Apparently The New York Times Editorial Writers’ blog The Board functions as a sort of kindergarten. There the infants are allowed to throw tantrums and make elementary journalistic errors.

Thus, The Nativists Are Restless, Continued today does correct the blunder in Sunday’s piece in not naming Marcus Epstein’s American Cause study (and the breach of blog etiquette in not linking to it). But other than that it is merely a repeated scream of outrage that anyone should think differently than New York Times editorial writers. No effort to assess how, much less why.

No doubt we will be answering this, but I find significant comment #3

The United States of America was the first big country composed of people without any common national heritage. When the Constitution was written the demographics could have resulted in a German speaking country as easily as an English speaking country. From the very start, to form a country, Americans had to accept as fellow citizens people who differed with each other in a lots ways.

This of course is utterly untrue. The American population at the time of the Revolution was overwhelmingly English speaking and Protestant. The Founding Fathers considered themselves to be claiming the Rights of Englishmen.

The Proposition Nation assertion is just a dishonest propaganda ploy.

Anyone under #3’s illusion cannot assess the risk current immigration poses. America’s traditional freedoms have no history of flourishing except where populations drawn from a small area of North West Europe are the norm.

As Peter Brimelow asked in Alien Nation: Why take this risk?

The New York Times is piling on, with The Nativists Are Restless, Continued, on their Editorial Board’s blog. Rather than answering it now,let me quote you something Matt Welch wrote recently on what an editorial board is and does.

As I have had the privilege to experience, there still exists these 19th century things called “editorial boards,” in which up to a dozen (though usually more like half that) wiseacres and a couple of dames sit around, listen to grandees, and between the lot of them write maybe 1,000 words a day of grave, unsigned, top-down wisdom about the State of the Union address (Hey! I wrote one of those!), or the latest fighting in Gaza. The opinion journalist Michael Kinsley, a man I once disdained but grew to have enormous respect for after learning what he tried to do with the L.A. Times opinion page, once wrote the world’s most brutal (and ultimately self-defeating) memo on the insane economics of editorial boards…I can’t find a public copy of it right now, but you can see a few of his similar sentiments here.

Suffice it to say, as one who is familiar with the numbers, you could probably print at least three Reason magazines (complete with website, blog, the whole nine yards) for the cost of one elite-newspaper opinion section, with its 14 pages a week. Are the elites three times better? You tell me.

Think of those economics—and of the fact that not one single ballyhooed newspaper poll organization added as much value to this year’s presidential race as a lone Internet baseball geek named Nate Silver—the next time you see some politician push for government assistance to our endangered newspapers, or read some columnist confuse her own job security with the very health of the nation. Mark my words: This will not be the last time you hear about newspaper bailouts. Not if journalists have anything to say about it.

[Bailing Out One of the 20th Century's Best Business Models: What's black and white and red all over? Newspapers looking for a handout, that's what!,By Matt Welch, Reason Magazine, January 8, 2009]

A snapshot of the New York Times editorial board is here. Kinsley’s memo is worth reading, for this familiar scene:

AT A STARBUCKS in Claremont recently, I watched the ceremony performed every day throughout the world, but in its most extreme version on Sundays in Southern California. People lined up to exchange cash for a pile of newsprint so thick and heavy it has to be tied with a string. They then lugged it to a flat surface, sorted it out, and threw about 80% of it away. I asked one person if I could have her Opinion section. She was willing to give it up (depressing) but couldn’t find it in the pile (even more depressing).

Trees chopped down, logs trucked to paper factories, huge rolls of newsprint trucked from paper plants to printing plants, where more trucks await to distribute the printed product throughout a huge metropolitan area, so that people can throw away most of it without a glance. In the age of the Internet, with information (meaning data bits, but also meaning news) zapping into people’s houses at many times the speed and an infinitesimal fraction of the cost, the process that gets a fat newspaper to my front door every day seems insane—and doomed.

The New York Times has sought various subsidies from the US Government, but their most recent plea for money was answered by Mexican mogul Carlos Slim, who gave them $250 million. We, by contrast, would be happy if our readers could send us a check the approximate size of the one they write to their local theater or art gallery.

A reader responds to my new VDARE.com article on the subtle but pervasive way in which the Community Reinvestment Act changed the culture of mortgage lending in America.

… my husband was working at [Famous Old] Bank at that time and was dealing with the pressures of CRA mandates during merger talks with other banks. He saw the kinds of promises [Famous Old Bank] had to make to get approval and he actually had to work with bullies at ACORN to get the job done. As I am much more to the right and more aware than he was, I pointed out that this would eventually skew the banking system in a very corrupt and unprofitable ways just to go along with the new government rules. As a banker, he just saw what he had to do to accomplish the ends.

This is like a car that can only go straight or turn left, not right. You’d initially think that if you could drive it straight down a highway no problem, but each little random shock aims it farther to the left with no way to go back to the right. And so it eventually ends up in the ditch on the left. (Interestingly, to get the banks out of the ditich, the federal government ignored the CRA process last fall in approving emergency buy-ups of broke banks.)

Ultimately, the failure of the banking system can be narrowed down to one set of core beliefs that nearly everyone in our society ascribes to: all groups are equal. There is no reason for them to believe, despite the mounds and mounds of evidence, that this premise is fatally flawed. So the Carter, Bush, Clinton, and Bush administrations operating under this false premise with near religious certainty saw no problem in pushing the banks in the direction of lending to peoples and groups who could or would not conform to the standard values of this society. This religious belief in the equality of groups is still enshrined in our value system. I don’t know what it will take to change this — but rest assured it will result in greater calamities …

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I don’t know if you can read it without a subscription to The Atlantic, but here is David Samuels’s recent Atlantic article on the UFC championship fight between Rampage Jackson and Forrest Griffin. (By the way, Samuels wrote in The New Republic one of the best articles on Obama’s autobiography (i.e., he clearly had read my stuff when researching his essay).

For an analysis of Rampage Jackson’s cognitive decision-making skills in the wake of his loss to Griffin, when he was arrested after trying to sneak away in his vehicle from a traffic accident he caused, see What Would Tyler Durden Do?:

Rampage is maybe the most charismatic and likeable athlete to come around since Barkley, but he’s no criminal mastermind. He committed a hit and run in a [jacked-up monster] truck with his name and picture on the side. “Can you describe the vehicle that hit you, sir?” “Yes, imagine if Rampage Jackson was a truck.”

Nat Hentoff has a piece in the Washington Times which details the threat of Islam and United Nations anti-racism efforts to press freedom world-wide:

On Inauguration Day, after it got the United Nations to pass a gag rule on insulting religions, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) told our new president in a New York Times ad that Muslims “have compelling strategic and moral reasons to cooperate and peacefully coexist with the United States in particular, and with the West in general.”

Many Muslims here and elsewhere want that partnership; but some, jihadists in the name of Islam, disagree violently. In its address to our new president, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (which has permanent status at the United Nations) made no mention of its own strategic skills that resulted, on Dec. 18, in the passage by the U.N. General Assembly of a nonbinding resolution (with strong advice to its members) that condemns “defamation of religion,” especially Islam.
…
Already, for example, as Reuters reported last June, Jordan prosecutor Hassan Abdullat subpoenaed “11 Danes for drawing and reprinting” cartoons that offend Islam. The Danes were charged - in Jordan - with “threatening the national peace.” Under Jordanian law, Reuters reported, “reproducing images of the Prophet Muhammad inside - or even outside - the country is illegal under the Jordanian Justice Act.”

One of the Danes summoned to Jordan was Kurt Westergaard, who, for years, has been subject to death threats for his cartoon, among others, of the Prophet Muhammad wearing a turban in the shape of a bomb.

When the riots and deaths following those Danish cartoons were reported in American newspapers, none of the offending cartoons was published accompanying the stories in major dailies, except the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Sun. But I ran the story at the Village Voice, where I then had a column, with the cartoon of Prophet Muhammad wearing the bomb-shaped turban.

I was damned if I’d be intimidated for doing my job as a reporter. For a couple of weeks, I was more vigilant than usual walking the streets, but I’m still here. What most stays in my mind is that long before the Dec. 18, 2008, resolution on defamation of religions, so much of the American free press refused to run even one of the cartoons at the core of the story, and hardly anything about the U.N.’s Dec. 18 resolution.

Did they not want to offend certain readers? Were they afraid? If the U.N. resolution became international law, the First Amendment would still protect opponents here, but think of the bloody impact on “defamers” around the world. [A free speech killer, by Nat Hentoff, February 2, 2009]

What Hentoff doesn’t mention is the threat to free speech in the US posed by Muslim immigration. See The Larger Lessons Of The Danish Cartoon Crisis by Steve Sailer. See also this item by Daniel Pipes on recent Muslim immigration to Britain, and remember that this huge upsurge in Muslim numbers in Britain happened

• After 9/11
• Mostly after the London bombings
• While the UK was at war in two Muslim countries, Afghanistan and Iraq

A couple weeks back, I wrote about the many warnings left by members of the previous administration for the new President about Mexico: More On Mexico’s Meltdown: Bush Team’s Parting Assessments Should Alarm Obama.

The USA Today article with the jaw-drop title contains similar warnings, except they concern the imported gang criminals within this country.

Michael Sullivan, the departing director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, says the gang’s dependence on shocking violence to advance extortion, prostitution and other criminal enterprises has frustrated attempts to infiltrate and disrupt the insular group’s activities.

“MS-13’s foothold in the U.S. is expanding,” Sullivan says.

Kaiser says the street gang is in 42 states, up from 33 in 2005. “Enforcement efforts have been effective to a certain extent, but they (gang members) keep moving,” he says.

MS-13 is the abbreviation for the gang also known as Mara Salvatrucha. The group gained national prominence in the 1980s in Los Angeles, where members were linked to incidents involving unusual brutality. [FBI: Burgeoning gangs behind up to 80% of U.S. crime, February 1, 2009

Below, a Los Angeles gangster and police.

Being the kind of guy who is totally up to date on all major social trends, I finally watched on TV some bouts of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the big growth spectator sport of the 2000s. As you no doubt know better than I do, this is a “mixed martial arts” competition. Originally, it was put together by, among others, John Milius (screenwriter of “Apocalypse Now,” director of “Red Dawn,” and the model for John Goodman’s Walter Sobachek in “The Big Lebowski”) to answer classic male questions such as: “Who would win in a fight: a boxer or a wrestler? A tai chi blackbelt or a krav maga adept?”

It has since evolved so that most fighters have a blend of skills, although you can still kind of tell which discipline they started out in. The two fighters typically start out boxing, with maybe a little kicking, then end up rolling around on the ground like high school wrestlers.

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