“In Rose George’s hometown in England, impoverished immigrants took up residence in the new public latrines. (‘Fighting over the more spacious disabled cubicle was fierce.’) Which is worse? Living in a toilet or living without one? ” From a review of
The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters, a book on global sanitation problems.

Which is worse? Having immigrants come to your town to live in your public toilets, that’s what’s worse.

Blogger John Carney at Clusterstock.com notices the differences in lending laws between Canada and the US

One humiliating part of the meltdown of our banking system has been the relative health of Canada’s banks. They avoided the huge real estate boom we went through, and subsequently avoided the mortgage meltdown and nosedive in housing prices. How’d they manage that?

The Washington Post reports that strict standards on mortgage lending and tougher default rules helped. In Canada, it’s much tougher to walk away from your mortgage. But what probably helped most of all is that Canada didn’t fall for the home ownership hooey that the US government adopted as its national policy. In fact, in Canada you can’t even deduct mortgage interest! [Why Canada Isn't Broken]

He’s linking to a Washington Post story, Worldwide Financial Crisis Largely Bypasses Canada , which makes these points,  but both he and the Washington Post miss the diversity aspect.

Canada has its own problems with diversity, yes, but it doesn’t have twenty million illegal aliens, millions of legal Hispanic immigrants, or the US’s underperforming African-American population, all of which provided the political impetus for the relaxing of mortgage standards.

The Religion of Peace in the American heartland! In this case, a gentle Son of Allah ejected two female family members out the window and onto the pavement below.

St. Louis (KMOV) — Police said late Saturday afternoon a 51-year-old man living with his family in a second floor apartment threw his wife and their 13-year-old daughter out the window.

The second floor apartment, located across the street from the Bevo Mill restaurant in south St. Louis, is nearly 17-feet above the sidewalk.

The woman and her daughter are in stable condition. A witness said the mother seemed almost in shock and the daughter was bleeding profusely.

The family is from Afghanistan and police said the father spoke little or no English. Other family members acted as interpreters.

Police said there are at least five children that live in the apartment. The 51-year-old man was arrested. [Man throws wife, daughter out window in south St. Louis, October 21, 2008]

We text pundits tend to be the opposite of Dorian Gray. As we decay dismayingly in the flesh, the headshots over our columns remain as youthful as the day they were shot (typically about a decade ago).

Anyway, I finally got my hair cut and ten hours of sleep, so, I figured that this was as good as it’s going to get, and I got my picture taken over the weekend. I suppose I should have somebody Photoshop it a little, but, all in all, it came out okay.

In contrast, here’s the smaller, less-high def 2000 headshot of me at 41 that I had used for years. I’m not really the redhead I looked in that shot — we were just using old-fashioned print film in a room lit by incandescent lightbulbs (I didn’t want any flashbulbs to show off my wrinkles), which gave a pleasantly warm but unrealistic glow to the color tone.

Especially after seeing Charlie Kaufman’s upcoming movie “Synecdoche, New York,” his first since “Eternal Sunshine,” in which Philip Seymour Hoffman is beset by ten or twelve diseases while aging 40 years, I’d say, overall, I’ve got nothing to complain about. It’s been a healthy, happy decade for me, much of which I owe to you, my readers, editors, and patrons.

Copyright photos by Steve Sailer 2008 and 2000

The NYT article on Clinton Housing and Urban Development secretary Henry Cisneros’s role in debauching mortgage credit standards in the name of helping lower income people get their hands on the American Dream raises a question that I’ve wondering about for awhile. I suspect that when the dust settles and we finally realize what an outsized role Hispanics had in mortgage defaults that set off the global credit crisis, we’ll begin to realize that one reason the insanity of the Bubble years stayed somewhat under the national radar was that some of the very worst aspects of it were being conducted in Spanish. For example, Spanish language radio stations are hurting financially right now because they had been getting so much advertising from mortgage brokers and real estate agents. (When you read about some poor illegal immigrant maid taking out a $400,000 loan that she didn’t understand from a predatory lender, read carefully and you’ll note that the “predatory lender” who talked her into was almost always a Spanish-speaker himself.)

And there were a lot of English-speaking working-class Hispanics who got in on the bubble, too, but they are almost equally invisible to the NY-DC axis of power and influence in this country.