| The Golden Tool |
July 3, 2013
Zuckerberg's latest Cheap Labor Lobby ad: "Decides the Golden Tool"
FWD.us (a.k.a., the National Association for the Advancement of Billionaire People) is at it again. Mark Zuckerberg's 30 second spot is called "Emma" and it features, you guessed it, the Statue of Liberty along with a rewrite of Emma Lazarus's schmaltzy poem to wedge in some new jargon, like "And give me the influencers." I didn't hear the term "disrupters" in there, but hopefully that word will be in the 60 second version.
Here's the automatic transcript on Youtube of the narration:
0:02 give me do it right your poorer huddled masses yearning to breathe
0:09 and kids who need the influences
0:11 entertainers
0:14 talent that is searching for a purpose
0:20 send all of these
0:22 brown this going to mean
0:25 agnes time and decides the golden tool
I couldn't have said it better myself.
In evaluating this ad, keep in mind that there are days, even weeks, when Zuckerberg's net worth drops from 11 digits to only 10 digits, so show some mercy to poor Zuck.
A Fourth of July sermon from Slate
Some good patriotic reading from Slate:
The Real Reason Silicon Valley Tech Workers Are Fighting Immigration Reform
By Will Oremus | Posted Wednesday, July 3, 2013, at 3:10 PM
Companies like Google are starving for top engineers, but some American tech workers want to limit visas for highly skilled foreign workers.
Just in time for the national holiday, The Verge today has a story about how immigration reform could harm rank-and-file American information technology workers. “Is Silicon Valley’s immigration agenda gutting the tech industry’s middle class?”, the tech blog wants to know. Subtract “Silicon Valley” and “tech industry” from the headline and you have the age-old canard about furriners stealing Amurricans’ rightful jobs.
As we all know, Google's American software engineers are semi-literate buffoons who are too stupid to deserve to be paid well enough to afford to buy a house with a yard in an extremely expensive region. Why should they get paid enough to marry and have children? Don't we all know that the American Dream of random foreigners must take precedence over the xenophobic greed of mere Americans?
In this case, the furriners are not migrant farm workers but highly skilled tech workers entering the country on H-1B visas. The immigration bill that recently passed the Senate would expand the national cap on these visas from 85,000 to 180,000—or rather, “all the way up to 180,000,” as The Verge’s Ben Popper objectively phrases it. Silicon Valley companies
I.e., billionaires, who are, by definition, our moral superiors.
are all for the move, since it would bring in tens of thousands of ace engineers at a time when demand for top talent far exceeds the domestic supply.
At the level of salaries the billionaires would prefer to pay their workers so they can become even bigger billionaires. As Thomas Jefferson explained, that's the American Dream: for a few guys to get incredibly rich and have all other Americans reduced to debt peonage under them.
But it doesn’t sit well with some of Silicon Valley’s rank and file, who happen to like holding a monopoly on IT jobs in the world’s tech capital.
The horror of Americans trying to hold something of a monopoly on jobs in America at Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon, whose billionaire owners would never, ever think about trying to exert any monopoly power to enrich themselves! If this kind of redneck populist thinking isn't squashed flat right now, these vicious American nativists might even start asking Apple and Microsoft to pay their corporate income taxes!
They have all sorts of justifications for their anti-immigration stance, but the most galling is when they put it in terms of their concern for the plight of the poor, exploited foreign workers who are taking their jobs, as they do throughout The Verge’s piece.
Oh yes, those poor, exploited, highly skilled foreign workers. Popper did not go so far as to actually talk to any of these foreign workers, as far as I can tell. Perhaps they were unable to return his calls because they were locked in Google’s secret “foreigners-only” basement sweatshop. But he did repeatedly quote one Kim Berry, a coder for the California Department of Health and spokesman for something called the Programmer’s Guild, who compares H-1B tech workers’ status to “indentured servitude.”
I, Will Oremus, point and sputter at the phrase "indentured servitude," so therefore I win!
Of course foreigners should be brought in and put under the control of rich men like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. That's how America was built! Cotton didn't pick itself, you know ...
Try not to forget all the lonely decades that Mark Zuckerberg sweated away to nurture an idea that only he, out of all the people in entire world, could ever have come up with. Where would we be without Zuck's breakthrough: Friendster for Harvard students?
Do you realize there are days, sometimes even weeks, when Zuckerberg's net worth dips from 11 figures to just 10 figures? Have you no pity?
My favorite quote from Berry, though, is the one where he unintentionally lays bare the hypocrisy at the root of his own argument: "American workers are being passed over in favor of foreign workers who make far less money, and politicians seem oblivious to our plight." That’s right: “our plight.” Not the plight of the foreign workers who make far less money. Berry’s real concern is the plight of the American IT workers who make far more money. Won’t anyone think of them?
Who do these American citizens think they are? Voters? The government needs to fix that quick by electing a new people. Why shouldn't American politicians be oblivious to American voters? Haven't you ever been to the Aspen Ideas Festival? If you had only been worthy of being invited, you'd know that billionaires are much more classy than (ugh) voters.
As twisted as that is, it might at least make some logical sense if it were true that foreign tech workers were being underpaid. In fact, as Popper duly notes, a Brookings study found that H1-B workers in the tech industry make 26 percent more than their American counterparts.
Obviously, billionaires want more H1-B visas so they can pay foreigners more money than Americans would cost for the same work. It's simple logic, but I'm not a billionaire genius, so don't ask me to explain it.
At the same time, it is true that some American graduates in science and engineering are being passed over for jobs. But it isn’t because there are foreigners will do those jobs for less money. It’s because there are foreigners who will do them better.
Or at lower price. In either case, it's all good for Billionaire-Americans.
That's why it isn’t the top American programmers who are threatened by the competition. As an Andressen Horowitz recruiter points out in Popper's story, it’s the ones who don’t have the skills that today’s tech companies need.
God forbid that the billionaires should pay to train American workers, especially senile ones over age 39. What next? Are these xenophobes then going to start suggesting that the billionaires might consider hiring American women to program? What insanity will they propose after that? That Silicon Valley hire a few Mexican-Americans and African-Americans?
If Americans want jobs programming, all they have to do is be programming geniuses like Marc Andreessen. If they aren't cut out to be billionaires, then, who needs Americans? What have your fellow countrymen ever done for you or yours? What did their ancestors ever do for your ancestors?
Historically, even the country’s least-skilled IT workers could count on cushy jobs with good pay. That isn’t because their work is inherently more valuable than that of, say, teachers. It’s because they didn’t have much competition. That’s changing, and they’re upset about it, and that’s understandable. But they should recognize that limiting H-1B visas will only hurt Silicon Valley in the long run.
As we all know, Silicon Valley is barely hanging on by its fingernails. Without increasing H-1B visas, all the tech billionaires will up and flee to India. Tumbleweeds will be blowing down Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto within three years.
It's just like how Congress drove Hollywood out of business by not granting H-1B visas for a massive influx of foreign gaffers, key grips, and best boys. Forcing Hollywood to pay market wages to American workers is why the last BMW dealership on Sunset Blvd. just folded up. That's why this weekend the big release at American movie theatres is Bollywood's The Lone Rajah. We can't have that happen to Silicon Valley, too!
And they should stop pretending that they’re serving anyone but themselves by fighting to keep foreigners out.
Themselves and their posterity. That's some kind of anti-American hate crime, isn't it?
Seriously, think about the men who fought 150 years ago today at Gettysburg. The two sides in Pickett's Charge had different opinions on what country they should be fighting for -- the Union or Old Virginia. But they didn't doubt that they and their countrymen were, to some degree, in it together.
Seriously, think about the men who fought 150 years ago today at Gettysburg. The two sides in Pickett's Charge had different opinions on what country they should be fighting for -- the Union or Old Virginia. But they didn't doubt that they and their countrymen were, to some degree, in it together.
What would any of them have thought of the unexamined assumptions behind this representative piece of Establishment punditry?
Could Lincoln have averted the Civil War?
My new column at Taki's today, the 150th Anniversary of the Fall of Vicksburg and Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg, offers a multipart theory on how Lincoln could have better managed the Secession crisis of 1860-1861. A glance at a map (see the post below), shows that the key was to keep Virginia, the northernmost state to secede, in the Union, just as Kentucky and all the other slave states at the same latitude as Virginia stayed in the Union.
One approach would have been to conciliate leading Virginians with offers of positions of responsibility in the Union, such as Lincoln's offer to Robert E. Lee -- but proactively, not after Virginia had voted, somewhat narrowly, to secede.
Another part is Secretary of State William Seward's April 1, 1861 plan to galvanize patriotic pro-Union sentiment by creating a foreign policy crisis over Spain's and France's efforts to use the secession crisis to violate the Monroe Doctrine in the Dominican Republic and Mexico, respectively.
Would Seward's plan have worked externally? Would the Spanish and French have backed down without fighting a trans-Atlantic war?
Possibly. The Spanish cared far more about keeping Cuba than regaining fever-ridden Santo Domingo. They immediately abandoned the Caribbean island upon the end of the American Civil War in 1865. Similarly, in 1866 French emperor Napoleon III chose Franco-American amity and pulled the plug on his Mexican adventure.
Would Seward's plan have worked domestically?
The psychology was not hopeless. I think this is the closest analogous situation: in the United Kingdom in the summer of 1914, civil war loomed as Irish Protestant officers, the heart of the British military since the Duke of Wellington (just as Southern officers were the heart of the U.S. Army), resigned their commissions to return home to take up arms against the Liberal government offering Home Rule to Irish Catholics. Suddenly, however, the Great War flared up and the Irish Protestant officers instantly returned and fought with tremendous loyalty against Germany.
Of course, the cost in this particular case to the United Kingdom was immensely high. But there's a big difference between fighting a land war with Germany on the Western Front and blustering about the Monroe Doctrine to dissuade Spain and France from undertaking what proved for them to be ill-fated misadventures in the New World.
Possibly. The Spanish cared far more about keeping Cuba than regaining fever-ridden Santo Domingo. They immediately abandoned the Caribbean island upon the end of the American Civil War in 1865. Similarly, in 1866 French emperor Napoleon III chose Franco-American amity and pulled the plug on his Mexican adventure.
Would Seward's plan have worked domestically?
The psychology was not hopeless. I think this is the closest analogous situation: in the United Kingdom in the summer of 1914, civil war loomed as Irish Protestant officers, the heart of the British military since the Duke of Wellington (just as Southern officers were the heart of the U.S. Army), resigned their commissions to return home to take up arms against the Liberal government offering Home Rule to Irish Catholics. Suddenly, however, the Great War flared up and the Irish Protestant officers instantly returned and fought with tremendous loyalty against Germany.
Of course, the cost in this particular case to the United Kingdom was immensely high. But there's a big difference between fighting a land war with Germany on the Western Front and blustering about the Monroe Doctrine to dissuade Spain and France from undertaking what proved for them to be ill-fated misadventures in the New World.
Read the whole thing there.
Here's the full text of William Seward's endlessly reviled April 1, 1861 memo to Lincoln, 12 days before the start of the Civil War:
SOME THOUGHTS FOR THE PRESIDENT'S CONSIDERATION
First. We are at the end of a month's administration, and yet without a policy either domestic or foreign.
Second. This, however, is not culpable, and it has even been unavoidable. The presence of the Senate, with the need to meet applications for patronage, have prevented attention to other and more grave matters.
Third. But further delay to adopt and prosecute our policies for both domestic and foreign affairs would not only bring scandal on the administration, but danger upon the country.
Fourth. To do this we must dismiss the applicants for office. But how? I suggest that we make the local appointments forthwith, leaving foreign or general ones for ulterior and occasional action.
Fifth. The policy at home. I am aware that my views are singular, and perhaps not sufficiently explained. My system is built upon this idea as a ruling one, namely, that we must
Change The Question Before The Public From One Upon Slavery, Or About Slavery, for a question upon UNION Or Disunion:
In other words, from what would be regarded as a party question, to one of patriotism or union.
The occupation or evacuation of Fort Sumter, although not in fact a slavery or a party question, is so regarded. Witness the temper manifested by the Republicans in the free states, and even by the Union men in the South.
I would therefore terminate it as a safe means for changing the issue. I deem it fortunate that the last administration created the necessity.
For the rest, I would simultaneously defend and reenforce all the ports in the gulf, and have the navy recalled from foreign stations to be prepared for a blockade. Put the island of Key West under martial law.
This will raise distinctly the question of union or disunion. I would maintain every fort and possession in the South.
For Foreign Nations
I would demand explanations from Spain and France, categorically, at once.
I would seek explanations from Great Britain and Russia, and send agents into Canada, Mexico, and Central America to rouse a vigorous continental spirit of independence on this continent against European intervention.
And, if satisfactory explanations are not received from Spain and France,
Would convene Congress and declare war against them.
But whatever policy we adopt, there must be an energetic prosecution of it.
For this purpose it must be somebody's business to pursue and direct it incessantly.
Either the President must do it himself, and be all the while active in it, or
Devolve it on some member of his cabinet. Once adopted, debates on it must end, and all agree and abide.
It is not in my especial province;
But I neither seek to evade nor assume responsibility.
Here's the full text of William Seward's endlessly reviled April 1, 1861 memo to Lincoln, 12 days before the start of the Civil War:
SOME THOUGHTS FOR THE PRESIDENT'S CONSIDERATION
First. We are at the end of a month's administration, and yet without a policy either domestic or foreign.
Second. This, however, is not culpable, and it has even been unavoidable. The presence of the Senate, with the need to meet applications for patronage, have prevented attention to other and more grave matters.
Third. But further delay to adopt and prosecute our policies for both domestic and foreign affairs would not only bring scandal on the administration, but danger upon the country.
Fourth. To do this we must dismiss the applicants for office. But how? I suggest that we make the local appointments forthwith, leaving foreign or general ones for ulterior and occasional action.
Fifth. The policy at home. I am aware that my views are singular, and perhaps not sufficiently explained. My system is built upon this idea as a ruling one, namely, that we must
Change The Question Before The Public From One Upon Slavery, Or About Slavery, for a question upon UNION Or Disunion:
In other words, from what would be regarded as a party question, to one of patriotism or union.
The occupation or evacuation of Fort Sumter, although not in fact a slavery or a party question, is so regarded. Witness the temper manifested by the Republicans in the free states, and even by the Union men in the South.
I would therefore terminate it as a safe means for changing the issue. I deem it fortunate that the last administration created the necessity.
For the rest, I would simultaneously defend and reenforce all the ports in the gulf, and have the navy recalled from foreign stations to be prepared for a blockade. Put the island of Key West under martial law.
This will raise distinctly the question of union or disunion. I would maintain every fort and possession in the South.
For Foreign Nations
I would demand explanations from Spain and France, categorically, at once.
I would seek explanations from Great Britain and Russia, and send agents into Canada, Mexico, and Central America to rouse a vigorous continental spirit of independence on this continent against European intervention.
And, if satisfactory explanations are not received from Spain and France,
Would convene Congress and declare war against them.
But whatever policy we adopt, there must be an energetic prosecution of it.
For this purpose it must be somebody's business to pursue and direct it incessantly.
Either the President must do it himself, and be all the while active in it, or
Devolve it on some member of his cabinet. Once adopted, debates on it must end, and all agree and abide.
It is not in my especial province;
But I neither seek to evade nor assume responsibility.
July 2, 2013
Sailer: "Lincoln's Folly"
Taki's Magazine column:
Perhaps to celebrate the Battle of Gettysburg’s 150th anniversary, liberal Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson announced on June 25th that, in effect, it’s too bad Pickett’s Charge of July 3, 1863 failed.
From Meyerson’s “Start the border fence in Norfolk, Va.”:
Until that day, though, if the federal government wants to build a fence that keeps the United States safe from the dangers of lower wages and poverty and their attendant ills — and the all-round fruitcakery of the right-wing white South — it should build that fence from Norfolk to Dallas. There’s nothing wrong with a fence, so long as you put it in the right place.
This is another manifestation of what John Derbyshire calls the Cold Civil War: “good old American sectionalism—two big groups of white people who can’t stand the sight of each other.”
One reason that America’s internal animosities have become so virulent is that since the Soviet Empire’s collapse two dozen years ago, we lack worthy external foes.
I go on to explain how a more experienced Lincoln could have headed off the Civil War in 1860-61.
Read the whole thing there.
By the way, here's a long article documenting the bizarre disdain of most Civil War historians for Secretary of State William Seward's brilliant April 1, 1861 memo to Lincoln (which Lincoln tragically brushed aside) explaining the most plausible plan anybody came up with at that late date for heading off the Civil War.
And it's not like Seward was some weirdo crank outsider. He was a great man. While Lincoln wasted time during those crucial weeks, Seward came up with a plan that might have worked, or at least bought time.
Perhaps it's just the déformation professionnelle of Civil War historians to be irrationally averse to anybody and anything that might have made their profession needless, even if it would have saved 750,000 American lives.
By the way, here's a long article documenting the bizarre disdain of most Civil War historians for Secretary of State William Seward's brilliant April 1, 1861 memo to Lincoln (which Lincoln tragically brushed aside) explaining the most plausible plan anybody came up with at that late date for heading off the Civil War.
And it's not like Seward was some weirdo crank outsider. He was a great man. While Lincoln wasted time during those crucial weeks, Seward came up with a plan that might have worked, or at least bought time.
Perhaps it's just the déformation professionnelle of Civil War historians to be irrationally averse to anybody and anything that might have made their profession needless, even if it would have saved 750,000 American lives.
Has a single billionaire spoken out against Schumer-Rubio?
According to Forbes, there are a little over 400 billionaires in the U.S. Many (such as the Koch Brothers, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, and George Soros) are actively using their money, influence, and power to promote more immigration. (And this is not to mention foreign billionaires, such as Carlos Slim, financial savior of the New York Times, who profits exorbitantly from phone calls between Mexican immigrants in America and their friends and family in his country.)
Here's a question -- in the latest round of controversy over immigration, has a single billionaire spoken up publicly against expanding immigration?
I'm aware of a tech billionaire who quietly gave some moderate support to immigration restriction a half dozen years ago, but I'm drawing blanks on any since 2010. Surely, here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, there must be one lone billionaire who felt able to speak out against his class's self-interest. Right?
Were constantly reading in the mainstream media about how Michigan eye doctor John Tanton is this malign supervillain personally standing athwart immigration reform, shouting "Stop," but, come on ... an eye doctor in Michigan? That's it? If one billionaire spent as much on immigration restriction as several billionaires have spent on their favorite college football teams' weight rooms, we might have something not too far off from a level playing field in the debate.
Were constantly reading in the mainstream media about how Michigan eye doctor John Tanton is this malign supervillain personally standing athwart immigration reform, shouting "Stop," but, come on ... an eye doctor in Michigan? That's it? If one billionaire spent as much on immigration restriction as several billionaires have spent on their favorite college football teams' weight rooms, we might have something not too far off from a level playing field in the debate.
You might almost suspect that the billionaires are waging class war on the citizens of America.
As Swift would say if he were alive today, "When a true patriot appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the scoundrels are in a confederacy against him."
As Swift would say if he were alive today, "When a true patriot appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the scoundrels are in a confederacy against him."
Summer iSteve Panhandling Drive
My Spring panhandling campaign was an encouraging success. I appreciate and am motivated by your feedback (especially feedback in the form of money). The boost to my energy that your support induces has helped me raise my traffic stats by about 20-25 percent since the last fundraiser began.
So, I'm going to run a donation drive each quarter of the year.
First, you can make a tax deductible contribution via VDARE by clicking here.
Second, you can make a non-tax deductible contribution by credit card via WePay by clicking here.
Third: You can mail a non-tax deductible donation to:
Steve Sailer
P.O Box 4142
Valley Village, CA 91607-4142
Thanks.
Tom Wolfe explains the Zimmerman case
One of my relatively few specific successes in the field of Awareness Raising over the last decade has been how much more cognizant a small fraction of the thinking public has become that Tom Wolfe's 1987 bestseller The Bonfire of the Vanities foreshadows many of the racial brouhahas that have consumed the press in the 26 years since. Judge Richard A. Posner's mid-1990s reassessment of Bonfire praised Wolfe's "prophetic insight (the sort of thing we attribute to Kafka)." Wolfe's phrase "Great White Defendant" is now up to 95,600 pages on Google.
With the current Bonfire-style trial of George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin shooting turning into an unsurprising train wreck, it's worth giving you excerpts of a key section from Bonfire (pp. 105-108) that provides the template for understanding much of what you see on the nightly news over the decades:
The language is NSFW.
Three Bronx assistant District Attorneys -- Ray Andriutti, Jimmy Caughey, and Larry Kramer (the indirect narrator) -- discuss elected head D.A. Abe Weiss's current obsession with the Moore case, in which an unemployed corporate executive in the nice Riverdale suburb of the Bronx shot his mother-in-law.
Three Bronx assistant District Attorneys -- Ray Andriutti, Jimmy Caughey, and Larry Kramer (the indirect narrator) -- discuss elected head D.A. Abe Weiss's current obsession with the Moore case, in which an unemployed corporate executive in the nice Riverdale suburb of the Bronx shot his mother-in-law.
An assistant D.A. in Major Offenses has started calling Abe Weiss "Captain Ahab," and now they all did. Weiss was notorious in his obsession for publicity, even among a breed, the district attorney, that was publicity-mad by nature. ...
[Kramer:] "Why was Weiss interested?"
[Caughey:] "Well, the guy's white, he's got some money, he lives in a big house in Riverdale. It looks at first like maybe he's gonna fake an accidental shooting."
"Is that possible?"
"Naw. Fucking guy's one a my boys. He's your basic Irish who made good, but he's still a Harp. He's drowning in remorse. You'd think he shot his own mother, he feels so fucking guilty. Right now he'd confess to anything. Bernie could sit him in front of the video camera and clean up every homicide in the Bronx for the past five years. Naw, it's a piece a shit, but it looked good at first."
Kramer and Andriutti contemplated this piece a shit without needing any amplification. Every assistant D.A. in the Bronx, from the youngest Italian just out of St. John's Law School to the oldest Irish bureau chief, who would be somebody like Bernie Fitzgibbon, who was forty-two, shared Captain Ahab's mania for the Great White Defendant. For a start, it was not pleasant to go through life telling yourself, "What I do for a living is, I pack blacks and Latins off to jail." Kramer had been raised as a liberal. In Jewish families like his, liberalism came with the Similac and the Mott's apple juice and the Instamatic and Daddy's grins in the evening. And even the Italians, like Ray Andriutti, and the Irish, like Jimmy Caughey, who were not exactly burdened with liberalism by their parents, couldn't help but be affected by the mental atmosphere of the law schools, where, for one thing, there were so many Jewish faculty members. By the time you finished law school in the New York area, it was, well ... impolite! ... on the ordinary social level ... to go around making jokes about the yoms. It wasn't that it was morally wrong ... It was that it was in bad taste. So it made the boys uneasy, this eternal prosecution of the blacks and Latins.
Not that they weren't guilty. One thing Kramer had learned within two weeks as an assistant D.A. in the Bronx was that 95 percent of the defendants who got as far as the indictment stage, perhaps 98 percent, were truly guilty. The caseload was so overwhelming, you didn't waste time trying to bring the marginal cases forward, unless the press was on your back. They hauled in guilt by the ton, the blue-and-orange vans out there on Walton Avenue. But the poor bastards behind the wire mesh barely deserved the term criminal if by criminal you had in mind the romantic notion of someone who has a goal and seeks to achieve it through some desperate way outside the law. No, they were simple-minded incompetents, most of them, and they did unbelievably stupid, vile things.
Kramer looked at Andriutti and Caughey, sitting there with their mighty thighs akimbo. He felt superior to them. He was a graduate of the Columbia Law School, and they were both graduates of St. John's, widely known as the law school for the also-rans of college academic competition. And he was Jewish. Very early in life he had picked up the knowledge that the Italians and the Irish were animals. The Italians were pigs, and the Irish were mules or goats. He couldn't remember if his parents had actually used any such terms or not, but they got the idea across very clearly. To his parents, New York City -- New York? hell, the whole U.S., the whole world! -- was a drama called The Jews Confront the Goyim, and the goyim were animals. And so what was he doing here with these animals? A Jew in the Homicide Bureau was a rare thing. The Homicide Bureau was the elite corps of the District Attorney's Office, the D.A.'s Marines, because homicide was the most serious of all crimes. An assistant D.A. in Homicide had to be able to go out on the street to the crime scenes at all hours, night and day, and be a real commando and rub shoulders with the police and know how to confront defendants and witnesses and intimidate them when the time came, and these were likely to be the lowest, grimmest, scurviest defendants and witnesses in the history of criminal justice. For fifty years, at least, maybe longer, Homicide had been an Irish enclave, although recently the Italians had made their way into it. The Irish had given Homicide their stamp. The Irish were stone courageous. Even when it was insane not to, they never stepped back. Andriutti had been right, or half right. Kramer didn't want to be Italian, but he did want to be Irish, and so did Ray Andriutti, the dumb fuck. Yes, they were animals! The goyim were animals, and Kramer was proud to be among the animals, in the Homicide Bureau. ....
Here they were ... and here he was, and where was he going? What were these cases he was handling? Pieces of shit! Garbage collection ... Arthur Rivera. Arthur Rivera and another drug dealer get into an argument over an order of pizza at a social club and pull knives, and Arthur says, "Let's put the weapons down and fight man to man." And they do, whereupon Arthur pulls out a second knife and stabs the other fellow in the chest and kills him ... Jimmy Dollard. Jimmy Dollard and his closest pal, Otis Blakemore, and three other black guys are drinking and taking cocaine and playing a game called the dozens, in which the idea is to see how outrageously you can insult the other fellow, and Blakemore is doing an inspired number on Jimmy, and Jimmy pulls out a revolver and shoots him through the heart and then collapse on the table, sobbing and saying, "My man! My man Stan! I shot my man Stan!" ... And the case of Herbert 92X --
... The press couldn't even see these cases. It was just poor people killing poor people. To prosecute such cases was to be part of the garbage collection service, necessary and honorable, plodding and anonymous.
Captain Ahab wasn't so ridiculous, after all. Press coverage! Ray and Jimmy could laugh all they wanted, but Weiss had made sure the entire city knew his name. Weiss had an election coming up, and the Bronx was 70 percent black and Latin, and he was going to make sure the name Abe Weiss was pumped out to them on every channel that existed. He might not do much else, but he was going to do that.
Prosecution of Zimmerman increasingly farcical
From the New York Times:
Prosecutors in Zimmerman Trial Ask Jury to Disregard Comments
By CARA BUCKLEY
SANFORD, Fla. — Prosecutors in the second-degree murder trial of George Zimmerman scrambled Tuesday to undo damage to their case by one of their leading witnesses, a Sanford police officer who interviewed the defendant hours after he fatally shot Trayvon Martin.
The witness, Officer Chris Serino, had testified under cross-examination on Monday afternoon that Mr. Zimmerman seemed to be telling the truth when he said he had fired his gun in self-defense. The officer’s remarks made for a dramatic moment in the trial — and clearly benefited the defense — but drew no immediate objection from the prosecutors. The court then recessed for the day.
But early on Tuesday, citing case law, the prosecution successfully argued that Officer Serino’s comments about Mr. Zimmerman’s truthfulness should be disregarded by the jury. The judge then instructed the jurors, who are being sequestered during the trial, to ignore the officer’s statement—nearly 17 hours after he made it.
Officer Serino’s testimony, in the second week of the trial in Seminole County Court, was the latest setback for prosecutors, whose witnesses have repeatedly helped bolster the defense’s case.
The prosecutions seems to be getting farther away from "beyond a reasonable doubt" with each witness it calls.
Are we ever going to see the admission that this whole PaS case (pardon my Bonfire jargon) should be cause for an agonizing reappraisal of the racial delusions and racial animus of those who hold the Megaphone?
Are we ever going to see the admission that this whole PaS case (pardon my Bonfire jargon) should be cause for an agonizing reappraisal of the racial delusions and racial animus of those who hold the Megaphone?
Cornel West: Black is the old gay
From National Review:
It’s been a great week for gay activists, but Dr. Cornel West is not happy. As the postmodern professor par excellence explained to radio host Tavis Smiley last Sunday, the advances made by gays and lesbians mean that “we black folk are just being pushed to the back of the bus”:
The irony of the age of Obama in which black folks found themselves pushed to the back, [and] our gay brothers and lesbian sisters more and more pushed to the center.
Can't say Rachel Jeantel and Trayvon Martin contributed much to making white liberals like blacks more than all those bright-eyed showtunes singing gays on Glee.
July 1, 2013
Who donates the most to colleges?
One of the interesting subjects that is kept under wraps is this: top colleges have had their admissions and alumni offices get together to carefully model what kind of high school applicants are likely to donate the most money to their alma maters in the long run. But, that information is treated like the President's nuclear football, so I can only guess based on anecdotal information about huge donors.
As far as I can tell from reading articles about 9-digit donors is that a one word description for many of the really big donors is jock: white, male, straight, athletic, competitive, fraternity-joining, and pretty conservative.
To be a big donor it also helps to have legacy ties to the college: either your parents or your children should go to the college.
For example, I first got interested in this subject reading about the first $100 million donor to USC. He was the shotputter on the USC track team, son of two USC grads, then started a steel fabrication company in Fresno.
For example, today we learn:
Billionaire Silicon Valley real estate developer John Arrillaga recently wrote Stanford University a $150 million check—the single largest donation from a living individual in the school’s history.
Arrillaga’s 9-figure donation is the latest in a long line of donations to the school, which began with a 2-figure donation shortly after he graduated in 1960, according to a letter published today from Arrillaga’s daughter, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen.
She's the wife of Netscape web browser developer Marc Andreesen.
Arrillaga, now 76, grew up in poor in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood and arrived at Stanford in 1955 on a basketball scholarship. He worked six jobs in college to pay for living expenses, his daughter wrote.
The name "Arrillaga" is of Basque origin from the Franco-Spanish border region. If Basques are Hispanic, then he is one of three Hispanics on the Forbes 400, along with a Miami Cuban real estate developer and Arte Moreno, the billboard king who is a genuine Mexican-American.
The Arrillaga name graces eight buildings at Stanford—the Arrillaga Alumni Center, the Arrillaga Center for Sports and Recreation, the Arrillaga Dining Service Building, the Arrillaga Family Dining Commons, the Arrillaga Family Sports Center, the Arrillaga Gymnasium and Weight Room, the Arrillaga Outdoor Education and Recreation Center and the Arrillaga Plaza.
These are not, you'll notice, the most highbrow buildings at Stanford. A lot of vast fortunes have been made by Stanford grads in all sorts of esoteric ways, but Arrillaga's billions have come in just about the lowest tech field: real estate development. This is not uncommon that the biggest donations often come from the alumni in the more regular guy fields.
... In 2006, Arrillaga made a $100 million donation to the school, which at the time was the single largest individual donation ever made to Stanford. In Nov. 2011, Dorothy and Robert King (who coincidentally also graduated from Stanford in 1960) topped that donation by writing the school a $150 million check.
Or, perhaps it's not a coincidence, at least not in Arrillaga's mind, that the two classmates have been competing to give the most humongous donation in Stanford history.
The Wall Street Journal reports Arrillaga’s most recent donation was slightly bigger than the Kings’ donation, edging them out to reclaim the top donor spot.
Can't stop competing, can he?
Athletics pays off for some colleges in donations. Laura Arrillaga-Andreesen writes:
Athletics creates strong family bonds. My father attended every basketball game, tennis match and softball or baseball game in which my brother, John Jr., and I played as kids. Today, he rarely misses a Stanford home basketball or football game ...
If you are wondering why Stanford is so good in football recently, it has a lot to do with its new facilities, which attract top athletes. Many of the buildings were paid for by Arrillaga:
As part of making his first nine-figure gift to Stanford, he led the construction of the university's state-of-the-art football stadium – completed under-budget and in just 42 weeks' time. He made high-level decisions on stadium design and landscaping while paying attention to detail, overseeing 24-hour construction crews, picking out every tree, selecting seat materials and tasting countless hot dogs before choosing which brand to serve.
Arrillaga is also a fraternity boy, Delta Tau Delta.
And he married a Stanford girl. His daughter Laura has four separate degrees from Stanford:
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, BA '92, MBA '97, MA '98, MA '99, is a lecturer in philanthropy at Stanford Graduate School of Business, a lecturer in public policy at Stanford, and founder and chairman of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.
This legacy thing has worked out well for Stanford:
In fact, my father's philanthropy was a primary inspiration behind the $27.5 million my husband, Marc Andreessen, and I gave to Stanford Hospital in 2006 to fund a new Emergency Department.
In general, it appears that the biggest donors to colleges are conservatives.
Today in Witch-Sniffing News
Kathy Shaidle points to this news story:
King was caught and sentenced to 25 years in prison after the [Paula] Deen robbery and a separate robbery. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, now and when we spoke to him, he actually broke down in tears. He blames himself for Paula Deen’s troubles.
“I really feel for her,” King said. “She’s being persecuted because of that one little mistake in her judgment. She was acting out of anger.”
King had 13 prior convictions for robbery before he pointed a gun at Paula Deen. He says he’s turned his life around.
But the Paula Deen empire is crashing down. More of her business partners are severing ties with her. JCPenney and Sears are the latest to jump ship.
Being a crime victim is racist.
Profiling: George Zimmerman v. Michael Bloomberg
And rightly so. After all, this Bloomberg person is just some provincial nobody with a crimefighting complex. He's not George Zimmerman. Let's keep our priorities straight, people.
June 30, 2013
The 2016 Undernews
You can use Google Prompts to find out what questions the public is asking. For example, just type in "Is " followed by the name of a celebrity. Let's find out what the Undernews is about 2016 Presidential Timbers. (Sorry about getting screenshots to display as different sizes.)
Republicans
Democrats
Boring! How can anybody take you seriously as Presidential Timber, Cory, if you can't generate any better Undernews than vague questions about your white girlfriend in Brooklyn? Check out the #1 questions for Hillary and Biden, Mayor Booker, and then get to work.
150th Anniversary of Gettysburg
I've only been to two classic battlefields: Waterloo and Gettysburg.
Waterloo is fascinating in its compactness, and in the drama of the two greatest generals of the age finally squaring off. It also had the great advantage of being the last battle of it age.
Napoleon's escape from Elba is one of the wildest yarns ever. The following headlines are said to have appeared in the French newspaper Moniteur in March of 1815.
March 9 The Monster has escaped from his place of banishment.
March 10 The Corsican Ogre has landed at Cape Juan
March 11 The Tiger has shown himself at Gap. The Troops are advancing on all sides to arrest his progress. He will conclude his miserable adventure by becoming a wanderer among the mountains.
March 12 The Monster has actually advanced as far as Grenoble
March 13 The Tyrant is now at Lyon. Fear and Terror seized all at his appeaance.
March 18 The Usurper has ventured to approach to within 60 hours' march of the capital.
March 19 Bonaparte is advancing by forced marches, but it is impossible he can reach Paris.
March 20 Napoleon will arrive under the walls of Paris tomorrow.
March 21 The Emperor Napoleon is at Fountainbleau
March 22 Yesteday evening His Majesty the Emperor made his public entry and arrived at the Tuileries. Nothing can exceed the universal joy.
As General Georges le Paton said, "The French, we love a winner!"
But there's also a sense of exhaustion about Waterloo on June 18, 1815. The best British troops were returning from the War of 1812 in America, so Wellington fought his usual defensive tactics, sheltering his troop on the reverse slope of a low ridge, not asking more of them than he could expect. The French troops fought well, but they had been winnowed by two decades of war.
But there's also a sense of exhaustion about Waterloo on June 18, 1815. The best British troops were returning from the War of 1812 in America, so Wellington fought his usual defensive tactics, sheltering his troop on the reverse slope of a low ridge, not asking more of them than he could expect. The French troops fought well, but they had been winnowed by two decades of war.
Napoleon's initial strategy of driving a wedge between the British and the Prussians, so he could destroy each army separately, had somehow come to fruition, leaving him about 12 desperate hours to beat Wellington and then turn on Blucher. For once, though, Napoleon seemed too tired to seize the initiative, puttering away the morning before finally launching the battle.
As for Gettysburg, the War Nerd says, "But not Gettysburg. The more you know about it, the finer, cleaner, more goddamn magnificent it was."
Understanding the postwar era
I just stumbled upon a key stat in an ancient Time magazine:
Religion: More Catholics
Friday, May 12, 1961
U.S. Roman Catholics now form 24% of the population, compared to 19% a decade ago. According to the Official Catholic Directory for 1961, published last week, baptized Catholics number 42,104,899—13,470,021 more than in 1951.
This was a sizable issue at the time, and the resolution of it in the 1960s, as I explained in Taki's article a few months ago, opened up room for much that followed.
Who wrinkles fastest?
What 70 IQ looks like
Candid_observer comments on the Trayvon-Zimmerman trial:
One thing that's remarkable about the testimony of Rachel Jeantel is that it puts on display a black whom one would simply never see under the standard media unspoken rules. Any depiction of a black who came across as so deeply ignorant, frankly stupid, transparently hostile, and flagrantly dishonest would be met with accusations of racism because it is so unflattering. One sees such blacks turning up in youtube videos of course, but I'm not sure I've seen any such in the media, even in news reports of crimes, which, I'm sure, are likewise sanitized for public view.
That's why Law & Order shows witnesses to cunning Park Avenue killings. The homicides they witnessed may not, technically, have happened, but they are a lot more interesting than the witnesses to actual killings.
Back in 2012, the press wanted this trial to be, to use Bonfire of the Vanities terminology, the triumphant culmination of "the hunt for the Great White Defendant," with George Zimmerman as Sherman McCoy, perfect for kicking off Obama's re-election campaign. Predictably, though, it's just turned into another Herbert 92X-style "piece a s---" case. (You can read Tom Wolfe's bravura description of Asst. D.A. Kramer's thoughts on pp. 105 to 108.)
This is reminiscent of the Supreme Court's 2002 decision that effectively banned the death penalty for murderers with IQs of 70 or below. In the extended families of Supreme Court justices, IQs of 70 or less are inevitably associated with a clear organic cases of mental retardation, such as Down Syndrome. But among African Americans, about 1/6th are no more than 70 IQ, just as about 1/6th are smarter than the average white American.
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