Yom Kippur is celebrated this year from sundown October 8 to sundown October 9. As with Rosh Hashanah, it is increasingly observed as a de facto holiday by American schools and legislatures. And, as with Rosh Hashana, we point out, in the spirit of diversity that has brought us the War Against Christmas, that it is also the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. Well, actually that’s on October 7, but Chanukah isn’t always near Christmas either. This feast is particularly appropriate to VDARE.COM readers, because it celebrates the Christian victory over the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, saving Europe from an earlier Muslim invasion. And in the Episcopalian Church Calendar, October 9 is the feast day of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln in the thirteenth century. Because of his resistance to church corruption, Italian absentee clergy and royal usurpation (he was present at the signing of the Magna Carta), plus his scientific interests, Grosseteste has been regarded as a precursor of the Protestant Enlightenment to which Virginia Dare, and America, are heirs.

You can really get into this upstaging game! VDARE.COM wishes a happy Day to everyone.

Joe Guzzardi is scheduled to be interviewed by Chuck Wilder on “George Putnam’s Talk Back” show. The interview is scheduled for 12:30 p.m Pacific Time, Wednesday, October 8th (that’s 3:30 Eastern). You can listen live here, and it’s repeated at 8 p.m. Pacific Time each night.

Joe, who recently moved away from California, will be talking about his new column about the next wave of politically correct teachers who will be educating your children.

If you read Apes Or Angels? Creationism And Race Denial by Steve Sailer in January, you remember that in polite society you must believe two things:

1. That humanity evolved from lower animals according to the process of natural selection outlined by Charles Darwin.

2. That humanity has not evolved any patterns of genetic variation corresponding to geographic ancestry … well, none other than the obvious ones that we can all see.

This is discussed in Cornelius Troost’s book Apes or Angels? Darwin, Dover, Human Nature, and Race, which has its own website at ApesOrAngels.com. (The title comes from a famous remark by Benjamin Disraeli, made at the Oxford Diocesan Conference in 1864: “Is man an ape or an angel? … I am on the side of the angels”.)

The book is a refutation of Stephen Jay Gould’s peculiar idea that despite all the visible differences between different races, of which evolution is the cause, and of which skin color is only one, there must be no difference between the races in average IQ. The reason I call this a peculiar idea, although it’s the “conventional wisdom,” it’s enshrined in law, and you can lose your job for not believing it, there’s no actual evidence for it.

You can see Cornelius Troost discussing the concepts in his book on YouTube (complete series here):

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Open borders allow foreign organized crime to enter at will. Such an idea verges on common sense, but in Washington, you can’t just say that a stupendously dumb policy has led to a whole string of predictable bad results; a well researched report is required.

A “dangerous side effect” of America’s failure to control the Southwest border and the nation’s tolerance for high levels of illegal immigration has resulted in the spread of violent transnational gangs across the United States, including Maryland, Virginia and Washington, a report says.

A report written for the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) says the gangs represent a “significant menace to the public,” with about 80 percent of the members involved in serious crimes in addition to immigration violations and another 40 percent having committed violent crimes.

“The recent emergence and spread of several Hispanic street gangs, most notably MS-13 and 18th Street, has attracted the attention of law enforcement agencies and political leaders nationwide,” said Jessica M. Vaughan, an author of the report, which was made public Tuesday. “Many gangs are made up of small-time troublemakers, but others have a reputation for grisly violence.

“They are responsible for virtually the entire spectrum of criminal activity, from nuisance crimes like graffiti to murder. Some are becoming increasingly well-organized and operating as sophisticated crime syndicates across national borders,” she said. [Spread of gangs tied to border-control Failure, By Jerry Seper, Washington Times, October 3, 2008]

A nice PDF version of CIS’ report is available: Taking Back the Streets: ICE and Local Law Enforcement Target Immigrant Gangs.

Here’s an interesting item, which suggests the wisdom of police inspections of day labor sites…

Immigrant gang members rarely make a living as gangsters. They typically work by day in construction, auto repair, farming, landscaping, and other low-skill occupations where employers are less vigilant checking status, often using false documents.

As I’ve been pointing out for a long time, much of the “diversity recession” theory does not rest on minorities per se defaulting on home loans, but on contortions to the market rationalized in the name of diversity, such as Bush’s attack on down payments (for everybody) in the sacred name of raising minority homeownership by 5.5 million; or by the see no evil-hear no evil-speak no evil politically correct mindset about lending to heavily Hispanic states and black parts of town by fear of discrimination lawsuit discovery of intra-firm emails asking “Aren’t we out of our minds to lend $340,000 on a 500 square foot house in Compton? Do you know who lives in Compton?”

Still, ideas have consequences, and these ideas, which both parties supported, no doubt led to higher defaults among minorities.

The federal government has created a vast apparatus of of race reporting on lending to make sure that minorities get their “fair” share of loans, but there doesn’t seem to be as equally accessible data on defaults by race. Why not? Well, because the point is to badger lenders into giving more loans to minorities, not to call attention to problems that can cause.

One of my most insightful commenters started out assuming that minorities couldn’t have comprised more than a tiny handful of percent of the defaulted dollars. Now, he’s up to 10% to 15%, but doesn’t think it could possibly be 30%. I’m willing to bet him that when it all gets counted up, it will be closer to 30% than to 15%.

A few methodology issues. The first is that, normally, recessions cause defaults. Eventually, the new recession will cause a lot of defaults, but what we are interested in is not the defaults caused by the recession of, say, 2008-2011, but the defaults that caused that recession. So, therefore, let’s look at, say, calendar year 2007.

Second, lenders always have a baseline expectation of default dollars per year due to random tragedies. What we are interested in is not the total dollar amount of defaults in 2007, but the amount incremental to the expectation. For example, if lenders expected due to random sad events that 1% of prime mortgages would default in 2007 and 3% of subprime mortgages, but the real numbers were 2% of prime and 20% of subprime, then the numbers of interest to us are not 2% of prime, but the unexpected increments: 1% of prime and 17% of subprime. (I just made these numbers up for illustrative purposes.)

Third, there are a variety of technical issues involving when something is foreclosure vs. default vs. severely stressed. And there’s the complicating hybrid of short sales.

Fourth, a lot of sales in, say, 2005-2006 were fraudulent using straw buyers, so sorting out blame has its metaphysical aspects.

Fifth, I suspect, on no particular evidence, just a hunch, that more than few of the most enthusiastic speculators in the California housing markets were white immigrants from the Middle East and the ex-Soviet bloc.

I will leave all the details to disinterested researchers to handle in a fair manner.

My first suggestion is that rather than hand out a new Nobel Prize in Economics this year, they instead take away one they gave to some economist in the past who now looks like a prime nitwit.

If that’s too radical, how about giving the Nobel to an economist who was actually, like, right? How about Robert Shiller who has been banging the gong about the coming housing crash for years?