Project much, Buzz?

A continuing theme here is that much of the conventional wisdom is generated by individuals with, as they say, issues -- personal, family, and ethnic -- which they tend, as Dr. Freud used to say, to project on to others. 

Buzz Bissinger is one of the more influential sportswriters of the last generation, with his 1990 book on high school football players, Friday Night Lights, beloved for its denunciation of small town racism and hate. Buzz's second cousin Peter Berg directed the movie version a decade ago, and it has twice been made into a TV series. I saw the movie, although I don't recall specifically reading anything by Bissinger before. He appears to have been a pretty standard issue Voice of Our Times, denouncing all the usual suspects.

Currently, Bissinger seems to be undergoing a mental breakdown in which he drops the mask and reveals some of his issues. (I suspect he has more). A fair number of celebrities are more or less bipolar: they became famous when one of their up cycles happened to correspond with a window of opportunity. 

He just published a long essay in GQ that he plays for both teams and spends $200,000 per year on clothes, much of them women's clothes.

This adds an interesting perspective on much of his Voice of Conventional Wisdom output. For example, here's an excerpt from a sequel book he published following up the Texas high school football players from his biggest hit.

After Friday Night Lights (Excerpt) 

When the games ended, real life began. An unlikely love story. 

by Buzz Bissinger  

Byliner Apr 2012

Boobie and I didn’t know it when we first met twenty-four years ago, but one day we would form the ultimate odd couple. A brash Jew from Central Park West in Manhattan who comes up to the chest of a black man from the bad side of the tracks in Odessa, together in the American forgotten. Boobie and me. Me and Boobie. I grew up in privilege and he grew up in poverty. ...

But we shared a year in our lives that forever changed us and created a bond that, no matter how elasticized, will never break. It is the most lasting legacy of Friday Night Lights, or at least the legacy I care about the most. Which is why I’m driving on Farm Road 1788 to Kermit, on my way to draw from him as he draws from me. I speak to him on the phone all the time, but I haven’t seen him in four years, and the time has come to see him again. 

Boobie became iconic to many Americans because of Friday Night Lights—he was the book’s most talked-about character and a symbol of everything that was wrong with high school football because of the tragedy that befell him as a rising senior and the virulent racism directed against him afterwards. ... 

Every teammate said he was a helluva football player who could pretty much do it all. But his coaches felt differently—they saw a powder keg with a fuse. And I think they wanted that keg to go off, just as long as they had another running back to replace him. 

I remember the first time I talked to Boobie. I didn’t know how he would react to me, so obviously an alien, with glasses and a thin reporter’s notebook dangling from my right hand. He was all chisel and sinew, beautiful in the distinct way high school athletes are beautiful, their bodies ripped with the grace of the last days of their youth. ... He was in the trainer’s room. It was August of 1988, a few weeks before the first game. He knew that all eyes in the bleachers would be on him. ... 

... Okay!

Or, then there's Buzz's denunciation of professional athletes as ignorant hate-filled Christians in "Major League Homophobia Isn't Going Away:"

Outside of mandatory meetings, one of the most popular group activities in the clubhouse is the Sunday morning prayer session, and I have a feeling that gay rights is not something that comes up a lot. It’s a guess, but I think it’s a pretty damn good one that most straight athletes’ image of gays is based on the religious right's handbook—predatory creatures who, even if they are professionals, are only in sports for the drop of the towel to the floor after the shower and the root revealed. Not only is the attitude insulting and offensive; way too many straight athletes, particularly pitchers over 30, with their sagging stomachs and scraggly beards picking up bits of food like lint, are kidding themselves. Were it not for the fact that most of them make millions of dollars for doing little or doing it badly, nobody would want them, whether straight, gay, or crustacean. As for their carrot, not the stuff of legend, with or without shrinkage. 

... A two-week suspension is a tiny slap, particularly since most pitching coaches do nothing but go to the mound and give the pitcher a pat on the rear and then take the ball from him (am I the only one who smells something homoerotic in the air?).

... Okay!

The Flight from White: Buzz Bissinger Edition

Bestselling 58-year-old sportswriter Buzz Bissinger, whose 1990 book Friday Night Lights was based on in-depth locker room interviews of half-dressed teenage high school football players, announces in GQ that he has spent $587,000 over the last three years on clothes for himself, both men's and women's, such as thigh-high leather boots with six-inch stiletto heels.

Before I started shopping with [his personal stylist] at Gucci, I could count on one finger the number of compliments I got from strangers on what I was wearing. Now I get dozens, 99 percent of them from women and gays and African-Americans who appreciate go-for-it style. No wonder male heterosexual whites are aimed toward obsolescence, boring the rest of us to death. 

Why polygamy will eventually be legalized

You hear the argument frequently that when gay marriage is declared a self-evident civil right, then how, in principle, can three fundamentalist Mormons or three Arabs be denied their rights to be married, too?

Easy -- They are fundamentalist Mormons. 

Look, principles don't have anything to do with it. It's a popularity contest. Gays are popular and Mormons aren't. Gays are powerful nationally, Mormons powerful mostly regionally. Polygamous fundamentalist Mormons are extremely unpopular and not very powerful, so nobody is going to do anything for them.

Okay, but can Arabs be denied their rights?

Not so easy, but it can still be done: After all, they are Arabs. Arabs have their proponents, but they also have their detractors.

Ultimately, though, polgyamy has a secret weapon: polygamous immigrant Africans. 

So, eventually, the question will become: Can blacks be denied their rights? What with America's dark history of racist brutality and all?

Now that is exactly the kind of question that America ultimately gives in on.

Taki's: The True Meaning of the V-Word

From my Taki's Magazine column:

What do people really mean by the word “vibrant?” 

Until the disco era, “vibrant” was used only rarely, mostly in connection with vibrations, literal or metaphorical. My cursory online search uncovered zero examples of “vibrant” in the works of George Orwell or John Updike, one in Evelyn Waugh‘s (“that silence vibrant with self-accusation”), and two in Vladimir Nabokov‘s. (Humbert Humbert looks up to a “vibrant sky” through “nervous” rustling branches.) 

According to Google’s Ngram, “vibrant” was an occasionally used word from the 1920s into the early 1970s. But then its share of all the words in books roughly quadrupled by the mid-2000s (when a few people finally started to make fun of it). 

In 2013, it’s hard to avoid the word. For example, on Monday, President Obama announced, “Immigration makes us stronger—it keeps us vibrant.…” 

Similarly, when new Secretary of State John Kerry paid a visit to German Chancellor Angela Merkel last month, he announced that the American-German relationship is “one of our strongest, most vibrant alliances.” (Is “vibrant” the post-Cold War version of “dynamic?”) 

And downtowns are always vibrant, or will be Real Soon Now: “Planners in Maine Envision Vibrant Downtowns.”

Read the whole thing there.

When white people honestly consider a place full of white people to be "vibrant" (e.g., Matthew Yglesias praising a gentrifying corner of Washington D.C. in today's Slate), what do they mean, deep down?

I offer a reductionist definition of "vibrant" in real estate talk terms.

Berezovskyanism in the USA?

In the NYT, Masha Gessen, author of a biography of Vladimir Putin, summarizes a long interview with the late Boris Berezovsky:

Berezovsky’s account had some holes, but he stuck to it his entire life. Whatever his exaggerations or omissions, he played a significant role in Russia’s transition from Boris Yeltsin to Putin. What strikes me is that years later — and up until his death — he still thought it had been a brilliant idea. 

Berezovsky claimed to have been the mastermind behind picking a man with no public face, a former K.G.B. agent, to succeed Yeltsin as the president of Russia. He also said it was his idea to manufacture an entire nonideological pseudo-political pseudo-movement to serve as the new president’s base of support. Berezovsky also had another brilliant idea, which to his regret Putin did not grasp: creating a fake two-party system, with Putin at the head of a socialist-democrat sort of party and Berezovsky leading a neoconservative one, or the other way around.

Well, that's pretty interesting. In fact, the last sentence above might be the most interesting one to appear in the NYT this year. But judging from Google, about the only other websites quoting it have names like Korean Jobs Forum.

By the way, what would be an enthralling fake controversy for the fake parties to fake argue over while they mutually loot the country for real?

Well, it's all too sci-fi hypothetical for me to think about. Obviously, it can't happen here.

"Gay Marriage" in Ngram: Media Muscle in action

Here's a Google Ngram graph of usage in books of the terms "gay marriage" in red and "homosexual marriage" in blue from 1800 to 2008. The terms were essentially nonexistent until the early 1970s, after which there were a tiny, relatively stable number of references to "homosexual marriage" for two decades. Then there was an inflection point around 1994 and another one around 2003. (Methodology notes: The graph above reflects Ngram's default three-year moving average smoothing. If you turn off smoothing, the inflection points appear a little later than when smoothing is on. Of course, books perhaps lag behind other media because of their longer production cycles.)

I'm fascinated by the mechanics of media muscle reflected in the two inflection points. Here's a topic that had interested almost nobody, straight or gay, for, roughly, ever, yet then in two stages becomes a cultural obsession.

My vague recollection from following the news at the time is that the 1994 inflection point was largely due to a concentrated push by the New York Times in the early to mid 1990s. The Times' front page became obsessed with gay genes and gay this and gay that. Perhaps the second inflection point was largely created by the Times as well. In 2000, Richard Berke, the NYT's gay National Political Correspondent boasted to the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association:

Now it's like, there are times when you look at the front-page meeting and ... literally three-quarters of the people deciding what's on the front page are not-so-closeted homosexuals. ...

Now, a theory I've long entertained is that the gay marriage brouhaha reflects a fundamentally healthy movement among gays to push more restrained lifestyles on themselves after their catastrophic debauchery in the 1970s following Gay Liberation caused the AIDS epidemic.

But, it's just expressed triple bankshot-style through today's Who? Whom? conceptual vocabulary.

These days, you see, it doesn't pay to upbraid your own kind to behave in a more traditionally moral manner, and perhaps apologize to society in general for your misdeeds and promise to act better in the future so as not to cause another horrific venereal disease epidemic. That's so ... Victorian! What did the Victorians ever accomplish? (I mean, besides building all those to-die for Victorian houses in the Castro district?)

We don't live in the Victorian Age, we live in the Victim Age. So, gays admitting that AIDS was their own fault was never on the table. So, AIDS had to be ... uh ... Ronald Reagan's fault!

Similarly, gays can't admit that  they need moral reform even when they realize it themselves. Instead, they have to be victims of oppression denying them the right to something they had never noticed they lacked in the past.

Why did Galton lag Newton by two centuries?

I have an intellectual toolkit that I use repeatedly while thinking about social systems. Long time readers probably use many of the same tools, such as the notions of regression toward the mean, nature v. nurture distinctions, bell curves, and so forth. On the other hand, it's pretty clear that these tools are second nature for only a very few people in our society. The articles in major newspapers are clearly written and edited largely by people who, while they may grasp these concepts in theory, do not regularly apply them to the news.

In general, it seems as if people don't like to reason statistically, that they find it in rather bad taste. For example, the development of statistics seemed to lag a century or two behind other mathematics-related fields.

Compare what Newton accomplished in the later 17th Century to what Galton accomplished in the later 19th Century. Both are Englishmen from vaguely the same traditions, just separated by a couple of hundred years. 

From my perspective, what Newton did seems harder than what Galton did, yet it took the world a couple of centuries longer to come up with concepts like regression to the mean. Presumably, part of the difference was that Newton was a genius among geniuses and personally accelerated the history of science by some number of decades. 

Still, I’m rather stumped by why the questions that Galton found intriguing didn’t come up earlier. Is there something about human nature that makes statistical reasoning unappealing to most smart people, that they’d rather reason about the solar system than about society?

Take another example: physicist Werner Heisenberg and statistician R.A. Fisher were contemporaries, both publishing important work in the 1920s. Yet, Heisenberg's breakthroughs seem outlandishly more advanced than Fisher's.

A couple of commenters at Andrew Gelman's statistics blog had some good thoughts. Jonathan said:

Physics and mechanics were studies of how God made things work. Randomness is incompatible with God’s will. Newton, Leibniz, even Laplace (“I have no need for that hypothesis”) were quite religious men trying to uncover the fundamental rules of the universe. Statistics is sort of anti-rules discipline, since randomness (pre-quantum physics, say 1930) is not part of the structure of the universe… it’s part of our failed powers of observation and measurement. Gauss realized this and developed least squares techniques, but unless you think “God plays dice,” the theory of statistics was always going to lag physics and mechanics.

R McElreath says:

There’s some history of the perceived conflict between chance and reason in Gigerenzer et al’s “The Empire of Chance”.  

Quick version of the argument: The Greeks and Romans had the dueling personifications of Athena/Minerva (Wisdom) and Tyche/Fortuna (Chance). Minerva was the patron of reason and science, while Fortuna was capricious and even malicious. Getting scholars to see Fortune as a route to Wisdom was perhaps very hard, due to these personifications. 

As Ignatius J. Reilly says in A Confederacy of Dunces:

“Oh Fortuna, blind, heedless goddess, I am strapped to your wheel. Do not crush me beneath your spokes. Raise me on high, divinity.”

Supreme Court to consider Ward Connerly case

The Supreme Court said to day that it would consider overturning an absurd late 2012 ruling by eight Democratic judges on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals overturning Ward Connerly's 2006 initiative victory banning affirmative action in Michigan. The Democratic judges said that it was unfair for the thuggish plaintiffs, By Any Means Necessary, to have to do what Connerly did and get the majority of Michigan voters to back their view of affirmative action. 

This was one of the more blatant of the countless post-Obama re-election expressions of sheer who? whom? thinking. 

Scalia gives the impression that he thinks that the five Republican Supreme Court Justices (who aren't terribly young, by the way) are all that stand between the country permanently slipping from a world in which affirmative action can't be ended because its beneficiaries are too weak to one in which affirmative action can't be ended because its beneficiaries are too strong.

Evolutionary theorists: Migration bad for evolution of cooperation

The "selfish gene" paradigm of evolution raises a lot of fascinating conundrums about how human beings got so cooperative. If you look at chimpanzees, for example, mothers are nice to their children and members of the same group will reciprocate in picking lice off each other. But, that's about it. Their general attitude toward helping their fellow ape is: "We're chimps, not chumps." 

How could altruism evolve under the rules of natural selection? Did it? Well, taking a broad view of "altruism," dogs seem more altruistic toward humans than wolves do. Of course, that probably was the result of artificial rather than natural selection. But then how do we know that humans didn't get artificially selected for being nice, just like their dogs?

Anyway, I'm not the one to work out the ultimate theory of this. So, here's the latest game theory of how an instinct for friendliness could evolve. 

From Nature:

How Natural Selection Can Create Both Self- and Other-Regarding Preferences, and Networked Minds 

Thomas Grund, Christian Waloszek & Dirk Helbing 

Biological competition is widely believed to result in the evolution of selfish preferences. The related concept of the ‘homo economicus’ is at the core of mainstream economics. However, there is also experimental and empirical evidence for other-regarding preferences. Here we present a theory that explains both, self-regarding and other-regarding preferences. Assuming conditions promoting non-cooperative behaviour, we demonstrate that intergenerational migration determines whether evolutionary competition results in a ‘homo economicus’ (showing self-regarding preferences) or a ‘homo socialis’ (having other-regarding preferences). Our model assumes spatially interacting agents playing prisoner's dilemmas, who inherit a trait determining ‘friendliness’, but mutations tend to undermine it. Reproduction is ruled by fitness-based selection without a cultural modification of reproduction rates. Our model calls for a complementary economic theory for ‘networked minds’ (the ‘homo socialis’) and lays the foundations for an evolutionarily grounded theory of other-regarding agents, explaining individually different utility functions as well as conditional cooperation. 

... In conclusion, we offer an over-arching theoretical perspective that could help to overcome the historical controversy in the behavioural sciences between largely incompatible views about human nature. Both, self-regarding and other-regarding types of humans may result from the same evolutionary process. Whereas high levels of intergenerational migration promote the evolution of a ‘homo economicus’, low levels of intergenerational migration promote a ‘homo socialis’, even under ‘Darwinian’ conditions of a survival of the fittest and random mutations. The significance of local reproduction for the evolution of other-regarding preferences is striking and may explain why such preferences are more common in some parts of the world than in others.

Our modelling approach distinguishes between the evolution of individual preferences and behaviours. This makes cooperation conditional on the level of cooperation in the respective neigh-bourhood. Hence, when a few ‘idealists’ are born, who cooperate unconditionally, this can trigger off cooperation cascades, which can largely accelerate the spreading of cooperation33. Our model can also serve as a basis to develop an economic theory of other-regarding agents. The advantage is that it does not need to assume certain properties of boundedly rational agents—these properties rather result from an evolutionary process. In fact, our model naturally explains the evolution of individually different utility functions, as they are experimentally observed (see Figs. 3 + 4), and also the evolution of conditional cooperators9, 34. 

I'm not going to offer an opinion on whether their entire theory works or not. But it sounds like a game theoretic version in reverse of Stephen G. Bloom's book Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America. Even though the New York media devotes a lot of effort to telling us all the time about Hate in small towns, you might start to suspect there's a bit of projection in that. Just walking down the street, you might think that people seem friendlier in smaller, more rooted places where they have to deal repeatedly with the same limited number of people.

Post: Nonwhites don't care about environment, whites at fault and must bribe minorities more to pretend to care

From the Washington Post:

Within mainstream environmentalist groups, diversity is lacking 

... But Tutman is not unique in his feelings of isolation. Minorities in the nation’s largest environmental organizations said in interviews that they feel the same way. 

In fact, they say, the level of diversity, both in leadership and staff, of groups such as the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Sierra Club and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation is more like that of the Republican Party they so often criticize for its positions on the environment than that of the multiethnic Democratic Party they have thrown their support behind. 

Some of the groups say they are working toward greater diversity. “I think that the concerns are absolutely well founded,” said Adrianna Quintero, a lawyer for the NRDC. “It’s taken too long for environmental groups to work closely enough with minority communities.” 

Kim Coble, vice president of environmental protection and restoration for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said the organization strives for inclusion, even though the percentage of minorities on its full-time staff is only 4.5 percent in a region where they represent nearly half the population.

“The environmental movement has a bit of a reputation as being a wealthy white community, and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation works hard to counteract that,” Coble said. 

The reputation is deserved, said Norris McDonald, president of the African American Environmentalist Association. 

“This goes back a long way,” McDonald said. “It’s why I founded the [association] in 1985. . . . White groups weren’t hiring black professionals, and when they did, it was a hostile atmosphere. There were a handful of black professionals in the environmental groups then, and there are a handful now.” ...

The Sierra Club, whose director, Allison Chin, is Asian American, did not respond to requests for interviews. Spokeswoman Maggie Kao said the group has had an environmental justice arm for at least a decade. Still, several minorities who work for Sierra Club said it lacks diversity.

At no point in the article does anybody suggest that non-whites ought to care more about the environment. It's all about nonwhites getting more jobs and grants to cash in bigger on the environment racket.

Presumably, environmental organizations pay a little less than the corporations they pester. So, trustfunders tend toward Greenpeace and diversity hires gravitate toward BP. The only way to alter this is for the environmental organizations to devote less of their budget to doing whatever it is they do and more toward bidding wars for diversity hires.

It's fascinating how in the 21st Century, ancestry trumps just about everything else. It's kind of like the era of the divine right of hereditary monarchs in that who you are descended from seems to be considered the most important trait in determining your moral worth.

Will Andrew Sullivan finally get a break on the price of his AndroGel?

One of the big changes in my lifetime has been the slow undermining of antitrust law due to the triumph of econ majors. Back in the lefty/populist 70s when I was in college, the conventional wisdom was that the only thing keeping big corporations from conspiring to raise prices were the anti-trust laws (for the benefit of non-American readers who are baffled by the historical relic word "trust:" anti-monopoly/cartel and anti-price-fixing laws).

As I majored in economics at Rice U., however, I learned that the need for anti-trust laws is mostly a big myth, and the magic of the market would take care of all but the most egregious cases. A true believer, I quickly came to scoff at at lawsuits such as the "notorious Utah Pie case" in which the courts upheld antitrust laws despite obviously being Bad for the Economy.

Then I got into business myself, and discovered that competition wasn't perfect like in the Econ textbooks. From the point of view of corporate employees, competition was awful, and that anybody with a brain in his head would negotiate a price-fixing deal or set up a cartel or monopoly with his competitors if the government didn't ban it. 

But, as experience was teaching me the opposite of what I'd learned in college, enlightened opinion (driven heavily by people who got a good grade in Econ 101) was moving toward what I had believed so whole-heartedly in 1978.

Thus, in recent years, huge pharmaceutical firms have been fairly openly bribing their would-be generic rivals to stay out of their markets, and the courts have been fine with this. Now, a Supreme Court case will decide this:

From the NYT:

The case, Federal Trade Commission v. Actavis, No. 12-416, centers on whether the maker of a brand-name drug can pay a generic-drug company to keep the generic version off the market. Based on antitrust law, the obvious answer would seem to be no, the view voiced by the government and most recently upheld by a federal appeals court. 

At least three other federal appeals courts have previously said those payments are legal, however, when made under the settlement of a patent infringement lawsuit. Those courts sided with drug company arguments that the payments are what Congress intended in setting up guidelines to encourage the production of generic drugs. 

The question before the justices pits a company’s constitutional right to protect its intellectual property — through reliance on a patent that excludes competitors — against antitrust law, which holds that a company cannot unfairly exclude others from legitimately entering a business with a rival product. 

When the court rules later this year, its answer could have a sweeping effect on one of the largest segments of the nation’s economy and an industry that touches the wallets of nearly every American. 

“Everybody wants to believe that the big drug companies are bad, that they’re giving us these piles of money to stay off the market,” said Paul M. Bisaro, chief executive of Actavis, whose generic version of AndroGel, a testosterone replacement therapy, is the subject of the case. “But these payments have saved consumers billions and billions of dollars.” 

The agency says in its court briefs that the opposite is true: the payment “allows the brand-name manufacturer to co-opt its rival by sharing the monopoly profits that result from an artificially prolonged period of market exclusivity.” 

The stakes in the dispute are huge. Pharmaceutical sales in the United States totaled roughly $320 billion in 2011, according to IMS Health, a research company whose statistics the agency cites in its arguments. 

Brand-name drugs accounted for only 18 percent of the total prescriptions written by doctors in 2011 but 73 percent of consumer spending, IMS reported. When a generic version of a brand-name drug comes onto the market, the F.T.C. said, it costs about 15 percent of the original, causing the brand-name drug maker to quickly lose about 90 percent of its market share.

Barone v. Sailer / Kaus

Michael Barone writes:

As blogger Steve Sailer notes, a Pew Hispanic Center survey in 2005, near the peak of the housing bubble, reported that 22 million Mexicans would immigrate to the United States as legal guest workers if that was possible. The Pew and Gallup numbers are not commensurate, since Pew asked a hypothetical question and Gallup asked about general desire to immigrate, but there’s a huge difference between 22 million and 5 million. In the debate on immigration policy Sailer and Mickey Kaus have argued that large-scale illegal immigration from Mexico will likely resume when the U.S. economy revives and if a comprehensive immigration law provides legal status for many or most current illegal immigrants. I have predicted that we will never see the kind of large-scale Mexican immigration to the United States that we saw in 1982-2007. I think the Gallup numbers tend to support my prediction. Desire to immigrate does not usually yield a decision to immigrate. People take the plunge of immigration not just to make money but to pursue dreams or escape nightmares. For Mexicans these days the United States is less of a dream and Mexico is less of a nightmare than in the years from 1982 to 2007. 

It's called convergence: Mexico becomes more like America (good in theory, although the obesity data raises a disturbing counter-example), while America becomes more like Mexico.

But, here's a suggestion. The construction industry is just starting to pick up again, and contractors are starting to make houses-rotting-in-the-fields noises about how there are "shortages" of construction workers and they need to get their workers back from Mexico. So, why don't we wait five years and see what happens with immigration before passing some massive immigration "reform" law based on suppositions about how Fortunately, It Can't Happen Again?

Test case: Puerto Rico. The huge influx of Puerto Ricans to New York City that started in the late 1940s abruptly ended in 1961, when incomes in Puerto Rico reached one-third the U.S. mainland income level. There were and are no legal barriers for Puerto Ricans, who are U.S. citizens under an act of Congress passed in 1917. They just stopped coming. Recent years have seen some movement of Puerto Ricans to the Mainland (probably more to metro Orlando than metro New York), but it’s nothing like the magnitude of the 1949-61 migration. The data suggested that Mexicans just stopped coming to the United States in 2007, when the housing bubble burst and the recession began. I’m betting—aware of the nontrivial possibility that I could be wrong—that we won’t see another massive wave of immigration from Mexico.

Perhaps, although the tax breaks given to American corporations to prop up the economy of Puerto Rico, to stop the Puerto Ricans from coming, are lavish. Bribing Puerto Ricans to not be nationalists is enormously expensive on a per capita basis.

Moreover the Puerto Rican population in the U.S. is growing steadily, despite mostly living in low birthrate East Coast cities. According to a new study, the Census Bureau found 2.7 million Puerto Ricans in 1990, 3.7 million in 2000, and 4.6 million in 2010. Over the same period, the population of Puerto Rico itself grew slightly from 3.5 to 3.7 million (but the population of Puerto Rico is down compared to 2000.)

So, that's 74% growth over two decades.

Puerto Ricans, both in P.R. and in America, have low fertility, although the population can keep growing due to "demographic momentum"? (E.g., somebody with four children can have eight grandchildren a lot more easily than somebody with two children can have eight grandchildren.)

But, it's also true that Puerto Rican immigration has been substantial for the last seven years, despite the recession here.

Here's a good 2012 article by John Marino on Puerto Ricans immigrating to the U.S.:

Puerto Rico residents continued their exodus from the island over the past year during tough economic times, with the local population shrinking by 19,099 residents, or 0.51 percent, the biggest percentage loss by far of any U.S. jurisdiction, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. 

The population loss was due to migration to the U.S., with a net 35,469 residents lost to out-migration [that a net of almost 1% of the population leaving in 1 year], while island births outpaced deaths by 16,370 during the 15-month period covered by the new Census data, which runs April 1, 2010 to July 1, 2011. 

The drop-more than double the average annual population loss reflected in the 2010 Census for the previous decade- is part of the first new U.S. population estimate released by the bureau since the 2010 Census, which showed the island's population had declined by 82,821 people, or 2.2 percent, over the past decade. ...

Back in October, an Ipsos poll commissioned by WAPA-TV found 45 percent of islanders have considered leaving Puerto Rico in search of a better quality of life, with the majority of those setting their sights on the States. One-quarter (25 percent) of those who have considered a move from the island have taken concrete steps to do so, the poll found. 

Projected over the entire population, the poll results indicate some 1.5 million people would consider leaving the island, while 419,000 of those have at least started a plan to move. ...

Puerto Rico's population was pegged at 3,725,789 in the 2010 Census, down from the 3,808,610 registered in the 2000 Census. It marked the first time the local population had declined between census counts. 

The 2010 Census also showed there were 4.7 million Puerto Ricans living in the States, which was the first time more Puerto Ricans lived stateside than on the island. 

Puerto Rico is richer than Mexico in terms of per capita GDP, although Puerto Rico has been declining and Mexico improving.

In contrast, the Census found the number of individuals in the U.S. self-identifying as of Mexico origin growing from 13.4 to 31.8 million from 1990 to 2010, a growth of 137% or a little less than twice as fast as the growth in the Puerto Rican population.

It's crucial to note that a huge number of births to Mexican women in the U.S. are within a decade or so of arriving in this country. That's why the Mexican Total Fertility Rate has dropped sharply since the Sand State housing bubble popped -- fewer immigrants means fewer women arriving to have the 3 or 4 kids they can't afford to have in their own country. The last amnesty caused a big baby boom among the amnestied, and there is no reason to imagine the next one wouldn't do the same.

Robert Maxwell as Lord Copper

The death of one of the Russian oligarchs in England, Boris Berezovsky, reminds me of the startling life and death of a similar personality, Robert Maxwell, who was a huge figure in the English-language media and marketing industries a quarter of a century ago. Since everybody knows that only conspiracy theorists believe in conspiracies, but since Maxwell's entire life was one conspiracy after another, his entertaining memory Does Not Compute and has largely been forgotten.

"The Bouncing Czech" had, apparently, been some kind of Soviet agent off and on, and the basis of his fortune was the Soviets giving him the copyright of all their scientific journals for publication in English.

Maxwell also seemed to be some kind of Israeli spy. Wikipedia explains:

Shortly before Maxwell's death, a former Mossad officer named Ari Ben-Menashe had approached a number of news organisations in Britain and the United States with the allegation that Maxwell and the Daily Mirror's foreign editor, Nick Davies, were both long-time agents for the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad. Ben-Menashe also claimed that in 1986 Maxwell had told the Israeli Embassy in London that Mordechai Vanunu had given information about Israel's nuclear capability to the Sunday Times, then to the Daily Mirror. Vanunu was subsequently lured from London to Rome by Mossad, where he was kidnapped and smuggled to Israel, convicted of treason and imprisoned for 18 years. 

No news organisation would publish Ben-Menashe's story at first but eventually the New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh repeated some of the allegations during a press conference in London held to publicise The Samson Option, Hersh's book about Israel's nuclear weapons. ...

The close proximity of his death to these allegations heightened interest in Maxwell's relationship with Israel, and the Daily Mirror published claims that he was assassinated by Mossad after he attempted to blackmail them.[22]
Maxwell was given a funeral in Israel better befitting a head of state than a publisher, as described by author Gordon Thomas: 

On 10 November 1991, Maxwell’s funeral took place on the Mount of Olives Har Zeitim in Jerusalem, across from the Temple Mount. It had all the trappings of a state occasion, attended by the country’s government and opposition leaders. No fewer than six serving and former heads of the Israeli intelligence community listened as Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir eulogized: "He has done more for Israel than can today be said" (Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad, St. Martin's Press, 1999).[23]

Or, maybe Shamir was talking about something else. Who knows?

Back in 1994, I watched a C-SPAN Booknotes interview by Brian Lamb of Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson promoting his book about his misadventures as a writer trying to fit into the business world after he left politics and got an MBA at Stanford. Lamb asked him about how he got personal job interviews with Steve Jobs, Rupert Murdoch, and Robert Maxwell:

Robinson: And so Bill Buckley was a friend of Robert Maxwell, the British media baron, and Bill was kind enough to write a letter of introduction to Maxwell on my behalf. Actually, a business school classmate's father did business with Rupert Murdoch and was kind enough to write a letter to Rupert Murdoch on my behalf. And then a classmate was dating Steve Jobs and has since become Mrs. Steve Jobs ... 

Lamb: Who's Steve Jobs? 

Robinson: Steve Jobs -- that's right -- at his company ... 

Lamb: Who is he? 

Robinson: Who is Steve Jobs? Steve Jobs is the founder, in 1977, of Apple Computer Company. ... 

That was a classic Brian Lamb interview technique. My assumption is that Lamb assumed that viewers, even of C-SPAN, don't know anything about anything, so he asked all these Man-from-Mars questions that frequently rattled his subjects who were used to being interviewed by people who liked to show off how much they already knew, much to the bafflement of viewers. Lamb, instead, would ask the author of, say, a new Lincoln biography:

Lamb: "Who was Abraham Lincoln?"

Author of new Lincoln biography [Baffled]: "Who was Abraham Lincoln?"

Lamb: "Who was Abraham Lincoln?"

Author [Unnerved, but rallying]: "Well ... that's a very insightful question. I'm glad you asked that because that really gets to the heart of what my new biography of Lincoln is all about. We all think we know who Abraham Lincoln was, but do we fully grasp what it was to like to be Lincoln, to be a son of the prairie suddenly --"

Lamb: "Who was Abraham Lincoln?"

Author [Finally sort of catching on]: "He was the President. ... During the Civil War."

I was particularly interested in Robinson's meetings with Robert Maxwell, who jumped off his yacht not long afterwards, about a month before Maxwell's embezzlement of many hundreds of millions dollars of his employees' pension funds was uncovered. I like this long segment because I'd dealt with Maxwell's company, and because Robinson's story sounds so much like how William Boot is hired as a war correspondent by Lord Copper in Waugh's Scoop. (Presumably, Robinson had read Scoop too, and thus his story of his meeting with the press lord is refracted through his delight in literature coming to life.)

Robinson: I had an interview -- in fact, two interviews with Robert Maxwell ... I met him in New York, and he had a suite at the top of the Helmsley Palace Hotel, which was the biggest hotel suite I have ever seen. I buzzed at the door and a little man came, opened the door, in a suit. It was a butler, a real butler, and he bowed to me from the head and said, “Good afternoon, sir.” And then a huge voice from around -- “Ah, that would be Robinson. Show him in. Show him in.” And this gigantic man -- Maxwell must have weighed 300 pounds if he weighed an ounce -- came padding around the corner in khaki trousers and a checked shirt and bare feet. 

He motioned me in, and I was now in a room that was two stories high. A curving staircase went up to the right, and off to the left was a kind of two-story bank of windows looking out on the Manhattan skyline with a grand piano, and if Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers had come high-stepping down those stairs, it wouldn't have seemed out of place to me at all. Maxwell was -- I had been warned that he was abrasive, he was difficult, he liked to humiliate people. He was, in fact, during that half-hour or so, absolutely charming, wanted to know all about me, where was I from, and we just chatted. ... At the end of the conversation, he said, “Well, I would not be averse to continuing this discussion. You must come to see us in London. See so-and-so and she will make the arrangements.” So ...

Robinson then explains why he changed the name of Maxwell's personal assistant to "Wilkes." (Poor Wilkes sounds like the forlorn and battered Mr. Salter, who works for newspaper baron Lord Copper of the Daily Beast, in Waugh's Scoop.)

Robinson: Robert Maxwell was a difficult enough man to deal with, and so I felt some sympathy for this fellow ["Wilkes"]. He was American and I was the one who was in need of a job, but he was trying very hard to sell me. He said, “Oh, Maxwell is -- he's a genius. This company is growing. What would you like to do here?” He just asked me what I would like to do. And then it was clear he kind of would give me any job I asked for, and it suddenly clicked that Maxwell must have told this person to hire me no matter what. 

As we were talking, the windows started to shake -- huge “whoop, whoop, whoop” sound -- and this fellow said to me, “Well, the helicopter's landing. He's here. We'll give him five minutes and go up and see the great man.” Waited five minutes; upstairs we went in the elevator. And there -- the anteroom or hallway outside Maxwell's office was this sort of cavernous place with a huge Maxwell logo, which was a map of the world with a gigantic M imprinted on it. And I noticed in the carpet -- this logo was repeated all through the carpet, stretching off into -- sort of into the distance. And the secretary said, “He's waiting for you.” So this fellow, Wilkes, as I call him in the book, opened the door. Just a gigantic room again -- tall windows looking out on the London skyline, Maxwell seated at a desk, and he stands up and he's wearing an electric blue suit, a hot pink bow tie, a bright blue shirt. He comes padding over to us. “Mr Robinson” -- shakes my hand -- “take a seat,” and he motions to a kind of conference table. 

... And his hair -- I'm sensitive to this. I'm getting gray myself now. His hair was absolutely jet black -- shoe-polish black -- as were his eyebrows. ... He was just a huge, bizarre, colorful figure. And my first impression was this kind of circus bear. 

And Maxwell turned to the fellow I had been dealing with and he said, “Well, what are we going to do with this young man?” And Wilkes said, “Well, Mr. Maxwell, Peter and I have been talking about his career” -- of course, not true. We hadn't been talking in any serious way at all. And he spins out this story about how I should start with the media group -- or the television group -- and after a year or two I could be running a chunk of the business on my own. I thought, this sounds remarkably good -- in fact, surreal. It can't be that good.
I was now 33 years old with not a whit of business experience. 

And Maxwell listens to this, and pauses for a moment and he says, “No. Wrong use to make of Robinson entirely.” Then he said that I would be his personal assistant. Maxwell said, “For example, this weekend I am flying to Moscow. Mr. Wilkes will accompany me. When Robinson joins the company, he will accompany me instead. He will sit in on the meetings, take notes -- notes on the negotiations -- return to the firm, and tell you and others what actions need to be taken as a result of the decisions I have reached.” This is almost exactly the way he talked. And this fellow turned ashen. Suddenly not only was I being brought into the company, I was, in effect, being made his superior. 

And [Wilkes] tried to object and Maxwell said, “No, no, no. Negotiate a starting date with Mr. Robinson and a salary. If he wants to join the firm, good, and if he doesn't,” waved his hand again. And just then the secretary walked in and said it was -- Ariel Sharon was on the line for Maxwell. So he got up and walked back to his desk and I heard him say, “Aric, how is the weather in Tel Aviv?” as we then went out of the office. Now he had flown me to London and he had spoken exactly five words to me: “Robinson, take a seat,” and then discussed me as though I was a kind of side of beef hanging in a shop window, and I decided that whole experience was just a little bit too bizarre. 

Oh, Mr. Wilkes -- we got out and down the hallway we went, and he kind of called me over to an alcove and he said, “You don't want this job. You don't want this job. Why don't you say it right now: ‘I don't want this job.’ Go ahead, say it.” 

Yes, he did. He said, “Maxwell is a madman.” I mean, he took back everything he had told me half an hour before. “Personal assistant -- he'll leave you on a runway in Moscow.” And I had subsequently found out stories -- someone was hired for a similar position by Maxwell, given a two-year contract, and Maxwell fired her the first day, gave her two years' salary, but said he didn't want to see her again. So he was just very mercurial. That was my experience with Robert Maxwell.

Lamb: By the way, the Maxwell estate turned out to be -- what? -- bankrupt? 

Robinson: I don't know that it's ever been decided clearly and for certain. What happened was that Maxwell -- it became clear that he was facing huge debts and it also began to become clear that he had effectively stolen about a billion dollars from his company's pension funds to pay off debts elsewhere in the corporate structure. And he retired to his huge yacht and one night -- it's still a little bit unclear, but it now seems as though he jumped into the ocean. He either fell into the sea or jumped into the sea, and that was the end of Robert Maxwell.

Robinson then had a job interview with Rupert Murdoch:

... And finally, I realized he'd offered me a job. I said, “Well, thank you very much.” He said, “I'd be tempted to make you my personal assistant,” and my heart sank. I thought, “Oh, no, back into the Maxwell problem.” “But,” he said, “I think that would be a disservice to you. I'd like you to come here and learn the company, and I'm hiring some young people to learn various aspects of the company, and in 10, 15 years they'll move up into management positions.” It all seemed very, very plausible to me. And then at the end he said, “By the way, I understand you've also talked to Robert Maxwell. Go to work for anybody else other than me if you want to, but don't go to work for Robert Maxwell. He chews people up and spits them out, and I've seen it again and again.” So that seemed to me the sanest alternative, and I went to work for Rupert Murdoch.

You'll notice that Rupert Murdoch, unlike Robert Maxwell, is still around.

Maxwell is about as forgotten as Armand Hammer, whose great-grandson Armie is now a movie star.

Russian oligarch in exile dies suddenly

From the BBC:

Exiled Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky has been found dead at his home outside London. 

A police investigation has been launched into the death of the 67-year-old - a wanted man in Russia, and an opponent of President Vladimir Putin. 

A former Kremlin power-broker whose fortunes declined under Mr Putin, Mr Berezovsky emigrated to the UK in 2000. 

Thames Valley Police said the death, at a property in Ascot, Berkshire, was being treated as unexplained. 

... Last year, Mr Berezovsky lost a £3bn ($4.7bn) damages claim against Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich.

Mr Berezovsky claimed he had been intimidated by Mr Abramovich into selling shares in Russian oil giant Sibneft for a "fraction of their true worth". 

The allegations were completely rejected by the London Commercial Court judge, who called Mr Berezovsky an "inherently unreliable" witness.

Suicide? Murder? Did Putin have him rubbed out like Berezovsky's colleague who died from polonium poisoning? Am I being a Conspiracy Theorist by thinking Mr. Berezovsky probably didn't just keel over from a heart attack?

Back in 1989, I spent about six hours on a trans-Atlantic call negotiating a business deal with a minion of Robert Maxwell (the press baron initialed R.M. who wasn't Rupert Murdoch). At the last moment, Maxwell intervened to try to cheat on a point already agreed upon, so my boss and I immediately broke off negotiations. Two years later, when I heard that Maxwell had fallen off his yacht, being an inveterate conspiracy theorist I assumed there was more to the story than just the slip in the dark that the Responsible Authorities agreed upon before Maxwell's vast embezzlement of his workers' pensions was discovered.

To the Washington Post, it's always Clarksdale in 1965

Remember a couple of weeks ago when the Washington Post splashed so heavily the ludicrous story about the "mysterious" murder of the black, gay politician in Clarksdale in Coahoma County, Mississippi? The black killer crashed the black victim's stolen car, then confessed to the Coahoma sheriff department, headed by a black sheriff, where he had stashed the body of the black man running against the black mayor's black son. But who cares about the facts of the case when the story gives you a chance to talk about Mississippi's “dark history of racial brutality"?

I eventually surmised:

A theory about this week's Media KKKraziness 

Why has the last week seen the national media break out into a frenzy over the specter of white racism?  

Perhaps it goes back to the February 27th oral arguments at the Supreme Court over whether or not to bid adieu to Title 5 of the Voting Rights Act after 48 years. Justice Scalia's question about the "perpetuation of racial entitlement," about how quickly we glide from a world where affirmative action can't be ended because the beneficiaries are too weak to one where they are too strong, definitely got the press's goat. Scalia suggested that the Supreme Court is the only institution left in America with the independence and the moral backbone to say Enough Time Has Passed. 

From the Washington Post yesterday:

The Voting Rights Act should be left alone 

By Gregory B. Craig, Published: March 22 

Gregory B. Craig, a Washington lawyer, was White House counsel from January 2009 to January 2010. 

On Aug. 6, 1965, I was working in Coahoma County, Miss., trying to register new voters at the courthouse in Clarksdale. ... 

That summer, we persuaded 500 African American citizens in Coahoma County to try to register to vote. ... The summer of 1965 was hot and tense, but it was not as violent as the previous summer, when three workers were murdered in Neshoba County and when the chief of police in Clarksdale, Ben Collins, reportedly shot a black boy in the head in a public playground. Nonetheless, I lived in fear ... on the dusty streets of these small Delta towns ...  

Just before we left Clarksdale to drive out to Friars Point the night of Aug. 6, we learned that President Lyndon Johnson had signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and that the U.S. government would be sending federal registrars to Mississippi. 

That was a moment of real hope and change.

You know how the neoconservatives view the whole world as if it's always Czechoslovakia in 1938? For the Washington Post editorial board, among others, various ramshackle overseas menaces (Iran/q, Hezbollah, etc.) are always the new Nazi Germany that must be crushed now before they blitzkrieg the world with their unstoppable military juggernauts.

Similarly, for the mainstream media when it comes to race, it's always Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1965. It never gets old.

What have boys who are smart at math and science ever done for humanity?

From the New York Times:

Girls Excel in the Classroom but Lag in Entry to 8 Elite Schools in the City 

By AL BAKER 

In the United States, girls have outshined boys in high school for years, amassing more A’s, earning more diplomas and gliding more readily into college, where they rack up more degrees — whether at the bachelor’s, master’s or doctoral levels. 

But that has not been the trend when it comes to one of the highest accomplishments a New York City student can achieve: winning a seat in one of the specialized high schools. 

At all eight of the schools that admit students based on an eighth-grade test, boys outnumber girls, sometimes emphatically. 

Boys make up nearly 60 percent of the largest and most renowned schools, Stuyvesant, the Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Tech, and as much as 67 percent at the High School for Mathematics, Science and Engineering at City College, according to city statistics. 

While studies suggest that girls perform as well as boys in math and science classes in high school, their participation in those fields drops off in college and ultimately in careers, a phenomenon that the White House, with its Council on Women and Girls, and the National Science Foundation have tried to reverse. 

The fact that girls are underrepresented in New York’s top high schools, which tend to be focused on math and science, and which have more than a dozen Nobel laureates among their alumni, worries some academics who see the schools as prime breeding grounds for future scientists and engineers. 

“It is very suspect that you don’t have as many girls as boys in New York City’s specialized schools,” said Janet S. Hyde, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin who has published research on girls’ performance in math and science from elementary school through college. Individual girls might be losing opportunities, she said, “but it is also bad for society as a whole because in a global economy we need to identify the best scientists and mathematicians.” 

The racial makeup of the schools has been a combustible issue for years — 5 percent of the students accepted this month into the elite schools were black, and 7 percent were Hispanic. Civil rights groups have argued that using a test as the sole basis of admission favors students with means to prepare for the test, and have pushed unsuccessfully to have the schools adopt additional criteria, like middle school grades, for admission. 

The gender imbalance has not generated the same kind of protest. But several academics and analysts said the reliance on the test might also play a role in keeping girls out. While girls outperform boys on an array of academic benchmarks in high school and college, they still trail on standardized tests, like the SAT, according to federal Department of Education statistics. 

This year, of those who took the Specialized High School Admissions Test, 51 percent were girls. But only 45 percent of those offered seats in the schools were girls. 

... Even the specialized schools with a focus on the classics and humanities, Brooklyn Latin and the High School of American Studies at Lehman College, now have a majority of male students. It was not always that way: Girls outnumbered boys at both schools until recently. American Studies has used the specialized admissions test since it opened a decade ago. 

But in the first few years at Brooklyn Latin, founded in 2006, it had a broader admission policy based on grades and exams. Once it was made one of the specialized test schools, its population swung toward males. 

A corollary, perhaps, of the masculine leanings of the eight schools is the makeup of some of the elite high schools that do not use the specialized admissions test for admission. 

At Fiorello H. La Guardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts, which admits students based on grades and auditions or portfolios of artwork, 73 percent of the students are girls. At Bard High School Early College, which has campuses in Manhattan and Queens, as well as at Millennium, Beacon and Townsend Harris High Schools, girls outnumber boys by at least 3 to 2. 

Has Mayor Rahm learned from Israel?

From WBBM-CBS in Chicago:

School Closing Opponents Call Mayor A Racist Liar 

CHICAGO (CBS) – The Chicago Public Schools’ plan to close 53 schools and 61 buildings, mostly in black neighborhoods, has some West Side residents vowing to fight the Emanuel administration until the end. 

As WBBM Newsradio’s Mike Krauser reports, to hear some tell it on the West Side, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is a racist liar who doesn’t care about the kids. And they’re just getting started. 

“I don’t see any Caucasians being moved, bussed, or murdered in the streets as they travel along gang lines, or stand on the steps of a CPS school,” said activist Wendy Matil Pearson as opponents of the school closing plans protested outside Horatio May Elementary Community Academy in the Austin neighborhood.

... Valerie Leonard, co-founder of the Lawndale Alliance, accused the mayor of trying to drive African Americans out of the city. 

“He says that he wants to turn around the city of Chicago, make a new Chicago. Does that new Chicago mean no black folks?” she said. “Where are people going to go? They’re not going to stay around in the community if there are no schools!” ...

The protesters weren’t the first to accuse Emanuel of racism in his school-closing effort. The Chicago Teachers Union has repeatedly said the school closing plans are racist, as most of the schools that would be closed are in African-American communities. 

On Thursday, CTU President Karen Lewis said the plan was both “racist” and “classist,” ...

I'm not up to date on Chicago, but none of this speculation about the Mayor's motivations sounds hugely implausible to me.

Mayor Emanuel is a worldly man. He's not some dweeb from Lake Forest. His family likes to emphasize how his mother was a civil rights activist for blacks in the American South, but they don't talk as much about his father. Dr. Benjamin Emanuel is an Israeli and belonged to the right-wing terrorist organization Irgun. Those are the the guys who blew up the British headquarters in the King David Hotel and committed the Deir Yassin massacre of an Arab village that did so much to improve Israel's long-term demographic position by terrifying many Palestinians into fleeing.

I'm not saying Rahm's dad was personally involved in either, but he was, by all accounts, a member of Irgun. And Irgun played a crucial role in Israeli history in the 1940s. Irgun was a predecessor of today's highly successful Likud Party. I presume that Rahm Emanuel is personally closer to Israel's non-Likud parties, but he definitely knows where Netanyahu is coming from.

The son remains so emotionally close to Israel that he served as a volunteer in Israel during the 1991 Gulf War. He's vacationed countless times in Israel, from summer camp as a child to recently vacationing there to hold his son's bar mitzvah at the Wailing Wall.

Presumably, the Mayor of Chicago knows a lot about Israeli politics, and the #1 lesson that all parties in Israel understand deep in their bones, much more intensely than American politicians understand, is: Demographics Matter. The basic lesson is: You want more of your kind of people and fewer of the other kind of people. The Israeli statesman's duty is to make that happen.

The basic logic of Israeli politics is that the Palestinians are Arabs and that, while Israel is a small place, the Arab World is a huge place, so there are lots of other places for the local Arabs to move to, away from Israel.

If you are an African-American in Chicago, the suspicion that Dr. Emanuel's son might view Chicago as a small place and view you as somebody who has a big place to move somewhere else in (namely, the rest of America), would be uncharitable but not unreasonable. Deep down, perhaps Rahm feels: "We're not racist: we've got Barack! And Oprah and Michael Jordan are welcome back any time. The rest of you ..."

A reader writes:

I'm wondering if you could do a blogpost in the near future on any future possibility on the next Detroit(or several new Detroits), what time frame and for what sociological reasons.  

As you've written about before, there's a quiet quest by white liberals to chase out blacks. This is happening in NYC, D.C. and perhaps now in Chicago too.

Personally, I think St Louis is a good candidate [to become another Detroit], as is Memphis. Milwaukee is also right there on the list. Basically cities that are 2nd and 3rd tier, often populated by naïve and communitarian Germanics in the Midwest or abandoned by devil-may-care Southern whites like Memphis. Birmingham is another candidate in the latter category.

1st tier cities like Chicago or NYC understand that they could go down that path, which is why they're pricing out, or in the case of Chicago, just zoning people out from their homes. 

I'm not an expert on cities these days. It would seem like a fascinating subject to statistically model as a way of predicting real estate prices. The problem is that a big chunk of the model would involve using Census Bureau race statistics. Somebody would have to come up with a way to launder the racial aspect so that corporations could pay you lots of money for your insights without getting them into trouble.

Another aspect would seem to be airports. Winner cities tend to have airports with direct connections to lots of other cities, while loser cities don't. The arrow of causation points both ways, obviously, but some of it is that frequent fliers want to live near direct connection airports, such as Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago, and, perhaps, Denver. You can have an inadequate airport if you are San Francisco, but don't risk it otherwise.

But it's not really a build it and they will come situation either. I used to fly in to Cincinnati a lot, and the airport was halfway across Kentucky. Presumably, they put it there so it would have a lot of room for expansion, but nobody seemed to be expanding, perhaps because the airport was way the hell out in Kentucky.

Also, it helps to have two airports, one for the masses (e.g., LAX or Dulles) and one for the elites (e.g., Reagan or Burbank, which is turning into a high-priced convenience for the entertainment industry. LAX is full of tattooed proles, while Burbank is full of successful-looking middle-aged couples picking up their lovely daughter flying in from Georgetown U., via Reagan).

The best defense is a good offense: Quebec

One of the funnier outgrowths of 1960s minoritarianism was Quebec's successful campaign to get speakers of the language of King Louis XIV declared an oppressed minority deserving of as many special breaks from the government as the wounded amour propre of indignant French-speakers could demand. Granted, in picking on English-speaking Canadians -- the nicest, least desirous of trouble people on Earth -- French Canadians weren't exactly banging heads with Menachem Begin.

Not surprisingly, the separatist party in Quebec is upping the ante again. And why not? All in all, it's been a pretty successful ploy.

In the National Post of Toronto, Barbara Kay writes:

Barbara Kay: Quebec’s Bill 14 is a pathological attack on the sin of speaking English 

Thanks to Bill 101, Quebec’s 1977 Charter of the French language, no language in the world is as regulated as French is in Quebec. 

But Pauline Marois’ young minority PQ government was not satisfied with French merely being protected from erosion. This government seeks to establish the primacy of French in a way that will reduce the presence of English in every walk of public and private life. To that end Bill 14, the first substantial revision of Bill 101,  was conceived, written up and prepared for passage. 

Bill 14 contains 155 proposed amendments to the Charter of the French Language. The government considers them necessary because the French language “constitutes a stronger vector for social cohesion…and maintaining harmonious relations.” What Bill 14 is essentially designed for is to elevate the wish of francophones never to speak a language other than French — even the other official language of Canada — to a human right on the same level as the right to medical care.

To this end Bill 14 would co-opt all public institutions, municipalities, school boards, unions, private enterprises and even ordinary Quebecers as participants and – not to put too fine a point on it – occasional spies in the great common project of suppressing English. That the project would radically diminish the freedoms and quality of life of non-francophones seems irrelevant, perhaps even a matter of satisfaction, to this government. 

Francophones’ opportunities to become fluently bilingual would be curtailed.
Some examples of the proposed amendments: 

· A government regulation that allows English-speaking members of the Armed Forces who are in Quebec temporarily to have their children schooled in English would be rescinded. ...

· Officially bilingual municipalities could lose their bilingual status against their democratic will because of slight demographic shifts. 

· Daycares would have to facilitate the acquisition of French-language skills by infants. 

· Employers would be required to justify the need for employees to speak any other language than French. An employee required to communicate in a language other than French would have the right to sue his or her employer for monetary damages. 

The PQ is obsessed with language domination to a degree that is in political terms pathological. The devastation of English school boards; the linguistic hardships imposed on the men and women who protect our country from harm; the cultural and psychological marginalization of fellow citizens for the Original Sin of being anglophone: What we are seeing with this government makes the patriarchy of the Roman Catholic Church in the years before the Quiet Revolution seem anodyne by comparison. 

In throwing off the Church’s domination, and with it all the trappings of their religion, Quebec also divorced itself from its cultural roots. 

The religious metaphor is apt. In throwing off the Church’s domination, and with it all the trappings of their religion, Quebec also divorced itself from its cultural roots. Without roots, there can be no new branches. All Quebec has that may be called culturally unique is language. The moral panic we have seen over the years – first to preserve French from disappearance, but now the push by Quebec’s new high priests to sanctify it and keep it safe from the pollution of other languages – is unjust to non-francophones, but arguably more harmful to francophones, whose aspirations have been appropriated as burnt offerings to the language gods.

Why are they doing this? Well, why is the NCAA holding a basketball tournament right now, even though 67 of 68 teams will end their seasons as losers? Because coming together with your team to fight is fun. Defeating the foe is even more fun. As John Milius phrased it:

Mongol General: Hao! Dai ye! We won again! This is good, but what is best in life? 

Mongol: The open steppe, fleet horse, falcons at your wrist, and the wind in your hair. 

Mongol General: Wrong! Conan! What is best in life? 

Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women. 

Look, very few people have gotten killed in Quebec's language wars over the last 45 years. And it's not as if Quebec has fallen into ruin because the Québécois have been slowly shoving out the Scots and Jews who used to run Montreal's businesses. Quebec isn't Zimbabwe. The Québécois can run their own country.

Sure, it's annoying to see the winners win by being nasty and the losers lose because they are nice, but such is the way of the world.