NYT walks Oberlin story back after falling for KKK hysteria

As I point out in my new Taki's Magazine column, although the American news media went nuts over the purported sighting of a one-man Ku Klux Klan rally at Oberlin, America's most racially hypersensitive college, only two newspapers in the world bothered calling the local cops to see whether the KKK appearance had actually happened. 

Today, the NYT's original reporter, Richard Perez-Pena, got replaced on the story with veteran Trip Gabriel, who wrote something of a walkback this evening:

Police Unsure of Klan Garb at Troubled College
By TRIP GABRIEL 

Published: March 5, 2013 

The police in Oberlin, Ohio, have been unable to confirm a report of a person wearing a white robe and hood that caused Oberlin College to cancel classes on Monday and plunged the campus in to a day of soul-searching.

Shortly after midnight on Monday, a female student reported seeing someone dressed in what looked like Ku Klux Klan regalia walking alone on campus near the Afrikan Heritage House. Campus security officers and the Oberlin Police Department responded, but could not find the person. 

Another student later told the police that at about the same time, he spotted a person wrapped in a blanket, raising the possibility that the woman had been mistaken. Lt. Mike McCloskey of the Oberlin police said it was unclear whether the two sightings were of the same person.

GL Piggy is all over the Oberlin story.

Sailer in Taki's: "KKK Is the New UFO"

From my new column in Taki's Magazine:

The current identity-politics hysteria was launched about a year ago (conveniently enough for the Obama reelection campaign) with the news that an angelic black baby named Trayvon Martin had been gunned down by white racist George Zimmerman. 

In the latest brouhaha, Oberlin, a (very) liberal arts college outside of Cleveland, immediately shut down all classes Monday to hold a frenzied, Cultural Revolution-style rally against the rising tide of racism because one student claimed to have spied a one-man Ku Klux Klan rally on campus in the wee hours of the morning. 

The past year reminds me of a similar frenzy in the early 1990s that Bill Clinton rode to the White House. Do you remember the “Year of the Woman,” in which Clinton (of all people) ran as the nemesis of bosses who make passes at the women who work for them? No? Well, since nobody else seems to remember the recent past, it’s worth mentioning how these manias seem to start up in conjunction with Democratic presidential campaigns, then sputter on for years.

Read the whole thing there.

The Love Life of Hugo Chavez

Back in 2000, I put forward a theory of why, 500 years after Cortez, Mexico, like many Latin American countries, is still run by largely white people despite no sharp color line:

... Now, in Mexico every century or so, there is a massive upheaval like the Revolution of 1910. The white monopoly is fractured. Up through the cracks come the most talented mestizos and Indians. They start dynasties that persist to this day … but their grandsons and great-grandsons are notably whiter than they were, since the men of the family have been exploiting their social ascendancy to marry white women. (Of course, many rich Mexican men father second families with their lower-ranking mistresses. But these kids seldom get the breaks in life that the legitimate children do.)

The late Venezuelan presidente Hugo Chavez, whose family life I wrote about in 2010, would be a good example of a poor man of pardo background (Indian, black, and white), who clawed his way up in life. But, I suspect his grandchildren, especially by the second wife he obtained after becoming successful, will be quite a bit fairer than him.

Mexico: "The Country that Stopped Reading"

Mexico gets relatively little coverage in the United States English-language media despite its immense importance to the future of our country. One reason is because the population is so aliterate -- not illiterate, just apathetic about reading and writing. (This spills over to the Mexican-American population.)

A Mexican novelist writes:

The Country That Stopped Reading 

By DAVID TOSCANA 

Nowadays more children attend school than ever before, but they learn much less. They learn almost nothing. The proportion of the Mexican population that is literate is going up, but in absolute numbers, there are more illiterate people in Mexico now than there were 12 years ago. Even if baseline literacy, the ability to read a street sign or news bulletin, is rising, the practice of reading an actual book is not. Once a reasonably well-educated country, Mexico took the penultimate spot, out of 108 countries, in a Unesco assessment of reading habits a few years ago. 

The PISA scores show Mexican doing mediocre overall, but with tiny proportions of high scorers, well behind a somewhat comparable country like Turkey in coming up with an intellectual elite.

One cannot help but ask the Mexican educational system, “How is it possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a week, and you give me back someone who is basically illiterate?” 

Despite recent gains in industrial development and increasing numbers of engineering graduates, Mexico is floundering socially, politically and economically because so many of its citizens do not read. Upon taking office in December, our new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, immediately announced a program to improve education. This is typical. All presidents do this upon taking office. 

The first step in his plan to improve education? Put the leader of the teachers’ union, Elba Esther Gordillo, in jail — which he did last week. Ms. Gordillo, who has led the 1.5 million-member union for 23 years, is suspected of embezzling about $200 million.

I'm amazed he could find her to arrest her, since she spends most of her time at her luxury homes in California.

She ought to be behind bars, but education reform with a focus on teachers instead of students is nothing new. For many years now, the job of the education secretary has been not to educate Mexicans but to deal with the teachers and their labor issues. Nobody in Mexico organizes as many strikes as the teachers’ union. And, sadly, many teachers, who often buy or inherit their jobs, are lacking in education themselves.

Many public school teaching jobs in Mexico are hereditary sinecures. If you die, your heir has the right to step into your job. If he doesn't want a teaching job, he can auction it off to people who do.

During a strike in 2008 in Oaxaca, I remember walking through the temporary campground in search of a teacher reading a book. Among tens of thousands, I found not one. I did find people listening to disco-decibel music, watching television, playing cards or dominoes, vegetating. I saw some gossip magazines, too.

Welcome to the future of America!

... But perhaps the Mexican government is not ready for its people to be truly educated. We know that books give people ambitions, expectations, a sense of dignity. If tomorrow we were to wake up as educated as the Finnish people, the streets would be filled with indignant citizens and our frightened government would be asking itself where these people got more than a dishwasher’s training.

You just lost Jeb Bush there with that last paragraph, Senor Toscano. Why would he or his friends in Mexican politics want a Finnish quality electorate? What's in it for him and his? Would George P. Bush be talked up as future Presidential Timber in Finland?

Earth Ball: A catastrophic hippie sport

It's hard to invent new sports. The 1960s were a period of creativity in some fields, but seem lacking in team sports. The most ostentatiously 1960s team sport was Earth Ball, a sport sometimes attributed to Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth catalog. Earth Ball was invented to be a coed, not very competitive game that emphasized teamwork and appreciation for ecology. A very light six-foot diameter ball with a map of the world on it is propelled by tapping with the fingertips by coed teams of any number across the opposing team's goal line. 

Since the ball floated in the air and only slowly descends, players had to look up and tap it.  In theory, this game sounds like the opposite of football. In practice, well ...

I first saw a picture of Earth Ball being played on a recruiting brochure from the Air Force Academy in 1975. Colorado Springs wanted to denote that that they were the with-it academy, so the brochure emphasized that each year the freshmen played the sophomores in the exciting new sport of Earth Ball. But looking at the photo, I noticed that all the freshmen were looking up in the air at the giant ball, hands raised to tap it, while all the sophomores (having more experience playing Earth Ball) were ignoring the ball and instead punching the defenseless freshmen in the gut or kneeing them in the groin.

I could see how that would be the better strategy.

I've only seen Earth Ball played once, at Rice U. in about 1977 in a dorm v. dorm mass melee. I would have played but I had a cold so I staked out a good viewing spot on the 50 yard line. 

The referee put the huge ball on the midfield stripe as two vast teams assembled on their own goal lines. When the ref blew his whistle, most of the 100 or so competitors ran at 3/4th speed toward midfield, but three guys from the opposing team dashed headlong toward the ball, along with one fellow from my dorm, Stu. 

Stu sprinted toward the ball to give his team the advantage. When he was ten feet away, he longjumped chest first into the ball. Unfortunately, he impacted it just as the three other sprinters slammed into the opposite side of the ball. The ball compressed, then flung poor Stu backwards about 15 feet through the air. Stu landed awkwardly just as a mob of his teammates clomped down the field and trampled him, leaving him in considerable pain. It was the closest thing I've seen to a Chuck Jones cartoon in real life. 

Within a few minutes of brutal play, a pretty girl named Velma Potash had her clavicle broken and had to be taken to the hospital. 

I left at that point. I learned later that the game was finally won by the other team. They eventually figured out to have the 6'11" backup center on the college basketball team, Doug Ekeroth, tap the ball to himself as he jogged down the field while his most bruising comrades formed a 360 degree wall of blockers around him to keep anybody from my dorm from suckerpunching him while he concentrated on tapping the ball.

Earth Ball did not become a regular event on the Rice calendar.

That was the last I'd heard of Earth Ball. Searching Youtube, I find one video of some East Asians playing it. It looks like the big innovation is to play it volleyball style, with a rope separating the two teams so they can't brutalize each other. Looks like it's become a fun game for middle-aged people, but how do you store the ball?

(Ekeroth, by the way, was that basketball player who was always suspected by Coach Mike Schuler of sneaking off to the library to study. The thought that Ekeroth might be just using them to get an education in engineering drove the basketball coaches crazy.)

Oberlin "KKK sighting" appears to have been another example of current anti-white hysteria

From The Guardian:

Lt Mike McCloskey of Oberlin police told the Guardian on Monday that officers were still following up the KKK sighting, but suggested that the only witness may have been mistaken. 

"Officers checked the area and were unable to locate anybody. College security later saw a student wrapped in a blanket." 

McCloskey suggested that the apparent missighting may have been an innocent mistake.

One last word on 2012 election polling

I'm going to superstylize the numbers here to make a point.

A hugely common trope since the election is that the Republican Party has been permanently discredited for being optimistic in the last few days of the election, for not believing the polls that showed, on average, Obama with a 51-49 lead in the two-party vote, and for not, therefore, giving up or something. This just proves Republicans are against Science, because polling is the essence of Science and can never go wrong.

What's been overlooked is that when all the votes were added up nationally, the polls were wrong by a two point margin, just as Romney hoped. Polling is actually pretty hard to get right, and unexpected new developments can throw it off. Unfortunately for Romney, the polls' bias was in favor of Romney not against: Obama actually won 52-48.

In general, people love horse race analyses, even though it's not really very important. What was Romney supposed to do with three days left in the election? Give up?

The vastly bigger issue is that the Republicans don't understand the long term fundamentals of their electoral position: their voters represent the core of America (on multiple dimensions: married v. single, white v. nonwhite, and so forth) while the Democrats represent the various fringes. What they cannot survive is a worldview in which demonizing the core of America is the default response in the culture.

Oberlin Roots of the Great "Girls" Whiteness Crisis of 2012

Now we perhaps know why Oberlin graduate Lena Dunham didn't put black characters in the first season of her sit-com "Girls:" she may be part of Oberlin's pervasive Ku Klux Klan movement.

From the NYT:

Oberlin Cancels Classes After Series of ‘Hate-Related Incidents’ 

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA 

Published: March 4, 2013 59 Comments

Oberlin College, known as much for ardent liberalism as for academic excellence, canceled classes on Monday and convened a “day of solidarity” instead, after a person wearing a robe and hood appeared near its Afrikan Heritage House early Monday morning in the latest in a string of what it described as hate-related incidents and vandalism. 

In the last month, a number of racist and antigay messages have been left around campus, a jarring incongruity in a place with the liberal political leanings and traditions of Oberlin, a school of 2,800 students in Ohio, about 30 miles southwest of Cleveland. Guides to colleges routinely list it as among the most liberal, activist and gay-friendly schools in the country. 

The sighting of the person on Monday, “in addition to the series of other hate-related incidents on campus, has precipitated our decision to suspend formal classes and all nonessential activities for today, Monday, March 4, 2013, and gather for a series of discussions of the challenging issues that have faced our community in recent weeks,” according to a statement issued by Marvin Krislov, Oberlin’s president, and three college deans. 

A number of the incidents are being investigated by the college’s security staff and the Oberlin city police. 

The incidents are deeply disturbing to students who saw the college as a protected universe, said Meredith Gadsby, the chair of the Afrikana Studies department, which hosted a teach-in at midday attended by about 300 students. “As inclusive as Oberlin has been historically and is at present, Oberlin also exists in the world,'’ she said. 

Dr. Gadsby said the bias incidents caused students to fear for their safety. One purpose of the teach-in was to make them aware of groups that have formed, some in the past 24 hours in dorms, to respond. 

“They’ll be addressing ways to publicly respond to the bias incidents with what I call positive propaganda and let people know, whoever the culprits are, that they’re being watched, and people are taking care of themselves and each other,'’ she said. 

Other events scheduled for Monday included a demonstration and a convocation, as well as meetings of campus groups. 

“I’m not sure why anyone is doing it, but those actions have made people uneasy and say we need to come together and discuss this,” said Scott Wargo, an Oberlin spokesman.

What are the odds that this is yet another campus hate hoax? I'd say at least 50-50.

Here is Nicholas Stix's 2011 list of recent campus hate hoaxes.

Celebrities in the news and their philoprogenitive relations

With Dennis Rodman back in the news for his exercise in basketball diplomacy in North Korea, it's worth mentioning Dennis's dad, Philander Rodman Jr., who is the father of between 29 and 47 children, according to various published reports and what kind of mood Philander Jr. is in when reporters visit his Rodman's Rainbow Obamaburger in the Philippines.

No word yet on Philander Rodman Sr.

Also in the news is Barack Obama, whose favorite half-brother and Best Man at his wedding Roy Abong'o Malik Obama is running for governor of Siaya County in Kenya. According to the always informative Daily Mail, Roy-Abong'o Malik has had approximately 12 wives.

Indeed, female members of his extended family accuse him of being a wife-beater and philanderer, who seduced the newest of his estimated 12 wives while she was a 17-year-old schoolgirl — a crime in a country where the legal age of consent is 18. 

As opposed to the United States in November 1960.

To the dismay of teachers and the girl’s mother, Mary, Obama had secret trysts with the girl after spotting her attending prayers at the mosque he has built in Kogelo — he and his brother’s ancestral home — as part of his promotion of the Islamic faith across the country.  

Now in hiding at her mother’s mud house, down a rutted track, Sheila Anyango, 35 years younger than her husband, told me this week that marrying him was the ‘worst decision’ of her life — and confirmed that they had ‘kept a secret’ since she was 17. 

Shy and softly-spoken, Sheila, 20, says: ‘At first he was good, after he started speaking to me at the mosque. But he has changed. Marrying him has been the biggest mistake of my life. He beats me, but mostly he’s just nasty and quarrelsome.’ ...

Dreams from My Father, indeed.

Sheila, who has an 18-month-old daughter by Obama called Hafifa, had spent the past two years living with three of Malik’s other wives at the ‘Barack H Obama Foundation rest and relaxation centre’ — a restaurant complex built by her husband to profit from the visitors attracted to the area by his links to his brother. 

Nor is Sheila the only one of Malik’s wives to accuse him of beating her.
Hafsa Abwanda, now 33, also  married the politician as a teenager, but escaped in 2008 after five years of marriage, saying he beat her and her ‘co-wives’, of whom she says she saw at least 12 come and go over  the years. 

Before Hafsa fled her miserable  marriage to live with relatives, she had a son with Malik, who she took with her when she left. ‘He is a bad man and I don’t want to ever see him again,’ she says. 

With Islam allowing only four wives, former wives and friends say Malik flouts this rule by ‘rotating’ his spouses out to other properties so he lives with only the maximum number at any one time. 

Fabulously rich by Kenyan standards, Malik is nevertheless careful with his money. ...

A former headmaster at the local school in Kogelo, Mr Ogombe knew Malik as a boy, and met Barack on his first visit to his homeland in 1987, when the future U.S. President spent his days in a simple room at his family home, and developed a taste for local home-brewed beers. 

‘Barack was a nice boy,’ he says. ‘He wasn’t used to the heat here, so he spent a lot of time inside resting, but he loved our beers and was very friendly to everyone. Malik and he got along well — but that was when both were nobodies.’ ...

He took a degree in accounting in Nairobi, studied at a madrassa — an Islamic school where students memorise the Koran — and became a committed Muslim. He moved to Washington DC in the Eighties and opened an electronics shop there, though he now divides his time between Kenya and America. 

He is also a regular traveller to Saudi Arabia, where he has taken part in pilgrimages to Mecca. He now spends his time fund-raising for the Barack H Obama Foundation, a body he set up to capitalise on his brother’s election for the ‘good of Kogelo’. 

But there have been questions about where the money has gone from his ‘charity work’, with a probe launched over cash owed to the U.S. taxpayer from his fund-raising activities. Famously, Malik’s conversion to Islam has been saluted by Barack, whose remaining family in Kogelo are all Muslims.  

He asked Malik to be best man at his 1992 wedding to Michelle. In his book Dreams From My Father, the American President wrote: ‘The person who made me proudest was Roy [Malik]. He converted to Islam, and has sworn off pork and tobacco and alcohol. 

‘[His] new lifestyle has left him lean and clear-eyed, and at the wedding, he looked so dignified in his black African gown with white trim and matching cap, that some of our guests mistook him for my father.’

Roy changing his name to Abongo is the happy ending to Dreams from My Father. The President devotes the last four pages of his autobiography to his brother's re-conversion to Islam. Here's the beginning and the end of the last four pages:

The person who made me proudest of all was Roy. Actually, now we call him Abongo, his Luo name, for two years ago he decided to reassert his African heritage. ... Abongo lifted up his glass of fruit juice for a toast. 

"To those who are not here with us," he said. 

"And to a happy ending," I said. 

We dribbled our drinks onto the checkered-tile floor. And for that moment, at least, I felt like the luckiest man alive.  

THE END

And lastly in the news about celebrities and their philoprogenitive relations, Ann Romney said she cried when Mitt lost.

"Pit Bulls and Parolees"

When my father was in the hospital in 2011, I watched an Animal Planet show called "Pit Bulls and Parolees," but I guess I'm not really part of the pit bull target demographic. Let me say upfront that I'm aware that put bulls are wonderfully loyal and they don't bite very much (the problem is that when they do bite they sometimes don't let go). In contrast, Labrador retrievers are bred to retract their teeth and gum rather than bite down. So, Labs are unlikely to maul your children's friends.

Audacious Epigone uses Google Trends to tabulate searches for "pitbulls" v. "labradors" by state. The most Labrador retriever-biased state is New Hampshire and the most pit bull-centric state is Mississippi: Moynihan's Law of the Canadian Border again.

Has there been much improvement in dogs in my lifetime? Ray Sawhill likes to point out how much better food has gotten in his lifetime, and that strikes me as close to indisputable. The board at Rice U. in the 1970s was awful by contemporary standards. 

But I don't see much evidence that dogs are getting better. Perhaps the amazing gains of (roughly) the 19th Century when most modern breeds were more or less invented were a one time deal, and only marginal improvements are genetically possible anymore. 

On the other hand, commercial animal breeding for specific traits continues: dairy cows produce twice as much milk as 40 years ago. Plant breeders apparently have made marijuana vastly stronger, too.

So, maybe animal breeding just doesn't attract the right type of hobbyist anymore. If you asked people 150 years ago to name somebody interested in animal breeding, they might have come up with Charles Darwin. Today -- Michael Vick. 

Or maybe it's the worldview. Perhaps the Whiggish world view that produced Darwin is a delicate flower. 

Average IQ in Jamaica

Over at Human Varieties, Jason Malloy gives a seminar on the the difficulties and methods of calculating the average IQ for a single country. He works through two dozen scientific papers involving IQ in Jamaica, a small English-speaking country with a not undeveloped academic infrastructure. 

Many of the IQ scores come from studies of social science interventions, where the test group are a few dozen disadvantaged people with problems and they are compared to a control group of (hopefully) representative Jamaicans. Other IQ tests were done on advantaged populations (e.g., college students, perhaps people in Montego Bay rather than in the Government Yard in Trenchtown, that sort of thing). Jason concludes:

There is no One True Way to do this, and different methods will have different limitations. An average of all the scores will include many samples that were deliberately chosen for health problems (The median IQ of all the samples in the table is 75). I’ve rated the samples for quality to help limit the influence of less representative test groups. 18 of the 41 samples were disadvantaged, 5 of the samples were advantaged, and 18 were reasonably representative. The median IQ of the disadvantaged samples was 66, while the median IQ of the advantaged samples was 87. 

The median of 18 reasonably representative samples gives us an IQ of 80 for Jamaica. This is also consistent with Samms-Vaughan (2005 ), one of the more recent and methodologically robust studies, which shows an average IQ of about 81.

So that's quite a bit higher than the 72 Richard Lynn came up with 11 years ago in IQ and the Wealth of Nations based on one study. (Malloy discusses the problems Lynn ran into). As I pointed out in my review in 2002, Lynn's low scores for black countries suggested the importance of nurture, not just nature in determining average IQ. Since African-Americans average about 85 and they are about 80% black, then this suggests that environmental forces are holding down black IQs in the third world. 

On the other hand, reanalysis over the last decade has tended to come up with somewhat higher scores, which, paradoxically, tend to lessen the likely power of nurture on IQ. 

On the third hand, Jamaica is not a dirt poor country: in nurture terms, it's healthy enough, rich enough, and smart enough to do whatever it is that helps a country win Olympic sprinting medals.

It would be interesting to see whether there's enough research on the small island of Barbados to come up with a reliable IQ comparison to Jamaica. There has always been a stereotype of Barbados as more educated and genteel than Jamaica, but does it show up in the data?

Do you notice anything different about Obama's 2nd term?

From the Washington Post:

Obama pushing to diversify federal judiciary amid GOP delays

By Philip Rucker, Updated: Sunday, March 3, 3:00 PM 

In Florida, President Obama has nominated the first openly gay black man to sit on a federal district court. In New York, he has nominated the first Asian American lesbian. And his pick for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit? The first South Asian. 

Reelected with strong support from women, ethnic minorities and gays, Obama is moving quickly to change the face of the federal judiciary by the end of his second term, setting the stage for another series of drawn-out confrontations with Republicans in Congress.

The president has named three dozen judicial candidates since January and is expected to nominate scores more over the next few months, aides said. The push marks a significant departure from the sluggish pace of appointments throughout much of his first term, when both Republicans and some Democrats complained that Obama had not tried hard enough to fill vacancies on federal courts. 

The new wave of nominations is part of an effort by Obama to cement a legacy that long outlives his presidency and makes the court system more closely resemble the changing society it governs, administration officials said. 

“Diversity in and of itself is a thing that is strengthening the judicial system,” White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler said. “It enhances the bench and the performance of the bench and the quality of the discussion . . . 

In my reader's guide to understanding Obama's Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, I predicted that Obama's first term would be fairly low key as this cautious man tried to win re-election by not scaring the white majority, but much would be different in the second term once he's safely home.

Of course, Obama isn't a big believer in diversity for his own staff -- where he wants the right man for the job -- just for the rest of us for the next several decades:

The diversity of Obama’s judicial nominees stands in contrast to staff selections at the start of his second term that have been dominated by white men, including White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, Secretary of State John F. Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. 

By contrast, 17 of the 35 pending judicial nominees are women, 15 are ethnic minorities and five are openly gay, according to White House statistics. Six are straight white men.

Mormon team ranked #1 nationally in HS basketball

Lone Peak High School in Utah is ranked #1 nationally in boys basketball by Maxpreps, despite being pretty much an all-white team of Mormons. (From the pictures, there don't appear to be any black players.) It played 10 games out of state this year and won 9, five of them over teams now ranked #1 in their own states.

This isn't a Hoosiers story about a small town school. Lone Peak is a large public high school in the suburban corridor between Salt Lake City and Provo. The community is well-to-do and thus can afford to send the team to national tournaments. It doesn't recruit much outside its school district lines, but I wouldn't be surprised if sports-minded family don't move there because of the quality of its sports programs.

The national media are amazed that Lone Peak wins (this was its 6th state title in 9 years) without black players, and that the white kids play a black Showtime style of fast-breaking and dunks. In general, I suspect that white basketball players develop better as adolescents without blacks around to intimidate them. I'm also guessing that Lone Peak's team was heavily "redshirted" by their parents because several of the players are about to leave for their overseas Mormon mission of two years -- that happens at age 19, which suggests that Lone Peak's team is older than you would expect high school players to be. 

But, in general, high school sports are much less black dominated than college or professional sports. They are typically dominated by mostly white schools, either Catholic or upscale exurban like Lone Peak. In football, the usual formula for winning state championships is to have a team that's about 80% white from a school that's 90% white, but with black stars at running back, receiver, linebacker, and, say, cornerback. 

For schools I'm more familiar with, Maxpreps has as #1 in California and #4 nationally the basketball team from Mater Dei, a large Catholic school in Orange County. Mater Dei is a traditional football power, with two Heisman Trophy winners among its alumni, and has the kind of weight room you'd expect to see in the SEC. Judging from pictures of Mater Dei's basketball team, it looks like it has about 3 black stars and the rest of the team is white with a few Filipinos or Mexicans.

Mater Dei just lost over the weekend to Etiwanda, previously ranked #9 nationally, a large public high school in exurban Rancho Cucamonga. Etiwanda's student body is about 19% black, and the team looks like it has four or 5 blacks on the court most of the time, with a more mixed bench. 

Basketball is different from football in that you can go a long way with about 3 stars. For example, a number of years ago, a local upscale private high school (we'll call them HC) recruited the #1 eighth grade black basketball prospect in the country (he's now playing well in the NBA), found a couple of black wing men for him, and won the California state championship. This was so successful that this private school, which played my son's school in football each year, tried this same strategy with their football team.

When my son was a freshman, his school's football varsity beat HC's varsity, mostly whites and Asians with one five-foot-tall fast black freshman receiver, in a tightly fought game. Over the next two years, HC's varsity football team filled up with giant fast black players and HC would win by scores like 56-0. But then by my son's senior year, all the giant black players were suddenly gone, and HC's team was back to whites, Asians, and the tiny black receiver, now a senior, and it was once again a close game.

I've noticed that strange stuff like this happens in high school sports not uncommonly these days, although you can never find an explanation in public. How did HC suddenly acquire giant black football players and why did it suddenly get rid of them? We're not likely to ever hear the full story.

Time to stop and think before amnesty

A reader writes:

Are you aware that the 2006 bill—Senate Immigration bill 2611—had a whole section requiring an impact report? It was pretty detailed and thorough—just one problem—it was only required “Not later than 90 days after the date of enactment of this act. Pretty cute. I am sure that the point of an impact report is to have it done before legal action is taken!

Here's the text of Sec. 401 of the 2006 immigration legislation. This may have gotten amended out at some point, and its confused post-hock nature was perhaps deliberate sabotage, but this is perfectly reasonable text to be reused in a bill calling for an Impact Statement before any new amnesty or guest worker program:

SEC. 401. IMMIGRATION IMPACT STUDY. 

(a) Effective Date- Any regulation that would increase the number of aliens who are eligible for legal status may not take effect before 90 days after the date on which the Director of the Bureau of the Census submits a report to Congress under subsection (c). 

(b) Study- The Director of the Bureau of the Census, jointly with the Secretary, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Education, the Secretary of Energy, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Secretary of the Interior, the Secretary of Labor, the Secretary of Transportation, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Attorney General, and the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, shall undertake a study examining the impacts of the current and proposed annual grants of legal status, including immigrant and nonimmigrant status, along with the current level of illegal immigration, on the infrastructure of and quality of life in the United States. 

(c) Report- Not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Director of the Bureau of the Census shall submit to Congress a report on the findings of the study required by subsection (b), including the following information: 

(1) An estimate of the total legal and illegal immigrant populations of the United States, as they relate to the total population. 

(2) The projected impact of legal and illegal immigration on the size of the population of the United States over the next 50 years, which regions of the country are likely to experience the largest increases, which small towns and rural counties are likely to lose their character as a result of such growth, and how the proposed regulations would affect these projections. 

(3) The impact of the current and projected foreign-born populations on the natural environment, including the consumption of nonrenewable resources, waste production and disposal, the emission of pollutants, and the loss of habitat and productive farmland, an estimate of the public expenditures required to maintain current standards in each of these areas, the degree to which current standards will deteriorate if such expenditures are not forthcoming, and the additional effects the proposed regulations would have. 

(4) The impact of the current and projected foreign-born populations on employment and wage rates, particularly in industries such as agriculture and services in which the foreign born are concentrated, an estimate of the associated public costs, and the additional effects the proposed regulations would have. 

(5) The impact of the current and projected foreign-born populations on the need for additions and improvements to the transportation infrastructure of the United States, an estimate of the public expenditures required to meet this need, the impact on Americans' mobility if such expenditures are not forthcoming, and the additional effect the proposed regulations would have. 

(6) The impact of the current and projected foreign-born populations on enrollment, class size, teacher-student ratios, and the quality of education in public schools, an estimate of the public expenditures required to maintain current median standards, the degree to those standards will deteriorate if such expenditures are not forthcoming, and the additional effect the proposed regulations would have. 

(7) The impact of the current and projected foreign-born populations on home ownership rates, housing prices, and the demand for low-income and subsidized housing, the public expenditures required to maintain current median standards in these areas, the degree to which those standards will deteriorate if such expenditures are not forthcoming, and the additional effect the proposed regulations would have. 

(8) The impact of the current and projected foreign-born populations on access to quality health care and on the cost of health care and health insurance, an estimate of the public expenditures required to maintain current median standards, the degree to which those standards will deteriorate if such expenditures are not forthcoming, and the additional effect the proposed regulations would have. 

(9) The impact of the current and projected foreign-born populations on the criminal justice system in the United States, an estimate of the associated public costs, and the additional effect the proposed regulations would have.

Good questions.

The forgotten Barbara Jordan Commission on Immigration

Are you telling me you want more immigration?

A good example of how "He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past" is the flushing of the reports of the 1990s U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform down the memory hole. Bill Clinton appointed black lesbian Democrat Barbara Jordan, a former Congresswoman who gave a famous keynote address at the 1976 Democratic convention, to head the in-depth study of immigration policy. 

In 1994, the Jordan Commission reported on illegal immigration:

In particular, we believe that unlawful immigration is unacceptable. Enforcement efforts have not been effective in deterring unlawful immigration. This failure to develop effective strategies to control unlawful immigration has blurred the public perception of the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants. 

For the Commission, the principal issue at present is how to manage immigration so that it will continue to be in the national interest. 

• How do we ensure that immigration is based on and supports broad national economic, social, and humanitarian interests, rather than the interests of those who would abuse our laws? 

• How do we gain effective control over our borders while still encouraging international trade, investment, and tourism? 

• How do we maintain a civic culture based on shared values while accommodating the large and diverse population admitted through immigration policy? 

The credibility of immigration policy can be measured by a simple yardstick: people who should get in, do get in; people who should not get in are kept out; and people who are judged deportable are required to leave. 

During the decade from 1980 to 1990, three major pieces of legislation were adopted to govern immigration policy—the Refugee Act of 1980, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, and the Immigration Act of 1990. 

The Commission supports the broad framework for immigration policy that these laws represent: a legal immigration system that strives to serve the national interest in helping families to reunify and employers to obtain skills not available in the U.S. labor force; a refugee system that reflects both our humanitarian beliefs and international refugee law; and an enforcement system that seeks to deter unlawful immigration through employer sanctions and tighter border control. 

The Commission has concluded, however, that more needs to be done to guarantee that the stated goals of our immigration policy are met. The immediate need is more effective prevention and deterrence of unlawful immigration.

The subsequent 1995 Jordan Commission report on legal immigration called for major cutbacks in the numbers of legal immigrants.

Back then, "immigration reform" meant immigration restriction. 

Tragically, Jordan died the next year at age 59.

I'm shocked, shocked to find that bribing is going on in the Macau gambling halls of Sheldon Adelson

From the New York Times:

The Las Vegas Sands Corporation, an international gambling empire controlled by the billionaire Sheldon G. Adelson, has informed the Securities and Exchange Commission that it likely violated a federal law against bribing foreign officials. ... 

 The Sands’ activities in China came under the scrutiny of federal investigators after 2010, when Steven C. Jacobs, the former president of the company’s operations in Macau, filed a wrongful-termination lawsuit in which he charged that he had been pressured to exercise improper leverage against government officials. He also accused the company of turning a blind eye toward Chinese organized crime figures operating in its casinos.

Why no Environmental Impact Statement on "immigration reform?"

The federal government has just released a 2,000 page environmental impact statement on the proposed Keystone pipeline from Canada to the U.S. I haven't quite gotten around to reading it yet, but that reminds me of something: Why shouldn't there be a required environmental impact statement on proposed amnesty and guest workers plans? How can the politicians blithely make changes that will have vast environmental consequences without first submitting an environmental impact statement?

Back in 2010, I estimated the impact of immigration on American and global carbon emissions. After all, pretty much the whole point of moving to America is to live larger and emit more carbon. I came up with immigration to the U.S. from 2005 to 2050 adding about 6% to global carbon emissions, which is a gigantic number.

Perhaps somebody else would come up with a different number, but, that's kind of the point: nobody is looking at this question.

You say that environmental impact statements have no place in immigration policy? Au contraire -- the need to dot ever i on EISs has held up border fence constructions projects for years. Time to apply the same logic to amnesty and guest workers.

Scalia on "perpetuation of racial entitlement"

Christopher Caldwell wrote in 2009:

"One moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which affirmative action can't be ended because its beneficiaries are too weak to a world in which it can't be ended because its beneficiaries are too strong." 

You might think that a black candidate winning back-to-back Presidential elections is evidence that the beneficiaries of affirmative action in voting arrangements are no longer too weak. But only a few wackos like Justice Scalia have drawn that inference. The bulk of respectable opinion has moved unthinkingly to the natural assumption that Obama's power proves that white people are racist losers, so of course the laws must continue to favor blacks over whites, because whites are evil. Didn't you read the election results? If whites weren't evil, they wouldn't be losers, now would they?

The Supreme Court is dealing with this situation with the Voting Rights Act. Back in 1965, this was passed to prevent Southern states from keeping blacks from voting and it rapidly succeeded, creating a powerful black political class to look after their own interests. Nevertheless, Congress has continued to renew the VRA, with additions such as in 1982 the requirement to gerrymander districts to such a black or Hispanic supermajority that they will elect black or Hispanic legislators, no matter how corrupt or comical. (This benefits Republican politicians in various ways, although not the general welfare.)

Much of the law, however, is of the familiar type that I can best explain by a driving analogy. As you drive down the road, you tend to drift left or right and have to constantly correct in the opposite direction to stay on your path. Title 5 of the VRA is like a governor on your steering wheel that blocks corrections to the right. Since the drifting is very small, the overall impact is hard to notice at any point in time, but ultimately all the little racheting to the left puts you on the wrong side of the street, head on into traffic.

In 2006, Congress renewed the VRA 98-0 for 25 years, which will keep some states and districts under federal trusteeship until at least 66 years after the original VRA. And who is going to dare vote against renewing it in 2031? Who will admit then that its time to take the Scarlet Letter off the South, since the evilness of white Southerners is becoming the central myth of our society, a sin that can never be forgiven or forgotten?

That the Voting Rights Act is both a substantive thumb on the scale of elections, and piece of symbolism in the reigning civic religion, worries Justice Scalia, although few others can comprehend his concerns. From the questioning in the Supreme Court:

JUSTICE SCALIA: Indeed, Congress must have  found that the situation was even clearer and the  violations even more evident than originally, because  originally, the vote in the Senate, for example, was something like 79 to 18, and in the 2006 extension, it was 98 to nothing. It must have been even clearer in 2006 that these States were violating the Constitution. Do you think that's true?

MR. REIN: No. I think the Court has to -­ ... 

JUSTICE SCALIA: Or decided that perhaps they'd better not vote against it, that there's nothing, that there's no -- none of their interests in voting against it. ...
JUSTICE SCALIA: That will always be true forever into the future. You could always say, oh, there has been improvement, but the only reason there has been improvement are these extraordinary procedures that deny the States sovereign powers which the Constitution preserves to them. So, since the only reason it's improved is because of these procedures, we must continue those procedures in perpetuity. ... 

JUSTICE SCALIA: Well, maybe it was making that judgment, Mr. Verrilli. But that's -- that's a problem that I have. This Court doesn't like to get involved in -- in racial questions such as this one. It's something that can be left -- left to Congress. The problem here, however, is suggested by the comment I made earlier, that the initial enactment of this legislation in a -- in a time when the need for it was so much more abundantly clear was -- in the Senate, there -- it was double-digits against it. And that was only a 5-year term. Then, it is reenacted 5 years later, again for a 5-year term. Double-digits against it in the Senate. Then it was reenacted for 7 years. Single digits against it. Then enacted for 25 years, 8 Senate votes against it. 

 And this last enactment, not a single vote in the Senate against it. And the House is pretty much the same. Now, I don't think that's attributable to the
fact that it is so much clearer now that we need this. I think it is attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement. It's been written about.

I'm interested in who has written about "perpetuation of racial entitlement" -- obviously, that's what Caldwell is writing about, Sowell has written about the subject, I have -- but I don't see the phrase many places in Google Books.

Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes. 

 I don't think there is anything to be gained by any Senator to vote against continuation of this act. And I am fairly confident it will be reenacted in
perpetuity unless -- unless a court can say it does not comport with the Constitution. You have to show, when you are treating different States differently, that there's a good reason for it. 

 That's the -- that's the concern that those of us who -- who have some questions about this statute have. It's -- it's a concern that this is not the kind
of a question you can leave to Congress. There are certain districts in the House that are black districts by law just about now. And even the Virginia Senators,
they have no interest in voting against this. The State government is not their government, and they are going to lose -- they are going to lose votes if they do not reenact the Voting Rights Act. Even the name of it is wonderful: The
Voting Rights Act. Who is going to vote against that in the future? ... 

Scalia's insights have evoked howls of protest: how dare an evil old white man favor equal treatment under the law. Doesn't he know he's a loser? And what's he talking about?

I think we've seen a real increase in my lifetime in what I call the Argument by Incomprehension: that if you don't understand the argument upon first hearing, then there's no reason to think about it.

More generally, human beings aren't very good at reasoning objectively about anything involving human beings. Instead, our natural reactions are to obsess over:

- Whose side am I on?
- Who is going to win?
- How can I ingratiate myself with the winners by putting the boot in to the losers?