September 6, 2012

Finally, the unacceptable face of globalization

When I was a kid, everybody assumed that high wages were "good for the economy." Now, everybody who is anybody assumes that low wages are "good for the economy." If the natives of a country (or even the previous immigrants), are enjoying relatively high wages, whether in computer programming or stoop labor, then the borders must be opened and wages hammered down for "the good of the economy."

One reason everybody has signed on to this new low wages uber alles ideology is that the people telling you this, whether plutocrats or well-paid television presenters, are much better looking on average than the losers making the low wages. 

The difference wasn't always this stark. In the old days of J.P. Morgan and friends, the Fat Cats literally were fat. Then, for much of the middle of the 20th Century, the affluent and the wage-earners were similar in weight. Now, rich people are much more slender than the non-rich. 

Now, though, a fat rich lady, Gina Rinehart, Australian mining heiress and the richest woman in the world at the moment (and mother of four), has enunciated the globalist conventional wisdom. But, looking as she does more like a coalminer's mother than like a mineowner, she's getting all sorts of pushback, such as suggestions that she looks like Jaaba the Hutt. From Reuters:
"The evidence is inarguable that Australia is becoming too expensive and too uncompetitive to do export-oriented business," Rinehart told the Sydney Mining Club in a rare public appearance. A video of her address was posted on the club's website. 
"Africans want to work, and its workers are willing to work for less than $2 per day," she said in the video. "Such statistics make me worry for this country's future.
"We are becoming a high-cost and high-risk nation for investment." 
Rinehart, whom Forbes estimated to be worth $18 billion in February, opposes a recently introduced mining tax as well as taxes on carbon emissions, which has created tensions with Gillard's government. 
Rinehart has also called for miners to be allowed to bring in foreign workers, and her company Hancock Prospecting was granted government approval in May to hire just over 1,700 foreign construction workers for her Roy Hill project in Western Australia. 
Gillard criticised Rinehart's remarks, saying the resources sector was doing well and had an investment pipeline of $500 billion, of which nearly half was at an advanced stage. 
"It's not the Australian way to toss people $2, to toss them a gold coin, and then ask them to work for a day," Gillard told reporters. "We support proper Australian wages and decent working conditions."

Micronutrient supplementation

I've been writing since 2004 about how the most cost-effective way to help poor countries is through micronutrient supplementation: the U.S. used to have, for example, problems with cretinism in inland states caused by a lack of iodine in the diet. (Saltwater fish tend to be a good source of iodine, but not freshwater fish). So, back before WWII, manufacturers started to add iodine to salt, and this IQ-sapping problem went away. Adding iron to flour also helped raise IQs. This is one of the (many) reasons that the military found the mental sharpness of draftees in WWII much more satisfactory than in WWI.

The NYT has an article about an alternative approach to supplementation: instead of trying to get local manufacturers to add micronutrients to staples, have parents sprinkle the nutrients on their kids' food. 

Whatever the delivery method, this appears to be the most cost effective way to raise national average IQ, and higher national average IQs correlate closely with a host of good things such as higher school test scores and higher per capita GDP. Unfortunately, the entire concept of "national average IQ" has been more or less verboten outside a small corner of social sciences, so the best argument for micronutrient supplementation almost never gets aired. So, this extremely promising method remains stuck in the unfashionable corner of global philanthropy, with Kiwanis International being the prime donor.

The good news is that in the last few years the Gates Foundation has begun to get involved in this field. But, after getting in late, a decade after their splashy debuts in other fields, they've kept if pretty quiet. My guess is that Gates' personal worldview is roughly the same as Mike Judge's Idiocracy and Monty Python's The Protestant View. We know he's obsessed with IQ and that his father was big on population control. (As I pointed out in Taki's Magazine, eugenics was the ideology of Silicon Valley's founders, William Shockley and Fred Terman, and, for all I know, it might still be the sub rosa worldview out there. Here's Paul Graham's essay on "What You Can't Say.") How long do you think it would take you to explain the logic of micronutrient supplementation to raise national average IQ to Gates before he interrupted you and said, "Okay, yeah, I get it." 90 seconds?

But because it's pretty obvious that Gates comes out of the old WASP ideology of quality over quantity in reproduction, if anybody stopped and thought about it, he has to operate through these complicated double bankshot projects to burnish his reputation for being a true believer in political correctness, such as wasting (in his own admission) $2 billion on the lefty "small schools" fad of the last decade.

Frum on what typical GOP delegate thought

David Frum attempts to explain what's inside the head of the typical delegate at last week's GOP convention:
This whole thing about us not being "diverse" enough - can we cut the crap on that? You suddenly load up the country with millions of newcomers, put them on food stamps and unemployment insurance and Medicaid and what all, put them on the voting rolls without any ID - invite them to help themselves to everything that was earned before they showed up - and what do you expect the original Americans to do? 
You think we're not diverse? This is what diversity looks like: the newcomers bunching up in one party, the old stock inhabitations bunching up in the other. It's the same in Britain and in France and in Germany, and just about everywhere. You don't like it? Maybe you should have thought of that before you invited half of Mexico to move here. 
Nothing against Mexican people! Or black people! Or any kind of people! So long as they pull their weight. Maybe instead of asking us why all these so-called diverse people are not Republicans, maybe you should ask them why they don't support the party for the people who do the work and pay the bills. Maybe it's their problem, not ours, that they identify with a president who is tearing down everything I grew up with. 
Whoever you blame, I don't see why I should change my beliefs just because somebody with a different color skin doesn't like them. I don't like Barack Obama's beliefs, but he won't change them on my account. Why is it that the guy with the white skin has to change his mind, not the guy with the other kind of skin? Or why can't we just respect the fact that some of us have one set of beliefs - others have different beliefs - and let us all compete on voting day and may the best team win? Why do you liberals always have to be dragging race into it? Makes me think that it's you guys, who are always blaming just one race for everything that's wrong with America, who are the real racists. 
What you want is a country where everybody looks different, and everybody thinks the same. That's what you call diversity. No thanks. You work hard, you pay your way, you quit asking for handouts, and you're American enough for me - and you'll be up there on the podium with Bobby Jindal, Allen West, Herman Cain, and Nikki Haley as a leader of the one party in this country that isn't hung up on race.

Well said, but I think you can notice the areas of weakness in this mindset that will relentlessly be exploited.

September 5, 2012

Bob Woodward: President "voted off the island"

From ABC's description of Bob Woodward's upcoming book on the 2011 national debt ceiling negotiations:
Obama's relationship with Democrats wasn't always much better. Woodward recounts an episode early in his presidency when then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid were hammering out final details of the stimulus bill. 
Obama phoned in to deliver a "high-minded message," he writes. Obama went on so long that Pelosi "reached over and pressed the mute button on her phone," so they could continue to work without the president hearing that they weren't paying attention. 
As debt negotiations progressed, Democrats complained of being out of the loop, not knowing where the White House stood on major points. Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, is described as having a "growing feeling of incredulity" as negotiations meandered. 
"The administration didn't seem to have a strategy. It was unbelievable. There didn't seem to be any core principles," Woodward writes in describing Van Hollen's thinking. 
Larry Summers, a top economic adviser to Obama who also served as Treasury Secretary under President Clinton, identified a key distinction that he said impacted budget and spending talks. 
"Obama doesn't really have the joy of the game. Clinton basically loved negotiating with a bunch of pols, about anything," Summers said. "Whereas, Obama, he really didn't like these guys."

Summers said that Obama's "excessive pragmatism" was a problem. "I don't think anybody has a sense of his deep feelings about things." Summers said. "I don't think anybody has a sense of his deep feelings about people. I don't think people have a sense of his deep feelings around the public philosophy." … 
Woodward portrays a president who remained a supreme believer in his own powers of persuasion, even as he faltered in efforts to coax congressional leaders in both parties toward compromise. Boehner told Woodward that at one point, when Boehner voiced concern about passing the deal they were working out, the president reached out and touched his forearm.

"John, I've got great confidence in my ability to sway the American people," Boehner quotes the president as having told him. 
But after the breakthrough agreement fell apart, Boehner's "Plan B" would ultimately exclude the president from most of the key negotiations. The president was "voted off the island," in Woodward's phrase, even by members of his own party, as congressional leaders patched together an eleventh hour framework to avoid default. 
Frustration over the lack of clear White House planning was voiced to Obama's face at one point, with a Democratic congressional staffer taking the extraordinary step of confronting the president in the Oval Office. 
With the nation facing the very real possibility of defaulting on its debt for the first time in its history, David Krone, the chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, told the president directly that he couldn't simply reject the only option left to Congress. 
"It is really disheartening that you, that this White House did not have a Plan B," Krone said, according to Woodward.

My vague recollection is that I didn't write much about the debt ceiling crisis in 2011 because the whole topic sounded dreary and depressing and I'd rather think about other stuff. So, I can totally sympathize with Obama. I would have botched the whole thing up at least as badly as he did for pretty much the same personality-based reasons. I don't like politicians, I don't like negotiating, I don't like face-to-face politicking, I'd rather, say, walk to the bookstore by myself than call up a whole bunch of conniving people and try to bend them to my will. 

Of course, I haven't wanted to be President since I was a child, either.

Slate: "The Unbearable Whitemaleness of Apple's Executive Team"

Matthew Yglesias points out that the top 12 executives are all white men at Apple (which, in less than a decade and a half, has gone from down-and-out to the world's highest stock market valuation). He goes on to suggest how to begin fixing Apple's problem.

Thank God I sold all my Apple stock in 1999 and used the money to buy Hewlett-Packard stock because HP had appointed Carly Fiorina CEO. As we all know, white men cannot begin to grasp the diverse needs of women and people of color, so how can they sell them computers?

Obama v. Jesse Jackson at reading "Green Eggs and Ham"

At the VDARE blog, James Fulford has contrasting videos of Barack Obama and Jesse Jackson reading Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham

Jackson's version is great. I didn't make it through Obama's version, but I did like the part at 0:24 when he's stumbling around and Michelle starts clapping, perhaps in the hope that everybody will join in and put an end to this ordeal before it gets started.

Much of the palpable disappointment with Obama among youngish voters who got so excited about him in 2008 is that for their whole lives they'd been informed that black guys are cool. So what could be cooler than electing President Will Smith? But then President Obama turned out to be, the more you got to know him, nowhere near as cool as he thinks he is.

We could have guessed that long ago from the way Michelle treats him. According to Jodi Kantor's book The Obamas, Michelle still very much believes in Barack as "transformational" for the rest of us. But, her body language always suggested that she never really got Obamania, and in fact resented the hoopla over her husband, who, if you know him the way Michelle knows him, isn't all that.

Kantor discovered that Michelle's initial reaction to his election was to demand a separation -- he could go bach it in the White House while she and the girls stayed in Chicago through the rest of the 2008-2009 schoolyear. Eventually, aides talked her out of what would have been a PR cataclysm, and her mood has improved as her husband's poll ratings came down from the stratosphere.

Comparing Obama to Jackson is particularly germane because Michelle was Jesse Jackson's babysitter. It's hard for people familiar only with the grandiose wreck of 70-year-old Jesse Jackson to grasp what he was like in the 1970s. I found this anecdote:
In June 1971, LOOK magazine recorded an encounter between Sen. Edward Kennedy and Rev. Jesse Jackson. 
Kennedy "stuck out his hand and exchanged banalities [with Jackson]. Kennedy acted like a man running for the Presidency. Jackson, typically, acted like a man who is President." The article went on to say Jackson is "the closest thing to a national leader that has surfaced on today's fragmented civil rights scene. Tough talking, fast-stepping Jesse Jackson is as different from the conventional notion of a black minister as a Maserati is from a Dodge."

Imagine being 15-year-old Michelle showing up Saturday evening to babysit. The 38-year-old Reverend Jackson, dressed magnificently, comes down the stairs of his 15-room house, heading out to some banquet to receive yet another award and give another galvanizing oration, and, yet, he takes time from his busy schedule to chat with the suddenly shy girl ... 

How can poor Barack compete with that?

Business is booming for Clinton

From CNN earlier this year:
Bill Clinton has most lucrative year on speech circuit

July 03, 2012|By Robert Yoon, CNN Political Research Director

In 11 years as a private citizen, Clinton has delivered 471 paid speeches and earned an average of $189,000 per event. 
Former President Bill Clinton commanded the largest speaking fees of his career in 2011, earning $13.4 million and exceeding his previous record by 25%. 

The successful efforts in 2011 of Bill Clinton's wife, the Secretary of State, to start a war with Libya and kill Col. Muammar Gadafi, a colleague of Bill's leading rival on the international lecture circuit, Tony Blair, couldn't have been bad for business.
Clinton's fees were detailed in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's annual financial disclosure report, released Monday. A CNN analysis of those records shows that the former commander-in-chief has earned $89 million from paid speeches since leaving the White House in January 2001. ...
Clinton delivered 54 paid speeches in 2011, roughly the same as his 2010 workload, but the marked increase in income can be credited to six overseas events that earned him the largest single paydays of his career. 
The most lucrative was a November speech in Hong Kong to Swedish-based telecom giant Ericsson -- $750,000. Clinton also earned $700,000 for a March speech to a local newspaper publishing company in Lagos, Nigeria [Huh?], and $550,000 for a November speech to a business forum in Shanghai, China. He earned $500,000 apiece for three events in Austria and Holland in May and in the United Arab Emirates in December. 
... The former president's previous record for speech income earned in one year was in 2010, when he earned $10.7 million for 52 events. His speech earnings last year were nearly double the $7.5 million he earned in 2009. 
Almost half of the former president's speech income last year, $6.1 million, came from 16 speeches delivered in 11 other countries, ranging from Canada to Saudi Arabia. The remainder was earned in 38 domestic speeches delivered in nine states and the District of Columbia.

The concept of "conflict of interest" is slowly dying out, especially when it  could be applied to two-career couples.

September 4, 2012

"Robot & Frank"

From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:
Robot & Frank is a clever little sci-fi dramedy about a semi-senile old coot (played by Frank Langella) whose concerned son buys him a robot as a valet and minder. The film is well crafted and timely because robophobia is once again in fashion. Americans, faced with a rapidly growing population, fear robots will arrive soon and take what jobs are left. 
In contrast, the Japanese, faced with a shrinking population, fear that robots won’t get here fast enough to spare them from finally having to let in poor foreigners to care for their elderly. While Westerners traditionally fear that robots are plotting to take over (e.g., Terminator), the Japanese, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.

Read the whole thing there.

Douthat on white identity politics

Ross Douthat blogs in the New York Times:
Claims of Republican race-baiting have a way of descending into self-parody (especially at this point in the campaign season), but there is obviously a thread of what I’ve previously described as white identity politics woven into contemporary conservatism  — not a politics of white supremacy or traditional racial animus, but a politics of racial/ethnic/native-born grievance, which regards contemporary liberalism as fundamentally hostile to the interests of middle class and working class whites. (David Frum’s attempt to channel the mood of G.O.P. convention delegates captures what I’m talking about pretty well.) 
This sense of white grievance can be noxiousdivisive, and deeply problematic for Republican politicians trying to broaden their party’s appeal. It can help harden divisions and increase tensions between otherwise like-minded Americans. But it isn’t likely to diminish so long as the Democratic Party continues to be a vessel for the much more explicit identity politics that Klein’s column deplores, and to support policies that often resemble a kind of racial/ethnic spoils system for non-whites: Permanent racial preferences in education and government, a “disparate impact” regime that can blur into a de facto quota system, immigration gambits that don’t even pretend to be anything other than plays for the Hispanic vote, and so on. 
This kind of ethnic/racial patronage is hardly a new thing in our politics, and it doesn’t make today’s liberals the “real” racists, or prove that President Obama is actually some kind of post-colonial score-settler, as the Michael Moores of right-wing identity politics are wont to claim. But it does means that when it comes to exploiting America’s ethnic divisions to mobilize key constituencies, today’s Democratic Party sins as much as it is sinned against. And it means that the Democrats’ struggle to reach Klein’s “plain old white insurance salesman” and the Republicans’ struggle to reach Hispanics and African-Americans are in some sense mirror images of one another. They’re both a consequence of party leaders taking the path of least resistance on racially-charged issues, and they’re both reminders of the hard truth that the more racially diverse America of the future could easily become, and remain, a more polarized society as well.

Much of the libertarianism of the Tea Party is an attempt to come up with a principled ideological justification for the banding together for mutual political protection of the only group left in America that's not supposed to band together. Julian Castro is not expected to put forward a principled defense of his special privileges, but white Americans feel the need for principles. That makes it easy for, say, plutocrats to hijack the Tea Party because it's not allowed to even conceive of what it's really about. 

Test your vocabulary

I asked awhile ago if vocabularies continue increasing with age. A reader sends a link to a website, testyourvocab.com, that offers a 120 word vocabulary quiz, ranging from extremely easy to extremely hard. It's not a multiple choice quiz, you just have to be honest with yourself about whether you know at least one definition for each word. Then it offers an estimate of the size of your vocabulary out of what the authors consider to be the 45,000 words that comprise the full, non-technical English vocabulary. I got an estimate of 40,100, which sounds reasonable: I know a lot of words, but I lack the precision of mind to rack (wrack?) up the really big numbers.

From looking at the ages of the self-selected sample of vocabulary test lovers who took the test (average verbal SAT score 700), they found that people from 15 to 29 add about a word a day to their vocabularies, with slower increases perhaps into your 60s. The age slopes are about the same for each SAT score. They need to adjust for the 1995 recentering of verbal SAT scores, but, still, they've got pretty good evidence that vocabulary size improving with age is a real effect, not caused by self-selection in their sample.

They also print English vocabulary sizes for non-native speakers of English by country. At the top of the list, not surprisingly, are Danes, Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Belgium. (My one trip to Belgium in 1994, I noticed that a fair number of people spoke English beautifully, with nice near-English accents -- I mean, aesthetically speaking, they spoke better English than I did). Germany is well down the list. I presume it's a big country and people don't feel as much need to learn a foreign language as in small countries where they need English to speak to people from other countries. At the bottom of list is Iran. All this is self-selected, but sounds plausible.

Booker or Villaraigosa in 2016 for Dems?

The Des Moines Register reported on potential Presidential aspirations of Newark mayor Cory Booker and Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who is the chairman of the Democratic convention:
Booker tried to connect with Iowa’s Democratic activists by saying his grandmother was born in Iowa. 
“I want to be described as a son of New Jersey, but a grandson of Iowa – because my grandmama back in 1918 was born in Des Moines, Iowa,” he said, acccording to Radio Iowa. 
Booker described trips through Iowa in a recreational vehicle, going to family reunions. His grandmother’s siblings got their college educations in Iowa, he said, as reporters from Politico, the Associated Press, NBC.com and others listened.
When reporters tried to catch him after his speech, he dodged – straight into his SUV, said Radio Iowa’s O. Kay Henderson.  ...
Villaraigosa will be the keynote speaker for the Iowa Democratic Party’s big fundraiser on Oct. 20 – the Jefferson Jackson Day Dinner, Iowa Democratic Party Chairwoman Sue Dvorsky said. Prominent Democrats have historically used the JJ dinner as a spring board for competition in the Iowa caucuses. 
Villaraigosa deflected questions about his own presidential aspirations by saying he’s “looking to finish my job the way I started, with a bang. I’m working ’til 11:59:59 on June 30 and then I’m riding into the sunset for a while.”

And from Yahoo News:
Is Antonio Villaraigosa poised to be America's first Latino president?

I don't know, do Presidents get free Lakers tickets? If not, I don't really see what's in it for him.

In case you are wondering, the picture of Booker illustrates the following article in Politico:
Cory Booker loves late-night mani-pedis 
It’s 3 a.m., do you know where Newark Mayor Cory Booker is? Possibly getting a mani-pedi. The rising Democratic star dishes in the September issue of Dujour magazine about one of his guilty pleasures: getting his nails done late at night. 
“I had an ex-girlfriend who ruined me in terms of my macho, ex-football-player self—she turned me on to mani-pedis,” he said. “Being a public figure, people talk smack about you, so I found this 24-hour mani-pedi place and go in the middle of the night. It’s this guilty pleasure I have. Look, manis are good, but pedis—there’s something...transformative.” 
Booker also talked about gaining weight recently: “I’m literally at my worst health right now; you can write that,” he said. “I crossed a barrier that I’d never crossed before—a certain weight—which I won’t even tell you ’cause it’s embarrassing. I was so grossly overweight, which is total hypocrisy because I’m Michelle Obama’s co-vice chair for the campaign against obesity.” 

So, is it going to be Hillary v. Andrew Cuomo in 2016? A reader writes that with the spread of high-def TV, Hillary's going to need Barbara Walter's vaseline covered lens by then: "My filter, please." She looked fine in 2008, a good facelift.

Cuomo's resemblance to Moe the Bartender on the Simpsons will also likely only grow over the next four years.

Julian Castro: The Great Hispanic Hype

I've been saying for a half dozen years in various ways that, just as a George W. Rush would never have been considered Presidential Timber because his father hadn't been President, Barack Obama could never have achieved Presidential Timberhood without his father being black, as he emphasized in the first 390 words of the state legislator's 2004 Democratic convention keynote address. Obama is a fine fellow, but in a life of numerous opportunities, he'd never put together the kind of sustained organizational accomplishment that one expects in somebody being talked about for the Presidency. Without that speech about his parents' "improbable romance," he's a nobody. 

This has not been a popular notion on either the left or the right. The right loves far more complicated explanations of Obama than that he's a nice articulate fellow promoted out of the affirmative action impulse. The left scoffs. I always hear objections like this:

"He didn't get elected because he's black, he got elected because he beat John McCain!"

"And how did he get into position to beat McCain?

"He beat Hillary!"

"And how did he get in position to beat Hillary?"

"Everybody was talking about him!"

"And why was everybody talking about him?"

"He, uh, gave this speech in 2004 ..."

The press frenzy over Julian Castro's keynote address tonight gives us an opportunity to see how everybody gets my logic when it's played forward. The media is full of stories about how Castro could become the first Hispanic President because giving this speech eight years ago was how Obama got started on the road to being the first black President.

A little more about Castro. Like Obama, he admits he's a beneficiary of affirmative action, even giving the SAT score that got him into Stanford (1210 old style, equal to about 1300 today -- the same as George W. Bush's score, by the way).

The job of mayor of San Antonio is almost wholly ceremonial. San Antonio has a city manager style of government, with a $355,000 per year city manager hired by the city council. Castro only gets paid about $4,000 per year to do whatever it is he does.

The reason Castro can afford to have his fake job is because Democratic power broker Mikal Watts, a John Edwards-style plaintiff's attorney, gave him and his identical twin brother a huge amount of money for a "referral."

September 3, 2012

"Few African Americans at Burning Man"

Headline in the Washington Post:
THE ROOT | Few African Americans at Burning Man

From the Burning Blog:
Is Burning Man a "White People Thing?" 
... My very first burn I was astonished to realize that an event that draws so heavily from the diverse San Francisco Bay would produce a population so colorless.  From camp to camp, end to end, it was a long block of white as far as the eye could see, with only occasional dots of diversity … rare enough to raise comment.  Where were the Asians?  Where were the Hispanics?  Where were the black people?

I'd be interested in how much of a Northern European v. Southern European divide there is in who attends. The whole hippie thing seems Northern European to me. My cousin, for example, is a regular at Burning Man. He takes after his outdoorsy Swiss German mother, who regrets being too old to give it a try. His sisters take more after their Italian father, and wouldn't be caught dead there.

Obama has entered manic phase of his cycle

In the New York Times, veteran White House reporter Jodi Kantor dogwhistles desperately about the President's psyche: 
The Competitor in Chief 
By JODI KANTOR 
As Election Day approaches, President Obama is sharing a few important things about himself. He has mentioned more than once in recent weeks that he cooks “a really mean chili.” He has impressive musical pitch, he told an Iowa audience. He is “a surprisingly good pool player,” he informed an interviewer — not to mention (though he does) a doodler of unusual skill. 
All in all, he joked at a recent New York fund-raiser with several famous basketball players in attendance, “it is very rare that I come to an event where I’m like the fifth or sixth most interesting person.” 
Four years ago, Barack Obama seemed as if he might be a deliberate professor of a leader, maybe with a touch of Hawaiian mellowness. He has also turned out to be a voraciously competitive perfectionist. Aides and friends say so in interviews, but Mr. Obama’s own words of praise and derision say it best: he is a perpetually aspiring overachiever, often grading himself and others with report-card terms like “outstanding” or “remedial course” (as in: Republicans need one). 
As he faces off with Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, Mr. Obama’s will to win — and fear of losing — is in overdrive.  
Even by the standards of the political world, Mr. Obama’s obsession with virtuosity and proving himself the best are remarkable, those close to him say. ... When Mr. Obama was derided as an insufferable overachiever in an early political race, some of his friends were infuriated; to them, he was revising negative preconceptions of what a black man could achieve.
But even those loyal to Mr. Obama say that his quest for excellence can bleed into cockiness and that he tends to overestimate his capabilities. ... 
For someone dealing with the world’s weightiest matters, Mr. Obama spends surprising energy perfecting even less consequential pursuits. He has played golf 104 times since becoming president, according to Mark Knoller of CBS News, who monitors his outings, and he asks superior players for tips that have helped lower his scores. He decompresses with card games on Air Force One, but players who do not concentrate risk a reprimand (“You’re not playing, you’re just gambling,” he once told Arun Chaudhary, his former videographer). 
His idea of birthday relaxation is competing in an Olympic-style athletic tournament with friends, keeping close score. The 2009 version ended with a bowling event. Guess who won, despite his history of embarrassingly low scores? The president, it turned out, had been practicing in the White House alley. 
When he reads a book to children at the annual White House Easter Egg Roll, Mr. Obama seems incapable of just flipping open a volume and reading. In 2010, he began by announcing that he would perform “the best rendition ever” of “Green Eggs and Ham,” ripping into his Sam-I-Ams with unusual conviction. Two years later at the same event, he read “Where the Wild Things Are” with even more animation, roooooaring his terrible roar and gnaaaaashing his terrible teeth. By the time he got to the wild rumpus, he was howling so loudly that Bo, the first dog, joined in. 
“He’s shooting for a Tony,” Mr. Chaudhary joked. (He has already won a Grammy, in 2006, for his reading of his memoir, “Dreams From My Father” — not because he was a natural, said Brian Smith, the producer, but because he paused so many times to polish his performance.) 
... Even some Democrats in Washington say they have been irritated by his tips ... 
Those were not the only times Mr. Obama may have overestimated himself: he has also had a habit of warning new hires that he would be able to do their jobs better than they could. 
“I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Mr. Obama told Patrick Gaspard, his political director, at the start of the 2008 campaign, according to The New Yorker. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.” 
... No matter what moves Mr. Romney made, the president said, he and his team were going to cut him off and block him at every turn. “We’re the Miami Heat, and he’s Jeremy Lin,” Mr. Obama said, according to the aide.

Notify the Asian vote.
... When local campaign staff members ask him what they need to do better, he talks about himself instead. “I need to be working harder,” he recently told one state-level aide. 

By the way, I wonder if he's having his doctor give him a little synthetic testosterone top-off?

Back in February I wrote in my Taki's Magazine review of Kantor's book, The Obamas:
Kantor is struck by the less flagrant but still marked swings in Obama’s mood and energy level. These mostly correlate with his approval ratings, but they sometimes go off on random jags of their own. For instance, Obama’s reaction to his party losing the House in 2010 was blithe. He assumed he might be better off without all that Democratic dead weight holding him back, only to be predictably disillusioned in the disastrous debt-ceiling showdown. 
Oddly, Obama’s down spells never seem to undermine his ego, which in Kantor’s telling remains bizarrely expansive for such an otherwise rational individual. Perhaps as a metaphor for a lifetime of affirmative action’s warping effects, Kantor is fascinated by this middle-aged politician’s obsession with competing on his White House basketball court against invited NBA superstars. Whether Obama can keep clear in his head that they’re just letting him score remains unclear to the author. 
Kantor’s most intriguing finding is that Barack and Michelle’s mood cycles are generally out of sync. ... As her husband’s popularity declined, however, Michelle’s attitude improved ...

Do you ever get the impression that Democrats who write books about Obama, like Kantor and David Maraniss, generally wind up not liking him very much? Of course, all they are allowed is this kind of passive-aggressive toting up of facts, which 99.9% of readers won't get. But, at least, Jodi and David, you can take comfort in knowing that I feel your pain.

On the subject of Obama's vanity, Jonathan Last's 2010 article in the Weekly Standard, American Narcissus, remains canonical.

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.