Thugs actually hate classical music.

From the L.A. Review of Books:

Bach at the Burger King
By Theodore Gioia

From Theodore Gioia’s website: “Hailing from a line of writers, Theodore has the dubious distinction of being the second best-known writer named Ted Gioia in his family.” The Gioias are like the Therouxs of the 21st Century.

MAY 17, 2018

AT THE CORNER of 8th and Market in San Francisco, by a shuttered subway escalator outside a Burger King, an unusual soundtrack plays. A beige speaker, mounted atop a tall window, blasts Baroque harpsichord at deafening volumes. The music never stops. Night and day, Bach, Mozart, and Vivaldi rain down from Burger King rooftops onto empty streets.

Empty streets, however, are the target audience for this concert. The playlist has been selected to repel sidewalk listeners — specifically, the mid-Market homeless who once congregated outside the restaurant doors that served as a neighborhood hub for the indigent. Outside the BART escalator, an encampment of grocery carts, sleeping bags, and plastic tarmacs had evolved into a sidewalk shantytown attracting throngs of squatters and street denizens. “There used to be a mob that would hang out there,” remarked local resident David Allen, “and now there may be just one or two people.” When I passed the corner, the only sign of life I found was a trembling woman crouched on the pavement, head in hand, as classical harpsichord besieged her ears.

… Experts trace the practice’s origins back to a drowsy 7-Eleven in British Columbia in 1985, where some clever Canadian manager played Mozart outside the store to repel parking-lot loiterers. Mozart-in-the-Parking-Lot was so successful at discouraging teenage reprobates that 7-Eleven implemented the program at over 150 stores, becoming the first company to battle vandalism with the viola. Then the idea spread to West Palm Beach, Florida, where in 2001 the police confronted a drug-ridden street corner by installing a loudspeaker booming Beethoven and Mozart. “The officers were amazed when at 10 o’clock at night there was not a soul on the corner,” remarked Detective Dena Kimberlin. Soon other police departments “started calling.” From that point, the tactic — now codified as an official maneuver in the Polite Policeman’s Handbook — exploded in popularity for both private companies and public institutions. Over the last decade, symphonic security has swept across the globe as a standard procedure from Australia to Alaska.

Today, deterrence through classical music is de rigueur for American transit systems. …

Baroque music seems to make the most potent repellant. “[D]espite a few assertive, late-Romantic exceptions like Mussorgsky and Rachmaninoff,” notes critic Scott Timberg, “the music used to scatter hoodlums is pre-Romantic, by Baroque or Classical-era composers such as Vivaldi or Mozart.”

Bach, more than anybody else, is the composer of civilization.

… In a strange mutation, classical music devolves from a “universal language of mankind” reminding all people of their common humanity into a sonic border fence protecting privileged areas from common crowds, telling the plebes in auditory code that “you’re not welcome here.”

.. Thus music returns to its oldest evolutionary function: claiming territory. Zoological research suggests that the original function of birdsong was not only attracting mates (as Darwin argued) but also asserting territorial rights. Experiments have demonstrated that birds usually refrain from entering regions where they hear recorded birdsong playing. These aggressive aspects of avian song extended to early humans. Primatologist Thomas Geissman speculates: “[E]arly hominid music may also have served functions resembling those of ape loud calls […] including territorial advertisement; intergroup intimidation and spacing.” The songs have changed, but the melody is the same — Warning: Private Property. Music carves public space into private territory, signaling certain areas are off limits to certain groups through orchestral “intimidation.” And no genre carries more intimidating upper-class associations than classical music.

And so forth and so on.

Anyway, it’s interesting why the better the music the more that lowlifes hate it. My guess is that it’s more than just class markers. I suspect that poor honest workmen don’t mind classical music playing in the background as much as punks loitering with criminal intent can’t stand it.

This could be you!

The New York Times asks for volunteers for a Struggle Session:

Tell Us About a Time You Judged Someone Based on a Stereotype

By The New York Times

May 16, 2018

At Yale University, a dormitory resident called the campus police on a black student who fell asleep in a common room.

At a Starbucks cafe in Philadelphia, an employee called the police on two black men who were waiting for a business associate.

And at a California Airbnb, a neighbor who thought she was witnessing a burglary called the police on three black guests as they were loading their suitcases into a car. The past few weeks have seen a rash of headlines in which people of color who were simply going about their lives were unjustly accused of wrongdoing, and the police were summoned. …

We Want to Hear From You Tell us what happened. How did it end?

Back in the 1990s, I was watching “Sex and the City” with my wife. I said, “That redhead actress playing Miranda, Cynthia Nixon, is obviously a lesbian.” My wife said she hadn’t noticed anything. I replied, “I can just tell.”

A number of years later, Ms. Nixon, now running for governor of New York, announced she was a lesbian.

What, if anything, would you have done differently?

I would have published my hypothesis about Ms. Nixon back then so you would have reason to believe me now.

From WNYC, a public radio station in New York:

Trump Administration Sought Negative Information on Haitians

May 16, 2018 · by Beth Fertig

In the spring of 2017, a high level Trump administration official asked for details on how many Haitians with Temporary Protected Status were on public benefits, how many were convicted of “crimes of any kind,” and how many had been in the country unlawfully before being granted TPS.

When told by staffers that this information wasn’t relevant to granting TPS and that the existing data “wasn’t good,” she continued to press ahead. She explained that the Homeland Security Secretary “is going to need this to make a final decision” that spring on whether to extend TPS for Haitians. They were granted the right to stay in the U.S. after a devastating 2010 earthquake.

There’s nothing more wrong that trying to learn facts about immigrants. As everybody know, they are sacred. They are here to save our souls. To ask questions about which immigrants we should let in and which ones we should keep out is evil. You never saw the Bush or Obama administration wanting to know information about immigrants.

A one-liner:

Why did Germany need Merkel’s million Muslim migrants?

Because assaulting Jews on the street was work Germans would just no longer do.

By the way, I’ve long wondered: why do one-liners have two lines?

AP has deleted a tweet from late Wednesday on Trump’s “animals” comment about immigrants because it wasn’t made clear that he was speaking after a comment about gang members.

— The Associated Press (@AP) May 17, 2018

And, of course, now begins a debate about how Trump is inhuman for calling MS-13 gang members “animals.”

The underlying reality is that the media is all worked up over Trump violating one of their unspoken assumptions: that American citizens should have no say in who gets to immigrate because that would be discrimination, and making a choice about whom you prefer is the Worst Thing in the World.

Granted, MS-13 is a r eductio ad absurdum of this logic, but the logic was always absurd and that didn’t stop them previously.

A PR release via News Wise:

Scientists Analyze First Ancient Human DNA From Southeast Asia
Results reveal three major waves of migration

Released: 16-May-2018 10:35 AM EDT

Source Newsroom: Harvard Medical School

In other words, a PR writeup of a paper from David Reich’s high tech graverobbing factory at Harvard.

Newswise — The first whole-genome analyses of ancient human DNA from Southeast Asia reveal that there were at least three major waves of human migration into the region over the last 50,000 years.

The research, published online May 17 in Science, complements what is known from archaeological, historical and linguistic studies of Southeast Asia, defined as the area east of India and south of China. …

An international team led by researchers at HMS and the University of Vienna extracted and analyzed DNA from the remains of 18 people who lived between about 4,100 and 1,700 years ago in what are now Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar and Cambodia.

The team found that the first migration took place about 45,000 years ago, bringing in people who became hunter-gatherers.

Then, during the Neolithic Period, around 4,500 years ago, there was a large-scale influx of people from China who introduced farming practices to Southeast Asia and mixed with the local hunter-gatherers.

People today with this ancestry mix tend to speak Austroasiatic languages, leading the researchers to propose that the farmers who came from the north were early Austroasiatic speakers.

Vietnamese and Khmer in Cambodia are well-known examples of these Austroasiatic languages.

… The research revealed that subsequent waves of migration during the Bronze Age, again from China, arrived in Myanmar by about 3,000 years ago, in Vietnam by 2,000 years ago and in Thailand within the last 1,000 years. These movements introduced ancestry types that are today associated with speakers of different languages.

The identification of three ancestral populations—hunter-gatherers, first farmers and Bronze Age migrants—echoes a pattern first uncovered in ancient DNA studies of Europeans, but with at least one major difference: Much of the ancestral diversity in Europe has faded over time as populations mingled, while Southeast Asian populations have retained far more variation.

One striking aspect of Europeans is how blended genetically they are, suggesting much less marital discrimination historically in Europe than in most other parts of the world. Europeans are constantly derided for discriminating against the handful of historic outlier populations in Europe, such as Jews and Gypsies, but what is unusual about Europeans is how little structure there is within their population due to old social barriers to intermarriage. Even China has many more population isolates than Europe.

The moral panic du jour is the supposed rise in “tribalism” among people of European descent. This is a particularly popular terror at the moment among pundits who are, for example, Brahmins or Members of the Tribe.

But, of course, Europeans have long been less tribal in mating patterns than just about anybody else, which might be why it can be a lucrative niche job today for elites from more tribalist peoples to get paid to berate Europeans for their purported tribalism.

“People who are nearly direct descendants of each of the three source populations are still living in the region today, including people with significant hunter-gatherer ancestry who live in Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and the Andaman Islands,” said Reich, professor of genetics at HMS and co-senior author of the study. “Whereas in Europe, no one living today has more than a small fraction of ancestry from the European hunter-gatherers.”

Not much evidence of a steppe invader influence on southeast Asians, evidently, as there is in Europeans and South Asians. Southeast Asia is a long, long way from the steppe.

Reich hypothesizes that the high diversity of Southeast Asia today can be partly explained by the fact that farmers arrived much more recently than in Europe—around 4,500 years ago compared with 8,000 years ago—leaving less time for populations to mix and genetic variation to even out.

The new findings make it clear that the multiple waves of migration, each of which occurred during a key transition period of Southeast Asian history, shaped the genetics of the region to a remarkable extent.

“The major population turnover that came with the arrival of farmers is unsurprising, but the magnitudes of replacement during the Bronze Age are much higher than many people would have guessed,” said Reich.

From The Guardian:

What do you say to a four-year-old white supremacist?
Race issues

A child’s uncensored racist commentary is a harsh reminder that while society has moved forward, the book on discrimination isn’t closed yet

Lamees El-sadek

Thu 17 May 2018 06.00 EDT Last modified on Thu 17 May 2018 14.13 EDT

‘The issue is that the same four-year-old boy who does not think brown or black skin is marriageable will likely hold other oppressive prejudices.’

I try to be sympathetic, although not accommodating, to the fact that entire generations of Americans were explicitly taught white skin is superior. But it’s difficult to be sympathetic when those beliefs are expressed by a four-year-old.

It was Friday night, 22 February 2015. My friend Nuha (a Sudanese American) and I (an Egyptian American) walked into a restaurant in Jackson, Mississippi. Both of us are different shades of non-white. The scene could have taken place anywhere in America.

The waitress seated us at the corner of the hibachi table, next to a white man who appeared to be in his mid-30s and his two young sons. As I reached to pull my chair away from the table, the youngest boy, the one sitting adjacent to my seat, looked at me and said: “White skin don’t marry brown skin, but it’s OK, you can sit here anyway.”

I stood frozen, hand still on the chair. I looked at Nuha. “Did we just return to the 1960s?” Nuha echoed: “I think we did.” The father, too, sat frozen: fork mid-air, eyes bulging. No one else was at the table other than the five of us.

We didn’t know what to do. No one teaches you this type of dinner table conversation when they teach you to pass the salt with the pepper. We stood agape, until we processed that we hadn’t hallucinated those words.

From a blog called Everything Studies:

The Nerd as the Norm:

… Using the implied definition in “Field Guide”, here’s a cluster of psychological traits that in my mind make up the nerd pattern:

an interest in things and ideas over people
a concern for correctness over social harmony
a preference for routine and predictability
obliviousness to and/or disregard for social norms and expectations
sensitivity to inconsistency, vagueness and ambiguity
difficulty appreciating the social implications of their actions
subdued emotional expression
a view of conversation as information sharing
a tendency to take statements literally and assume honesty
preference for codified knowledge and rationality over instinct, experience and intuition
strong appreciation for trivia, games and building things
lack of appreciation for appearance, food and exercise

We get the hypothetical anti-nerd personality by reversing this:

an interest in people over things and ideas
a concern for social harmony over correctness
a preference for spontaneity and novelty
sensitivity to social norms and expectations
obliviousness to inconsistency, vagueness and ambiguity
difficulty appreciating the logical implications of their ideas
strong emotional expression
a view of conversation as relationship building and -negotiation
a tendency to take statements as indications of implicit intentions
preference for instinct, experience and intuition over codified knowledge and rationality
strong appreciation for appearance, food and exercise
lack of appreciation for trivia, games and building things

The anti-nerd basically sounds like just about every famous actress ever.

This isn’t just a random bag of traits. Many of them naturally go together and to my eyes these are two coherent clusters. I have no problem matching the anti-nerd pattern to the real world: it describes most people working in media and the arts and to a lesser degree those in social services, education, sales, marketing, PR and politics[1].

“Anti-nerd” is pretty clunky, so I made up another word. I tried to come up with one that sounds right the way “nerd” sounds nerdy (a kind of prickly tenseness). So I guess something with a gooey, shapeless feel? How about “wamb”? Does that sound good?

No. Unless you are Dr. Seuss or Tom Wolfe, nothing you try to make up will ever stick.

I’d say that the opposite of a “nerd” is a “marilyn,” but that won’t stick either.

Nerds are highly male, but they aren’t the only male mode. The Big Man is a very different one. It’s interesting how the Big Man is a mixed bag of nerd and marilyn traits. Go through the two lists with Trump in mind and see what I mean.

From the New York Times:

Why North Korea Is Angered by ‘Libya Model’ in Nuclear Talks

By Megan Specia and David E. Sanger

May 16, 2018

When North Korea suddenly threw a historic summit meeting with the United States into question on Wednesday, it cited — five times — the fate of another country and another leader, half a world away, as an example of why no one should trust American efforts to disarm another nation.

The country was Libya, and the leader was Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, who made a bad bet that he could swap his nascent nuclear program for economic integration with the West. That deal, executed by the Bush administration nearly 15 years ago, is a footnote to American histories of that era.

But it has always loomed large for the North Koreans. …

What happened in Libya?

In 2003, Colonel Qaddafi saw the American invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein, and may well have concluded that he was next. In a lengthy, secret set of negotiations with Britain and the United States, he agreed to voluntarily hand over the equipment he had purchased from A.Q. Khan, a leader of the Pakistani nuclear program. North Korea and Iran had also been customers of Dr. Khan, who was later placed under house arrest after his activities were exposed.

The Libya material was flown out of the country, much of it placed at an American weapons laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn. When President George W. Bush announced the deal, he made a clear reference to North Korea and Iran when he said, “I hope other leaders will find an example” in Libya’s action.

What happened less than a decade later might be at the heart of what Kim Jong-un appears to fear.

The United States and its European allies began a military action against Libya in 2011 to prevent Colonel Qaddafi’s threatened massacre of civilians. President Obama acceded to arguments from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to join the European-led action.

But no one in the Situation Room debated what message the decision to turn on Colonel Qaddafi might send to other countries that the United States was trying to persuade to relinquish their weapons, according to interviews conducted later with more than a half-dozen people engaged in the discussion.

The Libya intervention allowed anti-government rebels to put Colonel Qaddafi on the run, and months later they pulled him from a ditch and killed him. Since then, Libya has devolved into a dysfunctional state. And North Korea has taken notice.

Thank goodness Hillary was the most qualified-to-be-President person ever, or she might really have screwed the pooched back in 2011.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlz3-OzcExI

From Journal of Human Resources:

The Value of Smarter Teachers: International Evidence on Teacher Cognitive Skills and Student Performance*

Eric A. Hanushek, Marc Piopiunik, Simon Wiederhold
March 20, 2018
Abstract

International differences in teacher quality are commonly hypothesized to be a key determinant of the large international student performance gaps, but lack of consistent quality measures has precluded testing this. We
construct country-level measures of teacher cognitive skills using unique assessment data for 31 countries. We find substantial differences in teacher cognitive skills across countries that are strongly related to student
performance. Results are supported by fixed-effects estimation exploiting within-country between-subject variation in teacher skills. A series of robustness and placebo tests indicate a systematic influence of teacher skills as distinct from overall differences among countries in the level of cognitive skills. Moreover, observed country variations in teacher cognitive skills are significantly related to differences in women’s access to high-skill occupations outside teaching and to salary premiums for teachers. …

All empirical strategies consistently indicate a robust positive relationship between teacher cognitive skills and student performance. In the OLS estimation with the full set of controls, we find that a one standard deviation (SD) increase in teacher cognitive skills is associated with 0.10-0.15 SD higher student performance. To put these estimates into perspective, they imply that roughly one quarter of gaps in mean student performance across our 31 countries would be closed if each of these countries were to raise the median cognitive skills of teachers to the level of Finnish teachers (the most skilled teachers by the PIAAC measures).

To put it in a different perspective, that sounds rather like a coupla IQ points. That’s good, but it also shows you the importance of a prudent immigration policy.