Sailer: Forbes Israel's list of 165 Jewish billionaires

From my new column in Taki's Magazine:

Forbes Israel, the Tel Aviv offshoot of the American business magazine, has a cover story on Jewish billionaires. The Israeli edition has made up a list, drawn from Forbes‘s overall ranking of the world’s 1,426 billionaires, of the 165 richest Jews in the world. 

In America, this just isn’t done in the mainstream media, even though it’s obviously interesting and important, and fairly easy to do. 

Here’s my count of Forbes Israel‘s list, with Jewish billionaires as a fraction of the country’s total number of billionaires: 

US 105 / 442 = 24%
Israel 16 / 16 = 100%
Russia 12 / 99 = 12%
Canada 6 / 29 = 21%
Brazil 6 / 45 = 13%
UK 5 / 37 = 14%
Ukraine 3 / 10 = 30%
Monaco 3 / 3 = 100%
Australia 3 / 22 = 14%
Spain 2 / 20 = 10%
France 2 / 24 = 8%
Germany 1 / 58 = 2%
Hong Kong 1 / 39 = 3% 

Read the whole thing there. By the way, before quoting the numbers in this posting, please read the article because it reveals a more accurate source than Forbes Israel.

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Sailer: "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Dzhokhar"

From my new VDARE essay:

Excerpts from press coverage of the acquittal of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on April 15, 2014: 

I
Associated Press: In an expected development, confessed Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was acquitted today on each of four counts of first-degree homicide and 190 counts of aggravated assault. The jury of eleven women and one man declared him “innocent on account of cuteness.” 

II
TMZ: Juror Kendra Newton explained after the verdict, “To be honest, I kind of zoned out, you know? I was trying to pay attention so I could write a book and make a lot of money, but trials are way more boring and confusing than you’d think from TV. They should edit out all the dull parts and have a musical score that tells you how you are supposed to feel.”  

III
World Star Hip Hop: I liked when the lawyer lady said, “If you ain’t a bigot, you must acquit it.” 

IV
Boston Globe: Commenting on the verdict, Senator John McCain, a member of the bipartisan Gang of Seven immigration reform leaders, told reporters, “This just proves what I’ve always believed: We must immediately grant American citizenship to anybody in the world who wants it. And bomb everybody who doesn’t.”

Read the whole thing there.

My first panhandling drive of 2013 has been going pretty well the last three days.

First: you can make a non-tax deductible contribution to me by credit card via WePay by clicking here.

Second: you can make a tax deductible contribution to me via VDARE by clicking here.

Third: You can mail a non-tax deductible donation to:

Steve Sailer
P.O Box 4142
Valley Village, CA 91607-4142

Thanks.

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Poor Jason Collins: Google breaks Google Gaydar just in time for his coming out

Last year, I pointed out in Taki's the unintended existence of what I called Google Gaydar. Go to the home page of Google.com and type in the name of a celebrity, then hit the space bar. Google gives you ten possible auto-complete prompts based on what others have typed. If the celebrity is the subject of gay rumors, one of the first prompts will be the word "gay." If that doesn't come up, you can add the letter "g" and see if "gay" comes up. 

For example, Bill Murray got a 0 on Google Gaydar, with the word "gay" never being prompted by Google in either situation. With Kevin Spacey, however, "gay" was the first prompt. 

It was an interesting tool for gauging, for whatever they are worth, public perceptions and rumors, the Undernews.

But now Google has broken Google Gaydar. The prompt system still works, but "gay" won't be offered as prompt. You can type in even "Harvey Fierstein g" and still not get "gay" as a prompt. Today, the first g prompt for the out Broadway actor who often performs in drag is "gerbil" -- that's okay with Google, but "gay" is not. 

Ironically, aged basketball player Jason Collins's carefully choreographed coming out party in the media is snagged on this too: Google's first prompt for "Jason Collins g" is "girlfriend." "Gay" won't come up as a prompt for Collins. Google is trying to force him back into the closet!

Bing Gaydar still seems to work, though.

If you pay attention to Google, you'll notice a lot of oddities like this that come and go. In 2010, I pointed out that Pat Buchanan had been deleted from Google's prompting system. You could type in "Pat Bu" and be prompted with

Pat Burrell
Pat bus schedule
Pat Buttram
Pat Burrell stats
Pat Burns
Pat Burrell wife
Pat Burke
Pat Buckley Moss
Pat Buckley
Pat Burns cancer

But not with the name of the devil incarnate Pat Buchanan. (On Bing, at the time, he was the first prompt.)

Now, however, Pat is back in the good graces of Google Prompt and comes up first.

What happened? Who knows? Nobody was all that interested in asking. My impression is that the media is slightly terrified of Google. The search firm has so much power that all we can do  is hope they live up their motto "Don't be evil," because if they don't, whaddaya whaddaya?

My guess is that these weird events are not generally part of a Conspiracy that Goes All the Way to the Top with Sergey and Larry sitting around deciding who they are going to mess with today.

Instead, my guess is that on the inside, Google is a big ball of twine, with lots of low-level employees having fiefdoms over chunks of the extremely complicated code. If an individual Google worker gets bored and decides to screw with individuals or websites that he doesn't like, he can get away with it for awhile, especially if it's intermittent and thus not always replicable.

For example, I notice that most of the time my posts pop right up in searches, but some fraction of the time, Google forgets about my posts except for my weekly archives. Right now, for example if I type in "Steve Sailer Hart Risley" I get excellent search results to individual posts I've done. Other times, however, I only get links to Blog Archive 10/7/2011 - 10/13/2011 or whatever. This can go on for a few hours, then go back to working right.

Is this just accidental or is some clever Googleite screwing around by creating non-replicable problems for objects of his ire? Who knows? And nobody seems that interested in finding out.

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Human Biodiversity: Seven-Footers

Here's a fun 2011 Sports Illustrated article by Pablo Torre on retired NBA seven-footers:

An actual accounting of 7-footers, domestic or global, does not exist in any reliable form. National surveys by the Center for Disease Control list no head count or percentile at that height. (Only 5% of adult American males are 6'3" or taller.) "In terms of the growth spectrum, 7 feet is simply extreme," explains endocrinologist Shlomo Melmed, dean of the medical faculty at L.A.'s Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The term 7-footer is itself a kind of outer limit, a far-off threshold beyond which precise measurement seems superfluous. A 6'4" guard isn't a 6-footer, after all. The curve shaped by the CDC's available statistics, however, does allow one to estimate the number of American men between the ages of 20 and 40 who are 7 feet or taller: fewer than 70 in all. Which indicates, by further extrapolation, that while the probability of, say, an American between 6'6" and 6'8" being an NBA player today stands at a mere 0.07%, it's a staggering 17% for someone 7 feet or taller.

There are a lot of issues with this, but it's not a bad first cut at the question. 

The article focuses upon iSteve favorite Mark Eaton. I learned an important lesson from him when we were at UCLA in 1981.

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NumbersUSA: Gang of 8 bill means 33 million more immigrants

Neil Munro writes in the Daily Caller:

The pending Senate immigration bill would bring a minimum of 33 million people into the country during its first decade of operation, according to an analysis by NumbersUSA, a group that wants to slow the current immigration rate. 

By 2024, the inflow would include an estimated 9.2 million illegal immigrants, plus 2.5 million illegals who arrived as children — dubbed ‘Dreamers’ — plus roughly 3.4 million company-sponsored employees with university degrees, said the unreleased analysis. 

The majority of the inflow, or roughly 17 million people, would consist of family members of illegals, recent immigrants and of company-sponsored workers, according to the NumbersUSA analysis provided to The Daily Caller.

Or America could converge to Third World status and the would-be newcomers would decide to stay home or go elsewhere.

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Slate: "Why Do So Many Moms Feel Sorry for Dzhokhar? Why Are Teen Girls in Love With Him?"

I hadn't seen this when I wrote my upcoming parody that should appear in VDARE soon, but I could sense it, so this phenomenon makes up one of my piece's major joke-lines.

From Slate:

Why All This Maternal Sympathy for Dzhokhar?
By Hanna Rosin | Posted Monday, April 29, 2013,

It’s not all that surprising that the suspected Boston bombers, particularly younger brother Dzhokhar, have already inspired passionate crushes in girls. (Here is a Tumblr called Free Jahar, as his would-be girlfriends call him, anchored by a photo of him kicking back in his Timberlands.) As Rachel Monroe wrote last year in her excellent essay “The Killer Crush,” extravagant murderers like James Holmes (the Aurora, Colo., shooter) and the Columbine boys tend to bring on alarming fevers of admiration from teenagers, and maybe some of them grow up to be the women who marry the guys in prison. (Hybristophilia is the technical term for getting turned on by high-profile criminals.) 

The fan-girl fantasies involve an injured Dzhokhar showing up at your house and lots of Florence Nightingale–like ministrations (before they get porny, of course). You can almost imagine them as one of the "~♥~ Let me take care of you ~♥~" series of videos where women with soothing voices bring out the warm cloths. Here is a scene from one posted on the “Free Jahar” site: 

[Dzhokhar] sounded much more terrified than you could have possibly been. “Are you okay?” You begged him to tell you he was fine, nobody really knew. “I’m hit, in the leg, but I- wait what? You’re asking if I’m okay?” He was surprised, but calmer now. “I know you didn’t do it, and even if you did, I know you aren’t harmful.” He sighed with your words, he felt safe for the first time since he saw his face on the television. 

But what stands out in the ardor for Dzhokhar is a deep maternal strain. Given what the man is accused of doing—killing an 8-year-old, among others, and helping to set off bombs that were loaded to maim—how do you explain that? In the past week and a half I have not been to a school pickup, birthday, book party, or dinner where one of my mom friends has not said some version of “I feel sorry for that poor kid.” This group includes mothers of infants and grandmothers and generally pretty reasonable intelligent types, including one who is an expert on Middle Eastern extremist groups. 

Many of them mention that ubiquitous photo of Dzhokhar with his hair tousled and too few hairs on his chin to shave. Some bring up the prom photo with the red carnation or the goofy video of him wrestling with his friends.* Some mention the “I love you, bro” tweets from his many friends. Some just seem anguished by the vision of that “poor kid” alone in the boat by himself, bleeding for all those hours. All of this sympathy stems of course from the storyline that coalesced early: a hapless genial pothead being coerced into killing by his sadistic older brother. As with such storylines, all evidence to the contrary gets suppressed. 

And Rosin brings up, naively, another one of my upcoming essay's joke themes:

(Older brother Tamerlan’s inability to continue to box in the top national competition because he wasn’t a citizen after a rule change barring legal residents—in other words, to become more American—seems to have narrowed his options and radicalized him, for example.)

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Finally, a gay male athlete comes out and he is ...

There has been much anticipation in the press that Real Soon Now an active major team sport jock would finally come out of the closet. But I've noticed that there has been an automatic assumption that he would turn out to be a good player -- you know, like, Tom Brady would announce that he had been living a lie, just going through the motions with Bridget Moynahan and Giselle Bundchen. 

But, what, I wondered, if the gay comer-outer turned out to be lousy? That's not exactly unprecedented. For example, when I was young, I was a big fan of the L.A. Dodgers during their pennant years of 1977-78. They had lots of fine ballplayers -- Sutton, Garvey, Cey, Lopes, Russell, Reggie Smith, Dusty Baker, and so forth -- and a terrible player, Glenn Burke. Well, eventually, Burke was traded to Oakland and then they cut him and then he came out of the closet and then died of AIDS. 

Ever since, you read about how he was a victim of prejudice, that that's what halted his baseball career. No, what hurt Burke's career was that he was no good. He was an outfielder/ first basemen who, at his peak in age 25 in 94 games hit .233 with 1 homer and 16 rbis. My recollection of Burke from listening to a lot of Dodger games on the radio was: "rally killer." For his career from age 23 to 26 his Wins Above Replacement number was -2.4. In other words, some random Triple A player would have been less deleterious to the Dodgers, but they kept giving him a chance to prove himself because he was fast and looked strong. (My vague impression is that Burke was assumed to be gay by Dodger management.)

The Collins Twins: Compare the facial
expressions. Which one looks gay?

So, today, NBA player Jason Collins announced to vast fanfare that he was gay. He is a 34-year-old seven-footer who, along with his 6'11" twin brother Jarron Collins, has been well-publicized since the 1990s, first at Harvard-Westlake (where actor Jason Segel was his back-up), then during four years at Stanford, where he finally developed into an effective Division I player as a senior, then as a #18 pick in the first round of the NBA draft. (I've often written about the Collins twins since I'm interested in twins for what they can teach us about human biodiversity. As I noted in Taki's three years ago, the Collins twins, like the NBA Lopez twins, are publicly agnostic on whether they are identical or fraternal twins.)

The Collins twins are a West Coast version of all those hated Duke basketball players from stable middle class backgrounds who stick around college for four years and learn to play team basketball, then go on to unimpressive NBA careers because they aren't super athletes. Personally, I like the Duke/Stanford model of recruiting athletes who aren't complete thugs and aren't totally out of place at an academic institution, but I'm in a minority.

As befits their middle class backgrounds and zillion dollar educations, the Collins twins are articulate. For example, when retired NBA player John Amaechi came out of the closet in 2007, amid much celebration of his bravery, I quoted Jarron pointing out:

"[Teammate Jarron] Collins' memory, though, is that Amaechi wasn't just indifferent toward his job, but irritated by it and the pro sports atmosphere. "He just wasn't interested in basketball, period," Collins said. "I never knew someone who just disliked the game. I would say that everyone has different motivations to play the game of basketball. John was very clear that money was his. But it really was like, he didn't like the game. It's kind of hard if you hate it." 

Amaechi was an example of how much some gay men don't like sports, even if they are being paid millions to play a sport. Amaechi was a 6'10" and 270 pound project from England who never developed because he despised practicing basketball as something that kept him away from visiting art galleries and his other interests, none of which had anything to do with sports.

I pointed out during the brief Amaechi whoop-tee-doo that the most likely gay male contact sport players would be guys who were given the rare genetic gifts to play whether or not they were obsessed with competitive sports, such as very tall basketball players. (In contrast, small, ferocious, over-achieving star athletes are unlikely to be gay. For example, I'm guessing that Wes Welker isn't gay. Let's see if he's married. Oh, indeed he is ... Mrs. Welker was formerly Miss Hooters.)

And what do you know? The next example of a team sport athlete coming out of the closet turns out to be another NBA big man.

My impression is that Jason Collins isn't a complete fraud like Amaechi was, that Collins is a conscientious professional athlete who worked hard at defense. Despite his height, he was never a shot blocker, but I believe he had good fundamentals on defense.

But he's still terrible at this stage in his career.

Jason's coming out of the closet is being given a big whoop-tee-do on the grounds that he is the first active male major team sport player to do so. But, "active" sounds like a stretch. In his just concluded season with two teams at age 34, he played only 384 minutes out of a possible 3936 or more.

Basketball-Reference has a handy "Per 36 minutes" section that projects out how well he would have done if he'd been allowed to play full time (and had not gotten tired or fouled out). Collins' 2012-13 per 36 minute stats are some of the worst I've ever seen. If he'd played 36 minutes per game, the seven-footer would have averaged 3.8 points per game, 5.6 rebounds, 0.7 assists, 0.9 blocks, and 8.0 personal fouls. His field goal percentage was .310!

Nate Silver, who isn't exactly unbiased, writes in the New York Times:

In some ways, that makes Mr. Collins’s decision to come out much braver. He would hardly have been guaranteed a job next year, regardless of his sexual orientation. If N.B.A. teams discriminate against him at all for being gay, that could keep him on the sidelines.

More skeptically, perhaps Jason Collins is trying to pressure the NBA into giving him one more year just to prove they aren't homophobic? Or this announcement could be calculated to help him do well on the public appearance circuit in his onrushing retirement. He can now look forward to several years of being paid to accept awards for his "bravery." Maybe this will get him a shot at a TV gig.

But, Jason, even before he got old, has never been very good (and 6'-11" Jarron, who has been out of the league for two years, was worse). A few weeks ago, commenter jody wrote:

when i was younger i didn't get this at first, and chuckled along when [ESPN] clowned players like [shawn] bradley. then after a while, i started to get it, and noticed they never ridiculed the goofy, clumsy, or just plain bad black players with nearly as much verve or ardor. and there are a lot of them. they screw up all the time too or have terrible careers. and the sports guys simply ignore it most of the time. 

i remember during some of bradley's later seasons, there were these twins in the league, jason collins and jarron collins, who were pure crap. yet they were 25 minute a game starters at center, and not one time ever were they clowned by ESPN or any sports writers. these two guys turned in a few seasons where they were playing 30 minutes a game and scoring 4 points or something ridiculous, the way erick dampier was for a couple years.

And that was back in their 20s when Jason and Jarron were young. Jason is old and extremely bad now, but being mediocre at his brief peak, then decrepit for years, and gay hasn't kept him from collecting $32,816,349 in salary over his career.

A sidelight is that this raises the question of concordance in terms of sexual identity among identical twins. (We don't know that the Collins' are identical, but that's the way to guess.) Jason writes in Sports Illustrated:

The first relative I came out to was my aunt Teri, a superior court judge in San Francisco. Her reaction surprised me. "I've known you were gay for years," she said....

It was around this time that I began noticing subtle differences between Jarron and me. Our twinness was no longer synchronized. I couldn't identify with his attraction to girls. ... 

I didn't come out to my brother until last summer. His reaction to my breakfast revelation was radically different from Aunt Teri's. He was downright astounded. He never suspected. So much for twin telepathy.

Northwestern U. psychologist J. Michael Bailey has done two studies of sexual orientation concordance among male identical twins. The first came up with an estimate of 50%, but Bailey became uncomfortable with the possibility that his figure was biased from how he'd recruited participants. So, he did another one using the national twin registry in Australia, and came up with, I believe, a figure of only around 22%. That is well above the single digit percentage you'd find if both nature and nurture among identical twins raised together had no effect and sexual orientation was completely random, but it's still strikingly low, meaning the causes of male homosexuality remain scientifically murky.

By the way, a half-dozen years ago I put up a post about Where are all the famous gay oldtime baseball players? After all, there is a vast literature devoted to the history of baseball, and yet few examples of old timers who turned out to be gay. A number of commenters wrote in to point out that everybody knows that a certain well-known hitter who is not quite a Hall of Famer (but was really good) is gay. This bon vivant was a media favorite during his long baseball career for his manners, charm, and superb taste in fine dining. In other words, he was an exemplar of some stereotypically gay virtues. But, he was not subject to many gay rumors, however, because most of the gay rumors are started by gays as sex fantasies, and this ballplayer was always a little on the plump side.

P.S., a commenter points out that Jason Collins still scores a zero on my Google Gaydar system of using Google's search prompts to see if anybody had been searching to see if he was gay. (Granted there are several Jason Collins out there, but the first prompt was NBA so he's the most prominent.) He's the kind of nice young gay man who doesn't loom large in gay fantasies.

By the way, I was recently cited as an authority on the TV show Red Eye by guest Gavin McInnes as the authority on the lack of gays among male golfers. Gavin slightly overstated my findings in saying there are "no" gay male golfers, but it is clear that in golf gay men are as rare, both at the professional and at the enthusiastic hobbyist level, as lesbians are common. As I pointed out in "Why Lesbians Aren't Gay" way back in 1994:

In roughly half the traits, homosexuals tend to more resemble the opposite sex than they do the rest of their own sex. For example, many heterosexual men and lesbian women are enthusiasts for golf, as well as other hit-a-ball-with-a-stick games like softball and pool. Lesbian-feminist sportswriter Mariah Burton Nelson recently estimated, not implausibly, that 30% of the Ladies Professional Golf Association women touring pros were lesbians. While such estimates are hard to verify, it's clear that the marketers at the LPGA desperately wish they had more mothers-of-three like Nancy Lopez, the most popular woman golfer ever: i.e., a victorious yet still feminine champion with whom other heterosexual women enjoy identifying. 

In contrast, pre-menopausal straight women and gay men typically find golf pointless. For example, despite incessant socialization toward golf, only one out of nine wives of PGA touring pros plays golf herself! And gay male golf fanatics are so rare that it's difficult to even come up with an exception that proves this rule (which might explain why golfers wear those god-awful pants).

Among famous gay male entertainers who are enthusiastic golfers, the only name that comes to mind is Johnny Mathis.

On the other hand, other country club sports, such as tennis (Bill Tilden and Hitler's favorite Baron Gottfried von Cramm) and diving (Greg Louganis), have gay male legends. I would hardly be surprised if the gay percentage in men's golf isn't at least as high as in baseball, but it's still low.

In summary, the weight of evidence illuminates much about the natures of masculinity and femininity, which are rather things to understand.

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Tamerlan: An unambitious pimp

From the Washington Post:

The Tsarnaev family: A faded portrait of an immigrant’s American dream 

... A neighbor who lived next to the Tsarnaev family for five years said the older brother stood out in the early years for his flashy clothes and his devotion to fitness. 

“He used to be more dressed like a pimp, kind of Eurotrash,” said the neighbor, who declined to be named, for fear of being associated with terrorists. “Trying to be fancy, but cheap looking” in pointy-toed shoes and matched track suits. ...

Katherine Russell grew up in a sprawling house on a quiet cul-de-sac in North Kingstown, R.I., not far from the ocean. Her pedigree was New England blue blood: Her grandfather and father both attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale. Her father is an emergency room doctor. Her mother is a nurse and social worker. 

Tall and fit, with long auburn hair, Russell graduated in 2007 from high school and soon left home to attend Suffolk University in Boston. She was interested in the Peace Corps and excelled at drawing, winning a state competition. 

In Boston, Russell met Tamerlan at a nightclub, according to her attorney. 

... Russell’s family was startled when she dropped out of college, converted to Islam and began to cover her hair, legs and arms in a show of Muslim modesty. ...

Marriage changed Tamerlan, as well. He dropped the flashy clothes, a change in look so drastic that his next-door neighbor at first thought the tall, athletic son had left town. Tamerlan now came out in the street in raggedy sweatpants and ratty T-shirts, sometimes with a bathrobe over his clothes. 

“I thought a different person had moved in,” the neighbor said.

Zubeidat was arrested last year, accused of trying to steal up to nine dresses from a Lord & Taylor store in Natick, Mass. The couple’s two daughters, Bella and Ailina, moved to New Jersey, where Bella was arrested in December, along with a man named Ahmad Khalil, and charged with possession of and intent to distribute marijuana. ... 

Back in Cambridge, Tamerlan and Russell received welfare payments, just as his parents had in earlier years, the Massachusetts Health and Human Services agency confirmed. 

Finances were tight. ... And in late January, the Tsarnaevs lost the Section 8 housing voucher that had subsidized their rent, according to someone in local government familiar with the case. 

The only steady income at the Norfolk Street apartment came from Russell, who, according to her family’s attorney, worked 70 to 80 hours a week as a home health aide while Tamerlan stayed home with their daughter. 

“He wasn’t really willing to work,” the Russell family intimate said.  

So, basically, Tamerlan was an unambitious pimp who, after he landed one woman to support him, was too lazy to keep up appearances.

Interestingly, an ethnographic documentary featuring Tamerlan's cab-driving second cousin Chic Tsarnaev was made in 1993 by Tracey Ullman. It's quite culturally informative.

My first panhandling drive of 2013 has been going pretty well the last couple of days.

First: you can make a non-tax deductible contribution to me by credit card via WePay by clicking here.

Second: you can make a tax deductible contribution to me via VDARE by clicking here. I should have a new VDARE article out by midweek or so.

Third: You can mail a non-tax deductible donation to:

Steve Sailer
P.O Box 4142
Valley Village, CA 91607-4142

Thanks.

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Open Borders: The Case

From The Atlantic:

If People Could Immigrate Anywhere, Would Poverty Be Eliminated? 

Some economists are pushing for "open borders" 

SHAUN RAVIV 

What if there was a program that would cost nothing, improve the lives of millions of people from poorer nations, and double world GDP? At least one economist says that increased mobility of people is by far the biggest missed opportunity in development. And an informally aligned group of advocates is doing its best to make the world aware of the "open borders" movement, which suggests that individuals should be able to move between countries at will. 

Vipul Naik is the face, or at least the voice, of open borders on the Internet. In March 2012, he launched Open Borders: The Case, a website dedicated to the idea. Naik, a Ph.D. candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, is striving for "a world where there is a strong presumption in favor of allowing people to migrate and where this presumption can be overridden or curtailed only under exceptional circumstances."

I don't know what kind of name Shaun Raviv is, but Vipul Naik is a polite and intelligent young graduate of Chennai Mathematical Institute in Tamil Nadu, India. 

I admire his ethnocentric loyalty. His people have overpopulated their own country, with dire consequences. He strives to talk Americans into allowing his people to come to America in vast numbers to overpopulate our country.

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Douthat on the real purpose of "immigration reform"

From the NYT:

When Assimilation Stalls 

By ROSS DOUTHAT 

THE immigration legislation percolating in the Senate ... real priority is to accelerate existing immigration trends. The enforcement mechanisms phase in gradually, with ambiguous prospects for success, while the legislation’s impact on migration would be immediate: more paths to residency for foreigners, instant legal status for the 11 million here illegally, and the implicit promise to future border-crossers that some kind of amnesty always comes to those who come and wait. 

Today, almost 25 percent of working-age Americans are first-generation immigrants or their children. That figure is up sharply since the 1960s, and it’s projected to climb to 37 percent by 2050. A vote for the Senate legislation would be a vote for that number to climb faster still. 

The bill has been written this way because America’s leadership class, Republicans as well as Democrats, assumes that continued mass immigration is exactly what our economy needs. As America struggles to adapt to an aging population, the bill’s supporters argue, immigrants offer youth, vitality and tax dollars. As we try to escape economic stagnation, mass immigration promises an extra shot of growth. 

Is there any reason to be skeptical of this optimistic consensus? Actually, there are two: the assimilation patterns for descendants of Hispanic (particularly Mexican) immigrants and the socioeconomic disarray among the native-born poor and working class. 

Conservatives have long worried that recent immigrants from Latin America would assimilate more slowly than previous new arrivals — because of their sheer numbers and shared language, and because the American economy has changed in ways that make it harder for less-educated workers to assimilate and rise. 

As my colleague David Leonhardt wrote recently, those fears seem unfounded if you look at second-generation Hispanics, who make clear progress — economic, educational and linguistic — relative to their immigrant parents.
But there’s a substantial body of literature showing that progress stalling out, especially for Mexican-Americans, between the second generation and the third. A 2002 study, for instance, reported that despite “improvements in human capital and earnings” for second-generation Mexican immigrants, the third generation still “trails the education and earnings of the average American,” and shows little sign of catching up. In their 2009 book “Generations of Exclusion,” the sociologists Edward Telles and Vilma Ortiz found similar stagnation and slippage for descendants of Mexican immigrants during the second half of the 20th century. 

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Hispanics not catching up to whites economically

This would seem relevant to thinking about immigration policy, but almost nobody draws the connection. Annie Lowrey writes in the NYT:

The Urban Institute study found that the racial wealth gap yawned during the recession, even as the income gap between white Americans and nonwhite Americans remained stable. As of 2010, white families, on average, earned about $2 for every $1 that black and Hispanic families earned, a ratio that has remained roughly constant for the last 30 years. But when it comes to wealth — as measured by assets, like cash savings, homes and retirement accounts, minus debts, like mortgages and credit card balances — white families have far outpaced black and Hispanic ones. Before the recession, white families, on average, were about four times as wealthy as nonwhite families, according to the Urban Institute’s analysis of Federal Reserve data. By 2010, whites were about six times as wealthy. 

The dollar value of that gap has grown, as well. By the most recent data, the average white family had about $632,000 in wealth, versus $98,000 for black families and $110,000 for Hispanic families.

A commenter writes in:

Please note that the MEDIAN wealth for white families was 110,729 in 2010. For black households the "wealth" drops to 4,995 and Hispanics "wealth" is 7,424. These are figures released by the United States Census Bureau. 

Lowrey (is she Ezra Klein's girlfriend?) continues:

Two major factors helped to widen this wealth gap in recent years. The first is that the housing downturn hit black and Hispanic households harder than it hit white households, in aggregate. Many young Hispanic families, for instance, bought homes as the housing bubble was inflating and reaching its peak, leaving them saddled with heavy debt burdens as house prices plunged in places like suburban Phoenix and inland California.

So, lenders overestimated Hispanic ability to pay off big loans.

Discriminatory lending practices were also a factor. “We know that communities of color, their rate of subprime or predatory loans was twice what it is in the overall population,” said Tom Shapiro, the director of the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University. 

So, lenders underestimated Hispanic ability to pay off big loans.

Which one is it?

Something similar may be happening as the housing recovery takes hold. “Some people talk about it in terms of a land grab,” said Professor Hamilton of the New School, as mainly white investors are buying foreclosed homes from disproportionately minority owners. “As the housing market starts to appreciate, some of those minority buyers might not be back.”

Clearly, the failure of minorities to pay their old mortgages means we'll need more programs to fight discrimination and racial inequality by encouraging fast-buck lenders to give them new mortgages. What could possibly go wrong?

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CIA ex-in-law of Bomb Brothers confirms one of my theories

Eighties-ish: Robert De Pacino, Joan Jettski,
Baby Kaboom, Uncle Mahamad Harmon

Earlier today, I recounted Mad Cow Morning News' report that the Bomb Brothers' Uncle Ruslan, the widely admired straight-talking tough guy who lives in Maryland, used to be married to the daughter of Graham E. Fuller, who describes himself on his website:

Uncle Ruslan

Graham E. Fuller is a former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA, a former senior political scientist at RAND, and a current adjunct professor of history at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of numerous books about the Middle East, including The Future of Political Islam. He has lived and worked in the Muslim world for nearly two decades. 

Wikipedia also claims Fuller was CIA station chief in Kabul and instrumental in starting the Iran-Contra Affair.

Graham Fuller, ex-Agency and
ex-father-in-law of Uncle Ruslan

So, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was just following a family tradition when he married an upper middle class American doctor's daughter. American women can't get enough of these Tsarnaev men, can they? 

In an e-mail to The Back Channel, Fuller confirmed that his daughter had been married to Uncle Ruslan, who is a lawyer big in Central Asian oil and gas negotiations, but the pair got divorced in 1999. 

Fuller made an interesting observation about his ex-in-laws that supports my surmise of a few days ago that the pan-Islamism of the Bomb Brothers and the Bomb Mom was one logical (but not logically necessary) outcome of their propensity for inter-ethnic marriage:

According to Fuller, the suspects’ mother Zubeidat Tsarnaeva was not an ethnic Chechen herself, but Dagestani, and so the family spoke the couple’s common language Russian, not Chechen, at home. “People who lose their native language (identity) sometimes are more fanatic in some respects,” he observed.

I suspect that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar might have been content with Chechen nationalism, with its impressive history of violence, but their mixed ancestry and Tamerlan's American convert wife made pan-Islamism a more appropriate outlet for their aggressive energies.

By the way, Fuller's new book is a memoir. Here's his blurb for it:

Three Truths and a Lie.

This latest book by author Graham E. Fuller is the compelling tale of Luke, a Korean adoptee who comes to an American family at age one and who gradually loses his life's way - to die from crack cocaine at age 21. It is also a story of his adoptive father, a CIA officer, who offers an unsparing and vivid account of his own efforts - wise, misguided, passionate, naive, creative, ultimately unsuccessful - to save his son. 

Luke is warm, likeable, funny, quick to win friends - and a skilled deceiver, able to impress others with a seeming maturity and urbanity. But the image he works to create for himself is increasingly belied by the realities of his life. Fuller writes of his poignant quest through multiple crises to understand who Luke really was - against the black hole Luke's life created for his family around him - and the search for meaning. The fast-moving action unfolds against a broad international backdrop from Afghanistan to Latin America. 

We explore the mysteries of adoption, identity, addiction - and grace.

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NYT: American nativism and a too slow path to citizenship denied Tamerlan his American Dream, turning him into a terrorist

"Tamerlan Tsarnaev, right, lost at the Golden Gloves championships in 2009.
A year later, a new citizenship rule blocked him." -- NY Times

You may have been musing that we would have been spared all this mayhem in Boston if we had had a stronger immigration system to keep out undesirables. But, the New York Times explains in a front page story, you've got it all backwards. It's not the immigrants' fault that they blew up the Boston Marathon, it's our fault for not embracing the immigrants more quickly in their quest for the American Dream. 

According to the NYT, if only Tamerlan Tsarnaev had been granted U.S. citizenship faster or if American organizations weren't occasionally prejudiced in favor of American citizens, all the recent unpleasantness could have been avoided. 

Nativism, that's the real problem.

I'll quote at length from this NYT article (not an editorial or op-ed) because it's a classic example of the reigning mindset:

Before Bombs, a Battered American Dream 

By DEBORAH SONTAG, DAVID M. HERSZENHORN and SERGE F. KOVALESKI 

BOSTON — It was a blow the immigrant boxer could not withstand: after capturing his second consecutive title as the Golden Gloves heavyweight champion of New England in 2010, Tamerlan Anzorovich Tsarnaev, 23, was barred from the national Tournament of Champions because he was not a United States citizen. 

The cocksure fighter, a flamboyant dresser partial to white fur and snakeskin, had been looking forward to redeeming the loss he suffered the previous year in the first round, when the judges awarded his opponent the decision, drawing boos from spectators who considered Mr. Tsarnaev dominant. 

From one year to the next, though, the tournament rules had changed, disqualifying legal permanent residents — not only Mr. Tsarnaev, who was Soviet-born of Chechen and Dagestani heritage, but several other New England contenders, too. His aspirations frustrated, he dropped out of boxing competition entirely, and his life veered in a completely different direction. 

Mr. Tsarnaev portrayed his quitting as a reflection of the sport’s incompatibility with his growing devotion to Islam. But as dozens of interviews with friends, acquaintances and relatives from Cambridge to Dagestan showed, that devotion, and the suspected radicalization that accompanied it, was a path he followed most avidly only after his more secular dreams were dashed in 2010 and he was left adrift. 

His trajectory eventually led the frustrated athlete and his loyal younger brother, Dzhokhar, to bomb one of the most famous athletic events in this country, killing three and wounding more than 200 at the Boston Marathon, the authorities say. They say it led Mr. Tsarnaev, his application for citizenship stalled, and his brother, a new citizen and a seemingly well-adjusted college student, to attack their American hometown on Patriots’ Day, April 15. 

Mr. Tsarnaev now lies in the state medical examiner’s office, his body riddled with bullets after a confrontation with the police four days after the bombings. He left behind an American-born wife who had converted to Islam, a 3-year-old daughter with curly hair, a 19-year-old brother charged with using a weapon of mass destruction, and a puzzle: Why did these two young men seemingly turn on the country that had granted them asylum? 

Examining their lives for clues, the authorities have focused on Mr. Tsarnaev’s six-month trip to the Russian republics of Chechnya and Dagestan last year. But in Cambridge, sitting on the front steps of the ramshackle, brown-shingled house where the Tsarnaev family lived for a decade, their 79-year-old landlady urged a longer lens. 

“He certainly wasn’t radicalized in Dagestan,” the landlady, Joanna Herlihy, said. 

Ms. Herlihy, who speaks Russian and was friends with the Tsarnaevs, said she told law enforcement officials that his trip clearly merited scrutiny. But she said that Mr. Tsarnaev’s embrace of Islam had grown more intense before that. 

As his religious identification grew fiercer, Mr. Tsarnaev seemed to abandon his once avid pursuit of the American dream. He dropped out of community college and lost interest not just in boxing but also in music; he used to play piano and violin, classical music and rap, and his e-mail address was a clue to how he once saw himself: The_Professor@real-hiphop.com. He worked only sporadically, sometimes as a pizza deliverer, and he grew first a close-cropped beard and then a flowing one. 

He seemed isolated, too. Since his return from Dagestan, he, his wife and his child were the only Tsarnaevs living full time in the three-bedroom apartment on Ms. Herlihy’s third floor. 

Mr. Tsarnaev’s two younger sisters had long since married and moved out; his parents, now separated, had returned to Dagestan, his mother soon after a felony arrest on shoplifting charges; and his brother had left for the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, returning home only on the occasional weekend, as he did recently after damaging his 1999 green Honda Civic by texting while driving. 

“When Dzhokhar used to come home on Friday night from the dormitory, Tamerlan used to hug him and kiss him — hold him, like, because he was a big, big boy, Tamerlan,” their mother, Zubeidat, 45, said last week, adding that her older son had been “handsome like Hercules.” 

Not long after he gave up his boxing career, Mr. Tsarnaev married Katherine Russell of Rhode Island in a brief Islamic ceremony at a Dorchester mosque in June 2010. She has declined to speak publicly since the attacks. 

His wife primarily supported the family through her job as a home health aide, scraping together about $1,200 a month to pay the rent. While she worked, Mr. Tsarnaev looked after their daughter, Zahira, who was learning to ride the tricycle still parked beside the house, neighbors said. The family’s income was supplemented by public assistance and food stamps from September 2011 to November 2012, state officials said. 

It was probably not the life that Anzor Tsarnaev had imagined for his oldest child, who, even as a boy, before he developed the broad-shouldered physique that his mother described as “a masterpiece,” dreamed of becoming a famous boxer. 

But then the father’s life had not gone as planned, either. Once an official in the prosecutor’s office in Kyrgyzstan, he had been reduced to working as an unlicensed mechanic in the back lot of a rug store in Cambridge. ...

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was born on Oct. 21, 1986, five years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in Kalmykia, a barren stretch of Russian territory by the Caspian Sea. A photograph of him as a baby shows a cherubic child wearing a knit cap with a pompom, perched on the lap of his unsmiling mother, who has spiky black bangs and an artful pile of hair. Strikingly, she did not cover her head then, as she does now; she began wearing a hijab only a few years ago, in the United States, prodded by her son just as she was prodding him, too, to deepen his faith. ...

Finally, Anzor Tsarnaev sought political asylum in the United States. He arrived first, with his younger son, in the spring of 2002. His older son, a young man of 16, followed with the rest of the family in July 2003. 

Their neighborhood in Cambridge was run-down, with car repair lots where condominiums have since arisen. But the city has long been especially welcoming to immigrants and refugees; its high school has students from 75 countries. 

The schools superintendent, Jeffrey Young, described Cambridge as “beyond tolerant.” 

“How is it that someone could grow up in a place like this and end up in a place like that?” he said of the Tsarnaevs. 

Unlike his little brother, who was well integrated into the community by the time he started high school, Mr. Tsarnaev was a genuine newcomer when he entered the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, from which he graduated in 2006. Enrolled in the large English as a Second Language program, he made friends mostly with other international students, and his demeanor was reserved, one former classmate, Luis Vasquez, said. 

“The view on him was that he was a boxer and you would not want to mess with him,” Mr. Vasquez, now 25 and a candidate for the Cambridge City Council, said. “He told me that he wanted to represent the U.S. in boxing. He wanted to do the Olympics and then turn pro.” 

... During a preliminary round of the New England Golden Gloves in 2010, in a breach of boxing etiquette, he entered the locker room to taunt not only the fighter he was about to face but also the fighter’s trainer. Wearing a cowboy hat and alligator-skin cowboy boots, he gave the two men a disdainful once-over and said: “You’re nothing. I’m taking you down.” 

The trainer, Hector Torres, was furious and subsequently lodged a complaint, arguing that Mr. Tsarnaev should not be allowed to participate in the competition because he was not a citizen. 

So, Hector Torres is the American nativist who, when you think about it, is really the one responsible for all those people getting blown up.

As it happened, Golden Gloves of America was just then changing its policy. It used to permit legal immigrants to compete in its national tournament three out of every four years, barring them only during Olympic qualifying years, James Beasley, the executive director, said. But it decided in 2010 that the policy was confusing and moved to end all participation by noncitizens in the Tournament of Champions. 

So Mr. Tsarnaev, New England heavyweight champion for the second year in a row, was stymied. The immigrant champions in three other weight classes in New England were blocked from advancing, too, Mr. Russo said. 

Mr. Tsarnaev was devastated. He was not getting any younger. And he was more than a year away from being even eligible to apply for American citizenship, and there appeared to be a potential obstacle in his path. 

The previous summer, Mr. Tsarnaev had been arrested after a report of domestic violence. 

His girlfriend at the time had called 911, “hysterically crying,” to say he had beaten her up, according to the Cambridge police report. Mr. Tsarnaev told the officers that he had slapped her face because she had been yelling at him about “another girl.” 

Eventually, charges against him would be dismissed, the records show, so the episode would not have endangered his eventual citizenship application.

Because we all know that when girlfriends eventually drop charges of domestic violence it's because they were lying from the get-go. We can't have fanatical feminist theories about abuse standing in the way of immigrants getting citizenship, now can we?

By the way, the phrase "American Dream," as in "Before Bombs, a Battered American Dream," has become the "vibrant" of the 2010s: near guaranteed evidence that somebody is yanking your chain.

Update: The NYT has changed the title of the article to "A Battered Dream, Then a Violent Path."

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Did Tsarnaevs get asylum through Deep State nepotism and string-pulling?

One of the funnier angles of the last week has been how so many Establishment figures are so deep into an Emma Lazarus-induced psychosis over the evils of non-open borders that they've chosen to double-down on defending the Tsarnaevs' 2002 asylum in the U.S. against mere questioning by a few Republican politicians.

As I noted recently, the editor of the NYT Editorial Page wrote,

"And when did the United States start excluding immigrants from dangerous places? Seems to me that [the Tsarnaevs] fall into the categories of “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” not to mention “wretched refuse” of teeming shores and the “homeless, tempest-tossed.""

But, the tiny number of Chechens in the U.S. is illustrative of the fact that the Obama Administration and previous Administrations have had an aversion to letting in Chechens, who, as we have seen, have a long track record of tending to be aggrieved, volatile, and formidable. 

Moreover the elder Tsarnaevs' recent return to Russian Dagestan suggests that their asylum in the U.S. was fraudulent.

So, out of all the Chechens in the world, how did the Tsarnaevs get asylum in the U.S..?

Well, why is their Uncle Ruslan in the United States? Why does Ruslan Tsarni, the brother of Anzor Tsarnaev, live in a nice house outside Washington D.C.?

Mad Cow Morning News has been following the Ruslan Tsarni story and it's pretty interesting. The site claims Uncle Ruslan used to be married to Samantha Ankara Fuller, who, it asserts, is the daughter of Graham E. Fuller. Mr. Fuller gave a talk on Turkey at Boston U. in 2006 and his bio read:

He received his BA and MA at Harvard University in Russian and Middle Eastern studies. He served 20 years in the Foreign Service, mostly the Muslim World, working in Germany, Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, North Yemen, Afghanistan, and Hong Kong. In 1982 he was appointed the National Intelligence Officer for Near East and South Asia at CIA, and in 1986 Vice-Chairman of the National Intelligence Council at CIA, with overall responsibility for all national level strategic forecasting. 

In 1988 Mr. Fuller left government and joined the RAND Corporation where he was a Senior Political Scientist for 12 years. His research focused primarily on the Middle East, Central Asia, South and Southeast Asia, and problems of ethnicity and religion In politics. His studies for RAND include a provocative 1991 study on the geopolitical implications of the Palestinian “Intifada”; a series of studies on Islamic fundamentalism in Turkey, Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Algeria; the survivability of Iraq; the “New Geopolitics of Central Asia” after the fall of the USSR; and problems of democratization and Islam. 

Now, there are a lot of people named Samantha Fuller, but ... Samantha Ankara Fuller sounds like she could be the daughter of an American expert on Turkey, since Ankara is the capital of Turkey. (By the way, Sibel Edmonds made an insinuation against Mr. Fuller in her allegations of a Turkey-related corruption ring in the American government, but that's a wilderness of mirrors if there ever was one.)

Keep in mind that a lot of people have connections to the CIA. Barack Obama, for example, grew up with a lot of one-degree-of-separation connections to the CIA, but then so did I.

Uncle Ruslan is the source for the claim that a red-headed Armenian convert to Islam named Misha exercised a malign Rasputin-like influence over Tamerlan. Armenians in Boston, however, say a red-headed Armenian convert to Islam would, uh, stand out, and they can't recall any such individual.

Mad Cow points out that Uncle Ruslan is in the Central Asian energy business. A 2005 press release when he joined Big Sky Energy Corporation said:

Mr. Ruslan Tsarni, a U.S. citizen, has over 10 years of professional experience in oil and gas legislation and corporate law. Previously, Mr. Tsarni served as Corporate Counsel of Nelson Resources Limited Group of companies, as well as Managing Director of several of its operating subsidiaries, responsible for all matters relating to corporate governance and placements and filing requirements under the securities regulations of Toronto Stock Exchange and AIM. He worked with financial institutions and banks on raising funds for acquisition and development of the assets operated by Nelson's subsidiaries, as well as managed legal and administrative matters for all such subsidiaries. From 1999 to 2001, Mr. Tsarni worked as Head of Legal Affairs of Golden Eagle Partners LLC where he developed downstream and upstream oil and gas businesses in Kazakhstan and served as Managing Director of its wholly owned subsidiary Tobe LLP. From 1998 to 1999 Mr.Tsarni worked as Senior Associate with Salans Hertzfeld & Heilbronn providing legal advise to major multinational companies on different aspects of Kazakhstan legal issues on development of mineral resources, corporations, taxation, currency, customs, employment, banking, bankruptcy and trade marks. From 1994 to 1996, Mr. Tsarni served as a consultant for Financial Markets International LLC and Arthur Andersen LLP contracted by USAID for projects aimed to develop securities markets in Central Asia, where he trained corporate governance and corporate finance principals to state and private companies.

Golden Eagle Partners, where Uncle Ruslan was head of legal affairs from 1999-2001, was a contractor of Dick Cheney's Halliburton. That's interesting, but shouldn't be overblown: Halliburton does business with a lot of companies.

But, the broader point is that Uncle Ruslan is connected. Maybe I'm being cynical, but my impression is that in the Central Asian oil and gas legal affairs business, it's less what you know than who you know. And Uncle Ruslan seems to know a lot of people, both in Central Asia and in America. 

It's likely that some people who pick up on this will develop a Ch-Ch-Ch-Cheney-Chechen conspiracy theory about how the Boston bombings really were, in some extremely complicated fashion, all about an oil pipeline or something like that.

But I think the Uncle Ruslan story is most relevant to getting a better grip on how the Tsarnaevs got asylum in the U.S.: I bet Uncle Ruslan got one or more of his American Deep State connections to pull some strings for his brother's family.

In general, that's symptomatic of how our immigration system works. The American Establishment has decided that there's nothing more evil than the American people having an opinion on which would-be immigrants to let in and which to keep out (to the New York Times editorial board, that's more or less eugenics which is more or less the Holocaust). But, somebody has to decide who gets in and who doesn't, so since Americans aren't supposed to do it, the decision often winds up in the hands of immigrants themselves, often nepotistic recent immigrants such as Uncle Ruslan.

UPDATE: Ex-CIA honcho Graham E. Fuller has confirmed that his daughter was married to Uncle Ruslan in the later 1990s, but says he, personally, only met Ruslan's brother, the Demolition Dad, once, and that his daughter was the Bomb Brothers' aunt-in-law only while they were young.

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Order of the Assassins: Between bombing and shootout, Dzhokhar was calm, stoned

From the NYT:

After Attack, Suspects Returned to Routines, Raising No Suspicions 

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and IAN LOVETT

BOSTON — Just five hours after the bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon last week, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was back at his computer, doing what he did almost every day, posting a message on Twitter. 

“Ain’t no love in the heart of the city, stay safe people,” he wrote. 

... For the most part, [the Tsarnaev Brothers] appeared calm, according to people who saw them, raising no suspicions that anything was amiss, let alone that they might have had anything to do with the attack. 

... By 1:14 p.m. Dzhokhar was back on Twitter. In an exchange with another fellow student, he dispensed some medical advice: you need to get Claritin clear. 

The other student has since deleted his account so the reply is no longer visible. Within three minutes, Dzhokhar added: #heavy I’ve been looking for those, there is a shortage on the black market if you wanna make a quick buck, nuff said. 

... “He was running some cardio on treadmill,” said Mr. Kedski, who said he often saw Dzhokhar smoking cigarettes and marijuana outside his dormitory. “He just seemed like a normal kid,” Mr. Kedski added. “He blended in very well.” ...

“I stopped by his room a couple times,” Mr. Juozaitis said. “He was just playing FIFA on Xbox. It wasn’t, like, weird. He was just doing what I do.” 

He seemed to have resumed his habits of staying up late and sleeping in late, and of smoking marijuana, which he did frequently, they said. 

Though he may have been quiet, Dzhokhar was hardly a loner — he was quite sociable. 

Sonja Bergeron, 19, said she would often see him at parties at dorms where he would be drinking and smoking marijuana. (She advised reporters to “look for the potheads” to find people who would have known him better.) 

“He was a kind of a party animal,” she said. 

I don't want to get all Umberto Eco-y on you, but I'm vaguely reminded of the legendary hashish-smoking Muslim "Assassins" that Marco Polo wrote about. They were one of the coolest things in my Classics Illustrated Adventures of Marco Polo comic book that I read when I was about nine.

Actually, Umberto Eco (Foucault's Pedulum, The Name of the Rose) is great. So, let's see where this absurd medieval hashhead thread goes.

Granted, the Tsarnaevs weren't bookish sorts, but the etymological link between "hashish" and "assassin" has got to be close to a universal in Pothead Lore. So, the Tsarnaev brothers would certainly have heard about "hashish" = "assassin" from some bong buddy, and they would have thought it was cool.

Moreover, it turns out that the Order of the Assassins was founded by the "Old Man of the Mountain" in Alamut Castle in northwestern Iran just down the coast of the Caspian Sea from Dagestan. So, the Tsarnaevs might have taken some hometown pride in the legend, because from the perspective of Cambridge, Chechnya, Dagestan, and Alamut are all practically the same place.

If you look up "Assassins" in Wikipedia, you get its usual multiple-personality syndrome. First, Wikipedia scolds you that this is all just an Orientalist myth:

"The literal interpretation of this term in referring to the Nizaris (as hashish consuming intoxicated assassins) is rooted in the fantasies of medieval Westerners and their imaginative ignorance of Islam and the Ismailis."

But, also, Wikipedia wants you to know, this stuff is pretty awesome:

Origins 

The origins of the Assassins trace back to just before the First Crusade around 1080. There has been much difficulty finding out much information about the origins of the Assassins because most early sources are either written by enemies of the order or based on legends. Most sources dealing with the order's inner working were destroyed with the capture of Alamut, the Assassins' headquarters, by the Mongols in 1256. However, it is possible to trace the beginnings of the cult back to its first Grandmaster, Hassan-i Sabbah. 

A passionate devotee of Isma'ili beliefs, Hassan-i Sabbah was well-liked throughout Cairo, Syria and most of the Middle East by other Isma'ili, which led to a number of people becoming his followers. Using his fame and popularity, Sabbah founded the Order of the Assassins. ... Because of the unrest in the Holy Land caused by the Crusades, Hassan-i Sabbah found himself not only fighting for power with other Muslims, but also with the invading Christian forces.[6]

... He had established a secret society of deadly assassins, which was built in a hierarchical format. Below Sabbah, the Grand Headmaster of the Order, were those known as "Greater Propagandists", followed by the normal "Propagandists", the Rafiqs ("Companions"), and the Lasiqs ("Adherents"). It was the Lasiqs who were trained to become some of the most feared assassins, or as they were called, "Fida'i" (self-sacrificing agent), in the known world.[7] 

It is, however, unknown how Hassan-i-Sabbah was able to get his "Fida'i" to perform with such fervent loyalty. One theory, possibly the best known but also the most criticized, comes from the observations from Marco Polo during his travels to the Orient. He describes how the "Old Man of the Mountain" (Sabbah) would drug his young followers with hashish, lead them to a "paradise", and then claim that only he had the means to allow for their return. 

Perceiving that Sabbah was either a prophet or some kind of magic man, his disciples, believing that only he could return them to "paradise", were fully committed to his cause and willing to carry out his every request.[8] ... 

With his new weapons, Sabbah began to order assassinations, ranging from politicians to great generals. Assassins rarely would attack ordinary citizens though and tended not to be hostile towards them.

Well, that doesn't fit. But, you gotta admit that the rest of the stuff might have appealed to Tamerlan and Dzhokhar.

All Hashashins were trained in both the art of combat as in the study of religion, believing that they were on a jihad and were religious warriors.

Cool.

Some consider them the Templars of Islam ...

like the Knights Templar in The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, the meathead's Umberto Eco.

Although the "Fida'i" were the lowest rank in Sabbah's order and only used as expendable pawns to do the Grandmaster's bidding, much time and many resources were put into training them. The Assassins were generally young in age giving them the physical strength and stamina which would be required to carry out these murders. However, physical prowess was not the only trait that was required to be a "Fida'i". To get to their targets, the Assassins had to be patient, cold, and calculating. They were generally intelligent and well read because they were required to possess not only knowledge about their enemy, but his or her culture and their native language. They were trained by their masters to disguise themselves, sneak into enemy territory and perform the assassinations instead of simply attacking their target outright. [7] ...

Interesting ...

Etymology

The Assassins were finally linked by the 19th century orientalist scholar Silvestre de Sacy to the Arabic hashish using their variant names assassin and assissini in the 19th century. ... This label was quickly adopted by anti-Ismaili historians and applied to the Ismailis of Syria and Persia. The spread of the term was further facilitated through military encounters between the Nizaris and the Crusaders, whose chroniclers adopted the term and disseminated it across Europe. ...

Military Tactics: 

For about two centuries, the hashashin specialized in assassinating their religious and political enemies.[Wasserman 2] These killings were often conducted in full view of the public and often in broad daylight, so as to instill terror in their foes.

= terrorism

Assassinations were primarily carried out with a dagger, which was sometimes tipped with poison. Due to being immensely outnumbered in enemy territory, the hashashin tended to specialize in covert operations. Hashashins would often assimilate themselves in the towns and regions of their targets and, over time, stealthily insert themselves into strategic positions.

See, they are assimilating!

... In the heat of battle however, under no circumstances did they commit suicide unless completely necessary, preferring to be killed by their captors. ...

In other words, like the Tsarnaevs, they were not suicide terrorists, but instead went down fighting.

The 19th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche gives prominent focus to what he terms "the Brotherhood of Assassins", in part 3, section 24 of On the Genealogy of Morality. Nietzsche's signature work is to attempt the transvaluation of values, that is, to transcend the inherited Jewish and Christian politics, psychology and ethics of ressentiment and guilt. Nietzsche points to the Assassins as anti-ascetic 'free spirits' who no longer believe in metaphysical truth.[17] 

I don't exactly know what that means, but as the 2011 movie The Guard pointed out, Nietzsche is the favorite philosopher of meatheads: Whatever doesn't kill me only makes me stronger.

Games like the the Assassin's Creed series employ assassin folklore to both their story and gameplay.

You can get Assassin's Creed on your X-Box. And you know who played a lot of X-Box? Dzhokhar!

This is not to say that Tamerlan and Django were inspired by Assassin pothead / meathead lore. But they might have been...

I sometimes worry that I might start a groundless rumor; but in my experience, the odds that I've figured out some wacky reality are significantly higher than that many people will believe me when I try to tell them.

Since my thinking tends to be parallel to reality but orthogonal to how most people like to think, I'm dependent on a limited group of readers to whom I have to appeal periodically for financial support. Thus, I've started my first panhandling drive of 2013.

First: you can make a non-tax deductible contribution to me by credit card via WePay by clicking here.

Second: you can make a tax deductible contribution to me via VDARE by clicking here.

Third: You can mail a non-tax deductible donation to:

Steve Sailer
P.O Box 4142
Valley Village, CA 91607-4142

Thanks.

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Are Mexicans the new Italians?

Last week, NYT columnist David Leonhardt enthused:

Hispanics, the New Italians 

By DAVID LEONHARDT 

Published: April 20, 2013

With the arrival of millions of Latinos in recent decades, there have been multiple reasons to wonder if they would assimilate and thrive — including legitimate economic issues that go well beyond ethnic stereotypes. Unlike previous generations of immigrants, today’s can remain in daily telephone and video contact with their homeland. And unlike those in the past, today’s immigrants face legal obstacles, and their pathway to a middle-class life involves college tuition. A decade ago, the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington described the newfound issues with assimilation as simply the “Hispanic challenge.” 

Yet as the Senate begins to debate a major immigration bill, we already know a great deal about how Latinos are faring with that challenge: they’re meeting it, by and large. Whatever Washington does in coming months, a wealth of data suggests that Latinos, who make up fully half of the immigration wave of the past century, are already following the classic pattern for American immigrants.  

They have arrived in this country in great numbers, most of them poor, ill educated and, in important respects, different from native-born Americans. The children of immigrants, however, become richer and better educated than their parents and overwhelmingly speak English. The grandchildren look ever more American. 

“These fears about immigrants have been voiced many times in American history, and they’ve never proven true,” Alan M. Kraut, a history professor at American University, in Washington, told me. “It doesn’t happen immediately, but everything with Latinos points to a very typical pattern of integration in American life in a generation or two.”

This Mexicans-are-the-new-Italians theory (I reviewed Michael Barone's version in 2001) is the kind of thing that sounds totally plausible to New York pundits. After all, there were practically zero Mexicans in the U.S. until, like, a couple of years ago, right, so how can you not believe it?

But doesn't anybody in New York or Washington know anybody in Los Angeles? Doesn't Mr. Leonhardt or Dr. Kraut have, say, an aunt in Encino who could give them some insight based on generations of experience?

Let's take a statistical approach. There were 4,644,000 Hispanics in Los Angeles County according to the 2010 Census. The 1980 Census found 2,066,103 Latinos in Los Angeles County, and in 1970 there were 1,288,716. So they've been here a long time.

Also, the motion picture industry is in Los Angeles County. Naturally, that raises the question of what percentage of the approximately 1,150 people invited over the last decade to join the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences (and thus be eligible to vote for Oscars) have Spanish names, either surnames or first names? Diversity is our strength, so Hollywood must be rapidly diversifying, right?

Being an Academy member is kind of a weird thing in that some of the members are among the most famous people on earth, some are moguls, and some are obscure craftsmen. For example, when I was 15, my driving instructor was a member of the Academy. His day job was teaching driver's training and coaching the wrestling team at a public high school, but he moonlighted as a character actor and stunt man (Yakuza henchmen, ninjas, and Japanese corporate executives were his specialties -- he wasn't the most skilled actor, but he was an extraordinarily tough looking guy who in real life was immensely affable, which is a good combination in a business where how much people like you matters a lot) in enough movies to be invited to join the Academy. (I believe my driving instructor was only the fourth East Asian in the Academy, following James Wong Howe.) A lot of members are technicians who are even more obscure.

Still, all else being equal, being in the Academy is better than not being in the Academy, so it's a good measure of social and economic status and achievement.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Oscars film academy may expand its ranks
The move would aim to add diversity to the mostly white, mostly male academy.

By Nicole Sperling 

April 26, 2013, 4:11 p.m. 

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is aiming to expand and diversify its ranks by relaxing a cap on membership that has restricted new admittances since 2004. 

The academy has about 5,800 voting members; in recent years, fewer than 200 people have been invited to join annually. The number of openings is essentially determined by how many members have retired, resigned or died. ...

Rules state that there are three ways to become eligible for admittance: an Oscar nomination, a recommendation from two members of the applicant's branch, or an endorsement by the branch's membership committee and staff. ...

Sound branch member Don Hall, who is on the Board of Governors, said it's a good move that will allow a greater number of accomplished people in his technical field to be recognized. "We can now invite in others who haven't won awards but are just as deserving," he said. "Without the quota, we can get them in." 

The academy has periodically faced calls to diversify its ranks. A 2012 L.A. Times study found that nearly 94% of academy voters are white and 77% are male. Blacks make up about 2% of the academy and Latinos less than 2%. 

Accompanying the article is a table of the 1,197 invitations to join the Academy from 2004 through 2012. (A few of those are writer-directors listed twice, so let's call the denominator 1,150 new members).

I went through the whole list looking for Spanish names. I found 40, or 3.5% of 1,150. I don't promise that I'm an expert on Spanish names, but I looked up many of the obscure ones ending in vowels. They were much more likely to turn out to be Italian rather than Spanish. (Italians seems to be doing pretty well at getting into the Academy.)

Most of those, about 28 out of 40, however, are people who were born and fully raised abroad (10 Spaniards, 4 Argentines, and so forth). For example, director Rodrigo Garcia (Albert Nobbs) was born in Colombia and raised in Mexico. By the way, his father is Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez (kind of like how move director Duncan Jones' dad is another 1970s icon, David Bowie).

Most, such as Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal, became prominent in their home countries' cinemas before trying their hand in Hollywood.

So these foreign elites aren't representative of mass immigration at all.

Only a dozen -- just 1% of the last 1,150 people added to the Academy -- appear to be Latino-Americans in the sense either of being born here or at least having gotten here by high school.

For example, character actor Miguel Ferrer has a Spanish-surname but was born in Santa Monica. His Puerto Rican-born father Jose won the Best Actor Oscar over 70 years ago, and his singer mother Rosemary Clooney was George Clooney's aunt. Zoe Saldana, who was so fetching as the 10' blue princess in Avatar was born in America but largely raised in the Dominican Republic. Andrew Jimenez, a Pixar animator, grew up in San Diego and went to UCSD. He speaks with no discernible accent, so I'm guessing he was born here.

Others were born abroad but got here young enough to be somewhat affected by growing up in America, so I classify them as also Latino-American.

For example, I went to Rice U. with Elizabeth Avellan, who was added to the Producers branch of the Academy in 2005. She grew up in Venezuela, where her grandfather owned the first private TV network in the country, but came to the U.S. when she was 13. (She married director Richard Rodriguez of San Antonio, and kept us apprised of her hubby's meteoric progress in the Rice alumni newsletter. They have five children: Rocket Rodriguez, Racer Rodriguez, Rebel Rodriguez, Rogue Rodriguez and Rhiannon Rodriguez.) So, I count her as one of the 12 Latino-Americans because she got here before age 18.

Makeup / hairstylist Mike Elizalde was born in Mexico, but came here with his parents when he was five. He and documentary maker Lourdes Portillo were the only individuals I could find who were conventional first generation Mexican immigrants.

And there are six others who appear to be Latino-Americans or at least there is no evidence that they fully matured in some other countries.

But barely over 1.0% is remarkably small.

But how can anybody in New York or Washington notice?

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More Wretched Refuse Mania from the NYT

The Editorial Page Editor of the New York Times writes in the NYT:

The Boston Bombing and Immigration 

By ANDREW ROSENTHAL

In the days since the Boston marathon attack, a number of Republican lawmakers have demanded a delay in immigration reform because the two bombers were fairly recent immigrants. 

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky wrote to Majority Leader Harry Reid on April 22 to say: 

“We should not proceed until we understand the specific failures of our immigration system. Why did the current system allow two individuals to immigrate to the United States from the Chechen Republic in Russia, an area known as a hotbed of Islamic extremism, who then committed acts of terrorism? Were there any safeguards? Could this have been prevented? Does the immigration reform before us address this?” 

Actually, neither brother immigrated from Chechnya. The ethnically Chechen Tsarnaevs came here from neighboring Dagestan. And when did the United States start excluding immigrants from dangerous places? Seems to me that they fall into the categories of “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” not to mention “wretched refuse” of teeming shores and the “homeless, tempest-tossed.” 

Ancestor worship / ethnocentric kitsch.

I wasn't actually aware that Emma Lazarus's 1883 poem legally dictates 21st Century immigration policy. 

Personally, I thought the more legally relevant general mission statement is the following:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

And I'm having a hard time figuring out how the Tsarnaevs promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.

Furthermore, in answer to Rosenthal's question, "And when did the United States start excluding immigrants from dangerous places?"

One answer appears to be that the Obama Administration has a fairly general policy of excluding males from Chechnya. (The Tsarnaevs got in under Bush.) From USA Today on April 19, 2013:

Few Chechen immigrants make it to U.S.

There are probably fewer than about 200 Chechen immigrants in the United States, and most of them are settled in the Boston area, as many U.S. cities have refused to accept asylum applicants from the war-torn area of southern Russia, says Glen Howard, president of the Jamestown Foundation. 

About 70% of the Chechen immigrants are women, Howard says. Very few men are granted asylum because of U.S. anti-terrorism policies and because Russia often protests when ethnic Chechens try to settle in the U.S., he said. The U.S. admitted only 197 refugees from all of Russia in 2012. 

That contrasts with many European countries, especially Austria, where many Chechens who want to leave difficult conditions at home settle. Austria has about 30,000 Chechen immigrants, Howard said. 

"This family is a very rare episode. Very few make it here, even fewer get green cards," Howard said. The Jamestown Foundation has testified on behalf of several ethnic Chechens who have applied for asylum in the United States, which is typically a three- to five-year process. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the remaining suspect in the Boston marathon bombing, is a naturalized U.S. citizens. 

President Obama has tried to "restart" U.S. relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has maintained a tough policy on Chechen insurgents. The U.S. also wants to maintain a key military supply line to Afghanistan known as the "northern route," which runs across Central Asia and southern Russia. 

Immigrating from Chechnya is particularly difficult because there are several groups on the U.S. Department of Treasury terrorism list, such as Islamic International Brigade, the Special Purpose Islamic Regiment and the Riyadus-Salikhin Battalion, which were implicated in the Moscow theater hostage bombing of 202 that killed 129, including an American.

So, congratulations to the Obama Administration for having a fairly sensible policy of largely discriminating against Chechens trying to get in to our country.

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