Pao vs KPCB

The Ellen Pao verdict is in. According to sfgate.com:

The jury sided with Kleiner Perkins on all four claims, finding that the firm:
• Did not discriminate against Pao because of her gender by failing to promote her or firing her.
• Took all reasonable steps to prevent gender discrimination against her.
• Did not retaliate against Pao by failing to promote her after she raised concerns about the position of women at Kleiner Perkins or filed the lawsuit.
• Did not retaliate against Pao by firing her after she raised concerns about the position of women at Kleiner Perkins or filed the lawsuit.

This clear-cut and unambiguous decision did not prevent the gender Stasi from trying to spin the verdict to mean the opposite of what it meant. As sfgate continues:

“Ellen Pao’s case is a win [?] for any woman facing gender discrimination and harassment in the workplace, in Silicon Valley and beyond,” said Felicia Medina, a San Francisco managing partner at Sanford Heisler Kimpel who has worked on several large gender discrimination cases. “The curtain has been pulled back [gasp], providing a rare glimpse into the lack of equal employment opportunities for women in Silicon Valley.”

The NYT chimed in breathlessly:

The decision handed Kleiner a sweeping victory in a case that had mesmerized Silicon Valley with its salacious details while simultaneously amplifying concerns about the lack of diversity in the technology industry.

Funny, I thought the outcome of the case, rather than "amplifying" concerns about the lack of diversity, helped lay them to rest. As an aside, I have to comment that, if what went on between a fairly geeky Ellen Pao (IMHO, at any rate) and a bunch of middle-aged VC's qualifies as "salacious," then I guess I have been seriously overestimating the excitement level in New York.

KPCB released its own statement after the verdict:

Today’s verdict reaffirms that Ellen Pao’s claims have no legal merit. We are grateful to the jury for its careful examination of the facts. There is no question gender diversity in the workplace is an important issue. KPCB remains committed to supporting women in venture capital and technology both inside our firm and within our industry.

I would have simply remarked that "After careful examination of the facts, the jury determined that Ellen Pao's claims had no legal merit" and left it at that. The additional statements to the effect that "gender diversity in the workplace is an important issue" and that "KPCB remains committed to supporting women" are unseemly and unnecessary concessions that will buy no respite for KPCB from the onslaught of the gender harpies.

If KPCB had felt the need for any additional commentary on the verdict, then, what they should have said instead is: "KPCB remains committed to hiring and promoting the most intelligent, talented, hard-working people possible regardless of sex, race, sexual orientation, or any other accidental characteristic." If, instead, Silicon Valley starts hiring/promoting people because of these various characteristics, then, Silicon Valley is doomed. The goal of business then will be not the pursuit of excellence, but merely the dispensation of patronage to various special interest groups.

In an earlier blog post condemning the attempts of Jesse Jackson to strong arm high tech companies into hiring more blacks simply because they are black, I wrote:

It is time for Silicon Valley executives to stand up and defend their hiring practices. These practices are meritocratic in nature and disregard such inessential characteristics as race, gender, and sexual orientation. As Chief Justice John Roberts famously wrote, "[T]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." If Jesse Jackson is allowed to exercise his disgusting brand of racial coercion at high-tech companies, then we are seeing not the end, but just the beginning of racial discrimination in Silicon Valley.

The same argument applies to misguided and, in their own way, prejudiced efforts to promote gender diversity as an end in and of itself. The way to stop discriminating on the basis of gender is to stop discriminating on the basis of gender. KPCB's goal should not be to promote women in the workplace simply because they are women, but to promote the best and brightest, period. Be they women or be they men.

What will be the Bergdahl Obama gets us in return this time?

WSJ reports:

Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was freed by Afghan insurgents last May as part of an exchange for five Taliban prisoners, was charged Wednesday with having deserted his remote base before his capture in 2009.

The military charges, resulting from a long-awaited but tightly guarded investigation, include desertion and misbehavior before the enemy. A conviction could lead to a dishonorable discharge from the military and, in the extreme, life in prison for Sgt. Bergdahl.

The Bergdahl affair should remind us just how bad President Obama is at negotiating with Islamic extremists. Mr Obama struck a deal with Afghan insurgents to swap five high-value Taliban prisoners being held in Guantanamo Bay for a single deserter. And then afterwards, Mr Obama held a Rose Garden press conference with Bergdahl’s parents to try to place the most positive spin possible on this shameful deal. It is difficult to imagine how Mr Obama could have been any more deluded and misinformed about the costs and benefits of the deal he was entering into.

And this is the very same President Obama who is now negotiating with the mullahs in Tehran on the question of whether Iran should be allowed to have nuclear weapons. If Obama was played for so big a fool in his negotiations with the Taliban, why, in Heaven's name, should we believe that he is going to be any less inept in his bumbling eagerness to close a deal with Iran?

We have arrived at a shocking state of affairs: Mr Obama is demonstrably a terrible negotiator and sees only what he wants to see; his foreign policy in the Middle East has been nothing but one fiasco after another; and yet, now he asks us to trust him that it is a good deal to grant to Iran, a terrorist state, a license to develop nuclear weapons it can use against Israel, our best ally in the region and a bastion of Western capitalism, technology, and democracy.

And for what? What will be the Bergdahl Obama gets us in return this time?

According to Fed, stable prices are prices that always go up

In a column arguing in favor of auditing the Fed, Alex Pollock writes in tomorrow's WSJ:

The historical argument against letting Congress play a role in monetary issues is that elected politicians are always inflationist, and it takes an independent body to stand up for sound money. Yet now we have the reverse of the historical argument: a sound-money Congress confronted by an inflationist central bank—a Fed that endlessly repeats its commitment to perpetual inflation at its “target” rate of 2% a year. This means prices will quintuple in a normal lifetime. ... In the Federal Reserve Reform Act of 1977, Congress defined a triple mandate for the Fed to follow: stable prices, maximum employment and moderate long-term interest rates. The Fed has dropped any mention of one-third of its assignment—“moderate long-term interest rates”—and redefined “stable prices” to suit itself. It tells us in remarkable newspeak that “stable prices” really means prices that always go up. [emphasis added]

The calculation is 1.02^80 = 4.86.

Nowruz greetings == good, Netanyahu's speech == bad

Why is it all right for the President of the United States to send a video letter to the Iranian people filled with smarmy Nowruz greetings and lobbying the Iranian people to support Obama's nuke deal with Iran, but it is not all right for the Prime Minister of Israel, the country that would be most threatened by Iranian nuclear weapons, to deliver a speech before the American Congress lobbying against the deal?

How Obama will prevent chaos in Middle East

Fox quotes Obama as saying:

We take [Netanyahu] at his word when he said that [Palestinian statehood] wouldn't happen during his prime ministership, and so that's why we've got to evaluate what other options are available to make sure that we don't see a chaotic situation in the region.

Oh no, we wouldn't want to see a chaotic situation develop in the region.

From Ferguson to Gaza: the Obama strategy remains the same

Obama has adopted the same despicable strategy wrt the Palestinians that he did wrt blacks in Ferguson: insinuate that the group has legitimate grievances; accept any violent acts they commit in response to these grievances as understandable, if regrettable; attack the other side as racists. By so doing, Obama foments violence, instead of tamping it down.

It was bad enough when we had riots in Ferguson in response to Obama's dog whistles; how bad will it be when the entire Middle East is engulfed in flames because of his dim machinations?

More on Obama's despicable treatment of Netanyahu and Israel

Here is an article by Peter Wehner, who reminds us that the shabby way our anti-Israeli President has treated Netanyahu and Israel should not be surprising from someone who sat for 20 years in the pews of the church of the anti-Semite Jeremiah Wright.

And here is an article by John Podhoretz, who correctly assesses the current relationship between the United States and Israel as having reached a crisis: Obama is on the verge of abandoning decades of bi-partisan American support for Israel and instead jumping into bed with the Mullahs in Tehran. And it is to distract attention from this unthinkable change of course that Obama criticizes Netanyahu's supposed "racism" (merely for urging Israeli right-wingers to go to the polls on Monday to counter a surge in Israeli Arab voters) while ignoring the far worse human rights violations that are so common in Muslim lands.

Who appointed Obama the arbiter of racism?

For 6 years now, Americans have had to put up with accusations from Obama and his Mini-Me, Eric Holder, that anyone who has a substantive policy disagreement with the Obama administration is motivated by racial animus. Now Obama's Press Secretary, Josh Earnest, is playing the race card outside America against Bibi Netanyahu:

“The United States and this administration is deeply concerned about rhetoric that seeks to marginalise Arab Israeli citizens,” Earnest said. “It undermines the values and democratic ideals that have been important to our democracy and an important part of what binds the United States and Israel together.” He added: “Rhetoric that seeks to marginalise one segment of their population is deeply concerning, it is divisive, and I can tell you that these are views the administration intends to communicate directly to the Israelis.”

And, true to form, the Obama administration's backers in the liberal media respond to Mr Obama's dog whistle and take up the chant. For example, the New York Times writes:

David Axelrod, President Obama’s former senior adviser, said Tuesday evening on Twitter that Mr. Netanyahu’s last-minute stand against a Palestinian state might have helped ensure him another victory. “Tightness of exits in Israel suggests Bibi’s shameful 11th-hour demagoguery may have swayed enough votes to save him. But at what cost?” he wrote. ... In interviews with the Israeli news media that Mr. Netanyahu usually shuns, he complained of a conspiracy of left-wing organizations funded from abroad and foreign governments out to topple him. ... [I]n a seemingly desperate bid to rally support halfway through the balloting, he went on a tirade against Israel’s Arab citizens. “Right-wing rule is in danger,” he said. “Arab voters are streaming in huge quantities to the polling stations.” He said they were being bused to polling stations in droves by left-wing organizations in an effort that “distorts the true will of the Israelis in favor of the left, and grants excessive power to the radical Arab list,” referring to the new alliance of Arab parties. Opponents accused him of baldfaced racism.

Since when is it racism to point out that one's opponents are being bused in large numbers to the polls and to encourage one's supporters to turn out to cast their own votes against them.

The Obama-Holder racial politicking has now metastasized beyond the borders of America and is threatening next to poison all of global politics. Who appointed Barack Obama the arbiter of racism? God, I can't wait for him to be gone.

What Bibi really said

The Obama administration has its shorts in a knot because, so they claim, Bibi Netanyahu on the eve of the Israeli election abandoned the plan for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This claim is complete bullshit.

Here is what Netanyahu actually said:

“I think that anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state today and evacuate lands is giving attack grounds to the radical Islam against the state of Israel. There is a real threat here that a left-wing government will join the international community and follow its orders.”

In other words, Netanyahu is not rejecting a two-state solution in principle, but rather is saying that a two-state solution would be unviable under present circumstances for a variety of practical reasons. This does not mean that this solution will be unviable forever. Netanyahu clarified his position today:

"I haven’t changed my policy," he said in the interview, his first since his resounding victory on Tuesday, which handed him a fourth term. "What has changed is the reality." ... "I don’t want a one-state solution; I want a sustainable, peaceful two-state solution, but for that, circumstances have to change,” he said. “I was talking about what is achievable and what is not achievable. To make it achievable, then you have to have real negotiations with people who are committed to peace.”

Given the missiles launched and the tunnels dug by Palestinians from Gaza against Israel last year, such a position is perfectly reasonable and should hardly raise eyebrows. But, the Democrats insist on twisting Netanyahu's original statement into something he never meant in order to continue their smear campaign against him.

And all the while, as Obama presses his assault against Netanyahu, his best ally in the Middle East, he negotiates to give nuclear weapons to the regime that took 52 American diplomats hostage in 1979, that sponsors terrorist organizations all over the Middle East, that has set up a puppet government in Iraq, that colludes with Bashar Assad in Syria, that labels America the "Great Satan," and that denies the legitimacy of the state of Israel.

Obama has come completely unhinged.

Our Anti-Semite in Chief

I do not know what else to call Obama but an anti-Semite.

Consider. Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, has expressed himself quite explicitly:

Regarding the Palestine issue, the problem is taking back Palestine, which means disappearance of Israel. There is no difference between occupied territories before and after [the Arab-Israeli war of] 1967. Every inch of Palestinian land is an inch of Palestinians’ home. Any entity ruling Palestine is illegitimate unless it is Islamic and by Palestinians. Our position is what our late Imam [Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini] said, “Israel must disappear.” The Jews of Palestine can live there, if they accept the Islamic government there. We are not against Jews.

"We are not against Jews?" Khamenei asserts that "any entity ruling Palestine is illegitimate unless it is Islamic." I'm sure there are many Jews in Israel who would beg to disagree. If they did, what would Khamenei say? That they must be forcibly overcome? Killed, exterminated, if they resist? And yet, Obama seeks to smooth the path whereby this man and his nation, Israel's mortal enemy, can arm themselves with nuclear weapons. If such active efforts to arm Iran, a nation whose leader denies Israel's very right to existence, are not, effectively, anti-Semitism, I don't know what is.

Attorney General Holder has claimed that opponents of Obama are motivated by "racial animus." If it is legitimate to insinuate that the opponents of Obama are racists, then, certainly, it is equally legitimate to label a President who is undermining Israel and arming Iran with nuclear weapons an anti-Semite.

Hillary's FAQ

The so-called fact sheet that Hillary released regarding her emails contains the following question and answer:

What level of encryption was employed? Who was the service provider, etc?

The security and integrity of her family’s electronic communications was taken seriously from the onset when it was first set up for President Clinton’s team. While the curiosity in the specifics of this set up is understandable, given what people with ill-intentions can do with such information in this day and age, there are concerns about broadcasting specific technical details about past and current practices. However, suffice it to say, robust protections were put in place and additional upgrades and techniques employed over time as they became available, including consulting and employing third party experts.

These serious assurances that "security was taken seriously" and this faux concern about revealing "specific technical details" are evasive in the most amateurish way. Every IT professional in charge of an email system knows how to set up a secure email system. Here, for example, is a primer on how to set up your own email server with your own domain. Why is it not possible for Hillary to make available her "consultants and third party experts" to explain the technicals details of her email system? Such openness would allow outside technical experts to verify the level of security inherent in Hillary's email system.

Hillary is too vain to have deleted 30000 personal emails

Imagine what a treasure trove of historical detail was contained in the 30000 emails that Hillary deleted. Future historians certainly would mourn the loss of such a wonderful source of personal information. Any single letter written by Abraham Lincoln is considered a precious historical document. Hillary certainly was aware of the fact that it was possible that she was going to be President of the United States some day. Would she be so cruel as to deny posterity a view port into her personal trials and tribulations by destroying nearly half of her email production over a period of years? My bet is that somewhere she has preserved a backup of her emails for her memoirs and for posterity.

Hillary's emails and e-discovery

In my earlier post on Hillary's emails, I wrote:

Anything I send through my work account is permanently preserved and subject to discovery. ... The problem with Hillary's single, not-controlled-by-the-State-Department, email account, on the other hand, is that it allowed her to go through her emails after the fact and delete any emails that in retrospect she judged to be embarrassing, thereby making later discovery impossible.

I used the term discovery advisedly. There is an entire legal sub-industry that specializes in combing through the documents of an entity to determine which are relevant to a particular legal purpose. In the old days, this process involved a lot of human labor and was very time consuming: an army of legal assistants manually read each document and determined whether it was relevant. Today, the process still involves human review, but is assisted by a variety of computer tools and is referred to by the term e-discovery. I have known about e-discovery for years. (I even interviewed once for a software engineering job at an e-discovery firm in Silicon Valley.) Wikipedia describes e-discovery as follows:

Electronic discovery (or e-discovery or ediscovery) refers to discovery in litigation or government investigations which deals with the exchange of information in electronic format (often referred to as electronically stored information or ESI). ... Data are identified as potentially relevant by attorneys and placed on legal hold. Evidence is then extracted and analyzed using digital forensic procedures, and is reviewed using a document review platform. Documents can be reviewed either as native files or after a conversion to PDF or TIFF form. A document review platform is useful for its ability to aggregate and search large quantities of ESI. Electronic information is considered different from paper information because of its intangible form, volume, transience and persistence. Electronic information is usually accompanied by metadata that is not found in paper documents and that can play an important part as evidence (for example the date and time a document was written could be useful in a copyright case). The preservation of metadata from electronic documents creates special challenges to prevent spoliation.

For more information about this legal specialty, you can visit the website of the Association of Certified E-Discovery Specialists or The eDiscovery Gold Standard, the website of e-discovery expert Daniel Gold. And here is a New York Times article that discusses state of the art in 2011; presumably, the sophistication of the software has only increased since then.

Wikipedia defines legal hold as follows:

A legal hold is a process that an organization uses to preserve all forms of relevant information when litigation is reasonably anticipated. The legal hold is initiated by a notice or communication from legal counsel to an organization that suspends the normal disposition [i.e., destruction] or processing of records, such as backup tape recycling, archived media and other storage and management of documents and information. A legal hold will be issued as a result of current or anticipated litigation, audit, government investigation or other such matter to avoid evidence spoliation.

Wikipedia defines spoliation as follows:

The spoliation of evidence is the intentional, reckless, or negligent withholding, hiding, altering, or destroying of evidence relevant to a legal proceeding. ... The spoliation inference is a negative evidentiary inference that a finder of fact can draw from a party's destruction of a document or thing that is relevant to an ongoing or reasonably foreseeable civil or criminal proceeding: the finder of fact can review all evidence uncovered in as strong a light as possible against the spoliator and in favor of the opposing party. The theory of the spoliation inference is that when a party destroys evidence, it may be reasonable to infer that the party had "consciousness of guilt" or other motivation to avoid the evidence. Therefore, the factfinder may conclude that the evidence would have been unfavorable to the spoliator.

The exact process by which Hillary decided which emails to turn over to the State Department is unclear. She has given (for example, in her fact sheet) only brief, incomplete, and informal descriptions of that process. More important, we must take her word that the process she describes was, in fact, the process that was followed; that is, we have no independent third-party verification that she really did what she said she did. And then she deleted approximately half of all her emails.

What is clear is that it was possible -- indeed, it should have been considered standard practice -- for Hillary to have turned her email server over to an e-discovery firm to determine which emails on the server were relevant to public business at the Department of State. Such a firm would have produced an independent, third-party certification acceptable in a court of law that all relevant emails were handed over and included all relevant electronic metadata. And, btw, cost would not have been an issue: there are any number of e-discovery businesses that would have jumped at the opportunity to perform the service gratis in return for the privilege of being able to advertise that they had done so for the Secretary of State.

If Hillary did not use a certified e-discovery process, this allows an inference to be drawn that some emails may have been intentionally destroyed because Hillary had a "consciousness of guilt" with respect to such emails or some other motivation to avoid the evidence.

Where Hillary's email explanation breaks down

Most of us have two email accounts. I have a gmail account for personal correspondence and a work account for work-related correspondence. I am forced by my company to use my work account for work-related emails. One way in which I am forced is by the simple fact that, if I use my personal account to send an email within the company, our spam filter may filter it out.

One thing I know, however: anything I send through my work account is permanently preserved and subject to discovery. And that is as it should be. Legal actions between entities (businesses, governmental agencies, and so on) would never be able to proceed unless those entities were forced to preserve clear records reflecting what was going on within those entities at various times.

The problem with Hillary's single, not-controlled-by-the-State-Department, email account, on the other hand, is that it allowed her to go through her emails after the fact and delete any emails that in retrospect she judged to be embarrassing, thereby making later discovery impossible.

For example, imagine if Hillary fired off a large number of emails on the night of the Benghazi attack. At the time she sent them, they may have appeared innocuous enough and they were definitely related to her official capacity, so, if she had had two accounts, she might have sent them out through her government account. The fact that she did not make use of two accounts and instead used a single email account under her sole control means that she had the opportunity with the aid of hindsight to go through all her emails and decide in retrospect whether there were particular emails that she found embarrassing and wanted to delete, thereby expunging them from public view.

This is like a CEO involved in a legal proceeding being allowed after the fact to go through the exhibits of evidence and decide which pieces he wanted filtered out. Alternatively, imagine if you had sole control over the records of your stock trades for the year. At the end of the year, you would be able to go back and decide which transactions you wanted to report and which you didn't. Nice gig if you can get it.

Hillary's argument that, even if she had used two email accounts, she still never would have been careless enough to send embarrassing emails through her government account is like a suspected house burglar telling the police not to bother dusting the place because he never would have been careless enough to leave behind fingerprints. It happens all the time that people inadvertently leave behind a paper (or, in our day and age, electronic) trail that in retrospect they wished they hadn’t. That's the whole reason why all of us are forced to leave behind these evidentiary trails in the first place. The fact that the Secretary of State through her use of a private email account for the transaction of public business was given the privilege of going back and, in essence, editing her evidentiary trail is an outrage.

What difference at this point does security make

Fox reports that the Clinton email server had serious security holes.

Once again, naked discrimination by liberals against Asians and Indians

I have written frequently (here, for example) about the prejudice against Asians one finds in liberal and Progressive circles in Silicon Valley. For more evidence of this prejudice, this time exhibited not by Valley liberals, but by some of the eminences of Democratic politics in New York City, see the recent blog post of Francis Menton, the Manhattan Contrarian.

Discussing an article in the New York Times written by Elizabeth Harris entitled "Lack of Diversity Persists in Admissions to Elite City Schools," the Contrarian writes:

[What was] the racial breakdown of those admitted [to New York's elite technical high schools]? According to Harris, of the 5,103, 5% were black, 7% were Hispanic, 28% were white, and 52% were Asian. ... Harris's summary of the reaction to the test results:
In the public school system in recent years, just shy of 30 percent of students have been black and about 40 percent have been Hispanic, and there is widespread agreement that the low numbers of these students in specialized schools is a problem.

I love that unspecific "there is widespread agreement." Has anybody asked any of the Asians? Then there are the reactions of Mayor Bill de Blasio and his Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose son is a senior at Brooklyn Technical High School, the largest specialized school, said the schools should more closely resemble the population of the city. In a statement on Thursday, the city’s schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, said, “It’s critical that our city’s specialized high schools reflect the diversity of our city.”

Sounds to me like they are proposing naked discrimination against the Asians. Hey Asians, how many of you know that you have now been designated as people against whom naked discrimination by the state is to be permitted and encouraged? Your dad may speak broken English and drive a cab 12 hours a day, but already you have been deemed to have too much "privilege" and you must be knocked back by having the state impose quotas on you.

The use of "naked discrimination" is all too familiar to those of us out here in the Valley. As I have written elsewhere, liberals like Jesse Jackson have tried to use precisely this type of naked racial discrimination and coercion to strong-arm Silicon Valley companies like Google, Yahoo!, and LinkedIn and even the University of California into "working to increase" the numbers of black and Hispanic employees and students:

White and Asian employees of high-tech companies need to ask themselves: What is my company going to do to "work" towards greater diversity? For example, if "Asians" are overrepresented now, then, presumably, one of the areas that high-tech companies will want to "work on" is bringing the percentage of those Asian employees down so that it is in line with the percentage of Asians in the general population. Does this mean that high-tech companies will introduce racial criteria and quotas into the hiring process, for example, adding points if a candidate is black or Hispanic, and subtracting points if the candidate is Asian? Such a practice is, of course, identical to the racial preferences that California Democrats recently tried to introduce into the admissions policy of the University of California through constitutional amendment SCA-5.

In other words, the measures that would be employed by New York Democratic Mayor DeBlasio and Chancellor Fariña to make New York's technical high schools "more closely resemble the population of the city" are exactly the same kind of measures that would be employed by those California Democrats who want racial quotas established in high-tech companies and who back California constitutional amendment SCA-5, namely naked racial discrimination in favor of blacks and Hispanics and against Asians and Indians.

So, thanks for the post, Contrarian. Apparently, naked racial prejudice against high-achieving Asians and Indians is not limited to West Coast Lefties, but is a nationwide phenomenon endemic to the Democratic Party.