vdare--2020-04-27--James Heckman Calls Out Raj Chetty Over “Zip Code Is Destiny” Magic Dirt Theory

James Heckman of the U. of Chicago is a famous statistician and social scientist who won the quasi-Nobel in Economics. In an interview, he disses Harvard economist Raj Chetty:
S: When people talk about the American Dream they do so in the context of the current academic and policy discussion on income mobility and inequality. How would you characterize the current research in this field? What are some of the key issues with the literature and public discussions around these issues?
H: The current research in the field is shoddy. It has gained traction because it appeals to the negative image of American society held by leading opinion makers like the New York Times and the Atlantic. In truth, the evidence based on the IRS data is deeply flawed and has been incorrectly analyzed. Take “The Opportunity Atlas” promoted by the New York Times. It claims that “zip code is destiny.” Careful statistical analysis of the data shows otherwise.
The same can be said of the academics who write about the growth of the Top 1%. Careful studies show much less growth in disparity than what is picked up in the popular press and by populist politicians. A new “wisdom” has emerged: large samples more than compensate for faulty or missing data. The wisdom of this crowd is that sample size trumps careful data analysis.
S: Without going into detail, what do you think are the main barriers to income or social mobility? (Could be micro level such as agency and family structure or on a bigger scale in terms of labor markets, entrepreneurship, etc.)
H: The main barriers to developing effective policies for income and social mobility is fear of honest engagement in the changes in the American family and the consequences it has wrought. It is politically incorrect to express the truth and go to the source of problems. Public discourse, such as it is, cannot speak honestly about matters of culture, race, and gender. Powerful censorship is at play across the entire society.
S: In your research you discuss the key importance of family structure for social mobility. Why do you feel so strongly about this issue?
H: The family is the source of life and growth. Families build values, encourage (or discourage) their children in school and out. Families — far more than schools — create or inhibit life opportunities. A huge body of evidence shows the powerful role of families in shaping the lives of their children. Dysfunctional families produce dysfunctional children. Schools can only partially compensate for the damage done to the children by dysfunctional families.
S: Your work on early childhood education is constantly cited as a justification for universal preschool education. Is that a policy you have recommended or what is your main focus and potential solution when you promote the importance of early childhood education?
H: I have never supported universal pre-school. The benefits of public preschool programs are the greatest for the most disadvantaged children. More advantaged children generally have encouraging early family lives. The “intervention” that a loving, resourceful family gives to its children has huge benefits that, unfortunately, have never been measured well. Public preschool programs can potentially compensate for the home environments of disadvantaged children. No public preschool program can provide the environments and the parental love and care of a functioning family and the lifetime benefits that ensue.
S: Do you have any thoughts overall on how this current crisis could impact social mobility and inequality?
H: Inequality in health and earnings will be exacerbated by it. Poverty and disadvantage foster disease. Inequality in access to health care fosters inequality in health and poor health inhibits the ability to contribute to society. With so many people now out of work — and out of health benefits — short-run inequality generated by poor health will increase in addition to the inequality created by the loss of jobs. We know this is true because those in poor health before COVID-19 struck are the primary victims of the new pandemic. … To those who have more will be given. For stressed families where the single parent is still working, the early childhood environment will likely worsen.


vdare--2020-04-27--Chicago Mayor Rips Florida Beach Opening, Can't Or Won't Stop Massive Black House Parties In Chicago

Our nation has been on lockdown for weeks now , and yet even as law abiding Americans are stuck in @ @ @ @ @ work and without options , Open Borders activists are agitating for the release of illegal @ @ @ @ @ inside the US .
For twenty years , VDARE.com has championed the need for lockdown @ @ @ @ @ your support by signing up for a $ 5 monthly automatic donation and get a @ @ @ @ @ Open Borders ” or “ ICE is nice !
” heavy duty vinyl stickers shipped @ @ @ @ @ our special thank you .

Earlier: Minorities Not Social Distancing: 400 Plus Person Party In East Bakersfield Scene Of Mass Shooting (With No One Killed)
From the Chicago Tribune:
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot rips Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for reopening beaches: ‘God help us all’ By GREGORY PRATT
CHICAGO TRIBUNE |
APR 20, 2020 | 4:19 PM
Chicago’s 30 miles of beach and other lakefront, being the windiest spots in the Windy City, are of course closed. That’s Settled Science!
But in Chicago last night from WGN TV:
Some guests are wearing masks, but basically this black house party looks like Jonathan Kay’s characterization of a typical in-your-face Super Spreader Event. Most of the West Side participants are quite young, so they aren’t in mortal danger, but no doubt many of them live with their moms and/or grandmas.
One thing the Windy City has a lot of compared to Los Angeles is park space. In the decades after the 1871 Fire, Chicago was laid out by city fathers whose motto was “Make No Small Plans.”
Perhaps Chicago authorities should encourage Chicagoans who feel they must socialize to socialize outdoors?
[Comment at Unz.com]


vdare--2020-05-01--Trump Vs. ?, Virology, Chicoms Show Steel Fist, And Captain Cook's Problematic 250th, Etc.

00m46s Trump v. A.N. Other. (Biden's beatable, A.N. Other may not be.)
08m40s The youngest branch of the youngest science. (Virology notes.)
15m02s ChiComs show the steel fist. (A tiff Down Under.)
20m07s The shotgun diplomat. (Swedes go to the mattresses.)
26m03s Tom Cotton on educational nationalism. (Unless they want to read Shakespeare.)
27m43s Coronavirus Laugh of the Week. (From Razib.)
28m39s Captain Cook's 250th. (It is of course "problematic.")
30m24s Coronavirus in India. (Youth, heat, and "incomplete figures.")
34m20s Scots wha hae … (To PC cucked.)
36m52s Romanian Transylvania, 100 years on. (The integrity of their quarrel.)
40m32s Signoff. (A song for the day.)
01— Intro. White rabbits! Yes, it's the first day of the month, and this is the first Radio Derb podcast of the month. Greetings, listeners, from your studiously genial host John Derbyshire.
Nothing on the bulletin board to be announced this week, so let's proceed directly to the hate-filled rants.
[Permalink]
02— Trump v. A.N. Other. This has to be one of the strangest Presidential election years ever. Our sitting first-term President is trying to surf a colossal economic crisis— national unemployment numbers passed thirty million this week. The candidate of the other party, meanwhile, is sequestered in his basement in Delaware making no public appearances except by Skype, and on the rare occasions he addresses us, he speaks in Klingon.
It's all very strange. The gravity and danger of the economic crisis, and indeed of the underlying healthcare crisis, has sucked all the fun out of our election season. We could have some fun mocking Joe Biden, except that we're feeling kind of sorry for him. Where is this all going?
I ventured my first prediction almost a year ago. After some cautionary remarks about the folly of calling a political event seventeen months in advance, I said I thought Trump would lose this November, and gave my reasons.
The quality of the opposition, as then lined up, was way better than in 2016, when Trump just squeaked home. Mrs Clinton was an awful candidate.
The media will have their act together, which they didn't in 2016. They didn't take Trump seriously until it was too late.
Likewise the social media. Twitter, Google, YouTube, and Facebook are more sophisticated now than in 2016, and more openly ideological.
Trump Disappointment Syndrome. Look at the comment threads. Trump's weakness on the key issues that won him victory four years ago— immigration and global policing— has lost him some part of his base. Yes, I know there are still Ever Trumpers: I hear from them. He's lost a lot, though; and with those thin margins of 2016, he can't afford to lose any.
I didn't mention demographics back last June, though I did in subsequent predictions. The USA of 2020 has fewer conservative geezers and more woke first-time voters than in 2016. That demographic drift could wipe out Trump's 2016 margin all by itself.
And on point number three there, about social media, I just a few minutes ago heard that Unz.com, to which my own VDARE.com articles get cross-posted, has lost its Facebook page. Ron Unz himself has things to say about this on the site.
So Trump is toast, right? Well, his poll numbers are going nowhere. The end-of-April polling has Joe Biden with a robust six percent lead nationwide— ten percent in one of the polls. Trump's lagging in those key midwestern states that took him to the White House.
Trump may be getting rattled. There was a little flurry of reports this week about him yelling down the phone at Brad Parscale, his campaign manager. All the reports I've seen were in mainstream-media outlets, though— The Mexican Oligarch Times, The Jeff Bezos Post, the CultMarx News Network— so this may just come under my earlier bullet point about the media.
And yet, even as I'm reading this negative stuff, I'm beginning to wonder if Trump may not pull off a win after all.
I mean: Joe Biden, really? For all the media shilling on his behalf, he's dragging a lot of baggage behind him: his son's shady-looking business dealings in China and Ukraine, the corruption of the FBI under Obama that Biden must have known about, the sexual harassment claims. A halfway-competent Trump campaign can publicize those to the millions of low-information voters who think of Joe as a kindly old geezer who loyally supported that nice unthreatening black guy who was President before Trump.
There are two separate questions here:
Can Trump win against Biden? And
Can Trump win against A.N. Other, someone the Democrats replace Biden with?
The case that Trump can win against Biden— the case that Biden is a no-hoper— is made eloquently by Conrad Black over at American Greatness. Quote:
There is an aura of otherworldly unreality about the Biden candidacy: a man who got 11 percent of the vote in New Hampshire is effectively the party's nominee a month later, and takes to his basement to avoid exposure to the media while he and his backers ignore several impending problems, any one of which could blow up his candidacy …
I believe that all of these supplementary problems will blow up during the spring and early summer. At that point, Biden could do the honorable thing and stand aside and ask his delegates to support a more presentable candidate than himself, well to the right of Sanders.
End quote.
The implied prediction there is one I can get behind. If Trump can stay on his surf-board and run a halfway decent campaign, he has a chance against Biden, whatever the polls are saying this week.
Against A.N. Other? That depends who it is. The Democrats could hardly do worse than Biden … but that's not to say they won't try. [Clip: Hillary cackle.]
[Permalink]
03— The youngest branch of the youngest science. Concerning the progress of the coronavirus itself, I should make some kind of report. I do so with reluctance because I don't have much clue what's happening or whose numbers to believe.
And I refuse to feel bad about that because, as best I can judge, nobody else has much more of a clue than I have. As my old boss Rich Lowry says in a New York Post op-ed today, quote:
An extraordinary feature of the coronavirus is how poorly understood it is. We don't know how many people have it, what the death rate is, what the long-term health consequences of having a severe case are, or how best to treat it.
End quote.
That by no means exhausts the list of things we don't know. Here's another: If I've had COVID-19, suffered with it and survived it, am I then immune to further attacks? The vague sketch most of us have about surviving a virus attack is:
the virus attacks you,
you respond by producing antibodies,
the antibodies vanquish the virus, and
the antibodies stay in your system, immunizing you against further attacks.
That doesn't necessarily happen, though. We have credible reports both of people surviving the virus but then getting re-infected and of people with no antibodies who recovered anyway.
One thing we've learned this past three months, in fact— I mean, we, the general public— is how young the science of virology is, and how much we still don't know.
That's why expert opinion has such a poor track record. I'm thinking of one of the first expert opinions about this new virus I ever read. This was an interview in early February, when panic was already beginning to spread in Hong Kong, with John Nicholls, a professor of pathology at the University of Hong Kong and one of the world's leading experts on coronaviruses. Said he, quote:
Wash your hands … Basically this is a severe form of the cold.
End quote.
I'm not quoting that to be snarky about Prof. Nicholls, who I am sure wishes he had a deep, warm burrow he could hide in. I'm just making the point that in understanding viruses, we are about where Ptolemy was at understanding the motions of the stars and planets.
A favorite book of mine is Lewis Thomas's The Youngest Science, published in 1974. Thomas was an eminent medical man, Dean of Yale Medical School. Born in 1913 to a medical family, he'd trained as a doctor in the 1930s. Prior to that time, he tells us, there wasn't much a doctor could do for you other than set broken bones, stitch up a wound, or drain an abscess. There was quinine for malaria and digitalis for the heart, but the list of effective medications ran out just about there. That's within living memory.
My own mother, born 1912, was training as a nurse about the same time. The stories I heard from her confirm Lewis Thomas's account. Medicine really is the youngest science.
Within medicine, virology is younger than the young. The first antiviral drug to be approved in the USA was idoxuridine in 1963, when I was at college. Still today there is a great number of viral infections against which no drug is effective— most famously of course the common cold. Virology is the youngest branch of the youngest science.
Our lack of understanding fogs up the near future. How do we get out of this?
For example, I was just reading something about Australia and New Zealand. They have gotten off very lightly in the pandemic, mainly because they've banned almost all inward travel to their territories. As an immigration-restrictionist, naturally I cheer that.
But then I find myself thinking: Wait, aren't they just setting themselves up for mass infection when they re-open their borders, as sooner or later they must? Aren't they then going to be in the same position New World aborigines were in when Europeans showed up five hundred years ago, with no immunity to the viruses incomers would be bringing?
Are they? I don't know. Does anyone?
[Permalink]
04— ChiComs show the steel fist. Ah yes, Australia. Three weeks ago I warned the folk Down Under that they are in danger of becoming a Chinese colony. Their economy, I observed, is heavily dependent on digging minerals out of the ground and selling them to China. They sell a lot of agricultural produce to China, too. And then there is education: Australia gets seven and a half billion dollars a year from Chinese students paying full tuition at Australian universities.
(That was the number I got from a global statistics website. A news story at Breitbart.com this past Monday gives thirty billion. I don't know which figure is right; but plainly educating Chinese students is big business for Australia.)
I'm glad to say the Aussies have not yet sold their birthright for a mess of bean-curd. Scott Morrison, the Australian Prime Minister, has joined our own President Trump and other national leaders in calling for the ChiComs to publish a full account of how they've dealt with the pandemic from its origins. Quote from Prime Minister Morrison:
I don't think anybody's in any fantasy land about where it started. It started in China and what the world over needs to know— and there's a lot of support for this— is how did it start and what are the lessons that can be learned.
That needs to be done independently and why do we want to know that? Because it could happen again.
End quote.
That caused the ChiCom ambassador to Australia, a very lifelike automaton named Cheng Jingye, to give us a glimpse of the iron fist inside the ChiComs' velvet glove. The ambassador didn't say anything about commodity exports, but he did threaten the education, tourism, and agricultural sectors of Australia's economy, honking that, honk:
I think in the long term … if the mood is going from bad to worse, people would think "Why should we go to such a country that is not so friendly to China?" The tourists may have second thoughts … The parents of the students would also think whether this place which they found is not so friendly, even hostile, whether this is the best place to send our kids … Maybe also the ordinary people will say why should we drink Australian wine or eat Australian beef?
End honk.
I guess we should be grateful that the ambassador-bot at least didn't tell us that Australia had hurt the feelings of the Chinese people. I always wince when the ChiComs pull that one, which they do a lot.
The Aussies are so far standing firm on this ChiCom bullying, I'm glad to say. One member of parliament has called the ambassador's remarks, quote, "despicable and menacing." Former Foreign Secretary Alexander Downer, a respected senior figure in Australian politics, said the ambassador had behaved in, quote, "a reckless, undiplomatic way." And so on. There's quite a tiff going on down there.
Ambassador Cheng's remarks fit into a pattern of the ChiComs taking advantage of the present crisis to flex their muscles. They've been leaning hard on Hong Kong the past few days, getting dissidents arrested and tearing big holes in the Basic Law that is supposed to guarantee Hong Kongers' freedoms of speech and assembly until 2047.
If street demonstrations start up again as the lockdown loosens, I'm guessing there will be some serious repression in Hong Kong, perhaps a repeat of Tiananmen Square 1989 with tanks in the streets.
[Permalink]
05— ChiComs go to the mattresses. Australia isn't alone in standing up to ChiCom thuggery. Sweden, of all countries, has taken the lead here. In part this is because the ChiCom ambassador to Sweden is an exceptionally nasty piece of work.
When I was studying Chinese in London forty years ago I once asked our lecturer, a worldly Chinese fellow of whom I can only remember the surname Tang, if there were any movies I could watch to help me understand ChiCom politics. He replied with no hesitation at all: "The Godfather."
That is a very good insight. The Chinese Communist Party is a crime syndicate, a clique of amoral gangsters, ready to do anything at all— lie, steal, torture, murder— to preserve their own power and privilege.
Their ambassador to Sweden illustrates this with exceptional clarity. Interviewed on Swedish public radio last November, he said the following thing, quote:
We treat our friends with fine wine, but for our enemies we have shotguns.
End quote.
That's only a hop and a skip away from "keep your friends close, but your enemies closer." These people, the ChiComs, are hoodlums. As China gets richer and more powerful, the nation's representatives can less and less be bothered to hide the fact.
The biggest irritant in Sweden's relations with the ChiComs has been the case of Gui Minhai, a naturalized Swedish citizen of Chinese birth who, living in Hong Kong, wrote gossipy books about the extravagant, corrupt lifestyles of the ChiCom elites, including capo di tutti capi Xi Jinping. Gui was kidnapped by ChiCom agents in Thailand in 2015. He reappeared in mainland China two years later, but was barred from leaving the country.
In January 2018, Gui— a Swedish citizen, remember— was arrested by plainclothes police while travelling on a train from Shanghai to a medical appointment in Peking, accompanied by two Swedish diplomats. February this year, after a perfunctory show trial, he was given a ten-year jail sentence for, quote, "providing intelligence" to foreign nations. The authorities told us he had renounced his Swedish citizenship … voluntarily. Right. Let's hope Mr Gui is not sleeping with the fishes.
The Swedes have been admirably firm about this. Several Swedish cities have ended their twinning arrangements with Chinese cities. The so-called Confucius Institutes, ChiCom propaganda outlets in Swedish universities, have all been shut down. Last November Sweden's parliament passed a law to compel a national-security review of Chinese telecom company Huawei as a supplier to Sweden's 5G network. When Pew Research polled 34 countries last year on public attitudes to China, Sweden came out as second most negative, after Japan.
So all strength to the Swedes for standing up to the Peking Cosa Nostra. There's a special bit of resonance here for those of us who have dabbled in Sinology: one of the greatest scholars in that field in modern times was Bernhard Karlgren, a Swede. Karlgren himself was before my time— his dates were 1889-1978— but I did once meet his disciple and biographer Göran Malmqvist, another fine Swedish sinologist, who died just last year at age 95.
Karlgren and Malmqvist were scholars of language and literature, not of political science. Still, I'd like to think that they are smiling down with approval at their native country from whatever place it is that Swedish sinologists go when summoned to the Afterlife.
[Permalink]
06— Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: On my occasional theme of educational nationalism, I'm pleased to see that Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas has suggested banning Chinese students from studying STEM subjects in our universities. He told Fox News on Sunday that, quote:
If Chinese students want to come here and study Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers, that's what they need to learn from America. They don't need to learn quantum computing and artificial intelligence from America.
End quote.
The Senator is right, but late. We've educated so many Chinese students the past thirty years that Chinese colleges are now well-staffed with US-educated professors. There's hardly any need for them to send students here any more.
I did smile to read, though, that one unnamed left-wing commentator had mocked Senator Cotton by pointing out that Shakespeare was not an American.
I'd really like to know who that commentator was so I can present him with my Non Sequitur of the Week Award.
[Permalink]
Item: For my Coronavirus Laugh of the Week I direct you to the Twitter feed of my old pal Razib Khan.
As you probably know, Sweden, as well as standing up boldly to the leg-breakers of Peking, has adopted an exceptionally loose model of social monitoring and quarantining, with much-debated results. Here is Razib's tweet from last Tuesday. Tweet:
I googled "the Sweden model" for news, but clicked "images" by mistake. Totally different model …
End tweet.
[Permalink]
Item: As sturdy as the Australians have been in standing up to ChiCom bullying, they have not been immune to the loathsome, nation-killing blight of political correctness.
The issue here is the commemoration this Thursday, April 29th, of Captain Cook's arrival in Australia 250 years ago. The commemoration has of course aroused much wailing and rending of garments from ethnomasochist white Australians and front men for the Aborigine lobbies.
Sample quote from one of the former, a spokesman for the National Museum of Australia, quote:
The perspectives of First Australians, and the Gamayngal people of this area, have been largely missing.
End quote.
Well, yes: Their perspectives have been missing because they were illiterate, and so unable to record their "perspectives."
To that spokesman, and anyone else whose job obliges him to utter similar banalities, I recommend the wise words of Dr Johnson to James Boswell, quote:
Don't cant in defence of savages.
End quote.
[Permalink]
Item: Returning for a moment to the topic of how little we understand about this new coronavirus, here's yet another area where there are as many different explanations on offer as there are commentators.
I've been trying to add some worldwide perspective to my virus commentary. Last week I took a brief look at Africa. This week it's India's turn. How are they doing?
It depends who you ask. In a general sort of way the answer seems to be: not bad. The government has taken a stern line, closing the nation's borders and instituting strict lockdowns. Recorded numbers of infections and deaths from the virus are comparatively low.
All kinds of things may be contributing here. As with Africa, India's population is young: median age 28, ten years younger than America, nearly twenty years younger than Germany or Japan. Also as in Africa, or any other poor country— India's per capita GDP is less than eight thousand dollars, compared with sixty thousand for the USA— as in any poor country with an undeveloped healthcare system, not many people live into old age, when COVID-19 is most deadly.
Again like Africa, India's warm. It's still not clear— not to me, anyway— what effect climate has on COVID-19 mortality, but coronaviruses in general prefer lower temperatures.
There are some more speculative possibilities, too. Our own Lance Welton has been pressing the perfectly plausible case that there may be innate race differences in susceptibility. Racially India is interesting: not so much a race, according to David Reich, as a patchwork of closely-related racelets.
Even further out— this is entirely my own speculation— Indians seem not to mind being peasants as much as Africans do. Sure, there are masses of migrant workers from the countryside in India's cities— or there were before the virus panic started— but they don't live in the kind of desperately overcrowded conditions their African equivalents do.
American blacks, like African blacks, shun the countryside, and head for the cities first chance they get. Is it a black thing?
Whatever. The consensus about India seems to be: lower infection rates overall for the aforementioned reasons, plus what the news stories politely call "incomplete figures."
I'm going to leave it there as just another zone of ignorance.
[Permalink]
Item: Still spanning the world, here's a story from Scotland. The government there, which has a fair degree of autonomy in the U.K., has announced an overhaul of "hate crime" legislation.
Scotland's Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf— there's a fine old Scottish name for you— says there will now be seven-year jail sentences for stirring up hate against the usual protected groups. That will include possession of, quote, "threatening or abusive material" that could lead to hatred being stirred up against one of the favored groups.
So there goes freedom of speech and publication in Scotland. Not that it wasn't mostly gone anyway; it is already a crime to stir up racial hatred, though I feel pretty sure there haven't been any prosecutions for hating on white people. They just want to extend that to all Designated Victim Groups.
In a nice little twist, illustrating yet again that political correctness is a religion for the godless, this new law will abolish the old crime of blasphemy, for which there have been no prosecutions since 1845. Now you can freely curse God and Jesus Christ in Scotland; but don't dare raise your voice against sacralized social groups: blacks, Muslims, women, or sexual eccentrics.
Wait … whose voice is that I'm hearing in my head? Why, it's Robbie Burns:
Lay the proud usurpers low!
Tyrants fall in every foe!
Liberty's in every blow!
Let us do, or die!
[Permalink]
Item: Back in 1922 Europe was struggling back to its feet after the catastrophe of World War One. The British government had put the issue of Irish independence on hold for the duration of the war and a settlement had been reached; but now in Northern Ireland here was the old sectarian conflict come back again. Winston Churchill expressed the mood very eloquently in the House of Commons, famous quote:
As the deluge subsides and the waters fall short we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that has been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world.
End quote.
A lot of international quarrels are like that. They just never seem to go away. Here's another one: Transylvania.
For that small subset of Radio Derb listeners who do not commit to memory everthing I write, let me say that I spent a few days in Transylvania during my youth and was deeply imprinted with the strangeness and— yes!— diversity of the place.
If you look in your atlas, Transylvania is the northwestern quadrant of the modern nation of Romania. It was granted to Romania by the Treaty of Trianon, also after World War One. Before that it had for the longest time been part of the Kingdom of Hungary. Hungarian patriots are still mad as hell about having lost Transylvania a hundred years ago this coming June 4th.
The population nowadays is mostly Romanian but with a big Hungarian minority, seasoned with Serbs, Ruthenians, Croats, Szeklers, Gypsies, Jews, Bosnians, Greeks, and Armenians. Also some German-speaking Saxons who moved there in the Middle Ages. The current President of Romania, Klaus Iohannis, is a Transylvanian Saxon.
President Iohannis has been stirring up trouble, accusing the Hungarian minority in Transylvania of plotting with Hungary's Viktor Orbán to give the region back to Hungary.
I have no idea whether they have been, and don't much care. I'm just enjoying an odd quiet satisfaction from the fact that, in a world of flux, where "change and decay in all around I see," some things are eternal, for ever un-changing.
[Permalink]
07— Signoff. That's it for the first day of May, 2020, ladies and gents. Thank you for listening, and thanks too for your comments, criticisms, and contributions.
Scanning back through the archives, I see this is only the second time the date stamp on the podcast has been May 1st. The last time was in 2009. That's what you'd expect mathematically. The probability of any given calendar date falling on a Friday is one in seven. The podcast is coming up to sixteen years old; sixteen divided by seven is two point three; so two instances of a May 1st date stamp is not surprising.
As an old Bee Gees fan, though, I am a bit surprised that I didn't use them for signout music on this date back in 2009. Here's my chance to make up the omission.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
[Permalink]
[Music clip: The Bee Gees, "First of May."]
Can't load tweet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Te9gLcBn6rA: Sorry, that page does not exist


vdare--2020-05-01--JOHN DERBYSHIRE: Australia, Sweden (!), Sen. Hawley Combat China—But Is Another Tiananmen Square Com

JOHN DERBYSHIRE: Australia, Sweden (!), Sen. Hawley Combat China—But Is Another Tiananmen Square Coming?

[Excerpted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively through VDARE.com]
On my occasional theme of educational nationalism, I'm pleased to see that Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas has suggested banning Chinese students from studying STEM subjects in our universities. He told Fox News::
If Chinese students want to come here and study Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers, that's what they need to learn from America. They don't need to learn quantum computing and artificial intelligence from America. Fox News Transcript, April 26, 2020
The Senator is right, but late. We've educated so many Chinese students the past thirty years that Chinese colleges are now well-staffed with US-educated professors. There's hardly any need for them to send students here anymore.
(I did smile to read, though, that one unnamed left-wing commentator had mocked Senator Cotton by pointing out that Shakespeare was not an American. I'd really like to know who that commentator was so I can present him with my Non Sequitur of the Week Award.)
Two countries (which by a remarkable coincidence seem to have done well in the fight against the WuFlu plague) seem also to be combatting China:
Australia
Three weeks ago I warned the folk Down Under that they are in danger of becoming a Chinese colony. Their economy, I observed, is heavily dependent on digging minerals out of the ground and selling them to China. They sell a lot of agricultural produce to China, too.
And then there is education: Australia gets seven and a half billion dollars a year from Chinese students paying full tuition at Australian universities.
(That was the number I got from a global statistics website. A news story at Breitbart.com this past Monday gives thirty billion [China Warns Australia: Drop Coronavirus Probe or Pay an Economic Price, by Simon Kent, April 27, 2020]. I don't know which figure is right; but plainly educating Chinese students is big business for Australia.)
I'm glad to say the Aussies have not yet sold their birthright for a mess of bean-curd. Scott Morrison, the Australian Prime Minister, has joined our own President Trump and other national leaders in calling for the ChiComs to publish a full account of how they've dealt with the pandemic from its origins. Quote from Prime Minister Morrison:
I don't think anybody's in any fantasy land about where it started. It started in China and what the world over needs to know—and there's a lot of support for this—is how did it start and what are the lessons that can be learned.
That needs to be done independently and why do we want to know that? Because it could happen again.
That caused the ChiCom ambassador to Australia, a very lifelike automaton named Cheng Jingye, to give us a glimpse of the iron fist inside the ChiComs' velvet glove. The ambassador didn't say anything about commodity exports, but he did threaten the education, tourism, and agricultural sectors of Australia's economy, honking that
I think in the long term … if the mood is going from bad to worse, people would think "Why should we go to such a country that is not so friendly to China?" The tourists may have second thoughts … The parents of the students would also think whether this place which they found is not so friendly, even hostile, whether this is the best place to send our kids … Maybe also the ordinary people will say why should we drink Australian wine or to eat Australian beef? Federal Government calls Chinese ambassador about comments on trade boycott over coronavirus inquiry, by Georgia Hitch and Jordan Hayne,Australian Broadcasting Company, April 27, 2020
I guess we should be grateful that the ambassador-bot at least didn't tell us that Australia had hurt the feelings of the Chinese people. I always wince when the ChiComs pull that one, which they do a lot.
The Aussies are so far standing firm on this ChiCom bullying, I'm glad to say. One member of parliament has called the ambassador's remarks "despicable and menacing." Former Foreign Secretary Alexander Downer, a respected senior figure in Australian politics, said the ambassador had behaved in "a reckless, undiplomatic way." And so on. There's quite a tiff going on down there.[Chinese ambassador's coronavirus inquiry warning was 'reckless, undiplomatic,' Alexander Downer says, by Nick Wiggins and Sasha Fegan, Australian Broadcasting Company, April 29, 2020]
Sweden
Sweden, of all countries, is also taking the lead in combatting China. In part this is because the ChiCom ambassador to Sweden is an exceptionally nasty piece of work.
When I was studying Chinese in London forty years ago I once asked our lecturer, a worldly Chinese fellow of whom I can only remember the surname Tang, if there were any movies I could watch to help me understand ChiCom politics. He replied with no hesitation at all: "The Godfather."
That is a very good insight. The Chinese Communist Party is a crime syndicate, a clique of amoral gangsters, ready to do anything at all—lie, steal, torture, murder—to preserve their own power and privilege.
Their ambassador to Sweden illustrates this with exceptional clarity. Interviewed on Swedish public radio last November, he said:
We treat our friends with fine wine, but for our enemies we have shotguns. How Sweden copes with Chinese bullying, The Economist, February 20, 2020
How Sweden copes with Chinese bullying https://t.co/8q52sfVSJM — The Economist (@TheEconomist) February 23, 2020
That's only a hop and a skip away from "keep your friends close, but your enemies closer." These people, the ChiComs, are hoodlums. As China gets richer and more powerful, the nation's representatives can less and less be bothered to hide the fact.
The biggest irritant in Sweden's relations with the ChiComs has been the case of Gui Minhai, a naturalized Swedish citizen of Chinese birth who, living in Hong Kong, wrote gossipy books about the extravagant, corrupt lifestyles of the ChiCom elites, including capo di tutti capi Xi Jinping.
Gui was kidnapped by ChiCom agents in Thailand in 2015. He reappeared in mainland China two years later, but was barred from leaving the country.
In January 2018, Gui—a Swedish citizen, remember—was arrested by plainclothes police while travelling on a train from Shanghai to a medical appointment in Peking, accompanied by two Swedish diplomats. February this year, after a perfunctory show trial, he was given a ten-year jail sentence for "providing intelligence" to foreign nations.
The authorities told us he had renounced his Swedish citizenship…voluntarily. Right.
Let's hope Mr. Gui is not sleeping with the fishes.
The Swedes have been admirably firm about this. Several Swedish cities have ended their twinning arrangements with Chinese cities. The so-called Confucius Institutes, ChiCom propaganda outlets in Swedish universities, have all been shut down [Gothenburg axes twin city agreement with Shanghai as Sweden closes all Confucius Institutes, by Rachel Wong, Hong Kong Free Press, April 24, 2020]. Last November Sweden's parliament passed a law to compel a national-security review of Chinese telecom company Huawei as a supplier to Sweden's 5G network, as reported by the Economist, above. When Pew Research polled 34 countries last year on public attitudes to China, Sweden came out as second most negative, after Japan [People around the globe are divided in their opinions of China, by Laura Silver, Kat Devlin and Christine Huang, December 5, 2019].
So all strength to the Swedes for standing up to the Peking Cosa Nostra.
There's a special bit of resonance here for those of us who have dabbled in Sinology: one of the greatest scholars in the field in modern times was Bernhard Karlgren, a Swede. Karlgren himself was before my time—his dates were 1889-1978—but I did once meet his disciple and biographer Göran Malmqvist, another fine Swedish sinologist, who died just last year at age 95.
Karlgren and Malmqvist were scholars of language and literature, not political science. Still, I'd like to think that they are smiling down with approval at their native country from whatever place it is that Swedish sinologists go when summoned to the Afterlife.
But these bullying ambassadors fit into a pattern of the ChiComs taking advantage of the present crisis to flex their muscles. They've been leaning hard on Hong Kong the past few days, getting dissidents arrested and tearing big holes in the Basic Law that is supposed to guarantee Hong Kongers' freedoms of speech and assembly until 2047 [China Takes Harder Line on Hong Kong Amid Coronavirus Protest Lull, by Joyu Wang and Rachel Yeo, WSJ, April 30, 2020].
If street demonstrations start up again as the lockdown loosens, I'm guessing there will be some serious repression in Hong Kong, perhaps a repeat of Tiananmen Square 1989 with tanks in the streets.
FOOTNOTE: As sturdy as the Australians have been in standing up to ChiCom bullying, they have not been immune to the loathsome, nation-killing blight of Political Correctness.
The issue here is the commemoration this Thursday, April 29th, of Captain Cook's arrival in Australia 250 years ago. The commemoration has of course aroused much wailing and rending of garments from ethnomasochist white Australians and front men for the Aborigine lobbies.
Sample quote from one of the former, a spokesman for the National Museum of Australia, quote:
The perspectives of First Australians, and the Gamayngal people of this area, have been largely missing.
Well, yes: Their perspectives have been missing because they were illiterate, and so unable to record their "perspectives."
To that spokesman, and anyone else whose job obliges him to utter similar banalities, I recommend the wise words of Dr. Johnson to James Boswell:
Don't cant in defense of savages.
John Derbyshire [ email him] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.
For years he’s been podcasting at Radio Derb, now available at VDARE.com for no charge. His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.
Readers who wish to donate (tax deductible) funds specifically earmarked for John Derbyshire's writings at VDARE.com can do so here.


vdare--2020-05-01--ICE, FBI Not Only Deep State Resistance, But Also Corrupt, Due To Hiring Foreigners

There is a reason that ICE SVU and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) don’t polygraph new hires and during renewal of security clearances; both organizations don’t want to uncover corruption and sabotage. Four long years ago I warned President Trump that both ICE SVU and USCIS would be deeply opposed to his immigration agenda and sabotage that same agenda, at least the campaign agenda, not the Jared Kushner agenda that has since evolved [President Trump Will Have Foes In Immigration Bureaucracy—But Also Friends. They Can Help Him Win, April 25, 2016]. The other major enforcement component at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U. S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), routinely polygraphs new applicants and employees under investigation for corruption and misconduct. Consequently, Border Patrol and the Office of Field Operations in CBP are more hard-line than ICE SVU and USCIS.
Then I did not warn of corruption being at the heart of the resistance, and for that I apologize. Corruption, especially at USCIS, is rampant, not only the pecuniary kind, i.e., payment by aliens for benefits, but also ideological corruption. ICE SVU doesn’t want to enforce the law and USCIS wants to approve every benefit that aliens apply for without regard to eligibility, especially the Refugee and Asylum Officer cadre.
But a pro-illegal alien ideology can be quite profitable for ICE SVU saboteurs and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents as well, and, surprise, it’s part of a Brown Run Border.
A Los Angeles-area lawyer bribed FBI and immigration agents to provide “protection” for him, with one scouring law enforcement databases to warn him of ongoing investigations, while the other cooked the books to help a client and a relative with immigration matters, according to a plea agreement filed in federal court this week. The charges against Edgar Sargsyan, 39, are part of a broader series of cases against the agents and a reputed organized crime figure who was convicted last month on charges stemming from a $1 billion renewable fuel tax credit fraud. Mr. Sargsyan admitted in court documents that he paid an FBI agent up to $10,000 to keep an eye on federal databases and alert him if certain people were under investigation. He also admitted to paying the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Homeland Security Investigations agent to try to smooth two immigration-related matters. [ICE, FBI Agents Took Bribes To Provide ‘Protection,’ Cook Books On Immigration Cases, Feds Say, by Stephen Dinan, Washington Times, April 29, 2020]
Iranian Babak Broumand, Would J. Edgar Hoover Have Hired This Guy
So, it looks like we have an Armenian Money Train going here mixed with the usual Hispanic corruption.
The agents aren’t named in the plea agreement, but authorities last week charged former FBI Agent Babak Broumand with conspiracy to commit bribery, accusing him of accepting cash and gifts from a Los Angeles-area lawyer. Mr. Broumand also is accused of obstructing an investigation into one-time HSI Agent Felix Cisneros Jr. Cisneros was convicted of a number of charges in 2018, including helping a Mexican criminal enter the U.S.
It was quite a tangled web that was woven with the immigrant-based Armenian Money Train.
At the center of the activity was Levon Termendzhyan, whom prosecutors called “an Armenian organized crime figure.” He was convicted in Utah in March for the renewable fuel tax credit fraud scheme. Mr. Sargsyan says the HSI agent was paid at least $77,000 to scour databases in order to help the lawyer’s associates. In one case, a German client wanted to enter the U.S. but had a past drug conviction. According to the plea agreement, the HSI agent ran the name through the Department of Homeland Security’s chief law enforcement database, spotted the drug flag and removed the alert, easing the German’s ability to get into the U.S.
Broumand is of Iranian origin, likely an immigrant rather than first generation American given his first name, and Cisneros likely a first generation American, given the Jr. appellation, and of obviously Hispanic origin, working with obviously Armenian immigrants. While one of the beneficiaries was identified as a German, we don’t know if he was a New German, rather than a real German. But the whole case revolves around corrupt immigrants and their immediate descendants corrupting the Federal government. Time to end the Brown Run Border. Stop hiring immigrants and their immediate descendants for Federal and local law enforcement.


vdare--2020-05-02--Always Remember: The Coronavirus Pandemic Is A Product Of Globalization, Political Correctness—And I

Always Remember: The Coronavirus Pandemic Is A Product Of Globalization, Political Correctness—And Immigration

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Earlier: The “China Virus” Came From China And Chinese People. AND IT'S OK TO SAY SO
Always remember this simple truth: THE COVID-19 OUTBREAK IS THE PRODUCT OF GLOBALIZATION, MASS IMMIGRATION AND RAMPANT POLITICAL CORRECTNESS. The Main Stream Media/ Democrat complex is counting on the disease and resulting economic disruption to take down Donald J. Trump’s presidency. But it’s actually shown why nationalism, and a realistic attitude to race, is more relevant than ever. What the U.S. needs going forward: economic self-sufficiency, an immigration moratorium, and a restored sense of national identity so that its leaders can respond quickly in a crisis without the paralyzing fear of being called “racist.”
There is still much we don’t know about the coronavirus, including the deeply controversial question about whether it was man-made, a product of Chinese dietary habits, or some completely unknown source [Chinese lab conducted extensive research on deadly bat viruses, but there is no evidence of accidental release, by Joby Warrick, Ellen Nakashima, Shane Harris, and Anna Fifield, Washington Post, April 30, 2020]. However, we do know that the Chinese government is refusing the World Health Organization’s request for a joint investigation about where the virus came from [China refuses WHO requests to participate in coronavirus investigations: report, by J. Edward Moreno, The Hill, May 1, 2020].
We thus see two critical lies of globalism revealed:
First, China, where American companies have outsourced so much manufacturing and investment, has such contempt for the world that it won’t share data about a plague that has killed tens of thousands and ruined the world economy.
Even the New York Times reported in early February that China ignored requests for help from both the CDC and the WHO “for weeks” [C.D.C. and W.H.O. Offers to Help China Have Been Ignored for Weeks, by Donald G. McNeil Jr. and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, The New York Times, February 7, 2020].
Second, we see that the World Health Organization, like the United Nations, is impotent at best and corrupt at worst when it comes to confronting a real crisis [Tucker Carlson: World Health Organization Is A Lapdog Of The Chinese Government, by Tim Hains, RealClearPolitics, April 1, 2020].
President Trump was right to defund this albatross. He should do the same with the United Nations.
While the MSM/Democrats are bashing Trump now, they were lecturing Americans in late January and early February that it was racist to worry about a virus coming from China [Who’s Right: Donald Trump or the Media?, by Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, April 3, 2020]. Remember the celebratory “reportorials ”(editorials disguised as reporting) about countries, like Canada, that rejected a travel ban because “research” said it wouldn’t work [Research supports Canada’s decision to reject a coronavirus travel ban, by Kelly Grant, Globe and Mail, February 3, 2020]. Suddenly, now they do.
Looking back, it’s striking how similar all these stories about the initial outbreaks were. There were reports that it began with Chinese nationals, followed by stern lectures about why countries must remain open and why racism is the real problem.
It’s almost as the MSM was working from a template:
It may be true that the coronavirus in hard-hit New York came from Europe, not directly from Asia as first reported. However, as Governor Andrew Cuomo said, the virus was already spreading “wildly” in Europe and “we had left the back door open because the virus had left China by the time we did the China ban” [Cuomo: The Coronavirus That Came To New York “Did Not Come From China, It Came From Europe," by Ian Schwartz, RealClearPolitics, April 24, 2020].
But in February, New York’s Latina Health Commissioner, Dr. Oxiris Barbot [Tweet her] was saying those who “spread racist ideas” about the coronavirus represented the greatest risk to New Yorkers and Mark [City leaders seek to allay fears of coronavirus in Chinatown, by Todd Maisel, AMNY.com, February 2, 2020] and Democrat Mark D. Levine [Tweet him], chairman of the New York City Council’s health committee was celebrating New Yorker’s defiance of the virus by visiting Chinatown to show they weren’t afraid.
Similarly, of course, our MSM/Dem Ruling Class has absolutely refused to report on the disease's racial incidence--until they thought they saw an opportunity to blame whites.
Dr. Anthony Fauci suggested Italy, “particularly northern Italy,” was probably what “seeded” New York [New York coronavirus outbreak originated in Europe, new study finds, by Kelly McCarthy, ABC, April 9, 2020].
Why northern Italy? Because northern Italy has quietly become a Chinese colony as tens of thousands have immigrated there to work in illegal clothing factories. The first confirmed cases were Chinese tourists, but the larger problem was the vast Chinese diaspora community [Italy Confirms Two Cases of Coronavirus, by Julia Arciga, Daily Beast, January 30, 2020].
We don’t know how much Chinese immigrants , exploited and crammed together in unhealthy conditions, helped spread the virus in northern Italy, because much of that immigration is illegal. But ironically, the Chinese diaspora in Italy may have awakened to the danger before the Italian government itself and started practicing social distancing after seeing the virus in action in China when they visited to celebrate the Chinese New Year [Coronavirus: why Prato, home to Italy’s biggest single Chinese community, is remarkably unscathed, Reuters, April 1, 2020]. (The same may be true in the U.S.)
In other words, even in the best case scenario, the virus was brought to Italy by Chinese nationals, was spread by an as yet unknown source in an area filled with many illegal Chinese immigrants, and the Chinese diaspora cracked down independently of actions taken by the Italian government.
At some point, an Italian man who had not traveled to China was infected and tested positive on February 20. The Atlantic called him “patient one,” but he wasn’t. The real “patient one” was someone who must have had some contact with China because that’s where the disease came from. He or she spread the disease, perhaps because he was asymptomatic. The mystery is how this man who had not traveled to China was infected, thus setting off the cascade of infections throughout Italy, which eventually hit New York and the East Coast [I can’t stop thinking about patient one, by Rachel Donadio, The Atlantic, April 16, 2020].
However, because of the very nature of the Chinese diaspora in Italy, partially illegal, we may never know how that happened. There may have been a whole series of people carrying the infection, every one of which except the first were not Chinese or had never traveled to China.
What was the solution in this context? Obviously, a total travel ban for the duration of the crisis—and an immigration moratorium, at least temporary, to prevent such internal colonies developing in the first place.
Thus New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, whom no one could call a conservative, said on March 14 that everyone who entered the country had to isolate for two weeks—“among the toughest border restrictions in the world,” according to CNN [How New Zealand ‘eliminated Covid-19 after weeks of lockdown, by Julia Hollingsworth, April 28, 2020]. On March 19, Ardern “banned foreigners from entering the country.” Note that it was only after she did restricted travel and immigration that there was a lockdown, on March 23.
Australia has also been successful. On February 1, conservative Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government barred foreign travelers who had recently been in China. On March 19, Australia’s government completely banned immigration for all non-citizens and non-residents.
In Australia too, it was only after travel and immigration were essentially banned that lockdowns were imposed [How did Australia flatten its coronavirus curve? Restrictions easing as infection rate continues to fall, by Nectar Gan, CNN, May 1, 2020].
Not surprisingly, China is unhappy with Prime Minister Morrison’s call for an independent investigation into how the virus started in the People’s Republic. China is threatening to use the economic weapon against Australia—showing again that the reliance on globalist economic policies makes a country weaker, not stronger [China warns Australia It Could Face Boycotts Over Call for an Independent Inquiry Into Coronavirus, by Rod McGuirk, Time, May 1, 2020]
In the U.S, of course, the MSM/Democrat Complex denounced Trump’s January 31 China travel ban as “racist,” apparently deterring him from stronger measures, and his proposed immigration moratorium was much watered down by White House staff (for now).
Thus there are major lessons from this pandemic that most Democrats and Republicans don’t want to hear:
First, borders can be controlled when leaders really want to do it.
Second, in pandemic situations, borders must be controlled done before any lockdown.
Third, free trade is not a free lunch, but a tradeoff that involves giving up freedom of action and self-sufficiency in return for short-term wealth but long-term reliance on hostile foreign governments and constant foreign migration.
Finally, as we saw in Italy, mass migration and the creation of internal foreign colonies for cheap labor imposes a high price during a crisis. National governments have no idea what’s going on within their own country. Lockdowns, contact tracing, and other methods to track disease vectors are completely pointless when you can’t even tell who is in the country.
When Jacinda Ardern is acting more like a nationalist than Donald Trump/ Javanka, we have a serious problem.
It’s a problem President Trump is going to have to solve if, as he put it recently in his inimitable way, he doesn’t want to “lose to f**ing Joe Biden” because he prioritized short-term stock market performance over long term national survival [Trump erupts over poll slump and threatens to sue campaign manager, by Kenya Evelyn, The Guardian, April 30, 2020].
James Kirkpatrick [Email him |Tweet him @VDAREJamesK] is a Beltway veteran and a refugee from Conservatism Inc. His latest book is Conservatism Inc.: The Battle for the American Right. Read VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow's Preface here.


vdare--2020-05-02--White South African Small Business Owners Denied Coronavirus Pandemic Aid Because They're White—All

White South African Small Business Owners Denied Coronavirus Pandemic Aid Because They're White—All Due to Country's Policy of "Black Economic Empowerment "

Never forget: Democracy is nothing more than a racial headcount.
What does this mean, in laymen’s terms? Don’t lose your country.
If you do, you lost the past, present, and worst, the future.
Coronavirus stirs rancour in South Africa on democracy anniversary, Reuters, April 27 2020
South Africa’s divisions over race and wealth inequality, which the COVID-19 crisis had briefly sidelined, returned to the fore on Monday’s 26th anniversary of the end of apartheid.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has been praised for decisive action to curb the epidemic in Africa’s most industrialised nation, which has one of the continent’s strictest lockdowns and has recorded just 4,546 cases and 87 deaths.
“South Africans have come together like never before to wage the struggle against this virus,” Ramaphosa told the nation.
However, recriminations are rising over inequalities in conditions to cope with the restrictions and distribution of aid around an economy already in recession.
“Our government loves … to keep white people happy and safe, even at the expense of Africans,” complained Julius Malema, firebrand leader of the far-left Economic Freedom Fighters party, in a statement.
At the other end of the political spectrum, white minority party Afriforum and allied union Solidarity threatened legal action against the tourism department which they accused of overlooking white-owned businesses for assistance.
Of a 500 billion rand ($26.64 billion) coronavirus rescue package, nearly a fifth has been set aside for the poor and unemployed. Much of the rest will help businesses keep afloat, not least the ravaged tourism sector.
But Afriforum and Solidarity, who plan to go to court on Tuesday, complained that “the Department of Tourism will … discriminate against you based on the colour of your skin” when it came to deciding who gets aid.
In a rebuff earlier this month, Tourism Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi-Ngubane said that the state was offering one-off small grants to small businesses guided by black empowerment criteria, but added: “Any person or business in the tourism sector can apply for the fund, regardless of the colour of their skin.”
Twenty-six years ago, South Africans rejoiced at their first ever fully inclusive democratic election, which saw Nelson Mandela elected as their first president under black majority rule, ending decades of toxic apartheid.
But critics say Mandela’s legacy party, the African National Congress, has not done enough to redress inequalities in land, wealth and access to services that are apartheid’s most enduring legacy, and which on some measures have worsened.
A government study last year found that whites on average earned more than four times as much as blacks. A year earlier, the state Human Rights Commission said in a report that the richest 10% of South Africans owned more than 90% of wealth.
Daniel Silke, of Political Futures Consultancy, said the coronavirus crisis had briefly put political divisions on the backburner before then pumping them up with “steroids”.
“The corona outbreak has brought into sharpest focus, the … inequalities that exist between black and white people in South Africa,” added Malema in a withering statement few would deny, although it omitted to mention a growing, wealthy black elite that includes him.
“Even when they want to be in self-isolation, our people do not have spacious houses to isolate into because they stay in shacks. Even when they want to keep maximum hygiene … they do not have access to clean water.”
In his televised speech, Ramaphosa acknowledged that while “some people have been able to endure the coronavirus lockdown in a comfortable home with a fully stocked fridge, for millions of others, this has been a month of misery, of children going to bed and waking up hungry.”


vdare--2020-05-02--Flight from White, Part 472: Justin Amash Doesn't Want To Be White

Of the three candidates, I’m the only one not of white European ancestry. — Justin Amash (@justinamash) April 30, 2020
Congressman Justin Amash (Libertarian-Michigan) is of Levantine Christian descent:
Justin Amash was born on April 18, 1980, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His father Attallah Amash is a Palestinian Christian who immigrated to the United States in 1956 through the sponsorship of an American pastor and his family. His mother Mimi is a Syrian Christian who met his father through family friends in Damascus, Syria and later married in 1974.
People of this ancestry have been considered white/Caucasian by the federal government for about 100 years. I believe there was a court case in the early 20th Century over this question, with the decisive argument being that Jesus was white and He was a Levantine Christian.
[Comment at Unz.com]


vdare--2020-05-01--Transylvania: Where Nationalism Is Still Alive...Or Possibly Undead

Back in 1922 Europe was struggling back to its feet after the catastrophe of World War One. The British government had put the issue of Irish independence on hold for the duration of the war and a settlement had been reached; but now in Northern Ireland here was the old sectarian conflict come back again. Winston Churchill expressed the mood very eloquently in the House of Commons,
As the deluge subsides and the waters fall short we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that has been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world [Speech on the Ireland Situation, February 16, 1922].
A lot of international quarrels are like that. They just never seem to go away. Here's another one: Transylvania.
For that small subset of readers who do not commit to memory everything I write, let me say that I spent a few days in Transylvania during my youth and was deeply imprinted with the strangeness and—yes!—diversity of the place.
If you look in your atlas, Transylvania is the northwestern quadrant of the modern nation of Romania. It was granted to Romania by the Treaty of Trianon, also after World War One. Before that it had for the longest time been part of the Kingdom of Hungary. Hungarian patriots are still mad as hell about having lost Transylvania a hundred years ago this coming June 4th.
The population nowadays is mostly Romanian but with a big Hungarian minority, seasoned with Serbs, Ruthenians, Croats, Szeklers, Gypsies, Jews, Bosnians, Greeks, and Armenians. Also some German-speaking Saxons who moved there in the Middle Ages. The current President of Romania, Klaus Iohannis, is a Transylvanian Saxon.
President Iohannis has been stirring up trouble, accusing the Hungarian minority in Transylvania of plotting with Hungary's Viktor Orbán to give the region back to Hungary.
I have no idea whether they have been, and don't much care. I'm just enjoying an odd quiet satisfaction from the fact that, in a world of flux, where "change and decay in all around I see," some things are eternal, forever un-changing.


vdare--2020-05-03--Derb's April Diary: Lockdown Lit; Great Unpublishables;  And Down And Out In New York City, Etc.  [1

Derb's April Diary: Lockdown Lit; Great Unpublishables;  And Down And Out In New York City, Etc.  [12 ITEMS!]

It's May! Above, Derb dances around a Maypole with actress Lily James.
Lockdown Lit. I think every educated person keeps somewhere in his head a mental list of Great Books he hasn't read. This lockdown is a good opportunity to tick a box or two on that list. Well, I have now read Middlemarch.
Spoiler alert. If you haven't read Middlemarch but are planning to, this segment, and the next, and the next but two ("Great unpublishables") contain references to the plot.
I came late to George Eliot. It was my mid-thirties. I was teaching English at a college in provincial China. The college had a library with a small English-language section. For leisure-time reading I plundered that section. It included Eliot's first three novels: Adam Bede (whose story is set in Derbyshire), The Mill on the Floss, and Silas Marner. No Middlemarch, though.
Having enjoyed those three, and knowing that Middlemarch is the book Eliot is best remembered for, I resolved to read it when I returned to England. It's a dauntingly big book, though—eight hundred pages in my Penguin Classics paperback—and once back in England I had to find a job and restore my finances … then I moved to the States … then I got married … What with one thing and another, the Middlemarch box on my mental list remained unticked for 37 years.
That was far too long. Middlemarch is a lovely book: rich and deep, with a strong narrative thread and sound psychological insight. "One of the few English novels written for grown-up people," said Virginia Woolf, and for once I agree with the crazy old bat.
I had to pause to look things up: "pilulous," "megrim," "Harpagon," "leather and prunella," … Also, enstupidated as I am from too much Twitter browsing, there were sentences I had to read twice to get the sense of them:
No one quicker than Rosamond to see causes and effects which lay within the track of her own tastes and interests: she had seen clearly Lydgate's preeminence in Middlemarch society, and could go on imaginatively tracing still more agreeable social effects when his talent should have advanced him; but for her, his professional and scientific ambition had no other relation to these desirable effects than if they had been the fortunate discovery of an ill-smelling oil.
If you're not willing to apply some mental effort, though, don't read Victorian novels.
The nearest I can get to finding any fault with Middlemarch is, I wish the author could have included a nice lively girl for Mr Farebrother to marry … but perhaps that would have made the plot a bit too symmetrical.
[Permalink]
Mr. Brooke's Joe Biden moment. I defy any present-day American to read Chapter 51 of Middlemarch without Joe Biden coming to mind.
Mr. Brooke is running for election to parliament. He has to give a speech to the electors of Middlemarch from a balcony overlooking the town market-place. Nervous, he fortifies himself with a second glass of sherry: "a surprise to his system which tended to scatter his energies instead of collecting them."
The speech is a disaster:
He began with some confidence.
"Gentlemen—Electors of Middlemarch!"
This was so much the right thing that a little pause after it seemed natural. "I'm uncommonly glad to be here—I was never so proud and happy in my life—never so happy, you know."
This was a bold figure of speech, but not exactly the right thing; for, unhappily, the pat opening had slipped away—even couplets from Pope may be but "fallings from us, vanishings," when fear clutches us, and a glass of sherry is hurrying like smoke among our ideas. Ladislaw, who stood at the window behind the speaker, thought, "it's all up now. The only chance is that, since the best thing won't always do, floundering may answer for once." Mr Brooke, meanwhile, having lost other clews, fell back on himself and his qualifications—always an appropriate graceful subject for a candidate.
"I am a close neighbor of yours, my good friends—you've known me on the bench a good while—I've always gone a good deal into public questions—machinery, now, and machine-breaking—you're many of you concerned with machinery, and I've been going into that lately. It won't do, you know, breaking machines: everything must go on—trade, manufactures, commerce, interchange of staples—that kind of thing—since Adam Smith, that must go on. We must look all over the globe:—'Observation with extensive view,' must look everywhere, 'from China to Peru,' as somebody says—Johnson, I think, 'The Rambler,' you know. That is what I have done up to a certain point—not as far as Peru; but I've not always stayed at home—I saw it wouldn't do. I've been in the Levant, where some of your Middlemarch goods go—and then, again, in the Baltic. The Baltic, now …"
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Quantifying the death of the novel. Speaking of novels, Joseph Epstein has a long grumbly piece in the current Commentary about how no-one takes novels seriously any more.
Joseph Bottum mentions Andrew Ferguson's cocktail-party test for books—would you be embarrassed at a cocktail party for not having read it?—and notes the last such novel Ferguson cites passing this test was Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities in 1987.
Well, duh. Things aren't real until you quantify them, though. I did the quantification leg-work in Chapter 4 of We Are Doomed:
An approximate measure of glory in our culture is getting your picture on the cover of Time magazine. How are authors doing on that? …
As of early 2009, it has been over ten years since Time did a cover story on an author. That was Tom Wolfe (Nov. 2, 1998). Two other authors showed up in the 1990s: Toni Morrison (Jan. 19, 1998) and Michael Crichton (Sept. 25, 1995). So that's three for the 1990s, none to date for the 2000s …
Ignoring the poets and scaling where necessary, I have for the past nine decades (present to past), the following numbers of authors with Time cover stories to their glory:
2000s: 0
1990s: 3
1980s: 3
1970s: 5
1960s: 6
1950s: 7
1940s: 5
1930s: 10
1920s: 12
If you add in the poets:
2000s: 0
1990s: 3
1980s: 3
1970s: 5
1960s: 9
1950s: 9
1940s: 5
1930s: 13
1920s: 16
Allowing the 1940s as a pardonable lapse, the trend is all too plain. If "the chief glory of every people arises from its authors," we have clear run out of glory.
You're welcome, guys.
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Great unpublishables. As mentioned in last month's diary, I was reading the Joseph Mitchell anthology Up in the Old Hotel. Following that with Middlemarch, I was struck by one of those occurrences for which there is no word in English, although there ought to be. The meaning is something like "not quite a coincidence."
One of the mid-20th-century New York City characters in Up in the Old Hotel is bohemian eccentric Joe Gould. He gets a 19-page sketch near the beginning of the book, then a much fuller 93-page description—it was actually published as a book in itself, then made into a movie—at the very end. Joseph Mitchell was plainly fascinated by Gould.
Every day, even when he has a bad hangover or even when he is weak and listless from hunger, he spends at least a couple of hours working on a formless, rather mysterious book that he calls "An Oral History of Our Time." He began this book twenty-six years ago, and it is nowhere near finished.
It was still unfinished when Gould died in 1957 at age 67, and was never published. To say more would spoil the story Joseph Mitchell tells.
Forward to this month and Middlemarch. A major character in the novel is the cold, dry clergyman Edward Casaubon, whose life is dedicated to a massive scholarly work titled Key to All Mythologies. His wife, an earnest soul who married Casaubon with the hope of being able to help him complete the work, eventually perceives that it has, in fact, no scholarly value, and is probably unpublishable. Casaubon dies, the book for ever unfinished and unpublished.
There is the not-quite-coincidence ("coincidencette"? "quasi-coincidence"?) I read two books, one after the other, one nonfiction and the other fiction, both featuring a huge unpublished and probably unpublishable manuscript.
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Down and out in New York City. Also featuring in Joseph Mitchell's book is the Occidental Hotel, "at the southwest corner of Broome and the Bowery."
The Occidental was quite a grand place in the 1890s and 1900s, before the Bowery slid out of respectability. Among its patrons was Timothy D. Sullivan, "the Tammany boss of the Bowery district … the most powerful and the most open-handed politician in the city."
He was a member of a syndicate which controlled all the gambling houses in Manhattan, he owned saloons, racehorses, and prizefighters, and he had a partnership in a chain of vaudeville and burlesque theatres. His clubrooms were at 207 Bowery, but he also kept a suite on the second floor of the Occidental, where he and other politicians played poker and he received reports from the managers of his various enterprises.
What got my attention there in Mitchell's book was that phrase "at the southwest corner of Broome and the Bowery." As it happens, I once lived at exactly that location, in a seedy just-not-quite flophouse called the Pioneer Hotel. That was in the fall of 1973, when the Bowery had become a slum. Like Big Tim, I kept a suite on the second floor — Room 93. And yes, checking up, it was the same hotel.
That whole area has undergone major gentrification since 1973. The Pioneer is now the Sohotel. A room the size of mine at the Sohotel today will cost you $159 a night. Back in the day I paid either $4.25 or $4.75, I forget precisely. That's an annual compounding rate of either 8 or 7¾ percent across 47 years—way better than the 3.9 percent for overall inflation.
(The Occidental/Pioneer/Sohotel is not, I should add, the "old hotel" in the title of Mitchell's anthology. That's a different place, the Fulton Ferry Hotel, at 92 South Street, down by the old Fulton Fish Market. Last I heard, the ground floor of the Fulton Ferry Hotel is today a bicycle rental shop. I don't know what's happened to the upper floors.)
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Speaking truth to power. April 13th we had a storm. It wasn't anything dramatic: rain, wind … until we heard an almighty BANG! outside and the power failed.
We get our power from overhead wires that are held aloft on wooden utility poles. Where wires meet pole they sometimes pass through a big cylindrical tub fixed to the pole. Transformer? Don't ask me.
The utility pole nearest our house was old and rotten. The weight of the tub, with an assist from the wind, had snapped it. The tub would have dropped to the ground with all its wires if a mess of tree branches hadn't got in the way. If anyone had been passing by the pole, or even sitting in a parked car right there, serious injury might have been done.
In the fullness of time—it took 24 hours—the utility company sent a crew round to plant a handsome new pole, fix the tub on it, and rewire the whole arrangement. You can see the rotten old pole (at right) and the spiffy new one (at left, with tub) here. I have a portable generator, so we didn't suffer any great inconvenience, though the street was closed for those 24 hours with wires all over.
Something similar happens every couple of years, which is why I bought a generator. Each time I find myself wondering why we have overhead power lines. I grew up on a public-housing estate, built from scratch in the late 1940s on the outskirts of a small English town. I subsequently lived all over England, in every kind of neighborhood from leafy upper-middle-class suburbs to Victorian slums. All those places were comprehensively and reliably electrified, but I never saw overhead power lines in any of them. Nor did I ever know anyone who owned a generator, as most of my Long Island neighbors do.
Do other First World countries have overhead power lines in residential neighborhoods? Does Australia? Sweden? Poland? Japan? It seems to me like a really bad idea.
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Michigan's strict governess. In my April 17th podcast I had some fun with the power-crazed governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer:
Targets for my hate this week will be the Democratic Party of course, innumerate journalists, reckless globalization, the language police, false religions, Jeff Bezos, and the Governess of Michigan. That is the female of "Governor," isn't it? "Governess"? I think so.
I can't resist a smile when typing the word "Governess." For me it has a slightly salacious color to it. That is a result of my having gone to college where and when I did: in West-Central London, the early 1960s.
Within walking distance of my college was Soho, at that time still a red light district of the old type, with streetwalkers actually walking the streets, or at any rate hanging out on the street corners calling out suggestively to possible customers. Soho also had a lot of good cheap restaurants; Charing Cross Road, which bordered it on the east, was home to many bookshops; the West End—theaters, movie houses—was a few minutes walk further on.
So one way and another I spent a lot of time in and around early-1960s Soho. One of the minor amusements of doing so was reading the business cards on display, advertising specialist services available from the resident ladies. These cards would be Scotch-taped to the wall behind the phone in the old-style public phone booths, or pinned to notice-boards in open entrance-ways with flights of stairs leading up.
Swedish and Karate Lessons from Karla, 2nd Floor.
Relief massage—Call MUSeum-3277, ask for Lulu.
That kind of thing. There was generally a card from a governess in there:
Strict governess will discipline naughty boys—Madame Whippe-Lashe, 3rd Floor
Would it give offense to Governess Whitmer to know that I thought of her in this precise context? I hope so.
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Over-lawyered? Are we—the Anglosphere in general, the U.S.A. in particular—over-lawyered? Leslie Carwell's book April Fools' Day Every Day in the Courts makes the case that we are, simply by listing short (one- or two-page) summaries, in plain language, of 171 cases that have been litigated since 1905, the great majority of them in the past forty years.
Every kind of make-work for our legions of lawyers is covered here: imagined new entitlements, workplace grievances, shakedowns of "deep pocket" defendants, improbable claims of emotional distress, prisoner lawsuits (what else is there to do in the pokey?), litigious compulsives, amateur constitutional scholars, … Hit with a civil paternity suit? Countersue for a stud fee. Accidentally shot yourself with a gun you stole? Sue the manufacturer.
Carwell's stated intent is to entertain. He takes a light approach, denying any lawyer-bashing intentions: "Far from it. It's an admirable feat what the [legal] industry has managed to pull off in full daylight in every country at every level and for so long."
Almost all of Carwell's cases in fact come from court records in the U.S.A., with appellate courts most heavily represented. There are also five cases from Canada, four from the U.K., and one each from Australia and New Zealand. The author helpfully provides an URL for each case so that you can see the original documents on the internet as PDFs.
I'm glad to live in a society under the rule of law. Speaking some years ago with a visitor from mainland China, I grumbled about the over-lawyering of America. He disagreed very forcefully: "You can't have too many lawyers. You can't. Impossible. Never too many."
Given where my visitor was coming from, I saw his point, but … never too many? Leslie Carwell's book left me wondering.
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The Fab Four Humors. And yet another coincidencette, this one concerning the Beatles.
Our weekly rental from Netflix for Saturday, April 25th was the 2019 Brit-flick Yesterday. It's an alternate-world story: there's a hiccup in the spacetime continuum causing the lead character, a penniless and unknown guitarist, to find himself in a world identical to his own in almost every way except that on his new world-line the Beatles never existed and no-one knows any of their songs. He does what you'd expect, attaining international fame and fortune.
I've been a sucker for alternate-world stories since reading Damon Knight's "What Rough Beast" at age fourteen in Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine. [February, 1959]
(Concerning which magazine—this is totally unrelated to the main point—did you know that Jared Taylor once had a short story published in F&SF? See the August 1991 issue. [PDF] I am so envious—really. The story is ingenious. On some alternate world-line my fellow Thought Criminal is an internationally-famous writer of short stories.)
Yesterday isn't bad: light and a bit silly, but it makes approximate sense on its premises, and Lily James is easy on the eye. ("Hot? Nah, but cute," is the verdict of my 24-year-old son, whose judgment in these matters I take to be dispositive.) Then there are the songs, which have aged wonderfully well across fifty-odd years.
So I exited the weekend with the Beatles on my mind—the part of my mind, I mean, not still occupied by Lily James. Then on Monday my subscription copy of Literary Review arrived from London. What should I find on page 12 but a full-length review of a new book about the Beatles: Craig Brown's One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time. The review is by Dominic Green. (That's right: Green reviewing a book by Brown. Magazine editors find amusement where they can.)
At 642 pages Brown's book isn't as long as Middlemarch, but it's sufficiently amazing that he could get that much material out of a subject that's been so thoroughly worked over across so many decades. After reading Dominic Green's review, though, I think I'll pass on the book itself.
The Beatles begin in four-part harmony, but after a while they no longer know who they are. Brown notes how each of them personifies a different element: John is fire, Paul is water, Ringo is earth, George is air.
Uh-huh. If I remember my Four Humors theory correctly, that means that John was choleric ("have enormous vitality and get angry quickly"), Paul phlegmatic ("deep thinkers, fair, calm, willing to compromise, and hard workers"), Ringo melancholic ("very sensitive, and enjoy artistic pursuits"), and George sanguine ("confident, joyful, optimistic, expressive, and sociable"). As personality sketches of the Fab Four, those aren't even close.
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Left behind. Like the protagonist of Yesterday, I may myself have slipped through a rent in the fabric of the cosmos at some point in the last few years without noticing. He found himself on a world-line where no-one knew the Beatles; I find myself on one where everyone except me knows who Ed Sheeran is. Even my wife, who is by no means a close follower of current pop, recognized Ed when he showed up in the movie.
Who is Ed Sheeran? What is Tik Tok? Who or what is the Tiger King? Don't bother telling me; I'm not even trying to keep up any more.
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Central concerns. On March 27th VDARE.com posted a piece under my name with the title "John Derbyshire, 30 Miles From Coronavirus Epicenter, Is Skeptically Social Distancing."
The piece was an edited extract from my Radio Derb of that date. The deal is, when I send in the audio of a Radio Derb podcast, I attach a full transcript for the VDARE.com editors to use in any way they please. If they need an article for the website, they can cannibalize distill one from parts of the podcast transcript.
Well, that piece drew the following email from a reader:
You may be innocent, and someone else wrote the headline, but "epicenter" doesn't mean what everyone now using it thinks it means, i.e., an even grander, more deadly, more powerful, etc., location than an ordinary center. But as you no doubt know, it means the spot on the earth's surface above (as in epidermis) the center of an earthquake, which may be many miles below. So metaphorically it actually diminishes the effect that the writers and news readers are striving for since earthquake forces far away at the earth's surface are necessarily weaker than those at its center.
I replied:
I am indeed innocent: You can hear me say "center" at 8m05s here. The transcript confirms.
That said, I must confess that if the newspaper I am quoting had said "epicenter" I would likely have repeated it without thinking. It is always good to be reminded of the need for precision in usage. Thank you!
Since then I have of course been seeing "epicenter" all over. I might be using—I mean, mis-using—the word myself if that reader hadn't sensitized me (although I hope I wouldn't be).
Given the massive misuse of "epicenter," there is a lot of corrective work to be done here, many souls to be saved. Get on it, VDARE.com readers! Onward, word-precision soldiers!
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Math Corner. John Horton Conway died on April 11th, aged 82. There is a good full obituary in the April 25th Economist. Like the Beatles, Conway was a native Liverpudlian—three years older than John Lennon. He apparently died from COVID-19.
There is a wealth of books by and about Conway. A favorite of mine is The Book of Numbers, which Conway co-wrote with Richard Guy. You can open it at wellnigh any page and find something interesting. (Well, if you think numbers are interesting.) Among Conway's research subjects was the monster group, a/k/a the friendly giant group, a family of symmetries in a space of 196,883 dimensions: he gives it a passing mention on page 62 of The Book of Numbers.
Conway attained lasting fame outside the sphere of professional mathematicians in 1970, when Martin Gardner, in his Scientific American column, described Conway's Game of Life. If you're not acquainted with it, take a look. The rules for the Game of Life (unlike those for the game of life) are absurdly simple, and it only uses two dimensions of space. "In the early 1970s a quarter of the world's computers were playing it," says The Economist.
Mine certainly was in 1970. Those were mainframe days, of course. I was a couple of years into my career as a programmer, helping to develop an interpreter for the then-newish BASIC language on ICL System 4 mainframes. We only had teletype machines for input and output—no monitors—but I got the Game of Life coded up in no time and wasted great stacks of teletype paper printing successive generations of the game for different starting configurations.
R.I.P. John Horton Conway … and thanks!
OK, a brainteaser. This is from the National Museum of Mathematics in New York City. The place is, like everything else, currently closed; but they are running an online subscription feature called Mind-Benders for the Quarantine, with a new brainteaser every Sunday. Here's one from mid-April. It got my attention because I had just posted something about hand-shaking.
Handshakes at a Party
Nicholas and Alexandra went to a reception with ten other couples; each person there shook hands with everyone he or she didn't know. (Obviously, this took place before the COVID-19 epidemic.) Later, Alexandra asked each of the other 21 partygoers with how many people they shook hands, and got a different answer every time.
With how many people did Nicholas shake hands?
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vdare--2020-05-03--Self-Reported Workplace Discrimination, by Race—Real Life Isn't Like Twitter

Twitter is not real life:
The question is a binary one, so the residual percentages–representing vast majorities of people of every race–are those who answered they do not in any way feel discriminated against at work on account of their race or ethnicity.
Race is not merely a social construct. It’s a biological one, too, and average group differences are empirical realities, not pseudoscience. That said, the neo-liberal establishment and its Woke useful idiots make American life much more contentious, mistrustful, and anxiety-inducing than it should be.
General Social Survey variables used: WKRACISM, YEAR(2012-2018), RACECEN1(1)(2)(3)(4-10), HISPANIC(1)(2-50)
[Comment at Unz.com]


vdare--2020-05-03--Audacious Epigone: China Slides—Now As Unpopular With Americans As Russia

Four weeks ago, we looked at the change in American sentiment towards China from the beginning of March, before the coronavirus shutdown, and again at the end of March, once shelter-in-place had been instituted nearly nationwide. Of mild surprise was the discovery that Americans expressed less hostility towards China after corona came to the US in a big way than before the virus turned society upside down.
The store of goodwill Americans carried a couple of weeks into the lock down looks to have been exhausted. By the end of April, six weeks into economic catastrophe and official indications–seriously challenged by the Unz Review’s eponym–that the virus originated in a Chinese virology lab rather than in a wet market, sentiments have headed south:
Nearly two-thirds of Democrats now regard China as either “unfriendly” or an “enemy”, up from half of Democrats a month ago. China is now, for the first time since YouGov began this module of questions three years ago, on par with Russia in terms of American resentment.
[Comment on Unz.com]


vdare--2020-05-03--How the Trump White House Stays Healthy—By Testing Everyone

Unlike Boris Johnson’s government, the Trump White House has done a good job of staying healthy. How?
From the New York Times:
Capitol Lacks Tests for Returning Senators While White House Tests Many in Trump’s Circle
As senators prepare to return on Monday, Congress’s doctor warned that he does not have the capacity to test all 100 for coronavirus. At the White House, the president and many of his aides are tested repeatedly.
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Nicholas Fandos and Katie Rogers
May 1, 2020
WASHINGTON — Dr. Brian P. Monahan, the tight-lipped doctor who attends to Congress, sent up on Thursday what some have construed as a warning: His office, he told senior Republican officials on a private conference call, cannot screen all 100 senators for the coronavirus when they return to work on Monday.
Two miles down Pennsylvania Avenue at the White House, the story is very different. President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence are tested frequently, aides who come into close contact with them are tested weekly and the list of people who need to be tested daily keeps expanding, according to officials familiar with the process.
… At the White House, the medical unit is using a rapid-testing kit developed by Abbott, which yields results in about five minutes. But Dr. Monahan told the Republican aides on Thursday that he lacked such equipment, and that it would take at least two days to get test results. …
…Shortly after 11 p.m. Friday, Mr. Trump’s health secretary, Alex M. Azar II, made an announcement on Twitter: “Good news: as the Senate reconvenes to do important work for the American people during this public health crisis, we have now received an initial request and are sending 3 Abbott point of care testing machines and 1,000 tests for their use.”
Whether that will lead to the testing of asymptomatic senators is unclear. Dr. Monahan, a strait-laced Navy rear admiral who has been the attending physician of the Capitol since 2009, has turned down dozens of requests for tests from House members and senators who have not exhibited symptoms, according to a congressional official with knowledge of the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss it.
His attitude is by the book: no symptoms, no test, which is in keeping with the C.D.C.’s guidelines for testing. In detailed guidance issued to lawmakers on Friday, Dr. Monahan advised that members of Congress wear masks or facial coverings when they cannot stand six feet apart from one another.
… Visitors to the White House are also tested before they are allowed to be close to the president, including groups of business leaders and governors this week like John Bel Edwards of Louisiana.
“The governor and Alex Billioux, who is our assistant secretary of public health, both were tested for Covid-19 when they arrived and before they could go into the White House,” Christina Stephens, a spokeswoman for Mr. Edwards, said on Friday. “They also had their temperatures checked several times before entering the Oval Office.”
Reporters who have been traveling with Mr. Pence have undergone coronavirus testing and journalists traveling with Mr. Trump to Arizona next week have been advised that they will be tested before boarding Air Force One.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California had not been tested as of Friday. Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the top House Republican, has, but at the White House, where Mr. McCarthy attended an event with the president last week. …


vdare--2020-04-30--NEW REPUBLIC Points And Sputters At VDARE.com And Roy Beck, But Makes No Attempt To Refute Us

The New Republic's review of All-American Nativism, by Daniel Denvir [Tweet him | Email him] ("A searing critique of the big big business nativists dictating our immigration policy—and the moderate Democrats that put them in power") includes attacks on Peter Brimelow, whose seminal 1995 book Alien Nation received a review in the Atlantic, and Roy Beck, who wrote The Ordeal Of Immigration In Wausau, which also appeared in the Atlantic in April 1994.
A theme of Daniel Denvir’s book All-American Nativism is the role that liberal political journals have played in giving cover to deeply reactionary ideas. In the 1990s, The Atlantic published a long and sympathetic review of the book Alien Nation by Peter Brimelow. While he was not yet the far-right webmaster he would become—his site VDARE today tags articles with the label “Immigrant Mass Murder”—Brimelow argued in his book that white Americans have a “legitimate interest in their country’s racial balance” and that the balance should be tilted back to a whiter era. Statements like that made the reviewer uncomfortable, but he ultimately praised the book as “powerful” and “painfully honest.” Another article published around the same time in the same magazine was a report from former journalist Roy Beck on a small Wisconsin town struggling to resettle Hmong refugees. While soberly reported, the story was darkly framed as “a possible American future” if immigration laws remained the same, where pregnancies in junior high among new arrivals were common and the small town’s new inscrutable foreign neighbors were said to act as a drain on the public treasury. How Democrats Let the Right Win on Immigration A new book traces the ways liberals have enabled nativism and xenophobia for decades, by Alex Amend, April 28, 2020
The reason we call this a point-and-sputter attack is that author Amend [Tweet him] makes no attempt to show that Hmong immigration wasn't bad for Wausau, that Hmong don't have lots and lots of teenage pregnancies, and that they weren't a drag on the public treasury.
They're also, of course, rapists, murderers, kidnappers, and gang members—and have committed several of the crimes we tag "Immigrant Mass Murder".
Chai Soua Vang's slaughter of six whites in Wisconsin was the subject of the late Sam Francis's Why Immigrants Kill in 2004.
Chiew Chan Saevang's killing of four fellow Hmong in Greensboro, NC (Saevang killed the wife and three children of a Hmong drug smuggler he was trying to rob) was the subject of Bloody Mass Murder Stems From Mass Immigration in 2009.
Nengmy Vang's killing of four more whites in Wisconsin was the subject my post NarrativeCollapse.com: Hmong Gunman Kills Four People In Wisconsin.
And finally, the Hmong gang shooting with four Hmong killed and six wounded by other, so far unidentified Hmong, was the subject of my post Fresno Asian Mass Shooting Involves Hmong...As Usual. in 2019.
As for the "drain on the public treasury", page immigration enthusiast Sanford Ungar, whose 1995 book Fresh Blood: The New American Immigrants, was reviewed in the pre-purge National Review in 1996, where Brimelow wrote
...Mr. Ungar does find Hmong who tell him flatly that they have congregated in Minnesota because of its generous welfare benefits, timing both marriage and divorce to exploit the rules. Several of the successful immigrants he cites are themselves employed by welfare agencies, sometimes specifically to deal with problems caused by their immigrant countrymen. Ungar's admiring account of how home-grown American social activists fought to facilitate the settling of Cambodian refugees in Revere, Massachusetts, is a litany of tax moneys extorted and spent, ending with his editorial complaint that "tax-limiting voter initiatives passed in the 1980s restrict the city council's ability to raise new funds to pay for the necessary programs." The result, Mr. Ungar reports without a qualm, is a filthy slum, racial violence, and warring Asian gangs.
So to recap, everything that Peter Brimelow wrote in Alien Nation and Roy Beck published in the Atlantic is true. Everything we say about Immigrant Mass Murder (and the general awfulness of Hmong immigration) is true.
But Denvir and the New Republic either don't know that, or think it's wrong that we're allowed to say it. They certainly have made no attempt to refute it.