in 1993, a friend from high school who had become a baseball player’s agent told me that Jose Canseco was the Typhoid Mary of steroids: you could see the affect of Canseco’s proselytizing steroids on his teammates in Oakland and then in Texas (co-managing director: George W. Bush. Here’s my 2004 American Conservative article on Canseco, the Bush dynasty, Andrew Sullivan, and steroids, which came out the year before Canseco’s tell-all autobiography).

Ray Fisman in Slate points to a 2007 study by two labor economists confirming Canseco’s role spreading steroids around those two teams, plus his later clubs.

Learning Unethical Practices from a Co-worker:The Peer Effect of Jose Canseco
Eric D. Gould and Todd R. Kaplan
This paper examines the issue of whether workers learn productive skills from their co-workers, even if those skills are unethical. Specifically, we estimate whether Jose Canseco, one of the best baseball players in the last few decades, affected the performance of his teammates. In his autobiography, Canseco claims that he improved the productivity of his teammates by introducing them to steroids. Using panel data on baseball players, we show that a player’s performance increases significantly after they played with Jose Canseco. After checking 30 comparable players from the same era, we find that no other baseball player produced a similar effect. Clearly, Jose Canseco had an unusual influence on the productivity of his peers. These results are consistent with Canseco’s controversial claims, and suggest that workers not only learn productive skills from their co-workers, but sometimes those skills may derive from unethical practices. These findings may be relevant to many workplaces where competitive pressures create incentives to adopt unethical means to boost productivity and profits.

Canseco’s outgoing personality contrasted with the more furtive and even anti-social personality of later steroid users, such as Barry Bonds, who introduced Gary Sheffield to his training methods, but who basically didn’t like his teammates.

A couple of years ago I wrote, “You’ll notice that the topic of art forgery is more interesting to philosophers than to art historians, who would prefer not to think about it. Philosophers like to ask questions like, ‘If this small sketch was so beautiful it was worth a million dollars when it was a Raphael, why isn’t it worth anything now that it’s a Hebborn?’”

The basic motivation of art historians and of baseball historians, such as Bill James, is hero worship. Thus, art historians don’t like to think about how many famous paintings are, in whole or in part, forgeries, while Bill James did everything he could to avoid thinking about the impact of steroids on his beloved baseball statistics.

Of course, there’s also the crass financial conflict of interest: James finally got himself a nice job with the Boston Red Sox, whose two best hitters, Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, were juicers. If he’d been sounding the alarm about steroids for years, would he have gotten that job? The same questions can be asked about museum curators.

Steve Sailer’s “A Triumph Of Assimilation” below, about Hispanics who say they believe in the power of education, but actually drop out of school early and often, is actually a story about “revealed preference.” From the Economist magazine’s website illustrates this concept with  this classic joke:

Revealed preference

An example of a popular joke among economists: two economists see a Ferrari. “I want one of those,” says the first. “Obviously not,” replies the other. To get a smile out of this it is necessary (but not, alas, sufficient) to know about revealed preference. This is the notion that what you want is revealed by what you do, not by what you say. Actions speak louder than words. If the economist had really wanted a Ferrari he would have tried to buy one, if he did not own one already.

The point is that you could afford the Maserati–if you sold your house. It’s true that you’d have to sleep in the Maserati, so your “revealed preference” is for sleeping indoors. (It’s true that you can’t sleep in a Maserati, but I do know of an actual case, years ago, of a young man who, faced with being unable to pay both his rent and the payments on his dream car, managed to do it in a Cadillac.)

It’s the same with anything people say they want–you may say you’d like to lose weight, but the scale may show a “revealed preference” for cheeseburgers. So when we read that 87% of Hispanics value higher education, 13% have college degree, we know that if Hispanics actually wanted higher education, they could get it.

For one thing, as underprivileged minorities, they are officially overprivileged. They count towards affirmative action, which means all kinds of “full ride” scholarships, in-state tuition for illegal immigrants, The Hispanic Scholarship Fund, the Hispanic College Fund and minority scholarships from corporations.

But Hispanics don’t even use up all the free high school that’s available to them, dropping out for “economic reasons” to take low-level jobs or have children, like the man in the comic book ads I read forty years ago advertising correspondence schools.

It’s a free country, of course, and if American teenagers want to do this, that’s fine, but we don’t need to import people to do that.

From the Associated Press, we witness a triumph of assimilation: Hispanics have learned to tell pollsters what they are supposed to say as good Americans about the all-important value of a 4-year college diploma. They don’t, actually, do all that much toward earning 4-year degrees, but they talk a good assimilated game, and that’s what’s really important, now isn’t it?

More than 10 years have passed since she gave up her pursuit of a degree in computer science, but Yajahira Deaza still has regrets.
“I feel incomplete,” says the 33-year-old, a customer service representative for a major New York bank. Her experience reflects the findings of an Associated Press-Univision poll that examined the attitudes of Latino adults toward higher education.

Despite strong belief in the value of a college diploma, Hispanics more often than not fall short of that goal.
The poll’s findings have broad implications not only for educators and parents, but also for the U.S. economy.
In the next decade, U.S. companies will have to fill millions of jobs to replace well-trained baby boomers going into retirement. As the nation’s largest minority group, Latinos account for a growing share of the pool of workers, yet their skills may not be up to par. …

“Aspirations for higher education are very strong among Hispanics, but there is a yawning discrepancy between aspirations and actual attainment,” said Richard Fry, an education researcher at the Pew Hispanic Center.

Indeed, the poll, also sponsored by The Nielsen Company and Stanford University, found that Hispanics value higher education more than do Americans as a whole. Eighty-seven percent said a college education is extremely or very important, compared with 78% of the overall U.S. population.

Ninety-four percent of Latinos say they expect their own children to go to college, a desire that’s slightly stronger for girls. Seventy-four percent said the most important goal for a girl right after high school is to attend a four-year college, compared with 71% for boys.

Enthusiasm about higher education hasn’t been matched by results.

Census figures show that only 13% of Hispanics have a college degree or higher, compared with 30% among Americans overall.

The poll revealed some of the roadblocks: Latinos do not have enough money, yet many are reluctant to borrow.

Buying an expensive California house with a zero-down subprime mortgage isn’t really “borrowing.” It’s investing in the American Dream!

In the poll, just 29% cited poor grades in high school as an extremely or very important reason for not going to college.

Dropping out of high school can be an extremely important reason for not going to college, and a larger percentage than that of U.S.-raised Hispanics drop out of high school. Also, having a child out of wedlock can put a damper on your college plans, and 51% of Hispanic babies are born out of wedlock.

… Deaza, the New York bank employee, said that is why she had to leave her computer studies back in the late 1990s. A single mom-to-be, she was expecting her first child, a daughter who’s now 11.

Now, scientists are predicting another consequence of climate change – mass migration to the United States.

As many as 7 million Mexicans could migrate to the U.S. by 2080 as climate change reduces agricultural production in Mexico, according to a new study being published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

I mentioned Howard Sutherland’s article, Weigh Anchor! Enforce the Citizenship Clause.[VDARE.com, August 31, 2001] below. It’s no longer the only source online of this kind of information–Fred Elbel has set up an entire website at www.14thamendment.us. It has links to a number of articles, including ours of course, which explain the constitutional question.

You can see a speech on the subject given by lawyer William Chip below:

I wrote yesterday that “Shirley Sherrod was only unemployed for about ten minutes (all right, two days). But she’s been offered groveling apologies from the Department of Agriculture and the White House. The only reason she hasn’t got her job back is that she won’t take it. “

This is a cartoon from the 27th.

Obama: (Pointing to picture of Shirley Sherrod) Here’s one American who lost her job and found one immediately. See? Proof of a recovery.

Adviser: (sotto voce) He’s reaching.

In real life, the Obama administration has been counting Census workers repeatedly in an attempt to lower the nominal unemployment rate.

When Michael Gerson asks below if Lindsey Graham thinks that

Congress and three-fifths of state legislatures will undertake a multi-year effort to feed racial conflict in America?

he’s saying that birthright citizenship can’t be ended without a Constitutional Amendment.

This is wrong, the Constitution never had birthright citizenship in it in the first place. The first commenter on his article knows better:

We may well not need a constitutional amendment to end birth right citizenship.There is an 1884 Supreme Court decision Elk v Wilkins that may well provide the foundation for ending birth right citizenship. It may well be that in giving citizenship to people born in this country to illegal immigrants we have been misapplying the law. Before anyone jumps down my throat I urge them to actually read the decision and I am not definitely saying that this decision will end birth right citizenship, all I am saying is that this issue is not as clear cut as many people want us to believe.

Posted by: jeffreed | July 30, 2010 1:35 PM

It’s possible that that commenter found out about Elk Vs. Wilkins from our article on the subject, Weigh Anchor! Enforce the Citizenship Clause. He wouldn’t have found out about the case from Michael Gerson or the Washington Post

After years of being in the Treason Lobby’s pocket, Lindsey Graham has amazingly come out against birthright citizenship, saying “People come here to have babies.They come here to drop a child. It’s called ‘drop and leave.’” Lindsey Graham has either seen the light, or felt the heat, and Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson is furious about it.

“After years of being a lonely voice of Republican sanity on immigration, Graham has decided to embrace the supreme symbol of nativism — changing the Fourteenth Amendment to restrict American citizenship. He has either taken leave of his senses or of his principles. Neither is unknown in Washington. Politicians sometimes come here to drop their deepest convictions. It’s called self-serving cynicism.

The authors of the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed citizenship to all people “born or naturalized in the United States” for a reason. They wished to directly repudiate the Dred Scott decision, which said that citizenship could be granted or denied by political caprice. They purposely chose an objective standard of citizenship — birth — that was not subject to politics. Reconstruction leaders established a firm, sound principle: To be an American citizen, you don’t have to please a majority, you just have to be born here.

Abandoning this principle would be particularly cruel when it comes to the children of illegal immigrants.”
[On immigration, Lindsey Graham abandons principle, Washington Post Blog,July 30, 2010 ]

There are a number of things wrong with this, the first of which is, of course, how does Gerson know that Lindsey Graham was acting on principle before? It might have been the influence of many, many, cheap labor donors that made him so enthusiastic about immigration.

Maybe it’s now that he’s acting on principle, that of loyalty to his country. Or loyalty to his party–the part about being a “lone voice” of immigration “sanity” means that, like McCain, he was going against the wishes of most Republicans, and most of the people who voted for him.

The part about the “supreme symbol of nativism” is interesting–perhaps the stolen citizenship that illegals achieve for their children could be the supreme symbol of “alienism.” We’ve seen how outraged John Podhoretz became at the mere thought that some alien somewhere would fail to steal citizenship for his children.

Anyhow, Gerson says that it’s wrong for Graham to complain of this constant affront to the American nation, because

“Does he actually think that Congress and three-fifths of state legislatures will undertake a multi-year effort to feed racial conflict in America?”

Once again, that’s the opposite of a principle–letting people get away with the theft of American citizenship to avoid resentment from Hispanics. But if you want to know what will feed racial conflict in America, it’s allowing twenty million illegals to invade America, and hating people like Gerson telling Americans not to fight back.

Arizonans still support SB1070 even after a Judge struck it down, says Rasmussen. [Subscriber content] So do a majority of normal Americans, many of who would like similar laws in their own state.

Rasmussen Reports polling separates out what they call the “Political Class” from normal people. These are people who, like Pauline Kael, don’t know anybody who voted for Nixon. Rasmussen says

“The Political Class sharply disagrees with Mainstream voters, however. While 66% of Mainstream voters want individual states to enforce immigration law, an overwhelming 81% of the Political Class want enforcement by the federal government. “[59% Support Arizona Law; 53% Trust States More than Feds To Enforce Immigration Law - Rasmussen Reports™July 30, 2010]

You may be thinking that one reason they trust states more than the Federal Government is that the states aren’t headed by Barack Obama. But Bush was not a lot better. It’s a bipartisan problem–the political class in both parties is insulated from immigration.

Sam Francis wrote about a similarly divided poll in 2002:

Probably nothing in public life in recent years shows so clearly the vast differences between how elites and the public at large view mass immigration. It goes far to explain why nothing is ever done to control immigration: The people with power and influence don’t regard immigration as a threat.

And indeed, why should they? The main problems that mass immigration brings are not those of terrorism but rather crime, job loss, educational chaos, cultural erosion and language barriers. Those are problems that middle class or working class people have to face every day, not those of the ruling class.

Elites, simply because they can afford to isolate themselves from the impact of these kinds of threats, don’t feel them and don’t see them even when they look at them. They can move to high-security, crime-free neighborhoods and dump their kids in well-protected private schools.

To them, the main impact of mass immigration is that it creates lots of cute little ethnic restaurants and cute little ethnic nannies that allow the up-scale young parents of the ruling class to dine regularly on Nepalese and Ethiopian cuisine.

As for the ethics of mass immigration, the ruling class has long since convinced itself that “we’re a nation of immigrants,” “the first universal nation,” a “proposition country” or a “credal society” that has a duty to let in anyone who wants to come here, and that anyone who opposes mass immigration is a bigot, a nativist, a xenophobe.

If you live in a small town that is being overrun by illegal immigrants, and pass a law to deal with it, lawyers from ACLU and MALDEF will come in from out of town to sue you, with foundation money.

They’ll keep after you with legal challenges until your town has to either give in or go bankrupt.

Then they’ll go back home and live in Scarsdale.