May 23, 2013

The blessings of diversity

From the New York Times, a run of the mill case of arranged marriage, visa fraud, and honor killings:
Court Documents Detail a Deadly Family Feud From Brooklyn to Pakistan 
By MOSI SECRET 
She fled her husband and her family, sneaking out of her home in Pakistan to take sanctuary in the American Embassy, which then whisked her to a secret hide-out in the United States. 
The thrilling escape seemed to end the harrowing ordeal of Amina Ajmal, an American citizen who said she had been held captive for years by her own relatives in Pakistan and forced to marry a man there who only wanted an American visa. But then, after law enforcement encouraged her to call her father from her hide-out, the episode took an even darker turn. 
“I will not end this until I find you,” Mohammad Ajmal Choudhry, a Brooklyn taxi driver, told his daughter on the phone in February, according to a transcript of the recorded call. “I will kill their entire family.” 
Four days later, two people in Pakistan were dead. Relatives of the man who had helped her escape, they were gunned down while riding a motorcycle through the streets of Gujrat. 
And now the tale of the Choudhry family, detailed in hundreds of pages of court documents, is a feud of Shakespearean proportions, sprawling across the two continents and the shifting cultures that these immigrants and their American children inhabit. 
Nearly two dozen people, including his other children, came to support Mr. Choudhry at his most recent bail hearing, in April. Despite his prison clothes, he looked every bit the jovial grandfather, plump, balding and waving warmly to the crowd before affirming his innocence. For now, the charges in Federal District Court in Brooklyn are for making threats and visa fraud for filing a visa application for Ms. Ajmal’s new husband without her permission. There is a warrant for Mr. Choudhry’s arrest in Pakistan, accusing him of murder. 
Ms. Ajmal’s ordeal began three years ago, when, at age 19 and having spent her whole life in Brooklyn, she moved to Gujrat, her ancestral city in northeast Pakistan. Her new home was much like the one she left, filled with relatives from several generations who regularly traveled back and forth between the two countries. Some had helped to raise her after her mother died. 
But Ms. Ajmal recently told federal investigators that for three years she was held as a prisoner in her own home. Her confinement was only made worse when her father forced her to marry a local man, Abrar Ahmed Babar, under the threat of death, she said. 
Then, with the help of a distant relative, Shujat Abbas, she fled. 
When she arrived in the United States in January, she called Immigration and Customs Enforcement seeking help. She told officials that her marriage had been arranged so that her husband could obtain legal permanent residency in the United States. Investigators said they later found a visa application for Mr. Babar that had been mailed from Brooklyn, bearing Ms. Ajmal’s signature, even though she was out of the country when it was mailed. 
When Ms. Ajmal called her father in February, he lashed out with pleas and threats, most of them directed toward the family of Mr. Abbas, according to a transcript of the secretly recorded calls that was filed in court. “I will catch each and every person of their family, and will kill them, until I find you,” Mr. Choudhry said. 
That same day Mr. Choudhry e-mailed the American Embassy in Islamabad, saying Mr. Abbas was a drug smuggler who was wanted by the government of Dubai. He wrote that Mr. Abbas was using his relationship with his daughter to try to gain citizenship. 
He is trying his level best to come to U.S.A. by hook and by crook,” Mr. Choudhry wrote, according to court documents. Mr. Choudhry’s lawyer, Joshua L. Dratel, provided the e-mails to the court in an attempt to show that Mr. Abbas “is not some good Samaritan interested in Amina’s welfare.” 
Mr. Abbas’s father and sister were killed four days later. Mr. Abbas’s mother filed a complaint in Pakistan alleging that the assailants were Ms. Ajmal’s aggrieved husband and her father’s brother, who she said were also responsible for “desecrating the bodies.” She named several other relatives of Mr. Choudhry who she said were involved. 
In a recorded phone call after the murders, Mr. Choudhry repeatedly denied that he ordered the killings, saying that other enemies of Mr. Abbas’s family must be to blame. But he did not back down from his threats.
“Even if I did kill him, isn’t a person supposed to kill that being, when he finds out that his daughter ran away because of him?” he said, according to court papers. “My name is tainted everywhere in newspapers, on TV channels, that I am a man with no honor, my daughters are whores.”
A legal resident since 1990, Mr. Choudhry, 60, was arrested on Feb. 26 outside his home in Brooklyn. Prosecutors charged him with visa fraud and communicating threats and they continue to investigate his involvement in the murders. He faces up to 20 years in prison on the two pending charges.
His lawyer, Mr. Dratel, filed more than a dozen sworn affidavits from people in Pakistan attesting to Mr. Choudhry’s character, providing alibis for the two accused of being the gunmen and presenting alternative theories for how the killings could have happened. He argued that Mr. Choudhry should be released on bail because he was not charged with murder.
As evidence that Ms. Ajmal was never held against her will, he included a photograph of her at her wedding, a lavish affair with more than 1,000 guests, showing her smiling in an ornate gown, with her arms outstretched, admiring her jewelry.

May 22, 2013

Eric Garcetti is first Mannequin-American L.A. mayor

Mr. and Mrs. Garcetti
kick back casual-style
The MayorTron 3000
is now operational
As we all know, the Hispanic Electoral Tidal Wave is sweeping into office new, diverse faces, like Eric Garcetti, who was elected mayor of Los Angeles yesterday. The Oxford-educated and always exquisitely-groomed Garcetti, who looks like Don Draper's less rugged cousin and is an heir to the Louis Roth Clothes fortune, claimed to be the Mexican candidate in the race for reasons that I could never quite keep straight in my head (something like Mexico being one of the countries his ancestors have had to flee one step ahead of angry peasants brandishing scythes).

As the city councilman from Silver Lake, where all the screenwriters live, Garcetti has a proven track record as a gentrifier. Hopefully, after Garcetti, all of Los Angeles will look like Silver Lake north of Sunset, not Silver Lake south of Sunset.
Beep! Tie askew. Beep! Tie askew.

Is George Zimmerman's lawyer taking notes?

From the New York Times:
The man, Ibragim Todashev, had been speaking for two hours in his apartment to officials from the Massachusetts State Police and the F.B.I. about Mr. Tsarnaev and the Sept. 11, 2011, murders in Waltham, Mass., when he suddenly grabbed an object and tried to attack the agent, one official said. 
“He exploded and leapt at him,” said the official, who said the F.B.I. agent sustained minor injuries that required stitches. 
A second law enforcement official said the shooting occurred after Mr. Todashev had admitted his role in the killings and had also implicated Mr. Tsarnaev. The official said he had begun writing out a statement when he asked to take a break. 
“They got him to confess to the homicides, and they say, ‘Let’s write it down,’ and he starts writing it down. He goes to get a cigarette or something and then he goes off the deep end,” the second official said. “I don’t know what triggered him, and he goes after the agent.” 
The official said Mr. Todashev had something in his hand, “a knife or a pipe or something.” 
It was not certain who, or how many officers, had fired on Mr. Todashev. Nor was it clear why, with at least three law enforcement officials in the room, deadly force was used on someone without a firearm in his hands. Asked, one law enforcement official said: “If somebody jumps on you and you have a gun, and you don’t do something, the gun will quickly come into play.”

Immigration news is all good for NAABP

Joe Green, a Harvard roommate of Mark Zuckerberg and head of Zuck's cheap labor lobby, National Association for the Advancement of Billionaire People FWD.us, emails:
Steve --
Yesterday was a great day for comprehensive immigration reform.
In a major step forward, Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 13-5 in support of reform.This bill contains all of the key principles that we’re fighting for, and we need to show our support for it.
Share this graphic on Facebook to thank the Senators who voted for reform:
There are several more steps before the full Senate votes on immigration reform. But this is the most encouraging sign yet.
Share our thank you card online.We’ll be in touch soon with updates on the next steps. Let’s keep up the good work.
Joe Green
Founder and President, FWD.us 

To commemorate this historic accomplishment by The Gang of Eight, iSteve brings you an exclusive photo of a key moment in the deliberations of the inner circle of The Eight Banditos:
Bipartisan Senate committee negotiates immigration reform.
From right to left:
a perhaps puzzled but still game John McCain;
Lindsey Graham, looking, as always, languidly stunning in leather;
the Gang of Eight's idea man, the persuasive Charles "1600 SAT" Schumer,
and Marco Rubio, who is more of a Big Picture than a details kind of thinker.

Youths acting youthy in Stockholm

Vibrancy, Stockholm-style
In more immigration and multiculturalism news, from MSN:
Sweden stunned by third night of rioting

STOCKHOLM - Hundreds of youths set fire to cars and attacked police and rescue services in suburbs of Stockholm Tuesday night in Sweden's worst disorder in years. 
A police station in the Jakobsberg area in the northwest of the city was attacked, two schools were damaged and an arts and crafts center was set ablaze, despite a call for calm from Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt. 
It was the third night of unrest. 
The riots, in one of Europe's richest capitals, have shocked a country that prides itself on a reputation for social justice, and fuelled a debate about how Sweden is coping with both youth unemployment and an influx of immigrants. 
"We've had around 30 cars set on fire last night, fires that we connect to youth gangs and criminals," Kjell Lindgren, spokesman for Stockholm police, said on Wednesday. 
... The riots appear to have been sparked by the police killing of a 69-year-old man wielding a machete in the suburb of Husby this month, which prompted accusations of police brutality. ... 
After decades of practicing the "Swedish model" of generous welfare benefits, Sweden has been reducing the role of the state since the 1990s, spurring the fastest growth in inequality of any advanced OECD economy. 
While average living standards are still among the highest in Europe, governments have failed to substantially reduce long-term youth unemployment and poverty, which have affected immigrant communities worst. 
The left-leaning tabloid Aftonbladet said the riots represented a "gigantic failure" of government policies, which had underpinned the rise of ghettos in the suburbs. 
"We have failed to give many of the people in the suburbs a hope for the future," Anna-Margrethe Livh of the opposition Left Party wrote in the daily Svenska Dagbladet. ... 

Clearly, Swedes just don't pay high enough taxes to provide enough social services to troubled youths.
Some 15 percent of the population is foreign-born, the highest proportion in the Nordic region. Unemployment among those born outside Sweden stands at 16 percent, compared with 6 percent for native Swedes, according to OECD data. 

Presumably, that 15% tends to be the parents and grandparents of the youths, while the youths tend to be Swedish-born. But I could be wrong about this.

Immigrationism in Zombie-mode

Vibrancy, London-style
Headline in the Daily Mail:
'We swear by Allah we will never stop fighting you': Terrifying threat of Islamic fanatic after he 'hacked British soldier to death with machete in horrific terror attack on London street'
Man tells camera: 'I apologise that women had to witness this today' 
Soldier attacked with meat cleavers and knives in Woolwich, SE London 
Eyewitness says: 'They were hacking at him, chopping him, cutting him' 
Two suspects waited until police arrived before trying to attack them 
Prime Minister David Cameron described the killing as 'truly shocking' 
Cobra meeting hears there are strong indications it was terrorist incident 
Suspects used 'a number of weapons' in attack, Metropolitan Police say 
Muslim Council: Act will no doubt heighten tensions on British streets

Nativism bad, Nahantism good

Nahant, Massachusetts provides all the scenic advantages of living on a rocky island blessed by spectacular beaches, with the convenience of being able to commute 14 miles by road to downtown Boston.

Not surprisingly, this one square mile municipality (pop. 3400) is a desirable place to live.

This 383-year-old settlement is a model of an orderly, deeply rooted New England community. It's a very middle class place, with one of the lowest poverty rates I've ever seen, but not a particularly high median income. Despite being part of the vast Boston megalopolis, Nahant is 97.11% white, which may explain why it voted for Obama only 60-40 over Romney. 
Uncrowded beach 13 miles from Boston's Logan airport

The big problem in Nahant is keeping non-Nahantians off the island and away from the publicly-owned pocket beaches.

One solution is to provide a public beach for outsiders along the dreary causeway that connects Nahant to the mainland town of Lynn, MA.

Typical Nahant signage
But, the nice white liberals of Nahants' main weapon for keeping the outside world out appears to be the world's densest collection of No Parking signs.

Without a Residency Sticker ($5 per year to residents, unavailable to nonresidents), you can park legally in front of the one convenience store on the island for 30 minutes, which gives you enough time to walk down the cliff to 40 Steps Beach, skip some stones in the Atlantic for five minutes, and then hustle back.

Non-Vibrancy, Nahant-style
You can park in front of the town hall for 15 minutes, enough time to admire the 1819 public library next door, but not to actually read anything.

And you can park in the beautifully sited cemetery for as long as you want to putter about there, admiring the chapel by Ralph Cram Adams (Collegiate Gothic-style architect of Rice U. and much else).
Ellingwood Chapel, Ralph Cram Adams, 1919
I should not overstate just how xenophobic the citizens of Nahant are. The good people of Nahant are not ineradicably opposed to all outsiders visiting.

For example, the MIT European Club holds an annual bike ride from Cambridge to Nahant:
On Nahant, we will sit together for a nice picnic on the premises of the Northeastern University Marine Science Center, a place that offers spectacular views over the shoreline of Cape Ann. After the picnic we will ride our bikes to Nahant's legendary 40-steps beach. This beach is a pebble beach, accessible only through wooden stairs. The 40 steps lead to an enclosed bay where warm seawater gets trapped during the summer to offer an exceptional ocean swim experience to its visitors. There are no changing rooms at 40-steps beach. Please be advised to bring a large towel for changing clothes the American way. 
After the swim we will go to "Tides Restaurant and Pub" for refreshments and bathroom break, Nahant's only restaurant. ...  
Due to practical considerations this trip is limited to 10 participants.

So, up to 10 members of the MIT European Club are more than welcome to bicycle to Nahant annually.

The underlying ideology of Nahantism is respectable and rarely controversial: the legal residents of Nahant have joint responsibilities and privileges, such as the right to enjoy scenic beaches without them being overrun by hordes of vibrant non-Nahantians. They are thus legally empowered to keep out other residents of Massachusetts by making it as inconvenient as possible for uninvited visitors to get out of their cars.

I like to draw analogies between various kinds of public policies (although I'm fascinated by how rare that urge has become). Why is it perfectly respectable for Nahantians to rig the laws to keep other Americans from lolling on their public beaches for an afternoon, but it's viciously nativist for Americans to similarly call for effective laws to keep foreigners from moving permanently to America? It seems to me that the citizens of Nahant are just being sensible, so why can't the citizens of America be allowed to be sensible, too?

Occasionally, a philosophy major pundit like Matthew Yglesias will grasp the logic of this argument and therefore demand that, just as America should take in 165,000,000 more immigrants, Nahant should be covered in Blade Runner-sized apartment buildings. But most pundits would think that it's okay for the citizens of Nahant to mind their own business, but that it would be hateful for the citizens of America to do the same.

Why was Ibragim Todashev in our country?

Tomb of one of Waltham Three
ritually murdered on 9/11/11
From ABC News:
Todashev was a lawful permanent resident holding a Russian passport, when he arrived in the U.S. in 2008 on a student visa, a senior U.S. official told ABC News. 
Despite a recent assault arrest, his immigration file was devoid of derogatory information, the official said.

Like I said, why was this Chechen maniac in our country?

By the way, the FBI says the late suspect suddenly pulled out a hidden knife and stabbed the FBI agent just before he was about to sign a confession to involvement in the 9/11/11 Waltham triple murder, forcing the federal agents to shoot him dead on the spot. That's pretty dramatic.

I presume the FBI was recording the conversation, right? And we'll be hearing the tapes soon, right?

Right?

Chechens Acting Checheny, Cont.

Vibrancy, Boston-style
There are what, about 100 Chechens in the U.S.? So, that's a pretty small sample size from which to draw national stereotypes. But, no true Chechen was ever daunted by long odds, and our small number of domestic Chechens are doing their damnedest to spread to America their homeland's stereotype among their Eurasian neighbors for maniacalness. From the Daily Mail:
Friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev shot dead by FBI after 'pulling a knife as he prepared to sign a confession to 2011 triple homicide'
- Ibragim Todashev, 27, reportedly turned violent during an interview with an FBI agent
- He was being interviewed over his ties to Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev
- Todashev, from Chechnya, was shot dead by the agent just after midnight Wednesday
- He had reportedly confessed to the FBI that he played a role in a brutal triple slaying in the Boston area in 2011
- Todashev had met Tsarnaev while he was living in Boston and last spoke him about a week before the bombing
- He was arrested on May 4 in an unrelated incident after he knocked a man unconscious in a fight over a parking space

Apple needs more immigration to pay lower wages to make higher profits to not pay taxes upon

Apple CEO Tim Cook swearing to tell
Congress only legally-vetted whoppers
Steve Jobs' widow Laurene Powell Jobs is a big pusher of Immigration Reform:
Ms. Powell Jobs has a net worth of about $11.5 billion, according to Bloomberg. Her husband, the Apple co-founder, wasn't a big philanthropist.  ...
It was through her work at College Track that Powell Jobs got on the track to immigration reform. Some of the students in California in the program came into the US at a young age illegally. Now, as high school graduates, they are ineligible for state or federal college assistance. And that has led Powell Jobs to take a more public and active stance on the immigration.

One might think that Ms. Powell Jobs could use some of the $11.5 billion she inherited to aid the Dreamers, but it's so much more cost-effective to invest in Immigration Reform, which will also increase her net worth by driving down the pay of Apple employees and thus increasing Apple's profits.

And Apple needs to pay its engineers less because tax-avoidance lawyers don't come cheap:
J. Richard Harvey Jr., a professor at Villanova Law School, estimated that Apple’s legal maneuvering had saved the company $7.7 billion in potential American taxes in 2011. ... 
For example, he noted, about two-thirds of Apple’s global pretax income in 2011 was recorded in Ireland, yet only 4 percent of its employees and 1 percent of its customers were located there. 

Apple negotiated a 2% income tax rate with the Irish government, but has also managed to concoct theoretically profit-garnering entities that legally don't reside in any country at all.
While Apple has repeatedly insisted it does not engage in “tax gimmicks,” Mr. Harvey was unswayed. 
“Apple does not use tax gimmicks?” he said rhetorically. “I about fell off my chair when I read that.”

How can Ms. Powell Jobs afford to lobby for more subsidies for the children of illegal immigrants if Apple has to pay the market rate for American engineers?

May 21, 2013

Preet Bharara is the new Patrick Fitzgerald

A Belgian hedge fund guy paid $17 million for this "Jackson Pollock"
In an era when everything seems to be rigged for the powerful, one small consolation was that federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald hadn't seemed to have gotten the memo. Fitzgerald was constantly putting governors of Illinois or West Wing apparatchiks on trial. 

Granted, being a prosecutor in Chicago ought to be a license to have a fun and fulfilling job.

Lately, Preet Bharara, the Manhattan United States Attorney, has become the prosecutor walking around with a bucket while it rains money (e.g., the Raj Rajaratnam insider trading trials), such as this case:
Dealer at Center of Art Scandal Arrested on Tax Charges 
By GRAHAM BOWLEY, WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM and PATRICIA COHEN 
In a case of alleged forgeries that roiled the New York art market and led to a host of civil lawsuits, federal authorities on Tuesday declared a series of works sold as Modernist masterpieces to be fake and charged a little-known Long Island dealer at the center of the scandal with tax fraud. 
Glafira Rosales
Prosecutors charged that the dealer, Glafira Rosales, 56, of Sands Point, N.Y., failed to disclose $12.5 million that she had earned from the sale of the works and had never reported, as required, that she had Spanish bank accounts where she had hidden much of the proceeds. 
“As alleged, Glafira Rosales gave new meaning to the phrase ‘artful dodger’ by avoiding taxes on millions of dollars in income from dealing in fake artworks for fake clients,” Manhattan United States Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement announcing Ms. Rosales’s arrest. 
... But according to the government’s case, an apparently talented forger — or forgers — confounded the art world for years by turning out realistic-looking works said to be by masters including Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. 
... Beginning in the mid-1990s, Ms. Rosales sold most of the disputed works through the East 70th Street offices of Knoedler & Company, which was at the time New York’s oldest gallery. The works, all new to the market and many said to be from a collector based in Zurich and Mexico City whom Ms. Rosales initially refused to name, were embraced by Knoedler, which sold them for millions. They became an important source of revenue for the gallery. 
But then several experts called the works fake, and the F.B.I. began an investigation. In 2011, after 165 years in business, Knoedler closed and was later sued by a half-dozen clients who had bought the Rosales works. ... 
In presenting their charges on Tuesday, the authorities outlined the details of an international scheme they said clearly showed Ms. Rosales’s efforts to profit from counterfeiting. 
In all, they say, she sold about 63 works to two prominent art dealers in New York between 1994 and 2008. ...
One of the civil suits claims that between 1996 and 2008, Knoedler earned about $60 million from works that Ms. Rosales provided on consignment or sold outright to the gallery and cleared $40 million in profits. ...
One of the suits, over the authenticity of a $17 million painting attributed to Jackson Pollock, was settled last year in a confidential agreement....
Ms. Rosales was arrested at her home and was presented in Manhattan federal court, the authorities said. She is being held without bail. 
Mandelbrot Set 'do
“The sale of a piece of art for profit is a taxable event and the seller is responsible for paying his or her fair share of tax, even if the art is counterfeit,” Toni Weirauch, a special agent in charge for the Internal Revenue Service said in a statement.

The success of Ms. Rosales, a Mexican immigrant doing the kind of job that Americans just will do, is more proof that Jason Richwine is wrong.

By the way, Ms. Rosales's Spanish boyfriend, Jose Carlos Bergantiños Diaz, was sued by painting buyers in the past, over a purported Basquiat painting, which is a good excuse for once again trotting out John Derbyshire's joke about Basquiat's hairstyle.

The portrait of Ms. Rosales above is attributed to Yelena Tylkina from Belarus, seen here in a self-portrait. There's no evidence that Ms. Tylkina is the mysterious forger, but that won't stop me from bandying her name about.

The "Jackson Pollock" shown above was bought from Knoedler for $17 million by Belgian hedge fund guy Pierre Lagrange, who made much of his money investing in Avatar. M. Lagrange had the Pollock appraised for his upcoming divorce settlement from his wife who bore him three children, which is expected to break the late Boris Beresovsky's English record for largest payout. Mr. Lagrange currently resides with Somali-born fashion designer Roubi L' Roubi.
Roubi L' Roubi and Pierre Lagrange:
Roubi is wondering: "How soon until
Gay Divorce is legal?"

It turned out that two of the paints in the "Pollock" hadn't gone through the formality of being invented before the painter's 1956 car crash death. Ms. Rosales never bothered to provide any documentation of the provenance of the 63 paintings she sold. You might think that the forger of the paintings would have gotten around to forging the accompanying paperwork, but that just goes to show you aren't the kind of high-level financial genius like all the people in this posting.

The War in Italy

At Taki's Magazine, my new column continues my intermittent series on the roots of postwar America. 
... For example, the fight against the Japanese furnished California with a national epic. After the war, the Golden State filled up with ex-servicemen who had passed through California in 1942-1945 and vowed that if they made it back alive, they were going to raise a family in the sunshine. They brought back from Hawaii not just a comic penchant for Tiki torches, but, more lastingly, for board-riding—first surfing and then skateboarding, laying the foundation for X Games culture. 
If the War in the Pacific gave Americans more of a yen for the sun, the now largely forgotten War in Italy (1943-45) set off a craze for all things Italian—such as dining, movies, and singing—that improved postwar American nightlife.

Read the whole thing there

Charlotte Allen at the White Privilege Conference

I'm on the mailing list for the annual White Privilege Conference, so I'm always on the verge of getting around to writing about it at length. But I didn't want to make a big deal out of it if it weren't a big deal, and doing the research to determine whether it's a big deal or not sounded depressing.

Charlotte Allen, in contrast, actually attended this year's WPC at the hilariously sprawling Sea-Tac DoubleTree by Hilton hotel, and here's some of her report in the Weekly Standard, "Beyond the Pale:"
Dr. Eddie Moore Jr.
WPC drew only 175 attendees at its first session in 1999, on the campus of Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, where the conference’s founder, Eddie Moore Jr., had earned a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1989 and was serving as an assistant dean while working on a doctorate in education from the University of Iowa (he received it in 2004). Moore is now director of diversity at the Brooklyn Friends School. A larger-than-life character (he’s at least six-foot-eight and a former college basketball player), Moore physically and psychically dominated the conference. The typical garb for WPC14 attendees ranged from hippie (old folks) to hipster (young ’uns), with common elements of rubber soles on every shoe and green-conscious water bottles dangling from every backpack. The shaven-headed Moore sartorially carved out for himself an impressive hieratic distance from his disheveled audience: meticulously tailored suits complemented with silk shirts, silk ties, and even socks in shimmering springtime colors. A gold elastic-band watch that looked like a Rolex gleamed on his wrist.
Quaker delegation to WPC
Back in 1999 the main focus of the White Privilege Conference had been on race. Recently, though, the categories of victims of white supremacy have grown to include such overwhelmingly white groups as feminists and the “LGBT community”​—​or “LGBTQ community,” “LGBTQQ community,” and “LGBTQQIA community”​—​all acronyms used by White Privilege participants at various times (the two “Q’s” stand for “queer” and “questioning,” the “I” for “intersex,” and the “A” for a conventionally heterosexual “ally” of all of the above). ...
Dr. Eddie Moore Jr.
By this year at SeaTac, the number of White Privilege attendees had swollen to 2,000, a substantial increase over the 1,500 or so at WPC13 last year in Albuquerque, where the theme was “Intersectionality”​—​WPC-speak for two-fer oppression, as in the case of a black female or a gay Latino. 
The bulging crowds at the SeaTac DoubleTree were a fire chief’s acid-reflux nightmare. By row-counting I calculated 1,500 chairs​—​all taken​—​in a ballroom whose wall proclaimed “Maximum Occupancy 505.” The smaller conference rooms that housed some 120 different workshops (a sample: “Talking Back to White Entitlement,” “Follow the White Supremacist Money,” “Engaging White People in the Fight for Racial & Economic Justice”) were typically as packed as mosh pits. ...
Dr. Eddie Moore Jr.
Who were those 2,000 people lounging on the lobby floor as they ate their WPC-supplied vegan-option box lunches or lined up to buy corporate lattes at the in-house Starbucks station? From my conversations with some of them, it seemed that they had one thing in common: Someone else, or something else, usually a public entity or a university or a nonprofit or a church, had paid their way (up to $435 in registration fees alone) for the four days and nights at the Seattle airport. The top representative professions at the conference were: college professor, student, campus diversity officer, and employee of an activist organization whose title typically included the words “equity,” “social justice,” or both.  
Not Dr. Eddie Moore Jr.
(possibly Ferris Bueller,
Diversity Consultant)
Indeed, one way to look at the conference was as a networking event for a diversity industry that is larger and more elaborate and competitive than one can imagine. The conference program bulged with ads for other White Privilege-style conferences (a Pedagogy of Privilege conference this coming August at the University of Denver, for example) and white-privilege reading material (sample book titles: Deconstructing Privilege; Cultivating Social Justice Teachers; White Women Getting Real About Race). It seemed that nearly everyone in attendance, including many of the college professors, was flogging a book or had a side gig as a “consultant”​—​that is, someone you might want to hire for your own campus or workplace exploration of the ins and outs of white oppression. Eddie Moore himself, when he is not at Brooklyn Friends, runs America & MOORE LLC, and his business card advertises “Diversity Education, Research & Consulting.”

Robert Downey Jr.: Short superstar shattering stereotypes

Robert Downey Jr. is currently the biggest box office star in the world, but he's definitely not the tallest. The good obsessives at CelebHeights peg him at 5'8". That sounds about right. Back when Downey was out of prison and out of work about a dozen years ago, I used to see him at our sons' baseball and soccer games at the local park, and he's not tall at all.* 

These days, Hollywood casts short leading men with leading ladies who are taller than them (e.g., Gwyneth Paltrow with Downey, Nicole Kidman with Tom Cruise).

In general, leading men are not as disproportionately tall as during Golden Age Hollywood (John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper, and Cary Grant were all close to a half foot taller than the average American man of their time). Overall, I'd say that the decline in bias in Hollywood toward tall role models is a good thing. 

Height used to be a pretty good marker of having enjoyed good nurture (e.g, had plenty to eat as a child). The Tory cabinet of prime minister Lord Salisbury in 1895 averaged six feet at a time when that was about a half foot taller than the average British man. From a female husband-hunting perspective, evidence that a man's family provided well for him when he was a child is evidence of a lot of good things. There's no downside to growing up so that you attain close to your genetic maximum of height.

Over time though, the systematic nutritional and health deficits that prevent a youth from a lower class background of attaining the full height of which his genes are capable have diminished. The NBA is full of guys who grew up on welfare. (Although in Downey's case, the kind of heavy drug use from very early age might have knocked an inch off his height.)

So, height is increasingly a measure less of nurture and more of nature. And, as somebody who is 6'4", the genetic advantages and disadvantages of being unusually tall seem like a mixed bag. If people weren't somewhat subjectively biased in favor of tall men like myself, I'd probably say the objective tradeoffs (clumsiness, head-banging, etc.) aren't really worth it. The human body isn't optimized for my height.

So, the continuing prejudice in favor of the tall seems increasingly pointless because it's now mostly a nature difference masquerading as a nurture difference, and there's no terribly good reason to want genes for additional height to be favored. Thus, the fact that Hollywood role models currently come in all heights seems, on the whole, like a good thing.

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* By the way, don't get the impression from this that Downey is some kind of regular guy. I said hello to him and he said hello back, very friendly, but the Charisma Gap was astounding. In a social setting that was blase about minor levels of celebrity -- e.g., the baseball team mom was an Emmy-nominated character actress -- Downey, in disgrace, was the cynosure of all eyes of team parents. Just lounging on the grass watching his kid take infield practice, he's magnetic.

You know those scenes in Iron Man where Tony Stark wakes up from a horrible dream? I suspect Downey's Method Acting technique for this is to tell himself: "Just imagine I had a nightmare that I had to move back to the Valley!"

Raj Rajaratnam: #236 on the Forbes 400

From the New York Times:
It was around this time, coincidentally, that Gupta started getting closer to Raj Rajaratnam. The son of a Singer Sewing Company executive, Rajaratnam, who is 55, did not have much in common with the “twice blessed” generation. He attended the same English boarding school as P. G. Wodehouse. At Wharton, he struck some students as rich and loudmouthed. But he inspired a group of loyal followers who, in 1997, after he had spent nearly 15 years on Wall Street, helped him cobble together about $350 million and set up shop in a cramped office on Lexington Avenue and 57th Street. Rajaratnam, whose most attractive feature was a wide, gaptoothed smile, seemed to relish his reputation as a player. In 1999, he invited about 300 clients and brokers to a blowout Christmas party headlined by Donna Summer. But he backed up the publicity stunts with phenomenal returns. That year, one of Galleon’s funds soared 93.2 percent. By 2001, investing in technology stocks like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, he had built Galleon into a $5 billion behemoth. 
All hedge-fund managers strive for an edge — an extra something that will help their funds beat the market average. For years, Rajaratnam had been dogged by the rumors that he owed his edge to insights from a circle of corporate insiders who were paid to divulge proprietary information. Indeed, Rajaratnam had assembled a stable of carefully curated industry moles. His favorite targets were South Asians like himself. Despite the stereotype of South Asians as hardworking grinds who eschew the sharp-elbowed politicking of their American peers, Rajaratnam knew they could be every bit as competitive as anyone else on Wall Street. Many Indians in finance had worked since grade school to gain entrance into the cutthroat I.I.T. system — which was far harder to penetrate than Harvard — before even landing in America. 
Even though he was from Sri Lanka, Rajaratnam made big gifts to Indian causes, and was a regular at exclusive Indian galas. He made his Indian informants feel so comfortable that they often sprinkled Hindi words like accha, or “O.K.,” into conversation. In India, where he would have been treated as an outsider, Rajaratnam’s approach would probably have fallen flat. But in the United States, such differences matter less. Rajaratnam made himself seem like one of them. “Raj sort of had a South Asian mafia,” recalled Gerald Fleming, a colleague from his pre-Galleon days. There were people he could call and “get, for a few companies, earnings to a penny.” Fleming recalled once sitting in Rajaratnam’s office when he logged a call to Advanced Micro Devices. After some time, Rajaratnam’s secretary came in and said that someone with an Indian-sounding name had returned the call. Rajaratnam picked up the phone, walked onto the trading floor and announced the profit figure. “And he was right,” Fleming said. 
Rajaratnam was also an expert at preying on his sources’ weaknesses. His first major target was an Intel marketing executive named Roomy Khan. He caught her attention by mentioning that his wife, Asha, was a Punjabi Indian, like her. Then he reeled her in by promising a well-paying job at Galleon in return for early readings of revenue indicators at Intel and, later, tips about acquisitions, like the Blackstone Group’s bid to buy Hilton Hotels. (She found out about the latter from a South Asian Moody’s analyst, a roommate of her cousin’s.) Rajaratnam also persuaded his old Wharton School classmate Rajiv Goel, a perennially frustrated executive at Intel’s treasury department, to feed him information in exchange for introductions to his high-powered friends. Rajaratnam’s most prized recruit, however, was Anil Kumar, a former classmate from Wharton and a graduate of the I.I.T. system who worked as a technology consultant at McKinsey. 
Kumar’s prickly manner had led to several career setbacks, including being passed over for the job of managing McKinsey’s India office. Rajaratnam shrewdly capitalized on his frustrations. When Kumar returned from India to McKinsey’s Silicon Valley office, Rajaratnam flattered him, asking lofty questions that the consultant readily answered. “I have all the brains, and you have all the billions,” Kumar was overheard saying to Rajaratnam. Feigning humility, Rajaratnam laughed right back. Then, one evening in the fall of 2003, as the two men were leaving a charity dinner in Manhattan, Rajaratnam pulled Kumar aside and offered him $500,000 a year to consult for Galleon. “You have such good knowledge that it is worth a lot of money,” he told him. Kumar, feeling underappreciated by his bosses at McKinsey, soon accepted. Then they found a way to pay him without ever tipping off McKinsey. Rajaratnam was now one step closer to the ultimate source of information — Kumar’s mentor, Rajat Gupta. 
As he had with his other informants, Rajaratnam began the seduction of Gupta by playing on ethnic ties and indulging his new friend during a rare career lull.

The CEO of Advanced Micro Devices was Hector Ruiz, a rarity in Silicon Valley because he's Mexican-American. Ruiz's name came up in amusing circumstances during Rajaratnam's trial.

Ray Manzarek, RIP

The keyboard player of The Doors has died of cancer at 74. I saw him perform in January 1981 as the producer / fifth member of X. I can recall thinking during Manzarek's organ solo in X's walk-off song "The World's a Mess (It's in My Kiss), "You know, for an old guy, he's really good."

May 20, 2013

Proof Jason Richwine is wrong!

From Slate:
The Children of Pahiatua 
They were orphaned, lost, and alone. Yet a generation of World War II Polish child refugees found a new life and happiness in distant New Zealand. 
By Anne Applebaum|Posted Friday, May 17, 2013, at 5:49 PM 
... But in another sense there was a happy ending—one that we might usefully contemplate. In recent years, the gap in educational attainments of rich and poor Americans has grown wider, largely because of the enormous resources many of us pour into our children. Success, we have come to believe, depends on excellent schools, carefully organized leisure and, above all, on high-concentration, high-focus parenting. 
The orphans of Pahiatua did not have any of these things. On the contrary, they had witnessed the deaths of parents and siblings, experienced terrible deprivation, and lost years of education before finding themselves in an alien country on the far side of the world. And yet they learned the language, they assimilated, they became doctors, lawyers, farmers, factory workers, teachers, and businessmen. Krystyna Tomaszyk—a Pahiatua child who became a pioneering social worker—told me over lunch that she was proud of their success. "We all had difficult childhoods. But none of us became criminals or vagabonds. We fit in." 
There were reasons for that success. New Zealand boomed after the war: Logging and mining expanded, and work was easy to find. The Polish children had an unusually warm reception here at an unusual moment: Knowing where they had come from, people went out of their way to be kind. 
But more than 70 years later, the now-elderly children of Pahiatua have an additional explanation. Zdzislaw Lepionka now believes that "the fact that we weree kept together, that we sang Polish songs and did scouting drills together— that was a kind of therapy."

May 19, 2013

Really?

From the New York Times:
Obama Urges Black Graduates to Set ExamplePresident Obama delived the commencement speech at Morehouse College in Atlanta.By MARK LANDLER 7:46 PM ETThe president told Morehouse graduates that “laws, hearts and minds have been changed to the point where someone who looks like you can serve as president.”

Ya think?