Stanley Kurtz links to an article on chain migration;

Pablo Baltazar was the first in his family to cross the Rio Grande, seeking a place where his children would never have to fight over morsels of meat in a watery stew, as he and his siblings had done on hungry nights.
In the three decades since his crossing, all nine of his siblings followed, bringing spouses and children. The Baltazar clan, now too numerous to count, stretches from Eastern North Carolina, where its members started out working the fields, to Florida, Texas and Colorado.
Their family ties to Pablo, who was granted legal residency in a 1986 amnesty, have helped nearly all of them become legal residents.’

Kurtz writes;

[I]n a clear echoing of the European pattern–the article notes, “Chain migration has cleared out entire village in Mexico. And it has turned areas of rural North Carolina into places where Spanish is the dominant language.”
That is the heart of the problem. Not only does chain migration make nonsense of numerical limits, it transfers entire extended clans–even whole villages–from one country to another. By setting up a little world that’s culturally and linguistically just like the originating country, chain migration effectively blocks assimilation.

Brett Lamb;

Anyhow, speaking of glass houses, some right-wing blog written by an artist who airbrushes cheeseball, kitsch paintings on motorcycle helmets, linked to the walk post and sent a couple of — expected — odd and offensive people to the comments (now deleted). Sociopaths and right wing blogs! They go together like … dragons and boobies!

Now, that was a really interesting comment – in effect, a smear directed not at me as much as it is those honest working guys (and girls) who come to me with their wish list and a bike helmet, goal mask, or racecar.
We call automotive airbrushing “candy art” for a reason. It reflects the customer’s whims, not the artist’s. It’s supposed to be fun and decorative, but rendered with the seriousness reserved for the potentially temporary. That’s because this style of art is sometimes painted on objects known to hurtle down racetracks at speeds approaching 200 mph.

Indeed, these particular customers trust that your prep and paint technique won’t result in the failure of structural integrity when they crash. Because eventually, they all crash.
Brett Lamb knows all this. Or he should – he’s a graphic artist. And he’s probably worn a silk-screened t-shirt at some point in his life. He may have even seen “boobies” and “dragons” cover art on a ’70’s rock album. And I’ll bet he knows that when he screws up the cover of a program guide, the customer doesn’t die.
Which brings me to the real point.
As it turns out, when he’s not documenting the stalking of rich people by Toronto Star columnists, he’s art director for the “Hot Docs” film festival;

For me, work on this year’s Hot Docs festival began almost a year ago — the first ad for RealScreen announcing the 2006 festival was due the day after the staff wrap party. It’s a very satisfying project: it’s quiet for several months, then things build slowly in the fall with Doc Soup, then the pace picks up in the new year and for the final two months it’s madness as we juggle deadline after deadline …
Finally, it all comes together! Tonight is Opening Night and from here on it’s parties and screenings (and more work, but that’s the life, eh?).

I wonder – from where does “Hot Docs” get a portion of their funding?

“The Ontario government has announced it is spending around $600,000 this year on programs to help artists improve business skills, reported The Globe and Mail April 30. Among the programs: film-industry training labs at the Hot Docs festival…”

Isn’t that thoughtful. Channeliing tax dollars towards filmmakers who find themselves unhappily excluded from that merit-based community known as “people who create stuff people will pay for voluntarily”.
You see, for reasons that have never been clearly explained, select members of the “arts community” are actually sheltered from their own lack of market appeal through programs and funding provided by various arms of government!

Hot Docs is one of 34 film festivals across the country supported by the media arts program at the Council. Support for media arts festivals is aimed at raising the profile of Canadian independent film and video artists and their works, and helping them connect with distributors, exhibitors and broadcasters.

In other industries, these people are called “corporate welfare bums”.
It’s not new for elitists to direct ridicule towards the whims and tastes of working class Canadians. You’d just think that subsidized elitists would exercise a little self-restraint.
While Brett may offer precautionary advice that the road to artistic misery is to allow money to “dictate what you do” – that’s the path that I and the oilfield workers, electricians, lawyers, doctors, and engineers who ask for “kitsch” on their helmets, cars, shop vehicles walk every day. Beyond the shiny, huggy, distainful realm of the publicly funded arts, there exist people who do that miserable, cheesy, commercially viable work to earn the bucks to pay the taxes to prop up the budgets of films and festivals that keep the kind of creative genius required to generate posters and brochures from having to sully itself with a second job behind a Burger King counter.
You know, if someone actually scraped these artistic parasites off the public tit, it might inspire a few of them to create something worth paying for.
Or, increase the number of available workers for the food service industry.
Win, win.

That when Castro’s death is finally acknowledged, the Trudeau boys will have a new father figure superhero waiting to fill his shoes;

Meanwhile, multiple sources around Caracas report that at a recent cabinet meeting, Chávez excoriated his ministers for disobeying his “orders” to stop inflation. Inflation has been spiraling as a result of Chávez’s reckless economic “policies” (if that is not too charitable a term). As a result, Chávez was moved to impose price controls in many categories of basic foodstuffs, which has predictably led to food shortages (despite huge oil windfalls) which has led to decrees obligating farmers and supermarkets to keep producing and selling, even if they incur losses.

Do you smell diesel?

In a proposal with all the economic rationality of developed world agricultural subsidies that pay farmers not to farm, Ecuador has seriously proposed that it be paid $350 million per year not to develop one of its oil fields as a contribution to alleviate global warming. According to the article “countries like Italy and Norway, as well as international foundations, the Inter-American Development Bank, the United Nations and universities in the United States have voiced interest in the Ecuadorian proposal.”

Hola, bulldozers.