Richard Hoste

One of my great joys in life is watching the next clueless meme pop up and spread like wildfire.  The latest is that education reform is going to solve this country’s problems.  Newsweek hopes that “imposing standardized test-based accountability for schools and teachers and fostering competition among schools” will be the one area where Republicans will work with the Obama administration.  The villains in this narrative are the teachers’ unions.  Tom Friedman tells us that “countries that outperform us — Singapore, South Korea, Finland — don’t let anyone teach who doesn’t come from the top third of their graduating class.”  More interesting is a recent Atlantic piece which points out America can’t use “the diversity excuse” to explain away our country’s failures.

These days, the theory Hanushek hears most often is what we might call the diversity excuse. When he runs into his neighbors at Palo Alto coffee shops, they lament the condition of public schools overall, but are quick to exempt the schools their own kids attend. “In the litany of excuses, one explanation is always, ‘We’re a very heterogeneous society—all these immigrants are dragging us down. But our kids are doing fine,’” Hanushek says. This latest study was designed, in part, to test the diversity excuse.

Actually, the diversity excuse mostly applies to blacks, who are twelve percent of the population and the worst performers on standardized tests, and who have been speaking English (or something that resembles it) for three hundred years. Never mind that though...

So Hanushek and his co-authors sliced the data more thinly still. They couldn’t control for income, since students don’t report their parents’ salaries when they take these tests; but they could use reliable proxies. How would our states do if we looked just at the white kids performing at high levels—kids who are not, generally speaking, subject to language barriers or racial discrimination? Or if we looked just at kids with at least one college-educated parent?

As it turned out, even these relatively privileged students do not compete favorably with average students in other well-off countries. On a percentage basis, New York state has fewer high performers among white kids than Poland has among kids overall. In Illinois, the percentage of kids with a college-educated parent who are highly skilled at math is lower than the percentage of such kids among all students in Iceland, France, Estonia, and Sweden.

Parents in Palo Alto will always insist that their kids are the exception, of course. And researchers cannot compare small cities and towns around the globe—not yet, anyway. But Hanushek thinks the study significantly undercuts the diversity excuse. “People will find it quite shocking,” he says, “that even our most-advantaged students are not all that competitive.”

The closest thing America has to a bright spot is Massachusetts.

Is it because Massachusetts is so white? Or so immigrant-free? Or so rich? Not quite. Massachusetts is indeed slightly whiter and slightly better-off than the U.S. average. But in the late 1990s, it nonetheless lagged behind similar states—such as Connecticut and Maine—in nationwide tests of fourth- and eighth-graders. It was only after a decade of educational reforms that Massachusetts began to rank first in the nation.

What did Massachusetts do? Well, nothing that many countries (and industries) didn’t do a long time ago. For example, Massachusetts made it harder to become a teacher, requiring newcomers to pass a basic literacy test before entering the classroom. (In the first year, more than a third of the new teachers failed the test.) The state also required students to pass a test before graduating from high school—a notion so heretical that it led to protests in which students burned state superintendent David Driscoll in effigy.

Standards for teachers!  Why didn’t anybody think of this before?  Actually, many people have, it’s just that objective tests for educators have been criticized for being racist. From the first edition of The Affirmative Action Hoax, pages 155-156.

...in the early 1980s, the three main American newsmagazines devoted cover stories to the scandalous performance of American teachers and prospective students on qualifying tests, thus recognizing that it was a vital national concern.  However, their stories hid from their readers that the cause was affirmative action university admissions and graduation.

Newsweek did not mention race at all.

Time’s article quoted ungrammatical, barely intelligible sentences written by American teachers and documented their terrible performance on qualifying tests.  It offered several explanations, one of which came close to the true one: “In Oregon, a kindergarten teacher who had been given As and Bs at Portland State University was recently found to be functionally illiterate.”  At one point, it carelessly included a parenthesis that disclosed how that could happen.  Pinellas County Florida, “required teacher candidates to read at an advanced tenth-grade level and solve math problems at an eighth-grade level.  Though all had their BA in hand, about one-third of applicants (25 percent of whites, 79 percent of blacks) flunked Pinellas’ test.”

U.S. News and World Report printed a selection of questions from the National Teacher Examination to show how risby easy they were.  It constantly blamed the problem on inadequate funding, and its cover showed a white teacher wearing a dunce cap.  But in two sentences in the last column on the last page, it mentioned, “In Florida, 84 percent of all those who took the exam last October passed.  However, only 37 percent of black students in education passed, which has raised concerns about worsening an already serious decline in the number of black teachers.”  Of course, it is exactly this concern that has prevented the use of legitimate qualifying tests.

Steve Sailer has pointed out before that quotas would be preferable to the kind of affirmative action we have in America because you could at least get the most qualified of each race.  But if liberals ever get their education reform and find that any test used will reveal the need to fire 80% of black teachers, the exam will be thrown out and even the white incompetents, of whom there are more than there are unqualified blacks in absolute terms, will get a pass.

Unlike most liberal shibboleths, perhaps the teachers matter idea has some truth to it (not as much truth as human biodiversity of course, but you have to start somewhere).  On the LSAT, used for law school admissions, and the GRE, taken by prospective graduate students, those who majored in education are consistently among the worst performers.  It’s not surprising that a profession dominated by unions attracts the least ambitious and capable people.

Whether liberals ever beat the teachers’ unions remains to be seen.  The opening shot in the war going on was this year’s mayoral race in Washington, D.C., where the main issue was school chancellor Michelle Rhee.  The Swipples were excited about school reform and thought they knew what was best for blacks, who themselves more sensibly understood that having the public education system as a jobs program was in their best interests.  If we’ve learned anything over the past forty years, it’s that our highly intelligent elite can usually get its way against the more numerous but passive and dimmer masses.  It’s just that on the issues of school prayer, immigration, affirmative action, etc. the Left had their secret weapon of moral certainty, due to the fact that the enemy was the wrong kind of white people.  We’ll see how quickly they lose their zeal when it’s their favorite victims who are standing in the way of their goals.  

Noam Scheiber in The New Republic has written an article that sounds like just about every other establishment liberal piece of the last few decades. Smart people with money are fooling dumb whites without money into advocating against their own interests. Instead, the dumb whites should listen to the other smart white people, those whose jobs and power depend on an activist and interventionist state.

Scheiber here is specifically writing about the recent criticism of the Fed.  The smart rich people are represented by the Pauls (Ron and Rand), while the dumb poor people have Sarah Palin.

What exactly does the former Alaskan governor get wrong?

There was, for example, her discussion of quantitative easing as though it were sorcery. “And where, you may ask, are we getting the money to pay for all this? We’re printing it out of thin air,” she complained. True-ish.

“True-ish” is liberal for “true.”

Then there’s my favorite passage of the speech, which displayed Palin’s solicitude for European policymaking sensibilities. “The German finance minister called the Fed’s proposals ‘clueless,’” she said. “When Germany, a country that knows a thing or two about the dangers of inflation, warns us to think again, maybe it’s time for Chairman Bernanke to cease and desist.” But the starchy Germans always worry about inflation, even when it’s not remotely a threat. (In the same way, my Jewish mother always worries that I’m starving, but I don’t take that as a reason to gorge myself.) If, on the other hand, Zimbabwe started lecturing us on out-of-control inflation, that might get my attention.

In other words, it’s irrational to complain until Zimbabwe is criticizing your monetary policy.  Why does anybody even bother trying to keep up with the brilliant Mr. Scheiber?

In this way, Palin is a near-perfect symbol of a certain type of Tea Partier—the people who’ve had enough of the government’s arrogant scheming, even if their worldview falls a bit short of cohering. When The New York Times surveyed Tea Party supporters earlier this year, it conducted follow-up interviews to gauge respondents’ thoughts on Medicare and Social Security. Most resisted cuts to either program. “That’s a conundrum, isn’t it?” a woman named Jodine White told the paper. “I don’t know what to say. … I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security.” Like Palin, White’s opposition to government isn’t logical; it’s visceral.

Look, there’s no doubt that many Tea Partiers hold views that are silly and maybe even damaging to themselves in the long run.  But I’m not holding my breath waiting for The Weekly Standard or Wall Street Journal to go and interview the least intelligent members of the Democratic base probing for logical inconsistencies in their statements.  Any movement or ideology that’s going to gain wide support in a democratic society is going to have a lot of followers who are of sub-standard IQ.  Luckily for liberals, making fun of their stupids is hate speech. 

Not only do liberals often accuse lower class whites of failing to understand the issues of the day, but their errors are said to work against their own interests.  Since blacks and Hispanics do actually benefit from redistributionist policies, Scheiber may argue that it doesn’t matter if many of those who vote for his side are stupid because they make the right choices, even if for the wrong reasons.  This seems sensible enough, though one must notice that this is a philosophy which sees amorality as the trait of the ideal citizen.  If you’re old, take your Social Security and Medicare and don’t worry about the debt to future generations because that’s what’s in your interests.  If you don’t have health insurance you should support other people having to buy it for you without any further philosophical or ethical considerations.  Only when poor whites reach this advanced stage of moral development will the Left find them acceptable.

As the Palins are the dupes, the Pauls are the villains.

But more than anything else, the Pauls represent the interest of the affluent and educated. After all, the people most worried about the debasement of the currency are the people who, well, have a lot of currency. On the other hand, the working class, who typically have more in the way of debt than assets, actually benefit from inflation, since it eats away at the value of their mortgages and credit card bills. Likewise, when the Pauls rail against Social Security and Medicare, they’re being perfectly true to their class, since the two programs downwardly redistribute income. It’s part of the reason Ron Paul’s presidential campaign took off on college campuses and online, two places where the affluent and educated congregate. (By contrast, unpublished data from this recent Washington Post poll shows that college grads are much more likely than non-college grads to have an unfavorable view of Palin and to believe she’s unqualified to be president.) One of Ron Paul’s most indispensable online activists was an early Google employee who sold his stock at the peak of the market.

While it’s true that many in the working class with high time preference and moderate to low intelligence and earning power would be hurt by the abolition of say, Social Security and Medicare, I find it hard to believe that those conscientious enough to join a movement worried about what government debt means for future generations will be among those who lack the foresight to save for retirement.  True, inflation eats away at debt, but it also eats away at savings.  There is an aspect of rich/smart vs. poor/stupid to the debates about who benefits from different kinds of monetary policy and the extent of government spending, but these issues also pit the responsible and thrifty against the wasteful and capricious.

And in the end, if one takes Scheiber’s analysis at face value, there's the question of on what grounds the author can object to the wealthy, conscientious and prudent working for their own interests.

I’m usually not as pessimistic as Richard about electoral politics.  My attitude yesterday was “talk about how much Republicans suck tomorrow, tonight is all about watching liberals get what they deserve.”   And while the elephants did do about as well as the pundits thought they would, the results out of Nevada can only be described as a crushing blow to the American far right.  Politico reports

Luis Gutierrez is pushing Harry Reid today to return to immigration legislation, on the grounds that Hispanic voters saved his hide.

Reid got an amazing 90% of the state's 12% Hispanic voters, according to exit polls; Sharron Angle got just 8%.

Now for years the establishmentarian conventional wisdom has been that Republicans need to improve their numbers among Hispanic Americans.  On the other hand, writers at VDare, particularly Steve Sailer, have said that the GOP should forget about minorities and focus on getting a larger share of the white vote (See the Sailer Strategy).

If the Politico article is correct, subtract Hispanics out of the Nevada vote and Angle wins by about 5 percent. Despite Angle hammering Reid on the issue of illegal immigration, not enough whites came out to make up for what was lost among the Latino electorate, as the Sailer strategy would’ve predicted.  Not in a relatively conservative state like Nevada, not in a "wave" election year. 

Seems that the conventional wisdom may be right after all.  Harry Reid’s win was a victory for third world, get out the peasants ethnic politics. If the far Right position on illegals couldn’t work in Nevada this year, where and when will it? (It must be noted that Pew Research contradicts Politico, reporting that Angle actually won 30 percent of Latinos, which if accurate means the Sailer Strategy fails even if it doesn't lead Hispanics to vote like blacks.) Also, in Colorado Hickenlooper not only beat Tom Tancredo but got more votes than the Constitution and Republican candidates combined.

Where to go from here? Sailer has got some other ideas that weren’t tried in the Nevada race, like trying to tell Hispanics to vote like Americans and making the Democrats unappealing by branding them "the Black party." We can call this “Cultural Sailerism” compared to what Angle ran on, which was “Classical Sailerism.”  Cultural Marxism proved a more successful strategy in the long run than its intellectual predecessor and hopefully its Sailerist counterpart will have the same fate.

Richard Spencer and Robert Burnham’s Facebook conversation is pretty frightening, but I must say that it pales in comparison to a recent Free Republic thread about Julian Assange.  A commentator recommends the government go after the man’s family and when someone objects he’s shouted down as a liberal commie.

Some other representative suggestions.

His head would look good on a pike.

He truly needs to be carbombed

Surely someone in our DOD can take this pipsqueak out. We have killed better men for less in the past.

I support a CIA covert operation to coat his butt-plug with arsenic. ARSEnic...get it? (too strong? sorry.)

This truly has become deadly serious. He needs to be taken out. No internet bravado here, our government or allies need to act and end this. I don’t know if our various agencies can act on their own, but if they can, I hope they do soon. 

$200 for a bullet between that mother effer's eyes.

All this hatred, and for what?  Ten years ago a couple fanatics killed three thousand Americans.  Every death is a tragedy, but the US has sinned against the Muslim world much more than it’s been sinned against.  Half a million Iraqis died due to US sanctions and then another half million thanks to the war.  Yet if any Muslim in the world talks like these so-called patriotic citizens do it’s proof of the inherent depravity of the religion.

What’s really scary is speculating on what Republicans would advocate if there actually was a terrorist problem-this is, if the murder rate for Muslims ever reached 50% of what it is for Americans blacks or people of the Islamic faith ever managed to kill 1/10th as many people as the US murders overseas.  They already defend the right of the president to murder anyone whom he deems a “terrorist” and hold “enemy combatants” indefinitely.  Thankfully the “war on terror” is a government fabrication, for if it wasn’t and people actually were dying in any large numbers the US would by now make North Korea look like Hong Kong.

What indicates that conservatives are particularly dull is that they seem to understand that everybody in power is against them, but at the same time desire the state to have the prerogative to decide whether they live or die.  It reminds me of when William F. Buckley said he was fine with totalitarianism in America in order to defeat international communism while he rallied against the Godless and degenerate elite, who naturally ended up running the system he advocated. But at least Buckley was facing an enemy that had taken over half the planet and had the potential to destroy it all, not a few isolated anti-social failed engineering students and low IQ Nigerians with firecrackers in their pants.  

I don't know if I quite agree with Richard and Robert who believe that these sentiments represent something healthy that simply should be channeled into another direction.  The way one terrorist attack carried out with box cutters threw the entire nation into the arms of big brother shows how effeminate and cowardly we've become.  The branding of anybody who tried to link US policy to the terrorist attacks as "blaming America first" represents not only a general stupidity, but hostility to intellectual inquiry.  The wars that resulted out of the attacks managed to somehow combine the worst aspects of White Man's Burden imperialism and Wilsonian idealism.  And of course hostilities in the Middle East have facilitated the complete Zionist take over of the Republican Party.   Sure, there's a decent bit of implicit whiteness and anti-ethnomasochism in there, but it's in a very thick neo-con shell which will be very difficult to crack.  

The Washington Post has an unintentionally funny headline “Gun-toting soccer moms a scary thought in D.C. area, but not out west.”  It turns out that what’s good for Sharon and Cheryl isn’t necessarily what’s best for Shaniqua and Shantay.

PHOENIX -- In the red rock and sand of the Arizona desert, just past the retirement villages and golf greens that have made this sun-worshipping city famous, sits the biggest public shooting range in the United States.

Not far away are the Wal-Marts where Arizonans pay Sun City retirees to wait in line when a new ammo shipment arrives, lest the supply run out. Residents have the right to carry handguns openly, and starting last month residents who have no criminal records and are at least 21 also are able to carry concealed weapons just about anywhere, without the bother of getting a permit.

The full embrace of firearms is just as fervent to the north in Montana, where nearly two-thirds of all households have firearms. Montanans feel so strongly about their right to own guns for hunting, fending off grizzlies and -- if it comes to it -- fellow humans that lawmakers passed a measure last year that challenges the federal government's authority to regulate guns made and kept in their state.

This is the gun culture of the American West, and it is from here that the latest challenge to the District's firearms laws has come. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) have proposed a law that they say would sweep away overly stringent regulations imposed by the D.C. Council after the Supreme Court struck down the city's 32-year ban on handguns.

Council member Phil Mendelson (D-At Large) said the McCain-Tester bill could gut the District's regulatory powers, including laws that are stricter than most states about keeping guns away from people with records of domestic violence. He also said the law shows a disregard for the realities of the District, where guns mean drive-bys, holdups and intimidation more than sport, tradition and the American way.

"The national debate about guns just misses that they are very different cultures," Mendelson said of the District and much of the rest of the country. "It's like a psychology, a mind-set, as to how people as a group think about guns."

What does one say to this kind of journalistic malpractice?  We should at least be happy that they’re admitting that it’s the quality of the population which determines how much crime there is, not the gun laws.  On the other hand...come on!  The lie by omission is so blatant that one thinks it must smack awake the most mindless Huffington Post-reading and PBS-watching liberal. Maybe the author here is a crypto-white nationalist who wanted to make it as obvious as possible without spilling the beans and getting fired.  If so, job well done.

I’m more than a little surprised and baffled by Richard Spencer’s suggestion that those on the Alternative Right might form some kind of alliance with right wing elements in Israel. I’m quite certain that if he took some time to consider the issue more carefully he would find that such hopes are based on little more than specious arguments about “common interests” that don't exist and wishful thinking.

When talking about alliances, the first thing we must ask is whether the group you’re thinking about joining together with has anything to offer you and what the cost of calling them your friends may be. Spencer differentiates between American Leftist Jews, whom he sees as the enemy, and his potential partners among the far Right Likudites:

Your average eastern seaboard liberal Jew, who takes his marching orders from the New York Times and reads Phillip Roth in his spare time, will likely never want to have anything to do with the far Right -- even if his life depended on it. Bibi Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman are a different story…

Israelis might learn to prefer… an isolationist regime, which would give them a free hand, as opposed to the ever-meddling Democrats and Republicans.

For the sake of argument, let’s momentarily pretend that there will come a time when Israeli far Right decides that all they really want from the United States is to be left alone (!), instead of financed and protected from international censure. At the same time, they trust ethnically conscious whites to simply stay out of the Middle East. I suppose gaining the support of the most right wing 1 percent of the world's Jews would have a few benefits. On the other hand, Western traditionalists might instead seek an alliance with those who find Zionist excesses repulsive: that is Western Europeans, Eastern Europeans, Latin America, the world’s one billion Muslims, Leftist Jews and even China and North Korea (in other words, the rest of the planet). I don’t think Netanyahu’s support is worth it.

The United States, along with Britain, France, Russia and China, are the only countries with veto power on the UN Security Council. According to John Mearsheimer, "since 1982, the US has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members." In other words, America spends more international political capital defending the Jewish state than the other four main UN powers use on all other issues combined. We must ask, when they have a country this slavishly devoted to them, why on earth would the Israeli Right risk throwing their support behind a new revolutionary movement that has to hold symposiums on whether or not they’re anti-Semitic and-best case scenario-in Spencer’s words “wouldn’t likely express strong opinions about who wins or who loses in various land disputes in the [Middle East]?" What more could we give them that they don’t already get from the United States and why would they prefer a neutral America to the present arrangement? Another consideration: what political sense does it make for us to ally with the only political movement on the planet less popular than authentic Western conservatism? Zionism is a sinking ship, both demographically and in its relations with the rest of the world. Their only friends are those that make up the American establishment, who just happen to be our main adversaries.

The suggestion that Likud might throw themselves into our arms because they fear “[the] next generation of Latino politicians will likely make Obama seem like Eisenhower,” in other words that they stay up at night worrying about a Mestizo march through the institutions, is completely risible. The Israel Lobby correctly understands that if it loses its power over the American government it’ll be because of opposition from American whites who've thrown off the shackles of political correctness or, even less likely, Leftist Jews, not a politically apathetic group with an IQ of 90 which will make up a third of the population in a few generations. 

It has been argued that conservative whites should at least back Israel in order to defend the idea of the ethno-state. The fact of the matter is one could support the Palestinians or Turks by the same reasoning. Beijing and Moscow seem capable of opposing the most blatant cases of Zionist expansion and aggression without having their ethno-nationalist regimes collapse under the weight of their own contradictions.  There's no reason that a conservative Western Europe or America wouldn't be able to do the same. 

There’s one final issue that needs mentioning, something I'm surprised nobody has brought up. It seems that some paleoconservatives and white nationalists have internalized the Left’s worst stereotypes about themselves. “We basically want the same thing as Zionists, so we can work with them.” I believe most WNs and traditionalists simply want to be left alone, not to seize some land in the third world, slaughter/expel the natives, and form an ethno-state there and then for the next 60 years continue living in a never ending state of war in order to expand in a sea of one billion hostile and aggressive Muslims in search of some all elusive “security,” all the while being financed and protected by foreign taxpayers and soldiers. Western Rightists shouldn’t be comparing themselves to Israelis, but pointing out how reasonable, humane and moderate their goals are compared to those of mainstream Zionists.

As Steve Burton has already pointed out, Senator Jim Webb (D-Virginia) has written an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal attacking the diversity-industrial complex.  It's rare to see such an honest look in a major paper at what "diversity" really means.  Thess parts are worth quoting again.

Those who came to this country in recent decades from Asia, Latin America and Africa did not suffer discrimination from our government, and in fact have frequently been the beneficiaries of special government programs. The same cannot be said of many hard-working white Americans, including those whose roots in America go back more than 200 years.

Contrary to assumptions in the law, white America is hardly a monolith. And the journey of white American cultures is so diverse (yes) that one strains to find the logic that could lump them together for the purpose of public policy....

In 1974, a National Opinion Research Center (NORC) study of white ethnic groups showed that white Baptists nationwide averaged only 10.7 years of education, a level almost identical to blacks' average of 10.6 years, and well below that of most other white groups. A recent NORC Social Survey of white adults born after World War II showed that in the years 1980-2000, only 18.4% of white Baptists and 21.8% of Irish Protestants—the principal ethnic group that settled the South—had obtained college degrees, compared to a national average of 30.1%, a Jewish average of 73.3%, and an average among those of Chinese and Indian descent of 61.9%.

While the Indian and Chinese numbers are due partly to selective migration, the Jewish stats are incredible.  Even if we give them an average IQ of 110, it means that it's common place for members of the tribe with IQs below 100 to be college graduates.  This shows what a culture focused on education can do and probably explains the Ivy League overrepresentation.  It seems that if Jews with IQs of 100> can graduate in higher numbers than their European counterparts from State U it's not surprising that those with IQs in the 130-145 range are more likely than their gentile counterparts to put in the work to get into an elite college. 

Policy makers ignored such disparities within America's white cultures when, in advancing minority diversity programs, they treated whites as a fungible monolith. Also lost on these policy makers were the differences in economic and educational attainment among nonwhite cultures. Thus nonwhite groups received special consideration in a wide variety of areas including business startups, academic admissions, job promotions and lucrative government contracts.

Where should we go from here? Beyond our continuing obligation to assist those African-Americans still in need, government-directed diversity programs should end.

Nondiscrimination laws should be applied equally among all citizens, including those who happen to be white. The need for inclusiveness in our society is undeniable and irreversible, both in our markets and in our communities. Our government should be in the business of enabling opportunity for all, not in picking winners. It can do so by ensuring that artificial distinctions such as race do not determine outcomes.

Pace Burton, this isn't really a "Nixon goes to China" type of event.  I've always been impressed with Webb (at least as far as politicians go).  I remember seeing on TV that even though he'd been a Republican, he decided to run against George Allen in 2006 after he asked the incumbent about his support for the Iraq war and the sitting Senator replied with something along the lines of "What, do you expect me to go against my own president?"  Webb is also pro-gun, tough on illegal immigration and has drawn criticisms from feminists for writing a paper against have girls in the military entitled "Women Can't Fight."

Of course, he's a Democrat for a reason and it's because he believes in class war.  But nobody's perfect and it seems to me that Webb is more of a Buchananite than anyone else in the Senate. 

Webb is also the author of a book called Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, a sypathitic portrayal of his group and its roll in determining American values. 

This article appears around the same time of Ross Douthat's New York Times piece on anti-white discrimination in college admissions. 

What is going on here? I have a theory that in modern America, our niceness tends to makes us think those who complain the loudest have a point.  I think most Americans and the intellectual class in general look at groups like the Black Panthers and say, "Well, they may take things a bit far, but if they're that angry, there must be some objective reasons.  Let's be 'moderate' and adopt programs X, Y, Z."  Before the Obama election, the appointment of the dense black supremacist attorney general and the "Wise Latina" making it on to the Supreme Court, whites believed the propaganda that they were the ones still in charge.  Even though the black bureaucratic class would disappear in a heartbeat without the support of white and Jewish liberals, as things now stand, they do have objective power to implement their racialist agenda. It took the Obama election and these racially tinged stories that have become weekly events to make this clear to the white masses.  They began to organize and make their anxieties clear and voices heard and a trickle up effect is causing the intellectual class to look at ways American Caucasians have been wronged.  The concept of "White Privilege" is starting to look silly and even that of white victimhood is getting a sympathetic hearing in the MSM.  

Some may not like the idea of whites turning into another self-pitying minority, but the truth is that people act when they feel wronged.  As declining white influence becomes more and more obvious, the more backlash we'll continue to see. Needless to say, a McCain/Palin presidency would've encouraged complacancy. 

We are making progress. 

The common themes of Mark Hackard’s informative articles are that the US elites oppose the spirit of the East due to liberal ideology and old school national interests. The former argument I agree with; the latter, on the other hand, seems to imply that those ruling America actually care about its citizens, or at least those which happen to be corporate shareholders. One will search in vain for a “rational”-that is, economic-reason for the Iraq War, which couldn’t be paid for if you stole all the country’s oil for a hundred years.  As for the petroleum companies, The Israel Lobby revealed that they have actually traditionally opposed a bellicose foreign policy in the Middle East, preferring to peacefully conduct business with whoever happens to be in power

Now the website thinkprogress.org puts forth evidence that Big Oil has been lobbying against sanctions on Iran.

The recent revelations about BP’s alleged rolein pressing for the release of convicted Pan Am Flight 103 bomber Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi in order to secure valuable oil concessions in Libya provides a potent reminder of the influence oil companies and other major corporations exert over foreign policy.  New evidence uncovered by ThinkProgress shows that America’s own oil giants are also trying to shape U.S. foreign policy to protect or enhance their own profits, even if it puts American security at risk.

Lobbying disclosure forms filed with the Senate this week show that the American Petroleum Institute, ExxonMobil, Shell, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, and Halliburton lobbied the House, Senate, and various executive branch agencies on the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act during the first half of the year as the bill was being debated in the Senate.

Big Oil’s interest in weakening the law is obvious.  Among other things, the new law, signed by President Obama on July 1, imposes significant new sanctions on individuals and corporations “that directly and significantly contribute to Iran’s ability to develop petroleum resources” and that sell more than $200,000 in fuel or other refined petroleum products to Iran.  The new sanctions are important because “although Iran is the second-largest oil producer in the world, it lacks refining capacity and relies on foreign suppliers for nearly 5 million gallons of gasoline a day.”  In addition, the country’s energy industry is “a huge source of revenue for the Iranian government and a stronghold of the increasingly powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps,” which “oversees Iran’s nuclear and missile programs.”…

• ExxonMobil, which spent $2.5 million on lobbying last quarter, currently enjoys $4.9 billion in revenues from federal oil and gas leases and sold fuel additives to Iran until 2006.
• Shell, which spent $4 million on lobbying last quarter, has $11.9 billion in revenues and benefits from the U.S. government, a wide variety of business relationships with Iran, and is alleged to be in violation of the 1996 Iran Sanctions Act—the very law amended by the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions Act.
• ConocoPhillips, which spent $5.5 million lobbying last quarter, accrues $1.7 billion in revenue from federal grants and oil and gas leases and still actively profits from selling gasoline to Iranvia Lukoil, in which it holds a minority stake.
• Halliburton has a whopping $27.1 billion in government contracts and, until 2007, provided oil and gas drilling services to Iran through a foreign subsidiary…

The Comprehensive Iran Sanctions Act passed the House 412-12 and the Senate 99-0, so it’s not surprising that Big Oil’s activities in Iran are not very popular. 

Think about that for a moment. The bill passed the Senate 99-0, despite only opposition from big business. There goes the myth of plutocracy.

Not that oil companies are angels; as the article reveals they lobby for subsidies just as hard as they fight for the opening up of foreign markets. In both cases they’re looking out for their interests, as is to be expected. Sometimes this is a good thing (trying to remove sanctions) and sometimes bad (looking for taxpayer funding).

Think Progress wants us to believe that we’re just lucky to have such an altruistic government. A full 100% of the Senate and 97% of the House was able to resist oil company lobbying to instead look out for the national interests and protect us from the menace of Iran. How fortunate we are to have such selfless public servants in office! 

Those of us of a more cynical bent may be forgiven for suspecting that it’s far more likely that there’s actually another lobby out there having a countervailing effect, one that in the minds of Congressmen relegates the wishes of Big Oil and their paltry tens of millions spent a year  to a mere afterthought. If our representatives only cared about the wishes of BP and Exxon Mobile it would actually be an improvement-the interests of these corporations at least sometimes accidentally converge with those of the nation as a whole.

I suspect the same factors are behind policy towards Russia, which opposed the Iraq War and is trying to put the breaks on any kind of similar strike on Iran. To the extent that the US government cares about controlling oil and gas reserves it’s only to be in a better position to spread liberalism and defend Israel. 

If you’ve ever taken a class in the social sciences that isn’t economics, you may have noticed that your teachers are so afraid of human biodiversity that they seek to discredit it from the start while patting themselves on the back over how far their field of studies has come.  Oh, around a century ago people explained things by inherent racial differences.  Today, of course, we all know better because you know, Martin Luther King. They rarely explain to you when or how the old theories were proven false and they don’t need to. They’ll sometimes pull out the old canard about human races being 99.9 percent similar if they really want to beat racial egalitarianism into your head or the professor is particularly ideological, though for kids raised on the public school system and television even that isn't necessary.

Due to this scholarly environment some of the most interesting and honest case studies about the Third World are those from a century ago or older.  Recently a YouTube user put together an impressive video based on an old broadcast of William L. Pierce called “The Lesson of Haiti.” It brought to my attention a volume from 1900 entitled Where Black Rules White: A Journey Across and About Hayti.  The author, Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard, was thought to be the first white man to cross the interior of the black republic since 1803, the year before Haitian independence was declared.  Where Black Rules White was republished earlier this year.

Prichard arrived first at Jacmel, the main Southern port.  The British Consular Agent gave him a place to stay for the night, which was a lucky thing considering the city had no restaurants or hotels (there were three of the latter in the entire country of 1.75 million).  A few white traders and government representatives inhabited the costal towns, but the population became exclusively dark as one traveled inward.  Haiti has very few mulattos and the ones that did exist were widely disliked at the time.

The NYT on very recent human evolution.