Author: Jacques Delacroix

A Racist Old Man. So?

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , , , , , , ,

A rich old white man instructs one of his black employees in private not to be photographed with black men. The black men include other employees he pays millions of dollars for their skills. (I have no quarrel with this fact; if he didn’t, others would. There is a real market here.) The employee so instructed normally provides the old man with lots of face among other rich old geezers because she is beautiful. She contributes to his image, he thinks. She may also sell him some affection. The old guy is 80. Who would bet she provides much more than affection? Part of the deal is that he is allowed to refer to her as his “girlfriend.” Nobody is fooled, I would think.

For my overseas readers,: I refer to the owner of the Los Angles Clippers, an average basketball team that is part of the National Basketball Association (NBA). The old man’s name is “Sterling.” The NBA official who punishes him is named “Silver.” Makes it sound like a family quarrel. And it would be if the press were doing its job. See below.

The media explodes in outrages when those few words are leaked. The manufactured scandal occupies the best part of a day of news plus some. Some African-Americans are permanently in a rage anyway (for reasons I understand, I think.) Other African-Americans find it expedient, political to be also in rage whether they feel any rage or not. What are the white liberal media figures – public friends of racial minorities all – supposed to do? Does anyone think they might have stated, “No big deal, boring,” and gone back to covering real news?

I, for one, am not outraged. I am bored. Why should I care about what instructions an employer gives one his employees who participates in this shaky image building? Why should I care when his own black employees, more than 2/3 black themselves don’t say a thing about the alleged verbal atrocity?

If I did care, what right would I have to do or even say anything? If they are offended, the man’s highly coveted black players and their offended white teammates can walk away, go on strike. Offended players on other teams can refuse to play with the Clippers. The paying public can boycott the team all it wants if it’s scandalized.

Instead, the Grand Poopah of the National Basketball Association – to which the Clippers belong – forbids the old man from attending his own team games forever and fines him 2.5 million dollars. Poopah Silver’s entourage makes loud public statements about forcing him to sell his team.

What is the Poopah going to do if the old man stands his grounds about the fine and flips him one? Does he have a private geriatric jail into which to throw the old man? It all sounds to me like a private confiscation of private property and a gangsterish restraint of trade. That’s a mafia-like action.

I hope the old man fights back and sues. I hope I am on the jury.

Yes, fascism is in the air. But it does not come from a rich old guy with a mind floating in another era and associated prejudices. We learn the next day that US GPD growth for the first quarter of 2014 is 1/10 of 1 %. That’s a French level. President Obama’s policies are all failing, domestic and foreign. The Democratic Party if facing congressional elections in the fall. Many Democrats are running scared. The party needs to draw attention to something else, to anything at all. The mass media are obliging as usual. Panem et circenses and the panem is  stale.

New Book

Jacques Delacroix Books, Current Events , ,

The electronic version of my book is up on Amazon.com. (The print version will soon follow.)

I Used to Be French: an Immature Autobiography

is live in the Kindle Store at: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JY0G3SA

Share it with your friends. Fling it at your enemies!

Voter Fraud; Women as People

Jacques Delacroix Politics , , , , , , , ,

The Democratic Party is strongly opposed to voter identification. It would only mean that people would have to do the same thing to vote  that they have to do to catch a plane, obtain a driver’s license or open a bank account. In the past, they pointed to cases of hardship such as invalids, very old people etc  for whom it would be arduous or impossible to perform the simple tasks associated  with getting an ID. Point well taken. No citizen should be deprived of his right to vote because of ill health and such.

When a  proposal is made to pick up such hardship cases and to take them to be registered free of charge at a time of their convenience, the Democratic Party is still opposed, just  as a opposed. When I vote in my 90% Democrat town (just a guess, maybe it’s only 85%), I always make it a point to show my ID. The poll officials react to my gesture with frank horror. Why?

Nothing stops the Democratic Party from declaring that it would accept voter ID if such and such precautions were taken to ensure that no one is disenfranchised. It does not. Why?

Inescapable conclusion, it seems to me:

1 The Democratic Party benefits more from voting fraud than does the Republican Party;

or, 2 The Republican Party is more respectful of the fundamental constitutional  process of voting than is the Democratic Party.

Am I missing something?

Separate topic:

A youngish woman parks her car in front of my house frequently. I have good reasons to think she is a social worker. There is a window sticker on the car  that says “Mills Alumna.”

Mills College used to be a college for rich girls in the East Bay of San Francisco. Some years ago, it started admitting males. Digression: What kind of guys seek admission to a women’s college? My guess is that the lot would be evenly divided between cold hearted predators and closeted gays.

Anyway, the car also sports a bumper sticker that proclaims: “Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.”

Good point but, frankly, what’s the point? Is there any segment of opinion in America that denies this self-evidence? Who is this young woman trying to persuade? Or is it just another shotgut guilt tripping: I am a man; I think women are people; I have always thought so. (After all, I was reared by a mother.) But maybe, there are bad, ignorant men somewhere, maybe even in my neighborhood, who really believe that women are not human beings. Bang, guilty by association! Again!

If at least the bumper sticker were in Arabic, or in Farsi.

La France et Apple

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , , , , , , , , ,

Les réserves financières

de la France: 30 milliards de dollars
de la Russie: 400 milliards de dollars
d’Apple: 159 milliards de dollars.

J’ai enseigné pendant vingt-cinq ans au beau milieu de Silicon Valley. J’y ai gardé des copains, bien sur. De plus, j’habite à Santa Cruz, Silicon Valley-Plage pour ainsi dire.

Il y a de plus en plus de jeune Français bien diplômés à Silicon Valley. Je n’en n’ai pas fait le rescencement. J’en entend parler et je les reconcontre par hasard. Il me semble qu’
on pense beaucoup de bien d’eux ici, de leur niveau de compétence, de leurs habitudes de travail.

On est bien obligé de se demander pourquoi ils ne sont pas en France ou la charcuterie est très supérieure et les vacances beaucoup plus longues qu’aux Etats-Unis.

Vu d’ici, on dirait que c’est la débandade de la formidable et radieuse colonie de vacances que se sont octroée les Français vers 1970. Je suis ce que je peux depuis ici de l’actualité politique française. J’ai l’impression qu on n’aborde jamais le grand problème de fond: l’état nounou n’est pas viable. On ne discute que telle ou telle reformette, telle ou telle diminution des telle out telle prestation sociale.

Le président de la grande banque d’investissement Lazare frères présentait l’autre jour son livre sur les réformes à l’émission que j’estime assez, “On n’est pas couché.” Une de premières choses qu’il dit c’ est qu’il est  “de gauche”. Qu’est-ce que cela veut dire?

On se croirait en 1946, comme si personne n’avait rien appris en soixante-huit ans. Misère!

Le capitalisme marche très bien quand on le laisse. C’est une vraie machine à fabriquer des emplois. Quand on l’empêche de faire son boulot, les gens fuient, à commencer par les meilleurs, comme on pourrait s’y attendre si on s’autorisait à y penser.

Fighting Obama!

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , , , , ,

We discovered something important a few days ago about the federal Bureau of Land Management. (Many Americans also discovered the existence of the Bureau of Land Management on the same occasion.) Anyway, the BLM, as it is fondly known in the American West, has snipers in its ranks. For some of our overseas friends: a sniper is a specially trained rifleman or woman with a super-powerful weapon who can kill someone at long distance, often with a single shot. The discovery took place on the occasion of a confrontation about a few hundred cattle between the BLM and the cattle’s owners.

That A.. H… Putin had better not try anything illegal or immoral to American cows. The dictator of Russia is now reconsidering his aggressiveness. The Obama administration wins another one!

Are GMOs Bad For Me?

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , , , , , , ,

I am vaguely perceiving that there is a battle brewing someplace about labeling food containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs). It happened in California before. The initiative lost by referendum.

Of course, I am almost always in favor of more information for the public (even when it’s likely to be used for mischief). However, I can’t avoid wondering why sellers of food products don’t just do it on their own to gain a marketing advantage over their competitors. Not getting an answer to this question, I am wondering whether this is not just another case of a minority using the power of the state to impose its views (by force) on the indifferent majority. Keep in mind that this is what the word “law” means: If you break it, you expose yourself to official violence.

I honestly don’t know what’s wrong with GMOs. I only know that they (one?) allowed for a reduced use of pesticides. This has to be a good thing because exposure to large amounts of pesticides is bad for the health of producers and handlers. (I doubt today’s pesticides cause much harm to consumers but I always wash fruits and salad components.) I invited a local libertarian who addressed the topic on Facebook to write an essay for this blog explaining the answer. That was only a couple of days ago. He has not responded. I repeat the invite, to anyone.

What am I supposed to do, I, simple citizen and consumer not especially well equipped to ascertain if GMOs are a threat or not to my beloved? As I keep telling you, fortunately, I don’t necessarily have to go to graduate school yet three or four more years to get an idea. Instead, I look at the proponents I know.

In my area, the people who fight GMOs are mostly (but not only) foofoo heads who overlap a great deal, I think, with those who cancel erotically promising dates on the basis of astrology. They are largely the same people who advocate policy which, taken together, would take us back to what Karl Marx called, “the idiocy of village life,” with a life expectancy hovering around thirty five and a 30% infant mortality They, themselves, wouldn’t survive there more five weeks or less, by the way, because they are too coddled, too self-indulgent, and not alert enough. The wolves about which they keep crying now and here really lived then on the outskirts of such villages. They would gobble up anti-GMOist for a snack.

All the same, I keep an open mind. Anyone who wants to post a comment on GMOs can be sure it will not be censored or modified in any way. I will also consider with great interest any essay on this topic for this blog. Anyone can also send me reading assignments. I will post them but I will not read them unless the sender explains clearly why I should, beginning with the source. (See the standards I apply here)

Unequal Pay: For Women Only – Part Two (There really is a Part One.)

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , , , , , ,

Editor’s note: this old essay by Dr Delacroix might be worth reading in tandem with this article. It’s titled “Sasquatch and Liberal Academe.”

I agreed in Part One of this essay that there may be a small average pay difference of five percentage points between employed American women and men. It’s possible that even after you take into account all the facts mentioned before, lower education, less seniority, lesser presence in well paid industries, women, on the average, earn 95 cents on men’s one dollar. (That’s also on the average.) I agreed that this may be evidence of discrimination against women in the work place. But is it the obvious explanation? Is it the only explanation? Is it even credible at all?

There is a reason this is an essay for women only. I want to help you evoke forbidden topics, topics never or rarely approached in the social sciences or in the newspapers. It’s time to muster everything you know about your sisters, ladies; we are going into taboo territory!

I am not a woman myself but I have had occasion in my 30-year teaching career to observe hundreds of women. I have also observed women in various workplaces in two countries. What follows is not (NOT) supported by any study.* It’s a thinking exercise about what I suspect you know. See if it jibes.

Female students obtain better grades than male students in college. However, they don’t get to good grades the same way. Males take more risks, on the average. In my observation, for example, they are many times more likely to wing it than their female fellow students. In general (on the average), males are more forceful, much more likely than women to demand their due (even when nothing is due to them at all).

If you don’t ask for a raise, often, you don’t get one. If you are timid about organizing, you will earn less than those who are well represented by unions. Is it possible that women, on the average…. (Finish the sentence) and that this would account for the remaining possible five percentage pay differential between women workers and their male counterparts. Is it possible?

I have personally seen a few cases of discrimination against women workers. They consisted in creating work conditions that would make it difficult for the targeted employee to produce a work performance that would make raises likely. (Poisoning the water.) As I said, I have only seen a few cases perhaps fewer than ten. Every single time, the discriminator was a female supervisor. Perhaps, my limited experience is atypical. Or is it? What do you think? Do women in positions of power ever persecute other women? Often? Seldom? Never?

Now, I want to talk briefly about productivity in a manner that is especially proscribed in polite society. I think I have observed hundreds of time that women in a group with an assigned task spend large amounts of time in activities that seem unrelated to the task. Women tend to socialize at length where it’s not called for. The socialization often includes plotting against one another and excluding some. Perhaps the socializing is a kind of disarmament conference without which work cannot even proceed. Again, those are a subjective observations possibly based on women who are somehow different, not representative, different from the average. What do you think?

Here is what I observed when teaching, specifically. Most of what follows is based on teaching the same, clearly elite class every winter for 22 years. The classes were small and they involved important group projects. The projects were done mostly in class. The sample these 22 classes give us is obviously biased, unrepresentative. It’s biased because it was composed of students markedly superior to the run-of-the-mill student. The women in that class were probably more productive than most female undergraduates (and than most male undergraduates as well).

Here is what I saw: Insofar as it’s observable, groups of males engaged in a collective task, achieved the same results as women with considerably less time expenditure than women. It’s as if a straight A cost guys three hours, and women nine hours. (Those numbers are subjective, of course. I am holding myself back; I wouldn’t be surprised if the gap in time investment were wider.)

Is it possible that my observation is not in some way nullified by bias? Is it possible that what I think I have observed in connection with the time cost of doing something is somehow related to the earlier observation that women tend to socialize when doing so does not appear to contribute to the accomplishment of the task ? You decide.

My informal observations are surely not (NOT) equivalent to a formal, rigorous study. This does not mean that I should keep quiet about them. If they don’t ring a bell with your experience, ignore them. If they do, maybe it’s worth thinking about alternative explanations to the widespread belief in the general existence of uncalled for, arbitrary discrimination against female workers. Keep in mind that, at this point, we are talking about a five percentage point differential; we are considering 95 cents on the dollar, not the president’s 77 cents.

Now, let me switch angles of vision a little bit. The actual, residual difference between women’s and men’s remunerations after you have accounted for the obvious factor, (Part One of this essay.) is so imprecise that it leaves open the possibility that women earn more than men in the same jobs.** Again, I am frankly wading into the subjective and I am inviting you to wade in with me.

During thirty years of teaching, there were about ten times when I fielded female students’ complaints that they were discriminated against in some fashion just for being female. That was always in my role as an adviser rather than as a classroom teacher.

Every time, I would ask the complaining student if it were not possible that she was angry because her male counterparts seemed to be getting grades they did not deserve according to her judgment. I will let you guess what answers I received to this particular query.

Then, I would look the student straight in the eyes and I would propose the following hypothetical:

Suppose you are completely right, suppose the instructor discriminated against you simply for being female, let me ask you: Has it ever happened in your whole life that you got an undeserved pass just because you were a girl?

I did not have the presence of mind to keep exact tabs, of course, but I can’t remember a single time when the conversation did not dissolve into a smile!

Adding subjectivity to subjectivity, doing it consciously, I would guess that male instructors by and large prefer female students. They are less likely than males to be grossly disruptive; they are nicer; they are more polite; they smell better. (It matters in a room of forty in June.) Female students also often flirt with the teacher in unconsciously charming ways. (Disclosure: I am married to a former student.)

Would these behaviors tend to cause male instructors to treat female students negatively? Women instructors?

Maybe this is all my own private self-delusion. Maybe this preference for women employees does not exist in the workplace, as a far as male supervisors and male decision makers are concerned. Or maybe, I am not that deluded, or maybe males in positions of power have a built-in preference for female subordinates as much as they do for female students. How surprising would that be?

Take my case, for example: My mother was a woman, my daughter is a woman, my granddaughter is female, my sisters are female. They all love me, without exception. I addition, I am married to a woman. She cooks for me, very well, almost every day; she does my laundry (even when I don’t want her to); I talk with her more than I do with anyone else on earth. When times are tough, she is always, every single time, in my corner. I don’t want to get X-rated but it’s also true that 100% of my sexual satisfaction, in my whole life, was somehow connected to women. (Like many California men, I also have an ex-wife somewhere but she does not cause me any grief. I am lucky; she just moved on instead of exacting a just revenge.)

Is my experience different from that of most or all men? Did they have male mothers? Were their sisters guys? Are they all married to other men who love them and spoil them? Is a very high percentage homoerotic? You see my point.

Is it possible also that a lifetime bath of estrogen predisposed me to a positive bias toward women or, is it more likely that all these good treatment left me prejudiced to the point where….

…to the point where I would take care- with someone else’s money, most of the time – to pay female employees only 95 cents when I pay their men colleagues a full dollar for the same work?

Or, alternatively, is it possible that my unchecked, unthoughtful, mindless tendency is to treat them better and to pay them more, say, $1.05 to males’ $1.00 ?

When you take a sketch and you take the trouble to draw in all the details, often suddenly, you come to see that you misunderstood or mis-perceived the meaning of the original sketch.

Three big questions to finish.

If the good research (that I did not do) confirmed my speculation that women may earn on the average one dollar and five cents ($1.05) to men’s one dollar would there be big demonstrations to protest the disparity? Would anyone have the nerve to initiate legislation to close the pay gap by force? What do you believe?

Discrimination against women in any way, shape or form has been illegal in this country since 1964. Is there any one who thinks that if legislation has been inoperative for fifty years, unable to correct (alleged) pay discrimination against women, more legislation under a weakened president, imposed on a deeply divided nation will now solve the problem? This is a real question. Please, answer it in your own mind.

And if it were possible to pay women less for equal work, with the same quality of workplace attention, the same performance, the same results, isn’t it true that a rational hiring policy would require discrimination against men? If this were true, all employers would try to limit labor costs by hiring only women until there were no more women available for hiring in the relevant pool. Or is there some magic male solidarity that trumps everything, including business competition and the search for profits?

By the way, the last time I looked, in the USA, women had most of the wealth and most of the votes. (If it’s not true anymore, I don’t worry; someone will surely correct me.) Why don’t women, on the average, use their votes and their financial resources to erase the pay differential, to turn the 77 cents into at least one dollar?

Here is my stake in all this. First, I detest government policy based on lies and on deviousness. Second, my daughter is rearing her own daughter alone. The last thing I want is that my adored granddaughter should be cheated because her mother is being short-changed on her paycheck merely for being a woman. Are other men different? Am I a brilliant and inimitable exception?

Some stories have been told so long and so often that people don’t think of subjecting them to even the slightest of reality checks. The 77 cents on the dollar story does not stand up to scrutiny. It’s a purely political story designed to keep alive an artificial sense of grievance in an important segment of the electorate.

The 77 cents on the dollar story exploits women. It’s insulting.

A good tale to finish, the second funny thing that any feminist ever said:

Ginger Roger was Fred Astaire’s dancing performer for twenty or thirty years. The couple dominated movie screens in the forties and fifties and beyond. Fred was more famous than his partner, Ginger. At one point, irritated by the fuss over her partner, Ginger is said to have declared,

“I did everything Fred did backward and in high heels!”

* Such studies are practically proscribed in academia. If they were not, their findings would be boycotted by major journals. Political correctness reigns where it shouldn’t exist at all. Nevertheless, there are a few brave academic researchers who venture where no one is supposed to tread. Most are women.

** In the early 2000s, black women earned more, on average than black men. The case I pose to you is thus not completely absurd or imaginary. I don’t know if this disparity continued after the crisis beginning in 2008. It does not matter. I just wanted to impress on you that women sometimes earn more than men.

Boys’ Toys, Girls’ Toys

Jacques Delacroix Liberty ,

I spent the better part of last weekend wrestling with refrigerators. My blood is on the bannister to prove it. I won eventually, me and three strong, smart Mexican men. (Of course, I had asked to see their papers.)

My wife wanted to replace our old refrigerator with another old refrigerator. She had her way, naturally.

By Sunday evening the new old fridge was humming reassuringly. The next day, I opened its door to get something. “Stop it,” said my wife, “some refrigerators are for men and women, this one is only for women.”

Would I make this up? Do I even have the talent?

Unequal Pay: For Women Only – Part One.

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , , , , , ,

American women who work for wages or a salary, on the average, earn 77 cents when American men earn one (1) dollar, also on the average.

You have to be careful of averages. They are not naturally vicious but they are often used to deceive. That is, people routinely overestimate themselves and don’t slow down enough to understand what they are seeing and hearing when an average is mentioned.

Here is a little practice exercise: Suppose all women who lack education beyond high school quit work completely. (They might go on welfare or they might find hard working husbands, maybe currently illegal immigrants – Not a bad idea actually, if I say so myself!) If this happened, what would become to the 77 cents on the dollar?

(The answer is several paragraphs below.)

Consider also that “on the average” means, of course, that there are many women who earn more money than many men, women in government, for example. Take the female toll-takers at the Golden Gate Bridge, for example. They earn about $100,000 a year for very low-skill work. They thus earn much more than male cable-television technicians who do things most of us don’t even know enough to think about. (There are female cable technicians of course, but that’s not the point, right now.) That’s compatible with the 77 cents on the dollar figure.

That women earn on the average 77 cents when men earn a full dollar speaks of rampant and rank discrimination against women where it matters most, the workplace. Or does it?

Below are some relevant facts that all of President Obama’s economic employers know. I mean that the facts are so well-known that it’s inconceivable that they don’t know them.

  • Fact: On the average, working women have less education and less seniority than men. That’s on the average.

As it happens levels of pay, in many industries depend largely on seniority (rightly or wrongly). Access to the best paid jobs in a given industry also depends much on level of education. Access to superior and well-paid jobs also often depends on achieving seniority. That’s a double-whammy on low education!

Answer to the question near the beginning of this essay: If women who had no college dropped out of the workforce, female workers would, on the average, suddenly have higher educational achievement. Then, the average pay of women nation-wide would go up. If all the women with no college education dropped out of the workforce, the 77 cents on the dollar would immediately disappear. I don’t know what the resulting number would be; it might be 80 cents on the dollar, or 90 cents on the dollar. What is certain is that it would be a higher, better number.

Repeat: If all the low-skill jobs requiring a modest level of education disappeared all of a sudden, if all the women holding such jobs lost their jobs, the average pay of women, including as compared to me, would immediately go up.

This is not some sort of foggy speculation, it’s an arithmetic certainty.

Similarly, if more women in the workforce had high seniority, the average pay of women nation-wide would also be higher than 77 cents on men’s dollar. Here too, it’s a mathematical certainty although I don’t know by how much the figure would change. This is all by way of remembering what averages mean.

  • Fact: Working women concentrate in economic sectors where wages are historically low.

That’s low wages for both men and women. Sometimes, there are no understandable reason why pay is low in such sectors. Often it’s a sort of historical accident connected with an early union activity in those sectors of the economy. Sometimes there are good direct reasons for the high pay in sectors where women are rare. Blue collar work on oil platforms and commercial fishing are both examples of activities where few women are found. They are also dangerous activities. They are also physically strenuous activities. In those two particular sectors, pay is much higher than it is say, in the health industries, or in retail where many women areemloyed. This means that both men and women employed in fishing and on oil, platforms earn more money than either men or women in many other industries.

The average lower pay of women nationally is at least in part the result of their low participation in these highly paid industries. If there were equal numbers of women in those high-pay sectors as there are men, the national average pay of women would be higher than 77 cents on men’s dollar.

  • Fact: Among those who work forty hours a week or more (“full time”), men work much longer hours than women on the average.

It’s often the case that, other things being equal, those who work longer hours earn more money than those who work shorter hours. They earn more for the total number of hours they work. (They may also be promoted faster but that’s not my point here; one thing at a time.) Incidentally, this is true both for base workers, such as assembly line workers and sales associates, and for so-called “exempt personnel,” personnel in supervisory and management positions. The mechanisms are different, union rules, formal pay scales and government-mandated requirements (think overtime pay), in one case, alleged “merit pay,” on the other. The results are similar: Work more; earn more.

Women earn less money than men on the average than men because they spend less time at work than men do.

Now, close your eyes and let me describe two imaginary workers. One has 25 years of seniority and three years of post-high school education. The same worker is employed in mining. Over the course of a year, this worker puts in 46 hours a week on average.

The second worker has one year of junior college and has been on the same job for eight years. That worker’s occupation is in one of the health industries. Calculated over one year, this second worker puts in 40 hours plus twenty minutes a week on average.

Now, keep your eyes closed and forbid yourself from stereotyping. You don’t know the sex of either imaginary worker. Keep in mind that they may well be of the same sex, for example (for example). One or the other, or something else…

Which of the two fully employed workers do you think earns the most money in one year in actuality?

Which do you think should earn the most money according to your own standard of fairness?

You get my drift?

It turns out that when studies compensate for these important factors, American women’s remunerations are about the same as men’s. That’s still on the average. I wouldn’t be too surprised if you could find a female fisherman with 25 years seniority and a doctorate who earns less money than her husband, a high school dropout who works in a candle shop. The relevant numbers are simply too small to affect comparisons of national averages.

Yes, women earn less than men but it’s not a case of unequal pay for equal work. It’s a case of unequal pay for unequal work.
It’s worth asking why women would heap upon themselves so many of the factors that result in comparatively low pay? I mean low education, low seniority, and working in less generously paying sectors.

You probably have your own hypotheses (plural) about why this is. Let me help with an additional fact:

  • Fact: Women who are not married, have never been married, and have no children earn as much as men. Are you really surprised?

Many other studies confirm what we all already know: Women are the primary caretakers of both home and children by a long, long shot.

The care of children interferes vigorously with women’s ability to reach for higher paid jobs, and with their attention to their paid work, and to their ability to work long hours. It’s that simple.

Women workers fail to accumulate seniority because they quit working earlier and more frequently than men. They tend to move in and out of the workforce; that’s inimical to the accumulation of seniority, of course.

Women workers have less education than men workers, on the average, for slightly (only slightly) more complex reasons. At the lower end of the pay-scale women who work outside the home are not equivalent to men workers in general. For one thing, many low-paid working women, and increasing numbers of them, are single women raising their children alone. But we know that women with lower educational status are more likely to find themselves in that situation than women with more formal education.

Married women with children have on the average, more education than single women with children. Such married women are less likely to be in the workforce at all . Instead, their husbands are. Their husbands’ higher education and seniority enter into the national statistics. Their non-working wives’ also high numbers don’t because they are not in the labor force, precisely.

If all married women joined the labor force, the gap in education between employed men and employed women on average would shrink. It might even vanish altogether.

That would raise women’s average pay nation-wide, although the fate of poor ly educated, low seniority, women employed in badly paying sectors would not improve one bit.

If all married women joined the labor force and stayed in it, employed women’s seniority would equal men’s after a while. That would raise women’s average pay nation-wide.

The pay of women with low seniority would….
(Complete the sentence; this is a test!)

Conclusions:

Those who claim the 77 cents on the dollar figure are comparing apples and oranges.

Those in government who do this know the facts. Why are they doing it?

Now, once you have taken account all facts above, the things we already know about different ways in which women and men deal with work, women on the average still earn a little less than men. The difference is much smaller than the difference between 77 and 100 (77 cents and one dollar). Nevertheless, as I write, I think it’s possible to argue that this small difference – maybe something like 5 percentage points – proves some degree of pay discrimination against women.

By the way, I don’t play down at all this kind of pay differential. If you gross $30,000/year, 5% more would be $1,500. Even with standard deductions, that’s a round-trip ticket to someplace, even someplace interesting.

In Part Two of this essay, I will leave the domain of what’s well know, of what the president ought to know, and I will take you with me on a trip of honest, frank speculations about women’s work.

Don’t forget to come back. The best portion is yet to come!

Tech. note: Anyone is welcome to challenge any of the assertions above. Here are the rules I play by: I you give me a general reading assignment, I won’t do it. It’s too easy to waste someone’s time on a wild goose chase. If you don’t bother to say, “Read this because it shows ‘this assertion of yours…’ to be false ,” don’t expect me to make the effort either. Also, evidence that does not come from a respected refereed journal is unlikely to make much of an impression on me.

Leçon d’Anglais (je ne sais plus quel numéro):

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics

To be on the same page = Etre sur la même longueur d’onde.

La Complainte du travailleur francais immigré en Californie.

Jacques Delacroix Liberty , , , , , ,

Voici, ci-dessous, le texte complet de mes memoires en Francais. Mes memoires en Anglais,- 400 pages – vont paraitre bientot: I Used to Be French: an Immature Autobiography. ($17)

Du métro Botzaris aux rives du Pacifique, ça fait quand même une bonne trotte. Bien sûr, je n’ai pas fait le trajet à pied ni en vélo mais cela m’aura quand même pris un demi-siècle, pratiquement. Physiquement, j’y suis arrivé plus vite que cela, bien sûr. Mais après avoir initialement planté mes pieds dans le sable, pour vraiment m’installer, pour m’y retrouver bien à l’aise, il m’aura fallu un bout de temps.

Que je parte là-bas, ça devait arriver puisque je suis né dans le quartier de Paris qui s’appelle (qui s’appelait?) « Carrières d’Amérique ». J’y étais donc bien prédisposé; c’était plus ou moins le destin qui le voulait! Par deux fois ou plus, j’ai donc mouillé mon ancre « Made in the dix-neuvième arrondissement » en Californie, cette fausse île merveilleuse et imaginaire qu’inventait Herberay des Essarts au début du seizième siècle, (à moins que ce ne soit l’Espagnol Rodrigues de Montalvo).

En réalité, je triche un peu en évoquant mon installation aux « rives » du Pacifique. En fait j’ai bien un modeste voilier dans le port mais ma maison n’a pas la vue sur la mer. Elle est même située à plus d’un kilomètre de l’Océan Pacifique. Il s’en est fallu de peu pourtant, d’un petit million de dollars, à peine. J’aurais dû être plus hardi à réclamer des augmentations. Ou alors devenir chirurgien-cardiologue. (Mais je n’en avais ni la patience ni le talent ni le courage, enfin, rien!) Ou bien, faire carrière dans la police locale – celle du shériff – avec une excellente retraite à cinquante-cinq ans et un emploi à mi-temps pour finir de payer les traites. (Mais je n’y ai même pas songé; c’est trop bête!) De toutes façons, avec mon accent francais, aucune chance d’être élu shériff; je serais resté employé et donc subalterne, (« Sheriff’s Deputy » – Oui, Sheriff, c’est un poste électif.)

Quand j’étais ado, à Paris on nous disait, on dit toujours aux jeunes, je crois: « Passe d’abord ton bac ». Moi, j’ai eu de la chance en devenant deux fois de suite non-bachelier. Le première fois, j’avais même obtenu la mention « Très mal ». On m’avait tellement seriné que sans bac on n’arrivait à rien que je me suis tiré en douce, presque sans prévenir.

Avant que je ne parte pour de bon, il y avait eu plusieurs aller-retour entre Botzaris et la contrée de mon choix, comme autant de rêves complexes et détaillés. Un jour, ayant raté le dernier métro, je suis parti à pied d’un bistrot des Halles pour rentrer chez mes parents, Avenue de la Porte Brunet, sur les boulevards dits « extérieurs », ceux « des Maréchaux ». Et puis, je ne sais pas trop comment, je me suis retrouvé à Sausalito en Californie. (C’est la petite ville charmante de Jack London, exactement de l’autre côté du pont dit du « Golden Gate ».) J’ étais assis au « No Name Bar », (au « Bar sans nom », comme son nom l’indique) à baratiner une blonde un peu grasse mais pas plus vulgaire que ça, somme toute. Un autre jour, j’ai quitté la cascade en béton armé des Buttes-Chaumont pour arriver, en fin de compte, au Grand Canyon, en Arizona. Tout près de là, j’avais acheté dans un Mont de Piété situé dans un réserve indienne un beau collier Navajo en argent et turquoise au motif dit de la « fleur de courge ». C’était un cadeau de mariage pour ma petite soeur, en France.

Par deux fois, pendant que je faisais mes études aux Etats-Unis, je suis vraiment allé rendre visite à mes parents à Paris. La première fois, faute de fonds, je l’avais fait en auto-stop. Je suis revenu ici, chez moi, en Californie, de la même façon. Bon, je suis bien obligé d’admettre que pour traverser l’Atlantique nord dans les deux sens je n’ai pas fait de bateau-stop. Je le regrette beaucoup. Quelle histoire cela ferait! J’aurais pu au moins essayer de faire la propreté sur un cargo pour payer mon passage. (Mon service dans la Marine Nationale, «la Royale », aurait suffit pour faire entendre au capitaine que je ne souffrais pas trop du mal de mer.) En fait, j’ai simplement acheté un billet bon marché sur un paquebot d’étudiants, une fois, New York – Le Havre, dans les deux sens. La traversée a été la fête à chaque fois. Le passager le plus âgé devait avoir environ vingt-cinq ans. Etre en croisière a un effet d’énervement sur les sens des jeunes filles, un peu comme Venise ; les jeunes filles reviennent souvent jeunes femmes des croisières en mer.

Le plus dur dans cette traversée n’a pas été le trajet Los Angeles-Chicago (la « Route 66 » de Nat King Cole ) comme on pourrait le penser. Le plus difficile, ça a été le tronçon Le Havre-Paris. C’est d’ailleurs une des raisons qui m’ont fait rester en Amérique pour de bon. Quand je poireautais au grand soleil de plomb, en plein été, dans le Midwest, les petites vieilles sortaient de chez elles portant un plateau de citronnade glacée à mon intention. En stop sur les routes de Normandie et d’Ile-de-France, les petites vieilles…rien. Que vous-dire? Et bien la vérité toute simple, tout simplement: En France, si on est inconnu, on est toujours un peu le Boche de quelqu’un.

Comme presque tous les immigrants, j’ai commencé par faire la plonge en Californie. C’est une expérience salutaire, égalitaire. A force de faire la plonge, plus tard mais assez vite, j’ai pu m’offrir le luxe de devenir plongeur (sous-marin) dans mes loisirs. J’ai même fait un petit livre la dessus avec un copain de plongée, américain de naissance lui, pas un livre sur la plonge, mais bien un livre sur la plongée. (Free Diving in California.)

Pendant un moment, pour gagner ma petite vie d’étudiant, j’ai même fait le guignol. Je ne veux pas dire que j’ai fait le con sur une estrade. Plutôt, j’ai appris aux enfants d’un centre de loisirs et de plein-air à fabriquer des marionnettes et puis à les mettre en scène. (Comme c’était un centre de loisirs juif, je me suis abstenu de mettre en scène la Nativité. Pas si bête!) A une autre époque, j’ai enseigné la natation à des bébés. C’est un attrape-couillon pour les mères super-compétitives de la classe moyenne, bien sûr. Il n’y a pas de bébés nageurs. C’est une question de développement musculaire. La plupart des bébés, si on les lâche dans la piscine, ils coulent à pic avec un grand sourire aux lèvres. C’est comme si ils se souvenaient de l’apesanteur dans le ventre maternel. Le grand sourire permet néanmoins de faire des photos impressionantes qu’on agrandit en affiches formidables, toutes truquées dans leur intention.

La deuxième fois que j’ai quitté la France en dehors des vacances universitaires, c’était pour de bon. J’ai laissé derrière moi, un très bon job (comme on dit en Franglais) dans la fonction publique, et aussi, la mort dans l’âme, le pâté de campagne. Mais, de l’autre côté, j’ai découvert le guacamole tout frais. On le fait en écrasant la chair bien mûre de l’avocat avec du jus de citron, plus des ingrédients secrets. Il y avait même des avocats qui pendaient au grand arbre d’un petite cour secrète de mon université. Je parle des fruits nommés à partir du Nahuatl, la langue des Aztèques cannibales. Les autres types d’avocat, ceux qui portent la robe noire, on les pend normalement à des potences.

Ici, en Amérique, il y avait des livres, des livres partout. On avait le droit de les toucher sans se faire engueuler par la préposée, même à la bibliothèque. Il y avait aussi des biblothèques partout d’ailleurs. Celles de la moindre petite ville contenaient plus de livres que, plus tard, la bibliothèque centrale du centre de Paris, au Centre Pompidou. Même dans les librairies on avait le droit d’ouvrir les livres, de les parcourir. En plus, on pouvait s’y asseoir confortablement pour boire du café tout en feuilletant les ouvrages qu’on n’avait même pas achetés, qu’on allait pas acheter du tout. Jamais vu, ça!

Tout seul aux Etats-Unis, au début, ça n’a quand même pas été facile tous les jours. Mais, il y avait les filles, des tas de filles, une avalanche de filles. J’ai même bien failli y laisser ma peau! Je ne veux pas dire que j’ai manqué mourir d’épuisement. Je veux dire que je risquais a tous moments de me faire trouer la peau par une balle bien placée. Enfin, je passe!

Pendant que tout le monde en France était « Marxiste » à ce moment-là, j’étais aux premières loges tandis qu’on transformait les vergers de pruniers (façon Béziers) en un immense parc industriel. Je veux dire le parc surnommé “Silicone Valley” qui a changé la vie pendant ma vie. En France, comme je l’ai dit, tout le monde s’affairait alors à devenir Marxiste ou à le paraître. Ceci bien longtemps après qu’il soit devenu impossible de prétendre ne pas être au courant des horreurs du Goulag ni de celles du « Grand bond en avant ». Ceci, alors que Fidel s’entêtait toujours et encore à mettre les homosexuels en prison, pour leur donner une bonne leçon.

C’était aussi au moment où son copain Che Guevara (« le fusilleur») allait libérer les paysans boliviens. Ces petits propriétaires terriens avaient tellement envie de libération qu’ils l’ont livré à l’armée. On connait la suite. Il aurait dû me demander mon avis, Che. J’y étais, dans la même Bolivie rurale, juste un an avant lui. (J’y étais grâce à une bourse de la Fondation Ford, les salauds !) Je lui aurais dit, au Che: « N’y vas pas, Ducon ». Il s’était avéré que le Che n’avait pas lu Marx, ou mal lu. Il en est mort. C’est ce que j’appelle des études rigoureuses, sans laxisme.

Il y avait aussi cette vieille salope de Jean-Paul Sartre, bien sûr, qui ne voulait à aucun prix désesperer Renault-Billancourt. Plus haut sur l’échelle sociale, perchait l’imbittable escroc de grande volée Claude Lévi-Strauss qui avait réussi à intimider plusieurs générations d’intellectuels francophones, moins deux (le courageux Jean-Francois Revel et le noble et digne Raymond Aron). A mon sens, Lévi-Straus avait construit une grande carrière universitaire exemplaire sur la base d’un tout petit livre de voyage charmant que tout le monde avait lu « Tristes tropiques » et d’une série de gros ouvrages aussi impénétrables qu’improbables que personne n’avait lus. Je ne me souviens que vaguement de cet autre intellectuel parisien, un philosophe, “Marxiste” lui aussi, qui avait assassiné sa femme. (“Nobody is perfect!”)

Disgression technique: Je ne blâme pas Karl du tout pour la lamentable bêtise de l’intellectuariat parisien des années 60, 70, jusqu’à 80. Non seulement il savait écrire, lui, Karl ; mais il savait aussi lire. Il avait même lu “La Richesse des nations” d’Adam Smith, ce dont on ne saurait accuser ses disciples hexagonaux. D’ailleurs, il avait pris soin de mettre les choses au point de son vivant. “Je ne suis pas Marxiste”, avait-il affirmé avant de mourir. (Marx, pas Adam Smith, Adam avait passé l’arme à gauche bien avant.)

Moi, pendant tout ce temps-la, je progressais sans états d’âme. Au beau milieu de l’un des derniers vergers de Palo Alto, du mauvais côté de l’autoroute, à deux kilomètres de Stanford, il y avait un petite château. Je veux dire un château d’eau tout en bois, comme un énorme tonneau sur échasses. La vieille dame noire entreprenante à qui il appartenait l’avait transformé en studio rustique, avec cuisinette et douche, qu’elle louait. C’est là que j’avais tranquillement rédigé ma thèse. On y montait par un long escalier de meunier en bois. On y entendait de loin, de tout en haut, le clapotement des talons des filles qui grimpaient l’escalier en vitesse parcequ’elles avaient pris sur elles de venir soulager ma solitude.

On disait de la localité qu’elle avait l’un des taux de criminalité les plus élevés d’Amérique. Moi, je ne voyais de mon perchoir que des abricotiers en fleurs, puis en feuilles, et une tribu d’écureuils gris. J’étais trop pauvre pour valoir qu’on m’agresse, ou qu’on m’y cambriole, d’ailleurs. Les malfaiteurs locaux, tous noirs, n’étaient pas racistes; ils volaient les riches et les presque-riches sans distinction de couleur. De moi, ils devaient se dire: «Il est complètement timbré ce blanc-la, descendant de son baril en pantalon du surplus de l’armée éraillé, avec ses liasses de paperasses sous le bras. Même ses godasses ne valent rien, le con!»

C’était juste après que je sois rentré d’enseigner à Hawaï, dans une belle île où on ne me payait pratiquement pas. Mais la plongée sous-marine y était fabuleuse et le soir, on allait contempler l’éruption volcanique à deux pas au lieu de regarder la télévision. Un peu plus tard, j’ai eu un doctorat, un «piechdi», comme on dit, les doigts dans le nez, sans blague. Je suis quand même resté inadmissible en première année des universités françaises. Je n’invente rien! A propos, mon diplôme était en sociologie, qui n’a à peu près rien à voir avec la discipline française du même nom. (En Amérique, on a bien suivi le chemin tracé par le Français Durkheim, Emile, en France, pas tellement.)

Il y avait du soleil presque toute l’année en Californie. Ce n’est pas la faute des Francais, bien sûr, ni même du Parti Socialiste, ni des fonctionaires, si leur pays se trouve à la latitude de Terre-Neuve (de Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, si vous préferez.) Mais cette septemtrionalité n’arrange pas l’humeur des ces méridonaux exilés que sont les Français. Sur moi, la brièveté de l’automne et de l’hiver californiens a fait l’effet des lumières de la rampe s’allumant d’un seul coup. Cela a transformé ma mentalité, la vision que je jette sur le monde, à jamais. La grande lumière m’a fait plus tolérant, plus entreprenant; elle m’a même rendu plus gentil, du moins, à la longue, du moins, dans une certaine mesure.

J’ai habité un moment à San Francisco-même. J’y faisais des affaires. Je faisais le conseil en commerce international. C’était juste après que mon livre (avec mon co-auteur, Eric Multhaup) ait gagné un gros prix francais. C’était un livre sur le quoi et le comment de faire des affaires aux Etats-Unis: « Les Clefs du labyrinthe. » San Francisco-ville, c’était gai jusque à ce que « gay » ait finir par signifier « triste » parce que tous les amis étaient en train de mourir du SIDA.

Je suis devenu prof finalement (dans plusieurs universités) parce-que j’étais curieux et paresseux à la fois. J’ai assez vite découvert ma vocation, ma mission d’enseignant. Elle consistait à faire admettre aux autres, aux jeunes comme aux moins jeunes, qu’ils étaient plus intelligents qu’ils ne le pensaient. Parfois, c’était à coups de pied au cul. Il faut ce qu’il faut! Je dis «aux moins jeunes» parceque, pendant longtemps, j’ai enseigné dans un programme de MBA où la moyenne d’âge des élèves était de vingt-huit ans. Cela se passait au beau milieu de Silicon Valley. Plusieurs des mes élèves sont devenus millionaires par la suite. Encore plus nombreux sont ceux qui ont simplement atteint une belle prosperité. Foutu capitalisme! Ça parait injuste! C’était moi qui donnait les notes, après tout!

J’ai passé quarante ans et plus dans les universités américaines, trente comme prof. J’y ai fait des travaux scientifiques tellement calés que je ne les comprend pas tous les jours moi-même. Et j’ai enseigné aux centaine, peut-être aux milliers, toujours les mêmes trucs, tellement peu de trucs que je pourrais presque vous les résumer ici. Pendant longtemps, j’ai assez aimé ce métier. Comme Socrate, je corrompais la jeunesse. De plus, on me payait pour le faire. On me payait aussi pour lire des livres. (C’est cela qui rendait difficile d’exiger des augmentations sur le ton indigné qui fait mouche avec les patrons.)

En fin de compte, ce qui m’a vraiment decidé à rester aux USA (comme on dit en Franglais), c’était la musique d’abord et puis, l’eau, ensuite. La musique, c’est assez évident. 90% de la gastronomie du monde entier a son origine en Chine ou en France. De la même façon indisputable, 90% de la musique, des chansons, viennent des Etats-Unis. C’est tellement vrai que rare est le film « Made in France » qui ne comporte pas au moins une chanson américaine. Les réalisateurs français se rendent bien compte qu’il n’y a plus de « cool » – comme on dit en Franglais – dans la chanson française depuis longtemps, depuis Brassens, au moins, depuis François Villon, le voyou-poète, peut-être.

Et l’eau maintenant. Dans toute mon enfance, dans toute ma jeunesse en France, et au cours de mes nombreux séjours dans mon pays d’origine, je ne suis jamais arrivé à ce qu’on me donne plus de deux glaçons dans mon verre de boisson fraîche (jamais, never, nunca, nimmer!) Pas à n’importe quel prix, dans n’importe quel établissement, aussi cher soit-il, à n’importe quelle heure du jour ou de la nuit. « Faut pas exagérer » pensent les garçons de café tellement fort qu’on les entend presque prononcer les paroles. Et aussi : « On n’a pas toujours ce qu’on veut ». Presque partout, en Amérique, on place un verre rempli de glaçons à côté de vous automatiquement dès que vous vous asseyez, même si vous n’en voulez pas (sauf sécheresse exceptionnelle).

Par ailleurs, il y a la cause des douches chaudes, vraiment chaudes, à durée indeterminée. On en rencontre en France, de temps en temps, j’en conviens, chez des particuliers et même dans certains hôtels plus ou moins mal gérés ou, par négligence, on ne règle pas le thermostat vers le bas. Pourtant, c’est toujours un peu la lotterie. La chasse à la douche chaude doit épicer la vie des Français, je me dis, sinon, ils auraient résolu le problème depuis longtemps. Ce n’est pas le savoir-faire plombier qui leur manque, en tous cas; ils ont quand même inventé le bidet.

Je suis persuadé que la vie, c’est la vie de tous les jours, que c’est le quotidien qui compte. Alors, mon idée simplifiée du bonheur, c’est de déguster, sans me presser, une boisson froide dans un verre rempli de glaçons assis bien à l’aise sur une chaise en bois, tout nu sous une douche brûlante. Un rêve à peu près irréalisable en France, je crois bien! Demandez-vous donc pourquoi. (Je ne vais pas vous le dire car je n’ai pas besoin d’ennemis supplémentaires, même loin de chez moi.)*

En vertu du même principe de ce que la vie, c’est la vie quotidienne, je tiens le compte des têtes de con rencontrées sans les chercher. Voici la définition scientifique d’une tête de con: C’est quelqu’un qui est désagréable avec moi sans me connaître assez bien pour avoir des raisons de l’être. Je crois bien que j’en rencontre plus en France en quinze jours qu’aux Etats-Unis en quinze mois. Les gens sont simplement beaucoup plus gentils, en moyenne, dans ce pays-ci qu’en France. (Même si on y tue plus qu’en France. On ne peut pas tout avoir, comme pensent les garçons de café.)

Je sais bien que la France est pleine de jolies villes pimpantes. En Amérique, par contre, la plupart des villes sont d’apparence quelconque et il y a souvent des détritus dans les caniveaux. Ça fait un peu Tiers-Monde, à dire vrai. Cela m’irrite, bien sûr. Et puis, je me rappelle que beaucoup de ces jolies villes françaises ferment trois heures avant le coucher du soleil en été. Ici, nos villes ont de l’animation. Les ville françaises, elles, ont des animatrices. Pas du tout pareil!

Malgré les apparences et malgré la distance, il y a beaucoup de continuité entre mon passé et mon présent, entre mon ancienne vie et celle d’aujourd’hui. Par exemple, à chaque fois que je gare ma voiture près de la Plage du Port à Santa Cruz, Californie, deux mouettes se relaient pour chier dessus en altitude. Je donnerais presque ma main à couper que ce sont les mêmes qui chiaient sur mon bus Volkswaggen quand j’étais hippie, brièvement, en 1967, au Portrieux (dans les Côtes d’Armor, autrefois mieux nommées: “Côtes du Nord” à cause de la température de l’eau de mer). Mais, je me raisonne. Ce n’est pas possible, ce doit être leurs petites-cousines.

«La France vous manque-t’elle, cher ami», on me demande à tout bout de champs? Oui l’île Saint-Louis me manque un peu, et aussi les côteaux de Bourgogne. Mais comme je n’avais été ni invité à l’une ni propriétaire dans les autres, ce n’est pas grave.

Ici, la banque et moi possèdons une jolie maison de style victorien sise exactement entre la mer et les sequoias. Mes grands-pères étaient encore gamins quand elle a été construite. Il y a dans ma cour arrière un pommier, un cerisier, un figuier, et deux citronniers, plus un prunier, qui donnent tous. (Heureusement, pour le prunier; il y a beaucoup de mecs de mon âge qui ont du mal à aller. Moi, ça va toujours pour aller mais on ne sait jamais. Un de ces jours je vais aller dans la direction où on ne va plus si facilement.) Le tout n’est déjà pas mal. A propos de rien: La police a capturé un puma derrière l’officine de mon dentiste il y a seulement un mois. Ici, on a su construire les villes à la campagne. (A propos, on a envoyé le puma, un jeune, un ado, en colonie de vacances dans la Sierra Nevada en lui interdisant de revenir.)**

Non, ce qui me manque vraiment parce que c’est introuvable et même inconcevable dans ce pays-ci, c’est la tête de veau sauce ravigotte. J’ai bien pensé à me la préparer moi-même en suivant une recette sur l’Internet (cette belle invention francaise. Ah, non, je me trompe, c’était le Minitel!) Ou alors, je pourrais essayer d’en trouver la recette classique dans mon exemplaire écorné de «La Cusine familiale et pratique» de Pellaprat (édition 1974).

J’aurais sûrement mis mon plan à exécution depuis longtemps si je vivais dans le Midwest où les gens sont plus conventionnels et plus proches de la terre. (J’en suis sûr, j’y ai habité quatre ans, en Indiana pour être précis.) En parlant d’éxecution, chez moi, à Santa Cruz, Californie, on est très écolo-sensible. Je saurais préparer une sauce ravigotte mais couper la tête du veau dans mon arrière-cour ne parait pas pratique, vu d’ici. La voisine de gauche, la garce qui a eu trois maris tués sous elle, appelerait les flics.*** Et je n’ai pas envie de devenir la préférée de la branche locale de Mafia mexicaine en prison, même pas pour une seule nuit!

Depuis longtemps immigré, j’éprouve une constante angoisse: D’un côté, la tête de veau ravigotte, et la tête de con, les paupiettes, la blanquette, le foie gras. (Ce dernier est franchement hors-la-loi en Californie, contrairement à la cannabis, par exemple.) De l’autre côté, un potentiel sans limites de créativité parmi des gens aimables, et des livres en abondance. Comme je vous le disais plus haut, on ne peut pas tout avoir.

Bon, alors, je m’arrête. Je voulais seulement vous donner une idée de mes souffrances existentielles de travailleur immigré. Et puis, il faut bien préciser avant de vous quitter que je n’étais pas parti m’installer à l’autre bout du monde grâce aux sous de Papa. (Il n’en avait pas de sous, Papa; je suis fils de flic.) Non, j’ai fait tout ça avec seulement ma bite et mon couteau (mon canif, quoi).

Pour finir, un mot de La Bruyère (dans « Les Caractères » : 80-IV):
«Ceux qui nuisent à la réputation ou à la fortune des autres plutôt que de perdre un bon mot méritent une peine infâmante.»

Ça, c’est moi tout craché (comme disait ma mère, Yvette).

*  « The Watershed » Liberty Unbound June 2010 24-5.
** Ce n’est pas la première fois, et de loin, qu’un puma (un cougar) se promène par chez moi. Voir mon l’histoire vraie, le conte, sur ce mon blog : « Les Pumas de Bécon-les-Bruyères. » factsmatter.wordpress.com
*** Voir le conte : « C’est presque pareil partout. » sur mon blog.

© Jacques Delacroix 2013

Bientôt, d’une manière ou d’une autre, mes mémoires (quatre cent pages) vont paraître en Anglais. Suivez mon progrès et partagezle  sur mon blog: factsmatter.wordpress.com

War Exposure and Suicide, a Scientific Study

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , , , , ,

Intro Note: Since I posted this short essay, MSNBC and National Public Radio have been atwitter with discussions of Post Combat Stress Disorder because of the new Fort Hood shooting. One commentator on MSBC I took to be some sort of  mental health expect declared with a straight face that  PCSD is hard to “pin down.” Yes, that what happens: When you call everything “door,” it’s difficult to find the door. PCSD is a bunch of vague things grouped together under one heading for transparently political purposes.

The new shooter at Fort Hood was in Iraq for four months, as a truck driver; no combat. After twelve years in the military, he was still at the low rank of Specialist Fourth Class. There a mystery there. It’s almost impossible not to make Sergent after such a long time. Isn’t it possible for a  someone employed by the military to  have private, non-military sources of depression or anger? According to the liberal media, the answer to this obvious question seems to be “No.”

Pacifists, the overt kind, as well as the semi-covert type,* have been taking a new tack: The obvious, real horrors of warfare are not enough anymore so, they are pointing to sequels of warfare less visible than mutilated limbs. The new sequels of war have the advantage of being largely hidden and of being capable of discovery long after the war has ended. The most useful new sequel is post-combat stress disorder (PCSD). It serves its purpose best when it causes suicide, like this:

war → death then or,

war → death now or later.

The generals and admirals have learned to be sensitive, for their own good and that of their service. (Same sensitive Pentagon that told us that 30% of the victims of sexual assault in the armed forces are males.) Correspondingly, the Pentagon commissioned a study on the causes of suicide in the military. The findings were published in a medical journal, JAMA a short time ago. They were summarized in the Wall Street Journal on 3/4/14. Here are the main findings, according to me:

The suicide rates in the military increased greatly between 2004 and 2008. That was more or less the height of the Iraq war while the war in Afghanistan was also going on. Not surprisingly the Army rate of suicide was 17.2 per 100,000 in 2010 while it was 22 for the Marines.

This makes sense, of course. The Marines are more likely, on the average, to find themselves in combat situations, exposed to violence, than are soldiers. Hence he greater incidence of PCSD and then, the higher the suicide rate. Marines are more involved in raw warfare than soldiers, therefore, they tend to kill themselves more often.

Wait a minute, wait a damn minute! I am toying with your mind; I am being deceitful! It’s the Marines suicide rate that is the lower rate, at 17.2 against the Army’s rate of 22; the latter is a full 25 % higher. Three possibilities:

  1. On the average, Marines are less exposed to the violence of war than are soldiers;
  2. The relationship between exposure to the violence of war and suicide is not straightforward;
  3. Exposure to the violence of war somehow preserves from suicide.

I don’t know which of these explanations is correct. What I am sure of however is that if the real findings had been the fakes ones I described above, there would have been no end of commentaries in pacifist circles about war participation and suicide. I am certain there would have been several NPR specials highlighting and commenting incompetently on the causal effect of war on suicide.

Myself, I believe that one should completely forbid oneself the desire to make tiny numbers speak. That’s irrespective of statistical significance. Here is why: Take the real figures. It’s possible that a single heart-breaker, one, on a single base drove two young Marines to love despair. Had they not met her, both would have been alive at the time of the study. Furthermore, it’s possible that a single Marine officer was in a bad mood for one week and that he then gave bad evaluations to three Marines who were desperate for a career in the Corps thereby precipitating their suicide. Had those two people not met those particular five Marines, the Marines score for suicide would have been as high as the Army’s. Or, a bad batch of dope hit three Marine bases the same year. Etc.

In point of fact, the Marines rate was 23 one year earlier, a little higher than the Army rate the same year.

Small number don’t mean much or they mean nothing, except when they are duplicated over time, in which case they are not small numbers. Here is a fictitious but not absurd example to drive this point home:

In the whole US, in 2013 as compared to 2012, the rate of church-going black grandmothers in full charge of their grandchildren who committed suicide jumped by a full 50%. (The raw number went from 2 to 3 nationwide – In fact, the kind of women who correspond to that description hardly ever commit suicide.)

Here is another (real) finding of the same study: During the period of observation, the number of suicides among soldiers deployed in combat zones nearly doubled. The number of suicide of soldiers who had never been so deployed tripled.

In the usual liberal logic, this last finding would dictate that one good way to save soldiers from suicide is to move them to combat zones. I don’t believe this, of course; see above.

Finally, here is the conclusion of the whole study as posted on the on-line article of JAMA. I copied and pasted it from the website to make sure I did not make another mistake:

“Conclusions and Relevance  Predictors of Army suicides were largely similar to those reported elsewhere for civilians, although some predictors distinct to Army service emerged that deserve more in-depth analysis. The existence of a time trend in suicide risk among never-deployed soldiers argues indirectly against the view that exposure to combat-related trauma is the exclusive cause of the increase in Army suicides.” (“exclusive”)

The last phrase of the conclusion is an astonishing understatement: “The more carrots I eat, the thinner I become. Therefore, carrots are not the exclusive cause of my overweight”!

Still missing, perhaps because I was not able to read the whole text of the study: a comparison of suicides over several years between combat-exposed military personnel and a truly comparable civilian cohort. (Basic demographics such as age and sex would not be good enough for me. ) Perhaps, it’s in the body of the study. Somebody, please spring some money to get it out! My own money is on that everyone would be surprised.

* I don’t like pacifism because I think it gave us World War II among other horrors. Ask me.

Ukraine: The Diplomatic Solution; the Conservative Blessing in ObamaCare!

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , , , , , , ,

There is a distinct preference out there, for solving our differences of opinion with the Putin gangster state “through diplomacy.” An elementary explanation is sadly in order here.

Diplomacy refers to one party explaining to the other with polite words how much harm it could do to that other party. And then, the second party takes its turn explaining to the first how much damage it could do to it if it really wanted to.

Once everyone understands concretely the other party’s capacity for evil, the parties get together to arrive at a compromise that minimizes the evil that  either party does to the other. That’s in successful diplomacy. Diplomacy often fails however. In 1939, Hitler and the Brits were talking to each other until the exact eve of the invasion in the west.

So, in this case, diplomacy only has a chance of  succeeding if doing severe harm is on the table in a credible manner. No perceived credible threat, no diplomacy.

Does anyone really believe that you can talk softly, talk sweet reason to Putin and that he will come to his senses and begin acting nice at last?

Another thing: As everyone knows, Obamacare is foundering. I am beginning to believe it’s a blessing in disguise. Whole young generations who really needed it are learning why Big Government is bad even when it’s trying to act nice. One of my young liberal friends is in the process of making a U-turn, I think. I don’t give myself the credit, much as I would like to. Mr Obama did it. My friend has a new bumper sticker on his car that says: “Obama- Dick-Dick.” That’s in Santa Cruz County so, it takes some courage. At least, he does not care a bit if his car is scratched! (My, that’s was evil and sly; I already feel a little ashamed!)

The Obama administration is not releasing figures the citizenry has a legitimate interest in knowing, such as: How many who signed up are also paid up? How many of the new sign-ups were without health insurance before? What is the net gain – if any -in insured  people who did not join publicly supported health insurance?

Refusing to divulge these figures has only one purpose. It’s to impede the opposition. That’s already Fascism. Not gathering these figures when you can and when you know some part of the public wants them is also Fascism. (Fascism is not an epithet, it’s political description. (See:  “Fascism Explained” and others on this blog. )

ObamaCare was a dishonest venture from the first. If it had not been, its first act would have been to make all health insurance available across state lines so as to maximize competition between insurance companies. If any Republican lawmakers had resisted, it would have been a blood feast for the Democratic Party. Large-scale buddy capitalism is also part of a  classical Fascist program.

A Reverse Crimea in the West: Kaliningrad

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, History , , , , , , , , ,

Look at the Kaliningrad Oblast. It used to be Prussian Koenisberg, an important detail: Many Germans still feel for it, like Russians for Crimea. This is one part of Europe toward which the Germans might loose a little of their current prudent cool and cooperate.

Find Kaliningrad on the map.

Source: BBC
Source: InKaliningrad.com

It’s a small Russian exclave on the Baltic. It’s entirely sandwiched between two NATO members that are also members of the European Union, Lithuania and Poland. It must have some military value because it’s the headquarter of the Russian Baltic Fleet.

Kaliningrad has no direct land links to the rest of Russia. Sea links are along the shores of unfriendly to very unfriendly countries. I don’t see why it would be difficult to apply an on-and-off siege to that territory. I don’t mean that the West or the US should actually attempt to starve its about one million people. I am thinking cutting off the water intermittently, for example. Perhaps a few US warships could cruise off Kaliningrad with all guns carefully covered. We should be able to cause enough unpleasantness there to stampede part of the civilian population. We might just let Russian sailors there lead lonely and even more drunken lives than they do now.

After the gobbling up of Crimea, making it difficult for Russia to staff its isolated western outpost would be a worthwhile goal. Even giving high Kremlin officials a few bad nights of sleep would be better than nothing. Letting bullies get away with anything is always a bad idea. It’s like asking for more bullying in the future.

I don’t know why no one is talking about it, not the Obama administration, not the Republican opposition, not the supine press.

Are we that pathetic or merely ignorant?

The Internet Needs a Multitude of Firm Guiding Hands Like I Need….

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , , , , ,

The Internet is an American invention depending on a specifically American vision of society. It was built with American seed money. It represents the best about the way we used to do things: Tell the folks what you want; spring a little money on them; most of it produces nothing; some of it turns out to be the very best investment of the century, perhaps even the best investment in history. Let it run itself as much as possible. Refrain from giving it a captain.

Other countries are utterly incapable of doing anything like this. How do I know? None but one even tried, France. Its government-managed (Post Office owned) Minitel was even accessible to the general public earlier than the Internet. The French closed it about two years ago. It had ceased to serve any purpose side-by-side with the Internet. That was as clear a case of competition between two ways of doing things as might be devised in a real scientific experiment.

The French Minitel (which I used) did good service for many years as an electronic phone book and address finder and it housed a prodigious amount of porn. I almost forgot: It was also a prime venue for prostitutional dates. In spite of these attractions, it was to the Internet as Wisconsin blue cheese is to real, cave-aged French Roquefort (not the stuff they put on your salad, the $26/lb stuff). The main fault in this comparison, of course, is that American cheese makers can only improve their act. Non-Americans are not going to catch up on items such as the Internet because they lack the vision thing.

Other countries claim that they have a right to co-manage the Internet because their citizens use it. That’s it! So, if I clear a path in the bushes for my own use and I let the nice guy next door use it, and also the child molester two houses down, it’s not my path anymore?

Note that this sharing in the name of the often-poisonous concept of sovereignty need not happen, even by their own argument. Other countries’ governments can always block it if they wish. They can and do occasionally deny access to their citizens and take the blow-back. In many countries, the blow-back is also indirectly a blow for freedom.

Letting other countries have a say over the management of the Internet is likely to produce no improvement that I can think of. (But I keep an open mind; please, instruct me.) It’s extremely likely to facilitate despotism in many countries. Try a mental experiment: What’s Vladimir Putin, or the Chinese Mafia masquerading as people’s party going to contribute? The tyrants simply want to do their best to close the windows that let in any fresh air at all.

In other parts of the world, the desire for partial control of the Internet is motivated by cultural jealousy. That would be the case in France, in Spain and in much of Latin America, also to an extent, in China. But governments in those countries don’t need more power over the Internet to combat their citizens’ regrettable proclivity to listen to American music and to buy primarily tickets for American movies (in spite of prodigious government subsidies for the national cinema in France and in Spain). They already have full power to put anything they want on the Internet. I mean loads of bad French movies, even erotic movies where the naked women are pointedly vaguely repulsive. (See my piece “French Movies, Sex, and the Welfare State” [and also “Can Protectionism Ever Be Respectable?” (pdf) in the Independent Review – bc]). The Spaniards are free to place on the Net four or five Spanish-made movies each year and even to try and charge admission. And the government of the so-called “People”, so called “Republic ” of China is always welcome to transmit live on its blog the full sessions of the Plenum of the Chinese Communist Party, for the pleasure of all.

There are plenty of ways with the existing Internet arrangements to combat the poison of American Cultural Imperialism. Best of luck to them. (For God’s sake, with a handful of major exceptions, even our disasters are better than theirs!)

You can count on the fingers of one hand the number of countries where moderate government involvement and decentralization are understood by any significant fraction of the populace. Others don’t know how to do anything decentralized, won’t know for years or centuries.

The worst case scenario is also the most likely, I think: Following the Obama administration’s capitulation, the Internet will end up being “managed” by a UN-like international body run by faceless, brain-dead bureaucrats.

What bothers me in yet this other American retreat at the hands of the Obama administration is its sheer mindlessness, its obvious abandonment of common sense. Contrary to may other conservatives, I don’t think Mr Obama is evil. He is acting pretty much as you would expect from a man who had never accomplished anything in his life before becoming president. I said this during his first campaign in 2008 (but I am too lazy to look for the relevant link . I said it many other times since, including this one).

It’s not that President Obama is bad or even stupid; the problem is that he is ignorant and lazy, including intellectually lazy. And he and his wife sure like their vacations at public expense.

Yeah, I must be a racist: “lazy” is just another racial stereotype, after all. See if I care!

And I am a little ashamed of the dig about the presidential family vacations. I mean his wife was severely deprived for 250 years; she is only catching up. He was not that deprived himself though. His name indicates a coastal origin among the slaving tribes on his father’s side. On his mother’s side he comes from reformed and moderate hippie stock. Hippie like me.