Recently while perusing Facebook.com profiles (read: procrastinating), I came across an interesting group to which one of my friends had subscribed: “Dora The Explorer Is Sooo An Illegal Immigrant“.

After doing a little e-research, I discovered that not only has the group gotten some extra-Facebook attention, but it has also ruffed some idiotic feathers.

For those of you who don’t have five-year-olds addicted to cable TV, Dora the Explorer is the name of a children’s cartoon that airs on Nickelodeon. In each episode, Dora, obviously Mexican with dark brown hair and brown skin, roams around trying to complete a task (usually consisting of solving a problem or doing a good deed). Impeding her way is a thieving fox named Swiper, who, if she’s not quick enough, steals her valuable clues. According to Nickelodeon’s webpage about the show, “the series is designed to actively encourage pre-schoolers in a play along adventure. Dora The Explorer builds on Nick Jr’s promise to ‘Play, Laugh and Learn.’” But what is Dora teaching?

For one thing, Spanish. There are several characters who are monolingually Spanish, with whom Dora communicates only in Spanish.

Now, Dora is probably harmless. But she has nevertheless caused some Facebook fanaticism to boil over.

The original Facebook group, which now has over 114,000 members, cited the following as evidence:

1. Both Dora and her talking backpack speak Spanish perfectly.

2. Dora carries everything she could ever need for survival (and/or climbing a wall) in her backpack - water, food, shoes, clothing for any weather, ropes, grappling hooks etc.

3. Dora has been known to produce a veritable menagerie of animals out or her backpack as well. In the group’s founder’s words: “What kind of legal immigrant has that many pets!?”

4. Finally, Dora is often attempting to transport a “package” to some destination, while being stalked by a fox trying to take said package. To the members of the Facebook group, Swiper is obviously “…some sort of border patrol agent trying to collect evidence of Dora’s entire narcotics trafficking business“.

It’s all fun and games, right? I mean, being a member of a Facebook group means nothing more than displaying the group’s title on one’s profile, and even that much is optional.

Wrong. Certain other Facebookers were highly offended. Not only was the group “reported”, (meaning a petition was made to take down the group because of alleged inflammitory content) but a counter group was formed called “Don’t call dora a beaner you stupid gringos” (sic). Amusingly, the counter-group was removed, but not the original.

Countless posts accuse the group of racism, ignorance, white supremacy…you name it. And as a result, most of the dialogue on the group’s discussion board has deteriorated into explicit vulgarity and personal attacks.

After scrolling through a few of them, I can’t help coming away with the feeling that not only is Dora quite probably an illegal alien - but also that her defenders have no sense of humor.

Over the last few months of the struggle against amnesty, Archbishop Roger Mahony was quieter than usual. In previous amnesty battles, Mahony has been a major supporter of open borders. This year, not so much.

Photo: Archbishop Roger Mahony and Sen Kennedy push for illegal alien amnesty.

He has apparently been busy on another front — wrangling with lawyers to settle the huge pile of lawsuits against his diocese from victims of sexual abuse by predatory priests, the evil men whom Mahony protected for years by refusing to release relevant records.

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles will settle its clergy abuse cases for at least $600 million, by far the largest payout in the church’s sexual abuse scandal, The Associated Press learned Saturday.

Attorneys for the archdiocese and the plaintiffs are expected to announce the deal Monday, the day the first of more than 500 clergy abuse cases was scheduled for jury selection, according to two people with knowledge of the agreement. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because the settlement had not been made public. [...]

The Los Angeles archdiocese, its insurers and various Roman Catholic orders have paid more than $114 million to settle 86 claims so far.
[LA archdiocese to pay $600M to settle abuse claims, San Francisco Chronicle 7/14/07]

Archbishop Mahony actively shielded a dozen pedophile priests and lied about at least one in court, actions which were included in the documentary film about priest sex crimes, Deliver Us from Evil.

Yet he has accused American citizens of being insufficiently moral for refusing to open US borders to his new parishioners (see Mahony Baloney).

On March 6, Lou Dobbs ran a clip of Mahony displaying his usual arrogance. Keep in mind that the Catholic hierarchy regard illegal immigration as a right for the poor, not a privilege allowed by the American people.

CARDINAL ROGER MAHONY, ARCHDIOCESE OF LOS ANGELES: This is an issue about people, and the focus upon people who are our neighbors, people who live here in our United States who are contributing to our country. We simply cannot exclude them. We must find ways to bring them into the full light of our society.

Don’t miss a fascinating page of Roger Mahony quotes, e.g. “Our country stands at a critical point in its history. Our heritage as a nation of immigrants is at stake.”

Remember - this is the man who doesn’t want the shocking testimony of victims of predator priests to be heard in open court.

A long article in Newsweek enthusiastically explains that Obama has repeatedly been challenged and repeatedly passed with flying colors on the “Is Barack Black Enough?” question. This won’t come as a surprise to readers of my “Obama’s Identity Crisis,” where I pointed out that the predominant theme of his autobiography, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, is his struggle to overcome these doubts and to make himself black enough.

Across the Divide

By Richard Wolffe and Daren Briscoe
July 16, 2007

Cornel West was on fire. Bobbing in his chair, his hands sweeping across the stage, the brilliant and bombastic scholar was lambasting Barack Obama’s campaign. Before a black audience, at an event outside Atlanta called the State of the Black Union, West was questioning why Obama was 600 miles away, announcing his bid for the White House in Springfield, Ill. Did he really care about black voters? What did that say about his willingness to stand up for what he believes?

“He’s got large numbers of white brothers and sisters who have fears and anxieties and concerns, and he’s got to speak to them in such a way that he holds us at arm’s length,” West said, pushing his hand out for emphasis. “So he’s walking this tightrope.” West challenged the candidate to answer a stark set of questions: “I want to know how deep is your love for the people, what kind of courage have you manifested in the stances that you have and what are you willing to sacrifice for. That’s the fundamental question. I don’t care what color you are. You see, you can’t take black people for granted just ’cause you’re black.”

A few days later, West was sitting in his Princeton office after class when the phone rang. It was Barack Obama. “I want to clarify some things,” the candidate calmly told the professor of religion and African-American studies. Over the next two hours, Obama explained his Illinois state Senate record on criminal justice and affordable health care. West asked Obama how he understood the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and interrogated him about a single phrase in Obama’s 2004 Democratic-convention speech: that America was “a magical place” for his Kenyan father. “That’s a Christopher Columbus experience,” West said. “It’s hard for someone who came out of slavery and Jim Crow to call it a magical place. You have to be true to yourself, but I have to be true to myself as well.” A few weeks later, the two men met in a downtown Washington, D.C., hotel to chat about Obama’s campaign staff. Just a month after ripping into him onstage, West endorsed Obama and signed up as an unpaid adviser.

Terrific! He’s convinced Cornel West that he’s black enough. Well, I’m reassured!

West may have come around, but he raised one of the most potent—and controversial—questions facing the candidate: is he black enough? It’s one that has long dogged Barack Obama’s career, though he says he settled his own struggle with racial identity (as the son of an African father and white, Kansan mother) in his late teens. …

Obama himself dismisses the idea. At the end of a NEWSWEEK interview in his Senate office, Obama offered an unprompted statement about “post-racial” politics: “That term I reject because it implies that somehow my campaign represents an easy shortcut to racial reconciliation. I just want to be very clear on this so there’s no confusion. We’re going to have a lot of work to do to overcome the long legacy of Jim Crow and slavery. It can’t be purchased on the cheap.” Obama was dismayed by the Supreme Court’s recent decision against public schools that pursue diversity by taking account of students’ race.

The preppie from paradise had to prove to his future wife that he was ideologically black enough to get her to marry him:

When the two first met at the law firm, Michelle was his reluctant mentor for the summer. She remembers rave reports that circulated around the office before she joined him for lunch the first time. “Yeah, he’s probably a black guy who can talk straight,” she recalls saying to herself. “This is a black guy who’s biracial who grew up in Hawaii? He’s got to be weird.” Afterward, she realized she may have misjudged Obama. But it was only later that summer, when he took her to a church basement on the South Side, that she fell for him. He gave an inspiring speech about “the world as it is, and the world as it should be.” Three years later, they married. Michelle had to work through her early misperceptions about him; now, she says, the nation needs to do the same. ” …

A black legislator in Springfield challenged Obama:

“He was questioning Senator Obama’s toughness and, frankly, his blackness, as to whether Barack really understood what it was like to be a teenage African-American standing on a street corner in Chicago and being harassed by police officers,” recalls Dillard. Obama stood his ground, evoking his childhood in tough neighborhoods of Honolulu ...”

No comment.

“Sometimes, the middle ground doesn’t hold between black and white, and Obama’s innate sense of caution and compromise can look like weakness. Just before his big announcement outside the old state capitol in Springfield—where Lincoln delivered his “house divided” speech—Obama abruptly changed plans and asked his pastor not to deliver the invocation prayer. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright is the man who gave Obama not just spiritual direction, but also his signature phrase, which became the title of one of his books, “The Audacity of Hope.” But in the days before Obama officially launched his campaign, Wright was also caricatured as a “radical” for his Afrocentrism and his focus on black issues—a strange criticism, perhaps, of a preacher on the South Side. (The Reverend Wright is considered mainstream among African-American church leaders; Ebony magazine once named him one of the top 15 black preachers in America.)”

The Rev. Wright may be considered mainstream among African-American church leaders, but he’s not mainstream among Americans. As he said recently, “When [Obama's] enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli [in Libya]” to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, Mr. Wright recalled, “with [Black Muslim leader Louis] Farrakhan, a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.”

It’s a commonplace in history for somebody of a mixed or marginal ethnic background to try to be more ethnocentric than thou, whether out of compensation or genuine enthusiasm: Napoleon, Eamon de Valera, and Stalin (from 1941 onward) are obvious examples. Similarly, Obama wrote a 442 page book about how his not being all that African-American by heredity and upbringing made him self-obsessed with being black.

To the Man from Mars, this article would make sense if Obama was running to succeed Jesse Jackson as the Uncrowned King of Black America. But, last I checked, he’s running to be President of the United States. To the average American voter, the news that Obama has relentlessly managed to prove to black activists such as Dr. West, the Rev. Wright, and Mrs. Obama that he’s black enough via his staunch political commitment to their cause might not be as reassuring as the article assumes.

But you won’t see that in Newsweek.

Garett Jones of Southern Illinois U. has been one of the very few economists working with the average national IQ data from Lynn & Vanhanen’s 2002 book IQ and the Wealth of Nations.

From the Economist Magazine’s blog:

Garett Jones: A Very Intelligent Economist on Economics and Intelligence

GUEST BLOGGER | Bryan Caplan

Thirteen years after Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve outraged the country, it’s hard to find a serious social scientist who denies that intelligence is a Very Big Deal. But it still takes courage to push the envelope. That’s just one of the reasons why I’m thrilled that Garett Jones, a leading expert on economics and IQ, will be joining the faculty of George Mason University, where I work, this fall.

So what’s Garett been up to? For starters, he’s done the most careful statistical study (with co-author W. Joel Schneider) of the relationship between intelligence and economic growth. Published in the prestigious Journal of Economic Growth, the Jones-Schneider study find that “In growth regressions that include only robust control variables, IQ is statistically significant in 99.8% of these 1330 regressions, and the IQ coefficient is always positive. A strong relationship persists even when OECD countries are excluded from the sample. A 1 point increase in a nation’s average IQ is associated with a persistent 0.11% annual increase in GDP per capita.”

Garett’s got another neat paper on intelligence and cooperation in Prisoners’ Dilemma experiments. By combining data from many previous experiments, and looking up the average SAT scores of the schools where the experiments were conducted, Garett answers a big question on the cheap. Result: “A meta-study of repeated prisoner’s dilemma experiments run at numerous universities suggests that students cooperate 5% more often for every 100 point increase in the school’s average SAT score.”

But my personal favorite is Garett’s job market paper (also co-authored with Schneider), “IQ in the Production Function: Evidence from Immigrant Earnings.” A common objection to international IQ comparisons is that the tests are not cross-culturally valid. This paper shows that the average IQ of immigrants’ country of origin predicts a lot about immigrants’ earnings in the U.S. In short, despite obvious shortcomings of international IQ tests, they still predict real-world outcomes right here in the U.S.

Now I should add that Garett Jones works in several other areas of economics, too. But I’m confident that his work on economics and intelligence will bring him the most attention and the most controversy. As I see it, that makes him a perfect fit for GMU.

By the way, George Mason U. itself is an interesting story. It was a nondescript public college in Washington D.C.’s Virginia suburbs. A couple of decades ago, it came up with the idea of hiring conservative and libertarian academics–nearby Washington provided demand for them and they were cheap on the market. Conservative foundations subsidize George Mason, and professors are encouraged to be public intellectuals. Thus, the large presence of George Mason economists in the blogosphere and their constantly blogrolling for each other. (The irony of course is that these libertarians are employed by the state of Virginia.) This strategy has raised GMU’s public profile considerably, although it doesn’t appear to have done all that much yet to attract a stronger student body. Still, in the sleepy world of academia where the reputations of institutions change only glacially, it shows that colleges can alter their fate if they are willing to try something new.

His new article.Abolish the SAT ?AMERICAN.COM, July 13, 2007

Let’s be clear that he wants to get rid of the SAT I (the traditional aptitude test) in favor of the SAT II (the optional subject achievement tests):

In theory, the SAT and the achievement tests measure different things. In the College Board뭩 own words from its website, 밫he SAT measures students?verbal reasoning, critical reading, and skills,?while the achievement tests 뱒how colleges their mastery of specific subjects.?In practice, SAT and achievement test scores are so highly correlated that SAT scores tell the admissions office little that it does not learn from the achievement test scores alone. …

I know how counterintuitive this sounds (I am presenting a conclusion I resisted as long as I could). But the truth about any achievement test, from an AP exam down to a weekly pop quiz, is that the smartest kids tend to get the highest scores. All mental tests are g-loaded to some degree. What was not realized until the UC study was just how high that correlation was for the SAT and the achievement tests.

Before, studies of the relationship had been based on self-selected samples of students who chose to take achievement tests along with the SAT, and there was good reason to think those students were unrepresentative. But by requiring all applicants to take both the SAT and achievement tests, the University of California got rid of this problem뾞nd the correlations were still very high.

After the College Board did all of its statistical corrections in its 2002 study and applied them to test-takers from California, it found, for example, that the correlation between the SAT Verbal and the Literature Achievement test was a very high 0.83 (a correlation of 1.0 represents a perfect direct relationship). The correlation between the SAT Math and the Math IC achievement test was 0.86. So I conclude that bright students who do not go to first-rate high schools will do fine without the SAT.

So, it’s a six of one (SAT I), half dozen of another (SAT II) result. Murray recommends:

Suppose, for example, that this fall Harvard and Stanford were jointly to announce that SAT scores will no longer be accepted. Instead, all applicants to Harvard and Stanford will be required to take four of the College Board뭩 achievement tests, including a math test and excluding any test for a language used at home. [More]

The University of California system started requiring three SAT II achievement tests in order to give Hispanics a leg up after Proposition 209 abolished ethnic preferences in California. Latino kids tend do unsurprisingly well on the Spanish achievement test. Blacks, however, tend to do terribly on Spanish. (Black lack of interest in learning Spanish is quite striking: a top black attorney in LA who used to work for Johnnie Cochran and now makes a nice living both suing the LAPD and defending LAPD officers told me in 2001 that of the 900 black LAPD cops, only four spoke Spanish.) But, blacks are losing political power in California, so hurting blacks to help Latinos was a no-brainer for the University of California.

I suspect that learning a language is the easiest educational skill to simply buy for your kids. If you send your kid (at a young enough age) to Seville for a few summers of Spanish immersion, he’ll come back speaking Spanish. In contrast, if you send him to Cambridge to trod the ground where Isaac Newton worked out the calculus, he won’t just pick up calculus through immersion in the milieu. So, I’d modify Murray’s suggestion to ban foreign language test scores altogether.