The Los Angeles Times was on a roll yesterday with the headline Denver promise of free college is breaking some hearts, along with a classic sob story (discussed below).

The idea that Americans are “breaking… hearts” by not handing out hard-earned tax dollars to illegal aliens is just absurd. Normal responsibility requires people to take care of their own before getting generous with foreigners, but liberal newspapers believe in an unside-down worldview. If parents and teachers didn’t inform the non-American Denver students that they didn’t qualify for the same benefits as citizen youngsters, that’s unfortunate. And the mayor definitely put his foot in it.

DENVER — A lot of kids sat up and took notice the day the mayor showed up at Cole Middle School, offering to make a deal: If they’d study hard and stay in school, he’d find the money to pay for college. Four years later, the first of those students are ready to take him up on his offer — and Mayor John Hickenlooper is ready to deliver.

But the deal has soured for some students in the group: those who are illegal immigrants. Because they would be required by Colorado law to pay out-of-state tuition, it would cost much more to pay for their college educations.

Although the mayor says he will give the students the same amount of monetary support that legal residents will receive, it’s far less than what they will need to cover tuition. At least 10 of the 38 who graduated are affected, according to a private group helping the students.

Some now say the mayor has backed away from a commitment that boosted their hopes for the last four years. “We acknowledge the fact the mayor is giving us partial help, but that is not what he promised,” said Yadira Zubia, 19.

Say, that’s a pretty high proportion of kiddies in one Colorado class who are illegal aliens.

Elsewhere in the June 8 Times was a sob story based on a La Raza “report” from a year ago (as admitted in the article): U.S.-born children feel effects of immigration raids.

I can recall no instance of newspapers taking a similar interest in the well-being of American children whose parent has been arrested and imprisoned. Of course such outcomes of criminality are traumatic on kids (like Yolanda Mendez, pictured here), but it’s the bad behavior of the adult that’s to blame, not the normal execution of laws.

But La Raza (“The Race” in English; “Das Volk” in German) uses emotional appeals about children to convince citizens to soften their resolve about immigration law enforcement. Should parents of minor children be exempt from normal legal penalties for crime? Apparently so, according to Raza types, as long as the perps are Mexican.

In another case, Yolanda Mendez, 12, called her father one day in March 2007 to tell him that her mother, an epileptic, was sick and that she needed help. But her father didn’t arrive home.

“I thought something bad had happened to him,” she said.

The family reported him missing and searched throughout the city. Three days later, Yolanda said, her father, Santiago Mendez, 39, called to tell them that he had been arrested by immigration officers during a traffic stop and that he was in a detention center.

Yolanda said she was relieved that he was alive but scared about him being deported. She and her 7-year-old brother began sleeping in their mother’s bed. She didn’t want to go to school. She wrote letters to her father daily.

Sorry, Yolanda. Life is tough, particularly when your parents are illegal aliens determined to break American laws in order to enrich themselves. I’m saving my tears for the American victims of illegal alien crime, who get little attention in the press.

Allan Wall is scheduled to be interviewed on Barbara Jean Whiteley’s show on June 10th . The interview is scheduled for 12:30 P.M., Mountain Daylight Time, on K-TALK (KTKK) AM 630, Salt Lake City, “The Voice of Utah”. It’s available on the Internet here. Barbara Jean’s website is here.

From the leftwing Independent in Britain, we see the admission from the World Health Organization that the Great and the Good have been, well, lying to us about AIDS for a quarter of a century:

Threat of world Aids pandemic among heterosexuals is over, report admits

A 25-year health campaign was misplaced outside the continent of Africa. But the disease still kills more than all wars and conflicts

By Jeremy Laurance

A quarter of a century after the outbreak of Aids, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has accepted that the threat of a global heterosexual pandemic has disappeared.

In the first official admission that the universal prevention strategy promoted by the major Aids organisations may have been misdirected, Kevin de Cock, the head of the WHO’s department of HIV/Aids said there will be no generalised epidemic of Aids in the heterosexual population outside Africa.

Dr De Cock, an epidemiologist who has spent much of his career leading the battle against the disease, said understanding of the threat posed by the virus had changed. Whereas once it was seen as a risk to populations everywhere, it was now recognised that, outside sub-Saharan Africa, it was confined to high-risk groups including men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and sex workers and their clients. …

In 2006, the Global Fund for HIV, Malaria and Tuberculosis, which provides 20 per cent of all funding for Aids, warned that Russia was on the cusp of a catastrophe. An estimated 1 per cent of the population was infected, mainly through injecting drug use, the same level of infection as in South Africa in 1991 where the prevalence of the infection has since risen to 25 per cent.

Dr De Cock said: “I think it is unlikely there will be extensive heterosexual spread in Russia. But clearly there will be some spread.” …

Aids organisations, including the WHO, UN Aids and the Global Fund, have come under attack for inflating estimates of the number of people infected, diverting funds from other health needs such as malaria, spending it on the wrong measures such as abstinence programmes rather than condoms, and failing to build up health systems.

Dr De Cock labelled these the “four malignant arguments” undermining support for the global campaign against Aids, which still faced formidable challenges, despite the receding threat of a generalised epidemic beyond Africa.

Any revision of the threat was liable to be seized on by those who rejected HIV as the cause of the disease, or who used the disease as a weapon to stigmatise high risk groups, he said. …

Critics of the global Aids strategy complain that vast sums are being spent educating people about the disease who are not at risk, when a far bigger impact could be achieved by targeting high-risk groups and focusing on interventions known to work, such as circumcision, which cuts the risk of infection by 60 per cent, and reducing the number of sexual partners.

There were “elements of truth” in the criticism, Dr De Cock said. “You will not do much about Aids in London by spending the funds in schools. You need to go where transmission is occurring. It is true that countries have not always been good at that.”…

One of the danger areas for the Aids strategy was among men who had sex with men. He said: ” We face a bit of a crisis [in this area]. In the industrialised world transmission of HIV among men who have sex with men is not declining and in some places has increased. …

The biggest puzzle was what had caused heterosexual spread of the disease in sub-Saharan Africa – with infection rates exceeding 40 per cent of adults in Swaziland, the worst-affected country – but nowhere else.

“It is the question we are asked most often – why is the situation so bad in sub-Saharan Africa? It is a combination of factors – more commercial sex workers, more ulcerative sexually transmitted diseases, a young population and concurrent sexual partnerships.”

“Sexual behaviour is obviously important but it doesn’t seem to explain [all] the differences between populations. Even if the total number of sexual partners [in sub-Saharan Africa] is no greater than in the UK, there seems to be a higher frequency of overlapping sexual partnerships creating sexual networks that, from an epidemiological point of view, are more efficient at spreading infection.” ….

But the factors driving HIV were still not fully understood, he said.

“The impact of HIV is so heterogeneous. In the US , the rate of infection among men in Washington DC is well over 100 times higher than in North Dakota, the region with the lowest rate. That is in one country. How do you explain such differences?”

How do you explain such differences between North Dakota and Washington DC? It’s a conundrum, a quandary, a puzzlement. Dr. Cock and the rest of the worlds’ AIDS experts are stumped, apparently, and if they can’t figure it out, with all their lavish research funding, then nobody could ever possibly puzzle it out. Some things we are just meant to never understand.

This is a disturbing report, because it reveals the ease with which employers embrace decreased safety on the job, a trend which does not bode well for citizen workers.

Hispanic workers die at higher rates than other laborers, with 1 in 3 of these deaths occurring in the construction industry, a government study reported Thursday.

Hispanics tend to hold more high-risk jobs than those in other racial groups, but language and literacy barriers and poor training and supervision may also be factors, researchers said. The leading causes of death in recent years have been falls and highway-related accidents.

“Many of the Hispanic workers in construction are undocumented, and many of those who are recently arrived do face a language barrier,” said Rakesh Kochhar, associated director for research at the Pew Hispanic Center.[Hispanics dying on job at higher rates than others By MIKE STOBBE, AP Medical Writer Thursday, June 5, 2008]

Just got back from a conference on “Post-Christian Europe and Resurgent Islam” held in (symbolically) Vienna. The numbers are really alarming and the mood was dire. But there was no mention of the obvious answer: directing public policy toward persuading Muslims to, you know, GO AWAY. After all, there is emigration as well as immigration. But if you mentioned it, people looked at you oddly.

Yet of course minorities do emigrate. In the U.S., we are slowly beating it into the political elite’s consciousness that attrition of the illegal alien presence through law enforcement is the alternative to the much-dreaded mass deportations. Three recent examples: the near-elimination of the Protestant minority in Southern Ireland after the 1921 Treaty; the radical reduction of Quebec’s Anglophones after the French-first language legislation of the 1970s; the near-eradication of Middle Eastern Christians.

As it happens, the May 29 Economist Magazine makes this inadvertantly clear in an article, Covering Up: A far-right party takes on the Islamic headscarf, tut-tutting about the Danish People’s Party’s popular campaign to stop public employees displaying Muslim symbols:

One response has come from Danish-born Muslims. A poll by Politiken, a daily, of 315 young Muslim students, found that two-thirds of them were considering emigrating after graduation. Most gave as their reason “the tone of the Danish debate about Muslims”.

Of course, it’s distressing to see this degree of compulsion, especially since the cowardly Danish govenment, which depends on DPP support, has decided to ban Christian crosses too. But, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, immigration is the Viagra of the State - for good and ill.

The DPP is sending a message. And the message is being heard.

P.J. O’Rourke visits the Field Museum in Chicago (via Five Feet of Fury):

“The sculpture of a Masai spearman facing off against a crouching lioness has been shunted to a lonely corner, lest someone somehow take offense. Nowadays offense is taken–snatched and grabbed–as if offense were something valuable to own.”

I believe he’s referring to Malvina Hoffman’s spectacular lifesize 6′-8″ tall sculpture of a naked Nuer tribesman. The Nuers are elongated Sudanese Nilotics, like their cousins the Dinka, famous for 7′-6″ basketball player Manute Bol. Barack Obama Sr.’s Luo tribe are more distant cousins.

It’s a natural mistake to make since you are supposed to be ignorant these days about what people look like. You’re supposed to celebrate diversity, but not know about it. Institutions like the Field Museum have gone to a lot of trouble to de-educate the populace. As I wrote in VDARE.com in 2002:

Malvina Hoffman has been called “the greatest American artist you’ve never heard of” and “the American Rodin.” She studied under Auguste Rodin, the greatest sculptor since Bernini, and Gutzon Borglum, creator of Mt. Rushmore. Her style was more realistic than Rodin’s, which helped drive her out of fashion in a 20th Century art world obsessed with abstraction.

In 1930, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago commissioned her to create 91 full size bronzes and 13 marbles depicting in exquisite detail the “The Races of Mankind.” She traveled the world to complete this most titanic sculptural project undertaken by any American woman ever. (Here’s her Bushman woman and baby.)

In 1933, the Hoffman exhibit opened in the Field Museum’s spectacular custom-built “Hall of Man.” It was a major part of the Chicago World’s Fair and remained a popular institution for decades afterwards. But it was shut down in 1968 because, well, because it was 1968.

Hoffman’s collection was broken up. A quarter of it is now in Cedar Rapids. When I last visited the Field Museum in 1999, only about half the statues were on display, and many of those were pushed into dark corners, often without labels. The magnificent 6′8″ Nilotic Nuer warrior, with proportional masculine endowment, was down in the basement next to the dusty souvenir-making Mold-o-Vac and Penny Squeezer machines.

Last time I was at the Field Museum a decade ago, the Nuer and the two stuffed man-eating lions who killed 130 Indian construction workers in East African in 1898 (as shown in the 1996 Michael Douglas-Val Kilmer movie “The Ghost and the Darkness“) were stowed away in the basement with each other.

O’Rourke goes on:

The brontosaurus has been pushed to the back (that is to say the front) of the main hall and isn’t called a brontosaurus anymore. (Doubtless offense was taken by Chicago’s Bronto-American community.)

Damn, I was sure I’d published something with “Bronto-American” in it, but the closest I can come up with is from my 2001 review of “Jurassic Park III.”

Before you rush out to see “Jurassic Park III” based on my stirring endorsement - “It’s a lot less annoying than the last one!” - please note that I can’t seem to recall anything that happened in either of the first two dinostravaganzas after that first glorious scene of a sunlit grassland with brontosauruses peacefully munching away. All I can remember after that is a lot of gnashing of really big teeth. …

Still, there are some cool new flying pterodactyls in “JP III” that try to turn the cast into birdfeed.

Yeah, okay, I know a lot of you out there are right now firing up your email clients to inform me that they aren’t “pterodactyls,” they are “pteranodons,” and those big galoot herbivores aren’t “brontosauruses,” they are “brachiosauruses.”

Sorry, but that’s what I called them when I was a kid and I see no reason to change now. I mean, what did I miss that would change the name of creatures that haven’t been around for 65 million years? Did some brontosaurus Jesse Jackson call a press conference to announce that from now on he wanted to be called a “brachiosaurus” and that anybody who forgot and referred to “brontosauruses” was terminally unhip? I bet that when even dinosaurs like me finally start calling them “brachiosauruses,” they are going to pull another switcheroo and announce that we are aren’t supposed to call them “brachiosauruses” anymore, but now instead they’ll be “dinosaurs of bronto.”