Ross Douthat is gracious in acknowledging his debt to Steve Sailer for an item in his book Grand New Party.  This was politely pointed out by Steve Sailer in his Sunday column (which included a fundraising appeal–please give generously) along with Steve’s note that certain things are not “career safe” to write about.

The astonishing outpouring of hate in the comments to Ross Douthat’s post shows why it’s not. (Approximately 14, 000 words so far.) It also shows why we don’t have, and don’t want, comments on VDARE.com.

Read it here:

Protesters as offensive as Sheriff Arpaio

By Anne T. Denogean

Tucson Citizen

Let’s be clear. I think Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is a bully with a badge.

But I don’t think you persuade the public that the man is an out-of-control, raving lunatic by behaving like out-of-control, raving lunatics.

That’s the kindest description I have for the immigration rights protesters who beat to a pulp a piñata meant to represent the sheriff during Arpaio’s visit to Tucson last week.

This was the scene for those who missed Thursday evening’s piece of street theater on East Broadway.

The sheriff came to town to plug his new book (an homage to himself) with a book-signing and a live radio interview with KNST-AM (790) at Barnes & Noble Booksellers. And where the state’s finest ringmaster goes, a circus inevitably will pop up.

The Coalición de Derechos Humanos (Human Rights Coalition) organized a protest. The normal stuff. Some chanting and marching. Folks carrying signs calling the sheriff a fascist. A few protesters even infiltrated the sizable crowd of Arpaio supporters and disrupted the live radio broadcast by shouting out insults.

What occurred about midway through the protest, however, was truly disturbing. Several young protesters outside the store brought out a piñata meant to represent Arpaio.

The piñata, with a picture of Arpaio’s face taped or glued to the head, was clad in a sheriff’s uniform and equipped with pink handcuffs. One woman held up the piñata, while two teenage girls took turns bashing it with sticks. The Tucson Citizen ran a picture the next day of a teenage boy carting away the remains of the beheaded piñata.

While the beating of Arpaio in effigy proceeded, Isabel Garcia, [Email her]head of Humanos Derechos, a group that purports to stand for the dignity of all human beings, stood by and laughed.

The spectacle reminded me of the antics of an extremist on the other side of the issue, a Tucson man who does his best to incite riots by burning Mexican flags in public places. I wondered how Garcia would react if the virulent anti-illegal immigrant hard-liners were to burn her in effigy or hang a papier-mâché figure meant to represent an Mexican illegal immigrant.

Garcia told me Friday that she thought the Arpaio piñata was great, although she said it wasn’t brought in by organizers.

“I think it’s a fair expression of First Amendment rights. I thought it was funny. It had him with the pink underwear and, of course, his face. And it’s a piñata. It was a fun thing for the kids that broke it,” she said. [More]

Watch it here:

Remember this, the next time someone panics at the sight of a piece of string with a knot in it, in the belief that it’s a hangman’s noose.

Eric Nagourney writes in the Health section of the New York Times:

Thinking about a life of crime? You may want to hit the gym first.

A new study that looked at the physical characteristics of about 5,000 Arkansas inmates found that most were athletically fit when they entered prison. The researchers referred to them as mesomorphs.

Oh, there were also endomorphs and ectomorphs — fatties and skinnies to the lay people. But the study found that they were less likely to have been imprisoned for violent crimes.

The researchers, whose study appears in The Social Science Journal, used body mass index, a measure of height and weight, to assess fitness.

Scientists have long explored whether physical traits play a role in criminality — a field that has fallen into disrepute when its practitioners advanced claims about characteristics like race.

The new study does find that mesomorphs make up an unusually large percentage of the prison population, from 62 percent to 73 percent.

But that does not mean that being fit is a predictor of criminal tendencies, said one of the authors, Jeffery T. Walker of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

“Those who are fit may have personalities that are more likely to make them violent,” Dr. Walker said in an e-mail message.

“In essence,” Dr. Walker said, “what drives them to be fit also drives them to be violent. It is also likely that those who are fit find themselves in violent situations more.”[Vital Signs Exercise: Link Is Seen Between Crime and Fitness, June 17, 2008]

Hmmhmmhmm, what could possibly be the underlying link between being muscular and being aggressive? Thank God this is a “field that has fallen into disrepute” due to political correctness. Otherwise, somebody might have learned something by now.

There are two remarkably contrasting articles out this week on the Presidential frontrunner.

Newsweek offers us a cover story on Sen. Obama’s religion, “Finding His Faith,” that is so skeptically insightful that you’d think it was written by Will.I.Am and Scarlett Johansson and edited by David Axelrod.

Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker has a much more informative article on Obama’s coldly calculated rise to power in Chicago from 1991-2004: “Making It: How Chicago Shaped Obama.”

Like many politicians, Obama is paradoxical. He is by nature an incrementalist, yet he has laid out an ambitious first-term agenda (energy independence, universal health care, withdrawal from Iraq). He campaigns on reforming a broken political process, yet he has always played politics by the rules as they exist, not as he would like them to exist. He runs as an outsider, but he has succeeded by mastering the inside game. He is ideologically a man of the left, but at times he has been genuinely deferential to core philosophical insights of the right.

Lizza doesn’t provide much explanation of what Obama wants to do as President, although he makes it clear that that’s kind of like asking Tiger Woods what he wants to do if he wins the US Open: Tiger wants to be the U.S. Open champion, just as Obama wants to be President. Among people who run for President, only weirdos like Ron Paul want to be President primarily in order to do something or other. Normal candidates want to be President in order to be President. (more…)

Having fixed the housing market, the federal government is turning its attention to fixing science. John Tierney writes in the NYT on the inevitable aftermath of the Larry Summers affair:

Until recently, the impact of Title IX, the law forbidding sexual discrimination in education, has been limited mostly to sports. But now, under pressure from Congress, some federal agencies have quietly picked a new target: science.

The National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Energy have set up programs to look for sexual discrimination at universities receiving federal grants. Investigators have been taking inventories of lab space and interviewing faculty members and students in physics and engineering departments at schools like Columbia, the University of Wisconsin, M.I.T. and the University of Maryland.

Uh-oh.

The Obama’s Gaffes blog has about the same reaction to the New Yorker cover that I did, and reminded me of this Nicholas Kristof story from last March, in which “In a free-ranging interview with the New York Times, Obama described the Muslim call to prayer as ‘one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.’ The Times’s Nicholas Kristof wrote, Obama recited, ‘with a first-class [Arabic] accent,’ the opening lines of the Muslim call to prayer. ”

Pretty good for a guy who can’t really speak any foreign language.
The part about “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset” is just nostalgia–the Muslim call to prayer is annoying when it’s not frightening. This is especially true since the muezzins got hold of loudspeakers in the 1950’s. Here’s more of Kristof’s fantasizing about how sophisticated Obama will be as a result of childhood foreign travel:

In foreign policy as well, Mr. Obama would bring to the White House an important experience that most other candidates lack: he has actually lived abroad. He spent four years as a child in Indonesia and attended schools in the Indonesian language, which he still speaks.

“I was a little Jakarta street kid,” he said in a wide-ranging interview in his office…He once got in trouble for making faces during Koran study classes in his elementary school, but a president is less likely to stereotype Muslims as fanatics — and more likely to be aware of their nationalism — if he once studied the Koran with them.

Mr. Obama recalled the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer, reciting them with a first-rate accent. In a remark that seemed delightfully uncalculated (it’ll give Alabama voters heart attacks), Mr. Obama described the call to prayer as “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.”

Moreover, Mr. Obama’s own grandfather in Kenya was a Muslim. Mr. Obama never met his grandfather and says he isn’t sure if his grandfather’s two wives were simultaneous or consecutive, or even if he was Sunni or Shiite. (O.K., maybe Mr. Obama should just give up on Alabama.)[Obama: Man of the World, March 6, 2007]

Kristof’s remarks about the voters of Alabama refer, of course to the white voters of Alabama–not the 26 percent of Alabama’s voters who are black, and can be expected to vote for Obama at the 90 percent rate. And he’s right that Alabama isn’t in play, as far as Obama is concerned. How about the rest of the white voters in America?

NPR presents a story about the culture clash in the Big Easy between local black citizens and Hispanics of various immigration statuses. The “job competition at the bottom of the economic ladder” is named as the source of the tensions.

Economic competition between Latino and African-American residents has intensified in post-Katrina New Orleans. The tensions are a snapshot of challenges facing the presidential candidates. [Tensions Persist For Blacks, Latinos In New Orleans ]

This was predictable, not only on VDARE.com, but even on  NPR if you listen regularly. Here are the “related stories” from NPR’s website.

• June 2, 2006

  Hiring Illegal Immigrants For Katrina Reconstruction

• Oct. 7, 2005

  Report Of Police Crackdowns On Latinos After Katrina

• Aug. 29, 2006

  What Katrina Taught Us About Race

• Jan. 23, 2006

  Study On Race And Rebuilding New Orleans

• Jan. 17, 2006

  New Orleans Contemplates Its Racial Future

• Jan. 11, 2006

  Katrina Reconstruction Brings Race To Forefront

• Nov. 2, 2005

  Mayor Nagin On Race and Rebuilding in New Orleans