue us?" I dunno.

Or maybe they just really want to give him money and shiny crud to show how much they hate hate.

It's like that scene in Bad Teacher where the dweeby rich teacher played by Justin Timberlake, whom gold-digging Cameron Diaz is after, is chaperoning a field trip to Abe Lincoln's log cabin, and the thought of Honest Abe makes him rant for three minutes about how much he hates slavery, while Jason Segel's low rent gym teacher needles him by telling him that he, personally, hates sharks. From TheMovieSpoiler:
On the field trip, Cameron Diaz actually starts to realize what a politically-correct and zombified bore Justin Timberlake really is. He has no real opinion on anything, and just spouts platitudes that dominate conversation in public school teaching circles. In the Illinois state capitol, the students admire a statue of Abraham Lincoln, which prompts Timberlake to deliver remarks on how much he hates slavery, and would time travel so he could "get rid of slavery" before Lincoln if he could. Diaz looks at him like he's a fool, because clearly few alive would say they were fans of slavery...so his taking this totally noncontroversial and obvious position and being so emotional about it makes him seem ridiculous. Jason Segel gets it too, and mocks Timberlake (without him realizing it) by joining the conversation and saying, "You know what I really hate? Sharks!" Timberlake agrees that sharks are indeed awful, because they destroy families. Segel springs the trap and says, 'But, on the other hand, they are magnificent creatures of the deep. Majestic". Timberlake then follows form and admits to highly admiring the majesty of sharks. Diaz, very clearly, sees that Timberlake is programmed on an intrinsic DNA level to just regurgitate platitudes and take noncontroversial, agreeable stances on everything imaginable. She suspects, for the first time possibly, that she does not want a life with someone like this, no matter how deep his trust fund runs.

Somebody should start the Abraham Lincoln Log Cabin Center for the Hating of Slavery and Hate. He'd wind up as rich as Morris Dees.

"What did we learn, Palmer?"

Paul Sperry (whose book The Great American Bank Robbery is pretty good) writes in Investor's Business Daily:
Justice spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa said the anti-discrimination notice "does not compel the banks to make loans to people who do not qualify." She said such measures are "essential to remedy the harmful effects of the banks' conduct." 
But industry analysts fear Attorney General Eric Holder is rekindling an anti-bank witch hunt launched by Attorney General Janet Reno in the 1990s, when Holder served as her deputy. 
Some blame that in part for the subprime boom, because banks were ordered to throw open their lending windows to credit-poor minorities. That crackdown spurred the American Bankers Association to distribute to its thousands of members "fair-lend ing tool kits" advising the adoption of more permissive underwriting criteria to help inoculate them from prosecution. 
In the new prosecutions, Justice acknowledges in every case it did not prove charges of intentional discrimination, while banks have denied any wrongdoing. Many, in fact, earned outstanding ratings from anti-redlining regulators enforcing the Community Reinvestment Act. 
Istook calls Holder's crusade an "egregious overreach by the government." He says many of the targets are smaller banks without the resources to fight a protracted legal battle.
The House Judiciary Committee plans to investigate. 
"This is an expansion of the law," said a congressional investigator. "They're pushing the envelope as far as they can go in the enforcement of civil rights." 
As part of settlement deals, prosecutors have required banks to sign "nondisclosure agreements" barring them from talking about the methods used to allege discrimination. Bank lawyers contend the prosecutors are trying to hide the shaky legal grounds on which the cases are built. "It's horrible what they're doing at the civil rights division," said Reginald Brown, a partner at Wilmer Hale in Washington, who has represented banks in connection to recent race-bias investigations. "They don't have any proof, just theories." 
He added, "They want you to sign something saying you agree, under the condition of any settlement with them, that you won't disclose what their theories were. That's because their theories are loopy and wouldn't stand the light of day."


If Paul Krugman ever admitted this kind of thing played any role whatsoever in the Recent Economic Unpleasantness, Mrs. Krugman would have him sleeping on the couch for a month.

The title is a reference to the wonderful J.K. Simmons' last lines in Burn After Reading.

It's scary to think how much money Google would make if it didn't stink

Have you ever noticed how bad Google ads are? I get about 8,000 visits or more per day from a hard-to-reach audience of highly intelligent and influential readers, but the ads Google chooses to place in my right hand column are hilariously inapt. If I write about the scandal of lawyers who commit asylum fraud, I get ads from Google for lawyers offering to help you commit asylum fraud. If I write about Bill James's suggestion for prison reform, I get ads for "Save $ on prison calls." If I write about Racehorse Haynes's legal tactics, I get ads for bailbondsmen.

After all these years, Google hasn't bothered to learn one thing about what sells and what doesn't sell on my website. Everything is still triggered solely by keywords, not by a long demonstrated patterns. 

July 12, 2011

Rupert Murdoch and the forgotten Pellicano scandal

An excerpt from my new column in Taki's Magazine:
In outline, the current Rupert Murdoch brouhaha in London—powerful media figures are caught employing a private detective to wiretap—is strikingly similar to Hollywood’s 2002-2008 Anthony Pellicano affair, a seemingly juicy imbroglio that never never gained much traction here and has pretty much been forgotten.
As you may recall (if probably only vaguely), numerous stars and moguls, such as Brad Grey, CEO of Paramount Pictures since 2005, paid sleazeball detective Pellicano to dig up—by any means necessary—dirt they could use against less-powerful people.
... The contrasting public reactions to these scandals demonstrate national differences. Nobody cares about private eye Glenn Mulcaire; this scandal has always been intended to bring down Murdoch. In the Pellicano affair, however, the feds let the private dick take the rap for the moguls. 
Moreover, Mulcaire hacked voicemails to publish facts, while Pellicano taped phone calls to intimidate and silence. Pellicano’s modus operandi is in tune with the times here. Our mainstream press routinely colludes with publicists practicing “access journalism.” In return for an interview, journalists agree not to ask impertinent questions or they’ll never work in this town again. A century ago, American reporters tended to be cynical ne’er-do-wells. Today, journalists typically come from the same kind of nice families and nice colleges as the VIPs they gently cover. 
American society has grown increasingly credulous. Our last three presidents have come to office remarkably unknown.

Read the whole thing there, and find out the most famous employer of Anthony Pellicano.

The Fast and Furious Scandal

I haven't really been following the Obama Administration's Fast and Furious scandal, but this is from the LA Times:
Are high-profile suspects in Mexican drug cartels also paid informants for U.S. federal investigators? If so, could a brewing scandal in Washington implicate more U.S. agencies in the ongoing drug-related violence in Mexico? 
Kenneth Melson, the embattled chief of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), made the earth-shaking revelation in testimony early last week, The Times reports. Melson reportedly told congressional leaders that Mexican cartel suspects tracked by his agents in a controversial gun-tracing program were also operating as paid informants for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the FBI. 
The revelation is further complicating an already tangled scandal unfolding in Washington that ties U.S. weapons to the violent drug war in Mexico. The conflict has left about 40,000 dead in 4 1/2 years. In effect, the scandal also points to a deeper involvement of the U.S. government in Mexico's drug war than the public has previously known or suspected.

The Fast and Furious scandal may perhaps be related to the Obama Administration looking to gin up a politically correct set of bad guys to blame for Mexican violence. If Mexican narco-cartels are obtaining guns in the U.S., they're probably mostly using immigrants and Mexican-Americans as their conduits, but that's not the kind of thing we're supposed to think about. Diversity is good!

But that gets me thinking about a more general topic: Mexico is to the U.S. as Afghanistan is to Pakistan. Nobody is surprised to find out that Pakistan's ISI spy agency pulls a lot of strings in Afghanistan.

Does the U.S. pull a lot of strings in Mexico the way Pakistan does in Afghanistan?

You know, that's an interesting question. What's even more interesting is that I've never heard anyone ask it before.

My guess would be "not really," but what do I know? Nobody in America pays much attention to Mexico.

Well, not exactly nobody. The Bush family, for one, has long paid close attention to Mexico.

Now that I think about it, it seems to me that you could write a Secret History of the Three Bush Administrations that could provide a coherent tale that the central plan of the Bushes, father and son, was to unify North America, economically and politically, under Washington's hegemony.

George H.W. Bush, owner of Zapata Oil was doing business, illegally (through a Mexican cutout who went on to be head of Pemex and then to jail for corruption), in Mexico from earlier than a half century ago. His son Jeb married a Mexican girl.

Look at it from GHW Bush's point of view coming into office in 1989. G.H.W. Bush is often derided as an "in-box President" who didn't have big ambitions like Reagan, but who felt up to dealing with events, like Iraq seizing Kuwait.

But I suspect that understates GHWB's strategic vision, which was directed at a place that nobody in New York or Washington cares much about, but is highly relevant to the business and political leadership of Texas: Mexico. Bush probably felt that Mexico should be a highly profitable country for American business.

But ever since the overthrow of dictator Porfirio Diaz in 1911, the government of Mexico has been overtly anti-American (e.g., the Plan of San Diego of 1915 or the Zimmerman Telegram of 1917). This reigning philosophy of anti-Americanism helped Mexico avoid being a banana republic minion of Washington like poor Honduras. But, it came with costs, especially for American companies, but also for Mexicans. Much of the Mexican economy was locked up in stodgy government owned monopolies. Nobody in Mexico could do much in the way of offshore oil drilling the way GHWB's Zapata could, but he had to hire a Mexican frontman, Jorge Diaz Serrano (who later became head of Pemex and then was one of the three symbols of 1970s corruption sent to prison by the new President who came in in 1982.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, President Salinas of Mexico decided to get very cozy with President Bush. He sold off many of the government-owned businesses to insiders and allies (this is the source of the fortune that made Carlos Slim the world's richest man). And they negotiated NAFTA.

But the Mexican public wouldn't let the politicians sell off the crown jewel, Pemex, the national oil monopoly, which long remained lusted-after by the Bush coterie. GHWB's Commerce Secretary Robert Mossberger said his dream job was CEO of Pemex.

The second Bush concentrated more on integrating the two countries' labor markets, with perhaps a hazy view toward eventual political integration of some sort under Jeb's half-Mexican son George P. Bush.

Inbreeding's ins-and-outs

Now that a man can marry a man, schismatic Mormons are asking: why can't a man marry two women? And Muslims are asking: why can't can't a man marry his first cousin? And Hindus from southern India are asking: why can't a man marry his niece?

In-breeding appealed to political and economic dynasts, such as the Habsburgs and Rothschilds, because it doesn't dissipate family assets to too many heirs.

The Habsburg dynasty that reigned over much of Europe from the late medieval period to the last days of WWI is notorious today for the inbreeding that beset Charles II, the Habsburg king of Spain from 1665-1700. Wikipedia explains:
Charles was born in Madrid, the only surviving son of his predecessor, King Philip IV of Spain and his second Queen (and niece), Mariana of Austria, another Habsburg. His birth was greeted with joy by the Spanish, who feared the disputed succession which could have ensued if Philip IV had left no male heir.
17th century European noble culture commonly matched cousin to first cousin and uncle to niece, to preserve a prosperous family's properties. Charles's own immediate pedigree was exceptionally populated with nieces giving birth to children of their uncles: Charles's mother was a niece of Charles's father, being a daughter of Maria Anna of Spain (1606–46) and Emperor Ferdinand III. Thus, Empress Maria Anna was simultaneously his aunt and grandmother and Margarita of Austria was both his grandmother and great-grandmother.[1] This inbreeding had given many in the family hereditary weaknesses. That Habsburg generation was more prone to still-births than were peasants in Spanish villages.[2] 
There was also insanity in Charles's family; his great-great-great(-great-great, depending along which lineage one counts) grandmother, Joanna of Castile ("Joanna the Mad"; however, the degree to which her "madness" was induced by circumstances of her confinement and political intrigues targeting her is debated), mother of the Spanish King Charles I (who was also Holy Roman Emperor Charles V) became insane early in life. Joanna was two of Charles' 16 great-great-great-grandmothers, six of his 32 great-great-great-great-grandmothers, and six of his 64 great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers.

(Here's my my movie review of the Spanish biopic Juana la Loca.)
Dating to approximately the year 1550, outbreeding in Charles II's lineage had ceased (see also pedigree collapse). From then on, all his ancestors were in one way or another descendants of Joanna the Mad and Philip I of Castile, and among these just the royal houses of Spain, Austria and Bavaria. Charles II's genome was actually more homozygous than that of an average child whose parents are siblings.[2] He was born physically and mentally disabled, and disfigured. Possibly through affliction with mandibular prognathism, he was unable to chew. His tongue was so large that his speech could barely be understood, and he frequently drooled. It has been suggested that he suffered from the endocrine disease acromegaly,[3] or his inbred lineage may have led to a combination of rare genetic disorders such as combined pituitary hormone deficiency and distal renal tubular acidosis.[2] 
Consequently, Charles II is known in Spanish history as El Hechizado ("The Hexed") from the popular belief – to which Charles himself subscribed – that his physical and mental disabilities were caused by "sorcery." The king went so far as to be exorcised.

Charles II died without issue at age 38, which set off a crisis in Europe's balance of power. His will named as king of Spain a relative who was also the grandson of King Louis XIV of France. Britain objected to the union of France and Spain under the Bourbons. In the ensuing War of the Spanish Succession, John Churchill became Duke of Marlborough for winning the Battle of Blenheim. (His descendant Winston Churchill wrote a six volume biography of his ancestor.)

So, the Habsburgs were genetically doomed forever by inbreeding, right? 

Well, on July 4, 2011 died Franz Joseph Otto Robert Maria Anton Karl Max Heinrich Sixtus Xavier Felix Renatus Ludwig Gaetan Pius Ignatius von Habsburg , crown prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from 1916-18, who lived a model of a healthy, useful life, died at age 98. He stood against Hitler and Stalin, turned down the throne of Spain and recommended Juan Carlos instead, and served in the European Union parliament for decades. Otto von Habsburg was, by political inclination, ancestry, and family trade, a pan-Europeanist. His ancestor Charles V had ruled over more of Europe (and ruled rather conscientiously) than any man between Charlemagne and Napoleon.

Otto von Habsburg's last great contribution to European unity was cosponsoring the Pan-European Picnic on August 19, 1989 on the Austrian-Hungarian border, where the Soviet Empire sprang a terminal leak. By pre-arrangement with Hungarian authorities, the border gate in what we call "the Berlin Wall" (but which was actually 1800 miles long, running from the Baltic to the Aegean) was opened for three hours during Otto's picnic. Hundreds of East German tourists left the Warsaw Pact countries to join relatives in West Germany. 

A few weeks after this genial occasion, the Hungarians decided to make it permanent and stopped stopping East Germans tourists from leaving Hungary for the West. Because there was no serious border control within the Warsaw Pact, a leak anywhere could eventually drain the Soviet Empire of its most valuable inmates. Eventually, the East Berlin authorities gave in on November 9, 1989 and told the wall guards to stop guarding.

Archduke von Habsburg was also a pundit whom I regularly read forty years ago. Charles A. Coulombe writes in Taki's Magazine in Death of an Imperial Pen Pal:
The San Fernando Valley in the 1970s was a very dull place. Hot and dusty, filled with lackluster architectural construction thrown together during the postwar housing boom, it was the last place I wanted to be. 
Back in those far-off days, the LA Archdiocese’s paper, The Tidings, ran a column by the Archduke Otto von Habsburg, son of Austria-Hungary’s last Emperor-King.

I read him, too. The Tidings' other columnist back when I was 12 was the almost as cosmopolitan Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. We got a quality dose of high-brow Mittel-Europa punditry in the San Fernando Valley

The solution to the genetic woes of inbreeding is to stop inbreeding. Even a modest level of non-inbreeding quickly solves problems like sterility.

Otto, who stopped appearing in public after the death of his wife, Regina, last year, is survived by his younger brother, Felix, as well as 7 children, 22 grandchildren and 2 great-grandchildren. 

You can do some interesting calculations about average fertility per generation using the last paragraph in the obituaries of prominent people (although one caveat is that the obituaries give survivors, not total descendants). It would be interesting to build a model to predict the number of surviving descendants by generation of, say, people important enough to get their obituaries in the New York Times. Use as factors: date of birth, age at death, sex, career, number of marriages, etc. 

Take the Archduke as an example. So, among his survivors, Otto had 7 children and an average of 3.14 surviving grandchildren per surviving child. But his 22 grandchildren have only 2 surviving great-grandchildren, so far, or 0.09 on average. 

Talk about pedigree collapse.

The Economics of Eldorado

With polygamy back in the news with some breakaway Mormon fundamentalists suing under the same logic as gay marriage, you might be interested in The Economics of Eldorado, a 2008 post I wrote on the how the leaders of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints can afford to have all those wives in that huge compound in Eldorado, Texas where the state seized 437 children:
If you ask most guys, they'll tell you that having one wife is expensive. So, how do you have a community based on having a bunch of wives?

Read the whole thing there.

Polygamists sue using gay marriage logic

From the NYT:
Polygamist, Under Scrutiny in Utah, Plans Suit to Challenge Law 
By JOHN SCHWARTZ 
Kody Brown is a proud polygamist, and a relatively famous one. Now Mr. Brown, his four wives and 16 children and stepchildren are going to court to keep from being punished for it. 
The family is the focus of a reality TV show, “Sister Wives,” that first appeared in 2010. Law enforcement officials in the Browns’ home state, Utah, announced soon after the show began that the family was under investigation for violating the state law prohibiting polygamy. 
On Wednesday, the Browns are expected to file a lawsuit to challenge the polygamy law. 
The lawsuit is not demanding that states recognize polygamous marriage. Instead, the lawsuit builds on a 2003 United States Supreme Court decision, Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down state sodomy laws as unconstitutional intrusions on the “intimate conduct” of consenting adults. It will ask the federal courts to tell states that they cannot punish polygamists for their own “intimate conduct” so long as they are not breaking other laws, like those regarding child abuse, incest or seeking multiple marriage licenses. 
Mr. Brown has a civil marriage with only one of his wives; the rest are “sister wives,” not formally wedded.

Are these "sister wives" actual sisters? That's the kind of thing I find interesting, but nobody else seems to wonder about...
The Browns are members of the Apostolic United Brethren Church, a fundamentalist offshoot of the Mormon Church, which gave up polygamy around 1890 as Utah was seeking statehood.
Making polygamous unions illegal, they argue, violates the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment, as well as the free exercise, establishment, free speech and freedom of association clauses of the First Amendment. 
“We only wish to live our private lives according to our beliefs,” Mr. Brown said in a statement provided by his lead attorney, Jonathan Turley, who is a law professor at George Washington University. 
The connection with Lawrence v. Texas, a case that broadened legal rights for gay people, is sensitive for those who have sought the right of same-sex marriage. Opponents of such unions often refer to polygamy as one of the all-but-inevitable outcomes of allowing same-sex marriage.  
Such arguments, often referred to as the “parade of horribles,” are logically flawed, said Jennifer C. Pizer, a professor at the law school at the University of California, Los Angeles, and legal director for the school’s Williams Institute, which focuses on sexual orientation law.
The questions surrounding whether same-sex couples should be allowed to marry are significantly different from those involved in criminal prosecution of multiple marriages, Ms. Pizer noted. Same-sex couples are seeking merely to participate in the existing system of family law for married couples, she said, while “you’d have to restructure the family law system in a pretty fundamental way” to recognize polygamy.

Huh? Professor Pizer, there are a whole bunch of Muslims who want to have a word with you about which has been around longer: polygamy or gay marriage.

Well, okay, what Prof. Pizer said didn't make much sense, but let me explain what she really meant: Here's the simple logic behind today's conventional wisdom about who should have family law fundamentally restructured on their behalf and who shouldn't:

Gays are good, so they should get whatever they want.
Fundamentalist Mormon wackos are bad, so they shouldn't. 

And that's all you need to know. The rest is just an exercise in legalistic rationalization of the basic who / whom distinction of gays good / Mormons bad.

That logic will stand to keep polygamy banned as long as it's just blond Mormons doing the suing. But, at some point, say, two immigrants from Guinea here on fraudulent asylum visas will sue for a third spousal visa to import a third spouse into their polygamous marital union. If they are all gay black immigrant HIV+ men who are members of a [long-awaited] progressive gay-friendly Muslim sect and they want immigration laws changed to recognize their culture's ancient history of gay polygamy (just wait for the scholarly books), well, then they've got what will, over a few decades, turn into an obvious slam dunk case. I can't predict exactly which legal rationalizations will be trotted out in that kind of case, but it's only a matter of time.
The Supreme Court supported the power of states to restrict polygamy in an 1879 case, Reynolds v. United States. Professor Turley suggests that the fundamental reasoning of Reynolds, which said polygamy “fetters the people in stationary despotism,” is outdated and has been swept away by cases like Lawrence.
Douglas Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine University, said today’s courts might not agree with the sweeping societal conclusions of the 19th-century courts, but noted that more attention has been paid in recent decades to the importance of internal family issues as part of the public policy sphere. Questions of child abuse and spousal domination, he said, could figure into a judicial examination of polygamy. 
“We’re more sensitive to the fact that a household can be quite repressive,” he said, and so reservations about polygamy “might be even more profound.”

Nobody ever mentions the leftover men problem with polygamy. We're only supposed to worry about the harms polygamy causes to women, not to men. (Here's my 2002 article on "The Problem with Polygamy.")
Professor Turley disagreed, noting that “there are many religious practices in monogamous families that many believe as obnoxious and patriarchal,” and added, “The criminal code is not a license for social engineering.”

July 11, 2011

Asylum Fraud

From the New York Times:
Immigrants May Be Fed False Stories to Bolster Asylum Pleas

Note the passive voice -- It's not their fault, it's that those poor immigrants are being fed false stories.
By SAM DOLNICK 
The man caught on the wiretap urged his immigrant client to fabricate a tragic past if he wanted asylum in the United States. To say that he was a victim of political repression in Albania. Or police brutality. Or even a blood feud. 
“Maybe you had to leave because someone threatened to kill you,” the man suggested. “Because of something that your father did to somebody else or something to do with the land. You understand? That can be a way to get asylum.”

It's easier to get let into the U.S. legally if you or your loved ones have done something back home that makes your fellow countrymen want to kill you. Emphasize to the U.S. government official how much you are loathed by many of the people who have gotten to know you. What could be better for the citizens of the United States than to import people involved in blood feuds in Albania? If you are some Albanian who minds his own business and stays away from crime and murder, well, good luck in Senator Kennedy's diversity lottery. But, if you are some Albanian that other Albanians want to kill, well, come on over!
Often enough, it is. A shadowy industry dedicated to asylum fraud thrives in New York, where many of the country’s asylum claims are filed. Immigrants peddle personal accounts ripped from international headlines, con artists prey on the newly arrived and nonlawyers offer misguided advice. 

Ah, the poor passive victim immigrants, getting preyed on by nonlawyers who offer misguided advice on how to con the system so that they get asylum.
The revelation that the West African hotel housekeeper who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault apparently lied on her asylum application has focused new attention on the use of these schemes.
The embellished stories go in and out of fashion along with the news of the day, reflecting turmoil in nations around the globe, lawyers say. 
West Africans claim genital mutilation or harm from the latest political violence. Albanians and immigrants from other Balkan countries claim they fear ethnic cleansing. Chinese invoke the one-child policy or persecution of Christians, Venezuelans cite their opposition to the ruling party, and Russians describe attacks against gay people.

Oh, for heaven's sake, can't gay people in Russia go to Google and type in the Russian equivalent of "gay Russia"? In English, I get:
About 102,000,000 results (0.14 seconds) 

Dear Russian gays: Go look up a gay neighborhood in Moscow or St. Petersburg and move there.

Dolnick continues:
Of course, thousands of those claims are legitimate. But each cataclysm provides convenient cover stories for immigrants desperate to settle here for other reasons, forcing authorities to make high-stakes decisions based on the “demeanor, candor or responsiveness” of the applicant.

In other words, the asylum process selects for people with con-man skills.
... Amadou Diallo, the street vendor from Guinea who was shot 41 times by New York police officers in 1999, came from a well-off, stable family. But he told immigration authorities that he was from nearby Mauritania, and that his parents had been killed in that country’s conflict.

How closely related were Amadou Diallo, whose relatives won a $3 million settlement from the NYPD and whose relatives to the U.S. was sponsored by Rep. Charles Rangel, and DSK's accuser, Nafissatou Diallo? How closely related were either to Cellou Dalein Diallo, who was prime minister of Guinea from 2004 to 2006? (It's a common name.)
It was not true, but he was granted asylum. The scheme was revealed after his death. 
Every immigrant neighborhood has businesses that guide newcomers — many of them here illegally — through the complicated process of gaining legal status. Sometimes that means claiming asylum in immigration court, one of several ways to receive it. ... 
“Often, the applicant is misled by various actors with a story that is much more compelling,” said Claudia Slovinksy, a longtime immigration lawyer. “Weren’t they soldiers? Wasn’t it a gang rape?”

More passive voice ...
Whether here legally or illegally, immigrants can apply for asylum within one year of arriving. To qualify, they must show a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group — which could cover gays or abused women.

How about nerds and geeks? If you are some foreigner who got bullied in fourth grade by the big boys, doesn't that grant you a right to live in America forever? Why the discrimination against the neurodiverse?
Immigration courts across the country granted 51 percent of asylum claims last year, government statistics show. Such courts in New York City, which heard more cases than in any other city, approved 76 percent, among the highest rate in the nation. 
Because many claims are based on events that occurred in countries in disarray, with evidence hard to collect, judges have to make decisions based on intuition. 
“A true refugee does not have a note from their dictator,” said Judge Dana Marks, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, paraphrasing a legal aphorism. She said many judges erred on the side of caution. “The mistake of granting a fraudulent asylum case is far less disastrous than denying a genuine one,” she said.

Huh? Have you thought about that for more than 3 seconds, Judge Marks. For example, letting Ms. Diallo stay in America has led to America being humiliated in the eyes of France and the world.
The Manhattan lawyer peddling Albanian blood feuds, James Christo, who was caught on a wiretap, is one of the few people who have been prosecuted recently for helping immigrants commit fraud.

The real crimes are A) Few have been prosecuted; B) Claiming to be involved in an Albanian blood feud is seen as a plus by our immigration bureaucrats.

July 10, 2011

Bill James's prison reform idea

The baseball statistics analyst Bill James writes in his new book Popular Crime:
Build smaller prisons. 
... Large prisons become "violentocracies" -- places ruled by violence and by the threat of violence. In a violentocracy, the most violent people rise to the top.  
In any prison of any size, the prisoners are going to be pushed toward the level of the most violent persons in the facility. ... In a prison 3,000 people, the entire prison is pushed toward the level of violence created by the five most violent people in the joint. The most violent person finds the second-most violent person and the third-most violent person, and they form an alliance to exploit the weak. Everyone else is compelled to avoid looking weak. ... 
Large prisons promote paranoia in the prisoners. You never know who in here is waiting for you with a homemade knife.  
... A prison of 20 people is, by its very nature, extremely different. You know who is in there with you; you know who you have to stay away from. ... Plus, if you have many small prisons, you can contain the violent people in a limited number of those prisons, the preventing their violent tendencies from infecting the rest of the prison population.  
... What you would do, with a network of small prisons, would be to place each prisoner in a facility that is appropriate to the threat that he represents. You grade the prisoners on the threat of violence that they represent, one through ten. You put the tens with the tens and the ones with the ones.  
Plus, when you move to a system in which some prisoners have more rights and live in more humane conditions, you create a powerful incentive to get into one of the less restrictive prisons..  
In a large and horrible prison, the new prisoner thinks "I've got to show everybody here how tough and vicious I really am, so that nobody will mess with me." But when you put a new prisoner in a 24-man prison with 23 other tought guys, and he knows that there are other prisons that are not like this, his natural thought is "I've got to get out of here. I've got to show these people that I am not a crazy, vicious sociopath, so they will move me to some other facility that is not populated by crazy, vicious sociopaths."

My vague impression is that some of the supersoft Norwegian prisons you read about are actually reward prisons for good behavior on the part of inmates at tougher prisons. Scandinavians aren't stupid, and there is a lot Americans should learn from them, but we have to grasp how their entire systems work, not just the parts they like to show off as evidence of their superior enlightenment.

Convergence between America and Mexico

In my new VDARE.com column, I analyze a recent feature package in the New York Times centering on Damien Cave's article: Better Lives for Mexicans Cut Allure of Going North.
The essential concept that evades the mental grasp of Damien Cave and the NYT’s editors: convergence. 
Mexico has indeed been—very slowly—becoming more like the U.S. 
For example, Walmart, a firm that clawed its way out of the Ozarks by being ruthlessly efficient, now operates 1,773 stores in Mexico and Central America. Walmart bans even the normal American corporate etiquette of salesmen taking buyers out to lunch. So its stern morality is likely teaching Mexico’s traditional culture of corruption some much-needed lessons. 
But, just as the temperature inside your house in July or January will eventually converge with the unpleasant temperature outside if you leave your doors open (unless you spend ever more on air conditioning or heating), decades of mass immigration from Mexico mean that America is also converging on Mexico: poorly-paid, underemployed, economically unequal, educationally unmotivated, and oligarchical. 
Not surprisingly, the more America becomes like Mexico economically, the less attractive of a destination it is to Mexicans. 
Another lesson to be learned from the theory of convergence: while you could, at vast expense, air condition a few feet of your porch by keeping your windows open, you can’t cool off the whole world. 
The global population will hit seven billion next spring. The U.N. predicts ten billion by 2100. It forecasts that Mexico’s southern neighbor, Guatemala, will grow from five million in 1970 to 46 million in 89 years. 
These billions of people are going to have to solve their own problems. We can’t do it for them by letting them into America.

Read the whole thing there.

July 9, 2011

Unstoppable Mexican political juggernaut somehow derailed by apathy again

From the LA Times article on the complete flop of plans to boycott Tuesday's baseball All-Star Game in Arizona to protest SB1070:
Shortly after Arizona lawmakers passed SB 1070, a number of All-Star-caliber players promised to boycott the game if it were held in Arizona. Among the most prominent was Adrian Gonzalez, who was born in San Diego and grew up in Tijuana. Last year, Gonzalez, then playing for the Padres, called the law "immoral" and a violation of human rights that "goes against what this country is built on." 
But recently Gonzalez, who as a member of the Boston Red Sox was voted into the American League's starting lineup at first base, said he was "not big into politics" and that he intended to play in Phoenix.

The Moneyballization of college admissions

Steve Hsu points to an article from Chronicle of Higher Education on how college admissions departments are, like baseball teams in the 1990s and basketball teams in the 2000s, increasingly hiring quants to statistically manage the admissions process. 
Those Tweedy Old Admissions Deans? They're All Business Now 
A profession that once relied on anecdotes and descriptive data now runs on complex statistical analyses and market research. Knowing how to decipher enrollment outcomes is a given; knowing how to forecast the future is a must. Which students are most likely to apply, submit deposits, and matriculate? At what cost to the college? How likely will they be to graduate? Such questions echo in the modern enrollment office, which is often supported by one or more institutional researchers, as well as consulting firms that sell recruitment strategies in various flavors. 
Search the job listings for top-level admissions and enrollment openings, and you will find that many colleges seek a "data-driven" leader, someone who will develop "data-informed" strategies. This past winter, for instance, Pomona College, in California, began a national search to replace Bruce J. Poch, who had stepped down after 23 years as vice president and dean of admissions. Among the qualifications listed in the job advertisement: "an ability to analyze and use data to guide decision-making and measure results." 
David W. Oxtoby, Pomona's president, led the college's search committee. The modern admissions dean, he says, must have a "technical, quantitative facility," the ability to delve into the relationship between a student's SAT score and her subsequent performance in college, or why some kinds of students are more likely to enroll than others. Moreover, Pomona had decided to merge its admissions and financial-aid offices (a change many colleges have made already). So the new dean would need to speak the language of costs.

Poch was the one admissions professional I've met who really impressed me. The lower levels of the business are full of nice young ladies (a large fraction middle class black) and nice young gay guys who couldn't get better jobs, but Poch definitely seemed like The Brains Behind the Operation. 

And clearly there are some brains somewhere, because American prestige education has been one of the big success stories of the last generation, at least at maintaining and enhancing its prestige. Granted, this is awfully easy to do in a business driven by brand names where the older the brand name the better, but only a handful of colleges in recent decades have screwed up so badly that they've fallen notably in prestige.

Digression Alert: I also once spoke on the phone to Poch's boss, David Oxtoby, now the president of Pomona college. Around 1990 in Chicago, I lived in a six-flat that had "The Oxtoby, 1923" carved over the front door. One day I started wondering who or what an Oxtoby was. So, I looked in the Chicago phone book (remember phone books?) and there was only one Oxtoby in Chicago: David Oxtoby, Hyde Park. So, I called the number and a man with superb diction, like a college president's speaking voice, answered. I asked him if his family had built The Oxtoby. He said no, but he kindly gave me a full, scholarly etymology of the name Oxtoby (it means oxen-go-by, kind of like "Oxford" is where the oxen forded the river). 

I never asked Mr. Oxtoby what he did, but I wasn't surprised to read in the newspaper years later that this Hyde Park resident with distinguished diction had been appointed president of a famous liberal arts college.

Being a college president is a tough job. Basically, you need to be Angelo Mozilo on the inside, a pushy Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross-style salesman always always asking for a donation. On the outside, though, you need to come across like Mr. Chips, an unworldly scholar who makes guys who've made a pile of money in real estate or metal bending (and their wives) feel classy by associating with you and giving you money. Elegant diction helps.
Pomona interviewed a dozen candidates before hiring Seth Allen, dean of admission and financial aid at Grinnell College, in Iowa. Soon to occupy one of the premier jobs in admissions, Mr. Allen, 43, represents the next generation of enrollment chiefs. They've ascended during an era of high competition, learning how to market their colleges and massage the metrics that define success in admissions. 
Although idealism may inform their work, they are clear-eyed realists. They are not introverts, for they must collaborate constantly with faculty members and other campus offices. They are diplomats who must manage competing desires: those of administrators who want to enroll more first-generation and low-income applicants, professors who want more students with high SAT scores, trustees who want to lower the tuition-discount rate. "Twenty years ago," Mr. Allen says, "there were not as many wants." 
Drawn to statistics at an early age, Mr. Allen earned a bachelor's degree in economics at the Johns Hopkins University in 1990. He first worked as an admissions counselor for his alma mater, a cutting-edge laboratory in the then-burgeoning science of enrollment management. Mr. Allen learned how predictive modeling could project net tuition revenue, how many biology majors would enroll, and a hundred other outcomes. 
Later Mr. Allen became the university's director of enrollment planning, research, and technology, a title that captured the profession's increasing sophistication. While most colleges were still operating in a pen-and-paper world, he helped create the university's first online admissions application. 
In the 1990s, selective institutions intensified their recruitment of prospective students, and Dickinson College was no exception. As dean of admissions at the Pennsylvania college, Mr. Allen oversaw a surge in applications that enabled it to become increasingly selective. Average SAT scores rose, as did enrollments of minority students.

Dickinson did two smart things. One, it made submitting SAT/ACT scores optional but reported to USN&WR the scores not of all freshmen but just those who felt like submitting their scores. So, it could let in more rich dumb kids and the like without taking a hit in the USNW&R rankings. Also, Dickinson appears to have a policy that any time a reporter, especially one from the New York Times, needs a quote about college admissions, a high-ranking Dickinson official will supply one at any hour of the day or night.

What's not mentioned in this rather starry-eyed article is that holy grail of admission moneyballers: alumni donations. Which type of applicant is most likely to donate the most to his alma mater? As far as I can tell, the big givers tend to be whites and males and legacies and jocks -- i.e., basically, the same kind of people they were most likely to admit back in the Bad Old Days. Ironies abound.

Moneyball turned out not to be a very big deal in baseball. A few underdogs did a little better for awhile, but ultimately the Yankees wound up back on top. I doubt if better statistical analyses of college applicants will change much in the visible world. When all the dust settles, Harvard will still be on top. But it would be very interesting to read those confidential analyses.

Have any college admissions moneyball stats ever been released to the public?

I like baseball statistics a lot, but the amount of public brainpower devoted to analyzing baseball statistics in contrast to real world statistics is striking. Brad Pitt is starring in Moneyball this year, but I've never even seen an economic professor's paper on the topic of what kind of college applicants give the best financial return to the college. These analyses exist, and I bet ambitious parents in Seoul are reading some of them translated into Korean right now, but Americans don't seem very interested in the topic.

Gov. Jerry Brown sides with BAMN

From the LA Times:
Gov. Jerry Brown in Friday added his voice in support of a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of California’s ban on racial affirmative action in public university admissions. 
In a legal brief, Brown said that minorities face too high a barrier in efforts to overturn Proposition 209, which voters approved in 1996, because it is part of the state Constitution and not just a law or university policy. In addition, he noted a 2003 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that said race could be considered in state college admissions if it did not involve quotas or carry predetermined weight in decisions. 
Last week, a federal appeals court struck down Michigan's ban on considering race and gender in college admissions, but that matter is expected to continue up the court ladder and does not affect California. A similar case seeking to overturn California’s Prop. 209 is in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the ban in 1997. 
George Washington, a Detroit-based attorney arguing against the affirmative action bans in both states, said Friday that he was heartened by Brown’s opinion and that it would help the case. “It is very, very important,” he said of the governor's action.