Archive for June 2010

Justice Minister Crispin Blunt says he is pursuing “all possible options” to transfer foreign prisoners back to their homeland after revealing they make up 13 per cent inmates held in British jails.

“We currently hold 11,367 foreign national prisoners, of which 7,824 have been convicted and are serving sentences of imprisonment, and who could be considered for transfer to their own country,” Blunt said.

“Yet in 2009, with this large number of foreign national prisoners in our prisons, we managed to transfer 41 back to prisons in their own country,” he said in criticising the “feebleness” of the previous Labour government’s efforts.

The number has almost trebled in the past 15 years. In contrast, the government says it is aware of only “about 2,000″ Britons held in overseas jails.

Around one third of foreign prisoners have been convicted of violence or sexual offences and almost one fifth of drug crimes, while nearly half come from 10 countries, led by Jamaica, Nigeria, Ireland, Vietnam and Poland.

Blunt said that there are a number of reasons why the figure of transfers has remained “stubbornly low,” particularly with vast majority in place for some time that require the consent of the prisoner.

We keep satirizing this, but now a Washington Post news story really is headlined

Minorities hit harder by foreclosure crisis

“Minority homeowners have been disproportionately affected by the foreclosure crisis and stand to lose homes at a faster pace than white borrowers in the future, according to a report released Friday by a nonprofit research group. … The ‘analysis suggests dramatic differences in how the foreclosure crisis has affected racial and ethnic groups,’ the report said. ‘African American and Latino borrowers have borne and will continue to disproportionately bear the burden of foreclosures.’ “

(By Renae Merle, Saturday, June 19, 2010)

If you translate this out of the evasive passive voice and into the active voice, you come up with something more informative, namely:

AFRICAN AMERICAN AND LATINO BORROWERS DEFAULTED AND WILL CONTINUE TO DEFAULT. DISPROPORTIONATELY

But defaults couldn’t possibly be the fault of the defaulters, if the defaulters are minorities, could they? So instead, Felix Salmon of Reuters asks Are foreclosures racists? June 18, 2010:

“If you’re a high-income Latino with a mortgage, you’re almost twice as likely to be facing foreclosure than a high-income non-Hispanic white person. And in general, the foreclosure crisis is hitting blacks and Latinos much harder than it is whites, according to a startling new report from the Center for Responsible Lending.”

Now, you might think that foreclosure rate has something to do with, say, blacks and Hispanics having remarkably fewer financial assets to use as safety cushions in case housing prices don’t continue to rise. After all, a 2007 Federal Reserve Board report to Congress (PDF) noted:

“Black and Hispanic families are less likely than non-Hispanic white families to have any financial assets, so the disparity in median financial assets for all families (rather than just those with financial assets) is even larger, with the overall medians for black and Hispanic families roughly 5 percent to 7 percent of the non-Hispanic white median.”

Moreover, African-Americans and Latinos are less likely than whites to have prosperous relatives who can help them out with a loan if they are in danger of defaulting.

You might think that, but being aware of those facts just shows you are a racist. Salmon [Email him] writes:

“I’ll hazard a guess and say that this probably has something to do with a lot of middle- and high-income Latinos in California and Arizona being sold subprime mortgages, even when they qualified for a prime loan.”

The Washington Post’s Merle agrees that discrimination is the cause:

“Research has shown that minority borrowers were more likely to receive subprime loans during the housing boom even if they had credit scores, incomes and loan sizes similar to those of whites. Some housing experts say that minority borrowers received higher rates on subprime loans compared with similarly situated white borrowers, resulting in higher monthly payments and quicker defaults.

“‘I think it reflects that minority borrowers were targeted by the sellers of these [risky] mortgages,’ said Barry Zigas, director of housing and credit policy at the Consumer Federation of America.”

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The news that the Obama Administration has decided to challenge Arizona’s anti-illegal immigration SB1070 is one of those moments when you see that, inside the Beltway and for our entire bipartisan political class, it’s an upside-down, through-the-looking-glass, funny old world.

Quite regardless of the very debatable legal merits of the Administration’s attack on federalism (which admittedly will not matter once there are enough Commissar Kagans legislating from the bench), why would the Obama Administration want to challenge a law that all polls show is overwhelmingly popular with Americans in general—and Arizonans in particular—right before November’s elections? Couldn’t it at least have waited until after the elections?

Even the liberals at Atlantic Magazine are worried:

“After the initial round of polling showed majority support for the bill both in Arizona and in the rest of the U.S., the latest polling still corroborates. Today, an ABC/Washington Post poll found that Americans support Arizona’s law 58% to 41%. Quinnipiac found 51%-31% support for the new law among national respondents in late May. Also in May, CBS found that 52% of national respondents think Arizona’s law is “about right,” while 28% said it goes ‘too far’ and 17% said it doesn’t go far enough. Democrats, even, supported it on the whole: 46% answered ‘about right,’ while 40% said ‘too far’ and 10% said ‘not far enough.’ … [Emphasis in original—pb]

“While opinions on immigration are complex, it’s reasonable to wonder if the administration’s decision to sue Arizona will turn out to be an unpopular move. People support SB1070 by wide margins; it stands to reason that, even amid political pressure to do something in response to the new law, the Obama administration will end up taking heat for their attempt to counter it in court.”

Department of Justice Will Sue Arizona: An Unpopular Move?, by Chris Good, June 18, 2010

It’s possible, of course, that the Democrats are as innumerate and stupid as the GOP leadership and actually believe there’s a vast slumbering Hispanic vote out there. But it’s precisely because our Joe Guzzardi doesn’t think the Democrats are that stupid that he has been predicting since Obama’s election that they will not, in the end, try to push through an amnesty. And so far he’s been right.

Still, I’ve always felt uneasy about Joe’s confidence about amnesty. Maybe this attack on Arizona is a straw in the wind. Maybe Obama really is going to try to amnesty all those illegals a.k.a. undocumented Democrats, perhaps in the lame duck session.
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The Moscow Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences has declared that the Circassians are one people with a single ethnonym (“Adyge”) and not five peoples – the Adygey, the Cherkess, the Kabardinians, and the Shapsugs – subdivisions of that people that the Soviet system used to divide the Circassians.

The announcement came almost a month ago in response to a query from the International Circassian Association, and this academic conclusion, one that ethnographers outside of the Russian Federation will certainly welcome, does not by itself necessarily point to a shift in Moscow’s policy.

But there are three reasons that this statement will have enormous and immediate policy consequences. First, it will encourage the Circassian peoples to declare themselves “Adyge” in the upcoming census, thus undermining further the Soviet-imposed divisions of a community with more than five million co-ethnics abroad.

Second, it will add fuel to the fire of Circassian objections to the Sochi Olympics because it is the Shapsugs on whose territory the 2014 Olympic venues are being built. Moscow has tried to play divide and rule politics against the Circassians to limit such protests, but this announcement almost certainly will broaden them.

And third, Circassians are now going to feel even more justified in calling first for the end of the bi-national republics of Karachayevo-Cherkessia and Kabardino-Balkaria in which they are combined with Turkic groups and then for the formation of a single Circassian Republic in the North Caucasus.

Such calls by themselves will further destabilize that region because they would require a radical redrawing of borders. But perhaps even more, they will likely lead other ethnic groups in that region and perhaps more generally in the Russian Federation to press for broader identities and the formation of republics in which those groups will be the titular nationality.

In a commentary posted on the Elot.ru portal today, Circassian commentator Khamid Bzhakho writes that “one cannot say that this event has passed absolutely unnoticed, but it still has not received broad resonance among the Circassians themselves and among experts” (www.elot.ru/main/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1827&Itemid=1).
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Immigrant Marxist Trevor Phillips of the absurdly named Equalities and Human Rights Commission

Dear Fellow Patriot,

Unfortunately we cannot pick and choose when we are dragged into court. That privilege lies with our enemies. This time, the absurdly named Equalities and Human Rights Commission wants to destroy our party and throw myself and the party’s Deputy Chairman, Simon Darby, into prison.

It is no coincidence that the immigrant Marxist Trevor Phillips (pictured) and his EHRC have timed this fresh legal assault just after a major national election campaign, when they know full well that party coffers are low — as they always are during such a period.

In fact, the full narrative of this saga reveals something far more sinister: the first EHRC assault was timed to financially cripple the party ahead of the general election. The membership ban, the time and energy put into constitutional changes, the EGM and the court costs did indeed hurt us, as they were meant to do. Now they have launched a fresh assault, designed to imprison us, criminalise the party and setting us up to be finished off.

In short, a taxpayer-funded, government-controlled institution is harassing and trying to destroy a legal democratic opposition party — it is nothing short of totalitarianism.

Despite the Conservatives winning the election — something which naïve people believed would result in the EHRC being reined in – that organisation is actually being ramped up with arch-Marxist and open Lenin admirer Trevor Phillips still at the helm. Phillips is the bigot who condemned BNP members and supporters as ‘less than human.’

Now that we have admitted ethnic minority members, the EHRC’s new, and desperately weak, ‘case’ is based on objecting to things they hadn’t even mentioned before and a number of deliberate misrepresentations of our new constitution. Hogwash of course, but they have the money to abuse the legal process, so it’s dangerous hogwash.

Believe it or not, but YOUR taxes are funding this wicked act of state persecution! What a disastrous event for British democracy and traditions! Britain is sinking under tyranny, with the only real opposition party facing persecution and harassment. And if they do for us, the Race Thought Police will move on to others. Migrationwatch, Christian groups, traditionalists of all hues — all sorts of decent people will be in the firing line if the EHRC can get rid of the REAL opposition — the British National Party!

What would the heroes of D-Day, charging up the beaches of Normandy through a hail of machine gun bullets, have thought had they known that one day a black Marxist would use taxpayers’ money to persecute British patriots fighting for their country, just like those soldiers of old?

What would the Spitfire pilots, scrambling into the air and risking death to repel the Luftwaffe’s bombers, have thought had they known that one day the beloved country below them would become a Third World slum colonised by millions of African and Asian immigrants, facing the growing certainty of eventual civil war between an ever-growing Muslim community and everybody else?

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by lainad

I wrote a post on my blog last month about a disturbing book review I read a few months ago. The reviewer dismissed Heidi W. Durrow’s novel, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky because he couldn’t relate to the biracial protagonist:

Durrow herself is biracial, and she writes capably on this subject. Still, she doesn’t always succeed in making you feel for her characters or believe her plot. Or perhaps I failed to more completely identify because I’m a white man. Other readers may be more powerfully moved, feeling to the bone the slights, grievances and complications that escape me.

I wrote that perhaps the reviewer shouldn’t have reviewed the book — or the magazine in which it was published shouldn’t have published the review. Or perhaps the reviewer should have passed it on to someone who had a bit more objectivity. The reviewer gave the book 63 out of 100, and I wondered if the mark reflected the reviewer’s inability to look outside his own navel. Just sayin.’

The review really bothered me, in part because I have lived in a world where the majority of books I was required to read in public school, high school, and university were written by white people. I have also reviewed books and music composed by white and non-black folks, and it never occurred to me to turn down a gig because I did not “comprehend” their life experiences. I can’t afford to do that. If I did, I wouldn’t have anything to write.

As a writer who just completed a non-fiction book, it worries me that, while I am confident in my subject matter, my book could be immediately dismissed because the reviewer does not know or care about the experiences of black women in the metal and hardcore music scene. It’s a possibility, and one that I will eventually have to face.

Thea Lim, the deputy editor at Racialicious, recently responded to a writer who wondered if writers automatically write for “their own” — that is to say, whether Black, Latino, White and Asian writers write for their ethno-cultural communities, assuming that the readers will look like they do. Do the characters in the book automatically come from the same ethno-cultural background as the writer? Says the questioner:

…. when I write fiction, I write white characters. When I read fiction I read them as white characters unless/until I am expressly told otherwise. This feels like an ignorant move on my part but at the same time, I feel that that’s what I do because I am white, and that people of other ethnicities read fiction as their ethnicity (or perhaps not, since the field is dominated a lot by dead white guys, but that’s another issue), and they write characters as their ethnicity.

A new poll shows that 61% of Coloradans want a copy of Arizona’s 1070 law allowing law enforcement to investigate those they encounter who exhibit “reasonable suspicion” of being an illegal alien.

A recent study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform discovered that illegal aliens cost Colorado taxpayers more than $1.1 billion per year, or about $612 per household.  Additionally, between $730 million and $1 billion per year of wages paid to illegal aliens is sent out of the country instead of being reinvested in local communities.

Since 2000, the population of illegal aliens in Colorado has nearly doubled, rising to over 270,000 illegal aliens.  Including children born to illegal aliens, this number is even higher, and has accounted for 35% of the state’s population growth over this time period.

More than 10% of the students in Colorado public schools are the children of illegal aliens, costing the taxpayers $11,000 each per year, for an annual total of $925 million.  Another $68 million per year is spent on programs for ‘limited English students’, who are mostly the children of illegal aliens.  These costs do not include the costs to the federal government incurred by illegal aliens in the Colorado public education system.

Illegal aliens cost Colorado taxpayers $82 million per year.  This does not include the health care costs which are charged to the federal government or the higher premiums paid by Coloradans to help cover costs incurred by illegal aliens in Colorado.

Visit Youth for Western Civilization here.
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Mexico files an amicus with the court against SB 1070

Both the Anti-Defamation League and the nation of Mexico have filed separate amicus curiae (friend of the court) briefs in the big anti-SB 1070 lawsuit that the ACLU, MALDEF, the NAACP and other groups filed in federal district court on May 17 against Arizona’s counties.

The complaint, known as Friendly House, et al. vs. Whiting, et al. challenges the constitutionality of Arizona’s new “papers, please” immigration legislation and seeks a preliminary injunction to prevent the law from going into effect July 29.

Amicus briefs are filed by those not a party to the case, but who have reason to believe the outcome will impact them in some way. They offer testimony from an interested source, and often argue for one result or another. Unofficially, it’s a way of “lobbying” the court.

The ADL, one of the leading nongovernmental organizations that advocates on behalf of victims of hate crimes, argues that SB 1070 will cause “irreparable harm to the enforcement of hate crimes legislation in Arizona.”

Indeed, the ADL believes that SB 1070 will “drive a wedge between law enforcement” and the communities that hate crime legislation is intend to protect.

“Unless its enforcement is enjoined,” states the ADL’s amicus brief, “SB 1070 will create an underclass of people who have no meaningful access to police services out of fear that their perceived immigration status — whether relevant or not — will subject them to heightened law enforcement scrutiny whenever they come in contact with police.”
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