April 26, 2014

Hollywood should stop using real children

A couple of years ago in Taki's Magazine, I argued that the 2011 hit sci-fi movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes revealed the technological feasibility of two possible social reforms:
This ape-liberation saga marked an important development in movie history ... Rise showed that you can make a monkey movie without the monkey: Put Andy Serkis in a performance capture suit, then digitally make him up as a chimp in post-production.  
At present, that’s still quite expensive. (Rise had a $93-million budget.) But if Moore’s Law, which predicts that computing power doubles every year or two, stays in effect for another decade and a half, digital chimps will only cost 1/1024th of what they did in Rise.  
At that price, who needs a real ape? ... 
As it becomes clear that having men play monkeys is better for all concerned, a similar question will suggest itself: Is it humane to use human children as professional entertainers? 
The digital technology enabling adults to portray kid characters is rapidly arriving. Should audiences encourage that switch? 
We should definitely consider it. We can all think of child stars who grew up to be sane adults, but the casualty list is long and lurid. A recent study found that 58 percent of retired laboratory chimpanzees show symptoms of depression. What would a study of former child actors find? A consuming hunger to get back into the spotlight and a permanent aversion to a normal job?

One obvious problem is sexual exploitation of ambitious minors. A January 8, 2012 Los Angeles Times story by Dawn C. Chmielewski reports, “At least a dozen child-molestation and child-pornography prosecutions since 2000 have involved actors, managers, production assistants and others in the entertainment industry.” That’s not a huge number—one known case per year—but who can begin to guesstimate the number of unknown cases?  
Much of what’s considered big news is driven by plaintiff attorneys who package scandals for the press. The Catholic Church was a particularly juicy target for sex-abuse lawsuits due to its two-thousand-year history as a centralized, deep-pocketed organization. In contrast, the entertainment industry is dispersed and amorphous.  
Moreover, man-bites-dog stories make better headlines. For several months, millions of words have been printed about one homosexual pedophile football coach, Jerry Sandusky, in part because of the rarity factor. Scandals involving sleazeball showbiz managers, on the other hand, attract less attention because they are a depressing cliché. 
The virtues of virtualizing child characters can be seen in one fiasco averted. In 1990, the first year of The Simpsons, “Bartmania” swept the world. Imagine if The Simpsons had been a filmed show. The little boy who played Bart would now be in his 30s. What would he be like today? Fortunately, Bart Simpson is a cartoon character voiced by a grown woman, Nancy Cartwright.
     

World War C

Here's a long article in the NYT Magazine by Charles Siebert called "Should a Chimp Be Able to Sue Its Owner?" about law professor Steven Wise's 25-year crusade to find one judge who will declare chimpanzees to be legal persons.

It starts with a visit to low-rent roadside attraction "Santa's Reindeer," where an adult male chimp is kept out of view in a small cage:
Tommy’s original owner, we learned, was named Dave Sabo, the one-time proprietor of a troupe of performing circus chimps. The repairman said that Sabo raised Tommy, who appears to be in his 20s, from infancy. Sabo, who had been living for a number of years in a trailer on the grounds of Circle L Trailer, recently died. “He’s back in there now somewhere,” the repairman said, quickly tracing with his hands what seemed to be the outline of an urn of ashes. “In a room next to Tommy’s.”

As I argued below in "Hollywood should stop using real chimps," Americans need to develop a sense of realism and stewardship about chimpanzees. While they make for amusing entertainment when young, the older they get, the cuter they ain't, so there is a constant demand from the media and advertising industries for new baby chimps (e.g., in Martin Scorsese's latest movie).

But chimps live almost as long as humans, and need almost as much space to be happy. Yet, the adult males are so violent they need to be locked up away from people. The only institutions that can afford to meet these competing needs are rich zoos and some of the better-supported shelters far out in the countryside.

Thus, we American humans should act like responsible adult human beings and reduce the number of these subhuman dependents of ours who are in America to levels that we can afford to properly care for.

The English-speaking world has a tradition of developing norms against cruelty to animals that goes back a couple of centuries at least to pioneers such as the eccentric Irish politician Humanity Dick Martin. For example, in the 1930s Hollywood regularly crippled horses in stunt falls in cowboy and Indian movies, but over time systems have been developed to prevent violence to our dumb chums in the making of movies. Now, almost all movies featuring animals come with a "No Animals Were Harmed" endorsement in the credits from American Humane Association watchmen.

(On the other hand, the long-term effects of the use of animals in the entertainment industry is still to be reckoned with. Southern California is dotted with grungy shelters for retired movie animals run by mostly broke ex-movie people. For example, 11:00 in [warning: lots of commercials to sit through], here's the old HBO series Tracey Takes On in which TV star Linda Granger directs a fund-raising video for the Aged Animal Actors Home owned by Australian stuntwoman Rayleen Gibson [who was raised by dingoes, but that's a different episode].)

However, that kind of old noblesse oblige logic is severely out of fashion these days in which the concepts of equality, rights, and majority oppression of minorities dominate thought. World War C is, of course, largely metaphorical, and thus pointing out that bringing chimpanzees to America has proven to be a mistake is not welcome.

As this NYT article on Professor Wise's crusade implies through its absence, there appears to be little appetite for a fight through the democratic process to improve treatment of chimpanzees. Instead, there's a growing desire for chimpanzees to be the next minority victim group whose equality is vindicated by the Supreme Court (although World War C will likely have to get in line behind World War T and the waging of World War G in Eastern Europe).
Seven weeks later, on Dec. 2, Wise, a 63-year-old legal scholar in the field of animal law, strode with his fellow lawyers, Natalie Prosin, the executive director of the Nonhuman Rights Project (Nh.R.P.), and Elizabeth Stein, a New York-based animal-law expert, into the clerk’s office of the Fulton County Courthouse in Johnstown, N.Y., 10 miles from Circle L Trailer Sales, wielding multiple copies of a legal document the likes of which had never been seen in any of the world’s courts, no less conservative Fulton County’s. 
‘I thought to myself, Well, if I’m interested in social justice, I can’t imagine beings who are being more brutalized than nonhuman animals.’ 
Under the partial heading “The Nonhuman Rights Project Inc. on behalf of Tommy,” the legal memo and petition included among their 106 pages a detailed account of the “petitioner’s” solitary confinement ... 
“Like humans,” the legal memo reads, “chimpanzees have a concept of their personal past and future

For example, chimpanzees can make plans. From the Los Angeles Times in 2009:
A chimpanzee named Santino has shown researchers that the great apes can plan ahead and execute carefully plotted maneuvers. Santino, the alpha male chimp at Sweden's Furuvik Zoo, planned rock-throwing attacks against zoo visitors, which shocked zoo staff and fascinated scientists. 
Writing in the journal Current Biology, Lund University doctoral student Mathias Osvath explains how Santino prepared an arsenal of rocks before the zoo opened, then waited until midday before throwing them at zoo-goers watching him across a moat around his enclosure.  
"These observations convincingly show that our fellow apes do consider the future in a very complex way," ...

More from the NYT article:
. . . they suffer the pain of not being able to fulfill their needs or move around as they wish; [and] they suffer the pain of anticipating never-ending confinement.” What Tommy could never have anticipated, of course, huddled just up the road that morning in his dark, dank cell, was that he was about to make legal history: The first nonhuman primate to ever sue a human captor in an attempt to gain his own freedom. ...
It has been only in the last 30 years or so that a distinct field of animal law — that is laws and legal theory expressly for and about nonhuman animals — has emerged. When Wise taught his first animal-law class in 1990 at Vermont Law School, he knew of only two others of its kind in the country. Today there are well over a hundred. Yet while animal-welfare laws and endangered-species statutes now abound

Huh? The history of animal-welfare laws is a lot older than Professor Wise's career. From Wikipedia:
Early legislation which formed the impetus for assessing animal welfare and the subsequent development of animal welfare science include the Ireland Parliament (Thomas Wentworth) "An Act against Plowing by the Tayle, and pulling the Wooll off living Sheep", 1635, and the Massachusetts Colony (Nathaniel Ward) "Off the Bruite Creatures" Liberty 92 and 93 in the "Massachusetts Body of Liberties" of 1641.[35] 
Since 1822, when British MP Richard Martin brought the "Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act 1822" through Parliament offering protection from cruelty to cattle, horses, and sheep, the welfare approach has had human morality and humane behaviour as its central concerns. Martin was among the founders of the world's first animal welfare organization, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, or SPCA, in 1824. In 1840, Queen Victoria gave the society her blessing, and it became the RSPCA. The society used members' donations to employ a growing network of inspectors, whose job was to identify abusers, gather evidence, and report them to the authorities. 
One of the first national laws to protect animals was the UK "Cruelty to Animals Act 1835" followed by the "Protection of Animals Act 1911". In the US it was many years until there was a national law to protect animals—the "Animal Welfare Act of 1966"—although there were a number of states that passed anti-cruelty laws between 1828 and 1898.[36]

Yet, this long legislative history, led by the Anglo world, seems to be dropping down the memory hole because it doesn't fit the contemporary paradigm of minority rights uber alles and the utter evil of the Bad Old Days of white men.

To carry on from the NYT article:
the primary thrust of such legislation remains the regulation of our various uses and abuses of animals, including food production, medical research, entertainment and private ownership. The fundamental legal status of nonhumans, however, as things, as property, with no rights of their own, has remained unchanged. 

It's not exactly as if property rights are absolute these days. There are already lots of laws -- such as the Endangered Species Act -- constraining your rights to do as you wish with your property. For example, Hairtrigger Dick Martin dragged a fruitseller into court 190 years ago for beating his donkey in violation of the Martin Act.

This legal campaign isn't really about improving the treatment of chimpanzees.
Wise has devoted himself to subverting that hierarchy by moving the animal from the defendant’s table to the plaintiff’s. 
... Wise’s increasing involvement in the anti-Vietnam War movement while at the College of William and Mary began to stoke a growing interest in social activism. ...
A few years later, while continuing to lecture in animal jurisprudence to law students, Wise revisited the famous case of Somerset v. Stewart. In 1772, the chief justice of the English Court of King’s Bench, Lord Mansfield, issued a writ of habeas corpus — a court order requiring that a prisoner be brought before a judge by his or her captor in order to rule on the legality of that prisoner’s detainment — on behalf of a slave named James Somerset, a being as invisible then to the law as any nonhuman. Mansfield ultimately decided to free Somerset from his Scottish-American owner, Charles Stewart — a landmark decision that would drive one of the first wedges into the wall then dividing black and white human beings from one another. ...

World War C is metaphorical.
Of course, a number of people both in the legal world and beyond find the very premise of seeking legal personhood for animals an oxymoron. There are, they assert, already ample protections available under current animal-welfare laws, on both the federal and state levels, without having to go down the practically and philosophically fraught path of extending a human right to a nonhuman. 

Or, if there aren't enough protections available under current animal-welfare laws, why not work to get legislatures to pass more? What about initiatives and referendums? Or are those means too democratic?
Richard Epstein
Richard Epstein, a New York University law professor, is an outspoken critic of Wise and of the notion of extending rights to animals.  ... “Steven is extremely ingenious,” Epstein told me in his N.Y.U. office in January. “I don’t think he’s a great intellect. He’s a man of tremendous persistence. He just doesn’t think there is any serious argument that can be made on the other side. It’s like watching someone with tunnel vision. . . . My attitude is this: There are two ways to think about it. He thinks of it as rights. I think about it as protection. You can guarantee the things he’s seeking through animal-protection legislation without calling them rights. I mean, you may want to enforce the laws better. I just think the argument of making animals into sort of human beings is what’s crazy.” ...

Welcome to the 21st Century mind, Professor Epstein. Democracy is de classe. A court decision is desired.

A triumphant Supreme Court vindication, and then the firings of the doubters haters can begin.
Ultimately, Wise is not interested in trying to distinguish between bad and better forms of captivity. What he is trying to provoke is a paradigm shift in how we think of our relationship to animals.  ...

World War C, like World War G and World War T is largely metaphorical:
“It’s those deeply held beliefs that I’m concerned about,” he told me. “The judge who either doesn’t recognize that he’s ruling against us on those grounds, or who does, and decides that way anyway. Our challenge is to lay bare that bias against our facts. I will say: ‘Judge, you know, we’ve been here before. We’ve had people who’ve essentially said, “I’m sorry, but you’re black.” Or “I’m sorry, you’re not a male or a heterosexual.” And this has led us to some very bad places.’ ” 
   
P.S., In the comments appears an interestingly radical rejection of the zeitgeist:
KarlosTJ Bostonia 13 hours ago 
Can I sue a chimp when it attacks me? When it steals from me?  
The fundamental property of "rights" is: reciprocity. Your right to your life is inherent in the belief that you hold my right to my life sacred - and vice versa. No animal can comprehend or respect the rights of humans - therefore, animals cannot have human rights.  
Giving animals "rights" is an attempt to destroy the term "rights". Animals can be given "protections", but that's all they are - because animals cannot reciprocate, or even recognize the protections. Activists believe they are improving the lives of animals by creating "animal rights" - what they are really doing is casting humans down to the level of animals. That is the definition of true hatred: hatred of human beings.

I haven't thought this through particularly, but certainly "reciprocity" is out of fashion and sheer Who Whom reasoning dominates, as in Justice Sotomayor's much-celebrated opinion this week on why Michigan voters can't be allowed to vote for equal protection of the laws: her team, which is The Good People, the Powerless Victims of The Bad People, lost the election.

 

April 25, 2014

Hollywood should stop using real chimps

Martin Scorsese's Best Picture-nominated Wolf of Wall Street
For a some time I've been arguing that Jane Goodall is right: the media should stop using real chimpanzees in entertainment and advertising. The 2011 movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes starring the great Andy Serkis in a motion capture suit showed that the technology for digitally simulating chimps on screen is rapidly getting better and cheaper, so the demand for chimps for commercial entertainment purposes should be stopped, just as the NIH announced in late 2011 it was banning medical research on chimps. 

If medical researchers aren't allowed use chimps to save human lives, why should Martin Scorsese get to rent a baby one to lard on more overkill in The Wolf of Wall Street?

But not much seems to be happening on the front of shaming the entertainment industry into not demanding more infant chimps. For example, although a few animal rights groups protested The Wolf of Wall Street, I hadn't even heard of the tiny ruckus. Hollywood went on to honor the film with a Best Picture nomination, and give Oscar nominations to Scorsese, writer Terence Winter, and star Leonardo DiCaprio.

Chimps are extremely cute from birth to six years. 

But then they live a long, long time (nobody seems to know for sure how long: online estimates range from 40 to 60 years and seem to be going up over time as old TV chimps don't die). Chimps are extremely expensive to care for humanely and safely in captivity because, to be frank, the adult males are vicious brutes: they'll rip your face off.
During the behaviorist era it was widely assumed assumed that chimps could be raised to be better-behaved just by exposing them to human role models: see Ronald Reagan's impassioned speeches denouncing pseudo-scientific hereditarian bigotry in the 1951 Bedtime for Bonzo. Unfortunately, when a chimp was raised alongside a human infant in a remarkable experiment, it turned out that the human wound up acting more like the chimp than vice-versa.

Then, in the 1970s and 1980s it was universally assumed that chimps could be taught to converse in sign language. But the failure of the Nim Chimpsky Project (and others) showed Noam Chomsky was right about humans having some special knack for language.

The business of providing exotic animals for the entertainment industry is a low rent one. The people in it typically can't make enough money to fund a half-decent retirement for themselves, much less their animals.

But even though they are sons of bitches, by importing or breeding them for use in the American entertainment industry, but now the ones in America are our sons of bitches and thus we have a moral responsibility not to, as so often happens, just lock them up in some cage somewhere. We need a stronger sense of stewardship, and a better realization of when things just aren't working out.

When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging. Society should lean heavily against further breeding of chimpanzees in America. I doubt if it's practical to send them back to Africa, but laws against smuggling more in should be strictly enforced. 
       

State Dept.: Putin invades Ukraine with Duck Dynasty

There's a propaganda war going on between the Russian and American governments, and skepticism is one casualty. Here's the New York Times ombudswoman apologizing:
The Public Editor's Journal - Margaret Sullivan
Georgia 2008

Aftermath of Ukraine Photo Story Shows Need for More Caution 
By MARGARET SULLIVAN  APRIL 24, 2014, 5:58 PM 
The Times led its print edition Monday with an article based in part on photographs that the State Department said were evidence of Russian military presence in popular uprisings in Ukraine. The headline read: “Photos Link Masked Men in East Ukraine to Russia.” 
And the article began:
Ukraine 2014
For two weeks, the mysteriously well-armed, professional gunmen known as “green men” have seized Ukrainian government sites in town after town, igniting a brush fire of separatist unrest across eastern Ukraine. Strenuous denials from the Kremlin have closely followed each accusation by Ukrainian officials that the world was witnessing a stealthy invasion by Russian forces. 
Now, photographs and descriptions from eastern Ukraine endorsed by the Obama administration on Sunday suggest that many of the green men are indeed Russian military and intelligence forces — equipped in the same fashion as Russian special operations troops involved in annexing the Crimea region in February. Some of the men photographed in Ukraine have been identified in other photos clearly taken among Russian troops in other settings. 
More recently, some of those grainy photographs have been discredited. The Times has published a second article backing off from the original and airing questions about what the photographs are said to depict, but hardly addressing how the newspaper may have been misled. 
It all feels rather familiar – the rushed publication of something exciting, often based on an executive branch leak.  And then, afterward, with a kind of “morning after” feeling, here comes a more sober, less prominently displayed followup story, to deal with objections while not clarifying much of anything. 

A lot of the American media coverage of Ukraine reminds me of Kennedy Era coverage of Vietnam, when reporters went over to this strange country and got briefed by the State Department and CIA and came back and filed gung ho stories.
The problems with the first article did not go unnoticed by readers and commenters. Ken Miller, a professor at Columbia University Medical School, called the photo story “egregious, being based entirely on alleged identifications of individuals in pairs of photographs where the faces were so fuzzy there was no way to see anything more than a vague and perhaps entirely coincidental resemblance (not to mention that the authenticity of the photographs themselves wasn’t established in any way).” 
And the reporter Robert Parry (formerly of Newsweek and The Associated Press) on Consortiumnews.com sees a pattern in Times articles, often based on administration leaks, that “draw hard conclusions from very murky evidence while ignoring or brushing aside alternative explanations.” 
Thursday morning, I asked the foreign editor, Joseph Kahn, to talk about what had happened. ... 
He rejects the idea that The Times’s coverage has lacked skepticism and sees this instance as a result of a simple mistake: the State Department’s mislabeling. ... 
Here’s my take: The Times’s coverage of this crisis has had much to commend it, especially the quality of the on-the-ground reporting. But this article, with its reliance on an administration leak, was displayed too prominently and questioned too lightly. The Times’s influence demands that it be cautious, especially when deciding to publish what amounts to a government handout.

You get better foreign affairs coverage in the U.S. press when reporters don't see themselves as on the same team as the Administration.

This is not to say that Putin isn't sending in commandos to stir up trouble -- I would imagine he is -- nor that two Phil Robertsonskis up there aren't the same guy. But still ...
       

April 24, 2014

Svante Pääbo: "Neanderthals Are People, Too"

From the NYT:
Neanderthals Are People, Too 
By SVANTE PAABO      APRIL 24, 2014

Oh, come now, NYT copyediting-and-spelling guidelines. The famous archaeo-geneticist who isolated Neanderthal DNA deserves to have his name spelled with its double umlauts: Svante Pääbo. That's much more metal.*

(I actually have no idea how to pronounce Svante Pääbo, and I don't want to know. It seems more Neanderthal that way.)
The ancient genomes also revealed that Neanderthals and Denisovans mixed with the direct ancestors of present-day people after they came out of Africa. So if your roots are in Europe or Asia, between 1 and 2 percent of your DNA comes from Neanderthals, and if you are from Papua New Guinea or other parts of Oceania, an additional 4 percent of your DNA comes from Denisovans.

------
* In other news:
Ünited Stätes Toughens Image With Umlauts 
NEWS IN BRIEF • Patriotism • Apr 30, 1997 
WASHINGTON, DC—In a move designed to make the United States seem more "bad-assed and scary in a quasi-heavy-metal manner," Congress officially changed the nation's name to the Ünited Stätes of Ämerica Monday. "Much like Mötley Crüe and Motörhead, the Ünited Stätes is not to be messed with," said Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK). An upcoming redesign of the Ämerican flag will feature the new name in burnished silver wrought in a jagged, gothic font and bolted to a black background. 
       

How many Forbes 400 billionaires publicly oppose "immigration reform?"

With the commentariat excited by French economist Thomas Piketty's argument that the rich dominate the political and intellectual processes and keep the masses from organizing to promote their own interests, it's worth looking through the Forbes 400 to see how many billionaires are publicly active in promoting more immigration v. how many promote less:

Donors and activists -- Here are just some of the more famous richest billionaires who are particularly active in pushing more immigration:

1. Bill Gates -- Yes, he's part of Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us group that buys TV commercials for politicians who support the Schumer - Rubio amnesty bill. -- Centrist Democrat

4 and 5. Koch Brothers -- Libertarian Republicans

10. Michael Bloomberg -- Bloomberg has publicly endorsed his Deepdale Country Club employing illegal immigrants to take care of the greens and fairways. -- Centrist Democrat

11. Sheldon Adelson -- His newspaper is staunchly in favor of deporting illegal immigrants. Oh, wait, that's his Israeli immigrants. In the U.S., he wants cheaper maids for his hotels. -- Republican

19. George Soros: Donated $100 million for pro-immigration groups. -- Liberal Democrats

20. Mark Zuckerberg -- Founded huge money pro-immigration lobby FWD.us -- Centrist

30. Rupert Murdoch -- Republican

35. Laurene Powell Jobs -- Don't know about her politics but she sleeps with former Democratic mayor of Washington D.C.

So, whatever their nominal political affiliations, billionaires are vastly more likely to be activists on the more immigration side. After all, it's hard to think of a billionaire who would benefit from immigration restriction.

Others fall in the category of vocal supporters:

2. Warren Buffett -- "Making an economic case for a pathway to citizenship, Buffett said Sunday that the reform package should "certainly offer [undocumented immigrants] the chance to become citizens" to deepen the talent pool of the labor force."


3. Larry Ellison -- In Ellison's defense, I can only find a few quotes where he says it would be smart to let in more smart immigrants. In general, I'm starting to like Larry more as he ever more embodies the James Bond Villain Lifestyle he's carved out for himself. He's less of a scold than most of these guys.

There are lots of others, like the Waltons, who seem pretty conservative but whose donations, if anything tend more toward pro-immigration groups. From the perspective of the Walmart heirs, presumably, more illegal immigration is more fresh meat.

Now, what about members of the Forbes 400 who support immigration restriction? Surely, out of 400, there are some billionaires who have unfashionable opinions and don't mind others knowing about them

Well ... yes, yes there are. Not many ... but some!

There have been a couple of candidates:

#134 Ross Perot, age 83 -- I can't find too much online, but yeah, I have the general impression that during his remarkable run for President in 1992, he wasn't enthusiastic about illegal immigration

#134 Donald Trump, age 67 -- had some good things to say when considering tossing his hat in the GOP ring

Meg Whitman waffled on the subject, saying she pretty much agreed with her opponent, Jerry Brown, while running for governor of California.

And I've found two guys between 301 and 400 on the Forbes list who are known to have actually given money to immigration restrictionist organizations. I'm not going to give their names because the Brendan Eichizing of America is proceeding apace.
   

Where's my iSteve blog blocked?

Recently, a reader reported that this iSteve.blogspot.com site is blocked in an Embassy Suites business center. Anybody else have any anecdotes of where I'm blocked?
  

April 23, 2014

How to help women in Silicon Valley

From Dice:
H-1B Women Few and Far Between 
BY DAWN KAWAMOTO | JUN 25, 2013 
Immigration reform proposals are circulating at a furious pace on Capital Hill, but it’s unlikely they will lead to a sea change in a rarely thought of area of the guest worker debate: The number of women in IT who work in this country under an H-1B visa. 
Even though the percentage of women in IT is higher in many of the home countries of H-1B workers, currently, the vast majority of IT H-1Bs are men. And there’s nothing in the bill now making its way through the Senate that aims to realign the ratio of women-to-men guest workers to align more closely with that of the domestic workforce. 
... While hard figures are difficult to come by on the number of H-1B visas awarded to women, some estimates put the number at just 15 percent, says Karen Panetta, Vice President of Communications and Public Awareness for IEEE and an Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor at Tufts University.

From Medill Reports last June:
Karen Panetta is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. She also is editor-in-chief of the award-winning Women In Engineering magazine, which is published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers trade association. ...
And Panetta believes that the H-1B is a contributing factor to the disparity in the male-to-female ratio. 
In written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 18, she described the gender imbalance. 
“The IEEE-USA represents more American high tech workers than anybody else, so we have sources,” Panetta said. “One from inside the industry, looking at the off shoring companies that dominate the H-1B program, is that their global hiring is 70 percent men. But in the U.S., where outsourcing companies get more than half the capped H-1B visas, the ratio is more like 85 percent men. That's outrageous.” 
Panetta believes that this trend creates work environments that may be unfavorable to women, based on a set of imported cultural values that don’t emphasize the importance of gender equality at work. 
“They have a negative effect, not only on the H-1B process for women, but for American women who have to then work in these environments, with these individuals who come from cultures where women are not treated equally and women are not respected in the workplace,” Panetta argues. “That’s a huge issue and American women won’t tolerate it. They’ll just quit. After the age of 35 the drop off and attrition of women in STEM fields essentially falls to the floor. People think it’s because they go off and have families, it’s not.” 

My wife's friend A. is a programmer in the Midwest. It was a good work environment until the big corporation she worked for started importing lots of Pakistani men, with predictable consequences for blonde American women.
... Panetta understands she needs data to back up her assertions. The problem is that these numbers are not available to the public. 
Despite the fact that gender is a data point on the required I-129 visa application form, neither the Department of Homeland Security nor the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services tracks the number of men and women being awarded these visas. 
Bill Wright, spokesperson for U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services, confirmed that the government has the information but is not capturing it. 
“There is a space for gender on Part 3 of the Petition for a Nonimmigrant Worker (Form I-129),” Wright said. “However, that particular category is not electronically captured in a manner that we can readily provide. You could certainly request this information via the Freedom of Information Act; that would require a manual check of each petition filed and I can’t estimate how long that would take.” 

Since nobody in America can figure out how to program a computer to count the sex ratio of H1-B tech visas, that just proves that Zuckerberg and Gates are right and deserve lots more H1-Bs. Maybe someday we'll import enough H1-Bs to figure out how to count H1-Bs.
In fact, multiple parties have made FOIA requests. Because the form is electronic it should be relatively easy to pull out the data. 
“I can get them a freshman in college from Tufts University to show them how to use it,” Panetta said. “They have the data; it’s a matter of them running a query and then tallying it up.”

We need a system like Pokemon Points to figure out who outranks whom in modern America. Clearly, American women programmers don't swing a lot of weight considering how little media coverage there has been of this issue. 

It appears the points go something like:

Women: +10
American women: +2
Workers: 0
American workers: -8
Diversity!: 20
Billionaires: 20
Billionaires Pushing Diversity!: 400
      

How to survive 100 duels

Reading that Irish animal rights activist Humanity Dick Martin fought a supposed 100 duels, I'm reminded of this chapter from Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad.
Chapter VIII. The Great French Duel 
I Second Gambetta in a Terrific Duel 
Much as the modern French duel is ridiculed by certain smart people, it is in reality one of the most dangerous institutions of our day. Since it is always fought in the open air, the combatants are nearly sure to catch cold. M. Paul de Cassagnac, the most inveterate of the French duelists, had suffered so often in this way that he is at last a confirmed invalid; and the best physician in Paris has expressed the opinion that if he goes on dueling for fifteen or twenty years more--unless he forms the habit of fighting in a comfortable room where damps and draughts cannot intrude--he will eventually endanger his life. ...  
Premier Gambetta
As soon as I heard of the late fiery outbreak between M. Gambetta and M. Fourtou in the French Assembly, I knew that trouble must follow. I knew it because a long personal friendship with M. Gambetta revealed to me the desperate and implacable nature of the man. Vast as are his physical proportions, I knew that the thirst for revenge would penetrate to the remotest frontiers of his person. 
I did not wait for him to call on me, but went at once to him. As I had expected, I found the brave fellow steeped in a profound French calm. ... He threw his arms around my neck, bent me over his stomach to his breast, kissed me on both cheeks, hugged me four or five times, and then placed me in his own arm-chair. ... 
I said I supposed he would wish me to act as his second, and he said, "Of course." ... He wanted to know how the following words, as a dying exclamation, struck me: "I die for my God, for my country, for freedom of speech, for progress, and the universal brotherhood of man!" 
I objected that this would require too lingering a death; it was a good speech for a consumptive, but not suited to the exigencies of the field of honor. We wrangled over a good many ante-mortem outburts, but I finally got him to cut his obituary down to this, which he copied into his memorandum-book, purposing to get it by heart: 
"I die that France might live." ...
The next thing in order was the choice of weapons. My principal said he was not feeling well, and would leave that and the other details of the proposed meeting to me. Therefore I wrote the following note and carried it to M. Fourtou's friend: 
Sir: M. Gambetta accepts M. Fourtou's challenge, and authorizes me to propose Plessis-Piquet as the place of meeting; tomorrow morning at daybreak as the time; and axes as the weapons. 
I am, sir, with great respect, 
Mark Twain. 
M. Fourtou's friend read this note, and shuddered. ... Then he added that he and his principal would enjoy axes, and indeed prefer them, but such weapons were barred by the French code, and so I must change my proposal. 
I walked the floor, turning the thing over in my mind, and finally it occurred to me that Gatling-guns at fifteen paces would be a likely way to get a verdict on the field of honor. So I framed this idea into a proposition. 
But it was not accepted. The code was in the way again. I proposed rifles; then double-barreled shotguns; then Colt's navy revolvers. These being all rejected, ... He fished out of his vest pocket a couple of little things which I carried to the light and ascertained to be pistols. They were single-barreled and silver-mounted, and very dainty and pretty. I was not able to speak for emotion. I silently hung one of them on my watch-chain, and returned the other.

Some of this actually happened.
     

Nicholas Wade: Males not going extinct after all

In the New York Times, Nicholas Wade reports:
Researchers See New Importance in Y Chromosome 
By NICHOLAS WADE   APRIL 23, 2014

There is new reason to respect the diminutive male Y chromosome. 
Besides its long-known role of reversing the default state of being female, the Y chromosome includes genes required for the general operation of the genome, according to two new surveys of its evolutionary history. These genes may represent a fundamental difference in how the cells in men’s and women’s bodies read off the information in their genomes. 
When researchers were first able to analyze the genetic content of the Y chromosome, they found it had shed hundreds of genes over time, explaining why it was so much shorter than its partner, the X chromosome. All cells in a man’s body have an X and a Y chromosome; women’s have two X chromosomes.
The finding created considerable consternation. The Y had so few genes left that it seemed the loss of a few more could tip it into extinction. 
But an analysis in 2012 showed that the rhesus monkey’s Y chromosome had essentially the same number of genes as the human Y. ... 
Dr. Kaessmann calculates that the Y chromosome originated 181 million years ago, after the duck-billed platypus split off from other mammals but before the marsupials did so. 
... “Throughout human bodies, the cells of males and females are biochemically different,” Dr. Page said. The genome may be controlled slightly differently because of this variation in the 12 regulatory genes, which he thinks could contribute to the differing incidence of many diseases in men and women. 
Differences between male and female tissues are often attributed to the powerful influence of sex hormones. But now that the 12 regulatory genes are known to be active throughout the body, there is clearly an intrinsic difference in male and female cells even before the sex hormones are brought into play. 
“We are only beginning to understand the full extent of the differences in molecular biology of males and females,” Andrew Clark, a geneticist at Cornell University, wrote in a commentary in Nature on the two reports.
  

Hairtrigger Dick Martin: Was this guy for real?

Bill Burns thumbing nose, Richard Martin holding reins
I was looking up the history of legislation against cruelty to animals, and I stumbled upon somebody I'd never heard of: Humanity Dick Martin (a.k.a., Hairtrigger Richard Martin), an Irish member of the British Parliament who was popularly credited with pushing through Martin's Act of 1822 against the ill treatment of cattle. 

In the celebrated "Trial of Bill Burns," the first prosecution under the Martin Act, Martin dragged into court the donkey abused by the Cockney costermonger Bill Burns. He sounds like he'd make a good subject for a biopic, although modern audiences might not be able to bear watching the abuses of animals that he campaigned against.

From Wikipedia:
Colonel Richard Martin (15 January 1754 – 6 January 1834), was an Irish politician and campaigner against cruelty to animals. He was commonly known as "Humanity Dick", a nickname bestowed on him by King George IV. He succeeded in getting the pioneering Act of Parliament "Martin's Act" passed. 
Martin was born at Ballynahinch Castle, County Galway, the only son of Robert Martin Fitz Anthony of Birch Hall, County Galway, and the Hon. Bridget Barnwall, a daughter of Robert Barnewall, 12th Baron Trimlestown. ...  
His father's family were Jacobites and one of "The Tribes of Galway", fourteen merchant families who ruled Galway from the 14th to 17th centuries. The Barnwalls were an ennobled family of Norman descent ... Though both of his parents were born to Catholics, Richard Martin was raised a Protestant and educated in England. ... 

Warning: The various kinds of Irish aristocrats over the last 800 years are pretty baffling to outsiders. That said, the Tribes of Galway were largely medieval Normans who stayed Catholic despite the Reformation in England. Families included D'Arcy, Joyce, and ffrenchEdmund Burke was another descendant of Ireland's Old English aristocracy. The Old English in Ireland were distinct from Ireland's New English or Anglo-Irish upper class, such as Swift, Berkeley, Wellington, Yeats, Wilde, Shaw, and Daniel Day-Lewis, whose ancestors typically arrived in Ireland in the 17th Century.

Whether Old or New, many of these aristocrats, while retaining their English high culture and privileges were raised by indigenous Irish Catholic servants, so they tended to strike English English as wild Irishmen. Richard Martin sounds like the wildest Irishman of them all:
He continued to represent County Galway in Westminster [i.e., Parliament] ... In the House of Commons he was known for his interruptions and humorous speeches. He continued his work towards Irish Catholic Emancipation till 1826, when he had to flee to France. Emancipation was finally granted in 1829, much to his delight.
Martin is now best known for his work against animal cruelty, especially against bear baiting and dog fighting. His actions resulted eventually in Martin's Act of 1822, entitled "Ill Treatment of Cattle Bill". He also tried to spread his ideas in the streets of London, becoming the target of jokes and political cartoons that depicted him with ears of a donkey. He also sometimes paid fines of minor offenders. 
On 16 June 1824, Martin was present when the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) was founded in a London coffee shop "Old Slaughter's". He denied being the initiator of the society. 
Martin also had a very eventful life. ... He survived two shipwrecks. He fought over a hundred duels with sword and pistol and earned the nickname "Hairtrigger Dick". He travelled extensively in Europe and the Americas during the 1770s and was in New England when the American Revolutionary War began. He initiated Galway's first theatre in 1783. He employed as tutor to his younger half-brothers Theobald Wolfe Tone, who had an affair with Martin's wife. Martin was in Paris when the French Revolution began during 1789. 
Martin was on a first-name basis with many of the famous names of his age, including King George IV (who gave him the nickname "Humanity Dick"), Henry Flood, Henry Grattan, William Pitt, Queen Caroline, and Daniel O'Connell.

After the election of 1826, Martin was deprived of his parliamentary seat because of a petition which accused him of illegal intimidation during the election. He had to flee into hasty exile to Boulogne, France, because he could no longer enjoy a parliamentary immunity to arrest for debt. ... 
Following the revelation of [his wife's] affair with a Mr. Petrie in Paris, Martin sued Petrie for criminal conversation in 1791 and was awarded £10,000. He had this distributed to the poor by throwing it out the windows of his coach on the long journey back from London to Galway.

That seems pretty cinematic. Michael Fassbender, you aren't getting any younger looking - this is the guy you were born to play.

Update: Now that I look it up, I see that the the Martin Act passed when Martin was 68, so quite a few actors could play Martin in a film concentrating on this (likely) manic depressive wild man's last hurrah: Daniel Day-Lewis, Liam Neeson, Pierce Brosnan, or, as a commenter suggests, Mel Gibson.
        

Schmaltz v. History

My new column in Taki's Magazine reviews the level of schmaltz in the conventional understanding of Jewish history and how that distorts Americans' grasp of 21st Century issues:
The reality is that for most of the last 800 years, the average Jew in Europe and America was relatively affluent, well-connected, and politically conservative. For example, Tory prime minister Benjamin Disraeli was Queen Victoria’s favorite. This began to change only when the prosperity-driven growth in the number of Ashkenazi Jews forced many out of traditional white-collar jobs and into blue-collar jobs they resented as demeaning.

Read the whole thing there.
     

Dueling writing advice books: Pinker v. Murray

Charles Murray is currently out promoting his advice book, much of which is devoted to how to write better. And in early fall, Steven Pinker will publish his own advice book for writers:
The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

When I think of people I know who are manifestly superb thinkers, Pinker and Murray are always near the top of the list for clarity, elegance, power, and precision of mind.

Here's a bit from an interview I did with Pinker to promote his book The Blank Slate that shows his command:
Q: Aren't we all better off if people believe that we are not constrained by our biology and so can achieve any future we choose? 
A: People are surely better off with the truth. Oddly enough, everyone agrees with this when it comes to the arts. Sophisticated people sneer at feel-good comedies and saccharine romances in which everyone lives happily ever after. But when it comes to science, these same people say, "Give us schmaltz!" They expect the science of human beings to be a source of emotional uplift and inspirational sermonizing.

Blacks lag adventuresses in shaking down Silicon Valley

As vast amounts of money pour into Silicon Valley, various shakedown artists, not surprisingly, have emerged from the woodwork to get themselves a cut. What's striking is how out-of-the-running the usual suspects -- blacks and Hispanics -- have been relative to attractive young women. Here are three recent bogus brouhahas:




Now that I look back at them, they all were written up in the New York Times by Claire Cain Miller, who seems to have figured out that there is an insatiable appetite for stories, no matter how far-fetched, about perky Programmer Babes standing up to the Alpha Male culture of software engineering. Sex, money, and feminist righteousness make an intoxicating and enstupidating brew in the 2010s.
     

April 22, 2014

NYT: Aunt Zeituni was Barack & Michelle's nanny

A boring article in the NYT about how President Obama isn't in touch (and thus doesn't bear any responsibility) for all his ne'er-do-well Kenyan relatives who keep winding up in America at taxpayer expense suddenly takes a swerve in a previously unknown direction:
As president, Mr. Obama has kept his distance from, and even failed to acknowledge, members of this eclectic clan. In the time-honored tradition of eccentric presidential relatives, the assorted Obamas have faced deportation and drunken-driving charges, started Obama-branded foundations and written memoirs. 
But they also made for a powerful element of the president’s Kansas-meets-Kenya narrative as a candidate who could connect different worlds. ...

But I hadn't known this:
In 2000, Ms. Onyango moved to the United States on a valid visa, and in 2001, when Mr. Obama was an Illinois state senator, she helped take care of his newborn daughter, Sasha, and did household chores for the family in Chicago, according to Obama family members. But she stayed illegally after unsuccessfully seeking asylum. When reporters found her in Boston public housing during the 2008 election, Mr. Obama’s aides said he did not know she was in the United States illegally and returned her $265 in campaign contributions. 
In 2010, she received asylum and celebrated by telling an interviewer: “President Obama, I’m his aunt. If he does a wrong thing, I’m the only person on earth allowed to pinch his ears and smack him.”

Does this suggest that Barack and Michelle imported his Kenyan aunt to work illegally in the U.S. for them and then dumped her on the welfare system when she didn't work out? Did they pay her or was this one of those quasi-slave labor arrangements? How many laws were broken?
         

"Do the Rich Call the Shots?"

The New York Times wonders:
Do the Rich Call the Shots? 
A recent study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page examining 30 years of opinion surveys and policy decisions by the federal government found that, “When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose.” The average voter has little influence on government, the study found, but the well-to-do hold tremendous sway. 
Has the United States become more of an oligarchy than a democracy? 

Perhaps the NYT should ask its second-largest shareholder, Mexican oligarch Carlos Slim?

Not surprisingly, there's no mention of immigration in these discussions, even though that's the most obvious case of Billionaires United, e.g., Rupert Murdoch, Carlos Slim, Mark Zuckerberg, George Soros, Bill Gates, the Koch Brothers, and Michael Bloomberg using their money and power to demonize opponents of their greed for more immigration to push down Americans' pay -- and, in the case of Slim, to profit exorbitantly off his monopoly power over phone calls between the United States and Mexico.

In other advanced countries, immigration restriction is in the ascendance in the legislatures, but in America we continue to have this bizarre stalemate with the elites pushing amnesty, a pre-2008 policy if there ever was one, against the disorganized, underfunded, demonized, but massive resistance of the public.

Here's an oldie from the Center for Immigration Studies:
Elite vs. Public Opinion: An Examination of Divergent Views on Immigration 
By Steven A. Camarota, Roy Beck December 2002

While it has long been suspected that public and elite opinion differ on the issue of immigration, a new poll provides the most compelling evidence yet that there is an enormous gap between the American people and "opinion leaders" on the issue. ...
This Backgrounder is based on the findings of a recent national poll conducted by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations in May through July of this year. The Council is a non-profit policy organization that sponsors polls and events on a host of foreign policy issues. The Council has a long tradition of polling to find differences between the public and opinion leaders. 
The polling of the public was based on 2,800 telephone interviews from across the nation. The council also surveyed nearly 400 opinion leaders, including members of Congress, the administration, and leaders of church groups, business executives, union leaders, journalists, academics, and leaders of major interest groups. 
The results of the survey indicate that the gap between the opinions of the American people on immigration and those of their leaders is enormous. The poll found that 60 percent of the public regards the present level of immigration to be a "critical threat to the vital interests of the United States," compared to only 14 percent of the nation’s leadership – a 46 percentage point gap. 
The current gap is even wider than that found in 1998, when 55 percent of the public viewed immigration as a "critical threat," compared to 18 percent of opinion leaders – a 37 percentage point gap. 
The poll results indicate that there is no other foreign policy-related issue on which the American people and their leaders disagreed more profoundly than immigration. Even on such divisive issues as globalization or strengthening the United Nations, the public and the elite are much closer together than they are on immigration. 
When asked a specific question about whether legal immigration should be reduced, kept the same, or increased, 55 percent of the public said it should be reduced, and 27 percent said it should remain the same. In contrast, only 18 percent of opinion leaders said it should be reduced and 60 percent said it should remain the same. There was no other issue-specific question on which the public and elites differed more widely. 
The enormous difference between elite and public opinion can also be seen on the issue of illegal immigration. The survey found that 70 percent of the public said that reducing illegal immigration should be a "very important" foreign-policy goal of the United States, compared to only 22 percent of elites. 
Also with respect to illegal immigration, when the public was asked to rank the biggest foreign policy problems, the public ranked illegal immigration sixth, while elites ranked it 26th. 
The very large difference between elite and public opinion explains the current political stalemate on immigration. For example, supporters of an amnesty for illegal immigrants have broad elite support ranging from religious to business and union leaders. Normally elite support of this kind would lead to policy changes, but on this issue public opposition is so strong that it creates a political stalemate. 
   

"Why Tiger Mothers Motivate Asian Americans But Not European Americans"

Via Marginal Revolution, here's an abstract from Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
My Mother and Me 
Why Tiger Mothers Motivate Asian Americans But Not European Americans 
Alyssa S. Fu 
Hazel Rose Markus 
“Tiger Mother” Amy Chua provoked a culture clash with her claim that controlling parenting in Asian American (AA) contexts produces more successful children than permissive parenting in European American (EA) contexts. At the heart of this controversy is a difference in the normative models of self that guide behavior. Ideas and practices prevalent in AA contexts emphasize that the person is and should be interdependent with one’s close others, especially one’s mother. In contrast, EA contexts emphasize the person as independent, even from one’s mother. We find that AA compared with EA high school students experience more interdependence with their mothers and pressure from them, but that the pressure does not strain their relationship with their mothers. Furthermore, following failure, AAs compared with EAs are more motivated by their mothers, and AAs are particularly motivated by pressure from their mothers when it conveys interdependence.

This topic is really crying out for an adoption study to determine what share is nature and what nurture. My usual guess is fifty-fifty, but it would be fun to know more about it.

In Southern California, you see the Surfer Gene express itself not infrequently among third and fourth generation Asian-Americans with trust funds. On the other hand, they tend not to be screw-ups, either.
    

Piketty and Immigration

Everybody is talking about French economist Thomas Piketty's new book on how the rich get richer Capital in the 21st Century. Piketty argues that the rich dominate the political process, so the masses have a very hard time getting laws passed that would benefit them. 

The most obvious example of this is the debate, such as it is, over immigration policy in America. After more than a half decade of high unemployment, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, and Mexican oligarch Carlos Slim continue to use their media and political dominance to demonize those who stand up for the American people in opposing the Billionaires United front for cheap labor and expensive phone calls back home to Mexico.

But, if you go to Google and type in 
Piketty immigration

You get:
[cough]
[cricket chirps]

Most of the handful of references are gingerly ones from outer edges of the Steveosphere like Marginal Revolution and Ross Douthat at the NYT. Outside that, the notion that there is any relationship between the rich getting richer and massive immigration simply doesn't register. If we did a brainscan of the typical economic pundit's response to the concept "Piketty and Immigration," you'd just see a flat line on the monitor.