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Recent News
“Simpson’s Paradox”? New “Fix-The-Schools” Book Fails To Address Immigration
As a book reviewer, I just received a copy of a book entitled Endangering Prosperity: A Global View of the American School , along with three pages of summaries discussing its contents. Its authors, Eric Hanushek, [Email] a Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, Paul E. Peterson, [Email]also a Hoover Senior Fellow and a Professor of Government at Harvard, and Ludger Woessmann, [Email] a professor of economics at the University of Munich, all bring substantial credentials to their assignment. And the book is published by the prestigious liberal Brookings Institution.
One reviewer on Amazon awards the book the maximum 5 stars, saying,
This book brings a lot of hard data, both international and domestic, to help illustrate several key points.
(a) The actual learning performance of students, as measured on standardized (cross-country) tests, correlates with different countries' economic performance to a striking degree. (Does growth explain schooling or the other way around? Well, the authors also show that learning in an earlier period links to growth in subsequent periods).
(b) US schools overall are doing a fairly weak job with getting kids to learn key skills, compared to other advanced economies.
(c) With efforts at improvement – and this is by no means all or even primarily about volumes of money – jurisdictions can in fact improve their relative and absolute performance, as shown e.g., by states like Maryland, Massachusetts, and Florida.
Of course, there are plenty of people out there with vested interests or axes to grind. Critics will no doubt cavil at the book's analysis, arguing that things are not all that bad... or that it's all the fault of our ethnic heterogeneity. Approach these excuses for complacency with skepticism. And above all read the book. [Links added to all quotes by VDARE.com]
Confession: I am indeed one of those who cavil
“Republic Of New Afrika” Arrives In Jackson, Mississippi
Mississippi is still burning. Not in the way the New York Times would have you believe, stuck in 1962 with lynchings of innocent blacks imminent at any given moment. Instead, while no one was looking, the capital city of Jackson has quietly become America's Harare.
Just as Africa's breadbasket, Rhodesia, had the name of its capital changed from Salisbury to Harare and became Africa's basketcase, Zimbabwe, racial democracy has spoken in 86% black Jackson. Racial socialist Chokwe Lumumba, the Nation of Islam's new favorite elected official, carried a not coincidental 87 percent of the Mayoralty vote on June 4. The almost entirely black electorate embraced his disturbingly familiar slogan of “One City. One Aim. One Destiny.” [Pictured right, Chokwe Lumumba as a young man.]
Symbolically, Jackson International Airport has now been changed to Jackson-Evers International Airport in 2004. But this is only the first step of Jackson's transformation. One can only speculate when Mayor Lumumba will rename the city in honor of Medgar Evers instead of the racist white American Andrew Jackson.
This transformation is taking place because, when all is said and done, “demography is destiny.” Because of remarkably swift white flight from Jackson, there was nothing to prevent the black majority from electing a man who thinks Africans visited North America centuries before Columbus. [Lumumba challenges history regarding Christopher Columbus: Presumptive next mayor says Africans visited Americas before Italian explorer, By Dustin Barnes, Clarion-Ledger, May 24, 2013.]
More importantly, just as revanchist Mexicans trumpet “Aztlan” in the American Southwest, Mayor Lumumba has his own vision of a black ethnostate. He once served as “Vice President” of the black “Republic of New Africa,” which claimed five states of the American South. Lumumba sees Jackson as the focal point of what he calls the “Kush District,” a “solid, non-self governing territory” with a black majority that can serve as a base for a new direction “of self-determination, of self-governance, self-economic development.” [Chokwe Lumumba: New mayor, new era for Jackson, Mississippi ? By Askia Muhammad, The Final Call, August 19, 2013.]
It's not like Mayor Lumumba is concealing his aims. Even his inauguration resembled the revolutionary destruction of a colonial regime instead a mayoral election in a nominally First World country.
On July 1, Chokwe Lumumba, an attorney with a long record of black radical activism, took office as mayor of Jackson. His inauguration took place in the gleaming convention center that sprang up four years ago in the state capital’s mostly deserted downtown.
A crowd of 2,500 packed the hall. The city councilors and other dignitaries, most of them African-American — Jackson, a city of 177,000, is 80 percent black — sat on the dais. The local congressman, Bennie Thompson, officiated. The outgoing mayor,
Liberal Feminists Demand More Violence and Sexism (aka Diverse Immigration)
Opening the Treason Lobby’s Fall Offensive, more than 100 women were arrested on Washington’s Capitol Hill recently as they blocked a street to demand that the House take up the Senate's Schumer-Rubio Amnesty/ Immigration Surge bill. The action was obviously sanctioned at the highest levels of Lefty feminism: arrestees included the top leaders of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and 9to5, the National Association of Working Women.
The New York Times unguardedly reported that the event was in part a ploy to scare up new members:
Leaders of the liberal women’s organizations said they were embracing immigration in a bid to expand their following among immigrant and Latina women, both fast-growing populations.
Women’s Groups Rally for Immigration Reform, by Julia Preston, New York Times, September 12, 2013
Elite feminists, of course, place the highest importance on remaining part of the liberal coalition, which is fanatically pushing to Elect A New People. But apparently they also see immigrant misogyny as a growth opportunity for their organizations, now that a lot of homegrown sexism has withered away.
The same dynamic can be seen with MADD Mothers Against Drunk Drivers): it turned to diverse outreach to foreigners after successfully educating Americans—and makes no effort at all to confront illegal immigrants, whose lethal drunk driving is a continuing national scandal. After all, MADD has well-paid executives who want to maintain their liberal credentials and their generous paychecks. A solved problem means no need for continued fund-raising (and –spending).
Equally, environmental groups like the Sierra Club violate first principles of ecosystem protection to be a part of the left open-borders coalition (and get lots of money from funders).
My question as a 1960s feminist: Whatever happened to the women's movement? In the beginning it did useful things, like promoting equality in the workplace and general safety overall. Now it has jumped on the multicultural immigration bandwagon—even though diversity is the enemy of American women’s safety and freedom.
Anyone who looks honestly at the attitude of non-Western men must see that they regard women as lesser beings who don't deserve equal treatment. We Americans simply don’t understand how barbaric much of the world is for women.
The Main Stream Media does reports some overseas horrors—like the Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by the Taliban for promoting education for girls there. But the idea that immigrants bring their cultural baggage with them doesn’t seem to compute in the big editorial offices, so inconvenient evidence like honor killing in America is largely ignored.
The women of NOW can’t be paying much attention to the tsunami of misogynous diversity included in the big Senate package (46 million newbies over 20 years).
The influx of low-skilled Hispanics will continue, despite claims that the Senate formulation will admit more skilled immigrants. Hispanics have a culture of misogyny that isn’t going away, either here or points south.
One rather rude marker: the recent execution-style killing of two Juarez bus drivers alleged
How The Census Bureau Socially Constructs The Next America(s)
I’m frequently accused of being overly interested in race and ethnicity, to which I reply: “Didn’t you fill in your Census questionnaire?”
Now, Kenneth Prewitt, whom Bill Clinton appointed head of the Census Bureau in 1998, has published an informative book, What Is Your Race?: The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans
Despite his half-decade in charge of the Census, Prewitt shares with the average American a certain perplexity over his old department’s fixation upon race and ethnicity:
What perhaps puzzles the reader is why [Census] race statistics are so terribly important that they are announced simultaneously with the population figures mandated for reapportionment. You may also be puzzled that the census form dedicates so much of its space to the race and Hispanic question but has no space for education, health, employment, or marital status questions.
(Not to mention the absence of a citizenship question, which would ask about a simple yes-or-no legal distinction far less murky than race or ethnicity.)
An old-fashioned nice white Protestant liberal, Prewitt, who is now Carnegie professor of public affairs at Columbia University, expresses befuddlement at how a job he apparently assumed would be suitable for a technocratic good government Progressive like himself wound up plunging him into the maelstrom of modern racial politics. Thus his proposals for technical improvements in the Census quite unexpectedly (to him) degenerated into a donnybrook over race, complete with angry charges of, guess what, “racism.”
Prewitt points out that, from the disinterested perspective of promoting the commonweal, the federal government’s racial preoccupation synchronizes poorly with the lack of informed public discussion over the purposes of all this categorizing of people. Instead, the crucial process of drawing official racial and ethnic boundaries tends to be either hijacked by interest groups or is the remnant of bureaucratic inertia and lack of foresight.
Prewitt is particularly concerned about the on-going racial mobilization
Forgotten Victims—American Workers Immiserated By Chinese Immigration In Nineteenth Century California
Open Borders advocates would have us believe there were no victims during past periods of rampant immigration enthusiasm. But immigrants to America were hardly innocents eventually shut out by cruel xenophobes. And the American victims of mass immigration are forgotten--perhaps deliberately in order to justify the current dispossession of the historic American nation.
One particularly enlightening episode: the nineteenth-century Chinese influx into California. Capitalists in search of cheap labor imported thousands of unskilled Chinese for the transcontinental railroad and other projects. Their numbers swelled until by 1870 they constituted one third of the male population of the state. When the railroad was finished, unemployed Chinese competed with desperate Americans from the East for jobs.
Employers did not bring the Chinese to America out of charity. Many arrived in ships as packed and filthy as those used in the African slave trade. Indeed, labor historian Vernon Briggs reports that some of the exact same slave ships were used for both purposes. He writes
“Such treatment reinforced the view of white workers in port cities that the Chinese immigrants were a subservient people.” Nor was this another example of uniquely white perfidy. As with the black slave trade, where African chiefs sold their fellow blacks into slavery, it was Chinese contractors who set and enforced the oppressive labor arrangements.
While the rich and the well connected prospered under this arrangement, American workers suffered. A 1901 article from the American Federation Labor entitled “Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion” explains why. It states, “In the agricultural districts a species of tramp has been created, known as the blanket man. White agricultural workers seldom find permanent employment; the Chinese are preferred. During the harvest time the white man is forced to wander from ranch to ranch and find employment here and there for short periods of time with the privilege of sleeping in the barns or haystacks….”
“Creolization”—Trinidad and America Converge, And That’s Not Good News
(For background on Trinidad, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.)
“It was a palace in its time.”
That was New York Mets announcer Gary Cohen reminiscing about the Mets’ former home, Shea Stadium (1964-2008).
The Boss (my wife) walked by, heard Cohen, and responded, “You see that? That was Pa’s house.”
We just got back from the house in Trinidad that my late father in-law, “Raka” (1925-2009) built, in part with his own hands.
Indeed, much the same could be said about the two-island Republic of Trinidad and Tobago (“TT” ) itself. And, although it has only 1,328,019 residents, I’m afraid that TT and the U.S. are converging.
Every summer we go to TT, not for vacation, but out of obligation. A few months before Pa died, he made The Boss promise him to take care of the house, and made her executrix of his estate, even though she lived in the U.S. and four of her surviving five sisters still lived in Trinidad.
Whenever we arrive, the house looks abandoned, having received no upkeep over the previous 12 months. One sister-in-law arrives religiously to collect the rent money from the Obeah man from India staying “alone” with up to nine fellow conmen upstairs. We stay in the seedy, underground, downstairs area.
There’s a lot of ruin in a great nation. But how much ruin can a less-than-great nation—let alone one family—overcome?
A highly intelligent auto-didact of Victorian virtue and Indian origin, Pa worked in the oil fields of Venezuela, and was the master mechanic for the local bus service, before setting up his own business as a subcontractor to builders, picking up and delivering loads of gravel. His frail build—5’9,” and 120 lbs. in his last years—could not handle driving a truck in the blazing equatorial sun six days and 60 hours per week. He coped with the pain variously with rum and by ramming his head into the
Claes Ryn, Allan Bloom, Leo Strauss, And Me
[See also by Paul Gottfried: Leo Strauss, Immigration, And Israel]
Every now and then, I receive an online “epistola” from the National Humanities Institute, an organization that presents itself as “culturally conservative” and whose apparent lifetime director is Catholic University of America professor , Professor Claes Ryn [Email him]. NHI, which seems to operate on a shoe string, occasionally puts out a journal, Humanitas. Not surprisingly, the latest issue features as a lead article by Ryn that is likewise the subject of Epistola 18: Allan Bloom and Straussian Alienation. [PDF]
Full disclosure: Professor Ryn and I have known each other for more than thirty years and spent considerable time together, socially and professionally. In 2007, we cofounded the Academy of Philosophy and Letters , aiming to fill the Philadelphia Society's former role as a forum for conservative discussion, before it fell under neoconservative control.
But we came to a parting of the ways when Professor Ryn and an assistant, NHI President Joe Baldacchino, demanded the removal from our organization of anyone who had addressed the IQ question or even been present at conferences in which this delicate subject was broached. My admission that I did indeed believe that individuals and ethnic groups have differing cognitive abilities resulted in Ryn’s unexpected insistence that I myself should leave.
I took along those who opposed the censorship and set up the H.L. Mencken Club. From what I can determine, our side has many more members than APL—and more open discussion. (HLMC has its sixth annual conference in Baltimore November 1-3—register here!).
Nevertheless, there is nothing in the current Humanitas or Ryn’s online piece that I would disagree with—for a very simple reason. Both restate the thrust of my most recent book Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America . The arguments marshaled by Ryn indicate, as does my book, why Straussians reign in the NYT’s Sunday Book Review Section as well as in Conservatism, Inc.
Although Ryn does not make this last point explicitly, perhaps for fear of reprisal, a fuller explanation is at least implicit in what he does tell us. His comments may also explain why my book, initially marketed by Cambridge with high hopes and considerable promo, received absolutely no attention in the national Main Stream Media.
According to Ryn, the Straussian persuasion assumes a spirit of alienation on the part of those who promote it. Ryn sees an illustration of this in Strauss disciple Bloom’s best-seller The Closing of the American Mind .
Bloom successfully took it upon himself in 1987 to teach American Christians what America can aspire to be, as he put it, “when it’s truly itself.” Bloom’s authentic America, which a universal nation that is true to its Founding and political creed, seeks to bring secular, individually-based democracy to the entire planet. When Americans engage in war, it is intended as an “educational project,” designed to instill in slow-learners our belief in equality, which is meant for all earthlings.
Bloom and other Straussians have a tendency to read their own preferred view of the America’s founding principles, as understood by themselves and their mentor, into long dead authors. Ryn correctly notes that Bloom, in a widely distributed commentary on Plato's Republic , informs the reader that Plato was defending democracy in his most famous dialogue. Strauss makes a similar statement, writing about the Athenian aristocratic historian Thucydides that his subject was actually vindicating democracy, despite Thucydides’ bitter contempt for the way Athenian democracy functioned during the Peloponnesian War against Sparta.
The conventional view is that Strauss and his disciples worked mightily
John Derbyshire: Scandinavian Reserve on Immigration Is Breaking Down
The performance of Norway’s conservative/populist/classical-liberal Progress Party in that country’s September 9th election caused much shrieking and swooning on the multicultural left.
One of the most piercing shrieks came from weirdly neckbearded sociologist Alf Gunvald Nilsen at the Guardian blog. [Norway’s disturbing lurch to the right, September 10, 2013].
Nilsen’s column [sic] led off with a picture of fellow Norwegian Anders Breivik, perpetrator of the appalling July 2011 murders in Oslo and nearby Utøya Island. The connection here was that Breivik had belonged to the Progress Party in 1999-2007, resigning his membership because he found the party’s line against multiculturalism insufficiently stern.
For an approximate equivalent, you can imagine VDARE.com running a story about Democrats doing well in the 2014 congressional midterm elections, the story prominently decorated with a picture of Washington Navy Yard killer Aaron Alexis, a liberal Democrat. (We promise not to.)
Mr. Nilsen’s hyperventilating is even stranger in that the Progress Party’s performance in this election was not very good, their representation in Norway’s 169-seat parliament dropping from 41 seats to 29.
What disturbed Mr. Nilsen was rather the overall performance of the rightist parties, which together attained a wafer-thin parliamentary majority of 2 seats over the left-green coalition, which has been ruling since 2009 with a majority of 7. Some “lurch”!
Indeed, analysts discount the drop in support for Progress by noting that the Conservative Party, which did exceptionally well—from 30 seats to 48—has adopted some of the Progress Party’s ideas, leading Progress supporters to some strategic vote-switching.
The rightist majority will only be a majority if Progress is fully included in government. Everyone assumes they will be. Progress helped prop up a center-right coalition in 2001-2005, but the coalition parties did not bring them in to decision-making. Now, with less of a fjord to be bridged between Conservative and Progress policy positions, there is no longer any reason for the mainstream Right to keep Progress at arm’s length.
Progress is pretty much what VDARE.com urges our own Republican Party to be: low-tax, small-government, classical-liberal, culturally conservative, and immigration-restrictionist. It is led by 44-year-old, agreeably-Scandinavian-looking Siv Jensen (who, although a spinster, is not a strumpet: the headline “Siv Jensen har stumpet røyken” on that 2011 link translates as “Siv Jensen has quit smoking”).
Even more encouraging to us, Progress went through a schism in the early 1990s over open-borders libertarianism. The Paulites eventually decamped and formed their own party, which soon withered on the vine.
Other good news from Norway: two years ago the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise (NHO), a mainstream-conservative business lobby, came out against unskilled immigration, noting that (via Google Translate):
Immigrants threaten the welfare state and [cost] too much. They work for a short time before they end up on welfare and [are] too little productive. [NHO will have fewer immigrants, ABC Nyheter, May 10, 2011.]
There are some slight qualifications to be made there. The immigration being spoken of in the NHO report, which it is now quite respectable to oppose, is of Muslims and Africans—“asylum seekers,” in the Euro-jargon of immigration. Immigration of Swedes,
Mentally Ill Mass Shooters Are Crazier Than Liberals
There's been another mass shooting by a crazy person, and liberals still refuse to consider institutionalizing the dangerous mentally ill.
The man who shot up the Washington Navy Yard on Monday, Aaron Alexis, heard voices speaking to him through the walls. He thought people were following him. He believed microwave ovens were sending vibrations through his body. There are also reports that Alexis believed the Obamacare exchanges were ready to go.
Anyone see any bright red flags of paranoid schizophrenia? (Either that, or Obama's NSA is way better than we thought!)
But Alexis couldn't be institutionalized because the left has officially certified the mentally ill as "victims," and once you're a victim, all that matters is that you not be "stigmatized."
But here's the problem: Coddling the mentally ill isn't even helping the mentally ill. Ask the sisters of crazy homeless woman "Billie Boggs" how grateful they were to the ACLU for keeping Boggs living on the streets of New York City. Ask the parents of Aaron Alexis, James Holmes (Aurora, Colo., movie theater shooter), Jared Loughner (Tucson, Ariz., mall shooter) or Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech shooter) how happy they are that their sons weren't institutionalized.
Tellingly, throughout the last three decades, the overall homicide rate has been in free fall, thanks to Republican crime policies, from 10 per 100,000 in 1980 to 4 per 100,00 today. (You might even call them "common sense" crime policies.) But the number of mass shootings has skyrocketed from 4 per year, between 1900 and 1970, to 29 per year since then.
Something seems to have gone horribly wrong right around 1970. What could it be? Was it the introduction of bell-bottoms?
That date happens to correlate precisely with when the country began throwing the mentally ill out of institutions in 1969. Your memory of there not being as many mass murders a few decades ago is correct. Your memory of there not being as many homeless people
Memo From Middle America | Obama, Mexican Meddlers Get Together To Amnesty Illegal Workers North Of The Border—No GOP Senator Objects
For years at VDARE.com, we’ve been reporting continued meddling in U.S. domestic affairs by the Mexican government. Our fearless leaders, of course, don’t want to know.
Here’s a recent example which passed almost unnoticed in the U.S. Main Stream Media—a direct deal worked out between the Mexican foreign ministry and the National Labor Relations Board.
According to its own website,
The NLRB is an independent federal agency created to enforce the National Labor Relations Act. Headquartered in Washington DC, it has regional offices across the country where employees, employers and unions can file charges alleging illegal behavior, or file petitions seeking an election regarding union representation.
Calling the NLRB “independent” when its members are chosen by the President and Senate is a bit of a stretch. But more on that later. Quoting from the NLRB website again:
Congress enacted the National Labor Relations Act ("NLRA") in 1935 to protect the rights of employees and employers, to encourage collective bargaining, and to curtail certain private sector labor and management practices, which can harm the general welfare of workers, businesses and the U.S. economy.
Well, on July 23, 2013, Eduardo Medina Mora, the Mexican ambassador to the U.S. (see here, here and here for more on him) signed an agreement with the NLRB. As reported on the website of the Mexican foreign ministry:
On behalf of the Foreign Ministry, Mexico’s Ambassador in the United States, Eduardo Medina Mora, signed a cooperation agreement with the United States National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the independent agency responsible for safeguarding employees' rights. The NLRB was represented by Mark Pearce, Chairman of the Board, [an African-American Obama appointee, pictured] and Lafe Solomon, Acting General Counsel.
The agreement promotes and protects the labor rights of Mexican immigrants in the United States, especially the right to free association, regardless of their immigration status.
[FOREIGN MINISTRY—U.S. NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD AGREEMENT. Spanish language version: Se firma acuerdo entre la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores y la Junta Nacional de Relaciones Laborales de Estados Unidos, SRE (Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores), Comunicado #259, July 23, 2013
My emphasis. Yes, you read that correctly—“regardless of their immigration status.” In other words, it’s protecting illegal aliens.
As for “free association”, that would be great—will Americans have it someday?
The Mexican Foreign Ministry press release continues:
Under this agreement, the Mexican consulates and the NLRB will take joint steps to inform Mexican workers of their right to join or be part of a union,
DC Shooting, TSA, Fort Hood, DREAM Amnesty—Warning: Our GOVERNMENT Is a Threat to Public Safety
Forget gun control. America needs government control. Have you noticed the common thread among several mass killings and homeland security incidents lately?
Time and again, it's the control freaks in Washington who have fallen down on their jobs, allowing crazies, creeps and criminals to roam free and wreak havoc while ignoring rampant red flags. Let's review:
Funny Thing—ACLU Didn’t Say Its Legalize-Marijuana Poster Boy Is Convicted Gang-Banger
With the Obama administration’s decision to allow states to legalize drugs, Eric Holder’s efforts to avoid minimum sentences for non-violent drug offenders and New York’s stop and frisk law in the hot seat, the persistent claims that the war on drugs targets minorities have increased. In June, the ACLU published a study entitled The War on Marijuana in Black and White. [ June, 2013 PDF] Everyone from the New York Times [Blacks Are Singled Out for Marijuana Arrests, Federal Data Suggests, By Ian Urbina, June 3, 2013] to Rand Paul regurgitated its findings. Virtually no-one criticized it. So I will.
According to the study, marijuana arrests have increased over the last decade and now make up 52% of all drug arrests. Some 46% of all arrests are for simple possession. Moreover, the study found that
…a Black person is 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than a white person, even though Blacks and whites use marijuana at similar rates.
The ACLU study relied on the Department of Health and Human Service’s National Household Survey on Drug Abuse and Health, which found that 14% of blacks admitted to using marijuana, while only 11.6% of whites did. I will explain why these numbers are unreliable in future VDARE.com article. But, for now, I want to focus on the minority drug offenders whom the ACLU chose to “profile” (with no apparent pun intended) as victims of the “racist” war on marijuana in their report.
I expected the ACLU to find some isolated case of a grandmother with glaucoma who had 1.1 ounces of marijuana and was charged with a felony and spent years in prison. However, almost all of the ACLU’s offenders spent, at most, a couple nights in jail while awaiting a judge. The most serious consequence for their arrests were inconveniences: modest fines, probation,
End The College Tuition Extortion Racket—Require Student Loan Give-Backs!
[Previously by Paul Streitz: Can Chris Shays Win “Blue”-State Connecticut On The Immigration Issue? (VDARE.com answer: he didn’t even try).
Higher education in the United States is a gigantic extortion racket. 
It’s time to do something about it. Colleges and universities should be forced to lower tuition—and to eliminate all outstanding student loans, with student loan give-backs.
Colleges and universities are not "non-profit." They grab as much money as possible from every source, spend every cent and then cry poverty. Tuition at private schools would be about $9,000 per year, not $44,000, at the rate of inflation since 1960.
Tuition is not determined by “costs.” It is determined by revenue. The more money schools have, the more money they spend. In effect, college “loans” make the poorest students indentured servants of colleges.
The IRS has strict guidelines as what is permissible for other non-profit organizations: only a certain percentage of revenue can be used for fund raising and administration.
But there appear to be no such guidelines for colleges and universities. So there are art museums, squash courts, luxury dorms, climbing walls, million dollar college presidents, multi-million dollar loans to administrators, diversity deans, sustainability deans, bloated salaries, excessive staff, minimal teaching hours (six hours of teaching class per week).
Congress should require the IRS to create and enforce such guidelines on colleges and universities. This would give them a choice: either colleges economize and reduce tuition, or lose their non-profit status and be taxed by federal, state and local authorities.
At my alma mater, Hamilton College, A.J. Lafley was the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of from 2008 to 2013. He is the President and CEO of Procter and Gamble and attended Harvard Business School. You would think he could run a cost-efficient organization. Not the case.
On Lafley’s watch, tuition was raised from $38,600 to $44,346. That is a cumulative increase of $42,418,614 over five years.
Where did this $42 million dollars go? Lafley paid
“But For Birmingham…” A Dissent On The Birmingham Church Bombing After Fifty Years
VDARE.com note: In case you missed our January 2013 VDARE.com webinar, or you want to relive its glory, DVD recordings are FINALLY ready and available! The DVDs come in a set of 2, divided into the morning and afternoon sessions. They offer a meaty sampling of some of VDARE.com’s favorite topics : the Birmingham bombing and racial realities of America’s urban decline (Paul Kersey), how guns, race and immigration really relate to each other (James Fulford); the critical significance of the white a.k.a. American vote (Steve Sailer); and, unforgettably, Our Job Is To Combat ‘Anosognosia’ BY SQUIRTING ICE-COLD WATER INTO SOCIETY'S LEFT EAR by John Derbyshire ). All for $50 (tax-deductible!). You can donate in the usual way, just alert office@VDARE.com with your snailmail address.
We post tonight an adaptation of Paul Kersey’s January 19 address “But For Birmingham” which was prescient in several ways, given this year’s debate, and is the only dissent you are likely hear on the fiftieth Anniversary of the Birmingham Church bombings, September 15, 2013.Paul Kersey’s book The Tragic City: Birmingham 1963-2013 was reviewed on VDARE.com here.
Time Magazine described Barack Obama as the “Architect of a New America” when it crowned him Man of the Year.
It's certainly an apt description for a man who just won a closely contested victory over Mitt Romney in the 2012 election.
Conservatism Inc. would have you believe it was a blowout, but the truth is that Barack Obama relied almost exclusively on a coalition of post-1965 Americans, with the significant addition of the monolithic black vote. The GOP also sabotaged itself because of its inability to get the white working class to show up at the polls.
Only VDARE.com discussed the important truth behind the 2012 elections. Conservatism Inc. has swept aside any real discussion about voting behavior so as to better welcome the “inevitable” Hispanic tide. As for Barack Obama, he's hard at work cobbling together a mostly anti-American coalition and still telling us it is the same country as Norman Rockwell's. “Electing a new people” indeed.
Few men of courage exist in Obama’s America—as Peter Brimelow has correctly observed, this is an occupied country. However, Brimelow himself and the writers and staff of VDARE.com are among the few who express cutting edge political opinions. Unfortunately, this places them squarely in the crosshairs of the trigger-happy Obama Administration.
2013 is an auspicious year for a resurgent authentic American nationalism—the kind of real patriotism VDARE.com has championed since I first found the site more than 13 years ago.
2013 is, after all, the 50th anniversary of the events in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963: the year Bull Connor, water cannons, and vicious dogs were packaged as the last vestiges of dying way of life—the American way of life.
Think about it. But for Birmingham, would we have watched Watts, Rochester, Detroit, and Newark go up in flames as a result of what Life Magazine dubbed the “Negro Revolt”? Had the events of Birmingham transpired differently, would the Western World have capitulated?
It is this one city, and the events of 1963 in particular, that have been used to promote the radical transformation of America to conform with racial egalitarianism. The specter of Birmingham haunts America, providing the justification for the “Architect of a New America” to socially engineer the country out of existence.
Any politician who dares question the mass immigration of non-European immigrants into the United States (or Europe for that matter) will instantly be denounced as preparing to unleash the hounds and water cannons, a la Bull Connor. After all, illegals are just “people seeking a better life.”
But for Birmingham, would this be happening?
Theologian Bruce Metzger, in his 1997 book, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significancee, claimed that the famous “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King, Jr, was actually considered by some ministers a worthy addition to the Bible. Metzger states:
“Shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, a group of ministers seriously proposed that King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” be added to the New Testament. All will appreciate that this letter, written in April 1964 after he had been jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, for participating in a civil-rights protest, conveys a strong prophetic witness, and interprets God’s will in the spirit of Christ. At the same time, however, most will recognize that the differences as to age and character between it and the books of the New Testament are far to great to warrant its being added to the canon, and today few if any take the proposal seriously.”
Does such a proposal sound so outlandish anymore?
Much has changed since 1997—a statue of MLK now rests
