Colby Cosh writes:

“Like Jon Kay, I find it ridiculous that Richard Florida has gotten fantastically rich for, essentially, writing over and over again that gay people are the secret key to wealth creation. On the other hand, I can’t prove it’s not true..

No, but Steve Sailer can! Richard Florida’s weird idea is that places with diversity and tolerance produce innovation. Diversity means multicultural immigration, tolerance means public indecency, and San Francisco, for example, has a lot of both. But while young people with tattoos are hanging out downtown, the actual innovation is being done by nerdy white guys in the suburbs.

Florida: “Gays predict not only the concentration of high-tech industry, but also its growth,”

Steve Sailer: “Bunk. These research high technology centers are not actually located in the cities of San Francisco, Boston and New York at all, but in their much less diverse suburbs. The authors’ methodological blunder is obvious: they use overly expansive definitions of “metropolitan areas.” Thus, they label “San Francisco” both the Gay Capital and the Tech Capital, even though Castro Street in San Francisco and Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto might be 90 minutes apart - in normal traffic. (more…)

I could write a book along the lines of Thomas Frank’s book What’s The Matter With Kansas, to the effect that black voters would be better off voting Republican, since they would, if not criminals themselves, benefit from tough-on-crime policies, less gun control, immigration enforcement, et cetera. I personally feel that conservative policies are better for everyone, and that includes blacks. Whether the modern Republican Party would actually enact conservative policies is questionable–remember that Bush went years without enforcing immigration law at all. But if it did, blacks would benefit in a number of ways.

Like I said, I could write such a book, and if I did, I’d call it What’s The Matter With Harlem? I’m not going to write it, since black conservatives like Thomas Sowell and Elizabeth Wright could do it better, and besides, I don’t really believe that it could change many votes.

Blacks are convinced that they benefit as a group by voting Democratic, because Democrats are the party of welfare, affirmative action, and being soft on crime. Thomas Frank’s Kansans, by contrast, are voting against that.  A while back I wrote

“I’ve never been a fan of the “false consciousness” theory promoted by Thomas Frank; even if Democratic policies would produce a better economic result for Kansans, (which they won’t) the Middle Americans refuse to be Economic Man, and vote for things other than an imaginary financial gain.”

If you want to know what’s actually the matter with Harlem, it’s that they keep re-electing Charles Rangel:

Until now, I haven’t been able to say anything good about the Bush and Obama bailouts, which seem designed to reduce the United States to some weird hybrid of Argentina, Brazil and South Africa. Now, if this Financial Times article is to be believed, there might be something to cheer about the TARP.

According to the Financial Times, Bank of America has decided to rescind job offers it has made to foreign nationals set to graduate from U.S. business schools this spring, whom BofA would need to sponsor for H-1B visas. [BofA withdraws job offers to foreign MBAs, By Della Bradshaw,March 8, 2009]We may be sure this is not out of any concern for American workers in hard times. BofA is one of the worst open-borders corporate offenders out there, with many H-1Bs already on the payroll. Among BofA’s worst offenses was its aggressive lobbying to get the U.S. Treasury to accept Mexico’s notoriously unreliable matricula consular as adequate identification to open a bank account in the United States, so that BofA could sign up illegal alien account holders and take a cut of the illegally earned remittance dollars illegal aliens send out of the country. With Mexichurian President GW Bush at the helm, the Treasury was delighted to comply with BofA’s blatantly illegal request.

After taking $45 billion of Americans’ dollars in TARP money, having laid off thousands of people and with the certainty of laying off thousands more, even an employer as shameless as BofA realized it could not simply continue with business as usual replacing American workers with cheaper H-1B aliens.

We’ll see how long that position holds, and if other employers police themselves this way. No doubt corporate employers are unhappy about finding it harder to replace American employees with cheaper foreigners, and business school deans are already moaning about how this vile protectionism will make America less competitive. They might, horror of horrors, have to admit more American applicants!

This is a small victory for Americans