India has an expanding middle class, largely due to American companies outsourcing jobs to take advantage of the dirt cheap labor there. The upshot is that many Indians have more money to spend, and they are purchasing cars, with mixed results.

A few weeks ago, the traditional Indian joint family household of Vineet Sharma, a fertilizer industry consultant, achieved a long deferred dream. Having ferried themselves on scooters all these years, the Sharmas bought a brand-new, silver-grey hatchback known as the Tata Indica.

Never mind that none of the six adult members of the household knew how to drive. No sooner had the car arrived than Mr. Sharma, 34, took it for a spin and knocked over a friend. His brother slammed into a motorcyclist, injuring no one but damaging the bumper and getting so scared that he no longer gets behind the wheel, except on Sundays when the roads are empty.

“We bought it first, and then we thought about driving,” Mr. Sharma confessed.
[Indians Hit the Road Amid the Occasional Elephant, New York Times, Jan 11, 2008]

Whatever your opinion about global warming, it’s bad news for the environment to have millions more vehicles spewing additional crud into the atmosphere. A major factor is the new affordability: Tata Reveals World’s Cheapest Car (San Francisco Chronicle, Jan 8, 2008).

For millions of people in the developing world, Tata Motor’s new $2,500 four-door subcompact — the world’s cheapest car — may yield a transportation revolution with as great an impact as Henry Ford’s Model T, which rolled off an assembly line one century ago.

The potential impact of Tata’s Nano has given environmentalists nightmares, with visions of the tiny cars clogging India’s already-choked roads and collectively spewing millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the air.

What I want to know is how many Indians will purchase a car before installing indoor plumbling, which is in short supply (No toilet, no seat, says minister, BBC, August 3, 2005).

Mr Singh told the BBC that more than 65% of India’s rural population defecated in the open, along roadsides, railway tracks and fields, generating huge amounts of excrement every day.

“This finds its way into the water sources,” Mr Singh said.

About 70% of India’s billion-plus population live in its more than 550,000 rural villages.

India is one of the world’s more diverse societies, where educated tech workers live alongside more traditional and superstitious persons. Oh wait, they are one and the same (India’s Visa God)!

Exit polls in all-white New Hampshire found no difference between Clinton and Obama voters on the issues, but sizable ones on demographics. The Guardian reports:

“[Hillary] noticeably won the votes of those on lower incomes and without college degrees. In the words of that Clinton adviser: ‘If you have a social need, you’re with Hillary. If you want Obama to be your imaginary hip black friend and you’re young and you have no social needs, then he’s cool.’”

As noted previously here, some in Washington are convinced that a substantial sum of money should be sent to Mexico to aid its internal police activities against drug cartels. Called the Merida Initiative, the proposed program would deliver $1.4 billion in military technology to a country known for corruption from top to bottom.

Worse than just being more taxpayer money wasted, however, the high-tech equipment could easily end up in the hands of the crime syndicates. Such things have happened before: the enforcer thugs known as Zetas were trained by the US military, but ended up on the dark side.

As it happens, there is still another problem with shoveling more money to wealthy Mexico: the low-rent neighbors to the south have become alerted to the smell of Washington freebies: now they want drug-fighting foreign aid also.

Naturally, Bush is happy to run up the national credit card for another $50 million or so. Why should he change his ways now in his last year? Spend!

Dismayed at being perceived as an afterthought to a massive counter-drug aid package for Mexico, Central American nations are asking for hundreds of millions for themselves, according to diplomats and U.S. government officials. [...]

Between 2000 and 2006, Central America received $140 million in U.S. counter-drug aid — a fraction of the more than $4 billion provided to Colombia in the same span.

Some Central American diplomats are suggesting that at least $500 million is needed from the United States.
[U.S. counter-drug aid sought, Miami Herald, Jan 11, 2008]

Central America may be an insignificant backwater but its leaders have learned from the master (Mexico) about how to mooch off Uncle Sucka, particularly as long as the great patron of hispanics remains in the White House.

  George Borjas, who writes his own papers, points to this article in  O2138Mag “about the shape of the production function in big-time academics.” I was particularly amused by this description of Alan Dershowitz’s work habits:

Several of his researchers say that Dershowitz doesn’t subscribe to the scholarly convention of researching first, then drawing conclusions. Instead, as a lawyer might, he writes his conclusions, leaving spaces where he’d like sources or case law to back up a thesis. On several occasions where the research has suggested opposite conclusions, his students say, he has asked them to go back and look for other cases, or simply to omit the discrepant information.02138 § A Million Little Writers, page 3

Following a link on Google News recently I found 290 articles in this vein:

Dad Throws Kids Off Alabama Bridge

A shrimp fisherman confessed Tuesday that he threw his children from a bridge in the coastal waters off Alabama.

Wednesday rescue teams were scanning waters for the bodies of the four children.

Tuesday night Lam Luong, 37, of Irvington, Ala. was charged with four counts of capital murder after he confessed that he threw his four kids off the Dauphin Island Bridge, which is 80 feet high over the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway that connects Mobile, Ala. and Dauphin Island…(Dad Throws Kids Off Alabama Bridge, By Matthew Williams, EFlux Media 01-10-08)

There were no Lam Luongs in the Army of Northern Virginia.

But only one headline in the 290 identified him as a Vietnamese immigrant - and it wasn’t in a US paper (Vietnamese admits throwing four children from Alabama bridge, South China Morning Post01-11-08).

This ABC News website has hosts a comments section after the story that proves this sort of mendacity really has an effect.

An early commenter says:

CurtMerzFan: “Another drunk rage-aholic male from the south? Why are we even surprized when the offspring of inbred #### smacks their wife or their kid…”

Luckily, not everyone is duped:

actinolite2: “Another drunk rage-aholic male from the south?” Would that be …south Vietnam? Way to go with your short-sighted regional stereotypes, CurtMerzFan (”inbred”? Seriously?)…”

And then, the inevitable:

Serene882: “Shame on you curtmerzfan and actionlite2 for even making that an issue. You two sound like a bunch of racist thugs…and under the influence, might commit the same hideous acts…watch out…don’t let your anger get out of control!! We should learn from the mistakes of others rather than point fingers and stereotype a certain group of people. As a Vietnamese, I am offended by your comments…”

In short, this is yet another case of what VDARE.COM has identified as “immigrant mass murder syndrome“. But don’t expect the MSM to report the trend, when it can’t even report the facts.