How Small Can Computers Get? Computing In A Molecule

ScienceDaily (Dec. 30, 2008) — Over the last 60 years, ever-smaller generations of transistors have driven exponential growth in computing power. Could molecules, each turned into miniscule computer components, trigger even greater growth in computing over the next 60?

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Atomic-scale computing, in which computer processes are carried out in a single molecule or using a surface atomic-scale circuit, holds vast promise for the microelectronics industry. It allows computers to continue to increase in processing power through the development of components in the nano- and pico scale. In theory, atomic-scale computing could put computers more powerful than today’s supercomputers in everyone’s pocket.

“Atomic-scale computing researchers today are in much the same position as transistor inventors were before 1947. No one knows where this will lead,” says Christian Joachim of the French National Scientific Research Centre’s (CNRS) Centre for Material Elaboration & Structural Studies (CEMES) in Toulouse, France.

Joachim, the head of the CEMES Nanoscience and Picotechnology Group (GNS), is currently coordinating a team of researchers from 15 academic and industrial research institutes in Europe whose groundbreaking work on developing a molecular replacement for transistors has brought the vision of atomic-scale computing a step closer to reality. Their efforts, a continuation of work that began in the 1990s, are today being funded by the European Union in the Pico-Inside project.

In a conventional microprocessor – the “motor” of a modern computer – transistors are the essential building blocks of digital circuits, creating logic gates that process true or false signals. A few transistors are needed to create a single logic gate and modern microprocessors contain billions of them, each measuring around 100 nanometres.

Transistors have continued to shrink in size since Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore famously predicted in 1965 that the number that can be placed on a processor would double roughly every two years. But there will inevitably come a time when the laws of quantum physics prevent any further shrinkage using conventional methods. That is where atomic-scale computing comes into play with a fundamentally different approach to the problem.

“Nanotechnology is about taking something and shrinking it to its smallest possible scale. It’s a top-down approach,” Joachim says. He and the Pico-Inside team are turning that upside down, starting from the atom, the molecule, and exploring if such a tiny bit of matter can be a logic gate, memory source, or more. “It is a bottom-up or, as we call it, ‘bottom-bottom’ approach because we do not want to reach the material scale,” he explains.

Joachim’s team has focused on taking one individual molecule and building up computer components, with the ultimate goal of hosting a logic gate in a single molecule.

How many atoms to build a computer?

“The question we have asked ourselves is how many atoms does it take to build a computer?” Joachim says. “That is something we cannot answer at present, but we are getting a better idea about it.”

The team has managed to design a simple logic gate with 30 atoms that perform the same task as 14 transistors, while also exploring the architecture, technology and chemistry needed to achieve computing inside a single molecule and to interconnect molecules.

They are focusing on two architectures: one that mimics the classical design of a logic gate but in atomic form, including nodes, loops, meshes etc., and another, more complex, process that relies on changes to the molecule’s conformation to carry out the logic gate inputs and quantum mechanics to perform the computation.

The logic gates are interconnected using scanning-tunnelling microscopes and atomic-force microscopes – devices that can measure and move individual atoms with resolutions down to 1/100 of a nanometre (that is one hundred millionth of a millimetre!). As a side project, partly for fun but partly to stimulate new lines of research, Joachim and his team have used the technique to build tiny nano-machines, such as wheels, gears, motors and nano-vehicles each consisting of a single molecule.

“Put logic gates on it and it could decide where to go,” Joachim notes, pointing to what would be one of the world’s first implementations of atomic-scale robotics.

The importance of the Pico-Inside team’s work has been widely recognised in the scientific community, though Joachim cautions that it is still very much fundamental research. It will be some time before commercial applications emerge from it. However, emerge they all but certainly will.

“Microelectronics needs us if logic gates – and as a consequence microprocessors – are to continue to get smaller,” Joachim says.

The Pico-Inside researchers, who received funding under the ICT strand of the EU’s Sixth Framework Programme, are currently drafting a roadmap to ensure computing power continues to increase in the future.

Early Americans Faced Rapid Late Pleistocene Climate Change and Man May Have Caused Pre-historic Extinctions

Early Americans Faced Rapid Late Pleistocene Climate Change And Chaotic Environments

ScienceDaily (Feb. 21, 2006) — The environment encountered when the first people emigrated into the New World was variable and ever-changing, according to a Penn State geologist.

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“The New World was not a nice quiet place when humans came,” says Dr. Russell Graham, associate professor of geology and director of the Earth & Mineral Sciences Museum.

Archaeologists agree that by 11,000 years ago, people were spread across North and South America, but evidence is building for an earlier entry into the New World, a date that would put human population of North and South America firmly in the Pleistocene.

“We want to know what it was like back then,” says Graham. “What did they have to deal with?”

The Pleistocene Holocene transition took place about 11,000 years ago and caused the extinction of a large number of animal species including mammoths, mastodons and ground sloths. The Holocene looked very different from the Pleistocene.

“We now realize that climate changes extremely rapidly,” Graham told attendees at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science today (Feb.19) in St. Louis, Mo. “The Pleistocene to Holocene transition occurred in about 40 years.”

As a result, animals and plants shifted around and the people living in the New World had to adapt so that they could find the necessary resources to survive. Graham likened the change to the difference between shopping at a WalMart where there is great abundance and large variety — the Pleistocene — to suddenly having to shop at a corner convenience store — the Holocene. In human terms this means that what grandparents knew to be true about finding resources, could be untrue and not helpful to grandchildren.

During the Pleistocene large eastern coastal resources existed, including walruses, south, as far as Virginia, seals and a variety of fish. Mammoth, caribou and mastodons were plentiful across the continent as well as smaller animals. The situation was not identical in all places across North America because, during segments of the Pleistocene, large portions of the Eastern North American continent were covered in ice, while western locations were ice free much further north.

“The Holocene climate is much more stable than the Pleistocene — warmer but more stable,” says Graham. “The environment, however, became more homogeneous, there was less variety.”

Graham argues that the Pleistocene experienced a series of rapid climate changes that created patchiness in the environment, but that once the climate change that signaled the beginning of the Holocene occurred, the climate settled down. Humans coming into the New World during the late Pleistocene would have encountered an environment shaped by rapid changes creating variety in available food sources both animal and vegetable. The groups of people would have to adapt continually and find new resources, but the variety of resources was out there. After the Holocene took hold, there was less need to adapt constantly, but also fewer options in resources.

Archaeologists and geologists debate whether the climate change at the Pleistocene Holocene transition caused the extinction of the mega fauna or if the influx of humans did in the large animals. Graham believes that it was the unstable changing rapidly changing climate, not human predation that killed the large Pleistocene animals.

Man May Have Caused Pre-historic Extinctions

ScienceDaily (May 5, 2006) — New research shows that pre-historic horses in Alaska may have been hunted into extinction by man, rather than by climate change as previously thought.

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The discovery by Andrew Solow of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, US, David Roberts of the Royal Botanic Garden, Kew and Karen Robbirt of the University of East Anglia (UEA) is published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The accepted view had previously been that the wild horses became extinct long before the extinction of mammoths and the arrival of humans from Asia – ruling out the possibility that they were over-hunted by man. One theory had been that a period of climate cooling wiped them out.

However, the researchers have discovered that uncertainties in dating fossil remains and the incompleteness of fossil records mean that the survival of the horse beyond the arrival of humans cannot be ruled out.

The PNAS paper develops a new statistical method to help resolve the inherent problems associated with dating fossils from the Pleistocene period. The aim is to provide a far more accurate timetable for the extinction of caballoid horses and mammoths and, ultimately, the cause.

“This research is exciting because it throws open the debate as to whether climate change or over-hunting may have led to the extinction of pre-historic horses in North America,” said UEA’s Karen Robbirt.

The Pleistocene period refers to the first epoch of the Quarternary period between 1.64 million and 10,000 years ago. It was characterised by extensive glaciation of the northern hemisphere and the evolution of modern man around 100,000 years ago.

It is known that the end of the Pleistocene period was a time of large-scale extinctions of animals and plants in North America and elsewhere but the factors responsible have remained open to question, with climate change and over-hunting by humans the prime suspects.

Competition, Not Climate Change, Led To Neanderthal Extinction, Study Shows

ScienceDaily (Dec. 30, 2008) — In a recently conducted study, a multidisciplinary French-American research team with expertise in archaeology, past climates, and ecology reported that Neanderthal extinction was principally a result of competition with Cro-Magnon populations, rather than the consequences of climate change.

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The study, reported in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE on December 24, figures in the ongoing debate on the reasons behind the eventual disappearance of Neanderthal populations, which occupied Europe prior to the arrival of human populations like us around 40,000 years ago. Led by Dr William E. Banks, the authors, who belong to the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, l’Ecole Pratique d’Hautes Etudes, and the University of Kansas, reached their conclusion by reconstructing climatic conditions during this period and analyzing the distribution of archaeological sites associated with the last Neanderthals and the first modern human populations with an approach typically used to study the impact of climate change on biodiversity.

This method uses geographic locations of archaeological sites dated by radiocarbon, in conjunction with high-resolution simulations of past climates for specific periods, and employs an algorithm to analyze relationships between the two datasets to reconstruct potential areas occupied by each human population and to determine if and how climatic conditions played a role in shaping these areas. In other words, by integrating archaeological and paleoenvironmental datasets, this predictive method can reconstruct the regions that a past population could potentially have occupied. By repeating the modeling process hundreds of times and evaluating where the errors occur, this machine-learning algorithm is able to provide robust predictions of regions that could have been occupied by specific human cultures.

This modeling approach also allows the projection of the ecological footprint of one culture onto the environmental conditions of a later climatic phase―by comparing this projected prediction to the known archaeological sites dated to this later period, it is possible to determine if the ecological niche exploited by this human population remained the same, or if it contracted or expanded during that period of time.

Comparing these reconstructed areas for Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans during each of the climatic phases concerned, and by projecting each niche onto the subsequent climatic phases, Banks and colleagues determined that Neanderthals had the possibility to maintain their range across Europe during a period of less severe climatic conditions called Greenland Interstadial 8 (GI8).

However, the archaeological record shows that this did not occur, and Neanderthal disappearance occurs at a point when we see the geographic expansion of the ecological niche occupied by modern humans during GI8. The researchers’ models predict the southern limit of the modern human territory to be near the Ebro River Valley in northern Spain during the preceding cold period called Heinrich Event 4 (H4), and that this southern boundary moved to the south during the more temperate phase GI8.

The researchers conclude that the Neanderthal populations that occupied what is now southern Spain were the last to survive because they were able to avoid direct competition with modern humans since the two populations exploited distinct territories during the cold climatic conditions of H4. They also point out that during this population event contact between Neanderthals and modern humans may have permitted cultural and genetic exchanges.

Samuel Huntington’s Warning He predicted a ‘clash of civilizations,’ not the illusion of Davos Man.

Samuel Huntington’s Warning

He predicted a ‘clash of civilizations,’ not the illusion of Davos Man.

By FOUAD AJAMI

The last of Samuel Huntington’s books — “Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity,” published four years ago — may have been his most passionate work. It was like that with the celebrated Harvard political scientist, who died last week at 81. He was a man of diffidence and reserve, yet he was always caught up in the political storms of recent decades.

Zina Saunders

“This book is shaped by my own identities as a patriot and a scholar,” he wrote. “As a patriot I am deeply concerned about the unity and strength of my country as a society based on liberty, equality, law and individual rights.” Huntington lived the life of his choice, neither seeking controversies, nor ducking them. “Who Are We?” had the signature of this great scholar — the bold, sweeping assertions sustained by exacting details, and the engagement with the issues of the time.

He wrote in that book of the “American Creed,” and of its erosion among the elites. Its key elements — the English language, Christianity, religious commitment, English concepts of the rule of law, the responsibility of rulers, and the rights of individuals — he said are derived from the “distinct Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers of America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”

Critics who branded the book as a work of undisguised nativism missed an essential point. Huntington observed that his was an “argument for the importance of Anglo-Protestant culture, not for the importance of Anglo-Protestant people.” The success of this great republic, he said, had hitherto depended on the willingness of generations of Americans to honor the creed of the founding settlers and to shed their old affinities. But that willingness was being battered by globalization and multiculturalism, and by new waves of immigrants with no deep attachments to America’s national identity. “The Stars and Stripes were at half-mast,” he wrote in “Who Are We?”, “and other flags flew higher on the flagpole of American identities.”

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Three possible American futures beckoned, Huntington said: cosmopolitan, imperial and national. In the first, the world remakes America, and globalization and multiculturalism trump national identity. In the second, America remakes the world: Unchallenged by a rival superpower, America would attempt to reshape the world according to its values, taking to other shores its democratic norms and aspirations. In the third, America remains America: It resists the blandishments — and falseness — of cosmopolitanism, and reins in the imperial impulse.

Huntington made no secret of his own preference: an American nationalism “devoted to the preservation and enhancement of those qualities that have defined America since its founding.” His stark sense of realism had no patience for the globalism of the Clinton era. The culture of “Davos Man” — named for the watering hole of the global elite — was disconnected from the call of home and hearth and national soil.

But he looked with a skeptical eye on the American expedition to Iraq, uneasy with those American conservatives who had come to believe in an “imperial” American mission. He foresaw frustration for this drive to democratize other lands. The American people would not sustain this project, he observed, and there was the “paradox of democracy”: Democratic experiments often bring in their wake nationalistic populist movements (Latin America) or fundamentalist movements (Muslim countries). The world tempts power, and denies it. It is the Huntingtonian world; no false hopes and no redemption.

In the 1990s, when the Davos crowd and other believers in a borderless world reigned supreme, Huntington crossed over from the academy into global renown, with his “clash of civilizations” thesis. In an article first published in Foreign Affairs in 1993 (then expanded into a book), Huntington foresaw the shape of the post-Cold War world. The war of ideologies would yield to a civilizational struggle of soil and blood. It would be the West versus the eight civilizations dividing the rest — Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist and Japanese.

In this civilizational struggle, Islam would emerge as the principal challenge to the West. “The relations between Islam and Christianity, both orthodox and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the other’s Other. The 20th-century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity.”

He had assaulted the zeitgeist of the era. The world took notice, and his book was translated into 39 languages. Critics insisted that men want Sony, not soil. But on 9/11, young Arabs — 19 of them — would weigh in. They punctured the illusions of an era, and gave evidence of the truth of Huntington’s vision. With his typical precision, he had written of a “youth bulge” unsettling Muslim societies, and young, radicalized Arabs, unhinged by modernity and unable to master it, emerging as the children of this radical age.

If I may be permitted a personal narrative: In 1993, I had written the lead critique in Foreign Affairs of his thesis. I admired his work but was unconvinced. My faith was invested in the order of states that the West itself built. The ways of the West had become the ways of the world, I argued, and the modernist consensus would hold in key Third-World countries like Egypt, India and Turkey. Fifteen years later, I was given a chance in the pages of The New York Times Book Review to acknowledge that I had erred and that Huntington had been correct all along.

A gracious letter came to me from Nancy Arkelyan Huntington, his wife of 51 years (her Armenian descent an irony lost on those who dubbed him a defender of nativism). He was in ill-health, suffering the aftermath of a small stroke. They were spending the winter at their summer house on Martha’s Vineyard. She had read him my essay as he lay in bed. He was pleased with it: “He will be writing you himself shortly.” Of course, he did not write, and knowing of his frail state I did not expect him to do so. He had been a source of great wisdom, an exemplar, and it had been an honor to write of him, and to know him in the regrettably small way I did.

We don’t have his likes in the academy today. Political science, the field he devoted his working life to, has been in the main commandeered by a new generation. They are “rational choice” people who work with models and numbers and write arid, impenetrable jargon.

More importantly, nowadays in the academy and beyond, the patriotism that marked Samuel Huntington’s life and work is derided, and the American Creed he upheld is thought to be the ideology of rubes and simpletons, the affliction of people clinging to old ways. The Davos men have perhaps won. No wonder the sorrow and the concern that ran through the work of Huntington’s final years.

Mr. Ajami is professor of Middle East Studies at The Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies. He is also an adjunct research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

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MRC’s Graham Discusses Worst Bias of 2008 on ‘O’Reilly Factor’

By NB Staff (Bio | Archive)
December 29, 2008 – 16:30 ET

Praise the Lord and pass the video clips!

What do Bill Maher slamming Pope Benedict XVI as the criminal head of a pedophilia ring, Washington Post’s Sally Quinn defending anti-American Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and Ted Turner founder prophesying environmental apocalypse have in common?

They are just three of the most outrageous quotes from the mainstream media in 2008 and were featured on the December 23 “O’Reilly Factor” in a segment with MRC’s Director of Media Analysis Tim Graham.

You can view the segment by clicking the link below.

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/nb-staff/2008/12/29/mrcs-graham-discusses-worst-bias-2008-oreilly

Homicide Rates: Back toward Crack among Blacks

[Steve Sailer] @ 11:02 am [Email author] [Email this article] [Print this article]

After a huge dropoff with the ending of the crack wars around 1995, the black homicide perpetration rate has turned up again in this decade. For black male 14-17 year olds, according to tables prepared by James Alan Fox of Northeastern U., the number of homicide perpetrators in absolute terms is up 34% from 2000-2001 to 2006-2007, up 12% for black 18-24-year-0lds, and up 17% for blacks men 25+.

In contrast, for “whites” (which appear to include most Hispanics), the number of homicide perpetrators is up 3% for 14-17 year-olds, down -2% for 18-24 year-olds, and up 6% for 25+. The federal government carefully breaks out Hispanic data for almost everything except crime statistics, which makes non-black crime numbers hard to interpret. My guess would be that the homicide rate for whites/Hispanics is falling because the number of whites/Hispanics is growing rapidly due to Hispanic growth. Unfortunately, we can’t use federal figures to break down white versus Hispanic crime trends, but I would guess that crime rate trends are pretty quiet among both whites and Hispanics in this decade.

Here in LA, there was a spike in Hispanic gang murders after Villaraigosa was elected mayor in 2005, but the LAPD remains in the capable hands of William Bratton, and that has faded out.

My assumption is that technological trends, especially the spread of cellphones and cellphone cameras, has made crime a riskier business, so crime rates should be dropping all else being equal.

When I debated economist Steven Levitt over crime in Slate in 1999, he asked me what my prediction for future crime trends was: I replied that I figured that black teens are currently benefiting from the example of their many older brothers and cousins whom the crack wars left in jail, wheelchairs, or cemeteries, but that eventually a new cohort of black teens would come along without direct experience of the horrors of crack wars of 1988-1994, and the homicide rate would go back up again.

Chicago, America’s most segregated big city

Racial lines were drawn over the city’s history and remain entrenched by people’s choice, economics

By Azam Ahmed and Darnell Little

Tribune reporters

December 26, 2008

The paths taken by Colin Lampark and Rosalyn Bates help illustrate why Chicago is the most racially segregated big city in America.

Both are young professionals with handsome earning potential. Both moved to the city a few years ago—Lampark, 28, to Lincoln Park; Bates, 31, to Bronzeville. And both chose neighborhoods reflecting their race, a practice common in Chicago.

Their personal stories, and many others, explain why blacks in Chicago are the most isolated racial group in the nation’s 20 largest cities, according to a Tribune analysis of 2008 population estimates. To truly integrate Chicago, 84 percent of the black or white population would need to change neighborhoods, the data show.

The calculations paint a starkly different picture from the ones broadcast across the nation during Barack Obama‘s Election Night rally last month, when his hometown looked like one unified, harmonious city.

The fact is, racial patterns that took root in the 1800s are not easy to reverse. Racial steering, discriminatory business practices and prejudice spawned segregation in Chicago, and now personal preferences and economics fuel it.

“Once institutions exist, they tend to persist, and it requires some act of force to get them to change,” said Douglas Massey of Princeton University, an expert on segregation.

For Lampark, who is white, the move last year to Lincoln Park from Minneapolis came because he had friends there. It wasn’t a racially motivated decision, he said. Lampark, an engineer, just doesn’t know anyone on the South Side.

Bates, who is black, settled in Bronzeville for similar reasons.

“It put us closer to friends,” she said.

She, however, may pay more dearly for her decision. Segregated African-American neighborhoods have less access to health care, quality education and employment opportunities than white areas, the research shows. Black homeowners can expect to receive 18 percent less value for their homes, according to one study—a tax the researcher attributed primarily to segregation.

James Hamilton, 50, a deckhand from Woodlawn, can live with that. In his experience, which includes 30 years on the South Side, he doesn’t think that whites would welcome him to their neighborhood.

“It ain’t never been us,” he said. “It’s always been [whites]—just don’t want to be around us.”

The research shows he may not be entirely wrong. While whites are willing to vote for Obama, they aren’t nearly as interested in living in neighborhoods rich in color.

Blacks make up about 35 percent of Chicago’s population of nearly 3 million and are largely concentrated on the South and West Sides. Whites make up nearly 28 percent, largely located to the north and in slivers of the South Side, while Hispanics, about 30 percent of the population, are scattered to the Northwest and Southwest Sides of the city center.

Dating back to the late 19th Century, blacks were confined to certain neighborhoods in Chicago by pen and sword, with legal restrictions and real estate practices ensuring whatever bombs and batons did not.

During the Great Migration in the early 20th Century, hundreds of thousands of blacks followed those patterns of settlement, creating densely populated communities on the South Side that hardened racial fault lines.

Real estate agents showing people homes only in certain neighborhoods and restrictive covenants guaranteed that blacks did not spread across the city or into the suburbs. Redlining ensured that black areas received less financing and investment.

Slum clearance and urban renewal in the 1940s and ’50s displaced more blacks. Most found housing in the deeper South Side, in areas rapidly turning over with the onset of white flight. The poorest moved into public housing, which transformed into housing largely for blacks.

The city decided to build high-rises for public-housing residents, a move that would prove fatal to hopes for integration. White aldermen refused to place the high-rises in their wards, so nearly all were placed in black areas.

“By the time civil rights comes along, the die has already been cast,” said Arnold Hirsch, a historian at the University of New Orleans and author of “Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940-1960.”

“It’s no longer how you set up something, but how do you uproot something that’s already taken hold,” Hirsch said.

More recently, income differences between racial groups have helped further entrench separation, clustering lower-income minorities into urban ghettos that beget further isolation.

But perhaps the most controversial driver of segregation today in cities such as Chicago is personal taste: People tend to select areas where their own color has a large presence or they have some familiarity.

“It plays a huge role because the neighborhoods have been firmly established, and Chicago has had a greater history of racial segregation than other cities,” said William Julius Wilson, professor of sociology and public policy at Harvard University.

Chicago’s history meant that churches and family networks for whites and blacks developed in separate areas.

Those connections prompted Reginald Halbert’s move to Kenwood 10 years ago. Halbert, who had been living in the suburbs, considered the North Side but decided to build his gated home on the South Side, where he grew up.

“We wanted to be in close proximity to all the things that matter to us,” said Halbert, 44. “Our work, our family and our religious institutions.”

Some studies show that blacks tend to prefer a more diverse neighborhood, something closer to a 50-50 split of blacks and whites, but those tend not to exist in a city as old as Chicago.

Research indicates that whites tend to have a lower tolerance for blacks and other minorities. A 2000 study found that whites prefer neighborhoods where they are nearly 60 percent of the population and blacks represent about 17 percent.

One theory posits that whites associate black neighborhoods with high crime and poor-quality schools. A recent study conducted in the Chicago and Detroit areas by the University of Illinois at Chicago and University of Michigan found that whites consistently rate a neighborhood higher when its residents are white regardless of the physical quality of the neighborhood.

Not only do the studies show a white reluctance to move into black neighborhoods, research shows that the share of whites who say they would leave a neighborhood grows as the proportion of black residents increases. That has proved true in Chicago.

“Chicago is a very, very large city with a large population of Hispanics and blacks and a declining white population,” said Harvard’s Wilson. “But it’s still a city in which people can find housing in other areas, and as long as there are areas to which whites can retreat, it will be difficult to reduce the overall segregation.”

Cities with smaller black populations, such as Tucson, Ariz., or Seattle, show greater integration. Chicago’s large black population would exceed most white thresholds, experts say.

Another factor that separates Chicago from other places is its age. Older cities in the Midwest and Northeast were established before restrictive housing policies were outlawed. Experts say more newly developed cities—such as Austin, Texas; San Jose, Calif.; and Charlotte, N.C.—are likely to see higher levels of integration.

Said Jacob Vigdor, an economist at Duke University: “What integration requires is the presence of blank slates.”

Even then, federal studies of equally matched black and white couples show that unequal racial treatment for both renters and buyers still exists.

“We live in a country where we think people should be able to move freely, so we don’t have a lot of policies or laws that either encourage or constrain people’s residential choices,” said Mary Pattillo, a professor at Northwestern University. “Our laws that are supposed to defend against discrimination put the burden on the individual.”

A final factor often cited as a reason that segregation persists is economics. Poor end up living with poor, and because blacks maintain the lowest place on the socioeconomic food chain, they are often lumped together.

But research shows that blacks largely remain segregated from whites across income levels, though to a lesser extent than 30 years ago.

Many higher-income African-Americans who could afford to live anywhere in the city choose to live among blacks, even at the expense of wealth accumulation in their homes.

“It provides a certain comfort for middle-class African-Americans who may work in a corporate environment where they are minorities to live in a neighborhood where they aren’t a minority,” said Richard Pierce, chairman of the Africana studies department at the University of Notre Dame.

Bates, of Bronzeville, might fit into that category. A clinical therapist, she and her attorney sister canvassed much of the city before selecting a neighborhood.

“There is a comfort level being among people of your own race,” she said. “I don’t think that there was any intention of segregation behind that.”

letter to another reader from Black locust

I have had many many things taken from me, property stolen, respect taken, loved ones murdered, you must understand the nature of the beast, You know what I’m talking about, all of you do.  Mankind, the human animal, the needs and wants of each individual out weigh the needs of the society, our nation is sick, the western world is dying.  What occurred to you is only a symptom of the underlying disease that is eating away at the soul of our nation.  It does not matter what they criminal took, but that they were walking down the street looking in peoples cars, looking for things they could take, maybe even looking in peoples homes, they saw something that did not belong to them, they thought nothing of how it would effect you or your family, they did not care about the memories on the tape, or how it would make you feel, the violation, the loss of trust in the community, only that they wanted what you have, and were willing to break you car window and take it by force.  You probably have an idea of what this person looked like, the nature of the beast, they weren’t some White or Asian kid walking down the street, don’t lie to yourself.  We all see what is happening to our communities, the raping of our states, and the death of our nation.  I ask one question, where will this nation be in 20 years, will California be just another Mexican state of Mexico, along with all of the wonderful events and culture that being a state of Mexico brings?  Will we still of a set of laws that everyone lives by, will we understand what our politicians are saying, will we want our children to grow up in a state that is going down the path we are currently on?  Is there a history of any nation in human history that has survived the path we are now on?  Will the democraps or republiclans do anything about anything?  Answer these questions, Obama will fail, he cannot save our economy with socialism, let alone the nation, only the patriots can save America, and save our lives along with it.  Do not feel sorry for the animal that stole your precious moments, don’t feel any pity, don’t allow them to win, and claim another victim in their war to exterminate us.

WHY THEY HATE THE ’50S

WHY THEY HATE THE ’50S

By KYLE SMITH

December 28, 2008 –Oh, no. Really? Again? Ten minutes into “Revolutionary Road,” director Sam Mendes delivers his nightmare vision of starched gray men suited up for corporate life sentences as they parade in suffering slo-mo through a sepulchral Grand Central Terminal. Repression. Conformity. Let’s drink a glass of lunch and toast our Formica souls. It’s the ’50s.

Can they really have been that miserable? Frank and April Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet) are a 1955 Connecticut couple (he commutes to a white-collar job in the city, she’s a mom) who, deciding they need “something different,” hatch a plan to move to Paris with no particular prospects. “I tell you – people are alive there,” says Frank, who visited France as a serviceman. “Not like here. I want to feel things. Really feel them. How’s that for an ambition?”

Frank plans to take time off to find himself (the actor playing him is 34, which seems a bit late to have no clue what might interest you) while April supports both of them with secretarial work. As they chatter about their plans, though, a grim sense starts to seep through the film that they”ll never have Paris, and that this is their tragedy.

Though self-location is an admirable goal, especially in Paris, how closed-minded are we to think of the 1950s as the acme of unhappiness? The fifties were insufferable, stultifying, unbearable – compared to what?

A man Frank’s age would have spent his entire adolescence in the Great Depression, and watched his maturity coincide with WWII. He might have served in that war himself, or Korea, or both. He would have friends who returned home from war with serious injuries. He would know men who had been violently killed before their 25th birthdays. A glance at any daily newspaper would remind him that the Soviets had the power to destroy everything he knows at the touch of a button. He might be the first man in his family to hold a job outside of a factory or a farm.

Wearing a corporate uniform (though those ’50s suits look pretty sharp now) to an office job that paid well must have seemed like a vast improvement from wearing a military uniform and having a job that paid badly in which you might get shot. And living in a bedroom community where everyone held approximately the same views (so unlike, say, Larchmont or Bethesda today) would have topped living in a barracks.

The Wheelers have a nice house, a nice family, friends and access to New York City. They don’t have artistic fulfillment (April failed at acting and Frank, though he has an artist’s yearnings, hasn’t even picked a medium), but if they aren’t geniuses in New York they’re not going to suddenly become talented in Paris. “It is possible that Parisians aren’t the only ones capable of leading interesting lives,” Frank says, a line that infuriates April. But how much of a dullard do you have to be to think otherwise?

This film’s contempt for the vast majority of American lives is nearly absolute. Just a couple of generations ago, the idea that we must all find our jobs delightful or spiritually engaging would have seemed laughable. Not everyone, our grandparents would have gently reminded us, can act on Broadway.

Besides, who says that even a job in sales can’t have its pleasures? It’s typical of the ’50s suburban tale, with its sneering at corporations, that it shows a complete lack of curiosity about what goes on in them. Even Frank doesn’t seem to know what his job is: “For God’s sake,” he says, “I don’t know what the Knox 500 does, do you?” Frank doesn’t think “it’s possible to discover anything on the 18th floor of the Knox Building.”

Maybe he’ll bump into Don Draper and learn how it’s done. In a scene in season one of “Mad Men,” which is set in early-’60s New York and has the same look as “Revolutionary Road,” ad creator Draper sells Kodak on his idea for naming a slide projector a “carousel” while flashing family snapshots creeping back in time through his own life. As Don revisits his various joys and losses and lies, the moment borders on the sublime.

The moral of “Revolutionary Road,” the stand-up-and-jeer part, is this line: “Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.” To assume people you don’t know and don’t try to understand are empty and hopeless, though, is a characteristic of a shallow, smug, incurious mind. It’s Sam Mendes who is punching a time card here.

Kyle.Smith@nypost.com

Spme Companies That Won’t Make It Through 2009

Companies That Won’t Make It Through 2009 (HMC)(SIRI)(AIG)(FRE)(FNM)(RAD)(NYT)(NT)(PIR)(CHTR)(HOV)

A lot of fairly well-known public companies either disappeared or went bankrupt this year. Circuit City is on the list. Based on the most recent news GM may get added soon.

24/7 Wall St. looked at some of the largest and most well-known companies, reviewed their SEC filings if they are public, analyst reports, and media observations about their businesses and picked ten that probably won’t be around at the end of next year. That does not mean that their brands will disappear, but these companies will have been dissolved as the world knows them now or working though the court system in the hopes of getting Chapter 11 protection and a chance at survival.

1) Chrysler already says it will be out of business by early next year. But, what does that mean. It is unlikely that its largest shareholder, hedge fund Cerberus, is going to throw good money after bad in an economy where US car sales are dropping 30% compared with 2007 figures. But, the Chrysler brand could be around. So could the brand of its Jeep division. Foreign car companies like VW and Honda (HMC) would love to get well-known operations without the baggage of debt, UAW contracts, and dealer networks. Chrysler still has some popular models including it 300 series cars and it created the minivan. Jeep is regarded as the grandfather of four-wheel drive. Watch Chrysler Motors LLC go away and some of its products move into other hands.

2) Sirius XM (SIRI) has traded under $.10 down from a 52-week high of $3.89. Reuters has reported that “Sirius XM faces some $1.1 billion in debt in 2009. Of that, about $300 million comes due in February.” In the current credit environment, that probably won’t happen. There is a theory that falling car sales will undermine the sale of Sirius subscriptions. The company says that it does no better than break-even in the first year it gets a new customer though GM. But, a shrinking subscriber based is not good news for the satellite radio company’s future. Sirius will be out of business, perhaps before mid-year. Who picks up the pieces? The logical choices are a healthy car company like Toyota or a satellite firm like DirecTV.

3) AIG (AIG) may be the biggest mess of all the financial firms that the federal government has bailed out. Uncle Sam has given AIG $153 billion in loans. The theory is that the money gets paid back by the huge insurance company selling assets. Investors don’t seem very sanguine about that. AIG shares trade at $1.60, down from a 52-week high of $60.04. Congress seems less and less enamored of having a lot of money sitting in troubled companies. Watch for the new administration to get frustrated quickly and appoint its own people to auction off AIG divisions. Better to get something back than keep writing AIG checks.

4) Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE) is two for one. They are both penny stocks, reflecting the fact that the Treasury has essentially taken them over, putting them into a conservatorship and pledging up to $200 billion to back their assets. With mortgage defaults rising, and home prices falling, that is not the end of the amount of money that the government will have to sink into the firms. Within a few months, the value of the common shares in the firms will be gone. The new administration may even decide that it does not need both companies. They can be replaced with some of their role going to the FDIC and the rest to one consolidated entity controlled by The Treasury Department which is already funding them.

5) Rite Aid (RAD) trades at $.35 down from at 52-week high of $4.16. The pharmacy company has over 5,000 stores and Wall St. does not expect it to be profitable in the foreseeable future. The chain is a roll-up of the original company and Brooks and Eckerd stores which it acquired. With a debt load of over $6 billion, the firm is likely to falter. Competitors CVS Caremark (CVS) and Walgreen (WAG) would be happy to pick up the pieces. Rite Aid recently announced poor quarterly numbers and cut forecasts.

6) The New York Times (NYT) has to repay $400 million in debt in the first half of 2009. It does not have the money. It plans to mortgage its headquarters, but it is uncertain what that will bring in an uncertain real estate market. The firm’s Boston Globe and regional newspaper operations lose money, so they will be hard to sell. NYT is controlled by the Sulzberger family which has super-majority voting shares. That won’t matter much when the company runs out of money. Another big media operation, perhaps News Corp (NWS) which owns The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, will come in and auction off what it can and keep the flagship New York Times newspaper and NYTimes.com website.

7) Nortel (NT), the huge telecom equipment company, has already been mentioned as a firm which could file for bankruptcy. That may be a game to get creditors to cut down their demands. It could be that  a huge contraction in the industry which is also undermining the fortunes of competitor Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) is pulling Nortel under. Nortel keeps losing money and has cut about as many people as it can and still stay in business. With the need for its products and services falling as the recession grows. Nortel has a pension obligation which may approach $3 billion. Selling divisions in a poor credit market will be hard. A bankruptcy filing would let a court run an auction.

8) Pier 1 (PIR) trades down at $.32 from a 52-week high of $8.25. This holiday season will determine its fate. UBS recently made the comment that “We are increasingly concerned that a weakening macro environment will continue to weigh significantly upon sales at Pier 1 Imports and further undermine turnaround efforts at the chain.”  The retailer recently said that its same-store sales could fall as much as 18% during the current quarter. Long-term debt is $184 million. More losses mean debt service becomes a huge issue. No other retailer is likely to want the stores, so this is probably liquidation. The retailer’s latest earnings showed a widening loss and the company said it could be delisted.

9) Charter Communications (CHTR) has over $20 billion in debt. The cable business usually drives reasonable cash flow, but Charter has to upgrade its system to better compete with telecom companies. It does not have that money. Debt service is overwhelming operating income. Billionaire Paul Allen controls that company. The stock is down to $.15. Eighteen month ago, it was close to $5. Allen will get out while he can and sell to one of the other large cable companies. Charter recently said it is “exploring financial alternatives.”

10) Hovnanian (HOV) shares are down by 70% over the last year. Recently, the shares have been as low as $1.70, putting the company’s market cap at $171 million. The housing downturn may actually get worse as unemployment and foreclosures rise. The costs of credit default swaps on the homebuilder are way. JMP Securities recently commented that HOV is a “bankruptcy risk” due to debt and exposure in the hardest hit real estate markets. A liquidation with Hovnanian would probably be an auction of land and unsold homes.

Hundreds of immigrants land on Italian island

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Italy’s reception centre on Lampedusa, between Malta and Tunisia, was built to house only 840 illegal migrants but now has twice that number

More than 900 immigrants have arrived on the southern Italian island of Lampedusa this weekend, bringing the numbers which have landed in Italy this year to more than 30,000 – more than double the number that arrived in 2007 and much the highest figure since the traffic started.

The conditions of the journey, which takes at least four or five days, are more hellish than ever. “They travel literally one on top of another,” said Francesco Galipo, at the Maritime Rescue Centre in Palermo. “We have intercepted boats 14 metres long with 324 people on board.”

After a lull during which rough seas prevented crossings, the latest landings brought the arrivals over the Christmas period to more than 1,700. Laura Boldrini, spokesperson for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, commented, “We can no longer consider summer the only season when people arrive. Now they are coming all the year round.”

Lampedusa’s reception centre was designed for 840 but now accommodates more than twice that number, and it is approaching breaking point.

The overwhelming number of migrants leave from Zuwahara, a seaside town west of Tripoli that is enjoying a boom time on the back of revenue from the people traffickers, said to be at least €2 million per month.

On Saturday, there were signs of internal squabbling within the government as Interior Minister Roberto Maroni of the right-wing rabble-rousing Northern League urged Foreign Minister Franco Frattini to persuade Muammar Gadaffi to live up to his promises and allow Italy to control the numbers leaving Libyan shores.

In August, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi signed a historic agreement with Colonel Gadaffi, intended to cement the reconciliation of Libya with its former colonial master. Italy would pay Libya 5 billion dollars in reparations over 25 years, and Libya would allow Italy to patrol the coast. Italy’s parliament has yet to ratify the reparations deal, however, and without that the Libyans won’t sign off on foreign patrols. And now the floodgates of Zuwahara are open again.

Many of the arrivals in Lampedusa in the past week come from Maghreb countries with which Italy has re-admission agreements, meaning that once their nationality has been confirmed they can be sent back, often within a week or two of arriving. But the UN’s Laura Boldrini stressed that many also come from the war zones of Eritrea and Somalia.

“The percentage of asylum-seekers among the new arrivals is getting higher and higher,” she said. “Italy received 25,000 new asylum-seekers in 2008, and many of those came from across the Mediterranean.” She said she did not know if the agreement between Gadaffi and Berlusconi contained special provisions for migrants escaping from war zones because the UNHCR has not been privy to the document. “Libya has no asylum system to guarantee the protection of people in need,” she pointed out, “and has not signed the Geneva accords on asylum.”

Corriere della Sera reported that the reception centre in Lampedusa was at bursting point even before the arrival of the latest boat-load. With all 840 beds occupied, mattresses cover the floors, the infirmary has been converted into a dormitory for 100 people while another 50 are crammed into the converted container intended for families. Tents put up in November remain in place, hosting another 120. “The centre has been swamped by migrants for months,” said Federico Miragliotta, the centre’s director. “But it’s not true that this is a hell, nor that sanitary conditions are a scandal.”

In August Berlusconi’s coalition allies, the xenophobic Northern League, hailed his agreement with Gadaffi as a triumph that would bring illegal immigration to an end. “This agreement sterilizes the situation with the country that sends us all the immigrants,” claimed the League’s leader, Umberto Bossi. Yet despite his large majority and his vow to solve Italy’s problems, Berlusconi has so far enjoyed no more success than his predecessor Romano Prodi in bending Gadaffi to his will.

Outrage at black French comedian comic’s award for Holocaust denier

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Outrage at Black French comic’s award for Holocaust denier

The black French comedian Dieudonné provoked outrage at the weekend by giving a “heroism” award to a veteran Holocaust denier.

Dieudonné, who is known for making anti-Semitic remarks in his shows, handed the spoof award for “social unacceptability and insolence” to Robert Faurisson, an academic with a string of convictions for denying the existence of Nazi death camps in the Second World War.

Among the audience of 5,000 at Le Zénith theatre in Paris were the far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, several figures of the far left and a popular television host, Julien Lepers.

A stagehand dressed as a Jewish deportee with a yellow star on his chest gave M. Faurisson the award.

Dieudonné – full name Dieudonné M’bala M’bala – was once a kind of French Lenny Henry. Born to Cameroonian and Breton parents, his stand-up comedy satirised racial prejudices, including those of whites and blacks.

However, in the past five years, his shows have come to symbolise – some say foment – a new strain of anti-Semitism in France among Arab and black youths and on the “white” far left.

Dieudonné said: “I don’t agree with all [M. Faurisson's] ideas. But for me, what counts most of all is freedom of expression.”

Age old Knowledge

So what have we learned in 2

millennia?

“The budget should be balanced, the Treasury

should be refilled, public debt should be

reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be

tempered and controlled, and the assistance to

foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome

become bankrupt. People must again learn to

work, instead of living on public assistance.”

Cicero – 55 B.C.

The Worst Predictions About 2008

This new version of the “ten worst predictions about 2008″ changes three of the ten based on feedback from online readers and BusinessWeek editors. CNBC’s Jim Cramer and President Bush are still on the list, but with different predictions. Author Shelby Steele is off the list, replaced by a pair of BusinessWeek writers.

Here are some of the worst predictions that were made about 2008. Savor them — a crop like this doesn’t come along every year.

1. “A very powerful and durable rally is in the works. But it may need another couple of days to lift off. Hold the fort and keep the faith!” — Richard Band, editor, Profitable Investing Letter, Mar. 27, 2008

At the time of the prediction, the Dow Jones industrial average was at 12,300. By late December it was at 8,500.

2. AIG (NYSE:AIG – News) “could have huge gains in the second quarter.” — Bijan Moazami, analyst, Friedman, Billings, Ramsey, May 9, 2008

AIG wound up losing $5 billion in that quarter and $25 billion in the next. It was taken over in September by the U.S. government, which will spend or lend $150 billion to keep it afloat.

3. “I think this is a case where Freddie Mac (NYSE:FRE – News) and Fannie Mae (NYSE:FNM – News) are fundamentally sound. They’re not in danger of going under I think they are in good shape going forward.” — Barney Frank (D-Mass.), House Financial Services Committee chairman, July 14, 2008

Two months later, the government forced the mortgage giants into conservatorships and pledged to invest up to $100 billion in each.

4. “I’m not an economist but I do believe that we’re growing.” —President George W. Bush, in a July 15, 2008 press conference

Nope. Gross domestic product shrank at a 0.5% annual rate in the July-September quarter. On Dec. 1, the National Bureau of Economic Research declared that a recession had begun in December 2007.

5. “I think Bob Steel’s the one guy I trust to turn this bank around, which is why I’ve told you on weakness to buy Wachovia.” —Jim Cramer, CNBC commentator, Mar. 11, 2008

Two weeks later, Wachovia came within hours of failure as depositors fled. Steel eventually agreed to a takeover by Wells Fargo. Wachovia shares lost half their value from Sept. 15 to Dec. 29.

6. “Existing-Home Sales to Trend Up in 2008″ — Headline of a National Association of Realtors press release, Dec. 9, 2007

On Dec. 23, 2008, the group said November sales were running at an annual rate of 4.5 million — down 11% from a year earlier — in the worst housing slump since the Depression.

7. “I think you’ll see (oil prices at) $150 a barrel by the end of the year” — T. Boone Pickens, June 20, 2008

Oil was then around $135 a barrel. By late December it was below $40.

8. “I expect there will be some failures. I don’t anticipate any serious problems of that sort among the large internationally active banks that make up a very substantial part of our banking system.” — Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve chairman, Feb. 28, 2008

In September, Washington Mutual became the largest financial institution in U.S. history to fail. Citigroup (NYSE:C – News) needed an even bigger rescue in November.

9. “In today’s regulatory environment, it’s virtually impossible to violate rules.” — Bernard Madoff, money manager, Oct. 20, 2007

About a year later, Madoff — who once headed the Nasdaq Stock Market — told investigators he had cost his investors $50 billion in an alleged Ponzi scheme.

10. “There’s growing evidence that parts of the debt markets…are coming back to life.” —Peter Coy and Mara Der Hovanesian, BusinessWeek, Oct. 1, 2007.

Oops.

From the left, a call to end the current Dutch notion of tolerance

By John Vinocur

Monday, December 29, 2008

AMSTERDAM: Two years ago, the Dutch could quietly congratulate themselves on having brought what seemed to be a fair measure of consensus and reason to the meanest intersection in their national political life: the one where integration of Muslim immigrants crossed Dutch identity.

In the run-up to choosing a new government in 2006, just 24 percent of the voters considered the issue important, and only 4 percent regarded it as the election’s central theme.

What a turnabout, it seemed – and whatever the reason (spent passions, optimism, resignation?), it was a soothing respite for a country whose history of tolerance was the first in 21st-century Europe to clash with the on-street realities of its growing Muslim population.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, the Netherlands had lived through something akin to a populist revolt against accommodating Islamic immigrants led by Pim Fortuyn, who was later murdered; the assassination of the filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, accused of blasphemy by a homegrown Muslim killer; and the bitter departure from the Netherlands of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali woman who became a member of Parliament before being marked for death for her criticism of radical Islam.

Now something fairly remarkable is happening again.

Two weeks ago, the country’s biggest left-wing political grouping, the Labor Party, which has responsibility for integration as a member of the coalition government led by the Christian Democrats, issued a position paper calling for the end of the failed model of Dutch “tolerance.”

It came at the same time Nicolas Sarkozy was making a case in France for greater opportunities for minorities that also contained an admission that the French notion of equality “doesn’t work anymore.”

But there was a difference. If judged on the standard scale of caution in dealing with cultural clashes and Muslims’ obligations to their new homes in Europe, the language of the Dutch position paper and Lilianne Ploumen, Labor’s chairperson, was exceptional.

The paper said: “The mistake we can never repeat is stifling criticism of cultures and religions for reasons of tolerance.”

Government and politicians had too long failed to acknowledge the feelings of “loss and estrangement” felt by Dutch society facing parallel communities that disregard its language, laws and customs.

Newcomers, according to Ploumen, must avoid “self-designated victimization.”

She asserted, “the grip of the homeland has to disappear” for these immigrants who, news reports indicate, also retain their original nationality at a rate of about 80 percent once becoming Dutch citizens.

Instead of reflexively offering tolerance with the expectation that things would work out in the long run, she said, the government strategy should be “bringing our values into confrontation with people who think otherwise.”

There was more: punishment for trouble-making young people has to become so effective such that when they emerge from jail they are not automatically big shots, Ploumen said.

For Ploumen, talking to the local media, “The street is mine, too. I don’t want to walk away if they’re standing in my path.

“Without a strategy to deal with these issues, all discussion about creating opportunities and acceptance of diversity will be blocked by suspicion and negative experience.”

And that comes from the heart of the traditional, democratic European left, where placing the onus of compatibility on immigrants never found such comfort before.

It’s a point of view that makes reference to work and education as essential, but without the emphasis that they are the single path to integration.

Rather, Labor’s line seems to stand on its head the old equation of jobs-plus-education equals integration. Conforming to Dutch society’s social standards now comes first. Strikingly, it turns its back on cultural relativism and uses the word emancipation in discussing the process of outsiders’ becoming Dutch.

For the Netherlands’ Arab and Turkish population (about 6 percent of a total of 16 million) it refers to jobs and educational opportunities as “machines of emancipation.” Yet it also suggests that employment and advancement will not come in full measure until there is a consciousness engagement in Dutch life by immigrants that goes far beyond the present level.

Indeed, Ploumen says, “Integration calls on the greatest effort from the new Dutch. Let go of where you come from; choose the Netherlands unconditionally.” Immigrants must “take responsibility for this country” and cherish and protect its Dutch essence.

Not clear enough? Ploumen insists, “The success of the integration process is hindered by the disproportionate number of non-natives involved in criminality and trouble-making, by men who refuse to shake hands with women, by burqas and separate courses for women on citizenship.

“We have to stop the existence of parallel societies within our society.”

And the obligations of the native Dutch? Ploumen’s answer is, “People who have their roots here have to offer space to traditions, religions and cultures which are new to Dutch society” – but without fear of expressing criticism. “Hurting feelings is allowed, and criticism of religion, too.”

The why of this happening now when a recession could accelerate new social tensions, particularly among nonskilled workers, has a couple of explanations.

A petty, political one: It involves a Labor Party on an uptick, with its the party chief, Wouter Bos, who serves as finance minister, showing optimism that the Dutch can avoid a deep recession. The cynical take has him casting the party’s new integration policy as a fresh bid to consolidate momentum ahead of elections for the European Parliament in June.

A kinder, gentler explanation (that comes, remarkably, from Frits Bolkestein, the former Liberal Party leader, European commissioner, and no friend of the socialists, who began writing in 1991 about the enormous challenge posed to Europe by Muslim immigration):

“The multi-cultis just aren’t making the running anymore. It’s a brave step towards a new normalcy in this country. “