October’s unemployment numbers came in this morning:

The unemployment rate has surpassed 10 percent for the first time since 1983 — and is likely to go higher.

Nearly 16 million people can’t find jobs even though the worst recession since the Great Depression has apparently ended…

The Labor Department said Friday that jobless rate rose to 10.2 percent, the highest since April 1983, from 9.8 percent in September.

(Jobless rate tops 10 pct. for first time since ‘83, by Christopher S. Rugaber, AP, November 6, 2009)

Unemployment is generally regarded as a lagging indicator, so it will probably rise for several more months–even if the recession is ending, something which government and private sector economists usually have a surprisingly hard time establishing.

My question:Where are the calls for an immigration moratorium?

VDARE.COM has been exploring the immigration moratorium issue here. When the previous month’s numbers came out, Ed Rubenstein estimated that an immediate moratorium would reduce unemployment by about half a percentage point in a year. A moratorium enacted in 1998 would have tightened the labor market to the point where, in the depths of this recession, the unemployment rate would have been less than half of what it is now.

But when I googled “immigration + moratorium“ in News this morning, I basically got VDARE.COM, plus some intrepid private citizens posting to MSM comment threads. (A good idea, btw).

When I googled “immigration suspension“, which is the term favored for some mysterious reason by NumbersUSA, I did find a useful story by Roy Beck pointing out that the 650,000 jobs that the White House claims were created or saved by the Stimulus Bill were more than completely wiped out by the 1.125 million legal immigrants and temporary workers admitted in 2009. But nothing else.

Republicans are congratulating themselves on winning on November 3 by focusing on economic issues. Isn’t unemployment an economic issue?

With Dede Scozzafava’s coming out of the closet and endorsing the Democratic candidate in the NY-23rd special election, the humiliation of the RNC’s Michael Steele and much of the Establishment Right is now complete. The Wall Street Journal, usually part of the problem, editorializes:

The voter revolt ought to be a lesson to the GOP’s backroom boys…Beltway bigs misjudged public dismay against the Democratic agenda in Washington. Nominating a candidate who “can win” in the Northeast does not have to mean someone whose voting record is more liberal on taxes and unions than that of most Blue Dog Democrats.

Revolt in New York, November 1, 2009.

Sounds good — for a second. Then the WSJ Edit Page goes on:

But that lesson will be for naught if conservatives conclude that their victory is reason to challenge any candidate who doesn’t agree with them on every issue. The truth is that some conservatives are as bloody-minded and intolerant of all dissent as the hard left is at the Daily Kos. A majority political party requires a far more diverse coalition than the audience for your average right-wing blogger or talk show host….If conservatives now revolt against every GOP candidate who disagrees with them on trade, immigration or abortion, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid will keep their majorities for a very long time.

In other words, it’s OK for peasants to revolt on “taxes and unions” but not on trade, immigration or abortion. Is the WSJ Edit Page trying to appear a mouthpiece for Big Business?

VDARE.COM does not take a position on trade or abortion. And as far as we can see, the Conservative Party challenger in NY-23 is wrong on immigration (although he certainly has all the right enemies and Minuteman PAC endorsed him, saying he opposes amnesty).

But the WSJ Edit Page is right to be worried. The Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg does interesting work - for example, he identified Affirmative Action as a key issue in the 1980s, something that both Democratic and Republican Establishments absolutely did not wish to hear. His recent report Why Republican Leaders will have Trouble Speaking to the Rest of America got some publicity because he found that “the self-identifying conservative Republicans who make up the base of the Republican Party” and who drive current unrest are not “racist“.

In a little-noted passage, Greenberg wrote:

Asked about the issues of greatest importance to them in choosing a candidate for Congress, health care ranked sixth among the Republicans, below issues such as tax cuts, immigration, and a candidate’s personal values and faith

(VDARE.COM Emphasis added).

Greenberg went on:

And yet remarkably, these voters had virtually nothing positive to say about the Republican Party. They see their own party as weak, old, and out of touch. They feel it has lost sight of conservative values and conservative voters and is in desperate need of new leadership.

Of course, it’s not remarkable — the GOP leadership (which for practical purposes includes the WSJ Edit Page) is out of touch. That’s why it so stubbornly and savagely resists patriotic immigration reform.

You can complain to the WSJ Edit Page (scroll to end) and many readers already have. It won’t listen but, who knows, Rupert Murdoch might decide to end the Bob Bartley Edit Page hangover, as he has so much else since buying Dow Jones.

We can always find bad news to write about at VDARE.COM, so here’s some good news: Victoria’s Secret, which sells, well, everyone knows about Victoria’s Secret, has just come out with a CHRISTMAS 2009 CATALOG! With “CHRISTMAS 2009″ RIGHT ON THE FRONT COVER! (Inspect here).

Not only that, but the model on the cover has BLUE EYES and BLONDE HAIR! Isn’t that a Hate Crime, now that Obama has indeed signed the Matthew Shepard Free Speech Suppression Act?

Thank Victoria’s Secret. Seriously–the Christophobe crazies will be complaining.

Alas, I’ve just found that, for family reasons, I can’t attend the HL Mencken Club meeting this weekend. It’s particularly unfortunate because the club is clearly reaching critical mass and a lot of VDARE.COM friends will be there. At least I spoke at the inaugural meeting last year! Hopefully in 2010…

That’s the headline on an October 15 story by Rebacca Stoll in the Jerusalem Post:

IDF units responsible for guarding Israel’s expansive western border with Egypt said Thursday that there are one million would-be infiltrators from Africa waiting to cross the mostly barrier-less border and enter Israel illegally…

After hearing the briefing by IDF officers, the committee’s members called upon the government to immediately initiate the IDF contingency plan that was approved by the Olmert administration, known as “Hourglass.”…

Committee Chairman Ya’acov Katz called upon the defense establishment to begin immediate work on one of the salient features of the proposed project - the erection of an electronic fence along hundreds of kilometers of isolated borderlands with Egypt….

But not all residents of the South are quite so enthusiastic regarding any cuts to the number of foreign workers in the work force. Even as Katz and his committee toured the Negev, farmers in the isolated Arava Valley put the finishing touches on their plans to launch a massive demonstration this coming Sunday to protest cuts to the number of foreign workers that they can employ on their farms.

(Hat tip, DP).

You have to admire Rev.Ted Pike’s fighting spirit: he still hasn’t given up on stopping the Hate Crime bill and in an alert this morning points out that the Democrats might add DC statehood to the defense bill to which the Hate Crime monstrosity is already (disgracefully) attached. This would delay and could derail the whole thing.

To grasp how important this is, ask yourself what will happen to anyone reporting “hate facts“, such as the unlikelihood that any given minority member at Harvard Law School got there on merit, once this law is being interpreted by a ruling class of prosecutors and judges made up of Obamas and Sotomayors.

Takuan Seiyo is difficult to edit because he hates it (cf. Steve Sailer) and because because his discursive style bothers me on behalf of VDARE.COM’s busy readers. Nevertheless, our Letters Editor, Joe Guzzardi, tells me that his articles get an extraordinary amount of email.

Seiyo’s (Tekuan’s?) Brussels Journal piece entitled (to my eye) elliptically From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 7: The True Horror in Hitchcock Films, is, for all its discursiveness, brilliant, and I urge VDARE.COM readers to study it and click on its amazing links.

Right now, I offer only this excerpt:

Here are James Stuart and Kim Novak in Vertigo, taking a walk in the fabled Muir Woods, a few miles north of San Francisco. This footage has been dubbed into Italian, but it doesn’t matter. The main actors here are the magnificent redwoods.

On their walk, Scottie and Madeleine/Judy, stop by a cross section of a giant redwood. There are markers next to the tree’s growth rings, to show how old it was when cut down. The tree was over-1,000 years old. To visualize that, there is an arrow close to the center, marked 1066 – Battle of Hastings. Other arrows, in an outward progression, mark 1215 – Magna Carta; 1492 – Discovery of America; 1776 – Declaration of Independence.

A pivotal exchange between the two characters takes place, prompted by the 1000-year calendar that the tree expresses. But what’s important for our purpose here is that this is a real redwood section, and those arrows and dates are real, and they were there on my hundreds of walks in that forest.

One day, Body Snatcher State that administers the park – for it is a U.S. National Monument – rearranged the arrows. The redwood calendar now looks like this:

The Battle of Hastings is gone. Instead, marking the pivotal event of the 11th century, of the greatest significance to Americans, is the building of cliff dwellings by murderous, self-extinguishing cannibals in a rock in Mesa Verde, Colorado.

The Signing of the Magna Carta as the late Middle Ages event of most significance to Americans is gone too. Instead, there is a new arrow that wasn’t there when Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak visited. It’s marked 1325 – Aztecs Begin Construction of Tenochtitlan, Mexico. Thus doth Body Snatcher State announce to its subjects, children of the people who walked through the frames of Hitch’s movies, that their country has been snatched away from them.

Now, the Battle of Hastings is of no emotional significance to me. I don’t have a drop of Norman or Anglo-Saxon blood in me, and until I was 20 I didn’t even speak English. But I emigrated to the United States because it had been founded by descendants of those Normans and Anglo-Saxons, and its founding institutions embodied the virtues of those people and of their singular document, the Magna Carta.

So that we don’t get our arrows confused, the way the U.S. Federal Government has, let us recall why the Aztecs began their construction of Tenochtitlan in 1325. Two years earlier, in 1323, these refugees, who had been welcomed and allowed to settle among the people of Culhuacan, and to intermarry and mingle with their hosts, had done something to celebrate their strength in diversity.

The Aztecs, or Mexica as they called themselves, asked the king of Culhuacan, Achicometl, for permission to make his daughter into their goddess. Their wish was granted. What the Culhuacan king didn’t know was the details of this “canonization.”

He would learn soon enough. At a feast celebrating the new goddess of the Aztecs, their priest appeared, wearing the flayed skin of Achicometl’s daughter. That is why the Aztecs had to flee the wrath of their hosts to an island on Lake Texcoco, where they began to build their city Tenochtitlan in 1325.

Now if this is what the United States Government wishes to celebrate, instead of one of the founding documents of Western Civilization and of its own Constitution, things have gone seriously awry. But that’s because the demographics have gone seriously awry. The people milling about in Hitchcock’s train stations and train cars, streets and restaurants, office and hotel lobbies, were replaced, when not by the “GLBTA community,” by Aztecs imported by bleeding-heart Body Snatchers and by fathomlessly greedy “capitalists.”

Another article I wish we’d had: End Affirmative Action, End the Black Upper Class: The Case of Law, by Richard Hoste, just posted on Kevin MacDonald’s webzine The Occidental Observer

Hoste argues that, looking at LSAT scores for 2007-2008, only 57 Blacks scored at 164 or above, which he shows is the minimum for non-Affirmative Action entry to the top fourteen law schools. But 351 blacks were actually admitted–for example, blacks were 9.5% of Yale’s entering class.

Hoste also estimates the financial benefit from quotas:

The affirmative-action case with the 158 LSAT score (approx. 118 IQ) makes anywhere from an extra $40,000 to $105,500 in his first year out of school for being Black.

Interestingly, the extra money that a Black T14 affirmative action recipient gets isn’t taken from any one White lawyer, but is distributed down the ladder. A White with a score of 158 isn’t getting into an elite school anyway.

He concludes:

[C]ollege admissions officers know what ending affirmative action would entail. No affirmative action means that NYU, Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Chicago would be accepting on average two Blacks a year each. A few would possibly have no Black students at all. So when liberals say that equal standards is a “strategy for locking Blacks out of higher education,” they have a point….Admitting the unpleasant truths about race differences and working towards colorblindness would, after decades of PBS specials, “look how far we’ve comes” and “Yes, we cans!”, bring down nearly the entire already meager Black upper class.

Hoste runs the website HBD Books, which we will belatedly add to our blogroll tonight.

Jared Taylor just posted on Takimag (grrrr!!) an excerpt from his new book-in-progress on race and immigration:

In his famous speech of April 20, 1968, the British statesman Enoch Powell said, “The discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician.”

One great, avoidable evil we face is the declining quality of the American work force.

The Census Bureau tells us that if immigration continues at its current rate of nearly two million people a year, whites will become a minority of the under-18 child population in just 14 years—in 2023—and will become a minority of the working population just 16 years later. The greatest increase will be in Hispanics, who are now dropping out of high school at higher rates than blacks, doing little better than blacks when they manage to stay in school, and are the group least likely to go to college. Demographers are beginning to warn that as well-educated, white baby boomers retire and are replaced by poorly educated blacks and Hispanics, the productivity gains of the last several hundred years will be reversed, and the United States could go into a tailspin.

“We have the possibility of transforming the American dream into the American tragedy,” says Irwin Kirsch, senior research director at the Educational Testing Service.

Taylor is perhaps the most brilliant of the individuals now grouped in what Takimag’s Richard Spencer calls the “post-paleo“ movement or “Alternative Right “ (to distinguish it from the Establishment or Beltway Right). Taylor’s earlier book on race, Paved With Good Intentions, was deservedly successful. (I even reviewed it for the pre-purge National Review!) He has a real live literary agent representing this one. But I’m going to bet that no mainstream publisher picks it up, because of the post-Bell Curve Reign of Terror that cripples American public debate about race.

Of course, I hope I’m wrong. And, fortunately, with the internet, it doesn’t–ultimately–matter any more. The Main Stream Media is finished, along with the traitorous caste that infests it. But it can’t happen a moment too soon.