April 11, 2013

Gang of Eight: Complete Cave-in by RINOs?

Am I being too cynical here? From the NYT:
Broad Outlines of Senate Immigration Agreement Emerge 
By JULIA PRESTON and ASHLEY PARKER 
WASHINGTON — A bipartisan group of senators has largely agreed on a broad immigration bill that would require tough border measures to be in place before illegal immigrants could take the first steps to become American citizens, according to several people familiar with drafts of the legislation. 
But in a delicate compromise worked out over weeks of negotiations, the bill does not impose any specific measurements of border enforcement results that, if they were not met, would stop the immigrants from proceeding toward citizenship. 
Instead, the bill allows a period of 10 years for the Department of Homeland Security to make plans and use resources to fortify enforcement at the borders and elsewhere within the country before it sets several broader hurdles that could derail the immigrants’ progress toward citizenship if they are not achieved.

Does anybody imagine that in ten years, the Castro Administration's Department of Homeland Security will announce, "Oh, wow, I guess we haven't stopped illegal immigration after all. No citizenship for you!"?

This is basically a ploy to delay the switching of Arizona from Republican to Democrat until after Senator McCain is gone, but that's about it. Those of us who have a longer time frame than John McCain, well, too bad, you should have carpe diemed when you had the opportunity.
... The senators’ compromise allows Republican lawmakers, including Senators John McCain of Arizona and Marco Rubio of Florida, to say that they achieved border enforcement advances in the bill as a condition before any illegal immigrants can apply for permanent-resident green cards, the first step toward citizenship. 
But it also allows Democrats to describe the border measures as goals that can be achieved with the resources provided, so they will not become roadblocks that could stop the immigrants from reaching the final stage of citizenship. 

Is this just a good cop - bad cop charade with Rubio claiming to be the good cop who just couldn't stand up anymore to Chuck Schumer's Wall Street zillions?

April 10, 2013

1971 "Crying Indian" anti-littering PSA and racial shaming

After WWII, as Americans became more mobile and affluent, littering started to be a more annoying problem, especially as paper wrappers, non-biodegradable plastic junk and very slowly rusting aluminum cans proliferated. 

Executives from big consumer packaged goods corporations like Anheuser-Busch that manufactured much of the litter founded the Keep America Beautiful organization in 1953. In the mid-1960s, First Lady Lady Bird Johnson made highway beautification, including anti-littering, her pet cause. On Earth Day 1971, Keep America Beautiful debuted its famous Crying Indian public service announcement TV spot (above).

Ginger Strand wrote in Orion:
IF YOU WATCHED television at any point in the seventies, you saw him: America’s most famous Indian. Star of perhaps the best-known public service announcement ever, he was a black-braided, buckskinned, cigar-store native come to life, complete with single feather and stoic frown. In the spot’s original version, launched by Keep America Beautiful on Earth Day 1971, he paddles his canoe down a pristine river to booming drumbeats. He glides past flotsam and jetsam. The music grows bombastic, wailing up a movie-soundtrack build. He rows into a city harbor: ship, crane, a scrim of smog. The Indian pulls his boat onto a bank strewn with litter and gazes upon a freeway. 
“Some people have a deep, abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country,” intones a basso profundo voice [actor William Conrad*], “and some people don’t.” On those words, someone flings a bag of trash from a passing car. It scatters at the Indian’s feet. He looks into the camera for the money shot. A single tear rolls down his cheek. 
“People start pollution. People can stop it,” declares the narrator.
Rewind. Replay. Thanks to YouTube, you can watch this ad over and over, framed by excited viewer comments: “A classic!!” “Very powerful.” “Best PSA ever made.” Most YouTubers agree with the trade journal Ad Age, which included the campaign in the century’s top hundred. Some netizens even claim the ad motivated them to pick up trash or chide litterers. The Advertising Educational Foundation declares the spot “synonymous with environmental concern.” Wikipedia says it “has been widely credited with inspiring America’s fledgling environmental movement.” The crying Indian wept for our sins, and from his tears sprang forth a new Green Age.

Of course, the veteran Western movie character actor Iron Eyes Cody was really an Italian American and the commercial was paid for by corporate interests that didn't want disposable containers outlawed. 

But, it more or less worked. White people felt shamed by the crying Indian and therefore littered less.

Racial shaming remains popular and effective, but the only allowable target hasn't changed since the early years of Earth Day: white people. 

Yet, the Hispanic population now numbers over 50 million and represents a major source of littering, but it's difficult to find any acknowledgment in the media of the fact that Hispanics today contribute disproportionately to littering. 

How about: If you want amnesty, you've got to stop littering first? Maybe if somebody ever dared to ask Latinos to stop littering so much, they'd feel embarrassed and knock it off. Who knows? Nobody has tried.

Race pretty much overrules everything else these days on who? whom? grounds, even petty nonsense like trashing a natural wonder. 

------
* William Conrad was the portly star of the detective show "Cannon" (1971-1976). I went to  elementary school with his kid (who liked to unexpectedly knock people down from behind during recess). I called him Cannonball.

Freeman Dyson on Thatcher hate

When I reviewed the Meryl Streep-as-Maggie-Thatcher biopic in Taki's last year, I quoted Thatcher's contemporary Freeman Dyson, the great physicist, on one source of the endless hatred for Thatcher:
In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class.…I learned to look on the commercial middle class with loathing and contempt. Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher, which was also the revenge of the commercial middle class. The academics lost their power and prestige and the business people took over. The academics never forgave Thatcher….

The only thing I'd add is that in reality, a commercial middle class usually breeds its own critics. And I'm using "breeds" literally. Consider the perhaps most prestigious clan in the history of the British intellectual middle class -- the Darwin-Galton-Wedgwood-Benn-Keynes agglomeration. 

This was, in a way, an outgrowth of the Lunar Society of Birmingham that met during the full moon in the early decades of the industrial revolution. According to Wikipedia:
... fourteen individuals have been identified as having verifiably attended Lunar Society meetings regularly over a long period during its most productive eras: these are Matthew BoultonErasmus DarwinThomas DayRichard Lovell EdgeworthSamuel Galton, Jr.James KeirJoseph PriestleyWilliam SmallJonathan StokesJames WattJosiah WedgwoodJohn Whitehurst and William Withering.[8]

Watt was the chief inventor of the steam engine, Boulton was Watt's millionaire business partner, Erasmus Darwin was the most celebrated doctor in England, Samuel Galton was a merchant, Priestly was the great chemist and radical intellectual, Josiah Wedgwood was the owner of the famous dinnerware factory and still valuable brand name. The next generation of Darwins, Wedgwoods, and Galtons intermarried, providing the fortune for grandsons Charles Darwin and Francis Galton to be gentlemen scientists.

The heirs of the Lunar Society continue to be prominent.

For example, one of Margaret Thatcher's archrivals was Labour Party star Tony Benn, the grand old man of the left. "Tony Benn" is, however, the proletarianized version of the name ultimately adopted by Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn, formerly 2nd Viscount Stansgate. From Wikipedia:
Benn was born in London on 3 April 1925.[6] Benn's paternal grandfather was John Benn, a successful politician who was created a baronet in 1914, and his father William Wedgwood Benn was a Liberal Member of Parliament who later crossed the floor to the Labour Party. He was appointed Secretary of State for India by Ramsay MacDonald in 1929, a position he held until 1931. He was elevated to the House of Lords with the title of Viscount Stansgate in 1941; the new wartime coalition government was short of working Labour peers in the upper house.[7] From 1945 to 1946, he was the Secretary of State for Air in the first majority Labour Government. 
Both his grandfathers, John Benn (who founded a publishing company)[8] and Daniel Holmes, were also Liberal MPs (respectively, for Tower Hamlets, Devonport and Glasgow Govan). ...
Benn's mother, Margaret Wedgwood Benn (née Holmes) (1897–1991), was a dedicated theologian, feminist and the founder President of the Congregational Federation. She was a member of the League of the Church Militant, which was the predecessor of the Movement for the Ordination of Women – in 1925 she was rebuked by Randall Thomas Davidson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, for advocating the ordination of women. His mother's theology had a profound influence on Benn, as she taught him that the stories in the Bible were based around the struggle between the prophets and the kings and that he ought in his life to support the prophets over the kings, who had power, as the prophets taught righteousness.[11] 
Benn went to Westminster School and studied at New College, Oxford, where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics and was elected President of the Oxford Union in 1947. In later life, Benn attempted to remove public references to his private education from Who's Who; in the 1975 edition his entry stated "Education—still in progress". In the 1976 edition, almost all details were omitted save for his name, jobs as a Member of Parliament and as a Government Minister, and address; the publishers confirmed that Benn had sent back the draft entry with everything else struck through.[12] In the 1977 edition, Benn's entry disappeared entirely.[13] In October 1973 he announced on BBC Radio that he wished to be known as Mr Tony Benn rather than as Anthony Wedgwood Benn, and his book Speeches from 1974 is credited to "Tony Benn".

Tony's son Hilary Benn was a Labour cabinet minister under Blair and Brown.

Somewhat similarly, in New England, some merchant families such as the Eliots got out of business around 1820, and then went into religion, academia, and writing. (In 1818, the Royal Navy began to suppress the slave trade -- did that have something to do with the Eliot clan's career shift into uplift?). The old commercial wealth funded the careers of worthies such as Harvard president Charles Eliot, Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, and poet T.S. Eliot.

Rock climbing and Latino littering

In the summer of 1977, I went rock climbing about a dozen times at Stoney Point in the northwest corner of the San Fernando Valley (on Topanga Canyon Blvd. just south of the Ronald Reagan Freeway, which is, now that I think of it, a very SoCal-sounding intersection). It's a sandstone promontory a couple of hundred feet high that played a historic role in the development of rock climbing in America. It was an early training ground of famous Yosemite climbers like Royal Robbins, Yvon Chouinard (founder of Patagonia), the late John Bachar, and top female climber Lynn Hill. Already by 1974, the city of Los Angeles had declared it a historical landmark.

Here are some videos on Stoney Point. I particularly liked the the 1970s "Eye on LA" segment.

By the end of that summer of 1977, I realized A) I was too clumsy to be a good rock climber and B) I was getting progressively more scared of heights as A) sunk in. So, I gave my climbing rope to my much better and braver friend Joe, who went on to do some big league climbing in Yosemite.

Yesterday, I went back to Stoney Point on a lovely spring day. It's still a beautiful place on a macro scale, but on a micro scale, the graffiti, trash, and broken glass everywhere were a drag.

The remaining rock climbers organize clean-up days (here are pictures).
Some of the trash picked up 9/9/2000
But, despite the altruistic efforts of old-timers, like a lot of particularly beautiful places in Southern California, such as Malibu Creek State Park and the upper San Gabriel River, Stoney Point is inundated by the bad habits of picnicking Latin American immigrants and their kids.

Was it this bad in 1977? I don't recall that it was, and the 1970s video doesn't suggest it either. I did find a photo from the 1950s that showed signs painted on the rock face as advertising for motorists driving by on Topanga. But, a big accomplishment of the rise of environmentalism in the 1960s-1970s was that Americans exerted greater self-discipline against the natural urge to litter and deface nature.

(Rock climbers took this preservationist ethic to an extreme by increasingly rejecting drilling bolts into the rock or even pounding pitons into cracks to secure their safety ropes, or rejecting ropes altogether, an ethos that a number of rock climbers, like local legend Bachar, have paid for with their lives.)

So, maybe in fifty years, Latinos will have caught up with where white Angelenos were in 1977. Or maybe not.

Is there any way to hurry this process along?

Conservationist Progressives of a century ago had multiple strategies for preserving America's natural beauty, including immigration restriction. Another was to publicly shame immigrant groups for engaging in retrograde behavior not up to sophisticated American standards.

This seems to have been fairly effective in inducing newcomers to assimilate to American norms. After all, people don't want their groups exposed to accurate criticism, so one way to avoid that is to stop doing what draws criticism.

The Keep America Beautiful campaign was organized by rich WASPs and corporations in 1953 to shame Americans into not littering. (The rise of non-biodegradable plastics made litter semi-permanent.) As commenters have noted, the biggest breakthrough was the 1971 "Crying Indian" TV PSA commercial that used Iron Eyes Cody to racially shame white people into not polluting their environment.

(Okay, Iron Eyes Cody was actually an Italian-American actor who specialized in playing Native Americans, but the point is that the "iconic" commercial worked.)

The more popular way to quiet correct criticism today, though, is to furiously denounce critics as racists. Any criticism of Latinos for their propensity to litter is a Stereotype demonstrating that you are full of Hate.

For example, if you type Latinos litter into Google, the first two responses are:

  1. Latinos Litter. Who Dares Say That? | VDARE.com

    www.vdare.com/articles/latinos-litter-who-dares-say-thatShare
    May 7, 2005 – "An initial proposal that the small group of local artists drafted about the effort described its mission as ''educating Latinos to stop throwing ...

  2. A question on Latinos? - Yahoo! Answers

    answers.yahoo.com › ... › Politics & Government › Immigration
    17 answers - Jun 4, 2008
    I am Latina too (Mexican, to be specific) and I don't litter like you say. I hope you're not using stereotype, and I think you're not. I doubt they're ...
Thus, not surprisingly, Latinos continue to litter.

Almost 100 million people aren't smart enough to enlist in the military

Because the pundit class in America is related to so few people who want to enlist in the military, there's negligible media awareness of how hard it has become to join up. A major hurdle is scoring high enough on the AFQT cognitive test. 

The Pentagon isn't in any hurry to make its intelligence requirements explicable to the media.  The conventional wisdom is that intelligence testing is a racist hoax or it just applies to academia, not the real world, or whatever. The fact that the military is obsessive about cognitive testing is something that simply isn't in the reigning worldview, and the military is fine with that. It likes testing and it dislikes outside interference, so the more convoluted its jargon for talking about its intelligence requirements, the better.

For example, the entrance exam is, in one sense, the ASVAB, a 9 or 10 part 3-hour test. But a 4-part subset of the ASVAB called the AFQT determines whether you'll be allowed to enlist or not. (The non-AFQT ASVAB subtests influence assignments, such as to vehicle repair.)

Are you losing interest in this topic already as you try to keep ASVAB and AFQT straight? The military doesn't mind if outsiders are baffled and bored. In fact, it kind of likes it that way. And if potential recruits can't keep this stuff straight in their heads, well maybe they aren't military material.

The AFQT is a verbal and math test kind of like the SAT or ACT. AFQT scores are so highly g-loaded that they are pretty much interchangeable with IQ scores on a non-culture free IQ test like the Wechsler, according to a retired head of psychometrics for one of the major branches of the armed forces whom I interviewed at length in 2004. Much of The Bell Curve was based on the military's AFQT data that was normalized on the 1979 National Longitudinal Study of Youth. 

The Wikipedia article on the ASVAB gives the AFQT minimum scores to enlist as of December 2012:
AFQT scores are not raw scores, but rather percentile scores indicating how each examinee performed compared with all other examinees. Thus, someone who receives an AFQT of 55 scored better than 55 percent of all other examinees. Maximum possible score is 99 as a person can do better than 99 percent of those who took the test, but he cannot do better than himself, so the high percentile is 99.

From Wikipedia:

Standards for enlistment

AFQT required minimum scores for people with a high school diploma as of December 2012 (unless otherwise noted) are as follows:
Minimum AFQT
Tier ITier II
Branch≥ HS Diploma= GED
Army3550
Navy3550
Air Force4065
Marines3250
Coast Guard4550 with 15 college credits
*Army National Guard3550
*Air National Guard3550

Also, if you get a GED and complete a certain number of college credits, that lets you use the HS Diploma column. 

So, the lowest percentile you can get into the military with is the Marines at the 32nd percentile (if you have a high school diploma, plus the Marines have plenty of physical and other requirements). With 315 million residents in the country, 31% percent aren't smart enough to join the Marines, so that's over 97 million.

But, with the recession and the winding down of the Iraq meatgrinder, the military now often won't let in kids who just barely make the minimums.

So, the current situation is actually worse for decent young people with 2-digit IQs than the Wikipedia table suggests. 

If you look around enough online you can find PDFs of statistical reports for the government that add even more insight. For example, the Congressional Research Service reported that the military branches have both quantity and quality goals in recruitment. The basic Department of Defense quality goals are that 90% of recruits have high school diplomas and 60% score above average on the AFQT (i.e., have a 3 digit IQ).

In FY 2011, all branches met their quantity goals and exceeded their quality goals. The Army had 99% high school graduates (i.e., not GEDs) with 63% scoring above average on the AFQT. The Marines had 100% grads with 72% scoring at the 50th percentile or higher. The Navy had 99% grads with 89% scoring above average. The Air Force had 100% grads with 99% above average in intelligence ("this would represent the highest “above-average AFQT” accession cohort of any service since the inception of the All-Volunteer Force in 1973," according to the CRS).

So, 150 million people, maybe more, couldn't join the Air Force in 2011 because they aren't smart enough. The Air Force is now Lake Wobegon and the other services are trending in that direction.

The various Reserves and National Guards are also exceeding their quality benchmarks.

The AFQT scores are normed versus the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997, the follow-up to the NLSY79 highlighted in The Bell Curve. I haven't looked into, but perhaps there is a Flynn Effect going on, which would making scoring a little easier than it was a decade-and-a-half ago. Also, people who want to join the military no doubt test prep on ASVAB/AFQT, while I presume the NLSY cohort didn't. So, the IQ hurdle to enlist is probably not quite as daunting as these numbers suggest, but still ...

I knew a kid who was working an MacDonalds, dealing a little weed, and then he resolved he was going to turn his life around by joining the Army. He started working out, developing a good attitude, and he impressed the recruiters. But he flunked the AFQT. The recruiters liked him so much that they sent him to a six-week AFQT boot camp where they lived in barracks, wore uniforms, followed military discipline, and studied to pass the AFQT. At the end, the day before they all took the AFQT, the sergeants picked this kid as the best example of the military virtues in the camp.

And then ... he still flunked the AFQT again.

In summary, every effective institution in America works hard to to select better people. But, the fake "immigration debate" going on right now has ruled out all discussion of just what is the quality of illegal immigrants.

Moreover, we have a whole bunch of our fellow American citizens who aren't of the cognitive quality currently necessary to fight for their country. Shouldn't we be worrying more about what kind of living they'll be able to earn before we care about solving Mexico's problems?

April 9, 2013

NYT: All we have to do to fix the schools is make the whole country as rich as the hedge fund capital

From the New York Times Magazine:
Who Knew Greenwich, Conn., Was a Model of Equality? 
By ADAM DAVIDSON 
... I had long known that Greenwich — with its grand estates — was ground zero for the 1 percent, but I was surprised to learn that nearly 4 percent of its residents live below the poverty line. “It takes a lot of labor to run those estates,” says Bob Arnold, president of Family Centers, a nonprofit social-service agency there. “They need housekeepers, cooks, landscapers.” I figured that many of those lower-income workers commuted from nearby places like White Plains, N.Y., or Stamford, Conn., where the rents are much cheaper. And many certainly do, but Arnold told me that the families who opt to live just on the Greenwich side of the New York border or in the apartments above the stores on Greenwich Avenue, fit a very specific profile: they pay the costs to have access to the schools that Greenwich’s high property-tax base affords.
What Greenwich doesn’t have is an abundance of affordable housing. Megan Sweeney, a director at Family Centers, explained that information about them is often guarded by family members or close friends. The Bonillas (a handyman from Spain) moved to Greenwich only because Veronica’s sister, Mercy Llerena, a manager of a private estate, went there from White Plains after marrying a man in town. ...
The Bonillas and Rozende felt lucky to have children in Greenwich. But historically speaking, researchers haven’t been so sure that it is beneficial to enroll low-income children in wealthier schools. A lot of sociological data, dating to the definitive Coleman Report of 1966, which studied the outcomes of 570,000 students, show that a child’s success in school, more than anything, was determined by her parents’ wealth and education level. So in the decades after the report was issued, attention was lavished on various reforms and integrating schools according to race, not economics. 
New research, however, suggests that economic integration may be the answer. Recently, Heather Schwartz, a policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, began studying the public-school system of Montgomery County, Md. The county, a suburb of Washington, has one of the most affluent populations in America and an innovative housing authority that allows low-income citizens to rent homes alongside wealthier neighbors at steeply discounted prices. The renters are randomly assigned to different parts of the county; some Montgomery County schools have many poor students, others have almost none. In 2009, Schwartz concluded that students from poor families did much better in predominantly wealthy schools than in predominantly poor ones. On average, the poorer children in wealthier schools cut their achievement gap in half compared with their peers in poorer schools. 
The same thing is happening at Greenwich High. Around 13 percent of the school’s students receive free or discounted lunches, a commonly used proxy for low income. And more than three-quarters of those students scored at or above proficiency on the most recent statewide 10th-grade performance tests. At nearby Stamford High School, where nearly 70 percent of students are on the lunch program, almost half the students failed to meet proficiency levels. 
Schwartz still isn’t exactly sure why poor kids do so much better when they are surrounded by wealthier ones, but the stability of wealthier districts probably plays a role. (“High-poverty schools are often lurching from crisis to crisis,” she told me.) As such, there is now a small but fast-growing effort to integrate schools on economic lines.
There is a tricky balance, however. If too many poor students are added to a high-income school, it would eventually become a low-income school; too few, and they may feel isolated. Schwartz says her research suggests that a possible solution is to encourage economic integration across school-district borders: students in the Bronx, say, could be invited to attend New Rochelle’s public schools and bring its low-income population up to 20 percent.

Okay, but New Rochelle has a population of 77,000, while the Bronx has a population of 1,408,000.

The reality is that we're running out of non-low income public school students with which to mix low-income students. Back in 2000, 38.3% of all public school students in the country. were eligible for free or reduced price school lunches. A decade later 48.0% were eligible. So, there's roughly one low income public school student for every non-low income public school student.

Good luck with the magic of Economic Integration with those numbers.

In general, I find that pundits frequently have a model in their head where "minorities," whether racial or economic, must be very minor in numbers. I mean, they're minorities, right? So their impact has to be, by definition, minor. Minorities couldn't possibly have had anything significant to do with the housing bubble, for example, because they are so rare. Thus, it likewise couldn't hurt to mix the minor number of minorities in with the majority of students who are, obviously white and comfortable.

This worldview can easily co-exist in the same skull with the Hispanic Electoral Tidal Wave and the notion that whites are obsolete and dying out and good riddance.

It's not hard to grasp whether something is considered Good or Bad and that's all that counts, not reality.

My Taki's column on Margaret Thatcher

My new Taki's Magazine column puts Mrs. Thatcher in historical perspective.

Gang of Eight announces immigration deal

The Gang of Eight is like the Gang of Four, just with twice as many running dogs.

Lawsuits rotting in the courts in South Dakota

We constantly hear about how there's a shortage of foreign unskilled workers that threatens to leave crops rotting in the fields if Big Ag doesn't get to employ more illegal aliens. Hence, solving the stoop laborer shortage through a larger guest worker program has been a high priority of the Gang of Eight in the Senate.

For some reason, though, politicians are less enthusiastic about importing foreign lawyers to keep lawsuits from rotting in the courts. Instead, in South Dakota where lawyers are scarce in rural areas, politicians have come up with an incredibly brilliant theoretical breakthrough in how to deal with a shortage of workers: offer higher pay!
No Lawyer for 100 Country Miles, So One Rural State Offers Pay 
By ETHAN BRONNER 
MARTIN, S.D. — Rural Americans are increasingly without lawyers even as law school graduates are increasingly without jobs. Just 2 percent of small law practices are in rural areas, where nearly a fifth of the country lives, recent data show.... 
Last summer, the American Bar Association called on federal, state and local governments to stem the decline of lawyers in rural areas.
Last month, South Dakota became the first state to heed the call. It passed a law that offers lawyers an annual subsidy to live and work in rural areas ...
The new law, which will go into effect in June, requires a five-year commitment from the applicant and sets up a pilot program of up to 16 participants. They will receive an annual subsidy of $12,000, 90 percent of the cost of a year at the University of South Dakota Law School.

As we all know, the law of supply and demand does not apply to workers, but the Science of Economics will just have to make an exception to its exception in the case of lawyers.

Margaret Thatcher, John Gielgud, and real estate investing

From the website of the Noel Coward Society, a story recounted by Sheridan Morley (son of actor Robert Morley):
Morley recalled an occasion in the 1980s when, walking along Piccadilly with John Gielgud, they spotted Margaret Thatcher, then at the height of her powers, coming towards them. As they both knew her slightly, they stopped. Gielgud asked where she was now living. "No 10, Downing Street," replied the Prime Minister with some surprise. 
"Oh, you women!" exclaimed Gielgud, full of admiration. "Always so clever at buying the right kind of property!"

April 8, 2013

Who was the first human to ride a horse?

Having watched in awe as wild Przewalski's horses rampage about their huge enclosure at the San Diego Zoo, my guess would be that first person ever to ride a horse was the ancient equivalent of a skatepunk: a wiry, acrobatic youth of about 17 with more courage than sense.

Margaret Thatcher, RIP

I'm going to write a column on Mrs. Thatcher, but you can post comments here for me to steal.

Annette Funicello, RIP

One cultural oddity is that ska music, a Jamaican forerunner to reggae and, on its own, a dance music that recurrently becomes a craze in the U.S. every decade or two, was introduced to the American public by Annette Funicello with her 1964 hit "Jamaica Ska." 

It's not as good as late 1960s ska songs like Desmond Dekker's "The Israelites" or Toots and the Maytals' "Pressure Drop," not to mention first revival ska songs like the English Beat's "Mirror in the Bathroom" or Madness's "One Step Beyond," or second revival hits like Rancid's "Time Bomb," but "Jamaica Ska" was on AM radio in America in 1964.

Ska is unusual in that it's a dance music genre that became increasingly monopolized by straight guys.

The mysterious epidemic of worker disabilty


Via Kevin Drum, the Wall Street Journal says:
Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist for J.P. Morgan, estimates that since the recession, the worker flight to the Social Security Disability Insurance program accounts for as much as a quarter of the puzzling drop in participation rates, a labor exodus with far-reaching economic consequences.

Thank goodness we let in all those illegal immigrants to do the jobs Americans are just too disabled these days to do. Who knew that working class Americans would suffer an epidemic of vague back pain and balky knees after decades of business, political, and economist elites conspiring to hammer down their wages through non-enforcement of immigration laws? Fortunately, our political, economic, intellectual, and moral betters somehow sensed that their fellow citizens would be getting more disabled in the future (apparently, arthroscopic surgery has been disinvented, or something), so our leaders brilliantly took action ahead of time to make sure America had an ample supply of unskilled foreign laborers to replace the Americans overwhelmed by this mysterious epidemic of disability. 

Archie and Jughead time travel to the future of music

Apparently, my popular music sensibility is derived from old Archie and Jughead comic books.

Charlotte Allen's expose of the SPLC

Charlotte Allen writes in The Weekly Standard:
King of Fearmongers 
Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center, scaring donors since 1971

... Irony turns out to be what the SPLC is all about. Thanks to the generosity of four decades’ worth of donors, many of whom—as SPLC president Richard Cohen himself noted in a telephone interview with me—are aging Northern-state “1960s liberals” who continue to associate “Southern” and “poverty” with lynchings, white-hooded Klansmen, and sitting at the back of the bus, and thanks also to what can only be described as the sheer genius at direct-mail marketing of Dees, the SPLC’s 76-year-old lawyer-founder, who was already a multimillionaire by the late 1960s from the direct-mail sales of everything from doormats to cookbooks, the SPLC is probably the richest poverty organization in the history of the world. From its very beginning the SPLC, thanks to Dees’s talent for crafting multi-page alarmist fundraising letters, has not only continuously operated in the black, but has steadily accumulated a mountain of surpluses augmented by a shrewdly managed investment portfolio. Today the SPLC’s net assets total more than $256 million (that figure appears on the SPLC’s 2011 tax return, the latest posted on the organization’s website). ... 
So impressed was the Direct Marketing Association in 1998 with Dees’s superb fundraising talents that it inducted him into its Hall of Fame, where he shares honors with Benjamin Franklin, first postmaster general, and catalogue retailer L. L. Bean. ... The new SPLC building, a postmodernist parallelepiped faced in steel and black glass, has been variously described by its critics as a “small-scale Death Star” and a “highrise trailer.”  
The SPLC turned the original Poverty Palace into a museum that complements another of its Montgomery monuments, the Civil Rights Memorial, where an imposing granite circle designed by Maya Lin, architect of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, records the names of such iconic martyrs to the civil rights cause as Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr., neither of whom was ever a client of the SPLC. In 2010 the Montgomery Advertiser published a 60-photo online slideshow of Morris Dees’s lavishly appointed neo-Mediterranean home, whose eclectic architectural and interior-decor influences seemingly included the Alhambra, David Hockney’s swimming-pool paintings, the Etsy home page, and a 1970s shag-rug revival. In one slide Dees’s fourth wife, artist and weaver Susan Starr, modeled a floor-length evening coat that she had stitched out of transparent vinyl sheeting and fake fur. 

There's much more here.
Still, there may soon come a day when the SPLC’s donation-generating machine, powered by Dees’s mastery of the use of “hate” to coax dollars from the highly educated and the highly gullible, finally breaks down. That is why, according to Cohen, the SPLC has no intention of soon spending down much of that $256 million in stockpiled assets that has earned the center an “F” rating from CharityWatch. “We’ve tried to raise a substantial endowment, because our fundraising is on a downward trend,” Cohen told me. “Those 1960s liberals—they’re getting older, and the post office is dying. We’re likely to be out of the fundraising business within 10 years.” What the SPLC wants to do is to ensure that “hate” is forever. 

Eh, I figure the SPLC has a long fundraising future in front of it. Just to run an idea up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes, how much of that $256 million would it cost, say, to donate blankets to homeless people near liberal arts colleges? And how much more would it cost if the blankets were, you know, white snuggies with maybe sleeves for convenience and a hood built in to keep the homeless folks' heads warm? Think of the ROI! There's a market out there and somebody is going to meet the demand for the glue that holds the Democratic Party together. Why not the reigning champs of KKKraziness?

The Joy of Elderly Tourette's Syndrome: Dance Music Edition

Here are the thoughts of two Spanish brothers on the kind of music they play in the famous Ibiza disco they own:
Ricardo Urgell, the son of a Barcelona engineer, built Pacha in the early 1970s on a desolate half-acre he bought for about $14,000. After its opening in 1973 the club came to represent ultracool debauchery and an escape from the conservative moral code of Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator. Native Ibicencos mixed with artists, hippies, thieves on the lam and those whose bronzed bodies were all the clothing they required. 
But as the scene grew, the elder Urgells eventually became disenchanted by the music that made them millionaires. 
“It’s monotonous sound and volume; it’s bodies squeezed together, it’s a little masochistic,” Ricardo Urgell said in a 2011 interview. “The great defect of this music,” he added, “is that it has to be accompanied by drugs. I took Ecstasy just one time in my life and found that out for myself.” 
Electronic music, Piti Urgell said last month, “hasn’t evolved in 20 years and is for idiots.”

Elderly Tourette's Syndrome helps make family gatherings full of interest. 

Anyway, I'm struck that it's older people these days who are the ones who most object to the relative lack of change in popular music. Perhaps us old fogeys are wrong and music is changing as fast today as in, say, the mid-1960s. But, it doesn't seem that way.

My general theory of 20th Century pop music is the spectacular changes in taste in the middle decades of the century were driven less by the much discussed sociological changes (e.g., Baby Boomers, racial changes, etc.) and more by technological changes. For example, Bing Crosby was the first to figure out that the microphone meant that singing was no longer as much of an athletic feat and now a more intimate medium. Similarly, the evolution of the electric guitar from the 1930s through the 1950s had much to do with The Sixties.

In contrast, the electronic synthesizer, which began to appear on records in the 1960s, has proved (at least so far) to be the ultimate instrument. The subsequent digitalization of sound generation and recording now allows anything to be done. But this complete creative freedom has led to perhaps less creativity as musicians less often have to deal with collective challenges, such as the electric guitar and multi-track recording revolutions of the 1960s. Moreover, audiences want, and can now get, their precise subgenre of music. 

The result is a more stable popular music landscape. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is a matter of taste.

April 7, 2013

The g factor and Ulam's challenge to Samuelson

The mathematician and thermonuclear bomb designer Stanislaw Ulam famously challenged economist Paul Samuelson to come with up a social science theory that was both true and nontrivial. After a few years, Samuelson replied with Ricardo's 1817 theory of comparative advantage in foreign trade: if Portugal is worse than Britain at making both steam engines and corks for wine bottles, Portugal should still concentrate on making corks because it's comparatively less bad at corks than at steam engines. (These may not be the precise examples Ricardo used in 1817, but they get his point across.)

Of course, Portugal's corkocentrism helps explain why the Portuguese Navy was such a decisive strategic element in the Age of Steam, but the advantages of having a navy that rules the waves are not considered relevant in conventional economics. 

Samuelson wrote to Ulam:
That it is logically true need not be argued before a mathematician; that is not trivial is attested by the thousands of important and intelligent men who have never been able to grasp the doctrine for themselves or to believe it after it was explained to them.

Whether Ulam, co-inventor with Edward Teller of staged radiation implosion, responded by pointing out the advantage of making nuclear weapons and not trading them is unknown. Compared to the Hussein family of Iraq and the Qaffathy family of Libya, two ruling clans that didn't find the economics of making nuclear weapons rational, the Kim family of North Korea has enjoyed a comparative advantage at avoiding violent death.

I've long thought that Spearman's 1904 g (for general) factor theory of intelligence is reasonably comparable in nontriviality.

I've always had a hard time grasping it myself. Back in 1998, I wrote a review of Arthur Jensen's magnum opus, The g Factor, that considered some of the paradoxical social and political implications:
Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, a 1981 book that continues to shape the non-scientific intelligentsia's feelings about IQ, demonized g as the "rotten core" of Prof. Jensen's 1969 article documenting the white-black IQ gap. The g Factor's overwhelming vindication of g, drawing on 15 years of new research, might seem likely to end the debate. It won't, of course, for reasons good and bad. The book sheds light on crucial new issues beyond the narrow scope of g (such as racial differences in nerdishness). More depressingly, few will grasp either its strengths or its limitations due to fundamental confusions rampant among American intellectuals about how to think about humanity. 
For example, nobody noticed that Gould's assertion that human equality is a factual (rather than a moral, legal, or spiritual) reality centered on denouncing g; yet, g is the only concept that could conceivably make sense of his claim. 
Ironically, the g-ocentrists are among the last students of human nature making important discoveries within the egalitarian world-view. The one technique capable of uncovering mental equality is Jensen's: minimize the number of data points by measuring only the single most important factor (g) across only a few vast groups. Thus, Jensen, the Great Satan to egalitarian fundamentalists, delivers in Chapter 13 the most important pro-equality finding in recent decades: Men and women really do possess the same average g. Their equal average IQ's scores aren't just an artifact of IQ tests being rigged to produce this result. Jensen's finding is hugely important in itself: it's the best explanation of the splendid performance of women in many white-collar jobs. 
Still, this example also shows that g, like any successful reductionist theory, has its limits. Males and females, while similar on mean g (but not on the standard deviation of g: guys predominate among both eggheads and knuckleheads), differ on several specific cognitive talents. Men, Jensen reports in passing, tend to be better at visual-spatial skills (especially at mentally rotating 3-d objects) and at mathematical reasoning. Women are generally superior at short-term memory, perceptual speed, and verbal fluency. Since the male sex is stronger at logically manipulating objects, while the female sex prevails at social awareness, that explains why most nerds are male, while most "berms" (anti-nerds adept at interpersonal skills and fashion) are female. Beyond cognition, there are other profound sex dissimilarities in personality, motivation, and physiology. All this helps explain the sexes' different patterns in career choices. 
Because Jensen's simple, single-factor model can detect intellectual equality between men and women, it can also detect intellectual inequality between whites and blacks, if that's what the facts are. Although most responses to Jensen's equality/inequality model haven't risen above name-calling, obfuscation, guilt-by-association, and professional cowardice, there is a logical, fruitful alternative: develop a complex, multi-factor "diversity" model that rather than concentrating upon one difference among a very few groups, focuses on the many differences visible among many groups. Emphasizing the trade-offs necessary for achieving different goals, it makes toting up an overall winner look a little pointless. 
The diversity perspective has much to offer, but only when it's thoroughly understood that it's inherently less empirically egalitarian than Jensenism. The diversity model's current popularity, however, stems from the wishful thinking that it discredits racial differences, on the assumption that since Diversity and Equality are both Good Things, they must be synonyms rather than antonyms. One particularly fashionable defense of empirical equality is to combine the doctrine that there "are no such things as races" (just swarms of little ethnic groups) with Harvard professor Howard Gardner's speculations about seven "multiple intelligences." Ergo, all groups must be equal, QED. 
Let's do the math: assume, say, 100 ethnic groups and seven "intelligences." That's 700 data points. No way, no how could they all be equal -- our universe doesn't work like that. The more complex your model, the less equality and the more diversity you'll perceive in the world. 

Interestingly, when I pointed this out to Gardner, he agreed with me.