June 12, 2013

Cesar Chavez movie: La Raza instead of La Causa

In 1969, St. Cesar Chavez led a giant protest march against illegal immigrants, because they drove down wages for member of his United Farm Workers. Fellow marchers included Sen. Walter Mondale and Rev. Ralph Abernethy, Martin Luther King's successor at the famous SCLC (not SPLC). He also had his brother lead a goon squad of UFW staffers who beat up illegal alien scabs. 

Why? Because Chavez understood the law of supply and demand. And, before he went crazy later in life and stopped being an effective union leader, he specifically chose La Causa over La Raza.

From the NYT:
Cesar Chavez Film to Avoid Immigration Debate

By MICHAEL CIEPLY 
But this time is different. 
Participant and its partners are getting ready to offer a Latino hero in their still-unfinished movie “Chavez,” about Cesar Chavez and his struggle to unionize farmworkers. But they are largely avoiding the overriding Latino issue of the moment — immigration reform. 
Mr. Chavez, perhaps the best-known Mexican-American activist, fought for better wages and conditions for workers but held complex and evolving views on the status of unauthorized immigrants, some of which would be at odds with the changes many Hispanics and others are seeking today. 
That has created a challenge for Participant, which is usually eager to have its films become talking points in a national debate. 
That debate has intensified this week as the Senate has begun a three-week push toward immigration reform, which might include offering a path to citizenship for millions of immigrants living and working in the United States and expanding legal entry to the country for some workers. Some of the proposals could soon become law, or be swept into the maelstrom of midterm Congressional elections next year. 
Either way, Participant and its partners, including Pantelion Pictures, a joint venture between the Lionsgate entertainment company and the Mexican media giant Televisa, are mostly staying outside the fray. At a meeting two weeks ago, the film’s backers began laying plans to sell the movie as a tale of American values and social justice, without much reference to the thorny issues now in the spotlight.
“It’s an American story, and that’s the way we’re treating it,” said Paul Presburger, Pantelion’s chief executive. 
While no release date has been set, the movie is expected to open next year around March 31, Mr. Chavez’s birthday, which several states, including California, will observe — and when backers hope the possible declaration of national holiday in his honor will give the film a point of entry. 
The producers’ aim, Mr. Presburger said, is to make the country’s large and vibrant Hispanic audience — which accounts for about 26 percent of domestic ticket sales, outstripping the 17 percent Hispanic share of the North American population — the core support for a more broadly based hit. 
Immigration issues, noted Jonathan King, a Participant executive who is closely involved with “Chavez,” do not directly figure in the film, which instead focuses on Mr. Chavez’s leadership of a strike and grape boycott that began in 1965 and lasted five years. 

Immigration issues are what made Chavez's 1965 strike and grape boycott feasible -- specifically, the ending of the bracero guest worker program in 1964.
“That’s apart from this story,” Mr. King said of the immigration issues. “This story is about the boycott.” 
Born 86 years ago in Yuma, Ariz., Mr. Chavez fiercely opposed the Bracero Program, which until the mid-1960s allowed growers to import cheap seasonal labor. This practice undercut efforts by the National Farm Workers Association (later the United Farm Workers union), which Mr. Chavez co-founded, to improve wages and working conditions. 
Under Mr. Chavez, the union, in its fight against strikebreakers, sometimes reported undocumented immigrants to officials, and only in the early 1970s, according to a spokesman for the Cesar Chavez Foundation, dropped its support for legal sanctions against employers who hired workers without legal status in the United States. In 1986, however, Mr. Chavez became a backer of the Reagan-era immigration reform, including its amnesty provisions. 

Did Chavez favor the corruption that led to growers getting the other half of the deal -- workplace enforcement -- turned into a dead letter? He was pretty loony by then, so I don't know?
Mr. Chavez’s changing posture toward unauthorized immigrants has led to a contemporary debate over whether he would have approved current reform proposals. 
Ruben Navarrette Jr., a columnist who has publicly argued that Mr. Chavez would have opposed contemporary reform proposals, reiterated that belief in a recent e-mail. “The deal breaker would be the guest worker program, where maybe another 200,000 guest workers would be imported and not allowed to join the union or not able to join in any practical way because they’d be temporary,” Mr. Navarrette wrote. 
Arturo S. Rodriguez, the U.F.W.’s president, and a son-in-law of Mr. Chavez, has spoken in favor of comprehensive immigration reform, and helped advise lawmakers in shaping legislative proposals. He argues that Mr. Chavez, who died in 1993, would do the same, though in his day a much smaller percentage of field workers came from abroad. 
“We have no doubt Cesar would have enthusiastically supported immigration reform today because he did so before,” Mr. Rodriguez said in an e-mail. Advocates of the new reform measure invoked Mr. Chavez, at least indirectly, when a version of the measure was approved by the Senate judiciary committee last month. “¡Sí se puede!” they chanted in the committee hearing room, echoing a slogan — roughly, “Yes, we can!” — that was a signature phrase of Mr. Chavez’s union movement. ...

What proportion of NYT subscribers do you think will utterly miss the point of this article, will take away the message: "There go those cowardly Hollywood rightwingers failing to show that Cesar Chavez was a great activist for more immigration just because they are terrified of the power of anti-immigrant racists like Karl Rove"?

I'd love to do social science experiments in which college students read New York Times articles that try to get across a subversive point in an understated manner and see what percentage of them actually get the point. I bet it's not high.

The movie sounds like it's going to be a waste of its star Michael Pena's sense of humor. It will probably be a dud, and then nobody will ever make the film Pena was born to star in: "The Lee Trevino Story."

Coulter: Hispanic vote overstated

Ann Coulter's been doing yeowoman's work on immigration:
IF THE GOP IS THIS STUPID, IT DESERVES TO DIE 
June 12, 2013 
Democrats terrify Hispanics into thinking they'll be lynched if they vote for Republicans, and then turn around and taunt Republicans for not winning a majority of the Hispanic vote.  
This line of attack has real resonance with our stupidest Republicans. (Proposed Republican primary targets: Sens. Kelly Ayotte, Jeff Flake, Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio.) Which explains why Republicans are devoting all their energy to slightly increasing their share of the Hispanic vote while alienating everyone else in America.  
It must be fun for liberals to manipulate Republicans into focusing on hopeless causes. Why don't Democrats waste their time trying to win the votes of gun owners?  
As journalist Steve Sailer recently pointed out, the Hispanic vote terrifying Republicans isn't that big. It actually declined in 2012. The Census Bureau finally released the real voter turnout numbers from the last election, and the Hispanic vote came in at only 8.4 percent of the electorate -- not the 10 percent claimed by the pro-amnesty crowd.  
The sleeping giant of the last election wasn't Hispanics; it was elderly black women, terrified of media claims that Republicans were trying to suppress the black vote and determined to keep the first African-American president in the White House. 

Ann is referencing this article by me in VDARE.com. It features links to all the Census Bureau reports documenting these findings.

Merion Golf Club and the decline of WASPs

Ben Hogan, 1-iron to Merion's 18th green, 1950 U.S. Open
The U.S. Open golf tournament starts tomorrow (assuming it's not inundated by thunder storms) at Merion Golf Club in Philadelphia's Main Line suburbs. The US Golf Association is taking a major financial hit to bring the Open back to where Bobby Jones finished his Grand Slam in 1930, where Ben Hogan came back from his seemingly crippling 1949 car crash, and where Lee Trevino tossed Jack Nicklaus a rubber snake before beating him in a 1971 playoff.

A century ago, Merion club member and amateur golf architect Hugh Wilson brilliantly wedged the club's new golf course into only a little over 120 acres, less than most municipal golf courses. So, ticket sales and corporate entertainment tents must be limited this week. 

Why go back to Merion instead of a more lucrative site? Lots of reasons, but partly because it's one of the world's great golf course designs. The USGA functions as a sort of crypto-WASP pride organization that keeps alive the reputations of works of artistic genius from early in the 20th Century.

But that also serves to illustrate the fairly inevitable dissipation of cultural dynamism. Once your civilization has reached a point where it creates golf clubs like Merion, the descendants of the founders tend to be more apt to spend their time playing Merion rather than creating new and even better monuments.

By the way, from 1898 onward, before the construction of the current course, the Merion Cricket and Golf Club was very active in women's golf. Merion's orginal course, for example, hosted the USGA's Women's Amateur championship in 1904 and 1909. We hear a vast amount about feminist history and the rise of a new wave of feminism in 1969 after the first wave of feminism from 1840s into the 1920s. What's seldom made explicit, however, is that American WASP culture was much more pro-feminist than the newer immigrant cultures that rose to power in the mid-20th Century.

By the way, if you someday get invited by a member to play Merion, here are the rules:
• A FEW POINTS TO BE AWARE OF • 
Cell Phones: The only place you can use your cell phone, pager, or blackberry (or any form of PDA), is in your vehicle. 

This is a mark of a high-tone club. I recently got roped into serving as a volunteer at a social event at the nouveau riche Sherwood club where Joe Montana, Will Smith, and Angelo Mozilo are members. (The club newsletter had a picture of the winners of last month's member-guest tournament: the winning member was Wayne Gretzky. Second place was Kenny G.) There were signs on the outside of the clubhouse designating locations where cellphone use was permitted. This may have something to do with the intersection of tax benefits and anti-discrimination laws: by restricting the holding of business discussions on premises, this frees up clubs to avoid EEOC investigations into their membership diversity. Or maybe they just have good taste and their members like to concentrate upon golf rather than their stupid phones.
Changing shoes: Shoes are not to be changed in the East Course parking lot or in the Caddiemaster’s Office. Please come up to the Men’s or Women’s Locker Room where our locker room attendants will be happy to get a locker for you. 

Changing into your golf shoes in the parking lot says Muny Golf.
Attire: Hats, caps, and visors worn by gentlemen should be removed while they are under cover (Dining Terraces & in the Clubhouse). “No cover under cover.”

Merion has a famous outdoor but canopied verandah lunch area right behind the first tee. Remove your cap before you set foot under the canvas. This sounds like one of those rules for the sake of having rules that WASPs enjoy.
Gentlemen are to have their shirts tucked in at all times. Bermuda shorts are permitted for men and women; knee length is preferred for both men and women, not to exceed 3” above the knee; golf skorts and skirts not to exceed 4” above the knee. Several items are considered inappropriate, and will not be permitted on either golf course, on the practice range, or in or around the clubhouse: tank-tops, short sleeve mock turtlenecks (men only), t-shirts, denim of any color, cut-offs, tennis-length skirts, short shorts, flip flops, crocs, leather sandals (men only), cargo shorts/pants, and jogging attire. 
Smoking Policy: Smoking is prohibited inside the Clubhouse and all outside dining areas. Smoking is only permitted in the designated area of the Front Porch (driveway side). 
Golf: There are no “mulligans” allowed on the first tee. Merion is a walking golf course.

Over the last generation, walking-only has become the mark of elite golf courses. This has led to a revival of caddie programs, although the demographics have shifted. Caddies are rarely anymore local urchins or colorful blacks with nicknames like "Cemetery" (the monicker of President Eisenhower's favorite caddy at Augusta National because he'd somehow survived getting his throat slashed in a dispute over a lady's affections). Caddies are more likely Wharton or Haverford students. Thus, professional golfers now come from uniformly upper middle class backgrounds, unlike in the old days where a Hogan or Sarazen could learn golf as a caddy.
Carts are only given with written authorization from a doctor due to a medical condition. 

Merion has a fine second course, Merion West, a mile away that allows carts, which makes it easier to preserve Merion East as a shrine to Golf the Way It Should Be.
The use of distance measuring devices (range finders) is prohibited.  

Get a caddy.
Pace of Play: Starting in 2006 the Board of Governors has emphasized the elimination of slow play. Please be prepared to play in 4 hours or less. Be prepared to play at all times. Always carry an extra ball. Be ready to hit when it is your turn and feel free to play ready golf. Always rake your own fairway bunker and replace your own divot. Repair ball marks and prepare to putt while others are playing their ball. Play from the appropriate tees (guests with a course handicap of 10 or higher may not play from the back tees). If you reach your maximum allowable score, pickup.

Elite private courses emphasize fast play. Elite public courses like Pebble Beach or Whistling Straits tend to have very slow play.

By the way, I realize nobody is interested in the arcane topic of country club memberships, but I still want to call attention to this little reminiscence by U. of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan about the late sociologist Father Doctor Andrew Greeley's study of ethnicity at Beverly Country Club just southwest of Chicago, with its fine Donald Ross course:
He was interested in assertions that Catholics were not segregated from Protestants, especially in Midwestern cities like Chicago. As evidence against segregation, Father Greeley told me, many people pointed to Chicago institutions that included significant numbers of both Catholics and Protestants. The Beverly Country Club on the southwest side of the city was one of those institutions, and in fact had roughly equal numbers of Catholic and Protestant members. 
Father Greeley wondered whether the club was nonetheless highly segregated on the inside, but, working long before the days of surveillance cameras and eye-recognition software, was faced with the challenge of measuring internal segregation. He approached the caddy master at the club, who kept records on which club members played golf and at what “tee time.” Up to four members could play golf together, and in doing so they would have a common tee time. Father Greeley was permitted to examine the tee sheets and found that Catholics and Protestants rarely shared a tee time: Catholics and Protestants might have been at the same club, but they were not golfing together. 
(If you are wondering how tee sheets would indicate religion, Catholics in the Beverly neighborhood were primarily Irish and had distinctly Irish surnames. Moreover, Father Greeley was the assistant pastor at a Catholic parish in that neighborhood and knew many of the families).

I'm slowly collecting information for an article on country clubs and ethnicity around 190-1970. The role of WASP clubs in turning down granddad for membership in current elites' views on, say, immigration can hardly be overstated. Yet, the actual history turns out to be much more complicated and interesting than the stereotypes.

The Vatican's Gay Caballeros

As we all know, gays are the most oppressed, powerless people in the history of the world. So, all the examples from history of cabals of gay insiders wielding inordinate power don't fit into the Standard Mental Framework and thus can't be remembered. Any time a gay cabal comes up in the news, it must be treated as a sui generis phenomenon unique to that institution and not as yet another example of a persistent phenomenon. In particular, the latest gay cabal revelation must not be allowed to raise doubts about the Mental Framework that gays are the most oppressed, powerless people in the history of the world.

From the NYT:
Pope Is Quoted Referring to a Vatican ‘Gay Lobby’ 
By RACHEL DONADIO 
ROME — For years, perhaps even centuries, it has been an open secret in Rome: Some prelates in the Vatican hierarchy are, in fact, gay. But the whispers were amplified this week when Pope Francis himself, in a private audience, appeared to have acknowledged what he called a “gay lobby” operating inside the Vatican, vying for power and influence.

Speaking to a meeting of the Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of Religious Men and Women on June 6, Francis discussed a dossier he had received from his predecessor, Benedict XVI. “The ‘gay lobby’ is mentioned, and it is true, it is there. … We need to see what we can do,” Francis said in Spanish, according to a loose summary of the meeting posted on a Chilean Web site, Reflection and Liberation, and later translated into English by the blog Rorate Caeli.

Twins galore in Wilmette, Illinois

From the Daily Mail:
Seeing double... 24 times! Illinois middle school breaks world record for having the most sets of twins in a single grade 
The breakdown: Three sets of boy-boy twins, 11 sets of girl-girl twins and 10 sets of boy-girl twins  
The two sets of identical twins are girls 
Three other schools hold current record of 16 pairs of twins 
An Illinois middle school has broken the Guinness Book of World Records for having the most sets of twins in a single grade - two dozen of them. 
Twin boys Luke and Ryan Novosel, both 11, discovered the fact when they began counting up all the other twins in their Highcrest Middle School directory, in Wilmette, Ill. while trying to find a way into the reference book.

Couple of comments:

- Fraternal twins are a lot more common than identical twins, even though we notice identicals far more.

- It's not a surprise that Wilmette has so many twins. Wilmette is a very nice suburb on Chicago's North Shore, just north of Evanston. It's one of those socialism-for-people-who-don't-need-socialism communities where you pay huge property taxes and get back wonderful government services for your kids. Park fieldhouses, for example, are palaces with remarkable amounts of equipment, such as full sets of Olympic gymnastics training equipment. New Trier HS, for instance, probably had the first high school FM station in the country.

Homes in Wilmette are expensive. My wife and I spent many a Sunday touring open houses of the worst houses in Wilmette, trying to get a foot in the door of Wilmette, including one that I swear started off as a WWII Quonset hut. So, the high cost means it attracts couples who don't have children until later in life, which seems to lead to twinning (am I right about that?) and to fertility treatments (which definitely lead to twinning).

Kaus: Set aside Team Red v. Team Blue follies and focus on the Big One, immigration

From Mickey:
It’s time to wake up! Conservatives–while you are (rightly) excited about NSA snooping and partisan IRS corruption, the Congress is about to change America in a more profound, permanent way right under your noses. In the process it will hand President Obama the major second term achievement that will help him overcome the very scandals that are distracting you–or, rather, make his survival or re-ascendance unimportant. He will have won. Democrats will have shaped the future electorate to their own liking. They’ll have transformed what America is.

Please forget about Benghazi and Cincinnati and Edward Snowden’s girlfriend for a minute and pay attention to the main event. 
You have one weapon in your arsenal that can trump the big money behind the Gang of 8 bill (S.744). That weapon is fear. It’s not as if the Republican elite has suddenly been persuaded that an amnesty-first immigration bill is a good idea, after all. They’ve always preferred amnesty. They were just too scared to pursue it. What stopped them was the prospect of swift retribution from the electorate, not limited to the Republican primary electorate. 
This fear hasn’t disappeared. The elites were scared of voters before and they can be scared again. This applies to red state Democrats like Mark Pryor and primary-able Republicans like Lisa Murkowski. It applies to fence-sitters like Lamar Alexander. It even applies to those like Kelly Ayotte who have now committed to supporting instant legalization (despite having campaigned against it). If voters now make their displeasure with Ayotte known–well, politicians at the top have a way of backtracking from unpopular stands. That’s how they got to the top. At the very least Ayotte’s difficulties would serve as a cautionary example to others. 
There will probably be several big votes–most likely on a House-Senate conference bill–before any amnesty can become law. Speaker Boehner will have to make a crucial decision on whether to break the “Hastert Rule” and try to pass a bill in the teeth of his own caucus’ strongly held views. In every case, fear will be the crucial factor. If Senators fear losing their office if a bill becoming law–and they tend to be highly risk-aware–it often has a way of dying without any fingerprints on it (which is arguably what happened in 2007). 
There’s a list of Senate phone numbers and emails here. Numbers USA has a handy page that lets you send a fax here. The Capitol switchboard is 202 224-3121
Ignore the f—ing scandals for a few days and save the country from Chuck Schumer.

June 11, 2013

Hasn't somebody else been spying on American telephone metadata for years?

My latest column in Taki's Magazine points out:
The news last week that the US government had collected Verizon’s “metadata” on who had called whom when and from where was widely seen as a stunning revelation. Timothy B. Lee of the Washington Post warned: 
For example, having the calling records of every member of Congress would likely reveal which members kept mistresses, which could be used to blackmail members of Congress into supporting a future president’s agenda. Calling records could also provide valuable political intelligence, such as how frequently members of Congress were talking to various interest groups. 
Likewise, Jane Mayer reported for The New Yorker: 
…in the world of business, a pattern of phone calls from key executives can reveal impending corporate takeovers. 
And yet informed observers have assumed for most of this century that American telephone metadata may well already be available to a foreign military-intelligence complex via hypothesized “backdoors” coded into complex commercial software.

Read the whole thing there. Feel free to follow the links to the sources.

Big Data versus Dominique Strauss-Kahn

"Whoa! Down, boy, down, Fido," warned Barack Obama, concerned that the energetic
Dominique Strauss-Kahn was about to launch himself at the First Lady and hump her
shin right there in the Blue Room. "Or it'll be time for that trip to the vet we talked about."
There's been a lot of speculating about scenarios involving electronic spying recently (and I add to the irresponsible speculation in my upcoming Taki's Magazine article). So, let's consider this scenario.

Imagine that it's early 2011 and you are concerned that French Socialist warhorse Dominique Strauss-Kahn might get elected president of France next year. Perhaps you don't think that's in the interest of the international financial community or America or Nicolas Sarkozy or whatever. 

If you had access to all of DSK's electronic communications, what kind of data mining algorithm would you craft to ferret out DKS's greatest vulnerability? How could you best sift through terabytes of data to find DSK's Achilles heel?

Well, you wouldn't. You'd just call up your press secretary and ask, "What's the gossip about DSK?"

And he'd reply, "He can't keep his hands off the women. Fashion models, wives, maids, whores, nuns -- he's out of control, a real life Pepe Le Pew."

"So, just to toss a purely hypothetical logical conception out there, if an extremely expensive lady of the evening were to, say -"

"You are overthinking this, Monsieur President. To entrap DSK, there's no need for a large budget."

The more general point is that a lot of the information that the public assumes must be secret is actually common knowledge among the tiny percentage of people who are paying attention. To find out about it, you often just have to ask.

Here we go again: SoCal home prices up 25% in 1 year

Geographically, the disastrous housing bubble of the 2000s was heavily driven by the centrifugal force of rising home prices in California's coastal cities flinging people out into inland California, Nevada, and Arizona, where (along with Florida) the vast majority of defaulted dollars were lost before the onset of the recession, in which mortgage defaults were the first domino to topple. 

From the L.A. Times today:
Southern California’s housing recovery barreled forward last month, pushing prices and sales to levels not seen in years as buyers faced stiff competition during the spring home buying season. 
The median price reached $368,000 for all homes in the six-county Southland, which marked a 24.7% increase from the same month a year earlier and the highest price in five years. The number of sales, 23,034, hit the highest level for a May in seven years, real estate information provider DataQuick said Tuesday. 
Historically low inventory and mortgage rates have ignited bidding wars and helped turn the housing market into an economic bright spot — in the Southland and nationwide. Investors have also played a major role in the recovery that began last year, purchasing run-down, lower-cost properties to fix up and then rent out. 
Home prices in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego and Ventura counties all posted double-digit increases last month compared with May 2012. In Los Angeles, the median skyrocketed 30.2% to $410,000. 
The swift price increases have raised bubble concerns among some, but many experts note prices remain far from the peak and say the spikes will likely ease as inventory increases from new home construction and as more owners — lured by higher prices — place their homes on the market. 
Still, May’s median price was 27.1% below a peak of $505,000 in 2007.

A major premise of current conventional wisdom about why we shouldn't worry about the Gang of Eight's amnesty bill is that because low skill immigration from south of the border had been relatively low from the economy's collapse in 2008 through about 20011, it will never, ever pick up again. 

Perhaps, though, it would be prudent to wait awhile to see if that turns out to be true?

Okay, I'm sorry, forget I ever said anything so wacko extremist. Prudence is evil; all that matters in setting public policy is the Dream.

Google neuters Google Gaydar

Most of the Orwellian theorizing we've heard over the last week about the power of the Big Data companies misses the point that they can surreptitiously exert modest degrees of influence in all sorts of nearly subliminal ways. 

For example, for several years, as you type in searches to Google, it offers auto-complete prompts of its best guess of what you are searching for. This might seem like a ridiculous trivial way in which to attempt to manipulate the public mind, and yet Google has a history of rigging prompts. For quite some time in 2010, for example, Pat Buchanan's name would simply not be prompted by Google. Was this an effort to ever so slightly stifle Buchanan's influence? Or did it just represent a vindictive desire to make Pat Buchanan fans type out all 12 characters? 

Nobody outside of Google seems to know. Few seem very interested in asking. After all, journalists reason, Pat Buchanan deserves whatever he gets coming. And Google is good. We know this because their motto is the reassuring "Don't be evil." That proves they are on the side of the Good, which is us.

And, deep down, there's the worry that Google is a lot better at keeping an eye on you than you are on them, so let's not get into a power struggle with a vastly rich near-monopoly with who knows what capabilities.

Now, there's a new example of Google rigging prompts. Last September, I published a column in Taki's Magazine called "Google Gaydar" demonstrating my new quantitative methodology for measuring what Washington Monthly editor Charles Peter dubbed "the Undernews." Just go to Google.com and type in a celebrity's name, then see how far down in the prompts it takes for "gay" to show up. If it's not one of the first ten, add a "g" and see how many prompts it then takes.

For example, Sir John Gielgud scored a 100 on Google Gaydar (i.e., "John Gielgud gay" was the first prompt, suggesting it was the number one search item about the great actor) and Walter Matthau a zero.

This opened up a new method for the social sciences to quantitatively study rumors, hunches, stereotypes, misinformation and the like.

But, since my article's publication, Google has methodically abolished most of this capability. If you search on the late John Gielgud (1904-2000) now, Google will absolutely not offer the prompt "John Gielgud gay." Only until you type in "John Gielgud ga" does it return "was John Gielgud gay," which appears to be a rare search phrase that slipped by Google unanticipated. In contrast, "John Gielgud h" will bring up "John Gielgud homosexual," but you aren't supposed to use "homosexual" anymore, so few do.

Now, I can certainly understand the viewpoint that the public's interest in the sexual orientation of the greatest Hamlet of the interwar stage is vulgar. But Google has hardly made it a policy to combat public vulgarity. And it's hardly an invasion of the privacy of this high culture figure, now dead for 13 years, whose personal traits are of historical interest.

Google has put a fair amount of effort into their recent campaign to neuter Google Gaydar, as can be seen from the fact that Google Gaydar is not broken for out-of-the-closet gay actors, such as Neil Patrick Harris and Zachary Quinto, both of whom still score 100 on my system. In other words, Google looked up out actors and didn't turn off Google Gaydar for them, or vice-versa.

Now, Google is a private company that has invested a lot of money into achieving something approaching a monopoly. They have, as far as I know, the legal right to manipulate their offerings as they wish.

I just think that the press should pay more attention to these subtle ways that Google manipulates us. Instead, the more evidence of Google's power, the more people seem to be afraid of Google's power, and thus conclude that they best shut up about Google's power.

Google unpersons Mangan's blog

For a number of years, I've been pointing out the unaccountable power of Google's search engine employees to marginally screw over individuals they don't like. One of the weirder examples is Google's intermittent but long-running petty campaign against the high-brow blogger Dennis Mangan. 

If you go to Bing and type in "Dennis Mangan," the first his is his blog, Mangan's.

But if you go to Google and type in "Dennis Mangan," you don't get his blog on the first page of responses. Ironically, you just get other bloggers wondering why Google is messing with Dennis.

June 10, 2013

Cluelessness is next to godliness

One of the interesting trends over the last generation is toward willful ignorance. In the past, newspaper columnists got paid in large part because they could put on a knowing manner. But obliviousness is the new saintliness. Thus, New York Times op-ed columnist Frank Bruni isn't embarrassed to admit he doesn't have a clue:
Sexism’s Puzzling Stamina 
By FRANK BRUNI 
... It’s gender — and all the recent reminders of how often women are still victimized, how potently they’re still resented and how tenaciously a musty male chauvinism endures. On this front even more than the others, I somehow thought we’d be further along by now. 
I can’t get past that widely noted image from a week ago, of the Senate hearing into the epidemic of sexual assault in the military. It showed an initial panel of witnesses: 11 men, one woman. It also showed the backs of some of the senators listening to them: five men and one woman, from a Senate committee encompassing 19 men and seven women in all. Under discussion was the violation of women and how to stop it. And men, once again, were getting more say. 
I keep flashing back more than two decades, to 1991. That was the year of the Tailhook incident, in which some 100 Navy and Marine aviators were accused of sexually assaulting scores of women.

All those poor women who traveled across the country annually to party in a Las Vegas hotel with fighter pilots ... How could those innocent women possibly have known that a convention entitled "Tailhook" might not be solely devoted to the discussion of naval aviation landing tackle?
It was the year of Susan Faludi’s runaway best seller, “Backlash,” on the “war against American women,” as the subtitle said. It was when the issue of sexual harassment took center stage in Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings. 
All in all it was a festival of teachable moments, raising our consciousness into the stratosphere. So where are we, fully 22 years later? 
... But what about movies? It was all the way back in 1986 that Sigourney Weaver trounced “Aliens” and landed on the cover of Time, supposedly presaging an era of action heroines. But there haven’t been so many: Angelina Jolie in the “Tomb Raider” adventures, “Salt” and a few other hectic flicks; Jennifer Lawrence in the unfolding “Hunger Games” serial. Last summer Kristen Stewart’s “Snow White” needed a “Huntsman” at her side, and this summer? I see an “Iron Man,” a “Man of Steel” and Will Smith, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Channing Tatum all shouldering the weight of civilization’s future. I see no comparable crew of warrior goddesses. 
Heroines fare better on TV, but even there I’m struck by the persistent stereotype of a woman whose career devotion is both seed and flower of a tortured private life. Claire Danes in “Homeland,” Mireille Enos in “The Killing,” Dana Delany in “Body of Proof” and even Mariska Hargitay in “Law & Order: SVU” all fit this bill. 
The idea that professional and domestic concerns can’t be balanced isn’t confined to the tube. A recent Pew Research Center report showing that women had become the primary providers in 40 percent of American households with at least one child under 18 prompted the conservative commentators Lou Dobbs and Erick Erickson to fret, respectively, over the dissolution of society and the endangerment of children. When Megyn Kelly challenged them on Fox News, they responded in a patronizing manner that they’d never use with a male news anchor. 
Title IX, enacted in 1972, hasn’t led to an impressive advancement of women in pro sports. The country is now on its third attempt at a commercially viable women’s soccer league. The Women’s National Basketball Association lags far behind the men’s N.B.A. in visibility and revenue. ...
But about the larger picture, I’m mystified. Our racial bigotry has often been tied to the ignorance abetted by unfamiliarity, our homophobia to a failure to realize how many gay people we know and respect. 
Well, women are in the next cubicle, across the dinner table, on the other side of the bed. Almost every man has a mother he has known and probably cared about; most also have a wife, daughter, sister, aunt or niece as well. Our stubborn sexisms harms and holds back them, not strangers. Still it survives.

It's almost as if the conventional wisdom does more to obscure than to enlighten about something as basic as male and female.

My recollection is that gay men once took a particular pride in being clever and perceptive about sex differences, while lesbians tended to be obtuse.

What happened? Can you imagine Bruni's essay being written by, say, Oscar Wilde? Noel Coward? Cole Porter? George Cukor? Lorenz Hart?

Roland G. Fryer, Jr.'s Great Moments in Social Science, Cont.: FryerPhones don't help the dim

Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer, Jr. gets a ton of funding to try out various interventions on young people to Close the Gap. So, here's Fryer's latest:
Information and Student Achievement: Evidence from a Cellular Phone Experiment 
Roland G. Fryer, Jr. 
Harvard University and NBER 
June 2013 
Abstract
This paper describes a field experiment in Oklahoma City Public Schools in which students were provided with free cellular phones and daily information about the link between human capital and future outcomes via text message. Students’ reported beliefs about the relationship between education and outcomes were influenced by treatment, and treatment students also report being more focused and working harder in school. However, there were no measureable changes in attendance, behavioral incidents, or test scores. The patterns in the data appear most consistent with a model in which students cannot translate effort into measureable output, though other explanations are possible.

Perhaps they were too busy texting their friends who also got FryerPhones to do their homework?

Why does Fryer get so much money to try out increasingly desperate interventions that he then forthrightly admits didn't work when other social scientists would try to obscure their depressing failure?

"Fryer is black."

I know that sounds like one of those horrible reductionist things that only I am so crude as to say, but I didn't make it up, I just read it in the NYT. As Steve Levitt's Freakonomics writing partner Steve Dubner wrote in the NYT Magazine in 2005:
To Fryer, the language of economics, a field proud of its coldblooded rationalism, is ideally suited for otherwise volatile conversations. ''I want to have an honest discussion about race in a time and a place where I don't think we can,'' he says. ''Blacks and whites are both to blame. As soon as you say something like, 'Well, could the black-white test-score gap be genetics?' everybody gets tensed up. But why shouldn't that be on the table?'' 
Fryer said this several months ago, which was well before Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard, wondered aloud if genetics might help explain why women are so underrepresented in the sciences. Summers -- who is also an economist and a fan of Fryer's work -- is still being punished for his musings. There is a key difference, of course: Summers is not a woman; Fryer is black.

Here's an interesting thought experiment: What if Professor Fryer announced that -- so far as he can tell after blowing through loads of philanthropic money (Bloomberg's, et al) testing every intervention he could dream up -- the best explanation for The Gap remains the one put forward by Shockley, Jensen, Herrnstein, Murray, Watson, and Richwine.

Say, he just let it slip out in casual conversation like Watson did that wound up in the newpaper?

Would Fryer be Watsoned/Richwined? Or would being black suffice as an all-purpose protection?

Further, would such an admission get any publicity at all?  Or would it be like, say, the Obama Administration's 2011 report on how much more homicidal blacks have been over the last 29 years: something that only disreputable Internet commenters link to, a fact that your knowledge of is taken as prima facie evidence of your disreputableness?

More depressingly, what if Fryer got hit by the bus tomorrow? Who, out of this country of 300 million, would replace him as the only reputable social scientist in America encouraged to poke around at the margins of the race and IQ topic?

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: