Recently, Condoleezza Rice revealed a foolish failure to understand what the Battle of Kosovo means in Balkan politics:

“I mean after all, we’re talking about something from 1389. 1389! It’s time to move forward. And Serbia needs to move forward. Kosovo needs to move forward.”

“The War Nerd” (Gary Brecher) was suitably scathing about this ignorance in a woman who is, after all, U.S. Secretary of State.

Well, how about 843?

News is finally making it into the MSM that Silvio Berlusconi’s victory in the Italian elections was partly due to a patriotic reaction against immigration, especially in the north, where the quasi-secessionist Lega Nord made significant gains. Paul Belien has posted an excellent article on Takimag, noting not just the MSM’s reluctance to acknowledge the immigration issue’s power, but also that the intense spirit of local autonomy closely allied with patriotic immigration politics from Belgium to Rome is part of a political tradition tracing back to the Middle Frankish Kingdom, created when Charlemagne’s empire was partitioned by the Treaty of Verdun in 843.

Curiously, nearly twenty years ago, on the one occasion when I met my namesake, the then-retired British diplomat Lord Brimelow–no relation, I hasten to point out to those who remember his role in forcibly repatriating Cossacks and Yugoslavs to certain death after World War II–he was reading a book open at a map of the Treaty of Verdun’s results. He commented that it revealed fault lines still working in European politics.

What this means is that the effects of America’s post-1965 immigration disaster could well be felt for a thousand years. Immigration enthusiasts are historically illiterate - where they are not actually evil.

Job losses decelerated sharply in April, leading many to suspect that the recession is likely to be short and shallow rather than sharp and long. The decline in payrolls–20,000–was only one-quarter of the prior month’s job loss.
Meanwhile, the “other” employment survey made a mockery of the recession talk. Nearly 400,000 jobs were added in April according to the Household Survey. As has been the case for most of the past seven years, Hispanics were the disproportionate winners:

• Total employment rose 362,000 (+0.25 percent) from April
• Hispanic employment rose 135,000 (+0.67 percent)
• Non-Hispanic employment: rose 227,000 (+0.18 percent)

More striking is the difference in total employment. The payroll survey estimates that 137.8 million people held jobs in April. That’s about 8.5 million fewer than the 146.3 million workers found in the Household Survey.
How to reconcile the difference? Some economists have argued that new economy workers, eBay entrepreneurs, and (at least before the housing collapse) real estate agents–i.e., people who are not on payrolls–show up in the housing survey, but not the payroll survey.

There’s a better explanation: illegal aliens. By a cautious count there may be 12 million illegals living in America. The gap between payroll and household employment is suspiciously close to estimates of illegals in the workforce.

American worker displacement, as measured by the ratio of Hispanic to non-Hispanic job growth, ticked up in April, after declining from remains the peak reached in August 2007. Increased workplace enforcement may have contributed to the recent displacement decline.

Month to month displacement trends since the start of the Bush Administration are graphed in VDARE.com’s American Worker Displacement Index (VDAWDI):

From the start of the Bush Administration through April 2008:

• Total employment rose 8.553 million (+6.2 percent)
• Hispanic employment rose 4.286 million (+26.6 percent)
• non-Hispanic employment rose 4.3 million (+3.5 percent

It’s always fun to see my work refracted in the New York Times:

The Cognitive Age

By DAVID BROOKS

If you go into a good library, you will find thousands of books on globalization. Some will laud it. Some will warn about its dangers. But they’ll agree that globalization is the chief process driving our age. Our lives are being transformed by the increasing movement of goods, people and capital across borders. …

But there’s a problem with the way the globalization paradigm has evolved. It doesn’t really explain most of what is happening in the world.

Globalization is real and important. It’s just not the central force driving economic change. …

The central process driving this is not globalization. It’s the skills revolution. We’re moving into a more demanding cognitive age. In order to thrive, people are compelled to become better at absorbing, processing and combining information. This is happening in localized and globalized sectors, and it would be happening even if you tore up every free trade deal ever inked.

The globalization paradigm emphasizes the fact that information can now travel 15,000 miles in an instant. But the most important part of information’s journey is the last few inches — the space between a person’s eyes or ears and the various regions of the brain. Does the individual have the capacity to understand the information? Does he or she have the training to exploit it? Are there cultural assumptions that distort the way it is perceived?

The globalization paradigm leads people to see economic development as a form of foreign policy, as a grand competition between nations and civilizations. These abstractions, called “the Chinese” or “the Indians,” are doing this or that. But the cognitive age paradigm emphasizes psychology, culture and pedagogy — the specific processes that foster learning. It emphasizes that different societies are being stressed in similar ways by increased demands on human capital. If you understand that you are living at the beginning of a cognitive age, you’re focusing on the real source of prosperity and understand that your anxiety is not being caused by a foreigner.

Of course, by this logic, you’d be right to be anxious about foreigners moving into your skill district whose children’s cognitive capacity will be deleterious to the education your children will get there.

From an art exhibit review in the New York Times by Roberta Smith:

Art is long, art criticism is often very, very brief, its Internet afterlife notwithstanding. Its viability relies on a mixture of prose style, sound-bite concepts, timing and its ability to clarify visual experience. Naming a major art movement can also help embed a critic in a period’s cultural achievement or its mythology.

Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg met many of these requirements, especially the myth part. Tenacious Jewish intellectuals formed by the leftist ferment of New York between the world wars, both entered the 1940s as lapsing Marxists drawn to culture and especially the new painting they saw emerging around them. In the late 1940s and ’50s they were Abstract Expressionism’s most prominent champions, defining its leaders, principles and achievements, often in diametric opposition to each other. Mounting mutual dislike was their bond.

Rosenberg and Greenberg are reunited in “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, De Kooning and American Art, 1940-1976,” a fast-moving exhibition at the Jewish Museum. Their names aren’t on the marquee, but their rivalry provides the structure for this exceedingly handsome if somewhat peripatetic show.

Tom Wolfe must be very happy because even though the review doesn’t mention his name, this exhibit illustrates his short and very funny 1975 book The Painted Word, which concentrated not on the famous painters of the post-war era, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Jasper Johns, but on the critics who composed the theories behind them: Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Leo Steinberg, respectively:

As for the paintings –de gustibus non disputandum est. But the theories, I insist, were beautiful. … I am willing … to predict that in the year 2000, when the Metropolitan or the Museum of Modern Art puts on the great retrospective exhibition of American Art 1945-75, the three artists who will be featured, the three seminal figures of the era, will not be Pollock, de Kooning, and Johns — but Greenberg, Rosenberg, and Steinberg. Up on the walls will be huge copy blocks, eight and a half by eleven feet each, presenting the protean passages of the period … a little “fuliginous flatness” here … a little “action painting” there … and some of that “all great art is about art” just beyond. Besides will be small reproductions of the work of leading illustrators of the Word from that period …

Not surprisingly, the famous painters tended to be gentile, while the famous critics tended to be Jewish, as the different distributions of visual and verbal intelligence would predict.

What’s Spanish for chutzpah?

The height of chutzpah is sometimes given as “a boy is on trial for murdering his parents, and he begs of the judge leniency because he is an orphan.” This does not go far enough for Canada. There, he would be able to withdrawal his admission of guilt when the judge denied him leniency. They they’d let him out of jail on his own recognizance, while still letting him plea for leniency because he’s an orphan to another judge.

Jose Francisco Cardoza Quinteros takes the prize in the ever expanding definition of a refugee. Last September, The MS 13 gang member admitted

“he had maimed and disfigured rival gang members between 15 and 20 times over a five-year period. He admitted to carrying a gun, robbing non-gang members for MS-13 coffers and to buying weapons in Los Angeles for his organization, the most violent drug gang in Central America. He said he was a witness to at least 100 gang murders and had been arrested 50 or 60 times.”

Because of these heinous crimes, he told Canadian officials said that he would face retaliation if he was deported to El Salvador and asked for asylum. His claim was denied and he was ordered to be deported. The common sense of Canadian judges and bureaucrats ended there.

Once he found out that being a gang member was not grounds for asylum he told the judges that he exaggerated his claims. Last September, Canadian Refugee Board member Daphne Shaw Dyck said he was not a threat and ordered him released pending appeal.

He was rearrested last week, but once again, Shaw Dyck ruled

“He is not in Canada to promote the gang’s activities. This is not a situation where a current gang member with an ongoing association with the gang has come to Canada to carry on the gang’s objectives and criminal activities. Without more, a member of a gang, who now fears the gang, does not automatically pose a danger to the Canadian public.”

According to the Canadian Press, while Quinteros “doesn’t appear to meet the UN definition of a refugee, there is a section of the law that offers protection from people facing unreasonable harm” and it’s still possible that he’ll get protected status and be able to stay legally in Canada.