The Terrorist Surveillance Program is in the news again this week, and there’s a lot that I could say about it, particularly the breathtakingly absurd opinion from the district court judge in Detroit. Update: As to the legal merit of said decision, Publius over at Legal Fiction (hat tip: Southern Appeal), though apparently a lefty in good standing on most things, pretty much speaks for me here. But for now I will just leave it at this:

If al Qaeda ever did call me at my house one evening, I would hope to God that the NSA was listening.

I thought I’d pin a quick update on the status of the blog here near the top of the page, for the sake of any new readers who might happen to wander by in the coming days.

Update: My recent post that got a link from The Corner—thanks Jonah!—is two posts down from here.

First of all, I’ll mention my favorite post to have scrolled off the main page to date: the “Prayer of St. Blog”. Some folks are of the opinion that it might just catch on.

I am continuing to tinker with some of the features, and the sidebar, and assorted details of presentation. (Readers who have helpful suggestions, or complaints about aspects of the blog that make them crazy, are welcome to e-mail me anytime.) But I remain very happy with the blog design overall, and I once again thank the folks at E.Webscapes for their fine work and considerable patience.

The “About” and “Rule” subpages are still under construction. The introduction and first Chapter of the “Rule” are finished, but work continues on the rest as time allows. When more of the subpage content is fit to receive company, I will be sure to mention it here on the main page.

The “Archives” subpage is set up, and should work just fine so long as the tasty AJAX goodness doesn’t cause a browser freak-out on your end.

As my perfectionism is satisfied or gets tired—or some combination of the two—actual posting should become a little more frequent. But I do not intend to, and am quite incapable of, becoming some sort of Insta-freak. (Note to Prof. Reynolds: I mean “freak” in a good way. Honest.) In an ideal world, I would be posting daily, with at least half of those being of the longish think-piece type. We shall see if that indeed comes to pass.

For readers who find themselves disappointed whenever they check a favorite website and find nothing new, may I suggest checking out the “Subscribe” box at left. Either the RSS or e-mail feed should keep you apprised of all new posts here, as soon as they go up. I’ve only just recently started using an RSS reader myself (I settled on the one built into Mozilla Thunderbird); I find it helps me reach a state of information overload so much more efficiently than before. Highly recommended.

Another day at the office. Get to work, have some breakfast at the desk (Diet Coke + ZonePerfect bar = usual workday breakfast), check the e-mail. Delete ridiculous quantities of preposterous spam.

Then sigh upon seeing yet another e-mail from a friend or family member, carrying a subject matter starting with the dreaded “Fw:”.

Scroll down through the twelve forward headers with comments (“Useful information!” “From So-and-so” “VERY IMPORTANT” “Great info!” “PASS IT ON TO EVERYONE IN YOUR ADDRESS BOOK!”), scan the original message just long enough to glean keywords, look keywords up on Snopes.com, copy link from Snopes into reply e-mail, e-mail friend or family member back explaining that this is yet another bogus one going around.

Rinse, lather, repeat the next day.

If men were angels, no Snopes would be necessary. But since they are not, every blog ought to carry a link to the Urban Legends Reference Pages, with a plea to readers to check the site before passing on forwarded e-mails. So here is mine:

Dear reader,

In an ideal world, none of you would be That Person in everyone’s e-mail address book, That Person who forwards a lot of stuff to a lot of people all the time. But that’s too much to hope for. So, if you must be That Person, at least, at least, check out the Urban Legends Reference Pages at Snopes.com before you forward anything.

Oh, and while you’re at it, please stop sending me attachments I haven’t asked for…or failing that, at least keep these points in mind:

1) Any attachment is a potential security risk, and that goes double for attachments from That Person (who is less likely than most to maintain a virus-free computer). So anything I’m not expecting is subject to peremptory deletion, without apology.

2) Photo and multimedia attachments are big and can fill up my e-mail box, causing messages I was actually waiting for to bounce. Attached photos that cause this to happen are subject to whimsical editing in the GIMP.

3) I can’t open Microsoft Office documents at home and those attachments never, ever contain anything that really needed Office to create anyway. Plus, I really, really despise PowerPoint presentations as a point of general principle. All .pps and .ppt files are subject to peremptory deletion with extreme prejudice (.doc and .xls only slightly less so).

Thank you for your attention. Though if you were paying attention to all this, there’s a 95% chance you never were That Person anyway. But thanks for listening anyhow…

…oh, and BE SURE TO PASS ON THIS IMPORTANT INFORMATION TO EVERYONE IN YOUR E-MAIL ADDRESS BOOK, PREFERABLY WITH A MESSAGE IN ALL CAPS SO EVERYONE KNOWS HOW IMPORTANT IT IS! THANKS!

In understanding current controversies, I often find it instructive to start putting assorted shoes on various other feet and see how things look from there. For instance, the latest round of discussions on airport security and profiling.

Jonah Goldberg raises a common objection in his column today: “Why is it morally superior to inconvenience old Mormon women of Swedish descent—for no reason at all—as much as young men from Pakistan?” A good question, that becomes an even better one if you switch around a few shoes.

Imagine, for instance, that it was the Ku Klux Klan that was bombing airplanes…and that on his next flight out of D.C., Jesse Jackson’s party got singled out, more or less randomly, for extra screening. What do you think he would say? Do you think he would find this morally superior to focusing the TSA’s attention on white males hailing from Southern and border states?

No, I would expect something more along the lines of “What, are you insane? We’re not the terrorists…we’re the people you’re supposed to be protecting from the terrorists! How brain-damaged do you have to be to not see that?” And I would be in full agreement. Now that I think of it, it’d be nice if, say, some disabled American veteran of Irish lineage or suchlike would throw a similar fit today. (He’d have to not care whether he would ever be allowed to fly again, of course.)

And just imagine how some Southern advocacy group would be received if they stepped forward to play the role that CAIR does now. How do you think the government would respond to their calls, in the immediate wake of a 21st-century version of the Birmingham church bombing, to reach out to disaffected white Southerners, to protect them from any hate or discrimination or other unpleasant backlash, to solemnly instruct Americans that the redneck culture is really one of peace and understanding? And don’t forget their demands that the “understandable rage” over this, that or the other thing be understood by everyone…not that any of it justifies terrorism, exactly; but we must always go after the “root causes”, you know…

Somehow I think it would all play out very differently, especially among the politically correct crowd, who would be making very different noises than they do now.

John Derbyshire has just quoted an eye-opening paragraph from a Fredo Arias-King paper for the Center for Immigration Studies (secondhand hat-tip to Steve Sailer…is that enough links and credits now for one graf?):

While I can recall many accolades for the Mexican immigrants and for Mexican-Americans (one white congressman even gave me a ‘high five’ when recalling that Californian Hispanics were headed for majority status), I remember few instances when a legislator spoke well of his or her white constituents. One even called them ‘rednecks,’ and apologized to us on their behalf for their incorrect attitude on immigration. Most of them seemed to advocate changing the ethnic composition of the United States as an end in itself.

One simply can’t write enough about the true nature and threat of multiculturalism, especially the facet on display here. It must be understood that the attitude of these legislators is exactly what the diversity project has hoped to cultivate among the non-minority population: uncritical celebration of the other, coupled with reflexive self-hatred.

Celebrating all cultures, equally, with an honest view of both virtues and faults, doesn’t enter into it—and I doubt it was ever meant to, except among some of the movement’s more naïve foot soldiers. In the land of diversity, you see, some cultures are more diverse than others; and people from the deep white WASP-y heart of non-minority America have no culture to celebrate at all, but only shame.

If they have truly drunk the Kool-Aid here, then it is no wonder the legislators Arias-King spoke with are so enthusiastic about blowing up what does exist of non-minority non-culture, and throwing open the doors to let the numinous light of Otherness flood in to take its place. The young woman I discussed in the previous piece is of a similar mind, but was able to perform a simpler trick on a far smaller scale: by accident of genetics and birthplace, she was able to slough off her hated non-minorityness and instead embrace her true, higher nature, embodied in an idealized vision of a native land she never really new.

Is this the usual way nations and civilizations commit suicide, or has today’s western world hit upon a new one?

I recently heard a promo on my local NPR station for a program called “Latino USA”, and it called to mind some of Andrew Stuttaford’s recent posts in The Corner on the subject of Britain and its multicultural problems.

Next time on Latino USA…

The growth of transnational adoptions from poorer countries by Americans exploded during the ’80s and ’90s and now those children have come of age and are asking questions.

We’ll hear one Central American woman’s story of discovery and transformation in the search for her own true identity.

That’s this week on Latino USA.

(My transcription of the promo for program 698.)

I will post a correction after the program airs if I’m mistaken as to how the full story goes; but I’m pretty confident in my assumption that it’s along the following lines:

Update: Meh. The story was much shorter and thinner than I had anticipated. The young woman in question is still only 19, and is just starting to explore the country of El Salvador, from where she was adopted at six months of age; and has just managed to locate her biological family. So most of what I wrote below should be taken as a prediction, a description of the direction she appears to be headed in. If I’d been able to hear the whole program before writing this, I probably would have chosen to go less speculative, and tee off on the host’s repeated and unequivocal description of the subject as a “Central American woman” instead.

The woman in question was adopted from a Central American country, probably as an infant, and was raised by her adoptive non-Hispanic family in the United States. Her teenage struggles with her parents lead her to look for her birth mother, explore the culture of the country of her birth, and experiment with a new, Central American identity. College provided her opportunity, encouragement, and incentive to deepen this immersion in the other culture, while buttressing her rejection of her parents’ culture with the ideology of multiculturalism and grievance. So now, even though she was raised in the same Wonder-Bread-and-Jello world as the rest of us in Middle America, she has discovered that her “true identity” is the one of her birth, in a land she remembered nothing of as a child.

The story is easy enough to describe because I have seen it plenty of times, working close to the front lines of the culture wars as I do. Familiarity does little, however, to ease my worry about this sort of thing. Especially as one reads the stories that Stuttaford and others have linked to about second- and third-generation Muslims in Britain, and how they have come to reject British identity in favor of an Islamist vision of their ancestral heritage.

Now granted, even the hard-core Aztlan crowd is a long way removed—geographically, culturally, religiously, and otherwise—from Islamism and its terror-spawning death cult. Yet the same sort of multi-culti cultivation of foreign “true identities” is going on, supported by major educational and media institutions; and I fear that left unchecked it poses the same existential threat here in the United States as it does in Britain, even if that threat manifests itself in different ways.

I suspect that many, perhaps even most, Americans sense this at some level. That certainly would help explain the current resonance of the immigration issue. The issue of multiculturalism also shows why many of us who remain grateful for earlier waves of immigration can at the same time insist that the current one be sharply curtailed, at least for a while; and also why, while we have no inherent preference for one nationality over another, we find the thought of five million additional Mexicans and Central Americans much more troubling in the present moment than we would five million Chinese, or Russians, or Indians…or even Frenchmen.