Atlanta is close to recording the dryest year in its history. But even if rainfall over the next couple days rescues the city from that unfortunate statistic, Georgia and the general area are facing “exceptional” drought conditions. (Pictured is Lake Lanier, a drastically reduced source of water for Atlanta, currently 20 feet below normal.)

In October, I reported that the state of Georgia had no plan of what to do if the unthinkable catastrophe happened and the water were to run out: Water Supply: Where the Overpopulation Rubber Hits the Road. (See also No Backup if Atlanta’s Faucets Run Dry.)

Georgia’s Governor famously held a prayer service to implore a higher power for rain (Perdue asks crowd to ‘pray up a storm’), where he blamed Georgians for wasteful consumption patterns. “We have not been good stewards of our land. We have not been good stewards of our water,” he said. The Governor might better have blamed Washington for its policy of endless population growth, against all reason.

Now Georgia at least has a short-term plan, although the sight of people lined up with buckets to get water from a tanker truck like some third world country may be deeply unsettling. Particularly if the National Guard must be called up to deliver water to a major city.

The state of Georgia said it has lined up contracts with vendors to bring in bottled water and tanker trucks that could dispense water into jugs, jars and buckets.

“Are we going to get to that point? I don’t know. But the most important thing is to be prepared,” said Buzz Weiss, spokesman for the Georgia Emergency Management Agency.

But the state, the city of Atlanta and the Georgia National Guard, which could be called into action by the governor to deliver water in an emergency, have yet to work out the details of exactly where the water would be distributed and how, saying it is too soon to say where it might be needed.

In any case, those are just emergency measures for supplying people with the water they need for drinking, cooking, bathing and flushing the toilet. Atlanta and other communities have yet to settle on a long-term solution if the water runs out.
[Amid drought, Georgia is lining up tankers and bottled water, but still has no long-term plan, Associated Press, Dec 5, 2007]

The skunk at the garden party here is immigration-fueled population growth. Georgia has mushroomed to double the population it had 1960, from 4 million then to over 8 million counted in the 2000 Census. So not only has the supply of water decreased (droughts are a normal part of nature) but the demand has increased enormously.

I want to thank VDARE.COM readers who rallied to my last appeal. And I want to commiserate with the surprisingly significant number of VDARE.COM donors who have written to say they have lost their jobs, due to outsourcing and immigration. Our fight is truly your fight. We are really grateful—but we need help from all of you - and especially those of you who have capital gains in 2007 and are in a position to shelter them by giving larger sums.

A few generous individuals still constitute the bulk of VDARE.COM’s support. You can really make a difference—now.

Please go to our donation links and give generously, before clicking on the link for today’s postings, just below.

“The Immigration Encyclopedia” Needs Your Support

By Nicholas Stix

[Peter Brimelow writes: New York journalist Nicholas Stix has once again very kindly supported our Christmas appeal with this unsolicited article on his blog, Nicholas Stix, Uncensored. His energy and effectiveness amazes me—and I just recently edited his definitive account of the black-on-white murders Stix calls the “Knoxville Horror”. Scroll to end, BELOW TO DONATE LINK, to get to today's postings.]

Bewildered former Arkansas governor and GOP presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee, recently told the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza that everywhere he goes, voters’ number one concern is immigration.

It does appear to be the issue out here wherever we are. Nobody’s asked about Iraq—doesn’t ever come up. The first question out of the box, everywhere I go—Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida, Texas, it doesn’t matter—is immigration. It’s just red hot, and I don’t fully understand it.

Welcome to America, Mike!

Here’s the problem. With the help of the MSM, Huckabee has conned millions of voters into thinking that he supports enforcing America’s immigration laws, when in fact he is a confirmed supporter of abolishing America through open borders.

What if I told you that there is an online encyclopedia – though its editor/publisher doesn’t use that term – devoted (though not limited) to immigration, which is vastly superior in factual reliability (unlike the New York Times, it has its own house fact-checker) to any daily newspaper, but which at the same time has more scholarly rigor than you’ll find from tenured professors? (With the notable exception of immigration economist George Borjas.) And what if I told you it has an archive of eight years’ worth of thousands of such articles? And what if I told you it’s free?

Readers of The Immigration Encyclopedia know all about Mike Huckabee’s chameleon routine, because TIE’s dogged researcher-writers have scrutinized the Governor every step of the way.

Keeping track of presidential aspirants’ flip-flops is just one of the many services that TIE provides on a daily basis through its articles and blogs.

And while it costs nothing to read TIE, it does cost money to produce and maintain it. Not just due to Web servers and bandwidth, but because TIE pays its writers and its fact-checker, which is how it can provide you such top-notch reporting, scholarship, and commentary. (Full disclosure: I am proud to say that I am one of those writers.)

The site isn’t actually known as The Immigration Encyclopedia. I gave it that title, because it is the most encyclopedic source on legal and illegal immigration into America on the Web, and to mock a certain pretend Web encyclopedia that has just collected so many millions of dollars in donations that it is embarrassed to even cite the figures. The pretend encyclopedia pays contributors nothing, and nothing is what it provides—but at a cost of millions! By contrast, The Immigration Encyclopedia is a priceless resource that is run for mere tens of thousands of dollars per year in tax-deductible donations. But that relatively small sum is essential.

TIE’s official name is VDARE.com. The reason I didn’t name it earlier was to be coy, to stress what I believe is VDARE’s true character, and to fool Google. Since this is my third fundraising post this month, had I stated its purpose at the top, Google’s blogsearch would have seen this as a repetitious post, and not listed it.

Please hit this link to support VDARE with a tax-deductible donation. (Did I mention that your contribution is tax-deductible?)

Thank you.

With best holiday wishes,

Nicholas Stix

Readers report that PayPal is now making TWO confusing efforts to get you to sign up for its proprietary system option when you just want to make a one-time credit card payment to VDARE.com.

When you click on the “credit card” link below (HINT!), you go to our donation page. If you click on “make a donation” in the credit card section, you see the PayPal login stuff on the right - and the Don’t Have PayPal account?/credit card option in very small print on the bottom left.

If you click on “continue” there, basically the same page comes up EXCEPT THAT you can enter a payment amount, top right.

If you do that and then again click on “continue”, bottom left, it gives up trying to get you to sign up for PayPal and takes you to a page where you can enter your credit card information.

PayPal is a great system, but its marketing people are aggressive - like those annoying ads on newspaper websites, something I really want to avoid on VDARE.COM. (HINT! HINT)

[Click here and scroll down for donate links--remember, if you donate electronically, you can be sure of getting in before the end of the calendar year.]

The mainstream media’s willful mis-reporting on many aspects of the immigration issue brings to mind Stalin’s rhetorical Q and A:

“How do we manage the ideological and political work of a party as large as ours? Only through the press.”

Luckily for the public, there is the internet and a handful of local papers which are willing to…well, report on the issue.

This from an eleven-part series on a recent refugee influx in Shelbyville, Tennessee [Somalians respond poorly to local hospitality, By Brian Mosely, Shelbyville Times-Gazette, December 29, 2007 ]

”Over the past few years, this community has given a helping hand and opened their arms to the new arrivals from Somalia.

In return, many of these refugees have given Shelbyville the finger.

When I began researching this story about the Somalis, I knew it would be controversial. We were aware that many in Shelbyville were having serious concerns about hundreds of Sunni Muslims moving here.

But as I began to talk with officials and others about our new neighbors, I was stunned by the reaction. Practically every person I spoke with locally said they had done everything possible to help out the refugees in adjusting to their new home and were treated very badly in return.

On the other hand, some I contacted for background on this story seemed to be so blinded by political correctness that they would excuse any behavior, no matter how upsetting or disruptive, as “part of their culture.”

Did anyone involved in integrating these folks into American society stop to think that many in the heartland of America might not share this overly optimistic and myopic view of cultural diversity?

There are also the stories that come from other communities that have many locals nervous. For example, in October of last year, Said Biyad, a Bantu refugee from Somalia, killed his four children in Louisville, Ky., and attacked his estranged wife with a blunt object, turning himself into police afterward. He slashed the throats of the children, aged 2 to 8, because his wife “disrespected” him, he said.

A difference in culture, no doubt.

If Shelbyville’s Somali community really wishes to “integrate into different societies to live together and to make our future here,” as Imam Haji Yousuf told me, that process must work both ways. The arrogant sense of entitlement demonstrated by these new additions to Shelbyville must stop.

One can not expect a community to keep bending over backwards to help folks, only to treated with rudeness, disrespect and hostility. At some point, our welcoming attitude and southern hospitality will turn into resentment and distrust.

And as the comments posted on our website demonstrates, that is already occurring, in far greater numbers than we ever imagined.”

Phyllis Schafly writes at World Net Daily:

A Duke University spokesman said that 40 percent of Duke’s engineering graduates cannot get engineering jobs. A Duke University publication suggests that the best prospect for good engineering jobs is for the U.S. government to start another major project like going to the moon.

U.S. News warns us that “government is becoming an employer of choice.” Corporations are getting leaner, but government can continue to pay good salaries with lots of vacation days, sick leave, health insurance and retirement benefits, because government rakes in more tax revenue in good times and can raise taxes in bad times; and if the Democrats win in 2008, we can expect government to expand even more.

Presidential candidates have gotten the message from grass-roots Americans that we want our borders closed to illegal immigrants. Headlines now proclaim “Immigration moves to front and center of GOP race” and “GOP candidates hold fast on immigration at debate.”

But Republican Party candidates haven’t yet gotten the message that jobs are just as big a gut issue as immigration. The Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey conducted Dec. 14-17 reports that, by 58 percent to 28 percent, Americans believe globalization is bad because it subjects U.S. companies and employees to unfair competition and cheap labor.[A Degree of Insignificance. December 28, 2007]

Now, the thing is that the jobs issue and immigration are greatly intertwined. In The Jobs Crunch, I showed that in IT, immigration,especially via programs like H-1b, is a bigger factor in decreasing employment opportunities for Americans than outsourcing. Immigration is also a major factor in the reduction of disposable income for Americans in less skilled employment.

Outsourcing spurred by bad trade deals is still a major factor–but when you add bad immigration policies to bad trade deals the results are synergistic and devastating. The folks being most impact are those that are younger-and with less of an established lifestyle and career.

I applaud Mrs. Schafly for being a more genuine “family values” conservative than we typically see–because if we don’t have and economy that supports families, we won’t see that many truly stable families.

Promoting education will do very little if the US continues to have horrible trade and immigration policies.

How many Presidential debates have been held this year? A quazillion? And how many have you, personally, watched? If you are like me, maybe half of one and three minutes of another.

Is this our fault? Well, of course it is. But, still … couldn’t the candidates try a little harder to make it interesting?

For example, one cause of voter cynicism is the suspicion that the candidates are complete ignoramuses on every topic on which they haven’t been preprogrammed by their handlers. So, instead of having them stand around and semi-argue with each other, why not have them play Jeopardy instead, with the categories weighted toward history and current affairs.

Sure, the frontrunners wouldn’t be likely to agree to it, but why not let laggards like Duncan Hunter and Dennis Kucinich volunteer for a match. They don’t even have to be in the same party. Come on, you’d watch that, right? And once a Hunter-Kucinich-Paul Jeopardy match got triple the ratings of the last debate, pressure would mount on the big boys and girls to pick up their buzzers and fight.

Couldn’t the match be rigged by producers who leak the questions to one candidate or another? Sure, but there are ways around that. The show doesn’t have to write new questions–it has tens of thousands of old questions, far too many for a candidate to study. All the producers would have to do is categorize old categories as Relevant, Middling, and Irrelevant with a weighting toward the Relevant, then have a random system that picks old categories moments before the show starts taping.