I have a sentimental attachment to Williamson County, Tennessee. It was the site of the ghastly Battle of Franklin, where my namesake, Patrick Cleburne, laid down his life for the freedom of his adopted country – along with five other brother Confederate generals.

So it is pleasant to learn that the land still has defenders. The Sheriff has joined the movement amongst Tennessee jurisdictions to equip themselves to deport illegal immigrants:

(Williamson sheriff wants officers trained to deport illegal immigrants By MITCHELL KLINE The Tennessean July 19 2007)

There is a pressing need:

Sheriff Ricky Headley…said that since January, 36 percent of all people arrested in Williamson County were not legal U.S. residents…50 percent of those people were arrested for not having a driver license.
Approximately 15 inmates a month who come into the Williamson County jail are sent to a federal immigration court in Memphis, according to Headley. He said jail officials often wait weeks to hear back from federal agents on the immigration status of inmates.

This is a county which is said to have been only 2.5% Hispanic in the 2000 Census!

With Congress deadlocked, more men like Ricky Headley are needed. Congratulate him.

(Dismal postscript: Today’s Tennessean reports the sentencing of the DUI illegal immigrant killer of the local mandolin maker mentioned by Brenda Walker here and last night:

Mandolin maker’s killer had been deported 14 times By Sheila Burke The Tennessean July 20 2007

I read this earlier today, and it may interest you–Jack Pumpkinhead and the Scarecrow discussing language issues in the Land Of Oz. Oz, if you recall, was a confederation of the lands of the Quadlings, Winkies, Gillikins, and Munchkins, under a monarch, or occasionally a wizard. At the time this incident takes place, the Scarecrow is the ruler of Oz, because of his bran-new brains. He is giving an audience to Jack Pumpkinhead, and they don’t realize that that they’re speaking the same language.

The excerpt is quite long, so I’ll put it under a “more” tag, but here’s the point. It is a great blessing for the United States that everyone speaks English, a language spoken also in other civilized countries around the world. Unless you’ve done business in bilingual countries, or in Europe, where you have to have translators to get anything done, you don’t know how much of a blessing it is–anymore than the Scarecrow and Jack Pumpkinhead did.

The King was the first to speak. After regarding Jack for some minutes he said, in a tone of wonder:

“Where on earth did you come from, and how do you happen to be alive?”

“I beg your Majesty’s pardon,” returned the Pumpkinhead; “but I do not understand you.”

“What don’t you understand?” asked the Scarecrow.

“Why, I don’t understand your language. You see, I came from the Country of the Gillikins, so that I am a foreigner.”

“Ah, to be sure!” exclaimed the Scarecrow. “I myself speak the language of the Munchkins, which is also the language of the Emerald City. But you, I suppose, speak the language of the Pumpkinheads?”

“Exactly so, your Majesty” replied the other, bowing; “so it will be impossible for us to understand one another.”

“That is unfortunate, certainly,” said the Scarecrow, thoughtfully. “We must have an interpreter.”

(more…)

After trying hard for half a decade to completely ignore the data set on average national IQs in Lynn & Vanhanen’s IQ And The Wealth Of Nations economists are now starting to attack it, albeit with embarrassing results.

While IQ hardly explains everything in this extremely complicated world, it does explain more than economists have traditionally given it credit for (which is virtually nothing). In other words, IQ is an underexploited resource in the field of economics. It’s a $20 bill that’s been lying on the sidewalk while the entire U. of Chicago faculty walks by.

For the next generation of economists who might be looking around for something important but vastly underexploited to analyze, let me review a key point. The nature vs. nurture arguments about IQ can be a distraction because they aren’t all that relevant for your purposes.

What is important for economists is the stability of national and group average IQ scores. If they have zoomed all over the place relative to each other, they don’t have much explanatory power about how we’ve gotten to where we are. And if they are likely to change quickly and unpredictably over the next few years, why bother worrying about them?

For better or worse, however, we can be confident that differences in average group IQ are going to be around for a long time.

The relative gaps among groups have been fairly stable for several generations. East Asians may have picked up a few points on everybody else over the last 40 or 50 years, and Maoris in New Zealand may have done the same (although New Zealanders tell me that may just be mixed race people reclassifying themselves to get affirmative action benefits), but otherwise, remarkable relative stability is the norm.

One of Lynn’s recent books, for instance, lists 620 IQ studies of different groups going back, in a few cases, to the first quarter of the 20th Century. I’ve created a graph showing that there has been no overlap of average scores among Japanese (23 studies in red), Hispanics in America (17 studies in green), and Australian Aborigines (17 studies in blue).

The Japanese have consistently scored somewhere around 105 on a scale where white American are pegged at 100, Hispanics in the U.S. at about 90 (which, by the way, is roughly the world average), and Australian Aborigines at very low levels.

I don’t know what causes differences in average IQ, but the evidence is overwhelming that they were stable enough over the 1950-2000 era to be used in studies, and, with almost as much assurance, that they will be stable enough over, say, the 2000-2030 era to be important to study for the future.

If a gap between two groups suddenly disappeared in all the babies being born tomorrow for some magic reason, the gap among the workforce wouldn’t begin to shrink until 2025 and wouldn’t disappear until 2072.

So, the current realities demand far more study than they’ve gotten from the economics profession.

America lost a great patriot last month. Bob Simmons was my mentor in many ways. He and I shared real-time and memories of crazy immigration meetings in California, and when I think of those events and his wonderful, wild, shocking behavior (!), I cannot help but smile. Bob was a great teacher too, and shared his experience and observations of the Black Panther movement (being nice gets a movement nowhere!). I wish we had video of him at a “San Patricio” (St. Patrick’s Brigade) event, honoring Irish colluders with Mexican soldiers during the Mexican-American war.

When caught, American soldiers hung the Irish traitors who had been allowed to emigrate to the US in exchange for serving in our military, from which they promptly defected. There Bob sat, a smiling older gentleman, leaning on a cane, listening quietly, so very civilized as seditious speakers glorified Mexican and Irish enemies.

The next moment, as the panelists proudly revealed their Aztlan plan to take over America, Bob jumped to his feet shouting, eyes darting, his cane whirling wildly above his head, looking like he might just use his cane to impale the enemy, or at least whack them hard on the head.

His transformation that evening truly freaked out the open-borders crowd — how could they respond to this “elderly” “disabled” man who possibly posed a threat to them? Of course, they called the cops to silence us Americans. The cops reminded the fascists that we have a First Amendment right to speak freely, a concept foreign to them. Bob later limped out to his car, savoring that sweet victory, and we recalled it with glee for years. I met Bob so many years ago, when we started the battle to keep America for Americans. He was typing up and faxing alerts, and I convinced him (after much pushing and prodding) to buy my old computer so that he could use email and get on the internet.

He really didn’t like that new-fangled technology, at least that is what he told me at the time. A couple of weeks later, Bob junked that old Mac, bought a high-powered state-of-the-art computer, and never looked back. As Bob’s mobility declined, he became an info hub, courier, and distributor of critical alerts. He rallied our troops over and over again. The fact that he died the very week that We the People turned back a Senate Amnesty Bill from Hell is fitting. Bob fought the fought, ran the race — even when he couldn’t walk –and quietly laid down his sword only when Victory was in sight.

Bob (”LucasValley@”) was a great foot soldier, dedicated activist, hero, and true American Patriot. He must be counted among the Founding Fathers of the New Republic, which only now is beginning to spring forth in the hearts and minds of awakened Americans. I already miss you Bob! Thank you for your service.