Previous mass shootings in Finland have been done by Finns:

Finland shopping mall shooting: gunman kills five before commiting suicide
A gunman, named by police as Ibrahim Shkupolli, killed his ex-girlfriend and then shot dead four more people at a shopping centre in Espoo, Finland’s second largest city, before committing suicide.

By Nick Squires
Published: 2:58PM GMT 31 Dec 2009
Link to this video

The 43-year-old immigrant, believed to be an ethnic Albanian from Kosovo, shot dead three men and one woman when he opened fire at the huge Sello shopping mall, one of the largest in Scandinavia.

Shortly before the attack he had shot dead his ex-girlfriend, who worked in the shopping mall, in her home.

After embarking on the killing spree Shkupolli fled the mall and was on the run for several hours before police found his body in his apartment in Espoo, six miles west of Helsinki. He had apparently committed suicide. [More]

Finland has gun control laws, although there are a fair number of guns there because it’s mostly rural. It also has, (aargh!) strict hate speech laws–a 2008 hate speech trial there featured a prosecution for maliciously quoting VDARE.com. [The Finnquisition And VDARE.COM]

If your mental picture of a “Texas Grandmother” is someone like 1920’s Governor of Texas “Ma” Ferguson, or the grandmother in The Outlaw Josey Wales, you might be misled by this AP headline, which is the point.

Texas grandmother led big green-card marriage scam
By ANABELLE GARAY

The Associated Press
Dec. 31, 2009, 12:27PM

FORT WORTH, Texas — For more than two decades, Maria Refugia Camarillo played matchmaker for her family members.

Camarillo, known as Cuca, found spouses for her children, her nieces, a nephew and even her three teenage grandchildren, all of whom lived within two blocks of each other.

The marriages were not only arranged, they were also lucrative. Since 1980, Camarillo arranged some 170 matches between more than a dozen of her relatives and foreigners willing to pay cash to marry Americans and get green cards. With fees of up to $12,000 per marriage, the scheme garnered more than $1 million, authorities estimate.

Federal prosecutors describe it as one the largest green-card marriage scams in the country and say it was unique because it was a family enterprise. Authorities say the 72-year-old Camarillo and her family avoided detection through identity theft, document fraud and immigration system savvy.

Camarillo and fourteen of her relatives pleaded guilty to charges including conspiracy to commit fraud in connection with immigration documents, and fraud and misuse of visas, permits and other documents. They received sentences ranging from probation to nearly four years in prison.

But authorities aren’t done with their investigation. They are now trying to track down the scores of immigrants who used sham marriages to obtain permanent residency.

Neither Camarillo nor her attorney would discuss the case, which investigators dubbed Operation Phony Love.[More]

Probably not.

But, in case you did, I just wanted t0 mention that I didn’t.

Today, New Year’s Eve, you can make tax deductible credit card contributions to me here (then, under “Steve Sailer Project Option” click on the “Make a Donation” button); or fax credit card details here (please
put “Steve Sailer Project” on the fax); or you can snail mail checks
made out to “VDARE Foundation” and marked on the memo line (lower left
corner) “Steve Sailer” to:

VDARE Foundation
P.O. Box 211
Litchfield, CT 06759

Second: any old time of the year, you can send me an email and I’ll send you my P.O. Box address.

Third:
You can use Paypal to send me money directly, either by just using any
credit card or if you have a specific Paypal account.

[Click through to Steve's site and scroll down for PayPal.]

In recent years, David Brooks of the NYT has taken up Malcolm Gladwell’s rhetorical straw man device of writing as if the conventional wisdom in 21st Century American media circles consists of a cartoonish caricature of my ideas. Gladwell and Brooks then go on to refute Sailerism to vast applause.

Not surprisingly, Brooks writes in the NYT:

It’s become fashionable to bash Malcolm Gladwell for being too interesting and not theoretical enough. This is absurd. Gladwell’s pieces in The New Yorker are always worth reading, so I’ll just pick out one, “Offensive Play,” on the lingering effects of football violence, for a Sidney award — in part to celebrate his work and in part as protest against the envious herd.

Gladwell’s problem isn’t that he’s “not theoretical enough.” Gladwell is relentlessly theoretical. For example, he entitled one chapter in his bestseller Outliers “The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes.” Gladwell’s problem is that most of his countless theories are so wrong that a few minutes of reflection can debunk them.

Note that the one Gladwell article Brooks specifically endorses is one that I endorsed in a post entitled “David Brooks’ lonely struggle against the Sailerite conventional wisdom.” Unlike Gladwell, Brooks is smart enough and sly enough to know he doesn’t want to get in a headlong battle over simple matters of fact, so he chose to endorse a Gladwell article pre-approved by me.

From the New York Times:

For First Time, Minority Vote Was a Majority
By SAM ROBERTS

Much of the focus on the results of last month’s New York City elections was on Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s small victory margin, despite the more than $102 million he spent to secure a third term. But the elections also produced a seismic political shift that so far has gone largely unnoticed: Black, Hispanic and Asian residents made up a majority of voters in a citywide race for the first time.

But, surely, that demographics are changing faster among voters than among journalists helps explain why the news media was so shocked that their beloved billionaire-mayor, the eighth richest man in America, barely squeezed through to a third term. Everybody they knew adored Bloomberg (who might be the only man in America hiring journalists). Bloomberg is their kind of guy.

But the new majority of voters didn’t find him their kind of guy.

The Washington Post story mentioned in Steve Sailer’s China Likes Blondes post is not illustrated with a picture of a blonde, but with a picture of a (rare) Western male model.

The Vietnamese version of the same story is illustrated with this photo, proving Sailer’s point.

China correspondent Keith B. Richburg of the Washington Post comes up with a tough reporting assignment for himself: the influx of blonde fashion models into China:

China’s Next Top Model may well be a blue-eyed Canadian blonde named Nicole.

Nicole Vos, 19, has been modeling in Canada for four years and was doing runway shows for Toronto Fashion Week when “my agency one day just told me that I’m going to China.” Now just halfway through her three-month contract in Beijing, Vos has been photographed for catalogues, magazines and commercials.

“I love it here!” Vos gushed, shouting over the blaring house music at Touch, a club at the Westin Beijing Chaoyang hotel, the models’ watering hole. “I definitely want to come back!”

Vos isn’t alone. Western models, it seems, are everywhere these days in the People’s Republic of China: on department store display ads, in catalogues for clothing brands, on billboards, in commercials and on the runways at fashion shows. They are blue-eyed American and Canadian blondes like Vos, sultry Eastern European brunettes and hunky male bodybuilders with Los Angeles tans and six-pack abs selling products from jeans to underwear.

(more…)

From the East Bay Express, the latest news from the national drive to eliminate racial gaps in test scores;

Berkeley High May Cut Out Science Labs
The proposal would trade labs seen as benefiting white students for resources to help struggling students.
By Eric Klein

Berkeley High School is considering a controversial proposal to eliminate science labs and the five science teachers who teach them to free up more resources to help struggling students.

The proposal to put the science-lab cuts on the table was approved recently by Berkeley High’s School Governance Council, a body of teachers, parents, and students who oversee a plan to change the structure of the high school to address Berkeley’s dismal racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse. [No Asians in Berkeley? Answer: BHS is 8% Asian. This wouldn't be happening if there were more Asians at BHS. Nobody pushes around determined Asian parents. Perhaps Asians already avoid Berkeley High School because of the power of multiculti ideology there.]

(more…)

Tyler Cowen asks a question of a type that I’ve often wondered about:

What are the odds that the best chess player in the world has never played chess?

… The more general issues are how well the modern world allocates talent and how much exposure you need to something you eventually will be very good at.

My view is that people who are born into a reasonably good educational infrastructure get exposed repeatedly — albeit briefly — to lots of the activities which might intrigue them. If the activity is going to click with them, it has the chance. To borrow the initial example, most high schools and junior high schools have chess clubs and not just in the wealthiest countries. Virtually everyone is put in touch with math, music, kite-flying, poetry, and so on at relatively young ages.

The idea of taking an economics class in college, or picking up some economics literature, strikes most educated people at some point, even if they squash the notion like a bug. If there is some other Paul Samuelson-quality-would-have-been who didn’t become an economist, perhaps he preferred some other avocation even more.

Billions of people are not exposed to quality economics, math, music, etc., but those people also don’t have the nutrition, the education, the infrastructure, or whatever, to excel at world class levels. …

[Chess player] Magnus Carlsen’s father suggested that if he hadn’t had an older sister, he might not have taken up the game at all. Magnus was uninterested at ages four and five, but grew intrigued at age eight when he watched his father play chess with his older sister. I read this anecdote as suggesting he would have been exposed again to the game, one way or another, probably in school. …

In sum, I believe that the odds that “the best (modal) chess player in the world” has never played chess is well under fifty percent but probably above ten percent.

Presumably, by “best chess player” in the world, Cowen means the most naturally talented. That raises the question of whether “overwhelming passion for the game” should be considered a talent or not. If somebody has the natural ability to be the best but lacks the urge to practice, they won’t be a top chess player.

Generally speaking, the people who claw their way to the top of something are fanatics about it. Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson were crazy about swinging golf clubs before their second birthdays. (more…)

Dr. Norm Matloff writes on some of the issues raised in Rob Sanchez’s piece, H-1B Bodyshop vs. U.S. First Amendment: The Case Of “Tunnel Rat”.

Computerworld has been covering H-1B and related issues quite thoroughly since 1999. The editor at that time was skeptical when he saw the industry lobbyists screaming that there was a tech labor shortage, as his wife couldn’t get a job as a teacher even while the Boston-area papers were claiming a teacher shortage.

Here I’ll comment on two items, one by recent Computerworld Editor-in-Chief Don Tennant and the other a new article in the publication. (To save time, I’m just including URLs, which is just as well as there are interesting links on these sites.)

I’ve praised Tennant in this e-newsletter for being open-minded in spite of having, I surmise, come in to the H-1B topic with biases in favor of the program. I believe he originally bought into the “best and brightest” claims of the industry lobbyists, which as I’ve shown before apply only to a very small percentage of foreign tech workers. See my earlier comments here and here.

In a recent pair of blog postings, the second of which is here, Tennant wonders why he hears of workers in the tech field advising their children not to pursue tech careers. After all, Tennant says, even a generous accounting would find that only 35% of IT workers are H-1Bs, which leaves 65%, i.e. plenty of jobs.

I’ll use that 35% figure here for ease of exposition (it’s an overestimate for many reasons). But Tennant is missing the point in several different ways:

• That 35% doesn’t include FORMER H-1B workers who now have green cards. To be sure, I’ve always said they should be protected just like the natives, but the point is that if there had not been a H-1B program most of them would not be in the current labor market.
• The 35% figure is large in terms of its dampening effect on IT wages. Some of you may recall that even the mainly pro-industry NRC report in 2000 made the same observation.
• The 35% figure is large in that it enables employers to shun the older (age 35+) American workers. (Which renders irrelevant Tennant’s comment about jobs opening as baby boomers retire.)
• IT is a very, very broad field. Only a minority of IT jobs are typically filled by computer science graduates (the field Tennant cites), BUT H-1Bs almost exclusively work in such jobs. In other words, the impact on CS grads of the H-1B program is much more acute than on IT jobs as a whole.

The notion that children of tech workers are shunning tech fields is real. Even if the parents actually encourage their kids to go into tech, the kids have seen up close how unstable the field is, and how vulnerable it is to H-1B and offshoring. Note that THIS IS THE CASE EVEN IF THE PARENTS ORIGINALLY CAME HERE AS H-1BS OR FOREIGN STUDENTS. The Wall Street Journal even did a piece on this; see here.

The second item I’ll discuss here is the current Computerworld article, Court orders three H-1B sites disabled | Judge’s ruling to shut down three opposition sites is part of Apex libel lawsuit By Patrick Thibodeau December 28, 2009.

Reportedly an H-1B worker publicly ratted on his employer Apex, an Indian body shop, for making him sign a contract which illegally bound him to indentured servitude. “IT Grunt,” who anonymously operates Web sites critical of H-1B, references the worker’s Web page. Apex is now suing ITG for allegedly defaming the firm, and has gotten a judge to temporarily shut down part of ITG’s Web operations.

To me it does seem reasonable to shut a site down, pending litigation, if there is reasonable evidence of defamation. But I don’t think there is much evidence of that, raising the possibility that this is just a nuisance lawsuit against critics of H-1B, in which case one wonders how the judge decided the way he did. In addition, this could open quite a Pandora’s Box, with those who’ve posted on the site possibly subject to exposure.

I would add, though, that to me this shows once again how the anti-H-1B activists are shooting themselves in the foot by concentrating on (a) violations of the law and (b) Indian “body shops” (rent-a-programmer businesses). As I’ve said before, (a) is the wrong way to go, because most abuses of the H-1B program and fully legal uses of loopholes, and (b) is wrong because the mainstream firms are just as culpable as the Indian body shops.

Norm