A reader says that his favorite immigration rock song is Illegal Alien, by Genesis.

Wikipedia says

The song’s lyrics are a lighter, humorous depiction of the frustrations an illegal immigrant faces, leading up to the chorus: “It’s no fun/Being an illegal alien”. Even though the lyrics are intended as a satire and to be taken in jest, the song can rarely be heard on United States radio stations because of its perceived offensiveness toward illegal aliens.

I hate that–it’s legitimate to worry, up to a point, about offending racial groups, but it’s not legitimate to worry about offending illegal aliens.

I’ve just finished reading Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue in the pathetic hope that I might make time to write about it and find this quote on p. 338:

“We got into this economic mess because of misplaced government interference in the first place. The mortgage crisis that triggered the collapse of our financial markets was rooted in a well-meaning but wrongheaded desire to increase home ownership among people who could not yet afford to own a home.

Politicians on the right and left wanted to take credit for an increase in middle-class home ownership. But the rules of the marketplace are just as constraining as human nature. Government cannot force financial institutions to give loans to people who can’t afford to pay them back and then expect that somehow things will all magically work out. Sooner or later, reality catches up with us.”

In other words, she’s bought Steve Sailer’s argument, in many VDARE.COM columns, that the Minority Mortgage Meltdown caused America’s first Diversity Recession. She even mentions two details Steve is particularly keen to stress: that the fatal policy was bipartisan; and that, as Steve concluded one recent column, “reality always gets its revenge”

I’m impressed.

In my Wednesday Taki’s Magazine column, I use a popular football argument to explain the philosophy behind why my punditry is so off-kilter from everybody else’s.

Last Sunday evening, while watching the final minutes of the now famous Indianapolis Colts - New England Patriots football game, I experienced a moment of middle-aged serenity. I realized that I didn’t actually need to have an opinion on perhaps the leading topic of office water cooler debate in this decade: Which quarterback is better—the Colt’s Peyton Manning or the Patriot’s Tom Brady?

I could just sit back and enjoy the show.

The everlasting Brady-Manning controversy reminded me of an epistemological insight that Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker suggested when I interviewed him in 2002 during his book tour for his bestseller The Blank Slate. It didn’t fully register upon me at the time, but what has stuck with me the longest is Pinker’s concept that “mental effort seems to be engaged most with the knife edge at which one finds extreme and radically different consequences with each outcome, but the considerations militating towards each one are close to equal.”

To put it another way, the things that we most like to argue about are those that are most inherently arguable, such as: Who would win in a fight, Tom Brady or Peyton Manning?...

Read the rest here and comment upon it here.

The Washington Times’s  Jerry Seper reports on yet another reminder that American government is not truly a two-party system, but a one-party regime with a hard left-of-center wing (the Democrats) and a just plain left-of-center wing (the post-Reagan GOP).

Anything to do with our awkward neighbor, Mexico, always brings out the worst in both wings of the regime. That’s what’s happening with  growing narco-anarchy in Mexico, where the American approach has consistently been to throw good money after bad while refusing to look at the character of the recipients.

The leaders of both big American political parties blithely adopt the Leftist canard that the reason Mexican drug cartels are so heavily armed is that Americans have the right, under the Second Amendment, to own weapons. The presumption, never proved or even seriously tested, is that Mexican narcotraficantes get all their weapons from the United States.

The Democratic Party remains committed to disarming Americans in defiance of the Second Amendment, but for tactical reasons is not trying at the moment to revive Bill Clinton’s unconstitutional “assault weapons” ban. Barack Hussein Obama and his Barbadian-American attorney general  both favor reinstating it, but Obama had decided not to push that now, even though the ban “made sense” in his mind.

That can only be because, bloodied by the fight over socialist medicine and contemplating the prospect of another fight over illegal alien amnesty and “guest-worker” programs, the Democrats don’t want to take on yet a third major assault on the Constitution that most Americans will hate.

In  this instance, the Republican riding to the Democrats’ aid is a better-forgotten apparatchik of the administrations of both feckless former Presidents Bush: Robert Bonner, former federal judge and former head of the Customs Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration. Bonner, presumed to be an expert because of the appointments he once held, has emerged from his L.A. law office to call for the reinstatement of the “assault weapons” ban.

Bonner [send him mail] claims that, along with other measures, is vital to help restore (if it was ever truly present to restore) civil order in Mexico. No doubt this endorsement by a prominent Republican who is supposed to know something about Mexico and the border will embolden Obama and Holder along with Democrats in the Congress–and go-along Republicans like Lindsey Graham–to push soon to reinstate the ban.[Bush aide urges weapons ban to slow Mexican drug war November 17, 2009 Jerry Seper]

And so, once again, our rulers propose to subordinate the legitimate interests and Constitutional rights of Americans to the perceived needs of Mexico and Mexicans. This is, of course, nothing new. The right of Americans to live in states that the federal government protects against invasion, as Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution mandates, has been subordinated for decades now to the “need” of Mexicans, other Latin Americans and just about anyone else (as long as he is not of European heritage - unless, of course, he is Jewish or Irish; thank you, Messrs. Jackson and Vanik, and thank you, Ted Kennedy) to enter our country, squat here, pillage our over-generous welfare, school and penal systems, drive drunk and kill people, sell drugs and kill people, undercut Americans at work, and render huge swathes of our country utterly alien to the natives.

Maria Candelaria Moreno, who lives in Milwaukee, WI, and companion Ricardo Moreno Esparza, “a citizen of Mexico,” were arrested for illegal-alien-smuggling in Laredo, TX on Thursday, November 12, when U.S. Customs agents at the border crossing found an unnamed, 31-year-old Mexican woman inside Moreno’s suitcase. “The woman in the suitcase was held for removal back to Mexico.” (Customs agents find woman in suitcase, by Lynn Brezosky, San Antonio Express-News, November 16, 2009)

Reading the article caused my claustrophobia to kick in, but other readers, apparently not so handicapped, left comments online proving that the American entrepreneurial spirit is robust and always in the hunt for promising economic ideas. Referring to the passenger in the suitcase, “cil492000″ wrote, at 8:50 AM, “She was probably a souvenir from one of the shops.” And “Independent,” at 9:18 PM, weighed in with “Here most people steal the soap or towels in hotels but I guess the sticky fingered Mexicans go one step further and steal the maids these days?”

There was also a simple patriotic urging by “JP” at 5:40 PM: “Sic em border patrol.”

Hat-tip, as so frequently, to American Patrol.

Iconoculture’s trendspotting service always has something horrifying in it, although they don’t seem to know it’s horrifying:

Fighting for an education: More Latinos joining the U.S. Army for school benefits

WHAT’S HAPPENING

* As Latinos fight to keep their head above water in the lagging economy, more are joining the U.S. Army. Although enlistment bonuses and military pay are welcome, the lure of a higher education has proven to be a strong incentive.
* A study by the RAND Corporation found that Latino young adults are most responsive to the military’s educational benefits, whereas black Army applicants respond most to salary and bonus incentives, and whites to military pay (CNN.com 10.21.09).
* According to the study, the percentage of Army recruits who were Latino rose from 6.6% in 1994 to 11.4% in 2007.

WHAT THIS MEANS TO BUSINESS

* Steady pay, job training and the opportunity to serve their country is helping to increase military recruitment among young adults overall. But for Latinos, the promise of higher education is a bonus that’s most attractive.
* Companies that are hiring can look to Latino military veterans who’ve taken advantage of educational benefits.

Great! Latinos,(which frequently means immigrants, and sometimes illegals) having colonized the military, can then take the jobs when they get back.

Here’s an article I wrote about the whole foreign legions problem before 9/11, and here’s the Onion News Network’s satirical take on this idea:

Some of this story will be old news to VDARE.com readers–Tom Piatak wrote about it in 2001. Today’s Daily Telegraph writes

How Hitler and the Nazis tried to steal Christmas
The Nazi Party tried their best to remove Christ from Christmas by paganising carols, producing glittering swastika, iron cross and toy grenade baubles for the fir tree, research for a new exhibition has found.

Published: 8:53AM GMT 17 Nov 2009
Many of the changes made under Hitler, put in place to remove the influence of the Jewish-born baby Jesus, are still in use today, much to the alarm of modern Germans.

The swastika-shaped baking trays and wrapping paper adorned with Nazi symbols have long gone, but traces of the Third Reich Christmas can still be found in the subtly rewritten lyrics of favourite carols.

The discoveries have been highlighted by a new exhibition at the National Socialism Documentation Centre in Cologne.

“I always thought that Unto Us a Time Has Come was a song about wandering through winter snow,” said Heidi Bertelson, 42, a lawyer who visited the exhibit told Times. “I didn’t realise that Christ had been excised.”

In 2001, Piatak quoted Father Gereon Goldmann’s autobiography, The Shadow Of His Wings:

As a conscript in the SS, Goldmann was forced to celebrate not Christmas, but a bizarre winter holiday concocted by the Nazis:

“On Christmas Eve, there was a celebration, not a Christian one, but a pagan German Julfest. We were all together and had to sing some trash about the night of the clear stars and other sad substitutes for the true Christmas message.”

As shocking as it may sound, the contemporary public observance of Christmas in America bears a much closer resemblance to the Nazis’ Julfest than to the Christmas that enticed [Whittaker] Chambers. And this extraordinary transformation has occurred in a generation.[More]

And it’s starting again this year–see the Catholic League’s latest list: WAR ON CHRISTMAS COMMENCES November 3, 2009.

UPDATE: Check out the Google News on “War Against Christmas” and “War On Christmas.”

A lot of it is “War On Christmas Denial”–no such thing is happening, they say, they say.

Terry McDermott blogs for the Columbia Journalism Review:

Criticism of Gladwell Reaches Tipping Point

… I should add here that my hatred of Gladwell is boundless, at least the equal of any critic, but I, a much more rigorous (and therefore slower and much poorer) writer, at least know its source – pure unadulterated jealousy.

Gladwell’s earlier books The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers have been publishing phenomena. Tipping Point alone has been on bestseller lists for five years. Gladwell in many ways is the social science equivalent of the New York Times foreign affairs columnist Tom Friedman, another favorite target of critics whose books sell huge numbers. Both are popularizers, in some sense hucksters, adept at phrase-making and simplifying (and often over-simplifying) complex subjects. A key difference, however, is that when Friedman is wrong, he helps start wars. When Gladwell makes a mistake, he dilutes public understanding of science – not a good thing, surely, but he’s a feature writer; that’s what they do.

There is plenty of reason to criticize Malcolm Gladwell, but you get the sense that his chief flaw is being popular.

The comparison to Tom Friedman is a valid one.

Still, “being popular” correlates with being influential. That Malcolm is a tireless and influential proponent of wrong ideas is a problem, especially as his ideas take on (particularly in his most recent bestseller Outliers) an increasingly coherent and politicized form that reinforces and extends the dumbest tendencies in the conventional wisdom.

From the standpoint of the general welfare, there are two potential solutions for the Gladwell Problem: either Malcolm becomes less wrong or he becomes less influential. I would prefer the former solution, but Malcolm seems hellbent on the latter.

he December issue of National Geographic carries a story about The Other Tibet which tells about the situation in Western China’s Xinjiang Province. The article quite graphically explains how the Han Chinese have invaded the province and how they have overtaken the local population. The story explains the local unrest but, of course, the reader does not hear about how this might relate to the situation in the U.S. Hopefully, many reader will connect the dots themselves. Our out of touch, narcissistic leaders here want us to believe that America can take in millions of people who are not like us and they then expect us to believe that we will all live harmoniously together because we are special. VDARE.com readers understand that this will not happen because our eyes are wide open. You read about this first at: VDARE.com.

F. Roger Devlin writes:

After mentioning Three Dog Night in my last piece, I got to thinking about whether there were ever any rock-n-roll records about immigration. I believe Led Zeppelin once did an “Immigrant Song,” but it’s not quite what I have in mind. I guess it isn’t the sort of thing that makes people burst into song. However, in 1976 the band Steely Dan did a song about Puerto Ricans coming to New York. They face various hardships (including violent blacks!) until they learn how to play the welfare system. Then they write home and tell Uncle Tio to come along and bring the whole family. The song is called “The Royal Scam.”

They are hounded down
To the bottom of a bad town
Amid the ruins
Where they learn to fear
An angry race of fallen kings
Their dark companions

Lyrics