NYT: "A Jew Not Quite English Enough"

One of the juicier political tales of recent years was the 2010 sibling struggle for leadership of the British Labour Party between brothers David and Ed Miliband, with the younger, more leftist brother Ed winning, and the elder brother going into a sort of exile in America.

Geoffrey Levy has written a fun article for the Daily Mail about the brothers' late father, the far left intellectual Ralph Miliband, and his relationship to his sons' sibling rivalry.

On a hot summer day, a young man made his way alone to Highgate Cemetery in North London to make a lifelong vow.  

Solemnly, he stood at the grave of Karl Marx at a moment when, in his own words, 'the cemetery was utterly deserted . . . I remember standing in front of the grave, fist clenched, and swearing my own private oath that I would be faithful to the workers' cause'.  

The year was 1940. The young man was Ralph Miliband, a Jewish immigrant who, with his father, had fled to London from Belgium just weeks earlier to escape the Nazi Holocaust. 

Miliband, father of Ed and David Miliband, died in 1994, aged 70, soon after the publication of his last book, Socialism For A Sceptical Age. In it, the venerated Marxist philosopher and academic continued to espouse his lifelong 'socialist' cause. 

One voice, however, vehemently informed him that he was still pursuing a lost cause. It was that of his elder son David. He did not mince his words.  

Having read the manuscript before publication, David wrote to his father asking, 'whether you are restating a case that has been traduced in theory or practice, or whether you are advancing a new case. I think that the book reads like the former . . .'

The word 'traduced' - which means 'disgraced' or 'denigrated' - was surely rather harsh, considering his aged father had always included his two sons (even when they were small), in the trenchant political discussions with ever-present academics and Left-wing thinkers that took place round the basement dining table of the family home in Primrose Hill, North London. 

Indeed, some family friends feel this episode, not long before their father died, could have been a contributory factor towards the younger - and considerably more Left-wing - son Ed unexpectedly deciding to fight his elder brother for the leadership of the Labour Party in 2010, and, of course, beating him. 

In his explosive memoirs, serialised last week in the Mail, Gordon Brown's spin doctor Damian McBride argued that Ed Miliband was obsessed with maintaining his father's legacy. Winning the leadership was Ed's 'ultimate tribute' to his father - an attempt to 'achieve his father's vision and ensure David Miliband did not traduce it'. Again, that word 'traduce'. 

Ed is now determined to bring about that vision. How proud Ralph would have been to hear him responding the other day to a man in the street who asked when he was 'going to bring back socialism' with the words: 'That's what we are doing, sir.'  

Ed's victory over David, made possible only with the unions' block votes, was perfectly in step with his father's fervent and undimmed conviction that 'alliance with the trade unions is not only one of the party's great strengths; it is by far its greatest strength'.  

Ralph's Marxism was uncompromising. ...

I have no idea if Levy's psychoanalyzing of the Miliband family makes sense, but it's certainly interesting. And it's hard to say that attention shouldn't be paid to the potential next prime minister.

But that's not good enough for Roger Cohen, op-ed columnist for the New York Times, who is now denouncing Levy in the NYT for "Jewish stereotyping" of Ralph Miliband.

A Jew Not Quite English Enough 

By ROGER COHEN 

... This is Ralph (born Adolphe) Miliband, the late father of David Miliband, Britain’s former foreign secretary, and of Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour Party. He is also, for that voice of the British conservative heartland, The Daily Mail, “The Man Who Hated Britain.” 

The headline stood atop a recent piece that portrayed Ralph Miliband as a disloyal socialist. He is accused of “availing himself” of a good British education while criticizing the nationalism he encountered on arrival. He helped his father in “rescuing furniture from bombed houses in the Blitz.” He stood reverently at the grave of Karl Marx in north London. He denounced the Falklands War, even while — The Mail insinuates — scheming to avoid death duties on the family house in fashionable Primrose Hill, and suffered from a “giant-sized social chip on his shoulder” that explained his criticism of British institutions. 

Sound familiar? The rootless Jewish Bolshevik who profits from others’ losses, shows no loyalty to the society in which he prospers, and devises clever two-faced financial maneuvers that demonstrate his essential hypocrisy: All this could of course have been borrowed from the Nazi propaganda Ralph Miliband fled as a young man. 

No matter, for The Daily Mail, that the young Jewish immigrant put his life on the line for Britain. Jews also served Germany with distinction as officers during World War I, but their military decorations, displayed with pride in their Berlin living rooms, did not prove they were loyal Germans (even if they loved nothing more than Germany) and could not save them.... 

... the evident Jewish stereotyping oozing from every insinuation in The Mail piece, which was written by a Jew, Geoffrey Levy, and defended most publicly by another Jew, The Mail’s deputy editor, Jon Steafel. For Levy and Steafel, in what the historian Lewis Namier characterized as the land of the “trembling Israelites,” Miliband was somehow not quite English enough. He was the Jewish communist outsider masquerading as an Englishman. 

John Mann, a Labour member of Parliament and chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism, clarified the issue in a tweet. He called the attack on Ralph Miliband a “classical age-old anti-Semitic smear about disloyal Jews.” 

Dressed up as a defense of British values — when in fact it was a demonstration of bigotry in a land of overriding tolerance — that is precisely what The Mail article was: a smear laden with stereotypes of the scheming Jew. The fact that it has scarcely been debated as such demonstrates the existence of a problem rather than its absence. 

In his book “Anglomania,” Ian Buruma writes about his grandparents, German Jewish immigrants who became British, felt British, loved Britain — and yet. He writes: “Instead of using the word ‘Jew’ in public we would say ‘forty-five.’ The origin of this odd phrase is unknown. When Bernard was refused a senior position in a famous hospital in 1938, he wrote to Win: ‘It is the old, old story — (45).”’ 

This is indeed an old, old story. Keep quiet, use code, ignore the occasional comments about “pushiness” or “flashiness” or “stinginess” or “Jewish behavior” (whatever that might be) or a comment about a Jewish woman’s “great conk of a nose.” This, after all, is no more than genteel prejudice, harmless enough, unlike the Continental brand that Ralph Miliband fled. 

In The Mail article, a letter of Miliband’s is quoted: “Respectability, good taste, don’t rock the boat, there will always be an England, foreigners, Jews, natives etc. are all right in their place and their place is outside.” 

The worst of the piece is that it reflects the attitudes that could give Miliband these feelings at a time when Britain is a far more open society than the one he first encountered. 

Fortunately, David Miliband, at least, has found asylum from London's looming anti-Semites. Cohen concludes on a defiant note:

David Miliband tweeted that his father loved Britain. He now lives in New York, city of full-throated Jewishness. 

Well ... Okay!

Considering that Benjamin Disraeli was Queen Victoria's favorite prime minister in the 1870s, perhaps, though, Levy was objecting to Ralph Miliband's ideology rather than their mutual ethnicity? From Wikipedia:

"[Ralph] Miliband published his first book, Parliamentary Socialism, in 1961, which examined the role that the Labour Party played in British politics and society from a Marxist position, finding it wanting for a lack of radicalism.[10] .... He began arguing that socialists in Britain had to start working towards building a viable alternative that would be genuinely revolutionary socialist in its positions.[12]"

Let's take a look at recent British political history. The two main candidates for leadership of the Labour Party were Jewish (brothers, to boot, and sons of a well-known Jewish radical). The Tory prime minister David Cameron is a little bit Jewish by ancestry, and the previous Tory leader, Michael Howard, was Jewish.

Perhaps anti-Semitism at the top of British life is not quite the burning problem that it appears to Mr. Cohen?

Fall Panhandlemania

I want to thank readers who have recently donated, and alert others that it's time for the Fall 2013 iSteve Panhandling Drive. There's nothing that encourages me more to keep up the fight than my readers' appreciation, especially in monetary form.

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Does Race Exist (part 49)?

Here are a couple of professors of philosophy debating the existence of race.

Adam Hochman explains "how to be a social constructionist about race in the post-genomic era."

In his recent article Race: a social destruction of a biological concept, Sesardic argues that social constructionists have been ‘refuting’ a straw-man characterisation of racial naturalism, the view that ‘race’ is a legitimate biological category (Sesardic, 2010). Social constructionists have burdened the concept of race, he claims, with clearly unacceptable essentialist connotations; all with the aim of dismissing it outright. In light of the modern synthesis, with its rejection of species essentialism, we are committed to the rejection of racial essentialism. The task for race naturalists, then, is to develop a “biologically informed but non-essentialist concept of race” (Sesardic, 2010, p. 146). 

But what are race naturalists made of, if not straw?

Neven Sesardic responds to Hochman in Confusions about race: A new installment.

Why the rise of Open Borders moralizing?

Back in the mid-2000s, the Sand States — California, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida — were booming, especially in areas with many immigrants and descendants of recent immigrants, such as California’s Inland Empire. Powerful figures such as George W. Bush and Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide had repeatedly and explicitly framed the expansive mortgage lending of the mid-2000s as a bet on the credit-worthiness of minorities, especially Hispanics. Only bigots would be skeptical. 

The booming economies in heavily immigrant areas were promoted by pro-immigrationists as proving that only racists had doubts.

The Sand State mortgage catastrophes of 2007-2008 led to a change of tack among immigrationist intellectuals. Rather than reassess their policy recommendations following the huge blow to their empirical case, they shifted sharply toward a moralistic argument for more immigration. Instead of saying massive immigration was good for Americans, economists began saying more vociferously: It’s evil to care about your fellow Americans. So what about the empirical questions, the important one is ethical. We must let in more poor Third Worlders because caring about your fellow citizens is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Of course, this sacralization of disloyalty as the highest morality hasn't stopped economists from aspiring to salaried positions of influence in federal and state government.

A Theory of Airports

It seems pretty obvious that metropolises that host major air transport hubs (e.g., Atlanta, Dallas, or Chicago) enjoy major economic advantages over metropolises that don't, such as Cincinnati, Cleveland, or Milwaukee. All else being equal, if you are a frequent flyer, you would prefer to live in a metropolis that offers numerous direct flights, rather than having to change planes constantly in Atlanta and other privileged places.

This must have been studied a million times, but I'm not familiar with what rules of thumb have been discovered about which cities tend to become the winners in the air hub competition.

So, here's a theory based on my limited and extremely out of date experience with business travel. Maybe having an airport convenient to the white collar part of the metropolis helps. For example, Chicago’s old Midway airport was built in the middle of the industrial, polluted, smelly (stockyards and slaughterhouses) southwest side. 

But then, mighty O’Hare was built out in the northwest. The wind tends to blow from the north in Chicago, so the wealthy long ago moved out of the South Side for the north side. O’Hare thus turned out to be relatively convenient for the upper middle class.

In contrast, Cincinnati’s main airport is way out in the sticks in Kentucky. I presume business travelers tend to live on the Ohio side of the metropolis, so they probably don’t find the airport’s location as convenient as they would hope in a small metropolis.

Unfortunately, those are the only examples I can think of.

Deep History: Genetic Economics

From Vox:

Long-term barriers to growth 

Enrico Spolaore, Romain Wacziarg, 3 October 2013 

There is now widespread agreement that ‘deep’ history matters for comparative development. Recent research has shown that ancestry – the transmission of genetic and cultural traits across generations – matters more than the history of geographic regions. This column argues that long-term divergences in inherited traits can create barriers to the diffusion of technology. The greater a population’s genetic distance to the population on the technological frontier, the lower its relative income will be. Development policies should aim at reducing barriers to exchange and communication. 

Students of comparative development have turned their focus to factors rooted deeper and deeper in history. 

There is growing agreement that human and geographic factors inherited from eras as far removed as the Neolithic period still influence the wealth of nations today. 

An early example of this hypothesis was Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel (1997), where he argued that geographic advantages from early human history still affect prosperity today. 

Economists no longer focus exclusively on the proximate determinants of growth, such as capital accumulation or technology – they now study deeper causes rooted in long-term history. The debate today is not whether deep history matters, but why and through which mechanisms it operates to affect current outcomes. 

Ancestors matter, but why? 

An important insight from the recent empirical literature is that the history of populations is a much stronger predictor of current economic outcomes than the history of geographical locations. For example: 

A long familiarity with organised modes of government and a long exposure to agriculture are good for economic development. But it is the history of a population that matters – more than the population’s location. The US is rich today because of the historical heritage of its European colonisers. 

The deep history of North America matters much less (Putterman and Weil 2010; Comin, Easterly and Gong 2010). 

The reversal of fortune – documented by Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (2002) at the level of geographic locations for former colonies – disappears when correcting for ancestry and expanding the sample beyond former colonies (Spolaore and Wacziarg 2013a; Chanda, Cook and Putterman 2013). 

This once more suggests that development can be accounted for by factors that are transmitted from generation to generation. 

A closely related literature argues that geography and biology affect current development because of long-term indirect effects, transmitted from one generation to the next, and going back to prehistoric times (Diamond 1997; Olsson and Hibbs 2005; Ashraf and Galor 2011, 2013). 

Even though Jared Diamond’s well-known book Guns, Germs and Steel is often presented as a purely ‘geographic’ interpretation of comparative development, at its core is the historical transmission of biogeographic advantage – such as agricultural knowledge and resistance to germs – across generations. According to Diamond, early inhabitants of Eurasia passed those advantages on to their descendants, who then moved to dominate large parts of the rest of the world.

Lots more good stuff here.

In the comments to Alex Tabarrok's post at Marginal Revolution, I ask:

Steve Sailer October 7, 2013 at 4:46 pm 

It would be interesting to compare genetic distance to language distance. Does genetic distance provide us any retrospective predictive power that language distance does not? The two measures correlate positively, but there are a number of interesting test cases where they are strikingly divergent, such as Hungary, Finland, and Basque country.

And Dr. Spolaore, one of the co-authors, replies:

Enrico Spolaore October 7, 2013 at 7:05 pm 

Good question. In our article “The Diffusion of Development” (QJE, May 2009), Romain Wacziarg and I discuss the relation between genetic distance and linguistic distance, and study the effect of relative genetic distance on income differences when controlling for measures of linguistic distance (and religious distance) (pp. 504-514). We conclude (p. 512): “In summary, using the best available measures of linguistic and religious distance, the effect of genetic distance on income differences is reduced by about 12%, but the effect remains large and significant. Overall, these results are consistent with our interpretation: when we measure some specific differences in vertically transmitted traits, such as in language or religion, we obtain a reduction in the size of the coefficient on genetic distance, suggesting that genetic distance was capturing some of the barrier effects associated with differences in these vertical characteristics. However, the reduction is not large enough to suggest that genetic distance only captures the effect of linguistic and religious distance. On the contrary, the reduction is relatively modest, and the effect of genetic distance remains large and significant even when controlling for linguistic and religious distance. This suggests that language and religion are but two of the many vertical characteristics that differ across populations, and perhaps not the most important barriers to the diffusion of economic development.”

News Flash: Science proves important people pay less attention to unimportant people

Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, explains in the NYT:

A growing body of recent research shows that people with the most social power pay scant attention to those with little such power. This tuning out has been observed, for instance, with strangers in a mere five-minute get-acquainted session, where the more powerful person shows fewer signals of paying attention, like nodding or laughing. Higher-status people are also more likely to express disregard, through facial expressions, and are more likely to take over the conversation and interrupt or look past the other speaker. ...

This has profound implications for societal behavior and government policy.  

I didn't quite follow Goleman's logic all the way to the end, but it has something to do with Republicans being Bad.

As a follow-up, they should investigate the burning problem that beautiful women tend to pay scant attention to homely, cheaply dressed guys who hit on them in bars and supermarket checkout lines.

Tyler Cowen denounces Open Borders

From Marginal Revolution:

And no I do not favor open borders even though I do favor a big increase in immigration into the United States, both high- and low-skilled.  The simplest argument against open borders is the political one.  Try to apply the idea to Cyprus, Taiwan, Israel, Switzerland, and Iceland and see how far you get.  Big countries will manage the flow better than the small ones but suddenly the burden of proof is shifted to a new question: can we find any countries big enough (or undesirable enough) where truly open immigration might actually work? 

In my view the open borders advocates are doing the pro-immigration cause a disservice.  The notion of fully open borders scares people, it should scare people, and it rubs against their risk-averse tendencies the wrong way.  I am glad the United States had open borders when it did, but today there is too much global mobility and the institutions and infrastructure and social welfare policies of the United States are, unlike in 1910, already too geared toward higher per capita incomes than what truly free immigration would bring.  

Plunking 500 million or a billion poor individuals in the United States most likely would destroy the goose laying the golden eggs.  (The clever will note that this problem is smaller if all wealthy countries move to free immigration at the same time, but of course that is unlikely.)

Nobel Prize Week begins

From NobelPrize.org:

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2013 was awarded jointly to James E. Rothman, Randy W. Schekman and Thomas C. Südhof "for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells."

It's always interesting to look for new trends in laureates. These, however, look traditional: Two Americans and a German.

Key publications run from 1979, 1984, 1990, 1990, 1993, and 1993. My vague impression is that the prizes started to lag more in time to make sure they don't miss all the great stuff done in the 1970s. You could test that using the Nobel Foundation's lists of "key publications."

The Dynastic Gene (megalomania allele)

An article from the Los Angeles Times about my high school's football team:

It's all in the family name for prep football players 

By Eric Sondheimer 

From the land of high school football weirdness comes this tale: 

One of the top defensive players at Sherman Oaks Notre Dame is senior linebacker Anthony Gutierrez, the identical name of last year's top linebacker. 

They're brothers. And that led a reporter to ask the question: What's going on? 

Their father is also named Anthony Gutierrez and he decided to name his first son Anthony. No problem there. But then he started feeling guilty. 

"He didn't want to name the oldest Anthony and not the others," the second Anthony son said. "He didn't want to be unfair." 

So the second son was named Anthony, then the third son also became Anthony. He's 3. 

"People think it's weird," the mother, Gloria, said. 

Last season, Notre Dame players called them "The Anthonys." 

... To avoid identification weirdness, everyone has been given a nickname. Big Anthony is the father. Anthony is the first born. Tony is the second. Antonio is the third. 

The Anthonys are just two boys away from equaling boxer George Foreman's five sons, all of whom are named George. 

At Long Beach Poly, there's Rodney Shorter II and Rodney Shorter III. They're brothers. One's a senior linebacker and the other is a sophomore running back. One is known as Bama and other Little Bama. Their father is also Rodney Shorter.

Making money

The new $100 bill, with its additional anti-counterfeiting features

The $100 bill is an especially hot item on the global stage: The Federal Reserve estimates that one-half to two-thirds of $100 notes in circulation are abroad at any given time, making them one of the nation’s largest exports.

Remember how, before internationally usable credit cards, when you were about to travel abroad you first bought a bundle of American Express travelers checks? You told yourself that when you returned, you would take your unused travelers checks to the Amex office to get (most) of your money back. But, it turned out, you were tired from your trip so you just stuck them in a drawer, rationalizing that you were sure to travel internationally real soon now again so you'd just use them then. But, it turned out, you actually didn't get out of the country for several years, and by the time you did, you'd forgotten you had travelers checks sitting around, and even if you did remember, they were probably in one of those 8 still unpacked moving boxes of old vacation souvenirs and eight track tapes, so you just bought some more travelers checks from American Express. Meanwhile, interest rates were running 10% annually.

What a great business Amex had! Just sell people fancy pieces of paper for money. 

This is totally different from what the U.S. government does, of course. I think. But I have to say that I've never understood money at all. Trading salt for bullets in the Sahara is about as far as my powers of abstraction go when it comes to money. By the way, if you someday take the tour of the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington, don't ask any of the employees if they ever have so much work to do that they have to take some of it home with them. They've heard it before.

I'm reminded of the scene in the 1984 movie The Killing Fields when Dr. Haing S. Ngor is making his escape from the Khmer Rouge. There's a close up shot of a roll of American $100 bills that will be essential in getting out of Cambodia. This was one of 1984's U-S-A! U-S-A! moments. It's hard to recall just how battered American economic self-esteem was after the late 1970s, but I spoke to several viewers at the time who felt like Sally Field accepting an Oscar: "You like it! You really like our paper money!"

Of course, most money doesn't exist in paper form, just in electronic notation. So, how much does it benefit America that the digital dollar is the reserve currency for, say, the oil trade? Former French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing argued that the U.S. enjoyed a sizable "exorbitant privilege." This Wikipedia article sums up various studies attempting to quantify this concept, but they make my head hurt.

But, the vague sense that a few insiders' heads must not hurt so that we'd all better do what they say, has vague but broad political effects. Because I, like most people, don't comprehend anything about reserve currencies, I find myself a sucker for those who intimate that they know just how uncountable are the benefits America gets from dollars being the reserve currency and that they know how to keep the dollar the reserve currency.

So, they imply, if the government were to prosecute Wall Street muckety-mucks, or tax billionaires more, or not build the F-35 flying money pit, or not bomb Syria, or not invite the world, or whatever violates this moment's DC-NY Economist-reading consensus ... well that would have catastrophic consequences that little me can't begin to understand. They obviously must understand things I don't, so who am I to question their plans to, say, build 10 new aircraft carriers?

Is the "No True Scotsman" fallacy a fallacy?

In recent years, as the logical objection "Correlation does not prove causation!" has spread to the lower depths of the Internet, the cool kids have increasingly turned to retorting "No True Scotsman." It's proving an increasingly popular safeguard against Noticing Patterns.

No true Scotsman 

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 

[For the practice of wearing a kilt without undergarments, see True Scotsman.] 

No true Scotsman is an informal fallacy, an ad hoc attempt to retain an unreasoned assertion.[1] When faced with a counterexample to a universal claim ("no Scotsman would do such a thing"), rather than denying the counterexample or rejecting the original universal claim, this fallacy modifies the subject of the assertion to exclude the specific case or others like it by rhetoric, without reference to any specific objective rule ("no true Scotsman would do such a thing").  ...

The use of the term was advanced by British philosopher Antony Flew: 

Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Glasgow Morning Herald and seeing an article about how the "Brighton Sex Maniac Strikes Again". Hamish is shocked and declares that "No Scotsman would do such a thing". The next day he sits down to read his Glasgow Morning Herald again; and, this time, finds an article about an Aberdeen man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. This fact shows that Hamish was wrong in his opinion but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says, "No true Scotsman would do such a thing".[4] ...

An example of a political application of the fallacy could be in asserting that "no democracy starts a war", then distinguishing between mature or "true" democracies, which never start wars, and "emerging democracies", which may start them.[3] 

How is our understanding of the human world improved by snickering about "No True Scotsman" fallacies when somebody offers to refine their initial assertion to make it more accurate? Obviously, Flew's example is intended to be comical. In contrast, Wikipedia's example about democracies and war is not inherently implausible, but the Wikipedians don't seem to notice. To them, they're both examples of the No True Scotsman fallacy.

I have no idea what's empirically true about Wikipedia's democracy / war assertion, but offering a distinction between mature and emerging democracies is hardly prime facie derisible. You could go on to define maturity in terms of years of endurance or numbers of peaceful changes of power or whatever and then see if that pans out statistically.

Nor is even the literal No True Scotsman argument itself automatically foolhardy:

Angus: No Scotsman rides in an electric buggy while playing golf! It's American degeneracy.

Jock: Well, actually, a survey shows that about 3% of Scotsmen ride while playing.

Angus: No True Scotsman rides in an electric buggy while playing golf! 

Jock: I lost my left leg serving in the Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders in Yemen in 1967, so I can't walk 18 holes anymore. The Honorable Company of Edinburgh Golfers unanimously voted to allow me to play Muirfield with an electric buggy annually on Bonnie Prince Charlie's coronation day in a two-ball foursome in which I partner with my boyhood friend from the streets of Edinburgh, Sean Connery (who, of course, walks).

Angus: Okay, No Two-Legged True Scotsman rides in an electric buggy while playing golf!

In general, we're seeing an ongoing convergence between the bad intellectual habits of two groups that are powerfully represented in Internet discussions: the politically correct and the Aspergery. The former dislike pattern recognition and the latter love mechanistic computer-programming style reasoning. And they increasingly come together to try to shut down probabilistic thinking about human behavior.

Autumn iSteve Panhandling Drive

I've been running quarterly fundraisers for the last year, and they've been an encouraging success. My readers have been quite generous. I deeply value and am inspired by your feedback (especially your feedback in the form of money). 

So, it's time for the Autumn 2013 iSteve Panhandling Drive.

First, you can make a tax deductible contribution via VDARE by clicking here. You can use credit card or check (please put my name on the memo line of any checks).

Second, you can make a non-tax deductible contribution by credit card via WePay by clicking here. 

Third: You can mail a non-tax deductible donation to:

Steve Sailer

P.O Box 4142

Valley Village, CA 91607-4142

Thanks.

In defense of fashionistas

Here's an NYT article about a lady designer in the brand new country of South Sudan who is pitching fashion as something that might give her country a bit of an international image and something that locals can feel proud of. Who knows if that will work, but it's worth a try because the South Sudanese (such as the Nuer and the Dinka) tend to possess this spindly Avatar-style elegance as if their ancestors had been kidnapped by flying saucers thousands of years ago, and they've been evolving ever since on a lower gravity planet.

On Fashion Runway, South Sudan Takes Steps Toward a National Identity 

JUBA, South Sudan — Even by the standards of fashion models, the women teetering in their high heels on the dirt catwalk here were remarkably tall and slender. But judging by South Sudan’s many towering inhabitants, they were hardly out of the ordinary in the young nation’s capital.

Of the many articles I've ever read about the difficulties of southern Sudan, this is one of the few that mentions what the locals tend to look like: tall. This may have something to do with the fact that it was written from a fashion standpoint.

I always thought that it was a mistake for sympathetic journalists to skip over how distinctive looking southern Sudanese tend to be in the interests of not offending modern customs against Noticing. Without a visual hook for readers to hang the story upon, the long struggle of southern Sudanese to be free of the brown northern Sudanese just sounded like More Bad News Out of Africa.

Fashion folks aren't necessarily the most likable human beings in history, but they do feel themselves exempt from the taboo against seeing with their own two eyes.

Is Noël Wells the first ever even slightly Mexican American SNL cast member?

Noël Wells

From the Washington Post:

As ‘Saturday Night Live’ cast reboots, questions about diversity emerge 

By Paul Farhi, Published: October 3 E-mail the writer 

During an often-glorious 38-year run, “Saturday Night Live” has featured some accomplished comic players of color: Eddie Murphy, Tim Meadows, Chris Rock, Tracy Morgan, Maya Rudolph, Kenan Thompson. 

Is that enough diversity for a program that has come to define satire on American television? 

... In another of its periodic resets of its ever-evolving cast, the show added six cast members this season — five of whom are white and male. 

This development has elicited a rebuke of sorts from within. Jay Pharoah, who along with Thompson is one of two African Americans in the 16-member cast, told the Web site TheGrio this week that the NBC show should hire an African American woman. ...

Otherwise one of the black male performers has to portray Oprah, who will probably be back in the news all through Oscar season.

The cast includes a performer of Hispanic-Tunisian descent (newcomer Noël Wells) and one of Persian heritage (Nasim Pedrad). 

But nonwhite cast members are overwhelmingly the exception. Horatio Sanz and Armisen were the first and only Latinos in the cast until Wells arrived; 

Obviously, everybody wants to talk about blacks. But how many Mexican Americans have been one of 137 cast members over the decades? Sanz was born in Chile, and Armisen's mother Hildegard was born in Venezuela, which leaves obscure featured performer Noël Wells' one grandparent as the sole Mexican-American hope. From IMDB:

She is half Tunisian and a quarter Hispanic.

And she's from San Antonio, increasing the odds that her one Spanish surnamed grandparent is Mexican. Or maybe the grandparent was a Tunisian-Mexican?

But, can you be Mexican and spell your name with an umlaut? Isn't that a dealbreaker?

I've always found Lorne Michaels hilarious, so I'd look forward to hearing his testimony in a disparate impact case: you know, 0.25 out of 137 for a group that makes up about 1/10th of the country seems kinda suspicious, don't it? I'm sure the Obama Administration will be filing its discrimination lawsuit against SNL any day now.

I like my reading just a little on the Spergy side *

It's not exactly a new discovery that reading good literature tends to improve perceptions, intuitions, and empathy, but it's fun to see an experiment, even if the finding that reading five minutes of Chekov makes a difference deserves skepticism.

For Better Social Skills, Scientists Recommend a Little Chekhov

... Something by Chekhov or Alice Munro will help you navigate new social territory better than a potboiler by Danielle Steel. 

That is the conclusion of a study published Thursday in the journal Science. It found that after reading literary fiction, as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction, people performed better on tests measuring empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence — skills that come in especially handy when you are trying to read someone’s body language or gauge what they might be thinking.

Here's the title:

Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind

A Theory of Mind is what autistics lack. From Wikipedia:

Theory of mind (often abbreviated "ToM") is the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, and intentions that are different from one's own.

From the NYT:

The researchers say the reason is that literary fiction often leaves more to the imagination, encouraging readers to make inferences about characters and be sensitive to emotional nuance and complexity. 

... The researchers, social psychologists at the New School for Social Research in New York City, recruited their subjects through that über-purveyor of reading material, Amazon.com. To find a broader pool of participants than the usual college students, they used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, where people sign up to earn money for completing small jobs. 

People ranging in age from 18 to 75 were recruited for each of five experiments. 

They were paid $2 or $3 each to read for a few minutes. Some were given excerpts from award-winning literary fiction (Don DeLillo, Wendell Berry). Others were given best sellers like Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl,” a Rosamunde Pilcher romance or a Robert Heinlein science fiction tale. 

In one experiment, some participants were given nonfiction excerpts, but we’re not talking “All the President’s Men.” To maximize the contrast, the researchers — looking for nonfiction that was well-written, but not literary or about people — turned to Smithsonian Magazine. “How the Potato Changed the World” was one selection.

That's an excerpt from Charles C. Mann's 2011 book 1493, which I reviewed here.

After reading — or in some cases reading nothing — the participants took computerized tests that measure people’s ability to decode emotions or predict a person’s expectations or beliefs in a particular scenario. In one test, called “Reading the Mind in the Eyes,” subjects did just that: they studied 36 photographs of pairs of eyes and chose which of four adjectives best described the emotion each showed. 

Is the woman with the smoky eyes aghast or doubtful? Is the man whose gaze has slivered to a squint suspicious or indecisive?  

But psychologists and other experts said the new study was powerful because it suggested a direct effect — quantifiable by measuring how many right and wrong answers people got on the tests — from reading literature for only a few minutes. 

“It’s a really important result,” said Nicholas Humphrey, an evolutionary psychologist who has written extensively about human intelligence, and who was not involved in the research. “That they would have subjects read for three to five minutes and that they would get these results is astonishing.”

An alternative explanation is that three to five minutes of Chekhov doesn't raise these capabilities meaningfully, it just primes people into making the effort to respond well on the test. Chekhov is such a striking reminder of how psychologically perceptive a member of the human race can be that he encourages you to up your game, at least for a little while.

(I think we need a Theory of Test, which would include the notion that modern people are pretty good at figuring out what testers want, and not bothering to expend energy on low stakes tests if that's not what the tester wants to hear. Much popular psychological research, such as stereotype threat, assumes that test-takers are more or less autistic in not noticing what the testers want to discover.)

On the other hand, when I last read a couple of Chekhov stories around 2009, I was exhausted by the time I finished the second. And then I didn't sleep well. I'm not in Chekhov's league. I, personally, like articles about the potato's effect on history.

Dr. Humphrey, an emeritus professor at Cambridge University’s Darwin College, said he would have expected that reading generally would make people more empathetic and understanding. “But to separate off literary fiction, and to demonstrate that it has different effects from the other forms of reading, is remarkable,” he said.

Is it "literary fiction" per se that matters? Does reading Borges make you less Aspergery than reading Gone With the Wind? If so, why?

---------

* By the way, I only listen to the country music radio station about 15 minutes per month, but it seems like every other month I hear "I Like My Women Just a Little on the Trashy Side." Is this a reference that others recognize? Or is it just randomness that I keep hearing the same obscure song? Or is there a deeper pattern? Chekhov and Borges would probably offer differing explanations.

Which KKK-infested county is this?

Try to guess which county (or which city or which state) this is:

Blacks are 5.5 times more likely than whites to be unemployed in YYY County. 

Three-quarters of the county’s African-American children live in poverty, compared to 5 percent of white children. 

Half of all black high school students don’t graduate on time, compared to 16 percent of white children. 

African-American children are 15 times more likely than their white counterparts to land in foster care. And black juveniles are six times more likely to be arrested than white juveniles. 

Those are some of the findings released Wednesday in a report, “Race to Equity,” by the XXX [state] Council on Children and Families. The report compared 40 indicators of well-being for YYY County residents, mostly between 2007 and 2011. In nearly every category, the study found, blacks, who make up 6.5 percent of the county’s population, fare much worse than whites. 

Eighteen months in the making, the report is offered as a baseline against which future efforts to close racial disparities in YYY County can be measured. It seeks to encapsulate and expand on previous studies that showed racial gaps in educational attainment, poverty, employment, participation in the criminal justice system and other indicators. 

Although some indicators show improvement — for example, arrests of black juveniles and adults is down significantly over the past four years — most of the numbers are bleak. 

“It’s no secret that we’ve had these disparities. A lot of groups have been working on this,” said Bob Jacobson, spokesman for the council. “But the approach to tackling the problem hasn’t been coordinated and comprehensive, which is really what’s needed.” 

Disparities are common across the United States, the report said, but the gap between the quality of life for whites and blacks is much worse in YYY County, the epicenter for progressive politics in XXX and often ranked among one of the best places in America to live. 

Rural or urban, north or south, across the United States, YYY County is “rock bottom” when it comes to racial disparities, Jacobson said, adding, “It’s really jarring.”

Any guesses?

A few hints:

- Obama won 71.0% of the vote in YYY County in 2012.

- ZZZ, the county seat of YYY County, is also the capital of the state of  XXX.

- ZZZ is a famous college town.

- I've often pointed out that the state of XXX, despite being admirable in numerous ways, has been terrible for African-Americans (and vice-versa). Blacks seem to do better in Texas or Georgia than this culturally quite different place, which has deep liberal roots going back to the eras of the Progressive and Socialist Parties.

- The Onion was founded here in 1988.

Ready to guess?

You can find this article in in the hometown newspaper here.

The regular guy (zillionaire division) ambassador

One more thought on Prince Bandar bin Sultan, now back in business as the Saudi spymaster trying to overthrow the Syrian government (and, according to Tehran-affiliated sites, the Tunisian one, too). Bandar had a spectacular 22-year run as Saudi ambassador to Washington that was remarkable not just for its length and brazenness, but for his adoption of a persona at odds with the traditional diplomatic style. 

Generally, ambassadors to Washington have been, ideally, either aristocrats (e.g., Lord Bryce or Lord Halifax) or suave imitations of aristocrats (e.g., Abba Eban). As I pointed out last year, Barack Obama was raised and educated to be some kind of diplomat, likely specializing in the non-Arab Islamic world.

The single most successful ambassador in American history, Benjamin Franklin (who talked the king of France's government into putting themselves on the path to the guillotine to make America independent), played up the opposite persona in Rousseau's Noble Savage-crazed Paris, dressing as some sort of sage from a backwoods region where haircuts hadn't yet been invented.

Part of Prince Bandar's effectiveness in Washington, however, is that he didn't act like an aristocrat, he acted like an NFL team owner. For example, it was international news in 2009 when Bandar didn't fly in on his America's Team-painted Airbus for the first game at the Dallas Cowboys' new super stadium. 

From McClatchy:

One of the big-money suite holders is a prince who finds himself mired in controversy over his private jet, which is painted in the colors of his beloved Cowboys. 

Team owner Jerry Jones will preside over Sunday's game from his suite on the 50-yard line. A suite nearby has been bought by one of the Cowboys’ most ardent fans, Jones'’ close friend, Prince Bandar bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia, one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world. 

Bandar, a national security advisor to the Saudi king, son of the crown prince, and the Saudi ambassador to the United States from 1983 to 2005, has a fanatical love of the Cowboys that dates to his days as a fighter pilot instructor in Texas in the 1970s. 

The Saudi Embassy tells the Star-Telegram that Bandar, who is observing the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, now lives in Saudi Arabia and will not be at the game against the New York Giants. 

During his time as ambassador, Bandar attended games in Jones' box at Texas Stadium and in Washington, visited the Cowboys' Valley Ranch training facility, gave Jones a silver-and-platinum life-size Cowboys helmet after Super Bowl XXVII, accompanied Jones during at least one critical game down to the sidelines with a large entourage, and hung out post-game in the locker room so many times that many Cowboys players know him simply as "the prince." 

Bandar flies around the world in a jet painted in the Cowboys' silver-and-blue colors.

Case Closed!

From Marginal Revolution:

Does increasing inequality weaken the case for additional low-skilled immigration? 

by Tyler Cowen  

In general, no.  Let’s assume that the increase in inequality is driven by new technologies, such as automation, or by foreign trade. 

In other words, let's begin by assuming that the increase in inequality is not caused even in part by additional low-skilled immigration. Ergo, increasing inequality does not weaken the case for additional low-skilled immigration.

Q.E.D.

Case closed!

See 1:44 to 2:01.

Pew's big survey of Jewish Americans

The Pew Center has published a long report, A Portrait of Jewish Americans, on the first major survey of Jews in America in a long time. This is a fairly exhausting task to take on, since there is a small sample size of Jews so standard random surveys don't work well, Jewish organizations have strong opinions on the subject of Jewish demographics (the list of acknowledgments is endless), and so many people have different opinions on (as the title of the second chapter says) "Who is a Jew?"

Pew came up with a little under 1.8% of the American adult population being "Jewish by religion" (presumably including converts). You don't have to be terribly religious to fit into this category: 31% of the Jews by religion attend synagogue never or less often than yearly.

Another 0.5% of the U.S. population are "Jews of no religion" (even though a majority of those identify as only partly Jewish. Lumping them together, Pew comes up with 2.2% of the adult population being Jewish. Oddly enough, that's the same number as the last couple of surveys over the last two decades. (That finding tends to cut down on the number of "Jews in Decline" headlines.)

Interestingly, another 1.0% of the population is "Jewish Background." But, they don't get counted as Jewish by the Pew Center. These are primarily people of Christian faith who have at least one Jewish parent. Among this group, 73% identify wholly or partly as Jewish, and 28% of them made a donation to a Jewish group within the last year, but that's not good enough. Apparently, the rule that the Pew Center came up with, after all its deliberations with Jewish leaders, is that people of no religion are fine being counted as Jews, even if they only partly identify as Jews, but professing a non-Jewish religion is a dealbreaker. Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli would have disagreed, but this is 21st Century America so the standards are not as lax as in Queen Victoria's time.

Finally, another 0.5% of the population falls into the "Jewish Affinity" category. This appears to consist of people like the late Christopher Hitchens and various other eccentrics. 

Here are the Pew rules:

- Jews by religion – people who say their religion is Jewish (and who do not profess any other religion); 

- Jews of no religion – people who describe themselves (religiously) as atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular, but who have a Jewish parent or were raised Jewish and who still consider themselves Jewish in some way. 

These first two groups constitute, for the purposes of this analysis, the “net” Jewish population. In addition, the survey interviewed: 

- Non-Jewish people of Jewish background – people who have a Jewish parent or were raised Jewish but who, today, either have another religion (most are Christian) or say they do not consider themselves Jewish; 

- Non-Jewish people with a Jewish affinity – people who identify with another religion (in most cases, Christianity) or with no religion and who neither have a Jewish parent nor were raised Jewish but who nevertheless consider themselves Jewish in some way. Some say, for example, that they consider themselves partly Jewish because Jesus was Jewish, because “we all come from Abraham” or because they have Jewish friends or relatives. 

Most of this report focuses on the net Jewish population (Jews by religion and Jews of no religion). Whenever the views or characteristics of U.S. Jews (or just “Jews”) are discussed, this refers to the combined categories of Jews by religion and Jews of no religion.

There is a ton of information in this report. Here's an interesting table on education and income that I wouldn't have guessed, but makes sense now that I see it:

The highest income Jewish denomination (is that the right word?) is Modern Orthodox, who also have the highest percentage of college graduates. 37% have a household income of $150,000 or higher, and 65% have a B.A. or better.

The highest income gentile denomination are white Catholics, where 13% of households claim that income level. Both Catholics and Jews tend to live in larger urban areas with higher costs of living and higher incomes. Note that income and wealth aren't the same thing: Catholics tend to be lacking in trust funds. According to Pew, mainline white Protestants are just ahead of white Catholics in college education.

There is much else of interest.

Bandar is back (in manic phase of his bipolar cycle)

The Saudi ambassador to the United States from 1983-2005 was Prince Bandar. Because he is the son of a part black slave girl, he's ineligible for the Saudi throne, but he has been an invaluable servant of the royal family at tirelessly spending its (not) hard-earned money to buy the maximum influence in the global imperial capital. For example, when George W. Bush thought about running for the White House, George H.W. Bush asked Bandar to educate his provincial son on America's foreign policy.

Who knows what fraction of Official Washington he's gladhanded or outright bribed? Do you, for example, really want to be at the sold-out Redskins-Cowboy game? It just so happens that Bandar is a close, close friend of Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. Bandar's memoirs would make interesting reading, although he no doubt he has his notes about everybody he's dealt with in his long career locked tightly away (but perhaps not so tightly locked up that he hasn't rigged some kind of deadman switch that would publish them in case of something unfortunate happening to him ... just speculating ...)

Every so often, however, Bandar tends to disappear, either due to alcoholism or depression or who knows what. He is said to have had his first depressive disappearance in the mid-1990s. He seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth from 2008 to 2010, but how now he appears to be back with a vengeance, running Saudi Arabia's adventure in Syria.

Much of history is made by men whose manic phases happen to coincide with eras of opportunity.

One question I've never seen investigated is whether bipolar disease might be semi-adaptive in a few lucky individuals. Do cycles just hit at random, or in some people do they coincide with auspicious and unauspicious periods? Perhaps we'll never know because if you fall in the latter category, they don't call you crazy, they call you "Mr. Speaker" (or whatever maximal title you attained during an up period).

Nature: "Taboo Genetics"

From the scientific journal Nature:

Ethics: Taboo genetics 

Probing the biological basis of certain traits ignites controversy. But some scientists choose to cross the red line anyway. 

Erika Check Hayden 

02 October 2013

Scientists cited or quoted include Steve Hsu, Geoffrey Miller, Christopher Chabris, Francis Galton, Robert Plomin, and Bruce Lahn.

And here is Nature's tut-tutting editorial:

Dangerous work 

Behavioural geneticists must tread carefully to prevent their research being misinterpreted.

Here are the four questions in Nature's poll. 

Should scientists refrain from studying the genetics of intelligence? 

Should scientists refrain from studying the genetics of race? 

Should scientists refrain from studying the genetics of violence? 

Should scientists refrain from studying the genetics of sexuality?

To quote the conclusion of a great American's 1940 book: "Vote early and often."

Designer Babies

From Wired:

Personal Genomics Firm 23andMe Patents Designer Baby System, Denies Plans to Use It 

BY BRANDON KEIM10.02.1312:08 PM

As described in a patent recently granted by the United States Patent Office, consumer genomics company 23andMe [started by the soon to be ex-wife of one of the Google Guys] has developed a system for helping prospective parents choose the traits of their offspring, from disease risk to hair color. Put another way, it’s a designer baby-making system. 

The company says it does not intend to use the technology this way. “When we originally introduced the tool and filed the patent there was some thinking the feature could have applications for fertility clinics,” said Catherine Afarian, a 23andMe spokeswoman. “But we’ve never pursued the idea, and have no plans to do so.” 

Filed in December 2008, the patent — number 8543339, “Gamete donor selection based on genetic calculations” — sounds like something out of Gattaca, the 1997 movie that came to symbolize tensions between self-determination and biologically ordained fate. 

The patent describes a technology that would take a customer’s preferences for a child’s traits, compute the likely genomic outcomes of combinations between a customer’s sperm or egg and other people’s sex cells, and describe which potential reproductive matches would most likely produce the desired baby.

Among the traits listed in the application as examples of possible choice are: height, weight, hair color, risks of colorectal cancer and congenital heart defects, expected life span, expected lifetime health care costs, and athleticism.

Lesbians and infertile couples leafing through the catalogs of sperm banks could make a good market for this. By necessity, they engage in Design-a-Baby, so it would be helpful for them to have some advice on the likelihood of getting their desired traits. It doesn't even have to be at the genotypic level, just at the phenotypic level: I want my child to have, say, red hair and be skinny and have an SAT over 1300. Here are three donors who each have two of the desired traits. But which ones are more of a sure thing?

Also, the Asian market would likely be much bigger than the Northern Atlantic market.

What the world will pay for

From the NYT:

A Master of Crime Fiction in a Nation Lacking Them 

Jakob Arjouni’s Last Novel, Now in English 

By WILLIAM GRIMES

... When Diogenes, a Zurich publishing house, brought out his first novel, “Happy Birthday, Turk!” in 1985, Germans got their first taste of an exotic flavor that soon proved addictive. 

Kemal Kayankaya, Mr. Arjouni’s Frankfurt-based private eye, was an anomaly. Though Turkish by birth, he spoke German like a native and often seemed like an American, with a cynical worldview and a wiseguy sense of humor straight out of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. German readers loved him. 

“Arjouni was the first writer to put a self-confident, aggressive, individual and charming German Turk on the national stage as a character in popular culture,” said Gabriele Dietze, a fellow at Humboldt University in Berlin and a former crime-novel editor. “Kayankaya was the first self-aware immigrant hero.” 

“Happy Birthday, Turk!,” which involves the murder of a Turkish immigrant and a sinister drug ring, became an immediate best seller. ...

On Jan. 17, Mr. Arjouni died in Berlin of the pancreatic cancer that had set him racing against the clock to finish the book. He was 48. ...

Although Kayankaya is indifferent to politics, his investigations entangle him in hot-button issues like immigration, racism, ecoterrorism and, in “Brother Kemal,” militant Islam. 

“This is ripped-from-the-headlines stuff, but he doesn’t beat you over the head with it,” said Dennis Johnson, a founder and publisher of Melville House, which has reissued all the Kayankaya novels. “You don’t realize you are reading a political novel, but you are.” 

Arjouni (formerly Michelsen-Bothe)

For years, readers and critics alike assumed that Mr. Arjouni, like Kayankaya, was at least partly Turkish. Mr. Arjouni made little effort to correct that impression, which was false. He was born in Frankfurt, the son of Hans Günter Michelsen, a fairly well-known playwright, and Ursula Bothe, a theatrical publisher, whose last name he used. 

Here's a picture of Arjouni. His father was an award-winning playwright and his mother was a player in elite German artistic circles: e.g., when I google her name, it comes up in a book about director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. You know, it really, really helps to be an insider, even when trying to be taken as an outsider.

When he began writing, he borrowed a new surname from Kadisha Arjouni, a Moroccan woman he met in France and to whom he was briefly married.

This is a not uncommon phenomenon among American authors who write about American Indians, such as Tony Hillerman who wrote novels about Navajo detectives. Forrest / Asa Carter, a former George Wallace speechwriter during the 1960s, wrote a huge bestseller "memoir" in the 1970s, The Education of Little Tree, about growing up half-Indian. 

Offhand, I'm not familiar with this phenomenon of authors sort of giving the impression of being Mexican American. Despite being vastly outnumbered, perhaps Native Americans have more literary marketplace oomph than do Mexican Americans.

Tom Clancy, RIP

The Hunt for Red October was a galvanizing book to read in 1985. I expected at the time that it would be even better in movie form, because movies don't have the inevitable weakness of printed books: you know when books will end by feeling the number of unread pages being held down by your right thumb. 

In The Hunt for Red October, everything goes right for the Americans culminating in a spectacularly complex rescue / false sinking of the refugee Soviet supersub in the North Atlantic. It's very well done, but it doesn't seem very plausible: fog of war, and all that.

But, your right thumb can tell that that's just the False Ending. And, indeed, for the next hundred pages, everything goes wrong for the Americans. (Clancy's message: military stuff is hard and luck plays a major role). This sets up the much harder-earned True Ending.

So, I was looking forward to the 1990 movie with a skinny Alec Baldwin as Jack Ryan, because you can't physically tell when a movie will end. During the movie's False Ending, I was ready for the complete reversal of fortune ... and then the credits came up. The False Ending was the Ending Ending. The movie makers had lopped off entirely what made the plot so satisfying. 

Oh, well ...

Chaos in (local) government

The ongoing billion dollar iPad fiasco in Los Angeles public schools ought to be a good moment to reflect upon why public schools tend to suffer from such poor management. 

From today's Los Angeles Times:

L.A. Unified's iPad rollout marred by chaos 

Confusion reigns as L.A. Unified deals with glitches after rollout of ambitious an-iPad-for-every-student project.

View of Van Nuys DMV from Vanowen

In contrast, I've been going off and on for 38 years to the Van Nuys Department of Motor Vehicles. You may remember it from such television shows and movies as The Simpsons and The Simpsons Movie. It used to be that you never knew which endless line was the right one to wait in. And the employees (see below) liked it that way. 

Van Nuys DMV staff

Yet, guess what? Over the years, even the Van Nuys DMV has gotten better organized and more helpful. 

Strikingly, I've never read anything about DMV reform, yet it seems to have sort of happened.

In contrast, I've read thousands of articles about Education Reform. Titans of industry like Bill Gates and Eli Broad have devoted themselves to Education Reform. The LAUSD is run by certified Education Reform stars from the Gates Foundation and other prestigious organizations.

And still ... chaos. Why?

... Schools Supt. John Deasy, who has pushed for the iPads, remains undeterred and said the project is essentially on track. 

"It's an astonishing success," Deasy said in an interview Tuesday. "I couldn't be more pleased to get [the iPads] in the hands of students and teachers. The feedback has been extremely positive. 

"This is a civil rights issue," he said. "My goal is to provide youth in poverty with tools that heretofore only rich kids have had. And I'd like to do that as quickly as possible." 

Perhaps one reason why DMV reform has progressed but Education Reform is so prone to confusion is because DMV reform is not a civil rights issue. It could have been called one: the long lines always seem to have disparate impact upon the Latino population of the San Fernando Valley, much of which could be found standing in line at the Van Nuys DMV any workday between 9 and 5. But it wasn't.

In contrast, Education Reform always turns into a "civil rights issue," which causes the Brain Freeze characteristic of anything having to do with race, IQ, and children in modern America. In turn, this attracts fad-mongers and the professionally gullible to the ranks of education management, and repels people who know what they are doing and are capable of projecting the consequences of proposed policies.

Hence, iPadGate.

That said, I'm not all that against iPads in public schools with competent managements. A lot of education ought to consist of drilling at each individual student's level of competence. Individualized tutoring works better than anything else, but it's always expensive. Computers makes possible individualized drilling. The iPad, with its printing recognition capability (it has that right, like a 1998 Palm Pilot?), sounds like a good form factor for drilling in math. Non-touch screen traditional PCs work okay with the right math drilling software, but math has evolved over the years to work best with chalkboards or paper and pencil. Keyboards can be made to work okay with math programs, but the iPad-like tablet resembles the kind of slate that Abe Lincoln worked Euclid's proofs upon.

However, I have no idea whether good software is available for the iPad yet. Most educational software is junk.

In the past, computers in the classroom have mostly been a waste. About a decade ago, the public school where Glaivester taught got a laptop for each student. He found 50% of his teaching time was suddenly devoted to troubleshooting PC problems.

Over the years, though, operating systems have gotten better (Windows Vista excepted), and now computers, especially Apple products, have high uptime rates.

NYT readers: Mexico maybe not so awesome after all

From the New York Times:

Mexico’s New Arrivals Mix Praise and Criticism 

By DAMIEN CAVE 

MEXICO CITY — Can Mexico ever ascend to its proper place in the world economy without tackling corruption and crime head on? When will the country, with its rising potential, stop being held down by weak government? 

Those are some of the tough questions raised by readers responding to an article published in The New York Times on Sunday [by Damien Cave] about the growing number of immigrants from around the world who have resettled Mexico in recent years, viewing it as a land of emerging opportunity. Many foreigners who have lived in the country for years stressed that while they wished the world would focus more on Mexico’s strengths, they also wished the country would do more to tackle its flaws – especially corruption and a justice system that does little or nothing. 

“This is a great dynamic place for growth and wonderful things to happen,” said Irene Lee Pagan, 74, a Texas jeweler who moved to San Miguel de Allende 20 years ago. “But the police don’t care. They’re just sitting there getting a paycheck.” 

Though her city’s new mayor put up posters promoting himself, she said, not one of the 50 robberies and assaults that occurred in her neighborhood over the last three years had been solved. Just a few days ago, she added, a Canadian retiree was beaten during a robbery in her home and nearly died, adding another unsolved crime to the list. 

“I told the police, ‘If one or two of these other crimes had been resolved, this woman would not have been at death’s door,'” she said. “But they just don’t see it.”

... And according to one foreign businessman with two decades of experience in Mexico, neither the country’s powerful officials, nor the corporate executives they often court worldwide, have put in the necessary effort to change how things work. 

“The lack of transparency in the government (national and local) and honest enforcement of laws leads often to years of litigation regarding such things as property rights and employment disputes, where all too often whoever has the deeper pockets comes out on top,” he wrote. While Mexico is, in fact, “a land of opportunity,” he said, it is “definitely not for novices.” 

The idea of an American owning a home in Mexico is not some novel 2013 breakthrough, it's actually something that has faded from memory over the decades. For instance, when I was young it wasn't considered remarkable that the Hispanophilic John Wayne (who had three Hispanic wives) spent much of his time in Mexico, filming movies in Durango and relaxing at his cliff-top home in Acapulco. 

Americans living in Mexico used to be more in the gossip columns because it was a popular destination for celebrities and bohemians who felt hemmed in by pre-1960s America. For example, in 1951 rich writer/druggie William Burroughs shot and killed his wife at a party in Mexico City. The Burroughs cash register heir managed to more or less bribe his way out of that rap. 

As America loosened up, however, the appeal of Mexico declined for American celebrities (although celebrity murderers, such as O.J. Simpson in 1994, continue to keep it in mind). Why go to Tijuana when you can go to Las Vegas?

California has highest poverty rate in country

For a long time, I've been pointing out that many standard statistics of income, poverty, or cost of living fail to fully get at the underlying question of most interest: standard of living. Now, a new study from the Public Policy Institute of California that includes a better cost of living measure and government benefits finds that California, home to Silicon Valley and Hollywood, has the worst poverty rate of any state in the country, with vast Los Angeles County having the worst poverty rate in the state.

From the Los Angeles Times:

L.A. County leads California in poverty rate, new analysis shows 

A new analysis of hardship that adds factors such as housing costs and government benefits found that 27% of L.A. County residents lived in poverty in 2011, compared with the official rate of 18%. 

By Gale Holland 

September 30, 2013, 9:05 p.m. 

Los Angeles has the highest poverty rate among California counties, according to a new analysis announced Monday that upends traditional views of rural and urban hardship by adding factors such as the soaring price of city housing. 

The measurement, developed by researchers with the Public Policy Institute of California and the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, found that 2.6 million, or 27%, of Los Angeles County residents lived in poverty in 2011. The official poverty rate for the county, based on the U.S. Census' 2011 American Community Survey, is 18%. 

The new analysis set California's poverty rate at 22%, the highest in the nation, compared with the official rate of 16%. [Emphasis mine].

Counties such as Placer and Sacramento, with more moderate housing costs, have lower poverty rates than those of metropolitan areas, researchers said. 

"We always see maps of official poverty and think of the Central Valley as the most impoverished,"

Well, much of the Central Valley also looks depressingly poor when you drive through it.

said economist Sarah Bohn, a research fellow at the public policy institute and one of the study's authors. "This really turns that on its head." 

The new model aims to present a fuller picture of poverty by taking into account living expenses and government benefits ignored in the official formula.

But, I thought massive immigration was Good for the Economy?

Eric Holder v. Austin FD: the fix is in

As commenters noted, last week's announcement that the Justice Department was suing the Fire Department of Austin, TX for racial/ethnic discrimination was evidence of a pre-arranged fix between the Obama Administration and the liberal city government to throw the case, rather than to let it go to courts where it might wind up a 5-4 Supreme Court decision cutting back disparate impact logic.

When the story broke, I couldn't find the DoJ's letter online, but now the firemen's union has posted it. It makes interesting reading in that it offers zero evidence for discrimination other than that using an objective test as one part of the three-part hiring process has "statistically significant" adverse impact on blacks and Latinos, and that hiring in top-down order based on the combined scores also has "statistically significant" adverse impact.

But who cares if this is a bizarrely bad case for the theory of disparate/adverse impact, if it will never be litigated? The DoJ letter spells it out:

"We understand that the City is interested in participating in settlement negotiations with the goal of resolving this matter without contested litigation."

My guess is that the octogenarian Ruth Bader Ginsburg will retire in 2015 or 2016 to make sure her replacement is appointed by Obama, giving the Democrats three relatively youthful Obama appointee votes. Perhaps Stephen Breyer, who will turn 78 in 2016, will take one for the team, too.

By the 2016 election, both Scalia and Kennedy will be 80, and Thomas's life expectancy doesn't appear all that hot. Chief Justice Roberts looks terrific, but has epilepsy.

So, if you are the Obama Administration, at present it makes sense just to pick rigged fights on adverse/disparate impact.