Recently, the LA city council voted to ban for one year the opening of new fast food restaurants in South Central Los Angeles (which, by the way, we’re not supposed to call South Central anymore, due to the unfortunate events of April 1992–it’s just South Los Angeles now, officially speaking).

Interestingly, the recent proliferation of chain fast-food restaurants and retail outlets in South-Central LA is actually the solution to an older problem.

As you’ll recall, South Central LA witnessed vicious racial pogroms in April 1992 against immigrant (typically Korean) entrepreneurs operating within the black community. Korean shopkeepers tended to treat black customers brusquely and would seldom hire and almost never promote local blacks.

Since then, corporate America, often in partnership with black entrepreneurs like Magic Johnson, has greatly expanded the number of chain outlets in South Central. These are more willing to employ local residents than immigrant mom-and-pop establishments, and promote them too.

For example, the Florence-Normandie neighborhood where the 1992 riot broke out now has a quite decent chain-run supermarket with a first rate fresh produce section.

In general, the Stuff White People Like coterie sees immigrant-dominated retail streets as “vibrant” and chain-dominated retail streets as “boring,” but the latter are better for African-Americans looking for jobs.

On the other hand, Hispanics are slowly pushing blacks out of South Central, so a lot of businesses tip to all Hispanic. Once you reach a certain percentage of Spanish-only employees, you have practical reasons to start demanding that new employees all speak at least Spanish. And there are virtually no bilingual African-Americans in LA. (Among the 900 black LAPD officers, I was told on good authority in 2001 that only four spoke Spanish–and LA cops have plenty of reason to learn Spanish.)

By the way, the ban on fast food restaurants is hardly unprecedented. It’s just that they are usually banned in upscale neighborhoods. For example, Avalon, the quaint little tourist town on Catalina Island, had, as of my last visit in 1997, absolutely no national chain restaurants, retailers, or hotels of any kind. Similarly, on Martha’s Vineyard, McDonalds famously waged an epic battle trying to get permission to open an outlet.

Yesterday the Los Angeles Times published a bi-partisan opinion piece from Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Senator Dianne Feinstein about the state’s current water crisis and why voters should approve a massive bond (“loan” in normal language) to upgrade, repair and expand California’s water infrastructure.

The op-ed, Turning the tide in the water crisis, catalogued the dreary symptoms associated with two years of sub-average rainfall:

California depends on water from three primary sources: The Sierra Nevada snowpack, the Colorado River and our existing water-storage system. Each of these sources faces unprecedented challenges.

The snowpack, which was measured at only 67% of normal in May, has become dangerously unreliable because of global warming. It is estimated that climate change will cause the state’s snowpack to drop by 25% to 40% by 2050.

The Colorado River Basin just experienced an eight-year drought, and the amount of water that California is allowed to take from the river has dropped by 18% from 2003.

Reservoirs are dangerously low statewide. Lake Oroville, California’s second-largest storage reservoir, will end this year with its lowest amount of water in more than 30 years. Shasta Reservoir, the state’s largest, is at 48% of capacity.

What’s even more “unprecedented” is the purposeful overpopulation of a bio-region where low rainfall and long droughts are a fact of life in the historical record, e.g. the Medieval megadrought of 400 years duration, from 900 to 1400.

California’s current population of over 38 million is environmentally unsustainable, yet the government elites plan on ever more growth, with the unwilling taxpayer footing the bill.

We believe this is a balanced and comprehensive approach that will help meet the needs of a growing population — expected to reach 50 million in the next decade. It will help us bank more water in wet years for use in the dry years. And it will meet our common goal of a healthy environment and reliable water supply.

(Incidentally, the precise bill for this bond extravaganza is not mentioned in the LA Times pitch. For that, inquiring minds must search the internet to find the dollar amount: Schwarzenegger, Feinstein propose $9.3 billion water bond , San Diego Union Tribune, July 10, 2008.)

The situation wouldn’t be so absurd if Mexifornia could cut back on the generous welcome mat for illegal aliens, like the continuing permissiveness when other states are cracking down, a city (San Francisco) that has advertised for foreigners to use its welfare services, in-state tuition for illegals, etc. ad nauseum.

Even Hollywood understands that “If you build it, they will come.”

And yes, the billions of dollars for the water bond are indeed another immigration tax, because California would not need such extreme infrastructure expenditures if Washington-mandated overpopulation policies had not been acting as growth steroids.

Steve Sailer has mentioned David Brooks and Ross Douthat as pundits who use his work but don’t often acknowledge it. (They get “a lot of grief from the commissars” when they do.) However, some people are willing to acknowledge their debt to Sailer. Peter Schweizer has written a book on the culture wars called Makers And Takers, which has been excerpted in Canada’s National Post. The latest excerpt is called Mind Wars, [August 1, 2008] and speaks to the “conventional wisdom” that liberals and progressives are smarter than conservatives. This is not, in fact, the case. Schweizer writes

Though at the time, of course, no one could actually check because Kerry kept refusing to release his transcripts from Yale, or any information about intelligence tests that he would have taken as a Navy officer. Bush had taken the equivalent Air Force Qualifying Test, and they would have made a good point of comparison. But the results were not, Kerry said, “relevant” to the campaign, even though his campaign was based in part on Bush’s lack of intelligence. (A similar excuse was made in regard to Kerry’s military records, though his campaign was largely based on his claim to have been a hero in Vietnam–before he became an outspoken critic of the war. In other words, he was for the war before he was against it.)

Then a Navy veteran named Sam Sewell noticed something on the Kerry campaign Web site. In one of the documents posted on the Web page, an obscure military report offered a cryptic score that was actually the result of an IQ-like qualifying test Kerry had taken in 1966. As it happened, George W. Bush had taken the same test just a few years later. Columnist Steve Sailer determined that Bush’s score put him in the 95th percentile, giving him an IQ in the 120s. Kerry’s score was slightly lower, putting him in the 91st percentile.

When these results became public, NBC’s Tom Brokaw asked Kerry about them. He was more than a bit peeved. Kerry dodged the question and wondered out loud how they became public in the first place. “I don’t know how they’ve done it, because my record is not public,” he told Brokaw. “So I don’t know where you’re getting that from.”

They were getting it from VDARE.com. It didn’t appear anywhere else, and when John Tierney referred to it in the New York Times, he had to quote Sailer (to the tune of more grief from the commissars) because VDARE.com had an exclusive.

See  October 21, 2004 This Just In—Kerry’s IQ Likely Lower than Bush’s!
and November 14, 2004 The 2004 IQ Wars: So Much For The Candidates—What About The Voters?
for more details.

From Mexicans Sending Less Money Home in the Washington Post:

Javier Martinez, 46, a construction worker who lives in Manassas, said that a year ago he was able to send up to $1,500 a month to his wife and two children in the Mexican state of Zacatecas. Now he can only send about $500 a month. His work laying tiles has slowed down, and he can no longer find renters for the three houses he owns as immigrants have left Prince William County because of the ongoing crackdown on illegal immigrants.

Wait a minute … a guy who lays tile for a living and sends $18,000 per year to his wife and two kids in Mexico owns three houses in a pricey Washington D.C. suburb? How much you want to bet we taxpaying citizens are going to end up bailing out his three mortgages?

David Willman of the LA Times breaks a big story on the post-9/11 terrorism wave that is one reason why we’re in Iraq:

A top government scientist who helped the FBI analyze samples from the 2001 anthrax attacks has died in Maryland from an apparent suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him for the attacks, the Los Angeles Times has learned.

Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who for the last 18 years worked at the government’s elite biodefense research laboratories at Ft. Detrick, Md., had been informed of his impending prosecution, said people familiar with Ivins, his suspicious death and the FBI investigation.

Ivins, whose name had not been disclosed publicly as a suspect in the case, played a central role in research to improve anthrax vaccines by preparing anthrax formulations used in experiments on animals.

Regarded as a skilled microbiologist, Ivins also helped the FBI analyze the powdery material recovered from one of the anthrax-tainted envelopes sent to a U.S. senator’s office in Washington.

Ivins died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital after ingesting a massive dose of prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine, said a friend and colleague, who declined to be identified out of concern that he would be harassed by the FBI. …

The anthrax mailings killed five people, crippled national mail service, shut down a Senate office building and spread fear of further terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The extraordinary turn of events followed the government’s payment in June of a settlement valued at $5.82 million to a former government scientist, Steven J. Hatfill, who was long targeted as the FBI’s chief suspect despite a lack of any evidence that he had ever possessed anthrax.

Early in the year, I took a look at a third Ft. Detrick scientist (since moved on to other jobs) — i.e., neither Ivins nor Hatfill — whose name has been fairly widely tossed around as the possible anthrax assassin. The more I Googled, the more the pieces seemed to fit together. I was about ready to post my conspiracy theory when I took one more look at it and — poof — I realized that I didn’t have any real evidence at all. So, thankfully, I didn’t post his name, and instead wrote:

“I’m not going to mention his name, but if you know who I’m talking about and think he did it, try to force yourself into a gestalt where you assume he didn’t do it and see if you can think of less sinister explanations for the facts known about him.”

As far as I can recall, Ivins’s name, in contrast, didn’t come up much in the conspiracy theorizing. Here’s a Google search that shows relatively little in the way of theorizing about his involvement — even though his name was published in USA Today in 2004 in regard to some dodgy doings at Detrick.

His name was featured suspiciously in the book Vaccine A by investigative journalist Gary Matsumoto about the anthrax vaccine that Ivins helped develop. But I don’t see anything on Google suggesting Matsumoto linked Ivins to involvement with the 2001 terror attacks.

In general, it appears that almost nobody – whether government investigators, professional journalists, or lone obsessives in their bathrobes — suspected Ivins, at least not enough to leave much of a trace on Google. (Indeed, most of the Google searches on “Ivins anthrax” turn up references to the late pundit Molly Ivins.)

For example, here’s the part of Ed Lake’s website where he collects all the published facts on the anthrax attacks where he speculates on traits of the supplier and who the mailer might be. He doesn’t sound too far off, but neither set of traits seems to fit Ivins terribly well. Lake’s profile is in bold: (more…)