Joe will be be on PHXNews Tuesday at 8 PM Pacific and you’ll be able to participate by calling in.

This happened after, (what else?) a hit-and-run by a pickup truck registered to a man named Alan Flores-Ocon. At least we have a clear picture of the identities of the people involved, although one local witness seems to feel that Hispanics just wouldn’t do that:“This is a very close community here, especially Mexican.”

Neighbors shocked over looting at hit-run scene
JJ Hensley and Sarah McLellan
The Arizona Republic
Oct. 3, 2007 09:56 AM
Collisions are fairly common at Main Street and Horne, a narrow intersection in west Mesa, but residents were shocked at what happened after a pedestrian was struck and killed Tuesday night.

Bystanders reportedly looted the victim’s groceries as he lay dying in the parking lot in front of a pawnshop near the intersection; they also stole items from a witness who was helping the victim, Mesa Police said.

The driver who swerved up onto the westbound curb of Main and hit the victim fled in pickup truck. Police recovered the truck at a nearby apartment complex but the suspect escaped. The truck is registered to Alan Flores-Ocon, 23, and police want to question him.

Rudy Rangel, an employee at Carnicerías Rancho Grande, near where the wreck occurred, was appalled to that learn thieves would rob a dying man in the largely Hispanic community where residents look out for one another.

“This is a very close community here, especially Mexican. If there’s a problem here, people help,” Rangel said. “For them to steal that man’s groceries, I can’t see that. We’ll find those people and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Chauncey Depew gave this speech at the Columbia Exposition in 1892, the four-hundredth anniversary of the discovery of the new world. A contemporary account of his speech is available, thanks to the New York Times archives. [AT THE FORMAL DEDICATION.; IMPRESSIVE SCENE IN THE BIG BUILDING ON THE GROUNDS. October 22, 1892]

This day belongs not to America, but to the world. The results of the event it commemorates are the heritage of the peoples of every race and clime. We celebrate the emancipation of man. The preparation was the work of almost countless centuries; the realization was the revelation of one. The Cross on Calvary was hope; the cross raised on San Salvador was opportunity. But for the first, Columbus would never have sailed; but for the second, there would have been no place for the planting, the nurture, and the expansion of civil and religious liberty.
…
All hail, Columbus, discoverer, dreamer, hero, and apostle. We here, of every race and country, recognize the horizon which bounded his vision and the infinite scope of his genius. The voice of gratitude and praise for all the blessings which have been showered upon mankind by his adventure is limited to no language, but is uttered in every tongue. Neither marble nor brass can fitly form his statue. Continents are his monument, and unnumbered millions, present and to come, who enjoy in their liberties and happiness the fruits of his faith, will reverently guard and preserve, from century to century, his name and fame.

In between those two quotes is more than 5,000 words of oration, online courtesy of the History Channel. I’ve placed the whole thing below. You are invited to magine any public figure giving this speech in 2007.

(more…)

Here’s an interesting story in Esquire from last summer about the big plans the Pentagon has for Africa. See, we’re going to go to Africa and kill people and break things at the same time we paint their schools! Pretty innovative, huh? What could possibly go wrong?

The Americans Have Landed

A few years ago, with little fanfare, the United States opened a base in the horn of Africa to kill or capture Al Qaeda fighters. By 2012, the Pentagon will have two dozen such forts. The story of Africa Command, the American military’s new frontier outpost.
By Thomas P.M. Barnett

The reality has been that not much happens in Africa that affects the outside world. Is that going to change? Maybe. Barnett has a complicated demographic theory about why Africa will soon transform from the rather lackadaisical place described by Modern Drunkard magazine as “a drinker’s paradise” into a seething inferno of Al Qaeda-led suicide bombers out to destroy America. See, in Barnett’s theory, all the countries that are “connected” to each other via trade and communications always get along, but the unconnected ones off on their own are trouble. (I guess that’s why isolated Paraguay caused the world so much more trouble in the 20th Century than centrally-located Germany.)

Okay, maybe, although I suspect that even though we assume that Somalians are obsessed with America, the reality is that life in Somalia is full of interest, thank you very much, and they don’t really think much about us except when we get in their faces. But, maybe I’m wrong.

Still, will painting their schools really make them like us more? If they care so much about having painted schools, wouldn’t they paint them themselves? Didn’t Ben Franklin explain that doing people favors just makes them resent that you can do them favors? (Instead, have them do you favors, which will make them like you more.)

Will having our soldiers roar around African locales in Black Hawks pointing .50 caliber machine guns at the locals — in between the school painting — really win the hearts and minds of the local youths? Aren’t they instead going to resent the fact that we get to roar around their neighborhood but they don’t get to roar around ours? Maybe that will plant the idea in their young men’s heads that they should come to America and do some roaring here just to show us we’re not so tough after all?

Wouldn’t it be easier for all concerned just to not let them through Customs at JFK?

Sorry, I forgot. Since our leaders have invited the world, we have to invade the world. It’s that simple.

One interesting point Barnett raises without quite making it is that when it comes to charity work, American soldiers tend to be better liked by the Third World locals than dweeby NGO volunteers (except when our soldiers kill their kin, which they remember unto the seventh generation):

Team leader of Team B/413th Civil Affairs Battalion, McKnight is an instantly likable fellow. He’s a balding bear of a guy whose uniform is a Cubs cap and a bike-messenger bag, and he comes off like a good high school football coach. And he did coach at a school in an unglamorous part of Miami. “Suburban kids didn’t need me because they’ve already got parents,” he says. …

Civil affairs promised him the most remote locations with the neediest clients. Now sitting across from me at a seedy Internet café located in the sweltering waterfront of Lamu, Kenya, an ancient seafaring port, McKnight downs a huge beer in a single gulp and leans back, flashing his gap-tooth grin like Vince Lombardi. He’s been in country for almost six months now and has put in repeated requests to extend his tour of duty, to no avail. “I’ll probably get me something deep in South America next,” he says.

McKnight in his element is a superb intelligence gatherer (or what they call in spycraft “human intelligence”). We took a long tour of Lamu’s labyrinthine back alleys, where the carved wooden doors mark the homes of some of the world’s oldest slave traders, and the open sewers reek. I’m holding my nose while McKnight presses the flesh of every shopkeeper we pass, most of whom warmly yell out his name in greeting. He’s like some muzungu running for office on Lamu’s south side: exchanging gossip, asking how business has been lately, needling them for details about this or that local issue.

Most of the Third World, especially the Horn of Africa, is a man’s world, and they like a man’s man better than a more sensitive soul.

That’s why some of the best anthropologists have been two-fisted brawlers, like Napoleon Chagnon and Carleton Coon. The latter’s autobiography recounts a lot more fistfights, some of them quite brutal, than is common in the memoirs of Ivy League professors. Coon’s specialty when wearing his cultural anthropologist hat was “the wilder whites” — mountain tribes in Northwest Africa and the Balkans. They thought Coon was a helluva guy. In fact, in the OSS in WWII in the Mahgreb, Coon’s highest priority was to be ready to become “Lawrence of Morocco.” If Franco had let the Nazis came down through Spain and wipe out from the rear the Anglo-American army that was fighting Rommel, Coon’s assignment was to disappear into the Rif Mountains and rally the tribes to fight the Germans.

In the 1969 movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Butch (Paul Newman) repeatedly asks while being pursued by railroad detectives, “Who are those guys?”

That’s the question I often ask when trying to make sense of journalists who think they have a clue about the immigration issue.

Take, for example, the recent column by the Kansas City Star’s Steve Penn, Semler controversy puts mayor in tough position, Oct. 5, who begins by telling his readers that Mayor Mark Funkhouser’s decision to appoint 73-year-old Frances Semler, a member of the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps, to the city’s park board will cling to him like an incurable skin rash for the remainder of his days.

In the next paragraph Penn lets fly with this from the yet uncharted regions of left field:

“Yet if you really picked his brain, you’d see that Funkhouser is more a fan of the NAACP and the ACLU than of the Minuteman group.”

What? To borrow from a former editor of mine who really didn’t get it, I don’t get it.

But I don’t want to spoil the fun you’ll have reading the column. Instead, allow me to give you a couple more examples of why today’s newsrooms are not exactly a favorable growing environment for common sense and critical thought.

Noting that Funkhouser’s wife Gloria Squitiro has until now remained silent on her husband’s choice of Semler, which does not measure up to the National Council of La Raza’s (The Race) high moral standards, Penn lets go unchallenged this comment from Ms. Squitiro:

“He didn’t create this race war. It existed. He came to try to help.”

“Race war?” This whole brouhaha is about La Raza’s Janet Murguia shooting off her mouth and threatening to cancel “The Race’s” 2009 annual convention in Funkhouser’s city unless he shows Semler the door. The NAACP’s Julian Bond also has threatened to pull the plug on his organization’s meeting for the same reasons.

Penn (e-mail) then gives center stage to Murquia’s brother Ramon, a local lawyer who would love to see Funkhouser “cave in” to the demands of both The Race and Julian Bond and certain of their local allies:

“We have to get beyond this, I agree . . . “But we also have to stand against injustice. When we see it, we can’t ignore it.”

Funkhouser is guilty of an “injustice” when he exercised his right to appoint someone whose abilities he feels would benefit the entire community?

Ramon rattles on:

“This is all about us as a community, getting together, united and standing up for these people who are voiceless. It’s time for us to say: ‘We’ve had enough. We’re standing up for our rights. And we’re standing up for this country. We helped build this country.’ 

Memo to Steve Penn: When the likes of Squitiro and Murguia spout off as they did in your column, why not give a little thought to what they are saying instead of, as my grandmother to say, “using your head only as a hat rack.”

VDARE.com likes to tease Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies for his habit of triangulating against us – although in fact we accept that enabling others to advance the patriotic cause by our drawing fire away from them is a valuable role.

However Mark can be pretty forthright himself. (As he was in the Q & A session of the Diana Furchtgott-Roth/Peter Brimelow row at the Hudson Institute Conference.)

A notable example of this appeared on Friday in the Frontpagemag.com debate already noted by James Fulford. Apparently irritated by the vicious sophistry of Linda Chavez, he said in conclusion:

…this whole discussion among John (Fonte), Joe (Hicks), Linda (Chavez), Clint (Bolick), and me has, I think, been quite illuminating. The substantive, documented critiques by John and me, and the glib, breezy responses by Linda and Clint, really highlight the unbridgeable divide on the Right over immigration. On one side is the majority of conservatives, who, despite many differing views on the specifics of immigration policy, nonetheless give first priority to Americanization, borders, sovereignty, and national cohesion. On the other side is a small but vocal group that places first priority on continued high levels of immigration, without any preconditions regarding assimilation or sovereignty. This faction is part of an odd-bedfellows coalition of business lobbyists, libertarian ideologues, racial-chauvinist groups, and left-wing open-borders activists that have been very successful over the years in preventing consistent, across-the-board enforcement of our immigration laws.

It’s long past time to establish the first of these two competing views as the consensus position of the Right: Assimilation first; Secure borders first; Sovereignty first. Those who disagree should either keep their own counsel or find a different political home. (VDARE.com emphasis.)

Find a different political home. We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

Linda Chavez also said some significant things in the FrontPage debate. (In inverse order):

the only way we can solve the problem with illegal immigration is to make it possible for more people to come here legally.

and

I am convinced that the real opposition to immigration reform is culturally-based.

That Chavez is in reality an open borders type is no surprise – although she denied it when Krikorian challenged her. But the assertion that culturally-based opposition to mass immigration (aka “reform”) exists (but is somehow illegitimate) sheds light on what motivates her own dogmatism on the question.

The “Hispanic” camouflage has faded. The lucrative board memberships at illegal-employing companies are beside the point. Linda Chavez – Mrs. Christopher Gerson – has assimilated both in style and beliefs to what comprises today America’s greatest danger.

A reader writes:

This might interest you.

I collected data from the new DHS site’s immigration statistics division for the years 2003-2006 on the gender of immigrants who were admitted as ‘immediate relatives of U.S. citizens’. As a practical matter, the majority of such immigrants are the SPOUSES of U.S. citizens (who may or may not be native-born Americans). Although DHS very unhelpfully stopped collecting separate statistics for spouses, parents, and children in 2003, I did my best to cut out adopted orphans which would skew the ratio for some important countries such as Russia, China, and Korea, which I did for 2003, 2005, and 2006 (2005 had defective data which included only about half of adopted orphans).

The upshot of all this is that doing this seems to show nicely how attractive the men versus the women of a given nation are!

Brendan Gordon

Click on the map to see the full size version. The key reads that Navy Blue countries have over 3 times as many female relatives of American citizens being brought into America as males. Medium Blue countries are 2x. At the other end of the scale is Dark Red.

I haven’t looked into this in detail, but it looks pretty plausible. I suppose it could be skewed by arranged marriages, such as all the arranged cousin marriage that bring Pakistani boys to Britain to marry their cousins. Another thing that could skew it is citizens bringing in non-spouse relatives, such as widowed moms and sisters. This would be especially high for countries that mostly send men to America as pioneering immigrants.

And it would be interesting to look at the sex ratio of foreign adoptions, since prospective American parents are very interested in how well their future child will do in the American marriage market.

But, it’s a good start.