Larry Auster in his always-interesting View From The Right blog notes my CPAC video interview with The Daily Beast’s Max Blumenthal and comments:

At least Blumental in his article is kind enough to refer to Brimelow as a “racialist,” not a “racist.” But Brimelow, somewhat to my surprise, eschews even the racialist label. I have always called myself a racialist, which to me means two things. First, as a general proposition, I think that race matters in all kinds of ways. Second, I care about the white race. It is the source of and is inseparable from everything we are, everything we have, and everything our civilization has achieved.

Larry has made this point before, in his characteristically pugnacious way. (Alas, he repeats the common misconception that there is more than one [1] reference in Alien Nation to my son’s blue eyes and blond hair. Funny how that happens).

But I don’t accept the term “racialist” because I think most people don’t distinguish between it and “racism” i.e. it implies prejudice. (In fact, “Racialism” and “racism” were completely synonymous in British English forty years ago, and I presume still are). I prefer the term “race realist” to describe those who ackowledge and study racial differences. Or maybe just “realist”.

In the last few months, a couple dozen Somali immigrants decided the American thing was not to their liking, and they returned to the dear homeland to pursue jihad. In fact, one “Twin Cities man” (as identified by the press) blew himself up along with 30 others in Mogadishu in order to advance the agenda of Islam.

The young jihadist fellows who traveled to Somalia all attended one Minneapolis mosque, the Abubakar Islamic Center, so the FBI is sensibly taking an interest in activities there. This is a welcome change from the extreme deference the FBI accorded Sons of Allah where in years past the agency has denied monitoring mosques, which may have been true or not. However, convictions of Muslims have accumulated in the last several years, particularly the important Holy Land Foundation case, so the FBI may believe it can now be more honest about its intelligence gathering. It is reassuring for citizens who may have worried that the FBI has become hopelessly PC as indicated by its excessive and undiscerning Muslim outreach. Hopefully there will be more police work and less (preferably zero!) touchy-feely.

Mosques have long been centers of anti-America organizing, as a result of Saudi funding of radical publications and the mosques themselves. A 2005 investigation of US mosques by Freedom House found that Muslims in the United States are instructed that they should “behave as if on a mission behind enemy lines”.

Here’s a recent report: FBI Watching Somali Muslims In Minneapolis, CBS News, March 3, 2009.

On election night last November, the outcome was wildly celebrated by Somalis living in Minneapolis, 70,000-strong, mostly refugees from their war-torn country. It is the largest Somali community in the United States, reports CBS News correspondent Dean Reynolds.

But the evening was noteworthy for something else, too. That night, the latest in a line of young Somalis who grew up here, departed unannounced for Somalia itself, joining a civil war in a country few had ever seen and causing concern in the United States.

Hussein Samatar’s 17-year old nephew left without a word to his family.

“He was an A student,” says Samatar. “He has everything to hope for to attend any Ivy League school that he wanted to. Why he would do it is a mystery to us.”

Some 20 vanished last year - all American citizens - an exodus the FBI has noticed for a troubling reason.

“A man from Minneapolis became what we believe to be the first U.S. citizen to carry out a terrorist suicide bombing,” said agency director Robert Mueller.

The October attack by 27-year-old Shirwa Ahmed killed 30 near Mogadishu, and there is alarm that the skills acquired abroad could be brought back to America.

“He could have done it here,” says Omar Jamal, a Somali advocate in Minnesota. “We don’t see anything that would have prevented him from doing this right here in the heart of Minneapolis.”

Yes, Shirwa Ahmed could have blown himself up in the huge Mall of America nearby and killed lots of infidels. It’s reasonable to assume that mosque leaders have exhorted young men to do their explosive behavior in Somalia and not the United States. The lack of bombings in the US gives credence to Robert Spencer’s contention in his recent book Stealth Jihad that jihadists are now committed to using peaceful means to achieve their long-term aim of a worldwide caliphate including America.

It’s a smart strategy, because bombs just make Americans angry. The left’s various arms like the press and the ACLU provide plenty of means for overturning traditional society using existing means. When someone disagrees with the Islamic agenda, there are deep pockets for lawyers and mouthpieces to raise a squawk about “racism” even though Islam is a religion and not a race. Trifles like accuracy no longer matter in our devolved public discourse, where cultural intimidation is pursued rather than honest discourse over differences.

Of course, it’s Muslim immigration that facilitates this infiltration and subversion, and a wise country would stop welcoming potential enemies. Wouldn’t it?

One of the more lurid and instructive events in recent economic history was the wave of gigantic pyramid schemes that plunged newly de-Communized Albania into chaos in 1997.

Even before Enver Hoxha’s xenophobic Communist dictatorship took power at the end of WWII, Albania was the back of the beyond. During WWII, a couple of American soldiers drove their jeep up to a remote Albanian mountain village, where they were invited in for dinner by the locals. When they came out, they found their jeep upside down. The yokels explained that they had flipped the vehicle over because they just wanted to see whether it was male or female.

When Albania started to open up around 1990, one of the first foreign journalists into the country was asked by a couple of Albanians who spoke English, “What are ‘microwave ovens’?”

He responded, “Well, where have you heard of microwave ovens?”

His interlocutors broke into the chorus of Dire Straits’s “Money for Nothing:”

We gotta install microwave ovens
Custom kitchen deliveries
We gotta move these refrigerators
We gotta move these colour tvs

That’s where’d they heard of microwave ovens: on Italian or Greek radio. And they’d been puzzling over the lyrics ever since.

So, it was hardly surprising that practically everybody in newly capitalist Albania fell hard for that recurrent disease of capitalism known as pyramid (or Ponzi) schemes.

From the March 2000 issue of IMF’s quarterly magazine Finance & Development:

The Rise and Fall of Albania’s Pyramid Schemes
Christopher Jarvis

During 1996-97, Albania was convulsed by the dramatic rise and collapse of several huge financial pyramid schemes. This article discusses the crisis and the steps other countries can take to prevent similar disasters.

The pyramid scheme phenomenon in Albania is important because its scale relative to the size of the economy was unprecedented, and because the political and social consequences of the collapse of the pyramid schemes were profound. At their peak, the nominal value of the pyramid schemes’ liabilities amounted to almost half of the country’s GDP. Many Albanians—about two-thirds of the population—invested in them. When the schemes collapsed, there was uncontained rioting, the government fell, and the country descended into anarchy and a near civil war in which some 2,000 people were killed. …

(more…)

An almost-forgotten incident in American economic history was the pyramid scheme that swept Southern California during the stagflation of May 1980. Yet, now that we know that about 2/3rds of the Housing Bubble of 2000-2007 took place just in California, it’s worth reviewing incidents from California’s long history of financial manias.

Time Magazine’s June 16, 1980 issue describes the mechanics:

For $1,000 each, 32 newcomers buy slots on the bottom row of a pyramid-shaped roster. Each new player pays half of his $1,000 to the person at the pinnacle, who ends up with $16,000. The new player also pays his remaining $500 to the person directly above him on the next tier, which contains 16 people. Since each person on that tier gets paid by two of the newcomers, he ends up with $1,000, thus recouping his original investment. As more people buy in, the players move up the chart. In time, theoretically, each person reaches the top—and $16,000.

The scheme caught on as only a California hustle can. Pawnshops did a booming business, as players hocked stereos to raise the initial fee. Most players, however, were middle-class suburbanites out to fight inflation. Everyone seemed to know someone who had indeed won $16,000. There were runs on local banks for $50 and $100 bills to be used in the night’s gaming. Dentists reported patients, even with mouths full of cotton, soliciting them to join the club. Games were held in unlikely hideaways, including Hollywood sound studios, chartered buses and the Grand Salon of the Queen Mary at anchorage in Long Beach.

The great thing about this 1980 outburst was that it was the most blatant pyramid scheme imaginable, combining the usual pyramid scheme mechanics with a New Age cult of the Power of the Pyramid.

Back in Gov. Jerry Brown’s California, “pyramid power” was a popular New Age concept. In 1977 I went to a fashionable Westwood hair styling salon where for a few bucks extra you could get your hair cut in a special chair under a pyramid dangling from the ceiling. The pyramidal aura was supposed to help you avoid Bad Hair Days or something. (I declined. But, now that I think about it, I did have a lot of BHDs …)

In May 1980, a vast multi-level cash exchange craze developed in California that explicitly invoked the mystique of pyramids. Every night there were hundreds of house parties hosted by people who had gotten in earlier on this multi-level scam (perhaps the night before). My vague recollection from newspaper reports is that you’d go over to a higher-up’s house and sit with him under his pyramid while you gave him cash in return for your very own kit for building a pyramid out of wire and fabric. The Ancient Egyptian emanations from his pyramid would ensure that you’d get even more cash back from the suckers you’d recruit to buy your pyramid kits from you while sitting under your pyramid. (Perhaps I don’t have the details right, but sitting under pyramids was a part of this pyramid scheme.)

This Pyramid Power Pyramid Scheme was very hard for anti-fraud authorities to effectively expose because when they’d go on TV news to denounce it as a “pyramid scheme,” it just was good advertising. “Well, duh, of course it’s a pyramid scheme! How do you think those Egyptian pharaohs got so rich that they could afford those giant pyramids? Through tapping the secret energy of Pyramid Power!” (more…)

The open-borders gang is hustling up its next media campaign for the upcoming amnesty push.

Naturally it will be filled with teary-eyed Mexican kiddies (as shown by the sniffly example), preferably with an illness, whose suffering is made all the worse because of jack-booted ICE officers tearing families apart willy-nilly.

Nobody in the press cares about the millions of unemployed citizens who might need one of the jobs held by seven million illegal alien workers: Americans, ho hum!
[Religious campaign seeks immigration stories, Houston Chronicle, March, 4, 2009]

Religious and community leaders want U.S. citizens and legal residents who have been separated from family members by deportation or detention to come forward with their testimonies ahead of meetings next week in Texas to push for immigration reform.

Those with the most compelling stories will be asked to speak during church meetings that are part of a national campaign to show the public that current immigration policies affect not just immigrants but American citizens, Pastor Freddy Santiago, one of the organizers, said during a news conference Wednesday.

“Our people are being split up,” Santiago, of Chicago’s Rebano Companerismo Cristiano Church said in Spanish. “We are seeing how our government is violating the laws of God.”

Pastor Freddy must be thinking of a different religion than the one I learned in church, or perhaps he regards Marx as his apostle-in-chief.

And Freddy, where’s your concern about the abandoned wives and children in Mexico? The ones whose breadwinner went to El Norte and was never heard from again. (See As men go north, wives get forgotten from the Christian Science Monitor.) Sending daddy home to his family in Mexico would be the decent thing to do.

I will be on the Chuck Wilder talk-radio show on Thursday 3/05 at 12:20 PM PST.

Wilder’s show is available online in streaming audio which can be listened to at this website:

http://www.crni.net

/To listen to the show, click the box where it says “now playing, listen live” “CRN1″. The sound quality of the streaming audio has been upgraded, but they have an annoying popup window that asks for your email address. I didn’t enter my real address and it accepted it. You can decide whether to use your email or not, I don’t think they send you junk mail so it’s anyone’s guess why they are asking for this.

There is a toll free call-in telephone number if you want to chat with us: 1-800-336-2225

This is the show schedule:

CRN1 12-2pm PT (live)

CRN6 8-10pm PT (replay)

CRN6 1-3 AM PT (replay)

The Lou Dobbs radio show is also streamed from this web site as well as many other interesting talk radio shows.

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Chuck Wilder and I will be talking about several topics. Wilder mentioned interest in the Filipino H-1B teachers in Kentucky and the California foreclosures. It would be very cool to get phone calls from people in the education business in Kentucky. This newsletter has very few subscribers in that state, so if you know somebody in Kentucky please forward this notice to them.

I will be on the air for about 1/2 hour. After that Wilder will have somebody to talk about health care for illegal aliens. That should be quite interesting!