The thing that strikes me about Saturday night’s results is the sheer tribalism it reveals - and how complacently this is passed over in the MSM. Women vote for Hillary in Nevada. Hispanics vote for Hillary in Nevada. Mormons vote for Romney in Nevada. Evangelicals vote for Huckabee in South Carolina. Veterans vote for McCain in South Carolina. (Close race). Probably blacks will vote overwhelmingly for Obama throughout the South. This will be a problem for the Democrats in the general because their tribes just aren’t big enough - yet. On the other hand, the GOP is too cowed to adopt what we call the “Sailer Strategy” - make a full-blooded appeal to American whites. That would get the MSM’s attention! My prediction: the Democratic nominee, whoever it is, will chose as running mate Jim Webb, the new Democratic Senator from Virginia - to get the unmentionable (but statistically critical) white, male, Confederate, veteran, American Patriot, vote. Webb could put a Democrat in the White House, although of course he would probably make his/ her life hell thereafter. You read it here first!

John Zmirak, who has written for us many times, just posted this unsolicited testimonial to VDARE.COM on Takimag.com. Follow the wild and woolly comment thread to see why I flinch from having comments on VDARE.COM - although they do build traffic!

We already know that foreign cultures really are different from our own. Now research has revealed that those differences actually affect brain function.

It’s no secret culture influences your food preferences and taste in music. But now scientists say it impacts the hard-wiring of your brain.

New research shows that people from different cultures use their brains differently to solve basic perceptual tasks.

Neuroscientists Trey Hedden and John Gabrieli of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research asked Americans and East Asians to solve basic shape puzzles while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. They found that both groups could successfully complete the tasks, but American brains had to work harder at relative judgments, while East Asian brains found absolute judgments more challenging.

Previous psychology research has shown that American culture focuses on the individual and values independence, while East Asian culture is more community-focused and emphasizes seeing people and objects in context. This study provides the first neurological evidence that these cultural differences extend to brain activity patterns.
[Culture Fundamentally Alters the Brain, LiveScience.com, Jan 18, 2008]

For more details (including diagrams of brain scans), see Culture influences brain function, brain imaging shows (MIT McGovern Institute, Jan 11, 2008):

How do these differences come about? “Everyone uses the same attention machinery for more difficult cognitive tasks, but they are trained to use it in different ways, and it’s the culture that does the training,” Gabrieli says. “It’s fascinating that the way in which the brain responds to these simple drawings reflects, in a predictable way, how the individual thinks about independent or interdependent social relationships.”

Fascinating stuff.

Across Difficult Country observes:

“Some outré opinions printed years ago in a few of Ron Paul’s newsletters have precipitated a widespread libertarian moral panic. For believers in an inalienable right to necrophilia the Libertarianoids are surprisingly delicate about certain things, aren’t they?”

One test of how politically correct libertarians have become is to examine their flagship publication’s coverage of James Watson. Before the recent contretemps, Reason loved Watson, as these examples show:

Reason Magazine - Hit & Run > James Watson–Genetic Libertarian
The current issue of Discover has a fascinating interview with biologist James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. For example: …

Reason Magazine - Hit & Run > “I’m Basically a Libertarian.”
That’s James Watson, Nobel Prize winner and co-discoverer of DNA, talking in the January 2007 issue of Esquire. More of that here (full disclosure: the …

But, when the chips were down, and Watson needed defenders, all Reason provided was this hemming and hawing, without a defense of “free minds” anywhere to be found:

Reason Magazine - Hit & Run > Is Nobelist James Watson, Co …
Is Nobelist James Watson, Co-Discoverer of the Structure of DNA, a Racist? Ronald Bailey | October 16, 2007, 10:21pm. According to the Independent, James …

Reason Magazine - Hit & Run > Race and I.Q. Debate Blanks Slate*
Race and I.Q. Debate Blanks Slate*. Ronald Bailey | December 3, 2007, 11:55am. Slate’s science and technology columnist, Will Saletan, is now stumbling back …

Over at NRO, an entertaining spat has developed between Ramesh Ponnuru and David Frum over Ponnuru’s criticism of Frum’s book Comeback. Ponnuru writes that “none of [Frum's] facts can be trusted without independent verification” and that Frum’s pose as a “bold truth-teller” is “insufferable.” Frum, for his part, describes Ponnuru’s “distinctive Grand Panjandrum manner” as “absurdly pompous” and refers to Ponnuru’s “weird combination of vitriol and grandiosity.” Of course, there is a lot of truth to each man’s description of the other.

The irony is that, as Ponnuru writes, both “agree on the need for Republicans to offer an agenda that helps the lower middle class.” As Ponnuru writes, he has even been writing about the need to curb immigration to help the lower middle class for six years![VDARE.COM note: He's referring to Minding the 'Golden Door': Toward a Restrictionism that can Succeed, an attack on Peter Brimelow, April 2, 2001—see more about Ponnuru here.]

The deeper irony–one that will be lost on both Ponnuru and Frum–is that the man each of them has vilified, Pat Buchanan, has been forcefully arguing for “Republicans to offer an agenda that helps the lower middle class” and to curb immigration since his first run for President, in 1992. In this, Buchanan was on the same page as Chronicles, which was the first major publication to recognize the need for immigration reform after the disastrous Immigration Act of 1965.

It is nice to see that Frum and Ponnuru are beginning to recognize that Buchanan and Chronicles may have had a point all these years. Just don’t expect either of them to offer a word of gratitude, given the all too accurate description each offers of the other.

The “man who trusts McCain” is Hispanic columnist Miguel Perez.

McCain gives Latinos leverage
By Miguel Perez
Wednesday, January 16, 2008

For the past few months, it seemed as if Latino voters had lost their leverage. When the polls and the pundits gave Sen. John McCain of Arizona up for dead, when they said his presidential campaign was on life-support, Latinos lost their ability to threaten Democrats with a viable GOP alternative.They could not tell Democrats that they had the option of voting for Republicans such as former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee or Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado because the Democrats know that Latinos are not masochistic. It would have been a joke.

After the way those candidates have pandered to conservative immigration extremists and promoted ethnic intolerance, no one expects them to get significant Latino support. And that includes former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who goes from compassionate to intolerant every other day, and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who has turned his back on the illegal immigrants he once defended. Most Latinos would pick any Democrat over them.

Only McCain, with his admirable posture in support of tolerance for diversity and compassion for illegal immigrants, could win a significant portion of the Hispanic vote, especially in some large states that could swing the presidential election.[More]

Of course, what he means when he says Latinos are “not masochistic” enough to vote for a border enforcement candidate is that they’re not loyal.None of the immigration restrictionists is trying to do anything about Mexican-Americans, who have the vote–only about illegal immigrants, who don’t. (I admit that those illegal aliens who vote illicitly wouldn’t mark the ballot for Tom Tancredo.) And if the Latinos he’s talking about support the illegal invasion, that’s because they’re putting their ethnic group ahead of their country . He goes on to explain how Latinos will vote to help their friends and relatives get away with the crime of illegal immigration:

Amazingly, after spending months scapegoating Latino illegal immigrants, some GOP presidential hopefuls believe they still can appeal to legal immigrants in the Hispanic community because, as Huckabee put it in a recent debate, “I think there is a great misperception that Hispanic people in this country somehow are soft and weak on immigration; they are not. Those who have come here legally, who have stood in line, who have patiently waited to get in this country are some of the ones who insist that we enforce the law.”

Nothing could be farther from the truth! It’s not a question of being soft or weak, it’s about having compassion for our friends and neighbors. In the Hispanic community, you don’t hear people protesting about anyone cutting in front of the immigration line. That is a myth created by people who are against us and then have the gall to try to speak for us.

Sure, you’ll find some Latino GOP party loyalists who always will put the interests of their party before those of their own community. And some of them still may be supporting candidates who clearly would be harmful to Latino interests. But to the overwhelming majority of Latinos, especially those who live in the major urban centers of this nation, illegal immigrants are not foreigners who represent some kind of threat; they are our friends and neighbors. Sometimes they are even our relatives.

Those who don’t think we will vote to help them are sadly mistaken.

What he calls McCain’s “integrity” is of course McCain’s lack of party loyalty, willingness to betray his constituents, and his consistent support for illegal immigration.