Remember Rep. Anthony Weiner (D, NY)?

In case you don’t, he thinks there is a shortage of beautiful fashion models in the United States. Weiner hopes to fix the problem by giving about 1,000 P visas to foxy foreign ladies every year so that they can come to our country to strut their stuff in front of adoring audiences. [New immigration controversy: Foreign models may flood U.S.! July 02, 2008]

OK, now let me tell you the downside of the bill: it would free up about an equal number of H-1B visas that could be used to import more programmers and engineers. Some of us, however, consider that a worthwhile sacrifice (LOL!).

Click this link to read additional background on the Weiner bill: Weiner Bill To Import Hot Looking Foreign Babes

On the George Putnam Radio show. Chuck Wilder and I really stiffed the Weiner bill. To listen to the 6/12/08 clip, click this link or download the MP3.

Weiner is running against Bloomberg for mayor of New York, so he needs all the money and luck he can get. So far he is running behind in the polls despite his enthusiasm for importing more fashion models.

It appears that Weiner is attracting a lot of fans in the modeling business, at least judging by the growing number of contributions he is getting from modeling agencies. Cory Bautista of NY Models came up with a $1,500 donation! [Modeling $$ Boost For Weiner , By David Seifman , NY Post, July 18, 2008]

So far Weiner’s bill hasn’t picked up any co-sponsors so it’s unlikely the bill is going to get the thumbs up from Congress. Without the Weiner bill gorgeous foreign fashion models are going to have to compete with engineers for H-1B visas. Of course if they are extra special beautiful, and they can sing, they might be able to use “O” visas. To read how that’s done, go here: “O” No! Dorismar Gets An “O” Visa!

Why do we laugh?

Lots of theories have been constructed to answer this question, but most haven’t been terribly successful because we laugh at so many different things. (Here’s a New York Review of Books essay on some of them.) So, let me try out a two-stage theory, which I haven’t actually tested yet against all the different kinds of humor, but it may be promising:

Stage One: Let’s start out with a negative but useful definition of humor: it’s not serious.

The more something seems serious but is not serious, the funnier it is. (more…)

Many people have been generous, and our thanks go out to all of them. Individual thank yous and copies of the Social Contract Magazine will go out soon. We still have some distance to go, so if you haven’t given yet, please do!

There has been a little more disclosed about the criminal history of the previously arrested illegal alien Edwin Ramos. He was the MS-13 gangster who murdered a father and two sons in San Francisco on July 22 over a minor traffic dispute. (See additional details in my article Is San Francisco At The Tipping Point?.)

The man charged with killing a father and two sons on a San Francisco street last month was one of the youths who benefited from the city’s long-standing practice of shielding illegal immigrant juveniles who committed felonies from possible deportation, The Chronicle has learned.

Edwin Ramos, now 21, is being held on three counts of murder in the June 22 deaths of Tony Bologna, 48, and his sons Michael, 20, and Matthew, 16. They were shot near their home in the Excelsior district when Tony Bologna, driving home from a family picnic, briefly blocked the gunman’s car from completing a left turn down a narrow street, police say.

Ramos, a native of El Salvador whom prosecutors say is a member of a violent street gang, was found guilty of two felonies as a juvenile - a gang-related assault on a Muni passenger and the attempted robbery of a pregnant woman - according to authorities familiar with his background.
[Slaying suspect once found sanctuary in S.F. San Francisco Chronicle, July 20, 2008]

He tried to rob a pregnant woman, but was nevertheless deemed as worthy of protection by the generous folks in San Francisco City Hall. When was the last time you were treated with such kindness by government?

Presumably MS-13 gangster Edwin Ramos would have been eligible for amnesty (pre-triple murder) under last year’s proposed legislation. He could have “renounced” his gang affiliation under the McCain-Kennedy bill and become a citizen, with all the rights and privileges. (See Sen Jeff Sessions Loophole List, Item #8.)

Danielle Bologna, the widow and grieving mother of Anthony, Michael and Matthew, appeared on Fox News today.

This is the totally avoidable pain and tragedy caused to American families because of an irresponsible government stuck on open borders.

NPR has an interview with a Hispanic voter. No matter how proudly Ernesto Alas may have held up the flag of El Salvador during illegal immigrant demonstrations, he is, in fact an American citizen, and he gets a vote in the Presidential election. He voted for George Bush twice. But he’s not going to vote for McCain, because he was never a Republican in the first place:

Ernesto Alas is obsessed with politics. He voted for President Bush twice, and he loved the president’s support for legalizing millions of immigrant workers.

When hundreds of thousands of Hispanics marched in the streets nationwide two years ago, Alas was there in Washington, D.C., with his wife and four children. He proudly held the flag of El Salvador, the country he left 25 years ago.

But by September 2006, Alas felt frustrated. The rallies were fizzling. Congress was blocking President Bush’s immigration efforts. Mid-term elections loomed.

Fallout From The Immigration Debate

Alas’ political wanderings reflect the Hispanic community’s shifting political views. In 2004, President Bush made huge inroads and won 40 percent of the Latino vote. This year, this fastest-growing part of the electorate is swinging heavily back to the Democrats–in part, over the fallout from the increasingly polarized immigration debate.

Many Hispanic voters were pushed in 2006 by a slew of Republican campaign ads targeting illegal immigrants. One ad in Rhode Island linked the use of Mexican consular ID cards to terrorism.
['Bush Hispanics' Say Goodbye To GOP by Jennifer Ludden,NPR, All Things Considered, July 13, 2008]·

So the way the Republican Party can secure Latino voters like Mr. Alas is to run a border-state governor with Mexican relatives who sincerely tries to speak Spanish, and is willing to open the borders. Otherwise, no dice.

That was how George Bush “made huge inroads and won 40 percent of the Latino vote. “ And the problem with that is that “40 percent of the vote” is a landslide in the other direction. Also, there are not that many Hispanic voters out there. The growing Hispanic population is mostly illegal, those are legal mostly aren’t citizens, and those have achieved citizenship mostly don’t bother to vote.

In 2004, Alas was an election officer. He says he was crushed when only a couple dozen eligible voters in his precinct showed up. This time, Alas believes turnout will be far higher, but he’s prepared to round up voters and drive them to the polls himself.

He may be willing to drive them to the polls, but are they willing to go? Most people who don’t vote,  don’t vote for a reason. It’s because they  genuinely don’t care about politics. In the case of Hispanic immigrants, they don’t care because it’s not their country. And that’s one more reason the GOP does not need to be pursuing the Hispanic vote.

Graphical data analyst Ben Fry takes some old data provided by NFL scribe Paul Zimmerman of Sports Illustrated on the average Wonderlic IQ test scores by position of draft prospects (which I’d published in VDARE in 2003) and plots it with offense in blue, defense in red, and the radius of the circle proportional to the scores.

You can convert them to IQs assuming that 21 correct answers = 100 and add or subtract 2 IQ points for each answer above or below 21. So, quarterbacks averaged 24 right for a 106 IQ. Tailbacks averaged 16 for a 90.

Don’t get too excited about minor differences between positions: I’ve seen other listings of averages by position and they differed slightly. But the overall pattern was the same.

Marginal Revolution explains the graph as “The closer you are to the ball, the higher your score.”

Okay, but why is that?

Because the closer you start out to the ball at the time of the center snap, the more crowded the field is around you. So, close to the ball, the more important upper body strength is and the less important footspeed is. If you are the center, say, there just isn’t much room to run and you don’t have anywhere in particular to go. You might dash a few yards forward to block the middle linebacker or backpedal a few yards to protect the quarterback, but that’s about it. On the other hand, if you are a defensive lineman, you want to get to the quarterback before he releases the ball, so footspeed is important on defense. A defensive end might take the long way around and sprint 20 yards to sack the quarterback.

Upper body strength is relatively equally distributed between the races, but footspeed most definitely is not. So, tailbacks, wide receivers, and defensive players have a need for speed, so they are disproportionately black. I haven’t checked recently, but in most recent years since Jason Sehorn’s retirement, none of the 64 NFL starting cornerbacks at the start of the season were white, and none of the 32 starting tailbacks were white. (For some reason, this never gets as much publicity as the perceived lack of black quarterbacks.)

As we all know, there is about a 15 point difference IQ gap between whites and blacks, so positions that are black dominated tend to have lower average IQs than positions that are more integrated (or that are white monopolized, such as placekicker and punter).

Another (also oversimplified, but useful) way to think about it is like this: talents are arrayed in a pyramid, with only a few people at the top.

Imagine you have a whole bunch of guys who are about 6-5 and 280 pounds. You then sort them by 40 yard dash times. The handful of extremely fast ones at the top of the pyramid of footspeed are assigned to play defensive end because they have the best chance of sacking the quarterback. The pretty fast ones in the next layer down play defensive tackle because they might sack the QB.

That leaves a lot of not very fast big guys to play offensive line. At any level of footspeed in the lower part of the pyramid, there are more people than at the top of the pyramid.

So, to differentiate among the average speed guys, you start looking more at other skills.

First, you tell them to gain 40 pounds because for pass-blocking you need inertia more than acceleration. Not surprisingly, lots of them find that why, yes, they can eat more pancakes if it means a chance to play in the NFL.

So, now you have a whole bunch of 320 pound guys who aren’t that fast. So, you look for the ones who are coordinated and relatively nimble and send the clods home. And then you look at the ones who have a lot of desire, who can play through pain, and so forth and so on.

Somewhere along in there, you look at IQ, which is useful in learning the playbook, in learning to play other positions in the offensive line, in keeping out of jail, in not getting caught taking steroids, and so forth.

Overall, because there are more people physically able to play offensive line, there is more selection pressure on non-physical attributes, such as IQ.

That then allows coaches to devise more cognitively difficult tactics for offensive linemen to execute than for defensive linemen, which in turn reinforces the need for IQ among offensive linemen. Or perhaps causality runs more in the opposite direction and the offensive line is inherently more IQ demanding than other positions. It’s kind of a chicken or egg problem.

But the important thing to keep in mind is that IQ is a relatively minor factor in the NFL relative to the ability to generate force: mass times acceleration. If you are over 220 pounds and can run the 40-yard-dash in under 4.40 seconds but have an 80 IQ, they’ll try to explain the playbook to you very slowly. There are 150 million people in America with 3 digit IQs, but only a tiny number of them have the combination of size and speed to play in the NFL.

Congratulations to Hazleton’s Mayor Lou Barletta:

Hazleton mayor named Pa.’s Mayor of the Year timesleader.com Sunday July 20, 2008.

Barletta, of course, came to fame two years ago with a city ordnance impeding the influx of illegal immigrants into his little north-east Pennsylvania town. Yet another in the apparently endless supply of Treason Lobby Federal Judges struck it down on the usual tortured grounds, but Barletta is still fighting, much to the irritation of the local establishment, (amongst others):

Barletta continues immigration fight with a gimmick standardspeaker.com July 20 2008

Barletta is trying to find a way to keep Hazleton free of illegals. He’s asking businesses to buy into his I-9 Challenge, so named for the federal I-9 employment eligibility document that all full- and part-time workers must sign before taking a job.

The Standard-Speaker grudgingly concedes

Those who know Barletta know he’s truly passionate about immigration

Barletta is apparently running for Congress against an incumbent Democrat. It speaks volumes of the unacknowledged power of this issue that the Democrat National Committee is already spending heavily against him:

House Democrats launch first TV ad of fall race
By DAVID ESPO The Associated Press July 17 2008

Needless to say, they do not dare to challenge Barletta on Immigration, but instead - laughably - try to link him to President Bush, from whom on the immigration issue Barletta could not be more divorced.

This contest means that VDARE.com, as a tax exempt entity, will probably have to stop commenting on this remarkable patriot. (We have always hoped to set up a separate arm able to deal with this kind of situation, but sadly have not yet found the backing.)

But we can repost an old blog Go, Lou Barletta!