Everyone should watch the school documentary Waiting for Superman:

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100929/REVIEWS/100929981

It's possible to take the same group of kids from the same underprivileged neighborhood, and send some of them to public schools where 50% will fail to graduate, and send some from the same pool to charter schools where *for less money per student* 90% will go on to attend college. It really is all about the schools, teachers, and methods, not the students, neighborhoods, or money.

The biggest culprit is teacher tenure. After a measly 2 years of teaching, public school teachers can get tenure and be almost impossible to fire for the rest of their lives, even if they're actively bad at their jobs. At the university level tenure is a useful tool for retaining teachers with unconventional views, who add to the campus experience; but at the high school level tenure is useless since kids have too many basics to learn for unconventional views to be given time. We should institute merit pay for teachers, and eliminate tenure--good teachers could make twice what average ones make, and bad ones could be fired.

> TL;DR. So, by 'natural born', you mean 'not brown'. Right?

Don't be a race-baiting PC tool of the elite greedy capitalists and cultural Marxists on both sides of the political spectrum who caused this socioeconomic mess.

Of course not. There have been black, red, and Hispanic people in the U.S since before it was the U.S. I'm 1/16 Cherokee myself, and I probably have some black ancestry as well. But then, if you go far back enough, we all do. ;)

If the 1965 Immigration Act had resulted in tens of millions of blond Germans and Scandinavians flooding our shores, keeping our black population in poverty, making the rich richer and the middle class less existent, tanking public education by costing our schools 1.65 times per student what it costs to educate natives, and waving German flags while demanding that we open borders to let more blond people in, I'd be just as justifiably unsatisfied at them as I am with our current crop of overnumerous immigrants. Whether brown, yellow, or blond, we need to limit immigration to sustainable and integratable levels. And fuck the racial red herring; it's about economics and culture--race is irrelevant.

>> In a few decades, native-born Americans will be about 25% of the U.S. population
>
> That seems like some sort of critical math failure.

You're right; I shouldn't have used the term "native-born" because the most natural interpretation of that would be "anyone born here," at any time under any circumstances. Parents come here on vacation, kid pops out, suddenly he's another "native-born" USian. He's legally entitled to birthright citizenship, of course (although absolute birthright citizenship isn't the norm in most developed countries). But that's not what I meant, though it's the most obvious interpretation of what I said.

Since I was talking about the negative consequences of the mass immigration begun in 1965, what I really meant in detail is, "In a few decades, the descendants of people who were already here before the mass immigration started by the 1965 Immigration Act will be about 25% of the U.S. population." The immigrants and their descendants will be about 75%. There's nothing special or "more American" about those people who were already here by around 1970 than anyone who immigrated here legally, attained citizenship, and integrated productively into the fabric of American society after that; we just need a baseline date to compare the pre-Act and post-Act population so we can assess its numerical impact. But certainly not all the immigrants and their descendants have integrated into the larger social fabric--some have, some haven't, and their presence has led to changes both good and bad; among the bad, some post-1970 immigrants and their children feel no connection with narratives of the Founding Fathers and the Enlightenment principles which shaped the Constitution; many take to the streets waving flags of their country of origin and advocating for even more open borders, for example; teaching the children of immigrants whose first language isn't English costs 1.65 times as much as teaching the children of native speakers (hello education meltdown); and some have very racist and tribalistic loyalties ("por la raza todo, fuera de la raza nada"); there are clear and sometimes arguably negative and divisive cultural differences in some immigrant communities even after having been in this country for decades.

At any rate, if we take the 1970 census data as our baseline, just 5 years after the new immigration begun by the 1965 act, we see exactly how big its effects were and continue to be:

http://www.flsuspop.org/images/population459.gif
http://www.numbersusa.com/content/learn/about/question-where-does-census-bureau-say-we.html
http://www.mnforsustain.org/united_states_population_growth_graph.htm

I'm not anti-immigration in general, I just object to the way the 1965 Act skews immigration toward unskilled Latin American immigrants and certain Asians to the exclusion of other groups, and how it's had a continuous unchecked growth. I just think instead of H1B and other special ad hoc programs, immigration should be reformed to shuffle skilled immigrants who want permanent residence and citizenship to the front of the line, regardless of national origin, and should have low ceilings built in for the time being. Americans are fond of recalling the mass immigration of the late 1800s/early 1900s when championing the current mass immigration; what they forget is that in the 1920s we stopped almost all immigration entirely for the next 40 years (until the 1965 Act) to give the country time to "digest" and assimilate these relative newcomers. I really think it's time to do something similar.

At any rate, that book I linked above, _Alien Nation_, makes some very valid arguments about the history of American immigration and since it's free I highly recommend it. I grew up in an almost ideally multicultural setting in Northern Virginia; my first babysitter was a Pakistani Hindu who gave me an unending appreciation for the beauty of her subcontinent, while my best friends were a band of whites, blacks, Filipino and Vietnamese. My favorite events included the monthly multicultural pot-luck dinners my elementary school held, where I first tasted most of the world at a time when Chinese takeout was still somewhat "exotic" to much of the country. If anything, I think the nation has become less multicultural over the last few decades and more "bicultural": white/black American or Hispanic, with other cultures crowded out of the spotlight. Pity.

The source is a book published in 1995, before vdare existed; I don't care where the free scan of it is hosted. And yes, you helpfully point out that it's a basic logical fallacy to attack ad hominem instead of attacking the argument. I happened to find the book's facts (which are all based on impartial sources like census data, etc.) and its analysis of them (clear and logical) enlightening, and largely irrefutable.

As for whether vdare is a racist website, it's racist only in the same sense that _The Bell Curve_:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve

is racist. That is, it discusses facts which are politically incorrect and not discussed in repressed multicultural American society, yet are still facts. Reading the site, it's clear that some very tiny few of the linked articles have a racist tinge, while most are mainstream. This is to be expected from any site where cultural and ethnic issues are discussed honestly.

After reading this prescient book from 1995:

http://www.vdare.com/alien_nation/

it started to dawn on me that nearly all the socioeconomic problems we in the U.S. face today* can be traced to the failings of the 1965 immigration reform. We shouldn't even have special niche programs like H1B; we should be putting those who really do have in-demand skills and qualifications at the front of the line for normal immigration visas and encouraging them to become citizens, but instead because of quirks of the 1965 reform unskilled Latin Americans will _always_ be at the head of the line--for the sole reason that they were "first out of the gate" to immigrate in large numbers post-1965--unless the law is amended. And good luck with that since so many are already here that they're a powerful special-interest lobby.

*: increasing economic stratification (rich getting richer, poor getting poorer, middle class shrinking), decline in inflation-adjusted wages (an average worker in the 70s had more buying power than an average worker today), high unemployment in the African-American community, etc., all trace back convincingly to post-1965 mass immigration, and the book _Alien Nation_ details the evidence. Even the recent housing bubble which set off the banking crisis and current recession has our immigration-driven population explosion and cheap immigrant construction labor as a significant component (though the book obviously doesn't detail this, having been published in 1995). In a few decades, native-born Americans will be about 25% of the U.S. population; will the culture of that day have anything in common with our own--will it descend from our culture and inherit its good points, or replace it and retain nothing of what we and our parents built? These are all interesting issues.

Why does this sound so familiar and timely? Oh yeah, because the USA has been killing its space program in a similar way for years now.

Fuck, just get a few billion in corporate advertising partnerships and use it to get us to Mars orbit already, where we can at least manipulate some probes usefully in realtime instead of leaving them to roam around with huge lag and probably missing 90% of the potentially interesting stuff they could be examining. And recover some material to bring back to Earth for life signs analysis, instead of baking it on Mars in a wholly inadequate process.

Seriously, if the USA announced a manned mission to Mars for a certain near but doable year and presold some corporate sponsorships, NASA's funding problems would go away. Why not put corporate money to good use for a change? I don't care if their damn spacesuits say Google on the back and they call it "the Mars Orbiter brought to you by Microsoft" as long as they actually get there before I'm bloodywell dead.

The real problem is that people aren't going to university to learn anymore, they're going because it's a prerequisite for jobs that didn't require a university degree a generation ago (and for the most part, shouldn't require one now). It's basically education inflation, with diminishing returns--now you have to spend tens of thousands of dollars and typically go into debt in the process just to get the same job your dad could've gotten for free. Is it any wonder then that almost 70% of university students cheat, and over 20% do it regularly? No, because they're not there for the education, just for the piece of paper that lets them get a decent job.

And let's be honest: for the most part students in university aren't learning anything they couldn't have learned for free in high school a generation ago, or for much cheaper than a full university education in a technical or trade school. Depth and breadth of high school education has suffered because the assumption is that any serious students will go on to university, and university education has suffered because they now have to teach remedial subjects that were covered in high school 20 or 30 years ago--so today's university graduate is typically be less well educated than his counterpart from previous generations. It's the McDonaldsization of higher education: it's been made attractive and affordable to the lowest common denominator and everyone is conditioned from a young age to like and expect it, but it isn't as good as a real meal, or a real education.

The result has been contributing to the devastation of the middle and working classes: adjusted for inflation and cost of living we typically earn less pay today than we did in the late 70s, and we have to go into education debt for the privilege while not being substantially more educated than we used to be. The only beneficiaries of this process are the corporate parasites which take advantage at all levels--large universities, for the most part, included.

I went to a small liberal arts institution in the 90s, which had recently instituted a required "Rhetoric" course (basic reading and writing and oral presentation proficiency) for all incoming freshmen who didn't score a 3 or above on the AP English Language exam. Professors were complaining even then that they were having to teach remedial skills that every high school graduate entering university used to possess just a decade before.

Yes, much of this is that people who'd never have had the opportunity to go to university before now do; the problem is we're making today's university into last generation's high school and dumbing it down in the process while going into debt without really getting ahead.

I'd say the scarlet letter is the public sex-offender registry, and that we also unreasonably impose a modern form of exile by making too many areas "exclusion zones" where past sex offenders are forbidden to live and work (so they end up living under bridges, at seedy motels etc., and at far greater risk of re-offending). I've actually thought for a long time that better, cheaper GPS technology would create a healthier alternative, but that unfortunately the older laws would never be repealed and we'd just create more layers of cruft on a poor system. That seems to be what's happening here.

Now, what they should do instead of adding GPS tracking on top of public sex offender registries and live/work exclusion zones, is use it _instead_ of those even more draconian measures. If we can track where every past sex offender is at any moment, that in itself is a powerful deterrent--a permanent record of movements would put any such person at the scene of any crime, and knowing there's a 100% chance of getting caught would deter most would-be offenders. Those not deterred, who re-offend even knowing they'd eventually get caught, would clearly be the worst of the worst and could be imprisoned permanently. But that other 99+ percent would be allowed to live normal lives, not be subject to public harassment by having their names and addresses and charges on a publicly accessible list, and be able to be productive citizens provided they don't spend more than a normal commute time traveling through real exclusion zones like school areas. And anyone afraid that their would-be babysitting neighbor or boyfriend shouldn't be left alone with their children could still find out if the guy's a convicted sex offender by asking him to lift his pant legs, but the general public need not know.

That will never happen because no politician wants to be the guy who says, "Yeah, let's get rid of the sex offender registries! We don't need 'em anymore thanks to technology!" But I think it would be a far better solution to the issue.

> You can't judge all vegetarians by your friends
> any more than I can judge all meat-eaters by the
> 400 lb guy in the scooter at McDonalds.

His name is CowboyNeal, you insensitive clod!

This may seem shallow or even trollish, but it's true: It won't see much adoption by offices in the U.S because of the association of "Libre" with third-world revolutionaries like Che and their hippie American fanclubs. Think like a management suit for a minute: is a name derived from dirty Marxist anarchist scum a name you want your clients to see your office using? Nope. They'd rather pay the Microsoft tax or stick with an old version of OpenOffice or find a third solution, than risk dropping the jaws of conservative clients.