Sincere Open Borders logos: half-baked swastikas

As I pointed out yesterday, most of the Open Borders logos that have survived the mass deportations look like underdone or surreptitious swastikas, with their Rotating Juggernaut of Doom common denominator. Some combination of the Cross and the Swastika seems to be a common motif in Open Borders logo, which is, well, interesting, to say the least: perhaps the Open Borders ideology is something of a cross between Christian universalism and Nazi let's-blow-up-the-world radicalism? Or maybe swastika-like imagery just looks awesome to the kind of adolescent male intellects who make up the truest true believers in Open Borders?

As a commenter points out, the above image is a modernized version of the Arrow Cross of the Hungarian party of national socialism, which ruled that unfortunate land in 1944-45.

It's worth noting that this rotating swastika-like look has appealed to the Indo-European mind for thousands of years. So the Open Borders boys are just part of a long skein, vastly predating Hitler, of guys who thought it looks cool. 

Before 1871, this image was known in Europe by its Greek name gammadion. But, with the advance in scholarship into the roots of the Indo-European family of languages that had been kicked off by the great philologist Sir William Jones in a 1786 address in Calcutta, the ancient Sanskrit word svastika became more popular in the West.

By the way, Jones was the first to propose an ancient Aryan invasion of India, an idea that remains controversial. Yet, Jones' notion of prehistoric Proto-Indo-European-speaking steppe warriors conquering India and Europe elegantly accounts for much about the linguistic and cultural history of the western two-thirds of Eurasia. (In 2010, Cochran and Harpending updated Jones' concept by suggesting that a genetic mutation offering lactose tolerance may have given the Proto-Indo-European people their competitive edge in warfare. And here's Razib Khan's post explaining the very latest genetic study of the Aryan invasion of India. The invaders of India seem to have the most in common ancestrally with "Georgians and other Caucasians," such as, say, Chechens.)

This Aryan Invasion theory was particularly admired in the first half of the 20th Century, leading Persia to change its name to Iran, and helping inspire Hitler's dreams of conquering much of the world: thus, his choice of the svastika as the symbol of his ambitions. (By the way, is the ancient svastika a reference to the rotating spokes of the wheels of the horse-drawn carts that gave the Aryan invaders such a huge military advantage in mobility? Sounds plausible, but most obvious-sounding etymologies turn out to be completely wrong.)

As we all know, however, Hitlerism was caused by Sir Francis Galton and other Darwinists / eugenicists / evolutionary theorists / statisticians. (Of course, St. Charles of Darwin was wholly untainted by his cousin's ideas). 

But, why isn't linguistics and archaeology also tarred by Nazism? Clearly, Hitler's artistic side was immensely influenced by the study of languages that led to Jones' theory of Aryan conquest. So why aren't linguists today constantly denounced for their role in causing the Holocaust in the same way that, say, IQ researchers are denounced?

Granted, Jones was a giant of British empiricism, but then so was Galton. Today's molders of the conventional wisdom about who was responsible for Hitler seem to find Galton's central place in the British tradition to be more of a feature than a bug. 

So, Jones' time on the pyre may come, too. A future Stephen Jay Gould may be even now working on his prose style, with the goal of demonizing the study of languages. After all, Sir William Jones recognized patterns, and what's more evil than pattern recognition?

Barzun: "The Public Mind and Its Caterers"

From Chapter 2, "The Public Mind and Its Caterers," in Jacques Barzun's 1959 book The House of Intellect:

"The world has long observed that small acts of immorality, if repeated, will destroy character. It is equally manifest, though never said, that uttering nonsense and half-truth without cease ends by destroying Intellect."

My upcoming movie review of Elysium documents a bizarrely widespread case of this.

Higher IQ people "just better" at getting away with being prejudiced

From the Daily Mail:

Being more intelligent does not stop people being racist – it simply makes them better at covering it up. 

A study found that they were just as likely to be prejudiced as their less educated peers but did not act on their feelings.

Or, more accurately, did not naively express their beliefs, while still acting upon them. In contrast, the intelligent are more likely to send their children to, say, Sidwell Friends School than to a D.C. public school.

Researcher Geoffrey Wodtke examined the attitudes of more than 20,000 white respondents from a society-wide survey.

He then looked at how their cognitive ability, or how they processed information, was shown in their attitudes to black people. 

They were also asked about  policies designed to counter racial bias. 

Mr Wodtke, of the University of Michigan, said: ‘High-ability whites are less likely to report prejudiced attitudes and more likely to say they support racial integration in principle.

‘There’s a disconnect between the attitudes intelligent whites support in principle and their attitudes toward policies designed to realise racial  equality in practice.’

For example, four years after demanding that the term limit law preventing Michael Bloomberg from a third term as mayor be ignored, New York City liberals are shocked, shocked to discover today that racial profiling has been going on under Bloomberg.

But who could have known? If anybody had told us that millions of blacks and Latins were being stopped and frisked in New York, we would have done something about it. It's not like we wanted to make the point to blacks and Latins about who is in charge in New York and if they don't like it, well, there are Greyhound buses leaving from the Port Authority terminal every few minutes. No, it's just that, uh, there weren't enough studies being done on stop and frisk over the last decade for us to notice!

He said that in housing, nearly all whites with advanced cognitive abilities agreed that ‘whites have no right to segregate their neighbourhoods’. 

But, added Mr Wodtke, nearly half were content to allow prejudicial practices to continue rather than support laws to open up housing to ethnic minorities. 

He said the study showed racism and prejudice were not simply a result of low mental ability. 

Instead, they result from the need of dominant groups to ‘legitimise and protect’ their privileged social position over other social groupings. 

More intelligent citizens ‘are just better’ at this, added Mr Wodtke at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. 

In modern America, ‘this means that intelligent whites say all the right things about racial equality in principle but they just don’t actually do anything that would eliminate their privileges’. 

Mr Wodtke warned: ‘Any effort to point out or eliminate these privileges strikes them as a grave injustice.’

Open Borders promises to reduce cranial capacity 50%

One proposed logo that wasn't deported when the Open Borders Logo contest closed its borders is this one showing how open borders will make us all like Siamese Twins with only one brain for every two bodies, so you won't have to do anymore of that pesky thinking for yourself.

It's also interesting how many of the (sincere) Open Borders logos are, like this one, stillborn swastikas. The Rotating Juggernaut of Doom look is highly attractive to the ideological male mind, no matter what conceits it chooses to publicly endorse.

Villaraigosa to edify Harvard

That living embodiment of the Mexican-American talent shortage, former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, has been looking for paying gigs since leaving office last month, but now Harvard has come through:

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa will be a “visiting fellow” this fall at Harvard, the Ivy League school announced Monday. 

Villaraigosa will serve the short stint in the university’s Institute of Politics alongside Mitt Romney, former U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis, and Massachusetts area Sen. Mo Cowan, among others. 

In July, the former mayor was hired part-time as a Strategic Advisor for the Banc of California.

There, the 60-year-old will “advise on the development of a community banking strategy focused on expanding home ownership, financing entrepreneurs and small businesses, and investing in communities through education and service,” the company said in a statement.

The "expanding home ownership" part is pretty funny considering that Villaraigosa doesn't own a home or any other assets, other than a small rental property in Moreno Valley.

In addition to his role at the bank and Harvard, Villaraigosa receives an annual pension of more than $97,000 from the City of Los Angeles.

Yeah, but much of that goes in alimony.

It's not a total coincidence that Harvard is located 3,000 miles from Los Angeles. Antonio Villaraigosa, deep down, is still basically Tony Villar, a juvenile delinquent straight out of the lowrider scenes in American Graffiti. But, there's so little other Mexican-American talent out there that he is credibly considered a future Governor of California and was made chairman of the 2012 Democratic convention that renominated Obama.

Oprah: A victim of Shopping While Black or of Shopping While Fat?

Just about the biggest news story in the world in recent days has been how Oprah Winfrey was the victim of racism (conveniently enough, just when she needed to promote her return to movies in The Butler, about black White House servants). Oprah accused a store clerk in Switzerland of racism for not getting down a $38,000 handbag for her to inspect.

I'm always fascinated by how often Stalin is vindicated in his observation that something bad happening to one person is a tragedy while it happening to a million is a statistic. For example, 500,000 black and Latin young men getting stopped and frisked annually for the last decade in New York City is a statistic that has mildly troubled some of the more sensitive souls in the New York elite, but hasn't really been much of a story even locally, much less nationally, while Oprah not getting shown a $38,000 handbag is Breaking Global News. It's like the vast outpouring of sympathy that greets the President of the United States whenever he recounts how his grandmother wanted a ride to work one day. You might think that being black in America has, on net, been good for Obama or Oprah, but that's not a widespread impression. 

More generally, human beings feel sorrier for immensely privileged people than they do for nobodies like shopgirls and grandmas.

Little noted in the hubbub was that Oprah has a long history of complaining about being racially abused while shopping. From Wikipedia's article on Shopping While Black:

In 2001, Oprah Winfrey told Good Housekeeping magazine about how she and a black companion were turned away from a store while white people were being allowed in, allegedly because she and her friend reminded the clerks of black transsexuals who had earlier tried to rob it.[17]

Personally, if anybody thought I looked like a transsexual robber, I'd stay quiet about that, or at least leave out the detail about me looking like a transsexual. (But it's just that kind of prejudice I'm exhibiting that is the reason the media is gearing up for its post-gay marriage offensive for transgender rights.)

And in 2005, Winfrey was refused service at the Parisian luxury store Hermès as the store closed for the evening, in what her spokesperson described as "Oprah's 'Crash' moment", a reference to the 2004 movie about racial and social tensions in Los Angeles.[18]

Unlike the rest of the press, however, the Daily Mail went and asked the latest store clerk to be accused of racism by Oprah what she thought of Oprah's charge:

'Oprah's a liar': Sales assistant in Swiss racist handbag row denies telling TV host that she could not view item because she couldn't afford it 

Sale assistant said she feels 'powerless' after the racism accusations  

Oprah Winfrey claimed assistant refused to show her a handbag because it was 'too expensive'  

Speaking anonymously, shop worker said claims were 'absurd' 

By ALLAN HALL IN BERLIN

The sales assistant who refused to show U.S. talkshow billionaire Oprah Winfrey a luxury handbag costing nearly £25,000 claims the superstar lied about what happened in the luxury Swiss boutique where she works. 

Speaking anonymously to Sunday newspaper SonntagsBlick, the Italian bag lady said she felt 'powerless' and in the grip of a 'cyclone' after Winfrey went on TV in America to claim she had been the victim of racism. 

Winfrey was in Switzerland in July when she walked into the Trois Pommes boutique in Zurich looking for a handbag to match the outfit she was going to wear to old friend Tina Turner's wedding.  

She claims the sales assistant refused to show her the black crocodile leather bag because - seeing a black woman - she automatically assumed she would not be able to afford it. 

Now the saleslady has hit back, stating: 'I wasn't sure what I should present to her when she came in on the afternoon of Saturday July 20 so I showed her some bags from the Jennifer Aniston collection. 

'I explained to her the bags came in different sizes and materials, like I always do. 

'She looked at a frame behind me. Far above there was the 35,000 Swiss franc crocodile leather bag.   

'I simply told her that it was like the one I held in my hand, only much more expensive, and that I could show her similar bags. 

'It is absolutely not true that I declined to show her the bag on racist grounds. I even asked her if she wanted to look at the bag.

'She looked around the store again but didn't say anything else. Then she went with her companion to the lower floor. My colleague saw them to the door. They were not even in the store for five minutes.' 

She emphatically denied ever saying to Winfrey: 'You don't want to see this bag. It is too expensive.  You cannot afford it.'

The saleslady went on: 'This is not true. This is absurd. I would never say something like that to a customer. Really never. Good manners and politeness are the Alpha and the Omega in this business. 

'I don't know why she is making these accusations. She is so powerful and I am just a shop girl.   

'I didn't hurt anyone. I don't know why someone as great as her must cannibalize me on TV.   ...

'I didn't know who she was when she came into the store. That wouldn't have made any difference if I had."

Sounds like the clerk didn't want to go through the trouble of getting down a ridiculously overpriced bag that almost nobody ever buys, compounded with the sin of Not Recognizing Oprah.

If the clerk is telling the truth, Oprah is putting words in her mouth. On the other hand, the clerk doesn't claim to have gotten down the bag, so it's likely that something in her manner discouraged Oprah, who is not the world's most easily discourageable person. 

It's also possible that the clerk was unenthusiastic about going the extra mile for Oprah not because she is black, but because she is fat. Oprah has some of the world's best makeup and lighting people working for her, so she normally looks fine on TV and on the cover of her O magazine, but when she's too rushed for the full treatment, she definitely doesn't look like she can afford a $38,000 handbag. (My guess is that Zurich boutiques do occasionally see black women who can afford such things, typically the wives of African dictators in town to visit their money at their Swiss banks.)

At ultra-high end luxury boutiques, the greatest sin is Shopping While Fat. Handbags that cost $38,000 are bought, I would guess, almost exclusively by Social X-Rays, who look upon shopping alongside fat people as potentially contagious, in terms of social status and perhaps even biologically. Thus, shop clerks frequently give the cold shoulder to the fat to encourage them out the door.

But being prejudiced against the fat is a far frontier that will have to wait its turn for condemnation until after all the last bunkers of prejudice against gays and transgenders are finally routed. (And of course, the most virulently prejudiced against the fat are gay men, so it will require some tricky spinning to avoid mentioning that.)

For Oprah's self-esteem, being the victim of Shopping While Black is much better than being the victim of Shopping While Fat. In the U.S., she enjoys 100% facial recognition among the kind of people who work in boutiques, so here nobody ever does anything other than pander to her every wish. But in Europe, she's not all that widely known, so she occasionally gets treated like other 200-pound women get treated at luxury goods stores.

World War G

When I recall the Cold War, I think:

- I'm glad we won

- And I'm glad it's over

But, apparently, lots of people look forward to another ideological struggle with Russia, this time over Russia's recent law restricting the dissemination of "gay propaganda" among children. The New York Times is particularly offended, what with gay propaganda comprising so much of its daily output. Thus, with zero sense of irony, the NYT's two top World stories tonight are:

World » 

Gays In Russia Find No Haven, Despite Support From The West 

Tell Us About Your Experiences Being Gay In Russia / Быть Геем В России: Расскажите О Вашем Личном Опыте

Schumer: House GOP bumbling into my hands

Via The Z Man, a story from Breitbart:

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), a member of the Senate's Gang of Eight, told CNN on Wednesday that he thinks the House GOP’s plan to approach immigration reform through piecemeal legislation is acceptable since the bills will simply be combined in conference. 

“We would much prefer a big comprehensive bill but any way that the House can get there is okay by us,” Schumer said. “I actually am optimistic that we will get this done. I’ve had a lot of discussions with members of both parties in the House. Things are moving in the right direction.” 

Schumer said House Republicans now appear more open than ever to granting amnesty to illegal aliens, and are going to use the strategy of passing a large group of bills addressing specific immigration issues to get to a conference with the Senate bill. “My initial reaction was the House wasn’t going to take up any bill,” Schumer said. “That would have been very bad, no bill. Now they’re doing it in pieces.”

The problem with conspiracy theorists is that they don't notice the giant conspiracies that really exist, the ones where the brains behind the operation go on CNN to explain the mistakes the opposition (such as it is) are making.

A Confederacy of Douches

Speaking of giant conspiracies hiding in plain view, from the Los Angeles Times:

Immigration reform creates odd political alliances 

Liberal organizations are working alongside GOP operatives, faith groups and high-tech companies to sway Republicans in Congress to overhaul immigration policies. And a lot of money is being spent to do so. 

By Brian Bennett and Joseph Tanfani 

WASHINGTON — When television ads aired in South Carolina this spring attacking Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham for supporting immigration reform, a GOP group came to his aid. So did the other team. 

"We came up with the money," said Frank Sharry, founder and executive director of America's Voice, a Washington-based group with close ties to the Obama White House. "We were just frustrated that nobody was doing anything, and Graham was under attack. We said, 'Fine, we will put money in.'" 

Sharry's group, knowing an ad sponsored by a left-leaning advocacy group could hurt Graham, donated $60,000 to Republicans for Immigration Reform, a super PAC started by President George W. Bush's former Commerce secretary, Carlos Gutierrez, and GOP fundraiser Charlie Spies. 

An unprecedented collection of political bedfellows has coalesced this year on the reform side of the immigration debate: liberal Latino organizations and Republican operatives, the Chamber of Commerce and labor unions, faith groups and high-tech companies. And as with the Sharry contribution, some left-leaning groups are financing Republican pro-immigration groups. 

The result is a flood of money for advertising, lobbying and field organizing aimed at convincing Republicans in Congress to create a pathway to citizenship for the estimated 11 million people in the country illegally, authorize more temporary work visas and increase security on the border with Mexico. 

During the first half of the year, reform backers outspent opponents in advertising by more than 3 to 1: $2.4 million to $700,000, according to Kantar Media's Campaign Media Analysis Group. They also hired a battalion of lobbyists. In the second quarter, 527 businesses, advocacy groups and others reported lobbying on immigration, up from 389 in the first three months of the year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. 

Some of that spending is about to show up in targeted campaigns in House districts. Advocates are trying to keep up the pressure when members are home during the five-week August recess — or "Action August," as President Obama called it last month. But the biggest spending is likely to come this fall, when the House is expected to take up a series of immigration bills. 

"We will see a significant ramp-up of activities in August and September," said Tom Snyder, who runs the campaign effort for the labor giant AFL-CIO. Some Republican House members have already started to soften their opposition to reform, he said, especially in districts with tens of thousands of union members. "What you are seeing is not an avalanche but a stream starting to trickle in our direction." 

The last time Congress took up the issue, in 2007, anti-immigration groups mounted a fierce grass-roots campaign and succeeded in defining the bill as "amnesty" for lawbreakers. This time, advocates have launched a preemptive strike. 

"I've heard it said, it could be lost in August but not won in August," said Spies, a lawyer who formed Republicans for Immigration Reform to provide "political cover." 

The AFL-CIO has spent $418,998 to run ads in at least six states and plans to spend more than $1 million in August and September targeting 40 Republicans in the House. The Service Employees International Union started a $200,000 radio campaign aimed at Republican congressmen in 10 districts with growing Latino populations, including four Californians: Jeff Denham (Atwater), Howard P. "Buck" McKeon (Santa Clarita), Gary G. Miller (Diamond Bar) and David Valadao (Hanford). 

Two moderate Republican organizations also have participated. The American Action Network spent $182,085 on television ads, and Americans for a Conservative Direction spent $105,251 for ads in six states, according to Kantar Media. 

FWD.us, an advocacy group founded by Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and funded by top tech executives, announced plans last week to spend more than $500,000 on ads featuring a young Chicago man who wants to become a Marine but can't because he came to the country illegally as a 7-month-old. 

Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which opposes boosting immigration levels, said his side was badly outgunned. The tide of corporate money has moved the debate away from the promise of the poem on the Statue of Liberty to welcome the tired, the poor and the freedom-seekers, he said. 

"Now, it's give us your industrial and farm workers who are low-wage and poorly educated, or give us the technical talent from somebody else's economy," Stein said. 

The immigration debate has drawn attention, and money, from a vast array of businesses: notably the tech industry, which wants more H-1B visas for highly trained foreign workers, but also other industries that rely heavily on immigrant labor, including agriculture and hotels. Since March, companies and trade groups signed up 76 more lobbying firms, according to the Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Responsive Politics. 

Microsoft Corp. has been among the most active. In addition to its in-house lobbying operation, the company has paid lobbyists from 15 firms this year to press the case on Capitol Hill. 

Fred Humphries, vice president for government affairs, said Microsoft supported reform efforts that would increase high-tech visas because U.S. colleges do not graduate enough computer scientists. "In the U.S. today, Microsoft has approximately 3,500 research and engineering jobs we can't fill," he said. 

The business lobby's influence on Republican lawmakers was on vivid display this spring. In March, Utah's Republican senators, Orrin G. Hatch and Mike Lee, urged the Senate to slow down on immigration reform. That didn't sit well at the Salt Lake City Chamber of Commerce, where many members had been agitating to increase high-tech visas. At a news conference, the chamber's president threatened to mount a recall of Hatch and Lee. 

Hatch soon changed course. He became a key player in the talks that led the Senate to approve a bipartisan bill authorizing up to 180,000 high-tech visas — nearly triple the current number. 

The business spending has been welcomed by immigration advocates. 

"For the first time, I am seeing business actually put political muscle into this campaign. In the past, it was more like lip service," said Eliseo Medina, secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union and a key strategist for the immigration reform forces. 

One congressman who has felt the squeeze is Rep. Mike Coffman, a Colorado Republican elected in 2008 in the district once represented by the vociferously anti-immigration Tom Tancredo. In 2012, the district was redrawn to include Aurora, one of the most immigrant-dense cities in the state. 

Among the pro-reform groups lobbying Coffman were evangelical church members, part of a grass-roots effort financed by Zuckerberg's FWD.us, a Christian family foundation and a hedge-fund manager who is a major Republican donor. 

"That has never happened before," said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, which was the conduit for the money. Noorani's organization typically draws financial support from progressives. 

During the Senate debate this spring, Coffman's Colorado office was deluged with calls and petitions, said Dustin Zvonek, his district director. Ten days in a row, evangelical churchgoers held prayer vigils in the office. 

Coffman endorsed comprehensive reform last month. 

That decision brought him $275,000 worth of positive TV commercials from Americans for a Conservative Direction — also funded by FWD.us. "On immigration, too many members of Congress argue with each other, but our congressman, Mike Coffman, listened to us," the ad said. 

* The post's title, suggested by a commenter recently, is of course a play on the the classic comic novel by John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces, which is derived from Swift's line, "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."

Open Borders boys get what they're asking for, good and hard

Over at the Open Borders logo contest on Facebook, the organizers have had to close their borders because all the cleverest logos were being submitted by satirists. It's almost as if human beings are happier when their communities are allowed to regulate who is allowed in ...

Here's a recent entry that was, apparently, sincere enough to avoid being deported.

Bryan Caplan 

I think it would be really cool if someone could incorporate the familiar hue and texture of a green traffic light into the design. It's the international symbol of "You're free to go," after all.

Alexandria Fraga 

Gave the traffic light suggestion a shot. 

Or, then again, this may be yet another reductio ad absurdum -- Let's use Open Borders to spread Mexico City-style driving to the whole world! -- that the Open Borders boys are too naive to notice.

Another subversive Open Borders logo that hasn't yet been rounded up by La Migra and kicked out of the contest page due to the sponsors' terminal unworldliness is:

Trust me, you do not want to look up the photographic original for this adaptation of a disgusting meme.

Previous (intentionally or unintentionally) ironic Open Borders logos are archived here.

How immigration can solve all the world's problems

From the comments, an Anonymous replying to an Anonymous:

 Anonymous said... 

"everyone born here would have to leave. Then they would be replaced with immigrants." 

Excellent plan. Here's my implementation: 

Part the first: 

All third-world population to move to USA, supervised by the UN. All, no exceptions. America becomes an exponential-GDP economists-utopia with a population of billions of ad-revenue generators. NY-LA greater metropolitan area. World GDP doubles. Trillion dollar bills on the sidewalk. Third world poverty ended. Sally Struthers retires. 

Part the second: 

The non-vibrant portion of USA is banished to the now-vacated lands. The ultimate liberal-revenge fantasy. Now they can experience first-hand the misery they inflicted on those people by not allowing them to immigrate here. 

They can see first-hand life with the civil-wars, the gang-rapes, child-prostitution, drug-cartels, brutal dictatorships, AIDs. They will see what effect an accident of birth can have on your life. O Fortuna velut luna statu variabilis. 

Then we will build a wall around USA so that they can never come back. They will try to climb the wall and beg for permission to immigrate, but their pleas will fall on deaf ears. See how it feels, hah. (Also, no one can leave either.) 

The low population density will really make for a miserable GDP. It will be like living in a world-wide Australia, shudder. 

I'm torn as to whether infrastructure left behind should be left intact or sabotaged. Immigrants are so industrious they won't need it.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Pro-Immigration Image

To promote increased immigration and lower wages, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has come up with this terrifying logo:

Why is TV cooler than movies these days?

There are a lot of reasons for the decline in Cool Factor of movies relative to television, but this new Wall Street Journal article updates the numbers behind a big contributor that I identified in Taki's Magazine four years ago. From the WSJ:

Hollywood Takes Spanish Lessons As Latinos Stream to the Movies 

In the past few years, Hispanics have become some of Hollywood's best customers. Though 15% of Americans over the age of 12 are Latino, they accounted for 25% of all movie tickets sold in the U.S. in 2012, according to a Nielsen Co. study. The average Hispanic moviegoer went to nearly 10 films in the year, compared with just over six for whites, African-Americans, and Asian-Americans. 

... The new industry focus comes at a critical time for the movie business, which is desperate for good news in the domestic market. Attendance at theaters has declined 10% in the past decade, according to industry data, while home entertainment spending is off more than 17% from its 2004 peak.

"The U.S. is a mature theatrical market," says John Fithian, chief executive of the National Association of Theatre Owners trade group. "But unlike any other, we have a growing population and the fastest-growing part of that population, Hispanics, also happen to be the most enthusiastic moviegoers. That's good news for the future of our business."

The impact upon the quality of films and the quantity of quality films influenced by the Mexicanization of the American audience is rather like the widely discussed effect of globalization: famously, explosions translate into any language, witty dialogue less so. But, as Hispanics become a massive pillar in the domestic audience, explosions play better here, too.

For example, the Academy Awards gave the latest Best Picture to Ben Affleck's "Argo" largely to encourage the production of more mid-budget flicks aimed at middle-aged, educated, white Americans (like the Academy voters). "Argo" was a fine movie, but it's hard to imagine it winning Best Picture in past eras when Hollywood made a similar quality movie for grown-ups about once a month rather than as a once a year exception that proves the rules.

In contrast, television, especially subscription channels, can rope in smaller but highly articulate predominantly white audiences for shows like Downton Abbey and Mad Men.

Let me point out the peculiar aspect of white flight from increasingly Mexicanized things: it's seldom talked about as much as white flight from black things. The media is constantly full of discussions of whether or not whites are listening to enough black music or giving blacks enough Academy Awards. This kind of thing strikes white people as fun to argue over.

In contrast, white people's declining interest in all things Mexican or even Mexican-influenced is almost never mentioned. It's not a conspiracy of silence, however. It's a conspiracy of boredom.

Pew: "Integration without blacks in NYC neighborhoods"

From the Pew Research Center:

Sign of things to come? Integration without blacks in New York City neighborhoods 

New York City has always been a trendsetter for the rest of the country in art, fashion and cuisine. Now two researchers have documented a new demographic trend in the Big Apple that they suggest may be a glimpse of the future for other large American cities. 

Researchers Ronald J.O. Flores and Arun Peter Lobo call it integration without blacks. In the past 40 years they found nearly a three-fold increase in the share of integrated New York City neighborhoods with a mix of whites, Hispanics and Asians but few, if any, blacks. 

At the same time, the share of integrated neighborhoods in which blacks comprised at least 10% of the residents fell by about a third, Flores and Lobo reported in the latest Journal of Urban Affairs. 

The result, they wrote, is an “emerging black/non-black color line, where Asians and Hispanics are increasingly aligned with whites while distancing themselves from blacks.” 

Using Census data, the researchers analyzed shifts in integration patterns in 2,111 New York City census tracts between 1970 and 2010. This period marked an explosive period of demographic change in the city: During that time the share of whites-nearly two-thirds of the population in 1970-fell by about half to roughly 33%, while the proportion of blacks remained relatively stable at about 23%. At the same time, the city’s Hispanic population doubled to 28% and the Asian share grew more than six fold to 13%. 

The researchers used census tracts as proxies for neighborhoods. They defined an integrated neighborhood as one in which whites comprised more than 10% but less than 70% of all residents while some mix of blacks, Asians or Hispanics comprised the remainder. 

Within these integrated neighborhoods, they identified those that were “integrated, with blacks” And those that were “integrated, without blacks.” In order to be defined as neighborhoods that were integrated with blacks, African Americans had to make up at least 10% of the residents in the census tracts. Those labeled integrated without blacks contained fewer than 10% blacks. 

Since 1970, Flores and Lobo found that the proportion of “integrated, without blacks” neighborhoods nearly tripled from 13% to 37% in 2010. At the same time, the share of “integrated, with blacks” areas fell from 22.4% to 14.9%. The biggest changes were in neighborhoods where minorities made up at least 70% of the residents, which grew dramatically, and those where whites were the clear majority, which plummeted as a share of all census tracts.

This pattern is hardly new in some places outside of New York: it was common in Southern California a generation ago. But it is interesting to see it playing out in New York City. 

My guess is that in a half century or so, African-Americans will look back in wonder from their current residences in Section 8 podunkvilles at the fact that a century before they heavily inhabited the great liberal cities of America, that they used to live in large numbers on Manhattan, in the nation's capital, a few miles from the beach in L.A., along the lakefront in Chicago, near downtown Boston, and even in San Francisco! It will seem strange in 2063 that back in the early 21st Century, the synonym for black music and black radio stations was "urban."

Here's an alternative possibility, however: if crime can be brought down even further in the Surveillance State, maybe African-American neighborhoods will become more attractive to white gentrifiers, even if they can't push all the blacks out.

By the way the top graph showing the steady rise in NYC's Asian population reminds me of something a New York reader told me awhile ago. She says that while today it seems inevitable that Jews like her will more or less dominate New York City politics forever, she looks around and sees an ever-growing number of Chinese competently inhabiting New York. Maybe, she says, in a half century New York will be a Chinese-dominated city?

Informative logo for Open Borders movement

The Open Borders movement is looking for a logo, so here's one that would help them get the impact of Open Borders across vividly:

C'mon, Open Borders guys, you always feel as if the media, while sympathetic, doesn't give you enough attention. By encapsulating one obvious effect Open Borders would have (the extinction of the Jewish State), this logo would get your message lots of attention.

Dr. James Thompson's Richwine / rich wine challenge

Four months ago, James Thompson made a challenge to the Ana Marie Cox-types hounding Jason Richwine out of work:

“So here is the challenge: a bottle of fine French wine sent to the first person who can show that Hispanic/Latino American intelligence and scholastic ability is on the same level as European American intelligence and scholastic ability. Data please.”

So far, the data has not been forthcoming.

Richwine: "Why can't we talk about IQ?"

Jason Richwine has finally found an outlet willing to publish his response to the tidal wave of ignorance that cost him his job. From Politico:

“IQ is a metric of such dubiousness that almost no serious educational researcher uses it anymore,” the Guardian’s Ana Marie Cox wrote back in May. It was a breathtakingly ignorant statement. Psychologist Jelte Wicherts noted in response that a search for “IQ test” in Google’s academic database yielded more than 10,000 hits — just for the year 2013.

Read the whole thing there.

From Drudge, a new flag