February 9, 2012

Great moments in neocon strategizing: Bomb Paraguay!

From an old Newsweek article:
Days after 9/11, a senior Pentagon official lamented the lack of good targets in Afghanistan and proposed instead U.S. military attacks in South America or Southeast Asia as "a surprise to the terrorists," according to a footnote in the recent 9/11 Commission Report. The unsigned top-secret memo, which the panel's report said appears to have been written by Defense Under Secretary Douglas Feith, is one of several Pentagon documents uncovered by the commission which advance unorthodox ideas for the war on terror. The memo suggested "hitting targets outside the Middle East in the initial offensive" or a "non-Al Qaeda target like Iraq," the panel's report states. U.S. attacks in Latin America and Southeast Asia were portrayed as a way to catch the terrorists off guard when they were expecting an assault on Afghanistan. 
The memo's content, NEWSWEEK has learned, was in part the product of ideas from a two-man secret Pentagon intelligence unit appointed by Feith after 9/11: veteran defense analyst Michael Maloof and Mideast expert David Wurmser, now a top foreign-policy aide to Dick Cheney. Maloof and Wurmser saw links between international terror groups that the CIA and other intelligence agencies dismissed. They argued that an attack on terrorists in South America—for example, a remote region on the border of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil where intelligence reports said Iranian-backed Hizbullah had a presence—would have ripple effects on other terrorist operations. The proposals were floated to top foreign-policy advisers. But White House officials stress they were regarded warily and never adopted.

As far as I can tell, there's no grand, carefully plotted, centrally controlled neocon conspiracy. There is just a small, somewhat loose network of energetic and overly excitable intellectuals who continue to have far more influence than their track record would suggest they deserve, and far more immunity from criticism of their network and their tendencies than is wise. They have a number of tendencies -- a love of international Rube Goldberg schemes; a love of conspiracy theorizing; dual loyalties; a strong willingness to play the anti-Semitism card to bully skeptics into silence; an aversion to leave well enough alone, to let sleeping dogs lie, and to try to fix things that aren't all that broken; an unhealthy love of violence in the abstract; and so forth. Not all of the neocons share all these tendencies, but there is plenty of overlap. And these problems generally get worse over time, because not only are they backed by powerful and wealthy interests so that they don't suffer much from their world-historical screw-ups like pushing the Iraq Attaq, but they aren't even exposed much to more than piecemeal criticism.

Let me go back to an incident I blogged about in 2005:

You may recall that prominent neocon Francis "End of History" Fukuyama jumped ship awhile ago and criticized Charles Krauthammer in The National Interest for his lack of realism about the Iraq War. Krauthammer responded, predictably, by playing the anti-Semitism card. Here is part of Fukuyama's rebuttal:
"Krauthammer says I have a "novel way of Judaizing neoconservatism", and that my argument is a more "implicit and subtle" version of things said by Pat Buchanan and Mahathir Mohamad. Since he thinks the latter two are anti-Semites, he is clearly implying that I am one as well. If he really thinks this is so, he should say that openly."

A little late, perhaps, Francis? "First they came for Pat Buchanan, but I was not Pat Buchanan, so I said nothing. Then they came ...". But better late than never. Fukuyama continues:
"What I said in my critique of [Krauthammer's] speech was, of course, quite different. I said that there was a very coherent set of strategic ideas that have come out of Israel's experience dealing with the Arabs and the world community, having to do with threat perception, preemption, the relative balance of carrots and sticks to be used in dealing with the Arabs, the United Nations, and the like. Anyone who has dealt with the Arab-Israeli conflict understands these ideas, and many people (myself included) believe that they were well suited to Israel's actual situation. You do not have to he Jewish to understand or adopt these ideas as your own, which is why people like Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld share them. And it is not so hard to understand how one's experience of Arab-Israeli politics can come to color one's broader view of the world: The 1975 "Zionism is racism" resolution deeply discredited the UN, in the eyes of Jews and non-Jews alike, on issues having nothing to do with the Middle East. This is not about Judaism; it is about ideas. It would be quite disingenuous of Charles Krauthammer to assert that his view of how Israel needs to deal with the Arabs (that is, the testicular route to hearts and minds) has no impact on the way he thinks the United States should deal with them. And it is perfectly legitimate to ask whether this is the best way for the United States to proceed."

Well said. America's foreign policy blunders since early 2002 have less to do with the fact that so many highly influential people in Washington and New York, like Krauthammer, think about Israel and its welfare all the time, as to the fact that it has become extremely dangerous to one's career to point out that they do. People like Feith and Krauthammer like to believe deep down that are tough sabras, who would do whatever it takes. Feith wasn't acting on orders from Tel Aviv, he was fantasizing about what his Israeli heroes would have done. Similarly, Krauthammer wasn't acting on orders from Ariel Sharon when be demanded America invade Iraq. Sharon was a smart, fairly realistic guy. Iraq was way down the list of countries he'd like America to attack. The Iraq Attaq was something neocons dreamed up themselves and the Israelis said, in effect, "Iraq? Well, okay, sure, go for it if that's what you want to do."

As Gene Expression blogged:
And I'm sorry, but ethnicity will and should legitimately be a topic brought up in the ensuing debate. Consider an analogy. Suppose that Wolfowitz, Perle, Shulsky, Feith, Ledeen, and all the rest were South Asian Americans rather than Jewish Americans and had names like Ramachandran, Patel, and Choudhury. Again they'd be selected from a highly educated group that was less than 2% of society (there are about 2 to 3 million South Asian Americans, about 1/2 to 1/3 the number of American Jews depending on how you count).
Now suppose they were pushing the US to invade Pakistan, and talking about how the Islamic terrorists killing Indian citizens in Kashmir were the same ones bombing the US on 9/11. Assume that they did this whilst having relatives, extended families, and significant contacts in India. 
Now, their arguments would not - and should not - be dismissed out of hand. After all, it is probably more accurate to say that Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the ISI are/were more closely involved in Muslim terrorism in Kashmir than they are with anti-Israeli terrorism in Palestine. (As far as I know, Al Qaeda has never directly attacked Israel.) 
But while their arguments would not be dismissed out of hand, clearly their visible ethnicity would figure into the debate. Plenty of people would take their opinions with a grain of salt, knowing that humans tend to be ethnocentric on the population level if not the individual level. It would be scurrilous to dismiss their arguments simply because they were of Indian ancestry, especially if they were born in America. But it would be foolish to think their ethnicity wasn't impacting any of their arguments, and to rule out mention of their ethnicity as "anti-Subcontinental."

What we need, now more than ever, is free discussion. Policing the "bounds of public discourse" helped get us into Iraq.

February 8, 2012

The Big Money behind Rick Santorum

Back in 1993, President Carlos Salinas of Mexico held a private dinner for Carlos Slim and 29 other rich Mexicans to whom he had sold various government monopolies. They all knew he was going to ask for campaign contributions to the ruling PRI party's 1994 presidential run, but Salinas's request for 25 million from each was kind of startling. 750 million is a lot of pesos, some grumbled. The president of Mexico replied that he wasn't demanding 750 million pesos from his guests, he was demanding 750 million dollars.

From the NYT:
A Wealthy Backer Likes the Odds on Santorum 
By JIM RUTENBERG and NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
Many more Republicans are taking Mr. Santorum seriously now, thanks to his victories in Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado on Tuesday — and perhaps none more than Mr. Romney, for whom Mr. Santorum’s unexpected rise poses another threat from the right. 
Few people played a more pivotal role in Tuesday’s turn of events than Mr. [Foster] Friess.

Is this guy named after the old Foster Freeze ice creams stands? Maybe he was conceived in the parking lot out back of one ... (No, it turns out that Mr. Friess is a few years older than the California chain.)
An investor who made millions in mutual funds and now lives in Wyoming, he is the chief backer of a “super PAC” that has helped keep Mr. Santorum’s candidacy alive by running television advertisements on his behalf. 
His role as outside funder — one that Mr. Friess indicated he would continue to play in the contests ahead — escalates the battle among a few dozen wealthy Republicans to influence their party’s choice of a presidential nominee. 
They are exploiting changes to campaign laws and regulations that have allowed wealthy individuals and businesses to pool unlimited contributions into super PACs that in turn have inundated the airwaves with negative advertisements. 
Mr. Friess’s chosen outlet, called the Red, White and Blue Fund, provided critical support for Mr. Santorum as he successfully sought to resuscitate his campaign with victories in Tuesday’s contests. At a time when Mr. Santorum could not afford to pay for a single commercial of his own, the Red, White and Blue Fund focused in particular on Minnesota, where the super PAC supporting Mr. Romney, Restore Our Future, broadcast a last-minute blitz of advertising against him, according to an analysis from Kantar Media/CMAG. 

This is all fascinating, but I'm most interested in how much Foster Friess has put up. America in 2012 is a lot richer than Mexico in 1993, so it's got to be a big number, right?
But Mr. Friess’s help could prove even more vital in the weeks ahead, as Mr. Santorum tries to capitalize on his upset victories on Tuesday to mount a more assertive challenge to Mr. Romney and to Newt Gingrich, who has an even more deep-pocketed supporter in the billionaire casino executive Sheldon Adelson, one of the richest men in country.

Okay, swell, but enough foreplay. Tell us how much?
... He is relatively rare among the major backers of super PACs for his close association with the religious conservative movement. His Web site quotes Scripture, and he often says that God is “the chairman of my board.” 
He is also rare for his willingness to speak openly about his political giving, a break from Mr. Adelson, who has not spoken publicly about his donations of $10 million, with his wife, to the super PAC supporting Mr. Gingrich.....

Show me the money number!
Campaign filings show that Mr. Friess has given the Red, White and Blue Fund more than 40 percent of its financing as of Dec. 31, or $331,000. He said he had subsequently given more. But he would not say how much, or how much more he may give in the future, joking, “If my wife finds out how much I put into the campaign and Santorum doesn’t win, you’re basically talking suicide.” 
And he played down the significance of his giving, crediting Mr. Santorum with his own victories and noting that another donor — whom he would not name — had chipped in $1 million to the fund and was talking about giving more as of Wednesday morning.
Asked what compelled him to give so much, he said: “No. 1, I think of all the guys that strap a gun on their backs and head to Afghanistan and Iraq to keep us free and safe and maintain what America has stood for. If I put up a million bucks or whatever, it doesn’t seem like much of a sacrifice.”

Microsoft spent $700 million on marketing the introduction of Windows 95. Today, a million dollars would get you about 8 seconds of Super Bowl commercial airtime.

From Wikipedia on Phil Knight, founder of Nike, which spends approaching $2.5 billion on advertising annually:
He is believed to have contributed approximately $230 million to the University of Oregon, the majority of which was for athletics. On August 18, 2007, Knight announced that he and his wife, Penny, would be donating an additional $100 million to the University of Oregon Athletics Legacy Fund. This donation is reportedly the largest in the University's history. 
His significant contributions have granted him influence and access atypical of an athletic booster. In addition to having the best seats in the stadium for all University or Oregon athletic event, he has his own locker in the football team's locker room.

So, I'm reading that as Phil Knight giving a minimum of $215 million to U. of Oregon sports teams, primarily the football team, which made the BCS Bowl a year ago. Granted, that's over a long number of years. Still, $215 million seems like a lot compared to what it apparently takes to get your boy into the hunt for a major party Presidential nomination. Sure, there are lots of rules limiting political contributions, but there are lots of rules limiting amateur athletics, too, and that doesn't seem to stop the Phil Knights and T. Boone Pickens from spending hundreds of millions to win at college football. And from a hardheaded return-on-investment point of view, surely having your own President has to be more profitable than having your own locker in the football team's locker room.

The only conclusion I can draw is that a lot of rich American businessmen just care about college football more than they care about politics or political power. Overall, I guess that's a good thing.

The Neocons' Ultimate Enemy

Back to the well for one more college football analogy ...

Charles Krauthammer and some guy who used to run Mossad have been trumpeting in the Washington Post and the New York Times, respectively, how crucial it is for the U.S. to overthrow the Alawite minority regime in Syria in order to throw a spanner in the works of the Iranian juggernaut, which would be good for America, the whole world, and all intelligent life forms in the galaxy (plus Israel).

But would regime change in Syria bringing the Sunni majority to power actually be good for Israel?

Now, the Assad dynasty in Syria are from the weird quasi-Shi'ite (and perhaps crypto-Christian) Alawite sect. Being surrounded, both in their own country and in the Arab world, by Sunnis, the Assads have taken multiple steps to stay in power and keep their necks attached to their heads: they run a nasty secular Baathist police state, they insist that Alawites are Shi'ites, they've formed an alliance with the Shi'ites in Iran, they've transformed Alawite worship into an imitation of Sunni orthodoxy, and they tried to get some kind of secret nuclear facility, which the Israelis blew up in '07 in an incident that neither side wants to talk about.

They got beat by Israel in '67 and '73, losing the well-watered Golan Heights, and have since maintained a hostile but largely quiescent posture toward the dominant Israelis ever since. They know Israel can crush them like a bug, and so they try not to provoke Israel, and don't let anybody within their police state provoke them either. All in all, not as good a neighbor for Israel as Egypt was under Mubarak, but things could be a lot worse for Israel. Syria has been less trouble for Israel for the last 38 years than, say, chaotic Lebanon.

As a weak minority-run regime concerned only with staying in power at home and out of favor with other Arab regimes for sectarian reasons, Syria has hardly been one to make a lot of trouble for the regional superpower. But, unlike Lebanon, the Syrian regime has been strong enough to keep aggrieved locals from firing missiles into Israel, which would provoke Israel to come smash up the Assad family's shiny military weapons that it uses to keep the Sunnis down. 

Now, with the overthrow of Mubarak's secular regime and the rise of democratic ideology in Egypt, which, not surprisingly, has turned out to mean the rise of Sunni fundamentalists, why would Krauthammer and Mr. Mossad want to risk the rise of another Sunni regime on the opposite direction of Israel's suddenly worrisome border with Egypt? As you may recall if you were a stamp collector as a kid, back in Nasser's day in the 1960s, Egypt and Syria were briefly united into one country called the United Arab Republic. Not surprisingly, that didn't last long, but it was more worrisome for Israel than Syria being on the outs with the Sunni Arabs. Compared to Syria being allied against Israel with Egypt, Syria being allied against Israel with far-off Iran is a piece of cake for Israel. Moreover, the main complaint Israel has had against Syria is being a conduit for weapons for anti-Israeli forces in Lebanon and the West Bank, but we've seen the Arab Spring in Egypt bring more enthusiasm in Egypt for helping Gaza Strippers get missiles to fire off in the general direction of Israel, so it's not clear that bringing the majority to power in Syria will help even with that.

So, why can't the neocons leave well enough alone? Why the urge to meddle, to play the great game even when the risks for Israel seemingly outweigh the rewards? 

Because that's what neocons do. It's like asking a college football fan if they want their team to go to a bowl game. Of course they do! They want more action, they want something to look forward to. 

For example, my neighbor gave me a ticket to a UCLA game at the Rose Bowl last fall. It was immediately obvious that the Bruins were a terrible football team. They fumbled the ball, they had a hard time getting plays off before the clock ran out, their defensive backs fell down a lot: just a bad team. But that night, everything happened to bounce right for them and they somehow beat a much better Arizona St. team by a point. 

This was very exciting to Bruins fans because it put the team in position to go to not one but two postseason games. Now, rational bystanders might have said, "Oh, no, please, dear God, don't make UCLA play any extra games this season. Twelve is enough." 

But that's not how college football fans think. They want their team to keep playing. Since USC, which then beat UCLA 50-0, was ineligible for the post-season for flagrant USCishness, UCLA wound up in the Pac-12 championship against Phil Knight of Nike's Oregon, where they only lost by about 20. And then, their 6-7 record somehow or other got them into the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl against another woeful team. And they lost, which made them the first 6-8 team in the history of college football. Woo-hoo.

Because UCLA qualified for two additional games, probably one or two players got seriously injured and, no doubt, a few flunked classes because they had to practice rather than study. But, from the perspective of the general welfare of the human race, war games like football are an improvement over war. A few crippling injuries and some concussions are a pretty small price to pay to give us non-lethal outlets for male combativeness.

Much like college football fans, just vastly more expensively in terms of lives and money (as the absurd Iraq Attaq demonstrated), for the neocons, banging the war drums and scheming, no matter how stupidly, are all part of the fun of being an Israel fan. 

For neocons in 2012, the true foe is not Iran or Syria or whomever. 

Their ultimate enemy is boredom.

Gays over blacks, Part XIV

A recent trend is prominent blacks like Kobe Bryant getting in trouble over remarks insensitive to gays. For example, somebody named Roland Martin just got suspended from doing something or other at CNN because he jokingly tweeted after watching a Super Bowl ad:
If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham’s H&M underwear ad, smack the ish out of him! #superbowl

I don't think this trend is just because gays are more politically organized now and their activists are looking around for something to keep them employed in the Public Indignation business after their inevitable total triumph with gay marriage. I think it reflects a more general impatience with stereotypical black behavior. A lot of straight white people are happy to seize upon a different Official Victim Group as a club to justify finally upbraiding blacks to not be such knuckleheads. 

It's like how a lot of white people were disappointed when Jesse Jackson somewhat shifted from the 1970s to the 1980s from advocating more that blacks clean up their act to shaking down whites. But you weren't supposed to say that, so a lot of white people got very worked up over Jackson once using in conversation the term "H*****town." Unlike whites in general, Jews are an Official Victim Group, so this single word was the biggest loophole in his Civil Rights / MLK's Bloody Shirt armor.

Some gay black could probably make a lot of money by becoming the media's go-to guy for urging blacks to behave in more civilized fashions -- maybe Lee Daniels, the gay black director of the movie Precious?

February 7, 2012

David Brooks' Self-Parody: "Flood the Zone" (A.K.A., Drain the Treasury)

Jodi Kantor notes in The Obamas that David Brooks of the New York Times is "the President's favorite pundit." In turn, I've been told on extremely good authority that Brooks is a regular reader of me. Being a covert member of the Steveosphere makes Brooks perhaps the most interesting conventional wisdom columnist, but also creates a lot of stress for the poor man. After such knowledge, what forgiveness? How do you triangulate your way to something that Obama will nod complacently over without totally boring yourself? How do you stay on TV, mouthing 21st Century platitudes, while knowing that a few people know you know?

This tension usually manifests itself in a couple of columns per year that only make sense under the supposition that I represent the conventional wisdom and that he's the man with challenging new ideas as he tries to dream up new epicycles to refute my Occamite slashes.

But then there's his new NYT column "Flood the Zone," the purpose of which is to eventually get around to gently criticizing Obama for his health insurance contraception stand. But, first, he feels he has to provide air cover for himself by trotting out all the shibboleths of 21st Century conventional wisdom.  

And that part is just brutal self-parody, presumably driven by a certain amount of self-loathing. No, I didn't write this, but if you read it as if I wrote it as a vicious satire on Brooks, it's quite funny. So, there's no need for me to respond to it. It's self-detonating:
The essential truth about poverty is that we will never fully understand what causes it. There are a million factors that contribute to poverty, and they interact in a zillion ways. 
Some of the factors are economic: the shortage of low-skill, entry-level jobs. Some of the factors are historical: the legacy of racism. Some of the factors are familial: the breakdown in early attachments between infants and caregivers and the cognitive problems that often result from that. Some of them are social: the shortage of healthy role models and mentors. 
The list of factors that contribute to poverty could go on and on, and the interactions between them are infinite. Therefore, there is no single magic lever to pull to significantly reduce poverty.
The only thing to do is change the whole ecosystem. 
If poverty is a complex system of negative feedback loops, then you have to create an equally complex and diverse set of positive feedback loops. You have to flood the zone with as many good programs as you can find and fund and hope that somehow they will interact and reinforce each other community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood. 
The key to this flood-the-zone approach is that you have to allow for maximum possible diversity. Let’s say there is a 14-year-old girl who, for perfectly understandable reasons, wants to experience the love and sense of purpose that go with motherhood, rather than stay in school in the hopes of someday earning a middle-class wage. 
You have no idea what factors have caused her to make this decision, and you have no way of knowing what will dissuade her. But you want her, from morning until night, to be enveloped by a thick ecosystem of positive influences. You want lefty social justice groups, righty evangelical groups, Muslim groups, sports clubs, government social workers, Boys and Girls Clubs and a hundred other diverse institutions. If you surround her with a different culture and a web of relationships, maybe she will absorb new habits of thought, find a sense of belonging and change her path.

"The Real Romney"

In Taki's Magazine, I review The Real Romney, the new biography of the candidate:
The Creepily Normal Mormon 
In his new book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, master social scientist Charles Murray flavors his statistical portrait of the widening gap between the classes with some human interest by referring to the bottom 30% of American whites as “Fishtown” (after the gritty Philadelphia neighborhood) and the upper 20% as “Belmont” (after the leafy Boston suburb). 
Perhaps coincidentally, Belmont, MA has been home for the last four decades to GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney and his lovely wife Ann, ever since Mitt was at Harvard earning his JD and MBA degrees. 
Indeed, this patrician paterfamilias is almost a cartoon embodiment of Murray’s thesis about elites losing touch with the rest of America ...

Read the whole thing there.

The Corn Bomb Gap

Personally, I think Krauthammer's version of these talking points in the Washington Post was more excitingly written up, but the NYT goes with the Mossad version:

From the New York Times:
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Iran’s Achilles’ Heel
By EFRAIM HALEVY 
THE public debate in America and Israel these days is focused obsessively on whether to attack Iran in order to halt its nuclear weapons ambitions; hardly any attention is being paid to how events in Syria could result in a strategic debacle for the Iranian government. Iran’s foothold in Syria enables the mullahs in Tehran to pursue their reckless and violent regional policies — and its presence there must be ended. ... 
... pave the way for Mr. Assad’s downfall.
Once this is achieved, the entire balance of forces in the region would undergo a sea change. Iranian-sponsored terrorism would be visibly contained; Hezbollah would lose its vital Syrian conduit to Iran and Lebanon could revert to long-forgotten normalcy; Hamas fighters in Gaza would have to contemplate a future without Iranian weaponry and training; and the Iranian people might once again rise up against the regime that has brought them such pain and suffering.
Those who see this scenario as a daydream should consider the alternative: a post-Assad government still wedded to Iran with its fingers on the buttons controlling long-range Syrian missiles with chemical warheads that can strike anywhere in Israel. This is a certain prescription for war, and Israel would have no choice but to prevent it.
Efraim Halevy, a former Israeli national security adviser and ambassador, was director of the Mossad from 1998 to 2002. 

Okay, so the threat Syria's chemical warheads pose to Israel is kind of like the threat that Venezuela poses to Florida. I mean, if Hugo Chavez suddenly decided that life wasn't worth living anymore and he wanted to be blown up by the American military, he might attack America. Maybe with speedboats loaded with WWI-technology chemical weapons. They could roar right up to Key West and wipe out some discos and t-shirt stands. I mean, why not?

In 2010, Oliver Stone made a documentary where he wandered around Latin America interviewing lefty caudillos. Chavez was the star. As Chavez is showing Stone a corn-processing plant built by Iranian technicians, he deadpans: "This is where we're building the Iranian atomic bomb ... the Corn Bomb." But Chavez gets a worried look on his face as if he were thinking, "Oh, crap, this is too serious to joke about. If that camera happened to run out of videotape right before my "Corn Bomb" joke, the USAF might blow us up."

By the way, the CIA World Factbook ranks Venezuela's military spending as a percent of GDP at 118th in the world. Israel ranks 6th, Syria ranks 11th, and Iran 62nd. But that was back in 2005 because the CIA hasn't bothered to update the list in a long time. Back in 2006, during the frightening bout of war fever in Washington caused by Israel's spat with Hezbollah, I wrote a bunch of blog posts citing the CIA's then-current rankings of military expenditures to show that the most of the world outside the Washington-Tel Aviv corridor was losing interest in war (prefiguring Steven Pinker's 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature). The CIA has barely updated their list since. And I've never seen anybody complain that this vital information isn't being kept up to date. Nobody seems to care about data. It would just get in the way of all the fun that Krauthammer and the Mossad alumni are having.

If the courts are overturning 2008 California initiative votes ...

... as they did today with the Proposition 8 vote against gay marriage on the grounds that majority rule violates minority rights, can they please also throw out Proposition 1A from the same ballot? As you'll recall, California's majority of marching morons voted to borrow $10 billion for a SuperTrain! that would go vroom-vroom between Los Angeles and San Francisco real fast. (It's now expected to cost $98 billion). As a member of California's endangered and oppressed minority of non-morons, I want the $10 billion back. 

It's Naptime in America


"Court Strikes Down Ban on Gay Marriage in California"

Obviously, by hook or by crook, gay marriage is going to happen in America, because powerful people want it to happen. Sure, last time I checked, gay marriage had gone 0 for 31 when presented to voters on ballots, but how can something so inherently suspect as "majority rule" be allowed to stand in the way of what has been defined as a "minority right?" Indeed, the very fact that gay marriage lost 31 straight elections proves that it must be imposed. I mean, when you stop and think about it, holding elections and abiding by the results is downright anti-democratic, because the contemporary understanding of democracy is victory for The Good People (i.e., those poor, powerless victims holding the bullhorn) by any means necessary. 

Will gay marriage turn out in the long run to have unintended consequences? Yeah, probably. Most things do. Has there been a frank, widespread public discussion to try to anticipate some of those unintended consequences? Of course not. That would be insensitive and thus outside the "bounds of public discourse."

Obama running as the "city of Detroit" candidate: Has this been fully thought through?

John Dickerson writes in Slate:
Detroit for President? 
Is the "Halftime in America" ad a preview of Obama's Re-election Campaign? 
Did the first Obama re-election ad run during the Super Bowl? You might have missed it since the president wasn't even mentioned. It was a Chrysler ad, although even that wasn’t obvious. Instead, more than 111 million viewers were greeted by that tough-talking American icon Clint Eastwood as he delivered what amounted to a locker room speech to the country. “It's halftime in America,” he intoned, as the New York Giants and New England Patriots went in for their midgame break. He heralded the auto industry’s revival and said it is a model for a nation poised for a comeback. By the end of the stirring message, pollsters could probably have found a majority of the country ready to elect the city of Detroit president. 
Since the Motor City is not on the ballot, the president would like you to consider him as a possible substitute.

Uhhmm ... Obama running on the theme that he will Detroitify the rest of America sounds like it's got some potential downsides. I dunno, but I'm just sayin ... It's reminiscent of Obama's brainstorm in 2006-2007 when he believed he was going to be the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter to win the votes of white Evangelicals. How? By playing up his long relationship with Rev. Jeremiah "Audacity of Hope" Wright!

Let's try out Obama's victory speech next November:
"This was the moment when the grass began to grow over our cities and the prairie began to return to our streets." 

I'm just not seeing it. But, then, what do I know?

How to sell used cars to African-Americans

Taking Judge Richard Posner's skeptical side in the debate with Malcolm Gladwell over the ethical rectitude of car salesmen, a commenter calls attention to these catchy low-rent commercials from the good old days of the Bush Bubble. Starring Washington D.C.-Baltimore area pro athletes like LaVar Arrington and Ray Lewis, they were hugely successful at increasing sales at Easterns Motors, a D.C. used car lot chain run by cousins Robert and Eiman Bassam:  
At Eastern Motors/Your job’s your credit!
At Eastern Motors/Your job’s your credit!
Fords, Hondas, Chevys, Beamers,/And minivans
Over 600 cars, trucks, SUVs/ Are you listenin’ man?
Let Eastern Motors/Put you in a car today!
Let Eastern Motors/Finance it all the way!

And here is a civic-minded commercial from Easterns educating its black customer base on how to negotiate to get the best price possible. Make sure to act aloof about the car you really want in front of the salesman! 

The commenter adds:
BTW, as you can probably tell from the commercial, Eastern Motors is like the Countrywide of car dealers. The founder and CEO, who is a "gold-chainer" type, sounds like Angelo Mozilo:
The would-be buyers he spoke with were looking for quality used cars, and many had been turned down by area dealerships. For Bassam, the trend was too obvious to ignore. “We realized very quickly that the subprime market was underserved and mistreated,” he says."

Fortunately, these days we all understand that immigration is sacred. What could be more morally uplifting than the sight of people from all over the world -- from the Levant to Korea -- coming to America to outsmart and rip off African-Americans, to reduce black American citizens to debt peonage?

February 6, 2012

Super Bowl and race

A reader writes:
The Patriots have had a lot of success with a lot of white guys on their team. More specifically, they let white players play positions most commonly handled by black players: running back (Danny Woodhead), defensive back / kickoff returner (Julian Edelman), receiver / punt returner (Wes Welker). They're almost the Duke of the NFL.

Those three played at obscure to formerly obscure college programs: Div. II Chadron St., Kent St., and Texas Tech. And they're all under six feet tall, too. They look more like Mark Wahlberg starring in an inspirational sports movie than real life Super Bowl players.

On the other hand Rob Gronkowski, the Patriot's 6'-6" 265 lb. superstar tight end who was hobbled with a sprained ankle, looks like the college football player in a 1940s joke:

Professor of Philosophy [peeved at the intelligence of scholar athletes recruited by the college's football coach]: "Mr. Gronkowski, can you tell us who is the author of The Critique of Pure Reason?"

Big Dumb Football Player [sweating, clueless, and apologetic]: "Professor, I can't ..."

Professor [surprised]: "Correct!"
The Giants, on the other hand, are a prototypical team with black players in black roles (RB, WR, D line) and white players in white roles (line, special teams, QB). They also have pretty good call and response chemistry: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyNPeLJBo7Y 
The racial angle wasn't played up because Eli is white, but the Giants have far superior athletic talent. If you gave a Martian a book about the last 20-30 years of American sport, especially football and basketball, and then showed him the roster of each team, he'd have no choice but to assume the Giants are 2 or 3 touchdown favorites. 
The Patriots came close, but it will be interesting to see which approach wins out over time.

With the exception of Brady and the two young tight ends, the Patriots looked like a team that has been drafting late in each round for most of the last decade due to their winning records. It looked like a roster brilliantly scrounged together from overlooked leftovers. 

Way back in 2005, Inductivist looked for me at the won-low records of NFL teams over the last 2.3 years to see if there was any correlation between teams' performance and their racial makeup. He found correlations around zero for starters, suggesting that teams were not overlooking white starters: i.e., no market inefficiencies caused by racial bias for starters.

On the other hand, he found positive correlations between the number of white nonstarters and wins. Perhaps white second stringers tend to be more versatile, or are less poisonous to the locker room atmosphere when they aren't starting or whatever. I never heard if anybody redid this study to see if the effect remained true. This is just not the kind of thing that people talk about. 

Or maybe NFL coaches had noticed their oversights and rectified this market inefficiency. This year's Patriots certainly looked like their ruthlessly intelligent coach Bill Belichik was trying hard to find cheap but effective football players who don't look like the stereotypes. Over the last 11 years, New England has averaged better than an 11-5 record in the regular season, and 13.5-2.5 over the last two seasons. It's very hard to keep a dynasty going in the NFL where the system is rigged in various ways for parity. It looks like possibly one of the ways they've stayed in the hunt is by exploiting market inefficiencies in utility players. But it's hard to tell without doing another statistical analysis. You might think that in this age of Moneyball that this type of analysis would be done all the time, but then you wouldn't under this age of Moneyball.

Chinese-American guy lights up NBA

Here's a fun story: Jeremy Lin, a 6'-4" basketball guard from Harvard, became the first Asian-American in the NBA awhile ago, but he has mostly sat on the far end of the bench. But, he got into a game for the New York Knicks on Saturday night and scored a career high 25. Tonight, he got his first ever start and scored 28 in a win over Utah, despite all the big money players on the Knicks (Carmelo Anthony, Amare Stoudemire, and Tyson Chandler) being out.

I don't know about Lin in particular, but as the Ivy League has gotten richer endowments, its sports teams have gotten better. It doesn't give out sports scholarships, but it gives out so much financial aid to middle class families now, that it makes sense for pretty smart and pretty athletic kids to play ball for the Ivy League: "Okay, UT El Paso, Iowa State, and Valparaiso are offering me full rides, or, for $5,000 per year I can go to Yale? Is this a trick question?"

I vaguely know a heavily recruited basketball player who enrolled in the last few years at a Very Famous Ivy League College. It was funny reading the ESPN interviews with him on Signing Day because the questions from the sportswriters were all framed as if all his ambitions were focused on the basketball court (Q. So, are you signing with Very Famous Ivy League College because you think you can help them win its first Ivy League title in 17 years? A. Uh, yeah, sure ... I mean, why not?), when his motivations for signing with VFILC were far more mature: He wants to go through life as a graduate of that Very Famous Ivy League College. It was like when I was at Rice in the 1970s, and the basketball coaching staff was alway scowling about how the 6'-11" backup center was just exploiting them to get a Rice engineering degree, always sneaking off to the library to work on differential equations.

Is Israel the most easterly outpost of Western civilization?

Niall Ferguson, the Scotch historian currently at Harvard, bangs the war drums in Newsweek:
Israel and Iran on the Eve of Destruction in a New Six-Day War 
Jerusalem—It probably felt a bit like this in the months before the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel launched its hugely successful preemptive strike against Egypt and its allies. Forty-five years later, the little country that is the most easterly outpost of Western civilization has Iran in its sights.

Why is Israel the most easterly outpost of Western civilization? What about Christian countries much farther to the east, like Armenia and Georgia? Not to mention Russia (Moscow is east of Jerusalem -- and if you are making up a list of important figures in Western civilization, it's hard to leave off Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky, Chekhov, Stravinsky, and Nabokov, right)? 

Here in L.A., there are lots of Armenians and lots of Israelis. I don't think many people here would define Israelis as obviously more members of Western civilization than Armenians. Back in December, I went to an Armenian wedding in the church across the Hollywood Freeway from Universal Studios. Here's their webpage. Seems pretty Christian to me. Moreover, Armenians make up a small but hardly unnoticeable number of eminent figures in the cultural history of Western civilization, such as the composer Khachaturian

Now, lots of Armenian-Americans would like more help from the U.S. government in their struggles with their Muslim rivals Azerbaijan and Turkey. And Armenians are relatively prosperous, intelligent, and energetic. But, truth be told, Armenian isn't a very important country, so, despite a sizable Armenian Caucus in the U.S Congress (overwhelmingly made up of non-Armenians), the U.S. doesn't do a lot for Armenia. Armenian concerns don't take up much space in American newspapers, even in L.A.

Fifty years ago, Israel was culturally an outpost of northern Europe, the late Austro-Hungarian Empire's southernmost province. But my vague impression is that it has been working hard to stop being a neurotic, high-achieving Teutonic culture and become a pleasure-loving Mediterranean culture. The Ashkenazis (and their Russian in-laws) still more or less run the place, but they've ceded a lot of cultural legitimacy to non-Ashkenazi Jews. Israel still produces some classical musicians and chemists, but the Jersey Shoreification of Israeli daily life is ongoing, along with various other trends, such as the Black Hatification of parts of the country, and the Afrikaanerization of the West Bank. Its cultural future seems kind of like Armenia or Lebanon.

Chinese Cheating

Mark McDonald writes in the NYT:
In many cases, according to anecdotal evidence and hard-data surveys, the successful Chinese applicants will have cheated their way into college. 
There are now 57,000 Chinese undergraduates at American universities, as my colleague Tamar Lewin reports. Five years ago, there were just 10,000. And top private universities in the United States now have freshman classes with 15 percent foreign students or more.
... Many Chinese families hire agents to help them navigate the applications process, and an agent’s fee can range up to $10,000, plus an equally large bonus if the student gets into a school highly ranked by U.S. News & World Report, the QS rankings and the so-called Shanghai List. 
Zinch China, a consulting company that advises American colleges and universities about China, published a report last year that found cheating on college applications to be “pervasive in China, driven by hyper-competitive parents and aggressive agents.’’ 
From the survey’s introduction: “Our research indicates that 90 percent of recommendation letters are fake, 70 percent of essays are not written by the applicant, and 50 percent of high school transcripts are falsified.’’ 

I wonder what these rates are in America? I'm not convinced Americans are that ethical about college applications anymore either.
... There might well be a cultural disconnect here. Fudging a transcript, plagiarizing a previously “successful” essay or embroidering your credentials is often seen as common practice in China — a low means to a higher end. 
But not always. 
Jiang Xueqin is the deputy principal of Peking University High School, one of China’s s top schools, and also directs its international division. In a commentary for The Chronicle, he said: 
“To be fair, American college recruiters in China feel overwhelmed by the proliferation of cheating, lying, and fraud: Study abroad is big business in China, and young Ivy League graduates write essays for Chinese applicants while many a Chinese public school fakes transcripts and recommendation letters.’’

Americans should demand better ethics from the Chinese. Criticism makes people better. The world will be a better place in the future if the Chinese are now shamed into having more of a culture of shame, like the Japanese have.

Singapore is an example of where the government has reduced the level of corruption among the Chinese over the last 50 years.

February 5, 2012

Why car salesmen are able to rip off black guys

Law professor Ian Ayres did a study once showing that car salesmen tend to drive tougher bargains with black shoppers than with white shoppers. Malcolm Gladwell explained in Blink that this was only because the car salesmen didn't realize they were being prejudiced, and would stop as soon as they read Blink and realize they are leaving money on the table. Judge Posner and I disagreed, arguing that, in our experience, car salesmen were more cynical than Gladwell assumes. The good folks at Cars.com just spent $3.5 million to buy 30 seconds of Super Bowl air time to settle this long running argument by showing us what car salesmen see when they look at black shoppers.

Are Super Bowls getting better?

I made sure to come home from school on time on Monday, January 16, 1967 so I could watch the entire first ever Super Bowl on tape delay. Super Bowl I had been played the day before in the L.A. Coliseum, but it hadn't sold out, so it wasn't shown live in L.A., just on tape delay the next afternoon at about 3:30 pm. It turned out to be a pretty lousy viewing experience. 

My recollection is that most of the early Super Bowls were either lopsided or inept. For example, Super Bowl VII Miami 14 - Washington 7 was a real bore, memorable only for Garo Yepremian's pass, which was famous for awhile as the worst play in the history of the NFL. The imported soccer player's attempt at a forward pass only goes about 4 inches forward, so he then bats the football up in the air as if it were a volleyball, allowing the Redskins to intercept it and score their only touchdown of the game. 

After awhile, when I was a teenager, I made a rule not to waste time watching the Super Bowls, a rule frequently broken, but one that seemed to be pretty sensible. Conference championship games were often thrilling, but Super Bowls were typically a waste of time. 

At some point in the 1980s I read a theory for why Super Bowls were so bad: the two week layoff between the conference championship and the Super Bowl and the intervening media hoopla posed unusual challenges for coaches. Some coaches made excellent use of the time, while others, unable to restrain their mania, whipped their teams into a game day frenzy by about Day 10 only to have them come out flat half a week later. 

I don't know if that was true, but my impression is that Super Bowls are seldom the stinkers they used to be so regularly. I wonder why that is? Obviously, the skill level is higher, but why do the games seem more competitive? Back in the 1970s, the Rose Bowl was usually more exciting than the Super Bowl, even though the skill level of college players is lower.