Now, suddenly, we all need to cool off

When I was a young boy in Catholic grammar school, I was picking persimmons off a tree on the other side of the school fence and throwing them at my class mates in the schoolyard. Monsignor Kilcoyne happened to be walking by and saw me. In a white-hot rage of Irish anger he marched over, grabbed me by the collar, and demanded my name. He told me that he would inform my teacher, Sister Agnita, what had happened and I would be punished appropriately. Then he marched off.

I was terrified. I had messed up badly. I did not know what punishment Sister would mete out, but I thought I would be better off me if I showed some contrition. I turned to my classmates in the schoolyard and said: “We all need to be sorry for what we have done.”

At that point, one of the boys in my class, Steve, came forward and said: “What do you mean: we? I didn’t pick any persimmons off the tree. You were the one who did it. And now you are the one who is going to pay the price. Don’t try to spread your guilt around to rest of us.” I immediately recognized how right he was and my face burned with shame.

I was reminded of this episode when I read how Bill de Blasio told a group of policemen this last weekend “We are all in this together.” “No we aren’t.” one of the officers replied.

For months de Blasio has been the foremost source of alienation and division between the police and communities of color in New York. But now, when his behavior has blown up in his face, de Blasio suddenly cries out: "We all need to come together, we all need to cool off."

No we don't, Bill. You are the one who messed up. You are the one who is responsible. And, now, you are the one who is in trouble. Shame on you for trying to involve other people in your guilt. It is not the case that voices of extremism on both the Right and the Left need to fall silent. It is only the voices on the Left that have been spewing their hatred and they are the ones that need to be silenced.

What will Krugman say now?

Several years ago, Paul Krugman wrote an idiotic column published by the New York Times in which he blamed the shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords not on the demented lunatic Jared Loughner, but on a "climate of hate" supposedly created by right-wing politicians:

When you heard the terrible news from Arizona, were you completely surprised? Or were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen?

Put me in the latter category. I’ve had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach ever since the final stages of the 2008 campaign. I remembered the upsurge in political hatred after Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 — an upsurge that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing. And you could see, just by watching the crowds at McCain-Palin rallies, that it was ready to happen again. The Department of Homeland Security reached the same conclusion: in April 2009 an internal report warned that right-wing extremism was on the rise, with a growing potential for violence.

Conservatives denounced that report. But there has, in fact, been a rising tide of threats and vandalism aimed at elected officials, including both Judge John Roll, who was killed Saturday, and Representative Gabrielle Giffords. One of these days, someone was bound to take it to the next level. And now someone has.
...
As Clarence Dupnik, the sheriff responsible for dealing with the Arizona shootings, put it, it’s “the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business.” The vast majority of those who listen to that toxic rhetoric stop short of actual violence, but some, inevitably, cross that line.
...
Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right.

It turned out, of course, that there was absolutely no connection whatsoever between Mr Loughner and right-wing politicians, but Mr Krugman never retracted his vile, unfounded accusations.

It was laughable to assert that right-wing politicians had anything whatsoever to do with Jared Loughner's shooting of Congresswoman Giffords. Over the last several months, on the other hand, President Obama, Attorney General Holder, and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio have actively encouraged blacks to believe that they are justly aggrieved at the supposedly unfair treatment they have received at the hands of supposedly racist police departments and grand juries across the nation. Obama and Holder have spoken of a breakdown in trust between the police and communities of color and implied that the frustration and disappointment that blacks feel at the behavior of the police and the grand juries in the Garner and Brown cases are understandable. Mayor de Blasio has spoken of his personal experience instructing his biracial son, Dante, to “take special care” during any police encounters, presumably, because racist police officers might gun him down.

But, if blacks were, in fact, justly aggrieved, then, it was reasonable to assume that eventually they would retaliate. Well, today, two New York City police officers were gunned down as they sat innocently in their squad car. The shooter was a black man, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who, according to the New York Times, was motivated by anger at the refusal of grand juries to indict police officers in the Eric Garner and Michael Brown cases:

[Brinsley] had made statements on social media suggesting that he planned to kill police officers and was angered about the Eric Garner and Michael Brown cases.

In other words, unlike Sarah Palin, Obama, Holder, and de Blasio have indeed created a climate of hatred, namely, against police officers and, as Krugman wrote, "someone was bound to take it to the next level. And now someone has."

One wonders if Krugman will feel a need to exhibit a sense of "balance" and be man enough to condemn Obama, Holder, and de Blasio with the same visceral sneers with which he condemned Sarah Palin. Of course he won't.

Obama, Holder, and DeBlasio are responsible for fomenting violence against police

As reported by the New York Times:

[Ismaaiyl Brinsley, the black man who today assassinated two New York City Police Officers as they sat in their patrol car, had] made statements on social media suggesting that he planned to kill police officers and was angered about the Eric Garner and Michael Brown cases. ... The double killing comes at a moment when protests over police tactics have roiled the city and other parts of the nation. ... [Democratic New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio recently had] spoken of his personal experience instructing his biracial son, Dante, to “take special care” during any police encounters. Some union leaders suggested the mayor had sent a message that police officers were to be feared. ... The killing seemed to drive the wedge between Mr. de Blasio and rank-and-file officers even deeper. Video posted online showed dozens of officers turning their backs to the mayor as he walked into a news conference on Saturday evening. “There’s blood on many hands tonight — those that incited violence on the street under the guise of protests, that tried to tear down what New York City police officers did every day,” the head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, Patrick Lynch, said outside Woodhull Hospital. He added, “That blood on the hands starts on the steps of City Hall, in the office of the mayor.”

Mayor de Blasio is, of course, not the only Democratic leader who has suggested that the police are not to be trusted. In recent weeks, President Obama and Attorney General Holder have themselves spoken of the "breakdown in trust between the police and communities of color" and expressed sympathy for the fact that blacks feel "frustrated and disappointed" by the grand jury decisions in the Garner and Brown cases. To quote President Obama:

Obviously, how we're thinking about race relations right now has been colored by Ferguson, the [Eric] Garner case in New York, a growing awareness in the broader population of what many communities of color have understood for some time. And that is that, there's specific instances at least where -- where law enforcement doesn't feel as if it's being applied in a colorblind fashion.

The effect of the words of these three Democrats has been to suggest that the mistrust, frustration, and disappointment that blacks feel are warranted and to imply that the police (and the grand juries that have refused to indict them) are racists and behaving unjustly. But, if the black President and Attorney General of the United Staes and the Mayor of New York who has a biracial son suggest that the police, the enforcers of the law, are racists and behaving unjustly, why should we be surprised if blacks like Ismaaiyl Brinsley somehow feel they are justified in retaliating against the police?

As I have written before, instead of discouraging violence, the irresponsible utterances of Obama, Holder, and DeBlasio only foment it. As Patrick Lynch suggests, Obama, Holder, and de Blasio have some soul searching to do. They need to ask themselves to what extent they bear some responsibility for the murder of these two police officers and for the intensifying alienation between police officers and blacks across the country.

Howard Marks starts to get aggressive

Howard Marks, co-founder and Chairman of Oaktree, writes:

For the last 3 1/2 years, Oaktree's mantra has been "Move forward, but with caution." For the first time in that span, with the arrival of some disarray and risk aversion, events tell us it's appropriate to drop some of our caution, and substitute a degree of aggressiveness.

Maybe it's time to buy a few shares of Oaktree.

Where is the consistency?

The LA Times reported in September of 2012:

Internet video giant YouTube has found itself drawn into a global drama being played out in violent Mideast protests over a 14-minute video trailer for Innocence of Muslims, raising questions about the website's responsibilities as the Internet's preeminent distributor of video.

The trailer has been blamed for inciting violence in Libya, Egypt and Yemen. Obama administration officials said Thursday that they have asked YouTube to review the video and determine whether it violates the site's terms of service, according to people close to the situation but not authorized to comment.

Later, UN Ambassador Susan Rice characterized the video as "hateful, offensive, and heinous" and again blamed the video (absurdly) as causing the attacks on our Benghazi embassy:

Rice told Fox’s Chris Wallace “what sparked the recent violence was the airing on the internet of a very hateful, very offensive video.” She told CNN’s Candy Crowley, “There was a hateful video that was disseminated on the internet… That sparked violence in various parts of the world…” She told ABC’s Jake Tapper, “What happened this week in Cairo, in Benghazi and many other parts of the region… was a result, a direct result, of a heinous and offensive video that was widely disseminated…” She gave similar answers to NBC’s David Gregory and CBS’s Bob Schieffer.

Subsequently, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the writer, producer, and promoter of Innocence of Muslims, was jailed:

On 27 September 2012, U.S. federal authorities arrested Nakoula in Los Angeles charging eight counts of probation violation. Prosecutors alleged that some of the violations included making false statements regarding his role in the film ... None of the charges relate to his use of the Internet [that's rich!]. Following a hearing before a judge, Nakoula was ordered to jail without bail, with the judge citing probation violations including lying to probation officials, "danger to the community" and "lack of trust in the defendant."

Today, President Obama took quite a different tone when speaking of the movie The Interview, a fictional portrayal of Americans assassinating North Korean leader Kim Jong Un:

We cannot have a society in which some dictator some place can start imposing censorship here in the United States. Because if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they start doing when they see a documentary that they don’t like or news reports that they don’t like. Or even worse, imagine if producers and distributors and others start engaging in self-censorship because they don’t want to offend the sensibilities of somebody whose sensibilities probably need to be offended. ... I wish they had spoken to me first. I would have told them do not get into a pattern in which you're intimidated by these kinds of criminal attacks.

So, it is an exercise of freedom of speech for Americans to make movies about assassinating a foreign leader and we should not be intimidated by parties who are offended by and respond violently against such movies, but videos disparaging Muhammad are hateful, offensive, and heinous and should be removed from YouTube?

Where is the consistency? Obama is correct to insist that Sony has the right to make whatever satirical movie it wants and to urge Sony not to be intimidated by Kim Jong Un. Why, then, did Obama and Susan Rice not come to the defense of Nakoula in the wake of Benghazi and insist on his right to make whatever movie he wanted to make about Muhammad?

Steven Pinker should stick with linguistics

MIT linguist Steven Pinker recently wrote a piece in the New Republic entitled Science Is Not Your Enemy: An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians, in which he argues not only that the scientific method can enhance our understanding of the humanities, but that scientific facts should serve as the basis for all human morality. Pinker writes:

[T]he worldview that guides the moral and spiritual values of an educated person today is the worldview given to us by science. Though the scientific facts do not by themselves dictate values, they certainly hem in the possibilities. By stripping ecclesiastical authority of its credibility on factual matters, they cast doubt on its claims to certitude in matters of morality. ... And in combination with a few unexceptionable convictions — that all of us value our own welfare and that we are social beings who impinge on each other and can negotiate codes of conduct — the scientific facts militate toward a defensible morality, namely adhering to principles that maximize the flourishing of humans and other sentient beings. This humanism, which is inextricable from a scientific understanding of the world, is becoming the de facto morality of modern democracies, international organizations, and liberalizing religions, and its unfulfilled promises define the moral imperatives we face today.[emphasis added]

Pinker, whose writings on linguistics and cognitive science I have found very enlightening over the years, here appears to be completely unacquainted with world history over the last several centuries. Does Pinker have any idea how dangerous that phrase "the scientific facts militate toward a defensible morality" is? The Jacobins of the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks of the Russian Revolution, and the Maoists in China were well acquainted with this kind of thinking: they, too, were convinced that the "scientific facts" as they understood them "militated towards a defensible morality." They ended up almost "militating" their nations out of existence.

Furthermore, how are we to implement the "maximization of the flourishing of humans and other sentient beings?" Cows, for example, are sentient beings. How is an effort to maximize the flourishing of cows consistent with the fact that we slaughter them every day for our consumption? What's more, if, on the one hand, we can justify the slaughter of cows for the sake of maximizing the flourishing of a larger group of sentient beings (thankfully, including us humans), and yet, on the other hand, science cannot distinguish between the worth of a cow and the worth of a human being (after all, as Pinker says, "scientific facts do not by themselves dictate values"), then, what is to prevent society from slaughtering the occasional human if it can be shown based on "scientific facts" that his death will maximize the flourishing of all the other humans and sentient beings in aggregate. In fact, this was precisely the logic that Lenin and Mao applied: certain segments of the Russian and Chinese nations had to be sacrificed to promote the general welfare of the Proletariat. Pinker does allow for the "unexceptionable conviction that all of us value our own welfare," but, exactly how he proposes to pursue the one principle of maximizing the welfare of all while preserving the welfare of the individual, he does not venture to say.

Steven, better stick with linguistics.

Disparate impact realism

I have written repeatedly (for example, here, here, and here) about the contradictions and pernicious effects of disparate impact theory in all walks of life. My attention was recently drawn to an interesting paper on the subject by Amy Wax, Professor of Law at University of Pennsylvania, entitled Disparate Impact Realism. The final sentence from the abstract states:

Disparate impact litigation, which does nothing to correct existing disparities and distracts from the task of addressing them, represents a cumbersome, misplaced effort that could better be directed at the root causes of workforce racial imbalance.

Here is a link to the abstract, from which you can download and read the entire article.

My current favorite movement from a Bach cantata

My current favorite movement from a Bach cantata is the opening aria duetto from Du wahrer Gott und Davids Sohn.

I have to listen to a Bach cantata at least several times before I become familiar with the melodies and the structure of the music and can begin to make sense of it. And then, all of a sudden, I find the pathway through the music, understand how the music relates to the words, and it becomes a work of incomparable genius and ineffable beauty, one that makes me realize that there is a fundamental difference between me, a mere human, and Bach, who operated on an entirely different, a divine, plane, endowed as he was with incomprehensibly rich and complex creative powers. And this is just one of his works.

The text is:

Du wahrer Gott und Davids Sohn,
Der du von Ewigkeit in der Entfernung schon
Mein Herzeleid und meine Leibespein
Umständlich angesehn, erbarm dich mein!
    Und lass durch deine Wunderhand,
    Die so viel Böses abgewandt,
    Mir gleichfalls Hilf und Trost geschehen.


You true God and Son of David,
you who from your eternal seat far off in the distance
have seen all my heart's woe and body's pain,
have mercy on me.
    And through your miracle-working hand,
    that has turned aside so much evil,
    let help and comfort come to me too.

This is one of Bach's cantatas from the Quinquagesima, the Sunday before Lent, when the Gospel tells the story of Jesus healing the blind man. In other words, as your miraculous touch healed the blind man, Jesus, let it heal me too. The way the oboes intertwine with the duet of female voices...

Torture versus drone strikes and atomic bombs

We are being asked to believe that for Democrats to launch drone attacks and special forces raids against terrorists on the sovereign territory of foreign nations, sometimes killing innocent bystanders in the process, is morally defensible, but for Republicans to torture a handful of the most extreme terrorists in order to obtain useful information in time of war is not.

In 1945, a Democratic President, Harry Truman, authorized the dropping of atomic bombs on the two Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These bombs killed in excess of 200,000 people, many of them non-combatants. Mr Truman considered this action regrettable, but necessary to crush Japanese resistance and put an end to the war.

In 1945, American planes also firebombed Tokyo, killing in excess of 100,000 people, many of them non-combatants. American and British bombers also firebombed Dresden, killing at least 25,000 people. Here is an eyewitness account from a Dresden survivor:

We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk to the size of small children, pieces of arms and legs, dead people, whole families burnt to death, burning people ran to and fro, burnt coaches filled with civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers, many were calling and looking for their children and families, and fire everywhere, everywhere fire, and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape from. I cannot forget these terrible details. I can never forget them. — Lothar Metzger.

Again, these firebombings were undertaken to crush Japanese and Nazi resistance.

It is time for Americans to put off their sense of moral outrage and acknowledge that sometimes such actions as all those listed above are undertaken in time of total war, by realistic American Democrats and Republicans alike, to achieve victory and preserve the nation.

Hobamaspeak vs Barkleyspeak

WSJ reports:

A New York City grand jury on Wednesday declined to indict a police officer in the death of an unarmed African-American, sparking a federal investigation and renewing a wave of protests that swept the country after another black man was fatally shot by an officer in Missouri.

The grand jury’s decision outraged many New York elected officials, and city leaders called for calm as protesters marched through Manhattan, denouncing the death of Eric Garner, 43 years old, who died after being held in an apparent police chokehold on July 17 in the borough of Staten Island.

The decision also elicited a quick reaction from President Barack Obama , who said Mr. Garner’s death “speaks to the larger issues” of trust between police and civilians. He renewed a vow to repair police-community relations.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced Wednesday night that the Justice Department would launch an “independent, thorough, fair, and expeditious” civil rights probe into Mr. Garner’s death. The department had been monitoring the local investigation of the case.

“His death of course was a tragedy. All lives must be valued,” the attorney general said, acknowledging that some are “disappointed and frustrated” by the grand jury decision. He added that “we must seek to heal the breakdown in trust that we have seen” between law enforcement and minority communities.

Just as George Orwell invented the term Newspeak in his novel 1984, we need to invent a new term: Hobamaspeak.

The definition of Hobamaspeak is: to speak as Attorney General Holder and President Obama do; to speak in banal platitudes and truisms that convey the message that the irrational inability of some blacks to accept the findings of grand juries and to act out lawlessly and riot in reaction to them will be "understood" and tolerated, and that local police forces, in particular, police forces with a majority of white officers, will be blocked by the Federal government through investigations and other coercive means from enforcing the law against blacks who break it.

Antonym: Barkleyspeak. Barkleyspeak is defined as: to speak as Charles Barkley does; to speak bluntly, but honestly about how certain black "scumbags" must (as most "real black people" do) face facts, refrain from rioting, assume responsibility for their own success or failure, be judged by the same standards as all other citizens, and be grateful for the police forces that preserve the peace in their communities.

When Obama and Holder speak of the "breakdown in trust between the police and communities of color" or state that blacks are "frustrated and disappointed" by grand jury decisions, they suggest that such mistrust, frustration, and disappointment are warranted. But, this frustration, disappointment, and mistrust are warranted only insofar as the police have done something wrong. So, Obama and Holder are, in effect, implying that the police (and the grand juries that have refused to indict them) are, in fact, doing something wrong. But, if the police, the enforcers of the law, are behaving unjustly, then what reason is there for blacks to obey the law? Obama and Holder are actually speaking in such a way as to erode the trust between police and blacks even further. Instead of discouraging riots, Hobamaspeak foments them.

The high-tech industry gets very little from Obama's executive order on immigration

Reuters reports:

"This holiday season, the undocumented advocacy community got the equivalent of a new car, and the business community got a wine and cheese basket," complained one lobbyist, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Instead of more temporary H-1B visas, which allow non-U.S. citizens with advanced skills and degrees in "specialty occupations" to work in the country for up to six years, the 200,000-member U.S. chapter of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers was hoping for measures to reduce the backlog of H-1B holders awaiting green cards.

"If this is all there is, then the president has missed a real opportunity," said Russ Harrison, a senior legislative representative at the IEEE. "He could have taken steps to make it easier for skilled immigrants to become Americans through the green card system, protecting foreign workers and Americans in the process."

Thus, after supporting Obama so generously over the last several years, the high-tech industry got almost zero action from Mr Obama on modifications to immigration laws that high-tech firms wanted most desperately. If Mr Obama had done more to improve the pathways to work permits and citizenship for high-tech immigrants, the result would have been a large influx of highly-educated, highly-skilled, highly-paid Indian and Asian high-tech workers into the United States, the kind of workers who build and work in dynamic, high-tech businesses that generate profits for investors and tax revenues for the government.

Instead, Mr Obama's actions will create an incentive for millions of new low-skill, low-wage undocumented workers from Central America to flood into the US, workers who will likely consume far more social services (such as food stamps, Medicaid, and subsidized housing) than they will contribute in profits and tax revenues.

In sum, the Democrats have shown once again that they place the interests of other groups (in this case, the Hispanic lobby) ahead of the interests of high-tech, and at a significant cost to the American economy. When will high-tech executives realize that the Democrats, whom high-tech has been supporting so generously for so long, are doing absolutely nothing for them?

Reuters continues:

Major changes [to H-1B visas] would require Congressional action ... and tech industry executives are worried that partisan rancor over Obama's unilateral action could set back chances for legislation.

“I don’t view this as a long-term solution, and I hope it doesn’t get in the way of a long-term solution,” said Dave Goldberg, chief executive of SurveyMonkey, a Palo Alto based company.

Come January, the Republican majorities in the House and Senate should act immediately to send legislation to Mr Obama increasing the number of H-1B visas for high-tech workers. If Mr Obama vetoes this legislation, it will become even more evident that the interests of high-tech are better represented by Republicans.

More progressive antipathy against Khanna

HuffPost reports:

"If Khanna had been successful, it would have been open season. The technology industry would have flooded [future races] to take out numerous progressive voices in the state," said Neil Sroka, the communications director for Democracy for America, a progressive group that directed funds toward Honda's campaign. It also received support from labor unions as well as MoveOn.org, the Sierra Club and Planned Parenthood.

Democracy for America had issued an earlier press release after the primary:

Tonight, Silicon Valley voters decisively chose Mike Honda, the true, grassroots progressive in the race, over the billionaire-backed, Republican-lite Ro Khanna. With the registered Republicans now out of the race, Democracy for America members look forward to continuing to make clear that Mike Honda is the only progressive Democrat in this race -- a job we expect to be made considerably easier as Republican-lite Ro Khanna inevitably begins making the same right-wing pitch to voters that he used to 'win' the support of fringe-right millionaires and billionaires.

Ro Khanna should run again, but as a Republican

Democrat Ro Khanna has conceded victory to Democrat Mike Honda in the race for the 17th Congressional District. Khanna should run against Honda again in 2 years, but this time Khanna should switch parties and run as a Republican. Here's why.

In this last election, California's new nonpartisan blanket primary prevented a Republican candidate from getting enough votes to appear on the final ballot. So, the race ended up being between the two Democrats, Honda and Khanna. Khanna, although a Democrat, received almost no support from the Democratic Party. Honda, on the other hand, was backed by almost every state and national Democratic leader, by the California Democratic Party, and by the traditional allies of the Democratic Party, namely the public service employee unions (like the teachers unions), Planned Parenthood, the Sierra Club, and black and Hispanic leaders. (For a more detailed discussion of who the respective supporters of Honda and Khanna were, see here.) It is next to impossible for a Democrat to win an election against another Democrat without the backing of the Democratic Party.

Many of Khanna’s positions are consistent with positions advocated by Republicans. For example:

• Khanna is in favor of reforming budget-busting pensions of public service employees. The leader of the pension reform movement is former Democratic San Jose mayor, Chuck Reed, who endorsed Khanna. (For more background on Chuck Reed's battles with the public service employee unions, see here.) Reed also endorsed Sam Liccardo in the race for mayor of San Jose. Liccardo, another advocate for public employee pension reform, won his race, and this victory was hailed by the Wall Street Journal as a "Reform Breakthrough." The union reform movement in the South Bay, led by Reed, Liccardo, and Khanna, is very similar in spirit to the union reforms that Republican Governor Scott Walker brought about in Wisconsin through the passage of Wisconsin Act 10, for which Walker has been vilified and attacked by the public unions (including through a recall election, which Walker won). Honda, on the other hand, was endorsed by the San Jose Police Officers union, which has opposed Chuck Reed and the pension reform movement at every turn.
• Khanna supports the Vergara vs State of California decision. The Vergara decision rules that California state laws giving tenure, seniority and other job protections to public school teachers deprive students of their constitutional right to an adequate education. The Wall Street Journal editorial page hailed the decision as a "School Reform Landmark." In contrast, Democratic California Governor Jerry Brown, with the support of the teachers unions, immediately appealed the decision. By supporting the Vergara decision, Khanna once again reveals himself as supporting the kind of reform of public employee unions that Republican Scott Walker brought about in Wisconsin. Honda, on the other hand, (like Jerry Brown, who endorsed him) opposed the Vergara decision. For more information on Khanna's support for Vergara and Honda's opposition to it, see here.
• Khanna supports patent reform. Patent reform is an issue that is near and dear to the hearts of Silicon Valley executives. Enormous amounts of money are lost every year by Silicon Valley companies in patent litigation. And yet, last May, when the Senate Judiciary Committee was about to send a patent reform bill for a vote by the full Senate, Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid blocked the legislation on orders from the trial lawyers, another major ally of the Democratic Party. Republicans, on the other hand, promise unqualified support for patent reform. This week, Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn (R., Texas) said that lawmakers are “absolutely” going to pass a patent-reform bill next year when Republicans take control. Khanna supports patent reform. Honda has also declared himself in favor of patent reform. But, one must ask oneself: Who would be more likely to be an effective advocate in favor of patent reform, Honda, who is beholden to the mainstream Democratic Party and its ally, the trial lawyers, or Khanna if he switched to the Republican Party?
Khanna opposes SCA-5. SCA-5 was a proposed amendment to the California state constitution that sought to reintroduce affirmative action into the admission process at California public universities. It was passed by the California State Senate on a party-line vote, with Democrats all voting in favor, and Republicans all voting against. It then ran into strong opposition from Indian- and Asian-Americans, who realized that, if affirmative action were introduced to increase the number of black and Hispanic students in California universities, this would inevitably result in a reduction in the number of places for Indian- and Asian-American students. For more information on the controversy surrounding SCA-5 and on the opposition to it in the Indian- and Asian-American communities, see here. Honda has also declared himself opposed to SCA-5. But, one must again ask oneself: Who would would be more likely to be an effective opponent of SCA-5, Honda, who is beholden to the mainstream Democratic Party, which introduced SCA-5 and voted unanimously in favor of it, or Khanna if he switched to the Republican Party?

Khanna has already been vilified as a "Republican-lite." For example, The San Francisco Sentinel reported:

Even Howard Dean, a Honda supporter and founder of Democracy for America, voiced his confusion in a mass email on Wednesday: “As the former Chair of the Democratic National Committee, it’s obvious to me that Ro Khanna is campaigning like a Republican,” Dean wrote. “Real Democrats don’t use ‘liberal’ as an epithet or attack fellow Democrats for standing up for progressive values like making sure the wealthy pay their fair share in taxes.”

So, if many of Ro Khanna's positions are consistent with Republican positions and he is already being labeled by Democrats as a Republican and denied any support by the Democratic Party, Khanna might as well take the final step and run as a Republican. That way, he could receive political and financial support from the Republican Party and Republican PAC's.

Of course, the larger point here is that Ro Khanna was also almost universally supported by Silicon Valley high-tech executives and workers for backing the very positions outlined above. What that means is that many of the positions these executives and workers support are supported by the Republican Party and opposed by the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party also attacks Silicon Valley on an almost daily basis for a variety of other reasons, for example, for not having a diverse enough workforce or for not paying enough taxes or for contributing to income inequality. For more information on all the attacks being mounted by the Democratic Party and Progressives in general against Silicon Valley, see here. Maybe it is time for Silicon Valley executives and workers to realize that their traditional close alignment with the Democratic Party is unwarranted and that their interests would be much better served if they aligned themselves more closely with the Republicans.

(As an aside, I must acknowledge that maybe there is a "third way." Yes, many of Ro Khanna's positions are also held by Republicans, but, Ro Khanna, Chuck Reed, and Sam Liccardo hardly resemble mainstream Republicans, either, and could not be elected in the South Bay running on traditional Republican platforms. Perhaps, Khanna, Reed, and Liccardo represent the kernel/vanguard of a third party, neither Republican nor Democrat, but one that adopts various reasonable positions from and avoids the extremes of both parties. Such a third party could likely find abundant support -- including financial support from high-tech billionaires -- in Silicon Valley and begin to expand from there. Perhaps Silicon Valley is on the verge of revolutionizing the political landscape in the same way it has revolutionized the business landscape over the last several decades.)

Update on race between Honda and Khanna

The San Jose Mercury reports that Khanna is not conceding:

Khanna's campaign was clearly not giving up hope. "Unfortunately, given the small number of votes released tonight, we are still left with nearly 35 percent of voters to be counted," spokesman Tyler Law said Wednesday evening. ... Santa Clara County estimates it still has about 120,000 to 150,000 mail-in ballots and about 14,000 provisional ballots still to be tallied countywide, said assistant registrar Matt Moreles. He said it's reasonable to assume the number of those from within the 17th District is roughly proportional to the amount of the county that's within the district -- about 25 percent.

It is unfathomable that in the heart of Silicon Valley somewhere between 25% and 35% of votes remain to be counted two days after the election. Apparently our government does not know anything about real-time, event-driven analytics.

What does the race between Honda and Khanna mean for Silicon Valley?

What does the race between Mike Honda and Ro Khanna for the 17th Congressional District mean for Silicon Valley?

Note: As of this afternoon, Honda is leading Khanna by about 5% of the vote, with many mail-in ballots still uncounted. But, the analysis in this post is valid regardless of who ends up actually winning the election.

California's new nonpartisan blanket primary prevented a Republican candidate from appearing on the ballot. So, the choice was between two Democrats. I voted for Khanna, who lives in my hometown of Fremont, believing that he would do a better job than Honda of representing and promoting the interests of the high-tech industry that forms such an integral part of the Silicon Valley economy.

Khanna was endorsed by many high-tech luminaries, including:

• Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google
• Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo
• Marc Andreessen, coauthor of the first internet browser, Mosaic, and general partner of the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz
• Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook
• Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce
• Brook Byers, founder, and John Doerr, partner, of the VC firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers
• Paul Otellini, former CEO of Intel
• Ian Clark, CEO of Genentech

Khanna was also endorsed by a few politicians, including:

• Gavin Newsome, Lieutenant Governor of California
• Steve Westly, VC investor and former Controller and Treasurer of California
• Chuck Reed, Mayor of San Jose

Khanna was also endorsed by many of the Indian-American entrepreneurs and businessmen who have contributed so much to the growth of the Silicon Valley economy over the last several decades. To mention just a few:

• Yogen Dalal, partner at the VC firm Mayfield Fund
• Deepak Ahuja, CFO of Tesla
• Ajay Banga, CEO of MasterCard

See here for a full list of Khanna's endorsements.

Honda was endorsed by most current national and state power brokers of the Democratic Party, including:

• President Barack Obama
• California Senator Barbara Boxer
• California Senator Dianne Feinstein
• Congresswoman and Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi
• California Governor Jerry Brown
• Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Chair of the Democratic National Committee
• California State Superintendent of Schools Tom Torlakson (a favorite of the teachers unions)
• California Senate President Pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg
• California Assembly Speaker John Perez

Honda was also endorsed by labor unions in both the private and the public sector, such as:

• AFL-CIO
• United Farm Workers
• California Federation of Teachers
• California School Employees Association
• San Jose Police Officers Association

Honda was also endorsed by many Latino and African-American leaders, including:

• Congressman Xavier Becerra, House Democratic Caucus Chair
• Congresswoman Marcia Fudge, Congressional Black Caucus Chair
• Congressman Rubén Hinojosa, Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair
• Congresswoman Barbara Lee
• Congresswoman Maxine Waters
• Aimee Escobar, Chair of the Silicon Valley Latino Democratic Forum

Honda was also endorsed by many liberal publications and special interest groups, such as:

• the Daily Kos
• Moveon.org
• Planned Parenthood
• Sierra Club

See here for a full list of Honda's endorsements.

The fact that Chuck Reed, Mayor of San Jose, endorsed Khanna, while the San Jose Police Officers Association endorsed Honda is an interesting detail. As I have written elsewhere, Mayor Reed has led the fight in San Jose against the extravagant, budget-busting pensions awarded to public service employees, including police officers:

In his book, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, Michael Lewis quotes Reed on the San Jose police and their pensions: "Our police and firefighters will earn more in retirement than they did when they were working. ... When did we go from giving people sick leave to letting them accumulate it and cash it in for hundreds of thousands of dollars when they are done working? There's a corruption here. It's not just a financial corruption. It's a corruption of the attitude of public service." ... The problem was going to grow worse until, as [Mayor Reed] put it, "you get to one." A single employee to service the entire city, presumably with a focus on paying pensions. ... "I don't know how far out you have to go until you get to one," said Reed, "but it isn't all that far." ... This wasn't a hypothetical scary situation, said Reed. "It's a mathematical inevitability."

In other words, the public sector employee unions, from the teachers unions right down to the San Jose police officers union, were backing Honda.

Honda was perceived as largely out of touch with the interests of and the issues facing high-tech companies in Silicon Valley, while Khanna was perceived as being conversant with those interests and issues. For example, when endorsing Khanna, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote:

One of the telling moments in our editorial board interview with seven-term Rep. Mike Honda came when he was asked about the endorsements his challenger has received from some of the most prominent people in the tech world. Has Honda reached out to those high-tech titans (Eric Schmidt of Google, Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook, Marissa Mayer of Yahoo among them) to find out why they were supporting Ro Khanna? Didn't Honda want and need to know where he was coming up short, or at least how he could be a more effective advocate for Silicon Valley concerns? He has not. Honda mentioned the companies he has toured and the executives he knows. Yet it's almost inconceivable that a veteran legislator would be unable to lock up the support of the biggest players in the industry that defines his district. It's simply unacceptable that a truly engaged leader would not immediately try to assess what went wrong. "I will probably do that later on," said Honda. "It's not a bad idea to follow through on that."

Likewise, the San Jose Mercury, when endorsing Khanna, wrote (here and here):

Honda for 13 years has been a solid vote for civil rights, the environment and equal opportunity. Khanna's views on those issues are similar. But Silicon Valley -- whose economy, like the 17th District, stretches into the East Bay -- needs more than a congressman who mostly votes the right way. It needs a leader who grasps the complex economic challenges this economy faces, can articulate how to deal with them and can reach across the aisle to maybe even win some GOP support. ... Today Congress needs to grapple with complex issues around technology and privacy: drones, NSA spying, medical records online and a whole new world of personal finance practices in a post-credit-card world -- not to mention lingering questions about net neutrality and consolidation of companies like Time Warner. In this world, Khanna, a former U.S. trade representative, would be a player. Honda is irrelevant. Back in the day of earmarks, Honda brought home some bacon. He helped secure the cleanup of Mount Umunhum's old Air Force base, for example. But earmarks are gone, and Honda is not effective in influencing policy. That would be Khanna's strong suit. He brims with energy and ideas, including how to return manufacturing to America.

So, what does the mainstream Democratic support for Mike Honda over Ro Khanna in the race for the 17th Congressional District mean? It means that the interests of unions (both in the private sector and in the public sector), of the pro-choice lobby, of the environmental lobby, and of the black and Hispanic communities count far more with mainstream national and state Democratic Party leaders than do the interests of the high-tech industry in Silicon Valley. When faced with a choice between supporting an old and out-of-touch candidate who represented the traditional factions of the Democratic Party or a young, highly-educated, tech-savvy candidate who was universally supported by the high-tech industry (and whose views on "civil rights, the environment and equal opportunity" were, according to the Mercury News, apparently acceptable), the mainstream leaders of the Democratic Party chose to support the out-of-touch candidate, thereby delivering a sharp and insulting slap in the face to its high-tech supporters, many of whom have donated generously to Democratic candidates and supplied much-needed technical expertise (recall how Google engineers pulled Obama's chestnuts out of the fire by getting the Obamacare website up and running) to Democratic programs.

As the San Jose Mercury reports this afternoon:

[One] of Honda's liberal allies ... [t]he Progressive Change Campaign Committee [the PCCC] called [Honda's probable victory] "a victory to the Elizabeth Warren wing against the corporate wing" of the Democratic Party. "Ro Khanna is a corporate conservative who ran as a Democrat in name only, who called Mike Honda 'too liberal' in smear attacks," the committee said in a statement. "His Big Money donors should demand a refund."

In sum, Democratic support for Mike Honda extends all the way from the left-wing "Elizabeth Warren" fringe of the Party, as represented by the PCCC, all the way up to President Obama. Thus, the Democratic effort to re-elect Honda is just another episode in the war being waged by an inherently left-leaning, anti-capitalistic Democratic Party against the high-tech industry, a war I have written about repeatedly. One can only wonder when the leaders of Silicon Valley's high-tech companies will stop giving knee-jerk support to the Democrats and start looking elsewhere to find a party that is more sympathetic to their high-tech agenda.

Trial lawyers order Harry Reid to scotch patent reform

In an article in WSJ today entitled Even Silicon Valley Tilts Republican, Gordon Crovitz writes:

Plaintiff lawyers joke that their focus has gone from “PI to IP”: Now that personal-injury litigation has been reformed in many states, they’re turning to intellectual-property lawsuits such as patent infringement. ... In May the Senate Judiciary Committee was about to send patent reform for a vote by the full Senate when Chairman Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.) shocked Silicon Valley lobbyists by declaring there would be no vote. “I have said all along that we needed broad bipartisan support to get the bill through the Senate,” Sen. Leahy said. “Regrettably, competing companies on both sides of this issue refused to come to agreement on how to achieve that goal.” ... Over the summer, Mr. Leahy admitted that his earlier explanation was false: There was no failure among technology companies to agree on reform. Instead, Mr. Reid had instructed Mr. Leahy to drop patent reform on the orders of trial lawyers.

As a result of the failure of a Democratic Senate to pass patent reform, writes Crovitz, Silicon Valley companies are beginning to transfer their allegiance to Republicans:

Washington is a disaster zone for innovation, especially for the software firms that make up the growing parts of the U.S. economy. There has been no progress in meeting Silicon Valley’s desperate needs, including patent reform and open immigration for skilled workers. As a result, technology companies long associated with liberal causes are switching loyalties. In 2010 Democratic candidates for national office got 55% of contributions from tech-company political-action committees. This year Republicans have received 52%. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, companies with PACs giving more to Republicans than to Democrats include Google, Facebook and Amazon.

I have written elsewhere (for example, here) about how the push by some elements of the Democratic Party for racial and gender quotas is inconsistent with the meritocratic philosophy of Silicon Valley. Now high tech companies are realizing that their interests are also inconsistent with another major member of the Democratic coalition, namely, trial lawyers.

Canadian PM calls attacker a terrorist

FoxNews reports:

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper described the perpetrator of a "brutal and violent" attack on the Parliament complex in Ottawa that left a soldier dead Wednesday as a "terrorist" in an address to the nation.

And I thought the attacker was just reacting spontaneously to an anti-Islamic movie. Maybe this coming Sunday Susan Rice can go on the morning talk shows and clear this all up.

What's good for the goose, is good for the gander

In a recent video, former Treasury Secretary Robert Reich warns:

If Republicans get enough votes November 4th to take over the Senate, they will use a tricky, little-known maneuver to try to ram through their right-wing policies. The maneuver is called "reconciliation." And it requires only 51 votes to pass major tax and budget legislation, instead of the 60 votes usually required to pass legislation in the Senate. If Republicans win this November, they'll have those 51 votes. ... [I]f [the Republicans] take over the Senate, they'll be able to pass legislation. And Mitch McConnell has threatened to shut down the government again, if President Obama doesn't sign it. ... Don't let them get control of the Senate. Democrats currently have a majority, but that hangs in the balance this election, and a handful of states will determine the outcome.

Sorry Li'l Bob, but reconciliation is not a "little-known" maneuver. Rather, it was made notorious when Senate Democrats and the Obama Administration used it to pass the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010, which placed the finishing touches on Obamacare:

The Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (Pub.L. 111–152, 124 Stat. 1029) is a law that was enacted by the 111th United States Congress, by means of the reconciliation process, in order to amend the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Pub.L. 111–148). [emphasis added]

If Republicans win back the Senate in 2014 and then use the "tricky maneuver" of reconciliation to "ram through" legislation, they will only be following the precedent established by the Democrats when they used reconciliation to ram through Obamacare in 2010. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, Bob.

I agree with Reza Aslan about the value of religion, but spare me the post-modernist gibberish

Reza Aslan has just written an interesting piece in the NY Times on the recent dustup between Bill Maher and Ben Affleck over Islam and ISIS. Aslan correctly points out that the value of any religion is not to be found in its system of beliefs, but in the way it allows the individual to be integrated into the community:

As a form of identity, religion is inextricable from all the other factors that make up a person’s self-understanding, like culture, ethnicity, nationality, gender and sexual orientation.

In other words, the main point of coming together on Easter is not to reaffirm our belief that Jesus actually rose from the dead and harrowed Hell (a ridiculous proposition, but great material for iconography), but because Easter is an event that allows members of a community to come together at a certain time of year and engage in activities that reinforce the bonds between them and to reflect on certain common human conditions, such as the awareness of one's own sinfulness and need for redemption. This is why atheists like Richard Dawkins, although they correctly point out the absurdities of various religious systems of belief, miss the psychological and societal reasons for religion entirely.

(Aside: One complication is the fact that one of the main activities in the liturgy of any religion is the affirmation of one's beliefs. For example, one of the most important parts of the Roman Catholic Mass is the Credo, a statement of what a person must believe in order to be a Roman Catholic. But, even this act of affirmation I see simply as helping to define the boundaries of the community and to strengthen the bonds between its members and not to be taken literally.)

Although from a purely scientific point of view I am an atheist (or a deist, at best), nevertheless I insist on saying grace before meals. Although I was raised a Roman Catholic, every summer when we go to our cabin in the mountains, I take my sons out in the boat to the middle of the lake, pour lake water over their heads, and invoke the gods and goddesses of the lake, mountains, trees, waters, and sky and the spirits of their grandparents, who built the cabin, to watch over them for another year. I do not engage in these activities because I believe in the Father's ability to bless our food or in polytheism or in a literal afterlife for my parents, but instead out of a desire to share and strengthen the bonds between the members of my family in some kind of symbolic (if literally ridiculous) way.

Embedded in Aslan's article, however, is the following nugget of post-modernist nonsense:

After all, scripture is meaningless without interpretation. Scripture requires a person to confront and interpret it in order for it to have any meaning. And the very act of interpreting a scripture necessarily involves bringing to it one’s own perspectives and prejudices.

Let's apply this analysis to any arbitrary text; for example, to one of Plato's dialogues. According to what Aslan says, the dialogue "requires a person to confront it in order for it to have any meaning. And the very act of interpreting it necessarily involves bringing to it one's own perspectives and prejudices." In brief: without a person to interpret it, the text does not have any meaning; and the meaning that the person derives from the text when he interprets it is determined by his own prejudices. Thus, it is impossible to recover the meaning that Plato himself had in mind when he was writing down the words of the dialogue.

Why should we bother to read Plato, then, if our interpretation of him is just an echoing back of our own prejudices? In fact, if post-modernism is correct, why would we ever bother saying or writing anything? After all, whatever we say or write will not have the meaning we ourselves intend for it to have, but only the meaning that others impose on it when they interpret it through their own "perspectives and prejudices." In fact, since many different people will impose many different prejudices and perspectives, what we say and write will have many different meanings. A veritable Tower of Babel.

But, of course, this analysis also applies to what the post-Modernists themselves write, so that I am free to interpret their writings as utter nonsense and my interpretation will be just as valid as anyone else's, given my own perspectives and prejudices. So, yes, nonsense.

Why you shouldn't let things spiral out of control

The simple fact is: With his plate full with ISIS, the President has no time or resources to deal with Putin. So, Putin knows he has free rein to do whatever he pleases in Eastern Europe. If Obama had kept the lid on problems in Iraq by leaving a small residual force there in 2010, he would be in a better position now to influence events in Ukraine/Crimea.

But, this points up a more general problem with Obama’s foreign policy. By hesitating, by failing to respond in a timely manner to various flare-ups around the world, Obama has allowed each one of them to grow into a significant crisis. So now, focusing on one consumes all his resources, and he must neglect the others. In this sense, North Korea becomes the ally of ISIS, or the Taliban become the allies of Putin: all are working to undermine US influence overall, and, what the one does, distracts Obama’s attention from the others. Thus, does the global world order guaranteed by the Pax Americana crumble because a hesitant Obama has let various small problems spiral out of control.

It is like fighting the Ebola virus. It is much easier to do if you respond quickly and try to nip it in the bud. On the other hand, if you hesitate and let it spiral out of control, then, later on it becomes much more difficult to deal with.

The two Rays

When this Ray Rice thing first broke a couple of weeks ago, I told my son's girlfriend: I don't get it. I don't know why more women are not completely outraged. Pete Rose is banned for life for placing a couple of bets on his own team. This asshole gets suspended for a measly two games for knocking his wife out and dragging her unconscious body out of an elevator?!?

I don't understand why the NFL had to wait for the second video inside the elevator before jettisoning this guy. The first video of him dragging his wife out of the elevator and then standing there looking nonchalant and disgusted while his wife lay on the floor like a limp rag doll was quite bad enough. If, in a fit of passion, I had punched my wife and knocked her cold, I would be on my knees begging her forgiveness, ministering to her, with my cellphone out calling an ambulance. Wikipedia defines psychopathy as characterized by "disinhibited or bold behavior" and "diminished empathy and remorse." By this definition, the violence of Rice's act and the coldness of his response were psychopathic. The NFL should have immediately banned him from the game for life.

And then, after all that happened, the goddamn Niners let Ray McDonald play after he was arrested for domestic violence? Yes, due process must be allowed to take its course, but haven't they ever heard of administrative leave, for goodness sakes? And if the NFLPA sues you, Mr York, suck it up and pay the damages. You will gain far more by maintaining the goodwill of your female fans than you will lose by paying off a lawsuit. And imagine the ignominy that would engulf the NFLPA if they actually did sue.

The NOW nags are going to be out in full force protesting this weekend at Levi's stadium. Deservedly so. What a shame for opening day at Levi's Stadium to be tarnished by such ineptitude in the Niners' front office. What a shame for the entire NFL to be tarnished by their apparent lack of concern for domestic violence.

The post-modern politicization of computer science

In an earlier blog post, I wrote about how the recent report from the Executive Office of the President entitled Big Data: Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values promotes the ideology of disparate impact. The report also provides a very peculiar politicized definition of an algorithm:

In simple terms, an algorithm is defined by a sequence of steps and instructions that can be applied to data. Algorithms generate categories for filtering information, operate on data, look for patterns and relationships, or generally assist in the analysis of information. The steps taken by an algorithm are informed by the author's knowledge, motives, biases, and desired outcomes. The algorithm may not reveal any of those elements, nor may it reveal the probability of a mistaken outcome, arbitrary choice, or the degree of uncertainty in the judgment it produces. So-called "learning algorithms," which underpin everything from recommendation engines to content filters evolve with the data sets that run through them, assigning different weights to each variable. The final computer-generated product or decision -- used for everything from predicting behavior to denying opportunity -- can mask prejudices while maintaining a patina of scientific objectivity.

The report goes on to say:

Powerful algorithms can unlock value in the vast troves of information available to businesses, and can help empower consumers, but also raise the potential for encoding discrimination in automated decisions. ... For these reasons, the civil rights community is concerned that such algorithmic decisions raise the spectre of "redlining" in the digital economy, the potential to discriminate against the most vulnerable classes in our society under the guise of neutral algorithms.

Thus does the post-modernist poison seep into computer science. Algorithms are "informed by the biases and desired outcomes of the author." Under the "guise of neutral algorithms," software "encodes discrimination" and "masks prejudices while maintaining a patina of scientific objectivity." Compare this politically tinged blather with the precise definition of algorithm provided by Wikipedia:

In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm is a step-by-step procedure for calculations. Algorithms are used for calculation, data processing, and automated reasoning. An algorithm is an effective method expressed as a finite list of well-defined instructions for calculating a function. Starting from an initial state and initial input (perhaps empty), the instructions describe a computation that, when executed, proceeds through a finite number of well-defined successive states, eventually producing "output" and terminating at a final ending state. The transition from one state to the next is not necessarily deterministic; some algorithms, known as randomized algorithms, incorporate random input.

According to the post-modernist ideology: it is impossible for any individual to be impartial; there is no objective truth to be discovered; we can never escape our various "identities" (white, black, Latino, Asian); every action we take or judgment we make is inexorably determined by the prejudices that our identities impose on us. And so, when post-modernism looks at computer science, it arrives at a vision where algorithms can never be objective and impartial, and cannot discover any truths about the world, but simply encode the prejudices of the author (probably a white or Asian male).

It is incumbent on the engineers of Silicon Valley to resist such portrayals of their activities. No software engineer worth his salt will refuse to fix bugs in his software if these bugs are pointed out to him. But, the presumption that software engineers are incapable of rising above their prejudices and only write software in order to arrive at "desired outcomes" is an insult to the intellectual integrity of the Valley.

What are you going to do about it, Mr President?

This morning WSJ has an excellent editorial on President Obama's response to ISIS's beheading of American journalist James Foley:

[President Obama] said that Foley's killers in the jihadist Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, "have rampaged across cities and villages, killing innocent, unarmed civilians in cowardly acts of violence. They abduct women and children, and subject them to torture and rape and slavery. They have murdered Muslims—both Sunni and Shia—by the thousands. They target Christians and religious minorities, driving them from their homes, murdering them when they can for no other reason than they practice a different religion." All of this is horribly true. It was also true a year ago. The question now—what the world wants to know now, Mr. President—is what are you going to do about it?

Kovacevich on BofA "settlement"

This morning on CNBC, Dick Kovacevich, former Chairman and CEO of Wells Fargo, gave an excellent summary of Bank of America's "settlement" with the US government:

Kovacevich: "[The settlement is] definitely politics. It has nothing to do with justice or restitution to the innocent victims. In fact, more of the money is going to the coffers of the states and various departments than the victims. ...
Interviewer: How do you describe a $17B fine? Is there any metric that gets you there?
Kovacevich: No. It just happens to be a lot of money that people can agree to. ... Interviewer: Dick, do you call this extortion?
Kovacevich: Yes. That's what it is.
Interviewer: Elaborate on that. You believe that the government is extorting the banks?
Kovacevich: Yes. Because they can.

We have entered an age where Democrats and their trial lawyer backers view large corporations, like BP or Bank of America, as ATM's they can plunder at whim. The fact that many Americans are not outraged by this kind of legalized theft is yet another sign of how far down the road to perdition our country has traveled.

Update: Even the Economist now editorializes:

Who runs the world’s most lucrative shakedown operation? The Sicilian mafia? The People’s Liberation Army in China? The kleptocracy in the Kremlin? If you are a big business, all these are less grasping than America’s regulatory system. The formula is simple: find a large company that may (or may not) have done something wrong; threaten its managers with commercial ruin, preferably with criminal charges; force them to use their shareholders’ money to pay an enormous fine to drop the charges in a secret settlement (so nobody can check the details). Then repeat with another large company.

The amounts are mind-boggling. So far this year, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and other banks have coughed up close to $50 billion for supposedly misleading investors in mortgage-backed bonds. BNP Paribas is paying $9 billion over breaches of American sanctions against Sudan and Iran. Credit Suisse, UBS, Barclays and others have settled for billions more, over various accusations. And that is just the financial institutions. Add BP’s $13 billion in settlements since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Toyota’s $1.2 billion settlement over alleged faults in some cars, and many more. ...

What is new is the way that regulators and prosecutors are in effect conducting closed-door trials. For all the talk of public-spiritedness, the agencies that pocket the fines have become profit centres: Rhode Island’s bureaucrats have been on a spending spree courtesy of a $500m payout by Google, while New York’s governor and attorney-general have squabbled over a $613m settlement from JPMorgan. And their power far exceeds that of trial lawyers. Not only are regulators in effect judge and jury as well as plaintiff in the cases they bring; they can also use the threat of the criminal law.

WSJ agrees

Jason Riley in WSJ agrees with what I have been saying about Jesse Jackson and about the fact that Silicon Valley companies are not racist:

"There's no talent shortage. There's an opportunity shortage."

That was Jesse Jackson's attempt to justify his current shakedown of Silicon Valley, where he's trying to impose de facto black hiring quotas in the name of expanding "opportunity" for minorities. Once again, Mr. Jackson has got it wrong. According to USA Today, whites and Asians make up around 90 percent of the staffs of Twitter, Google, Facebook, Yahoo and LinkedIn. "Of Twitter's U.S. employees, only 3% are Hispanic and 5% black," reports the paper. Let's leave aside Mr. Jackson's bizarre notion that Asian people—Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Indians, Bangladeshis, etc.—don't bring racial diversity to a workforce. Are these numbers proof that something is amiss? Not if you look at the pool of talent from which these companies are drawing workers. ... Silicon Valley's workforce does not reflect racial animus towards blacks. Rather, it reflects the rates at which whites and Asians are earning the requisite degrees from America's most selective institutions. Forcing Google and Yahoo to lower hiring standards in order to satisfy Mr. Jackson's definition of diversity would only slow innovation and make these companies less competitive. Let's hope they stand up to this shakedown.

Open letter to my friend Victor Hanson

Victor Hanson has been a friend of mine ever since we both were undergraduates studying Classics together at UC Santa Cruz some 40 years ago. Although we were fellow Banana Slugs at this institution, which has a reputation for being a hotbed of left-wing politics (where, for example, Angela Davis is a professor emerita in the Department of Feminist Studies), our views on American society, politics, and foreign policy developed over time along a similar, largely conservative, trajectory. For that reason, I usually find myself in whole-hearted agreement with what Victor writes and I admire (and envy) the polish with which he writes it. I must take issue, however, with some of the things Victor recently wrote in a column on Silicon Valley:

If Silicon Valley produced gas and oil, built bulldozers, processed logs, mined bauxite, or grew potatoes, then the administration, academia, Hollywood, and the press would damn its white-male exclusivity, patronization of women, huge material appetites, lack of commitment to racial diversity, concern for ever-greater profits, and seeming indifference to the poor. But they do not, because the denizens of the valley have paid for their indulgences and therefore are free to sin as they please, convinced that their future days in Purgatory can be reduced by a few correct words about Solyndra, Barack Obama, and the war on women. [emphasis added]

Victor, I take issue with your claim that Silicon Valley is not committed to racial diversity. Silicon Valley already has one of the most diverse workforces on the face of the planet. If you were to step onto the engineering floor of the typical Silicon Valley high-tech company, you, along with most other white Americans, would likely feel uncomfortable with the amount of racial diversity you would find there. Much of this diversity comes from the large numbers of Chinese and Indian employees that Silicon Valley companies employ. This diversity should be a cause for unbridled celebration. Instead, Silicon Valley companies are vilified for hiring “techno-coolies.” Why is it that Asian diversity does not count as real diversity?

By hiring so many employees from China, India, and other countries, Victor, Silicon Valley has proven that it is willing to go anywhere in the world to find good talent that will work for a reasonable wage. At the company I work for, for example, we recently hired a group of engineers from Novosibirsk, a city in the heart of Russian Siberia, because they are brilliant and they will work for a reasonable wage in exchange for being sponsored in the United States and allowed to pursue the American Dream like all the rest of us. Given our obvious willingness to go so far as Novosibirsk to hire well-qualified engineers, why ever would Silicon Valley not be willing to hire qualified blacks, women, or Hispanics if they could be found in our own back yard? It makes no sense. Facebook is located in Menlo Park on a parcel of land immediately adjacent to East Palo Alto, which has a large black population. Why would Facebook be unwilling to hire talented black engineers in East PA, its own back yard? It is because no such large pool of talented black engineers exists in East PA.

The reason why Silicon Valley companies have a preponderance of white and Asian male employees on their engineering teams is because the pool of available talent that feeds into these teams is made up preponderantly of white and Asian males. Perhaps this disparity exists because of some prejudice in our schools against teaching girls, blacks, and Hispanics math; perhaps it is due to (gasp – shall I dare to utter the politically incorrect words that so damaged Larry Summers) the possibility that white and Asian males have a greater aptitude for science, math, engineering, and technology than females; or perhaps it is due to the possibility that Asian families are less dysfunctional in aggregate than black and Hispanic families and Asian “tiger moms and dads” do a better job of encouraging their sons to work hard on math and science. Regardless of the cause of this disparity, the fact that the talent pool for engineers is made up predominantly of white and Asian males is certainly not the fault of Silicon Valley companies nor is it the result of any conscious effort they have made to discriminate.

Finally, Victor, by joining the chorus of those on the Left, like Jesse Jackson, who rail against Silicon Valley’s supposed racism and sexism, you are simply helping to promote the kind of racial politics that have been so poisonous elsewhere in this country and which, I am convinced, are personally repugnant to you. If Jesse gets his way, Silicon Valley will end up with the same racial and gender quotas and setasides that have become so prevalent elsewhere in our nation and that have proven so divisive. Silicon Valley does not want to become like academia, with its inability to hire, say, a male candidate for a professorship in the Classics Department because a vastly less well-qualified female candidate must be given preference.

Silicon Valley is by no means perfect. Its biggest flaw in my opinion is that it has become the handmaiden of big government, responding like so many other industries to the siren call of lucrative government contracts. Without the hardware and software systems created by Silicon Valley, Obamacare would be an impossibility. Big data tools, like MapReduce/Hadoop, which government agencies like the NSA and IRS and companies like Google use to parse and analyze every aspect of our lives, were developed right here in Silicon Valley. The danger is not that Silicon Valley is run by a bunch of racists and sexists, but rather that Big Data is enabling Big Brother. (We should fear not the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned against, but the government-technology complex that is expanding in Silicon Valley and McLean, Virginia.) Back in the day, when the two Steves, Jobs and Wozniak, were a couple of pot-smoking, long-haired, teenage hippies in Cupertino, Silicon Valley was the very essence of the “Counterculture.” Now, it has become just another appendage of the “Establishment.” That is what we should worry about, not whether Silicon Valley is hiring too many Asian boy geeks.

At any rate, Victor, I continue to value your friendship and commentary on modern life in America and, in particular, here in California and I look forward to reading (almost) everything you write. It's just that I think it might be good if you reexamined some of your ideas (dare I say prejudices) about Silicon Valley companies and the people who work there.

From Babel to Dragomans

In an earlier blog post, I wrote about the great historian of the Crusades, Steven Runciman:

In brief, Runciman was a genius at learning languages, both living and dead. He reminds us that the study of the liberal arts begins with the study of language. It is not possible to be a serious student of the liberal arts without being a serious student of languages.

But, it would be a slight and an insult to Runciman to label him as just a genius of languages. His command of the geographical, ethnic, political, religious, military, artistic, architectural, and economic factors in the patchwork that was Europe and the Middle East at the end of the first millennium is breathtaking. That is, Runciman's mastery of many languages enabled him to become a master of history, too.

As a historian, Runciman reminds us why the Middle East is such a complicated place, a region where waves of Persian, Jewish, Greek, Latin, Byzantine, Arabic, Turkish, Islamic (Sunni and Shiite), Christian (Orthodox, Monophysite, and Nestorian), Armenian, Mongol, and European (Frankish, German, Italian, Norman) influences have washed over the land at various times. We come away from his history convinced that there are no easy answers, that all attempts to cut the Gordian knot of the Middle East are in vain. The forces that shape the Middle East of today are the same forces that have been in play for centuries and they will remain in play for centuries to come. Our only hope is to fully understand all sides (for example, through the study of ethnicity, religion, and language) and to try gradually and gently to shape and influence them.

I just started reading Bernard Lewis' book From Babel to Dragomans. In his introduction Lewis writes:

As a student of the Middle East, my interests and training were primarily historical rather than -- as with most of my predecessors, teachers and contemporaries -- philological and literary. I did however serve a brief apprenticeship in these disciplines and am profoundly grateful for having done so. The first and most rudimentary test of an historian's competence is that he should be able to read his sources, and this is not always easy, as for example when the language is classical Arabic or the writing is a crabbed Ottoman bureaucratic script.

And that is not all. The historian of a region, of a period, of a group of people, or even of a topic, must know something of its cultural context, and for this literature is an indispensable guide.

Runciman and Lewis are examples of great humanists, masters of language and history, who can act as dragomans -- diplomatic interpreters of and advisors on the languages, peoples, culture, ethnicities, religions and history of the Middle East -- to help Westerners understand the conflicts that are taking place in that region today.

Wikipedia defines dragomans as follows:

A dragoman was an interpreter, translator and official guide between Turkish, Arabic, and Persian-speaking countries and polities of the Middle East and European embassies, consulates, vice-consulates and trading posts. A dragoman had to have a knowledge of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and European languages. ... The office incorporated diplomatic as well as linguistic duties—namely, in the Porte's relation with Christian countries—and some dragomans thus came to play crucial roles in Ottoman politics.

In the chapter From Babel to Dragomans, from which his book takes its title, Lewis writes about how dragomans assisted European diplomats in understanding the workings of the Ottoman Empire:

On whom did the embassies rely? They drew on a rather different group of people, whom it has become customary to call Levantines. The word levantine comes from Italian -- Levante is the sunrise; people who come from the east are politely called 'people from the sunrise' levantini. ... The Levantines flourished for several centuries. They were overwhelmingly Catholic by religion; mostly they spoke Italian. Many of them seem to have been of Italian origin, though they intermarried freely with Greeks, especially with Catholic Greeks, and they formed a more or less self-contained, autonomous society, not only in the capital but also in many provincial cities, since dragomans were needed not only at the embassies but also at consulates, vice-consulates and trading posts and the like. Both embassies and consulates relied very largely on Levantines to do these jobs.

Recently, Ali Khedery, who speaks Arabic fluently, served as special assistant to five American ambassadors in Iraq and as senior adviser to three four-star commanders of U.S. Central Command, and was the longest continuously-serving American official in Iraq, established a consultancy to facilitate interactions between Western governments and businesses and their Middle Eastern counterparts. His description of the services of his consultancy, named Dragoman Partners, is a reminder of the important intermediating function played by dragomans throughout history:

For hundreds of years, international trade in the Middle East went through the dragomans, licensed guides and cultural experts in the Ottoman capital. As new upheavals sweep across the region, bringing new players to the fore, the need for intermediaries in a complex environment has risen again.

We are a multilingual multicultural strategic consultancy with decades of experience at the highest levels of business and government. We serve international clients as a bridge between East and West, introducing businesses to new markets and new leaders while guiding them through the opaque politics and regulations of the region. We also assist sovereign clients in pursuit of development and prosperity as advisors on geopolitical and economic matters.

[NOTE: In a recent blog post, I linked to Khedery's penetrating discussion of how we lost Iraq.]

The interpretive (in the broadest sense) services that can only be provided by "dragomans" like Khedery, Lewis, and Runciman remind us of the enduring value of an education in the Humanities. America relies too much today on high-tech intelligence gathering through channels like the NSA, drones, or satellites. Scholars like Runciman and Lewis and diplomatic aides like Khedery remind us that the gathering of real intelligence can only be done by gaining an intimate familiarity with the languages, literatures, cultures, ethnicities, and religions of the people we wish to observe.

The war being waged by Democrats and their union supporters against innovative technologies like Uber and Airbnb

Great article by Grover Norquist and Patrick Gleason about How Uber can help the GOP gain control of the cities:

Democrats are facing a tough choice. A big part of their base is the unions now facing off against such disruptive innovations as Uber, Lyft, Airbnb and charter schools. Do Democrats support the regulations pushed by taxi and other unions that help to protect the status quo but can also stifle competition? Or do they embrace innovative technologies and businesses that expand transportation options, create jobs and are increasingly welcomed by another key Democratic constituency: urban dwellers, particularly young urban dwellers? ... Politically, this presents an opportunity for Republicans to make a comeback in cities. By championing the often disruptive share-economy businesses, defending them against the status quo and focusing their political campaigns on these issues, the GOP can show it is the party that embraces companies that improve the quality of life in cities.

By antagonizing and alienating various core constituencies, Democrats and Progressives are creating more and more opportunities for the GOP to make electoral gains in Silicon Valley. In just the recent past:

• Progressive groups have attacked the buses of large software firms with stones;
• Democrats have alienated Asian-Americans by supporting legislation to reintroduce racial quotas into the admission policy of the University of California;
• Democratic politicians and the liberal media have attacked Silicon Valley businesses for racist and sexist hiring practices;
• And now, Democrats are alienating young city dwellers by pandering to their union supporters and opposing new disruptive mobile phone technologies.

A playbook for how Republicans can begin to chip away at Democratic dominance in the urban centers of California is beginning to emerge. The argument against the Democrats should be something like the following: Democrats are in the pocket of the big public service employee unions that are bankrupting our cities and states, hindering the development of innovative, cost-saving technologies like Uber and airbnb, and opposing the charter schools and school vouchers that our educational system needs to regain competitiveness in the global economy; the Democrats' insistence on racial and gender quotas in hiring will destroy the vibrancy of the Silicon Valley economy (which is already one of the most diverse workplaces in the world) and threaten significant core elements of that economy, namely, Asian American high-tech workers; the Democrats' war on income inequality is actually a war on the high wage earners of high-tech industries.

New Iraqi Kurdistan is no panacea

It has been proposed that Iraq be partitioned into 3 states: Kurdistan, Sunnistan, and Shiastan. It is suggested that such a division will bring about a more stable situation in the Middle East.

In fact, the creation of a new independent state of Kurdistan may actually increase instability in the Middle East. To understand why, you need only look at the events that triggered WWI 100 years ago. Serbia had been recognized at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 as an independent state. Neighboring Bosnia, on the other hand, which had a large Serb population, had been annexed by the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1908. As an act of protest against Austro-Hungarian domination of the Bosnian Serbs, Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Frederick Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian crown, in 1914, thereby triggering the crisis that led to the First World War.

If the area of Iraq that is currently occupied by Kurds is recognized as a new independent state of Kurdistan, a very similar situation will be created. The new independent state of Kurdistan will have approximately 5M Kurdish inhabitants, but, right across the border in Turkey there will still be at least 15M more Kurds, who have historically been persecuted by the Turkish government. Additionally, there are 7M more Kurds right across the border in Iran.

Wikipedia defines irredentism as follows:

Irredentism (from Italian irredento, "unredeemed") is any position of a state advocating annexation of territories administered by another state on the grounds of common ethnicity or prior historical possession, actual or alleged. It is often advocated by pan-nationalist movements and has been a feature of identity politics, cultural and political geography.

We can very easily imagine that Turkish and Iranian Kurds will want the same independence that their Kurdish brethren will have across the border in the new independent state. It is also easy to imagine that Kurds in the new independent state will begin to agitate for the emancipation of their Kurdish brethren across the border in Turkey and Iran. The new independent state of Kurdistan will be the equivalent of Serbia. The neighboring regions of Turkey and Iran where Kurds predominate will be the equivalent of Bosnia. In sum, the creation of a new independent state of Kurdistan with pockets of Kurdish peoples right across the border in Turkey and Iran could very easily spawn an irredentist movement in Kurdistan that could lead to conflict with Turkey and Iran, further destabilizing the Middle East.

Keep it up NYT

In a recent editorial, the New York Times argues that the IRS is underfunded and therefore cannot do a good enough job of collecting taxes. NYT calls this the "real scandal at the IRS."

President Obama’s budget ... would increase the agency’s spending by $1.2 billion compared with this year’s — not nearly enough, but at least a start in reversing a troubling trend and letting the I.R.S. do its job of collecting the money to pay for essential government services.

Can conservatives think of anything more welcome to our crusade to limit the size of government than the NYT calling on Obama, recently judged the worst President since WWII, to increase funds to the IRS, the most hated agency in government, so they can intrude more into our lives and seize more of our hard-earned money?