(Warning: Some Graphic Language)

The New York City Transit Authority is announcing a program to fight the apparently expanding menace of subway gropers. [wcbstv.com - NYC Transit Plans Anti-Groping Campaign]

The “fight” against groping is reported to include such aggressive measures as the placing of posters encouraging women to report the grouping. (Yes, ladies, now you can relax, confident of the protection provided by the warning posters.)

But as with so many deteriorations of the quality of life in America, I’m tempted to wonder who, exactly, is responsible for all this subway groping. My own experience, as a 7-year veteran of the F and D trains, and from speaking to a variety of female straphangers, is that gropers are more likely to be black or Hispanic, like this charmer. [Alleged NYC subway groper could get life |Man has been arrested 53 times, mostly for groping women, AP, April. 14, 2008]

One common story from women I’ve spoken to is that of the lone black man, probably homeless, who has unzipped himself to masturbate in plain view inside the subway car. Needless to say, it’s an unnerving sight for anyone.

Above ground, in New York and elsewhere, women (even liberal ones) report the lewdness of Hispanic men, whose own culture takes a decidedly different view of respect for women. Here’s an example:

I haven’t been in NYC very long (originally from Nevada) but never in my life have I experienced so many creepy men who blatantly stare me up and down, say nasty sexual comments to me, call me names, etc. until I moved here. I’m a pretty attractive, young, blonde girl, which is very common where I’m from, so I assume the guys there are just used to it. But here it’s just ridiculous! So is it normal for a female to have 5 foot tall Hispanic men (oh you know what I’m talking about, I see them everywhere. They’re all hispanic, short, and creepy. Often seen delivering food.) on the subway staring and whispering at you? To walk past a guy on the street and have him stop and turn around and shout something at you? When I’m walking down the street and see a group of construction workers I know what’s coming. I’ve even had a guy grab my ass on a crowded subway.

Do these men have ANY respect for women?

City-Data Forum > New York City Being a female in NYC, what’s with all the creepy men/stares/comments?

And subway anarchy generally tends to be a non-white phenomenon, as this hair-raising account holds: Hell on Wheels–The job of a conductor on a New York City subway train is a voyage into the heart of darkness. by Daniel Attila, American Renaissance, January 1997.

Now, whites are not unknown to engage in sexual perversity, and whenever I hear that someone’s been arrested for child pornography, I assume the perpetrator is white. But I’m having trouble picturing a proportionate number of whites in the subway-groper population.

So who are the gropers? Can we expect anyone to report the statistics, if they’re taken? Transit won’t tell us, and I’m sure the press won’t, either. But common sense New York women probably have an idea.

[VDARE.com note: Some New York women have started a campaign to encourage women to snap cellphone pictures of anyone the see misbehaving, and post them on http://hollabacknyc.blogspot.com/. The results are about what you'd expect.]

As I’ve been pointing out, the hero in this investigation is the advance in genome sequencing technology over the last seven years. The Washington Post reports:

Much of what the FBI seeks to explain involves the scientific trail, which included 19 outside laboratories at a cost of $10 million, that led investigators to Ivins. The Justice Department yesterday continued to discuss whether it can shutter one of the most perplexing investigations in FBI history and unseal the bulky case files in their entirety.

“We crossed a number of scientific barriers in this case,” said one senior FBI official who has been ordered not to talk about the case publicly. “We literally were inventing science as we went along.”

Law enforcement sources and published scientific papers indicate that the investigation gained traction through technological and scientific advances that dramatically speeded up the process of differentiating the genetic makeup of hundreds of distinct but closely related strains of bacteria.

Coupled with a fresh scientific understanding of the subtle differences between the strains and a new system for analyzing them, the rapid “sequencing” machines made it possible to detect the minuscule differences and link the one used in the attacks to a single laboratory.

At the time of the attacks, the knowledge to accomplish this in less than decades of laborious work did not exist. But the science of reading and analyzing DNA was on the verge of an explosion, one that the anthrax attacks may have helped to speed up.

Bruce Budowle, an FBI scientist at its lab in Quantico, reported to an international conference in September 2003 that a new field of forensic science — known as microbial forensics — had evolved as a result of the investigation. The letter attacks, he said, showed the “need to enhance our capabilities for forensic attribution.”

The FBI has boasted publicly only in general terms about the scientific accomplishments in the case. Laboratories and researchers involved in the work under FBI contracts signed agreements not to discuss their contributions, but some relevant insights have emerged in scientific papers published over the past six years as work progressed on decoding the genetic composition of Bacillus anthracis, the anthrax bacterium. …

J. Craig Venter, former head of the Institute for Genomic Research, said such investigation was impossible before the recent advances. “This is just applying that same technology to forensic purposes. It’s more the use of it to solve a particular criminal problem rather than [to] make advances in science,” he said.

When I was a kid, you heard more about the Tarahumara Indian runners of Copper Canyon in Mexico than you heard about the Kalenjin of Kenya. The Tarahumara were supposed to be the great runners of the world, able to run a hundred miles without stopping. But Tarahumara runners have only competed once in the Olympics, with indifferent success, while the Kalenjin have consistently won medals.

Here’s an article comparing the two groups. The sports-obsessed British colonial administrators tried to get the young Kalenjin men to redirect their excess energy from cattle-rustling to track, while Mexico wasn’t terribly interested in track, and the Uto-Aztecan-speaking Tarahumara didn’t want anything to do with Mexicans, anyway.

The author argues that the Tarahumara’s strong suit is distances farther than the 26 miles of the marathon. In contrast, by my calculations, the Kalenjin’s best distance is about 3000 meters, which is why Kenyans really aren’t that all-conquering at the marathon, a distance at which there are a wide variety of winners. (Here’s my 1997 chart showing the best running race distances for different groups.)

In 1993, a 55-year-old Tarahumara showed up at the high-altitude 100 mile ultramarathon in Leadville, Colorado and won, running in sandals made from old tires. But since then they haven’t really shown much interest in running professionally outside their canyons.

In this decade, an American named Micah True has organized an annual ultramarathon trail run deep in Copper Canyon. Organizers award as prizes 30,000 pounds of corn and $6,000 cash. In 2007, the top American ultramarathoner, Scott Jurek, participated, winning in a time of 6 hours and 32 minutes. But Arnulfo, a Tarahumara finished second in 6 hours and 50 minutes. In 2008, Americans won the top two spots, and local Indians the next eight.

So, it’s hard to figure out just how good as runners the Tarahumara really are. There are only about 50,000 of them, so there isn’t a big enough sample size for there to be many running prodigies. And they are sometimes malnourished (eating mostly corn), they chain-smoke, and they regularly get falling down drunk. A common estimate is that 100 days per year are devoted to either heavy drinking or recovering from benders. (Like the Japanese, they’re emotionally reticent except when they’ve had a snootfull.) So, they’re pretty darn good, but it’s hard to get a precise sense of how good.

It’s now theorized that their running style (very short strides, landing on the ball off the foot rather than the heel, as is necessary with a long stride) helps them avoid injuries while running on rugged trails. And their running in crummy sandals instead of cushioned supershoes means that their foot muscles don’t atrophy, so they don’t get the many injuries suffered by American runners.

Indeed, it occurs to me that there might be a hint of an explanation here for one of the more curious trends in sports history. Americans used to be outstanding distance runners. In the 1960s, three American high school boys, Jim Ryun, Marty Liquori, and Tom Danielson, running in low-tech shoes broke the four minute barrier for the mile, but it was 32 years before it happened again (Alan Webb). In 1972, Frank Shorter won the Olympic marathon, which opened the door to the famous running fad of the 1970s. Soon, everybody was running. The Nike Corporation began selling enormous numbers of ever more technologically advanced running shoes.

Yet, as the quantity of American distance runners exploder, the quality declined. Could it have been the shoes? American runners had the best shoes money could buy, but they kept getting injured. One theory is that the more your feet are cushioned and stabilized, the weaker their muscles get, and the more likely you are to get hurt.

The Attorney General announced the charging of 11 people, some of them in foreign countries, in a huge identity theft scheme.

Three of the defendants are U.S. citizens, one is from Estonia, three are from Ukraine, two are from the People’s Republic of China and one is from Belarus. One individual is only known by an alias online, and his place of origin is unknown.[DOJ Press Release]

So what we’re dealing with is not just immigrant crime, but the outsourcing of immigrant crime. Can’t American criminals compete?
To  what extent is computer fraud like this dominated by immigrants? Is Alberto “Segvec” Gonzales, one of the US citizens in the case, an immigrant? We don’t know, and DOJ may not tell us.

However, sing the “What kind of name is that” investigative technique pioneered by Archie Bunker, I note that previous computer fraud cases have included US v. Ramanathan, US v. Holhoko, et al.,  US v. Simbaqueba, US v. Kalonji, and  US v. Carranza. [DOJ Fact Sheet (PDF)]

Greg Cochran says, in defense of the much maligned FBI, that in 2001 the technology didn’t really exist to sequence the anthrax found in mailed envelopes in the fall of that year. As you’ll recall, the Human Genome Project had spent years sequencing Craig Venter’s DNA, not finishing until about then.

By the middle of the decade, however, genome sequencing technology had improved so much that the FBI could hire biotech firms to sequence the evidence, which traced the terrorist anthrax to a particular batch accessible only to about ten people at Ft. Detrick. (That’s assuming that the initial inspection of the evidence at Ft. Detrick in 2001 didn’t contaminate the sample — which may or may not be a Big If.)

What we don’t know yet is how solid the links are to Ivins as the One of the Ten. He sounds like he was always pretty eccentric, and was fairly crazy at the end. Still, one concern would be: what if the FBI picked out the most eccentric of the ten for surveillance, and that, rather than guilt, drove him around the bend? Anyway, we should know more pretty soon.

It might not be a bad idea to buy out the other nine people at the lab who had access to the terror anthrax and pay them all to take early retirement.

If the anthrax mailer’s goal was to get America to pay more attention to and spend more money on defenses against bio-terrorism, he certainly succeeded: we’ve spent something like $50 billion since then.

In recent years the Italian military has deployed a lot to various places–Afghanistan, the Balkans, Iraq, Lebanon. Now they are deploying to Italy itself.

According to the AP report Italy: Soldiers Deployed to Fight Street Crime [Aug. 4th, 2008] :

Hundreds of soldiers were deployed Monday in cities across Italy as part of government measures to fight street crime. In Rome, an initial 400 men and women were stationed at subway and railway stations and at an immigrant center, the Defense Ministry said. They were not expected to be deployed immediately in the capital’s historic center. In Milan, some 150 soldiers were patrolling the Duomo cathedral and sensitive sites such as the U.S. consulate and the city’s synagogue. Soldiers were also deployed in Naples, Bologna and Palermo, Italian reports said.More soldiers will be deployed in coming days, reaching an overall total of 3,000, said Lt. Col. Mario Busi of the Defense Ministry.

Notice how this article deals gingerly with the immigration connection:

Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s conservative government had proposed the measure as part of a security package that also toughens rules for illegal immigrants, whom some Italians link to crime. The measure, recently approved by parliament, remains in effect for six months.

Imagine that, “some Italians” are linking illegal immigrants to crime! The AP article of course steers clear of making that link.

When I was deployed to Iraq in 2005 I served four months as a liaison with the Italian Army. It was an honor to serve with the Italian soldiers, and I still correspond from time to time with some of them.
In 2005 the Italians had about 3,000 troops in Iraq, about the same amount of personnel they are deploying now in Italy.

Here’s my article about the Italian military in Iraq. Maybe some of the Italian soldiers I served with are part of this new deployment.

Italy has recently begun a crackdown on illegal immigration. This has been accompanied by a general crackdown on crime that includes use of the Italian military in major Italian cities.

Now, part of what makes this interesting is that a big chunk of the illegal immigrants involved are citizens of EU member nations who have gained substantial opportunities for legal immigration to Italy as part of the economic integration of the EU. Once again this shows that expansion of legal immigration is not an obvious solution to the problems of illegal immigration. In fact expansion of legal immigration means the potential for illegal immigration becomes greater.

From my perspective, the Italian political establishment has been utterly calloused towards the needs of Italian youth for decades–and that is culminating in these heavy handed tactics being used. Italy needs to more seriously consider how to manage their economic elites so that the Italian economy better serves the needs of all Italians.

Allan Wall was interviewed on “Live Fire” by Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America. Topics of discussion included gun laws in Mexico, the drug war and immigration. The interview can be listened to here, where you just scroll down to where it says “Allan Wall - An American in Mexico reports on gun laws and violence in Mexico“.