September 2, 2012

Julian Castro in 2016! Making Bush & Obama look as qualified as the Duke of Wellington

Every election we get a lot of Hispanic Hype because of their large numbers, but it's tough for the media to come up with any individual all that galvanizing. They still try, though ...

From the New York Times on the Democrats' keynote speaker, San Antonio mayor Julian Castro:
A Spotlight With Precedent Beckons a Mayor From Texas 
By MANNY FERNANDEZ 
SAN ANTONIO — ... 
... The speculation lately about Mr. Castro’s future has reached fever pitch; there is talk of his running for governor, earning a place in Mr. Obama’s cabinet and even becoming the first Hispanic president. A Fox News Latino headline this summer read: “Julián Castro: Son of Chicana Activist, Harvard Law Grad, Future U.S. President?” 
“Do I think he could be president?” asked Mr. Cisneros, who was secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the 1990s. “I think he’s smart enough. I think he understands the level of work and attention you have to give to politics over a lifetime to get there. He certainly has put himself in position to be among the mentionables going forward.” ...
... As Mr. Castro prepared to take the stage on Tuesday at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., to give the biggest speech of his life — the first Latino to give the keynote address in the convention’s history — it was hard to know what was consuming this city more: Mr. Castro’s rising political cachet, or the vote on his pre-K program. 
... The pre-K plan illustrates the extent to which Mr. Castro, though of a different ideological stripe, has forged an identity as Texas’ version of the vice-presidential candidate Paul D. Ryan — a youthful, ambitious and dynamic policy wonk turned political star. Since becoming mayor in 2009, Mr. Castro, 37, has immersed himself in the minutiae of running a municipality while maintaining the connections that led to the second-biggest keynote address of his career in June, when he spoke at the state Democratic convention in Houston. 
In 2004, a state senator from Illinois named Barack Obama delivered the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention, which catapulted him to national prominence, and there are broad parallels in the lives of Mr. Castro and Mr. Obama. Both men were raised by single mothers, graduated from Harvard Law School and succeeded in transcending the racial politics that often pigeonhole black and Hispanic politicians. 
When Mr. Castro delivers his speech on Tuesday, he will be 12 days shy of 38. In his office at City Hall, one wall is adorned with an old poster from another young candidate’s campaign: his mother’s unsuccessful run for City Council at age 23 in 1971. Rosie Castro, now 65, was at the time a community activist with La Raza Unida, a party that challenged the largely white political establishment and fought to expand the rights of Chicanos, or American citizens of Mexican descent. 
... Last year, Mr. Castro won a second two-year term with nearly 82 percent of the vote.

Turnout in that election was 7.07 percent, down from 9.83% when Castro was elected. That's because nobody in San Antonio outside of the candidates' families cares who gets elected mayor because the mayor gets paid about $4,000 per year because San Antonio is actually run by its city manager, who gets paid $355,000.
... San Antonio has become a kind of Berkeley of the Southwest, 

Huh? They've been discovering transuranic elements in San Antonio? Look, San Antonio is a nice place, with a nice stable source of income in the Pentagon, but the NYT is just babbling here:
a progressive, economically vibrant and Democratic-leaning city of 1.3 million in Republican-dominated Texas. 

The funny thing about Castromania! is that it was launched by a May 2010 article in the New York Times Magazine, which when read carefully is more or less of a rightwing satire on Obama's America  and elaborate practical joke.

The jokester is veteran rightist journalist Zev Chafets. He grew up in Detroit, fled when Coleman Young became mayor, enlisted in the Israeli army, and became a press officer for Menachem Begin. Recently, he wrote an enthusiastic biography of Rush Limbaugh.

Chafets went looking for somebody who is even more of a "blank screen" than Obama, then tried to promote Castro into Presidential Timberhood solely on the basis of his race. It's not like Chafets tried to keep anybody from noticing how comic this was:
"Early in his administration, Castro assigned his chief of staff, Robbie Greenblum—a Jewish lawyer from the border town of Laredo whose own Spanish is impeccable—to discreetly find him a tutor. Rosie Castro's son is now being taught Spanish by a woman named Marta Bronstein. Greenblum met her in shul."

Chafets' prank is working. And nobody even gets the joke.

NYT doesn't notice aide's refrigerator light joke about Obama is funny

From a New York Times profile of empty pantsuit / most important Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett:
A Chicagoan who helped Mr. Obama navigate his rise through that city’s aggressive politics, Ms. Jarrett came to Washington with no national experience. But her unmatched access to the Obamas has made her a driving force in some of the most significant domestic policy decisions of the president’s first term, her persuasive power only amplified by Mr. Obama’s insular management style. 
From the first, her official job has been somewhat vague. But nearly four years on, with Mr. Obama poised to accept his party’s renomination this week, her standing is clear, to her many admirers and detractors alike. “She is the single most influential person in the Obama White House,” said one former senior White House official, who like many would speak candidly only on condition of anonymity. 
“She’s there to try to promote what she understands to be what the president wants,” the former aide said. “Ultimately the president makes his own decisions. The question that is hard to get inside of, the black box, is whether she is really influencing him or merely executing decisions he’s made. That’s like asking, ‘Is the light on in the refrigerator when the door is closed?’ ”

Indeed.

I have a question about the code for unsourced allegations, such as "aid one former senior White House official." When I was a kid during the Nixon Administration, I used to assume that quotes from "a senior White House foreign policy official" actually meant somebody pretty junior. I mean, in a sense, everybody in the White House is pretty senior, right? But, eventually, I found out that most of the time, it really meant Henry Kissinger.

So, does this attribution imply former Chief of Staff and now Mayor of Chicago Rahm Emmanuel?

A funny thing with Obama is how much the Chicagoans in his White House hate each other. With Jimmy Carter, the Washington old-timers complained about his Georgia Mafia that he had brought with him to the White House. But my recollection is that the Georgians mostly stuck together. With Obama's Chicagoans, though, they always seem to be out to stab each other in the back. It's not like they are a team, they are just some local bigshots that a small time local politician, Barack Obama, happened to know. A recurrent problem Obama has as in his first try at being an executive is that he doesn't know very many people and he doesn't really want to know more. I can empathize, but still ...

Where are the Hispanic flash mob videos?

For a number of years, I've been predicting that, all else being equal, crime should decline as ubiquitous information technology powers us into the This-Will-Go-on-Your-Permanent-Record era. And, indeed, crime rates appear to have fallen during the recession (demonstrating once again that very little crime in modern America is driven by Les Miserables-style stealing-a-loaf-of-bread-to-feed-your-familyism.)

On the other hand, the spread of technology has encouraged some people to draw the opposite conclusions: e.g., that Twitter is great for organizing a flash mob of convenience store looters and that the resulting high def surveillance video will look good on World Star Hip Hop

In recent years, we've seen a surfeit of video of Blacks Behaving Badly, validating the crime statistics at the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. The new availability of these countless videos has caused much unease in the Mainstream Media, and was likely an underlying factor behind the prestige press's kamikaze hyping of the Trayvon Trayvesty.

On the other hand, where are the Latino-American flash mob videos? Is there a Spanish-language equivalent of World Star Hip Hop that nobody I know knows about? 

I have several vague hunches. One is simply a bell curve explanation: people who want see their crimes displayed online come from the far edges of various bell curves and the black curves are more skewed in those directions. 

Another is that the vast growth in criminality in Mexico keeps the scariest Mexicans employed in Mexico and even sucks in some of the worst Mexican-Americans. When my dad and I would travel in Mexico in the 1960s-1980s, it was pretty safe. By the 1990s, there were guys standing around with AK-47s everywhere. And they were supposed to be the good guys.

Another possibility is that the traditional Los Angeles-style gang life is passe, that it cuts too much into video game-playing time. 

Another idea I don't hear much of is that the 1996 GOP reform that cut down on welfare for immigrants has attracted a better class of immigrants.

Jussim on Stereotypes

Lee Jussim is the chairman of the psychology department at Rutgers and perhaps the leading expert on stereotypes and bias. He has a new academic book out:
Social Perception and Social Reality: Why Accuracy Dominates Bias and Self-Fulfilling Prophecy contests the received wisdom in the field of social psychology that suggests that social perception and judgment are generally flawed, biased, and powerfully self-fulfilling. Jussim reviews a wealth of real world, survey, and experimental data collected over the last century to show that in fact, social psychological research consistently demonstrates that biases and self-fulfilling prophecies are generally weak, fragile, and fleeting. Furthermore, research in the social sciences has shown stereotypes to be accurate.  
Jussim overturns the received wisdom concerning social perception in several ways. He critically reviews studies that are highly cited darlings of the bias conclusion and shows how these studies demonstrate far more accuracy than bias, or are not replicable in subsequent research. Studies of equal or higher quality, which have been replicated consistently, are shown to demonstrate high accuracy, low bias, or both. The book is peppered with discussions suggesting that theoretical and political blinders have led to an odd state of affairs in which the flawed or misinterpreted bias studies receive a great deal of attention, while stronger and more replicable accuracy studies receive relatively little attention. In addition, the author presents both personal and real world examples (such as stock market prices, sporting events, and political elections) that routinely undermine heavy-handed emphases on error and bias, but are generally indicative of high levels of rationality and accuracy. He fully embraces scientific data, even when that data yields unpopular conclusions or contests prevailing conventions or the received wisdom in psychology, in other social sciences, and in broader society.

The funny thing is that this successful academic has a rather non-academic style. Jussim has summaries of each chapter up online here.
Chapter 17. Pervasive Stereotype Accuracy 
Abstract  
    This chapter reviews every high quality study of stereotype accuracy that I could find.  It presents the evidence with respect to personal and consensual accuracy, using both correlations and discrepancy scores (see Chapter 16 for an explanation of what these are).  It includes sections reviewing the empirical research on racial, gender, and other stereotypes. When the original studies addressed conditions under which accuracy was higher or lower, that, too, is included here.  Furthermore, each study is critically evaluated, highlighting both its strengths and its limitations.  Overall, this review indicates that the high quality, scientific research consistently shows that stereotype accuracy is one of the largest effects in all of social psychology.   
EXCERPTS: 
  WARNING: TURN BACK NOW, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE  
    This chapter contains contents that may be deeply upsetting to anyone committed to the view of stereotypes as inherently or generally inaccurate and irrational.  If you have read this book continuously, you undoubtedly do not need these warnings and know what to expect.  However, these warnings are necessary for anyone reading this chapter without reading the rest of the book.  
    Warning I: DO NOT READ THIS CHAPTER without having first read Chapters 10-12, 15 and 16.  You will need those chapters to understand what I mean by accuracy generally, and when I describe the results of the studies reviewed below as showing that people’s beliefs were “accurate,” “near misses” or “inaccurate” in this chapter. 
    Warning II: DO NOT READ THIS CHAPTER, unless you are willing to consider the possibility that stereotypes are often accurate. DO NOT READ THIS CHAPTER, if you think that merely considering the possibility that many of people’s beliefs about groups (stereotypes) have a great deal of accuracy makes someone a racist, sexist, etc.  DO NOT READ THIS CHAPTER if you believe that stereotypes are inherently inaccurate, flawed, irrational, rigid, etc., and this belief cannot be or should not be revised if empirical scientific data fail to fully support it.

September 1, 2012

Parker: In polls, "Romney, alas, leads whites."

From the Washington Post:
The elephant in the room 
By Kathleen Parker, Published: August 31 
TAMPA 
Gazing out on the pale continent of the Republican National Convention ... Where are the blacks? 
Notwithstanding the dazzling performance of Condoleezza Rice and the GOP’s raucous affection for her, African Americans are scarce in the party of Abraham Lincoln. Republicans can honestly boast of having once been the party of firsts. The first Hispanic, African American, Asian American and Native American in the Senate were all Republicans. But that was before the GOP went south, banished its centrists and embraced social conservatives in a no-exit marriage. 
The impression that Republicans don’t welcome blacks and other minorities is, however, demonstrably false. Note the number of minority Republican governors recently elected: Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Nikki Haley of South Carolina, Brian Sandoval of Nevada and Susana Martinez of New Mexico. Even so, the party is undeniably and overwhelmingly white, and minorities (and increasingly women) don’t feel at home there. ...
African Americans are not a monolithic group, obviously, and many likely would find comfort in the promises of smaller government, lower taxes, balanced budgets, school choice and so on that Mitt Romney put on the table Thursday night. But this isn’t likely to happen. A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found 0 percent support for Romney among African Americans. (Zero doesn’t necessarily mean none but is a statistical null.) Obama also leads Latinos younger than 35 and women. Romney, alas, leads whites. 

Right, because what candidate in his right mind would want a majority of the majority? Doesn't Romney know that the majority has cooties, that white people are icky, and that it's only because of some outmoded tradition that an individual white person's vote still counts just as much as the vote of a cooler individual? When is somebody going to do something about that anyway? And when are white people going to stop being so racist and be more like blacks and favor Obama 100-0?

Democrats can't find most black Milwaukee voters

From Slate:
Sixty percent of Milwaukee's black voters have disappeared. ... 
New data from Milwaukee give an indication of how dire the Democrats’ disappearing-voter problem already is. This spring, the League of Young Voters, which was created to mobilize young minority communities, collaborated with the liberal Wisconsin Voices coalition to dispatch teams of young canvassers. Starting in April, they spent eight weeks knocking on 120,882 doors across 208 of Milwaukee’s 317 wards to raise awareness of the gubernatorial recall election scheduled for June.  The doors had one thing in common: the voter file said they were all home to a registered voter whom a commercial data vendor had flagged as likely to be African-American. 
But the voter file represented a fiction, or at least a reality that had rapidly become out of date.  During those eight weeks, canvassers were able to successfully find and interact with only 31 percent of their targets. Twice that number were confirmed to no longer live at the address on file  — either because a structure was abandoned or condemned, or if a current resident reported that the targeted voter no longer lived there. 
Based on those results, the New Organizing Institute, a Washington-based best-practices lab for lefty field operations, extrapolated that nearly 160,000 African-American voters in Milwaukee were no longer reachable at their last documented address — representing 41 percent of the city’s 2008 electorate. 

The problem with this article is that there is no control group of other voters to see what percentage of them have disappeared.

In general, however, the Democrats would win a lot more elections if they could just find their voters to remind them that today's Election Day and to not screw up their ballots. More people who went to the polls in Florida in 2000 wanted to vote for Al Gore than for George W. Bush, but a higher percentage of Gore voters failed to mark their ballots properly, thus giving America a second President Bush.

Words William F. Buckley didn't know

Here are the words in John Updike's 1978 novel The Coup with which William F. Buckley was unfamiliar, according to WFB's December 14, 1978 column in which he passed "the sesquipedalian torch" to Updike:
Harmattan, disphoretic, toubab, laterite, suras, euphorbia, extollation, jerboa, coussabe, sareba, bilharzia, pangolins hyraxes, pestles, phloem xylem, eversion, goobers, marabout, xerophytic, oleograph, cowries, chrysoprase, henna, scree, riverine, adsorptive, haptic, burnoose

Thanks to James Fulford of VDARE.com for finding this column for me.

In case you are keeping score at home, "disphoretic" isn't a word in English. WFB misspelled Updike's "diaphoretic."

I read this column at 19 or 20. The only word on it I can recall knowing then was "scree," although goobers, henna, and riverine seem pretty easy. Most of the words WFB didn't know are either of a technical nature or indigenous to Africa or the Arab desert world. I know a lot more of the words now than I did then. although some of that comes from reading The Coup. Updike's vocabulary is excessive, but he was also such a talented writer that you can usually guess what the word means from context.

Do vocabularies continue to grow over a lifetime of reading? The 10 word vocab test on the GSS could of course be used for this, but most of my growth has evidently been at the high end of the range, which probably wouldn't show up on the GSS.

A New La Griffe essay!

For the first time since 2008, La Griffe du Lion has posted a new essay. It's called Crime and the Hispanic Effect. He builds a regression model for predicting crime rates in cities and finds its largely driven by the percent black. Percent Hispanic doesn't much matter, one way or another.

August 31, 2012

Brazil boosts race quotas for colleges

You constantly hear that it's silly to worry your pretty head about the existence of race/ethnic quotas because, everybody knows, they will wither away of their own accord, kind of like the state after a Marxist revolution. 

The disappearance of quotas will happen either because there won't be any need for them anymore as our country is flooded with African-American theoretical physicists real soon now; or because practically everybody will be a little bit white through the collapse of America's One Drop Rule, so of course they will claim the enormous Privileges of Whiteness, thus making themselves ineligible for affirmative action. 

Perhaps ...

On the other hand, in the real world, there seems to be slow movement in the opposite direction. For example, Brazil didn't have a One Drop Rule and liked to brag about how it was a Racial Democracy much more sophisticated than those racist American. But mostly it meant that everybody was cool with Pele having a blonde girlfriend, not that Brazilian blacks were becoming surgeons..

So, these days, Brazil is getting more and more racial preferences:

The New York Times reports:
Brazil’s government has enacted one of the Western Hemisphere’s most sweeping affirmative action laws, requiring public universities to reserve half of their admission spots for the largely poor students in the nation’s public schools and vastly increase the number of university students of African descent across the country. 
The law, signed Wednesday by President Dilma Rousseff, seeks to reverse the racial and income inequality that has long characterized Brazil, a country with more people of African heritage than any nation outside of Africa. ... 
But while affirmative action has come under threat in the United States, it is taking deeper root in Brazil, Latin America’s largest country. Though the new legislation, called the Law of Social Quotas, is expected to face legal challenges, it drew broad support among lawmakers. 
Of Brazil’s 81 senators, only one voted against the law this month. Other spheres of government here have also supported affirmative action measures. In a closely watched decision in April, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the racial quotas enacted in 2004 by the University of Brasília, which reserved 20 percent of its spots for black and mixed-race students. 
Dozens of other Brazilian universities, both public and private, have also adopted their own affirmative action policies in recent years, trying to curb the dominance of such institutions by middle- and upper-middle-class students who were educated at private elementary and secondary schools. Public universities in Brazil are largely free of charge and generally of better quality, with some exceptions, than private universities. 
Still, some education experts are already predicting a shift to the better private universities among some students. “With these quotas, these rich Brazilians who took up their spots will not be abandoned,” argued Frei David Santos, 60, a Franciscan friar in São Paulo who directs Educafro, an organization preparing black and low-income students for university entrance exams. “Their parents who had money saved will spend it” on elite private universities. 
The Law of Social Quotas takes the previous affirmative action policies to another level, giving Brazil’s 59 federal universities just four years to ensure that half of the entering class comes from public schools. Luiza Bairros, the minister in charge of Brazil’s Secretariat for Policies to Promote Racial Equality, said officials expected the number of black students admitted to these universities to climb to 56,000 from 8,700. 
The law obligates public universities to assign their spots in accordance with the racial makeup of each of Brazil’s 26 states and the capital, Brasília. In states with large black or mixed-race populations, like Bahia in the northeast, that could lead to a surge in black university students, while states in southern Brazil, which are largely white, could still have relatively few black students in public universities. 
... Brazil’s former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said in an interview that he was “completely in favor” of the quotas. “Try finding a black doctor, a black dentist, a black bank manager, and you will encounter great difficulty,” Mr. da Silva said. “It’s important, at least for a span of time, to guarantee that the blacks in Brazilian society can make up for lost time.”

How long is this "span of time" going to be? Christopher Caldwell noted in 2009:
"One moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which affirmative action can't be ended because its beneficiaries are too weak to a world in which it can't be ended because its beneficiaries are too strong." 

The NYT continues:
Brazil’s 2010 census showed that a slight majority of this nation’s 196 million people defined themselves as black or mixed-race, a shift from previous decades during which most Brazilians called themselves white.

You get more of what you pay for. The BBC reported last year on the 2010 Brazil Census:

Out of around 191m Brazilians, 91 million identified themselves as white, 82m as mixed race and 15m as black. 
Whites fell from 53.7% of the population in 2000 to 47.7% last year.

I suspect that as the benefits from affirmative action increase, the number declaring themselves eligible will continue to increase. 

Brazil differs from the United States in that eligibility isn't simply based on self-declaration. They have panels to eyeball applicants, famously once putting identical twins in different categories. As I've mentioned before, it would make a good Brazilian reality TV show in which people try to look black enough to get into college and white enough to get past the velvet rope into an exclusive night club. It would be like a Brazilian version of Kipling's If come to life.

Question about military service and affirmative action

When I look around for places to cut the federal budget, military spending looks like one pretty obvious place. The U.S. accounts for close to half of the world's military budget, and the world seems to be getting more peaceful. Cross-border military invasions seem to be declining in number decade by decade (not counting the U.S. and Israel). So, do we really need quite as many troops or aircraft carriers?

This is not, however, a popular view.

There are a lot of reasons why this isn't popular, but I wanted to ask about one that doesn't come up much. A few times, commenters have have asserted that being able to check the "Veteran" box on civil service applications is a major advantage in getting desirable government jobs, such as fireman or cop, roughly equivalent to checking "Black" or "Latino."

Can anybody who knows more about this than I do, fill me in on this?

The latest anti-discrimination cause

In a New York Times op-ed, "Deportation Nation," law professor Daniel Kanstroom explains the horrors of America deporting aliens who are convicted of subsequent crimes. 
To be sure, some deportees have been convicted of serious crimes. But most are guilty of drug offenses, or misdemeanors like petty larceny, simple assault, drunken driving.

Kanstroom explains that we must stop deporting them because they often become victims of discrimination in their home countries:
In a study of Latin American deportees who had lived for long periods in the United States (on average, 14 years), the sociologists M. Kathleen Dingeman and Rubén G. Rumbaut found that deportees who had emigrated as children suffered the most. Deportees to El Salvador (a country many had fled during the civil war of the 1980s) encountered discrimination because of their accents, style of dress and California gang-themed tattoos. [Bolding mine]

Okay ...

August 30, 2012

Romney speech open thread

Your comments?

Farm Report: Robbing in the Fields

John Carney writes in CNBC on the Phony Farm Labor Crisis that predictions of crops-rotting-in-the-fields doom for farmers because of a purported illegal alien shortage didn't quite come true:
Let’s start with California. The San Francisco Chronicle had warned: 
Farmers across California are experiencing the same problem: Seasonal workers who have been coming for decades to help with the harvest, planting and pruning have dropped off in recent years. With immigration crackdowns, an aging Mexican population, drug wars at the border and a weakened job market in the United States, the flow of migrants has stopped and may actually have reversed, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy research firm that has been studying the trend. 
So what happened? 
Farm profits, what the Ag Department calls “net cash income,” in California rose from $11.1 billion in 2010 to $16.1 in 2011, an eye-popping 45 percent growth.

August 29, 2012

"The Coup" by John Updike

The Coup was a 1978 bestseller by John Updike about Africa that is almost totally forgotten today, even though it was written by America's most gifted novelist at his mid-40s peak, when he was, in his own words, feeling "full of beans." Thus, it's an absurdly high-spirited first person account of a Muslim Marxist dictator of a drought-stricken African country.

It's interesting that Evelyn Waugh's African novel Scoop remains much discussed in the 21st Century, and Waugh's earlier African novel Black Mischief remains well-known, while The Coup has vanished.

The extraordinary lucidity of Scoop's prose has helped it endure because it is the rare novel that is both brilliant and an easy read. In contrast, Updike was feeling his oats in The Coup, and the style is over the top: William F. Buckley published a column in 1978 saying that while people accuse him of using sesquipedalian words too much, here's a list of all the words in The Coup that he doesn't know the meaning of. I recall feeling proud that, being a good Boy Scout, I knew a word that WFB didn't: scree.

While trying to look up that WFB column, I found this 1996 Paris Review interview with Buckley:
I occasionally run into stuff that deeply impresses me. For instance, Updike’s The Coup, which I reviewed for New York magazine. It astonishes me that it is so little recognized. It’s the brilliant put-down of Marxist Third World nativism. It truly is. And hilarious. It’s a successor to Black Mischief, but done in that distinctively Gothic style of Updike’s—very different from the opéra bouffe with which Evelyn Waugh went at that subject fifty years ago.

Updike's basic message in his 1978 novel was: America is going to win the Cold War. Capitalism makes people happier than Communism does, so these Third World Marxist dictators you read about in the newspapers all the time are going to lose.

This conclusion was not at all obvious in the Carter Era. When I read it in the tumultuous summer of 1980, I was surprised by Updike's optimism.

The Coup, however, has vanished from all memory. Almost nobody, for instance, noticed how similar the President's parents were to The Coup's ambitious African student narrator and his white American coed second wife. Joyce Carol Oates wrote in the New Republic in 1979:
Ellelloû is, or was, a devout Muslim, and a jargon-ridden Marxist whose hatred for all things American—"America, that fountainhead of obscenity and glut"—is explained partly by the fact that he attended a small college in Franchise, Wisconsin where he received an unfair grade of B- in African history, from a trendy professor who was jealous of his relationship with a white girl named Candy, and partly by the fact that he married this girl and brought her back to his kingdom, where their marriage quickly deteriorated. (Candy, called "Pinktoes" by the blacks she compulsively pursues, is coarse-mouthed, nagging, stereotyped as any cartoon suburban wife; even her most ostensibly idealistic actions—like marrying a ragamuffin Negro who seemed so lonely at college—are motivated by cliched notions of "liberalism." And of course she marries Ellelloû to enrage her bigoted father.)

Candy is probably closer to Ruth, Obama Sr.'s third wife, who married him in Boston and moved with him to Kenya, where she got to know him well enough to hate him. Oates continues:
in sharp contrast to [the narrator's] indefatigable syntactical acrobatics the other voices of the novel are either flat and silly or a parody of US advertising rhythm and jargon. ... Candy greets his infrequent visits with "Holy Christ, look who it isn't," refuses to listen to his formal Islamic pronouncements which are, to her, "Kismet crap," and says of his strategic execution of the old king: "Well, chief, how's top-level tricks? Chopping old Edumu's noggin off didn't seem to raise the humidity any."

Oates compared it to Nabokov's comic novel about a deposed ruler, Pale Fire, and it's in that class.

I presume that Obama has at least started to read it. I'd be interested to know his reaction to it. In Dreams from My Father, he describes his acute distress reading on the airplane on the way to Kenya, The Africans by David Lamb, a straightforward account by the L.A. Times' Nairobi correspondent of post-colonial African dysfunction. Updike's The Coup would have hit even closer to home.

In 2008, Updike endorsed Obama and recommended he read The Coup:
For Obama I'd recommend a novel of mine called The Coup. It's about an imaginary African country where the dictator pretends to hate the US, though he actually went to college here. The politics were based on Gaddafi - what's he called, not Mohamed, Muammar, right? The joke is how unlike Obama my character is!

Of course, as far as I can tell from Google, Updike, me, and about one other person in the history of the Internet have ever publicly noticed the connection between The Coup and Obama's parents. It would be interesting to ask Obama about it, but nobody ever has. Because that would be interesting.

Zoning enforcement: New v. existing construction

I only now noticed this dichotomy:

Zoning laws regarding new construction are fanatically enforced where rich white liberals live (witness the struggles of George Lucas in Marin Country and The Edge in Malibu to build on their own land). But zoning laws regarding existing construction are much less enforced in adjacent areas where poor illegal immigrants live.

On paper, it's illegal to have six men sleeping in bunks in your garage in southeast Hollywood, but rich white liberals in Hancock Park want cheap servants, so the laws aren't enforced. But, just try to build in Hancock Park ...

Gay marriage: 0 for 32 at the polls

Gay marriage has been put to a vote in 32 states. It is currently 0-32.

Of course, while it fails democratically, it also triumphs legally. Being on the anti-democratic winning side helps make it the central issue of contemporary liberalism.

I stumbled upon this comment somewhere, but have lost track of who said it:
"To be against gay marriage, at least in the views of most liberals ..., is to disqualify oneself from society as a hateful bigot." 

I think that exemplifies the main driving force of modern liberalism. It's not intellectual. In spirit, it's more like the caste system in India. It's a system for identifying new Untouchables whose very existence lifts the social status of the liberal. India is a pretty crummy place, but Indians like it because hundreds of millions of Hindus have hundreds of millions of lower caste Hindus to look down upon. So, they've got that going for them.

Gay marriage, for instance, is a trivial issue in real world terms, but it has become incredibly important to liberals precisely because it brands huge numbers of their fellow citizens as Dalits for them to hate and feel morally superior to.

Israel: America = Serbia: Czarist Russia?

XX Committee tosses out a historical analogy that's new to me:
Beyond the issue of who’s the tail and who’s the dog in the increasingly messy U.S.-Israel relationship – a question which has taken on more-than-customary urgency given the current Israeli government’s recent public move towards sky-is-falling rhetoric about Iran – there’s the intriguing matter of what historical analogies apply in this knotty case. ...The best analogy, says this historian, for the U.S.-Israeli relationship and the mounting crisis with Iran, goes back a century, to just before Europe went crazy and destroyed itself. 
In the years leading to the First World War, Russia developed a cancerous relationship with Serbia, with the latter becoming a troublesome client which occupied Russian attention out of any proportion to Serbia’s actual size, importance, and influence.  While there were genuine ethnic and religious ties between the two countries, they were neither traditional nor natural allies, beyond a mutual loathing for Islam. Russia aided Serbia for decades in its wars – some open, some covert – against the declining Ottoman Empire in the Balkans. By 1913 Serbia had defeated the forces of Islam in its neighborhood, taking over lands which Serbs held to be sacredly theirs (even if inconveniently occupied mostly by non-Serbs who did not want to ruled by Serbs), and it wanted to take the fight to Austria-Hungary, which it viewed as the last obstacle to Serbia’s quasi-religious ”place in the sun.” 
... The dangerously loopy head of Serbian intelligence convinced himself and his retinue that Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Habsburg throne, was the head of the “war party” in Vienna and had to be killed. So they did. This was the origin of the plot which culminated in the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. It was the most consquential act of state terrorism in modern history, yet was based on a complete and total misread of Austrian intentions – the ill-fated archduke in fact was the most peace-oriented leader in the empire – which may be instructive about the value of intelligence analysis.

Or, were the Serbian conspirators worried that Franz Ferdinand would, upon his ascent to the throne, succeed in placating Slavs within the Austro-Hungarian Empire by converting it into the Austro-Hungarian-Slavic Empire, thus depriving Serbia of its role as leader of disgruntled Slavs in southeastern Europe?

In any case, it's a totally ridiculous analogy because we all know that conspiracies only happen in the fevered imaginations of conspiracy theorists, so, obviously, WWI couldn't possibly have happened.

By the way, on a completely different subject, did you know that Mitt Romney and Bibi Netanyahu were colleagues on the job long ago, and Mitt sometimes calls Bibi to get his perspective on things? Isn't that cool?

Obama "playing out a superhero life"

I wanted to highlight another excerpt from my long VDARE review of David Maraniss's biography of the President:
One of Maraniss’s minor themes is Obama’s fascination with superheroes. For example, one of Obama’s white girlfriends in New York, Genevieve Cook, sensed that comic book characters might provide a key to understanding Obama’s opaque personality: 
Genevieve knew that he harbored faintly articulated notions of future greatness, of gaining power to change things. Once, when they were in Prospect Park, they saw a young boy in costume playing out a superhero role. They started to talk about superheroes, the comics he enjoyed as an adolescent in Honolulu, and intimations of “playing out a superhero life.” She considered it “a very strong archetype in his personality,” but as soon as she tried to draw him out, he shut down “and didn’t want to talk about it further.” 
This may offer an explanation of the resilience of Obama’s gigantic ego, “his irrepressible belief that he was the smartest person in the room,” his confidence that he would someday lead millions despite the relentless evidence that even his friends wouldn’t follow him around the corner to get a newspaper. 
The comic books provide a whole mythos in which nobodies have fabulous secret identities: mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent is actually Superman, while shy student Peter Parker is Spider-Man. 
The irony is striking. Obama opponents have frantically tried to piece together the secret identity of this seeming international man of mystery: Is he Muslim? Kenyan? Arab? Gay? Frank Davis’s son? 
But, in contrast, Maraniss goes to great lengths to reassure Obama’s supporters: relax—there’s nothing interesting about Obama! 
Yet, all the while, Obama himself was convinced that he wasn’t as boring as his friends assumed. Deep inside, he had a secret identity … President Man!

In general, I think Obama is somebody with some literary skills who half figured out, half stumbled into certain quasi-mythic hopes in American culture that were ripe for exploitation by a Presidential candidate of the proper background.. Thus, I think you can get a better handle on figuring out this guy's sudden rise by thinking about superhero movies, Star Wars, Harry Potter books, Morgan Freeman movies, and other modern mythology.

By the way, I don't see Obama as being particularly brilliant at figuring out that nice white people really wanted to elect a black President who was a nice white person on the inside. As far as we can tell, up through about his 40th birthday, Obama was much more focused on rising up out of the black slums to become mayor of Chicago as his hero Harold Washington had done in the Council War years, an ambition that seems remarkably stupid of him today. It wasn't until about 2001 that he realized that black people were never going to like him more than real black politicians, so his natural career path was as the quasi-black politician for white people to vote for.