The two of them haven’t got along, but they agree, in the presence of all those Texas Hispanic Democrats, that they’re both much nicer than the Republicans:

That opening exchange set the tone for a debate marked much more by agreement than disagreement, more by camaraderie than combat. On immigration and on economic policies, the two candidates were completely in sync. With Texas’ Hispanic vote in mind, they both advocated a comprehensive approach to overhauling immigration laws, with an emphasis on cracking down on employers, not illegal immigrants. Clinton even appeared to back away from her Senate vote to establish a vast border fence with Mexico, saying the Bush administration was moving toward a fence that would divide communities.Politeness Rules in Austin — at First | The Trail | washingtonpost.com

“Moving toward a fence that would divide communities” is good–if they’re on opposite sides of the border, they’re supposed to be divided.

Nedra Pickler and Beth Fouhy write at Associated Press:

Hillary Rodham Clinton has been waiting to get to Texas to begin her comeback against a surging Barack Obama. She might be more careful about what she wishes for.

Clinton has been banking on the state’s large Hispanic population — typically about a quarter of the turnout in Democratic primaries — to give her a victory on March 4. But the Democratic Party in President Bush’s home state has a complicated, hybrid primary-caucus that might just be better suited for Obama.[Texas' complicated rules may favor Obama, By NEDRA PICKLER and BETH FOUHY, Associated Press,February 20, 2008]

I tend to think Obama is a shoo-in in Texas because of the organizational ability his campaign has shown. Now, what this means is that if Obama wins in Texas and Ohio, is that Obama may lock in the Democratic nomination with less than overwhelming support from Hispanic Democrats. I can’t help but wonder what the implications of that would be to Obama’s immigration policy if he becomes president.

My sense is that Obama will probably want to expand immigration from countries like Kenya (and other countries that aren’t terribly well represented–perhaps in the name of making US immigration more “fair” and “diverse.” However, in an election against McCain, all he really needs to do is offer a package to various constituencies that appears better to them than McCain. I don’t think that necessarily has to mean catering to Hispanic and corporate interests like McCain would. I can easily imagine Obama expanding some social programs(like access to medical care)-and restricting illegal immigration in ways that are more gentle than most VDARE.com.com readers would advocate. I don’t expect Obama would be a restrictionist. I just suspect that corporations that want his support are going to have to support him and his administration is a strong and tangible way. I can also easily imagine Obama expanding H-1b visas in areas where those programs haven’t been traditionally used–and in ways that would specifically affect Republican voting blocks. This would be consistent with what Obama mentioned in his Senate speech:

And before any guestworker is hired, the job must be made available to Americans at a decent wage with benefits. Employers then need to show that there are no Americans to take these jobs. I am not willing to take it on faith that there are jobs that Americans will not take. There has to be a showing. If this guestworker program is to succeed, it must be properly calibrated to make certain that these are jobs that cannot be filled by Americans, or that the guest workers provide particular skills we can’t find in this country.

The simple fact is that virtually all employment in the US is a matter of supply and demand. At the height of the dotcom craze, I heard a lot of corporate managers whining about not being able to find IT people-and was personally able to recruit easily by simply going to the places that IT folks were likely to congregate rather than rely and old-fashioned HR tactics(and I helped staff the better part of a 150+ person start-up that way).

Similarly, the skills that Americans tend to invest in, are related to perceptions of long term demand. Expanding guest worker programs in any area will drive Americans out of that area over time. However, Obama’s approach would tend to restrict guest worker programs from being used for a lot of extremely low-wage and unskilled jobs-but would effectively mean that any skill specialty that started earning more than a “decent” wage would be subject to competition with guest workers. The simple fact is that often, if US workers wont’ take a job, there is a very good reason. Low cost guest worker programs inherently appeal to the baser instincts of corporate managers. The only somewhat workable examples of guest worker programs are those like Singapore’s in which companies much pay a substantial fee to the government to use foreign labor in Singapore(and the fees are substantial enough there is no clear cost advantage to guest work labor).

Traditionally, Obama has allied himself with “technocratic” Republicans-and right now, the best immigration the GOP excuse for “mainstream” can come up with is Romney’s idea of restricting illegal immigration and attaching a green card onto the diploma of anyone that can get a Ph.D. at a US university(Ron Paul I consider to be a GOP outsider and Huckabee’s immigration plan has some serious holes in it). Perhaps under an Obama administration that will include foreign recipients MBA’s and JD’s–and that just might work politically if Obama can figure out how to accomplish that while affecting the livelihoods mainly of Republican voters most unlikely to ever support Obama(and replacing them with immigrants more likely to vote Democrat).

Now on the positive side Obama has endorsed increase employer sanctions. However he has claimed that the price of reducing illegal immigration must be increases in legal immigration-and hopes to still “unite” Americans even while doing so.

If Obama is really as left sympathizing as some folks here have suggested, at some point he’ll have to address some of the traditional left economic issues-like jobs. These are issues that real leftist leaders like A. Philip Randolph realistically came to grips with a long time ago.

A lot of this depends on just how badly Obama wants to be president. Once he gets the nomination, the key factor is which constituencies that would tend to otherwise vote Republican he can appeal to. From that angle, Peter Brimelow’s suggestion that Obama choose a running mate like James Webb is probably a good one. Obama has a lot of advantages over McCain-and one of them is that he hasn’t been so vocal on a lot of issues that he can’t take the stand that would actually propel him into the presidency.

After the Jena Six brouhaha last year, the nation was swept by a frenzy of noose-sightings. Every day, the press brought us the latest noose news to alarm us that The Noose Was Loose in America!I want to thank the numerous readers who emailed me stories about the most publicized of the many noose incidents, that of Columbia U. Teachers College professor Madonna G. Constantine, a black woman who said she found a noose on her doors. They all said her story smelled like a hoax.

Today, the NYT reports:

A professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College who was propelled into the national spotlight when a noose was found on her office door last fall has been found to have plagiarized the work of a former colleague and two former students, the college has announced.

The college, in statements to the faculty and the news media, said an 18-month investigation into charges against the professor, Madonna G. Constantine, had determined there were “numerous instances in which she used others’ work without attribution in papers she published in academic journals over the past five years.” …

(more…)

The NYT headlines:

More Americans Are Giving Up Golf

In many parts of the country, high expectations for a golf bonanza paralleling baby boomer retirements led to what is now considered a vast overbuilding of golf courses.

That was a mistake. Golf is not young man’s game, but it’s a youngish man’s game: something like 30 to 50. Back in 2003, I wrote a 4-part series on why golf was in for a long stretch of economic hard times. In “The Golf Industry’s Demographic Dead-End,” I said:

According to the National Golf Foundation, the great leap forward in the number of players actually occurred between 1985 and 1990, when baby boomers, growing a little too old for contact sports swelled the ranks of golfers by 31 percent. Since 1990, however, the total is up only 14 percent.

The number of people turning 30, an age at which golf starts seeming more sensible than basketball or mountain biking, has been in decline since the mid-1990s. It will turn upward toward the end of the decade, but that growth will be driven heavily by minorities.

The urge to play golf appears related to testosterone levels. When they are at their peak, say age 15-25, you want to hit somebody, so contact sports are most appealing. Later, you want to hit something, so hitting a golf ball sounds good.

The funny thing is that the ability to hit a golf ball a long ways declines quite slowly with age. Typically, what goes first is putting ability.

Here are my four 2003 articles:

1. The Golf Recession

2. Why Golf Has Gotten So Expensive

3. Will Less Expensive Golf Courses Catch On?

4. Golf’s Demographic Dead-End

With California’s Republican Party broke, battered and beleaguered, this week’s statewide convention in San Francisco will set the stage for its future.

Years ago, RINOs took control of the GOP, assuring others that a “Big Tent” GOP was the key to success. But that circus tent was actually an open canopy, and more change agents quickly moved in for the kill. [State GOP Split As Convention Nears, By Carla Marinucci, San Francisco Chronicle, February 16, 2008]
So it’s no surprise that a draft of the proposed California GOP platform reads like it was written by open-borders, pro-amnesty globalists like John McCain or the shameless Mexico-first Bible-thumper Mike Huckabee.

The platform uses terms such as “Californians”, “residents,” “families,” “parents” and “people” — encompassing undeserving illegal and legal immigrants–with a token reference to “citizens”, as it promotes the worst elements of last year’s defeated, traitorous Comprehensive Immigration Reform Senate bill which was opposed by most Republicans and at least 80 percent of Americans.[Email the California Republican Party]

This odious draft platform is sure to please the Quisling Quartet of candidates (McCain, Huckabee, Obama, Clinton) being force fed to betrayed Americans including most prominently the impostor likely to be the GOP’s candidate, McCain.

This treacherous platform, as it now reads, states that:

“We believe that all children should have access to quality education whether they matriculate to higher education….”, clearly endorsing tax-subsidized free education to illegals up through PhD, with steep in-state discounts (DREAM Act) for higher education. Massive third-world immigration has utterly destroyed quality education for citizens in a state once leading the nation in quality education.

“Parents [no mention of citizens] should be confident knowing their children are attending a school that meets their standards for academic excellence, safety, and fulfillment.” An impossible goal in schools where English is a foreign language, many parents are illiterate in their own language, truancy is cultural, and ethnic gangs terrorize teachers and students alike.

“Immigrants are vital to the success of California’s agricultural, high-tech, and other key economic sectors.” (If we need immigrants to succeed, then why is immigrant-rich California broke?)

“We support immigration policies that encourage and reward legal immigration [reward?] and that support our family values by keeping immigrant families united.” (Chain migration aka family reunification, allows one immigrant claiming a relationship — however remote — to anyone in his homeland so that an entire tribe can enter the US. Far easy to reunify the tribe by sending that lonely soul home.)

“We support increasing the quotas on the number of individuals who may legally immigrate to America.” (No reason given for increasing immigration, let’s just open the floodgates, as if they are closed!)

“We oppose any general amnesty for illegal immigrants, but encourage thoughtful solutions [?] that allow immigrants vital to our economy to have opportunities to legitimize their status through guest worker and other legal programs (Amnesty!)

“…We believe in continuing to create and uphold environmental policies for clean air and water, healthy forests and oceans, and abundant wildlife”, impossible with massive immigration, and a platform that will “encourage and reward” higher levels of immigrants with high immigrant fertility rates that now drive nearly 100 percent of all California population growth, even as citizens flee resultant conditions.

“….California families are evolving and changing, and …society is best served by supporting [paying for?] all families. Families are ENTITLED and MUST BE EMPOWERED to make fundamental choices for their members, including education, healthcare, and fundamental moral and ethical decisions.” (New entitlements and empowerment for “changing” families, at the expense of citizen-tax slaves, with no need for changing families’ to pay their own way!)

“California’s growing population and fiscal responsibility demand that infrastructure needs be properly budgeted for in every state budget.” California’s infrastructure, including roads, water and sewage treatment, levies/dams, etc. are collapsing under the weight of unbridled immigration while scarce tax dollars pay for immigrant services, not key infrastructure maintenance.

Further, this perverse proposed party platform addresses carbon emissions (deport!), job creation (deport!), sound land use policies (deport!), protecting “California families” from criminals (deport!), asserts that all “persons” be presumed innocent…(deport!), supports protecting the public from violent acts of career criminals (deport!) and providing effective anti-drug education programs (deport!), stiffer penalties for child abductions, exploitation, and abuse (deport!); domestic violence (deport!), and free political speech for Californians in a healthy and vibrant Democracy. (RINO leaders choice of the term “democracy”, a form of government the founders loathed, shows how deeply embedded and arrogant these interlopers are within the California GOP.)

Will California’s Republican delegates at the convention shake free from the chains that bind them, chains that will be tightened by the wolves encircling the sheep, or will an awakened electorate rear up and rout these traitors out? We’ll know by Monday.

Harvard’s Marc Hauser proposes four ways that human intelligence is qualitatively different from animal intelligence:

These four novel components of human thought are

- the ability to combine and recombine different types of information and knowledge in order to gain new understanding;

- to apply the same “rule” or solution to one problem to a different and new situation;

- to create and easily understand symbolic representations of computation and sensory input;

- and to detach modes of thought from raw sensory and perceptual input.

Sounds like the abilities to abstract and to analogize are the keys.

Earlier scientists viewed the ability to use tools as a unique capacity of humans, but it has since been shown that many animals, such as chimpanzees, also use simple tools. Differences do arise, however, in how humans use tools as compared to other animals. While animal tools have one function, no other animals combine materials to create a tool with multiple functions. In fact, Hauser says, this ability to combine materials and thought processes is one of the key computations that distinguish human thought.

According to Hauser, animals have “laser beam” intelligence, in which a specific solution is used to solve a specific problem. But these solutions cannot be applied to new situations or to solve different kinds of problem. In contrast, humans have “floodlight” cognition, allowing us to use thought processes in new ways and to apply the solution of one problem to another situation. While animals can transfer across systems, this is only done in a limited way.

“For human beings, these key cognitive abilities may have opened up other avenues of evolution that other animals have not exploited, and this evolution of the brain is the foundation upon which cultural evolution has been built,” says Hauser.

This reminds of how stupid it was for the SAT to drop the often-criticized analogy questions: “Bicameral is to legislation as hand-crafting is to …” or whatever.

This reminds of how stupid it was for the SAT to drop its often-criticized analogy questions: “Bicameral is to legislation as handcrafted is to …” or whatever. Analogies are absolutely central to human intelligence.

Reader Ron Kyser wrote to say nice things about my recent article The Mexican Country Mouse And The American City Mouse and to point out something I missed:

The “country mouse” piece was excellent, as usual, but, whoa, Nellie, you let the most outrageous–and revealing–statement by the Mexican woman who moved to Kentucky pass without comment: “The police control the streets.”

The hell they do!

Rural Kentuckians control themselves.
Indeed, rural [insert state demonym here] control themselves everywhere. The police don’t have to do anything. Members of small-town (and suburban) police forces are notorious for getting in trouble themselves, with substances, their families, and occasionally the law, because their jobs are too boring for their personality type, which is similar to that of criminals in its attraction to risk. (One year, 90% of the infractions at the two-year state campus in tiny, isolated Canton, N.Y., were committed by the 50% of students magoring in Criminal Justice.)

But Mexicans assume the low crime rate is due to diligent police work. What a window into their mentality!!

It’s not only immigrants who don’t understand what things are like outside the big city. I wrote a while back, when Michael Bloomberg was making fun of Mayor Lou Barletta [“I testified before Congress and New York’s a city of 8.3 million people. The guy who testified after me came from Hazleton, Pa., which is 30,000 people, and according to him, there has never been a crime committed in Hazleton, Pa., that wasn’t committed by an undocumented”] that

even as a fairly safe New Yorker, who doesn’t have to ride the subway, for example, Bloomberg has lived all his life behind locked doors, in constant peril of crime, keeping a close eye out for people on the street who might attack him. I don’t believe he has any concept of what small-town life might be like, except to mock it.

To give you a counter example, when Denny Hastert, who lives in Yorkville, Illinois, became Speaker of the House in 1999, his new security detail went to his home to install new, high security locks on the doors, they found that that there were no locks there, period. They had to install them from scratch.

There are a lot of homes in Kentucky with no locks on the door, but not in Los Angeles, New York, …or Mexico City.