The pilot who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 has passed away at aged 92. Throughout his long life Paul Tibbets never doubted using that terrible weapon was the right thing to do, despite the carping of utopian pacifists and what-if revisionist historians.

“I was anxious to do it,” he told an interviewer for the Public Broadcasting System television documentary “The Men Who Brought the Dawn,” marking the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. “I wanted to do everything that I could to subdue Japan. I wanted to kill the bastards. That was the attitude of the United States in those years.”

“I have been convinced that we saved more lives than we took,” he said, referring to both American and Japanese casualties from an invasion of Japan. “It would have been morally wrong if we’d have had that weapon and not used it and let a million more people die.”
[Paul W. Tibbets Jr., Pilot of Enola Gay, Dies at 92, New York Times November 1, 2007]

For more about the life and times of General Tibbets, see the Columbus Dispatch slideshow and local television coverage.

In the mid-1990s, the Smithsonian planned an exhibit about the Hiroshima bombing that many Americans felt was too politically correct by overemphasizing the suffering of Japanese, while underestimating the number of US servicemen who would be killed in a land invasion. General Tibbets called the proposed display “a damn big insult.” The Smithsonian backed down and presented a simpler exhibit, with little “interpretation.”

What’s particularly sad is that General Tibbets requested that he have neither a funeral nor a headstone, because he feared that they would be an attraction for anti-war protesters. Instead, his remains will be cremated and his ashes scattered over the English Channel, where he enjoyed flying during WWII.

This detail of Tibbets’ passing is a dismal marker about the current state of American patriotism and the success of the left’s campaign to rewrite history, particularly when military conflict is involved. Given sufficient multicultural immigration and statist reshaping of behavior, leftists believe, worldwide peace will break out, poverty will end and utopia will reign.

The ideas are completely crazy and run counter to the basics of human nature, but far-left indoctrination is the current core curriculum on many college campuses.

But the upshot today is that an American hero cannot be remembered in a traditional fashion because the multicultural agenda has convinced many in this country that our heritage is an entirely negative one.

Robert J. Samuelson writes about Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms in the Washington Post. (My 2 part review of the book is here and here.)

Personally, I’m fairly optimistic about Third World poverty, in the absolute sense if not the relative sense. For example, telephones are hugely useful for getting things done, and the good news is that cell phone systems are much less dependent on having a functional culture than the old land line systems. The old systems required big bureaucracies that were reasonably honest and efficient, which many countries, including some Western European ones, couldn’t reliably manage. But you can have working cell phone networks in places as anarchic as 1990s Somalia.

My guess would be that technology will continue to evolve toward plug and play solutions that will work even in dysfunctional cultures like Nigeria. The U.S. burned up a lot of brainpower in the 1980s and 1990s figuring out how to use, first, PCs and then the Internet. (For example, I worked mostly on introducing PCs to my marketing research company from the fall of 1984 to the summer of 1988, and on introducing the Internet to the company from late 1994 to the end of 1996.) The whole world has benefited and will continue to benefit from these investments. Granted, the Nigerians have latched on to the Internet most famously for the purposes of fraud, so maybe that’s not the best example …

And then there’s the Secret Solution to African Poverty, the one that nobody talks about: get the men to work as hard as the women. By one estimate I’ve seen, from an African feminist organization, women do 80% of the work in sub-Saharan Africa. That’s probably biased, so let’s say it’s only 70%. So, if the men started working as hard as the women, and were on average as productive, that would boost output by 40%.

In Britain, voluntary grovelling toward hostile Muslims took another step toward destroying British culture and dragging Christmas down in the process.

Immigration works so much better than messy warfare for overturning a nation. Particularly when the people don’t seem much interested in defending their heritage…

Christmas should be downgraded in favour of festivals from other religions to improve race relations, says an explosive report.

Labour’s favourite think-tank says that because it would be hard to ‘expunge’ Christmas from the national calendar, ‘even-handedness’ means public organisations must start giving other religions equal footing. [...]

“We can no longer define ourselves as a Christian nation, nor an especially religious one in any sense.”
[Christmas should be 'downgraded' to help race relations says Labour think tank, Daily Mail 11/1/07]

Right on cue, a British school went all out: Teachers ordered to dress up as Muslims [Daily Mail, 10/31/07].

Teachers at a primary school have been ordered to dress up as Muslims to promote multi-culturalism.

The West Midlands school is belatedly celebrating the Muslim festival of Eid and told its pupils and teachers to don traditional Muslim dress for the day.

All 257 pupils, most of whom are Christians, and 41 teachers - two of whom are Muslims - dressed up.

A morning assembly was held to mark the event and an afternoon party was strictly for women only, because Muslim husbands object to wives mixing with other men.

Get that last bit? Hard-won women’s rights are the first thing to be thrown under the bus by multiculturalism. Furthermore, following Muslim misogynist rules for a kids’ assembly illustrates that the purpose was to appease Islamists and train girls into proper Muslim submission.

Winston Churchill wisely opined that a person deluded by the leftist appeasement philosophy believes that if he feeds a voracious alligator, “the alligator will eat him last.”

The BBC reports:

‘Gordon Brown has pledged more jobs for British workers as he seeks to draw a line under a row over the number of migrants employed in the UK.’

‘The prime minister promised more help for the unemployed to fill the 600,000 vacancies he said were available.’

‘It comes after the government admitted it had underestimated the number of migrant workers by as much as 700,000.’

‘The Conservatives say Mr Brown’s pledge of “British jobs for British workers” is illegal under EU law.

Historically, the US has been greatly influenced by political trends in the UK. It is quite likely that if containment of immigration truly goes“‘mainstream” in the UK, it will also do so in the US.

This Sunday’s NFL game between the 7-0 Super Bowl champion Indianapolis Colts and the awesome 8-0 New England Patriots is the first November battle of undefeateds in the NFL in many years, with temporary possession of the title of the top American athlete up for grabs between quarterbacks Peyton Manning and Tom Brady. For years, Manning had the better statistics but Brady had the Super Bowl rings, but now it’s reversed, with Brady putting together an unbelievable half season. If he could somehow keep up this pace, Brady would break Manning’s record of 49 touchdown passes and finish with 60 touchdown passes versus only 4 interceptions. By way of comparison, Manning is on pace to finish with the second best TD to interception numbers at 28 to 7.
A couple of weeks ago, sportswriter Jason Whitlock pointed out:

African-American football players caught up in the rebellion and buffoonery of hip hop culture have given NFL owners and coaches a justifiable reason to whiten their rosters. That will be the legacy left by Chad, Larry and Tank Johnson, Pacman Jones, Terrell Owens, Michael Vick and all the other football bojanglers.

In terms of opportunity for American-born black athletes, they’re going to leave the game in far worse shape than they found it.

It’s already starting to happen. A little-publicized fact is that the Colts and the Patriots — the league’s model franchises — are two of the whitest teams in the NFL. If you count rookie receiver Anthony Gonzalez, the Colts opened the season with an NFL-high 24 white players on their 53-man roster. Toss in linebacker Naivote Taulawakeiaho “Freddie” Keiaho and 47 percent of Tony Dungy’s defending Super Bowl-champion roster is non-African-American. Bill Belichick’s Patriots are nearly as white, boasting a 23-man non-African-American roster, counting linebacker Tiaina “Junior” Seau and backup quarterback Matt Gutierrez.

For some reason, these facts are being ignored by the mainstream media. Could you imagine what would be written and discussed by the media if the Yankees and the Red Sox were chasing World Series titles with 11 African-Americans on their 25-man rosters (45 percent)?

We would be inundated with information and analysis on the social significance. Well, trust me, what is happening with the roster of the Patriots and the Colts and with Roger Goodell’s disciplinary crackdown are all socially significant.

Hip hop athletes are being rejected because they’re not good for business and, most important, because they don’t contribute to a consistent winning environment. Herm Edwards said it best: You play to win the game.

I’m sure when we look up 10 years from now and 50 percent — rather than 70 percent — of NFL rosters are African-American, some Al Sharpton wannabe is going to blame the decline on a white-racist plot.

Back in October 2005, Inductivist did a statistical analysis for my VDARE.com article showing that in the 2.3 seasons he looked at — 2003, 2004, and early 2005 — that NFL teams with more white second stringers won more games. The correlation between the racial makeup of the starters and percentage of games won was close to zero, suggesting that teams rationally evaluated their starting line-ups. But, it appeared that, at least in 2003-early2005, teams with whiter benches did better, suggesting there had been an under-exploited opportunity to win more games:

Why would having more white nonstarters help a team? Caste Football’s J.D. Cash has suggested that perhaps white utility players are more likely to master the playbooks for multiple positions (as suggested by their higher average IQ scores on the Wonderlic test mandated by the NFL).

Or, possibly, the reason that teams with a higher number of white reserves have been winning more games is because whites are better team players about sitting on the bench without complaining about not starting. Perhaps white back-ups are less likely than black back-ups to poison the atmosphere and ruin the team spirit.

After all, our society for the last 40 years has lavishly encouraged blacks to claim to be victims of injustice, so it would hardly be surprising if, among pampered egotistical athletes, whites might tend to be more likely than blacks to keep quiet for the good of the team when they feel they are being treated unfairly.

Whatever the reason for this pattern, this quick study, while not definitive, is important news—both to team officials in charge of player personnel choices and also to anyone who likes to bet on football games.
It would pay to extend the study over more years to see if it represents a long-term pattern, and to go into more depth to find the reasons for this apparent market failure.

Anyway, there’s now a couple of years more data, so somebody might want to check and see if this pattern persisted.

This story is about a report commissioned by La Raza to say that workplace raids are bad for the children of the illegal immigrants. This is especially true when both parents are illegal and both are employed at the same plant, which happens fairly often.

Report: Workplace immigration raids harm kids

Spokesman for immigration enforcement says parents are responsible, not law enforcement.
By VANJA PETROVIC
The Orange County Register

WASHINGTON – Children of illegal immigrants arrested at workplace raids face an increasing amount of family separation, economic hardship and psychological trauma, according to a new report released today.

“The effect of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids on children is inevitable and underappreciated,” said Rosa Maria Castaneda, one of the authors of the report, commissioned by the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic advocacy organization. The study was prepared by the Urban Institute.

Of course, this is true of all law enforcement arrests. It’s bad if one of your parents is arrested, worse if both are, but it’s not the DHS’s fault that you have whole families of criminals establishing themselves in American cities. ICE spokesman Tim Counts explained it to the media:

“This report takes the bizarre position that ICE is somehow responsible for family disruption caused by parents who make poor decisions,” Counts said. “Law enforcement agencies across the nation arrest people who have children every day. Everyone understands that parents are responsible for their actions and the resulting impact on their families.”

I’m not really going to cry about this. It was really sad when Oscar Wilde’s two boys had to change their names because their father had disgraced himself, and it was sad in the Rosenberg case when two children were orphaned when both their parents were executed for betraying their country, to name two cases that spring to mind.

In immigration raids, the worst thing that can happen is that the kids will go live with their parents in a perfectly good country next door,.

Anyhow, you can read the whole report by Dr. Rosa Maria Castaneda, [Email her] it’s called Paying the Price: The Impact of Immigration Raids on America’s [sic]Children and is 129 pages in PDF.

AEI hosted a forum last Monday, with a guest appearances by Charles Murray and Sally Satel, to announce the publication of Jon Entine’s long-awaited book Abraham’s Children: Race, DNA, and the Identity of the Chosen People. (Here’s my 2003 interview of Jon.)

In the Washington Post, the ever-shallow Dana Milbank, who seems to be be auditioning for the role of the male Maureen Dowd, snarked incoherently in a column entitled “Nature or Nurture? Well, Smart Guy?”

Philip Weiss comments, “Yes, Jews Are Smarter, But We’re Undergoing an IQ Drop by the Minute.

Jessica Berman writes at the Voice of America:

A team of scientists, whose work was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has found that a specific strain of the HIV virus passed from Haiti to the United States in about 1969 before spreading further.

The strain, called subtype B, predominates in the United States, Europe, large parts of South America, Australia and Japan.

The team traced the virus by examining archived blood samples from five early AIDS patients - all of them Haitian immigrants to the United States - and analyzed genetic sequences from another group of patients from around the world.

Using the data, they developed a map of the virus, which they believe shows conclusively that the strain came to the United States via Haiti, probably by a single person, in around 1969.

Some questions that can’t really be properly analyzed today in academe:
How would the US HIV epidemic be different if US immigration laws hadn’t been loosened in the 60’s?

Did expansion of immigration in the 60’s accelerate the spread of new diseases in the US?

What limits on immigration, tourism and business travel are appropriate to control spread of communicable diseases-particularly ones that are poorly understood?

Over at GNXP, Jason Malloy unloads on the Watson brouhaha.