More Immigration, Please

by Gherald

Yglesias advocates more legal immigration:

Adam Ozimek offers up some quantitative research on the scale of the effect citing research from Albert Saiz (PDF) indicating that “[i]mmigration inflows equal to 1% of a city’s population were associated with increases in average or median housing rents and prices of about 1%.”
One way to especially take advantage of this effect and politically frame it as housing stabilization policy would be to create a special new class of visa specifically for people who purchase homes in the United States.

Patrick Appel is in, and notes Felix Salmon listing other economic benefits.

I'm double plus in.  For laughs, imagine the facial reaction of a typical 'patriotic' tea partier to the suggestion.

Evening Music Party - Glass Candy

Some delicious Glass Candy to get you through your Wednesday night:

Table 14. Why thinking with the gut is problematic.

On the heels of my latest McArdle FAIL post, I thought you might enjoy a little illustration I put together to show why McMegan's preferred style of "thinking" can be problematic:

Megan McArdle Loves to Stamp and Splutter; Scream and Shout and Whine and Mutter

I am really starting to enjoy the bountiful cornucopia of blog posts detailing what an overly excitable, fact-challenged fraud Megan McArdle is constantly proving herself to be.

Here's McMegan getting really worked up about an author's comparison of humans to bonobos:

"For example, like a lot of evolutionary biology critiques, this one leans heavily on bonobos (at least so far). Here's the thing: humans aren't like bonobos. And do you know how I know that we are not like bonobos? Because we're not like bonobos. There's no way observed human societies grew out of a species organized along the lines of a bonobo tribe." (emphasis in original)

Here's the author's retort:

Got that? Humans aren't like bonobos because we're not like bonobos. No way! So there! Case closed.

In addition to this somewhat embarassing "reasoning," it's pretty clear Ms. McArdle hasn't read even the first half of the book very closely. Pages 77 and 78 contain a table listing some of the major similarities between humans and bonobos, many of them unique to these two species. Hard to imagine how she managed to miss that. In the discussion of her article, she flatly states that chimps are genetically more closely related to humans than bonobos are, which is not only just plain wrong, it's something we explain very early in the book (along with a graph, no less, on p. 62).

Agree with our thesis or disagree with it, nobody who knows anything about primatology would argue that chimps are genetically closer to us than bonobos are (they're equidistant) or that humans and bonobos don't have a great deal in common—particularly in terms of our sexual behavior and anatomy. (The table appears below.)

How anyone continues to take McMegan seriously is beyond me.

Uh Oh. Facts! Illegal Immigration Reduced Significantly Over Past Decade

Gee, with stats like this, one might almost think that Republicans are stirring up fears about a flood of smelly brown people flooding over the border for political gain!

A Step-By-Step Plan For Rupert Murdoch to Regain a Piece of His Humanity, Then Burn in Hell

This is a super-fun rant against the Murdoch-fueled bile being pumped out daily about all those lazy, shiftless unemployed people who are causing all of our woes:

So here's my wish for Rupert Murdoch, and it's not all that my heart wishes for him, but some things shouldn't be said aloud. I want him to walk in the shoes of the unemployed for 100 weeks, but with only 26 weeks of unemployment insurance. I want him to have no way to pay for food, and for him to be passed over for every job applied for, day after day after painful day. I want him to lose his car, his home, and his dignity. I want him to sit in a bureaucrat's office and apply for emergency food stamps, aid for the children, Medicaid benefits and place himself at the mercy of others, who may or may not be merciful.

I want him to rot from the inside out from the constant anxiety of having to wonder if he will ever reach the age where he can claim Social Security benefits -- benefits HE paid for. I want him to lie awake at night wondering where he can go to collect aluminum cans and glass bottles to turn in for the recycling money so he can bring home groceries that night.

I want him completely humbled and humiliated, to be prostrate before the government agencies he so sneeringly dismisses, to know what it is like to have nothing, not to be able to rely on anyone, and when he is so low there isn't a lower place to go besides hell, I want to lean over and whisper in his ear, "This is all your doing. You, and you alone, are responsible for it."

And then I want him to rot in the hell he made for himself for all eternity, while his remains are picked apart by conservative vultures.

Afghanistan's Dirty Secret

Joel Brinkley writes in the SF Chronicle:

Western forces fighting in southern Afghanistan had a problem. Too often, soldiers on patrol passed an older man walking hand-in-hand with a pretty young boy. Their behavior suggested he was not the boy's father. Then, British soldiers found that young Afghan men were actually trying to "touch and fondle them," military investigator Anna Maria Cardinalli told me. "The soldiers didn't understand."

All of this was so disconcerting that the Defense Department hired Cardinalli, a social scientist, to examine this mystery. Her report, "Pashtun Sexuality," startled not even one Afghan. But Western forces were shocked - and repulsed.

For centuries, Afghan men have taken boys, roughly 9 to 15 years old, as lovers. Some research suggests that half the Pashtun tribal members in Kandahar and other southern towns are bacha baz, the term for an older man with a boy lover. Literally it means "boy player." The men like to boast about it.

"Having a boy has become a custom for us," Enayatullah, a 42-year-old in Baghlan province, told a Reuters reporter. "Whoever wants to show off should have a boy."

[..] In Kandahar, population about 500,000, and other towns, dance parties are a popular, often weekly, pastime. Young boys dress up as girls, wearing makeup and bells on their feet, and dance for a dozen or more leering middle-aged men who throw money at them and then take them home. A recent State Department report called "dancing boys" a "widespread, culturally sanctioned form of male rape."

So, why are American and NATO forces fighting and dying to defend tens of thousands of proud pedophiles, certainly more per capita than any other place on Earth? And how did Afghanistan become the pedophilia capital of Asia?

Sociologists and anthropologists say the problem results from perverse interpretation of Islamic law. Women are simply unapproachable. Afghan men cannot talk to an unrelated woman until after proposing marriage. Before then, they can't even look at a woman, except perhaps her feet. Otherwise she is covered, head to ankle.

"How can you fall in love if you can't see her face," 29-year-old Mohammed Daud told reporters. "We can see the boys, so we can tell which are beautiful."

Even after marriage, many men keep their boys, suggesting a loveless life at home. A favored Afghan expression goes: "Women are for children, boys are for pleasure." Fundamentalist imams, exaggerating a biblical passage on menstruation, teach that women are "unclean" and therefore distasteful. One married man even asked Cardinalli's team "how his wife could become pregnant," her report said. When that was explained, he "reacted with disgust" and asked, "How could one feel desire to be with a woman, who God has made unclean?"

That helps explain why women are hidden away - and stoned to death if they are perceived to have misbehaved. Islamic law also forbids homosexuality. But the pedophiles explain that away. It's not homosexuality, they aver, because they aren't in love with their boys.

Finally Feeling Better -- And, Yes, Still Not Smoking - With Bonus M.I.A. Videos!

Thanks for all the well-wishers who sent me healing vibes through an unpleasant bout of mystery sickness.  I am pretty much out of the woods and started up again today on Nicorette to keep me off the cigs.

For a bit of fun, here's a couple M.I.A. videos to enjoy:

Man Already Knows Everything He Needs To Know About Muslims

SALINA, KANSAS—Scott Gentries told reporters Wednesday that his deliberately limited grasp of Islamic history and culture was still more than sufficient to shape his views of the entire Muslim world.

Gentries, 48, said he had absolutely no interest in exposing himself to further knowledge of Islamic civilization or putting his sweeping opinions into a broader context of any kind, and confirmed he was "perfectly happy" to make a handful of emotionally charged words the basis of his mistrust toward all members of the world's second-largest religion.

"I learned all that really matters about the Muslim faith on 9/11," Gentries said in reference to the terrorist attacks on the United States undertaken by 19 of Islam's approximately 1.6 billion practitioners. "What more do I need to know to stigmatize Muslims everywhere as inherently violent radicals?"

"And now they want to build a mosque at Ground Zero," continued Gentries, eliminating any distinction between the 9/11 hijackers and Muslims in general. "No, I won't examine the accuracy of that statement, but yes, I will allow myself to be outraged by it and use it as evidence of these people's universal callousness toward Americans who lost loved ones when the Twin Towers fell."

[..] When told that the proposed "Ground Zero mosque" is actually a community center two blocks north of the site that would include, in addition to a public prayer space, a 500-seat auditorium, a restaurant, and athletic facilities, Gentries shook his head and said, "I know all I'm going to let myself know."

"All Muslims are at war with America, and I will resist any attempt to challenge that assertion with potentially illuminating facts," said Gentries, who threatened to leave the room if presented with the number of Muslims who live peacefully in the United States, serve in the country's armed forces, or were victims themselves of the 9/11 attacks. "Period."

"If you don't believe me, wait until they put your wife in a burka," Gentries continued in reference to the face-and-body-covering worn by a small minority of Muslim women and banned in the universities of Turkey, Tunisia, and Syria. "Or worse, a rape camp. That's right: For reasons I am content being totally unable to articulate, I am choosing to associate Muslims with rape camps."

Over the past decade, Gentries said he has taken pains to avoid personal interactions or media that might have the potential to compromise his point of view. He told reporters that the closest he had come to confronting a contrary standpoint was tuning in to the first few seconds of an interview with a moderate Muslim cleric before hastily turning off the television.

"I almost gave in and listened to that guy defend Islam with words I didn't want to hear," Gentries said. "But then I remembered how much easier it is to live in a world of black-and-white in which I can assign the label of 'other' to someone and use him as a vessel for all my fears and insecurities."

The Turkish Menace

by Gherald

Obviously last month's big news was Turkey committing the international crime of criticizing Israeli policy, becoming our latest neocon enemy.  But recently a less publicized menace has been exposed: attractive Turkish youths who are very excited about Facebook:

It's only a matter of time before these Islamofascists start bombarding us with Farmville updates in-between dance breaks.

The Glenn Beck Revival

OMG, Still Sick AND I Decided to Quit Smoking

Oy, will the fun ever start?  I'm still sick!

I'm so sick that I permanently decided to quit smoking.

I haven't had a cig for four days!   Argh!