April 30, 2014

Nicholas Wade: "A Troublesome Inheritance"

My review of Nicholas Wade's book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History is up at Taki's Magazine.
   

April 29, 2014

My apologies

By the way, I've been informed that Michael Milken's lawyers have at times been known to strenuously and expensively object to Mr. Milken being referred to as "the junk bond king," since they will not stipulate that junk bonds ever had a monarch, nor that there have even been any such things as junk bonds. 

So, to preclude the need for Mr. Milken to pay for many billable hours to protect his sterling reputation from the "junk bond king" smear, I shall henceforth endeavour to refer to Mr. Milken as "the high-yield honcho."
     

Yahoo: Sterling a plantation owner because he discriminates against white players

Adrian Wojnarowski writes for Yahoo Sports:
Through the years, [Sterling's] racism has been sometimes subtle and often overt. For those failing to understand why a racist like Sterling never preferred white players, it cut to the heart of his stereotypical stances on athleticism and strength and talent. 
Mostly, he's never loved paying white players. In that way, he has an absolute plantation prism with which he sees players: He always preferred long, strong, physical players. To him, that's a basketball player: Big, black and strong. 
When Sterling became reluctant to honor Rivers' sign-and-trade agreement for J.J. Redick, there was a belief race played a factor. As one league source said, "He thought it was too much to pay for a white player." 
Yes, Sterling didn't want to so easily part with Eric Bledsoe, despite Rivers telling him they could never afford to pay Bledsoe in restricted free agency next summer. That was part of it, yes, but those who knew Sterling – who had history with him – believed largely that his disdain for paying $7 million per year for a white player caused him pause. 
Nevertheless, those days could be soon gone.
 

Slate: Donald T. Sterling, Plantation Owner

Josh Levin writes in Slate to endorse the spreading meme of Donald T. Sterling as Leonardo DiCaprio's Southern slaveowner character in Django Unchained:
Yes, Donald Sterling Sees His Basketball Team as a Plantation

It’s a provocative comparison, but in this case it’s an accurate one. 
By Josh Levin

Donald Sterling has been banned for life from overseeing his plantation....

... I wrote that Sterling views the men on his roster “as tenants on a basketball plantation.” This analogy isn’t just supported by words Sterling said to his girlfriend. It’s been Sterling’s modus operandi for years, and the NBA is only now doing something about it. 
... As the New York Times’ William Rhoden argues in his book Forty Million Dollar Slaves, “money does not necessarily alter one’s status as ‘slave,’ as long as the ‘owner’ is the one who controls the rules that allow that money to be made.” Still, I don’t believe it’s fair to label any NBA commissioner a plantation overseer, an analogy that—in that case—trivializes slavery. 
 In the case of Sterling, the plantation comparison has less to do with dollars and cents than with how he views black people. 
It’s not just that Sterling said he gives his players “food, and clothes, and cars, and houses.” As Yahoo’s Adrian Wojnarowski writes, Sterling “has an absolute plantation prism with which he sees players: He always preferred long, strong, physical players. To him, that’s a basketball player: Big, black and strong.” 
Wojnarowski goes on to report that Sterling nearly scuttled the team’s agreement with white shooting guard J.J. Redick because, in the words of a source, “He thought it was too much to pay for a white player.” 
Elgin Baylor, the Clippers’ longtime general manager, laid out Sterling’s plantation mindset in a 2009 employment discrimination lawsuit. Baylor, an African-American, accused Sterling of saying he “wanted the Clippers team to be composed of ‘poor black boys from the South’ and a white head coach.” (In the years hence, Sterling did bring in Doc Rivers to coach the team, so I guess that’s some kind of progress.)

Over the offseason, Sterling fired his white coach, Vinny Del Negro, who had led the Clippers to a franchise-history best 56-26 record last season, and hired the black Rivers with a contract of about $23 million over three years. Under Rivers' much more expensive tutelage, the Clippers improved to 57-25 this season.
If you don’t catch a whiff of the plantation here, your nose is broken. 
   
Actually, the only thing Southern about Sterling, who was born in Chicago, is that he's lived in Southern California for almost 80 years. But, don't let that get in the way.
 

NBA needs younger, more ethical owners, like Mikhail Prokhorov

Mikhail Prokhorov and 3 players on his Brooklyn Nets
With today's lifetime ban on NBA owner Donald T. Sterling and moves to force him to sell his Los Angeles Clippers team, the NBA is showing it wants to move beyond its roots in tacky and embarrassing low rent jerks like Sterling and embrace a new culture of sophisticated, morally sensitive, and just plain awesome owners. From the NYT:
New Guard of Owners Could Be Key in Sterling’s Fate 
By SCOTT CACCIOLA and BILLY WITZ  APRIL 28, 2014

When the N.B.A.’s Philadelphia 76ers were sold in 2011, a group of private equity investors bought the team for $280 million. When the Memphis Grizzlies were sold in 2012, a 34-year-old wireless technology entrepreneur paid $377 million. This month, two hedge fund billionaires shelled out $550 million for the lowly Milwaukee Bucks. 
And then there is Donald Sterling, the former divorce lawyer who bought the Clippers for $12.7 million some 33 years ago and now finds himself at the center of swirling debate over racist remarks. 
Mr. Sterling is part of the old guard of N.B.A. owners, a group of men who bought teams before the league became a global phenomenon worth billions of dollars. 
Now, the new guard of owners could help determine Mr. Sterling’s fate as they await findings from the investigation led by Adam Silver, the N.BA. commissioner, into the racist statements. Mr. Silver, who has been commissioner only since February, scheduled a news conference for Tuesday afternoon. ...
Three decades ago, a successful local businessman interested in a team as an extravagant plaything could join the elite club of N.B.A. owners; today, the teams are within reach of few outside billionaire hedge fund managers, tech moguls and Russian oligarchs.

For an example of the new, morally superior type of owner that the NBA has been welcoming, consider Mikhail Prokhorov, during the Yeltsin era, right hand man to Vladimir Potanin, one of the Seven Oligarchs. Prokhorov bought the New Jersey Nets a few years ago on condition of being allowed to move them to the gleaming new stadium in gentrifying Brooklyn.

The dispossession of Sterling will clear the way for the NBA to ethically upgrade its owners to the high standards set Prokhorov, a man of such sterling character that he has managed to have highly profitable working relationships with both Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin.

From Wikipedia:
Mikhail Dmitrievitch Prokhorov (Russian: Михаи́л Дми́триевич Про́хоров; born 3 May 1965) is a Russian billionaire, politician, and owner of the American basketball team the Brooklyn Nets. ... His paternal grandparents were relatively wealthy peasant farmers (known as kulaks) who were persecuted as class enemies under the Bolsheviks and again under Stalin. ... 
In 1992, at the age of 27, Prokhorov partnered with Potanin to run Interros, a holding company that they used in 1995 to effect the purchase of Norilsk Nickel, one of Russia's largest nickel and palladium mining and smelting companies.[10] During the largely un-regulated privatization of former state-controlled industries after the collapse of the USSR, Prokhorov and Potanin (the latter by then a deputy prime minister who oversaw privatization) were able acquire the shares from the workers of Norilsk Nickel for a fraction of their estimated market value and seize ownership of the company. When he departed in 2007, Prokhorov's share of the company was worth US $7.5 billion.[11] 

Pay no attention to The Man behind the curtain

It sounds like there's a much more interesting story going on with the Donald T. Sterling donnybrook than anybody has been investigating yet. I don't know how far this story might go, but it just might go all the way from Magic Johnson to somebody really interesting.

For years, I've been pointing out that much of the hoopla over racism and sexism isn't actually about blacks or women or whatever. Instead, it serves as a cover story for ambitious, clever men to get what they want. For example, I've long been fascinated by how mortgage lenders like Angelo Mozilo, Roland Arnall, and Kerry Killinger used the rhetoric of the War on Racist Redlining to blow up the housing bubble.

Obsess over racism; pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

But in the Sterling Story, who is The Man?

I'll offer a theory about why the man might be Magic Johnson, who desperately wants Donald Sterling's NBA franchise now that the Buss family says they won't sell his old Lakers. But Magic was the front man in the purchase of the Los Angeles Dodgers two years ago. So it might be Magic's big money backers in Guggenheim Partners.

Or ... And this is really a stretch, but let me toss it out there. There's a financier in L.A. who invests some of his money with Guggenheim Partners who for intelligence and energy and guile makes Mozilo and the other mortgage guys look like smalltimers. You haven't heard much about him since he got out of prison a couple of decades ago. He's legally banned for life from getting anything in return for giving investment advice. But he's still here and he's allowed to manage his own billions. The SEC has been investigating whether the Dodger purchase by Guggenheim was something of a front for him to get back in the game.

Granted, I'm no doubt reading way too much into this. And if this story doesn't go all the way to the top, it's still really interesting. I apologize for this post wandering all over the place, but the more I looked into the story that Magic wants the Clippers, the more pieces fell into place.

Listening closely to the presumably illegally made tapes suggests that the mistress was setting the LA Clippers owner up -- she's the one egging on the racial angle over her photos cuddling with Magic Johnson and Matt Kemp of the Dodgers. Originally, I assumed her minor league lawyer was her mastermind, but the news that Magic and his mysterious Guggenheim Partners backers want control of Sterling's NBA franchise suggests that there's a reasonable chance that this whole set-up originated with somebody more high-powered than her Woodland Hills attorney. (This lawyer is so obscure that his office is on Burbank Blvd. rather than on Ventura Blvd.)

Former Los Angeles Lakers basketball star Magic Johnson was the public frontman for the secretive Guggenheim Partners in paying an outlandish $2 billion to Boston leveraged parking lot robber baron Frank McCourt for the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team. And now, what do you know, Magic and the Guggenheim Partners are willing to take the Los Angeles Clippers off Donald Sterling's hands and add it to their nascent Los Angeles sports empire.

In contrast, the new Guggenheim Partners firm is very high-powered. In fact, the SEC has been trying for a year to figure out if GP is so high-powered that its Los Angeles sports franchise acquisitions are done in illegal collaboration with ... well, I won't mention his name yet, but it's a smack-yourself-in-the-forehead name out of the history books of Los Angeles and finance. I'll tell you the name later in the posting, but for my readers who are at his annual Beverly Hills wingding today, why don't you ask around and see what your host thinks about the Clippers. Or ask Magic Johnson when he speaks at lunchtime on Wednesday.

From Yahoo Sports:
Exit strategy for NBA, Donald Sterling: Sell Clippers to Magic Johnson 
By Adrian Wojnarowski 
April 28, 2014 3:30 AM .
For all these despicable revelations tumbling out of the hateful heart of Donald Sterling, there promises construction of a roadmap to redemption for the Los Angeles Clippers and the NBA. There's a way out for the most hated man in Los Angeles now, a way out for the commissioner's office and the owners responsible for long legitimizing and harboring a bigot and slumlord. 
Magic Johnson and his billionaire backers, the Guggenheim Partners, want a chance to purchase the Los Angeles Clippers, league sources told Yahoo Sports. "Magic's absolutely interested," one source closely connected to Johnson's business interests told Yahoo Sports on Sunday night. 
To bail themselves out of the NBA's worst crisis of credibility since the Tim Donaghy officiating scandal, the easy part for the NBA will be enlisting the eagerness and financial muscle of Magic Johnson and Mark Walter of the Guggenheim Partners – owners of the Los Angeles Dodgers. 
For commissioner Adam Silver, the chance to turn the Clippers over to Magic Johnson and his partners is the best possible of solutions. Exit Sterling, enter Magic. It would be the greatest trade in sports ownership history since, well, Magic for the McCourts, with the Dodgers. 
Magic Johnson is the ultimate cleanser in sports, and steering a Clippers sale to him could be transformative for the franchise.

Okay ... ultimate cleanser ...

Funny, though, how one of the two pictures that Donald Sterling was upset over his hired girl not taking down from Instagram was of her and Magic (see above). Sterling apparently doesn't trust anybody around him associating with Magic, because Sterling is a horrible racist (and perhaps because Magic wants to take his team away from him. Now that I think of it, the other Instagram picture Sterling was mad about was of her and Matt Kemp, who plays for Magic's Dodgers.)

Now, you may be thinking that something odd could be going on here. But if you smell a rat, you just haven't benefited from Magic's ultimate cleansing.

You see, Magic is the ideal sports team owner.

Well, unless you are part of the 70% of Dodger fans who haven't been able to watch the Dodgers on cable television so far this season because Magic and Mark Walter of the Guggenheim Partners are so deadset on raising cable rates to get back the absurd amount they overbid to buy the Dodgers.

Mark Walter, founder and CEO of Guggenheim Partners
Chairman of the Los Angeles Dodgers
"I look all white, but my dad was black" *
McCourt was a terrible guy, but at least if you had paid for cable TV to watch the Dodgers, he let you watch the Dodgers. Magic (and the Guggenheim backroom boys) want so much more money for Dodger telecasts that most of the cable systems in Southern California haven't gotten on board because they'd have to raise their overall rates to subscribers.

John Maffei writes in the San Diego Union-Tribune on April 22, 2014:
How about 70 percent of Southern California not getting Dodgers telecasts? 
The Dodgers signed a 25-year, $8.35-billion deal with Time Warner to run and distribute the team's new SportsNet LA. 
Like the Padres' deal, which was worth $1.2-billion, the Dodgers jumped at the money before knowing the team's telecasts would be fully distributed. 
Only Time Warner customers in Southern California get the Dodgers. 
Verizon FIOS, DirecTV, Dish, Cox, AT&T U-Verse and Charter, which service about 70 percent of TV viewers in Southern California, do not get the Dodgers. 
I was at my sister's home in Apple Valley on Easter Sunday. She's on Charter and doesn't get the Dodgers. 
So we watched the Angels, whose games are available on fully distributed Fox Sports West. 
Don't think the lack of distribution is hurting the Dodgers? According to Nielsen, the Dodgers are averaging about 37,000 viewers a game. 
The Angels are averaging about 100,000. 
The Angels have an exciting team with top-notch stars. There is no way, however, that the Angels should have nearly triple the viewership of the Dodgers.
The Dodgers were getting about $350,000 a game last season from TV. They get about $1.5-million a game this season. 
No matter what the cost, bad ratings are what you get when three-quarters of Southern California are shutout of Dodgers telecasts. 
The problem with Time Warner and the Dodgers, just like Time Warner and the Padres, is cost. 

But, stop thinking about how Magic's greed is depriving a huge number of baseball fans of seeing their favorite team and get back to thinking about how racism is bad, and then you'll realize that of course the NBA should force Sterling to sell his team to Magic and friends.

By the way, who else is involved in the Guggenheim Partners' aggressive moves in the Los Angeles area? The SEC was trying to find out last year: they were interested in the activities involving the Dodger purchase of a certain Los Angeles ex-financier who happens to have $800 million invested with Guggenheim, a fellow who's got a little more mojo than lawyer Mac Nehoray of Woodland Hills.

And this giant in the history of finance also has a lot of time on his hands because he is under a lifetime ban on securities trading since his 22 months at Lompoc in the early Nineties.

Yeah ... him.

No, not the college president on the left; and, no, not Magic; him.
The man who remade American capitalism in the Eighties.

Now I have less than zero evidence that junk bond king Michael Milken has had anything to do with Donald Sterling's downfall. I mean other than that a year ago Milken had $800 million with Guggenheim and Guggenheim has been chasing sports franchises in Los Angeles and really wants to get the Clippers away from Sterling. So forget I ever mentioned the name Milken. This story has nothing to do with the ambitions of rich men. It's about racism. Nothing else. Stop thinking about anything other than the horrors of racism.

* Just kidding. Mark Walter from Cedar Rapids, Iowa is the whitest man in America.
 
By the way, speaking of Magic as the "ultimate cleanser," what's the over-under line for how many people the HIV-positive Magic killed by giving them AIDS? As a super-celebrity he got access in 1991 to experimental HIV-fighting medical techniques that apparently saved his life, but what about the little people who weren't first in line like him? How many were there?
   

April 28, 2014

Paging Dr. Gregory Clark ...

By the way, don't trust individuals who change their surnames to sound like money. For example, 

    

NYT: Donald T. Sterling, Southerner

From the New York Times:
After 33 Years of Sterling, a Boiling Point 
APRIL 28, 2014 
By JULIET MACUR 
... For decades it was perfectly acceptable to let him run his team like “a Southern plantationlike structure,” as the former Clippers general manager Elgin Baylor once charged in a lawsuit. ... 
That suit also accused Sterling of running his franchise with the mentality of a Southern plantation owner, as a man who preferred a team of “poor black boys from the South” who were “playing for a white coach.” 
Baylor lost the lawsuit, but among the most shocking parts of it — just like the most shocking aspect of the most recent accusations against Sterling — was how long Baylor put up with “the Southern plantation” mentality before standing up for himself. [emphasis added]

And here's some mood music to go with this NYT article:
 
 
Here's Luke Ford on Donald T. Sterling's non-Southerness.
 

Sterling v. Nehoray: Battle of the lowlife lawyers

Why are "CLIPPERS CELEBRATE" and "BLACK HISTORY MONTH"
in slightly - but disturbingly - different fonts?
One overlooked aspect of the remarkably tawdry Clippers Brouhaha is its personal injury/divorce lawyer flavor.


That's how Donald Sterling got his start, and he maintains the bulletproof ego of a sleazeball lawyer who knows It Pays to Advertise, no matter how badly.

When he first bought the Clippers, he put up hundreds of billboards featuring a giant portrait -- not of his best player, but of himself.

A rare Donald T. Sterling ad without Donald T. Sterling's picture
His real estate ads are so poorly laid out that professional graphic artists have organized campaigns to stop him from assaulting their eyeballs.

He constantly runs poorly Photoshopped ads in the Los Angeles Times of himself accepting awards from civil rights organizations and other charities. Via Kevin Drum, here's Sterling's latest of countless self-congratulatory LA Times ad:


Here's an online petition:
Whereas print advertisements currently placed by The Donald T. Sterling Corporation in the Los Angeles Times and other publications are really ugly,  
Whereas The Donald T. Sterling Corporation spends hundreds of thousands of dollars publishing the full-page ads, and  
Whereas millions of people are exposed to the ads every day.  
We the undersigned request that The Donald T. Sterling Corporation immediately hire an actual graphic designer to create all future ad layouts. Any future ads placed by The Donald T. Sterling Corporation should, minimally, not look like a disaster, and, ideally, look pretty nice, spread beauty through the world and perhaps even reflect well on The Corporation.  

Let me make clear that allegations that I have served for the last 25 years as Mr. Donald T. Sterling's personal graphic artist are completely baseless. Our visual styles are really not all that similar, if you look closely enough.

Here's one of Sterling's few ads where modesty compelled him to keep his logo small:


Sterling's mistress's lawyer isn't exactly Charles Evans Hughes, either:

A divorcing couple battles in court over their pet gibbon
Siamak Ebrahim Nehoray is a graduate of Memphis State (maybe he met some ballers there?) and the University of Laverne College of Law. He was suspended in 2004 by the state bar association for playing fast and loose with a small amount of a client's funds.

On a somewhat different topic, while I have no opinion on this question, the consensus of commenters at TMZ, who presumably have been following this story most closely, appears to be:


Great moments in foreign policy

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak: "Excuse me, but
what are "the clippers" and why are we talking about them?"

Forget it, Barack, it's Koreatown

One of Donald Sterling's high crimes and misdemeanors has been discriminating against non-Korean would-be renters in his properties in Koreatown west of downtown Los Angeles. From ESPN in 2009:
Even more bizarre but just as effective at driving away African-Americans and Hispanics, Beverly Hills Properties changed the name of the Wilshire Towers complex to Korean World Towers. A huge banner printed entirely in Korean was hung on the building, and the doormen were replaced by armed, Korean-born guards who were hostile to non-Koreans, again according to testimony given by multiple residents. In August 2003, during the Housing Rights Center lawsuit, a federal judge ordered Sterling to stop using the word "Korean" in the names of his buildings, but the damage had been done."

From Malaysia, President Obama took time out to upbraid the "ignorance" that Sterling displayed during his illegally recorded private conversation. Still, there remains the theoretical possibility that the octogenarian real estate billionaire isn't wholly ignorant about what his Korean customers are looking for. The news videos above and below are from Koreatown in April 1992.
     

Kareem on Extreme Finger Wagging

The NBA's all-time leading scorer offers a little perspective in Time:
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Welcome to the Finger-Wagging Olympics

Moral outrage is exhausting. And dangerous. The whole country has gotten a severe case of carpal tunnel syndrome from the newest popular sport of Extreme Finger Wagging. Not to mention the neck strain from Olympic tryouts for Morally Superior Head Shaking. All over the latest in a long line of rich white celebrities to come out of the racist closet. ...
And now the poor guy’s girlfriend (undoubtedly ex-girlfriend now) is on tape cajoling him into revealing his racism. Man, what a winding road she led him down to get all of that out. She was like a sexy nanny playing “pin the fried chicken on the Sambo.” She blindfolded him and spun him around until he was just blathering all sorts of incoherent racist sound bites that had the news media peeing themselves with glee. 

Kareem appears to have actually listened to the tapes rather than just reacted to excerpts like all the other pundits. (He also just might have a little hard-earned experience with Los Angeles golddiggers and their lawyers.)
They caught big game on a slow news day, so they put his head on a pike, dubbed him Lord of the Flies, and danced around him whooping. 
I don’t blame them. I’m doing some whooping right now. Racists deserve to be paraded around the modern town square of the television screen so that the rest of us who believe in the American ideals of equality can be reminded that racism is still a disease that we haven’t yet licked. 
What bothers me about this whole Donald Sterling affair isn’t just his racism. I’m bothered that everyone acts as if it’s a huge surprise. ... He was discriminating against black and Hispanic families for years, preventing them from getting housing. It was public record. We did nothing. Suddenly he says he doesn’t want his girlfriend posing with Magic Johnson on Instagram and we bring out the torches and rope. Shouldn’t we have all called for his resignation back then? 
Shouldn’t we be equally angered by the fact that his private, intimate conversation was taped and then leaked to the media? Didn’t we just call to task the NSA for intruding into American citizen’s privacy in such an un-American way? Although the impact is similar to Mitt Romney’s comments that were secretly taped, the difference is that Romney was giving a public speech. The making and release of this tape is so sleazy that just listening to it makes me feel like an accomplice to the crime. We didn’t steal the cake but we’re all gorging ourselves on it. ...
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a six-time National Basketball Association champion and league Most Valuable Player. Follow him on Twitter (@KAJ33) and Facebook (facebook.com/KAJ).
    

V. Stiviano and Tim Pawlenty

According to the Daily Mail, professional mistress V. Stiviano has gone by at least four other names and is 38. So the age arithmetic works out perfectly that this account by Bruce Lewis is actually about the current Miss Stiviano.
  

Sterling: Set Up on Shakedown Street

Donald Sterling has been a civic embarrassment to Los Angeles for several decades. He's always been buying giant ads in the L.A. Times congratulating himself for winning some Champion of Diversity Award from some civil rights organization he paid off so he can continue to keep his Koreatown rental properties all Korean. 

As the owner of the NBA Los Angeles Clippers, he's been the Anti-Jerry Buss, the late owner of the LA Lakers. Both were real estate guys who got into NBA ownership. In fact, Buss suggested Sterling buy the Clippers. (Was this a devious plot on Buss's part to make sure the nearest rival to his Lakers had a terrible owner?)

But Buss always got the best and Sterling was content with the worst. Each hired a 1960s Lakers superstar as their, in effect, general managers for picking players, but Buss hired the ferociously-driven Jerry West while Sterling hired the genial but befuddled Elgin Baylor. Sterling then left Baylor in the general manager's role for 22 years, until poor Elgin was 74 years old. Baylor wracked up 20 losing seasons in 22 years.

Still, it was shameful of President Obama in Malaysia to denounce at length an edited private conversation that was clearly illegally obtained under California law. According to the Daily Mail, the mistress's lawyer, Mac Nehoray, says she has 100 hours of recordings. So, putting together a Greatest Gaffe's album is child's play, especially when she's clearly leading him on along lines recommended by her lawyer.

It's fascinating how few people have listened to or read the comments and figured out what's really going on. Commenter Ray explains:
Instagram photo Sterling objected
 to of his mistress and
Dodger slugger Matt Kemp
This article is nearer to the truth than anything the PC Media will vomit out.

A pathetic and rich old man, desperate for "love" (note the fake "honeys"), and desperate for others to perceive him as still Virile and Manly (thus, a young multikulti skank on his arm that he and the rest of TrendingLand consider 'hot').

He got completely played, and I agree, portions of their exchange smack of preparation and witness-leading. The whole episode has Perfect Storm signatures all over it, dovetailing seamlessly into the Evil White Male Racist/Sexist narrative that's ruled the western nations for four decades, bringing Barry Soetoro two terms as President of the Victimocracy.

This one smells of set-up. The speed with which the Minority Machine whirred into national action also was suspect. The announcers and commentators couldn't get the Korrekt denunciations outta their mouths fast enough. No one had context yet; no one really understood the background yet. But that didn't stop the usual Lemming Rush over each other to see who could denounce most convincingly and passionately the Racist America in which such Evil White Males still hold all the power, etc. And etc.

As Barry Boy hinted darkly, the U.S. is still full of Sterlings, thus there is Much More Still To Be Done before it's safe for Minorities and Women (U.S. females also live under a state of Siege and War, doncha know!) to take their fair place in a nation that stands for freedom, equality, and civil rights blah lie blah.

Half-a-century of disenfranchising, degrading, and denouncing the Evil White Male is starting to show diminishing returns. The Ecomony isn't thriving under Feminism and Diversity. Therefore it is time for the Evil White Males (preferably, very rich and public EWMs) to demonstrate directly to the Almighty People exactly how racist, misogynist, homophobic, LGBT-phobic, and Etc. the nation truly is. Result: rationalizations for continued (and escalated) cultural and legal beatdowns of the EWM, on a silver electronic platter.

All washed down smoothly and imperceptibly with a day-long draught of hoops and entertainment. They don't even realize that their minds just got windexed, and that their "beliefs" were just created for them, right in front of their own blind eyes.
    

April 27, 2014

First they came for Dilbert and Wally ...

In parallel to the war on the supposed "alpha-male culture" that is "endemic in software engineering," Charlotte Allen points out that Organized Feminism is campaigning to destroy another key bastion of sexism.
   

Bill Simmons on Magic Johnson

With basketball mogul Donald Sterling in the news for hatefully and irrationally objecting to his mistress publicly appearing without him in her Instagram photos with slugger Matt Kemp and beloved HIV-positive role model Magic Johnson, it's worth taking a look at what Bill Simmons, editor of ESPN's Grantland website, has to say about Magic. From Simmons' The Book of Basketball:
[In the late 1980s,] off the court, [Magic] emulated Jordan's marketing savvy and reinvented himself as a commercial pitchman and celebrity, even launching a Rat Pack of sorts with Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall *... 
Footnote: Eddie: Sinatra; Magic: Dean; Arsenio: Sammy. I always thought The Black Pack would be a great documentary: they were on top of the world for four years, then Magic got HIV, Eddie's career went in the tank and Arsenio had financial problems. And that's just the start of it. I'd say more, but my legal team just electroshocked me. 
... And just like that, he became the face of HIV: November 7, 1991. ... 
After riding high for fifteen years and getting the "magic" carpet pulled from under him, poor Earvin spent the next decade hanging around like Wooderson from Dazed and Confused. *
Footnote: GQ's Charles Pierce believed that Magic and alter ego Earvin battled like Superman and Bizarro Superman. Earvin had a longtime girlfriend named Cookie; Magic cheated on her relentlessly. Earvin had an illegitimate son; Magic carried on like the boy didn't exist. Earvin was a shrewd investor who tripled his NBA income off the court; Magic behaved like a college kid on spring break. Post-HIV Earvin educated everyone about his virus; post-HIV Magic bragged about his earlier, wilder ways. 
... He wasted a curious amount of time squashing rumors about his sexuality, even releasing a 1993 autobiography colored with tales about his (very hetero!) escapades and shamelessly plowing through the talk show circuit as "the (very hetero!) stud who banged so many chicks that he ended up with HIV, which means this could happen to you as well!" (Important note: This relentless campaign inadvertently hampered the sex lives of all red-blooded American males between the ages of eighteen and forty for the next eight years. For the first four years, everyone was terrified to have unprotected sex unless they were s***faced drunk. For the next four, the guys weren't terrified but the girls still were, although it's possible that they were just out of shape and didn't want us to see them naked. Then the Paris Hilton / Britney Spears era happened, women got in shape and started dressing more provocatively, we figured out you had a better chance of winning the lottery than getting HIV from conventional sex, and it became a sexual free-for-all. Of course, I was married by then. Awesome. Thanks for ruining my twenties, Magic.) Did we really need to know about his elevator trysts, threeseomes and foursomes, or bizarre philosophy about cheating on longtime girlfriend Cookie? *
Footnote: The philosophy: If his one-night stand didn't share his bed all night, the event was somehow okay. I wish I had thought of this rule in college. Wait, why am I making fun of this? Can't the Supreme Court pass this as a law? 
Was Magic educating America's youth about HIV or affirming and reaffirming his heterosexuality. The lowest point: Magic appeared on Arsenio's show right after the HIV announcement and was asked about his sexuality. Magic said that he wanted to make it clear, "I am not gay." The crowd applauded like this was fantastic news ...
    

Donald Sterling: The Elderly Cuckold's grasp for dignity

Dodger slugger Matt Kemp ($160 million contract) and V. Stiviano, mistress
of octogenarian billionaire Donald Sterling, on her Instagram account:
What do you think she wants you to imagine about their relationship?
Reviewing the illegally recorded tape of part of 81-year-old billionaire Donald Sterling's conversation with his young mistress V. Stiviano, I'm reminded of old stories of elderly cuckolds, like Chaucer's The Miller's Tale and who knows how many comic operas.
Donald Sterling
We don't have the beginning of the conversation, which would presumably be very interesting. The parts of the recording leaked (no doubt by Team Stiviano) have the flavor of a well-rehearsed entrapment.
V: ... I'm sorry, sweetie. Everything was OK and perfect. 
DS. I'm just telling you, you told me you were going to remove it, so Dennis, the second [that?] Dennis looked at me and made that comment.

What was "that comment" that the second Dennis made that so wounded the 80-year-old sugar daddy?

That comment appears to have been made by Dennis regarding Donald Sterling's mistress's predilection for posting on social media pictures of herself with famous black athletes and celebrities. Why in the world would an octogenarian object to his arm candy advertising herself to the world as consorting constantly without him with famous black athletes? What implication could Dennis have drawn from Ms. Stiviano's Instagram pictures about the old fool's ability to keep his youthful and expensive girlfriend sexually satisfied?
V: ... I'm sorry you feel that way, honey. I don't know how this conversation even came about. You were telling me how people called you, and how they mentioned certain things to you, and how it bothers you.

"Mentioned certain things" ... Ms. Viviano's lawyer appears to have done an excellent job at coaching his client at how to lead the billionaire in this surreptitiously-recorded conversation so that the public won't be able to figure out what they are talking about when it is leaked.
DS: Can't you just say, "The few Instagrams, I won't, I just ..."

Next, the golddigger, not the billionaire, introduces the subject of black people into the part of the conversation she's released.
V: Honey, if it makes you happy, I will remove all of the black people from my Instagram.
DS: Thank you. You said that before, you said, "I understand." 

Obviously, there was a lot of previous discussion between these two that we aren't being let in on by Team Stiviano.
V: ... I DID remove the people that were independently on my Instagram that are black. 

What does "independently" mean here? My guess would be that he's okay with her posting pictures of herself with some famous athlete or hip-hop star as long as Sterling is in the picture with the two younger people, but he's not okay with her posting pictures suggesting to the world that she's hanging out with these famous studs without him in the picture.
DS: You said that before, you said, "I understand." Then why did you start saying that you didn't? You just said that you didn't remove them. You didn't remove every -- " 
V: I didn't remove Matt Kemp and Magic Johnson, but I thought -- I thought Matt Kemp is mixed, and he was OK, just like me. He's lighter and whiter than me.

Rihanna-Matt Kemp
Matt Kemp is the L.A. Dodger slugger who formerly dated pop star Rihanna (until he had an off-season in 2010, after which he got his mojo back and was runner-up in the MVP voting in 2011 when he led the NL with 39 dingers).

In other words, Kemp swings some heavy lumber in the Los Angeles Celebrity Sexual Marketplace. If I were an octogenarian giving some tart two Bentleys and a Ferrari to be my girlfriend, I'd know what people would think when they see pictures on her Instagram of her being friendly with the 6'4" 215-pound 29-year-old Kemp without her elderly sponsor in the frame.

In the picture at the top of the post taken from Stiviano's Instagram page, she's jamming her right breast into Kemp's ribcage as if the two are in the throes of a grand affair. (Kemp looks mildly surprised.)
DS: Okay. 
V: I met his mother. 
DS: You think I'm a racist, and wouldn't --  
V: I don't think you're a racist. 
DS: Yes you do. Yes you do. 
V: I think you, you -- 
DS: Evil heart. 
V: I don't think so. I think you have an amazing heart, honey. I think the people around you have poison mind, and have a way of thinking.

The people around him, such as the mysterious Second Dennis, "have poison mind, and have a way of thinking." What does that mean? My guess would be that the people around Donald Sterling think he's not keeping his hot young mistress satisfied in the sack, so she's getting some on the side with the jocks and rappers she hangs out with in her Instagram pictures. 
DS: It's the world! You go to Israel, the blacks are just treated like dogs
V: So do you have to treat them like that too? 
DS: The white Jews, there's white Jews and black Jews, do you understand? 
V: And are the black Jews less than the white Jews? 
DS: A hundred percent, fifty, a hundred percent. 
V: And is that right? 
DS: It isn't a question—we don't evaluate what's right and wrong, we live in a society. We live in a culture. We have to live within that culture. 
V: But shouldn't we take a stand for what's wrong?

Note to reality show producers considering Miss V.: she'll probably require more than one take to read the lines right.
V: And be the change and the difference? 

Did Obama write this for her?
DS: I don't want to change the culture, because I can't. It's too big and too [unknown]. 
V: But you can change yourself. 
DS: I don't want to change. If my girl can't do what I want, I don't want the girl. I'll find a girl that will do what I want! Believe me. I thought you were that girl—because I tried to do what you want. But you're not that girl. ... 

Los Angeles Lakers owner Jerry Buss would have returned her to the agency for a new, improved version a long time ago. But Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling is the man who employed Elgin Baylor as his general manager for 22 years until Elgin was 74, during which they had 20 losing seasons. Buss employed Jerry West as his general manager and dated a whole bunch of 22-year-old blondes. Donald Sterling employed Elgin Baylor as the brains of his basketball operation and dated Miss Subic Bay 1999.

The next part sounds like a Larry David sitcom:
V: It's like saying, "Let's just persecute and kill all of the Jews." 
DS: Oh, it's the same thing, right? 
V: Isn't it wrong? Wasn't it wrong then? With the Holocaust? And you're Jewish, you understand discrimination. 
DS: You're a mental case, you're really a mental case. The Holocaust, we're comparing with— 
V: Racism! Discrimination. 
DS: There's no racism here. If you don't want to be... walking... into a basketball game with a certain... person, is that racism?

Well played, V. You were coached well.

Okay, here's my guess at what the Back Story is before this bit of conversation. Imagine Larry David, even richer but 20 years older and feebler.

Warning: Pure Speculation, but this makes a lot of psychological sense: Sterling's aged male ego was crushed by comments from other men, such as the Second Dennis, about how, when he's not around, his girlfriend is sure seen a lot by herself in the company of famous studs like Matt Kemp. And, you know, Don, people will talk.

So, Sterling tells her to delete from her public Instagram various pictures of herself and some celebrity swordsmen in which he doesn't appear.

At some point, maybe, she points out that all the guys Sterling is objecting to are black. (I don't know that, but everybody else in the world is assuming that Sterling brought it up first and I don't see any proof one way or another.) Being an old coot, he eventually admits that she has a point. He says something like society assumes that women who publicly hang out with black jocks and entertainers are having sex with at least one of them, especially if their alternative source of sexual satisfaction is a rich octogenarian.

Her lawyer coaches her to make "blacks" synonymous in their conversations with the concept of the men her boyfriend objects to her being seen with outside of his company. So, she then gets him in the illegally recorded conversation to talk about how society sees "blacks."
   
This could be a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode on HBO in 2034.
 

The Life of Lily, Bride of the Obama Administration

Typical single mother who just can't find a decent man
A couple of law professors eventually slip a little affordable family formation heresy into Slate's XX after the usual Bad White Man verbiage:
Just Say No

For white working-class women, it makes sense to stay single mothers. 
By Naomi Cahn and June Carbone
The following is based on Marriage Markets: How Inequality Is Remaking the American Family, out in May 2014 from Oxford University Press. 
Lily had grown up in a rural town, more than an hour from Kansas City, Mo. She was four months pregnant and not feeling well, and she was in tears. She was also not married, but that’s not what was upsetting her. The car that she needed to get to her two jobs in the city had broken down, and she had no other way to get to work. We asked whether her boyfriend, Carl, could help her. Lily frowned. She had recently broken up with Carl, she explained, because “I can support myself. I always have. I can support myself and our kid. I just can’t support myself, the kid, and him.” 

You know, Lily, if Carl is such a loser that you don't want to marry him, why did you want 50% of your child's genes to be his? Are you really that convinced that your 50% are going to be so awesome that your kid won't wind up a loser?
... A generation ago her decision would have seemed narrow, misguided, and difficult to understand. But now we have to conclude that it makes a lot of sense. Although it defies logic, socioeconomic, cultural, and economic changes have brought white working-class women like Lily to the point where going it alone can be the wiser choice. And the final irony: The same changes that have made marriages more equitable and successful among elite couples have made it less likely that marriage will look attractive to Lily. 
When Lily looks around at the available men, they don’t offer what she is looking for.

That picture above from Slate is not actually Lily, it's just a stock photo of a model. But that's probably how Lily pictures herself, if she just found the right diet.
Lily, just like better-off men and women, believes that marriage means an unqualified commitment to the other spouse. When you marry someone, you support him in hard times. You stick with him when he disappoints you. You visit him if he ends up in jail. And you encourage him to become an important part of your children’s lives.  It’s just that Lily doesn’t believe that Carl is worth that commitment.

But he's worth making a baby with, apparently.
Nor does she believe that she will meet someone who will meet her standards anytime soon, and the statistics back her up. 
The economy has changed. A higher percentage of men today than 50 years ago have trouble finding steady employment, securing raises and promotions, or remaining sober and productive. Blue-collar men like Carl have lost ground while more highly educated men  have gained. The unemployment rate for all men ages 20–24 is almost 13 percent, and those with only a high school education are more than twice as likely to be unemployed as those with a college degree. 
... At the same time that men like Carl have lost ground, women like Lily have gained. While almost no one outside the top executive ranks has gained much since the financial crisis, women in the middle of the American economy saw greater increases than the comparable men in both pay and job stability through the ’90s. That doesn’t mean that ideas about who should be the breadwinner have changed much, though. Both men and women generally agree that a man who can’t hold a steady job shouldn’t marry.  Indeed, “the less education and income people have, the more likely they are to say that to be a good marriage prospect, a person must be able to support a family financially.”  
The  women ready for marriage in this group have grown larger than the group of marriageable men who would be good partners. These men—the ones with better jobs and more stable lives—have become more reluctant, in turn, to settle for only one woman. ... 
She has very few friends, married or unmarried, in strong relationships, and she did not see much point in waiting for a Prince Charming she did not expect to find. Indeed, while less than 20 percent of the most highly educated Americans believe that marriage has not worked out for most of the people they know, more than half of those who are least educated believe that marriage has not worked out. ,,,
In our view what would make the most difference to this unfair marriage market are  policies that would increase the number and quality of jobs available to working class men, retraining and unemployment benefits that fill in the gaps between jobs, and ongoing support for women’s autonomy. Since the ’80s, the gender gap in wages has increased at the top but shrunk in the middle.

In the past, young people molded each other into better people. Lots of guys start out as feckless as Carl, but shape up so they can have a woman.

Lily, of course, in her very 2014ish egotism and heedlessness sounds like she'll be a horrible mother to their poor misbegotten bastard child. That's a real failure of society when we fail to inculcate basic maternal virtues in young women by encouraging them in the Life of Julia, Bride of the Obama Administration mindset.
... Let’s not make raising a child become yet another marker of class.  

How about having a child?