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?

Predictable outcome in Iraq

Wonderful article by Ali Khedery of Dragoman Partners on the causes of the current disaster in Iraq.

In brief: whatever you may think about the wisdom of George Bush's invasion of Iraq, the situation at the end of 2008 had stabilized; however, when Obama withdrew all American troops from Iraq, Prime Minister Maliki was freed from all restraints and stopped promoting a unity government incorporating all elements of Iraqi society, Shiite, Sunni, and Kurds. Maliki's increasingly sectarian, pro-Shiite, pro-Iranian government alienated the Sunni minority; all the while, as Maliki was transforming Iraq into a one-man, one-Dawa-party state, similar in its repressiveness to Saddam's Iraq, the Obama/Biden administration continued to support him; the outcome was not only predictable, but Khedery predicted it; Sunni leaders, increasingly excluded from the pro-Iranian Maliki government, resorted to insurgency.

Architectural treasures

I just spent the last several days and evenings walking the streets of Manhattan.

I never knew how much architectural richness the city held.

Gilded Age splendors redolent of JP Morgan.

19th and 20th century limestone celebrations of the ceaseless throbbing of American commerce and capitalism.

Trinity Church nestled down in the midst of tall buildings with the tomb of the great father Alexander Hamilton in the grassy graveyard next to it.

And just across the street from Hamilton's tomb soars the Art Deco skyscraper that houses the Bank of New York that Hamilton founded.

Any one of these treasures would be the centerpiece of another American city. But here, it is just another treasure.