This is the last day for last-minute tax tips. One tax tip comes from Tax Update Blog–Charge Those Deductions:

Today is the last day for most 2008 tax deductions. If you use your credit card to pay for a deductible expense today, you can deduct it in 2008 even though you won’t pay the credit card bill until 2009.

And that applies to the tax-deductible donations you make to VDARE.com.

Back in 2003, Rush Limbaugh got himself in all sorts of trouble for saying during his (brief) tenure as a pregame show analyst for ESPN that Philadelphia Eagles QB Donovan McNabb wasn’t as good as the media claimed:

“I don’t think he’s been that good from the get-go. I think what we’ve had here is a little social concern in the NFL. I think the media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. They’re interested in black coaches and black quarterbacks doing well. I think there’s a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he really didn’t deserve. The defense carried this team.”

Five and a half seasons later, McNabb is still a pretty good quarterback, with his team in the playoffs again.

But, it’s worth taking a statistical look at black quarterbacks’ performance in the NFL.

The source for my data is ESPN.com. It lists for the seven years 2002-2008 all the quarterbacks who have thrown at least 224 passes in a season (14 per game) — in other words, the busiest 32 to 34 quarterbacks per year — the “regulars.”

One thing that jumps out of the data is that 2003, the year of the Limbaugh brouhaha, was the peak year in recent times for black quarterbacks. Among the top 32 quarterbacks that year, blacks accounted for over one quarter of all yards throw. In 2008, however, blacks only accounted for 14.7% of all yards passing among the top quarterbacks, a typical percentage for the last four seasons: (more…)

A new report:

By MIKE KNOBLER

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Sunday, December 28, 2008

Football and men’s basketball players on the nation’s big-time college teams averaged hundreds of points lower on their SATs than their classmates, and some of the gaps are so large they call into question the lengths to which schools will go to win.

The biggest gap between football players and students as a whole occurred at the University of Florida, where players scored 346 points lower than the school’s overall student body [out of 1600 points, or about 1.5 standard deviations]. That’s larger than the difference in scores between typical students at the University of Georgia and Harvard University.

Hmmhmm, isn’t Florida playing in the national championship game next month? Could there be a connection?

Seriously, one aspect of this that gets overlooked is that the average SAT scores at many state flagship schools have risen significantly over the last generation. For example, football players at Florida average 890, but U. of Florida students average 1236 which is pretty good. (Old timers who took the SAT before the fall of 1995 should subtract 110 points from these glitzy new scores to adjust them down to the harder scoring standards prevailing in their days.) (more…)

Mexico used to be a nice country, pleasant and safe to visit. But its new identity as the narco-hub of the Western Hemisphere has turned it into one of the most dangerous places on earth, where cartels engage in street battles over turf in which innocent civilians are killed in the crossfire. Naturally, such chaos has a negative effect on normal activities like commerce and education. People hide in their houses and civil society shrivels up.

Note the Los Angeles Times’ characterization of Mexico in chaos; it describes a failed state perfectly:

Swaths of Sinaloa periodically become no-go zones for outsiders; the central government abdicated control long ago. By one estimate, 32 towns are run by gangsters.

In Culiacan, the capital, casinos outnumber libraries, and dealerships for yachts and Hummers cater to the inexplicably wealthy.

This is where narco folklore started, with songs and icons that pay homage to gangsters, and where children want to grow up to be traffickers. How Sinaloa confronts its own divided soul offers insight on where the drug war may be going for Mexico, where more than 5,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence this year.

“The monster has lost all proportion,” said Del Rincon, who is a member of the conservative National Action Party.

A spunky woman with large eyes and hands that seem to be in constant motion, Del Rincon scans other tables at cafes where she meets people, making sure she knows who is within earshot; she lowers her voice when she names names. Her husband and closest confidant keeps tabs on her whereabouts throughout each day.

Such are the risks of speaking out.

“The narcos have networks meshed into the fabric of business, culture, politics — every corner of life.”
[In Sinaloa, the drug trade has infiltrated 'every corner of life', Los Angeles Times, Dec 28, 2008]

The level of corruption and social pathology can hardly be overstated. And this narco-state is our southern neighbor, where Washington leaves the doors to America wide open to Mexican criminals and assorted others.

More than 100 police officers have been killed in Sinaloa this year, most of them gunned down. Countless others have fled, or taken bribes and changed sides. As much as 70% of the local police force has come under the sway of traffickers, by some estimates. [...]

Then those same streets turn into a shooting gallery. Gunmen in dark-windowed SUVs open fire on rivals or cops, day or night. Five federal and state policemen were killed in a hail of bullets on Culiacan’s prominent Emiliano Zapata Boulevard one recent night. The truck with their bloodied corpses came to rest outside a busy casino under blue and purple neon lights and fake palm trees. It was the third time in recent weeks that an entire squad of agents was wiped out in an ambush. No one is ever arrested; shootings, even of cops, are hardly investigated.

“Twenty years ago we knew of the handful of big mafia dons, but they were discreet,” Rodriguez said. “Today we are dealing with the apprentices, who want to get rich very fast, who commit enormous excesses, who want to be noticed.”

Despite the hand-wringing of this LA Times article, just two months ago the very same paper reported that locals missed the easy money of narco-business: Culiacan, Mexico, feels the pain of a drug-induced recession. (See my blog at the time commenting on the crime-loving Mexicans of Sinaloa, Some Mexicans Unhappy with Improved Law and Order.)

Mexicans’ admiration of the dark side is illustrated by the elevation of a common crimal, Jesus Malverde, to the status of being an odd sort of secular saint, worshipped by drug traffickers.

“Jesus, help me, bro’, to get my next drug load across. Check out this nice votive candle I lit for you.” *

(* Not a real caption.)

I got an email inviting me to Google the phrase “black male” in Google News, and see what the result was, and to what extent the resulting stories  were blamed on white people. The phrase black male without quotes produces 7,334 results, but produces some false positives. such as a white male with a black  jacket. The phrase “black male” using the quotes to get that exact phrase produces about 1,273 results, but in either case, the top story is one from NPR, headlined by Google News as Black Male Youth Being Murdered At An Alarming Rate, and which has the headline, when you open it Why Are So Many Young Black Men Being Murdered? (The difference may reflect changes by NPR since Google found it.)

It’s a way of spinning the new homicide figures Steve Sailer discusses below. Black teenagers are comitting more murders, but in the media, especially NPR, they come out as victims–because they frequently kill each other.

And how are white people to blame? For cutting funding to crime prevention  programs, according to NPR.

“The study found the number of police officers in major cities has dropped more than 8 percent, and funding for crime prevention programs is down.

Fox said funding cuts disproportionately affect black communities, which suffer from broken families, bad schools and active gangs.

“I know people want their tax rebates and stimuli checks, but you know, a few extra dollars in your pocket is of little consolation if you’re staring down the wrong end of a gun,” Fox said.

Not all criminologists agree on the difference federal funding could make, but Fox said he hopes the Obama administration will increase funding. Vice President-elect Joe Biden was a driving force behind legislation that put 100,000 cops on the streets in the mid-1990s.”

But the real scandal is not these stories, but the stories that aren’t there. A search for robbery produces 42,000 plus stories. Many of those stories should include the words “black male” but they don’t. A story in the Baltimore Sun, headlined Two men arrested in kidnapping of family, bank-robbery plot, doesn’t mention race, nationality, citizenship or immigration status, although it seems to have been committed by two Ethiopians named Yohannes T. Surafel and Yosef Tadele. And can an American newspaper report that? No, they leave it up to a blog in Ethiopia! Ethioblog says

“Ed’s Note: Based on the suspects’ names, they appear to be from Ethiopia or Eritrea, but nazret can not confirm, more than likely the suspects are of Ethiopian origin.”

and

[Nazret will tag articles to Ethiopia and Eritrea when we can not confirm positively if the subject of the news is of Ethiopian or Eritrean origin. None of the original news stories have identified these suspects by nationality. ]

[Ethiopia Eritrea - Second Suspect Arrested in Family Abduction, Bank Robbery Plot , Nazret.com, December 30, 2008]

Political correctness in reporting is unfair to the hometown newspapers of foreign criminals.  It’s also unfair to the rest of us.

UK MP Andy Burnham’s formal title is Secretary of State for Culture, Media & Sport. Apparently this portfolio carries with it the responsibility of censoring the entire internet. In an interview in The Daily Telegraph, he talks about cooperating with the incoming Obama administration to censor English-language websites. Burnham, [email him] thinks the internet is a “quite a dangerous place” and thinks that each website should be rated, like Hollywood movies

“In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Andy Burnham says he believes that new standards of decency need to be applied to the web. He is planning to negotiate with Barack Obama’s incoming American administration to draw up new international rules for English language websites.

The Cabinet minister describes the internet as “quite a dangerous place” and says he wants internet-service providers (ISPs) to offer parents “child-safe” web services.

Giving film-style ratings to individual websites is one of the options being considered, he confirms. When asked directly whether age ratings could be introduced, Mr Burnham replies: “Yes, that would be an option. This is an area that is really now coming into full focus.”

ISPs, such as BT, Tiscali, AOL or Sky could also be forced to offer internet services where the only websites accessible are those deemed suitable for children. ”

[Internet sites could be given 'cinema-style age ratings', Culture Secretary says, By Robert Winnett, December 27, 2008]

He also mentions libel–if you’re used to modern American journalism, you have no idea what it’s like to live in a jurisdiction where the constant threat of a libel suit is hanging over your head. Of course, any attempt to coordinate with the Obama administration should run up against the First Amendment, which doesn’t exist in the UK, a place that no longer has freedom of speech. But does Obama believe in the First Amendment? Do Congressional Democrats? And remember, as discussed in my last night’s piece Internet Filters—Private Sector First Amendment Workaround, or Gov’t Censorship In Disguise?, there are already computers in offices and libraries throughout the United States where “the only websites accessible are those deemed suitable for children.” This does not include VDare.com

Update: See Martin Kelly on the same story here.

James Alan Fox of Northeastern University, whose study of homicide trends provided the basis for a somewhat misleading article in the New York Times today,[Murders by Black Teenagers Rise, Bucking a Trend,  By Erik Eckholm] has kindly sent me some more detailed data (derived from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics website) on recent trends in homicide offending rates.

Here’s the NYT’s graphs, which show not the expected rate per capita but the absolute number of perpetrators. The reader who doesn’t stop to take this into account would assume that the black homicide rate is about twice the “white” rate. But, of course, there are far more white than black teens, so the black rate is actually much higher than just twice as bad.

First, Dr. Fox confirmed for me that what the New York Times referred to as number of homicides perpetrated by “whites” is actually the number for “whites plus most Hispanics.” (The federal government is very careful about breaking out Hispanic statistics separately in almost all venues except crime rates. I wonder why?) This is an important point because it’s likely that Hispanics now commit the majority of homicides in the younger age groups of the government’s “whites plus Hispanics” aggregation.

Second, he sent me the per capita rates, from which I have calculated the ratio of homicide perpetrating rates. The following table lists the ratio of the murder rate for blacks to the murder rate for whites plus Hispanics. For example, in 2007, the black homicide rate among 14-17 year-old-males was 10.0 times the level of homicide rate for the aggregation of whites and Hispanics.

From this, it appears fairly safe to say that by 2007, the ratio of black to non-Hispanic white homicide rates was at least an order of magnitude for all age groups.

The Washington Post observed in its article about female genital mutilation among Iraqi Kurds that more than 60 percent of women have undergone the procedure. While Islamic apologists insist that the brutal torture is not mentioned in the Koran, many Muslims believe that their religion requires it to suppress women.

The photo is from the deeply disturbing slide show accompanying the article and shows a girl screaming in agony after being cut.

Sheelan Anwar Omer, a shy 7-year-old Kurdish girl, bounded into her neighbor’s house with an ear-to-ear smile, looking for the party her mother had promised.

There was no celebration. Instead, a local woman quickly locked a rusty red door behind Sheelan, who looked bewildered when her mother ordered the girl to remove her underpants. Sheelan began to whimper, then tremble, while the women pushed apart her legs and a midwife raised a stainless-steel razor blade in the air. “I do this in the name of Allah!” she intoned.

As the midwife sliced off part of Sheelan’s genitals, the girl let out a high-pitched wail heard throughout the neighborhood. As she carried the sobbing child back home, Sheelan’s mother smiled with pride.

“This is the practice of the Kurdish people for as long as anyone can remember,” said the mother, Aisha Hameed, 30, a housewife in this ethnically mixed town about 100 miles north of Baghdad. “We don’t know why we do it, but we will never stop because Islam and our elders require it.”

Kurdistan is the only known part of Iraq –and one of the few places in the world–where female circumcision is widespread. More than 60 percent of women in Kurdish areas of northern Iraq have been circumcised, according to a study conducted this year. In at least one Kurdish territory, 95 percent of women have undergone the practice, which human rights groups call female genital mutilation.

The practice, and the Kurdish parliament’s refusal to outlaw it, highlight the plight of women in a region with a reputation for having a more progressive society than the rest of Iraq. Advocates for women point to the increasing frequency of honor killings against women and female self-immolations in Kurdistan this year as further evidence that women in the area still face significant obstacles, despite efforts to raise public awareness of circumcision and violence against women.
[For Kurdish Girls, a Painful Ancient Ritual, Washington Post, December 28, 2008]

So it’s the socially advanced Iraqis who brutalize their little girls in this way — imagine my relief. What can the retro ones be up to?

For information about Kurds already residing in America, see my 2007 article, What The New York Times Didn’t Tell You About Nashville’s Kurdish Gangs. Presumably more Kurds are in the pipeline as a part of Washington’s promise to welcome additional refugees from Iraq in “record numbers.”

Washington does not permit individual criminals to enter the US as immigrants or refugees, and when they are discovered, they are deported, e.g. Ethiopian torturer Kelbessa Negewo, who was repatriated in 2007. Why then does the government allow FGM-practicing cultures to enter America, where the custom is prohibited by law?

Finally, consider signing a petition to end Muslim immigration.

Well, here it is from the Census Bureau: Net migration will add one additional person to the population every 36 seconds. [Census Bureau Projects U.S. Population of 305.5 Million on New Year's Day ] From the National Center for Health Statistics, births to immigrant women account for almost one quarter of all U.S. births. Over 4 million births are recorded every year so births to immigrants account for 1 million additional mouths to feed, clothe, house, educate. . .Why do we need this?

Keith John Sampson, a janitor and student was charged with “racial harassment” by an African-American co-worker for reading what is an actual anti-racist book, Notre Dame Vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan. There’s video of what happened to him below. This represents incredible stupidity on the part of IUPUI Affirmative Action Officer Lillian Charleston, [email her] who wrote:

“We conclude that your conduct constitutes racial harassment in that you demonstrated disdain and insensitivity to your co-workers who repeatedly requested that you refrain from reading the book which has such an inflammatory and offensive topic in their presence. You contend that you weren’t aware of the offensive nature of the topic and were reading the book about the KKK to better understand discrimination. However you used extremely poor judgment by insisting on openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your Black co-workers. Furthermore, employing the legal “reasonable person standard,” a majority of adults are aware of and understand how repugnant the KKK is to African Americans, their reactions to the Klan, and the reasonableness of the request that you not read the book in their presence.”[PDF]

If that’s what she wrote to a guy reading an anti-racist book, (she threatened him with “serious disciplinary action”) it’s hard to imagine what she’d give him if he were reading New York Times bestsellers like The Bell Curve, Alien Nation, and State of Emergency, which are denounced on campus as racist. The video below allows you to see Mr. Sampson, a typical victim of such policies.