I have to admit that once in awhile National Review produces some good material. Jim Geraghty’s Campaign Spot blog chastises the pundit class for denouncing white working class voters as as racists solely because they didn’t vote for Barack Obama.
Among the highlights:

Are white working-class voters really racist? How many and where? If a significant number of them are, should Democrats really court them on the terms of their racism? These are questions worth asking since, apparently, a lot of Democrats think they’re valid. But as long as the Clinton campaign continues to code the fact that it is counting on a base of white racist support, we’ll never have this conversation.

[How Does Hillary Clinton Feel About the White Racist Vote?,by Richard Kim The Nation, May 5]

“With the largest number of remaining delegates now being party insiders, they have to decide if Obama can overcome enough of that antipathy - essentially deciding if enough working-class whites will back away from the black candidate, whether because of the false Muslim rumors, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright flap or old-fashioned racism.”

-[ Ugly truth why Hillary Clinton won't quit, by Thomas M. DeFrank New York Daily News, May 7].

“There may have been some element of racism among these culturally conservative voters, who support Democrats if they think the politician is strong and empathetic toward their struggles; Obama appeared neither.”

[Obama's Tired Campaign Needs Victory, New Life, by Al Hunt Bloomberg News, May 5.

Geraghty notes that that Mormons voted for Romney, Evangelicals vote for Huckabee, and of course Blacks vote uniformly for Obama so “complaining about voters preferring candidates who share traits with them is like complaining about the weather.” The implication seems to be that it’s OK for working class whites to do the same. He concludes,

African-Americans are voting overwhelmingly for a candidate who shares their skin color, but it's being repeatedly suggested that white working-class voters are motivated by racism. Is this the "national conversation on race" that Obama had in mind in his Philly speech?[The Continuing Racial Polarization of the Electorate, by Jim Geraghty National Review Online, May 7]

This seems awful close to defending Ramesh Ponnuru’s dreaded “identity politics for white people.” If there is a silver lining to the Obama cloud, it is that conventional conservatives are becoming emboldened to take on anti-white racism and double standards.

Ilkka Kokkarinen sends a link to a Finnish government video recruiting skilled immigrants from other European Union countries. It provides some insight into Finns’ quietly self-confident sense of their competitive advantages in appealing to the kind of people they want:nlan

“Skilled people enjoy living in Finland. … Quality of life also includes peace of mind. An ordinary, normal life is good. Finns expect quality, freshness, and functionality as standard. The starting point is that everything works, in any weather or season. Everyday matters are easily taken care of.”

Canada has socialized medicine, which means overuse of non-essential services, and rationing of essential ones. As a result, at least a hundred women with high-risk pregnancies have had to come south of the Canadian border to get emergency free-enterprise medicine.

Of course, the babies naturally get dual Canadian-American citizenship as result of the circumstances of their birth, (and the current misinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause) but they go right home with their mothers, assuming, God willing, that both mother and child survive the high-risk birth. [Canada's U.S. baby boom| With neonatal resources stretched thin, more and more high-risk infants are sent south to find a bed, By Lisa Priest, Globe and Mail, May 5, 2008 ]

Possibly in twenty years from now, the child will come back to the United States to work, and not need a Green Card, but that’s about it.

James Taranto [Send him mail] is trying to be funny about this in the Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web:

Aw, look at the cute little Canadian babies! It’s all very sweet and innocuous, right?

Don’t believe it. Read between the lines, and you realize this is a sinister Canadian plot to take over America. Canada’s military is no match for ours, so the crafty Canucks are using infancy instead of infantry to carry out their imperial designs.

Think about it. Canadian officials send women across the border, smuggling in “anchor babies” cleverly disguised as clumps of tissue. The women give birth inside the U.S., which means their Canadian offspring are entitled to U.S. citizenship. As these “children” grow and mature, they receive instructions from their masters in Ottawa about how to undermine American culture.

Before you know it, your kids are stuffing themselves with litres of back bacon, downing kilogram after kilogram of Crown Royal and Labatt Blue, and belting out “God Save the Queen” as they watch hockey on TV.

It’s all so horrible to contemplate, but it can be stopped. All we need to do is make America as inhospitable as Canada for expectant Canadian mothers. Hillary Clinton has the right idea: The U.S. needs socialized medicine.

This, for those not familiar with Taranto’s open borders advocacy and heavy-handed attempts at humor, is a satire of “nativist” concerns about Mexican immigration. Now, I could say that the main problem with Mexican immigration is that they’re not Canadians, but that’s not the most obvious thing here–the most obvious thing is numbers.

• The Canadian women are in the US for an average of 26.6 day–Mexican illegals are here for life. And they take over whole towns.
• The Canadian government is paying the women’s medical bills–the Mexican government is paying nada.
• The Canadians’ children are going home with their parents–the Mexicans’ children tend to stay, even if their parents are deported.

And the final big difference:

• Approximately 100 Canadian babies going home with US Birth Certificates tucked into their blankies–up to half a million illegal immigrant anchor babies whose parents came from Mexico and similar places.

Those kids are staying, and they’ll cost the US Taxpayer a lot of money.

Here’s Picasso’s 1943 sculpture Bull’s Head, which H.W. Janson’s standard college textbook on art history uses in the introduction to illustrate the concept of “creativity.”

“Now let us look at the striking Bull’s Head by Pablo Picasso (fig. 2), which seems to consist of nothing but the seat and handlebars of an old bicycle. … Of course, the materials Picasso used are fabricated, but it would be absurd to insist that he must share the credit with the manufacturer, since the seat and handlebars in themselves are not works of art.

“While we feel a certain jolt when we first recognize the ingredients of this visual pun, we also sense that it was a stroke of genius to put them together in this unique way, and we cannot very well deny that it is a work of art.”

Okay, but the thought that occurred to me in art history class in 1979 was this: “Why does everybody assume this was ‘unique?’”

I would guess that more than a few people preceded Picasso in coming up with the idea of, and then carrying out, connecting handlebars and seat to imitate a bull’s head. It’s the kind of thing my dad came up with every year or two while puttering around in the garage. Maybe he got the idea of assembling two things to look like an animal from Picasso, but I really doubt it. I suspect lots of folks’ dads came up with a bicycle seat and handlebars Bull’s Head before Picasso did.

If somebody came up with proof that, say, a Bulgarian bicycle repairman created basically the same thing in 1927, would that render Picasso’s 1943 version valueless? Would Janson take out Picasso’s Bulls Head and put in a picture of the repairman’s Bull’s Head as the exemplification of artistic creativity?

Yeah, right.

Something that’s frequently overlooked about art history is that there has to be a “story.” That, say, Bull’s Head was independently discovered/created in, say, Bulgaria in 1927, in Uruguay in 1930, in Siam in 1931, and so forth, isn’t a good story. It’s just a bunch of random stuff that (hypothetically) happened.

That Picasso from Spain, the land of bullfighting, an artistic genius obsessed with masculine vitality, who had prominently painted a bull’s head in his famous Guernica, one day looked at some junk from an old bicycle and realized that he could create a bull’s head from two everyday objects … now that’s a story!

Short answer: No.

But, a lot of people suspect it is, so it’s worth exploring the question.

In 1993, I attended the enormously popular exhibition at the formidable Chicago Art Institute of the paintings of the Belgian Rene Magritte, a commercial artist in dreary Brussels who did witty Surrealist paintings in his off-hours.

After listening to a lecture on Magritte by the curator of exhibition, I approached her and told her how much more popular Magritte had gotten in just 17 years. In 1976 I’d visited a major exhibition of Magritte’s work at the museum of Rice University in Houston, which, at the time, consisted of two quonset huts made of corrugated metal out in the football stadium parking lot. Almost nobody was there.

(more…)

Last week I reported on the efforts in Houston to mask the data on attitudes to immigration revealed by a local opinion survey. (Un PC Results from The Houston Area Survey April 29).

The Houston Area Survey’s website has now posted a 10-page summary of the study An Historical Overview of Immigration in Houston, Based on the Houston Area Survey (PDF)

This document differs from a normal academic paper in two ways: first, the extreme stridency and tendentiousness of the pro-immigration spin it exhibits, and secondly the professional fluency of the writing–far removed from the turgid jumble usually emerging from University Sociology Departments (I speak from bitter editing experience).

Perhaps it is not too much to detect the hand of the Houston Chronicle’s Lisa Falkenberg, [Send her mail] who managed to publish a long (and fluent) pro immigration foil to the Survey the day of its press release. (I am informed she has the role of pro immigration Commissar on the Chronicle – thanks JC and GW.) Certainly it is clear that the complaint of the Survey’s progenitor, Professor Stephen Klineberg [Send him mail]:

“No matter how you ask the question,…every measure shows growing anti-immigrant sentiment.”

(VDARE.com emphasis) was heart-felt.

Quite out of place in a professional academic essay is this happy burble:

The United States, which throughout all of its history was an amalgam of European nationalities, is suddenly becoming a microcosm of the world — the first nation in history that can say, “We are a free people, and now we come from everywhere!”

(p2)

Or this polemical fulmination:

Between 1924 and 1965, under the notorious and viciously racist “National Origins Quota Act,” immigration into America slowed to a trickle, and explicit preference was accorded to Northern Europeans.

(P2)

(As Professor Kevin MacDonald has decisively demonstrated, the 1924 legislation was a clash between two groups, one seeking to preserve historic America, the other wishing to overthrow it. Both could be said to be serving their ethnic interests. In 1924 the former won, in 1965 the latter.)

Apart from employing glaring historical falsehoods–(The United States remained overwhelmingly a British, Protestant nation until the 1840s; there is a ridiculous effort on Page 4 to blame the abysmally low educational attainments of Houston’s Mexican immigrant population on the family reunification provisions of the 1965 Act–whereas of course the overwhelming bulk of this group are in Houston because they walked illegally across the border)–the main argumentation in the essay seems to be based on the assumption that the serfs reading it cannot think. Thus the information that half of third generation Hispanics have only Hispanics as their three closest friends is presented as evidence of assimilation! (P8)

As noted last week, the main evidence the report offers of assimilation is the irrelevant one of converging economic profiles–even having access to a computer! (P6-7)

Of course, I suppose it could be that the Klinebergs and Falkenbergs see being American merely as a matter of having similar possessions.

It is clear that the report realizes that Houston has imported itself a probably lethal problem:

More than 40 percent of all Houston’s Latino and Asian immigrants are recent arrivals, having come here since 1995…if the socioeconomic disparities with Anglos are not reduced, if too many of Houston’s “minority” youth remain unprepared to succeed in the knowledge economy of the twenty-first century, it is difficult to envision a prosperous future for the region as a whole…How the public responds…will do much to determine whether the region’s ongoing demographic transformation will become a significant asset for this port-city as it positions itself for prosperity in the global economy, or whether it will instead become a major liability, reducing rather than enhancing the region’s competitiveness and setting the stage for serious social conflict.

The strong implication is that the burden of adjustment should all fall on the historic Americans.

Instead, “the public” would do well to consider how it was this mess was created.

Tell Professor Klineberg to improve his scholarship - and get a more honest ghostwriter!

William Saletan’s ongoing Maoist-style self-criticism for the crimethink of pointing out that James Watson knows more about the genetics of IQ than Watson’s critics continues in Slate:

Not Black and White: Rethinking race and genes.
By William Saletan

Five months ago, I wrote a series on race, genes, and intelligence. Everything about it hurt: the research, the writing, the reactions, the regrets. Not a day has gone by that I haven’t thought about it. I’ve been struggling to reconcile two feelings that won’t go away: that what I wrote was socially harmful and that I can’t honestly renounce the evidence I presented. That evidence, which involved the proposed role of heredity in trait differences by race, is by no means complete or conclusive. But it’s not dismissible, either. My colleague Stephen Metcalf summarized the debate better than I did: “It’s a conflict between science and science.”

When you find yourself in a dilemma this difficult, sometimes the best thing to do is let it sit in your head until you find a way to make sense of it within your value system. I think I’m beginning to find the answer that works for me: I was asking the wrong question.

In last fall’s series, I asked myself why I was writing about such an ugly topic. “Because the truth isn’t as bad as our ignorant, half-formed fears and suspicions about it,” I concluded. “And because you can’t solve a problem till you understand it.” I wrote my commitment on a piece of paper and leaned it against my computer monitor: The truth doesn’t care what you want.

Sometimes, with time and perspective, it’s the small, overlooked things that turn out to be big. In retrospect, I was consumed by the wrong word. The flaw in my approach wasn’t truth. It was the. Even if hereditary inequality among racial averages is a truth, it’s less true, more unjust, and more pernicious than framing the same difference in nonracial terms. “The truth,” as I accepted and framed it, was itself half-formed. It was, in that sense, a half-truth. And it flunked the practical test I had assigned it: To the extent that a social problem is genetic, you can’t ultimately solve it by understanding it in racial terms.

A study published two weeks ago in Nature Medicine illustrates the point. Gina Kolata of the New York Times explains what happened:

Doctors who treat patients with heart failure have long been puzzled by a peculiar observation. Many black patients seem to do just as well if they take a mainstay of therapy, a class of drugs called beta blockers, as if they do not. [Now researchers] have discovered why: these nonresponsive patients have a slightly altered version of a gene that muscles use to control responses to nerve signals. … As many as 40 percent of blacks and 2 percent of whites have the gene variant, the researchers report. The findings, heart failure specialists say, mean that people with the altered gene might be spared taking what may be, for them, a useless therapy.

In other words, racial observation turned out to be a temporary step toward a deeper genetic explanation. Most blacks don’t have the altered gene, and some whites do. Given these findings, prescribing or not prescribing beta blockers based on race rather than genes would be malpractice.

In a similar way, policy prescriptions based on race are social malpractice. Not because you can’t find patterns on tests, but because any biological theory that starts with observed racial patterns has to end with genetic differences that cross racial lines. Race is the stone age of genetics. If you’re a researcher looking for effects of heredity on medical or educational outcomes, race is the closest thing you presently have to genetic information about most people. And as a proxy measure, it sucks.

Okay, but the reason people get so irrationally upset when talk turns to race is because, much of the time, it’s not a proxy measure: “Watch what you say, mister–you’re talking about family here.” People care about what you say about their races for the same reasons they care about what you say about their families. And that’s not a metaphor.

To say that somebody is, say, white is not just a crude way of saying that they are unlikely to have the gene variant that makes beta blockers ineffective. It’s actually much more of a way of saying that on, average, they are more likely to be genealogically related to another white person than to a non-white person. In other words, a white person has more family ties to white people than to nonwhite people. And who you are related to matters, in all sorts of ways, genetic, sociological, political, and personal, ways both subtle and bleedingly obvious.

It’s irritating that after a full decade of my yammering away over and over again about a single insight that can clear up a remarkable amount of confusion in public discourse –that a racial group is an extended family that’s partly inbred–confusion reigns unabated.

Audacious Epigone figures out the demographic breakdown of the London Daily Telegraph’s list of top 50 most influential American political pundits.

This is not to say that the Telegraph’s list is accurate or inaccurate, just that it’s a list somebody made up for a different purpose than demographic analysis, which makes it useful for demographic analysis. These kind of “found subjective lists” have more prima facie plausibility for demographic analysis than when the demographic analyst makes up his own subjective list, since his interest in demographics is likely to bias his list in one way or another.

The most interesting finding, to my mind, was in the Religious/Ethnic background category, where Roman Catholics held a plurality (40% of the top 50 pundits). I guessed that most of the Catholics would be Irish, but I only count seven Irishmen/women (Matthews, O’Reilly, Hannity, Noonan, Sullivan, Bennett, Shields) out of 20 Catholics. (That’s leaving out Pat Buchanan, who is German Catholic on his mother’s side and Protestant Irish on his father’s side).

As usual in lists of achievers, Jews (27%) are represented about an order of magnitude more than their share of the population, but it’s such a small share of the population that they come in behind Catholics and Protestants (29%).

Men make up 86%. Whites account for 90%, blacks 10%, with nobody else on it (Michelle Malkin didn’t make the list, but people I’ve never heard of, like Rachel Maddow, did). Average age is 52.4.

It’s all about what you’d expect from other lists or just from looking at the First Class cabins on airliners–America is run by middle-aged white men.

With my attention paid at the pathetic pandering at the RNC, I somehow missed John McCain’s Cinco de Mayo celebration. In addition to the typical banalities about the contributions of Mexican Americans and great heroism of Mexican forces at the Battle of Puebla, he went a step further, stating there is a “special relationship” between Mexico and America. He also launched a Spanish language website, and announced that he’d speak before the National Council of La Raza (the Race.)

McCain told reporters, “everything about our Hispanic voters is tailor-made to the Republican message…I know their patriotism, I know the respect for the family, the advocacy for pro-life, I know the small business aspect of our Hispanic voters.”

A quick reality check:

Patriotism: Only 34% of Hispanics eligible for US citizenship choose to take the necessary steps to take it—less than any other immigrant group. Of that group, only a third of Hispanics who are American citizens consider themselves Americans first.

Respect for the Family: Half of Hispanic births in the US are out of wedlock.

Pro Life: Hispanics are 2.7 times more likely to have an abortion than whites.

Small Business: Hispanics make up 15% of the population and only 6.6 percent of all businesses.

John McCain is not trusted by informed Republicans who are concerned about border security and the National Question–and that’s an understatement! But I don’t think his new Spanish-language website is going to help him with Republicans who want an end to illegal immigration and don’t like pandering to the Hispanic lobby. The more McCain panders the more he stands likely to lose more of the Republican base, which is his weak spot anyway.
According to Reuters,

John McCain reached out to Hispanic voters on Monday as he sought to win over a constituency that has moved away from his Republican Party but could prove key in swing states in a close U.S. presidential election in November.The Arizona senator’s campaign launched a Spanish language Web site to mark the Mexican Cinco de Mayo festival and McCain told reporters that “everything about our Hispanic voters is tailor-made to the Republican message.”[McCain Woos Hispanics and Launches Spanish Web Site, May 5th, 2008 Reuters]

The Reuters article is quite short, but if you scroll down there are a number of interesting comments. You might even consider adding comments of your own.
On the National Question, choosing between McCain and Obama, or McCain or Mrs. Clinton, isn’t much of a choice.
Isn’t the time ripe for some kind of independent or Third Party challenge? (Not that we can endorse candidates at VDARE.COM, just making a comment).