Ronald Bailey writes from Bali, where globalists who want you to stop driving your pickup or SUV have flown thousands of miles to talk about “global warming.” Bali was the site of a savage Muslim terrorist attack in 2002, and another in 2005, but apparently they’re not participating in the War On Christmas:

Nusa Dua, Bali — The second week of the U.N.’s annual Climate Change conference, also known as the 13th Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP-13), took off on Monday. I have covered four previous meetings—Milan, Montreal, Buenos Aires, Nairobi—and I must say that the 10,000 or so U.N. bureaucrats, diplomats, and environmental lobbyists have outdone themselves this time. The conference center facilities at the Nusa Dua beach resort on Bali are spectacular. If it were up to me, I would make Bali the permanent climate meeting site. (I, on the other hand, am ensconced in a perfectly serviceable business hotel about 7 miles from the resort area. In the spirit of multiculturalism, the lobby features a large artificial Christmas tree and an elaborate Santa figure on the reception desk.)[Reason Magazine - Do the Rich Owe the Poor Climate Change Reparations?]

Maybe your local Town Hall can catch up with the multiculturalism of Bali.

Ryan Lizza has an article on the return of “nativism” to Republican politic(the Council on Foreign Relations calls it a “must read“):

McCain gets animated whenever he discusses the immigration issue. After a town-hall meeting in Anderson, South Carolina, he recalled how the Irish were discriminated against in America. As he quoted a placard that hangs on the wall of an aide’s office (“Help Wanted—No Irish Need Apply”),[VDARE.com note: This is a myth.]he jabbed his finger in the air with such emphasis that he knocked my voice recorder to the ground and erased our conversation. “It was immigration” that hurt his campaign, he said when he continued, after a series of apologies on both sides. “I understand that. I was told by one of the pollsters, ‘We see real bleeding.’ ”

There were two major factions in the immigration debate in Congress. A["fragile"] bipartisan coalition wanted a bill that included tough border-security measures, which everyone favored, as well as more controversial provisions concerning temporary-worker permits for undocumented aliens and a way for them to attain citizenship. Conservatives, led by Tom Tancredo, a Colorado congressman and Presidential candidate, demanded a bill that dealt only with security. McCain seems torn by how to address the issue, and he makes a small but telling concession to the Tancredo faction when he argues that security legislation must indeed come first. “You’ve got to do what’s right, O.K.?” he told me. “But, if you want to succeed, you have to adjust to the American people’s desires and priorities.”[The Political Scene: Return of the Nativist: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker]

From McCain’s point of view, you have to either “adjust to the American people’s desires and priorities,”–or pretend to do so until you get elected.

It’s too bad you can’t copyright titles–the title Return of the Nativist, a typical headline writer’s switch on Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native, has been used before: by blogger Tom Watson in 2006, by Paul Starr in the New Republic in 2004,in a speech by anthropologist Renato Rosaldo the same year, (both men were attacking Samuel Huntington) and…by me, here on VDARE.com, in 2001. Of course, I was the only one to defend nativism past and present.

I don’t wan t you to think that I’m wimping out on H-1B visas when I say that importing skilled immigrants may result in a net gain to the US itself, rather than just their employers. They may do something necessary and useful, and wind up being net taxpayers, with a low crime rate. Compare that with importing an entire new underclass to do farm labor that could be done by machines.

Nancy Pelosi likes both kinds of immigration, but the defeat of the Axis of Amnesty shows that legalizing unknown millions of immigrants isn’t going to work, so in the meantime, Pelosi would like to give big business what they want–but she’s being blocked by the Latino Caucus in her own party.

Officially, however, Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly welcomed the Bay Area Council letter in a carefully worded statement that did not shut the door on a partial solution.

Pelosi “has been pretty clear that there would be no H-1B or H-2A or H-2B fixes unless there is genuine action on proactive immigration reform,” he said.

That statement substitutes the word “proactive” for what she and other democratic leaders had previously called “comprehensive” immigration reform, and with that shift, Pelosi signals a willingness to touch several different political nerves.

To begin with, Capitol Hill insiders say, Pelosi must contend with members of the Latino caucus who are most bitter about the collapse of the comprehensive immigration bill and most leery of cutting any deal with industry that would solve its problems - getting more foreign workers for tech firms, ski resorts and farms - without tackling any of the issues important to their constituents.[Bay Area Council weighs in on immigration policy,
By Tom Abate, San Francisco Chronicle, December 5, 2007]

I can’t tell you how shocked I am that members of the Latino Caucus are putting ethnic grievances ahead of their loyalty to the Democratic Party. Maybe that’s what all those people who insist that they’re “natural Republicans” mean. Or maybe not.

In Baghdad by the Bay, a family of Pakistani Muslim immigrants is suing the city because they say the Housing Authority refused to protect them from hate crimes. The agency offered to move them to another residence but the Pakistanis refused. The couple and their seven children were receiving taxpayer-subsidized housing, but evidently that ill-gotten benefit was not sufficient: they are going for the big-ticket payoff via a lawsuit.

Is this the new immigrant way of assimilation — to absorb the culture of slime-bag lawsuits? And since when did anyone expect deluxe accommodations in Section 8 housing?

There are a lot of fake hate crime complaints to get money and for political reasons, so the hate crime gambit may be a Pak of lies.

The Koran desecration aspect is suspicious — most Americans wouldn’t even think to do that. But Muslims are obsessed with the specialness of their book, and go ballastic at the thought of someone messing with their Koran.

A family of Pakistani immigrants living in San Francisco public housing was improperly denied an emergency transfer to another apartment after someone broke into their home, desecrated their Quran, defaced their passports and shredded their traditional clothing, according to a federal court lawsuit.

After the August 2005 incident - which took place during a time of intensified anti-Muslim sentiment in the country and while the San Francisco Housing Authority was under court order to better protect tenants from hate-motivated crimes - agency officials ruled that the break-in at Ashan Khan’s apartment was a simple burglary and didn’t qualify the family for an emergency apartment transfer, the family says.
[S.F. Housing Authority sued over failure to protect Muslim tenants, San Francisco Chronicle, December 10 2007]

The comments section is not as sympathetic to the foreigners’ plight as you might have expected in San Francisco. There is a lot of outrage against parasitic immigrants ripping off American social services, even from the most left-wing of cities.

ms_kitty wrote:
I used to work at the Alameda Housing Authority. The overwhelming majority of our clients were foreign. I had to turn away many genuinely needy Americans, because the Section 8 vouchers all went to fairly well-to-do Vietnamese immigrant families, who all drove late model mini-vans to their renewal interviews. The used public benefits to subsidize their off-the-books small businesses. The city government knew what was going on, but what did they care? The immigrants voted for them, and the bureaucrats got bigger budgets. The social workers at the Housing Authority suspected the people who ran the agency of taking bribes from the clients. Public housing is a scam. Poor Americans are not being helped, except the occasional token American.

San Francisco has been so downright evil in the last while with its special city ID cards for illegal aliens that perhaps it is getting back some well deserved liberal karma.

From the Times of London:

JAMES WATSON, the DNA pioneer who claimed Africans are less intelligent than whites, has been found to have 16 times more genes of black origin than the average white European.

An analysis of his genome shows that 16% of his genes are likely to have come from a black ancestor of African descent. By contrast, most people of European descent would have no more than 1%.

The study was made possible when he allowed his genome - the map of all his genes - to be published on the internet in the interests of science.

“This level is what you would expect in someone who had a great-grandparent who was African,” said Kari Stefansson of deCODE Genetics, whose company carried out the analysis. “It was very surprising to get this result for Jim.
Watson won the Nobel prize, with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, after working out the structure of DNA in 1953. However, he provoked an outcry earlier this year when he suggested black people were genetically less intelligent than whites.

This weekend his critics savoured the wry twist of fate. Sir John Sulston, the Nobel laureate who helped lead the consortium that decoded the human genome, said the discovery was ironic in view of Watson’s opinions on race. “I never did agree with Watson’s remarks,” he said. “We do not understand enough about intelligence to generalise about race.”

The backlash against Watson forced him to step down as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York state, after 39 years at the helm. He had said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospects for Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really”.

The analysis by deCODE Genetics, an Icelandic company, also shows a further 9% of Watson’s genes are likely to have come from an ancestor of Asian descent.

Newsday of Long Island “reports:”

“News that geneticist James Watson inherited 16 percent of his DNA from an African ancestor may provide the Nobel Prize winner with a new perspective on his ancestry. But experts Monday said the percentage of Watson’s DNA possibly contributed by someone of African descent illustrates that race is a counterfeit concept, having more to do with social notions than biological ones.”

And the NYT leaps in here.

It could be true that Watson is 25% nonwhite (although the graph in the Times says 27%), but it sounds unlikely to me, based on simple genealogical arithmetic that nobody else seems to have done. The only evidence I can see for this claim is that Watson has wavy or curly hair and that his father spent a year at Oberlin, the most racially liberal American college of the 19th Century. Otherwise, this claim fails most reality checks.

Watson’s new autobiography, Avoid Boring People, has a fair amount of information about his ancestors, including several old photos. His mother’s side of the family were recent immigrants from the British Isles:

“Mother was the only child of Lauchlin Alexander Mitchell, a Scottish-born tailor, and Elizabeth (Lizzie) Gleason, the daughter of an Irish immigrant couple (Michael Gleason and Mary Curtin) who had emigrated from Tipperary during the potato famine of the late 1840s.”

So, if his mother was 100% white, as this family history suggests, then his father would have to be 50% nonwhite, which sounds extremely improbable. There’s a picture of James D. Watson Sr. on p. 5, and he looks like your average white guy. (Granted, old black and white pictures can be somewhat misleading, but still …).

Further, his father’s upper middle class family history suggests that his father’s side of the family sure didn’t suffer from racial discrimination. If his father was 50% nonwhite, then his paternal grandparents had to average 50% nonwhite (e.g., one was 100% nonwhite, and the other 100% white). Yet, if one or both were significantly nonwhite, nobody in late 19th Century America seemed to notice! His paternal grandparents were both Episcopalians. His grandfather was a stockbroker, his grandmother was an heiress from wealthy Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. The odds that two individuals who were, on average, one-third black could have thrived in such an anti-black social environment seems absurd.

Further, Watson’s father had three brothers. Did any of them displays signs of being part black? For a mulatto attempting to pass into white society, there are many fraugh passages, such as what to do with their loved ones. Today, we hear about how Race doe not exist, but for those who passed from black to white it was terribly traumatic, generally leaving behind your family and and taking on a new identity. Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain gives a strong picture of what it is like to pass from black to white. It’s based on the literary critic Anatole Broyard.

I don’t see any more of a such a troubled passage of the Watsons

This reminds me of this great article I wrote in 2001 about a population geneticist doing a pioneering racial admixture study, who noticed that one of his subjects was determined to be 22% black. So, he looked into it more and discovered it was him! This came as a big surprise to him and all his relatives. I wrote it up and it was a wonderful human interest story. The only problem was that it wasn’t true. As a reader pointed out to me, 22% means that, say, one grandparent was 7/8ths black, which somebody would have likely noticed. Later, the population geneticist took a look at his DNA again with better methodology and found he had been way, way off originally.

I hate being wrong …

Racial admixture analyses are reasonably good for groups, but for individuals, at present, they can throw off some funny results. For example, one commercial firm often reports that Jewish customers are a little bit American Indian. Brent Staples, a black editorial writer for the NYT, took a racial admixture test and was told he was 18% Asian, which is another unlikely finding.

I don’t doubt that the paternal side of Watson’s family tree, which in the case of Watson’s paternal grandmother goes back to a Thomas Dewey who landed in Boston in 1633, could include some blacks and American Indians. Yet, simple arithmetic shows that the chance of him being 25% nonwhite is vanishingly small.