Archive for July 2009

The Home Office has released a report which states that the “benefits system” and the “existence of already established minority ethnic communities” are some of the biggest draw cards encouraging the illegal immigrant flood into this country.

The report, titled “Organised immigration crime: a post-conviction study” and dated July 2009, has also confirmed the accuracy of the dangers of recruiting foreign nationals to work at overseas visa clearing offices, as reported earlier on this website.

According to the Home Office, demand “for entry to the UK from a wide range of world regions is significant and potential migrants will go to some considerable lengths and expense to get to the UK.”

This demand is predicated, the report continued, “on a set of features that make the UK particularly attractive to migrants including: the health of the illegal economy, the existence of established Minority Ethnic communities, the universality of the English language and the UK’s comprehensive healthcare and benefit systems.”

The report confirmed that there are a large number of criminal organisations which specialise in bringing illegal immigrants into this country.

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Yesterday I began watching Craig Bodeker’s DVD, A Conversation about Race (previously discussed here), but had to stop half way through due to technical problems. I had never heard of Bodeker before the DVD came out. It is exceptional, and exactly what’s needed. It takes us into the heart of the contemporary liberal psychology like nothing I’ve seen. The moment that most strikes me so far is when a young, pretty white woman is asked to give an example of the racism that according to her is everywhere in our society. She says that sometimes when she is around black people who are being loud, she thinks to herself that black people are loud. But then she realizes that her objection to loudness is just a part of the “white culture,” the white racist culture in which she has grown up and which she must battle against.

Order “A Conversation on Race” here.

When she said this, I felt I was hearing something new, or at least understanding something familiar in a new light. It is of course a staple of modern liberalism that we must overcome our “stereotypes” about black people and other minorities. For example, if we think that blacks are generally less intelligent or more disorderly or more loud, those are racist “stereotypes” that we must identify and root out of our mind. But what this young woman was saying went beyond that. She was saying that the objection to loudness is itself a racist idea that she needs to root out of her mind. Her underlying reasoning goes like this: because she objects to loudness, and because blacks tend to be loud, the dislike of loudness is a racist feeling and must be eliminated. Which further means that any common standard of white people, any normal criterion of goodness or excellence in our society in which blacks on average happen to be deficient, is by that very fact racist and to be spurned.
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“Academics, like teenagers, sometimes don’t have any sense regarding the degree to which they are conformists.”

So says Thomas Bouchard, the Minnesota psychologist known for his study of twins raised apart, in a retirement interview with Constance Holden in the journal Science.

Journalists, of course, are conformists too. So are most other professions. There’s a powerful human urge to belong inside the group, to think like the majority, to lick the boss’s shoes, and to win the group’s approval by trashing dissenters.

The strength of this urge to conform can silence even those who have good reason to think the majority is wrong. You’re an expert because all your peers recognize you as such. But if you start to get too far out of line with what your peers believe, they will look at you askance and start to withdraw the informal title of “expert” they have implicitly bestowed on you. Then you’ll bear the less comfortable label of “maverick,” which is only a few stops short of “scapegoat” or “pariah.”

A remarkable first-hand description of this phenomenon was provided a few months ago by the economist Robert Shiller, co-inventor of the Case-Shiller house price index. Dr. Shiller was concerned about what he saw as an impending house price bubble when he served as an adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York up until 2004.

So why didn’t he burst his lungs warning about the impending collapse of the housing market? “In my position on the panel, I felt the need to use restraint,” he relates. “While I warned about the bubbles I believed were developing in the stock and housing markets, I did so very gently, and felt vulnerable expressing such quirky views. Deviating too far from consensus leaves one feeling potentially ostracized from the group, with the risk that one may be terminated.”
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Illegal immigration may have decreased in the last year but the Mexican border remains an increasingly dangerous thoroughfare for drug smugglers who have shattered records in the last few months attempting to bring their valuable cargo into the United States.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports an increase of 64% in drug seizures along the southern border during the first three quarters of this year compared to the same period in 2008. The agency revealed this week that it has seized an unprecedented 3.3 million pounds of drugs during the period, including 2.6 million pounds of marijuana, 60,411 pounds of cocaine, 4,384 pounds of methamphetamines and 1,446 pounds of heroin.

The Border Patrol’s Tucson sector broke an agency record by seizing more than 1 million pounds of marijuana during a 10-month period alone. It represents the largest marijuana seizure total along the nation’s 2,000-mile southern border with Mexico, according to Homeland Security officials, who estimate the drug’s street value at about $800 million.

During a five-hour period this week, agents in California confiscated $1.32 million worth of cocaine in two separate incidents near Pine Valley. In the first, a detector dog alerted officers to inspect a vehicle’s undercarriage, which had 66 pounds of cocaine in a modified compartment. A second vehicle, driven by a Mexican national, subsequently got busted with about the same amount of coke.
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This week’s bloggers’ briefing brought the biggest crowd yet; standing room only. What was the draw? Matthias Shapiro, mastermind of the 10,000 pennies videos that have become a viral sensation, showed the eager bunch how to utilize the overused rhetoric and statistics of the day to instead communicate the numbers coming out of Washington in a way that people can digest.

Through his use of visualizations, Shapiro puts real value to seemingly unfathomable amounts of money like millions, billions, and trillions of dollars. We’ve posted these videos before, but they deserve a second look:

10,000 pennies is like a real world bar graph, Shapiro explained. He strays away from bar graphs and other computer-generated images, because they lose their meaning in the same way as mere numbers do.

Going a step beyond the visualization, Shapiro has also created the visual metaphor.

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MANASSAS, Va., July 23 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — 156 conservative and constitutional cause leaders and citizens have signed a letter to members of the U.S. Senate expressing opposition to the confirmation of President Obama’s nominee to be an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor.

One of the letter’s signers, Richard A. Viguerie, said, “The media and Republicans aren’t defining President Obama as an extremist politically and constitutionally; therefore, it is up to us conservatives. It is also important that a message be sent that, while Republicans may not be unified in opposing Obama’s dangerous and unconstitutional agenda, conservatives and other constitutionalists are united.”

“President Obama has nominated a radical judicial activist who apparently feels the need to mask her outrageous statements, rulings and writings over the years with the soothing words of a constitutionalist,” said Kay Daly, president of the Coalition for a Fair Judiciary. “Perhaps the Left has discovered that the American people most certainly do not want the Constitution to be radically altered on the whims of empathy. Sotomayor’s extremist actions throughout the years speak far more loudly than the pretty words she spoke at her confirmation hearing. A ‘no’ vote for Sotomayor is a ‘yes’ vote for the Constitution,” Daly said.

The letter notes it may be historic that a nominee to the Supreme Court has gone on record at her confirmation hearing to reject the underlying judicial philosophy of the President who made the nomination. The letter also states in part:

“Given that an appointment to the Supreme Court is for life, the statements by the President and his advisors, and Judge Sotomayor’s pre-confirmation statements that conflicted with her confirmation testimony, we believe her judicial philosophy is indeed one that should disqualify her from appointment to the Supreme Court.

“This is a matter of whether the nominee has demonstrated that she will abide by the role of the judiciary consistent with, and as constrained by, the Constitution.

“Judge Sotomayor’s rulings, whether dealing with the 1st Amendment, 2nd Amendment, private property rights, criminal law, use of foreign law, race, equal protection and other areas of law, demonstrate that, if she is consistently ‘empathetic’ at all, it is in favor of government power, even beyond constitutional constraints.”
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ONCORD, N.C. — “Impeach Obama.”

“Al Qaeda’s favorite days: 9/11/01 and 11/04/08.”

“Work Harder. Obama needs the money.”

The bumper stickers and posters sold at “Free Market Warrior” at Concord Mills are meant to be “biting,” the kiosk’s owner Loren Spivack said.

At least one passerby found them racist and bigoted, and took time to tell the mall in a letter and a letter to the editor of the Charlotte Observer.

Whatever your opinion, the fact is this: At the end of July, Free Market Warrior will not be allowed at Concord Mills Mall. The kiosk chain’s owner shared e-mail correspondence with NewsChannel 36 that explains that the mall management has decided that the items sold are not “neutral” enough. The lease will be allowed to expire July 31, 2009 without an option to renew.

Spivack, who first leased the space this spring, says the decision came as a shock to him. He says mall management seemed pleased with the kiosk just a few weeks ago.
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Admirers of the thinking, writing and philosophical life of Ed Abbey (1927-1989) keep that quote handy when trying to make sense of any number of political, social, economic, environmental, imperial and even personal perplexities woven into the fabric of modern life. It is axiomatic that for something to grow, something else must die, a truism overlooked more often than not.

Abbey’s insight is, as usual, well phrased, and, as usual, mostly disregarded, disdained and denigrated by the people who could best use and be served by it. That is, the majority. Such is the fate of many hard or even inconvenient truths and the people who espouse them. Abbey was not the first to point out that growth for the sake of growth is destructive. Neither will he be the last, though “the ideology of the cancer cell” is hard to beat as metaphor.

All things seem to have a size that works for itself and for that part of the world in which it lives. Beyond that size, things tend to come undone. Anyone who has not been living in a high-mountain, isolated cave for the past few years can easily pick out numerous examples from world and local affairs to make the point.

Among the earliest and best known seers of the inescapable consequences of growth was Britain’s Rev. Thomas Malthus (1766-1834). His most famous quote and axiom is likely “the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison with the second.”
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BOSTON - President Barack Obama plunged his presidency into a charged racial debate and set off a firestorm with police officers nationwide by siding with a prominent black scholar who accuses police of racism.

Saying he was unaware of “all the facts” but that police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “acted stupidly” in their arrest of Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates, Obama whipped up emotions on both sides of an issue that threatens to open old wounds.

“The President has alienated public safety officers across the country by his comments,” said David Holway, president of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, which represents 15,000 public security officials.

In a letter to Obama, he sought an apology. “You not only used poor judgment in your choice of words, you indicted all members of the Cambridge police department and public safety officers across the country.”

Obama’s comments, made at a news conference on Wednesday evening, marked his biggest foray into the hot-button issue of race since taking office in January and underline how racial issues remain very much alive despite advances embodied by his election as the first black U.S. president.
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USA Today/Gallup poll shows that 59% of Americans say President Obama’s proposals to address the major problems facing the country call for too much government spending, and 52% say Obama’s proposals call for too much expansion of government power.

It is not surprising to find that Republicans are close to unanimity in their views on these issues, with 90% saying Obama’s proposals involve too much spending and 83% saying they involve too much expansion of government power. Of more concern to the Obama administration, perhaps, is the finding that clear majorities of 66% and 60% of independents, respectively, say Obama’s proposals involve too much spending and too much government expansion.

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