Via Colby Cosh, who spends a lot of time looking into the English language foreign press, this story from Yemen, about “human trolleys.”

Pre-Ramadan shopping in Saudi Arabia means it’s time for the annual reappearance of the kingdom’s familiar Yemeni “human trolleys”

Human Trolleys of Jeddah

JEDDAH, 8 August 2006 — With the approach of the peak shopping season in the holy month of Ramadan, it becomes quite a common sight to see seasonal illegal workers, locally known as human trolleys, carrying people’s shopping in Jeddah’s downtown Balad district. The human trolleys carry big empty boxes and ropes to carry goods and offer to carry anything small or big for a minimal fee. Empty boxes are used to store the goods and then tied up with the rope. These human trolleys carry the box over their heads and follow the shoppers from one shop to another until they finally reach their cars.

The “Human Trolleys” are of course what used to be called “porters” in England in the eighteenth century.

They had the same ropes and a thing called a “porter’s knot” that they wore on their heads like the “tump lines” used by Indians and masochistic Canadian canoeists.

This kind of employment is not just the kind of work Americans won’t do, it’s the kind of work nobody should be doing. Here’s another example, from the late Carl Sagan:

LATE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, Leib Gruber was growing up in Central Europe, in an obscure town in the immense, polyglot, ancient Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father sold fish when he could. But times were often hard. As a young man, the only honest employment Leib could find was carrying people across the nearby river Bug. The customer, male or female, would mount Leib’s back; in his prized boots, the tools of his trade, he would wade out in a shallow stretch of the river and deliver his passenger to the opposite bank. Sometimes the water reached his waist. There were no bridges here, no ferryboats. Horses might have served the purpose, but they had other uses. That left Leib and a few other young men like him. They had no other uses. No other work was available. They would lounge about the riverbank, calling out their prices, boasting to potential customers about the superiority of their drayage. They hired themselves out like four-footed animals. My grandfather was a beast of burden.[Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.]

It hasn’t got that bad in the US, yet, but it’s heading that way:

In that harbinger of the American future, Southern California, once the Promised Land of the middle class, unskilled labor has become so plentiful that now a common weekend sight is people who are paid to stand on corners and try to catch your eye by randomly wiggling brightly colored directional arrows, typically pointing to real estate open houses.

It’s the 21st Century equivalent of the Depression-era advertising practice of hiring unemployed men to walk around wearing sandwich board signs saying "Eat at Joe’s."

And it’s just as depressing.[ “Human Directionals”—The Cheap Wage/Expensive Land Economy Personified, By Steve Sailer, December 18, 2005]

John Reid has recently been a breath of fresh air from Tony Blair’s painfully PC government, which is still trying to make nice with the mythical moderate Muslim.

The popular U.K. tabloid the Mirror called it “Reid’s grim warning.”

Then today, just a day after British Home Secretary John Reid delivered a major speech in London on security and terrorism, it appears to have come true with Scotland Yard’s announcement that a “terrorist plot to blow up aircraft [bound for the U.S., from Britain,] in mid-flight has been thwarted,” and that the national-security threat level at U.K. airports has been raised to “critical.”

Yesterday, Reid (of Britain’s ruling Labour Party) delivered a much-anticipated a speech at Demos, a London-based organization that describes itself as “the think tank for everyday democracy,” with a “a major program of research on global security.” Reid told his audience: “Our adversaries in international terrorism are completely unconstrained….They endeavor to drain our morale through the misuse of our freedoms by misrepresenting every mistake or over-reaction as if it is our primary or real purpose.”

Reid warned “that Britain may have to give up some of its freedoms in the short term in order to protect them in the long term,” and that “the government’s terrorism legislation had proved necessary despite the opposition it has met from Parliament, the judiciary and the press.” [...]

Reid’s speech came just a few days after his most recent public comments on the controversial subject of immigration to Britain. Speaking to the BBC, he called for a open, productive discussion and said: “We have to get away from this daft, so-called politically correct notion that anybody who wants to talk about immigration is somehow a racist.” Against the backdrop of increasing immigration from new European Union countries like Poland (through late March of this year, 228,235 Poles had registered for work in the U.K. since May 2004), Reid said: “I don’t accept that there’s this unmanaged tide, but I do accept that people want reassurance that when we are allowing people to come to this country, they contribute something towards it.” [ British Home Secretary Reid's "grim warning" quickly comes true, August 10, 2006 ]

The first “freedom” Britain should discard is its foolish multicultural immigration policy. There is no worse threat to national security than welcoming enemies by the hundreds of thousands into home communities. A recent Pew poll found that 81 percent of British Muslims thought of themselves as Muslim first, rather than British citizens. One quarter of British Muslims believe the 7/7 London bombings which killed 52 were justified.

See also the 2005 article, America Infiltrated By Jihadi Terrorists: Box Score.