April 2, 2014

The other George Kennan and American anti-Czarism

That anti-Czarism was a natural political response for 19th Century Americans is illustrated by the life of the Other George Kennan. The famous George F. Kennan (February 16, 1904 – March 17, 2005) was the intellectual architect of the successful Cold War strategy of containment. But he was the second George Kennan born on February 16 in his extended family to become an American expert on Russia. George F. Kennan's paternal grandfather's cousin George Kennan had been quite famous in his day as a Russia expert. 

The Other Kennan's political evolution as he learned more about the Czarist regime's repression of dissidents by exiling them to Siberia seems to me representative of mainstream American feelings: e.g., Kennan's growing anti-Czarism was supported by Mark Twain.

From Wikipedia:
George Kennan (February 16, 1845 – 1924) was an American explorer noted for his travels in the Kamchatka and Caucasus regions of the Russian Empire. He was a cousin twice removed of diplomat and historian George F. Kennan, with whom he shared his birthday.

George Kennan was born in Norwalk, Ohio ... 
In 1864, he secured employment with the Russian American Telegraph Company to survey a route for a proposed overland telegraph line through Siberia and across the Bering Strait. Having spent two years in the wilds of Kamchatka, he returned to Ohio via St. Petersburg and soon became well-known through his lectures, articles and a book about his travels. 
In his book, Tent Life in Siberia, Kennan provided ethnographies, histories and descriptions of many native peoples in Siberia, that are still important for researchers today. ... In 1870, he returned to St. Petersburg and travelled to Dagestan, in the northern Caucasus region, which had been annexed by the Russian Empire only ten years previously. There he became the first American to explore its highlands, a remote Muslim region of herders, silversmiths, carpet-weavers and other craftsmen. He travelled on through the northern Caucasus area, stopping in Samashki and Grozny, before returning once more to America in 1871. These travels and earned him a reputation as an "expert" on all matters pertaining to Russia. ...
Ilya Repin's 1884 "They Did Not Expect Him" about a return from Siberia
In May 1885, Kennan began another voyage in Russia, this time across Siberia from Europe. He had been very publicly supportive of the Tsarist Russian government and its policies and his trip was approved by the Russian government at the very highest levels. However, in the course of his meetings with exiled dissidents during his travel, notably Nikolai Mikhailovich Yadrintsev (1842–1894), Kennan changed his mind about the Russian imperial system. He had been particularly impressed by Catherine Breshkovsky, the populist "little grandmother of the Russian Revolution". She had bidden him farewell in the small Transbaikal village to which she was confined by saying "We may die in exile and our grand children may die in exile, but something will come of it at last." He also met a teenage Leonid Krasin during this trip.[1] 
On his return to the United States in August 1886, he became an ardent critic of the Russian autocracy and began to espouse the cause of Russian Democracy. Kennan devoted much of the next twenty years to promoting the cause of a Russian revolution, mainly through lecturing. Kennan was one of the most prolific lecturers of the late nineteenth century. He spoke before a million or so people during the 1890s, including two hundred consecutive evening appearances in 1890-91 (excepting Sundays) before crowds of as many as two thousand people. ... He became the most prominent member of the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom—whose membership included Mark Twain and Julia Ward Howe—and also helped found Free Russia, the first English-language journal to oppose Tsarist Russia. In 1891 the Russian government responded by banishing him from Russia. ...
Kennan was vehemently against the October Revolution, because he felt the Soviet government lacked the "knowledge, experience, or education to deal successfully with the tremendous problems that have come up for solutions since the overthrow of the Tsar." President Woodrow Wilson did read and weigh Kennan's report to him in 1918 on the haplessness of the Bolshevik government,[2] but Kennan eventually criticized Wilson's administration for being too timid in intervening against Bolshevism. 
"The Russian leopard has not changed its spots... The new Bolshevik constitution ... leaves all power just where it has been for the last five years--in the hands of a small group of self-appointed bureaucrats which the people can neither remove nor control."—Kennan's last criticism of Bolshevism written in the Medina Tribune (a small-town newspaper), July 1923.
       

Anne Applebaum ponders World War G

Anne Applebaum, wife of the Polish foreign minister, writes in her column in Slate / Washington Post:
TBILISI, Georgia—Halfway through an otherwise coherent conversation with a Georgian lawyer last week—the topics included judges, the court system, the police—I was startled by a comment he made about his country’s former government, led by ex-president Mikheil Saakashvili. “They were LGBT,” he said, conspiratorially.    
What did that mean, I asked, surprised. Were they in favor of rights for sexual minorities? For gay marriage? Were they actually gay? He couldn’t really define it, though the conversation meandered in that direction for a few more minutes, also touching on the subject of the former president’s alleged marital infidelity, his promotion of female politicians, his lack of respect for the church. 
Afterward, I worked it out. The lawyer meant to say that Saakashvili—who drove his country hard in the direction of Europe, who pulled Georgia as close to NATO as possible, who used rough tactics to fight the post-Soviet mafia that dominated his country

Who also started ... a ... tank ... war ... with ... Russia, but who can remember that?
—was “too Western.” Not conservative enough. Not traditional enough. Too much of a modernizer, a reformer, a European. In the past, such a critic might have called Saakashvili a “rootless cosmopolitan.” But nowadays the insulting code word for that sort of person in the former Soviet space—regardless of what he or she actually thinks about gay people—is “LGBT.”      
It was an eye-opening moment. Like Ukraine, Georgia is a post-Soviet republic that has tried to pull itself out of the sphere of Russian influence. Unlike Ukraine, Georgia does not have a sizable Russian-speaking population, and Georgians even have cause to fear Russia. Since their 2008 invasion, Russian troops have occupied the Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, about one-fifth of the country. Russian tanks are parked a few hours drive from Georgia’s capital. 
Yet despite the absence of Russian speakers, a form of Russia’s anti-Western ideology can be felt in Georgia, too. It’s a minority view that drifts in through religious leaders—part of the Georgian Orthodox Church retains old ties to Moscow—through some pro-Kremlin political parties and Russian-backed media. But it finds indigenous support, taking the form of xenophobic, anti-European—and nowadays—anti-gay rhetoric. 
   
I quote this because it's the perfect set-up for my new column in Taki's Magazine.

Keep in mind that I admire Anne Applebaum. She's always impressed me as a good person. Her faults -- she's a little earnest and lacking in self-awareness -- are the faults of good people. She's an above-average quality representative of the American media's center-right, so her cluelessness about who has had the whip hand in World War G is illuminating about the self-interested obliviousness that has been driving this dangerous confrontation.
       

Neo-Czarism: But is it good for the gays?

From my new Taki's Magazine column:
There’s inevitable bad blood between Russians, for whom pro-czarism is the natural political inclination (for reasons of geography and history, Russia is a backward place, so its political traditions are backward), and American Jews, whose ancestral traditions are fervently anti-czarist. 
Thus, Putin’s reconstruction of a functioning Russian state after the disasters of the 1990s was inevitably going to turn out to be more or less neo-czarist. In turn, a strong Russia predictably triggered anti-pogrom alarms among American Jews. Since there aren’t actual pogroms, much of Jewish animus and angst got displaced into its 21st century proxies: neoconservatism (as in the case of the State Department’s Victoria Nuland) and gay activism (Radio Liberty’s Masha Gessen). 
Both Russians and American Jews have perfectly understandable reasons for feeling the way they do. Fortunately, this psychological disjunction needn’t lead to war or even to simple jingoism. After all, we live on different continents. Both sides ought to be able to recognize and laugh off their inevitable bigotry and malice. 
The central cognitive problem for America, however, is that gentile Americans aren't allowed to notice, much less laugh at, Jewish predilections, nor even mention the level of Jewish influence in the American media and government (consider the careers of Gregg Easterbrook and Rick Sanchez).
   
Read the whole thing there.
   

How long can a conspiracy be kept secret?

One common argument against the existence of any and all conspiracies is that it's impossible to keep secret any project requiring more than a few individuals. 

This sounds plausible, but is it? After all, I grew up around massive secret projects. Friends of the family worked on the crown jewels of the national security state, such as Area 51, the U-2 spy plane, the awesome SR-71, and the F-117 Stealth Fighter. 

Stealth work began in 1975 at both Lockheed and Northrop (which eventually became the B-2 Stealth Bomber) and Lockheed had a stealth prototype, Have Blue, flying at Area 51 by the end of 1977. Carter's defense secretary Harold Brown announced the existence of stealth in August 1980, claiming that leaks in the preceding days had made it impossible to keep the entire concept secret anymore. Republicans angrily claimed he spilled the beans early to defuse Reagan's attack on Carter canceling the B-1 program. The Russians apparently were still clueless about stealth. (It came as a surprise to me, too.)

Airline pilots frequently spotted the otherworldly-looking Skunk Works planes being tested out of Area 51, especially the 2000 mph 80000' altitude SR-71 which covered enormous amounts of territory and caused sonic booms (the SR-71 was announced fairly quickly by LBJ). One theory is that the U.S. government encouraged rumors of flying saucers at Area 51 to discredit these highly credible witnesses.

But all these pale in comparison to the huge Bletchley Park decoding operation in WWII England, which had a staff of nearly 10,000 working on site by the end of the war, and didn't surface in the popular press until the early 1970s. It required the history of computing to be rewritten.

Besides decoding the German Enigma machine, there were other projects at Bletchley that weren't declassified until much more recently, such as Tunny, the breaking of Hitler's personal cipher.

An obituary in today's NYT:
Jerry Roberts, Last of Team of British Code Breakers, Dies at 93 
By PAUL VITELLO   APRIL 2, 2014
Jerry Roberts, the last surviving member of the British code-breaking team that cracked strategic ciphers between Hitler and his top generals, helping to hasten the end of World War II, died on March 25 in Hampshire, England. He was 93. 
His death was confirmed by the Bletchley Park Trust, a nonprofit group that administers the Victorian estate north of London where the British government lodged Mr. Roberts and hundreds of other code breakers during the war, among them linguists, mathematicians and puzzle masters of various backgrounds. 
Mr. Roberts, a German linguist, was part of a small top-secret group assembled in 1941 to help decrypt messages picked up in radio signals between Hitler and his field marshals on the front. The team’s very existence remained a secret until 2006, when the British government declassified wartime intelligence files.

This 2006 date seems exaggerated. Here's the obituary in The Telegraph from 2002 of Roberts' colleague W.T. Tutte:
PROFESSOR BILL TUTTE, who has died aged 84, was responsible for one of Bletchley Park's greatest codebreaking achievments during the Second World War when he cracked the teleprinter cipher, known as Tunny, which Hitler used to communicate with his generals. ...
This was a far more complicated mechanism than the famous Enigma cipher machine, since the Lorenz SZ40 had 12 wheels compared with the three or four on the Enigma. 
It also led to Bletchley Park's other great achievement, the construction of the world's first semi-programmable electronic computer, Colossus, which was used to decipher the Tunny messages.

Looking at the bibliography on Wikipedia, there are sources for the Tunny decryption going back to 1993, but that's still a half century after William Tutte broke Tunny in a tour de force of cryptography.

Roberts' NYT obituary continues:
By 1941, Bletchley Park cryptographers had already deciphered thousands of messages transmitted by lower-level German commanders in the field, thanks to the work of the mathematician Alan Turing, who in 1940 cracked the daunting German secret code that the British called Enigma. But they were stumped by the even more complex ciphered messages being transmitted among Hitler and the generals Erwin Rommel, Wilhelm Keitel, Gerd von Rundstedt and Alfred Jodl. 

April 1, 2014

LA Times: "High deportation figures are misleading"

From the Los Angeles Times:
High deportation figures are misleading 
Immigrants living illegally beyond the border area are less likely to be deported under 'deporter in chief' President Obama, contrary to widespread belief.

By Brian Bennett 
April 1, 2014, 8:55 p.m. 
WASHINGTON — Immigration activists have sharply criticized President Obama for a rising volume of deportations, labeling him the "deporter in chief" and staging large protests that have harmed his standing with some Latinos, a key group of voters for Democrats. 
But the portrait of a steadily increasing number of deportations rests on statistics that conceal almost as much as they disclose. A closer examination shows that immigrants living illegally in most of the continental U.S. are less likely to be deported today than before Obama came to office, according to immigration data. 
Expulsions of people who are settled and working in the United States have fallen steadily since his first year in office, and are down more than 40% since 2009. 
On the other side of the ledger, the number of people deported at or near the border has gone up — primarily as a result of changing who gets counted in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency's deportation statistics. 
The vast majority of those border crossers would not have been treated as formal deportations under most previous administrations. If all removals were tallied, the total sent back to Mexico each year would have been far higher under those previous administrations than it is now. ...
Until recent years, most people caught illegally crossing the southern border were simply bused back into Mexico in what officials called "voluntary returns," but which critics derisively termed "catch and release." Those removals, which during the 1990s reached more 1 million a year, were not counted in Immigration and Customs Enforcement's deportation statistics. 
Now, the vast majority of border crossers who are apprehended get fingerprinted and formally deported. The change began during the George W. Bush administration and accelerated under Obama. The policy stemmed in part from a desire to ensure that people who had crossed into the country illegally would have formal charges on their records. 
In the Obama years, all of the increase in deportations has involved people picked up within 100 miles of the border, most of whom have just recently crossed over. In 2013, almost two-thirds of deportations were in that category.
At the same time, the administration largely ended immigration roundups at workplaces and shifted investigators into targeting business owners who illegally hired foreign workers. 
"If you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero — it's just highly unlikely to happen," John Sandweg, until recently the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in an interview. 
Even when immigration officials want to deport someone who already has settled in the country, doing so is "virtually impossible" because of a lengthy backlog in the immigration courts, Sandweg said. Once people who have no prior removals or convictions are placed in deportation proceedings, actually removing them from the country can take six years or more in some jurisdictions, Sandweg said. 
Deportations of people apprehended in the interior of the U.S., which the immigration agency defines as more than 100 miles from the border, dropped from 237,941 in Obama's first year to 133,551 in 2013, according to immigration data. Four out of five of those deportees came to the attention of immigration authorities after criminal convictions. 
Many of those convictions are related to crossing the border — the other big consequence of the change in the way border removals are handled. 
A growing number of people caught trying to cross the border now have a formal deportation order on their records. Entering the country without legal authorization is not a crime.

Why not?
But once a person has been deported, he can be prosecuted if he reenters the country.  ...
The turn away from deporting immigrants from the interior of the country amounts to an open invitation for people to come to the U.S. on a legal visa and stay, said Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). 
"It just cannot be the policy of the U.S. that if somebody gets past the border and gets to St. Louis or Memphis or Austin, Texas, or New York, they are not going to be deported," Sessions said. "The administration is systematically failing to enforce immigration law uniformly."
    

CNN: White males inventing too much stuff

From CNN:
In largely white male tech world, why capitalism needs an upgrade 
By Mitchell Kapor and Benjamin Todd Jealous

Mitch Kapor and Ben Jealous worry that a lack of diversity in tech firms is stalling innovation
Startups succeed, they say, when they meet unmet needs. Innovators from diverse backgrounds can uncover fresh, unsolved problems
Editor's note: Tech pioneer Mitchell Kapor is the co-founder of the Kapor Center for Social Impact and Kapor Capital. Benjamin Todd Jealous, the former president and CEO of the NAACP, is a venture partner at Kapor Capital. Both Kapor and Jealous serve on the board of the Level Playing Field Institute. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the authors. 
(CNN) -- When Frederick Hutson left prison in 2012 after serving four years on marijuana-related charges, he realized he had gained something more than his freedom: insight into an overlooked consumer market. 
Many inmates are stuck in an age before Instagram or Facebook, relying on envelopes and pay phones to connect with family on the outside. 
So Hutson founded Pigeonly, a photo-sharing and low-cost phone call service that has already helped 50,000 incarcerated individuals connect with their loved ones, maintain their ties to society, and remain a presence in their children's lives.

And, via Pigeonly, order hits on the stool pigeons who put them behind bars.
Last year there were eight states where zero Latino students took the Advanced Placement exam in computer science, and 11 states in which no black students took the test. In three states, not a single female student sat for the exam. 

A bigger problem is that the Latinos, blacks, and, to a lesser extent, women, didn't do so hot on average when they took the test. If black Puerto Rican females were acing the AP exam at a high rate when they were allowed to take it, it would be obvious that getting more to take it is a high priority, since even diminishing marginal returns would just bring the pass rate down to the white male average. But when those legally privileged individuals who take the AP Computer Science exam currently are failing it at a high rate, well, expansion will increase the failure rate.
It is no surprise, then, that 99% of venture capital-funded startups in 2010 were founded by whites or people of Asian descent, the vast majority of whom were men. The result of this pipeline problem is an enormous amount of untapped talent and a tech sector that fails to reflect the demographics of its users.

We really, really need a term for whites and Asians when talking about subjects like computers.
Underrepresented populations are uniquely prepared to do what the tech sector claims to do best: innovate.

Sure they are.
     

New PISA test on real world problem solving

The tireless PISA folks are back with the results of a test of math-related real world problem solving among 15 year olds in 44 upscale countries. (Check here for sample questions like how to find the quickest route on a map or how to adjust an air conditioner). The U.S. did not bad, scoring a little above the average for rich countries, but not as good as the Asians or the white countries with smart immigration policies (Canada, Australia, Finland). 

OECD average 500
Singapore 562
Korea 561
Japan 552
Macao-China 540
Hong Kong-China 540
Shanghai-China 536
Chinese Taipei 534
Canada 526
Australia 523
Finland 523
England (United Kingdom) 517
Estonia 515
France 511
Netherlands 511
Italy 510
Czech Republic 509
Germany 509
United States 508
Belgium 508
Austria 506
Norway 503
Ireland 498
Denmark 497
Portugal 494
Sweden 491
Russian Federation 489
Slovak Republic 483
Poland 481
Spain 477
Slovenia 476
Serbia 473
Croatia 466
Hungary 459
Turkey 454
Israel 454
Chile 448
Cyprus 1, 2 445
Brazil 428
Malaysia 422
United Arab Emirates 411
Montenegro 407
Uruguay 403
Bulgaria 402
Colombia 399

Shanghai came down to earth after its stratospheric scores on the last two PISAs. Poland was also down v. its PISA scores. Otherwise, there would appear to be a fairly high degree of correlation at the national level between the triennial PISA test of book smarts and the new PISA test of real world smarts, which is what the g Factor theory of intelligence would predict.
     

Justice without law: standup comedy division

Awhile ago I noted that stand-up comedy is in pretty good shape right now, even though it lacks dominant superstars. In fact, that's probably related to its health: the current culture of comedy enforces norms that allow a surprisingly large number of funny guys to eke out a living without one top banana getting too big a piece of the pie.

An article in Slate by Peter McGraw and Joel Warner references a paper by legal scholars on how comedians enforce their ban on joke-stealing:
While the law doesn’t provide much in the way of protection for comedians, Oliar and Sprigman found that today’s comics do maintain an informal set of rules. If two comics come up with a similar joke, for example, it’s understood that whoever tells it first on television can claim ownership. Similarly, if two comedians are working on material together, batting ideas back and forth, it’s generally agreed upon that if one comedian comes up with a setup and the other the punch line, the former owns the joke. 
Those who don’t follow the rules can face escalating repercussions. First they’re subjected to badmouthing; then they get blacklisted from clubs. Finally, if the unacceptable behavior continues, it’s understood that things might get physical. While none of the comics Oliar and Sprigman interviewed admitted to participating in or witnessing fights over stolen jokes, many had heard stories, and they accepted such violence as a possible, if remote, outcome. As one comedian told the researchers, “ … the only copyright protection you have is a quick uppercut.” 
Far from being dismayed by this extralegal system, Oliar and Sprigman came away impressed by the comedians’ informal arrangement. “They have managed to put together a community project that requires a pretty high-level amount of group coordination,” says Sprigman. It’s a lot better than the joke-stealing free-for-all of [Milton] Berle’s era. And it’s hard to imagine a more formal joke protection system, involving copyright filings and other legal procedures, working well in a world where comics are constantly generating and tweaking new material. In fact, Sprigman thinks this joke-stealing code could work for other industries struggling with how to balance creativity and copyright issues, including the music and tech industries. They should borrow it.

Indoctrination, criticism, ostracism, and violence are among the main tools for enforcing a set of social norms.
     

The funniest April Fool's Day hoax yet

From the NYT:
U.S. and Israel Said to Be Near Agreement on Release of Spy 
By JODI RUDOREN  APRIL 1, 2014 
JERUSALEM — Officials involved in the fraught Israeli-Palestinian peace talks said on Tuesday that an agreement was near on extending the negotiations through 2015 in exchange for the release of Jonathan J. Pollard, an American serving a life sentence for spying for Israel. 

The Grey Lady is a lot more limber than she used to be. Who would have thought the NYT would be splashing an April Fool's Day hoax right on the front page?  
   

Kirchick's conspiracy theory about Right Sector as Putin's agents provocateur

In Politico, veteran political trickster Jamie Kirchick expands upon my reader's theory that Right Sector in Kiev is a Russian false flag operation:
And it is this reciprocal relationship with Russia that has many Ukrainians suspecting a shadowy dirty tricks campaign by the Kremlin. Almost every Ukrainian I spoke with speculated that Moscow is secretly supporting Right Sector in an attempt to both destabilize the weak government in Kiev and provide a pretext for further meddling – the tried and true tactic of provokatsiya, or provocation, which Moscow has been using since the early Bolshevik period to deceive its adversaries and earn sympathy among credulous Westerners. 
There are many peculiar things about Right Sector that lend some credibility to this theory. Why, for instance, did Yarosh allegedly meet with Yanukoyvch for half an hour on the very day that special forces, the much-loathed “Berkut,” opened fire on protestors? How was it that not a single member of Right Sector was among the “Heavenly Hundred,” as the casualties of the Maidan protests are now consecrated (a particularly curious omission given the group’s much-vaunted role as the armed vanguard of the revolution)? How does the organization afford an entire floor of rooms at the four-star Dnipro Hotel, the Right Sector headquarters in downtown Kiev, where a red and black flag hangs prominently in the lobby? Talking with Right Sector members protesting outside the parliament, I never received a coherent answer as to why they were not lining up to join the country’s army. The greatest threat to Ukraine right now is a potential Russian invasion; yet here were these so-called patriots trying to bring down an already weak Ukrainian government. One Ukrainian who took part in the Maidan protests told me that she heard several Right Sector members speaking with Russian accents. That the group would be part of a Kremlin black PR campaign, she said, is “not a crazy idea.”

My brain can't really process whom to trust least. 

That part of the world tends toward Byzantine conspiracies, so perhaps a prudent response would be to suggest that us dumb Americans might not want to get ourselves in too deep in a place we clearly don't understand well.
   

March 31, 2014

College acceptances: "The Fence Around the Ivy League"

With high school students currently receiving thick and, mostly, thin letters from the colleges to which they applied last year, let me quote some numbers from an old Taki's column of mine:
Immigration boosters insinuate that patriotic Americans should want a nonstop deluge of immigrants to prove We’re Number One. In practice, though, the attitude of America’s most celebrated colleges has been identical to that of our snobbiest country clubs: Who needs the hassles of growth when our prestige is proportional to the multitudes turned away? Hence, over the last generation, elite colleges have concentrated upon becoming more elite, not more accessible.
Some colleges have swollen to keep up with the country’s vibrantly diverse population, such as U. of Central Florida and Arizona State. But they tend to be ones you mostly read about on the sports page, if anywhere. For example, in Back to Blood, Tom Wolfe spoofs Florida International—now the nation’s fourth-largest undergraduate college with 39,147 students, two-thirds of them Hispanic—by calling it Everglades Global University. Nonetheless, few people outside of South Florida will get Wolfe’s joke, because who ever heard of Florida International U.? 
In contrast, consider the growth rate of Harvard, the world’s richest university. The number of undergraduates in its class of 1986 was 1,722. After a quarter of a century, during which the US population grew by about 75,000,000, Harvard’s class of 2011 was 1,726: an increase of 4. 
This is not to say that Harvard isn’t expanding: Faculty and grad students are up, and non-teaching staff skyrocketed.

Similarly, Yale’s undergraduate student body has been the same size since 1978. Five years ago, the second-richest college announced a proposal for adding a couple of dormitories, but construction won’t proceed until another $300 million is raised.

After all, Yale couldn't possibly take out a loan to finance construction. Who would loan money to a college that's been around for only 313 years?
In 2010, MIT unveiled plans to expand undergrad enrollment by six percent, which would only get it back to where it was in the 1990s. ... 
Perhaps the defining activity of American life since the 1960s has been elites conspiring to become more elite. 
            

The Chinese Military-Disco Complex: Update

I recently mused about the Chinese army's tendency to see itself less as the pointy end of the spear and more in terms of: "It's not a job, it's a racket." It's cleaned itself up somewhat since the 1990s, but without any particular wars that need fighting, the urge to relapse is always there.

From the NYT today:
Chinese General Charged in Graft Inquiry 
By JONATHAN ANSFIELD MARCH 31, 2014

BEIJING — ... On Monday, prosecutors formally charged General Gu with bribery, embezzlement, misuse of state funds and abuse of power, the outcome of a far-reaching inquiry under President Xi Jinping that could foreshadow unprecedented criminal prosecutions of other high-ranking military figures. ...
An internal inquiry accused him of presiding over a vast land development racket that hoarded kickbacks, bought promotions and enabled him and his family to amass dozens of expensive residences, including places where investigators found stockpiles of high-end liquor, gold bullion and cash, according to people briefed on the investigation. 
Even as President Xi presses a sweeping campaign against graft within the Communist Party, he has seized on the case against General Gu to pursue a parallel drive to clean up the 2.3 million-member armed forces.... Mr. Xi’s goal, they said, is to transform a service larded with pet projects and patronage networks into a leaner fighting force more adept at projecting power abroad and buttressing party rule at home — and to strengthen his own authority. ...
Mr. Xi, unlike his immediate predecessors, took over the military and the party at the same time — in November 2012 — and brought strong P.L.A. ties. After university, he served as an aide to a top military official. His father was a revolutionary guerrilla commander. His wife is a singer in the P.L.A.'s song-and-dance troupe.

The President of China's wife used to entertain the troops? Ann-Margaret style? Or was she more hands-on?
Mr. Xi has ordered a stream of antigraft measures, audits and criticism sessions; enlarged drills to upgrade “battle readiness”; and advanced contentious plans to restructure a military bureaucracy criticized as bloated and outmoded. Those plans are expected to overhaul the command structure, streamline the army’s procurement practices and significantly downsize nonmilitary divisions such as the performance troupes.

Is "performance troupe" (such as the one the First Lady worked in) perhaps a euphemism? Does the President of China have some deep-seated personal issues involving the military?
Corruption has bedeviled the P.L.A. since the market reforms of the 1980s, when it was permitted to venture into industry and earn the funds to modernize its arsenal and sustain its troops. Widespread smuggling, graft and profiteering ensued. It took years of debate for the party in 1998 to order the military to divest from business. But as Beijing increased military spending, officers tapped their own resources for profit.
The P.L.A. retains extensive land holdings, which have ballooned in value in line with property prices across the country, and real estate transactions are considered its biggest source of corruption.

The major danger is that the Chinese government will try to clean up the Army by giving it a war to fight. On the very, very macro scale, war is the enemy of corruption and inequality. Of course, war is also war.

America's Founding Father's didn't think much of standing armies. You can see why.
 

Diversity Central: Oakland

Oakland, California, across the Bay from San Francisco, has long led America toward its racially diverse future, with at least four major ethnic groups. From the Oakland Tribune:
Report: African-Americans compose 28 percent of Oakland's population, 62 percent of police stops 
By Matthew Artz 
Oakland Tribune
... The report did not include data on the percentage of crime suspects described to police as African-Americans. Separate Oakland police records show that from 2007 through 2011, about 70 percent of those arrested were African-American. Last year, police said 90 percent of robbery suspects were described as African-American. 
Sam Walker, an emeritus professor in the criminal justice department at the University of Nebraska Omaha, who has reviewed stop-and-frisk police tactics in New York City, said Oakland police stops were far more likely to result in arrests or the confiscation of a weapon. 
In New York City, there was little evidence of criminal activity to justify the police stops, he said. "In Oakland, it's a very different picture." 
Franklin Zimring, a criminologist and professor at Berkeley Law School, pointed to the data showing that 14 percent of police stops involving African-Americans resulted in felony arrests, compared to 7 percent for Latinos, 6 percent of Asians and 5 percent of whites. 
"In terms of conventional mathematics, that is the opposite of racial profiling," he said. 
While traffic issues were the most common reason people were stopped by police, African-Americans were far more likely to be stopped on the basis of "probable cause" or "reasonable suspicion" than members of other racial groups. 
African-Americans stopped by police were searched 42 percent of the time, compared to 27 percent for Latinos and 17 percent for whites and Asians. Yet, those searches resulted in the recovery of contraband 27 percent of the time for African-Americans and Latinos, 28 percent of the time for whites and 25 percent of the time for Asians.

The question I have is why does Oakland have a distinctive "flavor," combining black criminality with political radicalism? I see it all the time in the news: if there's going to be a black political riot over some bit of news somewhere in the country, it's most likely to be in Oakland (with L.A. the second most likely).

This combination goes back at least to the Black Panthers in the 1960s. By the way, The Planet of the Apes movies have always been Black Power allegories, and the fine 2011 reboot of the series, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, is pretty clearly inspired by the once famous history of Bay Area black radicalism.

But maybe this combination of a culture of political radicalism and masculinity goes back even further before blacks arrived in large numbers for WWII military factory work: after all, the entertainment district in Oakland is named Jack London Square. And then there's the phenomenon of Raider Nation, the Oakland Raiders' obtrusively non-genteel fan base.

One vague theory I have is that the weather is so nice in Oakland (much better than in foggy San Francisco) that bad behavior is a long term strategy to prevent complete gentrification.
       

NYT: Mexican-American "disinterest" in voting

I'm not a stickler about proper usage of the English language (mote, log, own eye, etc.), but still, the decline of the word "disinterested" represents a decline in moral as well as literary standards:
Hopes Frustrated, Many Latinos Reject the Ballot Box Altogether 
By JACKIE CALMES MARCH 30, 2014 
Lizeth Chacon of Aurora, Colo., who signs up Latinos to vote, reports growing disinterest in registration. 
AURORA, Colo. — As the weather warms, Lizeth Chacon is anticipating a new season of registering Latino voters — yet dreading experiences like one late last year, when she came upon a skate park full of older teenagers. 
“I thought, ‘The perfect age! They’re turning 18,’ ” said Ms. Chacon, just 26 herself, born in Mexico and now the lead organizer at Rights for All People, a local immigrant organizing group. But among the roughly 50 people she approached in this increasingly diverse city east of Denver, “not a single person” was interested in her pitch, including those already old enough to vote: “They were like, ‘Why? Why would I bother to vote?’ ”

Man for man, Mexicans are not the most formidable political opponents a party can have.
    

March 30, 2014

Puerto Rico and IQ: Same as it ever was

At Human Varieties, Jason Malloy delivers a massive meta-analysis of Puerto Rican IQ, summarizing more than 70 studies over the last 93 years.

My favorite part is that Malloy has discovered a Jason Richwine-style brouhaha in the New York Times over Puerto Rican IQ from 1936:
The first report on the intelligence of NYC Puerto Ricans became something of a target for local and subnational hostility. In 1935 the New York State Chamber of Commerce’s Special Committee on Immigration and Naturalization commissioned a study on the intelligence of Puerto Rican schoolchildren in East Harlem. The average IQ of 240 9-14 year-olds on the Army Individual Performance Test was 86.8; a comparison group of 400 white children scored 103.3 (Armstrong et al, 1935). This relatively low IQ score—and, probably more so, the report’s consequent recommendations against Puerto Rican citizenship and statehood—incited a backlash among local community educators and activists. The popular Commie Congressman Vito Marcantonio even ranted against the study before the House of Representatives (Thomas, 2010, p. 86). 
Academics, journalists, and government leaders in Puerto Rico also condemned the report—many offering parentheticals on the inferior intelligence of Americans. The New York Times reported in 1936:
A recent suggestion by a committee of the New York State Chamber of Commerce that statehood for Puerto Rico be held “in abeyance” because of the low intelligence indicated by a group of children … has angered political leaders and newspapers here … 
[Commissioner of Agriculture] Mr. Menendez Ramos cites parts of a survey by… Columbia University… That … praised the intelligence of the island’s children, and said the level was higher than that of [American children] … 
It is unfair and unscientific, Mr. Menendez Ramos asserts, to assume that the New York colony, composed of a working class faced with the difficulties of a new language and a new environment, represents the average of Puerto Rican mentality. 
… The newspaper Mundo criticizes the report satirically … [suggesting] that the Chamber of Commerce study the excellent records of Puerto Rican students in American universities … the island’s college debaters have been uniformly victorious against American debaters (NYT Special Cable, 1936). 
Harlem educator Leonard Covello organized a “Racial Committee” to critically evaluate the study. The group “argued that the Puerto Rican children’s poor performance was attributable entirely to their lack of familiarity with English” (Thomas, 2010, p. 86). Meanwhile, criticisms of the study from Puerto Rico’s white elite took on a slightly more insulted and chauvinistic tone (as already seen in the New York Times report). PR Assistant Commissioner of Education, Pedro Cebollero—apparently not convinced that the problem was “attributable entirely” to language differences—fumed that the children in the report were described as 76% colored, while the U.S. census described Puerto Rico as only 26% colored: “This fact is an evidence of [the report’s] absolute disregard of the principle of “representativeness”… Pinter points out that ‘all results show the negro decidedly inferior to the white on standard intelligence tests.’” (Cebollero, 1936, p. 5)

Since then, of course, we've seen how wrong the 1936 psychometricians were, as Puerto Ricans have risen high in the ranks of accomplishment in America, such as composing, writing, and choreographing West Side Story.

Oh, wait, you're telling me West Side Story is by gay Jews? Why wasn't I informed?

Actually, it turns out that this video clip sums up how much has changed over the last 78 years.

This is not to say that Puerto Ricans in America haven't made any progress over the many generations. Malloy looks at 45 cognitive studies of Puerto Ricans in America, tosses 15 for methodological problems, and concludes:
The median of 30 studies gives us an IQ of 84.7 for Puerto Rican Americans. 
The current average appears to be somewhat higher. The median IQ of 19 samples from the 1930s-1970s is 83.7. The median IQ of 14 samples from the 1980s-2000s is 87.4.
   

National Journal: "Tech Pipeline Is Alarmingly White"

Evil-White-Men-in-Training plot against humanity
From The National Journal (a.k.a., The Voice of Respectability):
Tech Pipeline Is Alarmingly White 
By Emily DeRuy, Fusion 
January 14, 2014 
The pipeline of students who will be tomorrow's tech leaders is alarmingly vanilla.

The unobjectionability of food-based ethnic slurs (vanilla, white bread, mayonnaise, etc.) against white people dumbs down public discourse.
According to a new analysis of test-takers, not a single girl, African-American or Hispanic student took the computer science Advanced Placement test in Mississippi or Montana last year. More than a third of the population in Mississippi is black. 
In other words, a hugely disproportionate bunch of white guys took the test.

Obviously, an even more disproportionate number of Asians took the computer science AP test, but we don't have a conceptual category for whites and Asians combined.

Is there some well-known dessert that combines vanilla and lemon flavors? It would sure help the quality of discourse on education and demographics and discrimination if journalists had a food-based ethnic slur that lumps together whites + Asians.

Here are the pass rates (3 out of 5 or higher, equivalent to a C or better in a college 101-level intro course):

All test takers: 67%
Males: 68%
Females: 62%
Blacks: 36%
Black males: 38%
Black females: 27%
Hispanics: 45%
Hispanic Males: 49%
Hispanic Females: 31%
Whites: 66%
White Males: NA
White Females: NA
Asians: 70%
Asian Males: NA
Asian Females: NA
 

Non-New Yorkers! Do as we say, not as we do.

From a report by the liberal fundamentalist UCLA Civil Rights Project:
New York State’s Extreme School Segregation: Inequality, Inaction and a Damaged Future 
Authors: John Kucsera, Foreword by Gary Orfield 
Date Published: March 26, 2014 
New York has the most segregated schools in the country: in 2009, black and Latino students in the state had the highest concentration in intensely-segregated public schools (less than 10% white enrollment), the lowest exposure to white students, and the most uneven distribution with white students across schools. Heavily impacting these state rankings is New York City, home to the largest and one of the most segregated public school systems in the nation.
   

Shamelessness

It's not even April yet, but the 2014 Crops Rotting in the Fields public relations offensive is in motion. From the New York Times:
California Farmers Short of Labor, and Patience 
By JENNIFER MEDINA    MARCH 29, 2014

HURON, Calif. — When Chuck Herrin, who runs a large farm labor contracting company,

I.e., he's in the illegal alien procurement business, a pimp.
looks out at the hundreds of workers he hires each year to tend to the countless rows of asparagus, grapes, tomatoes, peaches and plums, he often seethes in frustration. 
It is not that he has any trouble with the laborers.

Thank God for that. We can't have stoop laborers getting uppity.
It is that he, like many others in agriculture here, is increasingly fed up with immigration laws that he says prevent him from fielding a steady, reliable work force. 
... In dozens of interviews, farmers and owners of related businesses said that even the current system of tacitly using illegal labor was failing to sustain them. A work force that arrived in the 1990s is aging out of heavy labor,

Indeed.
Americans do not want the jobs, and tightened security at the border is discouraging new immigrants from arriving, they say, leaving them to struggle amid the paralysis on immigration policy. No other region may be as eager to keep immigration legislation alive.

Assuming that "region" = "employers of illegal aliens."
... Like other employers interviewed, he acknowledged that he almost certainly had illegal immigrants in his work force. Would-be workers provide a Social Security number or a document purporting they are eligible to work; employers accept the documentation even if they doubt its veracity because they want to bring in their crops. ...
Roughly a third of Mr. Herrin’s workers are older than 50, a much higher proportion than even five years ago. He said they had earned the right to stay here. “If we keep them here and not do anything for them once they get old, that’s really extortion,” he said.

By "we," I don't mean "me," Chuck Herrin. I mean you taxpayers.
The region has relied on new arrivals to pick crops since the time of the Dust Bowl. For more than two decades after World War II, growers here depended on braceros, Mexican workers sent temporarily to the United States to work in agriculture.

Then there was this guy named Cesar Chavez who hated immigration. But that's Off-Message, so let's not think about it.
Today, many fieldworkers are indigenous people from southern Mexico who speak Mixtec and know little English or Spanish.

Nothing will alleviate America's Income Inequality and Social Immobility crises faster than bringing in a lot of Mixtec-speaking stoop laborers whose ancestors didn't learn Spanish in the last 493 years.
In recent years, farm owners have grown increasingly fearful of labor shortages. 
Last year, the diminished supply of workers led average farm wages in the region to increase by roughly $1 an hour, according to researchers at U.C. Davis who have tracked wages for years.

$1 an hour?!?
A report released this month by the Partnership for a New American Economy and the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform, two business-oriented groups that are lobbying Congress, said foreign-grown produce consumed in the United States had increased by nearly 80 percent since the late 1990s.

In other words, it's possible for Mexicans to grow food in Mexico and sell it to Americans in return for money.
The report argues that the labor shortages make it impossible for American farmers to increase production and compete effectively with foreign importers. While the amount of fresh produce consumed by Americans has increased, domestic production has not kept pace, and the report attributes a $1.4 billion annual loss in farm income to the lack of labor.

In other words, the whole country needs to take on the burden of importing ever more Mixtec speakers and their descendants ad infinitum so growers can make an extra $1.4 billion per year? The current farm bill is supposed to hand out something like $940.0 billion over ten years. That's an absurdly small sum to bet the country over.
So even amid a record drought threatening to wipe out crops here,

You know, I keep reading about how what with the drought and climate change and all that, California can't come up with the water for all the farms and people. Now, we're supposed to have more?
A generation ago, he said, growers often pretended to have no idea that people working for them were not authorized to be in the United States. Now, there is a nearly universal recognition that the industry relies on immigrants who cross the border illegally.

Shamelessness is the most striking characteristic of contemporary discourse on immigration: greed and ethnic animus are praised, while patriotism and prudence are excoriated.