Nick Griffin was greeted by egg-throwing lefties as he tried to do a press conference. This happens to right-wing speakers a lot. In spite of the left’s delusions about “fascism,” it doesn’t happen to left-wing speakers much, because right-wingers don’t act like that. But there’s this absolutely perfect quote from an “anti-fascist”:

Speaking to the BBC, Donna Guthrie of Unite Against Fascism (UAF) said Mr Griffin “may be an elected politician but he is an elected politician from a fascist party”.

“This is not a person who should be given any coverage by a legitimate free press,” she added.

[Eggs greet Griffin in shadow of parliament, INTHENEWS.CO.UK, Tuesday, June 9 2009 ]

Time reports:

Hekmati’s experience is typical of young Iranians, who are finding themselves increasingly priced out of the marriage market. During the tenure of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, real estate prices have soared across the country, but especially in Tehran, where they have risen as much as 150%. Economists have blamed the spike on Ahmadinejad’s disastrous economic policies. The President flooded the economy with capital through a loan scheme, cut interest rates 2% and embarked on huge state construction projects that drove up the price of building materials. Those changes prompted many investors to move out of the stock market and the banking system and into real estate, which was considered a safer bet. Apartment prices in the capital more than doubled between 2006 and 2008. (See pictures of health care in Iran.)

The real estate boom was a disaster for middle-income Iranians, particularly young men seeking marriage partners. And many of those who have married and moved in with in-laws are finding that inflation is eating away at their savings, meaning it will take years, rather than months, to get their own place. The resulting strains are breaking up existing marriages - this past winter, local media reported that a leading cause of Iran’s high divorce rate is the husband’s inability to establish an independent household. Many others are concluding that marriage is best avoided altogether. (See the Top 10 Ahmadinejad-isms.)

Ahmadinejad’s government response to the crisis included a plan, unveiled in November 2008 by the National Youth Organization, called “semi-independent marriage.” It proposed that young people who cannot afford to marry and move into their own place legally marry but continue living apart in their parents’ homes. The announcement prompted swift outrage. Online news sites ran stories in which women angrily denounced the scheme, arguing that it afforded men a legal and pious route to easy sex while offering women nothing by way of security or social respect. The government hastily dropped the plan.

As Iranians head to the polls on Friday, Ahmadinejad faces the prospect that the very same broad discontent with the economy that propelled him to victory in 2005 could now help unseat him. Samira, a 27-year-old who works in advertising, recently became engaged and is among the millions of young Iranians who are eyeing the candidates through the lens of their own marital concerns. “Ahmadinejad promised he would bring housing prices down, but that didn’t happen at all,” she says. If left to their own salaries, she explains, she and her fiancÉ will never be able to afford their own place. That’s a key reason they’re voting for Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the leading reformist candidate, who has made the economy the center of his platform. Like many young Iranians, they hope a new President will make marriage a possibility once more.

It’s striking how obvious the logic of what I call Affordable Family Formation is to Iranians, while the vast majority of social analysts in the U.S. remain oblivious to the obvious.

Different social norms mask the situation somewhat in the U.S. Here, high housing prices tend to discourage child-bearing merely among the prudent but not among the imprudent (as satirized in the opening scene of “Idiocracy.”) As I reported in VDARE.com: “From 2005 to 2007, the number of babies born in the United States to married women declined 0.3 percent. In contrast, the number born to unmarried women grew 12.3 percent.”

Still, you’d have to say that political discourse in America compared to Iran, whether due to our country’s well-padded safety margins or due to greater indoctrination by the media, is less in touch with the basic logic of human existence.

rom the Washington Post:

Take the case of Miami vs. La Crosse, Wis. In 2006, using inflation-adjusted figures, Medicare spent $5,812 on the average beneficiary in La Crosse, compared with $16,351 in Miami. Yet an examination of health status in both places, adjusted for age, finds no evidence that the extra spending resulted in better care, Weinstein said.

“That’s the enigma here,” he said. “Less is more, and more isn’t better.”…

Many fear that the push to contain costs will result in rationing.

In today’s system, “we don’t ration care, we ration people,” said Donald M. Berwick, president of the independent Massachusetts-based Institute for Healthcare Improvement. “We know that if you are black and poor or a woman, there are all sorts of effective interventions you are not going to get.”

Though the transition would be painful and the politics treacherous, Berwick said it is possible to spend less on medical care and have a healthier nation.

“If we could just become La Crosse, think of how much better off we would be,” he said.

This reminds me of Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s last well-known essay, “Defining Deviancy Down” in 1993:

Leroy L. Schwartz, M.D., and Mark W. Stanton argue that the, real quest regarding a government-run health system such as that of Canada or Germany is whether it would work “in a country that has social problems that countries like Canada and Germany don’t share to the same extent.” …

In a 1992 study entitled America’s Smallest School: The Family, Paul Barton came up with the elegant and persuasive concept of the parent-pupil ratio as a measure of school quality. Barton, who was on the policy planning staff in the Department of Labor in 1965, noted the great increase in the proportion of children living in single-parent families since then. He further noted that the proportion “varies widely among the states” and is related to “variation in achievement” among them. The correlation between the percentage of eighth graders living in two-parent families and average mathematics proficiency is a solid .74. North Dakota, highest on the math test, is second highest on the family compositions scale - that is, it is second in the percentage of kids coming from two-parent homes. The District of Columbia, lowest on the family scale, is second lowest in the test score.

A few months before Barton’s study appeared, I published an article showing that the correlation between eighth-grade math scores and distance of state capitals from the Canadian border was .522, a respectable showing. By contrast, the correlation with per pupil expenditure was a derisory .203. I offered the policy proposal that states wishing to improve their schools should move closer to Canada. This would be difficult, of course, but so would it be to change the parent-pupil ratio.

(more…)

The economy lost 345,000 jobs in May, the government reported on Friday, a sharp slowing in the pace of job losses that fueled hopes that the economy was on its way toward stabilizing. (See the report:[PDF] )

The “other” employment survey, of households rather businesses, revealed a significantly larger job loss: 437,000. Total employment as measured by this survey is also significantly larger. In May, for example, the business survey found 132.2 million individuals were employed while the household survey put total employment at 140.6 million.

The 8 million worker difference reflects, in large measure, illegal aliens who are counted in the household survey but missed when the government queries businesses. When times were good, and illegals crossed the border in even larger numbers than today, household survey employment rose faster than employment as reported by businesses. Over the past eighteen months that has changed: Employment as measured by the household survey has declined more rapidly than the employment per the more widely cited business survey.

Are illegal workers heading home? The BLS report is mute on the subject, stating that “Neither the establishment nor household survey is designed to identify the legal status of workers. Thus, while it is likely that both surveys include at least some undocumented immigrants, it is not possible to determine how many are counted in either survey.”

The May employment figures are, in fact, consistent with the “Homeward Bound” scenario:

• Total employment: -437,000 (-0.31 percent)
• Non-Hispanic employment: -178,000 (-0.15 percent)
• Hispanic employment: -259,000 (-1.30 percent)

Hispanic employment fell by 1.3 percent in May, nine-times the percentage decline in non-Hispanic jobs. Not surprisingly, the  Hispanic unemployment rate also deteriorated more than that of other groups:

• U.S. unemployment rate: 9.4 percent (+0.5 point from April)
• White unemployment: 8.6 percent (+0.6 point)
• Black unemployment: 14.9 percent (-0.1 point)
• Hispanic unemployment: 12.7 percent (+ 1.4 points)

Blacks, arguably the group competing most directly with illegal alien workers, were the only group to enjoy a lower unemployment rate last month. This may reflect the withdrawal of illegals from the labor force.

The ratio of Hispanic to non-Hispanic job growth since the January 2001, expressed as an index that we call VDAWDI (the VDare.com American Worker Displacement Index), declined 1.2 percent in May. Since peaking in September 2008, VDAWDI has declined by 1.7 percent.

The recession has cut Hispanic job growth, both in absolute terms and relative to non-Hispanic job growth. This is evident in the VDAWDI graphic:

The black line tracks Hispanic job growth; pink non-Hispanic job growth; and yellow the ratio of Hispanic to non-Hispanic job growth indices,–i.e., American Worker Displacement.

All lines start at 100.0 in January 2001.

A friend sent me this, headed “Funny IQ Story Of The Day”

Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Rotterdam Mayor: Antillean and Moroccan Criminals have Low IQ

The mayor of Rotterdam Ahmed Aboutaleb (Labor) says he is shocked by the fact that Moroccan and Antillean youngsters who are arrested, have been found to have a very low IQ. “It is so low,” he said, “that one can not do very much with them.” In addition one often finds a serious type of schizophrenia among the Moroccans.[Dutch link]

I’m just surprised to learn that the Mayor of Rotterdam is called Ahmed Aboutaleb. Sample Guardian story: Holland’s first immigrant mayor is hailed as ‘Obama on the Maas’ | The son of a Moroccan preacher has become the new figurehead of Rotterdam, a city once known for its flirtation with the radical right .[January 11 2009] I am also wondering what the headlines would be like if Geert Wilders had said that the jails were full of low-IQ immigrants.