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My favorite Sesame Street character is Count von Count, an amiable vampire who always refers to himself in the third person in his thick Transylvanian accent—"The Count loves counting!"—as he enumerates everything in sight.

I love counting, too, which is why I find Richard Lynn's books, such as 2002's IQ and the Wealth of Nations, irresistible: Lynn is another countaholic.

Lynn's latest, The Chosen People: A Study of Jewish Intelligence and Achievement, tabulates the consistently impressive performance of Northern European Jews—known as “Ashkenazi” Jews, as opposed to the Sephardic Jews from Spanish or Portuguese backgrounds, such as Benjamin Disraeli—across many fields in 17 different countries. Lynn, a psychology professor emeritus at the University of Ulster, calculates "Achievement Quotients" of how heavily Jews are represented in a broad range of desirable categories, from the professions to bridge champions.

To summarize Lynn's findings: Ashkenazi Jews do well in every country they inhabit, and in most every field in which they compete.

Jewish organizations devote much energy to counting the number of high-achieving Jews, as the many Jewish websites devoted to listing famous Jews attest. (For example, here is the Google search page for "Jewish baseball players").

So this information is available to anyone with an internet connection. But it is presently considered Just Not Done for gentiles like Lynn to take a scientific interest in such matters—no matter how appreciative their attitude.

In contrast, the federal government spends huge sums counting blacks, Hispanics, and whites for the purpose of rectifying white "overrepresentation" through quotas and lawsuits.

Lynn, however, blithely plunges ahead with his task. And he is quite right to do so. The impact of Jewish intelligence in the modern world could hardly be more important—or less studied.

For example, the Jewish record in winning Nobel Prizes is extraordinary. Lynn cites Nobel laureate data compiled by the Israel Science and Technology Homepage, a website run by biochemist Israel Hanukoglu, who was the chief science advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu during his first term as prime minister. Updating Lynn's Nobel numbers to include the recently announced 2011 prizes, we find:

The "National Foundation for American Policy”  (NFAP) came out with a policy brief on employment based visas for foreign workers. [Reforming America’s Regulations and Policies on Employment-Based Immigration (PDF)]If you are wondering why you should care, consider this: the mass media and the Washington DC elitists and policymakers consider the NFAP to be a paragon of truth.

 NFAP lobbyists are the voice Congress hears when they are making policy decisions. There is a new push to pass legislation for more H-1B visas and employment based green cards (EB). Most of the arguments that are being put forth for more visas can be found in the NFAP policy paper. Since we can expect politicians and the media to quote this study to justify the importation of more foreign workers it's worthwhile to analyze excerpts of it's main points.

Before discussing the study it's perhaps useful to describe what the NFAP is. In simple terms they are a lobby group disguised as a non-profit research organization.

They are another sordid example of the revolving doors in Washington DC where ex-government officials use their expertise and influence to milk the system to the benefit of special interests. Here is a brief rundown of the NFAP cast of characters:

Revolving door #1—Stuart Anderson: if there is one character who is as infamous as lobbyist Harris Miller it's Stuart Anderson, who is the Executive Director of NFAP. [Email him]Stuart is an example of a Washington DC bureaucrat who worked for the government and then exploited the loopholes in the laws that are supposed to discourage insiders from jumping between private employers and top level government positions.

During the years 2001 to 2003 Stuart had executive level positions at the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Before his stint at the INS he worked for four and a half years on Capitol Hill on the Senate Immigration Subcommittee for two Senators that were pivotal figures in pushing for H-1B and related visas: Senator Spencer Abraham (see #2) and Sam Brownback. Prior to that, Stuart worked at the Cato Institute. Stuart got an M.A. from Georgetown University and he has written for liberal icons of immigration enthusiasam such as the Wall Street Journal [See The Other Immigrants]and the New York Times.[See America’s Future is Stuck Overseas ] Stuart Anderson is the prototypical global elitist. [VDARE.com note: Check out his 1995 review of Alien Nation.]

Revolving door #2—Spencer Abraham:  he received a law degree from one of the bastions of globalism—Harvard University. He was nominated by President George W. Bush as the tenth Secretary of Energy of the  United States in 2001. Prior to that Abraham served as a U.S. Senator from Michigan for six years. As senator, Abraham was an infamous supporter of H-1B. Perhaps one of his worst misdeeds was his sponsorship of the 2000 H-1B bill that nearly tripled the yearly H-1B cap from 65,000 per year to 185,000.

Abraham [Email him]shamelessly received campaign money from lobbyists like Harris Miller, who at the time was president of the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA). Abraham was so bad on immigration issues that a coalition of labor and immigration control groups united to boot him out of office. He lost his 2000 bid for re-election but that has never slowed down his work for expansion of visa programs for foreign workers.

Revolving door #3—Jagdish Bhagwati[Email him]: he was born and raised in India and graduated with a PhD from Columbia University. Bhagwati is slightly different from the first two

It’s fitting that Ray Bradbury, the author of the acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451, considered his most important work a children’s story. Called The Halloween Tree, Bradbury’s story is a glorification of Halloween and a journey through the origins and traditions of the festival he considers is the most important celebrated in America.

 More importantly, his story is a celebration of an American nation that once existed. Just like the hopeless liberals from Prairie Home Companion on NPR who celebrate a culture that is actively being demographically overwhelmed, Bradbury’s story celebrates a people—and their unique traditions—who built the kind of communities that, as Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam laments, racial and religious diversity helps make extinct.

The opening lines of The Halloween Tree (it was made into a cartoon, (watch it here) narrated by Bradbury himself) are a celebration of the historic majority population of America:

“It was a small town by a small river and a small lake in a small northern part of a Midwest state. There wasn't so much wilderness around that you couldn't see the town. On the other hand, there wasn't so much town around that you couldn't see and feel and touch the wilderness. The town was full of fences to walk on and sidewalks to skate on and the muted cries and laughter of boys and girls full of costume dreams and pumpkin spirits, preparing for the greatest night of the year, better than Easter, better than Christmas—Halloween.”

The story celebrates Trick or Treating—that American tradition which now identifies whether or not you live in a safe community where parents feel comfortable sending their kids out into the night to collect candy from their neighbors.

Bradbury’s book was written to help young children understand the traditions and history of Halloween so that they could appreciate why they dressed up as hosts, mummies, skeletons, etc. Now, as so many communities across the nation have parents who bowl alone, having a book dedicated to extolling the virtues of Trick or Treating when the communities across America look radically different from when Bradbury wrote his book in 1972 seems like an anachronism.

How many parents live in cities where they don’t feel safe sending their kids out into the night to Trick or Treat? Well, if you are a Stuff White People Like white person living in a gentrified neighborhood in Washington DC, Atlanta, or New York, perhaps you

In a rare case of the Main Stream Media reporting on what is happening Daily in Occupied America, Glenn Beck’s “The Blaze” website recently publicized the case of a high school Spanish-language teacher, Mexican-raised Reyna Santos, in McAllen, Texas (right near the border),who required her students to recite the Mexican national anthem and Pledge of Allegiance from memory.

 It would have passed unnoticed except that student Brenda Brinsdon refused to do it, asserting that “reciting pledges to Mexico and being loyal to it has nothing to do with learning Spanish.” Miss Brinsdon also questioned the timing of the exercise:

 “Why are we doing their [Mexican] independence when it‘s Freedom Week [celebrating the American Declaration of Independence] and it’s also [U.S.] Constitution Day [September 17]?”

 You can read the article from “The Blaze” here: Blaze Exclusive: TX High School Students Made to Recite Mexican National Anthem, Pledge of Allegiance (by Madeleine Morgenstern, The Blaze, Oct. 17^th, 2011). Also courtesy of The Blaze, you can see a live video of the class activity surreptitiously filmed by Miss Brinsdon.

If you view the video, notice that the arm position used in the Mexican flag salute is practically identical with that of a Nazi salute. From 1892 to 1942, the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance was performed in a similar manner, but it was changed so as not to look like a Nazi salute. In fact, the Bellamy salute, the so-called Roman salute and the Nazi salute all look about the same. As James Fulford has pointed out here and here, any public  figure who raises his arm above the shoulder can be photographed to look like he’s giving a Nazi salute. However, the MSM only plays it up

[This article is adapted from a longer version that appears in the Fall 2011 issue of The Occidental Quarterly magazine.]

There was a time not long ago when the idea of Western uniqueness was received wisdom in the academic world. The West was characterized as uniquely rooted in individual freedom, representative government, science, and exploration. The intense dynamism of the West was responsible for dragging the rest of the world from its backward slumbers rooted in collectivism, superstition, and unchanging tradition. It was a view that coincided with a period when the West had a strong sense of cultural confidence.

But all that has changed with the rise of multiculturalism and an academic Establishment that is decidedly on the left. In the new dispensation, the West is seen as a historical backwater whose success is entirely due to luck—combined in some accounts with rapacious exploitation of non-Europeans—rather than anything unique, much less positive, about its people or its culture.

It’s no accident that the decline of the West as anything approaching an ethnic entity has coincided with the predominance of this academic Left and its scathing, politically- and ethnically-motivated critiques of the West. With the rise of multiculturalism in all Western countries, it is not only the people of the West who are in dire danger of losing their dominance over areas they have dominated for hundreds of years—in the case of Europe itself, for many thousands of years. The culture of the West is threatened as well.

Duchesne, a professor of sociology at the University of New Brunswick, is out to change all that. The Uniqueness of Western Civilizationis an extraordinary work written by an exceptionally wide-ranging scholar and thinker.

Duchesne begins by showing that the decline of self-confident assertions of Western uniqueness and cultural confidence began with the rise of the academic left in the 1960s. Any comparison of West and non-West became fraught with concerns about Western ethnocentrism. Standard college courses in “Western Civilization” were removed in favor of world history courses emphasizing multiculturalism and a downgraded role for the West. This was the beginning of what Duchesne terms “a crusade against the West”.)

In attempting to explain the rise of the West one fashionable strategy is to invoke luck. These historians “treat history as an unending series of ‘lucky shots’ and abrupt turns”   For example, Duchesne quotes Rosaire  Langlois, who maintains that Europeans “weren’t just lucky; they were lucky many times over” [The Closing of the Sociological Mind?, Canadian Journal of Sociology, 2008]

Then there’s Peter Perdue’s review of Ken Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence —undoubtedly the most famous and highly praised book on European economic ascendancy, titled “Lucky Europe, normal China.”

This is what one might term an anti-theory of Western uniqueness. In no other area of scientific

Talk show host and columnist Michael Medved is a neoconservative in the literal sense of being a former liberal. (An ad for his biography says “Michael Medved has taken an extraordinary journey from liberal activist to outspoken conservative.” Well, maybe it’s not that extraordinary.)

Which means that while he may now support the American side in foreign wars, and be on the side of law in the fight against crime, he maintains some of the liberal beliefs of his upbringing—above all with regard to immigration.

That being the case, it’s easy for him to get a gig at the liberal Daily Beast  sniping at ordinary conservatives, saying things like “The GOP Self-Destructs.” [October 19, 2011]

His latest effusion for the Daily Beast is indicative of this. Packaged by the Beast’s editors as GOP DISCORD, it insists that Republicans have to stop talking about immigration, because it’s not important.

This is what Medved’s Marxist former friends (or is that former Marxist friends?) call writing into the “optative mood”—i.e. if you say something loudly enough, it might come true...or at least you might bully people into thinking it’s true. Other, more objective, MSM observers have expressed surprise at just how important the immigration issue has actually turned out to be: see Immigration debate intensifies in GOP race, by Steve Peoples, SFGate, October 20, 2011; Why immigration won’t go away in 2012, by Ed Kilgore, Salon, October 24, 2011.

But in Stop Harping on Immigration! [October 24, 2011] Medved claims:

“With Rick Perry suddenly pushing a flat tax and Herman Cain substantively revising his popular 9-9-9 revenue plan, GOP candidates may finally relinquish their feverish immigration obsession—one that’s destructive, distracting, demented, and downright dumb.”

[Links in original]

Medved’s argument: people aren’t interested, as shown by polls where they’re asked to name what’s important to them—they don’t say “immigration”:

“Actually, no major poll of the last year—no, not one of them—showed robust public interest in immigration. This month, CBS News asked respondents to name “the most important problem facing this country today.” Less than 2 percent came up with “illegal immigration,” while a dozen other concerns, led by “the economy and jobs,” of course, finished higher on the list. Over the summer, surveys from Bloomberg and Fox News found 3 percent and 2 percent, respectively, who identified immigration as a priority, with gas prices, the war in Afghanistan, health care, the deficit, education, and even nebulous concerns like “partisan politics” and “moral values” more frequently mentioned by the public.”

Two points here:

• Actually, very few stand-alone issues break double digits in this type of polls. A Gallup poll in September showed “immigration” at just 4%— compared to just 7% for healthcare, 4% with education, and 3% for "War/ Wars", all of which get many times the MSM attention. "Taxes" came in at a mere 2%. Only four issues got above 10%.
• And these tend to be economic issues—but immigration is the economy.

As I’ve said before, you see people saying, in effect “Let's not talk about immigration, let's talk about THE ECONOMY”. But they forget that immigration is the economy in the sense that millions of foreigners are being invited in to share in it. And even more than that it's the jobs issue, since that's really what the immigrants are being invited to share in.

It works like this:

• People are concerned about jobs? Immigrants take jobs.
• People are concerned about spending? Immigrants receive spending.
• People are concerned about “health care, the deficit, education…”? All of them made worse by immigrants.

I think that leaves only the War in Afghanistan (started by immigrants on 9/11) and

With the Obama administration crowing about all the illegal aliens it has deported (no more than Bush but don’t expect the Main Stream Media to look past the press release), the average American unschooled on immigration must think those uniformed sentinels on the Southwestern frontier work day and night t