Women graduates of elite colleges 1/3rd more likely to be stay-at-home moms

Charles Murray writes:

I have noticed the phenomenon in my daughters and their friends: Highly educated women from elite schools who decide to take a break from their careers to stay home and raise their small children. Joni Hersch, a professor of law and economics at Vanderbilt, has put numbers to these anecdotes with a research paper entitled “Opting Out among Women with Elite Education.” It is a fascinating new window onto the development of the new upper class that I described in Coming Apart. 

Hersch uses a large database, the 2003 National Survey of College Graduates, that lets her identify 1,830 women who graduated from “tier 1” educational institutions — in effect, the Ivies and other high-prestige universities like Duke and Stanford — and compare them with women who graduated from less elite schools. When women with and without children of all ages are lumped together, the graduates of tier 1 schools are employed only slightly less often than their less privileged sisters. But as soon as Hersh separates out women with children from those without, it becomes obvious that women from tier 1 schools are significantly more likely to be home with the kids than the others — 68% of mothers from the tier 1 schools were employed, compared to 76% of those from the other schools.

Subtracting from 100%, that's 32% of tier 1 moms versus 24% of moms who are graudates of less prestigious, or 1/3rd more.

A lot depends on the kind of degree that a married woman with children has obtained. If she is a physician, has a PhD, or has an MA in education (i.e., is probably a K-12 teacher), she is as likely to be employed as graduates from lower-tier schools. But those degrees involve only 24% of mothers who graduated from tier 1 schools. Those with law degrees are 9 percentage points less likely to be employed than graduates from lower-tier schools; those with MBAs are 16 percentage points less likely to be employed, and the largest single group, those with just a BA, are 13 percentage points less likely to be employed. 

Something I noticed when my son won a scholarship to a fine high school in the Pasadena area: among students' mothers who had elite MBAs, the moms tended to still be working if they had superstar jobs (like CFO of a major division at Disney), but if they had been merely senior vice presidents and their husbands were doing well, they often would pack it in career-wise. So, the school would have utracompetent volunteer moms with Dartmouth MBAs and investment banking experience running refreshment stands at school events. Nothing ever went wrong at that school.

These numbers shouldn’t make sense. Who gets into tier 1 schools? Not just highly able women, but also women who are ambitious enough to want to be in those schools. It is plausible that they would be more likely, not less, to continue their careers after they have children than women who, on average, are surely less intellectually able and probably less intensely ambitious than the tier 1 women. 

Hersch also documents that women from tier 1 schools are more likely than other women graduates to have parents with college educations and to be married to men holding jobs that require a college education.

Or, husbands who are just highly successful in general. Similarly, at the high school in Sherman Oaks where my other son went, some mothers, like Pam Dawber and Moira Harris, were largely retired from their careers to be housewives focused on their children so that their husbands, Mark Harmon and Gary Sinise, respectively, could concentrate fully on battling each other for first place in the Nielsen ratings.

Add to that some other characteristics of women who have graduated from elite schools that Hersch does not address but are established by other sources: Those with children are almost always married. They are not only married to men with college educations, they are likely to be married to men who have also graduated from elite schools. Their family incomes are likely to be high. They tend to live in places with the best schools (or send their children to the best schools).

As Kingsley Amis noted in Lucky Jim, there's no end to the way nice things are nicer than not nice things.

Quotes from Ed West's "The Diversity Illusion"

HBD Chick has posted some quotations from Telegraph columnist Ed West's new book The Diversity Illusion: What We Got Wrong About Immigration & How to Set it Right.

“In over sixty years of enormous change such debate [about immigration] had been restricted by taboo, fear and mockery. Immigration is the most thought about and least talked about subject in British history.“ [kindle locations 173-175]

Well, maybe sex in the Victorian Age. But, even then explorer Richard Burton, a polygamy advocate, wouldn't shut up about sex in the Orient, and Queen Victoria knighted him anyway.

"As Kevin Myers noted, the people of Britain and Ireland ‘have taken a secret, Self-Denying Ordinance not to discuss immigration or race in any meaningful way’. In living memory barely a newspaper article, radio or television show has seriously questioned the diversity orthodoxy, and even in the intelligent Right-wing press scepticism has had to be couched in such a cryptic way that the paper’s horoscopes are more candid.” [kindle locations 202-205]

“Writing about Tibet, liberal blogger Dave Osler once stated that China ‘has resettled Han Chinese colonists there to the point where Tibetans are at risk of becoming a minority in their own homeland’. On his own country he declared that ‘further mass immigration obviously has the potential to rejuvenate the population of this island once the politicians can get their head round the idea’. Tibetans becoming a minority in their country are a threatened species; the English are being ‘rejuvenated. Of course the Tibetans have no choice in becoming a minority, yet when the British express their opposition to ‘rejuvenation’ they are condemned as racists.” [kindle locations 1145-1150]

"No universal altruism has evolved because a sense of universal altruism would have no evolutionary advantage. Garrett Hardin argued in a 1982 essay, ‘Discriminating Altruisms’, that a world without borders or distinctions is impossible, because groups that practise unlimited altruism will be eliminated in favour of those that limit altruistic behaviour to smaller groups, from whom they receive benefits." 

More at HBD Chick.

Richard Dawkins on eugenics

Here are a couple of tweets today from Richard Dawkins making the same basic point I made 13 years ago in a VDARE article on Celebrity Feminist Eugenics:

‏@RichardDawkins 

If you were contemplating Artificial Insemination, would you be content with a random donor? Or would you make a deliberate choice? 

‏@RichardDawkins 

Almost 100% say they'd opt for nonrandom choice of sperm donor. Shock, horror, you're all eugenicists!

Dawkins is a product of the English tradition that produced Galton, Fisher, and Hamilton, all of them ardent eugenicists, yet, somehow, none of them Nazis. One might almost think that Stephen Jay Gould wasn't a reliable, unbiased guide to evolutionary theory and its history. But, of course, that's unthinkable.

In reality, eugenics had no more to do with WWII happening than the ever-popular Volkswagen Beetle, probably less. But it did provide a convenient club for academics in the late 20th Century to use to whomp their predecessors of the early 20th Century.

For an analysis of Dawkins' views on race, see my 2004 VDARE article.

And for Dawkins and ethnic nepotism, see my followup article. 

New York City's missing black men

One of the more astonishing demographic articles I've ever read was this one by the excellent Jonathan Tilove, who used to be employed to report on race by Newhouse News Service, which went out of business in 2008.

The Gap: In a Single Statistic, the Measure of a Racial Tragedy

By JONATHAN TILOVE 

May 5, 2005 

c.2005 Newhouse News Service 

There are nearly 2 million more black adult women than men in America, stark testimony to how often black men die before their time. 

Worse yet, with nearly another million black men in prison or the military, the reality in most black communities across the country is of an even greater imbalance _ a gap of 2.8 million, or 26 percent, according to Census Bureau figures for 2002. The comparable disparity for whites was 8 percent. 

Perhaps no single statistic so precisely measures the fateful, often fatal price of being a black man in America, or so powerfully conveys how beset black communities are by the violence and disease that leave them bereft of brothers, fathers, husbands and sons. And because the number of black males plummets as they move from their teens to their 20s, the gap first appears with the suddenness of a natural disaster. 

The imbalance between the numbers of black men and women does not exist everywhere. There is no gap to speak of in places with relatively small black populations like Minneapolis, Minn., Portland, Ore., San Francisco and San Diego, and Seattle actually has more black men than women. But it is the rule in those communities with large concentrated black populations that are the hub of African-American life, and it is as good an indicator as any of things gone wrong. 

There are more than 30 percent more black women than men in Baltimore, New Orleans, Chicago and Cleveland, and in smaller cities like Harrisburg, Pa., Syracuse, N.Y., Flint, Mich., and Mobile and Birmingham, Ala. 

There are 36 percent more black women than men in New York City, and 37 percent more in Saginaw, Mich., in Philadelphia, and in East Orange.

Since you never hear about this, I've always wondered if Tilove's results were replicable.

I finally found a government report for New York City in 2000, and, yes, the ratio of black males to females plummets from about age 21 onward. To eliminate the natural effect of women living longer on average, I just looked at ages 20 through 39 in New York City. There were 28% more black women than men in that cohort.

And, it's not much caused by black women moving to New York because they were fans of Sex and the City, either. In Manhattan (which includes Harlem), the gap was smallest, with just 15% more women than men among 20 to 39 year olds. In more middle class Queens, with its large West Indian population, the gap was only 18%. In Staten Island 27%, in the Bronx 32%, and in Brooklyn, which had, by far, New York City's largest black population, the gap was 35%.

Hopefully, the decline in homicides and AIDS deaths means the gap is smaller in the 2010 Census, but I haven't been able to find any numbers for NYC from that Census yet.

"Can a Woman Win the Kentucky Derby?"

Since nobody remembers much about the past, it's easy to write articles about how in some particular field women are Real Soon Now going to break through the barriers of discrimination and stereotypes and achieve equality. For example, what about women jockeys? Obviously, there must be a lot of discrimination against them since they haven't achieved much. Maybe the social climate is finally changing in their favor!

From the New York Times Magazine:

Can a Woman Win the Kentucky Derby?

by Keith O'Brien 

Here is the perception: female jockeys can’t ride. They’re too weak. They don’t have the fight in them. They can’t close — not like men, anyway. Down the stretch, you need a jockey to carry the horse to the end, rally the winded animal and squeeze speed out of weary legs. Female jockeys can’t do that. Or so goes the explanation for why, almost 50 years after women first fought legal battles to become jockeys, there are so few top jockeys who are women.

The sportswriter is here winking to the handful of well-informed readers that he's actually aware of the history of women jockeys, but most readers won't notice what he's doing. My guess is that he's recounting his observations, just labeling them as Stereotypes.

Then there’s Rosie Napravnik. 

The 113-pound New Jersey native isn’t just the most successful “girl jockey” on the horse-racing circuit today; she’s one of the best American jockeys, period. Last year, she amassed more than $12.4 million in earnings, eighth-best in North America. Her horses finished in the top three in nearly half the races she entered. So far this year, she ranks fifth in earnings, leads all jockeys in victories and has picked up her third consecutive riding title at the New Orleans Fair Grounds Race Course. 

Some of her male competitors are less than charitable about the reasons for Napravnik’s success. “Look at me,” a veteran jockey was saying before a race in New Orleans last month. “I’m 53 years old, brother. I’m going to walk into a paddock, and I’m going to talk to these owners and their wives and stuff. And there’s little Rosie. She’s going to bounce out of there. A pretty little girl, good disposition. And she’s going to be talking all nice to them. Now, which one of them would you rather leg up on your horse?” ...

Now, at 25, she is one of the more provocative figures in racing, heckled at times by critics who don’t think she belongs on the track while being asked for her autograph by fans. ... 

I don't know that much about horse racing, but I had a Sports Illustrated subscription in the early 1970s when SI covered more sports than just NFL/NBA/MLB. The early 1970s were the Golden Age of female jockeys getting favorable media publicity. One female jockey, Robyn Smith, was on the cover of Sports Illustrated 41 years ago. Here's Frank Deford's 1972 cover story on her.

Then, in 1980 Smith married the octogenarian Fred Astaire. After his death in 1987, still feeling the need for speed, Smith took up flying, and by 2000 was working as a corporate jet pilot.

Another female jockey who was much celebrated when I was young was Mary Bacon, whose success on the track and good looks led to a Revlon modeling contract and the cover of Newsweek's 1974 "Women in Sports" issue. Here's the opening of a 1974 People article about her:

Mary Bacon Is Queen of the Turf 

By Mary Vespa 

In her career as a jockey, Mary Bacon has been kidnapped, knifed and shot at, and in racing accidents has suffered a broken back twice, broken hands and feet, a crushed pelvis and a punctured lung.  

Through it all, the 5'4" Mary has triumphed like some kind of charmed soap opera heroine. 

However, Bacon gave a speech at a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1975 and that wrecked her career. 

The larger pattern is that the door has been open to female jockeys for over 40 years. But, riding thoroughbreds remains a dangerous job needing a high strength to weight ratio. That female jockeys haven't, on the whole, had more success lately than they had 40 years ago suggests that racing is just one of those sports where an exceptional woman -- like Lynn Hill in rockclimbing or Judit Polgar in chess -- can make it to very near the top, but that the bell curve of talent and drive is simply shifted more in the male direction. 

But, as handy as bell curves are for understanding the way of the world, they don't make for a pleasing Narrative. A Napravnik, a Hill, a Polgar are pretty interesting as women achieving in a male field, but the press's need to frame every story as part of a trend by, say, ignoring how pro-feminist the 1970s were, gives a fundamentally distorted picture of the world.

NYT: Blacks and Latinos stopped and frisked by NYPD for being shifty-looking really are kind of shifty-looking

Here's a long article in the New York Times on the ongoing trial over whether the NYPD's stop and frisk strategy is racially biased. The theme of the article is that maybe stop and frisk isn't such a bad idea after all. Sure, maybe civil rights extremists are upset that about 1,500 blacks and Latins per day are getting humiliated by cops on the streets of New York, but we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater. We need to look in a more, uh, nuanced fashion at these accusations of disparate impact. Nobody wants to go back to the Dinkins Era, right? 

Some Testimony on Police Tactic Undercuts Bias Claim 

By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN 

One man was stopped and frisked because of his expensive red leather jacket — similar to one that a murder suspect was wearing in a wanted poster. Another man was stopped after a woman complained to the police that he was following her. Still another was stopped by officers who had watched him jostle the door of a home, trying to get in. 

Recruited by civil rights lawyers, these men and others have testified about their encounters with the police in a federal trial weighing whether the soaring number of stop-and-frisk encounters has resulted in widespread constitutional violations for hundreds of thousands of black and Hispanic men. They were chosen to give voice to the toll that the police’s use of the tactic has inflicted on an entire demographic, their lawyers say. 

But over the trial’s first month, some of these men’s accounts seemed to veer away from the straightforward narrative of racial profiling — and may have actually undermined the plaintiffs’ efforts to demonstrate that the police routinely disregard the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable police detentions. 

Whether the circumstances of each case rose to the level of “reasonable suspicion” — the legal standard required for forcible street stops — is a question that the judge, Shira A. Scheindlin of Federal District Court in Manhattan, will ultimately decide. Even if she finds these individual stops fall short of that legal threshold, there is still evidence suggesting the stops were not, as the plaintiffs claim, “suspicionless and race-based.” But the civil rights lawyers bringing the case say they have presented ample evidence of race-based decision-making by police officers. 

So far nine people have testified about more than a dozen occasions on which they were stopped. (Two more witnesses will testify.) These accounts are the foundation of a trial exploring whether the New York Police Department’s training, supervision and patrol strategies have led to weakened constitutional protections for minority men. 

The plaintiffs’ lawyers, who are with the Center for Constitutional Rights, are asking Judge Scheindlin to put the department’s stop-and-frisk practices under judicial oversight. 

But with five million police stops recorded since 2002, it would seem that the civil rights lawyers would be able to find witnesses to present far more conclusive accounts of unconstitutional police stops — an incongruity that lawyers for the city sought to portray during opening arguments as indicative of the case’s weakness. 

... But the testimony offered so far has presented a more nuanced picture of police work than the one the plaintiffs had hoped to show. In several of the dozen stops described by witnesses, the police appeared to have specific reasons for suspecting that the men were engaging in criminal activity. Even a police stop of the lead plaintiff in the case, David Floyd, seems open to interpretation.

David Floyd, shifty-looking door-jostler

Sgt. James Kelly of the Police Department, one of five witnesses to testify about the stop of Mr. Floyd, said he observed Mr. Floyd and another man standing in front of a door, jostling it. He grew more suspicious, he testified, after watching them unsuccessfully try several keys in the door. “It looked like they were forcibly trying to get into a house,” Sergeant Kelly testified. 

During the ensuing stop-and-frisk encounter, Sergeant Kelly and the two officers with him eventually accepted that the two men were not burglars but tenants: one had been locked out, and a neighbor, Mr. Floyd, had sought to let him back in. 

Sounds like Professor Gates and Officer Crowley in Cambridge.

In court, the city’s lead lawyer, Heidi Grossman, observed that several of the stops occurred because an individual matched a physical or “specific clothing description” of a crime suspect. 

One stop followed an anonymous 911 caller who reported overhearing three black men planning a robbery as they walked up Broadway, near 96th Street. The caller described the men’s clothing and mentioned a disturbing detail: one of the men had a gun. 

Nearby, officers spotted three black men seated on a bench. They were dressed much the same way as the 911 caller described the robbers. The officers ordered the men to the ground at gunpoint and frisked them before realizing they had the wrong men. One officer, in an apparent bid to explain the police interaction, radioed the dispatcher and requested that the suspects’ description be repeated, so the men could hear for themselves. 

One of the three men, Nicholas Peart, testified that he could not remember all of what the radio dispatcher said, but he did recall one detail about one of the robbery suspects. 

“Blue shorts, that’s what I heard that night,” he testified. He acknowledged that he had been wearing blue basketball shorts. 

Another stop involved similar circumstances. In that instance, Clive Lino, 32, explained that he was detained for 20 minutes because of his red leather Pelle Pelle jacket. “It’s a popular jacket,” Mr. Lino testified. 

But the two officers who stopped him testified how at the station house that very afternoon, their commander had emphasized a recent unsolved homicide, even distributing a wanted poster. It contained scant description of the suspect, mentioning a “male black” between 5 feet 9 and 6 feet, and a loosefitting, red leather jacket with the brand Pelle Pelle stitched conspicuously across it. 

The evidence involving another stop illustrated the challenge that police officers often face when called to the scene, where they must try to quickly resolve ambiguity and discern what is happening. A woman accused a man of following her around and demanding money at a big-box pet store in Union Square. 

After all, New York isn't some minor league town like, say, L.A. where the feds were right to use the purported racial bias revealed by the Ramparts Scandal to get a consent decree over the LAPD. This is New York!

Ed West on hate for Mrs. Thatcher

Ever notice how some kinds of hate are A-OK?

Ed West writes in The Telegraph:

What’s striking about all this is that the hatred does not come from the northern towns ruined in the late 20th century, but the London public sector classes, who did well under Mrs T. 

Great leaders ensure that they control the propaganda. The reason history remembers Alfred the Great and has entirely forgotten his grandson Athelstan, who actually unified England, is that Alfred employed a chronicler called Asser.

Seems to be a theme lately.

Therefore Alfred wrote his own history. Today there are plenty of kids called Alfie, but there aren’t any Athies. Mrs Thatcher’s enemies wrote the history of her times, in television, theatre and fiction. 

In a wider sense her profound failure was to lose the culture war, or not even fight it. As Tim Montgomerie reminded us on Monday, conservatism cannot triumph in economics while it remains totally beaten in the cultural sphere. 

While she destroyed an opposition base when the manufacturing industry shed its jobs – with terrible human cost – she actually helped to build up a far bigger and more powerful enemy class, led by local government and the administrators of the welfare state that flowered during her reign. She destroyed lots of unproductive working-class jobs and created lots of unproductive middle-class ones. She was responsible for New Labour and Tony Blair in more than one way, and this makes it harder for Conservatives to ever win again.... 

Among my contemporaries, huge numbers of talented people work in areas where there is an institutional hostility to conservatism, for the simple reason that conservatives do not believe their work should be professionalised and run by the state. Younger conservative politico types tend to move in these circles and know these people from school and university, so any Tory leader who takes them on will have to accept huge personal unpopularity and social death. 

When I criticised Thatcherism the other day what I specifically meant was Thatcherism as it has now become: libertarian and self-centred. 

Libertarians think they can get a Victorian-sized state without Victorian attitudes, but they’re deluded. If you really want a small state that doesn’t tell you what to do and gobble up half your income then start going to church, get involved in voluntary activities, tell the vicar or priest to stop droning on about the cuts and climate change and tell him to start shouting about sin and fornication. Repress yourself, you’ll find it’s good for your wallet. 

Were that to happen, then the need for an enormous state apparatus managing vast areas of our life would be reduced. As it is the blob gets bigger and bigger every year and will help to bring down Cameron, not the least because the powerful state broadcaster is very much part of it. 

Ricin mailing arrestee is an Elvis impersonator who is into dismembered body parts awareness

An arrest has been made of Elvis impersonator Paul Kevin Curtis of Mississippi in the mailing of letters poisoned with ricin to Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) and the President.

Here's are videos of the suspect's Elvis impersonations. I must say I like his version of Elvis's rockabilly class "Baby, Let's Play House" (above).

And this also appears to be the fellow's website:

Let the record show that on this date, March 05, 2008, I, Paul Kevin Curtis, being of sound mind, am attempting once again to expose various parties within the government, FBI, police departments, legal & healthcare systems, etc. that a conspiracy to ruin my reputation in the community as well as an ongoing effort to break down the foundation I worked more than 20 years to build in the country music scene, began on the day I accidentally discovered a refrigerator full of dismembered body parts & organs wrapped in plastic in the morgue of the largest non-metropolitan healthcare organization in the United States of America, AKA North Mississippi Medical Center where I was employed from 1998 until March of 2000.

The purpose of this online documentary of photos, police reports, as well as my 1st & only online petition, publications & events surrounding my life & the actions of what I believe to be that of a secret shadow government in which I feel have been put into place by higher powers to be in order to hide the truth behind the illegal organ harvesting market which I began investigating in 2000 after being "banned" for life for simply questioning the hospital administration on what they did with so many dismembered body parts? 

So, either this is good, prompt police work or an example of "Round up the usual suspects!"

My impression is that the anthrax mailings right after 9/11 helped push the politicians and the media over the edge. Without the anthrax mailings, cooler heads might have prevailed and forestalled the Iraq Attaq.

A wise New York Times Editorial against amnesty

From the New York Times Editorial Board:

Hasty Call for Amnesty 

The A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s call for the government to grant amnesty to an estimated six million illegal immigrants currently living in the United States and to eliminate most sanctions on employers who hire them in the future was a surprising turnabout. Until now, organized labor has fought hard to keep illegal workers from taking jobs from higher-paid union workers. 

The A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s proposal is attractive to many groups. Unions welcome the chance to go after a huge new pool of unorganized workers. Employers welcome the chance to hire cheap labor without fear of criminal liability. And illegal immigrants who have worked hard for years and raised families under harrowing circumstances would welcome access to medical care and other services denied to illegal aliens. 

But the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s proposal should be rejected. Amnesty would undermine the integrity of the country's immigration laws and would depress the wages of its lowest-paid native-born workers. 

Back in 1986, Congress granted amnesty to an estimated three million illegal immigrants as part of a law that also promised to crack down on further illegal immigration by imposing sanctions on employers who knowingly violated the law. At that time, this page endorsed amnesty because it was tied to measures that promised to keep further rounds of illegal immigration in check. But 14 years later there are twice as many illegal workers, and employer sanctions are widely deemed a joke. Workers pretend to show employers proof of citizenship or work visas and employers pretend they do not know the proof is fake.

The primary problem with amnesties is that they beget more illegal immigration. Demographers trace the doubling of the number of Mexican immigrants since 1990 in part to the amnesty of the 1980's. Amnesties signal foreign workers that American citizenship can be had by sneaking across the border, or staying beyond the term of one's visa, and hiding out until Congress passes the next amnesty. The 1980's amnesty also attracted a large flow of illegal relatives of those workers who became newly legal. All that is unfair to those who play by the immigration rules and wait years to gain legal admission. 

It is also unfair to unskilled workers already in the United States. Between about 1980 and 1995, the gap between the wages of high school dropouts and all other workers widened substantially. Prof. George Borjas of Harvard estimates that almost half of this trend can be traced to immigration of unskilled workers. Illegal immigration of unskilled workers induced by another amnesty would make matters worse. The better course of action is to honor America's proud tradition by continuing to welcome legal immigrants and find ways to punish employers who refuse to obey the law.

... Published: February 22, 2000

The unemployment rate in February 2000 was 4.1%, The unemployment rate today is 7.6%.

The conventional wisdom on IQ

The recent critique at Human Varieties of Cosma Shalizi's celebrated 2007 attack on the g factor theory of intelligence has led to some fascinating discussions in the comments at Metafilter and Noahpinion, economist Noah Smith's blog.

The discussions in the comments at those two sites are not fascinating in the sense that they advance our understanding of this complex and hard to grasp topic, which they do not. Instead, they represent state of the art conventional wisdom on the topic of IQ. It would be fun to do a factor analysis of the comments to see what are main factors in the standard prejudices of the educated. Candidates for major factors represented in the comments would likely include:

Hate

Projection of Hate

Who? Whom? thinking

Arrogance

Ignorance

Ad Hominem

Guilt by Assoication

Hypocrisy
Lack of Self-Awareness

Aryan Brotherhood running amok in Texas?

Oops. Never mind.

Texas prosecutor murders: Not linked to white supremacists, after all?  

The wife of a disgraced former justice of the peace is charged in killings once suspected to be the handiwork of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas

I explained what prison gangs are about in VDARE.com in 2005.

Salon: "Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American"

From Salon:

Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American 

There is a double standard: White terrorists are dealt with as lone wolves, Islamists are existential threats 

BY DAVID SIROTA  

TOPICS: RACISM, XENOPHOBIA, BOSTON EXPLOSIONS, U.S. FOREIGN POLICY, IMMIGRATION REFORM, MUSLIMS, EDITOR'S PICKS, WHITE PEOPLE, MALE, BOSTON BOMBER, NEWS, POLITICS NEWS

Updated: Sirota responds to critics of this piece over here. 

As we now move into the official Political Aftermath period of the Boston bombing — the period that will determine the long-term legislative fallout of the atrocity — the dynamics of privilege will undoubtedly influence the nation’s collective reaction to the attacks. That’s because privilege tends to determine: 1) which groups are — and are not — collectively denigrated or targeted for the unlawful actions of individuals; and 2) how big and politically game-changing the overall reaction ends up being. 

This has been most obvious in the context of recent mass shootings. In those awful episodes, a religious or ethnic minority group lacking such privilege would likely be collectively slandered and/or targeted with surveillance or profiling (or worse) if some of its individuals comprised most of the mass shooters. However, white male privilege means white men are not collectively denigrated/targeted for those shootings — even though most come at the hands of white dudes. 

Likewise, in the context of terrorist attacks, such privilege means white non-Islamic terrorists are typically portrayed not as representative of whole groups or ideologies, but as “lone wolf” threats to be dealt with as isolated law enforcement matters. Meanwhile, non-white or developing-world terrorism suspects are often reflexively portrayed as representative of larger conspiracies, ideologies and religions that must be dealt with as systemic threats — the kind potentially requiring everything from law enforcement action to military operations to civil liberties legislation to foreign policy shifts. 

“White privilege is knowing that even if the bomber turns out to be white, no one will call for your group to be profiled as terrorists as a result, subjected to special screening or threatened with deportation,” writes author Tim Wise. 

Will Sirota get his wish?

Mark Zuckerberg's NAABP (National Association for the Advancement of Billionaire People) gets loophole inserted in Gang of 4*2's immigration bill

From the Washington Post:

Facebook flexes political muscle with provision in immigration bill 

By Peter Wallsten, Jia Lynn Yang and Craig Timberg, Tuesday, April 16, 6:12 PM 

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg generated international attention last week for his entry into Washington politics. In launching a new political group, he positioned himself as a leading advocate to help aspiring entrepreneurs and other ambitious immigrants achieve the American dream. 

Yet behind the scenes on Capitol Hill, Facebook lobbyists were engaged in another form of politics: pressing to insert a few new words helpful to Facebook’s business interests into a sprawling legislative proposal. 

That would be the first time in the history of the world that immigrationist rhetoric was ever deployed in the service of special interests.

The deft maneuvering came during the drafting of the new bipartisan Senate immigration proposal being released this week. It underscores the rising clout of a young company that is following the road paved by such technology forebears as Microsoft and Google, moving from indifference toward Washington to persistent, sophisticated engagement. 

The payoff on the immigration provision could be substantial, allowing Facebook and other technology companies to avoid a requirement that they make a “good-faith” effort to recruit Americans for jobs before hiring from overseas. Facebook could also sidestep proposed rules that would force it to pay much higher wages to many foreign workers. 

... The new carve-out for Facebook and other firms, critics fear, could help companies evade the stricter proposed regulations being hailed by lawmakers as a way to crack down on ­abuses. 

Facebook officials declined to comment on the specific H1B provision, instead couching the company’s lobbying on the issue as part of a broader push to improve the country’s economy.

Ask not what your Economy can do for you -- ask what you can do for your Economy.

... “Modernizing the immigration system so it helps the U.S. economy and responsibly promotes innovation is a top priority for Facebook and all of our tech colleagues,” Jodi Seth, a Facebook spokeswoman, said by e-mail.

If only Facebook's spokeswoman were named Jodi Sith.

“We are working with the Hill and others to explain how our businesses work and to make sure reforms don’t have unintended consequences that might undermine the purpose of the bill.” 

I bet Facebook doesn't want unintended consequences. They paid good money to have the bill repurposed and they want what they paid for.

Facebook faces stricter regulations because the company recently surpassed a key legal threshold and is now considered to be “dependent” on H1B visas. The U.S. government classifies companies as dependent when more than 15 percent of their workers hold H1Bs. Facebook said it is “just over” the 15 percent line. 

The new H1B regulations in the Senate deal are aimed largely at big outsourcing firms — most of them based in India — that employ tens of thousands of new H1B workers each year. More severe limits would be placed on companies with more than half of their workers on the visas, including stiff fees and an outright ban to take effect in 2016 on these firms hiring additional H1B workers. 

... Then this year, as momentum built for an immigration bill, Facebook began pushing for an even broader exemption. 

Working with lobbyists for Compete America, a trade group representing U.S. tech firms, Facebook helped secure a workaround: Any worker in the process of obtaining a green card “shall not be counted” toward the 15 percent threshold. 

That means Facebook and other companies could file just enough applications to fall back below the 15 percent line. The language, pulled from a draft copy of the legislation, was reviewed by The Washington Post. 

Supporters of the workaround said severe backlogs in the green-card program have left many workers for Facebook and other firms on H1Bs, driving up the companies’ percentage. 

“We need to crack down on firms that abuse the H1B system, but some companies’ H1B number is inflated because their employees remain stuck in the backlog,” said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), a key architect of the new immigration plan. “It shouldn’t be seen as a company’s fault when the government simply takes too long to process green cards.” 

In an op-ed for The Post last week, Zuckerberg questioned why there are not enough H1B visas for immigrants while introducing his new group, FWD.us.
“Why do we offer so few H-1B visas for talented specialists that the supply runs out within days of becoming available each year,” Zuckerberg said, “even though we know each of these jobs will create two or three more American jobs in return?” 

... Joel Kaplan, the head of Facebook’s Washington office, was a senior aide in the George W. Bush White House, where he worked with his friend Cesar Conda, now chief of staff to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a key immigration negotiator. 

Kaplan was a driving force behind pressing the lawmakers to include the green-card exception, according to people familiar with the deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private meetings. 

... Without the exception, Corley added, some firms might be forced to pay foreign workers more than U.S. employees performing the same jobs.

You mean, without this exception, Facebook might, conceivably, have had an incentive to hire Americans? The horror, the horror ...

... Bruce Morrison, a lobbyist for U.S. electrical engineers, said the Facebook provision creates a substantial loophole. The measure requires only that green-card applications be at least “pending” — meaning U.S. government approval is not necessary for a temporary H1B worker to be classified as permanent by a company seeking to avoid stricter regulations. 

“It could just be a matter of paper pushing,” said Morrison, a former Democratic congressman from Connecticut who wrote key pieces of the H1B visa law in 1990. “All you have to do is file a piece of paper, which doesn’t even have to be approved or approvable.”

Cecilia Kang and David Nakamura contributed to this report.

Whites and Guns

From my new Taki's column on "Guns and Whites:"

Age-adjusted homicide victimization rates from the Center for Disease Control.

Read the whole thing there. I included a list of celebrities who have New York City "concealed carry" permits.

Will Big Data change the world?

Everybody is talking about how life will never be the same again as we enter the Age of Big Data. Here, for example, is David Brooks' new column on Big Data. As I've mentioned before, I started working in Big Data 31 years ago. After I got my MBA in 1982, I joined a newish firm that was the first to effectively exploit for marketing research purposes the inundation of data from checkout scanners at supermarkets and drug stores. 

We paid to put the new laser scanners in every supermarket and drug store in four small cities, such as Eau Claire, Wisconsin. We recruited 2,500 households in each of our four test markets to identify themselves as they went through the checkout lane, so we could track every single consumer packaged goods purchase they made. We could finally answer quantitatively an endless number of questions that brand managers and marketing professors had dreamed up since WWII about consumer behavior. Do people who buy Tab by the six-pack also buy Lean Cuisine when it's on sale? Any question like that imaginable, we could answer.

 Furthermore, we could do over 30 years ago what Jim Manzi called for in his recent book Uncontrolled: use these towns and giant real world laboratories, where we could control the TV commercials seen by each of our panelists in their own living room. If P&G wanted to test a new Mr. Whipple spot for Charmin, we could divide our panel up into two cells with identical Charmin purchasing over the last year, then show one cell the new commercial and one cell the old commercial, then record which cell bought more Charmin over the next year.

We caused a sensation in the consumer packaged goods world. Wall Street said the world would never be the same and our stock doubled on the day it went public in March 1983. 

For awhile, we made a lot of money, so it definitely changed our world.

After awhile, though, brand managers at P&G got tired of paying hundreds of thousands to find out much how sales would go if P&G management granted their fondest wish of having their advertising budget doubled. The usual answer was: not much, if at all. The only time doubling an already generous P&G-sized ad budget was likely to move the needle was if P&G had some real new news about their brand to convey (which, being P&G and investing heavily in chemists to improve their products, they actually sometimes did). 

As this lesson sank in, it set off a mini-recession in TV advertising around 1986. So, did testing. Every year after that, we'd write into our budget that this would be the year that the world would rediscover how incredible this testing service was, but instead sales just eked slowly away. The company finally shut down the service late last year.

By 1987, however, we'd moved into even bigger Big Data, collecting all the supermarket sales for about 25 million people. 

That too changed the world. Yet, somehow, the world kept spinning on its axis. 

Let me offer another, more well-known example: baseball. I first became fascinated by baseball statistics in 1965 when I was six. Let's see if I can remember Ken Boyer's 1964 MVP line: .293, 24 homers, 111 RBIs. ... Nope, it was really .295 / 24 / 119. 

A vast amount has been written since then about how Big Data has revolutionized baseball. For example, today we know that Ken Boyer wasn't really the best player in the National League in 1964. No, a vast amount of statistical analysis has uncovered the electrifying news that the best player in 1964 was actually -- and you'll be stunned to learn this -- Willie Mays! 

Oh, wait, everybody back then knew Willie Mays was the best player in the National League. I was six and I knew. According to the latest Big Data analysis, Willie had been the best player in the league for 9 of the previous 11 years, just like most six-year-olds would have more or less guessed.

So, how much has baseball changed since 1965 due to the famous revolution in Big Data? Michael Brendan Dougherty says we are in a Golden Age of baseball, while Ross Douthat has caveats, citing my post on moneyball making baseball worse.

To check how much has changed, I turned on the radio to listen to the Dodgers like I did in 1965. Some things have changed, but others haven't, such as Vin Scully, who was a veteran announcer in 1965 with 16 years experience with the Dodgers, is still doing the play-by-play in 2013.

Chronicle of Higher Education: Assheuer demonstrates Assmann's anti-Semitism

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Biblical Blame Shift 

Is the Egyptologist Jan Assmann Fueling Anti-Semitism? 

By Richard Wolin 

Jan Assmann has been described as the world's leading Egyptologist—a characterization that few these days would dare to dispute. A 74-year-old emeritus professor at the University of Heidelberg and honorary professor at the University of Konstanz, Assmann has held guest professorships at Yale, the University of Chicago, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, in Paris. 

In addition to his specialized work as an Egyptologist, Assmann has staked a more general claim to distinction as a leading theorist of cultural history as a result of his pathbreaking work on "mnemo­history"—a concept he has developed over the past three decades with his wife, Aleida Assmann, and other researchers. 

In his recent volume, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Assmann recapitulates a number of his most important findings. Building on the work of previous theorists of cultural memory as an approach to historical understanding (such as the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs), Assmann's notion of mnemohistory suggests that, from a cultural point of view, the way history is remembered is more important than—to quote the German historian Leopold von Ranke—"the way it really was." ...

As Assmann explains his methodology in Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: "Even if sometimes the debate over history, memory, and mnemotechnics may appear abstract and academic, it seems to me to nevertheless lie at the very heart of current discourse. Everything points to the fact that the concept of memory constitutes the basis for a new paradigm of cultural studies that will shed light on all the interconnected fields of art and literature, politics and sociology, religion and law." 

Assmann points out that questions of historical remembrance are frequently the object of contentious cultural negotiations and disputes. Often, such struggles go far toward determining the cultural self-understanding of a given society or social group. To take one example that resurfaces often in Assmann's work: At various points in European cultural history, the memory of ancient Egypt, as the "other" of the West, has assumed a pivotal function. Thus in both the Old Testament and early Christianity, Egypt was hyperbolically constructed as a "negative totem." For the ancient Jews, it became the symbol of worldly corruption ("the fleshpots of Egypt") and soulless idolatry. Among Christians, it became one of the essential sites of paganism—a past from which believers needed to free themselves in order to accede to the promised land of salvation. 

Assmann's approach systematically neglects ancient Judaism's robust moral inclinations toward tolerance and neighborly love. ...

Everybody knows Moses was the good guy and Pharaoh the bad guy. I mean, who are you going to believe: the world's-leading Egyptologist (who, allow me to point out, has a funny name) or Cecil B. de Mille? I rest my case.

What Assmann essentially describes in his writings is an improbable and presumptuous theory of historico-theological "blowback." 

By introducing the "Mosaic distinction," Assmann argues, the Old Testament established the foundations of religious intolerance, as epitomized by the theological watchwords: "No other gods!" "No god but God!" ... In Of God and Gods, Assmann goes so far as to suggest that the "religion of the book" was proto-totalitarian. "The Torah with its commandments and prohibitions ... served as a script for leading one's life, running one's business, performing the rituals, ruling the community, in short regulating every aspect of individual and collective existence," he argues. "This was a new phenomenon in the history of writing as well as that of religion and civilization generally. Never before had writing served such comprehensive functions." 

At the risk of lapsing into what, by his own admission, might be viewed as anti-Jewish stereotypes and polemics, Assmann invokes several chilling, if familiar, instances of mass slaughter from the Old Testament as confirmation of his thesis concerning the inherent relationship between "exclusive monotheism" and predatory violence. ... 

Of course, there is no archaeological evidence to support the claim that any of these alleged divinely mandated bloodlettings actually occurred. Instead, it is commonly acknowledged that they were conceived by the anonymous biblical authors as cautionary tales to illustrate the risks of straying from the basic precepts of the Old Testament's austere ethical injunctions. ... 

A major failing of Assmann's approach is that it systematically neglects ancient Judaism's robust moral inclinations toward tolerance and neighborly love. Numerous prescriptions in the Old Testament, known as the Noachide Laws, stress the importance of providing hospitality and succor to strangers. As we read in Leviticus (19:33-34): "When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as your self, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt." ...  

A number of astute critics have also pointed out that, from a social-evolutionary perspective, biblical monotheism represents a significant ethical breakthrough, providing a normative basis for the idea of universal human brotherhood—a characterization diametrically opposed to the "exclusionary" mentality that Assmann considers predominant. Historically, the Exodus parable, which Assmann judges the ur-text of exclusionary monotheism, has served as a foundational narrative of political emancipation: humanity's deliverance from the injustices of bondage and oppression. 

Assmann censures monotheism's ostensible "world alienation"—its embrace of a transcendent, invisible God who dwells outside of, rather than within, the world. But that divine barrier, in fact, underwrites the ethical distinction between justice and injustice, what is and what should be, mere life versus life led according to principle. This perspective conveys the idea that the moral life is something that must be achieved by a demanding process of existential reorientation and conversion. It "alienates" men and women not from the world as such, but from the world conceived as a locus of oppression and injustice. That was the reality that the Israelites were forced to confront during their 400 years of bondage in ancient Egypt. ... 

Thus as the journalist Thomas Assheuer has pointed out in discussing Assmann's work: "The appeal to a just God was the answer to an experience of violence and suffering that can no longer be compensated by myth."

And, no I'm not making this up. I've never heard of Assheuer before, but Assmann is a big deal in German intellectual life (as is Mrs. Assmann).

Personally, when I was eight, I thought the Book of Joshua, with all that smiting of the wicked Canaanites who had the effrontery to be living on land the Hebrews coveted, was awesome.

L.A. school board president: Problem with L.A. schools is too much discipline

From the Los Angeles Times:

Defiance no reason to suspend students, board president says

By Teresa Watanabe 

April 11, 2013, 2:29 p.m. 

Administrators in the Los Angeles Unified School District would no longer be allowed to suspend students for mouthing off or other acts of “willful defiance” under a groundbreaking school board resolution set to be proposed next week. 

Amid rising national concern that harsh discipline practices disproportionately harm minority students, the resolution by board President Monica Garcia would mark the first state ban on suspensions for willful defiance. 

Instead, schools would be required to use less punitive alternatives to deal with behavioral problems.  Students have been suspended for such acts as wearing hats, tapping their feet on the floor and refusing to read as directed under the willful defiance category, which accounts for nearly 42% of all suspensions in California and about one-third in L.A. Unified. 

Garcia was scheduled to appear at a rally Thursday with hundreds of students and community activists to kick off a citywide campaign to pass the resolution, the School Climate Bill of Rights. ...

Faer said two decades of research has shown that suspending students does not improve behavior but only places students at higher risk for dropping out or running afoul of the law. 

Yeah, but suspension gets them out of the classroom, allowing other students to learn. But who cares about the cooperative students who want to get an education? They're not official victims, so they don't count.

Studies have also shown that harsh discipline policies are used more frequently with African American youth and students with disabilities. In an analysis of federal data released this week, the UCLA Civil Rights Project reported that African Americans accounted for 26% of L.A. Unified’s suspensions in 2009-10 but make up less than 10% of the district’s students. 

However, the district has made progress in reducing suspensions overall. The number of instruction days lost to suspensions decreased to 26,286 in 2011-12, compared to 74,765 in 2006-07. 

Garcia’s resolution would direct all schools to develop two alternatives to suspension that research has shown to be effective: restorative justice practices, which include peer mediation, counseling and face-to-face meetings among involved parties and a program to improve schoolwide behavior through clear expectations and incentives. 

How about afterschool detentions doing humiliating litter pick-up in front of other students under the domineering command of an assistant football coach? It's not as if the human race has zero experience at how to intimidate young punks into line.

The resolution would also require the district to release data on suspensions every quarter and set up a complaint process for students and parents if their schools do not establish the two prescribed alternative programs.

LAUSD schools already have to release suspension data every year for the benefit of plaintiffs' attorneys trawling for disparate impact discrimination lawsuits. (For example, here is the suspension data by race for the expensive new East Valley high school in North Hollywood. This campus cost $130 million to build for 1,593 seats, but its enrollment is only 1,001, or $130,000 per student.) Apparently, though, the civil right lawyers don't find that fast enough for the purposes of getting their hands in LAUSD's deep pockets.

There's always a lot of talk about how We Need Better Teachers. One way to get better people to go into teaching is to not make their working days a living hell in the name of fighting racism.

If you want to see the mindset of the people who work to undermine the schools, watch Mike Leigh's insufferable movie "Happy-Go-Lucky" about a London schoolteacher. From my review in The American Conservative:

Most people in “Happy-Go-Lucky” have pleasant government jobs. Judging from this movie, the British welfare state exists mostly so people with soft college degrees can have some place to hang out together while making plans for which pub or disco to go to after work. ...

One vignette of this momentum-free movie unwittingly exemplifies the female cluelessness that has made Britain’s schools a dystopia of juvenile male thuggishness. When one of her students starts punching other children, does Poppy punish him? No, she signs the bully up for counseling, which consists of three adults—the headmistress, Poppy, and her future boyfriend—sitting around praising the little lout and asking him what’s the real reason he hits people. (Actual answer, but not one conceivable in Mike Leigh's mental universe: it’s fun.) 

The evolution of "The Simpsons"

The development of The Simpsons over its first few years is a fascinating case study in getting things right. Here's a 90 minute video of a discussion among five early Simpsons writers about how they did it: Conan O'Brien, Al Jean, Jeff Martin, Jay Kogen, and Mike Reiss.

(And here's Audacious Epigone's post crowd-ranking The Simpsons by season.)