Category: Uncategorized

MMR caused this case of autism

Ever notice that science fetishists love to point to the courts when it suits them, then quickly reverse course and point out that that the law isn’t science when it doesn’t?

At nine months old, Valentino Bocca was as bright as a button. In a favourite family photo, taken by his father, the baby boy wriggles in his mother’s arms and laughs for the camera. His parents look at the precious picture often these days. It is a reminder of their only son before they took him on a sunny morning to the local public health clinic for a routine childhood vaccination.

Valentino was never the same child after the jab in his arm. He developed autism and, in a landmark judgment, a judge has ruled that his devastating disability was provoked by the inoculation against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR).
The case of Valentino Bocca age nine from Rimini Italy has reignited the debate over a possible link between the MMR and autism after a judge ruled his disability was provoked by the jab.

The judgment in a provincial Italian court challenges the settled view of the majority of the medical profession — and could have profound implications in Britain and across the world. Valentino’s parents, Antonella, 44, and Maurizio, 43, have been awarded £140,000, to be paid by Italy’s Ministry of Health and they plan a civil action against the Italian government that may get them £800,000 more…. The judge’s view has since been endorsed by Italy’s High Court of Law (the equivalent of our Supreme Court) which ruled that the Italian government must pay compensation to children damaged by any jabs given under the Ministry of Health auspices — even if they are not compulsory ones.

The problem faced by the pro-vaccine camp is twofold. First, what passes for the science on this issue is dreadful and really should not be described as science. The same scientific community that didn’t hesitate to give syphilis to black men and performed experiments on Jewish concentration camp internees is suddenly claiming that it would be terribly unethical to allow children to remain unvaccinated or even push back the vaccine schedule a few months in order to gather meaningful scientific evidence on the safety of vaccines and the vaccine schedule. Statistical surveys of populations are not proper science, and furthermore, have absolutely nothing to do with whether one individual will be negatively affected by a vaccine or not.

The constant bleating that “no scientific evidence of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism” has been found is so irrelevant and misleading as to be dishonest. I doubt there is any scientific evidence between a punch in the nose and death either, but there is no question that people have been killed by a single punch before because people have seen it happen. For some reason, the process of simple observation that everyone believes is perfectly reliable when one person punches another in the face suddenly becomes not only unreliable, but downright anti-scientific when one person injects various foreign substances into a child. I have personally witnessed an infant scream and immediately collapse into unconsciousness when given a shot, and I absolutely defy any moronic scientist to claim it was not the result of the vaccine being administered. Fortunately, there were no ill effects apparent after the infant regained consciousness, but after witnessing that, I would no sooner permit any child of mine to be vaccinated at such a young age than I would permit someone to hit me in the head with a hammer… no matter how many statistical surveys are presented by scientists claiming that there is no scientific evidence showing any link between being hit in the head with a hammer and autism.

Second, the legal standard is “beyond a reasonable degree of doubt”. And it is well beyond a reasonable degree of doubt that certain vaccines have caused autism in some children. Very few vaccine skeptics are saying that no children can be vaccinated against anything or that all vaccines are intrinsically evil – although the whole fetal tissue thing on which some vaccines are based is, quite clearly, evil on its face – but most parents are not complete idiots incapable of recognizing when their normal child suddenly loses speech and motor abilities that it previously possessed, or linking it to probable causes. In fact, the awareness that vaccines are, beyond any reasonable degree of doubt, responsible for autism and other damage is precisely why Congress passed a law removing vaccine makers and administrators from legal liability.

It is far beyond the current state of biological science to claim one particular administration of a vaccine did not cause one specific case of autism and any honest scientist would admit it. Can you imagine if other culpable parties began to try defending themselves using the “no scientific link” defense? Science simply doesn’t work that way, especially “science” that is nothing more than statistical analysis, and those who attempt to appeal to science in such fashion are guilty of dishonesty, empty propaganda, and the abuse of science.

Anyhow, this is a welcome outcome and I hope that the threat of being financially ruined by their victims will force Big Pharma to spend more effort in improving the safety of their products than in lobbying the various governments to mandate more vaccines and providing them with additional protection from liability. Science is not the law, nor should it ever be confused for it. We don’t need scientists to determine if a specific vaccine has harmed a specific individual any more than we need them to determine if a specific individual has robbed a specific bank, in fact, scientists should not be involved in the legal discussion at all given their shoddy faux-science and oft-demonstrated biases on the matter.

Philosophy leads to the Cross

This erstwhile atheist’s intellectual path may explain why the leading atheists are, to a man, so philosophically incompetent:

I was ready to admit that there were parts of Christianity and Catholicism that seemed like a pretty good match for the bits of my moral system that I was most sure of, while meanwhile my own philosophy was pretty kludged together and not particularly satisfactory. But I couldn’t pick consistency over my construction project as long as I didn’t believe it was true.

While I kept working, I tried to keep my eyes open for ways I could test which world I was in, but a lot of the evidence for Christianity was only compelling to me if I at least presupposed Deism. Meanwhile, on the other side, I kept running into moral philosophers who seemed really helpful, until I discovered that their study of virtue ethics has led them to take a tumble into the Tiber. (I’m looking at you, MacIntyre!).

Then, the night before Palm Sunday (I have excellent liturgical timing), I was up at my alma mater for an alumni debate. I had another round of translating a lot of principles out of Catholic in order to use them in my speech, which prompted the now traditional heckling from my friends. After the debate, I buttonholed a Christian friend for another argument. During the discussion, he prodded me on where I thought moral law came from in my metaphysics. I talked about morality as though it were some kind of Platonic form, remote from the plane that humans existed on. He wanted to know where the connection was.

I could hypothesize how a Forms-material world link would work in the case of mathematics (a little long and off topic for this post, but pretty much the canonical idea of recognizing Two-ness as the quality that’s shared by two chairs and two houses, etc. Once you get the natural numbers, the rest of mathematics is in your grasp). But I didn’t have an analogue for how humans got bootstrap up to get even a partial understanding of objective moral law.

I’ve heard some explanations that try to bake morality into the natural world by reaching for evolutionary psychology. They argue that moral dispositions are evolutionarily triumphant over selfishness, or they talk about group selection, or something else. Usually, these proposed solutions radically misunderstand a) evolution b) moral philosophy or c) both. I didn’t think the answer was there. My friend pressed me to stop beating up on other people’s explanations and offer one of my own…. It turns out I did.

I believed that the Moral Law wasn’t just a Platonic truth, abstract and distant. It turns out I actually believed it was some kind of Person, as well as Truth. And there was one religion that seemed like the most promising way to reach back to that living Truth.

It is both interesting and informative to once more note that whereas the religious-to-atheist transformation is closely associated with adolescence and reactive intellectual immaturity, the converse one is much more often the product of emotional maturity and intellectual exploration. And, as I’ve noted before, a higher percentage of children raised atheist convert to Christianity than children raised Christian convert to atheism, as was apparently the case here.

But those are merely observations. My main purpose was simply to share her testimony and wish her well in her ongoing walk with God.

An Austrian case against free trade

Not long ago, Gary North wrote a column with some rather incendiary claims entitled “Free Trade: The Litmus Test of Economics“. In it, he relied on the 18th century arguments of David Hume and Adam Smith, both of which have been refuted by me, Ian Fletcher, and numerous other skeptics of free trade. Is our skepticism based on what North calls “trust in state power”? Is it really “faith in the economic productivity of men with badges and guns”?

Of course not. One of the interesting things about myopic free traders like North is that they stubbornly refuse to pay any attention to economic history or the observable consequences of their logic when it is tested by real world application. This is why they are constantly retreating to oft-refuted arguments that are more than 200 years old rather than attempting to defend their position on the basis of the post-NAFTA performance of the US economy or the economic state of the European common market now known as the European Union.

As an aside, I note that the European Union is one of the most fascistic, illiberal, intrusive, and centralized state powers in the world and it was largely constructed upon free trade-based arguments. Contrast North’s superficial and outdated polemic with Pat Buchanan’s WND column today which observes some very recent results of the latest experiment in free trade.

“The entry into force of the U.S.-Korea trade agreement on March 15, 2012, means countless new opportunities for U.S. exporters to sell more made-in-America goods, services and agricultural products to Korean customers – and to support more good jobs here at home.”

Thus did the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative rhapsodize about the potential of our new trade treaty with South Korea. And how has it worked out for Uncle Sam? Well, courtesy of Martin Crutsinger of the Associated Press, the trade figures are in for April, the first full month under the trade deal with South Korea.

And, surprise! The U.S. trade deficit with Korea tripled in one month. Imports from South Korea jumped 15 percent to $5.5 billion in April, while U.S. exports to South Korea fell 12 percent to $3.7 billion. Suddenly, the U.S. trade deficit with Seoul surged to an annual rate of $22 billion.

Shades of NAFTA. When it passed in 1993, we had a $1.6 billion trade surplus with Mexico. By 2010, our trade deficit with Mexico had reached $61.6 billion.

Verdict: Buchanan brutally kicks North’s ass. North’s only response to this would be to celebrate the growing trade deficit because “the world is richer than it was in 1973”. Regardless of whether that is true or not, the more relevant fact is that the United States of America is considerably poorer than it was in 1973, with lower wages, higher unemployment, and reduced net wealth. While there is no question that North’s ideological heart is in the right place, his intellectual limitations in the field of economics become readily apparent when one sees how he praises Henry Hazlitt’s hapless attempt to justify free trade:

“Henry Hazlitt’s classic little book, Economics in One Lesson, so completely destroys the arguments of the tariff supporters that there is nothing left of their position; still they keep coming. For two centuries their position has been intellectually bankrupt; still they keep coming.”

I found this statement more than a little amusing, of course, because it was trivially easy to show how Hazlitt’s book not only fails to completely destroy the anti-free trade case, but is a remarkably incompetent argument when examined in detail. I say this because I identified no less than 13 specific errors in his chapter on free trade in the first and second parts of the Hazlitt International Trade Challenge. Like most conventional – if not mainstream – economists, North is handicapped by his failure to pay any attention to debt. The following pair of charts show why North and other free traders feel their position is supported by the macroeconomic statistics, then show why their position is absolutely and utterly untenable.

This chart shows the free trade case. Since 1960, the trade deficit has gone from +3.5 billion to -494.7 billion while GDP/Capita has grown from $2,935.49 to $47,790.09. The growth in GDP has increased much faster than the population growth, therefore it appears to be obvious that the trade deficit is not only making the world richer, it is making the United States richer. However, this does not tell the entire story. As I mentioned previously, both the classical and the conventional free trade cases, like the Neo-Keynesian case for government intervention, completely fail to take debt into account.

Notice how adding the overall debt level of the economy completely changes the picture and makes it obvious how the trade deficit is impoverishing the USA despite the increase in GDP. GDP that does not account for debt is a terrible measure of wealth and every bit as misleading as GDP that does not account for inflation, as it is nothing more than a metric intended to track national income. Whereas per capita wealth, measured by GDP/capita – debt/capita was only -$1,417 in 1960, it has increased by two orders of magnitude to -$120,014. Debt that could once be paid off in 17 months would now require 42 months.

The prosperity that North and others claim free trade has brought the USA is nothing but a mirage and is the simple result of Americans borrowing to buy those foreign goods and services with money they will have to pay back from a smaller industrial base competing against much more serious competitors than they faced 50 years ago.

The case for free trade was always logically flawed, and on the empirical level simply cannot survive the incorporation of debt into the equation, as the historical statistics clearly demonstrate the intrinsic falsity that was always apparent to the sufficiently careful economic analyst. Free trade has not made the USA more wealthy, any more than buying giant houses with no-money down mortgages during the housing boom made those individuals who bought them rich. It hardly amounts to “state worship” to note that debt is not wealth. And it should be clear that by depriving the local consumers of their jobs and their ability to pay for imported goods and services, free trade necessarily requires either a decline in living standards or a constantly increasing debt load for countries on the red side of the trade deficit.

An so, as strange as it may sound, this observation points towards the legitimate possibility of developing the apparently oxymoronic Austrian case against free trade.

Euro 2012 Days 8, 9, and 10

Now that they’re doubling up on the group stage games, I can’t watch them all. So, in group A I opted for England-Sweden and in group B, for Holland-Portugal.

England 3 Sweden 2

England got off to a great start with a header by Andy Carroll, but two mistakes in the back allowed the Swedish right defender to score twice, once on a completely unmarked header, the other time when he was played on by an English player failing to stay with the offsides trap. However, Theo Walcott made all the difference when he came on, as his runs immediately turned the momentum of the game. First he scored on a shot from just outside the center of the 18-yard box; it would have been an easy save except the Swedish goalie’s view was obscured by about ten players. It wasn’t his fault, and even Walcott had an expression on his face as if to say “how did that go in?” Then he made a great break down the right side, blew past two defenders, and sent a hard, fast pass across the face of the goal that Welbeck somehow managed to flick backwards into the net with the bottom of his foot. A lovely pure instinct play; no one can think that fast. It was an entertaining and hard-fought game between two flawed teams, but England clearly merited the victory and should go through with 4 points going into the game against Ukraine, especially since Rooney is off his suspension and will be available. France beat Ukraine 2-0 in the other game in a monsoon.

Greece 1 Russian 0

Already wrote about this one. Great game, huge upset. The Russian attack simply fell apart after scoring 4 goals in the first game against the eventual group winners. Strange, and I didn’t like the way Kerzhakov was given so much playing time in the second and third games after looking worse than I’ve ever seen a striker at this level in the Czech victory. The Czech’s beat Poland 1-0 in the other game to win the group, Greece goes through in second.

Portugal 2 Holland 1

The Dutch got off to a great start and dominated possession for the first 15 minutes. Much to my astonishment, I saw Robben actually pass the ball three times, which was about two more times than he had in the previous two games. The Dutch even appeared to be bordering on optimistic about their chances of progressing when Van der Waart scored on a beautiful curling shot from the left corner of the box and the Germans went up 1-0 on Denmark. However, Denmark soon scored to go level and Cristiano Ronaldo simply took over the game. He and Fábio Coentrão were simply indefatigable; Coentrão went from defending the ball on the Portugal line to making a long run that took him the very opposite end of the field immediately after. Portugal just appeared to want it more, and when Ronaldo scored his first goal on an exceptional through ball given past three Dutch defenders, it seemed to break the Dutch backs. Portugal dominated after that point and subsequently put together one of the longest, most beautiful fast breaks I’ve ever seen, connecting on two long passes that were punctuated by Ronaldo patiently pulling the ball back to let a sprinting Dutch defender go past him, then coolly firing it home past the overmatched keeper. Germany finally put Denmark away to win 2-1, but the Dutch failed to do their part and they’re done.

WND column

Title IX Goes to the Movies

They may as well have named the movie “Strong Independent Girl.” Apparently because Disney hasn’t done enough damage to the intellectual development of three generations of American women, Pixar is introducing its much-ballyhooed first female lead, the princess Merinda, whom we are reliably informed is “more interested in archery and independence than in marrying and fulfilling royal traditions as dictated by her mother.” How innovative, how subversive, how not exactly the same as every other movie and television commercial produced in the last 20 years.

The rebel cow of the Romagna

And you wonder why I so love Italia and the Italiani:

I was wading through the daily mire of newspaper headlines the other day about the deepening euro crisis and the latest rich or famous Italian to be arrested when I saw this: “Mucca inferocita in fuga semina paura” (Ferocious cow on the run spreads panic). A cow, nicknamed “Libera” (free) by article’s author, had been on the loose now “for months” in the Apennine Mountains near the small city of Forlì where I live, and “quella enorme massa di 800 chili” (that enormous mass of 800 kilos) was charging anyone who approached it.

It was not that the cow had decided one day to become a bull, or a butch lesbian, or anything so boringly human. The cow’s feelings about its sexuality had nothing to do with it: The cow simply had enough of its life of slavery as a farm animal.

Capable of covering many miles a day, it had now bewitched two other cows from a different farm because, as the newspaper—La Voce di Romagna—explained, it “contagia” (infects) any other cow it comes across with the urge to be free. How many other cows in my neck of the woods, or indeed in Italy as a whole, would now heed the siren call to rebellion of this charismatic rebel cow and return to their primeval state? And where does the cow stand on the single currency? Is it for or against the euro?

According to La Voce, not even the farmer who owns the cow could get it to see reason. So the powers that be in the nearest town, Predappio, had at long last decided to swing into action….

Perhaps they convinced themselves that the cow was a fascist fifth columnist masquerading as a communist because according to the paper, one morning last week off they all went, up into those hills where there are no roads, just perilous mud tracks, woods, and the occasional field, in their four-wheel drives bristling with weapons. Amazingly, they soon found the cow and her two sidekicks in a scene described by La Voce thusly: “A sort of big game hunt. The forestale (forest rangers), veterinari (vets), and even the carabinieri (police) and the sindaco (mayor). All of them around Libera, at a safe distance, in order to immobilize her.”

But it was all in vain. They could not get near enough to the cow to capture it, and the only alternative was either to shoot it dead or shoot it with a tranquilizer bullet. But the sindaco, being a leftie and a staunch believer in animals’ rights over those of fascist humans, would not sign the order to kill the beast and nobody had any tranquilizer bullets. “The rebel cow has won her battle for freedom,” La Voce concluded, “for now Libera remains where she is, happy to roam the hills, and no doubt in the company of the other two cows.”

La dolce vita, baby. La dolce vita. I can’t wait for the inevitable political party, Mucca Ribella, to form around Libera. She certainly can’t be any worse as prime minister than Monti, and she’s already every bit as democratically legitimate.

Russia crashes out!

Holy Kremlin, but I did not see that coming. Greece upset Russia, 1-0, and combined with the Czech defeat of Poland, that bounces Russia out of the tournament! I’m shocked, as I thought the Russians looked like the third best team in the tournament, after Spain and Germany. The crazy thing is that Greece fully merited the win and could easily have won 2-0 had they been given an obvious penalty in the second half.

Oh, relax and enjoy it, Kate

One of the things I find remarkable is the readiness of outspoken feminist women to crucify themselves with their own words. It’s as if they have absolutely no conception of the logical consequences of their ideas, and despite their confrontational tone, they appear to have no expectation that their position can or will be criticized.

Consider the following excerpts from the linked cartoon, which features a retarded form of Socratic dialogue between a cartoon figure and an even more cartoonish version of anti-feminist arguments.

It’s not fair that I have to be terrified when I go jogging after 6 PM or when I’m on the bus or going to get milk.

Then don’t go out alone at night. That’s common sense.

That’s rape culture! When you tell me it’s my responsibility not to get hurt, you take away the responsibility of a human being not to rape!

Why are we even talking about this? I’m not a rapist.

Because it gets really fucking exhausting trying to believe in a future where I’m not treated like a crazy person for believing in equality!

First of all, Kate being terrified of rape when she goes to get milk is her problem. Some women are terrified of bats, others are afraid of heights, and those fears are no more your problem or my problem than Kate’s terror of rape on the milk run. It is very, very easy for Kate to significantly reduce her chances of being raped, as getting a concealed carry permit and avoiding the company of black and Hispanic men will virtually eliminate the possibility that she will be forcibly raped. Even without taking any such defensive measures, the national rate of forcible rape is only 24.7 per 100,000 population, one-third lower than it was in 1990. This means that in a population of 308 million, Kate’s chances of being raped in any given year are less than one in 12,000 and declining. This cannot be reasonably described as a “rape culture”.

If Kate genuinely lives in constant terror of a one in 12,000 risk, she is delusional and may be clinically paranoid. And this doesn’t even begin to take into account that unless a woman is raped at home by someone breaking into her residence, it is very difficult for a woman to get raped without her not only contributing to the situation, but contributing significantly to it. And yes, in such situations, that does make the victim at least partially culpable from a legal perspective. If you don’t understand that, try looking at it this way. If insurance companies sold rape insurance, are there any behaviors that would conceivably increase or decrease the premium?

Furthermore, Kate is quite obviously crazy. If she had said “it gets really fucking exhausting trying to believe in a future where I’m not treated like a crazy person for believing in rainbow-tailed unicorns”, everyone would quite correctly conclude that she is a lunatic. But there is no more evidence for equality than there is for rainbow-tailed unicorns. Human equality simply doesn’t exist and it has never existed. As I have pointed out before, both logic and genetic science demonstrate that human beings are not even all equally human. Her lunacy is further evidenced by her bizarre attempt to justify her broaching the topic with the non-rapist by an appeal to her own exhaustion. That does not follow. Moreover, it is apparent that Kate, by her own admission, doesn’t actually believe in equality anyway. Consider her final rant:

So fuck ANYONE who thinks they have the right to tell me not to care! FUCK THEM! I do care. I will always care.

Here Kate is expressly denying that others have the right to free speech, which is not only encoded into various legal systems but also happens to observably exist in a material manner, while simultaneously asserting the legitimacy of her attempt to believe in a future that is not only nonexistent, but improbable to the point of near impossibility. From which we are forced to conclude that she’s not only crazy, she’s outrageously stupid to boot.

The fundamentally nonsensical thing about her position is that she wants others to do what she will not. If she can’t be bothered to put any effort into defending herself against rape, why should anyone else? If it’s not her responsibility to act on something about which she professes to care so deeply, how could it possibly be mine, or anyone else’s, when we do not care in the slightest about her feelings or her fate.

Kate declares her opinion that angry posturing on behalf of nonexistent female rights is “hot as hell”. Which is fine, I suppose, so long as she is hoping to attract angry, rancid feminist women. But it certainly isn’t going to be attractive to men who have access to better options, such as Internet porn or voluntary chastity.

For further amusement, I highly recommend the emotional posturing in which various Pharyngulans are engaging as they attempt to demonstrate which one of them is the anti-rapiest of all. Apparently the winner will be awarded a tiara carved from the horn of a pink unicorn by PZ Myers himself. This was one of the finer examples of the intellectual fireworks on display:

I can’t think of one, even one, precaution that a woman (or man) can take that actually has a good chance of preventing rape that would also be considered “reasonable” by any rational or honest individual…. And if you want to talk about “reasonable” precautions, I think, the first burden on you is to describe your proposed precaution and demonstrate that it actually works to prevent rape.

This total inability of humanity to prevent any rape no doubt explains why rape rates never change over time and do not vary from one nation to another. It is a very strange belief system indeed where human action can modify the global climate, but rape is random, inevitable, and completely immune to human action. Of course, it would be deplorably raciss to notice that a 31 percent increase in the number of incarcerated black men, mostly for harmless drug charges, has corresponded with the 33 percent decline in forcible rapes per 100,000, from 41.2 in 1990 to 27.5 in 2010.

Vanished kingdoms, shifting cultures

“One has to put aside the popular notion that language and culture are endlessly passed on from generation to generation, rather as if ‘Scottishness’ or ‘Englishness’ were essential constituents of some national genetic code. If this were so, it would never be possible to forge new nations – like the United States of America or Australia – from diverse ethnic elements. The capacity of human societies both to absorb and to discard cultures is much underestimated. In reality, just as individuals can go abroad and merge into a foreign community, so a stationary population, if subjected to a changed linguistic and cultural environment, can quite easily be persuaded to follow suit. Dominant cultures are closely connected to dominant power groups. As the balance of power shifts, the balance of cultures shifts as well.”
– Vanished Kingdoms, Norman Davies

This is exactly why I consider it to be so significant that the racial, ethnic, and cultural mix of the USA has been transformed so dramatically since the two major immigration “reforms” in 1965 and 1986. In the course of half a single lifetime, the USA has gone from a white, Christian nation-state to a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-national state. While many people celebrate this, they do so foolishly because they wrongly believe that such transformations are possible without changing all of the aspects of the dominant culture. It’s not that the American people will vanish altogether, but they will become something that can no longer be reasonably considered American, just as the Brythonic Celts of the kingdom of Alt Clud first became “Scottish”, then “British” despite having been ethnically and linguistically distinct.

This is why the USA is now wracked by the same sort of corruption, crime, and legal inequality that occurs in most non-WASP cultures. And this is why we can safely assume that as long as the population mix continues to move towards the polyglot, basic aspects of WASP culture that are assumed to be intrinsic to the geographical location will continue to disappear. In Europe, the nationalism is stronger and the minority populations are smaller, which is why ethnic cleansing of the sort advocated by Greece’s Golden Dawn is the likely outcome, but in the USA, where there is already three, and arguably four, distinct nations, a breakup of the political entity is more probable.

Some are expecting war as a consequence of the failure of the Euro and the coming dissolution of the European Union, but I think it is much more likely to take place in the United States when the people of Aztlan demand their right to self-determination and all the Wilsonian neocons are hoist upon their own petard.

On a related note, the Obama administration is taking the law into its own hands by bypassing Congress and granting amnesty and legal residence to around one million young illegal infiltrators, to use the Israeli term:

The Obama administration will stop deporting and begin granting work permits to younger illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children and have since led law-abiding lives. The election-year initiative addresses a top priority of an influential Latino electorate that has been vocal in its opposition to administration deportation policies. The policy change, described to The Associated Press by two senior administration officials, will affect as many as 800,000 immigrants who have lived in fear of deportation…. It tracks closely to a proposal offered by Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida as an alternative to the DREAM Act.

Euro 2012 Days 6 and 7

Portugal 3 Denmark 2

Portugal was the better team, and they proved it by going up 2-nil, but the Danes were mentally tough and battled back to tie it up at 2-all with Bendter’s second header after Christiano Ronaldo sent wide a perfect through ball that would have sealed the game. I think he actually had too much time; that’s often a problem for otherwise efficient scorers. I thought the Danes merited a draw, but a bit of untimely defensive carelessness combined with a powerful shot from Varela in the 87th minute cost them the point. Contra my assumptions prior to the tournament, it looks as if Portugal will finish second in the group instead of Holland.

Germany 2 Holland 1

Aside from Van Persie’s goal from outside the box after the game was largely sealed, the Dutch looked more like a second-tier team than a legitimate powerhouse. Before his goal, Van Persie was dreadful for a second straight game, falling over his own legs, the defender’s legs, and even the ball. Willem, the Dutch left back, was as inept as I’ve ever seen a defender at this level; at one point, when one commentator mentioned that he had been caught out of position, the other commentator replied that he hadn’t been in position all night. Mario Gomez, on the other hand, was brilliant, showing an amazingly deft touch for such a big man on the little spin-and-shoot on his first goal, then running right past the hapless Willem onto a perfect Bastian Schweinsteiger pass to score the eventual winner. Germany looked much better than they did against Portugal and at this point, it’s readily apparent that the two best teams are Germany and Spain, with Italy a distant third.

Italy 1 Croatia 1

A wasted game for the Azzurri. It began on a bad note, with Balotelli up front despite his uselessness in the first game and that was the case again here, as Italy got its only goal from a very precise Pirlo free kick. Italy dominated the game in the first half, but seemed content to sit back and defend in the second, which was a mistake because the defense was caught sitting very deep in the box and failed to jump on a cross to Mandzukic that he had time to trap and shoot from about five yards out. Croatia didn’t earn the draw so much as Italy didn’t merit the win. Italy is in trouble with only two points to Croatia’s four, but should still qualify, as I can’t see them failing to take the three points against Ireland or Spain failing to beat Croatia.

Spain 4 Ireland 0

This game was a classic example of the way that certain strikers are very dangerous against mediocre defenses while being ineffective against good ones. Fernando Torres scored twice and looked like he was playing against boys as he powered through the Irish defense, while watching the Irish midfield try to deal with the Spanish midfield was like watching headless chickens try to solve a Rubik’s Cube. Spain looked like the reigning European and world champions, and only the Germans look as if they’re capable of denying them a successful defense of their title.