DDi reports:

Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Borders Group Inc. announced that it plans to offer Build-A-Bear Workshop Inc. products in most of its 500 stores, according to Bloomberg.com. The decision to dedicate an entire section within most of its locations to Build-A-Bear items—including kits to make stuffed animals, books and DVDs associated with the brand—comes as a response to consumers buying more books on the Web and trading in hard-copy books for electronic reading devices. “As more books are bought online or in digital format than bought at retail, it creates really the ultimate strategic challenge in terms of redefining the bookstore,” said Michael Edwards, CEO of Borders.

bookmark:

The WSJ reports German Politics Hit by Blowback Over Sarrazin.

The German government’s effort to oust a senior Bundesbank official for publishing controversial racial theories isn’t going at all well.

Yay!

A day after the German central bank asked President Christian Wulff to dismiss the official for racially charged remarks, it was becoming evident that a sizable slice of the electorate share Sarrazin’s concerns over immigration and ethnic integration and were protesting preparations to expell the 65-year-old from the central bank. Informal TV polls suggest that nine in 10 call-ins say Sarrazin might have a point or two.

Brand new in office, Mr. Wulff’s first reaction was to run for cover and ask the government to confer on the case before he makes a decision that only he has to make. The government itself fears that the Sarrazin case is splitting society on a thorny issue that German mainstream politics has tried to avoid confronting head on. Now there’s no choice.

The starkest evidence was the letter that the Social Democratic Party sent to members defending a decision to expell the 65-year-old Sarrazin from their party. It was in response to a groundswell of support for the author of a book that warned that high fertility rates among Muslims in Germany will erode the country’s economic potential and collective intelligence.

Copies of the SPD letter excerpted in the German media acknowledged that the party’s headquarters was being swamped with calls and emails supporting Sarrazin and at least some of his views on immigration.

Sarrazin, for better or worse, has outed a festering issue that Germany’s political class will have to take on before it’s hijacked by fringe groups. For the moment, Mr. Wulff is caught in a Ceausescu moment as he stands before the country and sees nobody waving back.

In another report, Chancellor Merkel finally deigned to give a reason why Sarrazin’s remarks were so outrageous.

“I can’t accept these comments,” Ms. Merkel said Friday. “They have an exclusionary effect.”

Profound, Chancellor. What you mean by “exclusionary” is that Sarrazin’s remarks have the effect of waking people up to the global elite’s project of abolishing the West by importing alien, hostile, low IQ immigrants.

So far, there’s no sign of Sarrazin backing down, and with the groundswell of support, maybe he won’t.

Even a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist like myself can see some grounds for optimism in Sarrazin.

bookmark:

Nothing much for me to add, other than it’s good to see that at least a few of the French are up in arms about it. Oh, and the cameraman’s has received death threats – who could have seen that coming?

This is related: Gaddafi: Europe will ‘turn black’ unless EU pays Libya £4bn a year. Unless the beloved leader of Libya gets his extortion money, he’ll unleash his hordes.

And this is unrelated, but I watched this video for the second time yesterday and it reinforced the message: Never Talk to the Police: fantastic lecture by a lawyer on why talking to the police is a very bad idea, accompanied by many examples. If they want to get you, they’ll do everything in their power to do so, so keep your trap shut. If you’re like me – and probably most readers here are in this respect – you trust the police and understand that they need to function properly for the good of society. It’s precisely people like you and me who need to hear this lecture, because we are the ones most likely to believe that there can′t be any harm in talking to the cops. Wrong.

bookmark:

John Derbyshire points out the completely liberal nature of Glenn Beck’s opinions and mode of operating, noting that it just about has to be this way, as the moment Glenn Beck starts offering genuinely rightist views is the moment he gets shut out of the airwaves.

Consider Derb’s list of “uncomfortable truths” that will need to be addressed to see real arrest of the nation’s deterioration.

* the impossibility of continuing federal entitlements at anything like their present levels;
* the radical reduction in public services and public employment that would follow if tax rates were lowered to the degree Beck and his supporters claim to wish
* the mad folly of giving settlement visas to a million foreigners a year when unemployment stands at ten percent;
* the doubleplus-mad folly of permitting illegal settlement of millions of Mexican and Central American peasants to form a permanent new underclass making huge new demands on government services;
* the gross and pointless squandering of public monies on crackpot schemes of education reform;
* the certainly and inevitably nation-destroying effect of permitting public employees to unionize;
* the impossibility of effective law enforcement without racial profiling
* the absurdity of waging war not to crush and demoralize the enemy, but to transform his nation into 1955 Oklahoma.
* the infantile narcissism of believing that all life’s ills have a remedy in law;
* the contradiction inherent in wishing for a health-care system that (a) has no socialist component, or only a modest one, while (b) providing every known treatment or level of care to every condition for everyone;
* the doubleplus contradiction inherent in the previous bullet point when the genome can be cheaply and rapidly sequenced.

Lets′ add a few more.

* that affirmative action has accomplished anything good whatsoever;
* the ongoing recruitment of whites via their money and manpower and fertility to remedy the “racial gap″ in education, i.e. helping the permanently disadvantaged;
* the media’s anti-white, hopelessly leftist agenda;
* the sure-thing race replacement of whites into the nation′s minority, with all that entails
* anchor babies;
* rule by lawyers and judges.

Beck, so far as I know, mentions none of these things; Palin either. That this big rally in Washington was led by an ex-alcoholic and drug addicted Mormon gives one pause, even more so considering the number of people this charlatan managed to attract, all eager to absolve themselves of racism, all eagerly playing to the current anti-white zeitgeist. He’s a William Jennings Bryan for the support-our-troops crowd.

The best we can hope for out of all this is, I think, that a real leader will come along and co-opt (to use a word of the 60s radicals, who can teach us a few things) Beck and Palin.

Maybe Thilo Sarrazin is available.

bookmark:

Businessweek – now owned by Bloomberg, a good reason not to read it – discusses Shrinking Societies: The Other Population Crisis. Nothing written there will be unfamiliar to anyone here, but along with the story is a slideshow listing the top 25 fastest shrinking countries. Japan, of course, tops the list.

Japan
Ukraine
Georgia
Bulgaria
Bosnia-Herzegovina
Latvia
Serbia
Lithuania
Poland
Moldova
Romania
Cuba
South Korea
Croatia
Belarus
Germany
Albania
Russia
Slovakia
Hungary
Macedonia
Slovenia
Estonia
Taiwan
Puerto Rico

Of these, 20 are white countries, and three are non-white but widely regarded as admirable by whites. Of the white countries, all but two – Germany and Georgia – are in Eastern Europe. I would imagine that countries like Italy, Spain, and France are not on the list only because they are on the receiving end of lots of mostly non-white immigration; the news that France may have finally managed to beat the population race with Germany becomes distinctly clouded when those who help make up the French nation are Moroccans and Senegalese.

As for Eastern Europe, it would appear that Communism has been a demographic disaster. I′m not sure what else could explain it other than a transition away from a total welfare state that sapped the initiative of all. Whatever the causes, it’s pretty clear that as things now stand, those who look toward the East as the Great White Hope need to think elsewhere.

bookmark:

I received the following email from a German friend of mine, whom I met and hung around with in Salamanca, Spain, in the summer of 2000, when we were both studying there. He’s now in his late 20s and studying for a Ph.D. in a social science field in Britain. Although the email isn’t as radical as many of the things I’ve written here, I think it noteworthy because until fairly recently, my friend seemed fairly middle-of-the-road politically. He now shows that he’s become deeply worried about Germany’s future.

I read your blog post on Sarrazin and the replies by readers as well.

I don’t want to go into this subject because the whole affair makes me very angry (what about freedom of speech for someone like Sarrazin who doesn’t share the opinion of all these tree huggers and who finally speaks out publicly about issues that threaten the very survival of our society and welfare state, for instance?). His party, the German Social Democrats, have already started a legal procedure trying to kick him out of the party. So a party that has the term democratic in its name, tries to rid itself of someone who speaks his mind. Very weird indeed.

On your blog you raised the issue of Sarrazin’s ancestry. [In the older post, here.] Please see page five of the pdf attached. In his reply starting with “Grober Unfug. Unter den Nazis…”, Sarrazin states that his father’s side of the family is Huguenot from Lyon, he also has an English grandmother, Italian great-grandmother and his mother is from West Prussia, hence his Slavic cheekbone (the cheekbone bit is somewhat entertaining). Sarrazin further states that the name Sarrazin is fairly common in Southern France and that its origin lies with the Arabic pirates of the Mediterranean.

Trying not to think about the future of my fatherland (as if Britain was in any better shape!) and focus on this PhD of mine instead.

Maybe if people like my friend are starting to question the zeitgeist, things are looking up.

Update: My friend writes:

The Bundesbank just asked the German president to sack Sarrazin it’s a fairly complicated process involving a number of institutions, but basically the message is that Sarrazin’s colleague’s in the Bundesbank kicked him out and now need the president and whoever else to make this dismissal official. An interesting twist is that the whole Sarrazin book launch and what the mainstream media and the German political class have made out of this by blowing the case out of proportion and by denouncing Sarrazin, has cast a negative light on the Bundesbank’s head, Axel Weber. It so happens that Mr Weber is very eager to become head of the ECB succeeding Mr Trichet.

One can hope that the powers that be in Germany have shot themselves in the foot. In any case, has anyone opposed to Sarrazin made any sort of case as to what he said wrong? Not as far as I can tell. The entire response has been nothing but point and sputter.

bookmark:

James Edwards nails the Glenn Beck rally. A sample:

It was about “restoring honor” or something, whatever that’s supposed to mean.
Or it was a way of supporting the troops, depending on which day you listened to Beck.
Then it turned into a rally to reclaim the Civil Rights movement, and give it back to the people who Beck swears pioneered the Civil Rights movement, right wing conservatives. Yes, that’s what Beck actually claims to believe. Leave it to Glenn Beck to make white-hating black columnist Leonard Pitts look sane and reasonable. [...]

 As it turned out, the rally was actually a huge revival meeting, in which Beck implored America to turn back to the god(s) of our Jewish-Christian-Muslim-Hindu-Mormon-Voodoo-Sikh-Zoroastrian heritage that made America great. He had over 200 members of the clergy on the podium, and he stressed that they were from “all faiths” and it didn’t matter which god we pray to, as long as we pray to something or someone, singular or plural. Just pick a higher power and go with it. In other words, it was the largest Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in history. Listen as Beck tells the crowd to “go back to your church, your synagogue, your mosque” and get to work on “refounding America.”

All that implicit whiteness, wasted. Beck and Palin are trying to take back the real America, and for them the real America is the one that leftists have spent the decades since 1965 turning into the one we know today, the one with white race replacement built into its very foundations. Beck and Palin are proud of their people, proud that they have voluntarily – or involuntarily, depending on your point of view – relinquished the nation controlled by their ethnic group for the great universal nation, where all are welcome – except the natives – where MLK is the only Ph.D. (other than Kissinger, perhaps) routinely styled “doctor″ and who has become America’s patron saint.

An anecdote: the other day when I was out shopping, I became more than usually cognizant of the large number of illegal aliens around, many of the women toting their anchor babies. The sentiment that hit me was that I lost all respect for white people for allowing this to happen. The sentiment is not entirely fair, I realize, yet the mass of apolitical whites who spend their time watching televised sports or driving around in their SUVs have, partly through their own fault, been droned into a state of stupor in which their nation is rapidly being stolen from them. Beck and Palin’s rally has done nothing to dissuade me from that feeling. They, like so many white Americans, are too stupid to see what is in front of their eyes.

bookmark:

Nature News reports on an easy way to boost a paper’s citations: include more references.

A long reference list at the end of a research paper may be the key to ensuring that it is well cited, according to an analysis of 100 years’ worth of papers published in the journal Science.

The research suggests that scientists who reference the work of their peers are more likely to find their own work referenced in turn, and the effect is on the rise, with a single extra reference in an article now producing, on average, a whole additional citation for the referencing paper.

“There is a ridiculously strong relationship between the number of citations a paper receives and its number of references,” Gregory Webster, the psychologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville who conducted the research, told Nature. “If you want to get more cited, the answer could be to cite more people.”

This is akin to blogrolling, the citing of others in the hope that one gets cited in return.

Although the results represent a correlation only, and thus don’t prove causation, the study calls into question whether judging a paper by the number of its citations really shows that the paper is important. Highly-cited papers may be that way only because they have included more references, not because of their intrinsic importance. Therefore, our view of what constitutes the most important science being done today, as well as who the important scientists are, could be highly skewed, giving a false depiction of scientific progress.

bookmark:

Robert Wenzel of Economic Policy Journal recommends Gonzalo Lira’s excellent piece on hyperinflation, which we discussed here. Wenzel points out a couple of things he believes could be different in a U.S. hyperinflation as compared to that which Chile suffered.

The one note of caution I must add is that Lira looks beyond a coming crisis for America and expects things to return to a new better normal, as it did in Chile. This may or may not occur in the United States and may take years or decades if it does return to a new normal. The real point to keep in mind is that things could be very different for the economy, very soon. Learn as much you can about volatile economies, especially those that suffered under hyper inflation, so that you have some kind of edge if such a period hits the U.S.

One other point, during hyperinflations asset prices including stocks tend to go up. The drop in the stocks in Chile during the hyperinflation is likely the result of a great fear the companies were going to be nationalized.

Lira ultimately feels optimistic that hyperinflations don’t last long and that things soon return to normal, but we really don’t know whether that would be the case here, nor do we know the particular factors that lead to a new normal. Presumably, conditions in a hyperinflation force the economy into new solutions. Chile had the “advantage” of a right-wing coup, which I rather doubt would happen here.

bookmark: