April 19, 2013

Giant news: Famous basketball player comes out of closet! Oh, wait ...

Sam Borden writes in the New York Times:
One of the most dominant basketball players in recent memory came out as gay Wednesday, casually mentioning the fact in an interview as if it were an afterthought. The news media and the sports world seemed to treat it as such, too, with little mention of the star’s sexuality showing up on social media or on message boards, and virtually no analysis of what the revelation meant for tolerance in society as a whole.

At first glance, it seemed implausible. After all, players, fans, coaches and league executives had been waiting with bated breath for weeks, if not months and years, to see if an active team-sport athlete would come out. So how could this sort of revelation be treated with such nonchalance? 
“Because it was a woman,” said Jim Buzinski, a founder of Outsports.com, a Web site about homosexuality and sports. “Can you imagine if it was a man who did the exact same thing? Everyone’s head would have exploded.” 
The aftermath of the former Baylor star Brittney Griner’s revelation in several interviews this week was muted, to say the least. Griner, who was chosen with the No. 1 pick in the W.N.B.A. draft Monday, did not treat the issue with any outward hesitation — in fact, she appeared to refer to her coming out in the past tense, as though it had happened before — giving a casual feeling to the entire episode. 
It was an odd juxtaposition: as there is increased speculation about whether a male athlete — any male athlete — will come out while still playing a major professional team sport, one of the best female athletes in the history of team sports comes out, and the reaction is roughly equivalent to what one might see when a baseball manager reveals his starting rotation for a three-game series in July. ...
There is, obviously, a more substantial history to female athletes’ coming out and continuing to play. Individual-sport stars like the tennis legend Martina Navratilova and team-sport players like basketball’s Sheryl Swoopes and soccer’s Megan Rapinoe are among the women to continue playing after publicly discussing their sexuality. 
But those players generally received a similarly subdued response, with nothing close to the expected surge in attention that figures to follow a male athlete’s coming out. The reaction to Griner’s disclosure, then, was simply the latest example of a disturbing trend, according to some leaders of L.G.B.T. causes. 
“We talk a lot in the L.G.B.T. community about how sexism is a big part of what contributes to homophobia,” said Anna Aagenes, the executive director of GO! Athletes, a national network of L.G.B.T. athletes. “It’s disheartening when there are so many great role model female athletes out that we’re so focused on waiting for a male pro athlete to come out in one of the four major sports.” 
Context may not be the only factor in the ho-hum public response to Griner’s disclosure. Stereotypes that top female athletes are gay continue to persist, and that probably played a role in how the sports world responded to Griner, said Sherri Murrell, the women’s basketball coach at Portland State and the only openly gay basketball coach in Division I. ...

She continued: “I think we’re always going to be living in that bias. I think it’s getting better, but there is still that tag.” 
That persistent stereotype about female athletes does damage on multiple levels, said Patrick Burke, a founder of You Can Play, a prominent advocacy group for L.G.B.T. athletes. While a number of heterosexual male athletes, including the N.F.L. players Chris Kluwe and Brendon Ayanbadejo, have publicly supported the efforts of L.G.B.T. athlete groups, it has been much harder to find straight female athletes to speak out in support, Burke said. 
“In sports right now, there are two different stereotypes — that there are no gay male athletes, and every female athlete is a lesbian,” Burke said. “We’ve had tremendous success in getting straight male players to speak to the issue; we’re having a tougher time finding straight female athletes speaking on this issue because they’ve spent their entire careers fighting the perception that they’re a lesbian.”

Maybe the straight female athletes know that the stereotype that female jocks are disproportionately lesbian is true?

And, maybe, male jocks are disproportionately not gay? Could that possibly be?

Everybody treats this like it's a new question because nobody remembers anything. But, Sports Illustrated gave a lot of attention to homosexual athletes around 1975. For example, Former NFL player Dave Kopay came out that year, too. About the same time, 1968 Olympic decathlete Tom Waddell came out. In early 1975 SI's (arguably) top writer Frank Deford ran a two part extract from his biography of 1920s tennis great Bill Tilden. Deford said he wrote a book about Tilden precisely because he was gay ... and that so few top male athletes are gay. (Here are Deford's first article and second article.)

Here's my 1994 National Review article "Why Lesbians Aren't Gay," which points out the radical difference in sexual orientation of male and female athletes.

For those who turn to iSteve first every morning

Lots of news overnight: 

The two Boston marathon bombers whose pictures were released by the FBI yesterday murdered an MIT campus policeman, carjacked a Mercedes, then shot it out (and threw bombs) in nearby Watertown, MA with pretty much all the cops on the Eastern Seaboard. Suspect No. 1 (black hat) is dead, Suspect No. 2 (white hat) is still on the run in Watertown.

Two names are widely being circulated via Twitter: Suspect No. 1 supposedly has an Ethiopian/Eritrean name and Suspect No. 2 has a subcontinental name. But does Suspect No. 1 look terribly Ethiopian to you?

Other rumors are that Pete Williams on NBC is saying the suspects have "foreign military training." I'm not watching NBC, so I don't know about that rumor either. It would seem to contradict the other rumor that Suspect No. 2 is the missing Brown student who is a fan of his hometown Philadelphia Eagles.

So, I don't know.

The Boston area is pretty much shut down at present for fear of bombs.

Update: NBC says they are Turks, legal residents who have been here about a year.

Invade the world, invite the world!

A reader in Cambridge, MA writes:

From the iSteve comments:
LiveInCambridge said... 
Been listening to Boston PD police scanner. Suspects identified as Michael Mulugeta (dead, black hat suspect), Sunil Tripathi (at large, white hat suspect). 
I live in Cambridge. I have been following since about 10:30 PM EST, when the MIT shooting kicked off. Heard the explosions in Watertown from Cambridge. 
Current situation (4 AM local) is that the police are holding a perimeter around the suspect, and waiting for daylight.

ST would be the missing Brown U. student whose father is a prominent IT entrepreneur.

That's assuming the cops and the various intermediaries got this right. That's a big if. Do terrorists carry proper ID?

MM sounds like an Italian name to my tin ear, but most of the people on Facebook with that name are Ethiopians. (Something to do with the Italian conquest of Ethiopia in 1936? Update: Ras Mulugeta Yeggazu was commander of the Ethiopian Central Army and killed in the retreat in 1936. Okay, I'm getting off track here.) Or, they are Eritreans.

Does Suspect No. 1 look Ethiopian? I don't know ... He kind of looks more like, I don't know, Nicholas Cage than Haile Gebrsellaise. Maybe his mom isn't Ethiopian?

My apologies to all the Michael Mulugetas out there if this lead turns out wrong. It looks like there are 300 or more Mulugetas on Facebook, so don't assume that guy you know with that name is Suspect No. 1. This could all be wrong.

If Suspect No. 1 is Ethiopian that might explain something about the targeting of the Boston Marathon. Ethiopia and Kenya are the world's leading marathon rivals. Kenya traditionally dominates the Boston Marathon. Since 2002, the Kenyans have won 9 Boston Marathons and the Ethiopians 3 in the men's open division. The ratios in the women's division are similar.

Update: NBC says two suspect have "foreign military training." NBC is making it sound like they came here from abroad a year ago. But ST is a Philadelphia Eagles fan because his father's company is in the Philly area. Or maybe the whole ID of ST and MM is wrong?

The last name of ST is a prominent Indian Brahmin name. Some Ethiopians are Christians, others Muslims, and kind of vice-versa for Eritrea. But, I don't know how confident we can be in these names in the first place, so it's probably not worthwhile to research these names at this point because I'm not sure if we can trust them yet.

We shall see ...

The events seem kind of reminiscent of the Pakistani attack on Bombay in 2008.

From another source I found on the Internet, here's video taken by somebody in Cambridge at about 1am EDT of all the police cars in the world racing by.

A reader in Watertown, MA writes

From the comments to my post below "Is This Relevant?" about whether the MIT shooting is related to the Boston marathon bombing (quick answer: yes):
I'm writing from within yards of where the shootout in Watertown happened. I was just getting to sleep when I heard hundreds of rounds fired in bursts, single shot, staccato, at least three different calibres from the sounds and also what sounded like grenades or IEDs (maybe pipebombs). I will say that Watertown is home to many Muslim immigrants, most of whom are great neighbors and fine people. But I've heard teenage punks sound off late at night in trhe local 24 hour store about Jihad, I suspect mostly to epater le kafir. But I'm now leaning to the conclusion that a couple of these punks may have become over-intoxicated by their own rhetoric and caused all the havoc of the past five days. I agree with other posters that the MSM and feds have done everything in their power to pin this on a couple of white, right-wing loons yet to be found (white Islamics, white Hispanics, WTF). But to my eye the suspects' pictures look a lot like many of my muslim neighbors from various parts of the Balkans, Levant, and Middle East. Color me prescient if I'm right. Call me a hateful right-wing, racist loon if I'm wrong.

Thanks. Keep your head down. One suspect is dead, but the cops are now searching door to door in Watertown for the other suspect (or suspects).

[Update: Suspect No. 2, the guy on the white hat, is the one on the loose. The cops think he set off motion detectors in a building in Watertown.]

In case this surmise turns out to be right, here's my 2010 review of Chris Morris's British comedy Four Lions about a terrorist attack on the “unbelieving Kafir slags" taking part in a marathon.

But, we shall see ...

April 18, 2013

Is this relevant?

From Reuters:
Police Officer Shot to Death at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This is total off the wall 100% fact free speculation on my part, but let me toss out a couple of words regarding possible motivation for the recent Boston events: Aaron Swartz.

Here is the page on Reddit on the battle in Watertown, MA. (Coincidentally, Reddit was co-founded by Swartz.)

Live video from Watertown, MA. One man on the ground, one shot and taken to hospital (different guys? -- no, apparently same guy who is now dead, cops are searching for another suspect) lots of cops running with guns drawn. (There will be some heavy police overtime bills!)
The late Aaron Swartz,
not Suspect No. 2

Or is all this just a coincidence?

Updates: "THESE ARE THE BOSTON MARATHON BOMBING SUSPECTS" --Boston's Channel 7 at 3:01 EDT.

So, the answer to my question about the MIT shooting is: Yes, the MIT shooting is relevant to the Boston bombing.

Channel 7 in Boston 2:33 AM EDT: One suspect shot and killed, second on the run.

No names yet.

From the Boston Globe:
Breaking News An official with knowledge of the investigation said a Marathon bombing suspect is in custody   9 minutes ago

It would seem like a possible contradiction between a bombing suspect being in custody versus one suspect in MIT killing/carjacking/robberies dead and one uncaught -- can you be both dead and in custody? -- but things are confused.

Update: Now, the cops are saying "One suspect is accounted for." So my pedantic quibble about being both dead and in custody apparently occurred to the cops, too.

A second cop, a transit officer, was shot and is in serious condition.

Update: From the New York Times:
Two young men, armed with guns and explosives in what appeared to be backpacks, engaged in a violent standoff with dozens of police on a street in Watertown, Mass., Thursday night, a resident said.

Andrew Kitzenburg, 29, said he looked out of this third floor window to see two young men of slight build in jackets shooting at dozens of police officers from behind a black Mercedes SUV. The officers and the men were 70 yards apart, he said, and engaged in “constant gunfire.” 
A police SUV “drove towards the shooters,” he said, and was shot at until it was severely damaged. It rolled out of control, Mr. Kitzenberg said, and crashed into two cars in his driveway. 
The two shooters, he said, had a large and unwieldy bomb. “They lit it, still in the middle of the gunfire, and threw it. But it went 20 yards at most.” It exploded, he said, and one of the two men ran towards the gathered police officers. He was tackled, but it was not clear if he was shot, Mr. Kitzenberg said.

"a large and unwieldy bomb"

Off topic, but I'm reminded a little of the 1997 North Hollywood bank robbery shootout.

Update: From the MIT Emergency website:
Friday, April 19, 2013 1:56 AM
MIT Police have determined that the suspect in this evening’s shooting is no longer on campus. It is now safe to resume normal activities. Please remain vigilant in the coming hours. 
Friday, April 19, 2013 1:04 AM
Suspect remains at large. Please continue to stay indoors. Updates at emergency.mit.net 
Friday, April 19, 2013 12:37 AM
Update on shooter situation. The shooter remains at large, police continue to search the campus. Please REMAIN INDOORS until further notice. ... 
Thursday, April 18, 2013 11:41 PM
Update on shooter incident. Responding agencies continue to investigate the situation. The scene is outside of Building 32 (Stata) and 76 (Koch) near Vassar and Main Streets. Injuries have been reported. The situation is still very active and we ask everyone to stay inside. ...

Thursday, April 18, 2013 10:48 PM
At 10:48 PM today gunshots were reported near Building 32 (Stata) which is currently surrounded by responding agencies. The area is cordoned off. Please stay clear of area until further notice. Unknown if injuries have occurred.. Although the situation is considered active and extremely dangerous, an investigation is underway. Updates will be provided at this site when more information becomes available.

Almost certainly completely coincidental, but:
U.S. District Attorney Carmen Ortiz is helping lead the investigation regarding the bombings near the finish line at the Boston Marathon on April 15, helping the FBI and state investigators to find the individual or individuals who are responsible for the deaths of three people and the injuries of at least 176 others. ... 
In office since 2009, U.S. Attorney Ortiz recently faced scrutiny for “prosecutorial overreach” in her office’s criminal case against internet entrepreneur Aaron Swartz. Two years after his arrest on federal hacking charges, the 26-year-old committed suicide in January 2013.

To flesh out the long-shot idea: Aaron Swarz was a charismatic Internet figure (a cofounder of Reddit) who killed himself in January when he was at risk of a huge stretch in prison for downloading JSTOR academic papers from a closet at MIT and putting them on the Internet for free. He's a hero to some of today's youth.

Conspiracy Theorists

As we all know, conspiracies can't exist. Somebody would rat out the conspiracy and then it would all be over. Therefore, conspiracy theories are not respectable.

Except, it's highly respectable to assume that the field of psychometrics has engaged in a giant conspiracy for the last 99 years to oppress blacks. The conspiracy goes so deep that it even extends to the promotion of the arcane g factor model of IQ. As the daring rebel Stephen Jay Gould spoke truth to power: "The chimerical nature of g is the rotten core of Jensen's edifice, and of the entire hereditarian school."

For example, Cosma Shalizi's giant 2007 blog post "g, s Statistical Myth" has proven wildly popular. Here's Shalizi's own list of links to his one post:
Crooked TimberUncertain PrinciplesPharyngulaChrononautic LogPure Pedantry;Exploding GalaxiesNanopolitanPyjamas in BananasDanny YeeExistence Is WonderfulCrooked Timber (again); Lawyers, Guns and Money3 Quarks DailySirisQuantum of WantumEntitled to an OpinionArchPunditRaw ThoughtIdiolectBoĆ®te noireDissecting LeftismThe Ministry of Science;LanguageLogNoli Irritare LeonesWork for Idle HandsGreen Apron MonkeyIt Makes an Ancient Rumbling SoundEphBlogMedical Humanities BlogArs MathematicaCrooked Timber (once more, with feeling this time); JewcyLean LeftThe Jed ReportEzra KleinThe Mahatma X FilesQuantum of WantumLanguage Log (again); Social Science Statistics BlogThe Inverse Square BlogThe Useless TreeRevelations of SilenceRobert LindsaySequential EffectsAdrift in the Happy HillsThe Learner;Strongly EmergentQuomodocumque

Shalizi has never gotten this long essay published in a peer reviewed journal and has announced he doesn't want to talk about IQ anymore.

The fundamental problem with his argument, however, is apparent in his opening line:
About 11,000 words on the triviality of finding that positively correlated variables are all correlated with a linear combination of each other, and why this becomes no more profound when the variables are scores on intelligence tests.

This is like the old joke about the physicist, chemist, and economist shipwrecked on a desert island who are trying to open a can of beans. After the physicist offers a physics solution and chemist a chemical solution, the economist says, "Gentlemen, gentlemen, I have a much better solution. Assume we have a can opener." 

Shalizi just assumes that virtually all cognitive skills are positively correlated, even though that's the amazing thing. 

Being a smart guy, many thousands of words later he gets around to trying to explain away why all these variables should be positively correlated: more or less, it's a conspiracy among psychometricians.
By this point, I'd guess it's impossible for something to become accepted as an "intelligence test" if it doesn't correlate well with the Weschler and its kin, no matter how much intelligence, in the ordinary sense, it requires, but, as we saw with the first simulated factor analysis example, that makes it inevitable that the leading factor fits well. [13] This is circular and self-confirming, and the real surprise is that it doesn't work better. ...

Because, of course, there would be no rewards whatsoever for any rebel who could come up with an IQ test with predictive validity that disproves Arthur Jensen. In our society, you'd have to be a very, very brave dissident to argue against Jensen's sacred book The g Factor. As we all know, Arthur Jensen is a god to the Establishment, which is why when Jensen died last year, President Obama flew out to deliver the eulogy at his funeral.

But, courageous Cosma Shalizi has spent about a day working on an alternative idea, and, if he wasn't so busy, he'd no doubt finish it up and destroy Jensenism once and for all:
My playing around with Thomson's ability-sampling model has taken, all told, about a day, and gotten me at least into back-of-the-envelope, Fermi-problem range. In fact, the biggest problem with Thomson's model is that the appearance of g is too strong, since it easily passes tests for there being only a single factor, when real intelligence tests, such as the Weschler, all fail them. If it wasn't a distraction from my real work, I'd look into whether weakening the assumption that tests are completely independent, uniform samples from the pool of shared abilities couldn't produce something more realistic. 

But, all the Big Money in the modern world wants blacks to continue to score worse on IQ tests, so what's the point in anybody even trying to come up with a better IQ test when The Man would just hide it away in Area 51 with the everlasting lightbulb and the water-powered car?

Women graduates of elite colleges 1/3rd more likely to be stay-at-home moms

Charles Murray writes:
I have noticed the phenomenon in my daughters and their friends: Highly educated women from elite schools who decide to take a break from their careers to stay home and raise their small children. Joni Hersch, a professor of law and economics at Vanderbilt, has put numbers to these anecdotes with a research paper entitled “Opting Out among Women with Elite Education.” It is a fascinating new window onto the development of the new upper class that I described in Coming Apart. 
Hersch uses a large database, the 2003 National Survey of College Graduates, that lets her identify 1,830 women who graduated from “tier 1” educational institutions — in effect, the Ivies and other high-prestige universities like Duke and Stanford — and compare them with women who graduated from less elite schools. When women with and without children of all ages are lumped together, the graduates of tier 1 schools are employed only slightly less often than their less privileged sisters. But as soon as Hersh separates out women with children from those without, it becomes obvious that women from tier 1 schools are significantly more likely to be home with the kids than the others — 68% of mothers from the tier 1 schools were employed, compared to 76% of those from the other schools.

Subtracting from 100%, that's 32% of tier 1 moms versus 24% of moms who are graudates of less prestigious, or 1/3rd more.
A lot depends on the kind of degree that a married woman with children has obtained. If she is a physician, has a PhD, or has an MA in education (i.e., is probably a K-12 teacher), she is as likely to be employed as graduates from lower-tier schools. But those degrees involve only 24% of mothers who graduated from tier 1 schools. Those with law degrees are 9 percentage points less likely to be employed than graduates from lower-tier schools; those with MBAs are 16 percentage points less likely to be employed, and the largest single group, those with just a BA, are 13 percentage points less likely to be employed. 

Something I noticed when my son won a scholarship to a fine high school in the Pasadena area: among students' mothers who had elite MBAs, the moms tended to still be working if they had superstar jobs (like CFO of a major division at Disney), but if they had been merely senior vice presidents and their husbands were doing well, they often would pack it in career-wise. So, the school would have utracompetent volunteer moms with Dartmouth MBAs and investment banking experience running refreshment stands at school events. Nothing ever went wrong at that school.
These numbers shouldn’t make sense. Who gets into tier 1 schools? Not just highly able women, but also women who are ambitious enough to want to be in those schools. It is plausible that they would be more likely, not less, to continue their careers after they have children than women who, on average, are surely less intellectually able and probably less intensely ambitious than the tier 1 women. 
Hersch also documents that women from tier 1 schools are more likely than other women graduates to have parents with college educations and to be married to men holding jobs that require a college education.

Or, husbands who are just highly successful in general. Similarly, at the high school in Sherman Oaks where my other son went, some mothers, like Pam Dawber and Moira Harris, were largely retired from their careers to be housewives focused on their children so that their husbands, Mark Harmon and Gary Sinise, respectively, could concentrate fully on battling each other for first place in the Nielsen ratings.
Add to that some other characteristics of women who have graduated from elite schools that Hersch does not address but are established by other sources: Those with children are almost always married. They are not only married to men with college educations, they are likely to be married to men who have also graduated from elite schools. Their family incomes are likely to be high. They tend to live in places with the best schools (or send their children to the best schools).

As Kingsley Amis noted in Lucky Jim, there's no end to the way nice things are nicer than not nice things.

Quotes from Ed West's "The Diversity Illusion"

HBD Chick has posted some quotations from Telegraph columnist Ed West's new book The Diversity Illusion: What We Got Wrong About Immigration & How to Set it Right.
“In over sixty years of enormous change such debate [about immigration] had been restricted by taboo, fear and mockery. Immigration is the most thought about and least talked about subject in British history.“ [kindle locations 173-175]

Well, maybe sex in the Victorian Age. But, even then explorer Richard Burton, a polygamy advocate, wouldn't shut up about sex in the Orient, and Queen Victoria knighted him anyway.
"As Kevin Myers noted, the people of Britain and Ireland ‘have taken a secret, Self-Denying Ordinance not to discuss immigration or race in any meaningful way’. In living memory barely a newspaper article, radio or television show has seriously questioned the diversity orthodoxy, and even in the intelligent Right-wing press scepticism has had to be couched in such a cryptic way that the paper’s horoscopes are more candid.” [kindle locations 202-205]

“Writing about Tibet, liberal blogger Dave Osler once stated that China ‘has resettled Han Chinese colonists there to the point where Tibetans are at risk of becoming a minority in their own homeland’. On his own country he declared that ‘further mass immigration obviously has the potential to rejuvenate the population of this island once the politicians can get their head round the idea’. Tibetans becoming a minority in their country are a threatened species; the English are being ‘rejuvenated. Of course the Tibetans have no choice in becoming a minority, yet when the British express their opposition to ‘rejuvenation’ they are condemned as racists.” [kindle locations 1145-1150]

"No universal altruism has evolved because a sense of universal altruism would have no evolutionary advantage. Garrett Hardin argued in a 1982 essay, ‘Discriminating Altruisms’, that a world without borders or distinctions is impossible, because groups that practise unlimited altruism will be eliminated in favour of those that limit altruistic behaviour to smaller groups, from whom they receive benefits." 

More at HBD Chick.

Richard Dawkins on eugenics

Here are a couple of tweets today from Richard Dawkins making the same basic point I made 13 years ago in a VDARE article on Celebrity Feminist Eugenics:
‏@RichardDawkins 
If you were contemplating Artificial Insemination, would you be content with a random donor? Or would you make a deliberate choice? 
‏@RichardDawkins 
Almost 100% say they'd opt for nonrandom choice of sperm donor. Shock, horror, you're all eugenicists!

Dawkins is a product of the English tradition that produced Galton, Fisher, and Hamilton, all of them ardent eugenicists, yet, somehow, none of them Nazis. One might almost think that Stephen Jay Gould wasn't a reliable, unbiased guide to evolutionary theory and its history. But, of course, that's unthinkable.

In reality, eugenics had no more to do with WWII happening than the ever-popular Volkswagen Beetle, probably less. But it did provide a convenient club for academics in the late 20th Century to use to whomp their predecessors of the early 20th Century.

For an analysis of Dawkins' views on race, see my 2004 VDARE article.

And for Dawkins and ethnic nepotism, see my followup article

New York City's missing black men

One of the more astonishing demographic articles I've ever read was this one by the excellent Jonathan Tilove, who used to be employed to report on race by Newhouse News Service, which went out of business in 2008.
The Gap: In a Single Statistic, the Measure of a Racial Tragedy

By JONATHAN TILOVE 
May 5, 2005 
c.2005 Newhouse News Service 
There are nearly 2 million more black adult women than men in America, stark testimony to how often black men die before their time. 
Worse yet, with nearly another million black men in prison or the military, the reality in most black communities across the country is of an even greater imbalance _ a gap of 2.8 million, or 26 percent, according to Census Bureau figures for 2002. The comparable disparity for whites was 8 percent. 
Perhaps no single statistic so precisely measures the fateful, often fatal price of being a black man in America, or so powerfully conveys how beset black communities are by the violence and disease that leave them bereft of brothers, fathers, husbands and sons. And because the number of black males plummets as they move from their teens to their 20s, the gap first appears with the suddenness of a natural disaster. 
The imbalance between the numbers of black men and women does not exist everywhere. There is no gap to speak of in places with relatively small black populations like Minneapolis, Minn., Portland, Ore., San Francisco and San Diego, and Seattle actually has more black men than women. But it is the rule in those communities with large concentrated black populations that are the hub of African-American life, and it is as good an indicator as any of things gone wrong. 
There are more than 30 percent more black women than men in Baltimore, New Orleans, Chicago and Cleveland, and in smaller cities like Harrisburg, Pa., Syracuse, N.Y., Flint, Mich., and Mobile and Birmingham, Ala. 
There are 36 percent more black women than men in New York City, and 37 percent more in Saginaw, Mich., in Philadelphia, and in East Orange.

Since you never hear about this, I've always wondered if Tilove's results were replicable.

I finally found a government report for New York City in 2000, and, yes, the ratio of black males to females plummets from about age 21 onward. To eliminate the natural effect of women living longer on average, I just looked at ages 20 through 39 in New York City. There were 28% more black women than men in that cohort.

And, it's not much caused by black women moving to New York because they were fans of Sex and the City, either. In Manhattan (which includes Harlem), the gap was smallest, with just 15% more women than men among 20 to 39 year olds. In more middle class Queens, with its large West Indian population, the gap was only 18%. In Staten Island 27%, in the Bronx 32%, and in Brooklyn, which had, by far, New York City's largest black population, the gap was 35%.

Hopefully, the decline in homicides and AIDS deaths means the gap is smaller in the 2010 Census, but I haven't been able to find any numbers for NYC from that Census yet.

"Can a Woman Win the Kentucky Derby?"

Since nobody remembers much about the past, it's easy to write articles about how in some particular field women are Real Soon Now going to break through the barriers of discrimination and stereotypes and achieve equality. For example, what about women jockeys? Obviously, there must be a lot of discrimination against them since they haven't achieved much. Maybe the social climate is finally changing in their favor!

From the New York Times Magazine:
Can a Woman Win the Kentucky Derby?
by Keith O'Brien 
Here is the perception: female jockeys can’t ride. They’re too weak. They don’t have the fight in them. They can’t close — not like men, anyway. Down the stretch, you need a jockey to carry the horse to the end, rally the winded animal and squeeze speed out of weary legs. Female jockeys can’t do that. Or so goes the explanation for why, almost 50 years after women first fought legal battles to become jockeys, there are so few top jockeys who are women.

The sportswriter is here winking to the handful of well-informed readers that he's actually aware of the history of women jockeys, but most readers won't notice what he's doing. My guess is that he's recounting his observations, just labeling them as Stereotypes.
Then there’s Rosie Napravnik. 
The 113-pound New Jersey native isn’t just the most successful “girl jockey” on the horse-racing circuit today; she’s one of the best American jockeys, period. Last year, she amassed more than $12.4 million in earnings, eighth-best in North America. Her horses finished in the top three in nearly half the races she entered. So far this year, she ranks fifth in earnings, leads all jockeys in victories and has picked up her third consecutive riding title at the New Orleans Fair Grounds Race Course. 
Some of her male competitors are less than charitable about the reasons for Napravnik’s success. “Look at me,” a veteran jockey was saying before a race in New Orleans last month. “I’m 53 years old, brother. I’m going to walk into a paddock, and I’m going to talk to these owners and their wives and stuff. And there’s little Rosie. She’s going to bounce out of there. A pretty little girl, good disposition. And she’s going to be talking all nice to them. Now, which one of them would you rather leg up on your horse?” ...

Now, at 25, she is one of the more provocative figures in racing, heckled at times by critics who don’t think she belongs on the track while being asked for her autograph by fans. ... 

I don't know that much about horse racing, but I had a Sports Illustrated subscription in the early 1970s when SI covered more sports than just NFL/NBA/MLB. The early 1970s were the Golden Age of female jockeys getting favorable media publicity. One female jockey, Robyn Smith, was on the cover of Sports Illustrated 41 years ago. Here's Frank Deford's 1972 cover story on her.

Then, in 1980 Smith married the octogenarian Fred Astaire. After his death in 1987, still feeling the need for speed, Smith took up flying, and by 2000 was working as a corporate jet pilot.


Another female jockey who was much celebrated when I was young was Mary Bacon, whose success on the track and good looks led to a Revlon modeling contract and the cover of Newsweek's 1974 "Women in Sports" issue. Here's the opening of a 1974 People article about her:
Mary Bacon Is Queen of the Turf 
By Mary Vespa 
In her career as a jockey, Mary Bacon has been kidnapped, knifed and shot at, and in racing accidents has suffered a broken back twice, broken hands and feet, a crushed pelvis and a punctured lung.  
Through it all, the 5'4" Mary has triumphed like some kind of charmed soap opera heroine. 

However, Bacon gave a speech at a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1975 and that wrecked her career. 

The larger pattern is that the door has been open to female jockeys for over 40 years. But, riding thoroughbreds remains a dangerous job needing a high strength to weight ratio. That female jockeys haven't, on the whole, had more success lately than they had 40 years ago suggests that racing is just one of those sports where an exceptional woman -- like Lynn Hill in rockclimbing or Judit Polgar in chess -- can make it to very near the top, but that the bell curve of talent and drive is simply shifted more in the male direction. 

But, as handy as bell curves are for understanding the way of the world, they don't make for a pleasing Narrative. A Napravnik, a Hill, a Polgar are pretty interesting as women achieving in a male field, but the press's need to frame every story as part of a trend by, say, ignoring how pro-feminist the 1970s were, gives a fundamentally distorted picture of the world.

NYT: Blacks and Latinos stopped and frisked by NYPD for being shifty-looking really are kind of shifty-looking

Here's a long article in the New York Times on the ongoing trial over whether the NYPD's stop and frisk strategy is racially biased. The theme of the article is that maybe stop and frisk isn't such a bad idea after all. Sure, maybe civil rights extremists are upset that about 1,500 blacks and Latins per day are getting humiliated by cops on the streets of New York, but we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater. We need to look in a more, uh, nuanced fashion at these accusations of disparate impact. Nobody wants to go back to the Dinkins Era, right? 
Some Testimony on Police Tactic Undercuts Bias Claim 
By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN 
One man was stopped and frisked because of his expensive red leather jacket — similar to one that a murder suspect was wearing in a wanted poster. Another man was stopped after a woman complained to the police that he was following her. Still another was stopped by officers who had watched him jostle the door of a home, trying to get in. 
Recruited by civil rights lawyers, these men and others have testified about their encounters with the police in a federal trial weighing whether the soaring number of stop-and-frisk encounters has resulted in widespread constitutional violations for hundreds of thousands of black and Hispanic men. They were chosen to give voice to the toll that the police’s use of the tactic has inflicted on an entire demographic, their lawyers say. 
But over the trial’s first month, some of these men’s accounts seemed to veer away from the straightforward narrative of racial profiling — and may have actually undermined the plaintiffs’ efforts to demonstrate that the police routinely disregard the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable police detentions. 
Whether the circumstances of each case rose to the level of “reasonable suspicion” — the legal standard required for forcible street stops — is a question that the judge, Shira A. Scheindlin of Federal District Court in Manhattan, will ultimately decide. Even if she finds these individual stops fall short of that legal threshold, there is still evidence suggesting the stops were not, as the plaintiffs claim, “suspicionless and race-based.” But the civil rights lawyers bringing the case say they have presented ample evidence of race-based decision-making by police officers. 
So far nine people have testified about more than a dozen occasions on which they were stopped. (Two more witnesses will testify.) These accounts are the foundation of a trial exploring whether the New York Police Department’s training, supervision and patrol strategies have led to weakened constitutional protections for minority men. 
The plaintiffs’ lawyers, who are with the Center for Constitutional Rights, are asking Judge Scheindlin to put the department’s stop-and-frisk practices under judicial oversight. 
But with five million police stops recorded since 2002, it would seem that the civil rights lawyers would be able to find witnesses to present far more conclusive accounts of unconstitutional police stops — an incongruity that lawyers for the city sought to portray during opening arguments as indicative of the case’s weakness. 
... But the testimony offered so far has presented a more nuanced picture of police work than the one the plaintiffs had hoped to show. In several of the dozen stops described by witnesses, the police appeared to have specific reasons for suspecting that the men were engaging in criminal activity. Even a police stop of the lead plaintiff in the case, David Floyd, seems open to interpretation.
David Floyd, shifty-looking door-jostler
Sgt. James Kelly of the Police Department, one of five witnesses to testify about the stop of Mr. Floyd, said he observed Mr. Floyd and another man standing in front of a door, jostling it. He grew more suspicious, he testified, after watching them unsuccessfully try several keys in the door. “It looked like they were forcibly trying to get into a house,” Sergeant Kelly testified. 
During the ensuing stop-and-frisk encounter, Sergeant Kelly and the two officers with him eventually accepted that the two men were not burglars but tenants: one had been locked out, and a neighbor, Mr. Floyd, had sought to let him back in. 

Sounds like Professor Gates and Officer Crowley in Cambridge.
In court, the city’s lead lawyer, Heidi Grossman, observed that several of the stops occurred because an individual matched a physical or “specific clothing description” of a crime suspect. 
One stop followed an anonymous 911 caller who reported overhearing three black men planning a robbery as they walked up Broadway, near 96th Street. The caller described the men’s clothing and mentioned a disturbing detail: one of the men had a gun. 
Nearby, officers spotted three black men seated on a bench. They were dressed much the same way as the 911 caller described the robbers. The officers ordered the men to the ground at gunpoint and frisked them before realizing they had the wrong men. One officer, in an apparent bid to explain the police interaction, radioed the dispatcher and requested that the suspects’ description be repeated, so the men could hear for themselves. 
One of the three men, Nicholas Peart, testified that he could not remember all of what the radio dispatcher said, but he did recall one detail about one of the robbery suspects. 
“Blue shorts, that’s what I heard that night,” he testified. He acknowledged that he had been wearing blue basketball shorts. 
Another stop involved similar circumstances. In that instance, Clive Lino, 32, explained that he was detained for 20 minutes because of his red leather Pelle Pelle jacket. “It’s a popular jacket,” Mr. Lino testified. 
But the two officers who stopped him testified how at the station house that very afternoon, their commander had emphasized a recent unsolved homicide, even distributing a wanted poster. It contained scant description of the suspect, mentioning a “male black” between 5 feet 9 and 6 feet, and a loosefitting, red leather jacket with the brand Pelle Pelle stitched conspicuously across it. 
The evidence involving another stop illustrated the challenge that police officers often face when called to the scene, where they must try to quickly resolve ambiguity and discern what is happening. A woman accused a man of following her around and demanding money at a big-box pet store in Union Square. 

After all, New York isn't some minor league town like, say, L.A. where the feds were right to use the purported racial bias revealed by the Ramparts Scandal to get a consent decree over the LAPD. This is New York!

April 17, 2013

Ed West on hate for Mrs. Thatcher

Ever notice how some kinds of hate are A-OK?

Ed West writes in The Telegraph:
What’s striking about all this is that the hatred does not come from the northern towns ruined in the late 20th century, but the London public sector classes, who did well under Mrs T. 
Great leaders ensure that they control the propaganda. The reason history remembers Alfred the Great and has entirely forgotten his grandson Athelstan, who actually unified England, is that Alfred employed a chronicler called Asser.

Seems to be a theme lately.
Therefore Alfred wrote his own history. Today there are plenty of kids called Alfie, but there aren’t any Athies. Mrs Thatcher’s enemies wrote the history of her times, in television, theatre and fiction. 
In a wider sense her profound failure was to lose the culture war, or not even fight it. As Tim Montgomerie reminded us on Monday, conservatism cannot triumph in economics while it remains totally beaten in the cultural sphere. 
While she destroyed an opposition base when the manufacturing industry shed its jobs – with terrible human cost – she actually helped to build up a far bigger and more powerful enemy class, led by local government and the administrators of the welfare state that flowered during her reign. She destroyed lots of unproductive working-class jobs and created lots of unproductive middle-class ones. She was responsible for New Labour and Tony Blair in more than one way, and this makes it harder for Conservatives to ever win again.... 
Among my contemporaries, huge numbers of talented people work in areas where there is an institutional hostility to conservatism, for the simple reason that conservatives do not believe their work should be professionalised and run by the state. Younger conservative politico types tend to move in these circles and know these people from school and university, so any Tory leader who takes them on will have to accept huge personal unpopularity and social death. 
When I criticised Thatcherism the other day what I specifically meant was Thatcherism as it has now become: libertarian and self-centred. 
Libertarians think they can get a Victorian-sized state without Victorian attitudes, but they’re deluded. If you really want a small state that doesn’t tell you what to do and gobble up half your income then start going to church, get involved in voluntary activities, tell the vicar or priest to stop droning on about the cuts and climate change and tell him to start shouting about sin and fornication. Repress yourself, you’ll find it’s good for your wallet. 
Were that to happen, then the need for an enormous state apparatus managing vast areas of our life would be reduced. As it is the blob gets bigger and bigger every year and will help to bring down Cameron, not the least because the powerful state broadcaster is very much part of it. 

Ricin mailing arrestee is an Elvis impersonator who is into dismembered body parts awareness

An arrest has been made of Elvis impersonator Paul Kevin Curtis of Mississippi in the mailing of letters poisoned with ricin to Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) and the President.

Here's are videos of the suspect's Elvis impersonations. I must say I like his version of Elvis's rockabilly class "Baby, Let's Play House" (above).

And this also appears to be the fellow's website:
Let the record show that on this date, March 05, 2008, I, Paul Kevin Curtis, being of sound mind, am attempting once again to expose various parties within the government, FBI, police departments, legal & healthcare systems, etc. that a conspiracy to ruin my reputation in the community as well as an ongoing effort to break down the foundation I worked more than 20 years to build in the country music scene, began on the day I accidentally discovered a refrigerator full of dismembered body parts & organs wrapped in plastic in the morgue of the largest non-metropolitan healthcare organization in the United States of America, AKA North Mississippi Medical Center where I was employed from 1998 until March of 2000.
The purpose of this online documentary of photos, police reports, as well as my 1st & only online petition, publications & events surrounding my life & the actions of what I believe to be that of a secret shadow government in which I feel have been put into place by higher powers to be in order to hide the truth behind the illegal organ harvesting market which I began investigating in 2000 after being "banned" for life for simply questioning the hospital administration on what they did with so many dismembered body parts? 

So, either this is good, prompt police work or an example of "Round up the usual suspects!"

My impression is that the anthrax mailings right after 9/11 helped push the politicians and the media over the edge. Without the anthrax mailings, cooler heads might have prevailed and forestalled the Iraq Attaq.

A wise New York Times Editorial against amnesty

From the New York Times Editorial Board:
Hasty Call for Amnesty 
The A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s call for the government to grant amnesty to an estimated six million illegal immigrants currently living in the United States and to eliminate most sanctions on employers who hire them in the future was a surprising turnabout. Until now, organized labor has fought hard to keep illegal workers from taking jobs from higher-paid union workers. 
The A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s proposal is attractive to many groups. Unions welcome the chance to go after a huge new pool of unorganized workers. Employers welcome the chance to hire cheap labor without fear of criminal liability. And illegal immigrants who have worked hard for years and raised families under harrowing circumstances would welcome access to medical care and other services denied to illegal aliens. 
But the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s proposal should be rejected. Amnesty would undermine the integrity of the country's immigration laws and would depress the wages of its lowest-paid native-born workers. 
Back in 1986, Congress granted amnesty to an estimated three million illegal immigrants as part of a law that also promised to crack down on further illegal immigration by imposing sanctions on employers who knowingly violated the law. At that time, this page endorsed amnesty because it was tied to measures that promised to keep further rounds of illegal immigration in check. But 14 years later there are twice as many illegal workers, and employer sanctions are widely deemed a joke. Workers pretend to show employers proof of citizenship or work visas and employers pretend they do not know the proof is fake.

The primary problem with amnesties is that they beget more illegal immigration. Demographers trace the doubling of the number of Mexican immigrants since 1990 in part to the amnesty of the 1980's. Amnesties signal foreign workers that American citizenship can be had by sneaking across the border, or staying beyond the term of one's visa, and hiding out until Congress passes the next amnesty. The 1980's amnesty also attracted a large flow of illegal relatives of those workers who became newly legal. All that is unfair to those who play by the immigration rules and wait years to gain legal admission. 
It is also unfair to unskilled workers already in the United States. Between about 1980 and 1995, the gap between the wages of high school dropouts and all other workers widened substantially. Prof. George Borjas of Harvard estimates that almost half of this trend can be traced to immigration of unskilled workers. Illegal immigration of unskilled workers induced by another amnesty would make matters worse. The better course of action is to honor America's proud tradition by continuing to welcome legal immigrants and find ways to punish employers who refuse to obey the law.
... Published: February 22, 2000

The unemployment rate in February 2000 was 4.1%, The unemployment rate today is 7.6%.

The conventional wisdom on IQ

The recent critique at Human Varieties of Cosma Shalizi's celebrated 2007 attack on the g factor theory of intelligence has led to some fascinating discussions in the comments at Metafilter and Noahpinion, economist Noah Smith's blog.

The discussions in the comments at those two sites are not fascinating in the sense that they advance our understanding of this complex and hard to grasp topic, which they do not. Instead, they represent state of the art conventional wisdom on the topic of IQ. It would be fun to do a factor analysis of the comments to see what are main factors in the standard prejudices of the educated. Candidates for major factors represented in the comments would likely include:

Hate
Projection of Hate
Who? Whom? thinking
Arrogance
Ignorance
Ad Hominem
Guilt by Assoication
Hypocrisy
Lack of Self-Awareness

Aryan Brotherhood running amok in Texas?

Oops. Never mind.
Texas prosecutor murders: Not linked to white supremacists, after all?  
The wife of a disgraced former justice of the peace is charged in killings once suspected to be the handiwork of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas

I explained what prison gangs are about in VDARE.com in 2005.

Salon: "Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American"

From Salon:
Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American 
There is a double standard: White terrorists are dealt with as lone wolves, Islamists are existential threats 
BY DAVID SIROTA  
TOPICS: RACISM, XENOPHOBIA, BOSTON EXPLOSIONS, U.S. FOREIGN POLICY, IMMIGRATION REFORM, MUSLIMS, EDITOR'S PICKS, WHITE PEOPLE, MALE, BOSTON BOMBER, NEWS, POLITICS NEWS
Updated: Sirota responds to critics of this piece over here
As we now move into the official Political Aftermath period of the Boston bombing — the period that will determine the long-term legislative fallout of the atrocity — the dynamics of privilege will undoubtedly influence the nation’s collective reaction to the attacks. That’s because privilege tends to determine: 1) which groups are — and are not — collectively denigrated or targeted for the unlawful actions of individuals; and 2) how big and politically game-changing the overall reaction ends up being. 
This has been most obvious in the context of recent mass shootings. In those awful episodes, a religious or ethnic minority group lacking such privilege would likely be collectively slandered and/or targeted with surveillance or profiling (or worse) if some of its individuals comprised most of the mass shooters. However, white male privilege means white men are not collectively denigrated/targeted for those shootings — even though most come at the hands of white dudes. 
Likewise, in the context of terrorist attacks, such privilege means white non-Islamic terrorists are typically portrayed not as representative of whole groups or ideologies, but as “lone wolf” threats to be dealt with as isolated law enforcement matters. Meanwhile, non-white or developing-world terrorism suspects are often reflexively portrayed as representative of larger conspiracies, ideologies and religions that must be dealt with as systemic threats — the kind potentially requiring everything from law enforcement action to military operations to civil liberties legislation to foreign policy shifts. 
“White privilege is knowing that even if the bomber turns out to be white, no one will call for your group to be profiled as terrorists as a result, subjected to special screening or threatened with deportation,” writes author Tim Wise. 

Will Sirota get his wish?