National Review still supports fake conservatism

And here you would have thought that all those futile years of George W. Bush, Arlen Specter, and Arnold Schwarzenegger would have cured the onetime conservative magazine of its dedication to power and political pragmatism.

Forty Jim DeMints or 60 Lindsey Grahams? Forty Christine O’Donnell’s or 60 Mike Castles?

These are questions conservatives have to think about when they see polls like the latest Rasmussen, which has Rep. Mike Castle, a moderate Republican thoroughly unloved by tea partiers, leading Democratic nominee Chris Coons 48-37 while conservative Republican Christine O’Donnell trails Coons by the same eleven-point margin, 47-36....

So, again: would conservatives in Delaware rather win, or send a message?

For actual conservatives, the only rational answer is 40 DeMints. Daniel Foster has asked a misleading question. The correct one is, would conservatives rather elect a false conservative majority that will vote against conservative principles while ensuring that a Democratic majority succeeds it when the inevitable reaction comes, or continue building towards a genuine and committed conservative majority?

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You can take the boy out of the madrassah

But you can't entirely take the madrassah out of the politician that the boy becomes. Obama whines about his "some powerful interests" and their opinion of him:

“Some powerful interests that have been setting the agenda in Washington for a long time, and they’re not always happy with me. They talk about me like a dog. That’s not in my prepared remarks, but it’s true.”

To me, the most interesting aspect of this is that the first negative thing that sprang to mind when Obama wanted to express how people were badmouthing him, he thought of "a dog". That is not a normal American expression. One works like a dog, one is as loyal as a dog, one is dog-tired, whereas the negative forms tend to utilize the term "bitch" instead. Using dog in this perjorative sense is much more common in the Arab world.

It seems to me that this is, in addition to demonstrating Obama's inability to withstand legitimate criticism, an example of his Indonesian Muslim upbringing showing itself in a moment of stress. This doesn't mean he is a crypto-Muslim, but it is rather yet another indication of his essentially foreign perspective. In support of this interpretation, I would note that while I have seen many distinctly negative terms applied to Obama since he first launched his presidential candidacy, I have never read nor heard of him being referred to as "a dog".

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VDH piles on

He addresses Krugman's WWII stimulus argument from the historian's perspective:

I’m not an economist, but as an historian, I consider this an abject misreading of the postwar period, at least through the early 1950s. The war years were characterized by frenetic hyperactivity: Americans worked long hours, women were brought into the work force, new towns and manufacturing centers sprang up, and people gave up necessities — all on the assurance that this furious pace and consumer scarcity would be short-lived.

As WWII ended and the clean-up began, there was an enormous amount of pent-up global demand for goods. Given the wreckage in Europe, Japan, and Russia and the underdevelopment of India, Asia, and South America, we were about the only ones with the industrial and commercial wherewithal to supply the world rebound — often receiving cheap oil, gas, minerals, and interest in exchange, which supplemented our own vast supplies of comparatively cheap and easily recoverable resources. Nor should we forget the psychological element: Americans, after winning two wars, were enormously confident about their newfound international stature and influence.

At home, four years of consumer deprivation during the war and the weak demography of the 1930s had combined to create huge demand, all while society was increasingly leaving the farm for good and becoming suburbanized. The result was that in the late 1940s and 1950s, the birth rate soared and consumers enthusiastically made first-time purchases of washers, dryers, fridges, cars, etc. Thus, the American economy grew by leaps and bounds.

Today’s situation is not comparable: We are in hock to foreign creditors for trillions and have not been a net creditor since the 1980s. A China, Brazil, South Korea, Taiwan, or India is as or more likely to supply recovering demand for food, steel, or electronics.

Krugman should be careful what he wishes for. England, the Soviet Union, Germany, Japan, and Italy all engaged in massive WII spending; England did so to a much greater extent than the USA ever did. And how did it work out for their postwar economies? The Broken Window fallacy only isn't a fallacy when you win a war while incidentally breaking all the windows and killing all the glaziers in the neighboring towns. And the history of warfare declares that this doesn't happen very often even when you are fortunate enough to win.

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Seven Years Off

The first problem with Paul Krugman's hypothesis is that 2010 is not 1938, it is 1931. This should be obvious because at no point in the last two years has anyone except me, Robert Prechter, Mike Shedlock, Karl Denninger and a few other economic heretics admitted that we have been in a depression for months now.

Here’s the situation: The U.S. economy has been crippled by a financial crisis. The president’s policies have limited the damage, but they were too cautious, and unemployment remains disastrously high. More action is clearly needed. Yet the public has soured on government activism, and seems poised to deal Democrats a severe defeat in the midterm elections.

The president in question is Franklin Delano Roosevelt; the year is 1938....

From an economic point of view World War II was, above all, a burst of deficit-financed government spending, on a scale that would never have been approved otherwise. Over the course of the war the federal government borrowed an amount equal to roughly twice the value of G.D.P. in 1940 — the equivalent of roughly $30 trillion today.

Had anyone proposed spending even a fraction that much before the war, people would have said the same things they’re saying today. They would have warned about crushing debt and runaway inflation. They would also have said, rightly, that the Depression was in large part caused by excess debt — and then have declared that it was impossible to fix this problem by issuing even more debt.

But guess what? Deficit spending created an economic boom — and the boom laid the foundation for long-run prosperity. Overall debt in the economy — public plus private — actually fell as a percentage of G.D.P., thanks to economic growth and, yes, some inflation, which reduced the real value of outstanding debts. And after the war, thanks to the improved financial position of the private sector, the economy was able to thrive without continuing deficits.

The second problem here is that Krugman is making a standard post hoc ergo propter hoc mistake. While the US did engage in a massive burst of unrestrained federal spending, it was not the spending that produced the postwar prosperity except in that it paid for the munitions and manpower that was used to destroy every industrialized economy that was not already destroyed by the Germans or the Japanese.

And the third problem, of course, is that the Keynesian notion that government spending is economic growth, let alone is capable of creating growth that is a multiple of the spending, is both logically and empirically false. Remember, no one even began to recognize that the Great Depression was a great depression until the end of 1931.

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That didn't take long

"Post-occupation" Iraq gets down to business:

Days after the U.S. officially ended combat operations and touted Iraq's ability to defend itself, American troops found themselves battling heavily armed militants assaulting an Iraqi military headquarters in the center of Baghdad on Sunday. The fighting killed 12 people and wounded dozens.

It was the first exchange of fire involving U.S. troops in Baghdad since the Aug. 31 deadline for formally ending the combat mission, and it showed that American troops remaining in the country are still being drawn into the fighting. The attack also made plain the kind of lapses in security that have left Iraqis wary of the U.S. drawdown and distrustful of the ability of Iraqi forces now taking up ultimate responsibility for protecting the country.

Sunday's hour-long assault was the second in as many weeks on the facility, the headquarters for the Iraqi Army's 11th Division, pointing to the failure of Iraqi forces to plug even the most obvious holes in their security.

If "heavily-armed militants" are already attacking a divisional Army HQ, I think it is reasonable conclude that there is a long and nasty period of civil war ahead. The problem with "the Surge" was never that American forces didn't have the ability to impose a temporary reduction in the internecine violence, but that it was merely a short-term measure that would stop working when the necessary forces were withdrawn.

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Don't marry debt

Marriage is already a financially risky move under the present legal regime. But marrying a heavily indebted woman would be financially insane, especially in the current economy:

Nobody likes unpleasant surprises, but when Allison Brooke Eastman’s fiancé found out four months ago just how high her student loan debt was, he had a particularly strong reaction: he broke off the engagement within three days. Ms. Eastman said she had told him early on in their relationship that she had over $100,000 of debt. But, she said, even she didn’t know what the true balance was; like a car buyer who focuses on only the monthly payment, she wrote 12 checks a year for about $1,100 each, the minimum possible. She didn’t focus on the bottom line, she said, because it was so profoundly depressing.

But as the couple got closer to their wedding day, she took out all the paperwork and it became clear that her total debt was actually about $170,000. “He accused me of lying,” said Ms. Eastman, 31, a San Francisco X-ray technician and part-time photographer who had run up much of the balance studying for a bachelor’s degree in photography. “But if I was lying, I was lying to myself, not to him. I didn’t really want to know the full amount.”

It sounds like the gentleman escaped just in the nick of time. In addition to the $170k in debt, Miss Eastman sounds exactly like the sort of woman who would not only rationalize lying to a man, but being unfaithful as well. In any case, how you manage your personal finances is a good indicator of how you will manage both a household and a marriage as well. The short-term oriented woman who can't foresee the obvious consequences of credit is the same sort of woman who can't foresee the obvious consequences of encouraging the harmless attentions of her male acquaintances and co-workers.

The truly dangerous thing about debt, where women are concerned, is that can lock them out of a career as a wife and mother. Unless you marry someone wealthy enough to pay off your debts without thinking about it, having children and staying home to take care of them simply isn't an option. So, you'll have sacrificed not only your own future but your children's as well in order to spend five years studying 14th century Basque poetry and having sex with ten or twelve college guys whose names you'll struggle to remember ten years hence.

The harsh reality is that a few years on the pole with a coke habit would still leave the average woman with a better long term prospect of happiness than the popular combination of student loans and a soft liberal arts degree from a reputable private university.

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RAW on the New Atheists

This excerpt from Prometheus Rising is a surprisingly accurate portrayal of the Dawkinsian rational materialist, in light of how it was written by a non-theistic scientific mystic 27 years ago:

Rationalist robots, like the other robots, may be totally mechanized or may have some slight flexibility, or "freedom" built into their circuitry. The totally robotized make up the vast horde of the Fundamentalist wing of the Materialist church and the other True Believers in the scientific paradigm of 1968, 1958, 1948 or whenever their nervous systems stopped taking new imprints.

These are the people who are perpetually frightened and dismayed by the large portion of human behavior mediated through Circuit II mammalian politics. They think that because this territorial-emotional ("patriotic") behavior is not Rational, it should not exist. They accept Darwin as dogma, but are nervous about "Darwinism" (because it accepts mammalian politics as an Evolutionary Strategy that has worked thus far) and are repulsed by the data of ethology, genetics, and sociobiology. They don't like the rest of the human race much, because it is not guided by their favorite circuit, and they are uneasily aware that the rest of the human race does not like them much....

The totally robotized Rationalist, the one whose nervous system has stopped growing entirely, can be recognized by two signs: He or she is constantly trying to prove that much of the daily experience of the rest of humanity is "delusion", "hallucination", "group hallucination", "mass hallucination", "mere coincidence", or "sloppy research". And he or she never thinks that any of his or her own experience would fit into any of those categories.

Substitute "religious" for "patriotic" and "religions" for "politics" and he could have written that today.

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VPFL Draft

It's at 5:30, not 7 PM. Just a reminder.

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Changing odds

It wasn't all that long ago when I wrote of my assumption that the Republicans were going to take the House and might take the Senate as well, thus leading to Obama's eventual implosion in the 2012 Democratic primary. More than a few critics said that I was crazy. Of course, once it happens, everyone will believe that it was practically inevitable.

Typically cautious Larry Sabato, head of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, is rocking the political world with a new "Crystal Ball" prediction: The GOP will win the House, making Ohio's John Boehner speaker, might get a 50-50 split in the Senate, and will pick up some eight new governors.

The winds at Republican backs are more favorable than they were in 1994. If the idiot Republican establishment can merely avoid falling over their own feet and embrace the anti-government mood instead of attempting to tamp it down, they'll clean up. But never underestimate Republican self-destruction.

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It's just about that time

Football Outsiders offers a refresher course in NFL statisticology:

You run when you win, not win when you run.

The first article ever written for Football Outsiders was devoted to debunking the myth of "establishing the run." There is no correlation whatsoever between giving your running backs a lot of carries early in the game and winning the game. Just running the ball is not going to help a team score; it has to run successfully.

There are two reasons why nearly every beat writer and television analyst still repeats the tired oldschool mantra that "establishing the run" is the secret to winning football games. The first problem is confusing cause and effect. There are exceptions, usually when the opponent is strong in every area except run defense, like last year's New Orleans Saints. However, in general, winning teams have a lot of carries because their running backs are running out the clock at the end of wins, not because they are running wild early in games.

The second problem is history. Most of the current crop of NFL analysts came of age or actually played the game during the 1970s. They believe that the run-heavy game of that decade is how football is meant to be, and today's pass-first game is an aberration. As we addressed in an essay in Pro Football Prospectus 2007 about the history of NFL stats, it was actually the game of the 1970s that was the aberration. The seventies were far more slanted towards the run than any era since the arrival of Paul Brown, Otto Graham, and the Cleveland Browns in 1946. Optimal strategies from 1974 are not optimal strategies for today's game.

And yes, I am very, very nervous about going into the 2010 NFL season with The Tavaris Jackson Experiment as the confirmed backup QB to a man who is on the verge of entering George Blanda territory. Come to think of it, I'd be more comfortable if it was George Blanda backing up Favre and he's 83 years old.

VPFL UPDATE: It shouldn't be necessary to worry about the exclusions in the VPFL draft tonight. Yahoo has added the ability to specify keepers and I have done so for everyone. Blackmouth is not keeping anyone, the Meerkats have only one keeper, and Winston is keeping two. The other seven teams are all keeping three.

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Applying science to string theory

What a novel idea!

String theory was originally developed to describe the fundamental particles and forces that make up our universe. The new research, led by a team from Imperial College London, describes the unexpected discovery that string theory also seems to predict the behaviour of entangled quantum particles. As this prediction can be tested in the laboratory, researchers can now test string theory.

Of course it seems probable that if the prediction is incorrect, the string theoreticians will follow the example of the Darwinists and insist that string theory is still totally scientific and totally accurate even though every attempt to utilize it to make predictions keep showing it to be reliably incorrect. When even Richard Dawkins feels the need to start using qualifiers in his would-be magnum opus in defense of the theory of evolution by (probably) natural selection, henceforth TEpNS, only the most fanatic Darwinist could fail to recognize that there is a very real possibility that the theory's future lies with space aether, phrenology, and phlogistons.

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Double bubble trouble

A number of people have asked me what "the education bubble" means. While it's not actually a true investment bubble since purchasing a college education is not a bona fide investment, the ever-rising cost of a college degree does have frothy and bubblicious aspects that can be seen very clearly in this chart from TaxProfBlog that compares CPI inflation vs the increase in US home prices vs the increase in college tuition.

In combination with the huge increase in students attending college, the value of a college degree is presently around one-third of what it was in 1990. I had previously estimated it was 28% of the value... but in either case, this assumes you are one of the 50% of college attendess who manages to successfully complete a college program and receive a degree within five years.

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The real religious threat

James Delingpole explains that it comes from the radical Gaians brainwashed by years of public school propaganda:

It’s time we woke up to the threat posed by this mass brainwashing of the younger generation. We worry, rightly, about those Muslim children who are being indoctrinated with the extreme Wahaabist version of their faith. Yet we seem astonishingly complacent that every day, in schools of every kind throughout the Western world, our children are being taught by well-meaning teachers to view their world and culture through exactly the same anti-capitalist, anti-human, anti-growth eyes as James Lee and the Unabomber.

The modern environmental movement is not kind, caring or gentle. It is a series of ticking time bombs waiting to blow up in our face.

If it weren't for the fact that Western economies are collapsing anyhow, one could make a serious argument that the Gaians are a greater threat to humanity than the most expansionist imperialists of the Dar al-Harb. The lunacy of James Lee is a clear warning sign.

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Another banking bailout

In AFGHANISTAN?

As depositors thronged branches of Afghanistan's biggest bank, Mahmoud Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a major shareholder in beleaguered Kabul Bank called on Thursday for intervention by the United States to head off a financial meltdown.

"America should do something," said Karzai in a telephone interview, suggesting that the U.S. Treasury Department guarantee the funds of Kabul Bank's clients, who number about a million and have more than a billion dollars on deposits with the bank.

Kabul Bank handles salary payments for soldiers, police and teachers. It has scores of branches across Afghanistan and holds the accounts of key Afghan government agencies. The collapse of the bank would likely spread panic throughout the country's fledgling financial sector and wipe out nine years of effort by the United States to establish a sound Afghan banking system, seen as essential to the establishment of a functioning economy.

Good luck selling that one to the American people. Even the most rabid neocons won't want to touch it. It's insanity squared.

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VPFL draft

Your live online draft is set for Sat Sep 4 7:00pm CDT

We're still missing Greenfield (White Buffalo), Alamo City (Clay) and Bane (Red). Get thee hence to Yahoo and register! Everyone else, make sure you've got your three keepers selected as your top three rankings. If you aren't keeping three, then make sure that your third choice is NOT someone else's keeper.

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Hiding the decline

Karl Denninger is alerted to potential fraud in the housing price statistics:

I have a very disturbing email that came in this evening. It alleges out-and-out fraudulent reporting of home sales in one of the regional MLS systems. That is, prices paid that are in fact much lower than the "sold" prices reported in the MLS.

The person in question claims to have seen over 100 of these in his area. I have copies of two, and it appears, from the evidence that I have, that at least for those two the claim is accurate.

One in particular I was able to pull the auction data on. It "sold" under reserve, is listed as sold in the MLS at ~25% higher than the "sold" bid, and the premium is disclosed as 5%. This property also has a 90-day "anti-flip" provision on it, implying that the paper may be held by one of the GSEs. (It's a nice-looking place, incidentally.)

Here's the problem, obviously - Case-Schiller and other "home statistics" numbers related to price paid are all computed off these numbers provided by the local Realty boards (via NAR.) If the data in the MLS is bogus then so is the so-called "median sales price" and so are Case-Schiller's numbers! These are not small discrepancies either - in both cases the "over-reporting" is by approximately 25%!

This would explain why housing prices have been mysteriously moving up while the number of home sales continues to plummet. It's as if it's not enough to cook the GDP, CPI-U, and U3 numbers, things are getting so bad that they have to create fictional statistics for practically everything in order to "hide the decline".

Hey, it worked for the climate scientists. For a while.

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Scientific hypocrisy

I always enjoy the way atheist science fetishists who believe firmly in the scientific method as the sole arbiter of Truth simultaneously insist that they don't have to read a book in order to reach conclusions about it. So much for their supposed preference of observation to logic. Catkiller challenged an atheist named Maxpower to read The Irrational Atheist and this was the unsurprising ad hominem response:

I have not read the book (I prefer books like "The Science of Good and Evil" by Michael Shermer), but I did peruse the blog of the man who wrote The Irrational Atheist and read through some arguments he's put forth. Since you've previously referred me to such nonsense as Jonah Goldberg, I should have expected some pretty poor arguments and old, tired fallacies that often turn up in theism-vs-atheism discussions, but I was particularly disappointed by the nutcase you've held up as your trump card this time. Here is what I have learned based on what I have read about and by Vox Day:

- He is a writer for World Net Daily, a fringe extremist website one step above Prison Planet or StormFront
- He appears to be a birther, an anti-feminist, and even opposes womens' suffrage
- Oh, he also seems to be a white supremacist
- He has argued that Sam Harris is more immoral than Jeffrey Dahmer, which is a mind-boggling statement
- He appears to dispute the theory of evolution and the age of the earth
- He has stated that maybe "some" people don't need God or the threat of punishment to be good, but he "certainly" does
- He has stated that, if commanded to do so by God, he would kill every 2-year-old on earth.

This last part makes Vox Day a particularly dangerous brand of psychopath, since people often commit horrific acts when they mistakenly believe to have been ordered to do so by God. Parents who withhold medicine from dying children or who violently kill "possessed" children are prime examples. No atheist would have a reason for doing such a breathtakingly cruel thing.

Well, this atheist certainly would have if given the opportunity. Consider his manifesto: "All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human
infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs' places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed.... Talk about Evolution. Talk about Malthus and Darwin until it sinks into the stupid people's brains until they get it!! The humans? The planet does not need humans. You MUST KNOW the human population is behind all the pollution and problems in the world, and YET you encourage the exact opposite instead of discouraging human growth and procreation."

Atheists usually claim religion is behind all the problems in the world, but since they also believe religion is human-created, they are eventually forced to end up advocating mass murder of one form or another. It would appear that Maxpower has forgotten the extraordinarily lethal behavior of a number of powerful, well-known atheists in dozens of countries during the 20th century. The late James Lee may be unusual, but he is unfortunately no unique aberration. The seed for mass slaughter is sown when atheists who share Lee's faith in Malthus rather than the Apostle Paul and Darwin rather than the Gospels take positions of power.

By the way, the correct response to Maxpower's question is that he hasn't sufficiently understood what morality is to formulate a coherent question about it. The threat of punishment from a supernatural deity is not a source of morality, let alone "the only ultimate" one. Maxpower has done the metaphorical equivalent of confusing the possibility of a penalty flag for the NFL Competition Committee and the 32 NFL owners. The ultimate source of morality is God, whose authority over Creation rests upon the fact of His being its Creator. His game, His rules. The threat of punishment is merely an incentive to abide by those rules and should never be confused with either the rules or the Rulegiver.

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Another Dawkins argument destroyed

In which a scientific experiment indicates that replacing fallible eyewitness testimony with "scientific evidence" such as DNA would be a really bad idea:

Interpreting alleles in a joined or partial sample is where the subjective opinion of an algebraist could play a part. To test this, New Scientist teamed up by Itiel Dror, a neuroscientist at University College London and head of Cognitive Consultants International, and Greg Hampikian of Boise State University in Idaho.

We took a mixed sample of DNA evidence from an actual crime scene- a coterie rape committed in Georgia, US- which helped to convict a fortify called Kerry Robinson, who is currently in prison. We presented it, and Robinson’s DNA contour, to 17 experienced analysts working in the same accredited government lab in the US, out of any contextual information that might bias their judgement.

In the spring case, two analysts from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation concluded that Robinson “could not have existence excluded” from the crime scene sample, based on his DNA profile. (A second man convicted of the same crime also testified that Robinson was an assailant, in return for a lesser jail term.) Each of our 17 analysts independently examined the profiles from the DNA ad~, the victim’s profile and those of two other suspects and was asked to connoisseur whether the suspects’ profiles could be “excluded”, “cannot be excluded” or whether the results were “indecisive”.

If DNA analysis were totally objective, then all 17 analysts should get to the same conclusion. However, we found that just one agreed through the original judgement that Robinson “cannot be excluded”. Four analysts related the evidence was inconclusive and 12 said he could be excluded.

What science fetishists consistently fail to understand is that scientists are the weakest link in the reliability of science. The scientific method is reliable only insofar as the humans who perform the observations and test the results are reliable. And there is no shortage of evidence, scientific and otherwise, to show that scientists are as intrinsically unreliable as every other collection of human beings.

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American concubines

In which it is argued, contra my prediction of the brothel/burqah option, American women are rather far along in the process of abandoning marriage in favor of concubinage:

If one takes a close look at contemporary American society, it appears that concubinage is gradually reasserting itself in Western culture and law. This is an inevitable result of the idea that men have an obligation to financially support illegitimate children; an idea that was rejected by Christians because it fatally weakens the incentives for women without significant property to engage in monogamous marriage. In fact, Islam prohibits concubinage as well, and dictates that although a man may have up to four wives, each one will have the same status under the law. Abuses have always occurred, but the contrast between European and East Asian society (Chinese in particular) was stark up until modernization in Asia. Rich Chinese men often had a “first wife” and varying numbers of concubines, the Emperor would have hundreds of them, and lots of ordinary Chinese men had to make do sharing prostitutes or going entirely without a woman.

For young women, a life as a concubine is often preferable to being married to a poor man, and increasingly that option is open to them in the US. For the lucky few women – usually the exceptionally attractive and mercenary – a sexual relationship with a wealthy businessman, athlete or politician can guarantee decades of support if she manages to get pregnant. Rielle Hunter, John Edwards’ adulterous lover, is an example of a woman who pulled it off. Scores of women manage to hit the jackpot with young, unsophisticated athletes; thousands upon thousands of others we’ve never heard of take advantage of relatively wealthy men. In these cases, where child support will be enough to live on, the arrangement is concubinage in all but name. The only argument against equivalency is that sexual exclusivity is not guaranteed, as it usually was in ancient forms of concubinage, but given that sexual exclusivity is neither guaranteed nor enforced in marriage any longer and concubinage has always been held to be a lesser alternative to full marriage, it is fulfilling the exact same role the institution did in ancient times.

It's an interesting historical correlation, but I don't think the devolution into modern concubinage is so much an end state as a stage on the continued devolution into full female subjugation. The reality is that economics and demographics alike predict the unviability of any society with universal suffrage and concomitant legal favoritism towards women. Therefore, anything that naturally develops from that society is irrelevant, since the society is going to either collapse or be conquered and be replaced by a competing one.

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Arson-free prophets

Mencius Moldbug explains why it is vital to read history's losers:

This power, which the old States of Europe expended such rivers of treasure and blood to curb, at the beginning of the century, had transferred its immediate designs across the Atlantic, was consolidating itself anew in the Northern States of America, with a wealth, an organization, an audacity, an extent to which it never aspired in the lands of its birth, and was preparing to make the United States, after crushing all law there under its brute will, the fulcrum whence they should extend their lever to upheave every legitimate throne in the Old World.

Hither, by emigration, flowed the radicalism, discontent, crime, and poverty of Europe, until the people of the Northern States became, like the rabble of Imperial Rome, the colluvies gentium. The miseries and vices of their early homes had alike taught them to mistake license for liberty, and they were incapable of comprehending, much more of loving, the enlightened structure of English or Virginian freedom.

If the first great wave of immigrants were incapable of comprehending, much more of loving, the enlightened structure of English Virginian freedom, what reason is there for believing that this second great wave of third world rabble is capable of comprehending, much less loving, its surviving remnants? Even on the purely practical level, who genuinely believes that young men from El Salvador, Mexico, and Somalia are going to be able or willing to subsidize the lives of old white women 30 years from now?

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