What to call Republicans who support Schumer's bill?

Rubiots.

Crime, Big Data, and real estate investing

Everybody talks about Big Data nowadays, but I never see mentioned one straightforward use: real estate investing.

The police have slowly been ramping up their information technology over the last 25 years to look for "crime hot spots," as recommended by Bill Bratton.

Can you use this data for real estate investing purposes? Scan the data for "crime cold spots" -- low crime blocks in low cost neighborhoods -- because they might be promising for gentrifying. 

Traditionally, cops have been interested in second careers in real estate -- see, for example, Harrison Ford in 2003's Hollywood Homicide -- because they drive around all the time and can notice neighborhood trends first. But this kind of data would make real estate trend-spotting even easier. 

The stand-up comics' cartel

Stand-up comedy is doing well right now for a form of entertainment that's been around for a long time. It's not an easy life, touring, hoping you'll get popular enough to do some specials and nursing the dream that you'll be one of the few to get a stable sit-com that will allow you to stop traveling. But, it does seem to support a relatively large number of quite good comics at present. There aren't too many massive superstars in stand-up right now, but that's probably a good thing.

The field seems surprisingly resilient to being disrupted by new technologies, the way that, say, star disk jockeys playing other people's music have taken away a lot of the music industry revenue that used to go to the bands' themselves when they toured.

Can you imagine people paying to see a Joke Jockey who just plays the best jokes from the best comedy albums of all time, serving up the precise joke that this particular audience will laugh hardest at at this particular moment, weaving all the famous comics' bits into an unexpected tapestry that's more than the sum of the parts?

Well, I can't either, but James Brown probably scoffed at the notion that DJs would largely replace live bands.

And 35 years ago, a lot of funny radio morning men across the country laughed at the idea that in the near future everybody would listen to Howard Stern out of New York instead of to local talents like them. How could they patch in the traffic updates?

That stand-up is still standing may stem in part from a professional culture that emphasizes paying-your-dues and doing things the time-honored way.

As usual, comics themselves tend to be tightly-wound bundles of resentments and hostilities, as suggested by comedian Patton Oswalt's lengthy venting in Slate on three topics: 

Heckling -- Oswalt's against it. I can't say that drunken fools add much to the performance of expert professionals in other realms (Roger Federer, for instance, isn't expected to volley nimbly with an overserved spectator who stumbles out on the court wielding a trash can lid as a racket), so Oswalt has a point here.

Rape jokes -- He's against them. Or, to be precise, he's against jokes about raping women. Not surprisingly, it doesn't seem to occur to Oswalt to object to (or even notice) jokes about raping men, such as the cliched but still hugely popular prison rape jokes that have been almost de rigueur in detective shows for the last generation. To Oswalt, the problem with rape jokes is that they are anti-women, not that they are pro-rape.

You might think that comedians would be better than the unfunny at noticing things outside the Who-Whom identity politics framework (Who are the bad guys? Who are the good non-guys?) that dominates mental life these days, but this just shows how unnatural are objectivity and principle.

Joke stealing -- He's really against it. He's extremely sore about various individuals over the last couple of decades who have used his jokes without attribution, such as a young person who told one of his jokes in a valedictory speech at a graduation ceremony. Each example gnaws away at him still.

This is perfectly reasonable, even if reading Oswalt on the subject is not going to incline you to think: I hope my kid grows up to have the perfect personality to be a stand-up.

But Oswalt isn't too interested in thinking about any of the obvious grey areas, other than his non-ethical example of when he started doing a joke about Hot Pockets, only to discover that Jim Gaffigan already does almost five minutes on Hot Pockets, so forget Hot Pockets, it's stupid to even to try to compete on that obscure topic with another top comedian who has mastered the subject. (By the way, this is a more male attitude among comics -- female stand-ups have a more limited variety of topics.)

There's an interesting contradiction between the increasingly fundamentalist Code of the Stand-Up Comic -- an absolute ban on joke-stealing that sort of extends to using jokes that you've paid for -- and the rest of popular culture's growing enthusiasm for, uh, "reappropriations," mash-ups, parodies, re-editings, and general meta-ness. 

For example, recently I quoted a member of Sweden's great and good explaining to Swedes that it's stupid of them to object to more immigration because brain surgeons don't need to speak Swedish: after all, their Swedish patients are sedated. I enthusiastically agreed, pointing out that, hey, it's not rocket surgery!

I've been using the "it's not rocket surgery" phrase for a number of years, but did I make it up? A quick check online today finds that you can buy T-shirts and coffee mugs emblazoned with the saying, so the answer is almost certainly "No." I must have stolen it from somebody else. Who probably stole it from somebody else. 

In other words, it's part of the culture.

But, the fact that "rocket surgery" is a widely known cliche joke just makes it funnier that the Swedish nag set herself up for it. If you are going to say something stupid, don't say something stupid for which there already exists a well-known joke. 

Stand-ups have their own cultural references that they use over and over, such as Henny Youngman's punchline "And, boy, are my arms tired." They've gotten a lot of meta-mileage out of Youngman's just-flew-in-from-Las-Vegas joke over the years, and, on the whole, that's a good thing. A shared culture of common jokes is extremely useful for speeding up the exchange of humor and of ideas in general.

My impression is that stand-up comics have evolved a set of norms and values that serve to keep the business semi-artisanal, that prevents the stand-up job from fully going down the superstar route of so many others. (Stand-ups are by no means averse to cashing in big with television sit-coms or sketch shows, but that's considered a different medium and a reasonable reward, which includes that you don't have to live out of a suitcase anymore.)

It's interesting to compare the contrasting opinions held about two giant figures in 20th Century stand-up comedy: Johnny Carson and Bob Hope.

Speaking (as always) broadly, professional stand-ups love Carson and hate Hope.

Why? Carson's Tonight Show was the main chokepoint for success in stand-up, so the people Carson liked tended to become the stars of the business, the ones who get interviewed about the history of their craft. It's a mutual admiration society. (Presumably, there are ex-stand-ups teaching English in Tulsa or selling real estate in Raleigh who weren't liked by Carson and who, if you asked them, would not offer a high opinion of Carson's taste, but nobody asks them.)

Bob Hope, on the other hand, you'll be informed, didn't write his own jokes. He employed -- I'm sure you'll find this a shocking revelation -- joke writers.

Carson, of course, also employed joke writers to help him come up with his nightly monologues. But that's okay because they weren't very good monologues. The funniest things about them were Johnny's spontaneous, unscripted reactions when his writers' jokes bombed. (And I know that Johnny's comebacks were spontaneous and unscripted because, uh, because everybody knows they were!)

In contrast, Hope didn't do all that much for other comedians (including for his brother, who billed himself as Bob Hope's Brother Jim -- "Sure I helped him out,” said Hope. “I helped him out of showbusiness.”) Moreover, he garnered a massive fraction of the public's stand-up dollars for himself by the popularity of his radio, television, movie and tour appearances. Mark Steyn wrote in 2003:

He was the first comedian to run himself as a business, and he succeeded brilliantly. Time magazine reported in 1967 that he was worth half a billion dollars. Asked about the figure, Hope said, “Anyone can do it. All you have to do is save a million dollars a year for 500 years.”

That semi-billionaire-in-1967 figure sounds exaggerated by an order of magnitude, but growing up in the Southeast San Fernando Valley in 1967, the English-born Hope was the local squire, the most prominent landowner.

When you’re that big – when you’re as mass as mass media can get – you don’t have hardcore followers, you’re not a cult or a genius like Buster Keaton or Monty Python. 

... As a boy in Cleveland, he’d dress as Chaplin and waddle down Euclid Street. But, as soon as he could, he dispensed with the pathos of the little tramp, the sentimentality of the ethnic comics, and embraced instead the dapper assurance of a newer American archetype: the wiseguy, the kind of rat-a-tat quipster you could find in the sports columns and the gossip pages of the Jazz Age but not in its comedy routines, in their way as convention-bound as grand opera. 

Much of what we now take for granted as the modern comedy monologue – the delivery, the structure, the subjects – comes from the template developed by Hope.

Like Bing Crosby among singers, Hope was perhaps the first comedian to appreciate the revolutionary impact of the microphone.

If Hope started out as the first modern comic, he quickly became the first post-modern one.

The celebrated "post-modern" elements in Woody Allen's films come straight from Bob Hope's films, as Allen has often pointed out.

Other comedians had writers, but they didn’t talk about them. Radio gobbled up your material so you needed fellows on hand to provide more. But Hope not only used writers, he made his dependence on them part of the act. 

... In vaudeville, a performer would have a comic persona – he’d be a yokel, say, and he’d tell jokes about rustics and city folk – but Hope’s comic persona was the persona of a comic: he played a guy who told jokes for a living, and the conceit (in every sense) worked; by advertising the fact that he had a team who did all the tedious chores like providing the gags, he underlined his extraordinary preeminence. 

I find quite funny the fact that by about 1950 Hope had already managed to embody much that would become characteristic of American culture by 2000, such as metaness, knowing irony, post-modernism, and winner-take-all superstaritis.

But, you can also see why other stand-ups would resent Hope's dominance. So, we now have a culture in which stand-up comedy is supposed to be artisanal rather than industrial. Each stand-up is supposed to write his own jokes (until, of course, he gets a television show).

In 1976, President Gerald Ford's head speechwriter was a famous professional joke writer named Bob Orben, who had written for Dick Gregory and who published a newsletter of gags used by so many 1950s stand-ups that Lenny Bruce advertised that he advertised "no Orben" jokes to distinguish himself from the herd.

But that seems like a very different era. Now, there's quite a bit of culture-molding that goes on about the purity of stand-up comedy. For example, post-Seinfeld, Jerry Seinfeld periodically issues documentaries or interviews about how he's laboriously perfecting a tiny new batch of handmade jokes. For example, from 2012:

Seinfeld will nurse a single joke for years, amending, abridging and reworking it incrementally, to get the thing just so. “It’s similar to calligraphy or samurai,” he says. “I want to make cricket cages. You know those Japanese cricket cages? Tiny, with the doors? That’s it for me: solitude and precision, refining a tiny thing for the sake of it.”

Here's a question that I've been looking around on the Internet for an answer to for a few days. But, not only can't I find an answer, the question doesn't seem to occur to anyone: Back before they started making their sitcom together, did Larry David write jokes for Jerry Seinfeld's stand-up act? If not, why not?

In the 1980s, Seinfeld had a flourishing stand-up career that must have put stress on the quantity of jokes he could come up with himself. Seinfeld was a handsome, likable, skilled stage presence, while David was a brilliant writer but an antagonizing live performer. Moreover, it's not as if David and Seinfeld were on wholly different personality and comedic wavelengths. I don't think it would have taken the genius of Adam Smith to have noticed the opportunity here for some division of labor in the stand-up business.

I don't think it's at all sinister that the best performers and best writers will gravitate toward each other. But I also don't think the current artisanal ideology of stand-up is a bad thing either. 

Obama foreign v. domestic policy

Foreign: Arm Sunni Syrian fanatics.

Domestic: Disarm small town American citizens.

Protesting Carlos Slim's exploitation of poor Mexicans

A mostly Mexican-American group called Two Counties One Voice has been protesting what Carlos Slim does to the poor of Mexico:

• Slim's company, America Movil (comprised of Telmex and Telcel), has nearly 75 percent of the TOTAL Mexican telecommunications system – from telephone landlines to mobile telephone services.^{2 ...}

• According to the January 2012 Organizations for Co-operation and Development (OECD) study “Review of Telecommunications Policy and Regulation in Mexico,” the country has a tremendous poor, rural population that could increase their socio-economic status given access to resources such as broadband.³

• It has been consistently proven throughout developing countries that access to services like mobile banking provides a route out of poverty.

• To date, Slim's telecommunications empire has overcharged billions and billions of dollars to Mexicans, especially to the rural poor. Carlos Slim price gouged Mexican customers a total of$13.4 billion each year from 2005 to 2009 for basic telephone and Internet service according to the OECD study.

• Slim's price gouging cost the Mexican economy $129 billion or about 2 percent of the country's total annual GDP.^4...

• Referencing these monopolistic practices, Mexico's Central Bank Governor noted “in unusually bold language... that successfully promoting an agenda of economic or 'structural' reform could see the country reach growth rates in excess of 5 percent a year – more than double the annual average over the last decade.”^{6 ...}

• The country's poorest are disproportionately hurt by the price gouging, coupled with the unreliable and poor services. Carlos Slim's monopolistic interests resulted in Mexico ranking LAST in public investment in telecommunications (#34 out of #34) while Slim's company Telmex had a profit margin of 47 percent – one of the highest of the 34 countries.⁷

• According to the OECD report, Mexico loses 2.2% of its gross domestic product each year because of astronomically high cellphone rates, low Internet penetration, and mediocre connectivity.

• Mexico has 10 percent as many wireless Internet subscribers per 100 inhabitants as Turkey. Its cellular phone rates are by far the most expensive in the OECD. Relative to other OECD countries, Mexico is ranked last in terms of investment in telecommunications per capita; but, says the study, “profit margins of the incumbent nearly double the OECD average.”⁸

Comparisons of Mexico to Turkey are not unreasonable. They currently have virtually the same GDP per capita.

Mexican telecom billionaire Carlos Slim, who intermittently trades off with Bill Gates as the World's Richest Man, bailed out the New York Times after the 2008 crash and owns, at last word, 8.1% of the most influential company in the American news and views hierarchy. 

The NYT has vociferously promoted more immigration from Mexico. Slim profits exorbitantly on calls between the two countries, but the NYT's obvious conflict of interest in promoting Mexican settlement in America, which promotes its second largest stockholder's wealth, is almost never remarked upon (or noticed).

Young Turks, Salonikan Freemasons, and Crypto-Jews

In my new column in Taki's Magazine, I try to put Turkish politics into long-term perspective:

It’s extraordinarily difficult to come up with an analogy to American history that would shed some light on Turkish politics since the beginning of the 20th century. 

All right, try this: Imagine that in 1908 the most advanced thinkers of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Greenwich Village take over the US Army. They eventually move the capital to Omaha and rename the country the Midwestern Republic. Yet the four times the country elects somebody a little more Christian than a Unitarian Universalist, the Army stages a coup. 

Finally, the Midwesterners stare down the Army. To rub in their long-thwarted dominance, the Midwestern Christian Party then orders all the bars in New York City to close at 10PM, driving New Yorkers into Times Square to protest. 

Does that clear everything up? 

No, I guess it doesn’t. 

But that’s kind of the point.

Read the whole thing there.

"Differential Fertility, Human Capital, and Development"

An economics paper:

Differential Fertility, Human Capital, and Development
Tom Vogl
Princeton University and NBER
March 2013

Discussions of cross-sectional fertility heterogeneity and its interaction with economic growth typically assume that the poor have more children than the rich. Micro-data from 48 developing countries [e.g., Mexico, Bangladesh, Indonesia] suggest that this phenomenon is very recent. Over the second half of the twentieth century, these countries saw the association of economic status with fertility and the association of the number of siblings with their education flip from generally positive to generally negative. Because large families switched from investing in more education to investing in less, heterogeneity in fertility across families initially increased but now largely decreases average educational attainment. While changes in GDP per capita, women’s work, sectoral composition, urbanization, and population health do not explain the reversal, roughly half of it can be attributed to the rising aggregate education levels of the parent generation. The results are most consistent with theories of the fertility transition based on changing preferences over the quality and quantity of children, and somewhat less so with theories that incorporate subsistence consumption constraints.

Basically, in quasi-Malthusians societies, well-off people had more surviving children, as Greg Clark demonstrated for England in A Farewell to Alms. Typically, rich people got married younger. Francis Galton noticed that the relationship was flipping toward the opposite direction in modernizing England. Vogl's studied shows the same process has happened for the Third World, just much more recently. 

Of the three countries he has the most data for, Mexico, Bangladesh, and India, Mexico had a tiny positive relationship between education and fertility in the 1940s, but it was quite negative by the 1970s. Uh oh ...

Kaus: Make a video against Schumer-Rubio

Mickey Kaus continues to be a font of better ideas than I can come up with on how to throw a wrench in the gears of what Establishment wants to do on immigration:

2. Make a video campaign ad! This helped in 2007. Then, as now, the idea was not to convince voters. The idea is to demonstrate to the undecided politicians the sort of devastating ads that might be used against them if they cave on immigration. It’s true that YouTube was newer and scarier back in 2007 than it is now. But the power of social networking is, arguably, more intimidating now than then.

If you are good at this sort of thing–I’m not, but plenty of you are–put together a 15, 30, or 60 second ad–post it on YouTube and “share” it on Facebook and Twitter. It’s the “sharing” that will sting. (Also share the link with me–Mickey@dailycaller.com. I’ll post links to the best ads in this blog.) 

It’s not as if there’s not a lot of ammunition for an effective negative spot: There is Schumer-Rubio’s phony enforcement provisions. The way it would legalize drunk drivers, spouse-beaters and child abusers. The way none of its provisions–to “learn English,” or pay “back taxes” –mean what they say they mean. The way it would drive down unskilled wages, discourage young people (especially minorities) from even entering the labor market, increase welfare payments, and threaten the jobs of even middle class skilled Americans with a huge wave of cheaper immigrant “guestworkers.”  (Of course, those American aren’t “star performers,’”so screw ‘em!) The way it would prevent the glory of the Clinton years–a tight labor market that raised everyone’s incomes–from ever happening again. 

A note on targets: It’s probably useful to distinguish two sorts of targets–senators who’ve more or less committed to the Gang of 8 bill and senators who are still on the fence. The first group (Sen. Kelly Ayotte would be a prime example) needs to be hammered, in large part to show those in the second group the fate that awaits them if they listen to the rich lobbyists pushing for amnesty. But you don’t want to hammer the second group yet–it might piss them off! After they’ve tried so hard to be ambiguous! They need to be pointedly persuaded. (“Senator Pryor, which will it be: American workers or California billionares?” Or something better than that. You get the idea.) 

Here is a rough list of senators in the two camps: 

Hammer-ready (Have indicated they’ll vote for Schumer-Rubio) 

Ayotte (who was spectacularly ignorant of the bill’s provisions)
Begich (already getting testy!)
Graham

Here's an interesting NYT article on how creative Chinese blackmailers Photoshop government officials' faces onto compromising photos. Sorry, that doesn't have anything to do with the topic at hand, so let me get back to Mickey's post:

Landrieu (do it for North Dakota!)
Murkowski 

Persuadable (Still on the fence)
Alexander
Chambliss
Coburn
Collins
Corker
Hagan
Heller
Hoeven
Isakson
Pryor

VDH: "The elite charm of comprehensive immigration reform"

Here's a good essay from Victor Davis Hanson in National Review:

Illegal Immigration: Elite Illiberality 

The elite charm of comprehensive immigration reform 

By  Victor Davis Hanson 

The divide over immigration reform is not primarily a Left/Right or Democratic/Republican divide; instead, it cuts, and sharply so, across class lines. 

Elites blur the distinction between legal and illegal immigration to ensure that the opponents of the latter appear to be against the former. They talk grandly of making legal immigration meritocratic, but fall silent when asked to what degree.  

They talk darkly of racist subtexts in the arguments of their opponents, but skip over the overt ethnic chauvinism of proponents of amnesty; they decry conservative paranoia over a new demography, but never liberal euphoria over just such a planned reset. They talk deprecatingly of rubes who do not understand the new global realties, but never of their own parochialism ensconced in New York or Washington or San Francisco. They talk of reactionaries who do not fathom the ins and outs of the debate; never of their own willful ignorance of the realities on the ground in East L.A. or southwest Fresno. 

The elites favor de facto amnesty for a variety of self-interested reasons. 

Read the whole thing there.

Stifling whistleblowers

For a lot of organizations, the threat of lawsuits over child sex abuse in the past are a potentially devastating threat that can turn into a feeding frenzy, as happened to the Catholic Church. For example, if the impression I've gotten from reading the memoirs of famous upper crust Englishmen isn't wholly wrong, distinguished boarding schools like Eton and Harrow might be in for a world of civil suit hurt if the atmosphere suddenly changed and they were targeted. But, it's all very contingent. 

One group in New York is making sure that won't happen to them.

An interesting story from the NYT:

After Sexual Abuse Case, a Hasidic Accuser Is Shunned, Then Indicted 

By MICHAEL POWELL 

Published: June 17, 2013 76 Comments

Sam Kellner, 50, spoke out about the sexual abuse of his son, 16, and others in the Hasidic community. Now he is charged with trying to extort the abusers.

Five years ago, this gray-bearded and excitable man with a black velvet yarmulke spoke out about the sexual abuse of his 16-year-old son by a prominent Hasidic cantor. As Mr. Kellner helped investigators with the Brooklyn district attorney’s office search for other young Orthodox victims of this man, the Orthodox establishment grew ever angrier at him. The rabbi at his Hasidic synagogue in Borough Park, Brooklyn, denounced Mr. Kellner as a traitor and forbade parishioners to talk with him on the street. Yeshivas barred his sons. His businesses dried up — he pawned his silverware to meet his bills. And he still fears that he will never find a marriage match for his son.

Leaving aside the personal questions, let me just make the anthropological point that this kind of ostracism, not letting anybody marry your child, is one big way how nonviolent endogamous minorities enforce their rules. If one Orthodox diamond merchant cheats another, they victim doesn't go to the Antwerp cops, he just gets everybody else in the community to not let their children marry the cheater's children. It can be awfully effective.

“I felt murdered and abandoned,” Mr. Kellner said. “I’m ruined.” 

This, however, was a prologue to a worse situation. In April 2011, after the district attorney’s office gained a conviction against that cantor, Baruch Lebovits, the prosecutors turned around and obtained an indictment of Mr. Kellner. They said, based on a secret tape and the grand jury testimony of a prominent Satmar supporter of Mr. Lebovits, that he had tried to extort hundreds of thousands of dollars from Mr. Lebovits.

Commenters have explained to me the very subtle difference between what's blackmail and what's perfectly legal, but I can never remember it. My takeaway lesson is: when blackmailing somebody, always use a lawyer.

District Attorney Charles J. Hynes has shown great deference to the politically powerful Hasidic community over the years, and it has rewarded him with large margins on election days. Even his heralded crackdown on Hasidic sexual abuse was a velvet glove wrapped around a velvet fist, as he took the unusual step of refusing to publicize the names of defendants — even the convicted.

Huh? Is that legal?

Mr. Hynes extended no such courtesy to Mr. Kellner. “We allege that Kellner sent emissaries to Lebovits’s family telling them that he controlled the witnesses against Baruch Lebovits,” the district attorney said at a 2011 news conference, “and that in return for $400,000, he would ensure that the witnesses would not testify.” 

Remember the family that got a $20 million payoff from Michael Jackson? They used a lawyer.

This indictment stunned the small, embattled community of Hasidic whistle-blowers. Mr. Kellner, to their view, took enormous risks in a righteous fight. That he could sit in the dock next month is a message not lost on anyone. 

“If he’s convicted, no one will ever come forward again,” said Rabbi Cheskel Gold, a member of a rabbinical court in Monsey, N.Y., that gave Mr. Kellner religious permission to investigate Mr. Lebovits. “No one.” 

Mr. Kellner posted $25,000 bail. And to pile legal insult atop injury, Mr. Lebovits’s lawyers used his indictment and other technicalities to persuade a state appeals court to overturn his conviction. Even today, Alan M. Dershowitz, one of Mr. Lebovits’s lawyers, portrays Mr. Kellner and other prominent whistle-blowers as extortionists. “We see Kellner as a leader of a major extortion ring,” he said in an interview. “He is not a do-gooder.” 

It's fun to look up students' anonymous opinions of their famous college professors like Dershowitz on RateMyProfessors.com, especially at colleges where the students have good vocabularies. One Harvard student rated Dershowitz as "odious."

Snowden: Don't mention the I-Word!

The New York Times' "public editor" writes a little piece that asks an interesting question in the title:

Following Up on the N.S.A. Revelations: Were They Really ‘Confirmations’?
By MARGARET SULLIVAN

She lists various articles over the last eight years that recounted much of what Edward Snowden said. For example, James Bamford has been covering the NSA since his 1982 book The Puzzle Palace. Bamford regularly discloses interesting information in Wired, such as the revelations of the more central NSA whistleblower William Binney. 

And there were plenty of disclosures about telephone metadata snooping going back to Carl Cameron's four-part Fox series in 2001.

No doubt there are lots of reason Snowden got so much publicity, but let me mention a subtle one. Unlike Bamford, Binney, Cameron and many others who have looked into snooping in America, Snowden, as far as I can tell, has never mentioned the I-Word: Israel. 

Generally, anybody who looks into NSA questions pretty quickly notices that the NSA outsourced some spying on Americans to Israelis, and that, by now, the question of which country is the dog and which country is the tail has gotten murky. For example, here's a 2012 Wired article by Bamford:

Shady Companies With Ties to Israel Wiretap the U.S. for the NSA

But that's not the kind of thing that the media or, to be frank, the great majority of the American public wants to think about. We've all been socialized to shut our brains off when it comes to this tail wagging the dog question. Cameron got to keep his job at Fox, for example, but his series got erased from the official record.

Snowden, in contrast, has kept things nice and neat for people. Everybody seems to have a nice strong opinion about Snowden in part because he hasn't set off the mental shutdown process that the I-Word provokes in well-trained Americans. 

A microcosm of what's wrong with the way we think

A continuing theme here at iSteve is that the top creative guys in popular culture are not quite as politically inane as the mass of liberal dweebs who write about them. 

For example, this season on Mad Men, the storyline has reached 1968, and one of Matthew Weiner's themes has been that the late 1960s rise in crime was ruining New York City. And how does he show that? By showing black criminals committing crimes, which is exactly what happened. How can he get away with that? Well, he's Matthew Weiner and a lot of nice liberal dweeb critics have a vast amount invested in the cult of his genius, so why not use it to tell some truth?

One of my more central themes is that the mass of liberals dweeb who frame The Narrative of how you are supposed to think about everything have come to view each question in childish, destructive, brain-sapping Who? Whom? terms. 

Here's a microscopic example of these two counter-currents in Slate, in which a minor league kultursmog dweeb calls out a major league novelist for the high crime of Noticing Things. Novelists can't be allowed to go around noticing things that raise even the most esoteric questions about who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.

Did Jonathan Franzen Just Make a Gay Joke in the New York Times? 

By Amanda Hess | Posted Tuesday, June 18, 2013, at 12:50 PM

Last week, Frank Bruni devoted his New York Times opinion column to the “puzzling stamina” of sexism in the United States ...

Bruni is the Perfect Gay Liberal Dweeb with an IQ around that of a summer day in Palm Springs. I wrote about his remarkably dopey column in "Cluelessness Is Next to Godliness."

Naturally, Jonathan Franzen was moved to respond.

Franzen is a heavyweight novelist, author of The Corrections and Freedom.

“There may still be gender imbalances in the world of books, but very strong numbers of women are writing, editing, publishing and reviewing novels,” Franzen wrote in a letter to the editor. “The world most glaringly dominated by male sexism is one that Mr. Bruni neglects to mention: New York City theater.”

Or New York City fashion.

A note below his byline clarified that—lest we confuse him with some lesser Jonathan Franzen—“the writer is the novelist.” 

I’m wondering why the novelist—according to Time, the Great American Novelist—would be moved to file this limp non sequitur of an argument in the paper of record. ... If Franzen wanted to administer a sweet burn to Frank Bruni for calling out sexism in his profession, he could have criticized the male-dominated field of New York City restaurants. (Bruni served for years as the Times' chief food critic.) He could have dug into the demographics of the Times opinion page, where 10 of its 12 op-ed columnists are men. Instead, Franzen laid into theater with bizarre specificity. Why? I can only conclude that this was a conspicuously ineffective letter from a man considered one of the greatest writers alive. Or else it was a gay joke. 

Frank Bruni is gay; Broadway is one of the few American industries that is perceived to be dominated by gay men.

Franzen is smart enough not to explicitly chide Bruni for failing to singlehandedly resolve sexism in the gay community before speaking out against chauvinism in all other corners of the United States, but he may be just self-important enough to imply it. Then again, not everyone picked up on Franzen’s subtext. “I applaud Jonathan Franzen for casting a spotlight on sexism in theater,” Jenny Lyn Bader, a member of the executive board of the League of Professional Theater Women, wrote to the Times this week. In light of Franzen’s little note, “maybe the public will finally take note hearing it from a man, who cannot be accused of speaking out of self-interest.” 

I'm not clapping. Instead of leveraging his clout to recognize gender imbalances in his own field (“there may still be, but” is an impressive hedge, but it does not count),

How is Franzen supposed to fix gender imbalances in the field of writing major novels? By not writing major novels?

Franzen deflected responsibility for resolving gender inequality onto gay men. Or maybe he just wrote a terrible letter that makes no sense. I'm not sure which accusation would bother the novelist more.

Who? Whom?

How much is the spread of this Leninist way of looking at the world a chick thing? Women tend even more toward subjectivity than men do, but women tend to be more individualist in who they like than men do. I guess lesbians tend to have the worst of both sexes intellectually -- they are positively averse to objectivity, and they display male gang aggression urges and the desire to rationalize them with ideology (most straight women aren't ideologues by nature). And then the heterosexual women notice which way the social status breezes are blowing and just get in line. 

The big winners in this kind of culture where you aren't allowed to explain things in writing tend to be the most sociopathic men, the cunning guys who understand at a gut level the weaknesses of everybody else.

Front Page News! 7-11s caught employing 50+ illegal aliens

From the New York Times:

U.S. Seizes 14 7-Eleven Stores in Immigration Raids 

By MOSI SECRET and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM 

Published: June 17, 2013 

More than a dozen 7-Eleven franchises took in more than $180 million in revenue by running a “modern-day plantation system,” prosecutors in New York charged on Monday, built on the unpaid labor of dozens of illegal immigrants hired using sham Social Security numbers. 

Federal authorities seized 14 7-Eleven stores on Long Island and in Virginia, arresting nine owners and managers, and seized property, including five homes. They are investigating 40 other 7-Eleven franchises in New York City and elsewhere in one of the largest criminal immigrant employment investigations ever conducted by the Justice and Homeland Security Departments, officials said. 

Through the scheme, the defendants, who as franchisees for the parent company were licensed to use 7-Eleven buildings, trademarks and Slurpee and hot dog machines, recruited more than 50 illegal immigrants and gave them identities stolen from American citizens, including children and dead people. 

The employees worked for 100 hours a week but were paid for a fraction of that time, and were forced to live in substandard housing owned by the operators of the convenience stores, the authorities said. 

The store managers escaped notice, some for more than a decade, because the national company, 7-Eleven Inc., which has more than 7,600 stores in the United States, did not have safeguards in place to protect its payroll system from employee fraud, the authorities said. For example, two immigrant employees, one in New York and one in Virginia, used the same Social Security number to get paid.

We're constantly told by the New York Times that the Obama Administration is deporting inhumanly vast numbers of illegal immigrants.  But there seldom seem to be examples of raids on businesses in the newspapers, suggesting that all that's happened is that Obama juiced the numbers by reclassifying any border crosser who gets caught by the Border Patrol on the north side of the line as a "deportee."

So, finally we get Big News: the feds have found more than fifty (>50) illegal immigrants working at 7-11s. It's front page news!

Women's basketball and The Narrative.

Something that doesn't fit well into The Narrative is that the current feminist era is now well into its fifth decade, so we've gone through numerous cycles already.

In The Narrative, however, differences between men and women are due to the benightedness of the sexist past, which lasted until yesterday. But we know the Future will be different, because it's never been tried before.

Yet, if you can remember the past, you can recall many media whoop-tee-doos that haven't panned out in the long run. For example, women's basketball was a media sensation at the 1976 Olympics, then at the 1984 Olympics in L.A., and then, most heavily, at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, which sparked a 1990s boomlet in women's college and pro basketball.

But the collapse of the Soviet Union has left the U.S. without a formidable rival (the last time the U.S. women lost the gold medal was to the ex-Soviet "combined team" in 1992). And without nationalism to spark interest, women's basketball isn't very interesting. Thus women's college basketball is hunting around for ways to get more popular now that the novelty has worn off and it has settled into a largely lesbian niche audience sport.

From the NYT:

To increase stagnant interest in women’s college basketball, a former prominent official has recommended wide experimentation with the rules and the N.C.A.A. tournament, including holding the men’s and women’s Final Four at the same location on a one-time trial basis.

After a six-month study, Val Ackerman, a former president of USA Basketball and the W.N.B.A., recommended that the N.C.A.A. also hold the women’s Final Four on the weekend after the men’s tournament to gauge its effects on the game’s popularity. 

She also recommended that the women’s Final Four be held in the same city for multiple years, just as the college baseball World Series is held annually in Omaha, Neb. 

As a further way to enhance competitive balance, Ackerman said that some of the coaches, athletic directors and conference commissioners she interviewed had advised reducing scholarships to 13 per team from 15. (The other two scholarships could be used to finance other women’s teams.) 

Some officials also recommended to Ackerman that the season be shortened to one semester. One possibility is to begin the women’s season after college football’s regular season and end it after the men’s N.C.A.A. tournament.

Seems reasonable. Football is the 800 pound gorilla of college sports, so why go head to head with that? Men's basketball is the 400 pound orang-utan of college sports, so why not draft off that? And a one-semester sport is better academically.

To address declines in shooting and scoring, Ackerman advised that the rules should be re-examined to speed the game, reduce the physicality and make it easier for teams to score. She advised that a kind of rules laboratory be created to consider radical suggestions, such as one by Coach Geno Auriemma of Connecticut that the rim be lowered to 9 feet from 10 feet. 

Nah, too many basketball rims around the country aren't adjustable. A smaller ball is a cheap way to get all the advantages of a lower rim -- except dunking, and even on a 9' rim, women can't dunk without a smaller ball they can control with one hand. (Also, I doubt if many NCAA players could realistically dunk on a 9' rim. Probably 8'9" would be necessary.)

And why switch to an above the rim game that only blacks could be good at? Keep it a below the rim sport that's more racially integrated than the men's game and it will do okay by appealing to white dads with tall daughters. There are a lot of college sports that putter along okay because they appeal to high income jockish fathers. Nobody much cares about women's college golf except for the fathers of the players, but that's not a bad little demographic all by itself.

The basketball is too big for women. I believe the official NCAA women's ball is 29" in circumference compared to 30" for the men's ball, and it weights 20 ounces versus 22 ounces. But women's hands are not, on average, 29/30ths as large as men's hands, and women don't have 20/22nd of the upper body strength. A women's basketball not much bigger than a volleyball, but a little denser so that it wouldn't get buffeted about by air currents, would make for a more elegant game.

Women play with a Size 6 ball that's almost as big as the Size 7 ball that men use, which seems pretty pointless. There's also a Size 5 youth ball (27.5") and a Size 4 kids ball (24.5"). I suspect the Size 4 ball would be about right for women. 

Now, most women have to kind of shotput the ball at the basket, and women's shotput is not a popular sport.

In general, it should be a priority in rulemaking for women's sports to make women look elegant while playing a sport. Most heterosexual women prefer to do things that make them look good. Female tennis players look good playing tennis, so women's tennis is a big money sport. Female basketball players shoot like shotputters, so it's a small money sport.

Middle class blacks v. underclass blacks in suburban Michigan

Corey Williams of the Associated Press reports on the traditionally middle class Detroit suburb of Southfield, which has gone from 54% black in 2000 to 70% black in 2010. 

Three years ago, Lamar Grace left Detroit for the suburb of Southfield. He got a good deal — a 3,000-square-foot colonial that once was worth $220,000. In foreclosure, he paid $109,000.

The neighbors were not pleased.

"They don't want to live next door to ghetto folks," he says.

That his neighbors are black, like Grace, is immaterial. Many in the black middle class moved out of Detroit and settled in the northern suburbs years ago; now, due to foreclosures, it is easy to buy or rent houses on the cheap here.

Middle class blacks tend not to be penny-pinchers, so I suspect a fair number got caught up in cash-out refinancings during the subprime bubble.

The result has been a new, poorer wave of arrivals from the city, and growing tensions between established residents and the newcome ...

People like John Clanton, a retired auto worker, say the new arrivals have brought behavior more common in the inner city — increased trash, adults and children on the streets at all times of the night, a disregard for others' property. 

"During the summer months, I sat in the garage and at 3 o'clock in the morning you see them walking up and the down the streets on their cell phones talking," Clanton says. "They pull up (in cars) in the middle of the street, and they'll hold a conversation. You can't get in your driveway. You blow the horn and they look back at you and keep on talking. That's all Detroit."

The tensions have not gone unnoticed by local officials. 

"I've got people of color who don't want people of color to move into the city," says Southfield Police Chief Joseph Thomas, who is himself black. "It's not a black-white thing. This is a black-black thing. My six-figure blacks are very concerned about multiple-family, economically depressed people moving into rental homes and apartments, bringing in their bad behaviors." 

For example, "They still think it's OK to play basketball at 3 o'clock in the morning; it's OK to play football in the streets when there's a car coming; it's OK to walk down the streets three abreast. That's unacceptable in this city." 

Thomas has seen the desperation of the new arrivals. His officers, handling complaints, have found two or more families living in a single house, pooling their money for rent. They have "no food in the refrigerator and no furniture," Thomas says. "They can't afford the food. They can't afford the furniture." But they were eager to flee the gunfire of their old neighborhoods in Detroit. 

The foreclosure crisis made it possible. 

"We had a large number of people who have purchased homes from 2005 on, where the banks were very generous with their credit and they've allowed for people without documentation and income verification to borrow 95 to 100 percent of home values," Southfield Treasurer Irv Lowenberg says. "Many purchased homes when they had two jobs in the household and one of the jobs was lost. 

"As values began dropping, people were looking around and saying 'Why should I stay and pay my mortgage when other people aren't?' They decided to hand the keys back to the bank." 

Many of the foreclosed upon Southfield homes were going for $40,000 to $60,000. 

... With so many empty houses available, rents also dipped by hundreds of dollars. Renters increased from about 13,100 in 2006 to 15,400 in 2009. 

Now, suburbs closest to big cities are "bedeviled" by the same problems that helped spur urban flight decades ago, Schragger adds. "And you're seeing further flight out. Rising crime levels, some rising levels of disorder."

These were the things that prompted Richard Twiggs to leave Detroit 23 years ago for the safety, quiet and peace of mind Southfield offered. 

"The reason suburbs are the way they are is because a certain element can't afford to live in your community," adds Twiggs, a 54-year-old printer. "If you have $300,000, $400,000, $500,000 homes you're relatively secure in the fact that (the homeowners) are people who can afford it. 

"But when you have this crash, people who normally couldn't afford to live in Southfield are moving in. When you have a house for $9,900 on the corner over there — that just destroys my property." 

The pride that comes with home ownership and a large financial investment in the property is missing, says Clanton, who lives across the street from Twiggs on Stahelin, about a half-mile north of Detroit. Back yards are deep and mostly tree-shaded. Sidewalks are few. 

"I treasure what I bought," Clanton says. "I want to keep it, but I don't need somebody to come in and throw their garbage on mine. Why would they come and make our lives miserable because they don't care?" 

Though they acknowledge they would lose money by selling their current homes, Clanton and Twiggs are contemplating moving further north. 

So, middle class blacks are following middle class whites to the exurbs. But if gasoline goes to $10 per gallon, how will that work out?

In the very long run, lower class blacks will likely end up warehoused in small towns in the middle of nowhere. But, small towns have far fewer surplus resources to support ghetto blacks than do rich big cities like New York and Washington D.C. that are currently shoving them out. So, it's likely that small towns that tip black will be chewed up rapidly and then begin depopulating as the least dysfunctional poor blacks get out. (For example, the population of East St. Louis has dropped from 82,000 to 27,000.) So, there will be a lot of churn in rural America, which I guess is good for the real estate and homebuilding industries.

Sheryll Cashin, who teaches constitutional law and race and American law at Georgetown University, says it would be a shame if black flight from the city set off black flight from the near suburbs. 

Some blacks just don't want to live near other blacks, she says: "There is classism within the black community. The foreclosure crisis may be accelerating it." But she says middle-class blacks, like middle-class whites, are also put off by behavior of impoverished blacks who "have developed their own culture, one that is very different from mainstream America."

Those who contemplate fleeing have fallen into what Cashin calls the "black middle-class dilemma." 

"You have a choice of whether you are willing to be around your people or go 180 degrees in the other direction," she says. "To the higher income black people, if you don't want to love and help your lower-income black brethren, why would you expect white people to? If you can't do it, no one in society can do it. You can try to flee or you can be part of the solution."

Racism as an all-purpose explanation for black dysfunction is a two-edged sword for non-dysfunctional blacks. It justifies all sorts of affirmative action and social service jobs that middle class blacks benefit from more than underclass blacks. On the other hand, it also disarms middle class blacks in trying to shame underclass blacks into acting better. Ghetto blacks have assimilated the message of American society that the highest moral priority is the War on Racism. And underclass blacks believe that by Keepin' It Real (i.e., acting in a selfish, anti-social manner), they are fighting the good fight against Racism. Of course, this also makes them extremely obnoxious to middle class blacks who can't get away from them.

In Southfield, the middle class blacks are using the police power to be obnoxious back:

Southfield officials say one solution to changing neighborhoods is blight enforcement, other ordinances and costly fines. The idea, said the police chief, Thomas, is not to chase people away, but to help them assimilate. 

Soon after Grace, the telephone company analyst, moved into his house, he was cited for parking a small trailer on the property and storing interior doors outside. These are things that would have drawn little notice in Detroit amid the crime and failing schools, he said.

He paid $400 in fines, got rid of the doors and put the trailer in paid storage. 

... He was fined $200 for noxious weeds because the grass was too high and dandelions covered much of the front lawn. 

Uh, oh. Better get too work on the dandelions on my lawn.

But, really, there's no end to the way nice things are nicer than not nice things. For example, I have one of the scruffier lawns on the block (and the lady with a similarly mediocre lawn across the street is 98 years old). But, instead of getting fined $200, I once got paid $2,000 to rent out my lawn for a day because a company shooting a beer commercial nearby needed to shoot 3 seconds of the Average American Beerdrinker's Lawn and my neighbors' Marathon-sodded lawns look like the Average American Pinot Noir Sipper's Lawn.

"It wouldn't happen in Detroit," he says. "Your property is pretty much your property. I think, here, they are going a little overboard."

Obviously, it would be nicer to have a self-disciplining culture (and sending the cops out to enforce a lot of neatness laws sounds like an invitation to corruption). Still, this seems like the best of a number of bad options. Hopefully, the fact that political power in Southfield is mostly black will protect the middle class from the usual federal discrimination lawsuits.

One thing I'm struck by is the lack of social science research into how to get lower class minorities to stop being such bad neighbors. Generally, research is organized either from the perspective of lower class minorities as victims of society, or, in a few cases, around preventing major crimes (J.Q. Wilson's famous "broken windows" theory). But how best to combat simple ghetto obnoxiousness, such as people strolling down the middle of the street blocking traffic, is not a popular academic topic.

For example, I haven't looked into it, but my vague impression is that over the last decade or so the LAPD has lessened the number of Mexicans who welcome in New Year's by shooting their guns in the air at midnight on January 1st. The method appears to have been to run PSA ads on TV telling people that it was against the law to shoot their guns into the air, and then killing one or two drunken shooters each New Year's Eve who wouldn't put their guns down.

For some reason, though, social scientists haven't been enthusiastic about studying this question.

Don't richwine me, bro!

Ask a Swede

One of my Swedish readers has volunteered to answer some frequently asked questions about Sweden and Swedes. So, just ask away in the comments and he may answer them. (Or not -- it's just voluntary on his part.)

Sweden is an interesting country, in part because its doom has been widely forecasted on the Right for, roughly, ever. I started reading National Review in my high school library in 9th grade in 1972. At the end of the school year in June 1973, the librarian told me they were tossing out all the issues of National Review from 1969-1971 to free up space, and did I want them? So, I read two or three years worth of back issues over the summer. I came away convinced -- among much else (14 is an impressionable age) -- that Sweden was about to collapse at any moment. 

Sweden tends to represent one extreme pole of Northern Europeanishness. But, there's also much that's idiosyncratic to Sweden that distinguishes it even from other Nordic countries. Even for bookish Americans, its history -- like that of most countries besides England and France -- is kind of a blur. Although I probably know more isolated facts about Sweden than most other countries -- Vikings, Gustavus Adolphus, that other king who was like Gustavus Adolphus, the playwright Strindsen (Ibsberg?), Pippi Longstocking, and that furniture that comes in really heavy cardboard boxes -- I have little idea how it fits together.

"Stockholm rioters could be a labour asset"

The iSteveification of everything continues apace:

'Stockholm rioters could be a labour asset'

The head of Sweden's Employment Agency (Arbetsförmedlingen) has said Swedish employers need to be more open-minded in their recruitment, choosing to joke about the organizational skills of vandals during the recent Stockholm riots. 

Agency chief Angelez Bermudez-Svanqvist made her comments on Thursday at The Economist's Digital Horizons Conference in Stockholm. 

She first addressed her own previous work in health care, adding that in retrospect she felt that employers in Sweden need not always demand perfect Swedish from their would-be staff. 

"If you are a brain surgeon, do you need perfect Swedish when you are operating on someone who is sedated?" she asked the audience rhetorically. 

Because hand gestures and grunts are a perfectly adequate way for a brain surgeon to communicate with his nurses and anesthesiologist, because, hey, it's not rocket surgery. I mean, it's not brain science.

Bermudez-Svanqvist decided to continue her talk about seeing hidden competences also among young people - of whom one in four is not in work - by referring to the string of vandalism across Stockholm in May, after unrest in the suburb Husby spread. 

"These revolutionary acts, because we are talking about revolution aren't we?" she joked about the title of the debate, Workforce Revolution, which looked at how digital technology could help employers and jobseekers find each other. 

"These acts show organizational skills, these are people who follow a leader," she said about the arson attacks on buildings and cars that grabbed headline space across the world. 

Bermudez-Svanqvist also pointed out that there was a working-condition like aspect to why some young people end up engaging in crime. 

"Those leaders 'employ' you even if you're young, they even take you out for coffee," she said.  

Sweden has long been at loss over how to tackle youth unemployment, with a string of governments looking at various solutions. 

This is from The Local ("Sweden's News in English").

Phil Mickelson v. Tiger Woods on paying California taxes

Phil Mickelson starts the final round of the U.S. Open golf tournament at Merion with a one stroke lead as he attempts to finally win the national championship after a record five second place finishes. 

Earlier this year, Mickelson, who is the seventh highest compensated athlete in the world according to Forbes, was widely denounced for complaining about the rise in taxes on the highest income Californians and implying he might decamp for a zero income tax state such as Texas or California. 

Golfers pay taxes on their winnings in the state they win in, so Mickelson will pay income tax to the the state of Pennsylvania for whatever he wins on Sunday, but golfers make extraordinary amounts of endorsements. Phil is third in the world in endorsement income behind Roger Federer and Tiger Woods.

As a California taxpayer, I'd like to thank Phil for choosing to shoulder an ample share of the California tax burden over the last 21 years, unlike a certain even-better compensated native Californian golfer who legally changed his state of residence to Florida on the day he turned pro in 1996.

Today is Mickelson's 43rd birthday. The oldest U.S. Open winners are Hale Irwin (45 at Medinah in 1990), Ray Floyd (43 at Shinnecock Hills in 1986), and Ted Ray (43 at Inverness in 1920). 

Golf's oldest major champion was Julius Boros at age 48 in the 1968 PGA. 

It's not all that obvious why there is a sudden fall-off in winning big tournaments after a certain age. It's not like being an NFL quarterback or some other extremely hard sport. 

With golfers, usually age just seems to sneak up and after awhile people notice that so-and-so just hasn't won in a few years. For example, Jack Nicklaus won two majors in 1980 at age 40. He remained a favorite for the next several years, almost winning majors at Pebble Beach in 1982 and Riviera in 1983. But by 1986, he hadn't won any Tour events, much less a major, since 1980. So he was finally ignored going into the 1986 Masters, which he came from behind to win at age 46.  

Theoretically, older athletes would find their success diminishing if the talent pool was growing steadily. But it's hard to find obvious examples of that happening in the history of sports. And it's by no means clear that that's happening in big time golf. Asian nationals have contended in majors going back to 1971, but have only one once. There's been a moderate growth in continental Europeans, but most of the recent major winners seems to come from the same old English language countries, such as Northern Ireland and South Africa, as was true going back over half a century.

My guess is that we'll see a number of breakthroughs by older golfers over the next generation. 

As a television sport, golf doesn't appear to have benefited quite as much as some others from the high definition-wide screen TV revolution. (Back in the Arnold Palmer era a half century ago, golf was a huge beneficiary of TV's emerging knack for switching cameras to track the most interesting shot happening right now. But, broadcasts haven't advanced that much since.) When you are actually at a tournament, you can watch the ball fly relative to the landscape and anticipate where it will come down. On TV, it's still a matter of a close up of the ball soaring against the sky and then, plop, well, what do you know, the ball turns out to have landed on the green or in the brook or wherever.

One thing that has changed about broadcasts is that you can now pick your own announcers. For example, you can watch the final round of the U.S. Open on CBS live and listen here to comedians Norm Macdonald, Chad Drew, and Jeff Martin commentate. Or at least I think that's how I think Sort-Of TV works. I haven't really been on top of any media innovations since 1997.