The Axis of Weasel: All iSteve obsessions are harmonically converging

From Fox News Latino:

Bloomberg, Republicans Join Obama Backers In Support Of Immigration Reform 

Published May 14, 2013 

From left, News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch, looks on as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg speaks during a forum on The Economics and Politics of Immigration in Boston on Tuesday. (AP2012)

WASHINGTON –  A grassroots political support group backing President Barack Obama is joining a Republican pro-immigration organization and an effort run by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to push for a comprehensive immigration bill using social media platforms.

Like, say, Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook?

Organizing for Action, a grassroots group run by Obama loyalists that grew out of his 2012 re-election campaign, will co-sponsor a "virtual march on Washington" planned for next week aimed at getting people to use social media platforms to register their support for the immigration legislation. 

Bloomberg's Partnership for a New American Economy is behind the effort. 

Featured members of Bloomberg's group include Michael Nutter (the anti-First Amendment Philadelphia mayor who looks like an R. Crumb cartoon character), Steve Ballmer, Antonio Villaraigosa, Julian Castro, Bob Iger, and J.W. Marriott.

Republicans for Immigration Reform, a group headed by former Bush administration Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, also is co-chairing the endeavor. 

Carlo Gutierrez is the most exquisite example of the Hidalgo-American yet identified.

"By bringing together leaders from both parties and Americans across the country, we hope to send Congress a clear message that there is broad support for smart reform — and the time for action is now," Bloomberg said in a statement. 

The virtual "March for Innovation," planned for May 22-23, is designed to get people to use Twitter, Reddit, Facebook and other social media platforms to push Congress to pass the immigration bill, which may come to a vote next week in the Senate Judiciary Committee. 

It's another sign of engagement by business and high-tech leaders and officials across the political spectrum to support the immigration legislation.

So, all we have to do is stop the open conspiracy of Barack Obama, Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, Mark Zuckerberg, John McCain, and Bill Gates from having their way with us. (Am I leaving out any names of those allied against us? Karl Rove? The Bushes?)

As Henry Kissinger might have said (at a Bilderberg Conference, no doubt): "Just because you are a paranoid doesn't mean you don't have real enemies, real enemies who are publicly conspiring against you, real enemies with billions of dollars, media empires, covert electronic surveillance capabilities, and nuclear weapons."

This could get fun.

I'm reminded of the famous passage in Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour about Guy Crouchback reading the newspaper in 1939:

Just seven days earlier he had opened his morning newspaper on the headlines announcing the Russian-German alliance. ... But now, splendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle.

By the way, unlike Bloomberg, Gates, and Zuckerberg, I've neglected to acquire a giant monopoly, so did I ever mention the Spring iSteve fundraising drive is still rattling on?

My thanks to all who have contributed so far. And for those who haven't gotten around to it:

First: you can make a non-tax deductible contribution to me by credit card via WePay by clicking here.

Second: you can make a tax deductible contribution to me via VDARE by clicking here.

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

Steve Sailer
P.O Box 4142
Valley Village, CA 91607-4142

Rubio: America becoming Third Worldish

From The Hill:

Rubio: Recent controversies 'things you typically see in the third world' 

By Justin Sink - 05/14/13 05:48 PM ET
 
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) on Tuesday blasted controversies over the Obama Administration's handling of the terror attack in Benghazi, IRS targeting of conservative groups, and subpoena of reporter phone records as "embarrassing to the country." 

"These are things you typically see in the Third World from unestablished republics and other places," Rubio told Fox News in an interview set to air on the "O'Reilly Factor." "You don't see that here."

But, don't worry, Senator Rubio has a plan to fix that!

Infrequently Asked Questions about Richwine kerfuffle

My new Taki's Magazine column is a Frequently Asked Questions list about the Richwine wingding. A sample:

Q. Hispanics are an ethnicity, not a race, so how can we know that the next generation of Mexican immigrants won’t be very different? 

A. I could imagine one event that would drive up new Hispanic immigrants’ children’s test scores substantially: another Revolution in Mexico. If rich white Mexicans, like the world’s richest man Carlos Slim, had to flee for their lives, the next generation of Mexican newcomers might be a lot like the prosperous Cubans who arrived in Miami after Fidel. 

But the way immigration from Mexico has been working since the end of the last Revolution almost a century ago is via family chain migration. New immigrants tend to belong to the extended families of old immigrants. 

Q. But that’s genetic determinism! 

A. Actually, it’s both nature and nurture working in tandem. If, say, a young fellow from Sinaloa moves in with his uncle in East L.A., the newcomer shares a lot, genetically and culturally, with the old-timer.

Read the whole thing there.

Lindsey Graham takes a brave stand against Richwineism

BloomBorg reports:

Senate Judiciary Committee members overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to limit the flow of immigrants to the U.S. offered by a leading opponent of a broad revision of immigration law. 

By a vote of 1-17 today, the panel defeated the proposal by Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions, who said the broader plan by a bipartisan group of eight senators would prompt a wave of immigration that would harm American workers. 

The panel’s Republican members joined Democrats in opposing the proposal. Among them, Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and co-author of the bill, said that from immigrants “who today have low skills, will come some of the brightest” individuals in the U.S. ...

After all, we all know such famous examples from the last half century such as ... well, Senator Graham's staff will get back to you with a long list real soon now.

If Senator Graham doesn't take a stand in favor of the potential of illegal aliens, then the "real criminals" like George Borjas and Christopher Jencks will have won.

Update: The NYT says:

Mr. Sessions also offered an amendment that would have restricted the future flow of legal immigrants, effectively limiting the number of immigrants and foreign workers to 33 million over a 10-year period and the total number of green cards to 1.2 million a year. 

The measure failed, 1 to 17, with only Mr. Sessions voting for his amendment.

Only 33,000,000 foreigners per decade? What kind of wacko extremism is Sen. Sessions trying to peddle? Why, after three decades that would total less than 100,000,000!?!? (Assuming none of the newcomers reproduce, of course.)

So, what exactly is the number The Eight Banditos intend to impose upon the American public? Apparently, it's more than 99,000,000 over the next 30 years, but what is it?

Don't worry, BloomBorg's hive mind is merely assimilating new entities

From Vitamin Press

From NYT's Dealbook:

Subscribers Fear Bloomberg Is Becoming Their Rival 

BY PETER EAVIS AND BEN PROTESS 

Long thought of as a company that serves the needs of Wall Street firms, Bloomberg L.P. is quietly becoming more like them, expanding recently into businesses that have been the domain of the largest banks. 

This relatively unheralded expansion by Bloomberg helps explain Wall Street’s consternation at recent disclosures that some customer data was freely available to reporters and others inside the company. The fear inside banks is that Bloomberg could use that data not only to write negative reports but also to become a better competitor. 

In recent years, Bloomberg has offered new ways to trade stocks, bonds and more complicated financial products, potentially taking revenue from subscribers to the ubiquitous Bloomberg desktop terminals, which contain a vast store of market data. The expansion is even leading Bloomberg to offer traditional Wall Street services like wealth management and research.

Here's a trading rule that would have been a moneymaker for most of the last generation: Watch what stocks the Goldman Sachs guys keep looking up on their Bloomberg Terminals and buy those. Watch what stocks the Citi guys keep looking up and sell those. Oh, and keep an eye on what the boys at Berkshire Hathaway are looking up for Warren and Charlie.

... Bloomberg executives apologized after Goldman Sachs and other banks complained that Bloomberg’s journalists were able to gain access to information about when customers logged in and what functions they were using.

Journalists are nobodies.

People close to the company said Tuesday that the same data had been accessible to employees in its trading division, known as Bloomberg Tradebook,

Uh-oh. Traders aren't nobodies.

but that the company had cut off that access recently.

So, nothing to worry about.

In fact, better not offend Bloomberg by worrying in public at all. Don't let anybody connect your name to your worries. After all, it's not like the owner of Bloomberg controls a 43,000-man armed and badged security force known as the NYPD. It's not like the Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job didn't lay out an entire strategy for how a police and prosecutorial force could put top Wall Streeters in jail: arrest call girls for cocaine possession, get them to roll over in return for suspended sentences on clients who are traders at the targeted firm, then get the traders to roll over on the bosses by spilling the dirt on high-level financial shenanigans. (Of course, people whom Wall Street doesn't like, such as Elliot Spitzer, Julian Assange, and Dominque Strauss-Kahn, seem to get arrested in sex scandals themselves a lot.)

The criticism of Bloomberg has been caused in part by Wall Street’s desire to push down the steep $20,000 yearly price tag for a Bloomberg terminal. Many bankers say they have little choice but to pay if they want to communicate with their customers, most of whom are on Bloomberg’s communication networks.

Bloomberg provides mindblowing 22nd Century technologies like, I'm guessing here, email, chat, text messaging, instant messaging, bulletin boards, file sharing, phone calls, telegrams, semaphore, smoke signals, piles of rocks beside the trail, notches carved in trees, and so forth. Where else could Goldman Sachs get all that?

Remember what I said about how in Econ 101 they tell you about the virtues of "perfect competition" using the example of a wheat farmer in South Dakota? Well, you don't want to be a wheat farmer in South Dakota. You want to be Michael Bloomberg, monopolizing the provision of technologically simple digital services to the world's richest customers.

Mr. Tierney has helped Tradebook win a greater market share in stocks and options and has developed new products. Last fall, it introduced Bloomberg Pool, which serves as a competitor to Wall Street’s dark pools, where stock trades are executed away from the public exchanges.

Okay, that should be the title of director J.C. Chandor's follow up to Margin Call. He should call his next Wall Street movie Dark Pool. I don't know what Dark Pool means, but I'd go see it.

The funny thing about Wall Street guys are that they have so much testosterone-driven arrogance that they love using sinister sounding names -- "dark pool" -- for whatever it is they are trying to put over on the rest of us. The unfunny thing is that the rest of us are so scared of the Wall Street guys that we let them rub our noses in it like this.

Like other Wall Street firms, Bloomberg has not been afraid to resort to legal muscle to protect its swaps business. It has hired a top Washington lawyer, Eugene Scalia, to challenge rules for the swaps exchanges that were proposed by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Scalia ... That name rings a bell. I've heard the name "Scalia" before in legal contexts. Oh ... Eugene Scalia is Antonin Scalia's son.

Guardian: "The real criminals" are Jencks, Borjas, and Zeckhauser

In The Guardian, distinguished psychometrician and Guardian columnist Ana Marie Cox, the original Wonkette, explains:

Indeed, as more details came to light, the more Richwine started to look like an earnest dupe – just a simple racist caught in a world he didn't create and couldn't understand. 

The real criminals here would seem to be Harvard, whose faculty is busy trying to avoid a conversation about whether they actually read Richwine's dissertation, and the insular world of Washington wonks, where you're not considered an "extremist" unless you disrupt lunch.

George Will: Dickens' "Christmas Carol" is pro-Cheap Labor Lobby

George F. Will writes:

On immigration, Charles Dickens matters

Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” is a gooey confection of seasonal sentiment. It also is an economic manifesto that Dickens hoped would hit with “twenty thousand times the force” of a political tract. It concerned a 19th-century debate that is pertinent to today’s argument about immigration. 

This week, a disagreement between two conservative think tanks erupted when the Heritage Foundation excoriated the immigration reform proposed by a bipartisan group of eight senators. Heritage’s analysis argued that making 11 million illegal immigrants eligible, more than a decade from now, for welfare state entitlements would have net costs (benefits received minus taxes paid) of $6.3 trillion over the next 50 years. 

Fifty-year projections about this or that are not worth the paper they should never have been printed on — think of what 1963 did not know about 2013.

Better question when it comes to immigration policy: "think of what 1965 did not know about 2013."

... The libertarian Cato Institutesaid that Heritage insufficiently acknowledged immigration’s contributions to economic growth (new businesses, replenishing the workforce as baby boomers retire, etc.). This dynamism, Cato argued, will propel immigrants’ upward mobility, reducing the number eligible for means-tested entitlements. 

Conservatives correctly criticize those who reject “dynamic scoring” of tax cuts. ...
Which brings us to Dickens’s revolt against Thomas Malthus’s pre-capitalist pessimism about the possibility of growth and abundance.

Okay, the notion that Dickens wrote the story of Scrooge to promote the Cheap Labor Lobby is pretty funny. To give Will some credit, it's a complicated subject. But, he's got it mostly backward. What increased Victorian English productivity was not an influx of labor from abroad, but a decrease of the supply of labor, due to emigration and to, finally, cracking down on child labor. Parliament debated setting a minimum age for little boys to sweep chimneys (from the inside) from 1788 onward.

As I wrote in VDARE in 2007:

Shaftesbury finally succeeded in passing effective legislation in 1875. 

And, of course, that winter everyone in Britain froze to death due to clogged chimneys. 

Oh, wait … sorry, that was in Bizarro Britain, where the reigning interpretations of economics actually applied. Rather like in Senator Kennedy's Abnormal America, where nobody will be able to afford to eat chicken without the Liberal Lion's amnesty and guest worker programs. 

In the real Britain, however, the master chimney sweeps quickly found other ways to clean chimneys. 

And, equally, Americans will not starve if they are deprived a continuous influx of uneducated foreigners. 

What we've learned since the early Victorian Era is that the world works in ways more responsive to intelligent effort than was imagined by Thomas Malthus: 

High wages can often spur technological advances that more than make up for their costs.

The key to economic prosperity is not low wages but high human capital. 

In contrast to Dickensian England, with its Scrooge-like obsession with cheap labor, Americans traditionally enjoyed high wages because the country was underpopulated relative to its natural resources. This inspired American entrepreneurs to invest in labor-saving innovations, which, in a virtuous cycle, allowed even higher wages to be paid. 

The most famous example: Henry Ford doubling his workers' salaries in 1914 after inventing the moving assembly line. 

In the long run, the cheap labor obsession debilitated the English economy. 

After the brilliant innovations of the early Industrial Revolution, the English textile industry tended to stagnate. Paul Johnson explains: 

"Factories paid higher wages than domestic industries; all the same, they were very low, chiefly because most of the factory hands were women and children. Low wages kept home consumer demand down; worse still, they removed the chief incentive to replace primitive machinery by the systematic adoption of new technology." 

And then there was the long run impact on Britain's economic culture: 

"State limitations of human exploitation came too late, and were too ineffective, to make the quest for productivity a virtue; the English did not discover it until the twentieth century, by which time the trade union movement had constructed powerful defenses against it." 

Victorian Scroogeonomics helped engender its own nemesis. It drove the British working class far to the left of the American working class, leading to both the nationalization of major industries in the 1940s and a hatred of productivity improvements among unions, exemplified in the 1959 Peter Sellers' movie I'm All Right, Jack. The effects on the U.K. economy were disastrous.

Canceled: Tonight's iSteve meetup at Palace Club in Mexico City is called off

I apologize to all readers en route to Mexico for tonight's iSteve meetup scheduled at Mexico City's Palace Club; unfortunately, I've just learned that the Palace Club might not be the ideal venue -- quiet, respectable, and economical -- that I had assumed when I booked it. From the NYT:  

The police here arrested two men on murder and robbery charges on Monday in the beating death last week of Malcolm Shabazz, the grandson of Malcolm X, though many questions about the case remained unresolved. 

The men taken into custody, David Hernández Cruz and Manuel Alejandro Pérez de Jesús, worked as waiters at the Palace Club, a downtown bar where Mr. Shabazz, 28, was beaten, in what the city prosecutor called a dispute over an excessive bill. 

Two other bar employees who the authorities said participated in the beating, which left Mr. Shabazz with fatal skull, jaw and rib fractures, were being sought. ...

The pair disputed a tab that came to around $1,200, Mr. Rios Garza said. Two young women had approached them on the street and invited them to the bar, but although Mexican newspapers have identified the bar as a known brothel, Mr. Rios Garza waved off questions regarding prostitution. Many of the bars in that rundown area charge customers for even a conversation with their female employees, according to Mexican news reports. 

Once again, my apologies for inconveniencing you with this last moment cancellation.

What would Beavis and Butt-Head say about the gay marriage tribe's totem poles?

There's been much discussion lately about surveillance and privacy in this electronic age. Is the Obama Administration spying on the Associated Press? Is the IRS out to get conservatives? Is Bloomberg snooping on Goldman Sachs?

Well, sure. Of course they are. 

Still, there are limits to the usefulness of spying because, while data is now cheap, data interpretation skills remain in scarce supply.

For example, consider yesterday's big feature article in the Washington Post about professional clam-diver Heather Purser, a strawberry-blonde Suquamish Indian, who convinced her tribe in 2011 to approve gay marriage. 

It's easily discoverable online that Heather has successfully been peddling this story, sometimes with Rebecca Platter, to major and minor media outlets for years. It's like a cross between a Greg Packer Man in the Street quote and a sketch from Portlandia -- the ones about the staff of the Women & Women First bookstore, combined with the performance artist spoofs.

All this is instantly available on Google, but nobody before ever got the joke. How can they? Gay marriage is serious.

Or then again, the Purser-Platter tale could even be a prank made up by two sniggering Beavis and Butt-headish adolescent sensibilities.

Consider, for example, the above photo from the feature "Same-Sex Marriage Brings Healing to Me—and My Tribe" in Yes! magazine (motto "Powerful Ideas, Practical Actions"). Look closely at the totem poles that Ms. Purser has chosen to pose between. Now think like Beavis and Butt-head:

What animals are carved on them?

And what exactly are those beavers about to do to each other?

That's the $69 Question.

Data interpretation!

Seriously, everybody is supposed to be into Big Data now for pattern recognition, but nobody is supposed to notice stereotypes. So, not much computes.

By the way, did I ever mention the Spring iSteve fundraising drive is still going on?

Thanks to everybody who has contributed so far. And for those who haven't gotten around to it:

First: you can make a non-tax deductible contribution to me by credit card via WePay by clicking here.

Second: you can make a tax deductible contribution to me via VDARE by clicking here.

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

Steve Sailer

P.O Box 4142

Valley Village, CA 91607-4142

Can the government listen in to your phone calls?

Back in 2001, I wrote for UPI:

Even Conspiracy Theories Can Be True 

We members of the press love to nag you members of the public about why you rush out to see these conspiracy movies. After all, conspiracies don't really exist. If they did, we reporters would know about them! Right? 

Not necessarily. One reason people are interested in conspiracy theories is that at least some important secret operations really do exist. As Henry Kissinger liked to say, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean you don't have enemies." 

For example, for a quarter of a century after World War II, the victors kept hidden from the public the very existence of what was possibly the most important factor in the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany: "Ultra." To break the German Enigma codes, the British built a top-secret deciphering complex on the grounds of Bletchley Park in central England. This gigantic project, which lead to the invention of the electronic computer, employed as many as 10,000 workers. 

The German military, it turned out, wasn't paranoid enough. They refused to change their codes because they didn't believe anyone could mount an operation capable of cracking them. 

Omnipresent surveillance is a staple of conspiracy movies, so it can't be true. 

Or can it? For years, it was easy to assume that unhinged-sounding Frenchmen ranting about how the "Anglo-Saxons" were eavesdropping on their telephone calls had just spent too much time at the cinema.

Did I ever crack-up in the 1990s when the president of France would complain that "the Anglo-Saxon powers" were listening in on his phone calls. "Ha-ha," I laughed, "Zee French are so fun-nee! Pe-Pe LePew!"

This Gallic paranoia turned out to be largely accurate, however. The U.S., U.K, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, who have been working together to intercept communications since "Ultra," do indeed team up to run a vast global wiretapping network called "Echelon" 

Awhile ago, I wrote about the Utah Data Center now under construction, but can't seem to find any trace of that posting.

Big Bloombrother is watching you

Bloomberg subscriber Winston Smith huddles out of line of sight of his $20,000
per year Bloomberg Terminal so it can't watch what he scrawls in his diary

From the New York Times:

More Clients Ask Questions of Bloomberg 

By AMY CHOZICK and BEN PROTESS 

With new concerns emerging about practices at its news division, Bloomberg L.P., the sprawling financial services company founded by Michael R. Bloomberg, scrambled to shield its lucrative terminal business and appease nervous customers. 

The report on Friday that a Bloomberg reporter had used the company’s financial data terminals to monitor a Goldman Sachs partner’s logon activity has set off a ripple effect of inquiries from other worried subscribers, including JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department and the European Central Bank. 

The revelations now stretch back to 2011, when UBS complained after a Bloomberg Television host alluded on air to his monitoring of the London-based rogue UBS trader Kweku Adoboli’s terminal logon information to confirm his employment status at the bank. 

Then, last summer, executives at JPMorgan Chase questioned Bloomberg reporters’ techniques after they were among the first to report on the trader Bruno Iksil, nicknamed the London Whale. “I’m unaware of any record of a complaint from either bank on this issue,” said Ty Trippet, a Bloomberg spokesman.

Citigroup and other Wall Street banks have also contacted Bloomberg in recent days, according to these people, who spoke on the condition they not be identified discussing confidential conversations. The banks all declined to comment. In response, the company has been contacting subscribers.

... Bloomberg subscribers pay on average about $20,000 a year to lease each terminal. 

So, Bloomberg customers pay annually about an order of magnitude more to rent a terminal that you can buy a MacBook Air for down at the Apple Store?

Mr. Bloomberg, who stepped away from day-to-day operations when he became mayor, declined to comment on the situation at the company that bears his name. “No, I can’t say anything. I have an agreement with the Conflict of Interests Board,” he said in a news conference on Monday.

Well, that's reassuring. The billionaire mayor can't talk about conflicts of interest because he has an agreement with the Conflict of Interest Board. Really, in the big picture, isn't the entire concept of "conflict of interest" so 20th Century? All this old-fashioned stuff about conflict of interest is really disinteresting to modern people like Mayor Bloomberg, and you should be disinterested in obsessing over it too.

The company also began to discuss possible legal ramifications. While people close to the company doubted that clients would threaten legal action,

The clients aren't likely to threaten to sue? For that to be true, the clients, who include world-historical vampire squids like Goldman Sachs, must be absolutely terrified of just which of their secrets Bloomberg has snooped from them.

Bloomberg hired outside lawyers on Friday to steer it through the crisis. The lawyers, according to the people close to the company, have assured Bloomberg that there is no basis for a lawsuit, since the subscribers did not suffer any damages and the information obtained was more trivial than confidential. An early analysis conducted by Bloomberg further suggested that reporters rarely, if ever, published stories based solely on information gleaned from the terminals.

There's a lot of lawyerese in that sentence: few stories "based solely" ... Anyway, if I were CEO of Goldman Sachs, I'd be a lot more worried about the secrets Bloomberg didn't publish, the ones' that were too valuable to let the reporters have, the ones that got locked away in that special safe at Bloomberg HQ (or, maybe, that safe in the mayor's office).

The people close to the company also noted that Bloomberg’s sales agreement with subscribers disclosed that company employees had access to certain private information. While the agreement did not specify that Bloomberg News reporters were among those with access, the journalists are technically employees of Bloomberg L.P.

It's not the journalists at Bloomberg L.P. that I'd be that worried about if I were, say, Lloyd Blankfein.

But some bank executives said the snooping could have violated a common confidentiality clause in their contracts with Bloomberg. In the clause, Bloomberg promises to keep large swaths of information “in confidence,” meaning that it won’t be shared with “third parties.” 

So, Bloomberg has promised not to let anybody else know what it knows. Now, that's reassuring!

One Wall Street executive, who asked not to be named because of a firm policy prohibiting employees from speaking to the media, said his company was involved in a sensitive situation last year and he now wondered if reporters were monitoring his activities. 

“Looking to see who is in or not is sleazy but hardly earthshaking,” he said. “But if they knew what stocks I was clicking on and what yields I was looking at, that is spying.” (Bloomberg officials have repeatedly said the functions used by reporters did not provide information on specific trades or securities.)

Like I said, reporters might be the least of my worries about who at Bloomberg knows what about my private business.

Another top Wall Street executive, who also asked not to be named, said although he did not know if his firm would take action, he planned to raise this issue with his board. “I don’t like it when something happens that hasn’t occurred to me, and this had not occurred to me,” he said. “I feel violated.”

I'm not sure exactly what he just said, but he seems to feel strongly about it.

... Bloomberg has at least 315,000 subscribers

at $20,000 per year that's $6.3 billion in annual revenue from a business model that sounds like it was obsolete about a year after the World Wide Web came along

and its proprietary terminals reign supreme on most traders’ desks. But the business Mr. Bloomberg pioneered took a hit during the financial crisis of 2008. 

Even as Wall Street recovered, some financial institutions questioned the steep price of the terminals. The price tag, combined with the breach of privacy accusations, have aggravated tensions between Bloomberg and its subscribers, several Wall Street executives said. 

The concerns also presented a rare opportunity for Bloomberg’s competitors to challenge the behemoth. ...

Because the federal government anti-trust enforcers would never presume to do that. Who knows what Bloomberg has on them?

What is more, a report in The Financial Times that a former Bloomberg employee had leaked online thousands of messages from a single day in 2009 and a week in 2010 between terminal subscribers threatened to further fray trust between Bloomberg and the hedge funds, investment banks and money managers who use the service. ... 

The Wall Street executive who expressed concerns over being spied upon by Bloomberg said the price the company charged for service added insult to injury. 

“They pretty much have a monopoly,” he said. “I am fed up and now they do this. I honestly would pay as much for three-quarters of the data just to get away from them.”

Commenter NOTA says:

Dear God, there is a wonderful SF story in there somewhere. Once, just as a civilization was reaching its information age, a particular group of people saw their opportunity and built special information terminals that only the very most rich and powerful people in the society could have, and got this terminal accepted as the marker of membership in the power elite of the planet. And then, control of what went on those terminals, and knowledge of who looked at what on them, turned out to be a source of almost unlimited power, and those terminals' makers became extremely powerful.

Oh, come now, NOTA, Michael Bloomberg is merely the three term mayor of New York City (sure, there was a two-term limit, but that was made to disappear -- he's Michael Bloomberg, for heaven's sake, not some normal New York City mayor who has to obey term limits) and the seventh richest man in America. He's not President of the United States. He's only seriously looked at running for President a few times. If he had judged that it would be in his interest to be President, you'd have been informed of that fact.

Dean Jeffries, RIP

Last week in Taki's Magazine, I wrote about how John Lautner was the leading architect working in the indigenous aesthetic of the car, plane, and movie-crazed eastern San Fernando Valley where I grew up. This week, car customizer Dean Jeffries, another local artistic legend, died at his North Hollywood home, age 80.

Above is Jeffries' 1964 Mantaray.

What a great time and place to be a little boy ...

Today's Mark Zuckerberg = "immigration reform" headline

La comadreja común

From the Washington Post:

Zuckerberg’s immigration reform advocacy group faces backlash  

Hayley Tsukayama 

FWD.us, the nonprofit founded by the Facebook chief, has lost some of its star tech sector supporters.

"In Bloomberg America, Bloomberg Terminals watch YOU"

Yakov Smirnoff

From the New York Times:

Bloomberg Admits Terminal Snooping 

Reporters at Bloomberg News were trained to use a function on the company’s financial data terminals that allowed them to view subscribers’ contact information and, in some cases, monitor login activity in order to advance news coverage, more than half a dozen former employees said.

More than 315,000 Bloomberg subscribers worldwide use the terminals for instant market news, trading information and communication. Reporters at Bloomberg News, a separate division from the terminal business, were nonetheless told to use the terminals to get an edge in the competitive world of financial journalism where every second counts, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the company’s strict nondisclosure agreements. 

The company acknowledged that at least one reporter had gained access to information on Goldman Sachs after the bank complained to the company last month. On Sunday, Ty Trippet, a Bloomberg spokesman, said that “reporters would not have been trained to improperly use any client data.” 

Matthew Winkler, editor in chief of Bloomberg News, underscored that the practice was at one time commonplace. 

Michael Bloomberg, crimefighting billionaire media mogul and mayor of Gotham New York City, is 7th on the Forbes 400 with a net worth of $27 billion. It's usually said that he made his money by renting old-fashioned timesharing terminals to Wall Street for vast monthly sums.

I'd often wondered why Wall Street relied upon an extremely centralized, extremely expensive, and otherwise obsolete computer technology. It's been explained to me that Bloomberg Terminals were so expensive that having your firm rent you one was a sign that you are a BSD, and what real man on Wall Street would allow the symbolic castration of having his Bloomberg Terminal replaced with a Mac or PC?

But this story of how lowly Bloomberg reporters had been trained on how to spy on Bloomberg Terminal clients like Goldman Sachs opens up an entirely different line of thought about how Mayor Bloomberg has continued to prosper.

On reflection, though, perish the thought. Forget I ever said this. Obviously, Bloomberg's organized snooping on its clients' inside info was utterly 100% restricted to pixel-stained wretches on the news side of the Bloomberg company. None of the Big Money Boys on the Terminals side of Bloomberg would ever have dreamed of doing such a thing.

Rubin: The Eight Banditos have better marketing and thus deserve to win

The Eight Banditos (minus five):
McCain, Schumer, and Rubio

As I've long been saying, political journalism is increasingly turning into marketing criticism. The dominant instinct of today's Washington press corps is that not only do the best spinmeisters tend to win, but that they deserve to win.

From the Washington Post's "Right Turn" column:

Why is 2013 different than 2007? 

By Jennifer Rubin, Published: May 10, 2013  

The 2007 immigration reform effort under George W. Bush faltered. 

As did, Bush's Pushes in 2001 (pre-9/11, by the way), 2004, and 2006.

So it is natural to wonder if the effort in 2013 won’t collapse as well. But much has changed in six years, and those changes work to the benefit of immigration reform. 

Then: A president commanding an increasingly unpopular war and having lost the House was losing altitude, especially with his own party. 

Now: A Democratic president desperate for some win — any win — is in office. 

Then: The GOP had the White House and was busy constructing (so it thought) a “permanent majority.” Bush had been successful with Hispanic voters, even absent immigration reform. 

Now: The GOP has now lost two presidential elections, understands (by and large) that it has a problem with minority voters and is eager to claim an accomplishment for which President Obama’s main contribution will be remaining quiet. 

Jen is so infatuated with her own Machiavellianism that it doesn't occur to her that as soon as the bill Obama wants is laid on his desk, he will be all over the Hispanic media claiming credit.

Then: Maverick Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), bane of the right wing, led the charge for the Republicans with Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), the poster boy for liberalism, at his side. Republicans were not disposed to do them any favors. 

This time: It is the darling of the GOP, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) who is leading the charge, charming the base and going over the heads of talk-show hosts to reach GOP voters. ... 

Then: The conservative base was relatively monolithic and dominate in think tanks and talk radio. 

Now: The conservative base is more heterogeneous, with heavy doses of libertarianism. A plethora of think tanks, pundits and activists are now pro-immigration. 

Then: The president rolled out a policy initiative and got cut off by right-wing activists.

Well, the President back in 2007 (and 2006, and 2004, and 2001) was a Republican.

This time: Rubio is running a campaign-style effort, employing social media and old media, working both in public and behind the scenes. 

None of this means that immigration reform is sure to pass. But it does suggest that the chances for passage are better this time around and that immigration opponents were caught flat-footed (on everything from Rubio’s effectiveness to the Heritage catastrophe), seemingly unaware how strongly a segment of the party had become more ideologically flexible and diverse. The opponents also lack, for the most part, telegenic, capable spokespeople for their cause who are media-friendly and can go toe to toe with pro-reform voices such as Rubio and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) 

Meanwhile, for once, Republicans on the pro-immigration side laid out a game plan and organized themselves. Grover Norquist at Americans for Tax Reform, the Cato Institute, the American Action Network and many evangelicals have joined together with high-tech executives to run a full-blown campaign for immigration reform. 

Marketing uber alles!

Richwine finally speaks out

Jason Richwine finally speaks out in the Washington Examiner in an interview with Byron York:

A talk with Jason Richwine: 'I do not apologize for any of my work'
May 13, 2013 | 4:22 pm

Byron York
Chief Political Correspondent
The Washington Examiner

"It seemed like that day lasted forever," says Jason Richwine of last Wednesday, when he found himself in the middle of a media firestorm over his writings about Hispanic immigrants and intelligence. "I knew that this probably would not end well." 

It didn't. On Friday morning, the 31 year-old scholar resigned from the Heritage Foundation, where he had co-authored the new report, "The Fiscal Cost of Unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. Taxpayer." The paper, released last Monday and written largely by Heritage scholar Robert Rector, argued that Hispanic immigrants to the United States, most of them low-skill, end up costing the government more in benefits than they pay in taxes. It was an explosive entry into the debate over the comprehensive immigration reform measure currently being considered in the Senate. By the time of its release, reform advocates on the left and right had already published a number of "prebuttals" arguing that Rector and Richwine had it all wrong, that in fact immigration would be a net benefit in years to come. 

Heritage expected that debate. What it did not expect was the firestorm that broke out Wednesday morning when a liberal Washington Post blogger posted an article titled, "Heritage study co-author opposed letting in immigrants with low IQs." The blogger, Dylan Matthews, wrote that Richwine, who earned a doctorate from Harvard University in 2009, had written a dissertation, "IQ and Immigration Policy," which argued that on average immigrants to the U.S., particularly Hispanic immigrants, have lower IQ scores than "the white native population." Admitting immigrants with higher IQs, Richwine argued, would be a better immigration policy than admitting low-IQ newcomers. 

The reaction was immediate and harsh. "The Heritage Foundation's immigration guru wasn't just racist -- he's wrong," wrote the Atlantic. "Ugly racism and xenophobia dressed up in economic hyperbole," said the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. "You have someone who is a racist, obviously, right?" asked a Univision anchor of a Heritage spokesman. 

Heritage quickly tried to put some distance between itself and its scholar. "The Harvard paper is not a work product of the Heritage Foundation," communications vice president Mike Gonzalez said in a statement. "Its findings do not reflect the positions of the Heritage Foundation or the conclusions of our study on the cost of amnesty to U.S. taxpayers, as race and ethnicity are not part of Heritage immigration policy recommendations." 

Richwine knew he was in trouble the minute the first story broke. "The accusation of racism is one of the worst things that anyone can call you in public life," he says. "Once that word is out there, it's very difficult to recover from it, even when it is completely untrue." 

Read the whole thing there.

Jason Richwine and Nate Silver

A friend writes:

It occurred to me that we haven't heard from the greatest statistician who ever lived -- Nate Silver -- on the Richwine affair.  

It seems like it was only a few months ago that the right was the party that was totally ignorant of stats -- and it was the left that owned the future because they knew how to use math.  

Strange turn.

The Greg Packer of Gay Marriage

The national news media appears to be turning into a giant conspiracy to feed me material. Yesterday, in "Flight from White -- American Indian Version," I noted the New York Times' breathless article about an academic who has made a career for himself as an American Indian despite being a redheaded white guy. Tonight, in the Washington Post:

Among Indian tribes, a division over gay marriage

The Post's caption: 

"Heather Purser (right) and her girlfriend, Rebecca Platter, are shown near their home in Olympia, Washington, on May 7, 2103. Purser, a member of the Suquamish Tribe, got her tribal council to to vote in favor of gay marriage."

Okay, which of these two white women, the brunette or the blonde, is the American Indian? My first guess was the brunette, but it turns out to be the blonde.

By the way, Washington Post, is Princess Fauxcohontas's t-shirt racist? 

The blonde's t-shirt appears to be racially stereotyping the residents of Motown (83% black) as prone to gun violence. Are blondes really allowed to do that in the Washington Post? Or is it okay because this blonde's not white?

That raises the metaphysical question: Can a blonde lesbian who claims to be an American Indian be racist against blacks? I look forward to the Washington Post's black magazine The Root debating this burning topic for several months.

Update: Okay, I've finally read the first three paragraphs in the article:

For Heather Purser, the first pang came more than a decade ago as she gathered clams on Puget Sound’s Chico Beach, watching her cousin’s new husband assist with the digging. She figured she’d never have a legal spouse to help with the backbreaking work. 

Then Purser, a member of Washington state’s Suquamish Tribe who says she knew she was gay at age 7, decided to act: She led a personal lobbying campaign that ended with her tribal council voting in 2011 to approve gay marriage. 

“I realized that I do have the power to change my situation,” said Purser, 30, a commercial seafood diver from Olympia, Wash.

Hmmhmmmhmm ... So far we have a lesbian "commercial seafood diver" who is into clams and racially insensitive t-shirts and is a blonde American Indian and has gotten the Suquamish Tribe to approve gay marriage?

Is this whole story a prank?  It sounds like it was made up by the kind of 8th grader who finds everything the teacher says hilariously dirty.

Well, if it is a prank it's more like a long running performance art project. Googling "Heather Purser" brings up a considerable number of you-go-girl profiles of her. Here's an article about her in Indian Country:

Ms. Purser in her clamdiver suit

Diver Heather Purser Pioneers Same-Sex Marriage for Suquamish
Kevin Taylor
January 18, 2012 

Earlier last month in Seattle, as all the threads for a planned Human Rights Day banquet were being woven together, Heather Purser, Suquamish, who was to be among the honored guests, was shuffling through mud and ooze. 

Under 50 feet of water. Down on the cold bottom of Puget Sound. Wrestling with giant clams.

Indeed.

Purser in New York Times, 2011

The Washington Post story is hardly Purser's first tribute in the national media Here's an ever-so-serious New York Times story from 2011 about Ms. Purser, back when she had strawberry blonde hair.

And here's her profile on NPR's All Things Considered.

Plus, there are a whole bunch of other news stories about her over the years in lesser venues.

For instance,  in Yes! Magazine:

Same-Sex Marriage Brings Healing to Me—and My Tribe 

Heather Purser set out to win gay marriage rights within the Suquamish Tribe and found herself on a personal journey toward self-acceptance.

Considering her omnipresence in the media, maybe Heather Purser is the Greg Packer of Gay Marriage?

In case you are wondering who Greg Packer is, here's Ann Coulter's 2003 column exposing the highway maintenance worker who has been quoted countless times in the MSM as the Voice of the Man on the Street. Here, for example, is a photo of Greg first in line for an iPhone at the Times Square Apple Store, ready with a media-friendly quote.

P.P.S. And what about Rebecca Platter, the non-Indian brunet in the Washington Post's romantic backlit photo above? Well, perhaps she used to be a blonde too, at least she was in this picture of a Rebecca Platter on Red Room: Where the Writers Are. That Rebecca Platter's bio says:

I am a writer who has a strong voice and a clever way with words. I make poetry with strong visual metaphors and an unexplainable emotional pull. Although I have not officially been published I know I will be at some point when the time is right. I feel strongly that the current generation needs to re-connect with their deeper thoughts as opposed to surface "shares" that have become too common. Red Room is a place where I can be surrounded by people who inspire me to continue on my journey.

According to Rebecca Platter's bio at The Seattle Lesbian:

Rebecca Platter graduated from the University of Washington with a BA in Comparative History of Ideas and a minor in Russian Literature. After studying abroad in Iceland and graduating on the Dean’s List, she backpacked throughout Europe then later moved to Costa Rica volunteering to tutor locals in English. Passionate about LGBTQ rights, Rebecca is excited to serve as a contributing writer for The Seattle Lesbian while working to transition her love of writing into a career. Rebecca is obsessed with painting multiple headed naked women, traveling anywhere she can, writing about life and wearing red lipstick whenever possible. She is currently writing a set of personal comedic memoirs. Read more.

"Multiple headed naked women"

So, this is all a Portlandia sketch come to life. (Indeed, one story says Rebecca is a barista.) We have two Northwest publicity hounds who have successfully exploited the media's gay marriage obsession. And over the course of several years of media coverage, none of these crack newshounds noticed anything amusing about the story.

By the way, even though Purser grabbed national attention for getting the Suquamish Nation to approve gay marriage in the spring of 2011, the pair still aren't married, or even engaged. The Washington Post article by Rob Hotakainen ends:

Purser is optimistic that the Supreme Court will make gay marriage the law of the land, leaving religion out of the deliberations. 

She’s still unmarried, but is living with 28-year-old Rebecca Platter, her partner of three years. 

“We’re not engaged, but I do plan on getting married — and she’s definitely the one,” Purser said. 

I'll leave you with Rebecca Platter's entire Twitter account:

Tweets

1. Rebecca Platter ‏@SunshineRebecca16 Jan 10

   I'm bored and anxious

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   •  Reply 
   •  Retweet 
   •  Favorite 
2. Rebecca Platter ‏@SunshineRebecca26 Dec 09

   Eating strawberries waiting for my face mask to dry.

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3. Rebecca Platter ‏@SunshineRebecca10 Dec 09

   So cold outside! I need to clean my room. How does it get this messy?

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4. Rebecca Platter ‏@SunshineRebecca10 Dec 09

   falling asleep at work

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5. Rebecca Platter ‏@SunshineRebecca9 Dec 09

   @MarleyBlonsky This is kinda confusing- I am trying to get part of the circle now-- you are the only person I know on here

    View conversation
6. Rebecca Platter ‏@SunshineRebecca9 Dec 09

   I have twitter now.

Stop snickering! Haven't you been informed often enough that gay marriage is the most serious issue in the history of the world?