Eric Holder isn't black: just ask his mom

Attorney General Eric Holder wants to talk about race some more.

It's quite interesting how Americans find Eric Holder's ancestry invisible to them. Most of Eric Holder ancestors weren't black. His recent ancestors were middle class mulattos in Barbados who carefully avoided marriage to blacks. (See the last chapter of Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" for a description of how people who look like Gladwell and Holder were bred.) Holder grew up in a middle class West Indian enclave in NYC that tried (and in Holder's case succeeded) keeping out black American influence.

   

Newark's new mayor

A key number for understanding the election as mayor of Newark of black nationalist Ras Baraka (son of Sixties poet Leroi Jones / Amiri Baraka) over Cory Booker's well-funded designated successor is 10.9. That's the number of miles from downtown Newark to Wall Street. Another number is 18: that's the number of minutes from Newark's Penn Station to New York's Penn Station.

In an age of gentrification, electing a hostile mayor like Baraka is intended to scare off potential gentrifiers.
     

Do Hume and Smith prove Wade wrong?

Hume and Smith

H. Allen Orr writes in the New York Review of Books in a characteristic review of about how the first half of Nicholas Wade's A Troublesome Inheritance is all very fine -- I mean, of course, race is biologically real, but who doesn't already believe that? -- while all this Gregory Clark stuff from the second half of the book is all wrong.

Conversely, it’s hard to see why profound instability in social institutions doesn’t trouble Wade more. He’s much taken, for instance, with the difference between tribal and modern societies, but one of the most tribal peoples on the planet, the Scots with their clans, are now identified with some of the most modern of ideas and attitudes. Were David Hume and Adam Smith precocious carriers of a mutation that swept Edinburgh? 

Like I said, figuring out the engines of history is the big leagues of erudition and nobody is all that good at it yet. It's easy for anybody to trip up. Wade does in places, as does Orr here in trying to score what he thinks is a slam dunk on Wade: Hume and Smith!

Of course, the Scottish Enlightenment was a product of the Lowland Scots, who had been settled English speakers for a long, long time. Orr is getting them confused with the Gaelic-speaking Highland Scot clans. As Thomas Babington Macaulay vividly pointed out in his 1855 History of England, his Highlander ancestors tended to be more or less barbarians into the 18th Century. Now Macaulay might be a better example of what Orr is groping for (but then that would be derided as Whig History.)

Similarly, consider the immense institutional differences that distinguish North and South Korea, ones that appeared only decades ago. The people who live north and south of the thirty-eighth parallel have very similar genes, so why do their social institutions differ so dramatically?

That's not really a tough question. From my careful study of history (mostly watching Team America: World Police), I've deduced that there appears to be this Kim family ruling North Korea.

C'mon, North and South Korea have been the go-to libertarian example for at least three decades. Can we come up with some newer ones? Also, as North Korea gears up for a fourth nuclear bomb test, I'm not sure it's such a good idea to insult their intelligence.
     

Wade in "The Spectator"

Nicholas Wade has an excerpt from A Troublesome Inheritance in The Spectator.

I'll reiterate my view that it's fruitful to think of this as a British v. American dust-up. The British competition-based paradigm (Adam Smith, Darwin, etc.) was fairly dominant in the natural and human sciences and in associated intellectual spheres from the 19th Century to the stock market crash of 1929. 

But after 1929, businessmen couldn't afford to fund intellectuals anymore, so the prestige of competition-based thinking plummeted. Only governments could pay for scholars in the mid 20th Century, so intellectuals in the 1930s quickly generated lots of rationales for why competition was bogus, as proven by all those busted businessmen who can't ante up for universities anymore, and central planning by the government was ideal both in practice and theory. One side effect was the collapse in prestige of the Galtonian tradition and the rise to dominance of the Boasian.

Here's something that's hard to keep in mind simultaneously: both Galton and Boas were pretty good guys. They both made contributions. When one's worldview like Galton's was riding a little too high, like Galton's was early in the 20th Century, the other served as a corrective. They still do.

 The Boasian worldview became too dominant later on in the 20th Century, in part because America became so rich and powerful compared to Britain. But both nature and nurture are important.

But the subtext to a lot of this struggle is a fairly adolescent struggle for turf dominance over the past. When you look at the combatants, it's pretty obvious that the breakdowns tend to be British v. American, WASP v. Jewish, and country boy v. city boy. There are many exceptions (e.g., Robert Trivers), but the natural biases are hardly invisible.

    

Nicholas Wade and Creativity v. Intelligence

Nicholas Wade's A Troublesome Inheritance tries to sidestep the controversial subject of intelligence and focus more upon creativity. Clearly, most of the creativity in the world in recent centuries has come out of the west.

To some extent this is an optical illusion because we have the individual names of almost all Western artists and scientists since maybe 1500. Since we don't have the names of many of the artists involved in Gothic Cathedrals in the Middle Ages, it's easy for pundits to overlook them. Similarly, we only have a vague notion of who was chief architect of the Shah Jahan's Taj Mahal in the 17th Century.

But, most of the rest of the world was indeed stultifying after 1500, with Japan as an exception that was making steady progress.

The problem with creativity, is that we feel that we know it when we see it, but it's hard to quantify in the present, much less predict in the future. IQ has been studied intensively for a century, and we now know that it not only works pretty well in the present but as a predictor of future developments (e.g., Ian Deary's recent work tracking down surviving Scots who took a national IQ tests as 11-year-olds in 1932). And it seems to be fairly heritable, which probably is the chief reason we relatively few radical changes over time in national average IQs.

Creativity remains somewhat difficult to measure in the present and notably hard to predict in the future, with various national golden ages of this or that happening regularly.

Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment art and science creativity metrics work reasonably well in hindsight, leaving a half-century lag. Yes, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and Wagner were creative. No question about it. 

But looking forward, it's hard to say. If you asked me on the way to the screening of The Matrix Reloaded if the Wachowski Brothers were the most creative filmmaker of our time, I probably would have said yes. On the way home, maybe not.

And what really matters isn't the judgment of critics like me, but of future creative artists. All the 19th Century composers were enthralled by or rebelled against Beethoven. It's the impact of Ludwig van upon  Schumann, Berlioz, Brahms, and Debussy that matters. And it's hard to predict what creative and thus surprising artists of the future will be influenced by.

Likewise, the bigness of the tent of "creativity" -- Michelangelo and Shakespeare, but also Newton and Einstein, and Ford and Wozniak, well, that's a big tent.

So, because the most creative is the most unexpected, I've usually been less eager to opinionize about the future of creativity than of intelligence. Of course, it's because scientists know more about intelligence than creativity that we aren't supposed to talk about differences in IQ.
    

A question about tattoos

The logic behind men getting tattoos seems pretty clearcut: this is who I am for life! USMC, Thug-4-Life, whatever, and the harder the location is to cover up with clothes the better. But, women generally want to follow fashions, which, by definition, change rapidly. So, what is the feminine logic, if any, behind getting tattooed? 

My wife recently talked a lovely young waitress on Lankershim Blvd. out of getting a gigantic tattoo (the young newcomer to SoCal explained that "I feel like my body is a blank canvas") on the grounds that she doesn't need to be creative because she can create a baby. 

But that leads to the question what's the purpose of tattoos for women who wouldn't wear the same shoes for six months? Is it too signal to the kind of guys she likes (e.g., drummers) that you are the type of guy I like? But what if after another year here she decides that while she liked drummers back in South Dakota, now she likes producers and agents? Tattoos are class markers, and might work against attractive young women rising in class by marrying well.

Is getting tattoos something guys suggest to discourage hypergamy? Or is it something that other women suggest out of the usual feminine malice?
  

"Who Gets to Graduate?"

Paul Tough in the New York Times has a long article "Who Gets to Graduate" on the high college dropout rate of working class kids, focusing on some black girl from a mediocre Dallas area high school who gets into desirable U. of Texas at Austin, the state flagship school, despite being down around the 10th percentile among freshmen:

Her senior-year G.P.A. was 3.50, placing her 39th out of 559 students in her graduating class. She got a 22 on the ACT, the equivalent of about a 1,030 on the SAT — not stellar, but above average.

The 25th percentile at UT Austin on the ACT is 25 and the 75th percentile is 31. I believe 30 is at the 95th percentile among takers of the ACT, so maybe 97th among the overall population. There are a lot of smart kids at UT Austin.

She got in, barely, under George W. Bush's plan to admit the top X percent of Texas high schools' graduating classes, even though 3.5 isn't very good these days.

Not surprisingly, like many freshmen, she struggled. Traditionally, state flagship universities are harder to graduate from than more prestigious private colleges because they spend less per student and don't feel a commitment to parents to deliver a degree in return for a huge amount of tuition.

After Sputnik, America focused on finding and educating the highest potential students. And 12 years later, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. But then came other priorities like civil rights. 

The solution touted in the article is for famous public universities to give low test score students much more handholding, such as improving the teacher to student ratio in a special chemistry class for low test score students by 10 to 1.

But, the article makes clear, it's absolutely essential that nobody on campuses notices that there are all these special courses for the not so bright because that would ruin their self-esteem and then the magic would vanish. Or something. 

It's the perfect anti-falsification trick. Didn't work? That's because white students noticed! Karl Popper is spinning in his grave.

  

Anyway, I'm gearing up for the first iSteve fundraiser to launch in this year, finally, so I've tried to upgrade my Panhandling technology at top right of the blog. I think the links all work now, with lots of new options for sending me money. I'd like to do a soft opening among those of you who have been itching to send me money but have been rightfully frustrated by the various payment systems recurrently getting shot out from underneath me. So, if you wouldn't mind playing guinea pig, please give it a try. Thanks. That would be a huge help for seeing if all these news systems really work.

Over the years, I've gotten Paypal, Amazon, and WePay shot out from under me. But I'm not ecstatic about asking you to entrust obscure firms with money. So, I've added Google, Wells Fargo, and Chase.

Update: Okay, a reader has successfully sent me a donation via Google Wallet. So, that works and you won't be stuck trying something that doesn't work.

         

Michelle, Ma Belle

Civil Rights Anniversary Season has become never-ending. We are currently in the thralls of celebrating the 60th anniversary of the 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education. Our First Black President has stepped back on this task, perhaps because of his preppie private education, and delegated Mrs. Obama:

Michelle Obama Cites View of Growing Segregation
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG MAY 16, 2014

TOPEKA, Kan. — Sixty years after the Supreme Court outlawed “separate but equal” schools for blacks and whites, civil rights advocates say American schools are becoming increasingly segregated, while the first lady, Michelle Obama, lamented that “many young people are going to schools with kids who look just like them.” 

“Today, by some measures, our schools are as segregated as they were back when Dr. King gave his final speech,” Mrs. Obama told 1,200 graduating high school seniors Friday here in the city that gave rise to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. 

In a speech that was part commencement address, part policy pronouncement and part journey into her own past, Mrs. Obama said that Brown’s advances were being reversed. “Many districts in this country have actually pulled back on efforts to integrate their schools, and many communities have become less diverse,” she said, leading to schools that are less diverse. 

You know, a system based on using the white majority of children to buffer the dysfunctions of minorities depends upon having a white majority of children, which the media recently was celebrating doesn't exist anymore among pre-schoolers.

“And too often,” Mrs. Obama said, “those schools aren’t equal, especially ones attended by students of color which too often lag behind.”

As opposed to the students in those schools.

For Mrs. Obama, too, the visit was personal. She was born in Chicago at a time when public schools were still resisting integration. By the time she entered high school, the city — under pressure from the federal government — opened an integrated magnet school for high achievers, which Mrs. Obama credits with setting her on a path to Princeton and Harvard.

And Michelle lived happily ever after.

Well, no actually, at Whitney Young H.S., Princeton, Harvard Law School, while trying to pass the Illinois bar exam, and while washing out of Sidley and the law profession entirely, she constantly felt like people were judging as not smart enough to be there without her affirmative action privileges.

I wrote up the whole story of Michelle's academic career and struggles and resentment of her test scores in 2008 in VDARE.

Lots of people wonder why the President has never released his test scores, but the explanation might be his wife's fragile ego, since I'll bet you dollars to donuts his were a lot better than hers.
     

The rise and rise of Julian Castro, America's first Hispanic President

For four years, I've been following the quasi-fabulous career of the Hispanic Obama, Julian Castro, who gets paid about $3k or $4k per year to be the ceremonial "mayor" of San Antonio while some white lady gets paid 100 times ($375,000) Hizzoner's stipend to be the actual city manager.

Texas Mayor Is Said to Be HUD Pick in Cabinet Reshuffling 

By JONATHAN MARTIN and PETER BAKER 3:35 PM ET 

President Obama intends to choose Mayor Julián Castro of San Antonio as the secretary of housing and urban development, replacing Shaun Donovan, who would move to head the Office of Management and Budget, according to Democrats informed about the plans.

Sheryl Sculley, city manager

Well, hey, San Antonio mayor Henry Cisneros used the same Cabinet post to launch himself on a public and private career that culminated in this January 2005 Countrywide press release: "Countrywide Expands Commitment to $1 Trillion in Home Loans to Minority and Lower-Income Borrowers." So, let's go back to the well and get another Hispanic San Antonio "mayor."

I wrote about how the Democratic establishment was prepping Castro to be the Hispanic Obama in VDARE in May 2010:

"Who Is Julian Castro And Why Is He Being Touted As The Next Minority President?"

   
For some reason, Julian's identical twin brother Rep. Joaquin Castro doesn't get quite as much Presidential Timberhood adulation. I wonder if that is a source of sibling rivalry?
   

Blond Muslim billionaire takes control in eastern Ukraine

Although a blond Muslim Russian-speaking billionaire sounds like the ultimate Hollywood blockbuster bad guy, at the moment Rinat Akhmetov is against the separatists in eastern Ukraine (although his long-range goals may be obscure). So that makes him Our Man in Donetsk and by definition a good guy.

I think. This is getting confusing.
   

Nicholas Wade's Story of Race and Inheritance

A few more reviews of Nicholas Wade's A Troublesome Inheritance:

A positive review in Scientific American.

A witty and thorough mixed review by James Thompson at Psychological Comments. From the comments on Psychological Comments:

Bruce Charlton *  15 May 2014 12:00 

A few years ago I have a vague memory of reading another NYT best-selling book, whose sub-title proclaimed it was covering similar ground to this volume. 

That subtitle was, I think, "A Story of Race and Inheritance" but I cannot (ahem) recollect the author (presumably a biologist) or the main title (something about psychology and paternity, perhaps?) - maybe you could help me with this?... 

Nonetheless, it clearly *must*, surely, have been making the same kind of arguments concerning ethnicity and genetics as does Mr Wade.

James Thompson 15 May 2014 15:40 

I do apologize. I should have referenced this notable text, but when people recount their dreams I often find it hard to maintain the requisite degree of rapt attention. Furthermore, I realize I should, in all fairness to the previous author, have described Wade's effort as being post-racial.

   
------------
* By the way, Bruce Charlton assures me he's not the golf course architect Bruce Charlton, who is the Senior Design Partner in the Robert Trent Jones II organization and designer of Chambers Bay, next year's U.S. Open site.
     

World Wars B, G, and T collide

The future belongs to whichever identity group can throw the biggest snit:

Racially Themed Work Stirs Conflict at Whitney Biennial
By FELICIA R. LEE MAY 16, 2014

The YAMS, a collective of artists who made a video on race and black identity for the current Whitney Biennial, have withdrawn the work to protest a project in the show that they contend is racially insensitive. 

The project is by Joe Scanlan, a white New York-based artist who creates sculptures, paintings and books that feature a fictional persona who is black. Mr. Scanlan, who is on leave this spring from his post as director of the visual arts program in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton, has for years showcased the life and art of “Donelle Woolford,” a black female Yale graduate and artist, even hiring black female collaborators to portray her. 

“Its de facto endorsement by the Whitney Museum is both insulting and troubling,” the YAMS said of the Donelle Woodford material in a letter to the Whitney. The collective said it objected to “the notion of a black artist being ‘willed into existence’ by a white male artist,” and that in the context of an art exhibition, the work presented “a troubling model of the black body” and amounted to “conceptual rape.” 

The YAMS collective, which is made up of musicians, poets, actors, writers and visual artists from around the world and describes itself as mostly black and queer, is participating in the Biennial under the name HowDoYouSayYaminAfrican? and allowed its video “Good Stock on the Dimension Floor: An Opera“ to be screened in March. But in the letter, it asked the museum to cancel final screenings of the video at the show, which ends on May 25. 

Not Donelle

Mr. Scanlan said he had not encountered much opposition to the Donelle Woolford theme until it was selected for the 2014 Biennial, in which it is represented by two paintings and “Dick’s Last Stand,” a series of performances around the country. In the show, Donelle, played by the artist Jennifer Kidwell, appears in drag to re-enact a subversive stand-up routine recorded in 1977 by Richard Pryor for the last episode of his TV comedy show. 

This may seem confusing, but it has a simple moral: whatever the complaint, the White Man is to blame.

As a tonic after all the World War Xs, here's the real Richard Pryor:

 

Liberalism's ultimate tendency: freedom for aggression

As I mentioned below, in today's New York Times (off to a great start, Dean Baquet!), actor Harvey Fierstein trumpets the very latest cause celebre: a 16-year-old youth legally called "Jane Doe" who has been put into a cottage at a detention center in Connecticut. He writes in "What Is This Child Doing in Prison?"

You see, Jane can be violent. She has fought with other children and with staff members wherever she’s been placed. But given her history, how could she survive by being anything but violent? Where, in her entire life, would this child have ever learned anything except to fight back? ... 

It’s not enough to recount the torment she has endured. If we want to stop the cycle of brutality, we have to ask why the heavens rained down on this child. I believe it is because Jane is transgender. 

Jane was born a boy. She began exhibiting feminine characteristics from age 5, and by the time she was 9 she knew that she was, in fact, a girl. Born into a society where blending gender lines was unacceptable, where God and preachers condemn, Jane didn’t have a chance. ...

And yet, against all odds and reason, she has not destroyed herself. And her strength has brought her allies; protesters have marched in the state capital, Hartford, demanding her release. 

What Harvey doesn't get around to mentioning in this call for "Jane Doe's" release is that "Jane" broke a woman's jaw. As Stalin might say if he were waging World War T today, "You can't make an omelet without breaking a few jaws."

World War T represents two fundamental extremist tendencies of contemporary liberalism: minoritarianism and what a blogger named J.S. Bolton called "freedom for aggression."

Note that the opening salvo of WWT in the NYT was a year ago in as story about some ex-man who is being oppressed by not being allowed to beat up women for money: "For Transgender Fighter Fallon Fox There Is Solace in the Cage."

            

The cure for all ills: Moar immigration

Here's a paper that lots of people are citing about "declining business formation dynamism" and decline in job relocation.

Declining Business Dynamism in the United States: A Look at States and Metros 

By: Ian Hathaway and Robert E. Litan 

Business dynamism is the process by which firms continually are born, fail, expand, and contract, as some jobs are created, others are destroyed, and others still are turned over. Research has firmly established that this dynamic process is vital to productivity and sustained economic growth. Entrepreneurs play a critical role in this process, and in net job creation.

But recent research shows that dynamism is slowing down. Business churning and new firm formations have been on a persistent decline during the last few decades, and the pace of net job creation has been subdued. This decline has been documented across a broad range of sectors in the U.S. economy, even in high-tech. 

Here, the geographic aspects of business dynamism are analyzed. In particular, we look at how these trends have applied to the states and metropolitan areas throughout the United States. In short, we confirm that the previously documented declines in business dynamism in the U.S. overall are a pervasive force throughout the country geographically. 

In fact, we show that dynamism has declined in all fifty states and in all but a handful of the more than three hundred and sixty U.S. metropolitan areas during the last three decades. Moreover, the performance of business dynamism across the states and metros has become increasingly similar over time. In other words, the national decline in business dynamism has been a widely shared experience. 

While the reasons explaining this decline are still unknown, if it persists, it implies a continuation of slow growth for the indefinite future, unless for equally unknown reasons or by virtue of entrepreneurshipenhancing policies (such as liberalized entry of high-skilled immigrants), these trends are reversed.

You know, I realize this may come as a surprise, but we've actually had a certain amount of immigration during these recent decades of declining economic dynamism. So, before we rush into even more immigration, maybe we should consider the possibility that immigration discourages business formation and job relocation among Americans. 

I thought through the logic last year in conversations with my wife's nephew, when he was visiting us in Los Angeles from his small town in the Midwest. He played on a couple of informal soccer teams here, one otherwise all-Mexican, one otherwise all-Russian. The friendly Mexicans called him "Hollywood" because he looks like the kind of All-American handsome young man associated with movie stardom. (The brooding Russians called him "you.")

But, assuming you aren't going to be the next Brad Pitt, does it make sense for an American to relocate for economic reasons to Los Angeles, the immigration capital of America over the last generation? 

First, it's really expensive in part because of the steady population increase, and in part because it attracts immigrants from cultures where extended families crowded into one house are standard.

Second, wages are not very good here relative to the cost of living. That has something to do with the esoteric concept known as supply and demand.

Third, lots of people make lots of money owning small businesses in Los Angeles, but for an American outsider without many family connections, it can be a baffling maze of ethnic specialties and unfriendly extended family business networks. What's your best field? Well, in Los Angeles, a lot of fields are not particularly open to random Americans moving up into management, so good luck. Maybe you'll stumble into one that doesn't turn out to discriminate against you. Or maybe you'll waste a few years before you figure out that the good jobs in the field where you are an entry-level employee only go to, say, cousins from Yemen.

Fourth, California imposes numerous regulations and taxes on businesses, which makes it a difficult business environment for law-abiding Americans. In turn, it attracts a large number of immigrants from cultures where everybody cheats. (Here's my jury duty story about the Iranian used car dealers who stole two million dollars in sales tax revenue.) It's hard to compete when you are burdened with small town Midwestern values against businessmen who think Americans are chumps.

      

The great issue of our times: World War T

Top right on the NYTimes.com now:

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

What Is this Child Doing in Prison?

By HARVEY FIERSTEIN

The transgender teen needs treatment, not isolation.

Marketing is the great art form of the 21st Century, especially socio-political marketing.

Update: As a commenter points out, to get the straight story on this, you need to go the radical feminist blog GenderTrender to find out that this youth broke a female staffer's jaw. This post is more than a month old, so the NYT had plenty of time to find out what was really going on:

It turns out that Jill, the ultra-violent girl cited in testimony by DCF Commissioner Joette Katz in February 14th hearings regarding the need for a Connecticut facility for ultra-violent female juveniles is in fact a male transgender. 

The 16 year old “girl” and “female” cited in multiple reports as an alleged serial violent batterer of women and girls across several foster care placements was revealed to be a male “transgender teen” yesterday when gay activist groups revealed he has since been remanded to an adult prison facility for evaluation and placement by the state. 

In most recent charges, the male teen has been charged with biting a woman on the top of her head, kicking her repeatedly in the head arms and face, punching, assaulting, [temporarily] blinding [in one eye] a female caseworker, and breaking her jaw. 

The young man has now been sent for evaluation to an adult (female!) prison for evaluation without charge, an extraordinary occurrence.

Strikingly, the main resistance to World War T is coming from hardcore feminists, typically lesbians, who have been trying to get away from the attentions, violent or sexual, of men in dresses for decades, as the old policy of the Michigan Womyn's Festival of keeping out anybody born male suggests.
    

Perils of prediction: telephone industry

Regarding Nicholas Wade's speculations on future economic developments by regions of the world, I recall that when I was young, the United States had an expensive and inflexible but relatively terrific national telephone system. Before its antitrust breakup in 1984, the Bell System was a regulated monopoly that provided unstylish but high quality analog telephone service (sound quality was so good that teenagers were notorious for spending hours on the phone), from installation of landlines to long distance to Bell Labs, where Claude Shannon invented information theory and Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson stumbled upon the origin of the universe.

Only a few other cultures, mostly in Northwestern Europe could rival the quality, reliability, and convenience of American telephony. Getting a phone hooked up after moving in, say, Rome or Moscow was a bureaucratic nightmare, much less in Cairo. In Mogadishu? Don't ask.

Now, we could speculate about whether this grand achievement of American technology and, especially, organization was a matter of nature or nurture, but my point is that this is a case in which the past didn't predict the future well, at least regarding phones. The introduction of cell phones over the last 30 years has been a godsend for low trust cultures. They simply don't require the organizational coordination of the old landline technology.

Most famously, the cell phone industry flourished in Somalia even when there was no government. A typical Somali cell phone company would have 500 regular employees (salesmen, technicians, and managers) plus its own private army of 300 AK-47 wielding warriors. Now, that's a lot of overhead, but it's a price Somalis were willing to pay for cellphone service. 

So a prediction from the past about the economic future of telephone industry in Somalia would have gone askew because it pays to develop new technological workarounds for regional deficiencies. 

On the other hand, it's still more pleasant in general to live in the kind of place that could run an old-style landline phone service, like Minneapolis, than to live in Mogadishu, as attested to by the number of Somalis shivering in Minnesota.

      

Oligarch Carlos Slim to own 17% of NYT

From Reuters last February:

(Reuters) - Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim plans to increase his stake in The New York Times Co by exercising at the end of this year warrants he received when he made a major loan to the newspaper company, according to a report in Bloomberg. 

The report, which cited a person familiar with the matter, said Slim plans to hold his stake in the New York Times Co. He currently owns about 8 percent of common shares though this will increase to about 17 percent when he exercises the warrants, according to the New York Times Co latest proxy filing. 

A spokesman for Slim was not immediately available to comment. A spokeswoman for the New York Times Co declined to comment. 

Slim's warrants were part of deal he made with the company in 2009 when he loaned it $250 million during the height of the economic crisis when many big city newspapers reported plunges in advertising revenue.

These are not voting shares, but, still, for a Mexican who regularly contends for richest man in the world, how has buying so much influence over the entire American news media not been a great deal for him?

   

Donald T. Sterling's commencement address at Michigan St. dogged by controversy

I don't actually have anything to say on the subject, but I liked the title.