Following last week’s news that one Canadian university is paying for spies to snoop on student mealtime conversations and turn them in more politically correct directions, we learn that Canadian students hardly need outside crimethink management. From Canada.com

Cystic fibrosis not ‘inclusive’ enough for Carleton students

OTTAWA - The Carleton University Students’ Association has voted to drop a cystic fibrosis charity as the beneficiary of its annual Shinearama fundraiser, supporting a motion that argued the disease is not “inclusive” enough.

Cystic fibrosis “has been recently revealed to only affect white people, and primarily men” said the motion read Monday night to student councillors, who voted almost unanimously in favour of it. …

During orientation week this year, Carleton students, who have raised about $1 million over the years, raised about $20,000, said foundation chief executive Cathleen Morrison, who was surprised and dismayed by the student association decision.

The rationale for dropping cystic fibrosis as the beneficiary is not correct, she said. CF is diagnosed just as often among girls as boys, although the health of girls deteriorates more rapidly, she said. It is commonly considered an illness that affects Caucasians, but that includes people from the Middle East, South America, North Africa and the Indian subcontinent.

“‘Caucasian’ as we understand it isn’t just white people,” said Morrison. “It includes people with a whole rainbow of skins.”

For the most part, this is a sensible editorial from the Houston Chronicle, which recently presented a fine series detailing how illegal alien criminals are running amok because of the failures of government and law enforcement.

But there is a certain naivete…

The exact shape of immigration reform may be subject to endless debate. But there’s something close to consensus on what to do with undocumented immigrants already in our midst who commit violent crimes: Confine them to prison and then deport them.[Emphasis added] [ICE failure to detect, deport criminal aliens shows distorted priorities, November 25, 2008]

If only that were so! In fact, many foreigners residing in America don’t want any law enforcement applied to illegal aliens at all, not even the worst criminals who prey upon their tribe.

For example, San Francisco Hispanics were angry that a passel of dangerous MS-13 gang members were arrested Oct. 22, and some of the non-arrested demonstrated in front of the ICE office: Operation Devil Horns: Salvadorans Targeted in Anti-Gang ICE Raids.

Eric Quezada, candidate for supervisor in San Francisco’s District 9, was among the demonstrators at the rally organized by the Alianza Latinoamericana por los Derechos de los Inmigrantes (Latin American Alliance for Immigrant Rights) and other immigrant rights groups.

The local politician believes arrests like those recently conducted by ICE should be left to the local police. He thinks these kinds of actions “put the whole comunity at risk” by making people reluctant to go to the police for fear of immigration authorities.

Quezada says Operation Devil Horns “connects immigration to crime and (San Francsco’s) Santuary City (status) in order to turn it into a political problem.”

Total BS. First of all, the Hispanics would be complaining just as much if their pals had been rounded up by the SFPD rather than ICE. The arrests of the MS-13 gangsters followed the triple murder last summer of the Bologna family by a previously arrested gang member, plus the gang murder of a 14-year-old Hispanic boy with a sword a couple weeks ago. San Francisco’s permissive sanctuary policy has turned the once charming city into a diverse crime theme park.

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson (former Goldman Sachs CEO) has bailed out Citi-whatever, whose “consigliere” is former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, (a former co-CEO of Goldman Sachs) on terms that were described in the Washington Post as:

“It strikes me as unbelievably generous,” said a former Fed official who has been in touch with Citigroup.

Commercial bank Citibank’s merger with investment bank Salomon Smith Barney was illegal under the New Deal Glass-Steagall Act, but Rubin helped get it made legal in the late 1990s, just before quitting the Clinton cabinet and going to work there.

Meanwhile, AIG, a close associate of Goldman, is getting a rolling bailout that appears to be mounting to the sky.

Only one massive financial institution didn’t get a bailout and been allowed to fail: the investment bank Lehman Brothers. After it went bankrupt, the economy fell off the edge of the world.

Is it just a coincidence that Lehman Brothers was a rival of Goldman Sachs?

Ironically, just as Rubin’s reputation for genius is is being flushed away, three of his proteges–Geithner, Summers, and Orzag–are getting top economic jobs in the Obama Administration. Funny how that works…

For some long term perspective on a dress rehearsal for what’s happening now on much more massive scale, here are John Brimelow’s reviews from 2000-01 in VDARE.com of two books on the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) in 1998 (first and second):

LTCM was set up to profit from irrational disparities in valuation between similar financial assets, primarily bonds. The assumption that these occurred randomly in a normal distribution pattern had become an article of religious faith at U.S. Business Schools in the previous 20 years. Two of the progenitors of the view, Robert Merton of Harvard, and Myron Scholes of Stanford (and of the Black/Scholes option valuation model) were LTCM partners. (Fischer Black had had the judgment to die an untimely death previously.) Careful reading of their work reveals that they assumed continuous markets and stable volatility ranges (neither always present in reality) and they acknowledged but ignored the fact that probability distributions in financial markets often show “fat tails” — in other words that extreme events occur far more frequently than a normal curve would predict. But they nonetheless built a “school” of like-minded thinkers and disciples. This group had become very influential on Wall Street by the late 90s.

Wall Street, in a sense, became a victim of the principal vice of the U.S. academic profession: the eagerness to set up introspective communities, dedicated to a dogma, which insulate themselves from fact-based criticism by exclusion and intimidation rather than argument. …

Given that LTCM’s “stunning losses betrayed the flaw at the very heart - the very brain - of modern finance” and that the concept it used “prevails at virtually every investment bank and trading desk,” it is very strange to find Greenspan and Rubin (when Secretary of the Treasury) blocking all efforts to improve transparency and improve regulation even to the extent of forcing out the former CFTC head, Brooksley Born. …

The saga of the Long Term Capital Management hedge fund - its rise, fall, and the peculiar circumstances surrounding its rescue in September 1998 - more and more appears paradigmatic of Clinton Era finance. Esoteric and secretive in action, operating through special relationships and understandings, involving greed and ambition on astonishingly uninhibited scale, and ultimately giving rise to suspicions of ominous fusion between private commercial objectives and the formulation of public policy, it lays out a pattern likely to become all too familiar as documentation of the period becomes more available.

[VDARE.com note: The AIG Bailout in particular is supposed to have saved Goldman Sachs $20 billion. ]

Nobody working for Obama seems to know how big his public works program will be, but the usual number you hear is around $700 billion.

You know where they got that number: from Hank Paulson’s original bank bailout. You can imagine the rhetoric already: “If we can afford $700 billion for Wall Street, we can afford $700 billion to fill the potholes on Main Street!”

And how did Paulson come up with his $700 billion number? As far as I can tell, he basically had no clue. He just wanted a really big number “to restore confidence,” but he probably didn’t want one so big that you could round it up to “a trillion.” Hence, $700 billion, our new national lucky number.

Update: A commenter points out that when Paulson left Goldman Sachs, he cashed in for $700 million, which might be how he came up with 700 as his favorite number.