The Texas Miracle

With the advent of Texas governor Rick Perry in the GOP Presidential race, there has been a lot of talk about the large number of jobs created in Texas v. the rest of the country. Much of the liberal critique of Perry (Paul Krugman, Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias) is finally reflecting my 2005 analysis of Texas v. California, The Dirt Gap. Hey, it doesn't have much to do with Perry, it has to do with there being a lot of land in Texas, and not much environmental regulation, so housing prices are cheap!

A couple of additional Texas themes of mine that may become conventional wisdom in, oh, a half dozen years are:

- The bad news for Democrats from the Texas experiment is that it suggests that driving down the skill level of the population through mass immigration means that the only affordable, feasible kind of government in a future heavily mestizo America is a low tax - low spend - low regulation - conservative values Texas-style Republicanism.

- The bad news for Republicans out of Texas is that just such policies attract in so many immigrants and encourage so much fertility among immigrants that the Republicans will eventually get swamped demographically.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

A city of L.A. gangs and English sunshine

From an AP article on the riots in England:

While senior British police officers openly resent that move, analysts of gang culture say it seems logical to seek American assistance, because today's British gangs consciously ape American gang ambitions and style, from the bling to the lingo. 

They talk in a street patois shaped by U.S. rap lyrics, use noms de guerre lifted straight from American gangster films and crime dramas, and choose such icons as Don Corleone, Al Pacino's Scarface or Baltimore ganglord Stringer Bell of "The Wire" TV series as their avatars on social-networking sites. 

"These teenage gangsters are creating their own criminal worlds, and in their minds it's very much an Americanized world. When they talk about the police, it's 'the Feds,' or 'The 5-0,' as in Hawaii 5-0," said Carl Fellstrom, an expert on England's gangs and author of a recent book on the topic, "Hoods." 

British law enforcement authorities admit that, until only a few years ago, they sought to minimize the scale and violent potential of their homegrown gangs. They promoted their preferred label of "delinquent youth groups" and billed full-blooded street gangs as an American phenomenon. ...

The starkest difference between British and American gangs is the firepower. In gun-control Britain, only the bigger gangs make firearms — smuggled in with drugs shipments from Holland, North Africa and the Caribbean — their weapon of choice. For U.K. teenage apprentices and wannabes, the knife is still king. 

Most of the more than 5,000 stabbings a year in Britain, according police and social workers, are gangs attacking rivals who strayed into their areas, muscled into their rackets, or simply insulted them. 

Already this year in London, eight teenagers have been stabbed to death. One wouldn't hand over his cell phone. Another was stopping a bicycle-borne gang from chasing his younger brother. 

Such bloodshed pales in comparison to the epicenter of gang culture, Los Angeles, where an estimated 90,000 gang members have been blamed for the majority of 297 murders last year [which is way down from a few years before]. 

The LA gang model is the world export leader, with chapters throughout the United States and Central America. Dozens of British gangs brand themselves as L.A.-style Crips and Bloods, too, although no true trans-Atlantic affiliation exists.

This whole idiotic Bloods-Crips thing got exported all over America after the beginning of West Coast gangsta rap around 1988. Local knuckleheads started calling themselves Bloods and Crips. By 1995, a lot of them were dead or in prison, and so the homicide rate dropped pretty quickly in the U.S. 

But, this kind of thing could go on a long time in gun-controlled and short jail-time Britain. 

It's like soccer rioting in England in the 1970s and 1980s, before it got squashed after the big death tolls at two soccer catastrophes in the later 1980s. Soccer rioting sounds totally moronic to Americans, because we assume it would get you killed really fast, but that mostly didn't happen for a long time. So, hooligan demographics weren't totally bottomscale. The guys who had the money to travel around Britain and Europe to take part in regular riots tended to be skilled blue collar workers. 

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Devoid of charm"

I wanted to briefly quote from my VDARE.com review of former Mexican foreign minister Jorge G. Castaneda's Manana Foreveri?

He notes that the impoverished Indian south of Mexico “continues to provide much of Mexico’s personality.” In contrast, the wealthier “north is industrious, modernizing, violent, lighter-skinned, and devoid of charm …” In short, the north sounds a lot like Los Angeles.

In Northeastern American intellectuals' assumptions about the impact of massive immigration from Mexico, I notice a lot of assuming that, of course, we are bound to get the best of both worlds -- all the visual quaintness of a Diego Rivera painting of the South of Mexico and all the industriousness of the North of Mexico. 

But, sometimes things work out like John F. Kennedy's description of Washington D.C.: "A city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm."

The evidence from the Southwest U.S. of a century or so of Mexican immigration is pretty similar to the north of Mexico: that you get a fair amount of industriousness, not much enterprise (especially not of a socially cooperative nature), and very little charm. Violence? Hard to say ... a lot in L.A. over the years (although far less than L.A. blacks), not much in El Paso.

Castaneda, by the way, worries about this conundrum. As a way out, he suggests some of the pleasant middle-sized old colonial cities of the middle of Mexico as national models: not too strip mallish, not too burroish.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Liebling's Law Confounded

A.J. Liebling, a mid-Century wit, made a boast that spells out the goal of every journalist: "I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better."

Or, you can get a gig with the New York Review of Books. The August 18, 2011 issue contains a review of Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which I reviewed in January. Heck, my son wrote a high school term paper on the book in April that was at least as insightful.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Panhandling 3

Yet another day pleasing to my ego and bank account. Thanks. 

So, please, would you consider giving me money so I can keep on writing? I think you'll find a lot of good stuff posted over the weekend.

You can send me an email and I'll send you my P.O. Box address.

If you already asked, please allow me to request that you follow up and put a check in the mail.

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My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Jorge G. Castañeda's "Mañana Forever? Mexico and the Mexicans"

My new VDARE column is a long review of former Mexican foreign minister Jorge G. Castañeda's new book Mañana Forever? Mexico and the Mexicans.

In 2001, Castañeda made a valiant effort to foist Mexico’s problems off on America—hey, you can’t blame him for trying. But today it’s obvious that America isn’t rich enough anymore to subsidize his country of 113 million. Mexico, therefore, is going to have to fix itself. 

Castañeda sees Mexico as doomed to perpetual mediocrity as long as it continues to indulge in its traditional worldview of victimism and anti-Americanism. If, as General Patton said, Americans love a winner, Mexicans love a loser.

Read the whole thing there.

I cover a whole lot of ground in this review, but something I'd add is that Castañeda has now come around to believing that Mexico's past and present is, relatively speaking, surprisingly nonviolent. In general, Castañeda seems to view Mexicans as being a little soft and childish, as being mama's boys.

This may seem unlikely, what with all the gruesome crimes in Mexico's current drug wars, but I can see that he has a point. 

Perhaps these opposing views can be reconciled by noting Mexico's traditional penchant for spectacular sadism, which goes back (at least) to Aztec priests ripping out captives' beating hearts on top of pyramids. You can't get much more spectacular or sadistic than that. But for sheer quantity of killing (as opposed to people dying due to side effects), it's hard to top Europeans in the 20th Century. White people had the organizational skills and the willpower and the ideological intensity to kill and die in ridiculous numbers.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Historian David Starkey is a big stupid stupid-head

Have you noticed how the smarter the offender against political correctness, the more the establishment denounces him for stupidity? A few nights ago, English historian David Starkey intellectually mopped the floor with the other three participants on a BBC talk show about the riots. Slowly the outraged losers in the debate are trying to gather their wits and respond.

Dreda Say Mitchell writes in The Guardian:

David Starkey's ethnic year zero 

The historian's views on race and rioting are ignorant and confused. Thankfully most people realise this 

Invited by BBC2's Newsnight last Friday for a discussion about the rioting, I was looking forward to an interesting debate. Fellow guests were Owen Jones, whose recent book on the white working class was widely admired, and historian David Starkey, whose perspective should have been a plus. 

But, instead of that debate, the viewers were treated to Starkey's random and confused thoughts on British youth culture. ... It is, as anyone who's tried it will know, very difficult to argue with crass stupidity. What do you make of someone who thinks using "Jamaican" slang encourages youth to torch buildings? You may as well argue that speaking with an upper-class accent encourages people to hunt foxes. 

Of course speaking with an upper-class English accent encourages people to hunt foxes. If you speak with an upper-class accent, you are vastly more likely to be invited to a fox hunt or to otherwise be invited to socialize with foxhunters or with people who approve of foxhunters than if you speak like Liza Doolittle's dad.

This isn't a particularly novel concept. G.B. Shaw wrote a play about the social and behavioral implications of English accents a century ago, Pygmalion. From Professor Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady:

Look at her, a prisoner of the gutter,
Condemned by every syllable she ever uttered. ...
Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?
This verbal class distinction, by now,
Should be antique.
If you spoke as she does, sir,
Instead of the way you do,
Why, you might be selling flowers, too! 

Conversely, if you think it's cool to speak like Ali G all the time, you are more likely to get invited along by other people who talk like Ali G to a looting. And if more people in your society start to think its cooler to speak like Ali G than like Henry Higgins, that means, to a somewhat lesser but still positive extent, that more people will think its cool to behave like Ali G than like Henry Higgins.

The host, Emily Maitlis, Jones and I had a go at challenging Starkey's views. But it's difficult to challenge someone who offers you no evidence apart from someone's text message and a spell teaching in Jamie Oliver's Dream School. 

As a former teacher I was tempted to suggest that Starkey go out into the corridor and think about what he'd said. Do intelligent and well-educated people in Britain really believe this nonsense? Are the debates about "race" and criminality that were supposed to have been fought and won decades ago going to have to be rehashed? Do we really need to compare gangsta rap with other forms of "outlaw" music, like country and western? Again? 

Mercifully the response to Starkey's remarks was overwhelmingly negative. I've been bombarded with emails and tweets from across the globe, 99% of which found him either ludicrous or comical. One tweeter was reminded of the 1970s character Eddie Booth from Love Thy Neighbour, the British sitcom. ... 

But the central problem with Starkey's comments is that they were based on complete ignorance about the social dynamics of urban life in Britain. 

In sum, everybody I know knows that I'm smart and David Starkey is stupid, for reasons that I can't quite put my finger on at the moment, but, obviously, I'm smart and he's a big stupid-head, almost as ignorant and unintelligent as that Enoch Powell.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Interview with shopkeeper Big Jim

Big Jim: "By 11 oclock there was at least 100, 200 black youths [inaudible], just rampaging, every shop -- "

Reporter: “You’re not being stereotypical there?”

Big Jim: “No, absolutely…” 

Reporter: “Are you sure that they were black? I’m sure they weren’t all black, were they? It doesn't make any sense ...” 

Big Jim: ”OK, then. Let me just say they weren’t all black. One of them there was a white guy. I was."

Reporter: “Well, there were probably other white guys there as well.” 

Big Jim: “I didn’t see any.”

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Die Welt: "Most defendants confirm all stereotypes"

While the NY Times puzzled until its puzzler was sore over the occasional man bites dog looters (the lady social worker, etc.), commenter Theo M notes that the German newspaper Die Welt reports that the main story was ... dog bites man.

Riots in the UK
Most defendants confirm all stereotypes 

Dispensation of justice on the assembly line in a 24-hour court: Despite a few exceptions most defendants confirm all stereotypes: foreigners, criminal, unemployed. Half of the accused are minor. 

In recent days many British media reported on defendants that did not confirm typical prejudices against rioters at all. There was the aspiring social worker who stole a flat screen TV, the student who swiped two T-shirts, or the elementary school teacher who broke into a music store. 

A night at Westminster Magistrates' Court, however, conveys a different picture: Almost all suspects have a migrant background, no job, but a sizable criminal record. About half of the defendants are minor, yet parents hardly felt the need to appear in court. 

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Why do dogs ...

The New York Times is puzzled by the riots in England:

British Ask ‘Why,’ but Answers Are Unclear 

By RAVI SOMAIYA 

At the heart of a debate after the riots in Britain is the question of what drove even some previously law-abiding Britons to steal.

Because, like the dogs in the old joke, they can?

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Rattling the Tip Cup 2

Well, we got off to a good start with the Summer 2011 iSteve fundraising drive, with some very generous donations, but then things slowed down when I didn't post an ask for a day. It turns out, remarkably enough, that if you want people to give you money, you have to ask them.

So, if you haven't donated yet during this drive, please consider it.

You can send me an email and I'll send you my P.O. Box address.

Or, you can use Paypal to send me money directly. Use any credit card or your Paypal account. To get started, just click on the orange Paypal "Donate" button on the top of the column to the right.

When that takes you to Paypal, if you want to use your Paypal account, fill in your Paypal ID and password on the lower right of the screen.

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Thanks.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Enoch Powell's speech

Here are a few extracts from Enoch Powell's infinitely demonized April 20, 1968 speech, delivered two weeks after the Martin Luther King riots in northern American cities.

The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.

In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature. One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: At each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future. Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: “if only”, they love to think, “if only people wouldn't talk about it, it probably wouldn't happen”. Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical.

At all events, the discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician. Those who knowingly shirk it, deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after. ... 

In fifteen or twenty years, on present trends, there will be in this country 3 1/2 million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants. That is not my figure. That is the official figure given to Parliament by the spokesman of the Registrar General's office. There is no comparable official figure for the year 2000, but it must be in the region of 5-7 million, approximately one-tenth of the whole population, and approaching that of Greater London.
Of course, it will not be evenly distributed from Margate to Aberystwyth and from Penzance to Aberdeen. Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by different sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population. 

... Nothing is more misleading than comparison between the Commonwealth immigrant in Britain and the American Negro. The Negro population of the United states, which was already in existence before the United States became a nation, started literally as slaves and were later given the franchise and other rights of citizenship, to the exercise of which they have only gradually and still incompletely come. The Commonwealth immigrant came to Britain as a full citizen, to a country which knows no discrimination between one citizen and another, and he entered instantly into the possession of the rights of every citizen, from the vote to free treatment under the National Health Service. Whatever drawbacks attended the immigrants—and they were drawbacks which did not, and do not, make admission into Britain by hook or by crook appear less than desirable—arose not from the law or from public policy or from administration but from those personal circumstances and accidents which cause, and always will cause, the fortunes and experience of one man to be different for another's. ...

For these dangerous and divisive elements the legislation proposed in the Race Relations Bill is the very pabulum they need to flourish. Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organize to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. 

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman [i.e., , I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”. 

That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. 

Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. 

Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know.
All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.

Now, it's not clear from this speech (although perhaps it is from others) that Powell feared what historian David Starkey called a couple of nights ago "intercommunal violence" of the Bombay-Hindus-whomp-on-Muslims type seen in the opening of Slumdog Millionaire. Powell's focus was evidently the black American riots of 1965-1968, which weren't all that intercommunal, although there was some animus against Jewish and other nonblack shopkeepers. They were more "political shopping," with Civil Rights as an excuse for looting sprees, much like this week's riots.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

More on David Starkey

Not surprisingly, more rage has been directed this week by the British media at an English historian for what he said than at all the rioters for what they have done. 

From the Daily Mail:

Historian David Starkey remained defiant last night after provoking a race storm by claiming the recent riots happened because too many young white people had ‘now become black’. 

The broadcaster was branded a racist yesterday after an appearance on Friday night’s Newsnight programme, when he blamed the riots on a ‘violent, destructive and nihilistic’ gang culture, which he said was being embraced by many white and black people. 

He stunned his fellow guests on the BBC2 show, writer Owen Jones and black author and broadcaster Dreda Say Mitchell, by placing the blame for the riots squarely with a form of black male culture that he said ‘mitigated against education’. ... 

Fellow broadcasters, politicians and members of the public criticised his remarks on Twitter and other social networking sites yesterday, and some even predicted that his television career was now ruined. 

Piers Morgan, the chat-show host and Mail on Sunday columnist [a judge on America's Got Talent on this side of the pond, and author of three volumes of his own memoirs], tweeted: ‘RIP David Starkey’s TV career. And good riddance. Racist idiot.’ ... 

In a surprise move, the BBC’s  business editor, Robert Peston, joined the chorus of disapproval, tweeting: ‘David Starkey’s nasty ignorance is best ignored not worthy of comment or debate.’ As a BBC employee, Mr Peston would normally be expected to be impartial about the channel’s output. ... 

Dr Starkey last night denied he had said anything racist and said he stood by his comments, reiterating  that in times of economic and political crisis, ‘plain speaking’ was needed. 

He told The Mail on Sunday: ‘I said until I was blue in the face on the programme that I was not talking about skin colour but gang culture. A large group of whites have started to behave like blacks. I think that is the most unracial remark anyone can make.’ 

Dr Starkey caused further outrage on Newsnight by claiming that if people listened to David Lammy, the MP for Tottenham, on the radio, they would assume he was white. 

He added last night: ‘David Lammy does sound white, so does [MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington] Diane Abbott, because they’ve had a white cultural experience. It’s one of the reasons they don’t have any street credibility. They have no contact with the young.’ 

In an obvious reference to the phone-hacking scandal, Dr Starkey said that critics like Piers Morgan should concentrate on ‘their own legal difficulties’.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Who is rioting?

An anonymous iSteve commenter has gone through a gallery of surveillance camera photos of rioters posted by the Birmingham, England police department and attempted to work out what the press hasn't been in a hurry to report. Granted, a lot of the pictures are pretty fuzzy, and most of the hoods are wearing hoods, but here are his estimates (feel free to go to the link and compile your own estimates):

Looking at those pics of rioters and toting them up in a spreadsheet - the demography is 60% Black, 35% White, 5% South Asian. 

Demography of the city of Birmingham (where the shots are sourced from) is - " 70.4% of the population was White (including 3.22% Irish & 1.49% Other White), 19.5% British Asian, 6.1% Black or Black British, 0.52% Chinese, 2.9% of mixed race and 0.63% of other ethnic heritage." 

So merging mixed race and Black, we have a per capita representation level of White - 0.5, Black (amalgamating Black and Mixed race in the American fashion) - 6.7 and South Asian - 0.25 (assuming they are all Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, those would have a rep of around 0.35). 

Now since the demographics are younger around ethnic minorities and older among Whites, I'd say that it probably normalizes to age around 6-8x White representation level among Blacks and a 1/4x White representation level among South Asians (and you could take it as 1/2 White representation level among Muslims, if you assume they're all Muslims, and correspondingly assume 0 Hindu representation). 

Of course, the totals as a whole might be Blacker or Whiter depending on how the other areas work out - I'd guess them to wash out at least somewhat Blacker and less White and South Asian, considering London is where the main action is at.

So, blacks 6-8X versus whites sounds about like the usual racial ratio in crime rates seen in America.

There's a lot of evidence that young white Brits commit more assaults and burglaries than young white Americans, but the ratios are not gigantically different.

Also, it seems like the white crime rate is much worse in Britain than in America because serious white youth crime has largely vanished from major cities in America, while it's concentrated in big cities in Britain. For example, in 2010, I looked through 2,600 homicides in Los Angeles County over a few recent years, and off the top of my head, I can recall seeing only one white-on-white youth homicide in a parking lot at night that didn't involve Armenians or other white immigrant groups. (That one was in exurban Stevenson Ranch). But, just because young white men in the biggest American cities tend to be middle class or higher these days, and stay well away from violent crime, doesn't mean that's true all across America.

We think of riots in the U.S. as being race riots and thus as being segregated, but that's probably not quite as true as it seems. For example, when my future wife in April 1968, after Martin Luther King was murdered, looked out her window on the ghettoizing west side of Chicago and said, "Look, Mom, free TVs! Let's get one!" a majority of the neighbors lugging TVs down the street were white. Same for the yuppies who looted coffeetable books of Impressionist paintings from Chicago's best book store on Michigan Avenue after the Bulls won in 1992.

In general, the term "race riot" can be misleading because there have been very few intercommunal mass riots in the U.S. in recent decades. We've had black v. middleman minority riots, as in blacks v. Koreans in L.A. Perhaps Crown Heights where blacks attacked Hasidim 20 years ago (and the Democratic candidate hasn't won any of the five mayoral elections in NYC since).

Something to keep in mind is that English riots tend to be less deadly than the worst American riots. The official death toll in South Central LA in 1992 was over 50, in Detroit in 1967 over 40 (and a reader whose father was an emergency room doctor in Detroit during the riot says his father told him the actual death toll was significantly higher), and in Watts in 1965 over 30. I presume that the large number of guns in America make a difference.

So, lots of American riots are, like these in London, "political shopping." But they tend to be more segregated because they are more dangerous, so whites who wouldn't mind playing smash and grab for a night or two tend to stay home because they don't want to risk getting shot by black rioters or by cops.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Career-ending moment"

A popular historian in England named David Starkey, who is a kind of David McCullough-type who makes television series about the Tudors, was on a British TV talk show last night (see video here), and now he's in trouble for saying out loud what everybody realizes is true, and therefore all sorts of tension builds up over whom will be the first to say it on TV. Nothing makes people madder than saying what's obviously true.

These are Ali G Riots, with blacks in the cultural vanguard and idiots of other races following their example of what's cool. (Here's the classic interview with Andy Rooney, who along with Donald Trump was just about the only celebrity in America who didn't try to help Ali G along.) The riots are a triumph of multiculturalism over white racism, something that Enoch Powell never foresaw.

From the Guardian:

David Starkey claims "the whites have become black" 

Historian provokes storm of criticism after remarks during a televised discussion about the riots on BBC2's Newsnight 

The historian and broadcaster David Starkey has provoked a storm of criticism after claiming during a televised discussion about the riots that "the problem is that the whites have become black". 

In an appearance on BBC2's Newsnight, Starkey spoke of "a profound cultural change" and said he had been re-reading Enoch Powell's rivers of blood speech. 

"His prophesy was absolutely right in one sense. The Tiber did not foam with blood but flames lambent, they wrapped around Tottenham and wrapped around Clapham," he said. "But it wasn't inter-community violence. This is where he was absolutely wrong." Gesturing towards one of the other guests, Owen Jones, who wrote Chavs: the Demonisation of the Working Classes, Starkey said: "What has happened is that a substantial section of the chavs that you wrote about have become black." 

An outcry on Twitter began with the Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn asking the BBC: "Why was racist analysis of Starkey unchallenged? What exactly are you trying to prove?" A spokesman for Newsnight said: "I think that [presenter] Emily Maitlis very robustly challenged David Starkey. 

Jones told the Guardian he believed Starkey's comments were "a career-ending moment". He said: "He tapped into racial prejudice at a time of national crisis. At other times, those comments would be inflammatory but they are downright dangerous in the current climate. "I fear that some people will now say that David Starkey is right, and you could already see some of them on Twitter. I am worried about a backlash from the right and he will give legitimacy to those views in the minds of some." 

Don't you love how nakedly careerist young journos are these days? And how they don't even pretend that jobs in the media are about free expression, but instead admit that they are about controlling speech?

On the programme, Starkey said: "The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion and black and white boys and girls operate in this language together. 

"This language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has been intruded in England and that is why so many of us have this sense of literally of a foreign country." 

The historian and broadcaster, whose historical documentaries on Channel 4 about the Tudors established him as a household name, went on to name-check Tottenham's Labour MP: "Listen to David Lammy, an archetypal successful black man. If you turn the screen off so that you are listening to him on radio you would think he was white." 

He was challenged by Mitchell, who ridiculed his theories about the speech patterns of young people. "You keep talking David about black culture. Black communities are not homogenous. So there are black cultures. Lots of different black cultures. What we need to be doing is ... thinking about ourselves not as individual communities ... as one community. We need to stop talking about them and us.

Don't you love how to the Guardian this ineffectual sputtering of cliches is conclusive demolition?

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Always back up your laptop

In decades past, when the Los Angeles Times was flush with cash, it was an extremely serious newspaper. Now that it's broke, the newspaper has started to notice that L.A. is the funniest city in America:

Beverly Hills police blew up an aspiring screenwriter's laptop and script when investigating a suspicious package Thursday morning on Rodeo Drive. The screenwriter, who was not identified, apparently left his briefcase -- with the computer and script inside -- unattended at a talent agency office. 

Beverly Hills Police Lt. Tony Lee said police, not knowing what was inside the briefcase, detonated it as safety precaution. 

Lee said the owner was distraught when he learned what happened to the briefcase. 

The case was found near the intersection of Rodeo Drive and Little Santa Monica Boulevard. Several streets were closed and nearby businesses were being evacuated, causing traffic jams in the area.

Reminds me of the time a robot from the Maryland police bomb squad was going to throw my new business cards into the Chesapeake Bay under the assumption that they were a letter bomb to Margaret Thatcher from the IRA.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Summer Panhandling Drive

It's time to shake my tin cup again and ask you to help me stay in business as a writer. I believe I provide good value. 

While I'm tooting my own horn, I want to call attention to my book reviewing. I've got a review coming out shortly of former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castaneda's book on how to fix Mexicans' national culture. I don't think any other reviewer is currently reading public intellectuals' books as carefully as I do. 

You can use Paypal to send me money directly. Use any credit card or your Paypal account. To get started, just click on the orange Paypal "Donate" button on the top of the column to the right.

When that takes you to Paypal, if you want to use your Paypal account, fill in your Paypal ID and password on the lower right of the screen.

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Thanks. I appreciate it, profoundly.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

How much ruin in a nation?

Back in 2005, I offered a half dozen explanations why the white crime rate in Britain is higher than the white crime rate in the U.S. (at least outside of homicide, where our huge number of guns makes crime less frequent but more deadly). You can read it here.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer