Ilkka Kokkarinen at The Fourth Checkraise has a post about the autobiography of Kevin Weeks, a an Irish mobster from Boston’s South Side:

I did find the description of Southie and its Irish Catholic working class culture in which the author grew up interesting, though, as it gave me a better idea of the mechanisms that connect poverty and violence. The author also didn’t mince words to describe his personal experiences with the Boston school busing scheme that used the white working class as pawns for rich liberals to show how progressive they are (while excluding their own kids from this scheme, of course), with well-known unintended consequences of accelerating the white flight both to suburbs and private schools, and gutting the public school system to leave it for those who have no alternatives. I’m sure that he would have learned to fight and distrust authority even without this scheme, but it certainly didn’t help.[The Fourth Checkraise: Hooligans in paddy wagons]

Weeks was born in 1956, and went to South Boston High–here’s an excerpt from his autobiography:

The saddest part is that there is a generation of Boston kids walking around today who basically have no high school education, who were condemned to not even mediocre jobs because of one man’s decision. These kids couldn’t get a decent education because Arthur Garrity took that opportunity away from them. A grand experiment, at the expense of the children of Boston, ultimately failed. But not before blood was shed at South Boston High. We now had black students in the school who were often twenty-one or twenty- two, older than the typical eighteen-year-old South Boston senior. You could feel the hatred in the corridors. Just a year earlier, there had been a great atmosphere in those same classrooms, where learning was taking place.

Students looked forward to going to school, to their classes, to sports, and to just being around one another. But It one year later, it was like Beirut. You were just waiting for the next fight to erupt. Kids from South Boston weren’t running scared, though. South Boston High was their home, and no one was going to come in and take their home from them.

Godless Capitalist, a co-founder of GNXP, suggests an approach for getting real achievement data by caste background for Indians in North America that’s similar to what Nathaniel Weyl and Stefan Possony did in the 1960s: surname analysis. Weyl and Possony made up lists of surnames that tend to belong to one ethnic group, like Clark is English, Wallace Scottish, Sullivan Irish, Lloyd Welsh, Schmidt German, and so forth; then figure out what percentage of the population has each surname from Social Security Administration data; then compare the base percentages to how frequently these names show up among lists of high achievers.

GC suggests you could do the same thing with social networking sites like Facebook where people put down their colleges, degrees, and jobs by comparing achievement levels to names associated with different castes and regions. For details of how to do it, see here.

An illegal alien is arrested for identity theft–using a false social security number–and borrowing up to $800,000 on two homes and two vehicles. without telling the lenders that he was a deportable illegal alien. Sounds pretty fraudulent to me–but he doesn’t think  so:

Accused ID thief to cops: Arrest real criminals

Katie McDevitt, East Valley Tribune, June 4, 2008

A suspected identity thief told police on Tuesday to arrest “real criminals” instead of a “good family man” like himself, court records said.

Adan Betancio Guerrero, 36, of Mesa is accused of stealing someone else’s Social Security number and using it to purchase two homes and two vehicles. The records stated Betancio racked up $787,000 in loans and has tried to get a job using the victim’s personal information.

A police search of Betancio’s home turned up mortgage paperwork, pay stubs and other bills that listed a false Social Security number.

The case came to the attention of authorities after a credit union doing a loan on a $33,000 truck noticed that they already had a customer with the same Social Security number. They contacted that customer, a 24-year-old woman, and learned that her identity had been stolen.

Betancio told police he is an illegal immigrant.

Video here.

The only kind of diversity that enjoys widespread support among Americans is that of food. Who doesn’t enjoy the occasional dim sum or pad thai?

But when in Sacramento, I think I’ll stick to meatloaf.

With a new Asian restaurant opening in Sacramento County every two weeks, health inspectors face a growing challenge because Asian eateries are most prone to health violations.

Like upscale French restaurants dinged for making hollandaise with uncooked eggs, some of the local Asian restaurants’ issues stem from cultural food practices. In Chinese restaurants, for instance, roast duck meat may hang from a hook to dry for more than four hours, creating a tasty entree that inspectors consider a virtual petri dish for bacteria.

But most of the inspectors’ unsavory findings are more basic: unwashed hands, vermin and food cooked or stored at the wrong temperature.

Forty-four of the 50 Sacramento restaurants castigated most often since 2003 for major violations–the infractions that pose an immediate health threat–serve Asian food, according to a Bee analysis of county inspection data newly posted at www.sacbee.com/databases.

Nearly half of the 400 or so restaurants temporarily closed down for safety problems during those years also served Asian food, though fewer than one in six local restaurants is Asian. [Asian restaurants often run afoul of Sacramento County health inspectors, By Phillip Reese and Dan Nguyen, Sacramento Bee, June 15, 2008]

In my new VDARE.com column, I respond to Kenan Malik’s criticism in Prospect of my definition of race. His assumption that it’s absurd to call the British royal family a racial group got me thinking about dynasticism again, and I finally figured out something about the essence of Barack Obama’s appeal that should have been obvious to me a year ago.

It’s absurd that in a huge country like America that a Bush or a Clinton has been on every national ticket since 1980. I viewed Obama’s victory over the Clinton dynasty as a defeat for the forces of dynasticism, but now I realize I was being naive, that has brilliantly tapped into the public’s dynastic logic, just on a larger and subtler scale.

Here’s an excerpt, but you’ll have to read the whole article to see how.

How to Think About Race — and Barack Obama

By Steve Sailer

A new but characteristically confused debate over whether race is a biological reality reminds me of the value of having a simple definition of “race” in mind.

Left-leaning British-Indian science journalist Kenan Malik’s latest book, Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate, has so far only gone on sale in the U.K. But he argues online: “Race is not a real biological entity.”

In a hostile review of Malik’s book in Prospect, the fine British intellectual magazine, Mark Pagel, a British evolutionary biologist, lands a flurry of blows:

“Malik knows these facts about our genetics, but wants to insist that, unless ‘race’ corresponds to absolute boundaries, it is a useless and damaging concept. But to deny what everybody knows and to swap the word race for something less politically charged like ‘group’ is just an act of self-denial and certainly no more accurate than the dreaded ‘r’ word. It is also patronising—I would like to think we are all grown up enough to accept the facts and ready ourselves for the deluge to come. I say deluge because the more we measure, the more genetic differences we find among populations …”

Unfortunately, Pagel doesn’t deliver a knockout punch because he lacks a definition of race. Like Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart wrote in his famous opinion in a pornography case, Pagel can’t define race, but he knows it when he sees it.

Malik responded in Prospect by noting, with some justice, “The debate over race has moved on. To judge from his review of my book, Mark Pagel hasn’t noticed.”

To illustrate the state of the art thinking among the race realists he opposes, Malik writes:

“In the 19th and early 20th centuries, races were viewed as fixed groups, each with its own distinct behaviour patterns and physical characteristics. They could be ranked on an evolutionary hierarchy, with whites at the top and blacks at the bottom. Today, with a few exceptions, race realists reject the idea that there are essential, unbridgeable differences between human populations, or that differences signify inferiority or superiority. So how do they define a race? Usually as ‘an extended family that is inbred to some degree‘ in the words of Steve Sailer of the Human Biodiversity Institute. … But once everything from the British royal family to the entire human population can be considered a race (because each is an “extended family inbred to some degree”), then the category has little value.”

[More]

Along these lines, here’s an update of an update of Richmond’s speech concluding Shakespeare’s Richard III about the dynastic marriage to end the War of the Roses between the Yorks and Lancasters:

We will unite the white rose and the black:
Smile heaven upon this fair conjunction,
That long have frown’d upon their enmity!
What extremist hears me, and says not amen?
America hath long been mad, and scarr’d herself;
The rev’rend shouted his congregation’s ire,
The consultant plotteth Will Horton ads
The undiverse fleeeth to the exurbs
All this divided White and Black
Divided in their dire division,

But then Barack Sr. and Stanley Ann
The true succeeders of each racial house,
By God’s fair ordinance conjoin together!
And let their heir, God, if thy will be so.
Enrich the time to come with smooth-faced peace,
With smiling plenty and fair prosperous days!
Abate the edge of racists, gracious Lord,
That would demand both parties make borders secure,
And make America less inclusive
Let them not live to taste this land’s increase
That would with insensitivity wound this fair land’s peace!
Now civil wounds are stopp’d, peace lives again:
That she may long live here, God say amen!

Rocco Mediate, a short-hitting 45-year-old from Pittsburgh, will face Tiger Woods in an 18 hole playoff Monday for the U.S. Open title, after the journeyman outplayed the greatest ever from tee to green on Sunday. It’s nice that golf, unlike most other prominent sports, has enough randomness in it and tests a wide-enough array of skills that a guy who looks like the district sales manager still has a fighting chance now and then.