Selling Grandma Out

Christopher Hitchens is a keen observer and formidable commentator. Last week, following the uproar over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama spoke of his grandmother having "once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe." Hitchens, in typical dry humor, writes:

You often hear it said, of some political or other opportunist, that he would sell his own grandmother if it would suit his interests. But you seldom, if ever, see this notorious transaction actually being performed, which is why I am slightly surprised that Obama got away with it so easily.

Obama's grandmother is now 85. I confess that I mused about what that phone call from the campaign trail might have been like. "Hi Grandma, how are you? Listen, tomorrow I'm giving a speech and you're in it. Yeah, isn't that great? Oh, hey I'm going to imply you are just a tiny bit racist, but just ignore it. When I'm President I'll buy you some knitting supplies and a bigger scooter. Love Ya!"

Jesus, MLK and the Rev. Wright

Oh boy, another post on race. On Monday, Richmond Times-Dispatch writer Michael Paul Williams tackled the controversy over Obama's ex-pastor Jeremiah Wright, and actually had the balls to equate Wright to Jesus and Martin Luther King Jr. I'm pretty sure that Jesus and MLK preached unity and love for people of all races, while Wright was consumed by hatred and bile. Michael Paul Williams is the T-D's voice of the African-American community, and I occasionally read him to gain some insight on that perspective, but this time I'm floored.

I'm left wondering why it's necessary for one man to have to explain or defend another man's words -- particularly a man most of us hadn't heard of until recently.

Why? We hold candidates for President, the highest office in the country, to a higher standard. We vet them thoroughly, and in this case "another man" happened to be a close spiritual adviser. I agree that Obama has handled the issue well, but don't think that the attention was unwarranted. I wonder if Williams and other African-Americans would be so forgiving if it were found that Bush or Cheney attended a church for the past 20 years that preached wild conspiracy theories about minorities?

America, for so long, denied black Americans fundamental rights. We have made enormous progress. But it appears some people still balk at hearing our anger and reject certain ugly truths about our nation.

Tactically slather on the liberal guilt, then try to claim that Wright was just preaching alternate truths. I'm not buying it. I think that it is perfectly acceptable to criticize policy, fight for a bigger voice in government, and expose the corruption and racism that still exist. I don't think it is acceptable to peddle divisive theories with no basis in fact, like the "HIV was invented by the government" doozy. My family is Catholic, and if I ever hear our priest spew such lazy internet garbage my children will no longer attend that church.

Minority Report

Via Marginal Revolution, Economists Decode Rational Behaviors of Black Women. The article summarizes the recent work of economists Tim Harford (the Undercover Economist), Kerwin Kofi Charles and A. Scott Cunningham on African-American marriage markets and related social consequences. It is a well established fact that African-Americans have experienced a disintegration of the family unit and alarmingly high rates of non-marital births (70%). I've always been interested in this topic, and to many conservatives it would seem to serve as a moral bellwether for society in general. The beginning of this article suggests the root cause is not a moral one:

For policy makers and society in general, who are indoctrinated to believe Black out-of-wedlock births, low marriage rates and single-parent households with all the attendant social ills are a result of a lack of morals entrenched in Black culture, Harford has given a logical explanation: "Marriage markets" where there are large numbers of Black men in prison significantly reduce the lifetime chances of marriage among Black women.

The issue is certainly not new. I did some background reading and found that it had been studied as early as 1965, when sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action". The subject was racially controversial even then. Moynihan went on to become a prominent and respected Democratic Senator. In the past four decades, academics have pondered a number of theories about the destructive shift in African-American family structure:

• women entering the workforce, allowing greater independence
  
• declining work opportunities for African-American males
• expanded welfare programs offering alternative support
• the sexual revolution

Today there is no consensus on any of these theories or their moral implications. The newest thesis advanced by Harford and Cunningham, that the soaring number of incarcerated black men plays a key role, suggests that there is a moral component:

Harford posits Black men who see the competition behind bars have no incentive to marry. The sex imbalance caused by imprisonment allows Black men who are not in jail to enjoy themselves sexually without getting married.

Cunningham explores "the relative shortage of men in Black communities, created largely by the high rates of Black male incarceration." Cunningham hypothesizes "that these high 'sex ratios' allows for men with tastes for sexual diversity to form concurrent partnerships, as well as affects on their condom use.

The rate of imprisonment causes scarcity of marriageable males, which tilts bargaining power heavily in favor of the remaining pool of men, encouraging promiscuity and other risky sexual behavior, which raises STD rates and non-marital births. After reading this, my thought was to ask if there are other subpopulations where this behavior has been observed? One that immediately came to mind were the post-WWII populations in Germany and Japan. Surely they had lost significant percentages of men in their prime. Did cultural or moral restrictions change the outcome, or were they not analogous in some other way?

Superdelicate & Undemocratic

Many Obama supporters would like to rewrite the Democratic party rules. Their candidate holds a narrow lead over Hillary Clinton in the delegate count at this point, so they look to the superdelegates to simply affirm the voice of the people. This self-serving spin on the issue is understandable, but if the superdelegates are to be constrained in this manner they could logically be removed from the equation entirely. Their whole reason for existence would be null and void, and they most certainly would not be super.

In fact, the rules the Democrats adopted were expressly designed to inject a non-democratic element into the selection process. At some point in the early 1980's the Democrats designed a formula that awarded 20% of the vote to party bigwigs, thinking that they would help guide the nomination with their superior vision of the long-term goals. It was supposed to avoid another nasty convention battle like the one that erupted in Chicago in 1968. Of course, they did not have better luck in the Eighties, nominating spectacular losers like Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis.

The Democrats seem to be headed for yet another trainwreck in 2008. The vote is a matter of some delicacy for the superdelegates, who would need a compelling reason to overturn popular opinion on the matter, lest they anger the supporters of the losing candidate. Still, they are not bound to the democratic result by any law. Dr Stanley Fish blogged about the issue recently at the NYTimes. The next time an Obamamaniac complains about "undemocratic" rules, whip this list out:

Anti-democratic elements are everywhere in our political system. The presidential veto is undemocratic. The rules governing filibusters and the closing off of debate are undemocratic. The procedural devices by means of which floor leaders or committee chairmen can prevent issues from coming to a vote are undemocratic. The fact that Rhode Island and California have two senators each is undemocratic. The appointment of senators by governors in the wake of a death or a resignation is undemocratic. The presidential line of succession is undemocratic. The fact that a vice president who has not been elected to the senate presides over it and can cast a deciding vote is undemocratic. Judicial review – the practice by which the Supreme Court invalidates laws passed by the people’s representatives – is undemocratic.

Oil Honesty

John McCain was interviewed by Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes Sunday:

"What do you do for the person who just saw gasoline go from three and a quarter to three fifty on its way to $4?" Pelley asked.

"I would love to tell you that I have an immediate answer for that. And I don't. The only way we are going to fix it is to eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. We've got to have a crash program, a all out effort," McCain said. "But, I can't give you straight talk and tell you that tomorrow I can change the price of a gallon of gas."

An honest man in Washington! Compare and contrast this with Hillary Clinton.

Oil Entitlement

Hillary Clinton was stumping in Hattiesburg, Mississippi recently. Here is an excerpt:

"Oil hit a $104 a barrel," said Sen. Clinton. "The president said 'I sure wish they'd drop the price' and they said 'No, we won't, Mr. President.' And he said he was disappointed."

Sen. Clinton continued, "I've got to tell you you won't see me holding hands with the Saudis. You'll see me holding them accountable for what they do to the oil price and to our country."

Hold them accountable. Uh, actually Canada supplies more oil than Saudi Arabia, and neither is close to cornering the U.S. import market. Do Democrats actually believe this conspiracy stuff? Oil is a fungible commodity, and the price is set by a world market. Hillary and Obama both lamented the Bush administration's lack of tact on foreign policy. Now, it seems she's saying that we should twist arms to manipulate the outcome of free market trade in our favor.

I'm seeing a pattern here. Democrats think that the solution to everything is a new entitlement. Need healthcare? By golly, government will give it to you. Wages too low? We'll just pass a law saying you get a "living wage." Oil too expensive? Government will make it cheaper by dictating to those dastardly foreigners! No thought is given to the fact that all of these are economic exchanges, people trading goods and services for mutual gain. Strong-arming the Saudis isn't going to change anything. The world oil supply cannot be changed much by an angry woman in the Whitehouse. In the long run, oil demand driven by growth in China, India and all parts of the world will continue to rise.

Code Monkey Getting Old

Several months ago I ran across a blog rant titled "Why a career in computer programming sucks" by an aging CS geek. While I don't agree with some of his points, I found that the kernel of his first paragraph really held some truth:

Computer programming is a job that’s heavily dependent on temporary knowledge capital. It’s temporary because the powers that be keep changing the languages and tools that programmers need to do their jobs. In nearly all other professions, knowledge capital increases as you grow older because you keep learning more about your field. But in computer programming, the old knowledge becomes completely obsolete and useless.

I've been in CS for more than 11 years now, and every time I've changed jobs I found myself scrambling to learn new tools, operating systems, and libraries. This is despite the fact that I've intentionally steered my career choices within the narrow bounds of computational science and engineering on Unix, using C and C++ as my languages of preference. I started out developing on little purple and blue Irix workstations, but when SGI execs flew their company into the ground I migrated to Sun. On both of those systems I eventually became proficient enough to assist in system administration, as well as Rational Clearcase administration.

In my next job much of that knowledge was useless, and I had to quickly learn Redhat Linux, CVS and a variety of obscure cluster utilities. Suddenly, the code I wrote was now Perl, not C++. Today I'm still using Linux, but it's Fedora. Patchadd became Up2date, which became Yum. The clusters I use have completely different queuing utilities, so I'm starting from scratch again. I'm back writing C++ but it's Visual Studio on Windows XP. Raw OpenGL has given way to OpenSceneGraph. Motif GUIs are obsolete, so I use FLTK or another cross-platform toolkit these days. You get the picture.

My jobs have all been interesting and I like to learn, but sometimes I wonder how many more of these paradigm shifts I can weather. Will I be able to pick up C-Plus-Plus-Cubed when I'm 49? Even though some of these technologies are similar, i.e. flavors of Unix like Linux/Solaris/Irix share many common commands, it's the last 10% (the patch administration, dark corners of the software development tools, and system libraries) that takes a couple years to master. My Dad is a Mechanical Engineer. He is 70 and he still uses the same solid mechanics equations and techniques that he learned in 1960.

The author tries to score a few more hits on the CS profession, but most of these fall flat:

• Low prestige - I don't care about prestige, my pay has been relatively good and the engineers and other coworkers have generally treated me respectfully. I've accepted that I'm a nerd.
• Outsourcing - Outsourcing and economic competition are a fact of life in the global economy, especially for ethereal quantities like software. Get a security clearance, defense-related software development cannot be outsourced.
• Project management sucks too - Yes, but somebody has to do it. This is certainly not limited to software or IT projects.
  
• Working conditions - Not that bad. I've had some pretty good (albeit shared) offices. I also generally get to order my own workstations with custom hardware.
  

The final recommendation compares the lowly IT position unfavorably with a career in law. But a JD is a graduate degree, wouldn't it be more fair to compare with a M.S. or PhD in Computer Science? Armed with a graduate degree, a CS major is more likely to have specialized skills that convey better job security, working conditions and prestige.

At least until he gets too old to learn...

Election Demographics

Ann Coulter on the Vermont primary:

Obama won Vermont, but that was earlier in the day. Exit polls indicate he took the black vote. Literally. There was just the one.

Having grown up in Vermont, I can vouch for this. I had one African-American classmate in junior high. His name was not Token.

Not So Imperial

I enjoy Steve Chapman, he's a good conservative (some would say libertarian) writer who isn't afraid to tangle with both Democrats and Republicans. I might be a libertarian myself if it weren't for my hawkish views on foreign policy. Chapman recently wrote about the expanding powers of the Presidency and his concern that Bush and those who will follow him show little sign of relinquishing those powers:

Imperial presidency may be here to stay

He acknowledges that Bush isn't the first President to push the envelope, citing Bill Clinton as an example from across the aisle. Surely, though, Chapman must know that this is a battle with a history at least as old as the Constitution itself? Some Presidents who've overstepped the line: Truman and the steel mills, um... NIXON! Give me five minutes on Google and I'll have a list going back to George Washington.

Let's review two of the examples of abuse he lists for Bush, the FISA/wiretapping controversy and the detainment of enemy combatants with U.S. citizenship. Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats currently have an ongoing fight with Bush over the renewal of the Protect America Act. They have deadlocked over giving telecom companies immunity from lawsuits. On the enemy combatant issue, in 2004 the Supreme Court ruled against Bush on Yaser Hamdi's detainment case.

This is not to imply that I agree with everything the Bush Administration has done in these matters. I don't. I'm just pointing out that the give and take between the three branches of government is alive and well, just as the Founding Fathers intended. From my point of view the Executive, Legislative and Judicial have all expanded their powers. The balance remains the same. The idea that contentious political issues like these would be resolved over a cup of tea is naive.