NYT: "Are You My Cousin?"

Contemporary thinking about genealogy seems exceptionally lowbrow.

From the New York Times:

Are You My Cousin? 

By A. J. JACOBS   JAN. 31, 2014 

I LOVE my family, but I’m glad I don’t have to buy birthday presents for all my cousins. I’d be bankrupt within a week. 

My family tree sprawls far and wide. It’s not even a tree, really. More like an Amazonian forest. At last count, it was up to nearly 75 million family members. In fact, there’s a good chance you’re on some far-flung branch of my tree, and if you aren’t, you probably will be soon. It’s not really my tree. It’s our tree.  

The previously staid world of genealogy is in the midst of a controversial revolution. A handful of websites have turbocharged family trees with a collaborative, Wikipedia-like approach. You upload your family tree, and then you can merge your tree with another tree that has a cousin in common. After that, you merge and merge again. This creates vast webs with hundreds of thousands — or millions — of cousins by blood and marriage, provided you think the links are accurate.

How good are online genealogy websites?

A few years ago, I helped out some relatives, two brothers, trying to find out about their father who had died when they were young. Their mother had remarried and their new stepfather had put the kibosh on all talk of their father. Now they were middle-aged and wished to get in touch with a whole side of their biological family they didn't know anything about.

I was not impressed with the quality and disinterestedness of the commercial genealogy sites I came across in a quick review. I eventually tracked down the newspaper in Whittier, CA in which an obituary of their father would likely have appeared, but only intermittent parts of the archives are online and not the crucial month. (The Whittier College library no doubt has the full newspaper archives on microfilm, but I've never gotten out there to look at them.)

Hopefully, the quality online genealogy has improved over the last few years.

One site, Geni, has what it calls the World Family Tree, with about 75 million relatives in more than 160 countries and all seven continents, including Antarctica. 

My newfound kin include the actress and lifestyle guru Gwyneth Paltrow, a mere 17 steps away, and the jazz great Quincy Jones, a mere 22. There’s also the former New York mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who is apparently my wife’s great-uncle’s wife’s first cousin once removed’s husband’s uncle’s wife’s son’s wife’s first cousin once removed’s husband’s brother’s wife’s nephew. 

These folks have no clue who I am. They have yet to return my calls. But at least according to this research, we are, in the broadest sense, family. 

In a few years, we may have a single tree containing nearly all seven billion humans on earth. The Family of Man will no longer be an abstract cliché. We’re all related — we just have to figure out how. ...

Concepts like "pedigree collapse" appear to be ungraspable in the current zeitgeist.

    

Russians win Olympic fashion parade by rejecting unisex

The Russians won the Opening Ceremony parade of nations fashion contest by simply rejecting the unisex orthodoxy for national uniforms. Just about every other country dressed both its male and female athletes identically, which can work at the Summer Games because that athletes aren't wearing all that much in the way of clothes. But, at the Winter Games, everybody has to march into the stadium in heavily insulated winter wear, so females curves get buried. 

This may appeal to some athletes on the women's ice hockey team, but not to most women. My experience with skiing in California over the years is that snow bunnies generally wear the most skin tight clothes possible without general frostbite setting in.

(In general, the Winter Olympics are noticeably less lesbian than the Summer Olympics, due to a number of factors: if the premiere sport, figure skating, didn't exist, it would be invented by the Disney Corp. to sell more merchandise to Daddy's Little Princesses; the smaller number of team sports; and the general association of winter sports not with school but with expensive vacations.)

If on top of the insulation, you insist upon dressing the male and female winter athletes in the same exact clothes, it makes for a thoroughly unsexy look. Thus, the American squad all wore patriotic ugly Christmas sweaters that kind of looked like a Fourth of July family reunion where all your aunts and uncles decided it would be the cutest thing to make everybody wear the same bulky red-white-and-blue sweaters to attend a very chilly fireworks show in Juneau, Alaska, or something.

A few Eastern European countries dissented from unisex dogma. The Czechs at least gave the boys and girls different colored hats. The Poles were subtly but elegantly varied with the men in gray and white, the women in white.

The Russians went all the way and dressed the men in some sort of dark pea coat-like militaristic thing to make their men look strong in the upper body, while their women wore long fake fur coats nipped in at the waist and flaring over the hips to make them look sexy. The Russian's execution of this basic concept -- make our men look manly, our women look womanly -- may have been less than ideal, but in the Culture War going on in Sochi, getting the basic concept right is a win for the Russkies.

   

Independence for Puerto Rico

From the NYT:

Economy and Crime Spur New Puerto Rican Exodus

 At the beginning of the 20th Century, the world was divided up into great empires, but the dominant political trend of the 20th Century was nationalism. After much turmoil, most of the empires are gone, and we live in a world of a couple of hundred independent countries. 

And, strange as it may seem from watching the 24-hour-news, the world is more peaceful and prosperous than ever. Sure, lots of former colonies remain badly run, but the general trend is toward slow improvement: after all, its their problem and they have incentives to get better at ruling themselves.

But self-rule is ideologically passe. Globalism is the default assumption: diversity, you know? Thus, the ongoing failure of imperialism and open borders in Puerto Rico is seldom portrayed as the ongoing failure of imperialism in Puerto Rico. The notion that maybe, after 116 years it's getting toward time for Puerto Rico to stand on its own two feet simply doesn't come up in 21st Century thinking.

Much of the problem is simply that we've replaced old-fashioned conceptual thinking with who-whom thinking. See, imperialism wasn't nice, and American elites believe in being nice to Puerto Ricans, so therefore it's not really imperialism.

     

Victoria Nuland and Ukraine

What's going on in Ukraine, where the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland was embarrassed by the Russkies releasing a presumably tapped phone call of her attempting to stage-manage Ukrainian affairs (e.g., heavyweight champ Vitali Klitschko should be kept out of any coalition government) and expressing short-temperedness with her putative E.U. allies?

The Game of the Great Powers. It's kind of like the Seahawks are winning 36-8, but even if they put in the reserves, the reserves are still going to try hard to run up the score even further. That's what they do. Ukraine may not strike you or me as hugely crucial to America's national interests, but if you are the State Department official in charge of Ukraine you still want to sack Peyton Manning (or the geopolitical equivalent).

Your Lying Eyes took a look at Ms. Nuland's background:

She got into the State Department during the Bush Administration, so she's probably not some wide-eyed liberal nut. In fact she's married to Robert Kagan - that's a familiar name, isn't it. Robert and brother Fred seem to have strategically implanted themselves in key policy-making positions within the Democratic and Republican party apparatus. Robert is embedded at Brookings, while Fred is ensconsed at AEI. It's a beautiful thing, America 2.0 (or is it 3.0 - can't keep track).

Her father-in-law is Yale historian Donald Kagan, author of a four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War from which neocons appear to have drawn remarkably wrong-headed lessons: e.g., a turning point in the war between Athens and Sparta was when the here-to-fore dominant Athenians decided to invade irrelevant Sicily, which turned out to be a vast waste of money and men. Athens ultimately lost the war. Back in 2002, the neocons, like all three Kagans, somehow deduced from this lesson of history that the New Athenians (us) should invade Iraq.

Fred and Kim Kagan
on the job for you and
me bringing democracy
to Iraq.

Her brother-in-law Fred's wife is Kimberly Kagan, who is also a militarist pundit and adviser.

Her father is surgeon and Yale medical school professor Sherwin Nuland, author of the bestseller How We Die.

A talented, energetic family that is part of the Permanent Government of the United States. It doesn't really matter who wins the Presidential election: some Kagan-Nuland will be doing something somewhere in your name and on your dime. From Wikipedia:

Nuland has had a long career in the Foreign Service and has worked for both Democratic and Republican administrations. During the Bill Clinton administration, Nuland was chief of staff to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott before moving on to serve as deputy director for former Soviet Union affairs. During the George W. Bush administration, she served as the principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and then as U.S. ambassador to NATO. During the Barack Obama administration, she was special envoy for Conventional Armed Forces in Europe before assuming the position of State Department spokesperson in summer 2011, which she held until February 2013. 

She was nominated to serve as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs in May 2013 and sworn in to fill that role in September 2013.[3]

So, if the 2016 election is between, say, Hillary Clinton and Paul Ryan, she won't be sweating about whether or not she'll have a job in 2017.

Considering their catastrophic track record on Iraq and their continued ascent in the stratosphere of power players, is there anything the Kagan-Nulands could screw up that would hurt their careers? (Other than publicly recanting and apologizing, of course.)
   

NYT v. WaPo on NSA spying glass: 1/3 full or 70% empty?

It's fun to compare how the New York Times and the Washington Post headline the same story on NSA domestic spying. 

The NYT emphasizes that the NSA is spying on about a third of American calls:

N.S.A. Is Said to Gather Data on a Third of U.S. Calls 

By CHARLIE SAVAGE 4:27 PM ET 

The once-secret program that is collecting bulk records of Americans’ domestic phone calls is gathering a large amount of landline data but has struggled to take in cellphone information, according to officials.

The Washington Post is a company town newsletter, and its town has prospered munificently over the last 13 years from all the black budget spending in the Global War of Terror. So, the WaPo focuses on all the American calls left for Washingtonians to spy upon.

NSA collects less than 30 percent of phone records 

Ellen Nakashima 

The agency is unable to keep pace with the explosion in cellphone use, officials say, contradicting popular perceptions that the government is sweeping up virtually all domestic phone data.

 
So, get back to work, all you spooks within the Washington Post home delivery zone! If you need more taxpayer dollars to help you spy on the last 70% of American calls, just let us know and we'll put out the word.
 

Bottled water and walkability

When I was young, bottled water wasn't sexy. It mostly came in giant glass bottles that you laboriously tipped upside down into a standing dispenser and then drank from tiny conical paper cups. I associate it in my mind with not very prosperous small businesses. Then Perrier came to upscale restaurants in the 1970s, but it was much joked about as a needless extravagance.

My vague impression is that the Gulf War of 1991 really boosted the idea of drinking water from plastic bottles among consumers. The U.S. military made a fetish out of keeping troops fully hydrated, so CNN’s coverage of the triumphant American military during those six weeks was like one giant product placement for plastic water bottles. U-S-A! Bott-led-Wa-ter! U-S-A!

An often overlooked downside to things like bottled water is that buying liquids in bulk almost requires that the shopper own a vehicle: water weighs a pint a pound and therefore it’s practically impossible for a mom to manhandle a family’s worth of bottled water home on foot or on bicycle. These days everybody talks about all the advantages of walkability and how much a family could save if they only had one car instead of two and so forth, but few have changed their shopping patterns to accommodate their talk. Bottled water can be the backbreaker.

In general, a week’s worth of groceries has gotten a lot heavier per person over the last 50 years. For example, in the 1960s, my mother bought Tang at the grocery store and mixed it up with tap water at home. In the 1970s she upgraded to frozen concentrated orange juice and added three parts tap water at home. In the 1980s-90s, she upgraded to a carton of orange juice. Quality improved with each upgrade, but heaviness went up too, and along with that dependence upon having a car for shopping trips.

Buying, say, three gallons of bottled water is of course more extreme than buying a half gallon of orange juice, since the taste differential is smaller and the consumption level is greater, but lots of people do it.

So, if you are going to buy things like bottled water, you probably need a car for shopping, and if you need a car for shopping, you might as well live in a car-oriented place, and thus who cares about walkability and all that.

So, the key to reducing Carbon Footprints and all that is going back to Tang-centric consumption. And that's not going to happen.
   

Open Borders not working out so hot in Puerto Rico

From Reuters:

White House says still not considering Puerto Rico bailout 

9:22 a.m. CST, February 5, 2014 

WASHINGTON, Feb 5 (Reuters) - The White House said on Wednesday it was still not considering a bailout for Puerto Rico after Standard & Poor's on Tuesday cut its credit rating to junk status.

Boehner admits to pulling a boner on immigration

From the NYT:

The yearlong effort to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws, which had the support of President Obama, Republican leaders and much of American business and labor, was seriously imperiled on Thursday when Speaker John A. Boehner conceded that it was unlikely he could pass a bill. 

His pronouncement, amid mounting resistance from conservatives, significantly narrowed the window for success this year and left it to Mr. Obama to win the trust of balking Republicans. 

Mr. Boehner’s remarks came a week after he and other House Republican leaders offered a statement of principles intended to win support for the measure. But, he said, House Republicans are not prepared to move forward in partnership with a Democratic administration that they believe will not fairly and impartially carry out the laws they pass.

Also from the NYT:

Democrats Aim for a 2014 More Like 2012 and 2008

The Democrats’ plan to hold on to their narrow Senate majority goes by the name “Bannock Street project.” It runs through 10 states, includes a $60 million investment and requires more than 4,000 paid staff members. And the effort will need all of that — and perhaps more — to achieve its goal, which is nothing short of changing the character of the electorate in a midterm cycle. 

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is preparing its largest and most data-driven ground game yet, relying on an aggressive combination of voter registration, get-out-the-vote and persuasion efforts. 

They hope to make the 2014 midterm election more closely resemble a presidential election year, when more traditional Democratic constituencies — single women, minorities and young voters — turn out to vote in higher numbers, said Guy Cecil, the committee’s executive director. 

... Even with new funding and tactical tools, the Democratic Senate campaigns face considerable challenges. The voting rates of core Democratic constituencies — blacks, Hispanics, unmarried women, younger voters — historically drop off considerably in midterm elections. According to data from the Voter Participation Center — a nonpartisan organization dedicated to increasing the share of historically underrepresented voting groups — the drop-off among these groups between 2008 and 2010 was nearly 21 million, going from roughly 61 million to 40 million. 

... “The question is whether the party’s Obama-era volunteer base will replicate itself for a Mark Pryor or a Mary Landrieu or a Kay Hagan,” said Sasha Issenberg, author of “The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns,” referring to three vulnerable incumbent Democratic senators. ... 

In many ways, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s efforts are simply reflective of a broader shift in electoral politics toward a more data-reliant and empirical approach: The effectiveness of television ads — which experts agree reach a point of oversaturation near the end of campaigns — is difficult to measure, while improved data-modeling and analytic techniques allow campaigns to more closely target their ideal voters.

You know, maybe the Republicans should try being smarter for a change instead of ignorantly wasting time and momentum on obviously bad ideas like these "immigration principles." Maybe the Stupid Party should try to get over being stupid?
   

The new conventional wisdom: Szukalski vindicated

As C. van Carter pointed out to me, Jim Woodring wrote in his profile of the eccentric Polish sculptor, The Neglected Genius of Stanislaw Szukalski:

Among his most strongly held (and extensively documented) theories was the notion that a race of malevolent Yeti have been interbreeding with humans since time out of mind, and that the hybrid offspring are bringing about the end of civilization. As proof of this, he pointed to the Russians.

Szukalski: Typical Russian

     
Also, I apologize for going a full 24-hours without any new Amy Chua-related content.

The last two Chua-centric posts have garnered 129 and 212 approved comments, so I shall get back to work ferreting out more denouncers or defenders of Professor Chua.
      

Jay Leno

We live in an era of quite good stand-up comedy, which has a number of guild customs that strive to keep any individual from getting too large of a share of the market the way that Bob Hope had in the mid-Century. Jay Leno's ambitiousness grated against this spirit of the age, so much of the resentment against him and his mass market comedy came from intense comedy fans. The finest comedians tend to be messed-up depressives, but, still, I have to be in awe of the bulletproof supermen like Leno and Hope who can just go on and on and on.

Personally, I liked Leno as a comedian (I saw him live among nine stand-ups at the Improv in 1981; not surprisingly, he was the best, and his story about his father coming to visit him from Boston is one of the most memorable I've ever heard), and I didn't hold it against him that he pitched his show's comedy at the 98 IQ mass audience and let Letterman aim at the 103 IQ audience.

But, the interviews ... Unlike stand-up comedy, we don't live in an era of good interviewing, so the fact that Leno was a terrible interviewer didn't generate that much criticism. But he was much worse than his predecessor Johnny Carson. The science fiction classic Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle about the approach and catastrophic impact of a comet includes a brilliant chapter written from Johnny Carson's point of view as he interviews the two astronomers who discovered the approaching comet. Niven and Pournelle go inside Carson's head as he figures out on the fly on live national TV how to guide the scientists into making their esoteric topic fascinating to the masses in TV land. Granted, astronomy was Carson's hobby so this comparison is a little unfair, plus nobody is interested in anything besides show biz celebrities these days, but Carson was also much better than Leno at interviewing movie stars.

  

The ideal Winter Olympics event

More quadrennial content repurposification:

My ideal Winter Olympic event 

The problem with most of the Winter Games events is that only one person or team competes at a time. That's because it's so slippery out there that catastrophes could ensue if athletes competed directly. So, the events end up with play-by-plays like this: 

"And there goes Schievenhoffel! He's going really fast. Man, he's flying! He's very quick! Wow, he's fast! Fast, fast, fast! And there's his time: oh, well, he just wasn't quite fast enough..." 

What I'd like to see is the Mass Downhill -- all the skiers line up side by on top of the mountain and the first one, no holds barred, to the bottom gets the gold. Whacking each other with ski poles is not only allowed, but encouraged.

Over the years, they've added a number of sports coming closer to my specifications, such as snowboard cross (remember when the American girl only had to stay upright to win the gold but she couldn't resist hot-dogging?) and short-track speed skating. 

I'm sorry to hear that Apolo Anton Ohno has hung up his skates. Every four years, you'd see him out there elegantly skating in ovals for two minutes concluded by ten seconds of absolute chaos that always seemed to end with him triumphantly crawling on his hands and knees over the bodies of a couple of fallen South Korean skaters to grab a medal. Then the Koreans would go berserk over how Ohno always getting a medal of some kind was obviously a Nippo-American plot against Korea. They may have had a point, but it was fun TV. 

   

28th Amendment: Bar children of Presidents from being President

One problem with Syria politically is that the stakes are too high: a single nuclear family, the Assads, has been ruling the country since 1970. This combination of president-for-life followed by president-for-next-life means that it's really, really important who grabs the presidency when it's up for grabs.

There are two obvious means to lower the stakes: term limits and bans on dynasticism.

Mexico limited presidents to a single six year term starting in the 1920s to lower the political pressure by assuring political players that if they live long enough they'll get another chance. Mexico has a lot of problems, but it hasn't had a convulsion like the Revolution that drove Porfirio Diaz from decades in power, killing a million people or so in the process, in a century. 

In the U.S., George Washington set a precedent of no more than two terms, but when FDR violated that in the 1940s, the 22nd Amendment, passed in 1951, added the two term limit to the Constitution. 

In places with less strong term limits, such as Russia, Turkey, and New York City, the term limit routinely gets junked when a politician is popular.

The other prong would be to legally restrict dynasticism. The United States has had two examples of children of Presidents succeeding to the White House:

- John Quincy Adams in 1824 -- 24 years after his father left office, after being a successful Secretary of State (the Monroe Doctrine), and in a country of 10 million people. After leaving the White House, Adams was elected to the House.

- George W. Bush in 2000 -- only 8 years after his father left office, after being governor of a state with a constitutionally imposed weak governorship, and in a country of 300 million people. After leaving the White House, Bush took up painting.

That's not really progress.

After JFK appointed RFK Attorney General, Congress passed a law in 1967 making that illegal:

(b) A public official may not appoint, employ, promote, advance, or advocate for appointment, employment, promotion, or advancement, in or to a civilian position in the agency in which he is serving or over which he exercises jurisdiction or control any individual who is a relative of the public official. ... 

(3) “relative” means, with respect to a public official, an individual who is related to the public official as father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, first cousin, nephew, niece, husband, wife, father-in-law, mother-in-law, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, stepfather, stepmother, stepson, stepdaughter, stepbrother, stepsister, half brother, or half sister.

That seems a little much, but the broader issue is less nepotism than dynasticism.

The problem with dynasticism is not just one family having the opportunity to hold on to political power for so long, but elevating nobodies like George W. Bush into Presidential Timber. Let's stop ourselves from indulging our dynastic predilections and take a symbolic stand by passing the following as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution:

SECTION 1. 

No person shall be elected to, succeed to, or in anyway hold the office of the President who is the child, biological or legally adopted, of another person who has held the office of President. But this article shall not apply to the children of any person holding the office of President or who had formerly held the office of President when this article was proposed by the Congress.

SECTION 2. 

This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several states within seven years from the date of its submission to the states by the Congress.

In other words, just like the 22nd Amendment, passed by Congress in 1947, didn't apply to Harry Truman, Jeb Bush can still be President, Chelsea Clinton can be President, George W. Bush's kids can be President, Obama's kids can be President, and so forth. But the next President's kids don't get to be President. Therefore, if Hillary becomes President, then Chelsea is barred. (Surely 3 Presidents from one household is too many?)

In the long run, I'd also want to ban spouses of Presidents from becoming President as embarrassingly Banana Republicish, but I'll hold off on that until Hillary is no longer the Great Pink Hope.

   

Welcome to the Winter Olympics

The more things change, the more they stay the same, so here are some posts I blogged about the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City:

Yes, I know lots of you couldn't care less about figure skating, but from a human biodiversity perspective figure skating is hugely instructive because it is that rare sport (assuming it is a sport) that appeals more to women than to men and to gay men than to straight men. It is the exception that proves a lot of rules. 

The Figure Skating Powers That Be have announced that they are going to try to make their sport's judging more objective by giving credit for each move on a degree of difficulty scale. There's only one problem with this. Figure skating, as we know it, is essentially about being a princess, not a jock.

Irate Wellesley feminists v. annoying po-mo Plop artists

Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc"

In the early 2000s, the Caltech administration hired celebrated sculptor Richard Serra to deface the only large open lawn on the tightly-packed campus with another of his massive rusting iron walls running diagonally across the greensward. Eventually, the nerds got themselves organized enough to defend their main frisbee-tossing site and the administration backed off. But that kind of victory over ugly, stupid, hostile post-modern institutional art was hard for even the high-IQ students of Caltech to pull off since they didn't have handy identity politics categories to deploy. 

Fortunately, the feminists of women-only Wellesley College appear better equipped to defend their nice-looking campus since they can frame it as a macro-aggression against their sense of comfort. From the NYT:

BOSTON — When Sruthi Narayanan, a Wellesley College senior, first saw a nearly naked man who appeared to be stumbling on campus, she assumed he was a drunk, about to be arrested.  

Art (the snow accidentally improves it)

He was actually a new work of art. 

The sculpture, “Sleepwalker,” is 5 feet 9 inches tall and made of epoxy, fiberglass and paint. The figure, with a bit of a paunch, is clad only in tight white briefs. His arms are stretched out in front of him, his face reddened and miserable. The work, by the Brooklyn artist Tony Matelli, was commissioned by the Davis Museum at the college as part of a solo exhibition of Mr. Matelli’s work, called “New Gravity.” 

The appearance of “Sleepwalker” along a busy thoroughfare on Monday stoked anger among some of the students at this all-women’s college in Wellesley, Mass. They swiftly took to the Internet to petition the school to move the statue indoors. By Thursday afternoon, the petition had more than 500 supporters.  

An explanation of the petition, which was started by two students, Lauren Walsh and Zoe Magid, calls the sculpture “a source of apprehension, fear, and triggering thoughts regarding sexual assault for some members of our campus community.”

What if it were a sculpture of a black man? Would the students have dared mention it "triggering thoughts regarding sexual assault?" Fortunately for the feminists, it looks like a drunk fraternity boy from MIT, so that's not a problem. Here's the petition against the piece of Plop Art:

The sculpture of the nearly naked man on the Wellesley College campus is an inappropriate and potentially harmful addition to our community that we, as members of the student body, would like removed from outdoor space immediately, and placed inside the Davis Museum. There, students may see the installation of their own volition.

Within just a few hours of its outdoor installation, the highly lifelike sculpture by Tony Matelli, entitled “Sleepwalker,” has become a source of apprehension, fear, and triggering thoughts regarding sexual assault for some members of our campus community. While it may appear humorous, or thought provoking to some, the “Sleepwalker” has already become a source of undue stress for a number of Wellesley College students, the majority of whom live, study, and work on campus.

As the sculpture was placed in a highly trafficked location, it is difficult for students wishing not to see the “Sleepwalker” to travel to the campus center and the residential and academic quads.  

While the sculpture may not trigger, disturb, or bother everyone on campus, as a community it is our responsibility to pay attention to and attempt to answer the needs of all of our community members. For those among us who find the sculpture triggering, daily activities that require moving about the campus may be seriously impeded by the nature, location, and context of the sculpture.  

In signing, we assert that the undue stress that the “Sleepwalker” causes some of us is enough reason to move it inside the Davis Museum. We also stand firm that art, particularly outdoor art installations, are valuable parts of our community. 

We welcome outdoor art that is provocative without being a site of unnecessary distress for members of the Wellesley College community. Further, we ask that in the future, the Davis Museum and the College notify us before displaying public art, especially if it is of a particularly shocking or sensitive nature.

Back to the NYT:

In an interview, Ms. Narayanan, who signed the petition, said on Thursday, “I know people who have had triggering responses to the statue.” She added, “The statue was put in a public place without students’ consent.” 

The reaction has pitted students concerned with their peers’ discomfort against the college administration, which has focused on the sculpture as a catalyst for discussion. 

“The community is debating everything from compassion to censorship, to freedom of expression and the significance of safe spaces,” said H. Kim Bottomly, the college’s president, in a statement on Thursday. She said the students who led the petition were going to meet on Thursday with Mr. Matelli and Lisa Fischman, director of the Davis Museum. 

Ms. Fischman said she intended to keep it on public view until the exhibition ends in July. She wanted the sleepwalker to be male, she said, partly because she thought a female sculpture would seem too exposed.  

“I was completely taken aback by this response,” said Ms. Fischman, who hopes to use the discussion around the work as “a teachable moment” on “creative freedom and what it means to honor that on campus.” 

The reaction to the sculpture also surprised Mr. Matelli, who said he intended the sculpture to be a vulnerable depiction of a man, in contrast with the aggressive, monumental figures that are more typically wrought in statues of men.  

“What they see in the sculpture is not in the sculpture,” said Mr. Matelli, who added, “If you have bad feelings toward this and it’s triggering you, you need to seek sympathy, you need to seek help.” 

Dude, to say stuff like that, Tony Matelli better be some kind of Hispanic rather than Italian name, and you better be wearing a dress or at least be gay.

So, I went to Google to find out about Mr. Matelli and this immediately came up:

Oh, that's convenient of Google. They've taken to putting up a rainbow symbol to instantly tell you who's gay or not. So, Mr. Matelli's got that going for him in his war with the Wellesley feminists, which is nice.

But then it occurred to me to test my assumption:

So, this rainbow flag is not a handy new feature to confirm your gaydar, it's just Google demonstrating World War G solidarity against all those homophobic Russian figure skaters, or something.

Anyway, Mr. Matelli doesn't wear a dress, looks like a white guy, and specializes in really ugly sculptures.

The NYT gives the feminists the last word:

Ms. Narayanan said she was frustrated that students’ concerns about the work’s impact on students have not been addressed. “It sort of feels like the big point here is that students’ emotions to [sic] the statue are being pushed aside in favor of having a discussion about art,” Ms. Narayanan said.

 
I'm betting on the feminists over the postmodernists in this scrap. But we shall see. There may be trump cards yet to be played. The feminists have the jargon, but the modern art promoters have the money (what are the odds that a major Wellesley donor is also a major Tom Matteli collector?), plus the big money art collectors are hardly hurting when it comes to hiring academics to make up jargon for them (e.g., "transgressive"), either. So we shall see.
    

"The future of U.S. politics, as seen in Silicon Valley"

Lion of the Blogosphere writes:

The future of U.S. politics, as seen in Silicon Valley 

Most rich businesspeople can’t vote Republican because they are disgusted by the prole values that Republicans stand for. Anti-abortion? Anti-birth control? Anti-gay? Climate change deniers? No way are rich businesspeople who want to be part of polite society going to vote for that stuff. The Democrats are the only viable party to vote for. But why do the Democrats have to be so anti-business? 

Well, as explained in a NY Times article, rich businesspeople in Silicon Valley are doing something about it. They are putting huge money behind Ro Khanna, a Democratic Indian lawyer who is mounting a primary challenge against the incumbent Michael Honda.

Honda is a Japanese-American Democrat of old-fashioned pro-poor liberal views.

Khanna “favors changes to tax policy suitable for a global economy, including ones that would make it easier for American companies to repatriate overseas profits without being taxed under certain conditions.” 

In other words, multinational corporations who have been evading the spirit of the tax law by keeping their profits overseas should be given a tax holiday and rewarded for it. That’s exactly the stuff that Republicans traditionally support. 

I skimmed this article, but didn't notice what LotB keyed in on: the priority in putting Khanna in the House is to the be point man for another massive rip off of the American taxpayers. (Here's my 2011 post on how Microsoft uses Puerto Rico, Ireland, and Singapore to avoid paying corporate income tax.)

Khanna is a patent lawyer, so no doubt he'll come in handy in intellectual property wars down the road, as well.

I think that as the Republicans become a Christian party that can only wins elections in Bible Belt states, we will see the Democratic Party split apart, into a pro-business SWPL/bobo wing, and another wing representing blacks and Hispanics

    

But the real future of politics is to have the best of both worlds: You're doing it for the diverse and the poor and it's going right into your bank account. Thus, for example, Mark Zuckerberg's class war on his employees is framed as being waged out of concern for the Dreamers living in the shadows etc etc. The real political genius will be the guy who figures out how to tie tax-free repatriation of tech profits in Puerto Rico into World War G/T.

   

Exception that proves rule proves unexceptional

I'm a big fan of the cognitive utility of the old phrase: "The exception that proves the rule." But then I'm kind of an exception in that regard, since anytime I mention I like that, I get deluged with logical and etymological objections. 

I merely mean that an exception that is famous for being exceptional suggests a general tendency in the opposite direction. The canonical example is that Beethoven's titanic fame as a deaf composer suggests that most composers aren't deaf, while, say, the lack of obsessive publicity about painter David Hockney's late onset deafness suggests that deafness isn't all that big of a deal, one way or another, to painters. Judging from the immortal fame of Beethoven's battle with deafness, we can assume that there aren't many deaf composers, while the ho-hum response to Hockney's deafness suggests that we can't make strong quantitative assumptions about painters and deafness.

Recently in Japan there has arisen an exception to my canonical exception: a popular deaf composer named Mamoru Samuragochi. 

From the NYT:

Renowned Japanese Composer Admits Fraud 

By MARTIN FACKLER  FEB. 6, 2014

TOKYO — He was celebrated as a prolific musical genius whose compositions appeared in popular video games and the competition routine of a top figure skater in the coming Sochi Olympics. His deafness won him praise as Japan’s modern-day Beethoven. 

It turns out his magnum opus was his own masquerade. 

On Thursday, Japan learned that one of its most popular musical figures, Mamoru Samuragochi, 50, had staged an elaborate hoax in which someone else had secretly written his most famous compositions, and he had perhaps even faked his hearing disability. 

Across a nation long captivated by Western classical music, people reacted with remorse, outrage and even the rare threat of a lawsuit after Mr. Samuragochi’s revelations that he had hired a ghostwriter since the 1990s to compose most of his music. The anger turned to disbelief when the ghostwriter himself came forward to accuse Mr. Samuragochi of faking his deafness, apparently to win public sympathy and shape the Beethoven persona. 

The scandal began on Wednesday, when Mr. Samuragochi publicly confessed that someone else had written his most famous works. These include Symphony No. 1 “Hiroshima,” about the 1945 atomic bombing of his home city, which became a classical music hit in Japan; the theme music for the video games Resident Evil and Onimusha; and Sonatina for Violin, which the Japanese Olympic figure skater Daisuke Takahashi is scheduled to use in his short program performance at the Winter Games in Sochi.

The timing could hardly have been worse for Mr. Takahashi, a potential medalist who won the bronze in the Vancouver Olympics four years ago. He said in a statement that he would continue to skate to the musical piece — he really had little choice with scant time left before the competition — and hoped the revelations would not overshadow his performance. 

... The reason for this sudden repentance became clear on Thursday when the ghostwriter revealed himself to be Takashi Niigaki, 43, a hitherto largely unknown part-time lecturer at a prestigious music college in Tokyo. Mr. Niigaki said he had written more than 20 songs for Mr. Samuragochi since 1996, for which he received the equivalent of about $70,000.

He said he felt so guilty about the deception that he had threatened to go public in the past, but Mr. Samuragochi had begged him not to. He said he finally could not take it anymore when he learned one of his songs would be used by the Olympic skater. He told his story to a weekly tabloid, which went on sale Thursday.

“He told me that if I didn’t write songs for him, he’d commit suicide,” Mr. Niigaki told a crowded news conference. “But I could not bear the thought of skater Takahashi being seen by the world as a co-conspirator in our crime.” 

Perhaps just as shocking was Mr. Niigaki’s assertion that Mr. Samuragochi was never deaf. Mr. Niigaki said that he had regular conversations with Mr. Samuragochi, who listened to and commented on his compositions. Mr. Niigaki said the deafness was just “an act that he was performing to the outside world.”

 

Why didn't the CIA bribe the Soviets into giving up?

Several decades ago I read an amusing first person account by (as far as I can recall) composer Igor Stravinsky about what it's like to visit your Swiss bank to check up on your private stash. (I can't find the story online to confirm this memory, other than a biographer noting that Stravinsky visited two Swiss banks in October 1968.)

Anyway, Stravinsky (assuming that was the narrator) emphasized that a visit to a high-end Swiss bank involved much careful shuttling from one private waiting room to another, like in the opening scene of an expertly constructed bedroom farce before everything goes awry in the last act. Discreet staffers orchestrate your movement down cleared hallways so that you don't accidentally bump into other clients visiting their own loot. I mean it would be embarrassing for all concerned for Maestro Stravinsky to bump into Prime Minister Wilson or General Secretary Brezhnev coming out of the vault.

I recall that when I read this (around 1982?) that I laughed at Stravinsky's example of the Labour PM, but I was surprised by his very notion that the Soviet supremo might be on the take, might be salting a little away against the day of destruction, then somewhat intrigued: it was an idea that just didn't come up much in the culture of the time. Two things were taken for granted back then: Muscovite women were homely and Muscovite men were honest.

So, that raises the question: Did the CIA ever attempt to bribe the Soviets into just giving up? And if not, why not?

   

Time: Chinese woman says calling Amy Chua racist is racist

Chen, not Chua

From Time Magazine:

Why the Tiger Mom’s New Book Makes You Nervous 

When it comes to discussing success in America, we're still afraid to talk about race 

By Vivia Chen Jan. 31, 2014
   
Amy Chua is an easy whipping post. After all, she’s the iconic Tiger Mom who blithely bragged about her extreme parenting methods in her book 2011 Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Overnight, she became the archetype of the nightmare Asian mom, hell bent on raising uber-achievers at all cost. 

I thought Battle Hymn was a humorous, breezy read, but many people (who probably never read the book) were outraged. ... This time, though, Chua is condemned not just as an arrogant elitist and abusive mother but something else: racist. 

Suketu Mehta writes in TIME that the book represents “the new racism—and I take it rather personally.” Mehta adds that “the language of racism in America has changed . . . It’s not about skin color anymore—it’s about ‘cultural traits.’” 

In a follow-up to Mehta’s article, Anna Holmes argues that the “new racism” in The Triple Package is just a continuation of “the same old racism.” Her verdict on the book: “It’s the same old garbage, in a slightly different, Ivy League-endorsed disguise.” 

The tenor of a lot of the criticism has been angry, hostile and extremely personal (Chua seems to get singled out much more so than her husband). And, I think, racist. The fact that some of the slings come from minority group members doesn’t make the criticisms less vicious. 

What gives the attacks a distinct racist tinge is that Chua is reduced to a stereotype—a Dragon Lady, of sorts. This time, though, the Dragon Lady is not the evil seducer of old Fu Manchu movies, but the new evangelist of racial superiority. Maureen Callahan writes in the New York Post: “[Chua] used her heritage and all the worst stereotypes of Chinese women — cold, rigid Dragon Ladies.” ...

Chen is the creator and chief blogger of the Careerist and a senior reporter at the American Lawyer. The views expressed are solely her own.