In the San Francisco Bay Area, the Nov 7 oil spill from the China ship Cosco Busan was a big deal, with many beautiful beaches ruined for months if not longer. Now we learn the Coast Guard was slowed in its response by not being able to understand the Chinese perp crew–language diversity is our strength!

It occurred to me that airline pilots are required to speak English in order to fly into US airports — why isn’t there a similar requirement for ocean-going shipping?

Actually, according to an LA Times article which was cited in VDARE.com at the time of the spill (see Oil Spill Raises Open-Borders, Open-Port Questions), “the captain and officers are required to speak English.”

Right, I’ve heard some of that English spoken in Chinese restaurants, and always ended up with the Chef’s Surprise.

Funny how some of these regulations work out in actual practice.

Coast Guard officials who boarded the Cosco Busan to determine how much oil had spilled into the San Francisco Bay had trouble communicating with the Chinese-speaking crew - and ultimately had to use drawings and hand gestures.

The new detail, contained in the first major report on the response to the Nov. 7 oil spill, helps explain why the Coast Guard came up with the faulty initial estimate of 140 gallons - far short of the 58,000 gallons that were later reported to have leaked into the Bay.

The report, ordered by the Coast Guard, was being released today at a news conference on Treasure Island.

The initial low estimate was a key factor in the response of the early hours of Nov. 7, after the ship struck the bridge, tearing a 100-foot long gash in its hull. The report found that many Bay Area officials did not take the spill seriously because it appeared to be minor.
[Language barrier played role in response to Cosco Busan spill, San Francisco Chronicle, Jan 28 2008]

The medieval right of sanctuary was supposed to give miscreants a chance to get right with God before they were executed, and only last 40 days at most, anyhow. No such right exists in American law. But someone else is trying it:

Immigrant takes refuge in church :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Metro & Tri-State
Immigrant seeks sanctuary in same church as Elvira Arellano

January 28, 2008
BY KARA SPAK Staff reporter/kspak@suntimes.com

Saying she hoped the fear of God would keep federal agents away, undocumented immigrant Flor Crisostomo said Monday she plans to stay in a Humboldt Park church as long as necessary to fight for immigration reform.

“In this moment, I am not leaving,” a tearful Crisostomo cried out in Spanish. She later said through an English translator that while she understands she may be imprisoned for her actions, she will return one day to her children with her dignity.

Crisostomo, 28, left her three children ages 14, 11 and 9 in the care of her mother in Guerrero, Mexico seven years ago to work illegally in the United States. Arrested in 2006 during an immigration raid at a pallet factory where she earned $300 a week, she was scheduled to turn herself in for deportation today .[More]

Maybe we need to get atheists like Christopher Hitchens  and the Americans United For Separation Of Church And State to harass the Church in question, and the DHS as well. Churches have no more right to harbor illegals than an employer does.The DHS made a mistake when they waited for Elvira to come out before they arrested her.

There’s been a lot of happy burbling about Barack Obama’s victory over Hillary Clinton in Saturday’s South Carolina Democratic primary shows that he can create a rainbow coalition, but of course it’s wishful thinking. According to the New York Times exit poll, 55% of the voters were black and Obama carried nearly four-fifths of them. He was close to an absolute majority without any white votes at all.

Obama carried less than a quarter (24%) of the white vote. And these are white Democrats. What kind of person is a white Democrat in South Carolina? The Republican primary, held the previous weekend, appears to have been all-white–at least, the NYT doesn’t bother to report its racial breakdown. All these whites will vote in the general election. The Democrats may be stupid enough to believe their own multculti propaganda and nominate Obama. But he has no chance of carrying South Carolina - or, on this showing, the country.

Unless, as I suggested ast week, Virginia’s new Senator Jim Webb is his running mate - to get the to get the unmentionable (but statistically critical) white, male, Confederate, veteran, American Patriot, vote. My suggestion seems to have hit a nerve: it generated an unusual amount of email. I see that Wikpedia has a section discussing the idea. Webb has apparently said he’s not interested, but of course he would have no choice: he’s 62, it’s his only route to the Presidency.

I’ve known Jim Webb for most of three decades. He and his second wife were perhaps the earliest dinner guests my late wife and I had in Washington D.C. after our marriage in 1980. I think I can fairly say that a Webb vice-presidency would be–interesting. The Democratic contenders no doubt fear this too. But they may have no choice either.

Interestingly, the New York Times survey also reveals that immigration was the second-most important issue to Republican primary voters, named by 26% vs. 40% for the economy. Only 16% named Iraq. But in a state whose near-lynching of Senator Lindsey Graham was among the first signs that the Kennedy-Bush amnesty/ immigration surge bill was going to fail, McCain, who supported it, got a quarter (24%)of those naming immigration. He even got a quarter (26%) of the gratifying majority (52%) of South Carolina Republican voters who thought illegal immigrants should be deported. Ron Paul, who got an appalling 4% of both groups, is missing a huge opportunity by not stressing his commitment to national sovereignty.

When Emma Lazarus talked about the “wretched refuse of your teeming shore,” this is not what she had in mind:

Green Valley News & Sun - News > News > Volunteers clean up trash left by illegals
By Jaime Richardson, Green Valley News
Published: Sunday, January 27, 2008 4:01 AM MST
The Arizona Department of Environmental Equality sponsored trash pickups in Tubac and Tumacacori aimed at removing waste left by illegal immigrants.

An estimated 10,000 pounds of water bottles, food containers and other waste were cleaned up and moved to the Rio Rico landfill, said Steve Owens, director of ADEQ.

The trashing of the desert by border-crossers is a huge problem, said Owens.

“We have been working with officials at the federal and local levels, as well as community groups, to develop a strategy for addressing this enormous issue and organizing cleanups of waste that has been left in the desert,” Owens said in a news release.

ADEQ is participating in the cleanups as part of its Undocumented Migrant Waste Project, through the department’s Office of Border Environmental Protection. The specialized office, based in Tucson, also works on border environmental issues related to air and water quality, among other issues.[More]

This has been going on for a while. See here for the problems this is causing the Papago Indian Nation on the border, and see Allan Wall’s Diversity Is Strength. It’s Also…Litter,  or Peter Brimelow’s Latinos Litter. Who Dares Say That? for the cultural aspect. While the volunteers’s activity in cleaning up the the litter is admirable, they might do better in the long run to join the Minutemen, which aims to stop the problem at its source.

Kevin MacDonald has just published on his blog The Neocons as a Hostile Conservative (!) Elite, which essentially is an updated and simplified reprise of his Thinking About Neoconservatism, possibly the most important and certainly the most costly article VDARE.com has ever carried.

In his new essay, MacDonald notes

First, neoconservatism is a Jewish movement. That should have been clear to everyone by now, but references to the Jewish basis of the movement have been noticeably missing from much of the mainstream media, to the point that Bill Kristol was introduced as a columnist at the New York Times as simply a “conservative.” This is critical because the neocons have now become the conservative establishment. When Kristol (or Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity) hold forth at Fox News, most people have no idea that they are tuning into the public face of a fundamentally Jewish movement that elbowed out more traditional conservatives.

Secondly, Jewish neocons not only have a strong Jewish identity, they also have strong Jewish interests. This is obvious from their involvement in pro-Israel activism, their personal relationships with Israeli leaders, and close ties with other Jews and with the wider Jewish community. In fact, I have argued that the neocons are more strongly identified as Jews than the mainstream liberal/left Jews — that the neocons form the vanguard of the Jewish community…along with the American Jewish mainstream, the neocons have been vital players in the establishment of a variety of policies opposed to the interests and attitudes of the American majority, most egregiously unrestricted immigration which has successfully altered the ethnic composition of the country.