Two policemen have been shot in a New York City subway station while trying to apprehend a cold-blooded illegal alien named Raoul Nunez. The thirty-two year old has a drug conviction and was deported to the Dominican Republic in 2001.

The cops tried to arrest Nunez for beating a subway fare. But while resisting arrest, Nunez got hold of an officer’s gun. He then stood over both officers, aimed, and fired two pointblank shots, wounding both. After racing up the escalator, he turned back and fired again. Nunez then fired at a third officer when he reached the upper platform. Fortunately, that officer escaped harm and returned fire, wounding Nunez. Raoul Nunez now claims that he resisted arrest because he feared deportation. [HUMBLE COP: I'M NOT THE HERO | TOOK DOWN SUSPECT WHO SHOT 2 OTHER COPS, NY Post, October 22, 2008]

Even though the crime occurred at rush hour at a very busy subway stop, I am still surprised at how much emphasis the NYC media has given to the criminal’s illegal status. Such facts usually get glossed over in NYC. However, I’m still waiting for the logical follow-up question: Why does New York maintain this insane sanctuary policy?

Luckily, the police officers survived.

Too bad the FBI folded like a cheap lawn chair to Muslims’ pressure to delete unpleasant references of their misogynist culture in the obvious “honor killings” of high school girls Amina and Sarah Said.

The FBI removed all mention of the controversial term “honor killing” from the wanted poster of a double-murder suspect after FOXNews.com ran a story announcing the use of the term.

Yasser Abdel Said, wanted for the murder of his two daughters, has eluded authorities for almost a year. The bodies of the young women — Sarah Said, 17, and Amina Said, 18 — were discovered in the back of a taxicab in Irving, Texas, on New Year’s Day.

According to family members, Said felt he was compelled to kill his daughters because they had disgraced the family by dating non-Muslims and acting too “Western.”

The girls’ great aunt, Gail Gartrell, has always called the case an “honor killing.” And for a few days — until last Friday — the FBI publicly agreed.

“The 17- and 18-year-old girls were dating American boys, which was contrary to their father’s rules of not dating non-Muslim boys,” The FBI “wanted” poster read early last week. “Reportedly, the girls were murdered due to an ‘Honor Killing.’”

Some Muslims have objected to the term “honor killing” because they say it attaches a religious motive to a crime, which could lead to discrimination against Muslims.
[FBI Removes 'Honor Killing' From Murder Suspect's 'Wanted' Poster, Fox News, Oct. 21, 2008]

Right, we know how disagreeable Muslims can be when they become annoyed about purported “stereotypes” which actually report the truth about the violent, extremist behavior of some of their adherents.

Incidentally, the FBI has been subjecting its agents to Islam-friendly “sensitivity training” since 9/11, and the program appears to have paid off big time for the Muslims in this case.

From Norm Matloff’s H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter.

Norm Matloff writes

Some of you may have heard about this news item in the last few days: The 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Martin Chalfie, Osamu Shimomura and Roger Tsien for their work on the gene green fluorescent protein (GFP). Douglas Prasher, who played a key role by discovering the gene, and contributing it to Chalfie and Tsien, was snubbed for the prize. Much worse, it turns out that he is currently not in science at all, working as a shuttle bus drive for a Toyota dealership in Alabama. [Shuttle driver reflects on Nobel snub By Aaron Gouveia, capecodonline.com October 11, 2008]

But here is the rest of the story.

The fact that a Nobel Prize is involved gives this story glamor (and pathos), but the story’s true significance lies in its connection to the false claims by industry lobbyists that “Johnnie Can’t Do Science” and thus the U.S. needs an expanded H-1B program to bring in scientists from abroad. These claims are false, and though Chalfie and Tsien are U.S. natives, they are the exceptions, with Prasher being much more representative. His case illustrates everything that is wrong with our current policies on H-1B.

The Urban Institute report [PDF]released last year (along with earlier research by others showing similar results) showed that plenty of Americans major in math and science in college, but most don’t continue in the field. There are two main reasons for this. First, as the National Research Council showed (for the computer field), pursuing a PhD produces a net loss in lifetime income. Second, as was discussed on NPR when the UI report came out, there are major issues of career security in the science field: these days a scientist must work several years as a post doc in addition to earning a PhD, so one typically reaches one’s early- to mid-30s before even knowing whether one will even be able to start a career in the field, much less sustain one. If one has started a family by then, it’s difficult to keep pushing on for low pay and an uncertain future.

All of this ties in directly with H-1B. The reason PhD wages aren’t worth the years of study are that the NSF, as I’ve stated before, advocated bringing in foreign scientists for the express purpose of holding down PhD salaries. This also suppresses graduate stipends for doctoral students, and post doc wages too. As was pointed out in the NPR piece by Shirley M. Malcom, head of education and human resources at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, these low wages, 15-year training periods, poor career prospects and so on are direct evidence that we have an OVERsupply of scientists, not a shortage as claimed by the lobbyists. And again, this oversupply was deliberately planned for by the NSF, back when it asked Congress to establish the H-1B program. [Glowing Gene's Discoverer Left Out Of Nobel Prize, NPR, by Dan Charles October 9, 2008]

Prasher was a casualty of this oversupply. There were too many people applying for grants, and he saw that the situation was just going to get worse, so he left the Woods Hole lab to take a “safe” job with the USDA. Unfortunately, the funding issue continued to bite him anyway. In his last science job, with a NASA subcontractor in Huntsville, funding cuts again left him unemployed. He now works for the Toyota dealer in the same town.

The oversupply of workers also contributes to the cutthroat nature of the competition. Chalfie and Tsien were able to do quite well in the system, good for them, but as an academic I can tell you that for many in the field, part of success comes from a willingness to throw some elbows here and there, and play hardball. I’m not saying that Chalfie and Tsien necessarily have sharp elbows, but it’s quite telling that Tsien now says he was “amazed” when Prasher quite willingly give him the gene–and maybe equally telling that Tsien stopped short of saying that Prasher should have shared in the prize. (Though Chalfie, to his credit, did say, “They could’ve easily given the prize to Douglas and the other two and left me out.”)

At one of the science blogs discussing the Prasher case, here someone named Lisa brings up the H-1B connection:

Ah, this scares me. My husband is a research scientist with the govt right now in plants. We had to move to Canada for two years recently because the US just doesn’t want to hire its own citizens anymore. We got back here on a temp. job. This story made me cry. We are about to be between jobs again, and it’s tough to find one. My husband has done some really great work in genetics, but it doesn’t seem to matter. I am angry at the way our nation has chewed up and spit out so many of its great scientists in search of cheap labor.

And again, though it makes for good newspaper copy to have a Nobel almost-laureate discovered driving a van for $10 an hour, this sounds painfully familiar to many readers of this e-newsletter. One of my PhD readers could only find work packing boxes at minimum wage–at the peak of the dot-com boom, no less. Another PhD reader did manual labor in a winery. Those “Johnnie Can’t Do Science” claims by the lobbyists have a bitter ring to them.

In the last presidential debate, moderator Bob Schiefer took it for granted that “Johnnie” indeed can’t do math and science, and sadly, neither presidential candidate objected. Maybe Obama and McCain, who both strongly endorse an H-1B increase, ought to pay as much attention to Prasher the Ex-Scientist as they did to Joe the Plumber.

I also recommend his Wikipedia entry, and a beautiful page on GFP, here, which has some great pictures as well as a History section explaining the contributions made by the various players.

Steve Sailer will be on the Ron Smith Show (WBAL in Baltimore which is also heard in the DC region) today at 4:15 ET to talk about: “Has McCain Thrown in the Towel?”

You can listen at WBAL.com.

As I wrote in my early 2003 American Conservative article on why Iraqi social structures were likely to undermine America’s goal of nation-building in Iraq, “Cousin Marriage Conundrum” (which Steven Pinker selected for his anthology The Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2004), about half of the married couples of Iraq are first or second cousins.

Reading Daniel Yergin’s history of the oil industry, The Prize, I discovered a great example of the logic behind this.

Imagine you are the dictator of an oil-rich country. Who is the most likely person to overthrow you?

Your Minister of Defense, right?

So, you could appoint your own first cousin as Minister. He’d be more loyal to you than some stranger would.

Yet, Shakespeare’s history plays about struggles for the English crown have been characterized as the War of the Cousins.

Or, you could appoint your own son-in-law. He’d be more loyal than some stranger would.

Yet, King James II of England was overthrown in 1688 by his son-in-law William of Orange.

But, if you were Saddam Hussein, you could appoint your own first cousin who is also your brother-in-law!

(more…)

Could it be that the shock of the racially-motivated disloyalty of the GOP Establishment’s pampered black prince, Colin Powell – whose endorsement of Barrack Obama Pat Buchanan politely describes as Colin Powell’s Tribal Politics - will precipitate some realism about ethnicity in conventional Republican circles?

On Tuesday the Wall Street Journal ran what must be its first attack in decades on a Black: Powell Catches the Beltway Breeze by Brett Stephens October 21 2008:

Cyrus Vance resigned as secretary of state after Jimmy Carter’s attempt to rescue U.S. hostages in Tehran failed — as Vance thought it would. Alexander Haig resigned the same office two years later when it became clear to him that he was out of step with the rest of the Reagan administration. These resignations were principled, honorable and personally painful decisions.

And then there is the Powell precedent.

Say what you will about Mr. Powell’s endorsement, then, it is also a spectacular repudiation of the Bush administration and of the Republican Party: a double-barreled letter of resignation, broadcast on national TV. But what are we to make of a resignation that arrives nearly four years after its author was let go by the president — despite his widely reported desire to stay on in the second term?

This article, essential reading for any students of Powell, has clearly been briefed by insiders:

In 2004, for instance, (Powell) was quoted in the Washington Post as calling Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith’s policy shop a “Gestapo office.”

Mr. Powell never apologized publicly to Mr. Feith (though he did so privately)

It is a systematic destruction of any claim Powell has to integrity in his public life. The question arises: why only now, WSJ?

An amusing aspect of the on line version of this piece is an unexplained photograph of General Powell performing dance contortions alongside two other black men.

The blog Craptocracy explains:

The Times of London said Powell, 71, surprised the crowd at the Africa Rising music and fashion festival by singing and doing a version of the Nigerian dance Yahoozee Tuesday night.

“I stand before you tonight as an African-American,” The Times quoted Powell as telling the audience. “Many people say to me, ‘You became secretary of state of the USA., is it really necessary to say you are an African-American, or that you are black?’ And I say, ‘Yes,’ so that we can remind our children. It took a lot of people struggling to bring me to this point in history. I didn’t just drop out of the sky. People came from my continent in chains. There’s no reason a new Africa can’t be created right here and now.”

Craptocracy links to a BBC itemWednesday October 25 2008:

It is not clear if Mr Powell was aware that the song was about Nigeria’s notorious internet fraudsters.

Other apposite blog comments are here and here.

It looks like Tuesday was Ethnic Reality day at the Wall Street Journal. An Editorial: Bernanke Endorses Obama There was a time when Fed chairmen feared to even seem political.
mourns

Ben Bernanke apparently wants four more years as Federal Reserve Chairman. At least that’s a reasonable conclusion after Mr. Bernanke all but submitted his job application to Barack Obama yesterday by endorsing the Democratic version of fiscal “stimulus.”

Mr. Bernanke could have begged off — and would have been wiser to do so — given how much the Fed has already made itself a political lightning rod with its many Wall Street interventions. He might also have thought twice about endorsing one party’s policy preferences a mere two weeks before Election Day given his obligation to preserve the Fed’s independence. We can remember when tougher Fed chairmen used to refrain from adjusting interest rates close to an election for fear of seeming to be political; they would never have dreamed of meddling in campaign tax and spending debates.

Ben Bernanke is a life time academic – even worse, an Ivy League professor. Furthermore, he is Jewish. Probabilitities are multiplicative. Ivy League Professors are unlikely to be 10% Republican. McCain will be lucky to carry 20% of the Jewish vote. The chances of Bernanke being a loyal Republican are about 1 in 50. And this has always been obvious.

Rise and shine, Wall Street Journal!