January 11, 2014

Is there any precedent for Stanley Fischer?

To get some sense of how revolutionary is President Obama's nomination of Stanley Fischer, the head central banker for the Israeli government from 2005 to 2013, to the number two role at America's central bank, I've been trying to look up American government officials who were previously high government officials for other governments. I haven't yet been able to find a Wikipedia category for such a thing.

In particular, I'm looking for American citizens who at a fully mature age took up citizenship in a foreign country, served in a very high position in the foreign government, then attempted to take up a high role in the U.S. government.

Wikipedia does offer a list of 20 U.S. cabinet officers and 4 other cabinet-equivalent level officials who were foreign-born. Most arrived in the United States as children. A few arrived as students in their early twenties. Not one of them appears to have been a foreign government official of the slightest importance before arriving in America, much less the top official in their fields for any foreign government.

Indeed, none of them appear to have started the post-educational phase of their adult political careers abroad, with the exception of Carl Schurz, a German student radical who rebelled against Prussian repression in 1848-49 when he was in his late teens. Fleeing for his life, Schurz arrived in the U.S. at about age 23. As the most dynamic figure in the German-American community, Lincoln made the orator a general in Union Army, in which he served bravely but ineptly at three major battles.

The high-ranking officials to have arrived at the oldest age include Zbigniew Brzezinski, who arrived in the U.S. to get a doctorate at Harvard after obtaining a bachelor's and master's at McGill in Canada. Zalmay Khalilzad's career is similar. Some others arrived around age 21, such as refugee Michael Blumenthal who then went to Berkeley as an undergraduate.

But none of these appointed officials had been important government officials in other countries. (You could claim that Douglas MacArthur's title of Field Marshall of the Philippines in the later 1930s was similar to Fischer's excursion to Israel, but, obviously, the Philippines were still an American colony only being prepped for independence.)

As an analog to the Fischer case, I guess you could name Werner von Braun:
Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical.
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.

Of course, von Braun was brought to the U.S. essentially as a prisoner of war and kept under guard at a military base in El Paso for five years as a sort of "prisoner of peace."

Another example would be Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, a gay pederast courtier who had to flee Germany due to scandal and wound up being the inspector-general of the rebel army during the Revolutionary War due to his being just about the only man in America with Prussian staff training. (The early U.S. tended to attract raffish adventurers fleeing their own reputations in Europe -- my favorite is Mozart's librettist Lorenzo da Ponte.) Of course, America in the 1700s was a small, not terribly well-educated country.

But those aren't good examples because von Braun didn't leave America in his sixties and, say, run France's rocket program for eight years, then try to come back to the U.S. at 70 and be #2 man in the American space program. 

The more you think about the specifics of the Fischer case, the more bizarre it becomes, and more far-ranging the precedent it sets.

The point is not that Fischer arrived in the U.S. at age 23, but that he left the U.S. at age 61 to head up a key department of a foreign power but now he wants to come back at age 70 to take a crucial position in the U.S. government.







Will nomination of Israeli official to Fed be "controversial?"

As I've often remarked, the word "controversial" has undergone a striking metamorphosis over my lifetime. From reading the Los Angeles Times in, say, 1967-1974, I recall that the word "controversial" was then a mark of approval: it was headline shorthand for new, exciting, forward-thinking, and, most of all, sexy.


So, it will be interesting to see how Obama's nomination of Stanley Fischer, until recently head central banker for the Israeli government, to be Vice Chairman of the U.S. government's Federal Reserve Board will be treated in the American mainstream press.

Will Obama's nomination of an Israeli dual-citizen be described as "controversial?"

Or, will any skepticism of the nomination be shunted aside as "controversial?"

Or, will the whole thing simply be treated as not being controversial at all, that everybody knows that high-ranking foreign government officials routinely become high-ranking U.S. government officials (even if it's hard to think of too many examples), so this is just a dog-bites-man business-as-usual story and no reason at all to distract the public's attention from the Really Big National News, the important issues you must think about, such as lane-closures in New Jersey?

"Chris Christie" controversial: "About 70,900 results (0.24 seconds)"
"Stanley Fischer" controversial: "19 results (0.22 seconds)"

Ariel Sharon was the Nathan Bedford Forrest of his generation

Ariel Sharon has died after a long coma. As Greg Cochran observed, Sharon's place in military history is secure: like the brilliant Confederate cavalry general Nathan Bedford Forrest, Sharon was the most accomplished light mobile commander of his generation. Sharon's performance during the 1973 war, when the more senior Dayan broke down under the strain and started thinking about nuking the Aswan Dam, was heroic. Out of favor politically, Sharon arrived at the chaotic front in a civilian car, took command through force of personality, and organized the recrossing of the Suez Canal, trapping an Egyptian army and winning the war.

But, also as with Forrest, you really wouldn't want to be a footsoldier taken prisoner by Sharon's troops. (The general rule in warfare is you are more likely to survive if you surrender like-to-like: if you are a footsoldier, it's best to surrender to enemy footsoldiers. Infantry POWs who surrender to fast-moving mounted forces are often seen as slow-moving impediments to their further dashes, and sometimes are disposed of accordingly.)

January 10, 2014

Dual loyalty? If we're lucky ...

From the NYT:
He also worked as a senior Citigroup executive from 2002 to 2005. ... 
Mr. Fischer, born in present-day Zambia [Northern Rhodesia, then], holds American and Israeli citizenship. 

Although Fischer's many well-heeled supporters portray his jobs in Israel and now America as utterly technical, they are inherently political. An anti-Israel lobby called IMREP has a long analysis of Fischer's career in regard to his service to Israel. For example:

That solution sure required some economic brilliance: "Instead of us loaning us money, we'll give us money. Great idea! Hey, who is this 'us' I'm referring to anyway? It's confusing."

As IMREP's Grant F. Smith points out, the importance of Fischer's nomination is triple:

The Fed is a major regulator, abroad and at home.

First, for example, last month the Fed and two other federal agencies fined the mostly British government-owned Royal Bank of Scotland $100 million for violations of the sanctions against doing business with Iran. Conversely, the Fed can also fight the growing movement in Europe to put sanctions on doing business with Israel.

Second, the Fed is supposed to be (but often isn't) a major regulator of domestic financial wheeler-dealers. For example, Fischer himself was Vice-Chairman of Citigroup from 2002-2005 as the subprime bubble inflated, before he decamped for Israel.

Third, the nomination of Fischer is to establish that it's A-OK for a dual-citizen high Israel-government official to move over to a similar job in the U.S. government. Sure, a few years from now it may still seem a little unusual for, say, the head of Israeli military intelligence to move on to running the National Security Administration in Fort Meade, but don't you remember the Fischer Precedent?

I apologize for the following comment by an America-hating fringe extremist:
– George Washington’s Farewell Address

NYT: "Ethnic Segregation at a U.N. Camp in South Sudan"

@alunmacdonald: "Most depressing photo of the day – a sign at UN camp in
South Sudan separates Dinka and Nuer as they arrive"
From the New York Times:
Ethnic Segregation at a U.N. Camp in South Sudan 

Reporting from South Sudan on Friday, the BBC correspondent Alastair Leithead discovered that civilians taking refuge from fighting at a United Nations base outside the town of Bentiu were being segregated along ethnic lines by the peacekeepers. 
One image from the video report filed by the BBC News crew, showing a hand-painted sign directing members of the Dinka and the Nuer tribes to opposite sides of the camp, caught the attention of Alun McDonald, an Oxfam media officer who has worked with refugees in South Sudan.

According to Mr. Leithead, civilians from both tribes have been forced to seek safety as the fighting raged between forces loyal to President Salva Kiir — a member of the country’s largest ethnic group, the Dinka — and followers of his former vice president, Riek Machar, a Nuer. ...
Still, many close observers of the conflict were taken aback by the partition of the camp. In a conversation on Twitter, both Rebecca Hamilton, a human rights lawyer who has written about the impact of citizen advocacy on U.S. policy in the region, and Amir Ahmad Nasr, a Sudanese blogger, criticized the United Nations Mission in South Sudan for dividing the civilians. 
Malvina Hoffman's
"Nuer Warrior"

I don't know. Sounds pretty prudent to me.

First, Dinkas and Nuers speak somewhat different languages. The Wikipedia article on "Dinka Language" says, "The closest non-Dinka language is Nuer, the language of the Dinka's traditional rivals."

Second, they are fighting right now.

Third, the Nuers and the Dinkas fought throughout the 19th Century until the British arrived and saved the Dinka from complete conquest. This is less obscure than it sounds because rivalries between and among the Nuers and Dinkas are the subject of the classic works on "segmentary lineage" among the Nuer by anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard (the father of colorful Daily Telegraph reporter Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, by the way). See for example, Marshall D. Sahlins' 1961 article "The Segmentary Lineage: An Organization of Predatory Expansion." The Nuer are a canonical example in the anthropological literature of me against my brother, my brother and I against my cousin, my cousins, brother, and I against the world.

The Nuer are pretty good though at coming together with distant cousins for the purposes of kicking around the poor Dinkas. Nuer tribes were traditionally organized on a larger scale that allowed Nuers to put larger armies in the field and defeat the Dinkas. Both sides take the cattle of each other, but the dominant Nuer do it by battle and the poor Dinka fight back by theft.

The ruling mindset of white people writing about Africa is that Africans have no agency: Africans are merely robotic vehicles for the malign influence of white people. Thus, if white people pay for a refugee camp for Dinkas and Nuers, this pair of signs can then be held responsible for all future conflicts between the tribes. The alternative is to assume that Africans have some responsibility for the state of Africa, but, considering the state of Africa, that would be racist.

In truth, the Nuer were always been proud of their ability to push around the Dinka and take his cattle. They would consider the conventional wisdom of themselves as pitiful victims being manipulated by white stereotypes into fighting the Dinka as an insult.

Pour encourager les autres

At Handle's Haus, there is a list (with links) to 91 incidents of  persecution for political incorrectness:
Bullied and Badgered, Pressured and Purged

January 9, 2014

Is Melissa Harris-Perry "America's most foremost public intellectual" or is Ta-Nehisi Coates the black Glenn Beck?

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes at The Atlantic:
On Saturday, [MSNBC talking head] Melissa Harris-Perry apologized on air for segment that made light of the Romney clan's adoption of a young black boy. ... 

[Large amounts of verbiage snipped]

[Large amounts of verbiage snipped]

[Large amounts of verbiage snipped]

[Large amounts of verbiage snipped]

Have you ever noticed how Ta-Nehisi Coates is the black Glenn Beck, in the sense that both are autodidacts (which is a good thing) who are constantly recounting for their rapt audiences mind-blowing excerpts from old books they are halfway finished reading?

Mitt Romney's black grandson and Glenn Beck's war on "Hetero-Fascism"

I pointed out years ago that Democrats are driven crazy by Mitt and Ann Romney's annual Christmas card featuring all their grandchildren: those Republicans are trying to breed their way to victory. Don't those Aryan crypto-Nazis know that the only legitimate way to win elections is to import foreigners illegally to vote for you?

Now, one of the five Romney sons has adopted a black child. So, when a half-black talking head on MSNBC named Melissa Harris-Perry invited a claque of minor comedians to fill some dead air by making fun of the latest Romney Christmas card, conservatives went nuts in response since there's now a black individual in the Romney family picture for them to defend, allowing them to accuse Harris-Perry of "racism."

Glenn Beck, in contrast, defended Harris-Perry sensibly, saying, "She apologizes, for what? It was a break with comedians."






A lot of money was made off the last Cold War. A new one waged against "Hetero-Fascism" sounds like a real geyser of cash for the well-positioned.)

Anyway, part of the Black Pride movement of the 1960s-early 1970s was opposition to whites adopting African-American babies. But this healthy emotional reaction ran into the reality that blacks weren't really ready to go to all the trouble of taking care of all black babies, so this attempt at a ban on interracial adoption fell apart. But that won't stop black people from feeling embarrassed and thus angry at nice white people like the Romney son who adopt a black child.

BBC editor: BBC blackballed immigration debate

From The Telegraph:
By Alice Philipson 11:48AM GMT 05 Jan 2014 835 Comments 

What's the Saudis' secret (besides all the money in the world)?




The War Nerd writes:

Same with the Hashemites, although they've hung on to little Jordan.


January 8, 2014

Abraham Lincoln's speech to 14 Indian chiefs: "We pale-faced people think that this world is a great round ball"


From the Washington Daily Morning Chronicle, March 1863
Cheyennes.---Lean Bear, War Bonnet, and Standing Water.  Kiowais.---Yellow Buffalo, Lone Wolf, Yellow Wolf, White Bull, and Little Heart.  Arapahoes.---Spotted Wolf and Nevah.  Comanches.---Pricked Forehead and Ten Bears.  Apache.---Poor Bear.  Caddo.---Jacob. 
Mr. Commissioner Dole introduced them.  The President said: "Say to them I am very glad to see them, and if they have anything to say, it will afford me great pleasure to hear them."
Mr. Lincoln then gave the following speech: 
Here a globe was introduced, and the President, laying his hand upon it, said: "One of our learned men will now explain to you our notions about this great ball, and show you where you live." 
"We have people now present from all parts of the globe---here, and here, and here. There is a great difference between this palefaced people and their red brethren, both as to numbers and the way in which they live. We know not whether your own situation is best for your race, but this is what has made the difference in our way of living. 

It's not terribly clear how much of this the Indian chiefs, none of whom spoke English and who spoke several different Indian languages, grasped. The translator rendered about a third of Lincoln's speech via sign language, which probably helped. (By the way, Lincoln addressing the Indian chiefs via a sign language interpreter who doesn't actually know any sign language sounds like it would make a pretty good Key & Peele sketch.)

Although Lincoln's White House speech to the Indian chiefs is quite obscure these days, I recognize it as perhaps the source of the ideology of the black and white Western movies that were always on TV when I was a small child. I recall that it was common for the cowboy hero to explain to his Indian captors just before they started torturing him to death that, sure, you Indians might outnumber me right now, but there are lots more pale-faces where I come from, and they're coming out West and you can't stop them all.

That kind of majoritarianism is highly out of fashion today, except when it comes to immigration politics and anything else where whites might wind up a minority and then it's all: There are hundreds of millions of us and we're coming and you can't stop us, nyah-nyah-nyah.

NPR: First ever anti-racist was racist

As I've been pointing out for years, much of what white liberal education reformers are demanding for (or, perhaps, of) black children today (universal pre-K, longer school hours, no summer vacations, taxpayer-supported boarding schools, etc.) is highly reminiscent of the boarding schools that white liberal reformers a century ago successfully demanded for aboriginal peoples in Australia, Canada, and the U.S. 

Whether the current white liberal reformers will be recalled more fondly than their predecessors has yet to be determined.

From NPR:
The Ugly, Fascinating History Of The Word 'Racism' 
Richard Henry Pratt was the first person the Oxford English Dictionary records using the word "racism," in a speech decrying it. But his own legacy on race is checkered. 
The Oxford English Dictionary's first recorded utterance of the word racism was by a man named Richard Henry Pratt in 1902. Pratt was railing against the evils of racial segregation. 
Although Pratt might have been the first person to inveigh against racism and its deleterious effects by name, he is much better-remembered for a very different coinage: Kill the Indian...save the man. 
We're still living with the after-effects of what Pratt thought and did. His story serves as a useful parable for why discussions of racism remain so deeply contentious even now. 
But let's back up a bit. 
Beginning in the 1880s, a group of well-heeled white men would travel to upstate New York each year to attend the Lake Mohonk Conference Of The Friend Of the Indian. Their primary focus was a solution to "the Indian problem," the need for the government to deal with the Native American groups living in lands that had been forcibly seized from them. The Plains Wars had decimated the Native American population, but they were coming to an end. There was a general feeling among these men and other U.S. leaders that the remaining Native Americans would be wiped out within a generation or two, destroyed by disease and starvation. 
The Lake Mohonk attendees wanted to stop that from happening, and they pressed lawmakers to change the government's policies toward Indians. Pratt, in particular, was a staunch advocate of folding Native Americans into white life — assimilation through education. 
He persuaded Congress to let him test out his ideas, and they gave him an abandoned military post in Carlisle, Pa., to set up a boarding school for Native children. He was also able to convince many Native Americans, including some tribal leaders, to send their children far away from home, and leave them in his charge. ...
The Carlisle Indian Industrial School would become a model for dozens of other unaffiliated boarding schools for Indian children. But Pratt's plans had lasting, disastrous ramifications. 
He pushed for the total erasure of Native cultures among his students. "No bilingualism was accommodated at these boarding schools," said Christina Snyder, a historian at Indiana University. The students' native tongues were strictly forbidden — a rule that was enforced through beating. Since they were rounded up from different tribes, the only way they could communicate with each other at the schools was in English. 
"In Indian civilization I am a Baptist," Pratt once told a convention of Baptist ministers, "because I believe in immersing the Indians in our civilization and when we get them under, holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked." 
"The most significant consequence of this policy is the loss of languages," Snyder says. "All native languages are [now] endangered and some of them are extinct."
Pratt also saw to it that his charges were Christianized. Carlisle students had to attend church each Sunday, although he allowed each student to choose the denomination to which she would belong. 
When students would return home to the reservations — which Pratt objected to, because he felt it would slow down their assimilation — there was a huge cultural gap between them and their families. They dressed differently. They had a new religion. And they spoke a different language.  ...
"For his time, Pratt was definitely a progressive," Snyder said. Indeed, he thought his ideas were the only thing keeping Native peoples from being entirely wiped out by disease and starvation. "That's one of the dirty little secrets of American progressivism — that [progress] was still shaped around ideas of whiteness." 
Given the sheer scale of the physical and cultural violence he helped set in motion, was Pratt himself a practitioner of the very ill he decried at the Lake Mohonk convention? Was he a racist? 

Obviously, Pratt was a Boasian culturalist avant-la-lettre. But he was a white man, so that makes him, despite being anti-racist, racist. (This stuff really isn't all that complicated.)

Of course, it's now evident that some of the problems of American Indians are biological -- specifically, they lack Darwinian adaptations for dealing with alcohol and some infectious diseases. In Australia, Aboriginals were dying so fast of novel infectious diseases such as tuberculosis that liberal reformers' hopes were focused on children of mixed parentage. The goal was to educate them so they could marry whites and have children with strong immune systems. Of course, this government-sponsored miscegenation campaign was racist.

The infectious diseases have been reasonably well controlled with vaccines and antibiotics, but alcoholism remains an immense problem for aborigines. Perhaps someday somebody will come up with a medical remedy for this tragic problem. Or would researching that be racist?

New York Review of Books: Never Trust Anyone Under 79






Why is tropical cuisine spicy?

I've mentioned this before, but it's worth repeating:

Spices from the tropics were always a luxury item to medieval Europeans, and now their descendants can afford more of them. Spicy plants are more common at lower latitudes because spices are commonly anti-parasite poisons evolved to protect the plant from the teeming variety of parasites found more in year-round warm climates than in wintry climates. (Also, biodiversity is greater in the tropics due to more specialization because of fewer seasonal swings). 

Thus, 15th Century Europe’s equivalent of the space race of the 20th Century was to find shipping routes to the Spice Islands of the East Indies to bring back peppers so that meat could be preserved longer against parasites.  

Thus, cuisines get blander the farther north you go (as shown by Garrison Keillor's jokes about Norwegian cooking), in part because there are so few spicy plants growing at latitudes where winter kills off most parasites. And it was easier to get snow and ice to keep your food refrigerated so you didn't need as many spices. (For example, a major product of 19th Century New England was ice. Riverboats plying the Mississippi might carry hundreds of pounds of ice from Walden Pond.)

Steak and a Baked Potato

Carrying on my discussion of white foods from Taki's Magazine, I have to admit to not really liking the kind of traditional expensive steak house fare that's heavily advertised in airline magazines: Ruth's Chris Steak House and the like. To my taste, a giant slab of steak gets repetitious compared to taking a smaller amount of beef and chopping it up and stir-frying it with vegetables like the Chinese do. And the Chinese approach is much cheaper since you don't need such high quality beef.

Of course, Ruth's Chris Steak House is largely in the traveling salesman business. And much of America's traditional fare is what traveling salesmen thought a safer bet after they had heard about that one horrifying chapter in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle:
It seemed as if every time you met a person from a new department, you heard of new swindles and new crimes. There was, for instance, a Lithuanian who was a cattle-butcher for the plant where Marija had worked, which killed meat for canning only; and to hear this man describe the animals which came to his place would have been worth while for a Dante or a Zola. It seemed that they must have agencies all over the country, to hunt out old and crippled and diseased cattle to be canned. There were cattle which had been fed on “whiskey-malt,” the refuse of the breweries, and had become what the men called “steerly”—which means covered with boils. It was a nasty job killing these, for when you plunged your knife into them they would burst and splash foul-smelling stuff into your face; and when a man’s sleeves were smeared with blood, and his hands steeped in it, how was he ever to wipe his face, or to clear his eyes so that he could see?

So, Ruth's Chris Steak House advertises itself as The Best USDA Prime Steak Restaurant, meaning everything it sells has passed the toughest inspection, which of course go back directly to the uproar caused by The Jungle. Plus, by serving you a big chunk of meat, you can have some confidence just from looking at the size of this piece of fine meat that it came from an overall healthy cow and that your meat dish wasn't assembled from bits and pieces of diseased cows that are then covered in a sauce.

Same with the baked potato -- it's just a whole potato, so it's unlikely to have had filler or worse added to it. You can put butter and sour cream on it -- more foods that you can inspect visually for gross contamination. The chives might be a little mysterious looking, but they seem unlikely to make you miss tomorrow's big meeting with food poisoning.

So, one motivation behind the much-derided traditional cuisine of mid-20th Century Americans was an attempt to avoid being swindled by unscrupulous businessmen.

Another point about mid-Century cuisine served in middle class homes is that much of it was modeled on business dining in restaurants, meals served to people who might not have all that much in common but who want to develop a friendlier relationship. Business dining was in contrast to exploratory dining among people who already are friends and who have already dined together and who find their tastes are enough in sync to want to explore cuisines together.

So, business cuisine in 1950 had a high emphasis on common denominator foods (e.g., steak and potatoes) that wouldn't be likely to weird out a customer. In turn, that had a lot of influence on what people ate at home. In general, the goal of mid-Century American culture was to create a friendly, open, fairly egalitarian, non-exclusionary society in which Americans would feel comfortable doing business with each other across a vast continent. This influenced norms toward some degree of homogeneity, blandness, and conformity in minor matters like cuisine, but was overall such an enormous success in terms of prosperity and national solidarity that we've forgotten the reasons behind many of the details, and thus view this culture with ignorant contempt.

January 7, 2014

The War on Whiteness (in Food)

Ground-up ants Quinoa
My new column in Taki's Magazine is on how "white bread," "vanilla," and the like became ethnic epithets. 
Then again, the Borscht Belt jokesters did have a point: Average American whites in the middle of the 20th century sure did eat a lot of literally white stuff. 
How come? 
I finally started to understand when my wife mentioned that sometime before WWII her grandfather had worked inside a Chicago ice cream factory. He came home and told his children, “After what I saw today, never eat any flavor of ice cream other than vanilla.”

Read the whole thing there.

Viva Puerto Rico Libre!

From the Wall Street Journal:
Puerto Ricans Flock North Away From Battered Economy 
Exodus in Past Decade Was the Largest Since the 1950s

But, hey, Puerto Rico is essential to America's national interest because it's an ideal place for Microsoft to evade federal taxes. And it would be a strategic location for a naval base for America's Great White Fleet to protect the proposed Isthmusian Canal from the Kaiser's weltpolitik and King Edward's new dreadnoughts.

We are frequently assured that we don't need to strengthen defenses against illegal immigration since nobody in Latin America will ever want to move to America again. Yet, here we are coming up on the 100th anniversary of open borders with Puerto Rico, and they just don't stop coming.

L.A. mayor Garcetti bemoans white males studying too hard

The mayor is sad.
From the Los Angeles Times:
New LAFD recruit class is nearly all male, overwhelmingly white

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti bemoaned the lack of diversity in new Fire Department recruits after celebrating a reported rise in local tourism at an event at the California Science Center. 
By Michael Finnegan, Ben Welsh and Robert J. Lopez
January 6, 2014, 8:13 p.m. 
The class of 70 firefighters, which is scheduled to begin training Monday, has just one woman and is 60% white. Twenty-three percent of the recruits are Latino, 11% are Asian American and 6% are African American, according to the figures.
Earlier Monday, Garcetti said that he had not seen the complete breakdown for the class but was not satisfied with the racial and ethnic balance based on preliminary information he received from the department. 
His office obtained complete figures and released them Monday evening after requests from The Times.  
"Mayor Garcetti thinks these numbers are unacceptable and wants the Fire Department to reflect the city it serves,” spokesman Yusef Robb said Monday evening. Los Angeles is 29% white, 49% Latino, 11% Asian and 10% black, according to the Census Bureau. 
Robb said the mayor's office is committed to working with the department  to improve recruiting and ensure future classes include more women and minorities. 
Robb noted that recruiting for the class starting next week took place before Garcetti took office. Another class of trainees could begin later this year.
Fire Department spokesmen could not be reached Monday evening for comment. 
For years, the LAFD has struggled with racial discrimination and sexual harassment, allegations that have cost taxpayers nearly $20 million since 2005, city records show. 
In November, a Superior Court jury awarded $1.1 million to a black firefighter who said he had endured three decades of discrimination. The verdict followed payouts totaling $1.5 million in other bias cases for the budget year that ended in June.

Suing the fire department on some sort of discrimination grounds, as in the famous case of veteran black fireman Tennie "Big Dog" Pierce, who was given $1.5 million by taxpayers for a firehouse prank involving dog food appearing surreptitiously in his spaghetti, is known as AARP: African-American Retirement Planning.
The department, which has 3,200 sworn personnel, has diversified its ranks over the last two decades, city officials say, noting that the last four fire chiefs have been African American. 
But the agency is still 50% white, 31% Latino, 12% black and 7% Asian.

Those darn white fire nuts keep studying how to put out fires.

So the huge city of Los Angeles is hiring firemen at the rate of 14 per year -- in other words, as the number of fires decline, it just doesn't need new firemen. So, this ought to be a non-issue.

Still, we get these ritual denunciations by white male authority figures of working class white males for the sin of burning the midnight oil studying how to save people from fires.

That's what important white people do these days: denounce white men. It's a very weird kabuki rite, but nobody seems to notice there's anything odd about it anymore.

January 6, 2014

Kung fu movie mogul Run Run Shaw dies at 107

Blade Runner (co-executive producer - uncredited) 







1,000 cars torched per week in France

From Time:

About 20% appear to be owners setting fire to their own cars to collect on insurance, which is a pretty plausible scam in a country where youths burn over 100 cars per night.

January 5, 2014

The annual retrospective season is finally over

The end of the year in the press features a lot of top ten lists, but the high-end guys strive to provide more than bullet points: they labor to explicate the thematic common denominator, the profound message about the state of the world in this year's list of the top ten dubstep tracks, point-and-shoot videogames, or movies. For example, poor David Denby explains in The New Yorker in "The Best Movies of the Year:"

Furthermore, we must not overlook the urgent apprehensions about the state of the American consciousness that unite and illuminate World War Z, Lee Daniel's The Butler, The CroodsThis Is the End, and Pacific Rim.

Not by Vermeer
Seriously, there are no doubt things that actually do unite movies released in 2013 that will be obvious a generation from now. But almost by definition we can't see the forest for the trees at this point. Recall the Dutch con man in the 1930s, Han van Meegeren, who painted many fake Vermeers, trading one to Goering for hundred of real Dutch paintings. Today, they look like badly done publicity posters for Greta Garbo movies, but back in 1937 they were perfectly convincing because they were so 1937ish: of course a missing Vermeer would look like this: Vermeer was a genius, far ahead of his time, our contemporary!

Everybody Hates Amy, Part II

Amy Chua owns January. 





Spelling improved -- the Daily Mail appears to have given up not only editors, but spell-checkers.

Everybody Hates Amy, Part I

The New York Post is mad at Amy Chua
Tiger Mom: Some cultural groups are superior 
By Maureen Callahan January 4, 2014 | 3:17pm


She’s doubling down. 
Cuban exiles

How about Armenians? Koreans? Barbadians (Bajans)?

What about certain Protestant groups like Episcopalians?

And what about looking back in time? Christian Scientists are fading, but they did extremely well for themselves for a long time.

If you go back to 1900, Scots dominated much of business in the U.S. and Canada. Mark Twain's long 1898 article praising Jewish business acumen mentions that of course the one place Jews can't compete is Scotland: "There are a few Jews in Glasgow, and one in Aberdeen; but that is because they can't earn enough to get away."

You mean, some people suspect Schumer-Rubio isn't the cure for whatever ails us?

Uh ...
1. A superiority complex 

I was surprised to see driving through Amish country last summer that the Amish aren't anywhere near as poor as I expected.
2. Insecurity ...
3. Impulse Control 

West African immigrants feel superior to African Americans, that's for sure.

Uh ... no, that's what they have wars for.

Or maybe having a whole bunch of nice land with only some tubercular Indians on it ...

The 4.8 million Hispanics in Los Angeles County can't even muscle their way into jobs as gaffers, key grips, and best boys. Do you really think they'll suddenly be running the media by 2042?