August 1, 2011

The Norwegian terrorist

I've got a 4,000-word article up at American Conservative on Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist. I think you'll find that it explains more about this whole horrible event than you'll find elsewhere. First, here are a few random observations:
Breivik, a smug egomaniac who boasts, “I have an extremely strong psyche (stronger than anyone I have ever known),” looks rather like a 1975 Chevy Chase signing off from Weekend Update on “Saturday Night Live” with the catchphrase, “I’m Chevy Chase … and you’re not.” ...
Breivik’s weightlifting and narcissism—“I’m in the middle of another steroid cycle at the moment … I have a more or less perfect body”—call to mind Yukio Mishima, the bisexual militarist novelist and bodybuilder who attempted to overthrow Japanese democracy in 1970. Mishima then committed ritual seppuku, stabbing himself and having an acolyte behead him. (But notice the “more or less” in Breivik’s boast; Breivik is always tempted by the Norwegian urge to try to appear reasonable.)
The Norwegian killer’s assault is reminiscent of the 1997 shootout in North Hollywood, in which two steroid-using, body-armor-wearing bankrobbers fired 1,101 rounds of ammunition at the LAPD. At the time, they were assumed to be the first of an inevitable wave of unstoppable Terminator-like criminals. Fortunately, 14 years later, they remain the American high-water mark for criminals who could have appeared in a Michael Mann movie like “Heat.” Hopefully, Breivik will remain an outlier.

And here's a summary of my main argument in Breivik’s Brain: The Norwegian killer is no Christian fundamentalist but a right-wing imitator of Marx and Lenin:
Among terrorist monsters, Breivik is perhaps the most lucid since the Unabomber, whom he plagiarizes in the 1516 page “compendium” he posted online just before his crimes. So I undertook the unpleasant task of trying to understand what motivates him. Is he a Christian fundamentalist fanatic, as has been widely assumed by the U.S. press? Or is there something else going on here that won’t make sense from an American perspective? 
Having thought about this rotten person longer than I’ve wanted, I have finally grasped that Breivik only makes sense when viewed on his own terms, which are those of the bloody history of continental European ideology. Breivik, I’ve come to realize, is a Marxist heretic. 
Breivik’s hundreds of pages of planning 72 years of conflict in his manifesto 2083: A European Declaration of Independence reflects a Marx-like confidence in his own science of history. His turn to terrorism to begin the recruitment of a revolutionary vanguard is reminiscent of the urge of the first major Marxist heretic, Lenin, to hurry history along with violence. Like the second world-historical Marxist heretic, Mussolini, who substituted for Marx’s emphasis on class his own emphasis on nation, Breivik wants to substitute “culture.” He argues that white leaders influenced the Frankfurt School of “cultural Marxism” import Muslims to deconstruct the indigenous conservative culture they hate. In response, he will set off an (oxymoronic) “conservative revolution.”

Read the whole thing (there's lots more) there.

America's decade in Afghanistan pays off

From the New York Times, a story about a Romeo and Juliet in Herat, Afghanistan:
This month, a group of men spotted the couple riding together in a car, yanked them into the road and began to interrogate the boy and girl. Why were they together? What right had they? An angry crowd of 300 surged around them, calling them adulterers and demanding that they be stoned to death or hanged. 
When security forces swooped in and rescued the couple, the mob’s anger exploded. They overwhelmed the local police, set fire to cars and stormed a police station six miles from the center of Herat, raising questions about the strength of law in a corner of western Afghanistan and in one of the first cities that has made the formal transition to Afghan-led security. 
The riot, which lasted for hours, ended with one man dead, a police station charred and the two teenagers, Halima Mohammedi and her boyfriend, Rafi Mohammed, confined to juvenile prison. Officially, their fates lie in the hands of an unsteady legal system. But they face harsher judgments of family and community. 
Ms. Mohammedi’s uncle visited her in jail to say she had shamed the family, and promised that they would kill her once she was released. Her father, an illiterate laborer who works in Iran, sorrowfully concurred. He cried during two visits to the jail, saying almost nothing to his daughter. Blood, he said, was perhaps the only way out. 
“What we would ask is that the government should kill both of them,” said the father, Kher Mohammed. ....
Family members of the man killed in the riot sent word to Ms. Mohammedi that she bears the blame for his death. But they offered her an out: Marry one of their other sons, and her debt would be paid.



Do Hispanic leaders have followers?

We constantly read articles in which Hispanic leaders, such as the head of the National Council of La Raza, threaten that any politician who takes a stand against illegal immigration will be buried at the polls. But do these media-acclaimed Hispanic prophets have all that many disciples?

From my new VDARE column:
In a Pew Hispanic Center survey in late summer 2010, 1,375 Hispanics were asked an unprompted question: “In your opinion, who is the most important Hispanic / Latino leader in the country today?” 
The landslide winner: “Don’t know,” with 64 percent. 
The runner-up: “No one,” with ten percent 
In third place: recently-appointed Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor, with seven percent. Then came the Congressional spokesman for amnesty, Luis Gutierrez, down at five percent; Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa at three percent; and Univision news anchorman Jorge Ramos at two.

Read the whole thing there.

Race and Medicine, Part LXXV

This Washington Post article illustrates that the widespread conceptual confusion over what race is can be bad for health care:
Race reemerges in debate over ‘personalized medicine’ 
By Rob Stein 
Federal examiners have rejected patents for genetic screening tests because the applicants did not explore their effectiveness for different races, adding to the debate about whether race has scientific validity in modern DNA-based medicine. 

Presumably, Patent Office staffers got a memo encouraging them to make sure that genetic tests work on minorities and aren't just being optimized for whites. But this upsets the Race Does Not Exist crowd.
Some geneticists, sociologists and bioethicists argue that “black,” “white,” “Asian” and “Hispanic” are antiquated categories that threaten to revive prejudices. Others, however, say that meaningful DNA variations can track racial lines and that ignoring them could deny many benefits of “personalized medicine,” which aims to develop tests and treatments tailored to a person’s genetic makeup. ...
Jonathan Kahn, a law professor at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn., discovered the patent rejections when he began sifting through applications, prompted by a 2008 patent office presentation that raised the race issue. 
“Constructions of race as genetic are not only scientifically flawed, they are socially dangerous, opening the door to new forms of discrimination or the misallocation of scarce resources needed to address real health disparities,” Kahn wrote in a report in the journal Nature Biotechnology in May. ...
Similarly, in 2009, an examiner rejected a patent for a test for a propensity for prostate cancer because it did not specify the risk the variation posed among different races, Kahn found.
And in 2010, an examiner denied a patent for a test for a genetic marker for asthma and eczema because it was vetted only in whites and Asians. 
The prostate cancer and asthma rulings were reversed on appeal. But the colorectal cancer applicant narrowed the application to win approval. 
“There’s no telling how many people will just give in and use race in a way that the scientists clearly do not think is an appropriate way to use race,” Kahn said. 
Just the fact that patent applications are including such information is disturbing, he and other critics say. 
“This gives almost scientific legitimacy to the false categories of race — that somehow being white or being European is a strong category you can use in research,” said Troy Duster, who studies the racial implications of scientific research at New York University. 
For decades, demagogues — and even some scientists — argued that racial groups were genetically distinct and, in some ways, biologically inferior or superior, justifying laws barring interracial marriage and other discriminatory practices. 
Genetic predispositions — such as for sickle cell anemia, which occurs more frequently among African Americans, and Tay-Sachs disease, which is found more often in descendants of Ashkenazi Jews — clearly can pass down through generations. But as scientists developed modern tools of molecular biology, they produced ever more convincing evidence that genes vary as much among people who identify themselves as the same race as among groups segregated along traditional racial lines.

Except that they don't. Statistically, genes vary a lot within races, just as they vary a fair amount among siblings within a nuclear family, but they vary even more among individuals across races.
“What we are learning is that ancestry is really the key here,” said Charles N. Rotimi, director of the center for research on genomics and global health at the National Human Genome Research Institute.

Because ancestry and race don't have much to do with each other, I guess.
“The labels for race, at least as we currently use them, distort some of the things we want to understand in terms of ancestry.” 

Then perhaps we need for doctors to use more accurate terms. For example, Professor Kahn is up in arms about a Patent staffer who supposedly treated "Hispanic" as a racial group. This suggests that the medical profession ought to revive more genetically useful terms such as "mestizo" and "mulatto." Doctors use technical terms for lots of things that are considered inappropriate to mention in polite society, so why shouldn't they use "mestizo" and "mulatto?" It's their job, after all.
For example, although sickle cell anemia is more common among African Americans, the blood disorder is also rare in some parts of Africa and common in some predominantly Caucasian populations.

This is the kind of race-does-not-exist talking point that's more likely to confuse nonspecialist doctors than to help them make more accurate diagnoses. For the purposes of figuring out which tests to run on sick African American children, it doesn't particularly matter that sickle cell anemia "is rare in some parts of Africa" because traditional African-Americans (i.e., the descendants of American slaves) are a blended population with no ability to accurately tell a doctor something like, "My baby can't have sickle cell anemia because all 512 of my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents were from parts of Africa where sickle cell anemia is rare." The point is that if your baby is African-American, sickle cell anemia should be a concern for your pediatrician. Now, if you and your spouse just got off the plane from, say, the highlands of Ethiopia, well, maybe not, but you are the exception.

Likewise, it would be good for doctors to know that if your baby is, say, 100% Sicilian, then there's a small chance of sickle cell anemia because there was some falciparum malaria in Sicily.
The ultimate goal of genetic-based personalized medicine is to match care to each patient’s genetic makeup, Rotimi and others say. 
“You are truly going to be looking at that individual, whether black, white or Asian. It’s the individual’s genome that becomes important to their disease risk as opposed to their socially identified race or ethnicity,” said Vence L. Bonham Jr., an associate investigator at the institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health.

But in the mean time ... Look, this individualized medical genomics thing hasn't working out as fast as people thought it would. What is progressing fast is racial genomics. Scientists are getting very good at figuring out people's racial backgrounds from their DNA.
Injecting race back into the mix carries myriad dangers, critics say. On a practical level, it may result in doctors using tests or treatments on one ethnic group and not another, denying people care based on the color of their skin.

Because less information is better when making diagnoses.
... On a more disturbing level, it could fuel racism. 
“It has the social consequence of making it seem that differences among groups are fundamentally biological,” said Barbara A. Koenig, a medical ethicist and anthropologist at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. “Inevitably, in our history, that leads back to the idea that one race is better than another.” 
But others say that although race is far from perfect, some genetic variations with meaningful implications for health can be much more common among certain groups. 
For example, the anti-seizure drug Tegretol produces a life-threatening skin rash more frequently among certain Asians than others; the best dose of the common blood thinner Warfarin varies by race and African Americans appear to be at an increased risk for kidney failure because they more often carry certain mutations. 
“I don’t think race/ethnicity and personalized medicine are mutually exclusive,” said Neil Risch, a professor of human genetics and epidemiology at the University of California at San Francisco. “You can call it sociological, cultural — whatever. It’s all of the above. That doesn’t mean it’s devoid of genetic meaning.”

In other words, racial medicine doesn't work in theory, but it does work with human beings. That suggests that we need a better theory.
In fact, recent analyses have indicated that many common diseases probably are caused by genetic variations in different populations, making it crucial to assemble diverse databases, researchers said in an article published online July 13 by the journal Nature. 
Two large genetic analyses published July 20 by the journals Nature and Nature Genetics found hundreds of genetic discrepancies between people of African American and European descent. And two papers published online Sunday by Nature Genetics found four unique genetic variations associated with asthma in people in Japan and people of African ancestry. Until scientists learn more about individual genetic predisposition, race provides a useful proxy, some say. 
“I think there’s a healthy debate right now about the role of race in medicine,” said Noah A. Rosenberg, a professor of biology at Stanford University.

One of the reasons that this debate has dragged on in a confused fashion for so many years, probably killing a few patients along the way, is that doctors aren't given a solid concept of race. Doctors are busy, practical people. They need the conceptual heavy lifting to be done by intellectuals, but the intellectual class has overwhelmingly failed when it comes to understanding what race is.

The problem is that because it's easy to poke holes in the crudest forms of old-fashioned American racial concepts, such as the one-drop rule, that means you can jump all the way to Race Does Not Exist, which is even cruder and stupider. What we need instead is a more sophisticated way for doctors to think about race. Fortunately, I invented* that way back in the 1990s: a racial group can most profitably be thought of as an extended family that is partly inbred. This is very close to being tautological, and, not surprisingly, lots of recent genetic data supports this insight.

The good news is that doctors shouldn't have too much trouble grasping my concept because it fits nicely as an extension of a concept they use all the time: the family medical history. The Surgeon GeneralAMA and the Mayo Clinic advocate that patients draw up a family medical history for themselves.

Race fits into the notion of a family medical history by allowing your family medical history to be extended beyond relatives whose medical histories you happen to know. Thinking of race as a partly inbred extended family means implies that statistical tendencies should also be garnered from large numbers of members of your more extended families.

The bad news is that almost nobody is explaining this concept to doctors. Thus, we see confused and confusing articles like this one.

----------------------
* I'm sure lots of other people invented it before me.

July 31, 2011

"Babies"


I finally got around to watching the 2010 documentary "Babies" that follows the first year of life of one baby each in San Francisco, Tokyo, rural Mongolia, and rural Namibia. There's no narration. It's like a greatest hits collection of home movies, if they were all beautifully lit.

Babies are pretty much the same (cute) everywhere, so the main interest is looking at the four different environments from a baby's point of view.

Mongolia looks like the most fun of the four places to be a baby. Dad takes Mom and the new baby home from the hospital on the back of his amped-up motorcycle. Mom looks like she'd prefer to ride in a Camry but Dad is no doubt a direct descendant of Genghis Khan, so what are you going to do? The Mongolian baby gets to live in a nicely furnished yurt on a ranch on the steppe, with lots of fancy carpets indoors and endless grass outdoors, like the Teletubbies set. It's a good place to fall down, which you do a lot when you are a baby. Plus, there are a huge number of animals around to look at (watch the trailer embedded above to the end), and he has an older brother to poke him and otherwise make life more interesting. 

Life is pretty similar for the Tokyo and San Francisco babies of yuppie couples, who are only children. Lots of polished hardwood floors, and only cats for animal company. The yuppie parents constantly point out interesting things to their babies and talk to them about it to get them ready for their SATs in 17 years. For example, the Tokyo mom belongs to a baby group with other mothers of only children. They all push their strollers to the zoo and helpfully point out to their babies the tiger, which terrifies the morsel-sized infants, but presumably will help them get into a good college someday.

The Namibian baby has lots of siblings and cousins around -- there are, evidently, a lot of babies in Namibia -- but the whole place is dirt. The women usually sit on pieces of cloth on the dirt, but they just let the babies crawl around in the dirt. The menfolk are never around. Are they all working in mines sending home paychecks or are they drinking at the shebeen?

Just as you would expect from that popular Hart and Risley study about how professional parents speak 427 million words to their children by age 1 or whatever, while underclass parents can barely be motivated to say "Shut up" to their kids, the Namibian women don't seem to have much to say to their children.

IQ heritability

Physicist Steve Hsu recounts IQ heritability figures from a 2010 metanalysis of twin and adoption studies:
He goes on:
But now that we have inexpensive genotyping, we can study heritability of a quantitative trait by looking at unrelated (or only distantly related) individuals, and asking to what extent similarity in genotype is correlated with similarity in phenotype. A simple way to think about this is to imagine that we have a sample of N people for whom both phenotype (measured g score) and genotype (e.g., SNP profile) are known. Form all possible pairs and plot magnitude of difference in g score against genetic distance between the individuals in the pair. The g score difference should (on average) decrease as the genetic distance goes to zero (at which point the pair are MZ twins; but we avoid the confound of shared prenatal environment). Even if we have no identical twins in the sample, and even if none of the people in the sample are closely related to each other, we can extrapolate to zero genetic distance to obtain an estimate of heritability. An analysis along these lines (more technically, a global fit across all SNPs of total heritability) for height yields a result which is consistent with the narrow sense heritability estimate from twin and adoption studies. The results for g have not yet been published, but rumor has it that they also support earlier estimates such as those given above.

Hsu points out that one way to look into the Flynn Effect would be to find elderly people whose IQs were measured for military enlistment / conscription purposes in the middle of the 20th Century.

Making American teachers unions look good

From the LA Times, which in recent years has started to cover Mexico more, and more entertainingly:
By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Mexico City— The most powerful woman in Mexico carries $5,000 Hermes purses and can make or break a presidency. 
She's head of the nation's principal teachers union, the largest syndicate in Latin America, and once gave Hummers as gifts to loyal teachers. 
Elba Esther Gordillo commands the patronage of more than 1.5 million teachers, and in election years, that means more than 1.5 million votes. Almost every political party courts her. 
Yet scandal has forever dogged her, including accusations of illegal self-enrichment and even murder. No charges ever stuck, making her seem untouchable. Her union reportedly takes in millions in government money while she, once a humble teacher from Mexico's poorest south, lives much of the time in luxurious properties in Southern California. 
Gordillo's critics say her extravagances during 22 years as union president might not be so bothersome if the state of education in Mexico were not so abysmal. ...
Last year, slightly more than half of high school students flunked the math portion of standardized tests, while more than a third flunked Spanish. Mexican students scored the lowest reading levels of developed countries in the most recent survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Okay, but Mexico doesn't really belong in the OECD with Denmark, Canada, and Japan. It's more like Turkey or Brazil. And, its 2009 PISA scores were up over the previous PISA.

On the other hand, Mexicans in Mexico score a lot worse than Mexicans in the U.S. on the PISA. The thing that struck me the most about Mexico's lousy PISA scores was not the mediocre average but what a tiny percentage of Mexicans scored high. There are several times more students in Turkey who ace the PISA than in Mexico, which suggests that rich Mexicans, the ones who ought to be doing well on the test, are lazy, don't like reading and studying, and set a bad example for the Mexican masses.
Meanwhile, in 2010, 75% of teachers-in-training failed the exam that would have placed them in a job, and last year only 1% of working teachers passed a test that would have raised their salaries. ...
Gordillo is in the spotlight again because Mexico is in the throes of campaign fever, with a presidential election coming up next year. Her support was considered decisive in the 2006 narrow victory of Felipe Calderon and his conservative National Action Party; and today, she appears prepared to cast her lot, and her many votes, with the clear front-runner, the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

By the way, wouldn't the best thing for Mexico be a victory by a responsible leftist, like Lula in Brazil? It's not like the political climate in Mexico is so anti-business that nobody can get rich there (e.g., Carlos Slim). The left party has never won, having the 1988 election stolen and may have had the close 2006 election swiped, and wouldn't it be time for them to learn some responsibility by having to govern? However, that's just my gringo view and Mexican voters seem to want to go back to the old ruling party. Maybe there aren't responsible leftists in Mexico?
Gordillo, with her fondness for designer frocks, extreme jewelry and, apparently, abundant plastic surgery, was in fact a product of the PRI's old-style, autocratic type of rule, which lasted seven decades until 2000 and is poised now to return. The party controlled just about everything, including unions. Then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari anointed Gordillo in 1989 as president of the National Syndicate of Education Workers, or SNTE, after she'd spent years as a tireless and fiercely loyal climber in the party and the union. 
In 2007, at a closed-door meeting protected by private guards, the union leadership purportedly made Gordillo "president for life." A dissident group of unionized teachers has been threatening ever since to denounce her to the International Labor Organization for abuse of office. ...
Gordillo, 66, calls herself and is widely known as La Maestra, The Teacher. In public speeches, however, she sometimes sounds more like a failing student than a polished educator, fumbling words and syntax.

My recollection is that some public school teaching jobs in Mexico have become a hereditary privilege. Talk about tenure: in Mexico, if you are a teacher and die, your heir gets your job. If your child doesn't want to teach, he or she can auction off the right to the job.

In general, Mexico is a pretty entertaining place to read about, but it doesn't get covered much in the U.S. in the English language media relative to, say, the Middle East. By the way, whatever happened to that whole Arab Spring thing? Did Summer happen to it?

Will the EEOC apply the Four-Fifths rule to this organization?

Company: Obama 2012 Presidential Campaign
Location: Chicago, IL
Web: www.barackobama.com 
The Obama for America Analytics Department analyzes the campaign's data to guide election strategy and develop quantitative, actionable insights that drive our decision-making. Our team's products help direct work on the ground, online and on the air. 
We are looking for Predictive Modeling/Data Mining Scientists and Analysts, at both the senior and junior level, to join our department through November 2012 at our Chicago Headquarters. We are a multi-disciplinary team of statisticians, predictive modelers, data mining experts, mathematicians, software developers, general analysts and organizers - all striving for a single goal: re-electing President Obama. 
Using statistical predictive modeling, the Democratic Party's comprehensive political database, and publicly available data, modeling analysts are charged with predicting the behavior of the American electorate. These models will be instrumental in helping the campaign determine which voters to target for turnout and persuasion efforts, where to buy advertising and how to best approach digital media. 
Our Modeling Analysts will dive head-first into our massive data to solve some of our most critical online and offline challenges. We will analyze millions of interactions a day, learning from terabytes of historical data, running thousands of experiments, to inform campaign strategy and critical decisions.

If the Obama for America Analytics Department doesn't hire at least four-fifths as many Hispanic females as Asian males, then Eric Holder is going to want to know why!

July 30, 2011

Everything you've ever wanted to know about the plunge for distance

As I mentioned in May, I once had a dream that I had won a gold medal at the 1984 Summer Olympics. When challenged over the unlikeliness of my memory, I explained to my dream interlocutor that it was in the plunge for distance, which isn't on TV so it doesn't get any good athletes. Now, somebody has notified me that they've just created a Wikipedia page on this long-lost sport:
In later years, the event was subject to criticism as "not an athletic event at all," but instead a competition favoring "mere mountains of fat who fall in the water more or less successfully and depend upon inertia to get their points for them."[5] John Kiernan, sports writer for the New York Times, once described the event as the "slowest thing in the way of athletic competition", and that "the stylish-stout chaps who go in for this strenuous event merely throw themselves heavily into the water and float along like icebergs in the ship lanes."[6] Similarly, an 1893 English report on the sport noted that spectators were not enamored of it, as the diver "moves after thirty or forty feet at a pace somewhat akin to a snail, and to the uninitiated the contests appear absolute wastes of time."[7]

It's well-written enough that some Wikipedia editor will probably delete all the amusing parts. (That's my main criticism of Wikipedia: not that it gets facts wrong, but that it is allergic to good writing.)

July 29, 2011

What's Rick Sanchez up to these days?

Last October, CNN blowhard Rick Sanchez got fired for giving an interview in which he talked about how he was the victim of prejudice against Hispanics. Well, he didn't get fired for that part. That's always okay. What wasn't okay was when he scoffed at the interviewer's suggestion that Jon Stewart, a frequent critic of Sanchez, is also an oppressed minority:
Yeah, very powerless people. [laughs] He's such a minority. I mean, you know, please. What—are you kidding? I'm telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart. And to imply that somehow they, the people in this country who are Jewish, are an oppressed minority?

To conclusively demonstrate that Jews really are an oppressed minority and don't have any power in the media business, Sanchez was immediately fired to encourage the others.

But, all's well that ends well. Less than ten months later, Sanchez has now gotten a part-time job. Well, it's not actually a job, since he isn't getting paid to do it. Mediaite reported on July 27:
According to the Miami Herald, ex-CNN anchor Rick Sanchez will be back this fall–on the radio in South Florida–calling football games for the FIU Golden Panthers. ... Sanchez says he’s taking the gig to “give something back” to a school he’s close to: "I’m extremely excited to be volunteering my time to Florida International. I’m not getting paid to do this—I just wanted to give something back to the school because FIU has a very special place in my heart: two of my sons now attend FIU and I believe in FIU football." ... 
Sanchez, who’s recently written for Mediaite, has spent his time since leaving CNN working tirelessly to clear his name, left tarnished by the comments he made last fall–calling Jon Stewart a bigot, among other things–that forced him from his high-profile network anchor gig.

Chimps ask: So, what's in it for me?

From a Nova documentary Ape Genius on why chimpanzees don't seem to learn much as a species:
MICHAEL TOMASELLO: What you'll see with the human mother and baby is that the mother is constantly trying to show the baby what to do, and the baby is trying to tune into what the mother wants. And so you have a full triangle of mother and baby and the thing in the environment that they are trying to work on. 
REBECCA SAXE: It's a special cognitive achievement. For some reason kids do this naturally, almost immediately. And curiously, apes can't get into that. 
MICHAEL TOMASELLO: At the moment we have no evidence that apes have shared goals based on shared commitments. They do things together, they coordinate their actions together, but they don't have a shared commitment to a shared goal. 
NARRATOR: The triangle is the core skill that makes teaching possible. Humans have it; apes seem to lack it. But apes are also missing one more thing. It's a key emotional driver: the passion to cheer each other on. 
TETSURO MATSUZAWA: "Good," "good job," "well done." This kind of facilitation, giving a hand, encouragement, is the base of teaching. 
REBECCA SAXE: It seems like it's not just a cognitive capacity that's necessary for teaching. There's this other thing, which is wanting to teach, that seems to be really pervasive in humans and maybe mysteriously missing in apes. 
NARRATOR: The pieces are now coming together. Apes have culture, a rare achievement in the animal world. They can learn from each other by imitation. But this process is passive, often slow and can easily backslide. 
BRIAN HARE: Probably there's a lot of slippage. There's a lot of loss of cultural innovations between generations when you're talking about a chimpanzee. 
MICHAEL TOMASELLO: If an ape invents something new and important and interesting, maybe some others will learn it, maybe they won't. 
NARRATOR: Unique among animals, humans have both the passion and mental skill to teach each other. When you're a student rather than a spectator, learning jumps to warp speed. That's because teaching locks in progress.

Chimpanzees: more Randian than Ayn Rand, who couldn't stop lecturing.

(Also, this show has the usual chimpanzee guru Sue Savage-Rumbaugh in it, which always sounds like a name made up for an ape expert by Hunter S. Thompson.)

July 28, 2011

Programming, women, and H1-B

Here's the first page of a 1967 article in Cosmopolitan called The Computer Girls that points out the advantages of a career in programming for young women. Photos show a lovely young IBM systems engineer surrounded by appreciative white-shirt-and-tie-wearing IBM bachelors.

The accompanying blog post claims that:
"In 1987, 42% of the software developers in America were women ... [Is that true?] From 1984 to 2006, the number of women majoring in computer science dropped from 37% to 20% — just as the percentages of women were increasing steadily in all other fields of science, technology, engineering, and math, with the possible exception of physics. The reasons women left computer science are as complex and numerous as why they had entered in the first place. But the most common explanation is that the rise of personal computers led computing culture to be associated with the stereotype of the eccentric, antisocial, male “hacker.” Women found computer science less receptive professionally than it had been at its inception."

Maybe, although there were other things going on as well. For example, the dominant language in mainframe business software in 1987 was Admiral Grace Hopper's verbose COBOL, a language that was particularly popular with female coders (my wife was one for awhile). Since then, the software languages that are popular have evolved toward higher levels of elegance and abstraction. 

It's a little bit like classical music composers. If you pick up a book on composers, such as R.J. Stove's concise and delightful A Student's Guide to Music History, they often start with the medieval German nun Hildegard von Bingen, composer of lovely monophonic songs. But, as composing art music became more complex, the number of top female composers became vanishingly small. 

But, here's another factor that helped drive American women away from programming careers: H-1B. Bill Gates and other zillionaires have added even more billions to their fortunes by getting the government to let in lots of foreign programmers to do for less money the lower level programming that American women tended to be doing. Logically, feminists should therefore have been anti-Bill Gates and anti H-1B, but logic doesn't play a big role in modern America in determining which Diversity Card trumps which. As a general Hi-Lo v. Middle rule, rich guys playing the race card against average whites are likely to win.

Exactly why was it important for the government to pitch in at the task of ruining computer programming as a fairly ordinary career for fairly ordinary Americans? Didn't Bill Gates have enough money already? Maybe it would have happened sooner or later anyway, but why did the government have to speed it up?

July 27, 2011

Hunter S. Thompson on Apes

Seeing the animal rights documentary Project Nim about the famous ape Nim Chimpsky (my review here) reminded me of the penultimate chapter of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:
So I picked up the phone. It was my friend Bruce Innes, calling from the Circus-Circus. He had located the man who wanted to sell the ape I'd been inquiring about. The price was $750. ... 
"Maybe you should come down and argue with the guy," said Bruce. "He's here in the bar with me. I told him you really wanted the ape and that you could give it a fine home. I think he'll negotiate. He's really attached to the stinking thing. It's here in the bar with us, sitting up on a goddamn stool, slobbering into a beer schooner." 
"Okay," I said. "I'll be there in ten minutes. Don't let the bastard get drunk. I want to meet him under natural conditions." 
When I got to the Circus-Circus they were loading an old man into an ambulance outside the main door. "What happened?" I asked the car-keeper. 
"I'm not sure," he said. "Somebody said he had a stroke. But I noticed the back of his head was all cut up." ... 
I found Bruce at the bar, but there was no sign of the ape. "Where is it?" I demanded. "I'm ready to write a check. I want to take the bastard back home on the plane with me. I've already reserved two first-class seats -- R. Duke and Son." 
"Take him on the plane?" 
"Hell yes," I said. "You think they'd say anything? Call attention to my son's infirmities?" 
He shrugged. "Forget it," he said. "They just took him away. He attacked an old man right here at the bar. The creep started hassling the bartender about 'allowing barefoot rabble in the place' and just about then the ape let out a shriek -- so the old guy threw a beer at him, and the ape went crazy, came out of his seat like a jack-in-the-box and took a big bite out of the old man's head ... The bartender had to call an ambulance, then the cops came and took the ape away." 
"Goddamnit," I said. "What's the bail? I want that ape." 
"Get a grip on yourself," he said. "You better stay clear of that jail. That's all they'd need to put the cuffs on you. Forget that ape. You don't need him." 
I gave it some thought, then decided he was probably right. There was no sense blowing everything for the sake of some violent ape I'd never even met.

July 26, 2011

"Project Nim"

From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:
Project Nim is a critically praised documentary about Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was the subject of one of those attempts to teach American Sign Language to an ape, a fad that once fascinated the popular imagination. 
Directed by James Marsh, who won an Oscar for his 2008 documentary Man on Wire about another 1970s phenomenon—the French tightrope-walker who strolled from one World Trade Center tower to the other—Project Nim turns out to be an engaging, entertaining, manipulative, and characteristically lowbrow animal-rights polemic. Project Nim’s never-quite-articulated message is that chimpanzees should have been left in Africa. Perhaps, but there’s much this movie ignores. 
Like the liberal college professor played by Ronald Reagan in Bedtime for Bonzo who raises a chimp like a child to show that nurture overrules nature, Columbia U. psychologist Herbert Terrace (Marsh’s designated villain) bought a baby male chimp in 1973 to prove Noam Chomsky wrong.

Read the whole thing there.

Let me add something about animals rights movements. Animal rights campaigners tend to be sentimental and illogical. The targets of their campaigns -- e.g., medical laboratory heads, slaughterhouse owners, and so forth -- are often their antitheses: logical and coldblooded. 

But, the syntheses that emerge from their conflicts, the compromise solutions, are often better than either side alone. So, chalk one up for Hegel. 

For example, we've learned an important lesson from the animal rights movement: don't import more chimps. Moreover, Americans shouldn't breed more chimps to use in entertainment. Young ones can be amazingly entertaining, but they live a long, long time, and the older they get, the cuter they ain't. (That line, which I use a lot, is from one of my favorite Simpsons' scripts, Lisa's First Word by Jeff Martin.)

The full cost of caring for a chimp over a typical lifespan of maybe 40 or more years is huge. Don't let private organizations privatize profits from chimps while socializing the costs they impose in the long run. (Funny how a lot of lessons learned from chimps can be applied more broadly.)

In medical research, don't make chimps your automatic first choice. They often turn out to be of less use as human stand-ins than they would appear. For example, a lot were bred for AIDS research, but then it turned out that chimps infected with HIV rarely developed AIDS.

And they are gigantic amounts of work. For example, because they are miniature King Kongs who will rip your face off, Jim, you can't, say, take blood from them without first shooting them with a tranquilizing dart gun. 

White rats are often a lot better choice outside of a few disease like hepatitis where chimps are valuable.

George Soros's Evado Tax Inc.

Last week, I pointed out how Microsoft had cut their tax rate on corporate profits from 25% in FY 2010 to 7% in 2011 by claiming to make most of its profits in places like Puerto Rico. A reader writes:
George Soros is another example of tax arbitrage. He has benefited from running his hedge fund in offshore jurisdictions while maintaining research offices in NYC.

Similar to MSFT - "we just research in NY, the money manages itself from overseas accounts." 
I'd guess there's something in dodd-frank about ending these loopholes.  
With soros, it's particularly egregious because he uses his excess wealth to argue for big government policies in the US.  
If Obama wants tax increases - how about retroactive taxes? 

I would be sympathetic to an investment firm that actually does its work on an island somewhere. I once expected that investment firms would relocate to Hawaii because it's paradise and for certain types of investing, being halfway between the Asian and American time zones might be convenient. But that really hasn't happened. 

My sneaking suspicion is that all this talk about the information superhighway and how you could be anywhere in the world and make above market returns just by looking at your computer screen is naive. To consistently make above market returns, it helps to have sources of inside information. And that depend heavily upon trust-building face to face contact and/or body language that can't be used to convict even if one party is wearing a wire. So, the high end investment business has not been spreading to many new locations. 

Wealth gap ratio hits new high

From a new study of Census Bureau data by the Pew Hispanic Center:
Hispanics: The net worth of Hispanic households decreased from $18,359 in 2005 to $6,325 in 2009. The percentage drop--66%--was the largest among all groups. Hispanics derived nearly two-thirds of their net worth in 2005 from home equity and are more likely to reside in areas where the housing meltdown was concentrated. Thus, the housing downturn had a deep impact on them. Their net worth also diminished because of a 42% rise in median levels of debt they carried in the form of unsecured liabilities (credit card debt, education loans, etc.).  
Blacks: The net worth of black households fell from $12,124 in 2005 to $5,677 in 2009, a decline of 53%. Like Hispanics, black households drew a large share (59%) of their net worth from home equity in 2005. Thus, the housing downturn had a strong impact on their net worth. Blacks also took on more unsecured debt during the economic downturn, with the median level rising by 27%.  
Whites: The drop in the wealth of white households was modest in comparison, falling 16% from $134,992 in 2005 to $113,149 in 2009. White households were also affected by the housing crisis. But home equity accounts for relatively less of their total net worth (44% in 2005), and that served to lessen the impact of the housing bust. Median levels of unsecured debt among whites rose by 32%.  
Asians: In 2005 median Asian household wealth had been greater than the median for white households, but by 2009 Asians lost their place at the top of the wealth hierarchy. Their net worth fell from $168,103 in 2005 to $78,066 in 2009, a drop of 54%. Like Hispanics, they are geographically concentrated in places such as California that were hit hard by the housing market meltdown.  
The arrival of new Asian immigrants since 2004 also contributed significantly to the estimated decline in the overall wealth of this racial group. Absent the immigrants who arrived during this period, the median wealth of Asian households is estimated to have dropped 31% from 2005 to 2009. Asians account for about 5% of the U.S. population.  
No Assets: About a quarter of all Hispanic (24%) and black (24%) households in 2009 had no assets other than a vehicle, compared with just 6% of white households. These percentages are little changed from 2005.

July 24, 2011

Blue Labour: The Rapid Rise and Faster Fall of an Immigration Realist Leftist

My new VDARE column is about Maurice Glasman, one of the most interesting leftist thinkers in recent years to emerge (and then get rapidly submerged as he made clear the full logic of his worldview). Lord Glasman served for the last half year as the idea man for the new British Labour Party boss Ed Miliband. 

Glasman, who is almost utterly unknown in the U.S. media, articulated a new old-fashioned, pre-multiculti leftism for Labour of the kind that George Orwell might have approved of. Not surprisingly, last week he got stomped down for calling for a halt to mass immigration, but he had an interesting ride while it lasted. 
Lord Glasman has found himself on the less privileged side of the central ideological divide of the 21st Century—a gap that sprawls across the more familiar ideological chasms of the 20th Century. The crucial question is no longer capitalism vs. communism, but globalism v. localism, imperial centralization v. self-rule, cosmopolitanism v. patriotism, elitism v. populism, diversity v. particularism, homogeneity v. heterogeneity, and high-low v. middle. 
Barack Obama, for example, epitomizes the first side of these dichotomies, especially the high-low coalition. By being half-black, he enjoys the totemic aura of the low, but has all the advantages of the high. He has never, as far as anyone can tell, had a thought cross his mind that would raise an eyebrow at a Davos Conference. 
In contrast to the President, Glasman is certainly an original thinker. But anybody on his side of these new dichotomies faces a tactical disadvantage. 
Because globalists want the whole world to be all the same, they share common talking points, strategies, conferences, media, and so forth. 
In contrast, because the localists want the freedom to rule themselves, they often don’t even realize who else is on the same side of this divide. 
For example, to most Americans, "socialism" is a very foreign-sounding word. To a lot of Brits, however, socialism is what their grandfathers looked forward to while they fought WWII and then came home to create the National Health Service.

Read the whole thing there.

Norway

A few random observations:

- This evil bastard is one cold-blooded, rational Northern European. I'm reminded of an underlying tragic theme of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings that stems from Tolkien's combat experience on the Somme in the Great War: all of this Northern European efficiency can go terribly wrong when it turns to organized killing, at which Northern Europeans are the champs. This terrorist is the kind of rationalist who estimates the probability of failure of the various steps in his planning, like a 30% chance of getting caught while buying fertilizer to make his bomb. (It's a good thing that Finnish sniper Simho Hayha who killed, one at a time, 505 armed Russian soldiers in 1939-1940 wasn't an evil bastard or there could have been thousands of dead children.)

- For example, throughout his lengthy planning phase, he maintained a public persona online of being anti-Islamic but non-violent and, indeed, rather philosophical. Psychologically, that must be very hard to do. For the rest of us, this guy's ability to play a double game of being reasonable on the surface while homicidal underneath is of course going to be incredibly destructive of all anti-multicultural online dissent.

- The killer was, perhaps not surprisingly, a juicer. His 1500-page secret document has details of his various steroid cycles. Whether he came up with the idea of killing a bunch of children after he started on steroids, or whether he deliberately chose to use steroids to keep up his will power against attacks of angst, I can't say.
When initiating the “chemical [fertilizer for his bomb] acquirement phase”, in end November/early December, I must admit I was filled with some angst. This was after all a critical phase, perhaps the most dangerous of all phases. If I messed this phase up, by being flagged, reported to the authorities etc. I would be neutralized before I could finalize my operation. Even when taking all possible precautions; I estimate it is a 30% chance of being reported to the system protectors at the national intelligence agency during this phase. 
My concerns and angst relating to this phase impacted my motivation, to a point where I had to initiate specific counter-measures to reverse the loss of morale and motivation. I decided that the correct approach to reversing it was to initiate another DBOL steroid cycle and intensify my strength training. I also spent some time locating and downloading some new inspirational music. A lot of new vocal trance tracks and some inspirational music by Helene Bøksle. In addition; I decided I would allow myself to play the newly launched expansion: World of Warcraft – Cataclysm. The combination of these three counter measures, in addition to my 3 weekly indoctrination/meditation walks, resulted in my morale and motivation again peaking.

Or maybe the common link between his steroid use and his terrible crime is vanity.

- Ideologically, he's a neocon on steroids. From the Jerusalem Post:
'Norway attack suspect had anti-Muslim, pro-Israel views'By BEN HARTMAN
07/24/2011 18:37  
1,500 page manifesto credited to Breivik, accused of killing spree, lays out worldview including extreme screed of Islamophobia, far-right Zionism.

Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian who killed nearly 100 people in a combined terror attack Friday that included car bombings in Oslo and a shooting rampage at an island summer camp, held fiercely anti-Islamic and pro-Israel views, according to a 1,500 page manifesto he uploaded before his killing spree Friday. 
In the 1,500-page tome, which mentions Israel 359 times and “Jews” 324 times, Breivik lays out his worldview, which includes an extreme, bizarre and rambling screed of Islamophobia, far-right Zionism and venomous attacks on Marxism and multi-culturalism.

- In terms of personality, he seems somewhat less like the usual comparison, Timothy McVeigh (although they are both examples of how right wing white male terrorists, while less numerous, might be more deadly on average due to higher competence levels), and more like the highly intelligent, cold-blooded leftwing assassin of Pym Fortuyn, Volkert van der Graaf, whose story has disappeared down the memory hole after the European press put out a cover story that he was an animal rights nut. His court testimony explained that his chief cause for murdering the potential prime minister was to halt immigration restrictionism. This had been a topic of obsessive coverage in the European respectable press, climaxing the day before the murder. A two weeks hate had been conducted throughout Europe against Le Pen's candidacy in the French Presidential election the day before the murder. In general, elite reaction in Europe to Fortuyn's murder was that this political outsider more or less had it coming.

- Neither this guy nor Fortuyn's killer seemed terribly crazy, just evil.

- I was reading up awhile ago on Norway's summer camp-style prisons and maximum 21-year sentences for murder. Hopefully, Norway's also got a non-summer camp to send this guy to on, say, the north coast of Spitzbergen, and that the 21-year max is per murder, not overall.