Here We Go, Again

It's happened again.

The news here in France is reporting what must be a top headline back in the States - that an apparently mentally ill young man has butchered a bunch of his peers in a terrible spree of mis-directed vengeance and anger.  22-year old Elliot Rodger of Santa Barbara, California, angry about his personal failures and social isolation, went on a rampage, stabbing to death his room-mates, shooting a handful of UCSB students, and then crushing some more with his car before finally shooting himself.

Details are still filtering in, but as it were, Rodger left behind a 141 page "manifesto" in which he outlined his catalogue of grievances at girls who rejected him, boys who shamed him, his mother, his step-mother, and society more broadly.  

The whole episode was called the "Day of Retribution."

Another needless day of violence and blood-shed in the US.  Like Newton, CT before it.  Or Virginia Tech.  Or Columbine.  There are again candles, and stuffed animals, and flowers.  There are more crying families and friends.

The reactions are of course predictable.  The feckless politicians are in for more (well-deserved) opprobrium for the utter failure to address gun violence.  The mental health care "system" in the US is being looked at, again, for a failure to deal with what in retrospect is so obviously a dangerous, nihilistic - and narcissistic - young man.  The police are being asked why, when they visited Rodger following reports that he had posted video montages on YouTube in which he more or less laid out what he planned to do and why, they did little more than knock on his door, ask a few polite questions, and then go away.  Rodger himself recorded how relieved he felt that the officers did not enter his apartment, where they surely would have found his arsenal.

Of course, this particular sage has an admixture of the current PC mush of "white, male privilege," despite the fact that the perpetrator was not white.  It's a bit like the ethnic cleansing of sorts that George Zimmerman underwent when he failed to match the narrative.  "Privilege" is the new, shiny toy of the left to explain all the ills of the West.

I don't want to address the foolish psychobabble at this point.

This is the third time I've found myself writing about guns and violence in the US.  This time it feels just a bit different; and, a bit more personal.

First, the cries about mass killings, the need to ban "assault weapons," and why these things are an American problem are a bit off this time.  The shooter in this case legally obtained all of his weapons (like Adam Lanza, I suppose).  But none of them, so far as I know, fit the "assault weapon" profile.  

Second, and perhaps not widely known in the US, is that mass killings in Western Europe are not so rare as most Americans think.  Here in France, for example, the newspaper just today had a story remarking on the increasing exodus of Jews from France, accelerated following a mass shooting at a Jewish school in Toulouse, and, more recently, a rampage at a Jewish museum in Belgium.  It's true that these sort of things happen with somewhat greater frequency in the States, but they do happen with disturbing frequency in countries with strict gun laws.

Third, the perpetrator in this story was (despite the idiocy of those who claim "white privilege") of mixed ancestry.  His ethnic profile is very close to my own son.  Rodger's mother was of Chinese ethnicity from southeast Asia (Malaysia, in this case), and his father was English.  That is about as perfect an ethnic match as one might have for our eight year old.  (Though, unlike Rodger, my own family does not hale from British aristocracy; my own father was of a decidedly less landed stock of sheep farmers in the Shetland Islands).  Reading the deranged manifesto, the 'troubles' Elliot Rodger encountered - whether real or imagined - began around his 9th birthday, which my own son will celebrate in just beyond two months.  Prior to that, all accounts talk of a happy, almost idyllic youth.

I cannot help but wonder what sort of social pressures my son may face in a culture where you are black or white, otherwise you don't exist.  I remember when he was an infant, around the time that Halle Berry won her Academy Award, proudly proclaiming how she was the first black actress to win.  At that time, I wondered how my own son would see himself.  If he would follow Berry and reject, loudly, half of himself, and if so, which half?

Fourth, the debate about mass killings is, in my opinion, a distraction from the real problem in the US, and that is the utter banality of gun violence - violence in general.  Chicago, Illinois, the third largest of American cities, in 2012 was awash in blood, topping 500 homicides.  This topped 2011, which saw more than 400.  2013 saw some relief, but still, there were 415 people murdered in Chicago last year.

In France, by comparison, there were 650 murders in the entire country in 2012.  

Chicago is a city of 2.7 million people.  France is a country of 66 million.  

And this is where all the non-sense about "white privilege" and assault weapons and spree killings is perhaps its most irritating.  

Gun violence in America is a significant problem, not because crimes like this are shocking.  It is because in Chicago, more than a murder a day is not.

The US, plain and simple, has a violence problem.  It's obvious that, yes, it is far, far past the time that Americans accepted sensible, rational rules about gun ownership.  Requiring law-abiding citizens to have a licence to own a gun, and limiting the amount of ammunition they can purchase is not "gun grabbing."  The Second Amendment guarantees people the right to own guns and to defend themselves.  But this ain't 1750 on the frontier.  The Constitution was not written by God himself, nor was it given to Moses.  It can (and has been) amended to reflect the times.  The Second Amendment itself is testament to that.

But we neeed also to focus on what is really happening - guns are a symptom.  You palliate the symptoms.  And, as sad as it is for the father of Chris Martinez (one of the young victims) and as righteous as his anger is, he is just wrong about what is really the problem here.

Il n'y a Plus Sacre... Fin du Lapin RATP?

We have been living in Paris for almost a year, and have more or less settled into a comfortable routine.  Each day, for example, I ride to and from my office on a sequence of trains.  First the RATP (Metro) and then the RER, a suburban line leading out of the city into the suburbs surrounding Paris.  The journey is 40 minutes or so each way, give or take an incident avec un voyageur or panne de signalisation.

As I had written some time ago here, the trains in and around Paris have placards posted on doors and elsewhere within the rames to warn youngsters to keep their hands away from the doors.  The phrase

Ne mets pas tes mains sur les portes. Tu risques de te faire pincer très fort

accompanied by a cartoon rabbit has over time become a bit of a cultural icon.  Serge, le Lapin RATP as he is known, has adorned the trains here since I have been coming to Paris 20 years ago, and apparently first appeared in about 1977.  His message has remained unchanged, as his his appearance - a pink bunny in a set of yellow pyjamas.

Well, all things in time, as they say, and today, I read that after three decades, Serge will undergo a face-lift.

As of today, the RATP announced a new look for Serge:

His face will apparently remain much the same, as will his unfortunate left anthropomorhic paw.  His clothes will undergo a significant update, however, with the yellow jump suit replaced with a yellow tee and jeans.  He will now sport shoes - a pair of Chuck Taylors, as it appears.

The makeover is the first new look for the Lapin RATP since 1986.

To celebrate, the agency behind the cartoon have inaugurated a contesto n Twitter and Facebook, asking people to submit various alternative versions of Serge, as well as new twists on his warning to riders, young and old.

Can a re-boot of "mind the gap" be far behind?

Les Urnes Attendent...Les Pouvoirs Européens Se Cachent

The big news in France - in all of the EU in fact - this weekend is the elections for the European Parliament.  As we speak, voters in the Netherlands and the UK have already gone to the polls; French voters get their turn on Sunday.

The European Parliament is not something that raises a terrible amount of interest, in normal times.  Talking with my Parisian friends and neighbours, most are not even aware of more than one or two MEPs.  The goings-on in Brussels usually do not merit much more than an occasional complaint (for the interference in local cultural issues, like school discipline), or the occasional joke (about how the people in the UK are constantly complaining about Europe).

These are not normal times, however.  Every day, the press has new commentary about the spectre of the rise of what are described as ultra-right (l’extrême droite) parties across the continent - from the Front National (FN) in France to the UK Independence Party (UKIP) across the English Channel.

As context, last month local elections were held in France, a country that resisted the most heavy-handed of the "austerity" measures seen in other European capitals, especially London.  François Hollande, the socialist president who had just been elected at the outset of the global financial crisis, vowed to tackle France's problems with larger social spending and punitive taxes on the wealthy.  Most famous among his promises was a pledge to put in place a tax of 75 per cent on incomes above one million Euros per annum (his plans were blocked by a French court which found them illegal).

Many European countries - including the UK under Tory David Cameron - have emerged from the crisis.  France continues to see massive unemployment, huge budget deficits, falling property values, and a general economic and social mal-a-l'aise. Hollande himself got caught in a series of petty, embarrassing scandals, including an affair with a second-tier actress, mocked not because of its indiscretion as much as its lack of taste and joie de vivre (Hollande sneaked in and out of his rendez-vous on a cheap, Vespa scooter).  Proposals to place fuel sur-taxes on farmers, who never were in close alignment with the globalist elites, introduced a new populist term to the press here - le ras le bol (loosely meaning, 'pissed off'), with nightly images of les bonnets rouges (rural protesters in red hats) blocking roadways with heavy farming equipment, and, oddly, an epidemic of destruction of speed cameras on rural highways.

This has left an opening for the FN to cleanse itself and re-brand as the party of the forgotten - lower middle-class labourers and rural people.  The PS were trounced in the local by-elections, with the FN taking control of several constituencies, in their best showing, perhaps in history.  Of course, the press continue to consider the FN to be 'far-right,' but much of their strongest showings have been in former leftist strongholds.  

With that context, the press in France (and if my on-line readings of the Daily Telegraph and The Guardian in the UK are indicative, l'outre Manche as well) have become increasingly and obviously afraid of how the European parliament elections will go.  

This article, in today's Le Figaro is an excellent example of the sort of coverage recently.

Ils n'ont parfois pas grand-chose à voir entre eux mais surfent sur la même vague: la crise. Souvent, ils tirent les mêmes ficelles: le rejet de l'Europe, des élites et la relance du nationalisme. Qu'ils soient issus de l'extrême droite historique ou de la nouvelle tendance nationale-populiste, les partis hostiles à l'Union européenne donnent le ton dans de nombreux pays, à l'occasion de ces élections européennes.

[They do not have much between them besides the same tidal wave: the crisis.  They often pull the same strings: rejecting the EU, elites, and the rise of nationalism.  Whether they are historical issues of the far-right or the new, nationalist/populist tendancy, the parties hostile to the EU give the same tone in a number of countries during the European parliamentary elections]

The article provides a survey of the various EU countries and their respective dissident parties.

Below is a typical billboard ad seen all over Paris, in which le Pen and the FN portray themselves as representing France against powerful, external interests; a modern-day take on Joan of Arc.   And it's working.

Typical Advert Seen Currently in the Streets of Paris

It's not known how the FN will do Sunday - as the title of indicates, the ballot boxes await.  Early indications are mixed - the Netherlands voted last night, and despite rules that all countries should wait to report until the final vote - Sunday at 23h00 in Spain - is done, exit polls have shown that the PVV of Geert Wilders has come fourth despite leading.  Whilst at the same time, the UKIP and its head, Nigel Farage, did perhaps better than expected, in an election called a "political earthquake."

The Guardian did not mince words in saying that "(e)arly results seem to indicate that the main parties' worst fears have been realised."  Worse still, the UKIP have made a strong showing in places like Birmingham, a mill town and long-time Labour stronghold.

Farage, who looks and sounds a bit like a jumped-up Michael Caine, engaged in a series of disastrous debates with Nick Clegg, the head of the Liberal Democrats, themselves currently in a coalition government with the Tories.  The plan was to try to make Farage look like a frothing lunatic, but the reality is that it made Clegg (and the establishment parties) look dangerously out of touch.  The opposite effect of what was desired.

We won't know the ultimate outcome in the European elections until Sunday, but the UKIP and FN are talking about forming some sort of coalition, as the FN and Dutch PVV have already vowed.

The FN currently are running neck-and-neck with the centre-right UM
This is causing nothing short of a panic.  For the FN to take the election would be a massive embarrassment to France, and the klaxon has been sounded

What apparently is not working is the sort of tactics seen in the US, where a similar populist rising - the so-called "Tea Party" - was painted as know-nothing racists and xenophobes.  Le Pen's father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded the FN, was recently quoted making a comment about the ebola virus being a natural check on the growth of immigrants in France.

Unlike the Tea party, the FN are the 'real deal' in terms of hostility for foreigners.

The bottom line is that the old attacks on the FN and their like as being "extreme right" are well beyond their sell-by date.  

What remains to be seen is the impact.  For better or for worse, the EU is a reality, and France and the other large, Western European countries are better in the EU than out.  Sending an overt, anti-European message will have consequences.  Recently, the Swiss voted to implement restrictions on immigrants, even from other European countries. The Swiss are not officially in the EU, but are signatories to the Shengen agreement that relaxed or even eliminated most border restrictions amongst parties to the agreement.  

It's unclear the ultimate result of such a decision - many Swiss employers are large, multinational companies with international workforces.  Two of the giants in my industry - Roche (parent of Genentech) and Novartis - have headquarters in Basel, which sits at the border of Switzerland, Germany, and France.  These companies need to have foreign workers, as Switzerland simply does not produce enough chemists, analysts, and doctors to staff them.   

Whether Europe continues on the same trajectory, or reverses 50 years of movement to a more federal, united 'state' is very much at issue now.  

The next 48 hours will tell.

She Blinded Me with Science

Foolishness back in the US of A is in the news again.

No, I'm not talking about the increasing pace with which the country is turning into a banana republic (pace the revelation that the son of Vice President Biden - who, despite being a Yale Law School grad was so dull that he three times failed the Delaware bar exam, benefiting from a rules change allowing him a fourth and finally successful bite at the legal apple - has been appointed to the board of directors of one of the largest energy holding companies in Ukraine).

I'm talking about the nearly schizophrenic relationship the country has with "science."  

The way the "teams" typically line up on either side of the ball has the progressives taking ostentatiously "pro-science" positions, attacking conservatives as being anti-scientific dunces who believe that the flat earth was cooked up in a bath tub six days ago.  Just recently, many of my more liberal friends were crowing about the most recent take down of a climate change "denier" by Bill Nye "the Science Guy" on some obscure noisemaking show on HBO.

Nye is the go-to guy for those who want to engage in an exercise in fishing with dynamite, looking to embarass the religious or those who think that the best solutions to the challenges climate change presents might not involve Al Gore enriching himself or other political patronage.

Nye is a smart guy, and generally performs a public service by trying to highlight to Americans the value of science and promoting interest in it.

He's not, however, a "scientist," despite what the barking dogs at Mother Jones or the clowinsh Bill Maher would have you believe.  He has a BS in mechanical engineering, but largely his career has been as an entertainer.  He wears a bow tie, but then again, so did Colonel Sanders, so that's not too strong a set of bona fides. 

In short, Nye has less science education than I do, and I am not scientist.

The allegiance to science changes quickly when other nettlesome topics arise.  Most recently, a former science writer for the New York Times called Nicholas Wade has just had published a book entitled A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History.

The book follows to a degree in the footsteps of the work of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein from twenty years ago. The arguments presented revolve around the role of genetics and various human characteristics: behaviour, intelligence, personality.  

The reaction from the left has been as fierce as it has it has been predictable.  And, to say the least, hardly what one could call "scientific."  

In 1994, when The Bell Curve was published - and argued inter alia that intelligence was significantly correlated with genetics (people with 'smart' parents tended to be 'smart' and vice versa) - the reaction was even more fierce.  Leading the intellectual Charge of the Light Brigade was subsequently disgraced paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, whose argument at the time more or less amounted to "intelligence cannot be genetic because it just can't."  Gould has by now more or less been unmasked as a charlatan as a scientist.

My somewhat tongue in cheek description of Gould's point is not a terrible exaggeration of Gould's argument.  At the time, the human genome project, with GWAS and other genetic advances were then in their infancy.  In twenty years, the science has improved.  The "intelligence" gene has not been isolated - likely a simplification, as the science now indicates that it is likely that there is a strong genetic component, but one that relies on multiple genetic combinations - but it is getting closer.  

Wade's book provides an very good, top-level review of human bio-diversity, historically and currently.  One would think that people who describe themselves as defenders of the scientific faith would treat the work appropriately.

Think again.

Here is the comment of blogger P Z Myers, a tenured professor at a public university in Minnesota, with actual degrees and publications in evolutionary biology.  Myers is not nobody - his blog has been listed in Nature magazine as one of the top science-based blogs on the web, and he has an asteroid named in his honour:

I considered reading his (Wade's) book, just to tear it up, but I don’t think it’s worth the effort

How scientific.  He spends several hundred pages on his blog attacking Wade, but does not once address a single point. In summary: I considered reading a science-based book not to ascertain if it was true or false, but as a way of attacking the author, but I was either too lazy or too afraid of what I might find that I didn't bother.

As a disclaimer, I don't know for a fact that intelligence or behaviour have a genetic component.  There is very strong empirical evidence that it so, and that evidence is moving in a direction that must be disquieting to those who hold a contrary position.  Gould has been revealed to have misrepresented and massaged his research.  The conclusions of 40 years ago by Richard Lewontin on which much of the counter-arguments were based have been shown by Richard Dawkins and E O Wilson to be demonstrably false.

Thus, the arguments one hears against the possibility are becoming increasingly shrill.  The equivalent of a child putting his fingers in his ears and shreiking "na na na na."

That intelligence may be at the least partially heritable (like height, weight) is in and of itself, unremarkable.  The main bugbear of what Wade (and others - Wilson and Arthur Jensen before him) raise is the uncomfortable possibility that, if intelligence is partially heritable, and human beings overwhelmingly select mates, either because of geographic proximity or cultural pressures, who are of more or less a similar ethnic background as themselves, that there may over time have developed group differences among the various ethnies of the world.

THAT has political ramifications.

The fallout has been a full-throated attempt by the left not just to control the debate, but to silence it.  Those who, as blogger Steve Sailer says dare to "notice" things are immediately faced with professional and social pressures that are intense.  Witness the very public defenestration of a previously unknown analyst Jason Richwine who, in his dissertation at Harvard, analysed data that showed differences in IQ between arriving Latino immigrants and the general US population.  Richwine's thesis met the fate of most - sitting, untouched, on a dusty shelf for years until it became politically necessary to attack him.  I suspect that Richwine will now find it practically impossible to find work in a mainstream research outfit having been tried and convicted of so heinous a thought crime.

Again, I don't know for a fact that there are population differences among the races in intelligence.  But I also do not know for a fact that there aren't, and I allow for the possibility that there are.  Guys like Gould, Lewontin, Myers, and other self-described or even actual scientists will not.

As a thought exercise, instead of intelligence, suppose we think about something much less politically freighted.  Performance in short distance running.  According to Wikipedia, 76 different men (and they are all men) have run 100m in less than 10 seconds.  Exactly one of those (Christophe LeMaitre) has been of European extraction.  Despite being the largest region in the world by population, it has never - not once - been accomplished by someone whose ancestry arose in Asia.

Of the world records in all running events less than 1000m, every single one is held by a man of west African descent (Sebastian Coe's 30 year old record in the 800m fell 1997).  Wikipedia has a list of top performances by year for the past 50 years.  The last European to have the fastest time in the 100m was 1979.  I suspect that in 2016 - like 2012 - every single finalist in the mens' 100m will be from the same west African origins.

In this case, this does not of course prove that there is a genetic component to sprinting, but it certainly indicates a possibility.  Does anyone really, if being honest, suspect that heritage is totally unrelated to sprinting?

The only reason that people deny that there may be similar relationships between genes and intelligence is because of politics, not science.  It's helpful to keep this in mind the next time a left-wing blowhard starts in about his or her "belief" in science.

Collision of the Dismal Science and Reality-Denying People

As the name of this site (SJREFUGEE - that is, San Jose Refugee) implies, my family and I are, shall we say, escapees from the San Francisco Bay Area.  We're of course not 'refugees' in the traditional sense of the word.  We chose to leave central California a while back for a number of issues, none of which was related to storm disasters or political persecution.  And we live a pretty nice life these days in Paris, which is one of the truly great cities of the world.



But having lived the bulk of my adult life in the Bay Area, and still owning a property in Sunnyvale (it's a rental, and a hedge for our retirement), I try to keep up on the goings-on, out there.

By now, most everyone with even the slightest connection to the Valley, or to Tech, knows about the infamous "Google Buses" that have been the target of various attacks in San Francisco.  It's a backlash against the economic forces currently roiling the city.  

This article, published in the online journal TechNet, really encapsulates better than any I have ever seen the situation.  It's strongly San Francisco-centric, but an excellent synopsis.

The middle and late '00s, marked by the economic world-wide slow-down were not particularly kind to the Bay Area, with significantly worse unemployment compared to the rest of the US, and commensurate out-migration.  California more broadly saw a massive wave of people leaving for less costly places like Texas or Nevada.  

Of course, California and the Bay Area in particular have long been extremely expensive places to live.  Because buildable land is one thing that cannot be "made" in any significant quantities, the laws of supply and demand are pretty much iron-clad.  When our family first arrived in Los Angeles about 40 years ago, the property boom had really just started to take off.  But a family could reasonably expect to own a home on a middle-class salary.

All that had changed by the time I was out of school and working.  In 1994, when I took my final degrees and looked for my first market-rate housing, I was shocked by the prices of what were described as "entry-level" homes.  A tiny, 40 year old shack in Palo Alto, California (I was a Stanford student) that could be kindly described as "mid-century shabby chic" at that time would fetch between three and four hundred thousand dollars.  Using the old rules - where one's mortgage should not be more than three times one's annual salary, you can easily see why the Bay Area was near the bottom of the rankings in the US of home affordability.  With the great recession, home prices had fallen, significantly, and possibly for the first time in my lifetime.

Fast forward further, and there is today apparently another "tech bubble" growing in and around Silicon Valley, and housing prices are climbing again at dizzying rates.  That shabby chic Palo Alto rancher is now easily well north of a million dollars.  The Facebook Boom is of course good news in some respects for Bay Area governments, who finally can stop cutting services as payroll and property taxes rebound.  It's also good for tech workers and their adjacents.  But it's not universally good, and the down-side includes the pricing-out of many middle income residents, some of whom are relatively long-time residents.  This is particularly acute in San Francisco, which 10 years ago was not really part of the "tech" economy in any real way.

All of that has changed, with demographic changes that are not well-documented (for example, the famous work of sociologist Richard Florida, whose book The Rise of the Creative Class highlights stark differences between Gen-Xers and baby boomers, and the so-called "millennials".  My generation (decidedly Gen-X) preffered quieter, suburban settings.  A single family home with some land.  The millennials reject that, preferring the new urbanism of "walkable" neighbourhoods (I suspect, in no small part driven by a desire to avoid cooking their own food, and a greater desire to be able to go out on a Friday or Saturday, or perhaps even Thursday - the "new" Friday night, have a bit too much to drink, and be able to walk home without risking a DUI or worse) and density.  Hence, the movement of companies from the actual Valley to former warehouses and other artefacts of the old economy in San Francisco (e.g., Twitter).

An Anti-Yahooligan, Astride His Prey

This makes a tight situation even more acute.  It used to be that participants in the new digital economy had to live in the Bay Area.  They now have to live in San Francisco.  When 8 million people desire to live in a three or four county-area, that's a problem.  When they want to live in a single city that is less than 50 square miles, that is a crisis.

There is a lot of teeth-gnashing going on, as people in San Francisco and beyond confront the following realities.

It is not possible to have, simultaneously, strong enironmental laws that severely restrict housing, activist preservationists who demand that the aesthetics of neighbourhoods remain unchanged, massive increases (even moderate ones) of people from other places, liberal immigration policies, and afforable housing that protects people of modest means.

You can have some of them, but to demand all is to square the proverbial circle.

So the result is people, who on virtually any other day would be championing ride sharing, attacking buses that shuttle workers from San Francisco to Mountain View.  You have people who on the one hand demand amnesty for illegal immigrants and push for softer immigration laws that will bring ever more people demanding that rules be put in place to ensure that newcomers cannot come to San Francisco.  

An interesting side effect - law of unintended consequences, if you will, is that 50 years of strict zoning (ostensibly for environmental reasons) in San Francisco have turned the city into one of the least "diverse" (measured by black and Latino residents) in the Bay Area.  In 1970, one in eight San Franciscans (13%) was black.  In 2010, that figure had been cut by more than half.  Similarly for Latinos, in 1970, about one in six (12%) was Hispanic.  That figure has grown of course to 15% in 2010, but pales in comparison to the state of California.  San Francisco added about 100,000 residents in the past 40 years, which means that it has added 36,000 Latino residents (using some basic algebra, the numbers have grown from 84,000 to about 120,000 in 40 years).

In California, the corresponding figures: total population in 1970 of 20 million.  Total in 2010 of 37 million.  In 1970, Hispanics made up about 12% of the total California population - an almost exact match for the city.  That amounts to about 2.4 million.  The current Hispanic population in California is now 13 million or so, more than one in three.  

So, over 40 years, the state has added about 10 million Latinos, an increase of 400 or so percent.  The city of San Francisco has seen its Latino population grow by 43%.  An order of magnitude less.

Thus, San Francisco's ostensibly "liberal" housing policies have resulted in a sort of quasi-ethnic cleansing.

One thing I find most interesting is the arguments one hears about how newcomers (and I am strongly suspicious that what they really mean are tech heads from Illinois, not border jumpers) are pushing out long-term residents, fundamentally changing the character of the city.  I suppose that this is true.  When I was living in San Jose, the "Metreon" (a chimeric shopping/entertainment/dining venture) opened just south of Market Street.  The area had long been somewhat dodgy.  Now, with the addition of Pacific Bell Park (or whatever it's called these days), the entire South of Market area, including large parts of the so-called "Mission District" - long home to Mexican and other Latin American residents - has changed entirely, with gleaming new apartments, "artisan" stores and restaurants with "hyper local" sourcing, and coffee shops proudly boasting of "fair trade" products.  

The latter is extremely ironic.

Many activists are demanding an end, and for the city to act to preserve the makeup of San Francisco.

It's a bit to me like conservatives elsewhere who cling to visions of what the country was like in 1950; trying to preserve in legislative amber some idealised view.  No one stops to ask who the people now demanding protection replaced.  For example, the Castro district, now the ostensible cultural centre of San Francisco's gay culture, at one point was the home to a socially conservative, blue-collar Irish Catholic community.  That is California - waves of newcomers push out to some degree their antecedents.  One of the little ironies of the TechNet piece is a focus on a "long-term" renter who is losing his home due to rent rises - who himself is an immigrant from China.  I suspect that few of the most timourous activists have roots in San Francisco going back even one generation.

They all replaced somebody for the most part.  So, who decides at what point in time to apply the amber?  People are very happy to preserve the status quo, but only after they've got their piece.  Wearing fair-trade hemp shirts does not innoculate you from human nature.

Solutions are not going to be easy, as the TechNet piece points out.  And people in San Francsico I suspect are finding out that the laws of demand, supply, and price are not subject to debate any more than gravity.

(弱肉強食) Weak Meat, Strong Eat

There is a short aphorism that the strong eat, the weak are meat (弱肉強食 - "ruo rou, qiang shi").  There are I think variants of this theme across the world, but this particular version arises in Asia.

I was reminded of the saying when I came across this truly disheartening story that recently has made the news in suburban Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  The long on the short of the story is that a 15 year old student who allegedly had been the chronic victim of various acts of bullying in his classroom, decided to try to defend himself.  The boy used an iPad to record an incident, and present the recording to his parents.

In the approximately six minutes recorded, the student is threatened and humiliated by multiple classmates, all the while as his teacher is standing right next to him, attempting to help with some maths questions.  

One might think that the school principal, when shown the evidence, would take action to punish the other kids, if not for the threats against the victim, then for the vulgarity and disrespect shown the teacher.

One would be wrong.

Apparently, the principal:

1) Ordered the student to erase the recording
2) Telephoned the police and had the victim arrested for making a "wiretap."

The craziness did not end there - a judge actually convicted the victim for disorderly conduct.

How on earth did we arrive at such a point?

I remember high school, despite the more than 25 years that have passed; I remember junior high school (now called "middle school") as an even more "lord of the flies" sort of place.  Of course there was bullying.  The "law of the playground" (as described by Homer Simpson) was more or less in effect.  But even then, this sort of obvious, in your face type of attack would not have been tolerated.

Why do we put up with it?  Why do those in authority simply refuse to do anything to help?  My sister is a school teacher, so I am sympathetic up to a point that the teachers are in many cases helpless - after all, the teachers cannot be all places at all times.  And I suspect in many instances, they fear retribution - here in Paris, some weeks ago, a teacher who punished a miscreant was savagely beaten as the other students sat and watched - either from the perpetrator, or by the parents or worse, lawyers who argue that it's not "fair" to Johnny to punish him for his misbehaviour.

My own son some years back in pre-school was the target of another boy who searched through the classroom until he found a target - in this case my then four year old son - who would neither fight back nor alert the teacher.  My wife waited at the edge of the playground one day to confirm that the little brat indeed was guilty, and when we went to the teacher and principal, neither seemed to know a thing, and the principal started in with a bunch of flapdoodle about "dialog" and the like.

Needless to say, she quickly changed her tune and took action to separate the problem when we suggested that she was now aware of the problem, and that we intended to name her personally should anything happen to our son.

Yes - it took threats to get results.  And we lived in one of the "best" school districts in the state.

Right now, "bullying" has reached an almost hysterical status, with virtually every conflict of every stripe being called "bullying."  It's a bit like how Orwell observed that the word "fascist" had been so abused and mis-applied that it simply did not mean anything specific any longer: (f)ascism "has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable."  

The abuse, however, of course doesn't mean that existentially fascist behaviour had ceased to exist, nor does it now mean that there are not real incidents of bullying, and this case in Pennsylvania illustrates it perfectly.  The kids who have terrorised the boy are certainly bullying him, the school is likely bullying the teacher, making it impossible for her to control her classroom, and the authorities - the principal, the police, and the idiot judge - are bullying all those who are trying to obey the rules into not making waves.

It's unacceptable.

Some have commented that the school's hands are tied - that there is nothing to be done with bullies.  Nonsense.  Those kids should be expelled.

The principal who allowed this to happen should be fired.

The judge who handed down the sentence should be recalled.

The rules are in place precisely to protect the weak from the strong.  THAT is why we have laws; it's why we have police.  

It's why we have prisons.

Fight the Power

Sometimes, You've Just Got To Say
"WHAT THE HELL?"

It may surprise many of my friends, especially those who have only known me since adulthood, that when I was younger, I had a pretty strong anti-authoritarian streak.  These days, perhaps as a reaction to living for many years in the rather nauseatingly self-righteous bubble of the San Francisco Bay Area, I have been associated with a rather reactionary personna. Now, I've never thought myself to be particularly conformist, and to those who knew me as a child, my political migration would, I think, be seen as unsurprising.

Simply put, I find "groupthink" and unquestioning acceptance of orthodoxy just unappealing.  (It is on full display right now in the sort of "militant tolerance" as the heretic ex-CEO of Mozilla is boiled in oragnic patchouli.)

As a kid, when ordered to do something "because I said so," I frequently found myself on the wrong side of "law" for asking for some sort of rationale.

Today's microagression comes in the form of a homework assignment my eight year old handed in.  The assignment, a book report, required him to describe the five items he liked best about the book he had read.  He completed the task, I reviewed it with him, and he handed it in.

Last night, his teacher returned the paper with her "corrections," asking that our son "fix" his "mistakes."

So far, so good.  I value education, and I am pleased for my son to have his errata laid out for improvement.

In this particular instance, however, I was quite disturbed to see that the teacher had marked as wrong our son's use of the enumerative "First....second... third" and "last of all."  His teacher "corrected" these to be written as "Firstly," "secondly," etc.

His teacher is wrong.  And I've told my son that she is wrong.  (As an aside, the use of "firstly" versus "first" is plainly laid out in, inter alias, Strunk and White and the OED).  My sister is an English teacher, and I for certain will be checking with her opinion as well.

My dilemma is this: I do not want my son to learn improper usage; at the same time, I want him to get out of the third grade.  Here, he is confronted with an authority figure - demonstrably in error - requiring him to correct an assignment that he knows is not wrong.  

I recall when I was in the fifth or sixth grade, a geography lesson in which the teacher insisted that the capital of Canada was Montreal.  She marked my exam as wrong, and would not be budged.  Now, I was born in Canada. The overwhelming majority of my family are Canadian.  My mother and all but one of my uncles currently live in Canada.  The teacher simply would not be convinced that the correct answer was Ottawa.

Of course, in this case, the immediate solution - to go the library, get a copy of the World Book Encyclpedia, Volume "C", and show her that she was wrong - was quite simple.  Note, though, that I said "immediate solution."  The teacher, forced to confront her mistake, grudgingly corrected the correction, but was plainly less than happy about it, and I believe afforded the rest of my work for the semester the royal treatment.

I have decided in this case to try to settle on a middle course.  Usage "evolves" over time (consider the current acceptability in our language of "the data is," or the use "leverage" as a verb).  I've asked my son to adhere in this case to the teacher's request.  I've also pointed out to him that this is a perfect example that sometimes the king is wrong, and indeed, authority figures are most decidedly not always right.

Unless it's his parents, of course.

Marching to the Beat of Another Drummer: Round and Round We Go

Do YOU March to the Beat?

With the onset of spring and warmer, longer days here in France, I've adjusted to a degree my workout routines.  Paris sits at a surprisingly high northern latitude, at least to this US expat, which means darker winters and brighter summers compared to the States.  During the winter months, with darkness arriving at 430 in the afternoon, my running was exclusively on the sidewalks through the streets of Paris.  This has the up-side of some truly inspiring views; I alternated my routes to pass by the Arc de Triomphe, the Place de la Concorde with its obelisk, the Musee du Louvre, and the Eiffel Tower, to name a few.

Now that it is light until nearly 9 PM each evening, the parks are open and available later and later, which allows me to use the nearby Parc Monceau for much of my course.  I've found that running the loop around the bucolic park is a bit easier on the joints than the stone sidewalks, and it's defninitely a lot more efficient, and probably safer as well, than the streets, where I am forced to contend with traffic and pedestrians.  As an added bonus, the loop is almost exactly a kilometre around, which makes pacing and planning very easy.  The park is also quite nice, with many trees, flowers, a small lake, and a sprinkling of fake artefacts (a faux Roman pillar, a replica of an Egyptian pyramid) as pleasant distractions.

I'm decidedly middle-aged, and thus am careful to take measures to prevent injuries.  I have read that one should alter the direction of travel so as to distribute the impact of turning more equally between left and right.  Hence, on odd days, I run clock-wise around the park, and even days, anti-clock-wise.  Not sure if this benefits my knees, but at the least, there is a minor placebo effect.

The park is often full of other runners, which is a relatively new phenomenon in France, where running has taken a certain following, only a few years after former President Nicolas Sarkozy was jeered for his passion for such an "Anglo-Saxon" pursuit.  

What I've noticed, but had not thought of previously, is how uniform other runners are.  On my first foray into the park, I ran around the loop in the "standard," anti-clock-wise direction.  The same as virtually every other runner.  Only the people strolling the path headed the opposite direction.  However, the next trip into Monceau, I ran clockwise.  To my chagrin, this was decidedly against what every other runner was doing that day.  It's not an exaggeration that every other runner in Park Monceau was running anti-clock-wise.

In fact, several looked at me with a certain shock that I would be so heterodox to run clock-wise.

I wonder, is it peer-pressure, conformity, what, that results in such a uniform behaviour?  In competitive track, of course, the racers all must go the same direction, and that direction happens to be anti-clock-wise.  But why should casual jogging, and to be fair, the French may have taken to running, but they still are more or less plodding along at a pretty slow pace, be so uniform?

Horse racing is a bit more varied.  In the UK, typically, the horses run in a clock-wise (what in equestrian is called "right-handed") fashion.  But it's not uniform - there are both right and left-handed races in the UK, depending on the location.  In the US, of course, it's entirely left-handed, which according to this article came as a reaction to the predominance of right-hand racing in England, which was cast out along with King George III in the US revolution.  Over time, there had been attempts in the States to re-introduce right-hand racing, but each attempt failed, and as a bit of trivia, the very last right-hand race in the US was at Belmont Park, where the famous horse Man o' War won the final leg of his triple crown in 1920.

In the Interest of Creating a Free and Open Dialogue...

....sit silently and watch this film.  

One of my favourite tart quotes from The Simpsons, now nearly 20 years ago (I think).

Apparently, back in the US, there is a mini-tempest swirling around the forced, auto-da-fe of (now ex) Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich.  Eich, one of the creators of the web browser "Firefox" and multi-platform language Java, got into some hot water, retroactively, when it was "discovered" that he gave $1000 to the campaign in favour of California ballot proposition Eight.  The initiative, which infamously banned same-sex marriage in the Golden State, passed by a comfortable margin in 2008.  It was, of course, subsequently struck down as unconstitutional.

Now, I personally found the proposition wrong-headed and mean-spirited, and said as much at the time.  Furthermore, I find the opposition to equal rights for gay people at the least bizarre, and have said so as well.  

In fact, I find it more than bizarre; I find the fervent opposition to be wrong headed and cruel.

But on this issue (gay marriage), I think that largely, the conservatives are about as wrong as they possibly could be...

Frankly, the only real reason I see for anti-gay marriage ads is meanness. I do not know a lot of gay people, but I do know more than one. Some are nice people. Some are obnoxious. I do not see why the government should deny them the basic right to enter into contracts with one another, and to treat those contracts with the same respect as any other.

So this year, at Christmas time, in the time of miracles and of the forgiveness of man (the reason Christ came into the world), instead of puffing ourselves up "defending" marriage and righteousness, let's take a look at how we are living up to one of the few things that He asked when He came to the world.

How are we treating our fellow man?

The answer to that question is far more relevant in my view than any propositions we sign or lawmakers we call to defend marriage against a threat that just does not exist.

For what it's worth, in 2000, when the Knight Initiative (Proposition 22), which also sought to restrict marriage rights, I voted "No," and had a "No on 22" sign in my yard in San Jose.  (In those days, I was still living in California).

This is not to say that I think that people whose opinions that differ from mine are bad people, or that they necessarily are bigots.  I think they're wrong, and I think that, over time, most will come to see that.

Which brings us to Eich.

Once it was discovered that Eich had contributed to the Proposition 8 campaign, the ruction became sufficiently timourous that he was more or less forced to resign.  

Is this really where we want to go as a culture?  

William F. Buckley once quipped in response to the famous remark attributed to Voltaire (wrongly), that one may oppose another's viewpoint, but would be willing to fight to the death to protect one's right to say it, that "liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views."

The whole sad story is not making much news here in Europe, but it's all over various social media to which I subscribe, and apparently, the crime of Mr Eich is not so much that he gave the money, six years ago, but rather, that when he was given the chance to confirm that he had changed his views, he refused to do so.

See the difference?  He is unsuited to be the CEO not so much because of his donation six years ago (after all, if we look back and hold people accountable to their prior stated preferences, that is going to rule out most of the Democratic party, as even President Obama opposed gay marriage as a candidate then, and the Clinton administration has one of the worst records in recent history on laws passed with respect to gay rights), but because he thinks differently from the mob.  

Had Eich offered a sufficiently circumspect mea culpa, perhaps his job might have been saved.

This is wrong, in my opinion, no matter how one looks at the issue.  What it says is, "if you do not agree with the majority view, you will be purged."  I think that progressive columnist Andrew Sullivan puts it quite succinctly, when he states

Will he now be forced to walk through the streets in shame? Why not the stocks? The whole episode disgusts me - as it should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society. If this is the gay rights movement today - hounding our opponents with a fanaticism more like the religious right than anyone else - then count me out. If we are about intimidating the free speech of others, we are no better than the anti-gay bullies who came before us.

A New York Times editorial questioned whether this action represented "militant tolerance" (sic). 

Sullivan is right, IMHO, and the answer to the Times' question is "yes."

I understand, of course, that Mozilla is a private company.  It exists in a quasi-capitalist economy, and as such, must respond to the demands of its consumers.  It is not a First Amendment or even a  free speech issue as some have framed it.  If Mozlla think that having a chief executive who offends its customers is bad for business, then he should go.

But I would ask those consumers if, indeed, this is the direction we want to go?  Do we want people to feel constrained from expressing their opinions or participating in political action because they might be outed and fired?  Their careers destroyed?  If so, what happens when it's your opinion that is in the minority, or your voice that is unpopular.

The Dixie Chicks, anyone, or has that gone down the memory hole?

The principle of tolerated free speech exists precisely because of unpopular views.  After all, it's damned easy to "defend" views that are popular, or in agreement with our own.

Saying that we like bunnies and chocolate ice cream sundaes is not freedom in any real way.  Sorry.

There is a quote circling the internet attributed to, of all people, Keith Richards.  Richards is not a brilliant man, and I cannot actually verify that he said or wrote it, but it captures my views.

"We don't kick people out of the band because of their politics.  We're not the f***ing Politburo."

Gimme shelter, indeed.

Is Age Really Just a Number

A friend of a friend has a web page in which he is travelling the world, stopping here and there to take pictures of things that strike his fancy.  This past month, he's been on the US east coast - most recently in the New York-New England corridor.  During his trip (he hails from Southern California), he captured a couple of pictures of the gothic buildings on the Yale University campus (founded in 1701).

In the US, 1701 is ancient history.  Of course, when Yale was founded, its chief rival, Harvard, had been in existence for more than a half century.  

The pictures got me to thinking that what is "historic" is in large part of function of where you are.

I lived most of my adult life in the San Francisco Bay Area, in central California.  My first home in San Jose was an American Four Square built in 1901.  The neighbourhood I lived in - Naglee Park - was one of the first fully planned communities in the US, and had many "historic" homes.  My own house, which celebrated its 100th year during my time living there, was considered old in California, coming just after the Victorian era (the neighbourhood had a few "Victorian" buildings, but not many - there is more classic Victorian architecture in nearby Santa Cruz, Los Gatos, and of course, San Francisco itself), and just before the Arts and Crafts movement (the neighbourhood had comparatively many "California Craftsman" bungalows, which proliferated in the 1900-1925 period).

A few years ago, my company moved my family to Princeton, New Jersey. The town of Princeton pre-dates the US (hence the name) by more than 100 years, and there are several homes and buildings in the area build before 1800.  My "old" house in San Jose would of course be considered "vintage" in Princeton, but by no means remarkably so.

Last year, again as a company relocation, my family and I moved to Paris, France.  On Saturday, walking home from taking our dog to a nearby park, we happened across an art nouveau apartment, constructed in 1901.  It looked radically 'new' (hence the name art nouveau), compared to the generally Haussmannien style buildings that made up the lion's share of the block.  Haussmann style buildings are the classic "Parisien" style most Americans imaging when they think of Paris - five-floor, stone-faced buildings with gabled or mansard roofs.  The art nouveau apartment was a stark contrast.  In further fact, when the Paris Metro opened at the turn of the 20th century, most of its signage and stations used the style, and some of these survive even today.  

Of course, Baron Haussmann's work was an early example of urban renewal in the mid to late 19th century in Paris - at the behest of Napoleon III, the city of Paris was modernised by demolishing many of the gothic and Romanesque buildings and narrow streets of the city to create a more modern, open city. 

Haussmann died in 1891.

My own apartment building in Paris was constructed at the end of the ancienne regime at the turn of the end of the 18th century.  

Paris is an old city, but it itself has nothing on Prague in the Czech Republic, which we visited in March.  In Prague, there has not been a Baron Haussmann - even the Soviets did not do much in terms of uprooting and destroying the glorious, old buildings.  The astronomical clock, for example, was constructed starting in 1410.  Prague is almost a living museum piece, with hundreds of gothic and older buildings.  We had dinner one evening in a gothic clock tower that had been retro-fitted to purpose.

German (and also allied) bombs had little impact on the city, which for the most part escaped the unintended urban "renewal" inflicted on the great cities of Europe in the two world wars.

Paris has few remaining gothic buildings - the Notre Dame Cathedral stands out, and last year celebrated its 850th anniversary.