Condemnation continues in Italy concerning Muslims’ provocative pray-in at Milan’s famous cathedral January 3: Italian minister blasts Muslim protesters’ prayers [Reuters, Jan 11, 2009]

ROME, Jan 11 (Reuters) - Italy’s defence minister warned the country’s Muslims to stop further “provocations” after thousands held prayers in public squares in Milan during pro-Palestinian demonstrations over the past week.

Ignazio La Russa, from the right-wing National Alliance, said he did not oppose protests or want to deny anyone the right to pray, but called the public prayers a challenge to peace.

“I say enough of the provocations of Islamists in Milan,” he told Il Giornale newspaper on Sunday. “In Milan, a legitimate demonstration ended in a deliberately provocative mosque under the open sky.”

In fact, concern over encroaching Eurabia prompted a mass to be held a few days later on the same spot, to reset the vibe more or less.

The press has had reports of Muslims “to apologize” but no expressions of regret have yet appeared, nor are they likely given the belief in taqqiya (purposeful deception to advance Islam by any means necessary). Jihadists don’t apologize, but have been known to prevaricate and postpone when they see such a move as strategic to their interests.

The act under consideration is the traditional up-butt salute (shown below) delivered by hundreds of hostile Muslims in front of one of the world’s most beautiful cathedrals as part of an anti-Israel rally.

How would Muslims like it if the Pope held a mass in front of the Kaaba? Oh wait, Christians and other non-Muslims cannot even enter Mecca.

I asked one of VDARE’s friends for a sketch of Maryland’s Montgomery County, now rebelling against illegal immigration and official complaisancy: he replied

It used to be extremely affluent and almost lily white 30 years ago. Huge Jewish population (Chertoff is from Potomac in the county) and a large number of very educated Roman Catholics. Think of Bethesda, Chevy Chase and Potomac.

Now it has a huge number of Hispanics in places like Wheaton, Silver Spring, and Takoma Park. I believe Takoma Park is a sanctuary city.

Now the county is overrun by illegals.

President George W. Bush has just said that the Republican Party, which he has led to catastrophe, should be “open-minded about big issues like immigration reform”, by which he means closed-mindedly in favor of amnesty. In fact, of course, a truly open-minded party would move to give expression to Montgomery County’s distress. With Bush off the scene, maybe this can finally happen. (Thanks, RC).

The classic saying about liberals becoming conservatives, or at least neo-conservatives, after being “mugged by reality,” goes double, of course, for anyone who’s actually mugged. And it looks like that’s what’s happening in very liberal Montgomery County, Maryland.

Attitudes Shift on Illegal Residents
Some Link Crime In Montgomery To Immigration

By Dan Morse and Ann E. Marimow
Washington Post
Sunday, January 11, 2009; Page A01

For years, mainstream Montgomery County has been generally accepting of illegal immigrants, and county leaders followed suit, pledging not to enforce immigration laws even as police agencies elsewhere in the region began to do so.

But public sentiment appears to be shifting in Montgomery, driven less by ideology than by alarm over rising crime and the recent slayings of a 14-year-old honor student on a county transit bus and a 63-year-old woman in her Bethesda home.

“People who are very, very tolerant want to see some changes,” said County Council member Marc Elrich (D-At Large), one of five council members who said in interviews that public opinion has shifted in recent months.

Elrich said crime has “really hit home” even in his neighborhood of Takoma Park, a city that since 1985 has officially refused to identify or report undocumented immigrants.

Mariana Cordier, who grew up in the county and is a past president of the Maryland Hispanic Bar Association, said residents are increasingly linking crime to illegal immigration.

“It’s been slow to come to Montgomery County,” she said of that perception, “but it has arrived.”

Police Chief J. Thomas Manger is developing a proposal to have county police officers check the immigration status of suspects arrested for violent crimes and weapons offenses.

“I wouldn’t have gone for it a year ago,” Bethesda resident Judy Campbell said recently, leaving a natural food co-op in Takoma Park with soy milk and a slice of vegan double-chocolate fudge cake. “Until this series of violent crimes, it wasn’t on my radar screen.”

Campbell, a 50-year-old nurse, is an avowed liberal. She thinks illegal immigrants deserve publicly funded health care. She once voted for Dennis Kucinich. And for the upcoming inauguration, she plans to participate in Chant4Change, an event that bills itself as a gathering for “conscious revolutionaries.”

But she supports the chief’s efforts, in part because the emerging proposal is not as far-reaching as policies that have been enacted in Prince William and Frederick counties. [More]

The AP reports:

President George W. Bush told a group of Texas reporters Friday that he regretted immigration policies were not reformed while he was in office.

“I’m very disappointed that it didn’t pass,” he said in an interview with correspondents from his home state. “I’m very worried about the message that said, ‘Republicans are anti-immigrant.’”

Bush said he wanted a comprehensive immigration plan “not for political standing or for Latinos, but because it was best for the country,” the Houston Chronicle reported in its online edition Friday.

The outgoing president said that in hindsight he should have pushed his immigration proposal soon after the 2004 election, rather than after partisan squabbling over Social Security began.

Yeah, sure, that was the problem–partisan squabbling, rather than the public hating your plan.

The idea of Obama having a blank check to spend billions for two years on “infrastructure” has liberals fantasizing over all the SWPL projects they’d like to build, such as solar powered magnetic levitation trains. The problem, of course, is that liberals have spent the last 40 years making building anything in the the coastal regions of America an extremely slow process, so it’s implausible for them to argue that their favorite projects could have non-negligible “stimulus” effect.

So, that’s leading liberals to demand that we cut the red tape holding back construction. It’s time to deregulate. Bulldoze, baby, bulldoze!

You see, all those environmental regulations are supposed to stymie bad people. But, we liberals are good people, so the laws shouldn’t apply to us.

… and discovers he has the Bald Gene.

In a long article in the New York Times Magazine, “My Genome, My Self,” the author of The Blank Slate recounts all that he has learned about himself from having his genome sampled, which turns out to be unsurprisingly modest.

The most prominent finding of behavioral genetics has been summarized by the psychologist Eric Turkheimer: “The nature-nurture debate is over. . . . All human behavioral traits are heritable.” By this he meant that a substantial fraction of the variation among individuals within a culture can be linked to variation in their genes. Whether you measure intelligence or personality, religiosity or political orientation, television watching or cigarette smoking, the outcome is the same. Identical twins (who share all their genes) are more similar than fraternal twins (who share half their genes that vary among people). Biological siblings (who share half those genes too) are more similar than adopted siblings (who share no more genes than do strangers). And identical twins separated at birth and raised in different adoptive homes (who share their genes but not their environments) are uncannily similar.

Behavioral geneticists like Turkheimer are quick to add that many of the differences among people cannot be attributed to their genes.

Identical twins raised apart tend to be almost as similar as identical twins raised together, although part of the reason is that identical twins raised alone don’t feel the need to distinguish themselves from their twin by developing something unique about themselves. Horace Grant, the skinny power forward on Michael Jordan’s first three championship teams, would probably have become a quick forward if he hadn’t grown up playing on youth teams alongside his identical twin Harvey Grant, who became an NBA All-Star shooting forward, while Horace was given the role of rebounding forward.
(more…)