"The Stephen King Of Political Science" [James Fulford] - 10/06/04That would be Samuel Huntington, according to Jesús Silva Herzog Márquez. What Márquez was saying was that Huntington was being fantastic in saying that there is a major terrorist danger from Mexico, in that WMDs could be transported across the porous border. But it would be fairer to compare Huntington to Tom Clancy. King writes about psychic powers that don't exist. Clancy writes about terrorist threats that do. Bush/Rove: Working to make that state IQ hoax a reality. [crossposted from www.isteve.com]Majority and Minority in Prison [James Fulford] - 10/06/04Lafayette Bailey, an ex-convict, [Send him mail ] and a paralegal with the D.C. Prisoners' Legal Services Project. , writes in the Washington Post that The Sept. 12 front-page story "As Lapses in Parole Rose, So Did Killings; District Felon Charged in Slayings and Rapes" addressed the tragic result -- but not the root -- of a serious problem: the surrender of the District's criminal justice system to the federal government. In 1997 Congress passed the misnamed National Capital Revitalization and Self-Government Improvement Act, which eliminated the D.C. Parole Board and ordered the closing of the Lorton prison complex a few years later. By any measure, Lorton was a mess -- the subject of years of litigation to remedy problems of medical care, violence and overcrowding. Corruption was rampant, as were drug dealing and other organized criminal activities. I know. I lived there. [Segregated, Silenced And Far From Home, October 3, 2004] The District of Columbia government is the closest thing in the United States to a "failed state" like Haiti. DC prisons were so bad that in Will, the autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy, Liddy says that he could have had people involved in the Watergate case killed on the street for a carton of cigarettes. The problem that Mr. Bailey is complaining about is an unusual one: And although African Americans represent about 60 percent of the D.C. population, nearly 95 percent of convicted D.C. felons are African American. They enter a federal penal system in which African Americans are numerous but still a minority. Typically, federal prisons are in rural areas such as Leavenworth, Kan., and Beaumont, Tex. Nearly two-thirds of the staff members in these prisons are white. When a male D.C. prisoner arrives at a new facility, he is segregated. During this period of separation, the prison staff tells D.C. inmates to steer clear of other inmates from the District "for their own protection." Although no D.C.-based gangs are known to exist in the federal prison system, D.C. inmates collectively are called "D.C. Blacks" by prison officials and treated as though they were gang members. The problem is that what Mr. Bailey is complaining about isn't segregation, it's integration. He would apparently like to have a prison system were his minority group was a majority, as it is in the District, or a supermajority, as it is in the local prison system. Instead, the prison system, being federal, "looks like America." I'm not sure what can be done about the prison guards referring to DC blacks as DC blacks. Perhaps we should issue a fatwa ordering them to substitute the term "Pennsylvania Dutch?" "The Motorcycle Diaries:" (Che Guevara And The "Mestizo Myth") [crossposted from www.isteve.com]American History Standards: "The One Thing" [James Fulford] - 10/06/04On NBC’s Dateline, Jane Pauley asked Gary Nash what was the one thing American students should know about Washington. The answer: “He was a member of a slaveholding aristocracy.” Impressionable Minds: Teaching Politically Correct History By Tom O’Brien, Crisis Magazine Journalistic Standards: "Quotation marks aren't put in a text for decoration" [James Fulford] - 10/06/04The story: Canadian conservative journalist George Jonas finds himself misquoted by an Arab-Canadian grievance monger. The leftish Toronto Globe and Mail refuses to print a correction. Jonas writes Quotation marks aren't put in a text for decoration. They're there to tell the reader -- indeed, to warrant to the reader -- that the portion of the text which they bracket is a verbatim rendering of words uttered or written by the source to whom the quote is attributed. Putting anything but a source's actual words in quotation marks is a breach of this warranty. We try very hard to adhere to this standard at Vdare.Com. I spend a lot of my time adding hyperlinks to the various pieces that come in, and making sure that quotations are accurate. Most of the time, you can click through a link and "read the whole thing." Writers for Vdare.Com are kindly requested to use the cut and paste feature on their computers. [Update: I've just spent the last hour chasing Joseph de Maistre all the way to France for a quotation in the latest Chilton Williamson piece. Aargh. Hope you read French.] Steven Levitt "eliminates" the black-white test score gap! [crossposted from www.isteve.com]Context Omitted [James Fulford] - 10/06/04The Denver Post has an attack on Michelle Malkin's book. [In disgrace or in defense? A new book's claim that the U.S. was justified in interning Japanese Americans in WWII worsens the pain of their history, Colorado families say, by Douglas Brown [send him mail] Denver Post September 2, 2004] The first Colorado internee interviewed is Mariagnes Medrud Shortly after Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation plucked her father, a Japanese immigrant living in Seattle, from his home and placed him in Department of Justice camps. He was actually a Japanese loyalist -- a teacher of kendo, (Japanese swordsmanship,) he refused to swear loyalty to the US, or to "forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or any other foreign government, power or organization?" He and Medrud's mother were both willing to renounce their American citizenship and go back to Japan. But Mariagnes Medrud had decided to stay in America, so the father and mother changed their minds. Scots-Irish [James Fulford] - 10/06/04Parade Magazine has a feature on the Scotch-Irish in America. It's not available online yet, so you'll have to read about the redoubtable Scotch-Irish here or here. But I'm not sure if Mark Krikorian approves. Defending Starbucks [James Fulford] - 10/06/04Starbucks is raising its prices today. A hit piece appears in Slate, accusing them of profiteering on caffeine addiction, with the usual jab at the idea of paying $4.75 for a coffee, comparing the 50 cent coffee from a street vendor, or a dollar coffee at a 7-Eleven to a "java chip Frappuccino." John Derbyshire wrote that [A]nyone who pays four dollars for a cup of coffee is in need of a psychiatrist,] This is comparing apples to Valencia oranges. Starbucks actually only charges a dollar thirty-five or so for an actual coffee. The fancy drinks are more like a milkshake or an ice cream sundae, labor and material intensive, which explains the price. And they hire Americans who can speak English, unlike 7-Eleven, which spends millions lobbying for open borders, and has bad coffee 24 hours a day. The Suicide of the West epitomized in a USA Today op-ed. [crossposted from www.isteve.com] |
