May 13, 2014

African-American cultural homogeneity

From the NYT:
RACE IN SPORTS
Different N.B.A. Loyalties for Black and White Neighborhoods
MAY 13, 2014
Nate Cohn

It is no secret that the N.B.A. is especially popular among black Americans. About 45 percent of people who watched N.B.A. games during the 2012-2013 regular season were black, even though African-Americans make up just 13 percent of the country’s population. 
In addition to being numerous, African-American fans also seem to have different patterns to their N.B.A. rooting. Hometown basketball teams tend to earn a lower share of Facebook “likes” in heavily black areas. Many black fans instead seem to gravitate to teams with national followings, like the Heat and Lakers, over the local team.

There's nothing wrong with this. After all, NBA teams are not like old time European soccer teams that actually were manned by locals, they are hired gladiators mixed randomly. So deciding to root for Oklahoma City because you like Kevin Durant even though you couldn't find Oklahoma on a map makes as much sense as rooting for the local team.

There are no doubt multiple reasons for this, but one point I don't see made too often is that these days African-Americans have a strikingly homogeneous national culture. Sure there are local variants, but the culture is largely propagated by electronic media and defines itself in opposition to national white culture as seen on TV, so it's pretty much the same everywhere.
       

Donald Sterling wisely turns to iSteve for his P.R. tactics

I just got back from mailing my invoice to The Donald T. Sterling Corporation for all my public relations gambits that Sterling used in his triumphant interview with Anderson Cooper tonight. 

If you are going to launch a giant PR offensive to restore your battered reputation, always remember to turn first to this blog to see what I think would be epic for you to say (e.g., How many people did Magic Johnson kill by giving them AIDS?), and then say the exact opposite. Unfortunately for Sterling, he's not getting any younger, so he appears to have forgotten the part about saying the opposite. But as the links below will indicate, Sterling sure remembered everything else I posted here.

From Sports Illustrated:
Clippers’ Donald Sterling attacks Magic Johnson, says he should be ‘ashamed’ of HIV

BY BEN GOLLIVER

Disgraced Clippers owner Donald Sterling launched into an extended tirade against Magic Johnson in an interview with CNN, saying that the Lakers legend should be “ashamed” of being HIV-positive and suggesting that he hasn’t financially supported minority communities. 
Making his first public statements in the 16 days since his initial racially-charged audio leaked, Sterling apologized for his comments in an interview on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° and said that he was “asking for forgiveness.” 
But when the topic turned to Johnson, the 80-year-old Sterling launched into multiple, extended diatribes against one of the most popular NBA players of all time. 
“What has he done? Can you tell me? Big Magic Johnson, what has he done? He’s got AIDS,” Sterling told CNN. “Did he do any business? Did he help anybody in South LA?” 
Sterling was just getting started. 
“What kind of guy goes to every city, has sex with every girl, then he goes and catches HIV,” he said. “Is that someone we want to respect and tell our kids about? I think he should be ashamed of himself. I think he should go into the background. And what does he do for black people? He hasn’t done anything.

“Here’s a man I don’t know if I should say this, he acts so holy. He made love with every girl in every city in America, and he had AIDS, and when he had those AIDS, I went to my synagogue and I prayed for him. I hoped he could live and be well. I didn’t criticize him. I could have. Is he an example for children? You know, because he has money, he’s able to treat himself." ...

Well, that will persuade the media and the public to rethink this whole question of who is the Good Guy and who is the Bad Guy. It will be just like the end of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Emperor's New Clothes" when the whole mob suddenly realizes that the lone truthtelling brave little boy billionaire is right and therefore they were all wrong and hypocritical and venal. That kind of thing happens all the time ...
As Sterling and Cooper’s discussion continued, the Clippers owner tried to draw a distinction between the Jewish community and the African-African community in how each community supports its own members.

Good thinking ... This part I didn't actually recommend, but Sterling is clearly getting into the iSteve spirit and improvising nicely:
"I told you about the loans"
“The Jewish people have a company and it’s for people who want to borrow money for no interest,” he said.

They do?
“We want to give them a fishing pole. We want to help people. if they don’t have money, we’ll loan it to them. There is no African-American …. I’m sorry. they all want to play golf with me, everyone wants to be with me.” 

Good work! Comparing blacks to Jews is a surefire road to mass popularity and media approbation.

"You do know who runs this town,
don't you?"
But, next time, Donald, don't forget to mention how everybody knows that Hollywood isn't run by the Jews, it's run by the Gay Jews.

Maybe work in a Bryan Singer conspiracy theory angle.

For example, you could say that your good friend Rip Torn called to tell you this whole Clippers whoop-tee-doo was concocted as a red herring to distract from the Real Story.

"Party's at my suite. Wear your
full dress Wehrmacht uniform."
Trust me, that would go over great.
Sterling also said that Johnson leaked quotes from a conversation the two had had since the first tape was released by TMZ and said that Johnson “lulled” him into remaining quiet after the controversy first began. 
“I’m hurt that he called me up and he said don’t do anything,” Sterling told CNN. “[He said], ‘Wait until you hear from me.’ Then someone called me later and said he doesn’t want to be involved. And then he released the tape I sent to him. That I talked to him in confidence.” 
Sterling believed Johnson wanted him to wait because, “I think he wanted me to do nothing so he could buy the team. He thought the whole thing would be resolved in two weeks.”

So, yeah, as I wrote back in April, it sounds like Magic set Sterling up to get control of the Clippers. Was the set-up after the tape was released? Or was it before? It would be interesting to know how much contact there was between Magic and V. Stiviano.

"I make Jorge Ramos
look like Anderson Cooper."
And how much discussion was there of the Clippers between Magic, his backers in Guggenheim Partners such as CEO Mark Walter, and, my favorite speculation, between the Guggenheim COO Todd Boehly and Boehly's backer, Mike Milken.
The CNN interview is the first since Sterling was caught on tape berating his girlfriend, V. Stiviano, for posting a photo of Johnson to her Instagram account while making a series of racist remarks. ...
Then, in comments that leaked out last week, Sterling allegedly admitted that “jealousy” fueled his initial comments about Johnson and other African-Americans. 
"I'm not actually involved."
“The girl is black. I like her. I’m jealous that she’s with other black guys. I want her,” Sterling allegedly said, according to RadarOnline.com. “I never thought a private conversation would go anywhere out to the public. … I didn’t want her to bring anybody to my game because I was jealous. I mean, I’m being honest.”

That's exactly what I theorized on April 27th. Straight out of Moliere. Now it could be that Sterling is just lying -- he has a lifelong track record of being a terrible person -- but the Jealous Elderly Cuckold theory always made sense.
Johnson, for his part, was furious when the tapes first became public, pledging never to attend a Clippers game until Sterling was removed as owner.

Furious, I tell you, Magic was furious when the tapes first became public.
As it became clear that Silver was intent on pushing out Sterling, Johnson’s name was rumored as a possible buyer for the Clippers, and he called on Sterling to sell the team in multiple interviews. 
“I would definitely take a look at [buying the Clippers] because I am a businessman,” he said, according to the AFP. “But we here in Los Angeles, whether it’s myself or somebody else, we just want an owner who will include everybody, who will understand diversity and not include all races of people.” ...
Donald Sterling is reportedly battling cancer, and Shelly Sterling suggested in a recent interview that her husband could be suffering from the “onset of dementia.”

So, like maybe when Sterling gets my invoice with the printouts of all my blogposts giving him almost all his best ideas for the Anderson Cooper interview, he won't remember that he didn't actually hire me and just whip out his checkbook. (Darn. I should have included a self-addressed stamped envelope.)

Okay, Donald, you don't have to pay me for the part about how the Elders of Zion give free loans to all Jews while blacks would rather golf than fish -- that was all yours and it's genius stuff.

The Demented Billionaire niche sounds like a promising market for my knack for coming up with what exactly will most please contemporary America. (Call me anytime, Sheldon!)

More from what's turning into Steve Illustrated:
Clippers owner Donald Sterling on V. Stiviano: ‘She’s a street person’

... Asked specifically about Stiviano, the 80-year-old Sterling broke down in tears, painting her as a “good person” that he cared about, while also pointing out her disadvantaged background. 
“She’s a good person, she’s a beautiful person,” Sterling said. “There’s 15 of her, 15 children, 15 Hispanic kids, sisters and brothers (in her family), and she supports them all. Perhaps she’s made some mistakes. I thought she cared for me. I was stupid. How could a girl care for a man 51 years older? She wouldn’t release those tapes. She’s not a bad person. ...
“I made such a mistake,” he told CNN. “I thought that woman really cared for me. but thank God, this has all come to the light, because it could have been worse. I don’t know what she wants, I don’t know how it happened.” 
Sterling also told CNN that he believed Stiviano “baited” him into making the comments. 
“I don’t know why the girl had me say those things,” he said. “Yes, I was baited. That’s not the way I talk. … When I listen to that tape I don’t even know how I could say words like that. I’m not a racist. I love people. … An 80-year-old man is kind of foolish, and I’m kind of foolish. I thought she liked me and really cared for me. I guess being 50 years older than her, I was deluding myself.”
   
You heard it here first.
       

Mrs. Sterling threatens NBA Owner Armageddon

Donald T. Sterling's wife of 58 years, Rochelle Sterling, who co-owns the Los Angeles Clippers via a trust, gave an interview to the New York Times, along with her lawyer Pierce O'Donnell
NYT: Have you spoken with any other N.B.A. owners since your husband’s suspension was announced? 
Mrs. Sterling: No, I haven’t. But I often wonder: If the wife of one of the owners had done this, and if the roles were reversed, would they take the team away from the man? Is it something sexist? Is it the man’s club? The owners are afraid of their own issues. Because I’m sure if anybody goes into all their records, they have skeletons in their closets. ...
O’DONNELL: The situation here from a legal perspective is unprecedented. No professional sports league has ever terminated an owner’s interest involuntarily. And what Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, means when he refers to a “slippery slope” is that if they can do it to Shelly Sterling, they can do it to any other owner. And that invokes a precedent that could then be cited. I’m sure other owners have said things in private. We’ve had owners who have taken anti-civil rights stands on certain issues over the years. So is there dirty laundry? When the owners think about this in the quiet of their thoughts, and they have to render a vote, they have to think about the implications of it. 
NYT: So if you sue the N.B.A., would you depose other owners and their team personnel?

O’DONNELL: I’d certainly be entitled to discovery. Any fair administrative process would allow us to get discovery. And I want to know a lot of different things about the records of the N.B.A. and what information they have about the conduct or misconduct of other owners that was not acted upon. The N.B.A. is as much at risk as Mr. Sterling to have this whole thing aired publicly. So it’s not risk-free for either side. To answer your question, of course I’ll ask for discovery. But it’s in everybody’s best interests to avoid Armageddon.

Not everybody. NBA Owner Armageddon is totally in my best interests. These depositions and email discoveries could provide years of great blog material.

Ar-Ma-Geddon! Ar-Ma-Geddon!

UPDATE: Pssst! Counselor O'Donnell ... You know who probably has some great tapes of Brooklyn Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov's most heinous phone calls? I mean, I don't know for sure, but it's my impression there's this guy who seems to have a lot of embarrassing wiretaps at his fingertips: Victoria Nuland, the EU lady, lots of good stuff.

Vladimir Putin.

Heck, Putin's probably got some hilarious wiretaps of Michael Jordan, too, just to play as an icebreaker at summit conferences with Netanyahu and Lieberman. (And, I hope, some scandalous stuff on Paul Allen: I hate that guy.)

Depose Putin. The Stiviano Precedent says that anybody's secrets obtained anyhow can be splashed in the press if they are politically incorrect enough, right? So, FSB wiretaps are fair game. And by that point Putin might be like, "Ukraine is game to you, Obama? How about I take your little NBA and smash it?"

I'd cut and paste for months.

This could be awesome.
            

The snitch set me up!

Some excerpts from the transcript of Anderson Cooper's interview on CNN with Donald T. Sterling:

STERLING: ... So, when she said to me, "I'm going to bring four gorgeous black guys to the game," players she was referring to, either football or basketball, I was a little jealous, maybe.  And I --

COOPER:  When did she say that?

STERLING:  Just -- just before.  And I said to her, don't bring them to the game, because of my jealousy.

I mean, in any event, she never brought anybody to the game.  It was like she was baiting me just to say things.

COOPER:  So, you're saying she, before the recording that we heard, she had said she was going to bring four black players, and she specifically said black players?

STERLING:  Yes.

COOPER:  And you're saying that's what this conversation sparked from, stemmed from?

STERLING:  Yes.

And so I used her words.

Rick Telander on how Magic might have gotten HIV

Rick Telander, the veteran Chicago Sun-Times sports columnist who broke a lot of important stories about steroids, writes about Magic Johnson:
He had tested positive for HIV, which is the precursor to AIDS, and the way he got the virus — though he never exactly would say how — certainly hinted at irresponsible sexual activity and arrogance. AIDS was so scary and misunderstood at the time that people — and I mean this literally — didn’t want to touch him. He retired from the NBA immediately. 
Johnson had just married his wife, Cookie, who was pregnant, and at first he feared he had infected his first child with her, Earvin Jr., with the virus. But he hadn’t. 
From the early 1980s, when AIDS first was identified, until maybe the early 2000s, many considered the disease a death sentence. Most of us figured Magic was a dead man walking. I think he did, too. 
But he stayed healthy, taking a cocktail of drugs and exercising, while many gay men, intravenous drug users and others of both genders died. I bought Magic’s book from 1992, What You Can Do to Avoid AIDS, and read it with my irony meter on high alert. Among his statements: ‘‘The L.A. Lakers even had lectures on HIV in the locker room. I wish I had paid attention.’’ 
In the book, he makes his promiscuity sound almost like a life passage, a tough break but part of the deal: ‘‘I didn’t get HIV because I was a ‘bad’ person or . . . someone who ‘deserved’ it for whatever reason. I got HIV because I had unprotected sex.’’ 
Well, yes. And people kill others because they get blasted drunk and drive cars into other cars. 
But judgment doesn’t last long in this country if you plow ahead, never quit, have a great smile, etc. All the coaching clichés are true. And nobody at the top has any shame. I think we know that. 
So as you think about the despicable Sterling — if you think the fact he beat his son, Scott, constantly with a belt is enough to condemn him forever — don’t forget about second acts. 
Sterling, who has cancer and is 80, likely won’t be around much longer. His curtain is closing. Then again, you never know. 
Just ask Magic, the healthiest dude around. 
† JOHNSON’S BOOK about AIDS was part of a three-book deal his agent sold to Random House. (What, you thought it was done out of contrition?) 
The next was called My Life: Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson, co-written with William Novak, the author of, among other works, The Big Book of Jewish Humor. 
I read that book, too. Among the insights: ‘‘You were definitely taking a chance when you brought a strange woman up to your room. That’s because a few of them really were strange. . . . For one thing, the women weren’t as beautiful as they had seemed at first glance. For another, it eventually became clear they weren’t women at all — they were men in drag.’’ 
Take heed, kids.

Magic's buddy Eddie Murphy should have paid closer attention to Magic's book. (And here's Bill Simmons on Magic, Eddie, and Arsenio.)
     

Donald Sterling turns to iSteve for P.R. strategy

I moved this back up top, but your comments are still here.
      

May 12, 2014

Daniel Kahneman: Eternal Sixth-Grader

David Brooks writes in the NYT:
Much of the recent psychological research also suggests that overconfidence is our main cognitive problem, not the reverse. Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” describes an exhaustive collection of experiments demonstrating how often people come to conclusions confidently and wrongly. When asked to estimate if more murders happen in Detroit or in Michigan, most people give higher estimates for Detroit even though every murder in Detroit also happens in Michigan.

The sanctification of psychologist Daniel Kahneman is one of the weirder phenomena of recent years, since it ought to be obvious to everybody that Kahneman's most celebrated shtick is to ask questions that are stupider than people expect him to ask, so they interpret them in a more intelligent fashion than they literally are, and then he says, "Gotcha! I wasn't asking about the per capita murder rate like you assumed I must be, I was asking a dumber question than that. Burn on you!"

I guess it's part of the exaltation of ignorance that's essential to our jihad against prejudice. Here, for example, is Michael Lewis exulting over Kahneman's most famous trick question:
It didn’t take me long to figure out that, in a not so roundabout way, Kahneman and Tversky had made my baseball story [Moneyball] possible. In a collaboration that lasted 15 years and involved an extraordinary number of strange and inventive experiments, they had demonstrated how essentially irrational human beings can be. In 1983—to take just one of dozens of examples—they had created a brief description of an imaginary character they named “Linda.” “Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright,” they wrote. “She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.”  
Then they went around asking people the same question:  
Which alternative is more probable?  
(1) Linda is a bank teller. 
(2) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.  
The vast majority—roughly 85 percent—of the people they asked opted for No. 2, even though No. 2 is logically impossible. (If No. 2 is true, so is No. 1.) The human mind is so wedded to stereotypes and so distracted by vivid descriptions that it will seize upon them, even when they defy logic, rather than upon truly relevant facts. Kahneman and Tversky called this logical error the “conjunction fallacy.” 

No, it's people assuming that the professors wouldn't be wasting their time with a lot of contrived details simply in order to play a lowbrow trick on them.

This is not to say that Kahneman possesses the self-awareness of a Boy Scout patrol leader hazing the Tenderfeet. Judging from his book, he doesn't really seem to be aware that his questions come out of a long tradition of smart-aleckry and Aspergerness.
          

Apologies for posting my old articles ...

With the current discussion of the merits of the human biodiversity perspective that suggests that nature, as well as nurture, can often play a role in human affairs, there have been a number of assertions that this kind of thinking is obviously crude, unsophisticated, ignorant, and fallacious. These characterizations, though, tend to be lack links to examples. 

So, I've been posting on my blog some of my old articles as examples of what human biodiversity awareness can contribute. By putting them on my blog, I make them easy to share via social media. For example, below is my 1997 "Track and Battlefield" article in National Review that has largely succeeded in changing the conventional wisdom to reject the once popular idea that women would someday equal men in most sports. Please note that to demonstrate that, I had to explain the racial patterns seen in running, as well as deal with the non-genetic human biodiversity question of the impact of steroids.

This article is now 17-years-old and ought to remain a model for how to disentangle the effects of nature and nurture.
    

"Track and Battlefield" by Steve Sailer and Stephen Seiler, 1997

Track and Battlefield

Everybody knows that the "gender gap" between men and women runners in the Olympics is narrowing. Everybody is wrong.

by Steve Sailer and Dr. Stephen Seiler

Published in National Review, December 31, 1997

Everybody knows that the "gender gap" in physical performance between male and female athletes is rapidly narrowing. Moreover, in an opinion poll just before the 1996 Olympics, 66% claimed "the day is coming when top female athletes will beat top males at the highest competitive levels." The most publicized scientific study supporting this belief appeared in Nature in 1992: "Will Women Soon Outrun Men?" Physiologists Susan Ward and Brian Whipp pointed out that since the Twenties women's world records in running had been falling faster than men's. Assuming these trends continued, men's and women's marathon records would equalize by 1998, and during the early 21st Century for the shorter races.

This is not sports trivia. Whether the gender gap in athletic performance stems from biological differences between men and women, or is simply a social construct imposed by the Male Power Structure, is highly relevant both to fundamental debates about the malleability of human nature, as well as to current political controversies such as the role of women in the military.

When everybody is so sure of something, it's time to update the numbers. So, I began an in-depth study with my research partner, Dr. Stephen Seiler, an American sports physiologist teaching at Agder College in Norway. (Yes, we do have almost identical names, but don't blame him for all the opinions in this article: of the two of us, I am the evil twin).

The conclusion: Although the 1998 outdoor running season isn't even here yet, we can already discard Ward and Whipp's forecast: women will not catch up to men in the marathon this year. The gender gap between the best marathon times remains the equivalent of the woman record holder losing by over 2.6 miles. In fact, we can now be certain that in fair competition the fastest women will never equal the fastest men at any standard length race. Why? Contrary to all expectations, the overall gender gap has been widening throughout the Nineties. While men's times have continued to get faster, world class women are now running noticeably slower than in the Eighties. How come? It's a fascinating tale of sex discrimination, ethnic superiority, hormones, and the fall of the Berlin Wall that reconfirms the unpopular fact that biological differences between the sexes and the races will continue to play a large, perhaps even a growing, role in human affairs.

Wreckers

From the NYT:
The Public Editor's Journal - Margaret Sullivan

Still Talking About It: ‘Where Are the Women?’
By MARGARET SULLIVAN  MAY 12, 2014, 10:00 AM 23 Comments

Some facts, according to a recent Women’s Media Center study: 
* At the nation’s 10 most widely circulated newspapers, men had 63 percent of the bylines, nearly two for every one for a woman. 
* Among those papers, The Times had the biggest gender gap – with 69 percent of bylines going to men.

I'm shocked to hear that the best newspaper is the most male-dominated.
* Women are far more likely to cover health and lifestyle news. They're less likely to cover crime, justice and world politics.

Women are also far more likely to read health and lifestyle news. They're less likely to read crime, justice and world politics articles.
* At three major papers, including The Times, and four newspaper syndicates, male opinion-page writers outnumber female writers four to one.

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, back before the WWW, I started writing op-eds as a hobby and mailing them off to newspapers around the country. I noticed that most of the salaried op-ed page editors who chose my unsolicited contributions and sent me my check for $150 (or whatever) were women, but most of my fellow op-ed contributors on the tear sheets of the Cleveland Plain Dealer or Christian Science Monitor were men.

This seems like basic evolutionary psychology: males gravitate toward riskier career paths where they try to broadcast their acumen to the public at large, and women take more stable roles where they get to choose the individual men.
After three decades in journalism, I find it hard to believe that – while things have changed radically in some ways – there’s still such a gender imbalance.

After four and a half decades in which feminism has been conventional wisdom (for example, look at how the the Equal Rights Amendment was ratified by 30 states from March 1972 through March 1973 before Phyllis Schlafly's critiques started to be understood), wouldn't it seem likely that the distribution of types of jobs that has been fairly stable among young people for a approaching a couple of generations now reflects enduring sex differences?

A lot of conventional wisdom these days sounds like a Joe Stalin speech from 1937: the Five Year Plan cannot fail, except for the Wreckers, those relics who are on the Wrong Side of History, who are secretly sabotaging everything.
           

A Genetic Census of America

Via Race / History / Evolution Notes, here are Ancestry.com's interesting maps of racial ancestry by state: A Genetic Census of America. One pattern I noticed is that the more odd the background (as with this map of Melanesian ancestry, which tops out at 0.1%), the more New Mexico stands out (with New York as the other state most likely to be anomalous). 

I'd call it the Law of Newness, but it doesn't much apply to New Hampshire, with New Jersey kind of in the middle.
      
Since we've been speaking of German-Americans, here's "Europe West," which presumably includes Germans, Dutch, Belgians, and French (but not Scandinavians, Brits, Irish, Iberians, or Italians):
Generally, most of the country is kind of German, but less so in the giant cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Or New Mexico.

By the way, n/a says that he think's Ancestry.com's methodology in these maps isn't the ideal, so don't take them as the final word. (Also, keep in mind that the maps are likely biased by who wants to spring for ancestry testing.)
    

Wade's speculation disclaimer

From Chapter 1 of Nicholas Wade's A Troublesome Inheritance:
“Since much of the material that follows may be new or unfamiliar to the general reader, a guide to its evidentiary status may be helpful. Chapters 4 and 5, which explore the genetics of race, are probably the most securely based. Although they put the reader on the forefront of current research, and frontier science is always less secure than that in the textbooks, the findings reported here draw from a large body of research by leading experts in the field and seem unlikely to be revised in any serious way. Readers can probably take the facts in these chapters as reasonably solid and the interpretations as being in general well supported. 
“The discussion of the roots of human social behavior in chapter 3 also rests on substantial research, in this case mostly studies of human and animal behavior. But the genetic underpinnings of human social behavior are for the most part still unknown. There is therefore considerable room for disagreement as to exactly which social behaviors may be genetically defined. Moreover, the whole field of research into human social behavior is both young and overshadowed by the paradigm still influential among social scientists that all human behavior is purely cultural. 
“Readers should be fully aware that in chapters 6 through 10 they are leaving the world of hard science and entering into a much more speculative arena at the interface of history, economics and human evolution. Because the existence of race has long been ignored or denied by many researchers, there is a dearth of factual information as to how race impinges on human society. The conclusions presented in these chapters fall far short of proof. However plausible (or otherwise) they may seem, many are speculative. There is nothing wrong with speculation, of course, as long as its premises are made clear. And speculation is the customary way to begin the exploration of uncharted territory because it stimulates a search for the evidence that will support or refute it.
"The reader may also wish to keep in mind that this book is an attempt to understand the world as it is, not as it ought to be."

Geithner and Rubin

28 Sherman has been working on his hunch that the central stringpuller in the American government-financial system over the last 20 years has been Robert Rubin, who went from Goldman to Clinton's second Treasury Secretary to an ill-defined job at Citi, for which he was paid $126 million. 

A lot of other recent Treasury secretaries seem to have ties to Rubin, such as Larry Summers and the current one Jack Lew, who was COO at Citi. The previous Treasury secretary was Timothy Geithner, who has a book out.

James Freeman writes in the WSJ:
One of the themes in "Stress Test" is Mr. Geithner's difficulty in understanding the health of large financial firms. He admits that he didn't see the mortgage crisis coming and didn't grasp the severity of the problems after it appeared. He didn't require that the banks he was overseeing raise more capital because his staff's analysis couldn't foresee a downturn as bad as the one that occurred. 
None of this is particularly surprising in a man who, at the time he became president of the New York Fed, had never worked in finance or in any type of business—unless one counts a short stint in Henry Kissinger's consulting shop. 
At Dartmouth, Mr. Geithner "took just one economics class and found it especially dreary." After three years at Kissinger Associates, he spent 13 years at the Treasury Department, becoming close to both Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, and then worked at the government-supported International Monetary Fund. Messrs. Rubin and Summers recommended him to run the New York Fed. "I felt intimidated by how much I had to learn," he writes of taking up the job in 2003. 
Mr. Geithner's New York Fed was the primary regulator for Citigroup, where Mr. Rubin was a director. Although a former senior executive at the bank had warned Mr. Geithner that Citigroup was "out of control," and the staff at the New York Fed "always considered [Citigroup] a laggard in risk management," Mr. Geithner figured it wasn't as risky as many of the non-banks that didn't hold insured deposits. Looking back now, he concludes that "Bob Rubin's presence at Citi surely tempered my skepticism, and he probably gave Citi an undeserved aura of competence in my mind." Citigroup would require a series of taxpayer bailouts after it had been allowed to hide more than $1 trillion in risky assets outside its balance sheet. Mr. Geithner admits that "it wasn't as well capitalized as we thought." 
Mr. Geithner was perhaps a natural choice to be Barack Obama's Treasury secretary, given how many Rubin and Summers associates were populating the administration. In his new job, he continued to promote his no-haircuts-for-creditors principle and even helped codify a plan for the largest firms to avoid bankruptcy if regulators believed their failure could be damaging to the financial system. 
Mr. Geithner scoffs at what he calls the "moral hazard fundamentalists" and "Old Testament" types who worry that bailing out financial firms will encourage even riskier behavior. He says that the financial rescue programs enacted in the crisis years were a success because the alternative—which no one can ever know—would have been far worse. What we do know is that, six years later, the economy is suffering through a historically weak recovery and the emergency programs haven't ended. The Federal Reserve is still providing easy credit for banks and for the U.S. government, which has racked up more than $8 trillion in additional debt since the end of 2007.

I think it's interesting to compare Rubin to his predecessor in the long transition to the Wall Street Uber Alles economy, Michael Milken. Back in the 1980s, Milken was the man with a plan, but government just didn't play that big a role in it. I suspect that Milken made a big mistake by moving in 1978 from the East Coast back home to Encino, CA, while Rubin has merely shuttled back and forth between NY and DC. Moreover, Milken was kind of odd, crass, pushy, and didn't have great hair like Rubin. Milken thought he had enough pull, but he ultimately went to prison.

Since Milken got out of prison a couple of decades ago, he's learned his lesson to butter up politicians and the media. Milken's Davos Jr. conference every April in Beverly Hills doesn't get your heads of state like Davos does, but it does get your Tony Blairs, Al Gores, and current governors of California.
       

May 11, 2014

"A Troublesome Inheritance" and the Hate Squad

The always angry PZ Myers at Pharyngula is angry about Nicholas Wade's new book:
I considered reading his book, just to tear it up, but I don’t think it’s worth the effort, from the reviews ...

Fortunately, PZ has read the ever self-confident Noah Smith at Noahpinion, who is confident he knows all about it:
Here's how academic racism generally works. Suppose you see two groups that have an observable difference: for example, suppose you note that Hungary has a higher per capita income than Romania. Now you have a data point. To explain that data point, you come up with a theory: the Hungarian race is more industrious than the Romanian race. But suppose you notice that Romanians generally do better at gymnastics than Hungarians. To explain that second data point, you come up with a new piece of theory: The Romanian race must have some genes for gymnastics that the Hungarian race lacks. 
You can keep doing this. Any time you see different average outcomes between two different groups, you can assume that there is a genetic basis for the difference. You can also tell "just-so stories" to back up each new assumption - for example, you might talk about how Hungarians are descended from steppe nomads who had to be industrious to survive, etc. etc. As new data arrive, you make more assumptions and more stories to explain them. 

Of course, a dozen years ago, I was writing this. The state of the art in human biodiversity thought has progressed well past my first review in 2002 of Lynn and Vanhanen's IQ and the Wealth of Nations, but the Myers and Smiths haven't caught up even with that.

Or here's my 17-year-old article that shows how to disentangle nature and nurture when it came to the complicated data involving Olympic running.

Nobody ever said that figuring out what part is nature and what part is nurture is easy: that's why it's the Big Leagues of intellectual life.
      

The Obama Administration's own goal in Ukraine

From the NYT:
DONETSK, Ukraine — Snap referendums conducted by secessionists in eastern Ukraine in hopes of legitimizing their cause drew large crowds on Sunday, and unfolded in a carnival-like atmosphere that was celebratory in some places and lethally violent in others. 
In Donetsk, the capital of one of the two provinces where pro-Russian separatists have declared “people’s republics,” there were balloons and loudspeakers playing Soviet-era songs, and families came to vote with children in tow. But outside the provincial capitals, the voting took place in such a state of raw chaos that in one town a man was shot to death by pro-Ukrainian paramilitaries on a sidewalk outside a polling station. ...
The referendums were roundly condemned from the outset, both in Kiev and internationally, as elections that could not possibly be free and fair, given the political turmoil enveloping the region. But while the results were unlikely to be accepted by anyone but the organizers and their Russian patrons as reflecting the democratic will of the majority, the turnout on Sunday appeared to at least demonstrate that the separatists had substantial popular support. ...
“I am voting because I don’t want war,” said one participant, Roman Agrisov, a 40-year-old steelworker, as he stood in a line that was three people wide and a hundred yards long, snaking out the door of Middle School No. 32 in Donetsk.
He and some fellow voters said they thought the referendums would deter the authorities in Kiev from pressing military operations to reassert control in the region. Others were less sure whether it would tamp down the unrest or stoke it further, but said they were voting anyway to reject the interim government in Kiev, which they consider illegitimate. ...
Galina Kuznetsov, an election volunteer overseeing this polling station, said in the morning that she was pleased with the way things were going because nobody was drunk. “You don’t see one person here with a bottle of beer,” she said. “Everybody is sober.” 
But shortly after noon, a pro-Ukrainian volunteer militia backed by Ukrainian army troops who guarded nearby checkpoints swept in and broke up the voting in Krasnoarmiysk, though the organizers managed to carry off the cardboard boxes of ballots, presumably to count. ...
The scene darkened, with the voting already forgotten and a group of local men taunting the militiamen, who took up positions in City Hall and made a show of cocking their Kalashnikov assault rifles. One man in the group who advanced on them, ignoring warning shots over his head, was shot and killed, and another was wounded. 

The good news is that Slavs (or at least northern flatland Slavs) generally don't hate other Slavs the way everybody in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, or Libya hates everybody else. While there has been lethal violence in Eastern Ukraine in the last couple of months, it has been more notable for scary scenes where the people involved manage to avoid killing each other. For example, here's a Tianamen Square-style confrontation between unarmed civilians and a military armored vehicle sent by the new government in Kiev:

Keep in mind that the unarmed local civilians putting their bodies in front of the war machine are terrorists who hate our freedom. Also, you may recall that the overthrown elected president of Ukraine never sent in the Army like this to confront protesters. Well, stop recalling that -- it just complicates the Narrative.

The danger is that, while Slavs are slow to fight, they are pretty good at having really big wars once they finally get going.
   
I can't imagine that President Obama is terribly happy to spend 2014 worrying about some part of the globe of which he knows nothing. He was planning to spend his second term's foreign policy on southeast Asia -- the "pivot to Asia" -- an area he is personally familiar with. But personnel is policy, and if Obama won't sack the underlings who have been in charge of this region for him, he'll get more of the same.
        

The Secretary of State isn't that bright

I rather like John F. Kerry. He strikes me as a fairly cool guy. Personally, I'd rather drink a glass of fine French wine with Kerry than a non-alcoholic beer with George W. Bush.

For example, in the winter of 2004, when the media had derailed Democratic frontrunner Howard Dean with the Dean Scream Meme and Kerry's path to the presidential nomination looked wide open, allegations of adultery suddenly popped up. But, within a day or two, the young lady of interest simply left the country on an extended trip overseas and the scandal vanished along with her. 

But, let me point out, that there's never been that much evidence that Kerry is smart enough to be a good Secretary of State. I recently reread Henry Kissinger's huge volume of memoirs devoted just to the tumultuous years 1973-74. Now, whatever else you want to say about Nixon and Ford's secretary of state, everybody was in agreement that Dr. K was smart enough for the job.

On the other hand, is John F. Kerry smart enough to hold all the pieces of the puzzle in his head and keep track of how each influences the other? And if he ever was, can he still do it now that he's in his 70s? These kind of questions are almost never asked because Kerry is a Democrat, and Democrats, especially upper crust ones, are assumed by the media to have higher IQs than Republicans. (Not that IQ exists, of course, but if it does, everybody knows that Democrats have higher IQs.)

Actually, though, we have a lot of data on how well Kerry performed on various objective tests as a young man, and it's in line with how well he performed as a presidential candidate in 2004: not bad, but nothing special. I spent a huge amount of time in 2004 researching the performance of Kerry and George W. Bush on the Officer Qualifying Tests they took in the 1960s while seniors at Yale to get into the Navy and Air Force Reserve, respectively. 

From the New York Times:
Secret Weapon for Bush? 
By JOHN TIERNEY

Published: October 24, 2004

 To Bush-bashers, it may be the most infuriating revelation yet from the military records of the two presidential candidates: the young George W. Bush probably had a higher I.Q. than did the young John Kerry. 
That, at least, is the conclusion of Steve Sailer, a conservative columnist at the Web magazine Vdare.com and a veteran student of presidential I.Q.'s. During the last presidential campaign Mr. Sailer estimated from Mr. Bush's SAT score (1206) that his I.Q. was in the mid-120's, about 10 points lower than Al Gore's.
Mr. Kerry's SAT score is not known, but now Mr. Sailer has done a comparison of the intelligence tests in the candidates' military records. They are not formal I.Q. tests, but Mr. Sailer says they are similar enough to make reasonable extrapolations. 
Mr. Bush's score on the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test at age 22 again suggests that his I.Q was the mid-120's, putting Mr. Bush in about the 95th percentile of the population, according to Mr. Sailer. Mr. Kerry's I.Q. was about 120, in the 91st percentile, according to Mr. Sailer's extrapolation of his score at age 22 on the Navy Officer Qualification Test. 
Linda Gottfredson, an I.Q. expert at the University of Delaware, called it a creditable analysis said she was not surprised at the results or that so many people had assumed that Mr. Kerry was smarter. "People will often be misled into thinking someone is brighter if he says something complicated they can't understand," Professor Gottfredson said. 
Many Americans still believe a report that began circulating on the Internet three years ago, and was quoted in "Doonesbury," that Mr. Bush's I.Q. was 91, the lowest of any modern American president. But that report from the non-existent Lovenstein Institute turned out to be a hoax.

Here's my enormous 2004 VDARE.com article explaining the methodology.

Tom Brokaw asked Kerry about my study, as I recounted in The American Conservative:
For a moment, I thought Sen. John F. Kerry was the exception to the rule that all liberals are secretly obsessed—even though they tell each other they don’t believe in it—with IQ. 
The Thursday before the election, Tom Brokaw interviewed Kerry on the “NBC Nightly News” and told him, “Someone has analyzed the president’s military aptitude tests and yours and concluded that he has a higher IQ than you do.” 
Kerry instantly dismissed this news with admirable nonchalance, “That’s great. More power.” ...
When Kerry insouciantly replied to Brokaw as if he didn’t care what he scored on a 90-minute exam 38 years ago, as if he believed that all that he had accomplished since then was the proper measure of the man, I was impressed. 
But then Kerry broke the spell by quibbling about my research, “I don’t know how they’ve done it, because my record is not public. So I don’t know where you’re getting that from.” Evidently, IQ mattered to Kerry, too. 
A few days later, Brokaw went on Don Imus’s radio show and revealed just how much it bugged Kerry that I had said Bush probably had a slightly higher IQ. After the cameras had stopped rolling, Kerry had rationalized to Brokaw, “I must have been drinking the night before I took that military aptitude test.”

Kerry's performance in naval officer training programs was good but not exceptional:
During the 3.5 month-long Officer Candidate School, Kerry outperformed his test score, finishing 80th out of his class of 563. 
I found two other class ranks for Kerry. In a ten-week class on damage-control, Kerry ranked 17th out of 33. In a three-week Command and Control course, he ranked 7th of 22.

Then, the year after the election, Michael Kranish broke this story in the Boston Globe:
During last year's presidential campaign, John F. Kerry was the candidate often portrayed as intellectual and complex, while George W. Bush was the populist who mangled his sentences. 
But newly released records show that Bush and Kerry had a virtually identical grade average at Yale University four decades ago. 
In 1999, The New Yorker published a transcript indicating that Bush had received a cumulative score of 77 for his first three years at Yale and a roughly similar average under a non-numerical rating system during his senior year. 
Kerry, who graduated two years before Bush, got a cumulative 76 for his four years, according to a transcript that Kerry sent to the Navy when he was applying for officer training school. He received four D's in his freshman year out of 10 courses, but improved his average in later years.

This shouldn't have come as a surprise after Kerry's dreary performance running for President. Like Romney in 2012, he won the first presidential debate due to an awful performance by the incumbent but then couldn't deliver a knockout in the next two. And Kerry's speeches ...

As Chris Suellentrop of Slate wrote in "Kerry vs. His Script: Why can't the man read a simple speech? Declaring war on declarative sentences," the candidate repeatedly insisted on padding out the well-written speeches his staff gave him with meaningless improvisations:
The campaign gives reporters the text of each of Kerry's speeches "as prepared for delivery," apparently to show how much Kerry diverges from them... 
Kerry proves incapable of reading simple declarative sentences. He inserts dependent clauses and prepositional phrases until every sentence is a watery mess. Kerry couldn't read a Dick and Jane book to schoolchildren without transforming its sentences into complex run-ons worthy of David Foster Wallace. 
Kerry's speechwriters routinely insert the line "We can bring back that mighty dream," near the conclusion of his speeches, presumably as an echo of Ted Kennedy's Shrum-penned "the dream will never die" speech from the 1980 Democratic convention. Kerry saps the line of its power. Here's his version from Monday's speech in Tampa: "We can bring back the mighty dream of this country, that's what's at stake in these next two weeks."... 
Kerry flubs his punch lines, sprinkles in irrelevant anecdotes, and talks himself into holes that he has trouble improvising his way out of. He steps on his applause lines by uttering them prematurely, and then when they roll up on his TelePrompTer later, he's forced to pirouette and throat-clear until he figures out how not to repeat himself. He piles adjective upon adjective until it's like listening to a speech delivered by Roget. 
Kerry's health-care speech Monday in Tampa was a classic of the form. The written text contained a little more than 2,500 words. By the time he was finished, Kerry had spoken nearly 5,300 words—not including his introductory remarks and thank-yous to local politicians—more than doubling the verbiage.

Last year, Kerry flubbed up badly regarding chemical weapons in Syria, but the Russian foreign ministry bailed him out by turning his scoffing words into a constructive solution. But the international situation has turned more perilous since then, and the country needs a first-rate Secretary of State.
   

World War T, Part MCCIX

From the NYT:
Hagel ‘Open’ to Review of Military Policy on Transgender People 
By HELENE COOPER MAY 11, 2014 
WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said on Sunday that the military should “continually” review its prohibition on transgender people serving in the armed forces, calling into question whether the Pentagon’s ban may eventually be lifted, as was the ban on gay men and lesbians in the military. 
While such a reversal appears to be far in the future — the Pentagon’s stock talking points on the issue have been that it is under continuous review — Mr. Hagel, appearing on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, pronounced himself “open” to a review of the policy and added, “Every qualified American who wants to serve our country should have an opportunity if they fit the qualifications and can do it.”
 
Stop snickering, this is serious stuff. In the near future, you could lose your job if you aren't properly submissive on this burning issue.
       

Luke Ford interviews retired (not fired) Nicholas Wade

From Luke Ford:
I just spoke by phone with the famous genetics reporter. He retired from the New York Times two years ago but still contributes occasional articles.

Listen to the interview here. Update: Ford has transcribed the whole interview so you can now read it.