Welfare Reform Is as Necessary as Immigration Reform

It is no coincidence but on the contrary highly significant that the British modern welfare state was born after the Second World War.

Having fought together against Hitler provided that sense of unity that is necessary for people to willingly financially support total strangers.

For a welfare state to succeed that sense of an entire society's belonging figuratively to the same family is a conditio sine qua non. Another necessary condition is a general sense of trust, the perception that the welfare recipients will not exploit and take advantage of the welfare donors' generosity.

Both these indispensable conditions have now been lost.

Immigration is undoubtedly a cause of this loss, but it is not the only one. The welfare state over the long decades of its existence has produced what American sociologist Charles Murray and others call the "underclass" (incidentally another sign that the US, contrary to European popular opinion, does have an extensive welfare state too).

The underclass is a new social class, it is no longer the working class. It is not characterised by its economic status so much as by its behaviour, mores and ethos.
It has a disproportionately high illegitimacy rate, school drop-out rate, unemployment rate and crime rate. It is anti-social in its outlook, attitudes, rules and codes.

In the US the underclass is disproportionately black but in Britain it is mainly formed by indigenous Britons.

This is why only solving the problem of immigration will not solve the welfare problem.

That pro-welfare consensus after World War II does not exist any more. Now the opposite consensus exists.

One of the purported reasons for the creation of the welfare state was the desire to reduce income inequality (or relative poverty), portrayed as a cause of social unrest.

I don't know if enough evidence exists that income inequality causes social unrest. As is well known, correlation is not causation.

Social instability is more likely to be caused by poverty - real, absolute poverty in relation to one's needs, not the feeling of envy generated by looking over the fence at the neighbour's garden and seeing there rare orchids not found in one's own pretty but not luxurious garden - not income inequality. Moreover, it is caused by agitprop elements who keep telling people that they are treated unfairly (a bit like the US black leaders, that author Tammy Bruce calls "merchants of misery", who have made a career out of perpetuating in blacks a never-ending sense of victimhood and desire for retribution).

At the moment, much of Western social unrest is caused by the disastrous effect of governments' overspending, mostly due to elephantine welfare states.

US Racist and Capital Crimes Have a Black Hue

There are far more blacks on Death Row in the United States than whites, and this is attributed by the usual suspects, namely the mainstream media and Lefties, to - you'll never guess - racism.

This is an exampe of the kind of pro-black, anti-white prejudice that we have to constantly endure from the self-proclaimed "progressives" (who are anything but):

Today people of color continue to be disproportionately incarcerated, policed, and sentenced to death at significantly higher rates than their white counterparts.

The much simpler, Occam-razor-obeying in its parsimony, explanation is that blacks commit disproportionately many more crimes, including capital ones.

American blacks perpetrate almost 8 times more murders per capita than whites.

These are the U.S. Department of Justice official statistics:

The demographic characteristics of homicide victims and offenders were different from the characteristics of the general population.

This means that some race, sex and age groups are disproportionately represented in murder statistics.

Based on available data from 1980 to 2008—
Blacks were disproportionately represented as both homicide victims and offenders. The victimization rate for blacks (27.8 per 100,000) was 6 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000). The offending rate for blacks (34.4 per 100,000) was almost 8 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000).

Males represented 77% of homicide victims and nearly 90% of offenders. The victimization rate for males (11.6 per 100,000) was 3 times higher than the rate for females (3.4 per 100,000). The offending rate for males (15.1 per 100,000) was almost 9 times higher than the rate for females (1.7 per 100,000).

Approximately a third (34%) of murder victims and almost half (49%) of the offenders were under age 25. For both victims and offenders, the rate per 100,000 peaked in the 18 to 24 year-old age group at 17.1 victims per 100,000 and 29.3 offenders per 100,000.

So, basically blacks are much more likely to commit murder than whites, in the same way that men and youngsters perpetrate more homicides than women and people over 25. The difference is that, although it is well known and accepted that males and young people offend more, we don't read or hear in the mainstream media that blacks offend more, even if the public is not stupid and suspects it.

While whites are 82.9% of the American population, they only execute 45.3% of all murders. Conversely, blacks, who are just 12.6% of the population, carry out an astonishing 52.5% of all homicides.

The different rates of victimization (6 times higher for blacks) and offending (8 times higher for blacks) for murder quoted above also belie the "black-on-black" crime narrative which the media love and use to try to shelter blacks from the accusations of racism and hate crimes that would arise spontaneously by looking at the statistics. Blacks commit more attacks on whites than on other blacks. From the New Century Foundation's report The Color of Crime:

Of the nearly 770,000 violent interracial crimes committed every year involving blacks and whites, blacks commit 85 percent and whites commit 15 percent.

Blacks commit more violent crime against whites than against blacks. Forty-five percent of their victims are white, 43 percent are black, and 10 percent are Hispanic. When whites commit violent crime, only three percent of their victims are black.

Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery.

Blacks are 2.25 times more likely to commit officially-designated hate crimes against whites than vice versa.

Oh, look who is racist now!

The blog of my friend, author Alexander Boot, has some more statistics:

What about interracial crimes then? There’s no shortage of those, according to the FBI study for 2007, cited in Pat Buchanan’s book Suicide of a Superpower... Blacks also perpetrated 14,000 assaults on white women – with exactly zero committed by white men on black women.

Buchanan himself adds:

If interracial crime is the ugliest manifestation of racism, what does this tell us about where racism really resides — in America?

A reference to the pamphlet Black Skin Privilege, by David Horowitz and John Perazzo, can provide us with the appropriate conclusion by means of the following considerations:

Black sin privilege has created an optical illusion in the liberal culture that white on black attack are commonplace events when in fact there are five times as many black attacks on whites as the reverse. As Horowitz and Perazzo note, in 2010, blacks committed more than 25 times the number of acts of interracial violence than whites did.

UK Muslims Back 7/7: So What's New?

This is another article transferred from my older blog which I'm closing down, still relevant today.

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A 7 August 2006 survey reveals that almost a quarter of British Muslims believe the July 7 terror attacks in London, the worst the city has ever seen in its long history, were justified because of Britain's support for the war on terror.

And nearly half of the UK Muslims questioned said that the 9/11 attacks on New York were a conspiracy between the US and Israel.

The survey found Muslims under the age of 24 were twice as likely to justify the 7/7 attacks as those aged over 45.

A third of those polled said that they would prefer to live under Sharia law in the UK rather than British law.

Now the question is: what is the news value of these results?

Only if you are a liberal, a leftie or a person brainwashed by politically correct propaganda, this may seem shocking to you.

Let’s face it: the Muslims living or trying to live in the West are extremely lucky that the Western people do not know almost anything about Islam.
Ignorance is the greatest ally of the Islamic world or, to paraphrase a famous song, Western ignorance is a Muslim’s best friend.

The majority of people of Western countries, understandably, do not want to read the Koran and do not want to know about the Muslim doctrine. Who can blame them? It’s one of the most uninteresting theories ever developed, philosophically it’s a non-entity.

Unfortunately, its importance does not derive from its non-existent intellectual worth: it stems from the terrible power it holds on people who culturally and morally belong to a different age from ours, from its political significance.

Who else in the West should know anything about Islam? The media people, like all those on the left of the political spectrum, are completely naïve in their misunderstanding of the Muslim world. They erroneously believe that everybody is the same, that all humans of all races, cultures and latitudes want the same things and share the same values, which is obvioulsy not true. So they attribute to Muslims the same desires, intentions and attitudes of mind that they have, so losing any possibility of grasping the first thing about them.

One detail particularly revealing of this huge incomprehension, a funny one too, occurred when Channel 4’s Jon Snow, during the TV broadcast yesterday of his survey of UK Muslims, talked in sheer puzzlement to the camera about a Muslim bloke who had just tried to convert him to his own religion: “He tried to convert to Islam even me!” he cried, in true disbelief, as if the young chap had attempted something amazing and not simply done what was the most natural thing to him, what the Koran demands him to do with any means.

For the Koran, the whole world must become Muslim one day.

The advertisng blurb for this recent survey was “You’d better know him better” next to the picture of a Muslim lad.

But the point is: we know who Muslims are already, or at least the Western authors, political thinkers and philosophers who have not been blinded by the current media propaganda and political orthodoxy know.

Whenever some Muslim commits an atrocity, you watch the news coverage and what do you get? TV crews interviewing Muslim leaders, “scholars” and common people about whether that is the “real Islam” or “what the Koran says” or not.

But you never see or read anything in the mainstream media that shows the other side of the coin, a different opinion.

This biased, one-sided reporting is the equivalent of a situation in which some staff of a large corporation, like a multi-national for example, committed something illegal or damaging to the public health or the environment, and the only people that journalists bothered to interview, the only ones asked to voice their opinion on the matter, were the spokespersons of the company involved itself.

Socialism Is Ethically Wrong

The fact that communism, or even socialism, cannot be implemented in reality, is by now widely accepted; even Leftists and liberals, if unhappily and grudgingly, had to surrender to the overwhelming historical evidence which has accumulated especially in the last 2 or 3 decades, showing that a socialist economy is almost a contradiction in terms, and a society based on those principles is barely feasible, and certainly not a happy one.

But hardly anyone seems to question the ethical validity of socialist ideas. In the mind of most people, they still inhabit the moral high ground.

In fact, I believe that socialism not only starts from premises which are wrong factually, but it is also wrong ethically.

First of all, let's start from explaining what wealth is. There is a common misconception that wealth is a theft of sort, that people become rich by taking from others.

I don't think that this idea began with socialism. The French libertarian socialist, or anarchist, Proudhon, famously said: "Property is theft", but I don't think that he was original in that.

No, it seems to me that, when you lack something, to blame someone else for your want is one of the simplest, most instinctive of all human impulses: envy.

The thought behind this seems to be that there's only a given, limited amount of goods, and if somebody has more, then it follows that somebody else must necessarily have less.

There's a long history of that idea, perhaps beginning with humanity itself, through Robin Hood to modern-day socialists.

It is a misconception, due to a failure to understand the nature of wealth. Wealth is essentially created, not given.

If anybody is in any doubt about it, they just have to think of these two countries: Iran and Switzerland.

Nature has given an enormous wealth to the former, in the form of oil (although the reason why oil is "black gold" has to do with the huge economic and historical development of the West, and the need of Western societies for it) and natural gas. Iran has the world's largest proved natural gas reserves, and the world's fifth largest proved crude oil reserves. And yet, it is the 75th country in the world for Gross Domestic Product based on Purchasing-Power-Parity (PPP) per capita.

The Swiss live in an extremely hard habitat, a region of high mountains very unsuitable, on the face of it, to human settlement and economic prosperity. Still, the Swiss have the 9th highest Gross Domestic Product based on Purchasing-Power-Parity (PPP) per capita in the world.

It is obviously the use that both these populations have made of their natural resources that has made them rich or poor, not those resources in themselves. And that use stems from a conscious choice of those people, which in turn comes from their mindset, their way of thinking.

And here we arrive at one of the many hypotheses and fundamental parts of his theory that Karl Marx got wrong: the idea that human beings are dominated by the ineluctable laws of economics, which in turn are governed by the dialectic of history and eventually of nature.

For both Marx and Sigmund Freud humans are not free agents, but subject to deterministic principles. They go against the Christian concept of free will, which is not only closer to the truth, but also positively guides human behaviour, so it is pragmatically useful.

Instead, psychoanalysis and Marxism, two theories of huge influence, one in the personal the other in the public sphere but both profoundly affecting the cultural and political life of our time, have done a lot of damage through the creation of a highly destructive way of thinking that denies free will.

It's true that most individual human beings only use a little part of their potential. That doesn't imply the flattering idea, which has sometimes been expressed, that everybody is potentially an Einstein or a hidden genius.

It just means that most human beings don't fully realize how much control they can have on their lives, how much difference a choice rather than another can make on one's destiny.

You Don't Need to Be Racist to Be Racist

This article in FrontPage Magazine, headlined "Oprah: Just Because You’re Not Racist Doesn’t Mean You’re Not a Racist" , reminds me of what happened in Britain when the Macpherson's Inquiry into the death of black teenager Stephen Lawrence on 22 April 1993 enshrined that racism does not need to exist in reality for someone to be guilty of it, opening the door to the abuses we witness today, with these words: "A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person".

So what if racism in America is at an all-time low? So what if the vast majority of Americans are not only not racist, but actively anti-racist? That’s not enough for Oprah. “A lot of people think if they think they’re not using the n-word themselves, they physically aren’t using the n-word themselves, and do not harbor ill will towards black people that it’s not racist,” she said in a comment that is as challenged syntactically as it is intellectually.

This is paranoia of the highest sort. And it is absolutely crippling to America’s future. If a huge number of Americans believe that racism that is not present in action nonetheless lurks beneath the surface of our life, waiting to burst forth in a conflagration of hate such as that which allegedly claimed Trayvon, there can be no shared future.

But many on the left, including Oprah, apparently don’t want a shared future. They want emotional blackmail. The corollary to the belief that racism hides in the nooks and crannies of the white personality is the belief that the only way to expunge such racism by embracing the philosophy of people like Oprah. If you see The Butler, you’re buying a racial indulgence; if you vote Obama, you’re buying a racial indulgence...

That seems to be the perspective not just of many black Americans like Oprah and Daniels, but the perspective of many in various minority communities. For example, in California, Governor Jerry Brown recently signed a law declaring that transgender children must be allowed to enter bathrooms of their choice and join sports teams of their choice. The idea here is that this will minimize bullying, as though most Americans bear children with gender identity issues some sort of ill will. The truth is far simpler: Americans have a right to worry that their children will feel uncomfortable in a bathroom next to someone of the opposite sex, no matter what that person believes him or herself to be. That’s not wrong. That’s normal. But the onus has now been placed on children without gender identity issues to explain why they feel uncomfortable at the urinal next to a girl, even if they’ve never bullied a transgender child.

That’s nasty. More than that, it’s an attempt to shape values by implying that everyone is in need of having their fundamental racism, sexism, homophobia overcome by government action. Americans have nothing left to discuss. America is now a country where whites are often perceived as racist until proven innocent. And the only way to prove yourself innocent is to perform acts approved by the leftist establishment.

None of this helps black Americans. All it does is perpetuate power for those who divide us in pursuit of political gain. Hillary Clinton, who has begun touring the country invoking the supposed racism of voter ID supporters, is merely the latest race hustler to attempt this pernicious trick. Unfortunately, it seems to work. And that means that Oprah’s racial narrative is far more influential than The Butler’s.

Immigration or Invasion?

First published on FrontPage Magazine.

By Enza Ferreri


What we insist on calling “immigration” from the Third World to Western European countries like Britain is a historically new phenomenon, for which a case can be made that other, more appropriate terms should be used — like “colonization” and “invasion.”

The definition of “colony,” from which the word “colonization” is derived, is: a) a body of people living in a new territory but maintaining ties with their homeland or b) a number of people coming from the same country, sharing the same ethnic origin or speaking the same language, who reside in a foreign country or city, or a particular section of it.

Either could apply to the people coming to live in Europe from Asia and Africa.

In reference to colonization, dictionaries add “relating to the developing world,” but this is only because colonization primarily occurred there in the past. Word meanings have to change to adapt to the new historic realities.

Similarly, the expressions “native” and “indigenous” previously referred to the original inhabitants of non-European continents, whereas now they are used to describe Germans, French, British, Swedes, Dutch and so on.

“Invasion” has three main meanings: a) the act of invading, especially the entrance of an armed force into a territory to conquer; b) a large-scale onset of something injurious or harmful, such as a disease; c) an intrusion or encroachment, an incursion by a large number of people or things into a place or sphere of activity.

The latter is a perfectly apt description of what is happening in Western Europe.

Even “ethnic cleansing” could be used, since local populations are being replaced by different ethnic groups. London, for instance, is no longer a white-British-majority city, although mainstream media like the BBC and London’s own paper, the Evening Standard, barely mention it, to say nothing of the city mayor Boris Johnson.

From Wikipedia:

The official United Nations definition of ethnic cleansing is “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove from a given area persons of another ethnic or religious group.”

[...]

Terry Martin has defined ethnic cleansing as “the forcible removal of an ethnically defined population from a given territory” and as “occupying the central part of a continuum between genocide on one end and nonviolent pressured ethnic emigration on the other end.”

European native populations are being replaced because many locals, tired of being colonized, flee their countries, cities or neighborhoods.

The proportion of white British Londoners fell drastically from 60 percent in 2001 to 44.9 per cent in 2011, partly due to the arrival of so many foreign nationals and partly to a mass exodus of white Britons. David Goodhart, director of Demos, writes in The Financial Times:

Over the decade between the 2001 and 2011 censuses, the number of white British Londoners fell by more than 600,000 (17 per cent). That is about three times the fall over the previous census period, 1991 to 2001.

“Most of the leading academic geographers did not expect London to become a majority minority city for another 20 or 30 years – they underestimated the extent to which white British people have opted to leave an increasingly diverse London,” says Eric Kaufmann, an academic at Birkbeck College who is leading a project on “white flight” at Demos, the think-tank I lead.

Six hundred thousand is a big city disappearing in just 10 years.

Are we sure that Londoners have abandoned their city because of this “cultural enrichment”? Looking at the areas where white flight mostly occurs provides reasonable evidence that they do: the most multi-racial districts tend to experience high levels of it.

What the large-scale influx of foreigners to Europe can no longer be called is “immigration.” Immigration is what you have when, for example, small groups of French go to live in Britain or the British in Spain.

What distinguishes invasion from immigration are three things: the volume of people involved in the movement, the span of time and frequency of these movements — the same number of people moving to live in a country over 4 years as opposed to 400 years — and the kind of people, in particular how similar or alien to the natives they are, and how easily or improbably they’ll integrate.

The sheer numbers of people who have come to live in the UK in the last few decades have negatively affected the indigenous population’s quality of life in a serious, profound way, even assuming that those people were all law-abiding, upright citizens, which they are not.

There are many areas where this is occurring, including jobs, social services, education and public health – with tuberculosis constantly rising largely due to immigration.

A classic example is the current housing shortage. The UK is suffering its worst housing crisis in modern history. Two or more household units cram into one dwelling, and young people, not being able to afford to move out, live with their parents.

It would be trivializing the issue to say that all housing problems are created by immigration, but it’s impossible to deny the obvious fact they are exacerbating it.

There are other factors contributing to the housing crisis, including the very low interest rates, which result in fewer forced sellers, and the welfare system that, by underwriting sometimes exorbitant rent bills for people who’ve never worked, indirectly encourage landlords to charge more, thus driving up both rental and purchase prices for those who do work.

But one of the main causes is the high number of immigrants increasing the demand for dwellings, while the supply remains low, therefore pushing up house buying and renting prices.

Liberal commentators say that there is no evidence for that, but the evidence is in the most self-explanatory statistics: the more people are in the country, the more properties are needed.

Most immigrants rent, rather than buy, a property in the first 5-10 years since their arrival, which inevitably increases rental prices for everyone, including the indigenous people.

Social housing is also in limited supply. Therefore, the immigrant population that takes a share of it deprives the natives. The percentages are roughly the same: 17 percent of British live in council-rented accommodations, 18 percent of foreigners do.

Leftists and charities would want the government to “build more affordable housing” and “enough homes to meet demand” rather than limit immigration, although it’s difficult to see why the government should act like a construction company in preference to a body that protects and defends the country’s borders.

Overpasses for Obama's Impeachment

Via Facebook.com



This is something I like very much. We should do more things like it:

The New Fad Taking The Country By Storm: "Overpasses For Obama’s Impeachment"

The group “Overpasses For Obama’s Impeachment” held rallies around the country this weekend calling for Obama’s impeachment. The group lists 12 reasons for Obama’s impeachment on their website and has quite the following on Facebook. It’s the next big thing.

They have a Facebook page, Overpasses for Obama's Impeachment, with currently 35,108 likes (including mine) and 37,700 talking about this.

Their website is Impeach Obama.