More Uplift from the Press: Navy SEAL "Warrior Princess"

ABC News celebrates:

Transgender Navy SEAL 'Warrior Princess' Comes Out

A former member of the elite U.S. Navy SEALs has come out to say she's now a woman.  

She had a Y-chromosome-ectomy that replaced the Y-chromosomes in all the trillions of cells in her body with another X chromosome, so now she's a woman.

Oh, wait, that operation doesn't exist.

Sorry, my mistake.

Kristin Beck, formerly Chris, served 20 years as a SEAL and fought on some of the most dangerous battlefields in the world, but after she left the service she realized she wasn't living the life she wanted. 

"Chris really wanted to be a girl and felt that she was a girl and consolidated that identity very early on in childhood," said Anne Speckhard, co-author of Beck's biography "Warrior Princess," which was published over the weekend. 

Speckhard told ABC News Beck suppressed that secret for decades, however, through the trials of SEAL training and the harrowing missions that followed, growing a burly beard as she fought on the front lines of American special operations. 

... Speckhard said Beck first announced her decision to friends online with the declaration "No more disguises" and the book describes her going out to gay bars in Florida as a woman.

What kind of gay bars? Male or female?

Sounds like Speckhard might be one of the plagues of lesbian life: heterosexual men who put on dresses and hit upon lesbians.

There's a long history of lesbian feminists trying to exclude anybody born male from their events. For example, the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival has a policy of denying entry to anybody not "womyn-born womyn" -- i.e., no Navy SEALs in dresses. Olivia Records had a similar imbroglio.

I used to make fun of lesbian feminists for this. But I'm starting to feel sympathetic toward poor lesbians who just want to sit in the dirt and listen to dull folk songs without having to fend off a retired Navy SEAL in stripper heels.

Beck is currently on hormone therapy in preparation for sexual reassignment surgery and generally wears long hair, make-up and women's clothes, Speckhard said. 

In the book's Preface, Beck said she wrote the book "to reach out to all of the younger generation and encourage you to live your life fully and to treat each other with compassion, be good to each other, especially in your own backyard (where it be high school or your community)."

In similar news, economist Donald/Deirdre McCloskey, who played football at Harvard and has two children and an ex-wife, has published a memoir, Crossing, about getting amputations. 

Many years ago I read travel writer James/Jan Morris's memoir Conundrum. Morris is a delightful writer, but the I-always-felt-like-a-girl-on-the-inside-even-while-fathering-my-five-children party line sounded fishy to me even at the time.

There's an alternate theory, but Professor McCloskey doesn't want you to hear about it.

Thus, Professor McCloskey was a leader, along with two other high IQ transsexuals, Dr. Conway and Dr. Roughgarden, in the lengthy persecution of Northwestern psychology professor J. Michael Bailey for publicizing an alternative theory of the motivations of transexuals that undermined the party line that "I always felt like a girl on the inside."

The New York Times offered an insightful analysis of the conduct of McCloskey et al in this 2007 article by reporter Benedict Carey.

Bailey's crime was recounting the theory developed by sex scientist Ray Blanchard that most male to female transexuals fall into two categories: 

- Extremely effeminate homosexual men whose lack of masculinity puts them at a disadvantage in the gay dating market (where butchness is prized), and who therefore resolve to land a real (i.e., heterosexual) man by getting an operation to make them even more feminine.

- More masculine / more heterosexual men who have a bizarre sexual fetish in which the objects of their erotic obsessions are a feminized vision of themselves.

Neither explanation fits in well with today's dominant Victim of Society mode of thinking, so they must be suppressed. The supreme duty of 21st Century Americans is to be ignorant.

Elderly Tourette's Syndrome claims another old white guy's job

From the Washington Post:

Ohio State president to retire after disclosure of remarks offensive to Roman Catholics 

Ohio State University President E. Gordon Gee, one of the nation’s highest-paid university leaders, announced his retirement Tuesday after the disclosure of disparaging comments he made in December about Roman Catholics, the University of Notre Dame and other institutions. 

Caption: E. Gordon Gee will step down after being quoted as saying, “You just can’t trust those damn Catholics.”

That's taken out of context and is highly misleading: Gee was explicitly referring to administrators of the U. of Notre Dame, such as late ND executive vice president Father Ned Joyce, and their actions regarding big money sports contracts.

Gee came under fire recently after the Associated Press published remarks he made in a Dec. 5 meeting of the Ohio State athletic council. The AP had obtained a recording of the meeting through a public records request. 

In the meeting, Gee said Notre Dame was not invited to join the Big Ten athletic conference because of difficulties he encountered in dealing with Catholic priests who led the university. 

“The fathers are holy on Sunday, and they’re holy hell the rest of the week,” the AP quoted Gee as saying at the meeting. He continued: “You just can’t trust those damn Catholics on a Thursday or a Friday, and so, literally, I can say that.” 

Gee later apologized, calling the remarks inappropriate and “a poor attempt at humor.” 

Gee’s remarks to the athletic council also were viewed as dismissive of the academic record of schools in the Southeastern Conference. According to the AP, when asked about SEC fans who say the Big Ten can’t count because it is expanding to 14 members, Gee replied: “You tell the SEC when they can learn to read and write, then they can figure out what we’re doing.” 

In addition, Gee said that the Big Ten would accept only “institutions of like-minded academic integrity.” He added: “So you won’t see us adding Louisville,” a reference to the University of Louisville.

Personally, my reaction to Gee's comments is: "Fascinating, tell me more." Big time college "amateur" sports is a remarkable subject that I've studied for most of my life but still want to know more about how it really works. But appreciation for insiders who open up a little seems to be a dwindling minority opinion. In contemporary America, the media and much of the public have an aversion to people speaking their minds about what they are well-informed upon.

I've mentioned before about how in the 1970s, two dominant baseball teams, the New York Yankees under George Steinbrenner and the Los Angeles Dodgers under the O'Malley family, had opposite media strategies. The Dodgers stuck to the old-fashioned method of not airing dirty laundry. Occasionally, a bit of gossip was so awesome that it leaked out of the Dodgers' buttoned down organization -- such as handsome Steve Garvey and Hall of Famer Don Sutton having a locker room fistfight over Sutton wisecracking about Mrs. Garvey sleeping with Oscar-winning composer Marvin Hamlisch. But mostly, you just heard the usual bromides from the Dodgers (the ones Kevin Costner enumerates for Tim Robbins in Bull Durham). The Dodgers were much derided by the press for this.

In contrast, the 1970s media loved the New York Yankees because owner George Steinbrenner, intermittent manager Billy Martin, superduperstar Reggie Jackson, and various spear-carriers waged their feuds in the newspapers, calling reporters in to denounce each other in detail. At the time, this was widely praised as The Wave of the Future.

But now, the press and public mostly seems to admire smooth marketing efforts and are annoyed by unspun statements.

Why hasn't this guy been executed yet?

In more Invite the World / Invade the World news, from the NYT:

KILLEEN, Tex. — Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people, told a judge on Tuesday that he believed he was defending the lives of the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan from American military personnel when he went on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood here in November 2009. 

You know, the U.S. Army has well-known precedents of how officers are supposed to behave when they find themselves in an extreme conflict of loyalties, such as Robert E. Lee resigning from the Union Army or William Tecumseh Sherman resigning as superintendent of the Louisiana military academy. Lee and Sherman didn't suddenly open fire on random comrades.

Major Hasan’s remarks were the first public explanation about the motive for one of the deadliest mass shootings at an American military base. His comments came a day after the judge granted his request to release his court-appointed military lawyers so that he could represent himself. 

On Monday, one of Major Hasan’s first legal maneuvers had been to ask the judge, Col. Tara A. Osborn, for a three-month delay for the start of his trial, scheduled to begin on July 1. His primary reason in asking for the delay was to change his defense to “a defense of others,” but he had not elaborated on the identity of the “others.” At a new hearing on Tuesday, Colonel Osborn asked him pointedly whom he was defending. 

“The leadership of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the Taliban,” he said, specifically naming Mullah Muhammad Omar, the founder of the Islamic insurgent group. 

His comments, delivered in a soft, matter-of-fact tone, stunned many in the courtroom. Seated in the gallery behind him were Army soldiers, military police officers and relatives of some of his victims. Colonel Osborn then asked him to explain his defense, and Major Hasan asked for a recess to gather his thoughts.
When the hearing resumed a few minutes later, the judge again asked him to explain the facts supporting his defense, and he said he preferred to submit his thoughts in written form. “I don’t want to brainstorm in front of the court,” he told her.

I've always suspected that Hasan, who is a Palestinian, has, at least in part, motives similar to Sirhan Sirhan's for murdering Robert F. Kennedy.

But, the real question is: Why, 42 months later, this guy is still alive?

Cambridge residents wonder why The Diverse tried to slaughter them

Front and center on NYTimes.com right now:

Bombing Link Rattles a ‘Welcoming’ City 

By JESS BIDGOOD 1:55 PM ET 

Residents of Cambridge, Mass., are having a hard time squaring the allegations against the suspects with the city’s diversity.

Much SWPL cluelessness ensues.

Violent crime rate went up in 2012

From the NYT:

Violent Crime in U.S. Rises for First Time Since 2006
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

Violent crime rose in the United States in 2012 for the first time in six years, led by an increase in major crimes in large cities, according to preliminary data released Monday by the F.B.I.

I can't say I really know what's going on, but this isn't good news. My theory was that changes in technology such as camera phones and Facebook make crime less plausible of a career, but maybe that's fading. Or maybe the recession depressed crime, and animal spirits are reasserting themselves. Who knows?

Lots of good theories in the Comments.

The Eight Banditos and Obamacare

Mickey Kaus points to veteran liberal analyst John Judis's article in The New Republic on the Eight Banditos' bill:

Just look at the tortuous way the bill deals with immigrants’ access to the Affordable Care Act. The bill denies health insurance coverage to the eleven million undocumented workers, who will become “registered provisional immigrants” (RPIs), and to over 100,000 guest agricultural workers (who will get “blue cards” rather than “green cards”). Only after immigrants become permanent residents, which in the case of the eleven million undocumented will take a minimum of ten years and as long as 15 years, will they become eligible for Obamacare. ...

But it’s also bad economics. It creates an incentive for employers to hire the new immigrants over citizens or green-card holders and to provide neither with health insurance. Under the Affordable Care Act, employers with fewer than 50 workers do not have to buy health insurance for their employees, but businesses with 50 or more workers—which employ about three-quarters of American workers—either have to provide insurance or pay a fine for those workers who buy insurance through the exchanges the act creates. The fine is ordinarily $2,000 but can run as high as $3,000. 

Businesses with 50 or more employees that choose to pay a fine rather than provide insurance will not have to pay fines for the RPIs or blue-card holders because they are not eligible for the exchanges. So employers will be able to save from $2,000 to $3,000 a year by hiring a new immigrant over an American citizen. For salaries that hover between $15,000 and $25,000, as they do in many immigrant-heavy industries, that’s no small savings. Even an advocate for low-income immigrants sees the language as a potential problem: “We don’t want them to hire immigrants over citizens because of that loophole,” says Sonal Ambegaokar, who analyzes health policy for the National Immigration Law Center. “We want a level playing field.”

As Milton Friedman pointed out, welfare and immigration don't really play nice together, do they? Back in 2001, the Danes picked the former over the latter, but then what do the Danes know about running a successful society?

Did Senator Schumer really get a perfect 1600 SAT score?

SAT prep guru Stanley H. Kaplan,
Schumer's teacher, boss, and mentor

Chuck Schumer (D-NY) of the Gang of Eight is almost universally said to have gotten a perfect 1600 on his SAT score in the mid-1960s. Yet, single-sitting 1600s were vanishingly rare before SAT scoring was made easier in 1995: annually, perhaps single digit or very low double digit numbers of students in the entire country.

Schumer seems like a very, very smart guy, but what were the odds he was really Top Ten in the USA smart? 

The only voice I can find online that says that maybe Schumer didn't score 1600 is the late test prep entrepreneur Stanley H. Kaplan, who wrote in his autobiography:

"Charles Schumer, now the senior U.S. senator from New York, worked in my printing office while he was in high school. I should have known then that he would aspire to high office because he would read the materials as they came off the copy machine to check to see whether I had made any mistakes. He studied while he worked. His SAT score was close to a perfect 1600."

So, Kaplan says Schumer scored "close to a perfect 1600," which sounds more likely.

The Kaplan businesses keep the Washington Post afloat these days, so we're supposed to treat Kaplan's big breakthrough as a great thing, but test prep is pretty much of a negative sum game. We'd be better off if test prep had never been invented.

Also, didn't Kaplan start out as kind of a scam where he had high school students who worked for him write down immediately after the test all the questions they could remember, and thus Kaplan overwhelmed the Educational Testing Service, which was unprepared at the time to vary questions often enough for Kaplan-groomed test-takers? (It's much the same system of cheating in essence as the one that South Koreans have perfected recently.)

Malcolm Gladwell wrote in the New Yorker in 2001:

So Kaplan would have “Thank Goodness It’s Over” pizza parties after each S.A.T. As his students talked about the questions they had faced, he and his staff would listen and take notes, trying to get a sense of how better to structure their coaching.

That seems more than a little bit of naive way to phrase this activity. Kaplan and his employees were writing down the questions. You know what's a better way to structure their coaching? Tell students what a lot of the questions and answers are going to be.

“Every night I stayed up past midnight writing new questions and study materials,” he writes. “I spent hours trying to understand the design of the test, trying to think like the test makers, anticipating the types of questions my students would face.” His notes were typed up the next day, cranked out on a Gestetner machine, hung to dry in the office, then snatched off the line and given to waiting students.

Hey, Schumer was a high school student who worked for Kaplan! In fact, he ran the Gestetner duplicating machine.

From a 2007 New York Observer summary of a not-on-line New Yorker article by Jeffrey Toobin about Chuck Schumer:

In high school, he helped a teacher of his, Stanley Kaplan, get his test-prep business off the ground.

From NPR:

Senator CHUCK SCHUMER (Democrat, New York): Stanley believed that these tests could overcome all the other barriers that, you know, America was ultimately the Ameritocracy. And even if your last name was different and you went to a large, you know, 5,000-person Brooklyn public school, if you could do well on these tests, you could get somewhere. 

SMITH: For Senator Schumer it was a very, very good score and admission to Harvard. 

From the WSJ:

"It was a mom-and-pop operation in those days," said Sen. Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat, who worked for Mr. Kaplan for three years while in high school. The future politician operated a mimeograph machine in a small office in a former dentist's suite in Brooklyn. "It was my first job," Mr. Schumer said. "I would go get him dinner at the cafeteria." ... 

"He was regarded as a rebel trying to bring down the whole system," Mr. Schumer said. "It was almost religion that you couldn't study for the aptitude test; that it was like an IQ test. Kaplan believed differently, and he proved them wrong."

From an article in The Forward on Stanley H. Kaplan's funeral:

Across from us sat Schumer, who later confided: “At 14, I worked for Stanley, running a mimeograph machine…. My nickname was ‘Four 800s’ [for acing SAT tests], but don’t quote me!”

"Four 800s"?

From the Washington Post:

He scored "four 800s" on his SAT, he says, including two achievement tests.

So, Schumer is on the record claiming 800s. But does that imply a single-sitting 1600? What we don't know is how many times he took these tests. As Kaplan's protege, Schumer may have taken several tests so he could so he could write down test questions immediately afterwards.

From Schumer's recent book:

"After Madison, I got into Harvard (in part because of those endless hours spent staring at SAT prep material spinning around the mimeo drum)."

The ETS didn't change questions all that often back then. Before Kaplan, gaming the SAT was considered unsporting. As Schumer has explained, he read the SAT questions over and over running Kaplan's mimeo machine. So, he had a huge advantage over other high school students in that more trusting, less cynical, more honor-bound America that Stanley H. Kaplan helped undermine.

Okay, that might explain a lot. You know, sometimes it almost seems as if the world isn't quite as random as we're supposed to believe it is.

In summary, Chuck Schumer may or may not be one of the few hundred smartest people in America as his "Four 800s" self-proclaimed nickname would imply.

But, even more tellingly, he spent the formative years from age 14 to 17 working for Stanley H. Kaplan, the man who built a big business by out-conniving the College Board and the Educational Testing Service.

Graham, McCain, and Rubio ponder how high immigration
will turn out to be under their new bill.

Do you really think Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, and 76-year-old John McCain are going to out-connive Schumer?

The devil is in the details of a bill that is now over 1,000 pages long. Who do you think has mastered more of the details: Stanley H. Kaplan's prodigious protege or the GOP's Three Amigos?

Kaplan and Schumer in the mid-1960s were attacking a testing system that assumed that people wouldn't be so unsporting as to try to methodically exploit its weaknesses. Schumer's stated view (see this video) is that he's not all that innately brilliant, he just had a huge advantage in being one of the first in the country to fully exploit Kaplan's system. This was before ETS erected a lot of defenses around their tests due to Kaplan-style prepping.

The question of whether Schumer would have scored "four 800s" without these advantages is less important than the realization that Schumer has just under a half century of experience (going back to when he started working for Kaplan around 1964) of the huge payoffs from methodically exploiting complex but naively constructed systems, such as college admission testing or immigration legislation. This should come as a wake-up call to Republicans who think they can rely on the Republican members of the Eight Banditios to defend GOP interests from Senator Schumer.

Disparate Impact Watch: Dope Dealing Division

We're supposed to be living in the age of Big Data, but data just seems to make us dumberer:

Blacks Are Singled Out for Marijuana Arrests, Federal Data Suggests 

By IAN URBINA 

WASHINGTON — Black Americans were nearly four times as likely than whites to be arrested on charges of marijuana possession in 2010, even though the two groups used the drug at similar rates, according to new federal data. 

This disparity had grown steadily from a decade before, and in some states, including Iowa, Minnesota and Illinois, blacks were around eight times as likely to be arrested.

The four that are off in a class by themselves for biggest black to white marijuana arrest ratio are Wisconsin, Illinois, D.C., and Iowa. What kind of racist Red State conspiracy is this?

The new data, however, offers a more nuanced picture of marijuana enforcement on the state level. Drawn from police records from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, the report is the most comprehensive review of marijuana arrests by race and by county and is part of a report being released this week by the American Civil Liberties Union. Much of the data was also independently reviewed for The New York Times by researchers at Stanford University.

And, apparently, none of these savants figured out how it works.

“We found that in virtually every county in the country, police have wasted taxpayer money enforcing marijuana laws in a racially biased manner,” said Ezekiel Edwards, the director of the A.C.L.U.’s Criminal Law Reform Project and the lead author of the report.

"Virtually every" one of the 3007 counties in America are "racially biased." That just proves how deep-rooted this racism is. Think of all the meetings it must take to organize a conspiracy in 3000 different counties!

... Researchers said the growing racial disparities in marijuana arrests were especially striking because they were so consistent even across counties with large or small minority populations.

This conspiracy goes all the way to the top! (Or bottom. It's hard to say.)

The A.C.L.U. report said that one possible reason that the racial disparity in arrests remained despite shifting state policies toward the drug is that police practices are slow to change. Federal programs like the Edward Byrne Justice Assistance Grant Program continue to provide incentives for racial profiling, the report said, by including arrest numbers in its performance measures when distributing hundreds of millions of dollars to local law enforcement each year. 

Phillip Atiba Goff, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that police departments, partly driven by a desire to increase their drug arrest statistics, can concentrate on minority or poorer neighborhoods to meet numerical goals, focusing on low-level offenses that are easier, quicker and cheaper than investigating serious felony crimes.

As we all know from watching Law & Order, serious felony crimes are concentrated on Park Avenue.

“Whenever federal funding agencies encourage law enforcement to meet numerical arrest goals instead of public safety goals, it will likely promote stereotype-based policing and we can expect these sorts of racial gaps,” Professor Goff said.

Okay, let's point out two obvious aspects that this article is completely oblivious to:

Whether or not blacks are more likely to be drug consumers (the notion of racial equality in consumption is based on surveys that ask people if they break the law), blacks are more likely, on average, to be drug dealers. And you are more likely to get arrested for drug possession if you are a dealer than a user.

That's why states with particularly law-abiding whites (such as the upper midwest and the District of Columbia) have the highest black to white arrest and imprisonment ratios.

Second, arresting somebody for marijuana possession is a way for cops to get people they don't like off the street for a few hours. Fo example, a woman calls 911 to say her boyfriend punched her. The cops show up and she has a black eye, but claims she hit her face on the doorknob. The boyfriend, who is obviously a chronic user, looks like he might hit her again as soon as the cops leave, but she swears she was never hit in the first place. So, the cops pat him down, find his hash pipe and haul him off downtown to cool his heels. 

You can generalize this to the whole No Snitching black drug-dealer culture of the inner cities. Gangstas can intimidate eyewitnesses in their neighborhoods, but they have a hard time intimidating forensic chemists. So, drug possession arrests become a proxy for "serious felony crimes."

None of this should be new to the NYT. But it is. 

Way back in a 2001 UPI article, "Imprisonment Rates Vary Wildly by Race," I crunched the numbers from a report on overall imprisonment rates in 1997 provided by a liberal thinktank and found similar patterns:

For instance, the racial gap in the highly liberal, black-dominated District of Columbia was found to be off the charts. In D.C., a black person is 56 times more likely than a white person to be in prison. The next-largest racial disparities were found in liberal mainstays Minnesota (a 31-times higher rate of blacks being in prison) and Wisconsin (22 times higher), followed by New Jersey, Iowa, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Illinois. All of these states voted for Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore in 2000. ...

The smallest difference in the black-to-white imprisonment rate was found in liberal Hawaii (only 2.9 to 1). This may have something to do with many members of Hawaii's small African-American community being active or retired members of the U.S. armed forces. 

After Hawaii, though, the next 10 states closest to black-white racial equality in imprisonment rates were all Southern or Western states that voted for George W. Bush. For example, highly conservative Mississippi and South Carolina each imprisoned blacks only six times more often than whites per person, compared to the national average of nine times more often. 

Eighteen of the 20 states with the least disparity between blacks and whites voted for Bush in 2000. These below-average racial ratios are driven in part by the tendency of whites in Republican states to get themselves thrown in prison more often than whites in Democratic states. The highest white imprisonment rates tend to be in old frontier states of the Wild West. 

The most often locked up whites are in Alaska, followed by Oklahoma, Nevada, Arizona and Texas.

The world is full of interesting patterns, but contemporary elites push stupidity.

Lots of good additional explanations in the comments.

Minority population increases by one

From Fox News in Austin, TX:

George P. Bush, wife have baby boy 

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - Texas land commissioner candidate George P. Bush has become a father. 

Spokesman Trey Newton said Bush and his wife Amanda had their first child, a boy named Prescott Walker Bush, Monday afternoon. 

Bush is son of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and grandson of former President George H.W. Bush. Another former president, George W. Bush, is his uncle. 

Newtown said the baby is a third generation Texan and joked that "George P. looks forward to his son carrying on his tradition of playing baseball for the Rice Owls." 

A Spanish-speaking attorney and consultant based in Fort Worth, Bush is considered a rising star among conservative Hispanics.

So, in 18 years, Prescott Walker Bush can check the "Hispanic" box on his Rice application.

Schumer v. Rubio: Which one looks smarter?

Trust me on immigration, guys -- no way
could Mr. Schumer put one over on me.
Do l look like some kind of doof?

Would I mislead you, Marco?

One way to get a sense of the likely political effects of the Gang of Eight's immigration bill is to think of it as a contest of brainpower between Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL). In the long run, either the Democrat is going to have proved to have outsmarted the Republican or vice-versa. Which one would you bet on, Schumer or Rubio?

Commenter Zoink looks up the biographical evidence about the two main men of the immigration bill. From Wikipedia:

"Schumer attended public schools in Brooklyn, scoring 1600 on the SAT, and graduated as the valedictorian from James Madison High School in 1967. 

"Schumer competed for Madison High on the It's Academic television quiz show. 

"He attended Harvard College ... After completing his undergraduate degree, he continued to Harvard Law School, earning his Juris Doctor with honors in 1974." 

Before recentering [SAT scores in 1995], only around 5-7 people a year got 1600 on the SAT each year. [In 1985-86, for example, nine students in the whole country got a 1600]. If Schumer isn't lying about this, he is certainly one of the 1000 or so smartest men in the USA.

Schumer has a career won-loss record in general elections of 15-0. Add in primaries, and he's 30-0 lifetime. He represents Wall Street's interests while also claiming to represent the middle class: that's not easy but his customers appear satisfied with his high-wire balancing act.

"Rubio attended South Miami Senior High School and graduated in 1989. He then attended Tarkio College for one year on a football scholarship from 1989 to 1990, before enrolling at Santa Fe Community College ... He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Florida in 1993, and his J.D. degree cum laude from the University of Miami School of Law in 1996." 

Rubio did not graduate from Tarkio College because it was shut down by the federal government for acting as a "front" to scam the student loan system: 

New York Times,
A College Acts in Desperation And Dies Playing the Lender
April 17, 1991

"Auditors found that the college was so desperate to increase enrollment and stay alive that it had dealt out loans and grants to ineligible students until it owed the Federal Government more than $22 million.  

'Acting as a Front' 

"In a scheme more often connected with beauty academies than accredited institutions of higher education, Tarkio set up illegitimate off-campus programs and signed up thousands of unprepared students, many of them whisked right off city streets. Most of these students dropped out and never repaid their loans, leaving Tarkio at one point with the highest loan default rate in the nation. 

"'Basically what you had was a small college acting as a front,' said Kent Kraus, Dean of Institutional Advancement at Tarkio."

In conclusion, Schumer attended the most competitive college in the USA and 2nd most competitive law school and plausibly claims to have a 99.999 percentile IQ, while Rubio attended what by one measure was the single worst 4-year colleges in the USA: 

"In 1986 Tarkio's loan default rate was 79 percent, the highest in the nation for four-year colleges. The average default rate is about 6 percent."

Hispanic turnout in 2012 was overstated by 19%

From my new column in VDARE.com:

Ever since last November’s election, we’ve been hearing that Hispanics comprised a record 10 percent of the vote—which therefore obliges Republican Congressmen to pass “comprehensive immigration reform” right now. 

For example: 

National exit polls showed that 10 percent of the electorate was Hispanic, compared with 9 percent in 2008 and 8 percent in 2004. … A growing perception of hostility toward illegal immigrants by Republican candidates is driving many Latinos to the polls.

[Growing share of Hispanic voters helped push Obama to victory, By Donna St. George and Brady Dennis, Washington Post, November 7, 2012]  

But what if these nice, round turnout numbers provided by the Edison exit poll company weren’t true? What if the “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” clamor is based on exit poll error? ...

It turns out that the official federal government estimate of the Latino share of 2012 voters isn’t 10 percent—but merely 8.4 percent:

So the standard story you’ve been hearing in the MSM for almost seven months is indeed inflated by 19 percent.

Read the whole thing there.

Djoe Unchained: VP Biden apparently a "Larry Sanders" fan

The "D" is silent; I'm not.

Garry Shandling's 1990s HBO sitcom The Larry Sanders Show about a neurotic late night talk show host and his staff who keep him semi-functional offered this insight into contemporary cultural power, as summarized in a 1998 Los Angeles Times article: 

[Producer] Artie chews out [writer] Phil after his repeated homophobic jokes prompt a gay assistant (Scott Thompson) to hit the show with a sexual harassment lawsuit. “You know who runs this town?” Artie growls at Phil. 

“The Jews?” Phil says. 

“No,” Artie retorts. “The gay Jews.”

(The LA Times' recollection of Phil's reply that sets up Artie's retort is a little different from mine, which is that Phil replied something like: "The Jews, of course" without a question mark. If there was anything quizzical about how Phil responded, it would have been his implication: "Why are you bothering to ask me a question, Artie, that obviously I know the answer to?")

From Politico:

Biden: 'Jewish heritage is American heritage'

By JENNIFER EPSTEIN | 5/21/13 8:18 PM EDT 

Vice President Joe Biden spoke at length Tuesday night about the influence of Judaism on the United States, dating back to the country's founding and to the present day as Jews helped shape views on gay rights. 

... "No group has had such an outsized influence per capita as all of you standing before you, and all of those who went before me and all of those who went before you.” 

Biden spoke for nearly 20 minutes at the American Institute of Architects building in Washington, at times improvising after asking that the teleprompter machine that had been set up in the event space be taken down.

Djoe Unchained!

... “The embrace of immigration” is part of that, as is the involvement of Jews in social justice movements. 

... “I believe what affects the movements in America, what affects our attitudes in America are as much the culture and the arts as anything else,” he said. That’s why he spoke out on gay marriage “apparently a little ahead of time.” 

“It wasn’t anything we legislatively did. It was ‘Will and Grace,’ it was the social media. Literally. That’s what changed peoples’ attitudes. That’s why I was so certain that the vast majority of people would embrace and rapidly embrace” gay marriage, Biden said. 

“Think behind of all that, I bet you 85 percent of those changes, whether it’s in Hollywood or social media are a consequence of Jewish leaders in the industry.

(Here's Joel Stein's 2008 column in the Los Angeles Times "How Jewish Is Hollywood?" giving demographic numbers on the ethnicity of studio bosses. And here's Ben Stein's essay on the same subject from 1996. A casual reading of the two Steins' articles would suggest that the top jobs in Hollywood became more monolithically Jewish from 1996 to 2008, but of course the actual trend, whatever it is, should be researched in greater depth by ... by ... uh, by some  careful social scientist who is independently wealthy and who never eats lunch.)

"The influence is immense, the influence is immense.

Fortunately for Joe's post-VP career prospects, he can not only talk himself into trouble, but, since he never shuts up, he can also talk himself out of trouble as well:

"And, I might add, it is all to the good,” he said. 

In other news, former CNN anchor Rick Sanchez now has found a variety of part-time jobs after merely a couple of years or so of unemployment.

“He who controls the schmaltz controls the future. He who controls the present controls the schmaltz.”

From the Washington Post:

Schumer: Immigration overhaul will pass Senate by July 4

Computer Programmers and Teamsters

Coach Iron Mike Ditka
Richard Trumka,
head of AFL-CIO

Here's a recent paper by Tooby and Cosmides et al that strikes me as pretty plausible: muscular men tend to favor governmental policies on redistribution that are in their own self-interest.

My late father-in-law was a classical tuba player, maybe 6'1" and 220 pounds, who was regularly chosen by his weedy violinist colleagues to negotiate union contracts for them. Why? Because he looked like (and was) a hard man for Management to buffalo.

As a weedy young intellectual, I was struck by how my father-in-law's union career didn't seem to fit into my standard intellectual categories -- Was he on the Left or the Right? Was he Right or was he Wrong? -- and that he didn't care. He wanted to redistribute wealth from Management to Labor, not because he thought it had the better case in the abstract, but because Labor was his side. The irony that Labor in this case was not precisely the poor (the Chicago Symphony Orchestra recently went on strike because their base union contract only paid $144,000 annually) did not concern him.

Upper-Body Strength Regulates Men’s Assertion of Self-Interest Over Economic Redistribution 

Michael Bang Petersen1
Daniel Sznycer2
Aaron Sell2,3
Leda Cosmides2
John Tooby2

E-mail: michael@ps.au.dk

Over human evolutionary history, upper-body strength has been a major component of fighting ability. Evolutionary models of animal conflict predict that actors with greater fighting ability will more actively attempt to acquire or defend resources than less formidable contestants will. Here, we applied these models to political decision making about redistribution of income and wealth among modern humans. In studies conducted in Argentina, Denmark, and the United States, men with greater upper-body strength more strongly endorsed the self-beneficial position: Among men of lower socioeconomic status (SES), strength predicted increased support for redistribution; among men of higher SES, strength predicted increased opposition to redistribution. Because personal upper-body strength is irrelevant to payoffs from economic policies in modern mass democracies, the continuing role of strength suggests that modern political decision making is shaped by an evolved psychology designed for small-scale groups.

I'm not sure that the blanket statement that these days "personal upper-body strength is irrelevant" is true. Guys who lift things for a living largely operate in the "non-tradeable" sector of the economy.

The irrelevance of upper body strength is true in some jobs. For example, computer programmers don't have to lift anything heavier than the lids of their laptops. And, perhaps not coincidentally, programmers are notoriously prone to self-defeating universalist ideologies like libertarianism and open borders. The Gang of Eight openly conspires with the billionaires of Silicon Valley to lower the pay of programmers, and what do programmers do about it?

In contrast, consider one set of guys who lift things for a living: blue collar workers on TV sitcom sets in Burbank. (Here's Homer Simpson meeting his role models on the set of Radioactive Man: "I always wanted to be a Teamster: so lazy and surly.")

They are in the "non-tradable" sector so their jobs can't be easily outsourced to Foxconn in China. Their jobs, however, could be easily insourced and gradually replaced with, say, immigrants, illegal or even skilled foreign set workers via H-1B visas. And yet the entire concept of granting visas to, say, Mexico City's television set workers to lower Hollywood's costs has never, as far as I know, been publicly aired.

One reason is that the guys who lift things on sets in Burbank don't want it to happen. And, unlike computer programmers, they aren't wracked with guilt over it not happening.

If set workers don't like, you know, who the producers had started hiring, things could get, just hypothetically speaking, dropped. I'm just saying. And little accidents on the set could be really upsetting to the neurotic stand-up comedian who is the star of the show. And if he's upset, his timing could go off, and the show's ratings would drop. So, maybe we don't want to mess up this nice little set we have here by trying to chintz on pay for the guys who lift stuff. Understand?

In contrast, Mark Zuckerberg has organized a coalition of billionaires and near-billionaires to  lobby Congress to grant more visas to lower the pay of his programmers. You might think that Facebook's current programmers might have a certain amount of leverage in this situation. For example, Zuckerberg's current employers could, just theoretically speaking, sabotage his campaign to lower their pay by inserting code that would, say, reveal embarrassing personal details about their owner on his Facebook page.

But this would never occur to them. It would be unsporting. What would Ayn Rand say?

Marine Le Pen to be prosecuted for crimethink

From the BBC:

French far right leader loses immunity, faces charges

French far right leader, Marine Le Pen, could face criminal charges for inciting racism, the BBC has learnt. 

The French authorities opened a case against Mrs Le Pen in 2011 after she likened the sight of Muslims praying in the streets to the Nazi occupation of France. 

As a European Parliament member (MEP), she enjoyed immunity from prosecution. 

However, this protection was removed by a European parliamentary committee in a secret vote this week.

Uh, I'm not a lawyer, but isn't there something a little fishy about prosecuting somebody retroactively for what they did even though it was perfectly legal when they did it?

BBC chief political correspondent Gary O'Donoghue says he has been told that the vote to remove her immunity was "overwhelming". 

It will need to be ratified by the full parliament, but that's expected to be a formality, our correspondent says. ...

The move clears the way for the French authorities to pursue a case against the leader, who steered her party to a record 18% showing in the first round of last year's presidential election.

So, this is rather like the U.S. government prosecuting Ross Perot, who got 18.7% of the vote in 1992, the next year for campaign statements -- if Perot had been a Congressman and had made them on the floor of the House.

Mrs Le Pen made the remarks at a party rally in 2010 in the southern French town of Lyon. 

She said that Muslims using the streets to pray because mosques were overflowing was an "occupation" of French territory. 

Praying in the streets was banned in Paris in 2011 in response to growing far right protests. 

A reader writes:

Talk about naked political bloodsport. They're going to charge her with a retroactive crime for comments she made when she had immunity from prosecution. 

Also, notice the BBC finds it worthy to note that this was a widely supported and popular move amongst her fellow MEPs. What does the popularity of a decision have to do with whether it is sound? 

The Left is going nuclear against its opponents. 

I wonder if these types of tactics actually work or do they transform the targets into Obie-won-Kenobi - strike me down and I shall become stronger.  

Her father cultivated a mythos around Joan of Arc, who is (or ought to be) the patron saint of nationalism.

Vibrant diversity and diverse vibrancy

From the Washington Post:

Russian forces arrest mayor of Dagestan city where Tsarnaev lived
By Kathy Lally, Saturday, June 1, 11:34 AM E-mail the writer 

MOSCOW — The mayor of Dagestan’s largest city, who has survived 15 assassination attempts and employs a large security force to protect him, was arrested on murder charges Saturday by heavily armed forces in armored personnel carriers and helicopters, Russian officials said. 

Said Amirov, the 59-year-old mayor of Makhachkala, has been in a wheelchair since 1993, when one attempt on his life severed his spine. His southern Russian city is known for frequent bombings and shootouts among police, criminal gangs and Islamic fighters. For six months last year it was home to Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the accused Boston Marathon bombers. His parents live there now.

Amirov was seized by troops wearing camouflage, helmets and bulletproof vests and armed with automatic rifles. They surrounded his palatial house on the Caspian Sea, according to a video shown on LifeNews, a Web site that has close connections to the security services. ... 

In Russia, one question nearly always arises when an arrest is made: Why now?

In other words, everybody is guilty, so who arrests whom is mostly a question of timing.

The answer was unclear Saturday. President Vladimir Putin, however, recently appointed a new acting president of the Dagestan region, Ramazan Abdulatipov,

Putin really likes that name, doesn't he? For those of you keeping score at home:

Ramzan - Chechnya
Ramazan - Dagestan

Maybe RamZPaul could get a gig doing stand-up before Bolshoi Ballet performances?

amid speculation that the usual corruption has gone too far or that officials want order to be imposed on the North Caucasus before the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

From the NYT:

Mr. Amirov in many ways embodied the rough-and-tumble North Caucasus city he led, a place where brawls and gunfights are so standard that restaurant menus occasionally list the price of replacing damaged tables and chairs.

America needs more immigrants from the Caucasus to bring the blessings of vibrant diversity to our boring white-bread country.

Affordable Family Formation in the U.K.

It's interesting how in the U.K. the intellectual tide has shifted so that the downsides of immigration can increasingly be talked about in a sophisticated fashion just as the American establishment is battening down the hatches and crushing dissent. For example, David Goodhart getting banned from the Hay Festival for being an immigration skeptic has gotten him good publicity in Britain, while Jason Richwine getting fired has been widely treated as proof that he had it coming.

From This Is Lincolnshire in the U.K.:

Grantham MP Nick Boles blames rising house prices on immigration 

Grantham and Stamford MP Nick Boles says immigration is helping push up house prices, preventing young people from owning their own home. 

The Planning Minister said he has changed his mind about immigration after seeing how the arrival of 2 million new immigrants over the last decade has left Britain short of houses.
​
He warned that failure to build enough homes would mean only the professional classes would be able to buy a house. 

Mr Boles told a national newspaper: “I have become much more critical of immigration. A very substantial contribution to housing need comes from the level of immigration in the past two decades.

“‘I had the classic metropolitan view about immigration that it was broadly good for me because it made life more varied and interesting and there were lots of people bringing different skills into the economy. 

“I wasn’t really aware of the effect on people who were competing for relatively low skilled jobs and competing for public services.” ...

Mr Boles said young people are being priced out of the property market, citing figures which show that the number of first time buyers who get a mortgage without help from their parents has halved from 69 per cent in 2005 to just 35 per cent now. 

“The biggest block on home ownership now is affordability,” he said.

The Atlantic on affirmative action

Racist ginger Abigail Fisher
sued for her so-called "constitutional
rights" in the Supreme Court

From The Atlantic:

Americans Oppose Affirmative Action for Race, If You Only Ask White Americans 

What do polls show about racial preferences in college admissions? Don't take the overall number at face value.

... The story also drops this seemingly innocuous fact: "Polls show that while most Americans oppose racial or ethnic preferences in college admissions, they also think colleges should give extra help to the poor." 

That's a deceptively complex statement. When you actually take a look at the polls, the truth is more like this: A majority of Americans oppose racial or ethnic preferences, but only because a majority of Americans are also white.

The Gang of Eight is doing good work to solve that problem in the long run, but can't something be done in the meantime, such as disenfranchising or deporting about a 100,000,000 white citizens right now?