June 10, 2013

Chinese conspiracy theorizing

A friend writes:
Obama meets with Chinese leader. Cyber attacks by China is on the menu for discussion. Days before, Obama is hit with repeated scandals about SIGINT from leaked documents. His credibility on the topic is at its nadir right now. But it must be a coincidence, because we know things like that never happen.
And the leaker comes forward. He defects to hong kong (china?). 

Interesting. One angle to test this notion is:. Did his girlfriend go with him to Hong Kong? Is she Chinese?
None of the articles say, mention her name etc.  
For all the paranoia around what the US govt might do it is amazing that the press hasn't explored this angle (what foreign govts might do). 
This could well be the score of a lifetime for chinese intelligence.  
Perhaps that's why michelle stayed home - the US govt knew this was going on and she didn't see the need to be humiliated along with her husband.  
If the govt can't acknowledge prism, it would doubly follow they can't acknowledge the chinese operation to turn a high school dropout on the NSA team.

Having worked in Big Data almost 30 years before anybody came up with that name, my impression is that it's still not what you know, it's who you know.

June 9, 2013

Education fads: What goes around comes around

Back in 1972-1973, when I was a freshman in high school, the national high school debate topic was:
(1972–1973) Resolved: That governmental financial support for all public and secondary education in the United States be provided exclusively by the federal government

So, I've been following the social science of education ever since. A common pattern is for energetic, self-confident people who have made a bundle in other fields to decide one day that they are going to Fix the Schools and thus fund a lot of hoopla about the latest panacea. After awhile, they get depressed and bored and either go away or, in Bill Gates' case after he wasted two billion dollars on "small learning communities," they move on to some other cure-all.

Thus, there isn't much institutional memory in education. All the incentives are set up to flatter the latest messiah that everybody who came before him was an idiot.

Not surprisingly, with no incentives for remembering anything, there is a lot of hamster wheel churn in education policies. For example, tracking frequently gets denounced as racist, but then after a few years of not tracking, teachers and schools start it up again because it's clearly less stupid than the alternatives.

But, will anybody learn anything permanent from the latest failure of anti-tracking? How long until the next cycle in which civil rights lawyers make a killing suing school districts for disparate impact in tracking? Currently, the Obama Administration is persecuting school districts for disparate impact in suspensions, so it's only a matter of time.

From the New York Times:
Grouping Students by Ability Regains Favor in Classroom 
by Vivian Yee 
It was once common for elementary-school teachers to arrange their classrooms by ability, placing the highest-achieving students in one cluster, the lowest in another. But ability grouping and its close cousin, tracking, in which children take different classes based on their proficiency levels, fell out of favor in the late 1980s and the 1990s as critics charged that they perpetuated inequality by trapping poor and minority students in low-level groups. 
Now ability grouping has re-emerged in classrooms all over the country — a trend that has surprised education experts who believed the outcry had all but ended its use. 
A new analysis from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a Census-like agency for school statistics, shows that of the fourth-grade teachers surveyed, 71 percent said they had grouped students by reading ability in 2009, up from 28 percent in 1998. In math, 61 percent of fourth-grade teachers reported ability grouping in 2011, up from 40 percent in 1996. 
“These practices were essentially stigmatized,” said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who first noted the returning trend in a March report, and who has studied the grouping debate. “It’s kind of gone underground, it’s become less controversial.” 
The resurgence of ability grouping comes as New York City grapples with the state of its gifted and talented programs — a form of tracking in some public schools in which certain students, selected through testing, take accelerated classes together. 
These programs, which serve about 3 percent of the elementary school population, are dominated by white and Asian students. 
... Teachers and principals who use grouping say that the practice has become indispensable, helping them cope with widely varying levels of ability and achievement. 
When Jill Sears began teaching elementary school in New Hampshire 17 years ago, the second graders in her class showed up on the first day with a bewildering mix of strengths and weaknesses. Some children coasted through math worksheets in a few minutes, she said; others struggled to finish half a page. The swifter students, bored, would make mischief, while the slowest would become frustrated, give up and act out. 
“My instruction aimed at the middle of my class, and was leaving out approximately two-thirds of my learners,” said Ms. Sears, a fourth-grade teacher at Woodman Park Elementary in Dover, N.H. “I didn’t like those odds.” 
So she completely reorganized her classroom. About a decade ago, instead of teaching all her students as one group, she began ability grouping, teaching all groups the same material but tailoring activities and assignments to each group.
“I just knew that for me to have any sanity at the end of the day, I could just make these changes,” she said. 
While acknowledging that wide variation in classrooms poses a challenge, critics of grouping — including education researchers and civil rights groups — argued in the 1980s and 1990s that the practice inevitably divided students according to traits corresponding with achievement, like race and class. Some states began recommending that schools end grouping in the 1990s, amid concerns that teachers’ expectations for students were shaped by the initial groupings, confining students to rigid tracks and leading teachers to devote fewer resources to low-achieving students. 

NYT Self-Parody Watch: Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves version

It's sometimes hard to tell whether articles in the New York Times are self-aware satire or are just S.O.P. on Autopilot. For example, 
Treatment Still Harsh for Roma in France 
By STEVEN ERLANGER 
Published: June 3, 2013
PARIS — In the last three weeks alone, the French police have dismantled Roma encampments in Saint-Denis, just outside Paris, and along the Var River west of Nice. In Lyon, 200 Roma were temporarily housed in a gymnasium when someone set fire to their squat in a disused factory, killing two women and a 12-year-old. 
President François Hollande’s Socialist government came into office a year ago promising a better deal for the Roma, also known as Gypsies, an end to the shantytowns and the rehousing and integration of those displaced. But like other promises, including a return to economic growth, reality has been a recalcitrant political partner. 
Having criticized the previous center-right government of Nicolas Sarkozy for being careless with individual rights and flirting with the anti-immigrant far right, the Hollande government has done little to change policy toward the Roma. The interior minister, Manuel Valls, who has been praised for his organizational ability and toughness, has expelled at least as many non-French Roma as his predecessor and continues to order the police to dismantle illegal camps and shantytowns, without rehousing most of those displaced. 
On Jan. 1, the rules will change, as Romanians and Bulgarians, seven years after entering the European Union, will have the same right to travel and work in member countries as others in the union. But that will not make them more welcome — most illegal Roma immigrants come from those two nations. Fanned by anti-immigrant and nationalist parties of the right and far right all over Europe, the coming change has led to new fears of a large influx of poor workers and criminals seeking to take jobs from citizens and benefit from lavish social welfare systems. 
“In principle, things are different in France, but in practice, things are pretty much the same,” said Dezideriu Gergely, the executive director of the European Roma Rights Center in Budapest. “We expected a different approach, to reduce social exclusion and economic problems, instead of taking a problem and moving it from one place to another.” 
The complexity and tragedy of the problem are easily seen here in Paris at the Gare du Nord, one of the busiest transportation hubs in France.

So far, this has been pretty paint-by-the-numbers. But get a load of Erlanger's example:
Near the third glass door from the left of the older building, young Roma men hover. Small, thin, often wearing bright clothing like green pants or a pink scarf, the men are prostitutes, looking for work or waiting for prearranged rendezvous.
Some are as young as 14, though they insist they are older; some are 16 and married, sometimes with children.

Huh?
They come from a community around Craiova, in south-central Romania. They troll the station to earn a living, which they say gets them about 100 euros a day, or $130. 
A young man named Ruset said he was 19 and had left Romania as a child. He and his friends, like Bogdan, 17, and Gutsa, 17, whose wife is pregnant, “do business” at the station, he said;

And, Gutsa said, in 17 years my son, God willing, will follow in my footsteps at the train station.
they live in a shantytown in a forest east of Paris, near the Noisy-Champs station on the suburban railway line. None wanted to have their family names used. 
“France is terrible for us,” Ruset said, watching for the police, whom he called “superracist, hassling us all the time.” Echoing many of France’s estimated 20,000 noncitizen Roma, he said: “I would like to stay in Romania, but there is no chance to work there. France I liked well at the start, but today things are very hard.”

I presume this example just pushed multiple buttons in NYT subscribers' heads without raising conflicting thoughts about contradictions: Those horrible Parisian nativist racist homophobes, who are no doubt Red State Republican Evangelicals, are oppressing gay teen immigrants who are just trying to feed their wives and children.

In contrast, what percent of NYT readers, do you think, have the other reaction to this example about married teen male prostitutes: Wow, the Roma must have just about the worst culture in the world?

The point and sputter state

Ross Douthat writes in the NYT:
This ideal of anonymity still persists in some Internet communities. But in many ways, the online world has turned out to be less private than the realm of flesh and blood. In part, that’s because most Internet users don’t want to cloak themselves in pseudonyms. Instead, they communicate in online spaces roughly the way they would in a room full of their closest friends, and use texts and e-mails the way they would once have used a letter or a phone call. Which means, inevitably, that they are much more exposed — to strangers and enemies, ex-lovers and ex-friends — than they would have been before their social lives migrated online. 
It is at least possible to participate in online culture while limiting this horizontal, peer-to-peer exposure. But it is practically impossible to protect your privacy vertically — from the service providers and social media networks and now security agencies that have access to your every click and text and e-mail. Even the powerful can’t cover their tracks, as David Petraeus discovered. In the surveillance state, everybody knows you’re a dog. 
And every looming technological breakthrough, from Google Glass to driverless cars, promises to make our every move and download a little easier to track. Already, Silicon Valley big shots tend to talk about privacy in roughly the same paternalist language favored by government spokesmen. “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know,” Google’s Eric Schmidt told an interviewer in 2009, “maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” 
The problem is that we have only one major point of reference when we debate what these trends might mean: the 20th-century totalitarian police state, whose every intrusion on privacy was in the service of tyrannical one-party rule. That model is useful for teasing out how authoritarian regimes will try to harness the Internet’s surveillance capabilities, but America isn’t about to turn into East Germany with Facebook pages. 
For us, the age of surveillance is more likely to drift toward what Alexis de Tocqueville described as “soft despotism” or what the Forbes columnist James Poulos has dubbed “the pink police state.” Our government will enjoy extraordinary, potentially tyrannical powers, but most citizens will be monitored without feeling persecuted or coerced. 
So instead of a climate of pervasive fear, there will be a chilling effect at the margins of political discourse, mostly affecting groups and opinions considered disreputable already. Instead of a top-down program of political repression, there will be a more haphazard pattern of politically motivated, Big Data-enabled abuses. (Think of the recent I.R.S. scandals, but with damaging personal information being leaked instead of donor lists.) 
In this atmosphere, radicalism and protest will seem riskier, paranoia will be more reasonable, and conspiracy theories will proliferate. But because genuinely dangerous people will often be pre-empted or more swiftly caught, the privacy-for-security swap will seem like a reasonable trade-off to many Americans — especially when there is no obvious alternative short of disconnecting from the Internet entirely. 
Welcome to the future. Just make sure you don’t have anything to hide.

One obvious example is the 2010 imbroglio involving a Harvard Law Student who had put her (reasonably well-informed and carefully nuanced) thoughts on the race and IQ question into a private email to two friends. A long time later, one of those ex-friends became a rival for a young man's affections, so the young woman's email was dredged up and leaked to a black organization, which set off a national frenzy. The dean of Harvard Law School, Martha Minow, condemned not the leaking of the private email but the author of the email.

The trend is that the more careful and accurate your statement (e.g., your Harvard Ph.D. dissertation), the more likely you are to get in trouble.

Gang of Eight to import more stoop laborers because current ones too well paid

This photo taken Saturday June 1, 2013, in Fresno, Calif. shows farmworker Cristina Melendez posing with her seven children and one grandchild. A Mexico native who came to the U.S. at age 13, Melendez and the children have for years struggled with poverty in the San Joaquin Valley, one of the richest agricultural regions in the world. Photo: Gosia Wozniacka
California Central Valley metropolises like Fresno and Modesto have some of the lowest, most Third World standards of living in America. From the San Francisco Chronicle:
In nation's breadbasket, Latinos stuck in poverty 
By GOSIA WOZNIACKA, Associated Press 
Updated 12:54 pm, Sunday, June 9, 2013

FRESNO, Calif. (AP) — On a warm spring day, farmworker Cristina Melendez was bedridden and unable to make her way back into the asparagus fields of central California for the kind of backbreaking work she's done since childhood. 
The 36-year-old mother of seven was desperate. Her bank account had been at zero for months, the refrigerator was nearly empty, and she didn't have enough to cover the rent. Lacking health insurance, Melendez couldn't see a doctor or afford medication, so her illness dragged on — and another day came and went without work or pay. 
A native of Mexico who was smuggled into the United States as a child, Melendez had once dreamed big: to be a bilingual secretary, to own a house and a car, to become a U.S. citizen. Agriculture, she hoped, would be the springboard to a better life — for her and her U.S.-born children, the next generation of a family whose past and future are deeply rooted in the fertile earth of America's breadbasket.
California's San Joaquin Valley is one of the richest agricultural regions in the world, with Fresno County farmers receiving a record $6.8 billion in revenues last year. But the region also consistently ranks among the nation's most impoverished. Sometimes called "Appalachia of the West," it's where families, especially Hispanic immigrants and their children, live year after year in destitution. 
This divide causes concern because of what it may foretell as the nation's Hispanic population explodes and the U.S. moves toward becoming a majority minority nation. Census data show that non-Hispanic whites will cease to be a majority somewhere about the year 2043. The shift is largely driven by high birth rates among Hispanics as well as by declines in the aging white population.
Already there are a record number of Hispanics living below the poverty line nationwide, and the number of Hispanic children in poverty exceeds that of any other racial or ethnic group. Largely less educated, Hispanic workers are concentrated in relatively low-skill occupations, earning less than the average for all U.S. workers. 
"America's communities have become divided between economic winners and losers," said Daniel Lichter, a Cornell University sociologist and past president of the Population Association of America. "Increasingly, Hispanics begin life's race at a decided disadvantage, raising the specter of new Hispanic ghettos and increasing isolation." 
As poor working Latinos settle across the country, fueling local economies in industries such as manufacturing, construction and agriculture, some are left with little room to climb the job ladder. 
That holding pattern leads to a cycle of poverty that shows up in the next generation of U.S. citizens. With poverty stunting childhood development and stymieing educational attainment, experts say many Latino children are on track to remain stuck in low-skilled, underpaid jobs. 
Harvard economist George Borjas projects that the children of today's immigrants will earn on average 10 percent to 15 percent less than nonimmigrant Americans, with Latinos in particular struggling. The trend could have broad repercussions. 
"Much of the nation's labor force growth, its future growth, will come from the Hispanic community," said Mark Hugo Lopez, associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center, pointing to research showing that childhood poverty affects education and jobs. "This not only has implications for Latino families, but for the nation as a whole." 
The cycle is especially evident in the fields, vineyards, orchards and groves of the San Joaquin Valley, which stretches about 250 miles between the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. ... Despite agriculture's modernization and its steadily growing revenues, surprisingly little has changed for the workers themselves. 
Farmers have always relied on hiring racial or ethnic minorities ranked at the bottom of society. Valley crops once were harvested by Chinese, Japanese, Punjabis, Filipinos, Mexican braceros, southern Europeans, African-Americans and the white American Dust Bowl arrivals that were an exception to the immigrant mold. Today's crops are picked primarily by Hispanic immigrants like Melendez or their American-born children. 
Hispanics account for half the population in Fresno County, and one-third of them live in poverty. Nationally, 1 in 4 Latinos lives below the poverty line, the second-highest percentage of all ethnic and racial groups, after blacks. That compares with an overall national rate of 15 percent and a rate for whites of about 10 percent. 
Nowhere are these differences more apparent than in Fresno, California's fifth-largest city and the state's unofficial agricultural capital. 
Fresno's north side — home to bankers, doctors and teachers — is dotted with gated communities and McMansions with manicured lawns. It boasts newly paved streets, bike lanes, generous sidewalks, a popular mall and parks. 
Melendez's neighborhood in southeast Fresno is a world away. Children on bikes crisscross cracked streets, their gutters strewn with trash. Shabby apartment complexes stretch for blocks. Melendez's three-bedroom home sits on the bottom floor of one such complex, shared by Latino immigrants and Hmong refugees.
Melendez's journey here began with her father, who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally in the late 1970s to pick oranges. He returned to Mexico within a year, but Melendez's mother, Maria Rosales, then came to pick grapes, almonds and peaches. 
"People told me I would be sweeping dollars with a broom in California, but what I swept were only pennies," said Rosales, 60, who is now a U.S. citizen and still lives in Fresno. 
At 13, Melendez, along with two of her sisters, joined her mother in California, having trekked with a smuggler across the border. The family settled in a small farmworker town in Fresno County. After school and on weekends, Melendez and her sisters picked the grapes that surrounded them. 
"It was loneliness. It was sadness," Melendez said. "I hated grapes." 
Melendez dropped out of high school to get married and to get away from working the vineyards, but she and her husband soon separated.

And then where did the rest of her seven children come from? The stork? Demographic vibrancy asserting itself? Where are the father(s) these days?
Though she spoke good English, she still lived in the country illegally and lacked a high school diploma, barring most employment. She again turned to the fields. 
When Melendez can work, she picks every type of crop, from asparagus and grapes to chili peppers. In the offseason, she ties vines and trims branches.
Paid by the hour, Melendez generally receives California's minimum wage of $8.

Let's see, if she worked full time annually (2000 hours) at $8 per hour, that would be $16,000 per year for her family of eight, or $2,000 per capita. That's a dollar per hour. Peter Schaeffer recently pointed out that if you divide national health care expeditures by national hours worked, the medical bill comes out to about $12 per hour. I'd say that the Melendez lineage unto who knows how many generations looks like they are going to have a hard time paying for their health care. But just keep repeating "Immigration is good for The Economy!" and "Crops are rotting in the fields!" and stop trying to think quantitatively. What are you, some kind of Richwine? All that matters is Dreaming.
But whenever possible she works "piece rate," getting paid a set amount per box or bucket picked. Running through the fields to pick as much as she can, she once grossed about $3,000 for a few weeks of work. 
But lean months with no work inevitably follow such windfalls. Without legal status, Melendez can't file for unemployment. She obtains food stamps for her U.S.-citizen children, but otherwise receives little government help. To make ends meet, she sometimes peddles barbecued beef, tamales and beauty products door to door and rents a room to a friend. ...
Her children know this, too. Her eldest sons, age 18 and 21, have high school diplomas but no jobs. The oldest, Cristian, started attending Fresno City College's automotive technician program with the help of a loan but then dropped out. Last winter, with help from a local employment program, he got a two-month job at a bakery. He's also filled temporary positions in maintenance and at a vacuum cleaner company. 
Now a parent himself, with a 3-year-old son to support, Cristian said he's desperate to find something permanent. He worked as a farmworker in high school and last year picked peaches, nectarines and grapes. He eventually hopes to get a business degree and open a tattoo parlor and smoke shop

The Great Mexican-American Dream: a tatto parlor and smoke shop in a strip mall.

I'm always fascinated by how oblivious SWPLs remain to the role of Latin American immigration in the Idiocraticization of country.
, but still fears following in his mother's footsteps — never finding a way out of the fields. 
"I don't want to work in the fields, busting my ass for low pay. That doesn't make sense," he said. "But if I don't find work soon, we're low on income, so I'm going to have to go to the fields."

Fortunately, the Gang of Eight has a solution for this Mexican-American American citizen: more competition for him, complete with an increased guest worker system to drive down farm labor wages even further. (Why? The all-purpose Occamite explanation for predicting what's in the bill is that The Eight Banditos hate American citizens. You may scoff, but is there an alternative explanation with more predictive power?)
In Fresno, advocates and experts for years have noticed the inextricable relationship between agriculture, the Hispanic community and poverty, and sounded the alarm. But little has been done to tackle the root of the problem.

The root of the problem is having large numbers of Hispanics. The Eight Banditos will solve that: no longer will we have large numbers of Hispanics, we will instead have vast numbers of Hispanics.
"The number of working people in poverty is increasing, and we're falling further behind in education and health. We need to reverse that trend. Otherwise we'll continue to be seen as a poor area with bad statistics," said Caroline Farrell, executive director of the Valley-based Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment. "And it will get worse. ... We won't have a sustainable community." 

But, but, but ... crops rotting in the fields!
Fresno's mayor, Ashley Swearengin, hopes to reverse the trend and last year led a citywide program called Learn2Earn, which helps residents earn their high school diplomas and encourages them to pursue higher education and job training. 
"We're talking about changing the mindset of people who think this is their lot in life, this is all they are ever going to do," said Linda Gleason, who leads Learn2Earn. "It's about tapping into people's internal motivation — and showing them education and a better job are not impossible dreams."

Why didn't any nice white people ever think of any programs like that over the last half century? Being the first such program ever tried, this one will no doubt work.
___
Associated Press writer Hope Yen in Washington contributed to this report.
___
Follow Gosia Wozniacka on Twitter at https://twitter.com/GosiaWozniacka 
EDITOR'S NOTE _ "America at the Tipping Point: The Changing Face of a Nation" is an occasional series examining the cultural mosaic of the U.S. and its historic shift to a majority-minority nation.


Why does the Gang of Eight want to Fresnoify and Modestoize the rest of America?

Obviously, it's because stoop labor immigrants and their children and their grandchildren and great grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren are making us vibrant. They are our Dreamers. No white bread American from Modesto ever had any dreams about anything.

By the way, here's what life in Modesto was like a half century ago. Totally nonvibrant:

June 8, 2013

Top 10 standard of living metro areas in the U.S.

Here's a 2011 USNWR table of interest:

Below are the 10 metropolitan areas with the highest adjusted median household incomes, as computed from 2009 median household income and cost of living data.
Metro AreaCOLI2009 Median Household Income2009 Adjusted Median Income 
Des Moines, Iowa90.6$56,576$62,446
Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, D.C.-Va.-Md.-W.Va.138.685,16861,449
Worcester, Mass.103.763,36061,099
Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, Texas89.354,14660,634
Ogden-Clearfield, Utah*10060,20860,208
Colorado Springs, Colo.92.355,17659,779
Dallas-Plano-Irving, Texas92.154,53959,217
Madison, Wisc.*96.256,70958,949
Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta, Ga.94.255,46458,879
Raleigh-Cary, N.C.101.359,31658,555
The weather isn't great in Des Moines, but the scenery isn't quite as flat as I expected from Illinois. (Here's the Waveland golf course, for instance.)

D.C. is expensive, but the people who live there seem to be good decision makers about making money. It's almost like they know things we don't know, as if they have inside information.

Most of the rest of the list are the Dirt Gap usual suspects.

And here are the ten lowest standard of living metropolitan areas:
Metro AreaCOLI2009 Median Household Income2009 Adjusted Median Income 
McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Texas87.230,46034,931
New York-White Plains-Wayne, N.Y.-N.J.177.862,88735,370
Modesto, Calif.*136.648,71635,663
Fresno, Calif.120.145,66138,019
El Paso, Texas89.736,14640,297
Honolulu, Hawaii166.367,74440,736
Springfield, Mass.*119.849,17741,049
Los Angeles-Long Beach-Glendale, Calif.141.658,52541,331
Miami-Miami Beach-Kendall, Fla.109.845,94641,845
Scranton--Wilkes-Barre, Pa.*98.141,82342,633

Now, I would argue that Honolulu, New York, Miami, and L.A., have other things going for them that aren't measured in these statistics (e.g., nice weather or attractive women). But what do McAllen, Modesto, and Fresno have going for them? Cheap chalupas?

The Worcester, MA v. Springfield, MA conundrum is a little strange. They are both very old manufacturing cities. Worcester is 48 miles west of downtown Boston, while Springfield is 91 miles west, so Worcester might be an exurb now with big city salaries, while Springfield is too far to commute to the Boston area, while Hartford 27 miles to the south is decaying. But I don't really know much about Massachusetts. Springfield is 1/3rd Puerto Rican, which doesn't help median income stats. [As commenters note, you have to keep in mind that this is a list of metropolitan areas with the name of the urban core given as references, not as a definitions. The suburbs of Worcester are also exurbs of Boston and suburbs of Route 128, so they've got that going for them, which is nice.]

Bill Gates praises nearly all-white class: "Every classroom could look like that"

Here's Bill Gates' TED talk "Teachers need real feedback," which is no doubt true, but ... Bill's video-within-a-video of what every classroom "could look like" is pretty hilarious. Bizarrely, Gates' TED talk is from just last month. Considering that he's been mucking around in education for 14 years, you'd think he'd be less naive by now.

(If you don't like watching videos, here's Diane Ravitch's transcript.)

Starting at 5:30 in to the TED talk is a video about how Bill's new teacher evaluation system is working wonderfully in a classroom in Johnston High School, Iowa.

The classroom appears to have a student body made up of about 14 blonde and 8 brunet white kids. (There seems to be one black student on the edge of one shot, but he doesn't seem to show up in other shots -- this video could represent multiple classes.)

Johnston is a fast-growing white flight suburb of Des Moines. In 2010, the demographics of Johnston, Iowa were:
The racial makeup of the city was 91.0% White, 2.2% African American, 0.1% Native American, 4.6% Asian, 0.6% from other races, and 1.5% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 2.0% of the population.

If it's Iowa and the second biggest ethnic group is Asians, it's pretty high end. Also, the students in the video are slender, so this is clearly an upscale school.

From Zillow, here are the demographics of Johnston High School:


Ethnicity
SchoolDistrict
White, non-Hispanic91%88%
Black, non-Hispanic4%4%
Asian/Pacific Islander3%5%
Hispanic2%3%
Native American or Native Alaskan0.5%0.3%

Only 13% of Johnston High students qualify for reduced price lunches compared to almost half of all students nationally.

Wikipedia doesn't give the 2010 income figures for Johnston, but back in 2000: "the median income for a family was $97,322." Nearly six figures in 2000 in Iowa must put that community at the 95th percentile or higher. A 2011 US News article listed the Des Moines metropolitan area, with its cost of living at only 90.6% of the national average and median income of $56,576, as having the highest cost-adjusted standard of living in the country. And Johnston is gold-plated by Des Moines standards.

Bill ends his video about Johnston High at 7:58 with the assertion:
every classroom could look like that

Of course, nobody, Gates or his TED audience, gets the joke.

Santa Monica shooter perhaps named Zawahri

LALate has the property records on the home burned down at the start of the domestic dispute turned rampage shooting in Santa Monica, right near where I lived in 1981-82. The owner of the house appears to have been the now late Samir Zawahri, father of the presumed shooter. The LA Times reports:
Firefighters later found the bodies of two men inside the house. Police sources, who requested anonymity because of the ongoing investigation, said the men were Samir Zawahri, 55, the owner of the house, and one of his adult sons. A second son is suspected of being the shooter, the sources said.

Any relation to Ayman Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri, current head of Al-Qaeda?

Probably not. This sounds like the usual domestic murder-suicide, just given the evil recent twist, a la Newtown or Chris Dorner, where the guy kills a family member or some other personal enemy, then decides, rather than just shoot himself in the traditional manner, to go out big like his favorite video game or media anti-hero.

Is H1-B visa boost a payoff for PRISM?

From Facebook:
Mark Zuckerberg · 18,271,654 followers10 hours ago near Menlo Park, CA · 
I want to respond personally to the outrageous press reports about PRISM: 
Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers.
Okay, Mark, we get it, you've given the government indirect access.

Interestingly, Twitter, unlike many of the other big tech players, simply refused to make it easier for the government to get Tweets. (I'm not sure how world-historical most Tweets are, but still ...) Twitter's successful recalcitrance suggests that the tech firms that did play along did so less because the government was holding a gun to their heads, than because they figured it would be worth their while in the long run to play ball with Washington.

One obvious question is whether the big increase in H1-B visas in The Eight Banditos' immigration bill is a quasi-quid pro quo payoff to the National Association for the Advancement of Billionaire People for their cooperation in spying on their customers (or whatever it is you call what, say, Facebook has). 

It kind of makes sense, but the fact that it makes sense probably means this theory is less likely.  A simpler, more general explanation is that the Gang of Eight wants to drive down the standard of living of American engineers merely because they hate Americans.

By the way, if 18,271,654 people are electronically following Mark Zuckerberg, how many people is Mark Zuckerberg electronically following?

June 7, 2013

"American Pravda:" Sibel Edmonds

With Turkey in the news, it's worth taking another look at Sibel Edmonds' charges about a corrupt cabal linking Turkey and the U.S. government. Ron Unz writes in "American Pravda" in The American Conservative:
During the mid-2000s I began noticing references on one or two small websites to a woman claiming to be a former FBI employee who was making the most outlandish and ridiculous charges, accusing high government officials of selling our nuclear-weapons secrets to foreign spies. I paid no attention to such unlikely claims and never bothered reading any of the articles. 
A couple of years went by, and various website references to that same woman—Sibel Edmonds—kept appearing, although I continued to ignore them, secure that the silence of all my newspapers proved her to be delusional. Then in early 2008, the London Sunday Times, one of the world’s leading newspapers, ran a long, three-part front-page series presenting her charges, which were soon republished in numerous other countries. Daniel Ellsberg described Edmonds’s revelations as “far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers” and castigated the American media for completely ignoring a story that had reached the front pages of newspapers throughout the rest of the world. Such silence struck me as rather odd. 
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA official who regularly writes for this magazine, suggested he investigate her charges. He found her highly credible, and his 3,000-word article in TAC presented some astonishing but very detailed claims.

Edmonds had been hired by the FBI to translate wiretapped conversations of a suspected foreign spy ring under surveillance, and she had been disturbed to discover that many of these hundreds of phone calls explicitly discussed the sale of nuclear-weapons secrets to foreign intelligence organizations, including those linked to international terrorism, as well as the placement of agents at key American military research facilities. Most remarkably, some of the individuals involved in these operations were high-ranking government officials; the staffs of several influential members of Congress were also implicated. On one occasion, a senior State Department figure was reportedly recorded making arrangements to pick up a bag containing a large cash bribe from one of his contacts. Very specific details of names, dates, dollar amounts, purchasers, and military secrets were provided. 
The investigation had been going on for years with no apparent action, and Edmonds was alarmed to discover that a fellow translator quietly maintained a close relationship with one of the key FBI targets. When she raised these issues, she was personally threatened, and after appealing to her supervisors, eventually fired. 
Since that time, she has passed a polygraph test on her claims, testified under oath in a libel lawsuit, expanded her detailed charges in a 2009 TAC cover story also by Giraldi, and most recently published a book recounting her case. 
Judiciary Committee Senators Chuck Grassley and Patrick Leahy have publicly backed some of her charges, a Department of Justice inspector general’s report has found her allegations “credible” and “serious,” while various FBI officials have vouched for her reliability and privately confirmed many of her claims. But none of her detailed charges has ever appeared in any of America’s newspapers. 
According to Edmonds, one of the conspirators routinely made payments to various members of the media, and bragged to his fellow plotters that “We just fax to our people at the New York Times. They print it under their names.” 
At times, Congressional Democratic staff members became interested in the scandal, and promised an investigation. But once they learned that senior members of their own party were also implicated, their interest faded.

[The original article has lots of links to documentation.)

I've looked into Sibel Edmonds' charges a couple of times and they seemed not unreasonable. Thus, they ought to be pretty interesting to Americans, but, evidently, they're not.

Unfortunately, I couldn't think of any way to either validate them or falsify them. 

I could also dream up scenarios in which the U.S. government activities she apparently stumbled upon weren't the blatant corruption they seemed, but were actually a Byzantine plot to furnish somebody the U.S. government doesn't like with disinformation on nuclear weapons in return for cash. Maybe the mainstream media has ignored the Sibel Edmonds story because they've been privately told by government officials that it's really a U.S. operation.

But how could you tell who is telling the truth?

Here's a question I've always wondered about: Exactly how do the back channels between the U.S. government and the commanding heights of the national media work? Does the editor of the New York Times have a phone number to call to find out if a story is okay to run with or they'd better spike it? Does it also work the other way: does the government call up the NYT and tell them here's this week's Biggest Story in the History of the World, like, say, the Epidemic of Military Rape? Or is it all much more poorly organized?

I haven't been reading enough spy thrillers lately, so I'm out of the loop on how this sort of thing works.

Turkey is Byzantine, Part XXXVII

With Turkey back in the news, it's fun to link to my old series of blog posts on one of the more influential yet little-known elements within the Istanbul elite, the Donmeh.








For other sources on the Donmeh, there's Wikipedia, the Jewish Encyclopedia, and Marc David Baer's 2009 book from Stanford University Press, The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks.  Here's the summary by Baer, a professor of history at UC Irvine:
This book tells the story of the Dönme, the descendents of Jews who resided in the Ottoman Empire and converted to Islam along with their messiah, Rabbi Shabbatai Tzevi, in the seventeenth century. For two centuries following their conversion, the Dönme were accepted as Muslims, and by the end of the nineteenth century rose to the top of Salonikan society. The Dönme helped transform Salonika into a cosmopolitan city, promoting the newest innovation in trade and finance, urban reform, and modern education. They eventually became the driving force behind the 1908 revolution that led to the overthrow of the Ottoman sultan and the establishment of a secular republic. 
To their proponents, the Dönme are enlightened secularists and Turkish nationalists who fought against the dark forces of superstition and religious obscurantism. To their opponents, they were simply crypto-Jews engaged in a plot to dissolve the Islamic empire. Both points of view assume the Dönme were anti-religious, whether couched as critique or praise. 
But it is time that we take these religious people seriously on their own terms. In the Ottoman Empire, the Dönme promoted morality, ethics, spirituality, and a syncretistic religion that reflected their origins at the intersection of Jewish Kabbalah and Islamic Sufism. This is the first book to tell their story, from their origins to their near total dissolution as they became secular Turks in the mid-twentieth century.

Baer's claim of "near total dissolution as they became secular Turks in the mid-twentieth century" appears dependent upon his emphasis on Donmeh religious exercise, as opposed to, say, their continuing to in-marry, and being Foreign Minister in the last pre-Erdogan government, and so forth.

"In Defense of Judge Edith Jones"

At Above the Law, a former clerk of Judge Edith Jones, Tamara Tabo, defends her.

Shouldn't the Utah Data Center, with its yottabyte of storage, have a transcript by now?

The Epidemic of Rape in the Military

The media is currently worked up over the Epidemic of Rape in the Military. For example, here's a representative op-ed in the NYT:
Don’t Trust the Pentagon to End Rape 
By KIRBY DICK 
JUNE 3, 2013 
LOS ANGELES — THE Senate Armed Services Committee will hold a hearing today on sexual assault in the military. This comes after months of revelations of rapes and other violent attacks at military bases and academies. ... 
The military has a problem with embedded, serial sexual predators. According to a 2011 report from the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault and Prevention Office, 90 percent of military rapes are committed by men with previous histories of assault. These predators select and befriend lower-ranking victims; often they ply their victims with alcohol or drugs and assault them when they are unconscious. 
In my film “The Invisible War,” a retired brigadier general, Loree K. Sutton, describes the military as a “target-rich environment” for serial predators. The training and leadership efforts the Pentagon proposes won’t change this environment. It simply isn’t possible to “train” or “lead” serial predators not to rape. 
There is a way to stop these predators: we should prosecute and incarcerate them. But here the military fails entirely. 
Though the Defense Department estimates that there were 26,000 sexual assaults in the military last year, fewer than 1 percent resulted in a court-martial conviction. 

Wow, 26,000 rapes in one year, and only 1 percent getting convicted!

Oh ... wait a minute ... the 26,000 figure, a projection from a survey, isn't for "rape." The author suddenly switched from talking about "rape" to talking about "sexual assault," which is ... well, what exactly? 

The media isn't in a hurry to provide examples of what's just over the line and is therefore "sexual assault" and what is just under the line and is therefore not "sexual assault."

Here's the Army's FAQ on the subject, but it's not all that illuminating, either. It's bereft of concrete examples of what is and isn't "sexual assault." The Army defines "sexual assault" as "intentional sexual contact," but no examples are given. Is, say, a pat on the butt sexual assault? Is playing footsie sexual assault?

This murkiness is not unique to this latest sex scandal. It's not a bug, it's a feature when lawyers enlist the media in helping them target a deep-pocketed institution.

In lawyer-driven sex-scandals, it's not uncommon for crisp sounding abstractions to mask a lot of murkiness. For example, in the endless, and highly lucrative, Catholic priest scandals, picture in your head a representative example of a sexual act perpetrated by a Catholic priest. My guess is that the most likely example that comes to mind is Gerry Sandusky in the shower with the 10 year old boy. 

And yet, Gerry Sandusky wasn't at all a priest, he was the retired linebacker coach at Linebacker U., Penn State. But, the Sandusky example comes readily to mind in relation to the priest scandals because we've been told over and over and over exactly what Sandusky did. Why? Because it's so horrifying. 

In contrast, the media (and the plaintiff's attorneys who package much of what appeared in the media) were seldom in as much of a hurry to tells us about exactly what all those Catholic priests tended to be doing over the years. When you look into what actually happened, it seldom turns out to be all that Sandusky-like: instead, creepy and disgusting, but seldom brutal. 

After all, the priests in these scandals were seldom America's most famous linebacker coach. Instead, they tended to be gentle, gay, lonely alcoholics who had taken a personal interest in some youth (youths, not children, typically past puberty -- the priests were far more often gay than pedophiliac), a personal interest that went too far. (See John Patrick Shanley's play Doubt.)

Back to the Epidemic of Military Rape.

Finally, reading through the military's report on the survey where the endlessly-cited 26,000 number of "sexual assaults" comes from, I find an example:
(e.g., intentional touching of genitalia, breasts, or buttocks) 

So, if I'm reading this right, the pat on the butt would be sexual assault, but footsie would not. Or maybe not. It doesn't seem to be in the interest of anybody important to clear up confusion.

Here's the official graph of the Rape Epidemic:
So, the percentage of military women asserting "unwanted sexual contact" declined from 6.8% in the first survey in 2006 to 4.4% in the second in 2010, then rose to 6.1% in the 2012 third survey. (So, for whatever it's worth, this number is down slightly from 2006 to 2012.) The rise from 2010 to 2012 is, as far as I know, the only evidence of the Epidemic of Military Rape that you keep hearing about.

In a related story, as part of the media campaign, from the NYT:
Naval Academy Is Shaken by Student’s Report of Rape by Athletes 
By JAMES RISEN 
MAY 31, 2013

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — As midshipmen were graduating from the Naval Academy here last week, Navy investigators were conducting an investigation into reports that several football players had serially raped a female midshipman at an off-campus party last year. ...
The investigation, stemming from an April 2012 party, has sputtered off and on for more than a year, hampered in part by the woman’s initial refusal to cooperate, the officials said. She was ashamed and then later felt intimidated, according to her Washington lawyer, Susan Burke. In a series of interviews, the female midshipman said that she was upset that she had faced disciplinary action for under-age drinking at the party while the football players were permitted to play last season. 
... Academy officials said that the players were allowed to play for the team last fall because no charges had been brought in the case and they were accorded the presumption of innocence as a result. ... 
The inquiry comes amid a growing national controversy over sexual assaults in the military — and over whether he Pentagon has reacted aggressively enough to curb them. The controversy has now reached into the cloistered world of the elite service academies. 
... On April 14, 2012, the woman said, she went to a crowded off-campus party hosted by a group of football players. It was held at an Annapolis home known as “the football house.” In interviews, several midshipmen who attended the party said it was one of several houses used by members of the academy athletic teams, in violation of rules prohibiting midshipmen from having off-campus housing in the Annapolis area. 
The woman, then a third-class midshipman, or sophomore, said she drank heavily before the party and was intoxicated by the time she arrived at the football house. She said she drank more after she got there and began to black out. 
She said she could recall only brief moments of that night. ...
Later that night, Ms. Tisdale told her friend that rumors were flying around campus that several football players had had sex with her at the party.
...Still worried about the backlash, she was not fully cooperative once an investigation was begun by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. “I told them I chose to drink, it was my fault, and I couldn’t remember,” she recalled. “The N.C.I.S. agent told me, ‘Just because you were drinking doesn’t give them the right.’ ”
... She also hired Ms. Burke, who says she began meeting with Navy investigators as well. 
In cooperating with the investigators, the victim agreed to secretly record conversations with some of the football players, including one by telephone the day before President Obama came to deliver his graduation address at the Naval Academy last Friday, she said. 

Since nobody remembers anything these days, not surprisingly, nobody has brought up in relation to this case what Naval Academy professor Bruce Fleming wrote in an NYT op-ed on 5/20/2010:
Meanwhile, the academy’s former pursuit of excellence seems to have been pushed aside by the all-consuming desire to beat Notre Dame at football (as Navy did last year). To keep our teams in the top divisions of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, we fill officer-candidate slots with students who have been recruited primarily for their skills at big-time sports. ... 
It’s no surprise that recruited athletes have been at the center of recent scandals, including a linebacker who was convicted of indecent assault on a female midshipman in 2007 and a quarterback who was accused of rape and dismissed from the academy for sexual misconduct in 2006. Sports stars are flattered on campus, avoid many of the onerous duties other midshipmen must perform, and know they’re not going to be thrown out. Instead of zero tolerance, we now push for zero attrition: we “remediate” honor code offenses. 
Another program that is placing strain on the academies is an unofficial affirmative-action preference in admissions.

In the early 1960s, Heisman Trophy winner Roger Staubach almost single-handedly carried to Navy to a national title bowl game, but after that the Navy football team seldom qualified for post-season bowls? Why? Staubach had to spend four years as a naval officer. On his 31st birthday, Staubach had so far only started 14 NFL games in his life (and yet he still went on to wrack up one of the great careers in NFL history.) So, other high potential athletes shunned the military academy to avoid the 4 year post-graduation commitment

In the 38 years after Staubach, Navy went to only 4 bowl games. Since, 2003, however, Navy has gone to 10 bowl games in 12 years.

The easiest way that rigorous colleges get better at football is by letting in more marginal characters. One little discussed side effect is that the number of co-eds getting raped tends to go up along with the win totals.

Paranoia

From the Washington Post:
The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post. 
The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley.

If document requiring company to submit phone records for millions of Americans is authentic, it would be the broadest surveillance order known to date. 
Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”

As I've been admitting for over a decade, I used to laugh back in the 1990s when the president of France would complain about the "Anglo-Saxon powers" listening in to his phone calls via Echelon. Of course, as it turns out, the president of France is seldom an idiot and employs people in his intelligence services who are indeed intelligent.

The Anglo-Saxon wiretapping cabal goes back to the famous Ultra project of WWII. It's been a big deal my whole lifetime. I have family relations in the Virginia suburbs of D.C. who periodically move to the dead center of the Australian Outback because it's the ideal quiet location for snooping on signal intelligence.

Tyler Cowen calls attention to this June 2, 2013 column in the Financial Times:
Obama’s faith in the geek elite who have your secrets 
By Edward Luce 
Self-interest guides the Big Data companies, and the same is often true of the White House 
... Mr Obama is no traitor to geek culture. His administration shares many of the faults and virtues of the Silicon Valley leaders to whom it is so closely allied. Mr Manning’s prosecution begins three days after the White House co-hosted its second “We the Geeks” conference with Google. This Thursday, Mr Obama will attend a fundraiser at the home of Vinod Khosla, one of Silicon Valley’s most celebrated venture capital geeks. And in the coming months the White House will be pushing for Congress to pass immigration reform – alongside a newly-created lobby group founded by Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook. This controversial outfit is called Forward (Fwd.us), which was also the slogan of Mr Obama’s 2012 campaign.
One of the geekocracy’s main characteristics is a serene faith in its own good motives. It is not hard to imagine how much greater the US left’s outrage would be over the drone programme were it carried out by George W. Bush or Mitt Romney. When Mr Obama asks Americans to trust that he evaluates every target on his “kill list”, most acquiesce. That pass is also extended to Mr Obama’s “signature strikes”, which select targets by probability based on often sketchy information. But there is a world of difference between zapping a known target and taking an educated guess. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that Mr Obama’s reputation for being a nerd shields him from tougher criticism. Call it geek exceptionalism. To his credit, Mr Obama conveyed last month that he shares much of this disquiet in a lapidary address on counterterrorism. 
If signature strikes – attacking suspected terrorists before they can act – are the stuff of the film Minority Report’s “pre-crimes”, the Obama campaign’s brilliant use of demographic data is about “pre-votes”. His data team has aggregated more detail about individual preferences than most voters know about themselves. Mr Obama is likely to use his database as a bargaining tool to help secure his legacy after 2016 (whoever is the Democratic nominee will need it to win). It is no coincidence this resembles the growing ingenuity with which Facebook, and other social media, cull their users’ personal information. Mr Obama’s operation was partly designed by Silicon Valley techies. The Obama administration is also a strong ally of Google, Facebook and others in pushing against Europe’s moves towards far stronger data privacy rights. France’s so-called “right to be forgotten” sparks as much derision in Washington as it does in San Francisco. “Trust us,” say the geeks. “We have noble motives.” 
The reality is more mundane. Self-interest, rather than virtue, guides the growing clout of these “Big Data” companies in Washington. The same is often true of Mr Obama. Big data’s agenda is not confined to immigration reform. Among other areas, it has a deep interest in shaping what Washington does on privacy, online education, the school system, the internet, corporate tax reform, cyber security and even cyber warfare..... 
For while big data brings innovation, it also has dangerous side effects. Culture is already pushing Americans towards “data nudism”. Such currents will only get more acute. Before long, it will be possible to map an individual’s genetic sequencing at an affordable price. No one will be forced to attach their genetic record to online dating profiles. But potential mates may assume that anyone who chooses not to is concealing a genetic disorder. ...
Mr Obama should pay closer heed to history. And he should become wary of geeks bearing gifts. 
edward.luce@ft.com

I worked in Big Data over 30 years ago, for a marketing research company that collected data on every supermarket or drug store item bought and commercial watched by tens of thousands of volunteer households in eight small town test markets. 

When privacy advocates objected, we asked, sincerely: What would we be interested in?

The best answer any privacy advocate came up with back in the early 1980s was that we might have records on file of a small town Protestant minister buying liquor at the grocery store, so we could then blackmail him.

Thirty years ago, this struck us as comic: Procter & Gamble wants us to provide them with representative samples, not with gossip about ministers hitting the bottle in Eau Claire, WI, and we want to satisfy P&G so we can satisfy Wall Street's profit expectations. What kind of chump change could we make off blackmailing preachers, anyway?

Our old logic is becoming less persuasive, however, as Big Data becomes less voluntary, more pervasive, and more powerful as computers advance. These days, Big Data has its hooks into people a lot more important than small town preachers.

Think about Watergate. My best guess about what the Watergate burglary was about is that President Richard Nixon had expressed an interest in knowing what Democratic National Chairman Larry O'Brien knew about the Nixon family's relationship with billionaire Howard Hughes. In 2013, however, why go to all the trouble of having plumbers break into the other party's headquarters when you can just have Big Data companies spy on them?

For years, I've been pointing to odd little data points of Google screwing with people like Pat Buchanan and Glenn Beck. I doubt if this is a giant conspiracy that goes all the way to the top, with Larry and Sergey sitting around deciding who to target. More likely it's just low level Google employees adding code to the giant Google hairball that harms people they don't like. But, nobody has been very interested in investigating these incidents, perhaps for fear that Google might unpersonize them.

I wouldn't be surprised if it were common for people to self-censor themselves these days when it comes to giant, mysterious entities like Google and Facebook. Who knows what they can do to you if you peeve them? (Similarly, a friend has suggested that the reason American politicians agree to pay so much to the medical industry is that they are terrified that if they don't, when they go under on the operating table, their surgeons will kill them. This seems insane, but, then, it's the things we're afraid to talk about that turn out to be most expensive to us.)

Are there any examples of Big Data biting anybody? 

I don't know. I can't think of too many suspicious examples. 

And yet ... I keep coming back to the weird cases of the three critics of the Wall Street-Washington axis who were suddenly arrested in sex scandals: Elliot Spitzer, Julian Assange, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

Or, maybe I'm just being paranoid.

Journalist demands of potential source: More Message Discipline Now!

Earlier this week, I noted the firing of the president of Ohio State for making frank, funny comments in a private meeting relating to the big money business of college sports. The weird thing these days is not that big powerful institutions like Ohio State don't like loose cannons, but that journalists have come to abhor insiders who speak their minds, too: More Message Discipline Now!

For example, here's former financial reporter Joseph Nocera's latest column in the New York Times. Nocera has been on a crusade against the National Collegiate Athletic Association, a perfectly reasonable target. Yet, instead of appreciating the Ohio State ex-president's indiscretions about just how cut-throat the college sports racket is, Nocera is shocked, shocked by the insider's leaked statements.
And, on Tuesday, E. Gordon Gee, the president of Ohio State, said he would be retiring on July 1 after some crass private remarks he made in December about other college teams were reported last week by The Associated Press. ...
Let’s take Gee first. He has been a college president forever. A prodigious fund-raiser, he makes nearly $2 million a year and was named the country’s best college president by Time magazine in 2010. 
But whenever the subject is sports, Gee turns into a blithering idiot.

Huh? My impression is that Gee's gaffes are among the best sources we have for how college sports really works. He's like Captain Renault in Casablanca.
A few years ago, in the midst of an N.C.A.A. investigation, Gee was asked whether he was going to fire the football coach, Jim Tressel. “I just hope the coach doesn’t dismiss me,” he said.

That's not idiotic, that's hilariously cynical in how it reveals the power relationship at a big time football school. (Tressel had beaten archrival Michigan nine times in ten years.) Gee sounds like Captain Renault discussing his relationship with Major Strasser.
... In the most incendiary of his most recent remarks, he said that Notre Dame had never been invited to join Ohio State’s conference, the Big Ten, because “you just can’t trust those damned Catholics.” Gee has said plenty of, er, quirky things over the years, but it was his foolish comments about sports that got the headlines — and finally got him.

Gee told the Ohio State athletic council that "The fathers are holy on Sunday, and they’re holy hell the rest of the week.”

Is that true? It would be fun if it were.

According to a commenter, Notre Dame had once been invited to join the Big Ten, accepted, then overnight reversed its decision under pressure from big donors, leaving Big Ten presidents angry and distrustful. Is that true? I don't know, but it would seem like a fun thing to ask Gee about now that he's going to be unemployed.

But instead of buttering up Gee to spill more beans, Nocera is mad at him for spilling any.

In contrast to today's establishmentarian journalists, here are some of Ben Hecht's reminiscences of what Chicago newspaper reporters were like in 1910:
They sat, grown and abuzz, outside an adult civilization, intent on breaking windows. 
There was, I am sure, neither worldliness nor cunning enough among the lot of us to run a successful candy store. But we had a vantage point. We were not inside the routines of human greed or social pretenses. We were without politeness. There was a feast all around us. We attended it as scavengers. 

Kaus: "Why S.744′s a Fraud"

Here's part of Mickey Kaus's Handy U-Print-It Pocket Guide: Why S.744′s a Fraud
"Multiple triggers"
Legalization is immediate. DHS just has to write border "plan." The most any "triggers" can possibly do is delay green cards and citizenship. 
"90 % effectiveness"
If not reached, triggers only toothless commission 
"Pay back taxes"
Only if already "assessed" by IRS (unlikely). Newly legalized may instead get
refunds.

"Learn English"
Only need to sign up for English class. 
"Clean record"
Allows two free misdemeanors. Additional misdemeanors (including assaults) can be waived by DHS. 
No "public charge." Must earn 125% of poverty line
They're going to deport people who earn only 124% or less? Ha.

Read the whole thing there.

Basically, the symbolic point of the bill, which will determine how it's interpreted and enforced, is that deporting illegal aliens is evil and illegitimate.