Steven Pinker’s “Inherit the Wind: Our Weird Obsession with Genealogy” is the cover story in\ the August 6, 2007 issue of The New Republic. Here’s an excerpt:

In the struggle between society and family, the exponential mathematics of kinship ordinarily works to the advantage of society. As time passes or groups get larger, family trees intertwine, dynasties dissipate, and nepotistic emotions get diluted. But families can defend themselves with a potent tactic: they can graft the twig tips of the family tree together by cousin marriage. If you force your daughter to marry her first cousin, then your son-in-law is your nephew, her father-inlaw is your brother, your parents’ estate will be worth twice as much per grandchild, and the couple will never have to bicker about which side of the family to visit on holidays. For these reasons, clans and dynasties in many cultures encourage first-or second-cousin marriage, tolerating the slightly elevated risk of genetic disease. Not only does cousin marriage amplify the average degree of relatedness among members of the clan, but it enmeshes them in a network of triangular relationships, with kinsmen valuing each other because of their many mutual kin as well as their own relatedness. As a result, the extended family, clan, or tribe can emerge as a powerfully cohesive bloc—and one with little common cause with other families, clans, or tribes in the larger polity that comprises them. The anthropologist Nancy Thornhill has shown that the prohibitions against incestuous marriages in most societies are not public-health measures aimed at reducing birth defects but the society’s way of fighting back against extended families.

In January 2003, during the buildup to the war in Iraq, the journalist and blogger Steven Sailer published an article in The American Conservative in which he warned readers about a feature of that country that had been ignored in the ongoing debate. As in many traditional Middle Eastern societies, Iraqis tend to marry their cousins. About half of all marriages are consanguineous (including that of Saddam Hussein, who filled many government positions with his relatives from Tikrit). The connection between Iraqis’ strong family ties and their tribalism, corruption, and lack of commitment to an overarching nation had long been noted by those familiar with the country. In 1931, King Faisal described his subjects as “devoid of any patriotic idea … connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil; prone to anarchy, and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatsoever.” Sailer presciently suggested that Iraqi family structure and its mismatch with the sensibilities of civil society would frustrate any attempt at democratic nation-building. [More]

Overall, Pinker does an excellent job of synthesizing what I’ve been writing for years, with one lacuna, which I’ll explain at another time

What’s this country coming to when a poor illegal alien can’t even run out to the local drug store without getting busted for not having the required auto insurance or a valid drivers license?

“I would say that if I’m not this color I’m not gonna get pulled over,” said an indignant Gustavo Flores, who moved to Waukegan, IL, nine years ago and is whining to everyone who will listen that because he’s an illegal he’s now “afraid of the police.”[Waukegan Man Says He Was Arrested Based On Race By Katie McCall, CBS, June 30, 2007]

Memo to Mr. Flores and those who share the same “plight”: That’s how the system is supposed to work.

Waukegan is among the growing number of U.S. cities that have signed on to the federal program (287g) that allows local police to assist in enforcing our immigration laws, a move many Latinos view as an “abuse of power.”

“We have persons, we have innocent people who are being arrested and deported,” said Margaret Carrasco of Casa Mexiquense.

Gee, it would have been swell if reporter Katie McCall (e-mail) had asked Ms. Carrasco, “If someone is here illegally and uses bogus ID to get a job in violation of federal law, how can they be ‘innocent?’ ”

Robert Vasquez has been mentioned in these pages before–he’s was Commissioner of Canyon County in Idaho, and he once sent the Mexican Government a bill for what their citizens were costing Canyon County. Here, he’s complaining about the University Of Idaho Law School’s Tribal And Immigration Clinic,

Ex-commissioner says UI Law School illegally defends immigrants
AG Weekly Online — Twin Falls, Idaho
MOSCOW, Idaho (AP) — A former Canyon County commissioner and vocal foe of illegal immigration says instructors and students at the University of Idaho Law School are breaking the law by offering free legal representation to people who face deportation or other immigration proceedings.

“Federal law states that anyone who aids and abets an illegal alien in remaining in the United States is committing a felony,” Robert Vasquez told the Lewiston Tribune.

Monica Schurtman, [Send her mail]a UI professor and supervising attorney for the Tribal Clinic, laughed off Vasquez’s criticism.

“That’s really funny,” she said. “What we try to do is assist our clients in a well-established legal system to remain legally in the United States.”

Schurtman said the immigration aspect was added to the clinic in 2000 when she saw immigration as a growing concern in the state.

Schurtman has a point in that lawyers are generally exempt from being considered accessories after the fact, but I question the use of the taxpayer’s money and the students’ time to aid in the Mexican invasion of Idaho. A while back, I wrote

But even if one granted a theoretical “public good” in helping to make sure that justice is done to accused American citizens, it wouldn’t apply to the Treason Lobby’s free (or worse, taxpayer subsidized) legal assistance to people who aren’t part of the the American public at all.

Perhaps they should call this kind of advocacy “Pro Bono Mexico.”

Perhaps they’d be better employed defending towns like Farmer’s Branch and Hazleton from the ACLU, or employers who try to check for illegals from the Federal Government’s anti-discrimination police.

Peter Brimelow was on the Washington Monthly Radio Show with Markos Kounalakis and Peter Laufer. He was on in the third segment, Border Skirmish, at 31:47 on the audio which you can get here.April 22, 2007 Show.
My post about the Duke University debate is here.

I saw a discussion of this on the Just One Minute blog, where Tom Maguire says

“So young white nerds today are traitors to their whiteness by not pretending to be hip-hop gangstas? Could someone please just cap me with a nine right now? But quietly - people are sleeping…”.

Apparently a linguist at the University of California, Mary Bucholtz, [send her extremely grammatical mail]has spent 12 years studying “nerds” and wrote a paper in 2001 called
The Whiteness of Nerds: Superstandard English and Racial Markedness[PDF] which is part of the whiteness studies phenomenon. Just saying “phenomenon” I get a rush of nerdiness to the the head.

Who’s a Nerd, Anyway?
By BENJAMIN NUGENT
New York Times
July 29, 2007
Idea Lab

What is a nerd? Mary Bucholtz, a linguist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has been working on the question for the last 12 years. She has gone to high schools and colleges, mainly in California, and asked students from different crowds to think about the idea of nerdiness and who among their peers should be considered a nerd; students have also “reported” themselves. Nerdiness, she has concluded, is largely a matter of racially tinged behavior. People who are considered nerds tend to act in ways that are, as she puts it, “hyperwhite.”

You really need to read the whole thing–one part of nerdiness is not using African-American slang. Which I suppose means actually keeping it real. With a “g” at the end of “keeping,” and everything.

Apparently that “g” is a sign of being so white it hurts:

As a linguist, Bucholtz understands nerdiness first and foremost as a way of using language. In a 2001 paper, “The Whiteness of Nerds: Superstandard English and Racial Markedness,” and other works, including a book in progress, Bucholtz notes that the “hegemonic” “cool white” kids use a limited amount of African-American vernacular English; they may say “blood” in lieu of “friend,” or drop the “g” in “playing.” But the nerds she has interviewed, mostly white kids, punctiliously adhere to Standard English.

And I’m sure you will all appreciate this aspect of the nerdiness problem:

On the other hand, the code of conspicuous intellectualism in the nerd cliques Bucholtz observed may shut out “black students who chose not to openly display their abilities.” This is especially disturbing at a time when African-American students can be stigmatized by other African-American students if they’re too obviously diligent about school. Even more problematic, “Nerds’ dismissal of black cultural practices often led them to discount the possibility of friendship with black students,” even if the nerds were involved in political activities like protesting against the dismantling of affirmative action in California schools. If nerdiness, as Bucholtz suggests, can be a rebellion against the cool white kids and their use of black culture, it’s a rebellion with a limited membership.

Of course, if you do somehow acquire the hyper-correct language disease, you can be a copy-editor like me–I’ve only used the word “farizzle” in conversation once in my life. (I couldn’t resist:EARNEST YOUNG FELLOW:” Sir, I think that older people sound foolish when they try to use the younger people’s slang expressions, don’t you?” ME:”Farizzle?”) But really, this is probably a symptom of something important, and it makes me wish we had Sam Francis still around to write about it.

Mark Fisher is an opinion columnist for the Washington Post, so he’s not required to be objective or keep his personal feelings out of his work. But that’s no excuse for playing the grandmother card. After discussing white flight, and local government attempts to deal with illegals and blight, he writes:

Stirrup says this time is different. “In previous waves of immigration, you had a vast majority of the immigrants who wanted to assimilate and embrace the American dream,” he says. “These individuals have no desire to embrace American culture. Their motivation is a purely economic one — to make money and ship it home.”

I thought back on my grandmother’s stories of hoarding the dollars she earned in a hat factory in New York’s Lower East Side and sending what she could back to her family in her native Russia. Yet sending money back in no way diminished her determination to be a hard-core, flag-waving U.S. citizen who embraced the United States, right down to watching Lawrence Welk on TV every Saturday night.

What is different about the recent spurt in immigration is that our country has changed: Jobs and cheaper housing are no longer in city neighborhoods where immigrants live in isolated ghettos. Instead, immigrants–legal or not –live smack dab in the middle of the rest of us. That confronts us with the culture clash that has always been part of the glorious process of becoming American.Marc Fisher - The Melting Pot Boils Over

Actually, the difference is that the immigrants now are Mexicans. They have a perfectly good country of their own, to which they remain loyal. As I explained in a previous blog item, [Age Of Disloyalty] earlier generations of immigrants had no homes to go back to. For example, it’s not likely that Fisher’s grandmother would have felt any loyalty to the Czar of All The Russias, because she would have been a member of an oppressed minority. [See Appendix B to The Melting Pot. ] But modern immigrants are, as Steve Sailer wrote yesterday

don’t care much about citizenship (or America either, for that matter.) They are, in the most part, patriotic Mexican nationals here merely for the money.

And as Samuel Huntington pointed out, the Ellis Island generation didn’t come from a country right next door with irredentist claims on the Southwestern United States.

How does it happen that an illegal alien can drive something as dangerous as an 18-wheel tractor trailer on America’s highways? Particularly when he does not speak English and has a poor safety record…

Portuguese trucker Milson Sabino Oliveira Filho was sentenced July 24 to 4-24 years in prison for killing three adults and a child and injuring six in a horrific tractor trailer crash near Las Vegas last year.

Oliveira plowed his rig into 13 vehicles that had slowed for a well marked road construction project. The car that contained Arturo and Estrellita Cortez and their 8-year-old granddaughter Kayla was dragged for 100 feet. All within were killed, as was Robert Allen Newsted Jr. in another car, whose infant son survived in a carseat.

Kayla’s father, Arturo Cortez Jr., was in the courtroom for Oliveira’s sentencing.

“I have lost both my parents and my only child,” he said through tears. “They were the three most important people in my life. I was never given a chance to say goodbye to them.

“The truck he was driving became a weapon. Because of that I will never see my parents or my child ever again.”

Cortez and his sister asked for the maximum sentence, which would have put Oliveira behind bars for 14 to 35 years. Cortez said he believed Oliveira chose to violate safety laws.
Four to 24 Years: Trucker gets sent to prison, Las Vegas Review-Journal 7/25/07]

A tougher sentence certainly seems indicated. Oliveira blamed brake failure, but a post-accident inspection by an expert with the Nevada Highway Patrol found the brakes to be “essentially fine.” Oliveira had falsified his driving records. He had been cited several times for safety violations. He did not speak English. Yet the illegal alien apparently was licensed in California and allowed to continue driving.

I am not accusing the writer here of concealing that fact that they’re talking about illegals, but the headline just calls them “Immigrants”, and the whole tone of the piece seems to say that the illegality is just a product of bigotry, somehow. I’ve added a couple of [illegal]’s where it would do the most good–someone needs to devise a browser plug-in that will do that for MSM immigration stories.

By the way, I’m not sure how they got to the US illegally from Brazil, the traditional way to come if you’re not Mexican is to come legally and overstay, but Brasileiros are frequently encountered by the Border Patrol coming across the Rio Grande. The good news is that they’re leaving because of fear of stepped up enforcement. At least part of the stepped-up enforcement is the ending of the catch and release program for “Other than Mexicans,” exposed here on VDARE.com.

Worried, frustrated [Illegal]immigrants headed back home to Brazil -

By Liz Mineo, Framingham MetroWest Daily News
July 29, 2007

The 51-year-old Brazilian man came [illegally]with plans to stay here for up to six years to save enough money to buy a house in Brazil, two cars for his daughters and secure a life back home.

But after three years of calling Framingham home, the man has decided to go back to Brazil with only part of his dreams fulfilled mainly because, he said, living as an illegal immigrant doesn’t pay off anymore.

“It’s not worth it,” said the man, who doesn’t want to be identified for fear of deportation. “It was good when I first got here, when the money I made here had more value back home. Now it’s not worth all the suffering. That’s why I’m leaving.”

He is not the only one.

Across MetroWest and the Milford area, many Brazilian [illegal]immigrants are packing their belongings and leaving for good as they grow tired of immigration crackdowns, increasing demands from employers to produce working papers, and the worsening exchange rate between the dollar and Brazil’s currency, the real.

For years, illegal immigrants from Brazil have coped with the uncertainty of life here and the threat of deportation because of a favorable exchange rate. When the dollar hit its lowest level in three years this month compared to the Brazilian real, a result of the real’s strengthening due to Brazil’s export boom, many people decided to take the plane home.

A minor victory for common sense in (legal) immigration occurred today at an unlikely place: the Bank of the West tennis championships at the Stanford University courts in Palo Alto, CA.

In a match-up between two twenty-year-olds, Russian Anna Chakvetadze defeated Indian Sania Mirza, 6-3, 6-2.

Two years ago, when Mirza–a Muslim from a predominantly non-Muslim Hindu country–came onto the U.S. tennis scene, she was the target of Islamic Jihadist death threats because she wore short pants and (somewhat) revealing tops.

Extremists wanted her to play in a dress that covers her whole body and face.

Said Siddiqullah Chowdhry, leader of Jamaat-e-Ulema-e-Hind:

“What she wears offends Islam. She will be stopped from playing if she doesn’t adhere to it.”

Police were deployed to protect Mirza in case the threats against her were carried out.[Sania Mirza Will Not Change Dress--Ready to Face Islamic Threats, Kiran Chacube, India Daily, September 16, 2005]

But during the two-week long Bank of the West tournament, not a mention was made of Mirza’s tennis outfits.

Good for Mirza for not backing down. Let’s hope she serves as a model for other Muslim women to adopt traditional western clothing.

A story from CBS News has an item about the death of an African-American soldier in a gang initiation in Germany. Gangs are getting to be a bigger problem in the military with the upsurge in recruiting caused by the war.

wcbstv.com - FBI Report: Gangs Spreading In The Military
Called A Threat To Law Enforcement, National Security
Jul 28, 2007
(CBS) BAGHDAD U.S. Army Sgt. Juwan Johnson got a hero’s welcome while home on leave in June of 2004.

“Not only did I love my son - but my god - I liked the man he was becoming,” his mother, Stephanie Cockrell, remembers.

But that trip home was the last time his family saw him alive.

When Johnson died, he wasn’t in a war zone, he was in Germany.

Sgt. Johnston was beaten to death during a “jump-in”–a gang initiation where the new member allows himself to be beaten half to death to prove he’s tough. Unfortunately, the gang members weren’t very good at beating people half to death, and killed him instead.

The Stars and Stripes has good coverage of this story [Gangs in the Military] and Michelle Malkin did a story in 2005called The Truth About That Cop-Killing Mexican Anti-War Marine, about a Hispanic gangster who was affiliated with the Nuestra Familia prison gang.

Part of the problem is that the need for more soldiers has led to lower standards–CBS says that “The rise in gang activity coincides with the increase in recruits with records. Since 2003, 125,000 recruits with criminal histories have been granted what are known as “moral waivers” for felonies including robbery and assault.”

But they still have some standards:

Military regulations disqualify members of hate groups from enlisting, but there is no specific ban on members of street gangs.