"The government should dissolve the people and elect another one," quipped the Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht after the East German riots of 1953. For good or ill, the U.S. political elite seems to be acting on his advice.

~Peter Brimelow, 1992

As much misery as it caused, the German Democratic Republic never actually tried to displace the German people. The natives of Britain haven't been so lucky:   

War does not only occur on television in the remote North Caucasus. With Allah's will, the borders of military action will extend to cover the entire territory of Russia, and this year, great successes await us."

~Terrorist Umarov quoted by Gazeta.ru (my translation)

Today's suicide bombings at two of my hometown's busiest subway stations were not simply acts of Islamic terrorism. Rather, they were an attack on the European civilization. One need not side with North American neocon foreign policy or gloss over the Russian regional specifics to see the global dimensions of this escalating East-versus-West civilizations' clash.

In addition to the death toll and gruesome details, news reports everywhere emphasized the fact that one of the subway stations in questions, Lubianka, is the current FSB headquarters, and, thus, is a spit in the face of Russian counterterrorism, after Nord-Ost and after Beslan. Instead, I recalled that the Moscow subway system is one of the most beautiful examples of public architecture in the world. Its central (yes, Soviet-era) stations, rich in marble and mosaics with a variety of neoclassical references, are an aesthetic symbol of European culture.

Our friends at Youth for Western Civilization were in DC for the pro-amnesty march this past weekend and have made a video that purports to show the "true colors" of the protesters. Check it out:

The problem with dealing honestly with race is that if you’re familiar with and talk about the science/common sense on group differences it’ll overshadow everything else you want to say. Imagine someone coming up to you and telling you he’s an environmentalist, creationist, neo-con and child molester. The last descriptive term is the only thing that you’re going to take away.  Everything else becomes irrelevant. So it is with the term “racist.” The term means little more than believing in the scientific method and rejecting the double standard which says Asian countries for Asians, African countries for Africans, Middle Eastern countries for Middle Easterners and white nations for everybody.

With that in mind, take a look at Frum Forum’s Tim Mak’s new article on Alternative Right.  See if you can find anything in there that would be out of place in a report put out by the SPLC.

A great many pixels have bee spilt over Ron Unz's March cover story in The American Conservative, "Hispanic." The critiques that appeared at AltRight and VDARE can be found here, here, and here -- and Unz's response to them, here. If you'd like to follow the debate play-by-play, the best place to turn is this exhaustive catalogue on the Conservative Heritage Times's blog.

And just today, Jason Richwine has written another blog on the subject, this time over at AEI, and he includes this startling new revelation:

Though this is only one of many contentious issues, Unz suggested that a 2006 report from the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) could help resolve it. The PPIC report uses incarceration data from California’s government that Unz says could be among the most reliable available. The report gives an HDW of 1.48, which Unz claims as a victory. Once we control for age, he says, the HDW comes down to just about his 1.1 estimate.

But Unz missed something important in the report. The 1.48 number is already fully controlled for age. I exchanged emails with one of the PPIC report’s coauthors to confirm this fact.

"AnteBragd" was upset by my article on the illustrious M. Van Rompuy. His/her arguments are incorrect, illogical or just plain silly. They are worthy of a response, however, because millions of Europeans are being force-fed such platitudes every day - as relentlessly, in fact, as we are being force-fed les victimes du jour by The Morning Edition...

• "Just because a lot of the paleos repeatedly claims that the EU is some kind "prison of nations" and rally or mock it by calling it EUSSR does not make it so. It is not so, by the simple reason, that all member states has [sic!] chosen to become members."

"Chosen"? Just ask the Danes or the Irish. When the people of a state say "no" to membership, or to an ever-tighter Union once their country is inside the Lager, they will be subjected to relentless pressure by the ruling elite to change their mind and say "yes"; but if and when they do succumb - as the Irish did to Lisbon last year, having been subjected to a massive barrage of Brussels-endowed Agitprop - now, that decision is treated as irreversible. The Euro-elite treats "democracy" as the process of manufacturing ideologically desirable outcomes determined in advance of the ostensible decision. The failure to produce one equals the failure of democracy; ergo the process will be fine-tuned and reactivated until it performs as expected.

Nigel Farage, a British member of the European Parliament, was fined an equivalent of $4,000 on Tuesday for "insulting" the new European Union President Herman van Rompuy (r.) and refusing to apologize. In a memorable performance in Strasbourg ten days eaerlier, the Euroskeptic MEP told the former Beligian prime minister that he had "all the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk":

"We were told that when we had a president, we'd see a giant global political figure, a man who would be the political leader for 500 million people, the man that would represent all of us all of us on the world stage, the man whose job was so important that of course you're paid more than President Obama. Well, I'm afraid what we got was you... The question I want to ask is: 'Who are you?' I'd never heard of you, nobody in Europe had ever heard of you."

The March issue of The American Conservative features Ron Unz's long essay, "His-Panic: The Myth of Hispanic Criminality." His surprising conclusion, contrary to most of the technical literature, is that Hispanics in the U.S. do not commit crimes at higher rates than white Americans.

Unz's article is laudable for its straightforward, dispassionate discussion of a sensitive issue. His methodology, however, is problematic, and his conclusion is wrong. A proper analysis of the data indicates that Hispanics have a substantially higher crime rate than whites.

The key statistic here is the Hispanic incarceration rate divided by the white incarceration rate. Let's call this number HDW for short. So hypothetically, if four out of every 100 Hispanics are in prison, and two out of every 100 whites are in prison, then the HDW is two, meaning Hispanics are incarcerated at twice the white rate.

At first glance, the national HDW seems to be rather damaging to Unz's case. Table 13 in the 2005 Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) report, featured prominently in Unz's article, makes the HDW calculation straightforward. When we include prisoners of both genders and all ages in federal, state, and local confinement, HDW is 2.62.