This past Tuesday VDARE editor Peter Brimelow appeared at a press conference sponsored by the Social Contract Press on a new study [PDF]  put out by VDARE columnist Ed Rubenstein. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists both VDARE and the Social Contract Press as hate groups. The other panelist was Wayne Lutton, editor of said “hate publication” and they tied him to a number of “hate groups” as well.

The report was on the relatively uncontroversial topic of the fiscal costs of immigration, so the Southern Poverty Law Center—not known for any policy work—had little to say about study except to say that it is higher than other estimates (why else would they publish it?) and that “no mention whatsoever is made of what most economists agree on —that immigrants, legal and otherwise, help grow the economy in ways that actually increase jobs for native Americans.” (Well, that is outside of the scope of the study, and in fact Rubenstein addressed that argument at the press conference.)

Brimelow, Lutton, and Rubenstein are not racists—whatever that means, but they are willing to make arguments about culture and demographics that some immigration restrictionists try to avoid lest they be tarred as racists. The next step of fear is to avoid being associated with such unkempt individuals and organizations. Of course this allows for the SPLC and the other smearmongers to set the terms of the debate.

The naming of FAIR, the largest immigration reduction organization that has done a great deal of outreach to the minority community, as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center should dispense any notion that this makes any difference.

With this in mind, look at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s exposé of a Townhall meeting in Alabama about immigration:

“Clearly aimed at riling up nativist fury, the fliers for the event allege that “the average illegal immigrant household receives approximately $30,000 in government benefits each year but pays only $9,000 in taxes.”

The problem, as is often the case with the “facts” nativists dredge up to illustrate the evils of immigration, is that these calculations are wildly misleading at best…”

While the SPLC’s words are nearly identical to the attack against the Social Contract Press, the group they are referring to is the Eagle Forum, and the study they are tarring is by Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. The Eagle Forum is one of the largest grassroots conservative organizations in the country, and is headed by Phyllis Schlafly who is one of the most respected conservatives in the movement. The Heritage Foundation is the largest and most respected conservative think tank, and as the architect of welfare reform, Rector is one of their star scholars.

The “links” that the SPLC used against the Eagle Forum were to other mainstream conservative groups like Accuracy in Media and the Swift Boat Veterans.

The sooner more and more conservatives and immigration restrictionists start ignoring the SPLC, their influence will wane.

In response to readers’ questions about how Ashkenazi Jewish genes compare to other groups’, Utah anthropologist Henry Harpending sends along a 3d graph he and Greg Cochran created for (but didn’t use in) their famous paper on the evolution of high IQs among Ashkenazi Jews.

You can click on the graph to see it in a larger, more readable version. The main left to right axis is the first Principle Component, accounting for 45% of the variance. The axis running from the middle bottom to the upper right is the second Principle Component, accounting for 25%, while the vertical axis is the third PC, accounting for 15%.

As always, the principle components methodology doesn’t tell you what the axes mean. That’s just how the data cluster and you’ve got to come up with insights to figure out why. (Don’t look to me for them.)

On the first two axes, Ashkenazi Jews are rather close to “Europeans” and “Russians.” They are similar to Yemenites (from Southern Arabian peninsula) on the first axis, but not on the second. And they are similar to Samaritans (who currently subsist on two hilltops in Israel), good, bad or indifferent, on the second axis but not on the first. They are fairly similar to the Druze (of Lebanon and Israel) on the first two axes, but not on the third.

On the other hand, if you included some Australian Aborigines, Bushmen and Tierra del Fuegans on this graph, probably all six of these data points would look clustered fairly closely together.

So, Ashkenazis look pretty European on this chart compared to a few Middle Eastern groups. But, as the recent graph showed, genetics has progressed to the point where Ashkenazis (at least those with four Ashkenazi grandparents) can now be reliably distinguished from other Europeans.

Tautologically enough, when it comes to ancestry, everything is relative.

Steve Sailer has a post on his blog  called Obama’s Afrocentrism is his mother’s passive-aggressive revenge on her Indonesian second husband.

It includes this vignette from Obama’s past

In the meantime, in his easygoing way, Lolo helped little Barack adjust to Indonesian culture, teaching him how to ignore beggars, how to change a flat tire, and how to fight with his fists. The last was necessary because, as Chicago Tribune reporters who interviewed his schoolmates discovered, Obama was routinely subjected to racist violence by Indonesian lads: “All say he was teased more than any other kid in the neighborhood–primarily because he was so different in appearance.” He was frequently attacked by three Indonesian kids at once, and one time they threw him in a swamp. “Luckily he could swim.”

(Obama doesn’t mention in his voluminous autobiography the racism of Indonesians toward him, although he recounts in microscopic detail every hint of white racism he believes he has endured in America, such as the palimpsest of the N-word that he claims to have discerned under coats of paint in a men’s room stall at that hotbed of racism, Columbia University. He left out getting beaten up by Indonesians for being black presumably because Asian anti-black racism just doesn’t fit into his black-white worldview. That’s a little too nuanced for Senator Nuance.)

It’s amazing when you consider that growing up in Hawaii, and attending Columbia and Harvard, Obama seems to have been never victimized by whites who hated blacks.  Compare that to his actual experiences in Indonesia, and you get a sense of how hard he must have worked to develop his anti-white worldview.

About a year ago, I reported after a daring visit to Empire Central the then-dramatic news that the McCain/ Bush/ Kennedy Amnesty/ Immigration surge bill was in trouble—to the surprise of Beltway Treason Lobbyists and Beltway Immigration Reform Patriots alike. (That this kind of Stockholm syndrome affects even good people inside the Beltway is why it’s worth risking ambassadors from America to D.C. from time to time.

Last week, I found nothing quite so heartening, but there were a few encouraging straws in the wind:

• Intense discontent among patriotic immigration reformers and Republicans generally with McCain’s gerrymandered primary victory and his (Steve Sailer-predicted) Establishment me-tooism (click here for a devastating Tom Sowell critique of McCain’s Martin Luther King groveling). It’s not yet reached Dole-1996 proportions, but it still might.
• Surprisingly widespread resigned acceptance among Beltway Republicans that McCain’s much-touted POW record will boomerang, just like John Kerry’s Swift Boat service, because of allegations, widespread on the internet, that he eventually collaborated with his captors. I don’t know what the truth is. But I do know that, nearly twenty years ago, William Stevenson, author of the huge spy best-seller A Man Called Intrepid, and his co-author and wife Monika Jensen, were privately expressing puzzlement at finding in their research for their Kiss the Boys Goodbye: The Shocking Story of Abandoned U.S. Prisoners of War in Vietnam, that McCain had emerged as an opponent of efforts to solve the MIA conundrum.
• But neither Clinton nor Obama can easily raise this—which is why the idea of nominating an unimpeachable war hero, Jim Webb (D-VA) is visibly gaining ground.