September 14, 2011

Woodstock conservatism

From the New York Times:
In Woodstock, Values Collide over Housing 
... a protracted battle over a 53-unit affordable housing project is dividing this still-crunchy town where mellow ’60s vibes and liberal politics coexist uneasily with real estate prices increasingly out of the reach of the humbler classes. 
When workers finally began clearing land for the Woodstock Commons project in July, it looked as if the uncomfortable dispute might finally be ending. Instead, new issues kept popping up: the plight of black bears and endangered Indiana bats threatened by the construction; a botched permitting process; uncertainty about water service. 
In some ways what is playing out in this Ulster County town is a more colorful microcosm of affordable housing controversies elsewhere. Still, the collision of environmental, neighborhood and social justice issues is making people squirm in a place where the only thing more important than making the world better can be keeping Woodstock the same. 
“Nobody would tell you they don’t want these people in our town,” said Jeff Moran, the town supervisor, who has been a conflicted supporter of the rental project. “Instead, they talk about the effect on the quality of life, ramping up the costs of services and those kind of things. But there’s a joke in town that the reason The Woodstock Times costs a dollar is because people don’t want change. People come here and they think they have an investment in the town being a certain way.” 
Opponents, particularly in neighborhoods near the project site, said the issue was not Nimbyism or opposition to public housing but practical objections based on Woodstock’s small size (population about 6,000), charmingly Brigadoonish downtown and creaky infrastructure. Among their complaints: the project is too big, it is at a dangerous bend for traffic and the site should remain green space. They have picked apart particulars, like the nonprofit developer’s claim that residents would be within walking distance of a nearby “grocery store” that is actually a high-priced health food store. 
“It’s politically incorrect to oppose an affordable project, so you can’t even look at it,” said Robin Segal, who has a doctorate in energy policy and who moved to town two years ago in search of a garden and peace and quiet. She has since been consumed with writing a detailed blog about the project that has found errors and problems the planning process missed. “But,” she continued, “it’s the wrong project in the wrong place.” 
Woodstock’s lack of affordable housing has long been a public concern, though a low-level one, in a place where almost any building project — whether a cellphone tower, the expansion of a Buddhist monastery or solar panels at an animal sanctuary — can set off a nasty dispute. 
“This is a town where if someone is sick or someone’s house burns down, people will come out of the woodwork to be generous and to help,” said Susan Goldman, a longtime community volunteer. “But we don’t see people who have a need for housing as part of that community. It’s a town full of social progressives, but we don’t look at our own community the way we look at the rest of the country.”

As a man of conservative disposition, I sympathize with Woodstock's many conservatives, even if they claim to be progressives. 

I don't particularly believe that the 1960s were about "values" or whatever. I think it was more a struggle for dominance and the talk about principles was more a smokescreen. Much of contemporary politics, therefore, consists of the the winners of the 1960s trying to preserve their gains. 

That's only natural.

From Wikipedia:
The racial makeup of the town was 94.25% White, 1.30% Black or African American, 0.21% Native American, 1.57% Asian, 0.02% Pacific Islander, 0.79% from other races, and 1.87% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 2.56% of the population.

That's less diverse than the lineup at Woodstock in 1969, which featured Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone, Ritchie Havens, Santana, Joan Baez, Grateful Dead, Ravi Shankar, and two albinos.

SAT reading scores down

From CBS:
SAT reading scores for the high school class of 2011 were the lowest on record, and combined reading and math scores fell to their lowest point since 1995. 
The College Board, which released the scores Wednesday, said the results reflect the record size and diversity of the pool of test-takers. ... 
Still, it’s just the second time in the last two decades reading scores have fallen as much in a single year. And reading scores are now notably lower than as recently as 2005, when the average was 508. 

In contrast, scores on state exams mandated by the No Child Left Behind act have gone up, UP, UP! I wonder why? Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the College Board and ETS don't have large material incentives to get scores up by hook or by crook. There's this concept called "conflict of interest" that you may have heard of, although evidently George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy hadn't.
Average math scores for the class of 2011 fell one point to 514 and scores on the critical reading section fell two points to 489.

My guess is that math is more amenable to schoolroom instruction, since kids seldom do math for fun on their own. Since 1983, America has invested a lot in math teaching (often at the expense of history, arts, music, etc.), and we've gotten a (quite) modest but positive ROI. Reading in the classroom and homework, however, is merely a fraction of the total reading kids do (or ought to do), so spending less time on other subjects and more on reading has a more marginal effect.
College Board officials pointed to a range of indicators that the test-taking pool has expanded, particularly among Hispanics, which is a good sign that more students are aspiring to college. For instance, roughly 27 percent of the 1.65 million test-takers last year came from a home where English was not the only language, up from 19 percent just a decade ago.

Up through 2007, it was common for Hispanics to drop out of high school to take construction jobs, or the like. Since unemployment went up, Hispanics have been flooding into community colleges to give themselves something to do. Presumably, more marginal students are taking the SAT, depressing scores.

Also, they've been letting more and more students take the SAT for free since 2007, so the number of minority test takers increased from 553,000 to 720,000 from 2007 to 2011. (Here's the College Board's report.)
But the increasingly diverse group of test-takers is clearly having more trouble with reading and writing than with math. Wayne Camara, College Board vice president of research, said recent curriculum reforms that pushed math instruction may be coming at the expense of reading and writing — especially in an era when students are reading less and less at home. 
“We’re looking and wondering if (more) efforts in English and reading and writing would benefit” students, Camara said. ../
Based on research at 100 colleges, the College Board calculated that scoring 1550 (equivalent to about a 930 on the SAT M+V before 1995) or above on the three sections of the test indicated a 65-percent likelihood of attaining at least a B-minus average in the freshman year of college.

I once took a detailed look at what percentage of students in LA County public high schools score 1000 out of 1600 (M+V) on the SAT, which is a little below that 1550 out of 2400 cutoff that the College Board suggests. Among LAUSD seniors, only 14% scored at least 1000/1600.

The CB report says that this score of 517 / 800 is very close to the minimum Proficient score on the fed's NAEP test of 12th graders. 517 is about the 57th percentile, while 500 is exactly the 50th percentile this year.
Overall, 43 percent of test-takers reached that benchmark. The College Board emphasized the tool is for policymakers, and shouldn’t be used by college admissions officers to evaluate individual candidates. 
The main message from the College Board was the importance of a rigorous curriculum, which is a strong and perhaps growing predictor of SAT scores. 
For instance, nearly one in five students takes less than four years of high school English. That’s about the same percentage as a decade ago, but it now makes a much bigger difference on SAT scores: The reading scores of those students have fallen from 500 to 462. Students who took AP and honors classes, meanwhile, score significantly higher across the board.

Causality!
A decline in average scores isn’t necessarily good news for top students who were applying to competitive colleges. The number of high scores is also increasing. For instance, the number of students with math scores of at least 700 is up 22 percent since 2007.

Some of that may be ACT takers also taking the SAT. But, I think it's pretty clear that the SAT is more and more being successfully gamed by the upper middle class's Tiger Mothers. College Board / ETS don't have strong incentives to lift average scores, but they also don't have strong incentives to crack down on whatever it is that is allowing elite offspring to separate themselves from the masses.

For example, when I went to Rice, the average SAT score was about 1300. Now, it's about 1440, which makes me 140 points awesomer. What incentive do I have to complain?

September 13, 2011

"Contagion"

From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:
Ever since Oscar-winner Gwyneth Paltrow started her website Goop.com to let people know about all the expensive stuff she owns, many have wanted to see her portray, say, a corpse who gets the top of her skull sawed off by coroners trying to figure out what brain-rotting disease killed her. And Gwyneth, I’m happy to say, is terrific as Patient Zero in Contagion, which is being marketed as a vast thriller about a global viral epidemic. I definitely got my money’s worth from the Paltrow head-hacking scene. 
The first half, in which several of Contagion’s eight Oscar nominees (Paltrow, Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard, Jude Law, Laurence Fishburne, John Hawkes, and Elliott Gould) drop dead from a new southeast Chinese germ transmitted merely by contact, is almost as creepy as promised. You’ll want to watch Contagion through a couple of eyeholes in a large upside-down plastic garbage bag.

Read the whole thing there.

Anybody who doesn't have cable TV is a loser

In the discussions over the new statistics showing ever more Americans in poverty, I was struck by this line from Robert Rector at the Heritage Foundation: "Nearly two-thirds [of the officially poor] have cable or satellite TV" and "One-third have a wide-screen plasma or LCD TV." 

Unlike, apparently, the more on-the-ball sort of impoverished person, I haven't had cable or satellite TV for over a decade. I bought an old-fashioned TV about seven years ago. That was fine at the time because we got the major networks on broadcast TV. Then, after a delay, old-fashioned analog broadcasting was halted in June 2009. Various officials made various promises about how this wouldn't be a problem, that with simple fixes everybody would be as well off as before. 

That didn't turn out to be true. Despite trying various work-arounds, we haven't gotten CBS since the switchover, NBC comes and goes. It's a mess. Digital broadcast TV has gifted us with a plethora of new fourth-tier channels. My favorite was the This channel, which broadcast, apparently off old VHS tapes it had bought at a garage sale, 1970s movies that nobody had ever heard of. But then that fizzled out. 

This is no doubt a problem for many millions of Americans who don't have cable. It's an extremely minor problem for me, but for people who don't like the Internet (often old, sick, illiterate, etc.), it's a big problem.

And guess what? Nobody who is anybody cares about them.

A simple rule of thumb is that if you don't have cable or a nice TV in contemporary America, you are a nobody.

Is Obama Depressed?

From the rumor site Gawker:
Is Barack Obama Depressed? 
Wouldn't you be? Barack Obama is at the nadir of his political popularity and effectiveness. He has been maneuvered into an economic corner of 9%-plus unemployment by a relentlessly nihilistic Congress. His achievements—killing bin Laden, saving the auto industry at negligible cost—are written off as flukes. Plus all this 9/11 anniversary stuff! We hear the New York Times is looking into whether it's all starting to get to him—like, clinically. 
We're told by a source inside the Times that the paper is preparing a story arguing that Obama no longer finds joy in the political back-and-forth, has seemed increasingly listless to associates, and is generally exhibiting the litany of signs that late-night cable commercials will tell you add up to depression. Or maybe Low T. 
Either way, the investigation was described to us as taking seriously the notion that Obama may be suffering from a depressive episode. Of course, absent a telltale Wellbutrin prescription or testimony from the man himself, it's really impossible to achieve a reliable diagnosis. And a story like "Obama Appears to Suffer From Depression" can be easily downgraded to "Political Travails Begin to Take Personal Toll on Obama." So the story in question, if it ever comes out, may not end up supporting the depression thesis. But rest assured: There are people at the Times who, based on the paper's reporting, believe Obama is depressed—the kind of depression where, if he weren't the president of the United States, he wouldn't be getting out of bed in the morning.

From his own writings, it seems like he suffered depressive episodes in New York in the 1980s and in Chicago in 2000. But, so little objective empathetic analysis has been applied to what Obama has written that almost nobody has noticed this important aspect of the life of the President of the United States of America. 

On the other hand, he's also gotten over depressive episodes. I would imagine that watching the Republican candidates for his job must be a real cheerer-upper.

September 12, 2011

"1493" by Charles C. Mann

From my new VDARE.com column:
Once or twice per year, my local Costco puts out for sale a big stack of paperback copies of Charles C. Mann’s 2005 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, a detailed combination of history, travelogue, and popular science that has become one of more respected and popular nonfiction books of the last decade. I find it heartening that somebody can still make decent money writing an ambitious, serious, and well-researched book.  Now Mann has published a new bestseller sequel about the historical roots of globalization: 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created.

Read the whole thing there.

UPDATED: Which state has the best blacks?

Audacious Epigone has a table ranking states by the ratio of the percent of blacks on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families versus the entire population's ratio. In one state, blacks are only very slightly more likely to use welfare than the general population. Which is it? Also, in which state are blacks the most likely to be on welfare relative to the whole population? 

The answers won't be too surprising to my long term readers:

45) Texas 2.39
46) Colorado 2.38
47) Mississippi 2.22
48) Rhode Island 2.11
49) New Mexico 1.70
50) Hawaii 1.06

So, the state where blacks are most equal, where there is the least local evidence supporting stereotypes of black fecklessness, turns out to be that hellhole of racial prejudice and bigotry where Barack Obama was forced to grow up in a discriminatory environment where, as he recalled decades later in Dreams from My Father, a white girl at his exclusive prep school wanted to touch his hair

Second best is frequent commenter Truth's New Mexico. I think the common denominator is that blacks in both states mostly got there through the military, or that they just had to be kind of independent-minded and self-starting to move there.


Anyway, some caveats: relative welfare usage is hardly the only measure of interest, but it seems like a pretty good single number measure of the intensity of underclass pathology.

I think the good ranking of Mississippi, the blackest state, is more a statistical artifact of Audacious comparing blacks to the entire population (including blacks) rather than to the non-black population or to whites. Say that blacks make up 40% of Mississippi's population and 100% are on welfare and 0% of everybody else is on welfare. Then, the ratio would still only be 2.50 (instead of the actual 2.22). Something similar is true for other highly black states like South Carolina and Louisiana.

Rhode Island seems to have pretty feckless white people, with RI whites with a lot on the ball moving to Boston or New York. Colorado strikes me as a pretty good all-around state that usually does well on state rankings on just about anything. Perhaps the altitude drives away the sickly and lazy?

The really interesting number here might be giant Texas, which suffers less from Mississippi-style statistical illusion because its black share is relatively modest. As you'll recall, during the orgy of media hate following Hurricane Katrina in which anybody who said anything obviously true was denounced, Barbara Bush got in trouble for saying that black refugees from New Orleans' long dysfunctional Lower Ninth Ward would be better off making new lives for themselves in Houston. There is a lot of evidence that blacks do relatively well in conservative-dominated Texas.

So, which states have the worst blacks relative to the general population? Once again, iSteve readers shouldn't be too surprised:
StateTANF
1) Wisconsin9.04
2) Minnesota8.90
3) Nebraska7.92
4) Idaho7.33
5) Iowa7.23
The peculiar awfulness of Milwaukee's black slums, relative even to, say, Chicago's black slums, has been on the radar for a long time. It's not a coincidence that a number of important innovations in policy aimed at blacks, such as welfare reform and vouchers and charter schools were heavily pioneered in Wisconsin in the early 1990s. 


Also, keep in mind that rural whites in Wisconsin have their act together more than rural whites in a lot of other states. Driving around back roads in Arkansas in the early 1990s, it wasn't uncommon to see thirtyish Winter's Bone white guys sitting on the porches of their shacks at 3pm on a Thursday, glaring at me as if I might be an undercover revenooer. Driving back roads in Wisconsin, in contrast, past all the lovingly maintained family dairy farms, it looked like rural Wisconsin would make a credible stand-in for rural Austria in a remake of The Sound of Music.

The roots of this appear to be Wisconsin's traditional social democratic tendencies. As Alice Cooper points out to Wayne in Wayne's World, Milwaukee three times elected a Socialist Party mayor. If you have a feckful, cooperative population like most of Wisconsin, then it made sense to set liberal welfare rules in the 1960s to make sure that neighbors in need weren't shut out by bureaucratic red tape. The problem with this generous attitude is that it attracted in the most parasitical blacks from the South and from Chicago. 


A long time ago in VDARE I mapped 1997 data on imprisonments by race by state. The three states with the highest ratio of black to white imprisonment were Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, which are three of the top five in Audacious's TANF ratio table.

UPDATE: Audacious has recalculated the rankings to get around the statistical problem I pointed out. Now, he's just looking at the black to white ratio in TANF usage rates. Fortunately for all the verbiage I wrote above, you get the same winner (Hawaii) and the same loser (Wisconsin). Different states have different eligibility levels for welfare, so it makes sense to report not the absolute black welfare usage rate, but their rate relative to the rate of whites in that state:


Best blacks relative to local whites (i.e., #50 Hawaii has the most equal blacks and whites):

41. Vermont5.27
42. Rhode Island4.93
43. Washington4.73
44. Alaska4.52
45. New Hampshire4.41
46. New Mexico4.15
47. Kentucky4.01
48. West Virginia3.45
49. Colorado2.75
50. Hawaii1.39
Now, Texas blacks falls out of the better reaches and right into the middle of the pack. Oh, well ... My  explanation above sounded highly persuasive while I wrote it.

Worst blacks relative to local whites (#1 Wisconsin worst):
StateB:W
1. Wisconsin27.75
2. North Dakota23.40
3. Minnesota23.15
4. New Jersey17.97
5. South Dakota16.50
6. Pennsylvania15.81
7. Nebraska15.00
8. Illinois12.55
9. Iowa11.30
10. Michigan11.10
To some extent this is unfair to blacks in the Upper Midwest and New Jersey because the white people there are pretty good about not being a burden on society (Italian-Americans are famous for not wanting to use welfare no matter how much they might need it). But it's still a pretty interesting way to rank states.

September 11, 2011

Tutsi and Hutu

After the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, it became common to proclaim in the press that there aren't actually any average differences between the Nilotic Tutsis and the Bantu Hutus, that Tutsis don't actually tend to be taller than Hutus, that these perceptions are just some sort of mass delusion socially constructed by Belgian colonists. 

I can understand why the Tutsi minority that has ruled Rwanda for the last 17 years, and has ruled the Hutu majority in neighboring Burundi for the last half century, wants to propagate a myth intended not only to keep them unchopped up, but also keep them in power undemocratically. But having never felt the urge to chop up a Tutsi, I don't feel much compulsion to believe it, just as I don't feel the compulsion to avoid noticing that most of the people in the news in recent decades in Mexico (e.g., Vicente Fox, Jorge Castaneda, Carlos Slim, or Subcomandante Marcos) don't appear to be terribly Indian by ancestry, even thought the Mexican ruling class made up the La Raza Cosmic ideology/mythology in the 1920s to prevent further race wars.

Razib Khan decided to check out the genetics of this assertion, so he looked for a volunteer for his genetics project. He eventually found somebody who was 3/4th Tutsi and 1/4th Hutu. Sure enough, even with a sample size of N=0.75, he can see that Tutsis show up as different than Bantus.

Still, that raises the question of how in a culture with some degree of intermarriage over the last 500 years, can you still have somewhat distinct Tutsis and Hutus. I think an instructive analog for Rwanda is Mexico. Both were invaded by taller people about 500 years ago. Despite twenty or so generations of intermarriage, taller people still tend to rule there. (E.g., the previous president of Mexico is 6’5″). In my movie review of “Hotel Rwanda,” I explained a likely mechanism for these patterns:
Unfortunately, the screenplay aims at self-absorbed white liberals who think all Africans look alike and that white racism is the root of all evil. The script even claims that it’s merely a white myth that Tutsis tend to be taller than Hutus, asserting that the Belgian imperialists arbitrarily assigned those identities to random Rwandans. Yet, soon the Hutu Power radio station is broadcasting the prearranged code to begin exterminating the Tutsis: “Cut down the tall trees.” 
Rwanda’s true history is more instructive. The medium-height Bantu Hutu farmers arrived 2,000 years ago and drove the pygmoid hunter-gatherer Twa into the forests. Then, about the time of Cortez, the tall, slender Tutsi herdsmen invaded from the north and, according to Gary Brecher, the acerbic “War Nerd” columnist, “claimed all the land, on the legal basis that if you objected they’d kill you.” 
The Tutsi rulers treated the Hutu peasantry with the same contempt the Norman lords display toward the Saxon yeomen in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. Commenting on Rwanda’s “indigenous racism,” Congo-born sociologist Pierre L. van den Berghe reported that the Tutsis, like other aristocracies, saw themselves as “astute in political intrigue, born to command, refined, courageous, and cruel.” 
The Tutsi ascendancy resembled the white pre-eminence in Latin America. Intermarriage was frequent, yet physical differences between the classes endured, just as they have in Mexico, where despite five centuries of intermarrying, the elite remains much taller and fairer than the masses. The trick is that Mexico’s most successful short, dark men often wed tall, blonde women and have more European-looking offspring, thus replenishing the caste system. 
Likewise, in “Hotel Rwanda,” Cheadle’s ultra-competent Hutu executive is married to a Tutsi beauty who is taller and fairer than he is. (She’s played by Sophie Okonedo, whose mother is a Jewish Englishwoman.)

 I gotta say, that while I have my weaknesses as a movie reviewer, I don't think too many other critics offer novel explanations for major global conundrums in the course of reviewing the Movie of the Week.

Flight 93

Jonathan Last makes an excellent point:
Despite the national memorial now emerging in Shanksville, I don’t think America has fully begun to appreciate where Flight 93 fits into the pantheon of great moments in American history. I’d argue that–for a host of reasons–it belongs somewhere in the same neighborhood as Little Round Top and Revere’s ride. It’s fitting that we mourn the World Trade Center and Pentagon dead on 9/11, but properly understood our commemorations every year should start there and build toward reverence and appreciation for the men and women of Flight 93. That field in Pennsylvania, not the hole in Manhattan, should be our enduring symbol of the day.

A bunch of yuppie strangers self-organized within minutes and not only saved the Capitol or the White House, but appear, a decade later, to have historically eliminated the strategic threat posed by airline hijacking for kamikaze purposes. For about two hours, the bad guys seemed to have invented an unstoppable new weapon, with who knows what dire long term consequences. But then it proved they were stoppable by unarmed frequent flyers. And, probably consequently, there haven’t been any kamikaze hijackings in America since Flight 93. And two would-be suicide bombers on airplanes have been disarmed by passengers in the years since.

As an old yuppie marketing researcher, I take pride in knowing that one of the heroes who rushed the cabin on Flight 93 was a marketing researcher whose boss on 9/11 had been my boss back in 1982.

September 10, 2011

Another successful Indian tribe membership drive

Bob Hope once said of his hyper-exclusive Cypress Point Golf Club in Pebble Beach, CA, "One year they had a big membership drive at Cypress. They drove out 40 members." American Indian tribes, especially since Congress gave each tribe the right to one (but only one) casino, tend to hold similar views of what comprises a successful membership drive. Thus, from today's Washington Post:
One of the nation’s largest American Indian tribes has sent letters to about 2,800 descendants of slaves once owned by its members, revoking their citizenship and cutting their medical care, food stipends, low-income homeowners’ assistance and other services. 
The Cherokee Nation acted this week after its Supreme Court upheld the results of a 2007 special vote to amend the Cherokee constitution and remove the slaves’ descendants and other non-Indians from tribal rolls. 

You'll note that when it comes to defining who gets access to racial/ethnic privileges, Indians behave the opposite of blacks and Hispanics, tending to define access narrowly. Only a handful of blacks, such as Henry Louis Gates and Lani Guinier, have complained about people (like Barack Obama) with no family ties to American slaves benefiting from affirmative action for blacks. (And Gates and Guinier appear to have avoided mentioning their complaints in connection with Obama.)

How come?

Unlike casino benefits, which are extremely finite legally, affirmative action benefits for blacks and Hispanics have no theoretical limits, so black and Hispanic leaders tend to have expansive views of who should be eligible for quotas as being black or Hispanic. The more who benefit from affirmative action, they reason, the more supporters for affirmative action in the political arena.

Of course, if anybody stopped to think about it, they'd realize that the more beneficiaries of affirmative action, then the higher average costs imposed upon each benefactor, which would tend to increase political resistance among nonbeneficiaries. So, conceptually, it's not obvious that the black/Hispanic approach to winning political battles over racial preferences is a clear-cut winner.

But ... that's racist! So, nobody thinks about it. The easiest way to win political debates is to not hold them because you've redefined thoughts you don't like as crimethink.

Ten Years Ago

With the press rehashing everything they can think of about 9/11, allow me to once again recount something that has very much not become part of The Narrative because it is close to unthinkable. Here's an article I wrote for UPI on the evening of 9/11:
Bush had called for laxer airport security
by Steve Sailer
UPI, September 11, 2001

LOS ANGELES, Sep. 11 -- Ironically, in an attempt to appeal to the growing number of Arab-American and Muslim voters, exactly eleven months ago George W. Bush called for weakening airport security procedures aimed at deterring hijackers. 
On Oct. 11, 2000, during the second presidential debate, the Republican candidate attacked two anti-terrorist policies that had long irritated Arab citizens of the U.S. 
At present [i.e., the evening of 9/11], of course, there is no definite evidence that Arabs or Muslims were involved in today's terrorist assaults. Many incorrectly assumed after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that Middle Easterners were involved. Nor is there direct evidence that Bush's attack on airline safety procedures made the four simultaneous hijackings easier to pull off. 
Bush said during the nationally televised debate, "Arab-Americans are racially profiled in what's called secret evidence. People are stopped, and we got to do something about that." Then-Governor Bush went on, "My friend, Sen. Spence Abraham [the Arab-American Republic Senator from Michigan], is pushing a law to make sure that, you know, Arab-Americans are treated with respect. So racial profiling isn't just an issue at the local police forces. It's an issue throughout our society. And as we become a diverse society, we're going to have to deal with it more and more." 
Bush's plug for Senator Abraham was intended to help Abraham in close re-election battle, which he ultimately lost. (Abraham is now the Bush Administration's Secretary of Energy.) More important personally to Bush was the swing state of Michigan's 18 electoral votes, which Al Gore eventually won narrowly. Arab-Americans, centered in Dearborn and Flint, make up about four percent of the population of Michigan, the most of any state. 
In the debate, Bush conflated two separate policies that Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans felt discriminate against them: the heightened suspicions faced by Middle Eastern-looking travelers at airport security checkpoints and the government's use of "secret evidence" in immigration hearings of suspected terrorists. Yet, despite Bush's confusion, Arab-Americans appreciated his gesture. Four days after the debate, the Arab-American Political Action Committee endorsed Bush. 
The day after Bush's remarks, 17 American sailors died in a terrorist attack in the Arab nation of Yemen. The bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, however, did not stop Vice President Al Gore from echoing Bush's calls to end these two anti-terrorist techniques in a meeting with Arab-American leaders on October 14, 2000. 
According to a spokesperson for a leading Arab-American organization, people of Arab descent are stopped and searched at airports more often than many other ethnic groups. Some refer to this as Flying While Arab or Flying While Muslim. These terms are intended as plays on the popular phrase "Driving While Black," which is widely used to criticize police departments for stopping more black than white motorists. 
This year, both Bush and his Attorney General John Ashcroft have called for an end to racial profiling. 
The Federal Aviation Administration provides airline and airport personnel with the Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening system to help them identify suspicious travelers. It relies on a secret profile of the characteristics of typical hijackers and terrorists. 
Bush's Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta has said that "the security procedures are not based on the race, ethnicity, religion or gender of passengers" Yet, the system is widely believed to use other information - such as whether the traveler is going to or coming from the Middle East - that tends to "disparately impact" Arab and Muslims. 
None of the ethnic rights groups, however, has offered any data to dispute the widespread assumption that in the three decades since the Palestine Liberation Organization invented skyjacking, a disproportionate number of hijackers and plane bombers have had Middle Eastern ties. 
Nonetheless, the Bush Administration publicly agrees with the civil rights organizations that even a nonracial airport profiling system that had merely a disparate impact on Arabs and Muslims would be objectionable. Secretary Mineta said, "We also want to assure that in practice, the system does not disproportionately select members of any particular minority group." Of course, if Arabs and Muslims are disproportionately more likely to hijack airliners, and the profiling system does not end up disproportionately targeting them, then system wouldn't work very well at preventing hijackings. 
To ensure that no disparate impact is occurring, the Bush Administration carried out in June a three-week study, first planned by the Clinton Administration, of whether or not profiling at the Detroit airport disparately impacts Arabs. 
The results of the study have not been released. Nor is it known whether the secret profiles have been relaxed - they are kept secret in order to keep hijackers guessing. 
However, on June 6th Attorney General Ashcroft told Congress, "We want the right training, we want the right kind of discipline, we want the right kind of detection measures and the right kind of remediation measures, because racial profiling doesn't belong in the federal government's operational arsenal." 
Besides airport profiling, Arab-American activists long demanded the repeal of the "secret evidence" section of the 1996 Anti-Terrorism Act. To prevent terrorist gangs from murdering U.S. government secret informants, this law allows the government to provide evidence from unidentified moles in the immigration hearings of foreigners suspected of terrorist links. The government has deported or detained a number of Arabs hoping to immigrate to the U.S. due to testimony by witnesses they were never allowed to confront. 
Although Abraham's bill repealing the use of secret evidence died in 2000, during his confirmation hearing, Ashcroft endorsed the ban on secret evidence. He told Congress in June that the Bush Administration has not used secret evidence. 
As the practice has come under increasing attack, the number of Arab immigrants detained on secret evidence has dropped sharply. Hussein Ibish of the American Arab Anti-discrimination Committee told UPI in June, "Two years ago there were 25 in prison," he said. "Now we're down to only one."

Four years later, we found out how this had played out:
It was not until 2005 that Michael Tuohey surfaced. He was the veteran U.S. Air ticket agent in Portland, ME who checked in Mohammed Atta, the leader of the 19 9/11 terrorists, and a companion on the first leg of their trip that ended in the World Trade Center. Tuohey was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey: 
Michael Tuohey was going to work like he had for 37 years, but little did he know that this day would change his life forever. On September 11, 2001, Tuohey, a ticket agent for U.S. Airways, checked in terrorist Mohammed Atta for a flight that started a chain of events that would change history. 
Tuohey was working the U.S. Airways first-class check-in desk when two men, Atta and his companion Abdul Azziz-Alomari, approached his counter. From all outward appearances, the men seemed to be normal businessmen, but Tuohey felt something was wrong. 
"I got an instant chill when I looked at [Atta]. I got this grip in my stomach and then, of course, I gave myself a political correct slap...I thought, 'My God, Michael, these are just a couple of Arab businessmen.'" 

Tuohey also told David Hench of the Portland Press Herald: 
Then his eyes locked on Atta.  
"It just sent chills through you. You see his picture in the paper (now). You see more life in that picture than there is in flesh and blood," Tuohey said. 
Then Tuohey went through an internal debate that still haunts him."I said to myself, 'If this guy doesn't look like an Arab terrorist, then nothing does.' Then I gave myself a mental slap, because in this day and age, it's not nice to say things like this," he said. 
"You've checked in hundreds of Arabs and Hindus and Sikhs, and you've never done that. I felt kind of embarrassed." 
It wasn't just Atta's demeanor that caught Tuohey's attention."When I looked at their tickets, they had first-class, one-way tickets - $2,500 tickets. Very unusual," he said. "I guess they're not coming back. Maybe this is the end of their trip."

Indeed, they weren't coming back.

It's fascinating how all of this has disappeared down the Memory Hole. If you search in Google News for

"Arab-Americans are racially profiled" Bush

you find nada, zip, zilch articles quoting what George W. Bush said about air travel security in front of tens of millions of viewers during a Presidential debate eleven months before 9/11. 

September 8, 2011

Just when you start to forget why unions became unpopular ...

From the NYT, on a labor dispute at a port in the state of Washington:
About 500 longshoremen stormed the new $200 million terminal in Longview before sunrise Thursday, carrying baseball bats, smashing windows, damaging rail cars and dumping tons of grain from the cars, police and company officials said.

That reminds me that one of the forgotten efficiencies bestowed by the containerization revolution after WWII in which sealed standardized steel boxes that could be carried by truck, rail, and ship became the norm. Containerization made it much harder for stevedores to steal some of the cargo. Theft had been a traditional perk of working on the docks. Wikipedia explains:
Improved cargo security is also an important benefit of containerization. The cargo is not visible to the casual viewer and thus is less likely to be stolen; the doors of the containers are usually sealed so that tampering is more evident. Some containers are fitted with electronic monitoring devices and can be remotely monitored for changes in air pressure, which happens when the doors are opened. This reduced the thefts that had long plagued the shipping industry.

By the way, as a commenter points out, the American engineer who invented the modern container, Keith W. Tantlinger, just died. Here's his NYT obituary, which does a good job of explaining both the importance of his particular innovations, and how precisely they made an old idea idea a giant success.
Until the mid-1950s, however, seaborne cargo transport had changed little since the day man first lashed together a raft, stocked it with trade goods and set out for distant shores. For centuries, on waterfronts worldwide, goods as diverse as flour, coffee, whiskey and mail were literally manhandled — loaded by longshoremen onto ships in sacks and crates and barrels and, at the other end, loaded off again. 
The method was expensive and took time. In 1954, Mr. Levinson’s book reports, the cargo ship Warrior left Brooklyn for Germany carrying 194,582 separate items. These had arrived at the Brooklyn docks in 1,156 separate shipments. 
Containerization unified the process, letting a single shipper move merchandise across land and sea. In 1958, The New York Times described the new technology this way: 
“A trailer is loaded, for example, in Springfield, Mo. It travels by road to New York or San Francisco, sealed, virtually damage-proof and theft-proof. By ship it goes to France or to Japan, eliminating warehousing, stacking and sorting. Each ship takes on her cargo with a few hundred lifts, compared to 5,000 individual lifts by the old method.”

Also, now that I'm on the topic of longshoremen, one of the odder economic facts is that America's busiest port is Los Angeles / Long Beach, despite LA being a high cost urban area, traffic for trucks being bad, and the port being notoriously unionized and corrupt (e.g., the scene in Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs where the head gangsters get the vicious ex-con Mr. Blond a job at the port that he doesn't have to show up for as a reward for taking the rap and not ratting them out). And LA / Long Beach isn't even a real harbor -- it's just created by breakwaters. I guess the other potential dominant ports are even worse. San Francisco used to be the dominant West Coast port due to its superb natural location, but I guess Harry Bridges, the San Francisco-based Communist boss of the ILWU, permanently wrecked San Francisco Bay.

But even with the extra costs imposed by the LA / LB port, the cost of intercontinental shipping is a minor aspect of the cost of imported goods today. Tantlinger's invention broke down the natural tariff barriers of oceans that protected American manufacturers. 

The latest crises besetting affluent white women

Kevin Drum is upset by an LA Times article:
The financial industry, long known for its boys-club environment, has only a small fraction of women as top executives. And that small cadre has been thinning out in recent years, with the most recent example Krawcheck's departure as BofA's president of global wealth management. Her departure is part of a broader trend in the financial industry in recent years: Female employees are losing their jobs at a faster clip than men. ... 
....The finance industry has not historically been known as a welcoming place for women. The cigar and strip-club reputation was confirmed by a lawsuit against Smith Barney in the 1990s, which accused it of turning a blind eye to raunchy, sexist behavior. The lawsuit later became the subject of a book called "Tales From the Boom-Boom Room." 
The attention brought by the suit spurred wide-scale changes that helped stamp out overt discrimination and open up hiring. A decade ago, the number of women in finance was rising.

Similarly, on Forbes:
Public-relations executive Richard Edelman writes in his blog this week that he wants women to occupy half of the senior roles in his company by 2016. 
"Our goal is simple—50% of those on Strategy Committee, Operating Committee, GCRM and practice leadership will be women by 2016," he writes. "They will have earned the positions; there will not be a quota." 
Edelman, who is president and CEO of Edelman, the world's largest independent public-relations firm, acknowledges that his industry has no problem attracting women. Some two-thirds of his workforce is female, he writes. But the ranks of women start to thin in leadership roles.

Wall Street, as seen in the works of Tom Wolfe, Michael Lewis, and Oliver Stone, is a notoriously competitive, macho, insensitive environment. 

Other industries are less so, but, still, as you climb the corporate ladder, the environments often get more macho. 

For example, I worked for a successful start-up in market research, which was, at the MBA entry level, very yuppie and pretty gender neutral (we went out to restaurants in mixed sex groups and then talked about other restaurants, since food was one topic that appealed to both sexes). The market research industry as a whole is pretty genteel and sedate. One marketing research tycoon I knew, an old B-17 bomber pilot, liked to point out, with a little contempt, that most of his competitors had been started by college professors or housewives. (I suspect PR is even more feminine and much more gay at the MBA entry level than is Marketing Research. But, the top dogs even in big PR firms tend do be masculine guys.)

But the founders of my company, which revolutionized the market research industry in the 1980s, were high testosterone guys who were into importing Porsches that had to be customized for six months just to be street legal in the U.S. One morning in 1983, after about six months on the job, I was standing on a street corner in Lincoln Park waiting for the bus to work, when the CEO pulls up in his TurboPorshe and offers me a ride. "Sure!" But, the stoplights on La Salle Street heading toward the Loop are not optimized for a CEO who floors it at every green light and thus gets caught by every single red light. So, every block consisted of us going 0-60 in five seconds, with my head being shoved back into the headrest, followed by 60-0 in five seconds (with my forehead just about bouncing off the dashboard). When we got to work, the CEO offered to pick me up every morning on that corner, but, feeling pummeled by G-forces and whiplash from the ride, I went back to taking the bus.

Then, luckily for me, when the founders started pushing 40, their recreations downshifted from the Need for Speed to becoming fanatical golfers. This worked out well for me socially at the office, because, being a lower testosterone guy about a decade younger, I'd transitioned earlier from playing contact sports to being a golf fanatic at about age 25. So, by the time the bigshots' hormone levels had dropped enough to move on from racing sports to golf, I was already an expert on all the best public golf courses in the Chicago area. So I played a lot of golf with the top dogs while they were getting started in the game. (One boss got so into my hobby of golf course architecture that he went on to build his own fine golf course in Wisconsin, and then singlehandedly revamped, without a professional golf course architect's assitance, it to make it more interesting.)

Very few women feel the urge to, say, drive around the Chicago suburbs visiting golf courses to rate them for quality. It's a good thing to know for career networking purposes, but it really only appeals to individuals with a nerdy turn of mind and a fairly average level (for a man) of male hormones. It's not utterly unknown among women -- one very friendly, slightly tomboyish woman golfer in Accounting was a popular choice for golf foursomes, but she wasn't really into finding new, good golf courses to play (but she liked to arrange golf resort trips, with more emphasis on quality of accommodations than on the course itself -- a more feminine version of this urge). But caring a lot about golf courses is fairly rare among men and extremely rare among women.

Returning to these complaints about disparate impact on women in the executive suites, let me point out that one mechanism that thins the ranks of women in the executive suites is that as young women climb the corporate ladder, they come into less and less contact with the dweebier guys down the ladder and more and more contact with the most powerful and ambitious men at the top. Women don't generally love working in the macho atmospheres found higher up, but a lot of them do fall in love with individual macho executives, whom they often marry. And then they tend to downsize their own careers (since their husbands make so much money) to concentrate on helicopter mothering their children. 

I recall one young woman at my old company who was shooting up the corporate ladder until she became a direct report to the single most brilliant youngish executive. After awhile, he left his wife and kids to marry her, and then she started concentrating less on her own career and instead on the promoting the career of her very high income, very high potential new husband.

So, here's a different model of what might have happened on Wall Street: Affirmative action pressure to hire women at Wall Street banks to avoid disparate impact lawsuits led to a lot of women getting hired, who then found that they don't really like trading, with its macho atmosphere, but they do like macho traders. In fact, they like them so much they want to have their babies. So, they tended to marry a rich male colleague, then downshift careerwise to being a Tiger Mother for their offspring.

I can't say that I'm terribly outraged by any of this.

Infectious disease and national IQs

Christopher Eppig is back, this time in Scientific American, with his study showing a high correlation between average national IQs around the world and infectious disease burden. I would hardly be surprised if this were partly true (for example, in some Third World regions, various public health measures undertaken in the U.S. in the 20th Century, like hookworm eradication and iodine and iron staple supplementation, remain low-hanging fruits). But I can't say I've found Eppig's evidence highly persuasive yet that the arrow of causality doesn't mostly run in the opposite direction: e.g.,  that high average IQ Singapore has used its smarts to cut infectious disease more than low average IQ Lagos has managed to do so, despite both being at similar latitudes and altitudes.

Eppig claims that evidence from the U.S. backs up his international correlations:
Despite the strength of our findings, our study was not without its limitations. We did our best to control for the effects of education. But what we really needed was to repeat our analysis across regions within a single nation, preferably one with standardized, compulsory education. The nation we chose was the United States. Average IQ varies in the states. (Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont are at the high end, for example; California, Louisiana, and Mississippi are near the low end.) Again, infectious disease was an excellent predictor of average state IQ. 

The fever swamps of California? The swarming hordes of malarial mosquitoes in Compton? I don't really get this idea that Californians have their high infectious disease burdens to blame for their stupidity. The climate in California is famously healthy: dry, sunny, few mosquitoes or other insects, and low humidity. Health nuts have been moving to California for 125 years. For example, my grandfather was a health nut and he moved to Altadena in 1929.

A reader points out:
It is hard for me to believe that infectious disease is by far the most important cause of IQ variation.  If this were so, I would expect to see significant numbers of very high IQs even in low-average-IQ regions (asymmetrically long high-end tails of IQ bell curves for these regions), because even in high-infectious-disease areas (I assume) the number of uninfected people is significant.  In reality, the IQ bell curve is shifted to the left for low-IQ regions, but retains its symmetrical shape.  Only if everyone in low-average-IQ regions had been infected with IQ-lowering disease does the infectious disease hypothesis predict that normal distribution curves will be shifted to the left without the shape being affected.

For example, Kenya has high rates of infectious disease, infant mortality, crippling accidents, and so forth. Yet, the Kenyans who avoid all that sometimes do extraordinarily well in Olympic running events.
Also, the hypothesis doesn't square with the fact that people have lower IQs in any region when their family origins and genetic pedigrees originate in low-IQ areas.

September 7, 2011

Paging Doctors Herrnstein and Murray!

From the Washington Post:
Many in U.S. slip from middle class, study finds 
By Michael A. Fletcher, 
Nearly one in three Americans who grew up middle-class has slipped down the income ladder as an adult, according to a new report by the Pew Charitable Trusts. 
Downward mobility is most common among middle-class people who are divorced or separated from their spouses, did not attend college, scored poorly on standardized tests, or used hard drugs, the report says. 
... The study focused on people who were middle-class teenagers in 1979 and who were between 39 and 44 years old in 2004 and 2006. It defines people as middle-class if they fall between the 30th and 70th percentiles in income distribution, which for a family of four is between $32,900 and $64,000 a year in 2010 dollars. 
People were deemed downwardly mobile if they fell below the 30th percentile in income, if their income rank was 20 or more percentiles below their parents’ rank, or if they earn at least 20 percent less than their parents. ... 
Overall, African American men have a particularly hard time clinging to middle-class status. Thirty-eight percent of black men who grew up middle-class are downwardly mobile, nearly double the rate of white men, the report says. Hispanic men are slightly more likely than white males to fall down the economic ladder, but the difference was not statistically significant.
Among African Americans and Hispanics, men are more likely to slip than women, although the reverse is true among whites. 
The racial gap in mobility has perplexed researchers at Pew since a 2007 report that said nearly half of African Americans born to middle-income parents in the late 1960s plunged into poverty or near-poverty as adults. That report underscored the feeble grip many African Americans had on middle-class life, prompting researchers to probe deeper, said Erin Currier, project manager of Pew’s Economic Mobility Project. 
The new report called the performance of blacks on a key standardized test a factor that accounts for virtually the entire mobility gap separating the races. Black males scored much lower than white males on the Armed Forces Qualification Test, which measures reading comprehension, vocabulary and math ability. 
“Taking into account differences in AFQT scores between middle-class white and black men reduces the gap until it is statistically indistinguishable from zero,” the report said. 
The findings in the report are drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a group of 12,000 interviews that researchers have followed since 1979.

Hmmhmmhhhh ... AFQT scores ... the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth ... Where have I heard all this before?

Ideal elevation?

Ever since I was a Boy Scout, I've been fascinated by the effects of altitude on a place's climate, vegetation, and human life. When I reread volumes of my 1971 Encyclopedia Britannica, I appreciate that the standard Britannica format is to put the altitude of a place in the first paragraph.

Yet, altitude doesn't come up much in daily thinking, which can cause problems. For example, I knew a man who spent his prime building his retirement dream home at 9,000 feet, but then found that by the time it was finally finished, he was getting on in years and didn't thrive anymore in that thin atmosphere. 

Elevation is an important element in the concept of "Whitopia," a term coined by a black journalist named Rich Benjamin in his genial book Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America. Benjamin drove around to various places white people are moving to in out of the way states like Utah and Idaho to discover what white people are up to. He discovered, among other things, that they are up to playing a lot of golf. To burrow deeper into his investigative journalism project, he took up golf. And discovered that golf is awesome. In fact, golfcentric whitopias are pretty cool overall, he found. 

Whitopias tend to be located in the sunny, low humidity inland West.

I think you can divide whitopias into two class categories, by elevation. Elite whitopias like Aspen (7900 feet), Santa Fe (7200), and Telluride (8700) tend to be very high ski resorts. The homes in these elite whitopias tend to be second (or third) homes. For example, I stayed once at my boss's 17,000 square foot house in a highland suburb of Aspen at about 9,000 feet. Personally, I would be leery of buying a house at 9,000 feet, but the kind of people who buy giant homes in Aspen (e.g., my boss's neighbor Chris Evert) tend to have outstanding aerobic capacity. 

Extreme altitude can cause massive health problems. For example, doctors in Leadville, Colorado (10,152 ft.) insist that all pregnant women go down to lower elevations. In Peru and Bolivia, white people have trouble carrying babies to term on the Altiplano relative to Amerindians.

More middle class whitopias like Bend, Oregon (3600 feet), Grand Junction, Colorado (4600), and St. George, Utah (2900) tend to be middling in height. They are often located in the high desert near the base of major mountain ranges, which provides easy access to the highlands for recreation without having to deal with massive snowfalls, and a lot of water for lawns and golf courses in the summer, when temperatures, while warm, are not as insufferable as in low deserts. 

So, has anybody systematically looked at the effects of elevation on real estate?

September 5, 2011

Malconomics

Economist Steven D. "Freakonomics" Levitt reports:
"The fee for a trick varies with the type of sex act, and prostitutes seem to discriminate across clients in order to maximize profit. White men pay $8 to $9 more per trick than black customers, with Hispanic clients paying some amount in between. When bargaining, prostitutes will usually offer a price to a black customer but will make a white man throw out a number first. Repeat customers pay slightly less than new customers."

Too bad prostitutes can't afford to pay for Malcolm Gladwell to address them, because Malcolm would explain to them that, like car salesmen, if only the whores understood that they were unconsciously discriminating, they'd stop leaving money on the table.

September 4, 2011

Glenn Burke: tragic victim of homophobia or his own all-around suckiness?

From ESPN.com, about Glenn Burke, a 1970s ballplayer who died of AIDS:
What most people didn't know was that Burke was gay. Following his retirement, in 1980, he became the first major leaguer to come out. Even though he tried to keep his sexuality a secret during his playing days, there had been rumors in the clubhouse. And as the 2010 television documentary Out: The Glenn Burke Story revealed, Dodgers executives scrambled to squash those rumors at all costs: In the off-season of 1977, team VP Al Campanis offered Burke $75,000 to get married. According to a friend, Burke rejected the marriage deal with a mix of wit and rebelliousness. He told Campanis, "I guess you mean to a woman." 
It was around that time that Burke struck up a relationship with Spunky Lasorda, aka Tommy Lasorda Jr. Spunky was a lithe young socialite who frequented West Hollywood's gay scene, smoking cigarettes from a long holder. A 1992 GQ profile of Spunky portrayed his homosexuality as an open secret. But his father was in staunch denial and remained so even after Spunky's death, in 1991, from pneumonia. GQ reported that the death certificate said his illness was likely AIDS-related. "My son wasn't gay. No way," Lasorda Sr. told the magazine.
Burke and Spunky's relationship didn't become public until years later and remains ambiguous. Burke's sister, Lutha Davis, insists the two men were just close friends. In his 1995 memoir, Out at Home, co-authored with Erik Sherman, Burke went out of his way to leave the true nature of the relationship unclear. "That's my business," he wrote. He also explained that Lasorda Sr.'s homophobia was something he and Spunky commiserated about. Burke described them turning up together at Lasorda's house one night, done up in pigtails and drag, hoping to stage a kind of gay Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. They chickened out before knocking on the door. 
Whatever the case, Burke's association with Spunky marks the point at which his big league career took an irrevocable left turn. Lasorda stopped being amused by the player's dugout antics and, according to Burke, turned on him. "Glenn had such an abundance of respect and love for Tommy Lasorda," says Burke's sister. "When things went bad at the end, it was almost like a father turning his back on his son." Early in the 1978 season, the Dodgers abruptly dealt Burke to the Oakland A's — among the most lackluster teams in baseball — for Billy North, an outfielder past his prime. L.A. sportswriters described the trade as sucking the life out of the Dodgers' clubhouse. A couple of players were seen crying at their lockers.
For Burke the trade had everything to do with his sexuality — though the outfielder sounded off to the press about it in only the most cryptic terms. "I never got a chance here," he said. "I felt I was supposed to kiss ass and I didn't." 
After unproductive years in 1978 and '79, Burke hoped for a fresh start in 1980 under new A's manager Billy Martin. But the gay rumors followed Burke to Oakland. Martin threw the word "faggot" around the clubhouse and didn't play Burke. Some teammates even avoided showering with him. Burke, accustomed to being the heart of the clubhouse, felt crippled by the discomfort he was causing. His unhappiness was compounded by a knee injury and a demotion to Triple-A. After playing just 25 games in the minors in 1980, he abruptly retired. He was 27 years old. "It's the first thing in my life I ever backed down from," he later said.
Burke started hanging around San Francisco's Castro district. He became a star shortstop in a local gay softball league and dominated in the Gay Softball World Series. "I was making money playing ball and not having any fun," he said of his time in the majors. "Now I'm not making money, but I'm having fun." Jack McGowan, a friend in the Castro who has since passed away, once said of Burke: "He was a hero to us. He was athletic, clean-cut, masculine. He was everything that we wanted to prove to the world that we could be." 
In the Castro, Burke's creation of the high five was part of his Herculean mystique. He would flash his magnetic smile and high-five everyone who walked by. In 1982, he came out publicly in an Inside Sports magazine profile called "The Double Life of a Gay Dodger." The writer, a gay activist named Michael J. Smith, appropriated the high five as a defiant symbol of gay pride. Rising from the wreckage of Burke's aborted baseball career, Smith wrote, was "a legacy of two men's hands touching, high above their heads." 
By that time, however, Burke was struggling with a drug habit. It escalated in 1987, when a car plowed into him as he was crossing a street, breaking his right leg in four places and stealing his athleticism. He couldn't hold a job. He went broke. He did some time at San Quentin for grand theft. Then, in 1993, he tested positive for HIV. He passed away on May 30, 1995, after a sharp and grisly decline.

I remember Glenn Burke from when I was an intense Dodger fan in the late 1970s. He struck me then as a useless waste of space any time he got into the lineup. Looking up his statistics, I see I was right: In his career, he had 556 plate appearance, or about one full season's worth. His career stats in MVP form were .237 average, 2 homers, and 38 rbi. He got all of 22 walks in his career. His career on base percentage was .270 and slugging average was .291, for an OPS of .561. His OPS+ on a scale where an average big leaguer is 100 was 57. His career wins above replacement was -3.1, evenly split by being terrible on both offense and defense. The remarkable thing about Burke was not that his promising career was sidetracked by irrational discrimination, but they let him stay in the big leagues so long when there were better players in Triple A.