Rating "The Butler's" Presidential impersonations

As for the celebrity impersonations in the new movie The Butler, about a White House butler from 1952-1986:

Robin Williams looks rather like Truman, but plays Eisenhower. (Perhaps Williams was signed to play Truman, but then got reassigned when Truman got cut to shorten the movie?)

Boyish romantic comedy leading man James Marsden plays JFK even though he looks more like RFK.

Minka Kelly, actress/model/whatever and former girlfriend of Derek Jeter, is too va-va-voom to play Jackie Kennedy. She’d be well cast in a historical bedroom farce where Jack has to sneak Marilyn out through the White House dressed in a dark wig and Jackie’s wardrobe (if you want to write this up, be my guest.)

Liev Schreiber isn’t too far off in size and looks from LBJ, but as a Northeastern bourgeois, he lacks the massive Texan personality. Matthew McConaughey of Uvalde, TX is moderately tall and would have been more fun.

John Cusack is Nixon, although he looks more like Kennedy. Cusack plays Nixon as sinister and crazy, like a charmless version of the Nixon/Dracula mélange invented by Jeremy Irons to portray Claus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune.

Ford and Carter are relegated to newscast footage of themselves.

Jane Fonda is well-cast as a gracious Nancy Reagan. Ideology aside, they are similar enough that they can be compared: – Jane was a better movie actress, Nancy was a better big man's wife (Jane seemed to be a bit of a distraction to the careers of Tom Hayden and Ted Turner.)

Alan Rickman looks surprisingly like Ronald Reagan, but the introspectively gloomy Severus Snape sounds less like Reagan and more like the actor-turned-President doing an amusing impression of Alan Rickman after a White House screening of Die Hard.

"The Butler"

From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:

The hit movie Lee Daniels’ The Butler, staring Forest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey, takes us back to the bad old days when blacks worked in the White House rather than lived there. 

Strange as it may seem now, in an America where Hispanics and Filipinos fill ever more of America’s servile jobs, African Americans were once employed across the land in vast numbers as trusted domestic servants. With the coming of the Black Pride movement in the late 1960s, however, blacks began to see service work as neo-slavery and an insult to their masculine dignity. 

Meanwhile, well-to-do whites, alarmed by the rising rates of crime and surliness among blacks, were happy to be handed a politically correct excuse to stop hiring uppity African Americans ...

Read the whole thing there.

Common Core: Good for white boys?

There's much hubbub over the Common Core, a new set of quasi-national curriculum guidelines that have been endorsed by over 40 states. 

I'm relatively cynical about issuing new standards in education, whether state, federal, or in-between. Like all education panaceas, the Common Core is being sold as the means to Close the Gap, help American students catch up with China and Japan, improve critical thinking skills, and all other good things.

That said, from what little I've peered into the Common Core, I suspect it might conceivably benefit the most overlooked group in schooling in recent decades: white boys.

For example, for reading and literature, it emphasizes less fiction (which girls and women prefer) and more nonfiction (which males increasingly prefer as they mature).

Some of the inspiration for the Common Core appears to be the long campaign by E.D. Hirsch for "core knowledge." Hirsch has long argued that kids often lose the thread in reading when they are hit by references (e.g., "he met his Waterloo") to facts they don't know. So, rather than leach all the facts out of their readings and just emphasize feelings, use readings to teach kids more facts, especially important facts, such as what Waterloo was. The male bias in this should be obvious.

It's supposed to encourage critical analysis. If it really does that, rather than just encouraging students to complain in socially endorsed manners, white boys will do relatively better on tests.

A big deal is being made about how Common Core tests won't be just multiple choice tests, they'll include lots of essays. Which is fine, but note a big advantage of multiple choice tests: they can be graded instantly by computer, which is not just labor saving, but which allows inflight adjustments. Essay tests not only add a lot of labor (expect to see a lot of part-time jobs for Common Core essay test graders), but can take weeks or months to grade. Nobody seems terribly sure about how testing will work out under the Common Core.

Richard Dawkins on Islam v. Trinity College, Cambridge

From the Daily Mail earlier in the month:

Muslims peaked in the Dark Ages. But since then?': Richard Dawkins embroiled in Twitter row over controversial comments  

The author of The God Delusion tweeted that the world's Muslims had won fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge 

His comments sparked anger among high-profile Twitter users including Caitlin Moran and Faisal Islam  

By JOHN STEVENS 

Richard Dawkins has  provoked anger after he claimed Muslims have contributed almost nothing to science since the Middle Ages. 

The outspoken biologist and atheist wrote on Twitter that a single college at Cambridge  University had won more Nobel Prizes than all the world’s Muslims. 

His comments sparked fury on the social network where he was accused of disguising his ‘bigotry’ as atheism. 

But last night the 72-year-old best-selling author of The God Delusion refused to apologise for his remarks. 

The row broke out after he commented: ‘All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge.’ He responded to the barrage of ensuing criticism by telling his 782,000 followers: ‘A statement of simple fact is not bigotry. And science by Muslims was great in the distant past.’ 

In response to one Twitter user who pointed out that Muslims had been responsible for algebra and ‘alchemy’, Professor Dawkins replied: ‘Indeed, where would we be without alchemy? Dark Age achievements undoubted. But since then?’ 

He sought to justify his controversial observation by adding: ‘Why mention Muslim Nobels rather than any other group? Because we so often hear boasts about (a) their total numbers and (b) their science.’ 

One angry Twitter user hit out  at the remarks telling the author: ‘You absolutely disgust me.’  

Writer Caitlin Moran added: ‘Think it’s time someone turned Richard Dawkins off and then on again’. Channel 4 News economics editor Faisal Islam questioned Dawkins’ ‘spurious use of data’. 

Writer Owen Jones told the professor: ‘How dare you dress your bigotry up as atheism. You are now beyond an embarrassment.’ 

But some users noted that the criticism of Professor Dawkins was in marked contrast to that when he has made comments about Christianity.

One wrote: ‘Dawkins spent the best part of 10 years attacking Christianity and not raising an eyebrow. He now turns that same eye on Islam and uproar.’

An Emeritus Fellow at New College, Oxford, Professor Dawkins appeared to try and appease his critics by saying that Trinity College also has more Nobel Prizes than any country in the world except America, Britain, Germany and France

WHO TOPS THE NOBEL TABLE? 

Trinity College has 32 Nobel laureates, whereas only ten Prize winners are thought to have been Muslims. 

Awarded annually since 1901, the Nobel Prize recognises achievements in Physics, Medicine, Chemistry, Peace and Literature, as well as a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. 

Winners from Trinity include Bertrand Russell who won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his 1946 work, ‘A History of Western Philosophy’. 

Twelve of the college’s Nobel laureates were recognised for work in physics, eight in chemistry and seven in medicine. 

Of the ten Muslim Nobel Laureates, only two are scientists: Pakistani Abdus Salam, who won the Prize for Physics, and the Egyptian-American Ahmed Zewail, who won in Chemistry. 

Six were awarded the Peace Prize, including Yasser Arafat. 

Half of the ten Muslim laureates were awarded the prize in the 21st century, during which Trinity College has only had one prize winner.

Dawkins didn't pick Trinity at random as the exemplar of the West. Trinity's list of former students is insanely distinguished, as I noted in 2006:

I'm reading a biography of Sir Francis Galton, who attended Trinity College at Cambridge University. I found amusing the biographer's cautious reference to Sir Isaac Newton as "one of Trinity College's most distinguished alumni." 

Wouldn't Newton rank as the most distinguished alumni? After all, what other Englishman is as distinguished as Newton (besides Shakespeare, and he didn't go to college)? Newton was calculated to be the most eminent figure in the sciences in human history in Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment. 

Still, when I looked up on Wikipedia the list of alumni of Trinity, I could see why the writer didn't want to commit himself. Here are some other Trinity alumni and  / or professors besides Newton and Galton: 

Francis Bacon (not the sculptor, but the first philosopher of modern science), Niels Bohr, John Dryden, Thomas Babington Macaulay, James Clerk Maxwell, Vladimir Nabokov, Bertrand Russell, Ernest Rutherford, William Makepeace Thackeray, Arthur Balfour, G. H. Hardy, A. A. Milne, Jawaharlal Nehru, John Maynard Smith, Charles Babbage, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Lord Byron, Lytton Strachey, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

And that's just one college within Cambridge University.

One thing to keep in mind is that Cambridge and Oxford aren't really the Harvard and Yale of Britain, they're more like the Ivy League and the other Ivy League of Britain, who each all happen to be located in their own ancient small city. The Claremont colleges in Southern California are structured like this, with a half dozen small colleges side-by-side with assets in common, but Claremont is about seven centuries behind Oxford and Cambridge.

Dawkins himself studied at Balliol, Oxford, which has its own list of famous alumni. My vague impression is that Cambridge, with Trinity pre-eminent, tended to be more scientific / intellectual, while Oxford, with perhaps Balliol pre-eminent *, tended to be more political / literary / social / political.

Stereotyping wildly, Cambridge was slightly more progressive and Whig, Oxford slightly more conservative and Tory. Cambridge is northeast of London in flat, swampy country where Puritans once predominated, while Oxford is west of London amidst country estates ideal for foxhunting. To put it in Albion's Seed terms, Cambridge was more like Harvard, Oxford more like the U. of Virginia.

By the way, Dawkins fits my stereotype of evolutionary theorists as smart country boys. The sociology behind British predominance in evolution is that the affluent and the intellectual did not huddle in the cities (at least not year-round), but instead spread out across the countryside and took an interest in wildlife, farming, and scientific breeding.

From Wikipedia:

Dawkins was born in Nairobi, Kenya. His father, Clinton John Dawkins (1915–2010), was an agricultural civil servant in the British colonial service in Nyasaland (now Malawi). ... He returned to England in 1949, when Dawkins was eight. His father had inherited a country estate, Over Norton Park, which he turned into a commercial farm. Both his parents were interested in natural sciences; they answered Dawkins's questions in scientific terms.

Over Norton Park, 22 miles from Oxford, is a mile north of Chipping Norton, a gorgeous town in the Cotswold Hills that has become the country home center of the new Tory elite, the Chipping Norton Set: Prime Minister David Cameron, an Oxford man (PPE at Brasenose College) represents Chipping Norton in the House of Commons.

* No, as a commenter points out, Christ Church outranks even Balliol at Oxford. From Wikipedia:

Like its sister college, Trinity College, Cambridge, it was traditionally considered the most aristocratic college of its university. 

Christ Church has produced thirteen British prime ministers, which is equal to the number produced by all 45 other Oxford colleges put together and more than any Cambridge college (and two short of the total number for the University of Cambridge, fifteen).

For example, in real life, Evelyn Waugh was a scholarship lad at Hertford College, Oxford, but in his Brideshead Revisited, his alter ego Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte are students at Christ Church, Oxford. Christ Church traditionally had the highest rate of undergrads failing their finals, which was proudly seen as a mark of social distinction.

The Chinese love counting

The Count loves counting

From the NYT:

Communist Party cadres have filled meeting halls around China to hear a somber, secretive warning issued by senior leaders. Power could escape their grip, they have been told, unless the party eradicates seven subversive currents coursing through Chinese society. 

These seven perils were enumerated in a memo, referred to as Document No. 9, that bears the unmistakable imprimatur of Xi Jinping, China’s new top leader.

Why do the Chinese love to enumerate things? Are certain numbers unlucky? Does labeling your political rivals the "Gang of Four" instantly raise doubt about their inauspicious future because everybody knows that four is an unlucky number? Or do the Chinese just love numbers in general?

"Malt liquor, it's a helluva drink"

From the NYT:

The study, carried out over the course of a year at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, found that five beer brands were consumed most often by people who ended up in the emergency room. They were Budweiser, Steel Reserve, Colt 45, Bud Ice and Bud Light. 

Three of the brands are malt liquors, which typically contain more alcohol than regular beer. Four malt liquors accounted for nearly half of the beer consumption by emergency room patients, even though they account for less than 3 percent of beer consumption in the general population.

Okay, but keep in mind, as you might have observed while watching The Wire, that the tastes of emergency room patients in inner city Baltimore are not necessarily demographically representative of the whole country.

Albert Murray, RIP

The Harlem literary critic and USAF major (ret.) has died at 97.

Back in 1997 I reviewed The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, which was edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., for National Review. In "The Ebony Tower," I wrote:

This compendium raises the more general question of what is the overall contribution of blacks to American culture? One appealing, if possibly grandiose, perspective might be called the Patriotic Black Chauvinism of blues critic and novelist Albert Murray. In contrast to so many other black literary intellectuals, who've only been employed as professors and who now reside in such hotbeds of African American culture as Amherst and Santa Cruz, Murray is a retired Air Force major living in Harlem. Along with his friend Ralph Ellison (author of Invisible Man) and disciples such as trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, Murray has argued that rather than merely being a pitiful victim of racism, the black man's defiant sense of style makes him the most distinctively representative of Americans. That seems fairly plausible, if unprovable. A cruder version is testable: If America otherwise was as WASPish as Protestant Canada, would blacks by themselves make America a much more interesting place than Canada? Most definitely. (Of course, several other American ethnic groups could claim the same: after all, for better or worse, America is a lot less boring than Canada.)

From the NYT obituary, an interesting adoption experiment story of nature and nurture:

Albert Lee Murray was born on May 12, 1916, in Nokomis, Ala., to middle-class parents who soon gave him up for adoption to Hugh Murray, a laborer, and his wife, Matty. “It’s just like the prince left among the paupers,” said Mr. Murray, who learned of his adoption when he was about 11. ... As rendered in Mr. Murray’s inventive prose, the adolescent Scooter and his friend Buddy Marshall could imagine themselves as “explorers and discoverers and Indian scouts as well as sea pirates and cowboys and African spear fighters not to mention the two schemingest gamblers and back alley ramblers this side of Philmayork.” 

After graduating from the Mobile County Training School, where he earned letters in three sports and was voted the best all-around student, Mr. Murray enrolled at Tuskegee Institute, where he discovered literature and immersed himself in Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce and Mann. He met Ralph Ellison, an upperclassman, as well as another student, Mozelle Menefee, who became his wife in 1941. She survives him, as does their daughter, Michéle Murray, who became a dancer with the Alvin Ailey company.

... He enlisted in the military in 1943 and spent the last two years of World War II in the Army Air Corps. After the war, the Murrays moved to New York City, where he used the G.I. Bill to earn a master’s degree from N.Y.U. and renew his friendship with Ellison. In 1951, a year before Ellison published his classic work, “Invisible Man,” Mr. Murray rejoined the military, entering the Air Force. He served in the military, peripatetically, for 11 years 

My recollection is that when Murray was serving at bases in West Germany, he'd hop the train for Paris every time he got some leave and go hang out with the black jazz greats then in France. I believe Murray tended to see the glass as half full. While it was a shame that America was less welcoming to these artists than France was, he couldn't overlook that the American taxpayers were paying for his glorious Bohemian weekends in Paris by providing him with a good square job Monday to Friday that got him saluted all the time.

Caste outside of India: black blacksmiths

One of the odder phenomena that I've never seen much of an explanation for is that in many Middle Eastern and North African cultures, blacksmiths tend to be a hereditary caste who are markedly blacker (i.e., more sub-Saharan) than the average. 

There's not that much written about this these days, but here's a brief sample from an essay on the Tuareg blacksmith/artisan caste of the Sahara:

What is most striking about many Inedan is their Negroid appearance, or rather, their completely distinct physiognomy, in which Negroid traces are often very clear.   A Touareg can identify an artisan merely from his facial features, even if he comes from a region thousands of miles away across the desert.   This has lead to speculation that the Inedan are descended from an ancient black race who lived in the desert before the Berber tribes of the north came south and who were subsequently subdued and forced to work for their new ‘whiter’ overlords.

And this pattern is seen much farther from sub-Saharan Africa, such as in Jordan.

In contrast, in Europe, "Smith" is often the modal surname, suggesting that being a blacksmith was one of the more common occupations outside of farming and that smiths tended to have reasonable Darwinian success. And that sounds reasonable: being a blacksmith isn't a great job -- it's hot, it requires much strength. 

But, as a rudimentary technologist, it's not the worst job either. A few Western blacksmiths, such as John Deere, turned into inventors or tycoons.

So it's not immediately evident why the dominant Caucasians of the Middle East often reserved blacksmithing for a black caste. Anybody know why? This is an obscure question, but trying to understand things that seem puzzling can often lead to a better overall understanding of the way of the world.

Perhaps we can learn something about the differing fates of the West and the Muslim world from their differing attitudes toward blacksmiths. The American writer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's once famous poem The Village Blacksmith begins:

UNDER a spreading chestnut tree
  The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
  With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms      
  Are strong as iron bands.

His hair is crisp, and black, and long,
  His face is like the tan;
His brow is wet with honest sweat,
  He earns whate'er he can,
And looks the whole world in the face,
  For he owes not any man.

3D home printers

I don't get the appeal of the idea of 3D home printers. Maybe if I was into, say, plastic Star Wars collectibles and thus could forge rare ones in my spare bedroom. But, I've already got enough plastic crud as it is. What I definitely don't want to do is print my own gun, then hold it up in front of my right eye and pull the trigger. Like everybody tells the kid in Christmas Story, you'll put your eye out.

Anybody know what all the ex-Sovs are doing in L.A.?

From the WSJ:

Mall Owners Woo Hispanic Shoppers

By MIRIAM JORDAN CONNECT 

PANORAMA CITY, Calif.—On a recent Sunday, Spanish-speaking families swarmed the Panorama Mall here in the outskirts of Los Angeles for an afternoon of Latino entertainment. 

"We come for the mariachi, then we eat something and go shopping," said Gloria Mesina, visiting the mall with her daughter, Viviana, and her granddaughter, Brisa. 

That is music to the ears of José Legaspi, a real-estate broker who joined forces with the mall's owner, Macerich Co., MAC -2.17% to revitalize the shopping center by targeting Hispanics. 

The partners are among an emerging crop of commercial-property investors responding to the same demographic reality that has rocked the political landscape: the rise of Hispanics. 

Hispanics accounted for more than half the population growth between 2000 and 2011; Latinas have more children than non-Hispanics; Hispanic households that earn $50,000 or more are rising at a faster clip than total U.S. households. Their households outspend other groups on beauty products *, food and apparel, according to Nielsen Co.

* Not getting much for their money, apparently.

This Panorama City mall in the WSJ article has been a largely Mexican dump for decades.

But the weather is nice in Panorama City in the middle of the San Fernando Valley (last couple of weeks, the August highs have been mostly in the 80s with low humidity), so my guess is that in the very long run, Panorama City won't stay Mexican.

Filipinos (who work in huge numbers at the Kaiser Permanente medical center in Panorama City, where my late father was a patient), Armenians in Valley Village to the South (who put up those amazingly hostile security fences topped by lethal finials), and other ex-Soviets are likely to push Mexicans out of the middle of the San Fernando Valley. 

Nobody talks much about ex-Soviet Bloc immigrants, but they aren't scared of Mexicans. 

Nobody even seems to know what the ex-Soviet newcomers are doing in the San Fernando Valley. A dumpy 2-bedroom apartment in Valley Village costs about $1700 per month rent, so they must be making money somehow, but the L.A. Times doesn't cover the question and the ex-Sovs aren't the kind to volunteer information.

My nephew from small town Illinois was staying with us for a few months. He played soccer once a week with a Mexican team and twice a week with a Russian team. The Mexicans were friendly (they called him "Hollywood" because he's the kind of blonde, squared-jawed lad that used to be common in Los Angeles back when Robert Redford and Don Drysdale were baseball teammates at Van Nuys H.S. just down Van Nuys Blvd. from Panorama City.) 

The Russians, in contrast, were foreboding and stand-offish. They called him "Red Pants" because he wore red gym shorts, and that's about as far as their concern for any non-Russian went. I kept asking him what all these Russians do for a living, but they never gave him a clue. Overall, I think that was for the best. I told him if the Russians ever suddenly turned friendly and asked him to give them a ride while they ran into the bank ("Keep motor running, Red Pants!"), don't do it.

I've theorized that a lot of these ex-Sovs are the boyfriends / "managers" of pretty Eastern European girls who are trying to be actress / model / whatevers in Hollywood. But that's pure speculation on my part. The Russians are not talking and nobody is asking. I suspect we don't want to know.

Where the Los Angeles Mexicans will go is an unanswered question (a neighborhood near you, probably). But I suspect in the long run LA won't look like it does in Elysium. There are too many peoples in this world more formidable than Mexicans to let Mexicans have this superb climate. If Americans don't want California enough to keep it, lots of others folks will.

What movie directors tend to be like

Here's a profile of Peter Berg, a not hugely distinguished but often competent director (e.g., Hancock and Friday Night Lights -- he's FNL author Buzz Bissinger's cousin) and actor (he was Linda Fiorentino's mark in The Last Seduction). He's currently directing Mark Wahlberg in Lone Survivor, a true story about SEALs fighting Taliban in Afghanistan.

Berg is fairly representative of contemporary filmmakers in a variety of ways: e.g., he comes from an upscale mixed Christian-Jewish background. And, like so many directors, he's a macho guy who loves the U.S. military, boxing, and football. 

Berg had been trying to make “Lone Survivor” for five years. “I’m a patriot,” he said. “I admire our military, their character, code of honor, belief systems. I lived with the SEALs, their families, went to their funerals. I went to Iraq. Did you ever see anyone killed? I did.” Berg is infatuated with heroes, military, sports and, sometimes, because of his teenage years, misfits.

It's partly the personality demands of directing -- a film crew consists of a large number of people who need ordering about, many of them beefy guys who lift machinery for a living. And it's partly the subject matter of current movies -- blowing stuff up. So, you end up with authoritarian personalities as directors.

But, it ought to be rather obvious that one consequence of this is that the creative people in movies and the nice liberal dweebs who explain what their movies are about to us aren't always in sync. The NLDs seldom notice, however.

On another note, here's an interesting description of the real SEALs who are technical advisers on Berg's film, which pretty much matches what Zero Dark Thirty showed:

The SEALs stood off by themselves, eating standing up, in silence. They were ordinary-looking men in baseball caps, T-shirts, jeans. Many of them were big, well over 6-foot-2, 230 pounds. Wahlberg was 5-foot-8, maybe 155 pounds. Yet he looked more like a SEAL than they did, at least a film version of a SEAL. 

Berg said that what defines SEALs is their “extraordinary competitiveness. It’s not that they’re stronger or more violent, it’s that if you ask them to throw rocks at a hill, they’ll do it until they drop. It’s about will.” I asked how they were adjusting to helping make a movie. “They’d prefer to be anonymous,” he said. “They don’t covet attention. They even resist a project that glorifies them.”

Okay, terrorists, try to figure out which SEAL is which

That's exactly how Zero Dark Thirty portrayed SEALs: as a bunch of major league first basemen-sized guys who are hard to tell apart. As SEALs, Kathryn Bigelow cast Chris Pratt, the first baseman in Moneyball, plus a whole bunch of guys who look like Chris Pratt. I thought this haziness of identity was to confuse and depress Al Qaeda terrorists looking for clues about whom to take retribution upon, but maybe that's just what SEALs are like.

It's interesting that commandos tend to be such big men these days. Other military specialties often aren't. For example, Marine drill instructors are not generally tall, imposing figures like Lou Gossett Jr. in An Officer and a Gentleman. Instead, they tend to be wiry bantamweights whose knees can stand up over the years to all the running that boot camp recruits and their DIs must do.

But, SEALs tend to be tall and wide, probably due to all the gear they must carry.

The Pentagon is currently working on whetherthey can have the first female SEALs by Obama's last year in office. If SEALs tended to be Mark Wahlberg-sized, this would still be a bad idea, but since the ideal SEAL is built more like Liam Neeson, this women SEALs plan is that much more derisible.

Yglesias counts up Jewish Fed chairmen

In Slate, Matthew Yglesias counts up Federal Reserve Chairmen by religious ethnicity:

Christopher Mahoney, a former vice chairman of Moody's, has a piece arguing that Protestants will never understand monetary policy because their moralistic worldview makes them incapable of accepting that monetary stimulus offers a real life free lunch. He suggests that we leave this to the Catholics and Jews. 

I can't say that the inflation-fighting record of Catholic countries like Argentina is all that hot (although that has mostly improved in recent decades).

The stereotype I have in my head is that the German and Swiss central bankers are all Protestants, but is that true? There are plenty of Catholics in Germany and Switzerland, but they generally get assumed to be Protestants when thinking about the Protestant Work Ethic.

Now it looks to me like in real life we've never had a Catholic Federal Reserve Chairman.

That's interesting.

But if we look at Jodi Beggs' data on annual inflation by Fed chairman, we can see that the Chosen People have not done very well at monetary matters in practice. Of the men on this list, five—Meyer [appointed by Hoover], Burns [appointed by Nixon], Miller [? - appointed by Carter], Greenspan [appointed by Reagan], and Bernanke [appointed by Bush]—have been Jewish.

Was G. William Miller, the widely criticized Fed Chairman under Carter in 1978-79, actually Jewish? His name comes up as Jewish a lot on anti-Semitic conspiracy theory websites, but he sure sets off my WASPdar. If he was Jewish, he'd rank up there with golf writer Herbert Warren Wind and maybe Southern belle songbird Dinah Shore in assimilatedness:

Consider his New York Times obituary.

George William Miller was born on March 9, 1925, in Sapulpa, Okla., but grew up in Borger, Tex., where his parents hoped in vain to cash in on the discovery of oil in the Texas Panhandle. 

He graduated from the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., in 1945,

Maybe the picture I have in my head of the Coast Guard Academy being like the Naval Academy in its yachty WASPiness, only more so, is wrong, but I don't much evidence for that:

... After graduating at the top of his law school class at the University of California, Berkeley, he joined the Wall Street firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore in 1952.

Cravath didn't have a Jewish partner until 1964.

But in 1956, he joined Textron, based in Providence, R.I., as an assistant secretary. Within four years he was president of the company ... 

Textron was a conglomerate run by Royal Little, nephew of Arthur D. Little, the famous consultant. It had a lot of defense, aerospace and industrial divisions. It sounds pretty Protestant to me.

... Mr. Miller is survived by three sisters: Catherine Spiller and Myra Fowler, of Amarillo, Tex., and Mabel Wade, of Bedford, Va.; and two brothers, Othneil and Dee, both of Amarillo.

So, four of the six Millers make their homes in that center of Jewish culture and life, Amarillo. Othneil Orrick Miller and Dee Deane Miller, both graduates of SMU law school, remain licensed attorneys in Amarillo to this day. I don't know which name -- Othneil Orrick or Dee Deane -- sounds less Jewish. So, I'd strongly bet against G. William Miller being Jewish.

Yglesias getting this wrong isn't a major mistake; it just goes to show how it is hard to find authoritative information on the Internet about something as obviously interesting as the ethnicity of Federal Reserve Chairmen. Because the Fed chairmen for the last 27 years have been Jewish, and that streak is likely to reach 32 years straight by 2018 because all three candidates that Obama is publicly considering to replace Bernanke are Jewish, it's not a topic that you are supposed to know anything about. For example, the term "Jew counting" is used, according to Google, almost solely by liberals at Slate, the Washington Post, ThinkProgress, and so forth to furiously denounce anybody doing what liberals do all the time with categories like "white male."

Who-Whom.

Yglesias goes on:

Eccles [appointed by FDR] was Mormon. The rest were Protestant. And sorry to say it but Meyer, Burns, and Miller are the worst chairmen we've had. Meyer allowed years of deflation and depression. Burns and Miller both refused to curb inflation. 

Greenspan and Bernanke are both mixed bags. ... 

But the real heroes of American central banking are Protestants—Eugene Black [appointed by FDR] who knew when to inflate and Paul Volcker [appointed by Carter] who knew when to disinflate. William McChesney Martin [appointed by Truman] I would say ranks alongside Greenspan as a bit of a mixed bag. 

Okay, but Miller was a dud, and he appears to have been a Prod.

Could U.S. rebuild manufacturing by not exporting fracked gas?

Dow plant in Freeport, TX
uses cheap American gas

Here's a fascinating NYT story about hands-on economic policy that doesn't involve the abstractions of macroeconomics. In short, should the U.S. start to quickly export its new wealth of natural gas to the manufacturing giants of Asia, or should the feds restrict natural gas exports to rebuild our manufacturing base by nurturing an American advantage in manufacturing that requires cheap power?

Foreseeing Trouble in Exporting Natural Gas 

By CLIFFORD KRAUSS and NELSON D. SCHWARTZ 

MIDLAND, Mich. — As Dow Chemical’s chief executive, Andrew N. Liveris has made himself into something of an outcast among his fellow business leaders.
The reason? He is spearheading a public campaign against increased exports of natural gas, which he sees as a threat to a manufacturing renaissance in the United States, not to mention his own company’s bottom line. But many others say such exports would provide far more benefits to the country than drawbacks, all part of a transformation that promises to increase the nation’s weight in the global economy. 

The debate has grown personal. In the words of Charif Souki, an energy industry executive promoting a new natural gas export facility, Mr. Liveris is both “self-serving” and a “hypocrite.” 

Now it seems that one constituency where Mr. Liveris had gained a sympathetic ear, the federal government, may also have turned against him. Last week, the Energy Department approved another planned project to export natural gas, the second such proposal it has accepted since May. 

The battle over natural gas exports reflects just how starkly the nation’s economic landscape is being reshaped by newfound energy supplies — much of the discoveries in the form of oil and gas being freed up by unconventional methods like horizontal drilling combined with hydraulic fracturing. 

As environmentalists and industry advocates debate the merits and risks of fracking, as the practice is frequently called, its consequences are increasingly visible. Last week, the government reported a sharply improved trade balance for June, largely because of lower oil imports. 

By 2020, new oil and gas production could increase the country’s economic output by 2 to 4 percent beyond what it otherwise would be, add as many as 1.7 million jobs and perhaps reduce the bill for energy imports to zero, according to a report by the McKinsey Global Institute. 

... To nurture the nation’s good luck, [Liveris of Dow] says, the government needs to plan an energy policy that carefully balances the interests of the oil and gas companies that want to freely export natural gas with those of industries like Dow Chemical that fear that an export boom could outpace domestic gas supplies and bring higher energy prices. 

An Australian by birth and citizenship, Mr. Liveris has emerged as the principal opponent of unfettered natural gas exports.  

... After spiking in the last decade, natural gas prices in the United States have hovered between $3 and $4 per million B.T.U.'s this year. That is down from a high of $12 before the recession, and a fraction of what it costs in Asia and Europe.

The last time I bought some propane and propane accessories for my barbecue grill, the price had fallen 30% from last year.

That price differential is one reason exports are so appealing for domestic energy companies, who are willing to spend billions to build export facilities to ship liquefied natural gas in tankers in the hopes of selling it overseas. 

On the other hand, cheap domestic supplies mean Dow — one of the biggest private consumers of natural gas in the country — and other chemical companies are now paying much less than their foreign competitors for the raw material they turn into products like plastic, raising profit margins. It could also bring back jobs to the United States as manufacturers that use natural gas for energy benefit, Mr. Liveris says, although that renaissance is just in its infancy. 

... In an interview, Ken Cohen, an Exxon Mobil vice president, said that having a major business leader like Mr. Liveris supporting “protectionism” is so incongruous that “it’s almost like man bites dog.” 

Isn't it weird how "protectionism," which, prima facie, sounds okay -- "protect" is good, right? -- has become an invective? But knowing that "protectionism" is a swear word is the symbol that you got at least an A- in Econ 101: You remember that Protectionism Is Bad. (Remembering about supply and demand, however, is wholly optional in status terms: if you want to be taken seriously as a pundit, never point out that "Shortages of Farmworkers" or "Shortages of Programmers" are, in economics terms, gibberish.)

... But there is increasing pressure to move more quickly, because Canada is planning to build a few export terminals on the Pacific Coast, which could compete for Asian markets. 

In the United States, roughly 15 proposed gas projects await regulatory approval; if all were approved they could export the equivalent of more than a third of the domestically consumed natural gas. Along with an expected future increase in natural gas consumed by vehicles and industry, such an export boom would undoubtedly push prices up. 

... Not surprisingly Mr. Liveris has become a lightning rod among economists and business leaders, particularly those in the oil and gas drilling business, who say he is espousing protectionism merely to promote the interests of his own company. 

“He is coming across as a hypocrite and a self-serving person,” said Mr. Souki, chief executive of Cheniere Energy, which won the first permit to export gas, from its Sabine Pass, La., terminal. “He wants free trade for everything he manufactures but no free trade for anybody else.” 

Mr. Liveris concedes that the interests of his company coincide with his views. But he says that as the chief executive of Dow Chemical he also represents the interests of energy consumers at large, and he understands better than most what high gas prices can mean for the economy. 

He says he remembers the impact of escalating domestic natural gas prices between 2001 and 2005, when the company was forced to cancel plans to build a $4 billion chemical plant in Texas. 

“I’m protecting my shareholders,” he said, adding that $5 billion to $6 billion in new Dow Chemical investments were depending on the continuation of low gas prices “and not repeating the ‘01-to-'05 movie.” 

“What would make that repeat movie occur?” he asked rhetorically. He pointed to his native Australia, which he said exported 90 percent of its gas. That has caused, he said, “the collapse of the manufacturing sector — and, by the way, the retail sector’s paying through the nose. We’re paying Japanese electricity prices in Australia, yet Australia is gas-rich.” 

When natural resource exports drive up the price of your currency too high to make your manufacturing or tourism affordable, that's known as the Dutch Disease, which refers, interestingly enough, to a post-war Netherlands boom in natural gas drilling.

Now, Australia has a lot of natural resources per capita, so Australia's decision to concentrate on serving the Chinese economic dragon can make sense, even at the expense of an unbalanced economy. America still has a fair amount of natural resources per capita, too, although Senators Schumer and Rubio are working hard on solving that problem.

Dow Chemical has assembled a list of more than 120 manufacturing projects, representing investments of $100 billion, that are being planned or are already under construction in the United States at least partly because of lower gas prices. 

The beginnings of the manufacturing renaissance Mr. Liveris imagines for petrochemicals, fertilizers, steel, aluminum, pulp paper and cement can be seen at its giant complex of plants in Freeport, Tex., the largest of its kind in the world. 

The complex is a wonder of chemical engineering that has 6.5 million miles of pipe, employs more than 8,000 people and consumes enough electricity to power a city of three million people. And it is growing bigger. 

The company is investing $4 billion to build a ethylene plant to manufacture a vital building block for adhesives, plastic packaging and sealants; a propylene plant that will produce a chemical used to make mattresses, toys and shampoo; a chlorine plant; and a herbicide plant. More could come — if prices for natural gas, the vital feedstock for all the chemicals, remain low. 

Peter Schaeffer told me a few years ago that one area where America retains a comparative advantage is in giant scale manufacturing -- off-shore oil rigs, huge turbines, that kind of thing. These vast chemical plants might fall in that area, too.

Mr. Liveris says that he also favors free markets, but that energy, like defense and food, requires special care to protect the national interest. Exporting natural gas is fine, he says, but not at the price of importing it back in the form of goods made with cheap gas elsewhere. 

“The paint ingredients need the paint can,” he said. “The paint supply chain needs trucks. The trucks go to warehouses. Warehouses go to retail. I’m not importing finished goods. I’m making them in the United States of America.” 

I'm in over my head here, but my vague hunch would be that the U.S. should not rush to export its new natural gas bonanza by shipping it to the Chinese, but should instead use it to capture a larger share of more value-added businesses than just natural resource exports.

One reason is that I'm not in that big of a hurry to use up the newly available domestic energy supplies. The future is long, the supply of fossil fuels is, ultimately, finite, and alternative energy sources are not making edifying progress -- witness the shuttering of the San Onofre nuclear power plant on the Pacific next to Camp Pendelton after 50 years.

Nor at present does there seem to be any particular strategic reason to go for the quick bux: it's not like Washington must, say, goose the domestic economy in the near term to show Third World peasants that Capitalism is better than Communism. And, while the economy, is bad at present, it's not horrible. So, we seem to be at a point where we can take steps for the long term national interest, rather than just do whatever is easiest in the short term.

Moreover, slowing the exploitation of frackable resources a few years until domestic industry can make better use of them, rather than just sell it to China as fast as possible, ought to allow technical improvements in domestic fracking to make it less environmentally dubious.

My point is not that the U.S. should follow one macro-strategy or another regarding the new era of energy, but that we should have an open national debate on this topic, without one side being able to close off discussion by hissing "protectionist" as if that were a one-word trump card.

Art forger exploited

The forger of this fake Rothko only received
about 1/1,000th of the $8.3 million it sold for

Forgery is the most intellectually interesting aspect of modern art, so back in May I posted on the hilarious case of the huge scandal that took down the prestigious Knoedler gallery in Manhattan. Now, a few details about the gifted forger have surfaced:

For 15 years, some of the art world’s most established dealers and experts rhapsodized about dozens of newly discovered masterworks by titans of Modernism. Elite buyers paid up to $17 million to own just one of these canvases, said to have been created by the hands of artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell.

But federal prosecutors say that most, if not all, of the 63 ballyhooed works — which fetched more than $80 million in sales — were painted in a home and garage in Queens by one unusually talented but unknown artist who was paid only a few thousand dollars apiece for his handiworks. 

Authorities did not name or charge the painter and provided few identifying details except to say he had trained at a Manhattan art school in a variety of disciplines including painting, drawing and lithography. He was selling his work on the streets of New York in the early 1990s, they said, when he was spotted by a Chelsea art dealer who helped convert his work into one of the most audacious art frauds in recent memory.

It sounds like the poor forger got less than 1% of the proceeds, while the middle-woman that discovered him made $12.5 million and the two galleries made much more than that. 

That's the real scandal. In the art forgery business, it's obviously not what you know, it's who you know.

This whole Egypt thing not really working out

Israel's covert commenters

The Israeli broadsheet Haaretz reports:

Prime Minister's Office recruiting students to wage online hasbara battles 

PMO and national student union to create covert units at universities to engage in diplomacy via social media; unit heads to receive full scholarships.

Hasbara is a Hebrew term meaning anything from "explanation" to "advocacy" to "propaganda," depending on your political alignment.

Although this Israeli system has been widely rumored to be operative for years, my first thought was that this didn't sound very cost-effective. After all, plenty of people, some of them quite talented writers, like to comment for free.

On the other hand, this should allow the Netanyahu government to systematically identify and evaluate its verbalist supporters at an early age, and then reward the ones it likes most.

For example, back in 1969, Richard Nixon and his chief domestic advisor, the brilliant Democratic social scientist Daniel Patrick Moynihan, had numerous long talks about how to detach some of Moynihan's New York intellectual friends from leftism. It didn't prove all that hard for Nixon and Moynihan to conjure neoconservatism into being: just flatter some of these poor ink-stained wretches that you care about their ideas, invite them to meet with high officials, arrange for sinecures for some, give others awards and advisory posts, and so forth.

Similarly, the CIA had long subsidized the magazine Encounter to wean European intellectuals away from loyalty to Moscow. Writers aren't all that expensive.

And it's even cheaper to do this kind of thing at the junior varsity level with students. It would thus seem like a clever idea for any political organization with some spare cash.

Another question is whether subsidizing online comments works on people who aren't in on the game. A recent study suggested that thumbs up signaling worked on outsiders, but not thumbs down. Still, I suspect that tossing out accusations of anti-Semitism is an effective method with Americans of implanting the idea: Better not go there.

Stop and frisk and diminishing marginal returns

Here's an excerpt from an article by the NYT's mostly pro-cop reporter Joseph Goldstein about the decision against Mayor Bloomberg's stop and frisk policy in New York City. I haven't read the 195-page decision, but it sounds kind of incoherent (at least in Goldstein's not hugely sympathetic retelling), even though I have some sympathy for the decision.

Police Dept.’s Focus on Race Is at Core of Ruling Against Stop-and-Frisk Tactic 

In the process, Judge Scheindlin coined a term, “indirect racial profiling,” to explain how the department’s reliance on data indicating that black men committed a disproportionate amount of crime led to what she saw as violations of the Constitution. 

How the judge came to this decision was revealed over the course of a 195-page opinion, released on Monday. 

One witness claimed to have heard Mr. Kelly say that the stop-and-frisk tactics were intended to frighten minority men into leaving any guns they owned at home. A precinct commander described “the right people” to stop, with a reference to young black men. And a statistical analysis of millions of police interactions revealed that few people subjected to stop-and-frisk methods had been engaging in wrongdoing. 

These three items of evidence were central to Judge Scheindlin’s conclusion that the Police Department has a policy of conducting stops “in a racially discriminatory manner.” 

In particular, the statement attributed to Mr. Kelly, as well as the phrase about the “right people,” served as the lens through which the judge interpreted a mountain of data about 4.4 million police stops. That data showed that stops overwhelmingly involved black and Hispanic people and that the people stopped were rarely found to be engaging in criminal activity. 

Judge Scheindlin found that the department operated on the notion that black and Hispanic people were the right people to stop — a theme, she wrote, that was evident in statements made by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg out of court, and in directives made by commanders during station house roll calls. 

The judge repeatedly cited testimony by the onetime highest ranking uniformed member of the department, Joseph J. Esposito, who was asked about the reasons for some stops. At one point, Mr. Esposito explained: “Well, who is doing those shootings? Well, it’s young men of color in their late teens, early 20s.” 

It was a similar sentiment that Judge Scheindlin detected in a recording of a deputy inspector exhorting a subordinate to conduct more stops. 

That meant stopping “the right people at the right time, the right location,” the deputy inspector, Christopher McCormack, said. Pressed on what he meant, he noted that black teenagers and young men were behind some crimes being committed in his precinct. 

At another point, Judge Scheindlin noted that Mr. Kelly had said, according to a state senator who was present for the conversation, that young black and Hispanic men were the focus of the stops because the commissioner “wanted to instill fear in them, every time they leave their home, they could be stopped by the police.”  

A key point is that New York City, with its income tax on rich people, can afford to pay cops to get in the face of shifty-looking people far more than most cities can. Without acting in an overtly discriminatory manner, NYC can afford to show its blacks and Latinos who is boss. If they find that awareness of who is top dog in New York these days depressing and want to move somewhere in America less affluent, well, Mayor Bloomberg wouldn't mind if they remembered, like the crack dealer at the end of Clockers who grabs a bus for Atlanta, that the Port Authority Bus Terminal is open 24/7.

Mr. Kelly had filed an affidavit denying that he made such a statement, but the judge credited the account of the state senator, Eric Adams, who testified during the trial. 

The city offered explanations for the statistics on millions of stops that so troubled Judge Scheindlin. The low arrest rate of people stopped reflected the fact that officers were proactively stopping criminals before they had a chance to go through with their crimes, according to city lawyers. And minorities were disproportionately stopped because they lived in the same high-crime neighborhoods where the police deployed many of its officers. 

But Judge Scheindlin was not swayed by those arguments. She concluded that the low arrest rate meant that the people who were being stopped were rarely the criminals the police sought; all they had in common was the color of their skin. 

“The city adopted a policy of indirect racial profiling by targeting racially defined groups for stops based on local crime suspect data,” she wrote.

Perhaps the way to logically unsnarl this is to think hard about the distinction between relative and absolute differences in stops. We're not supposed to think about differences in crime rates by race, so most of the more sophisticated thinking on the subject has been limited to pointing out that blacks are more prone to commit crime, while the unsophisticated gasp in shock. 

But, let me try to take this to another level and explain arithmetically why a realist like me has been uncomfortable with the disparate impact of Bloomberg's huge intensification of stop and frisk.

To help, let me make up some stylized numbers. Let's say that under Giuliani, the average young black man in New York city gets stopped once every 4 years and the average young white man gets stopped once every 40 years. Moreover, let's assume that that 10 to 1 racial ratio is reasonable considering differences in crime rates and so forth.

Then, under Bloomberg, the mayor and the police chief figure that, heck, New York is rich, so let's quadruple the number of stops. Now the average young black man is stopped every single year and the average young white man every ten years. The racial ratio remains the same ten to one, so how can anybody logically object to what Bloomberg is doing compared to what Giuliani did? The relative proportions remain the same, right? 

Okay ... but, think about the change in absolute rather than relative terms. Under Bloomberg, the number of stops a young black man can expect to endure per year has increased by 0.750 stops annually (from 0.250 to 1.000). For young white men, however the increase is only 0.075 stops (from 0.025 to 0.100). 

While these increases of 0.75 incremental stops for blacks divided by 0.075 incremental stops for white still give the same old relative racial ratio of 10 to 1, it's worth noting that 0.75 minus 0.075 gives an absolute increase in stops for blacks relatives to whites of .675 stops per year, which might be considered a serious quality of life degradation for young black men.

So, perhaps the question ought to be: rather than focusing on the reasonableness of the relative rates of blacks and whites being stopped and frisked, perhaps the focus should instead be on the absolute overall levels of stop and frisks. In other words, under any reasonable system, blacks are going to be stopped and frisked a lot more often than whites; but given the expectation of diminishing marginal returns, is the absolute number of stops and frisks under Bloomberg too high for the pain it inflicts on blacks relative to the gains in reduced crime?

The problem for the judge, however, is that Americans are much more comfortable with judges making decisions about relative matters (e.g., make sure blacks are treated fairly relative to whites) but not absolute matters (e.g., how much stopping and frisking to do). On the other, Americans aren't comfortable thinking hard about racial differences in crime rates, so handwaving is probably good enough.

More fundamentally, it's not all that clear that marginal returns diminish that fast. The NYC homicide rate keeps going down. It could be that, beyond the numbers about guns taken away and the like, stop and frisk may have slammed home a psychological shift away from the criminal energies unleashed during the civil rights era back to a more orderly and authority-fearing culture that preceded the 1960s. But, that's speculative.

Facial Profiling

I have been negligent in keeping up with my reality TV viewing lately, but a current hit is apparently "Duck Dynasty" about a hirsute clan in Louisiana that has gotten rich in the duck call business.

NYC Hotel Kicks Out ‘Duck Dynasty’ Star After Confusing Him For Homeless Man 

WEST MONROE, La. (CBS Houston) — A New York City hotel kicks out one of the stars of “Duck Dynasty” after an employee thought he was a homeless man. 

Appearing along with his family on “Live with Kelly and Michael” Wednesday morning, Jase Robertson described the incident. 

“The first thing that happened to me at the hotel was I got escorted out,” Robertson said, joking that it was a “facial-profiling deal.” 

Robertson said that the hotel employee simply didn’t know who he was.

“I asked where the bathroom was and he said, ‘Right this way, sir.’ He was very nice,” Robertson explained. “He walked me outside, pointed down the road and said, ‘Good luck.’” 

Robertson continued, “So I circled back around and my wife said, ‘What happened?’ and I just said I just got kicked out.” 

Robertson took it in stride and didn’t blame the employee for the incident. Robertson continued to stay at the hotel despite the incident.