Our friend Carl Horowitz has just published a major report (pdf) on Al Sharpton for the National Legal and Policy Center, just in time for the rally Sharpton has organized (so to speak) to celebrate the 55th anniversary of Brown vs. Board.

ImmigrationVoice is a sumptuous Executive Jet of a website accurately described yesterday by Life of an I.T.Grunt as a

NASSCOM/USINPAC front

(NASSCOM and USINPAC are both ethnocentric Indian self-promotion groups.)

Yesterday in ImmigrationVoice and the Web of Corruption I.T.Grunt offers a valuable map of the Lobbying groups involved:

This is the enemy, a powerful and vast group of corrupt insiders bent on destroying the American I.T. industry.

By making it Indian

Follow the money…Increasingly, find Indians.

I.T. Grunt has more on this theme.

In Southern California, the closer somebody’s house is to the ocean, the more likely they are to passionately believe that global warming will cause the polar ice caps to melt and the oceans to rise. The less affluent folk who live in the high desert don’t seem to pay global warming much mind. They’ve got other troubles to worry about.

Now, you could argue that this is purely rational, but here’s the catch: I see no evidence of people behaving as if they believed their beliefs about rising seas. For example, are real estate prices falling faster next to the beach than in the high desert, which you would predict if you believed that people believed their beliefs?

No, very much the opposite. While high desert home prices were dropping by half, Malibu’s average home sale price rose from 2007 to 2008. The LA Times recently made a big deal out of the fact that quarterback Carson Palmer had sold his Manhattan Beach place for somewhat less than he paid for it around 2006, as an indicator that the Great Crash was finally hitting the beach, which mostly shows how it hasn’t hit beachfront land much yet, even though the conventional wisdom implies that that property won’t be there anymore not too far off in the future.

Something does not compute.

Here’s the opening of an interesting new paper that will be presented at this year’s Human Behavior and Evolution Society meeting at Cal State Fullerton from May 27-31. “Consanguinity” means cousin marriage (typically, second cousins or closer relations):

Consanguinity as a major predictor of levels of democratization in a study of 55 countries.

Michael A. Woodley

Institution: School of Biological Sciences, Royal Holloway, University of London.

Abstract: This
study reports the existence of a significant and robust correlation at
the national data scale between consanguinity (as measured by the
coefficient of inbreeding), and levels of democratization (as measured
by the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index) for a sample of
55 countries (r=-.77, P<.05). Comparative correlative analysis found
that democracy exhibits a higher magnitude correlation with
consanguinity than with measures of nine other factors believed to
influence levels of democracy (economic freedom; education; GDP per
capita; history of foreign occupation in last 100 years; human
development; inequality; IQ; media age; and percentage exports in
non-renewable resources). Multiple regression analysis further revealed
that consanguinity was the strongest predictor of differences in levels
of democracy, although three factors (history of foreign occupation in
last 100 years; inequality; and percentage exports in non-renewable
resources) also produced statistically significant β coefficients.
These results are interpreted in light of the theory that democracy
only seems to be an optimal political system for countries in which
consanguinity has not allowed for the extensive perpetuation of
genetically closed kinship groupings (clans or tribes), as these will
tend to maximize both their collective utility and inclusive fitness
through securing resources at the expense of other kinship groupings.

It
has been speculated that high levels of consanguinity within countries
(mating between second cousins or closer, F<0.0156), prevents
democratic nation building. High degrees of consanguinity within ethnic
kinship groupings (traditional tribal groups and clans) are thought to
generate mistrust between those groups through the reinforcement of
endogamous social and biological arrangements, with non-democratic
regimes emerging as a consequence of individuals turning to reliable
kinship groupings for support rather than the market or the state
(Kurtz, 2002; Sailer, 2004).

A reader who enjoyed my review in The American Conservative of “Il Divo,” the complex Italian movie about Giulio Andreotti, seven times prime minister of Italy in 1972-1992, writes:

I had a number of encounters with Andreotti when he was Prime Minister, and also met frequently with some of the Democristiani conservatives who despised him. They used to refer to him as “Il Gobbo” the hunchback due to his peculiar posture, which you describe in the review. A gobbo in vernacular Italian also implies treacherous and sly. Andreotti ignored the US Ambassador in Rome and insisted on regular meetings with the CIA Chief of Station whenever he had questions or something to convey. I would go along to carry the Chief hat’s. The Chief was old school and the conversations in Italian were elliptical to say the least, making it possible to leave the room without any idea of what had just taken place. As the Agency had the prime minister’s office bugged anyway, I frequently had this vision of my boss returning to the station to review the tape to try to figure out what Andreotti had been talking about.

Andreotti was always playing multiple games. He milked the U.S. desire to keep the Communists out of power in Italy, but he also cozied up to Libya. When he was foreign minister in 1986, the Italian government tipped off Col. Gadaffi that of the U.S. airstrike the day before it happened.

When The Kvetcher takes an interest in something he does not get distracted. Since his initial post acknowledging the force of Kevin MacDonald’s analysis on this site of the upcoming Hate Crime legislation:
The Hate Crimes Prevention Bill: Why Do Jewish Organizations Support It?

he has published two more items. Preventing Another Great Travesty of Justice points out that the killers of Matthew Shepard for whom the legislation is popularly named were in fact ferociously punished:

Henderson is currently serving two consecutive life sentences and McKinney is serving the same but without the possibility of parole.

Given the general inability of American Courts to deliver the death penalty, what more could be done? Objectively, what went wrong?

But in an earlier post, The Kvetcher identifies the truth: this legislation is about privileging and promoting certain minority elements. Putting a thumb of color on the scales of justice posits the logical solution.

Let’s just pass a law that flatly states that any time a violent crime is committed, if the assailant enjoys a significantly less “minority” protected status than his victim, he is given an additional 2/3rd’s time to his prison sentence, provided we can be reasonably sure that he was aware that the victim was a member of a protected class. But if the assailant is of a protected class, he just receives the regular sentence, even if it were inspired by hatred, since as we know, that’s really Whitey’s fault anyway.

Irony is a dangerous weapon – lot of slow-witted people out there – but it certainly illuminates the point.

Matthew Shepard’s name is used not because his killers were inadequately punished - they weren’t - but because his case riles up his sexual comrades.

It is working. The Kvetcher began Putting a thumb of color by saying

Nat Hentoff lashes out at the press over its strange silence on the hate crimes law.

Why is the press remaining mostly silent about the so-called “hate crimes law” that passed in the House on April 29?

Moreover, scanning through the comment threads of those articles which have appeared, noisy pro-privilege elements are preponderant. It is some way to being the reverse of the situation which prevailed in the Amnesty battles.

Given the way these social control laws morph, and the general dishonesty of their engineers, there is every reason to fear a degeneration of American rights in the appalling direction of the U.K, Canada and Australia.

Indeed, the process has already started.

(E mail alerts on the Hate Crimes legislation can be signed up for at the top of this site)