California's Hispanic Challenge

At WSJ, "Hispanics Surge in California":

Latino children for the first time made up a majority of California's under-18 population in 2010, as Hispanics grew to 37.6% of residents in the nation's most populous state.

A new U.S. Census report showed the state's non-Hispanic white population fell 5.4% over the past decade, a continuing trend offset by a 27.8% surge in Hispanics and 30.9% increase in non-Hispanic Asians.

Though in decline, white Californians remained the state's largest demographic group at 40.1%. But demographers said Hispanics were poised to take the lead.

Underlying the demographic shifts, California grew at its slowest pace in the past decade in more than a century. The population rose 10% to 37.3 million, an increase in line with the national average.

As in California, Hispanics are gaining ground in many other states, such as North Carolina, as whites are on the verge of becoming a minority among all newborn children in the U.S.

The report released Tuesday is the latest to indicate major shifts in where Americans live. Census figures released earlier this year showed that Chicago's population fell to its lowest level in 90 years.

Other census figures showed that blacks migrated to the faster-growing South from cities in the Northeast and Midwest in the greatest numbers in decades. That boosted North Carolina, whose population rose 18.5% in the decade—compared to the nationwide rate of 9.7%.

In a first, California failed to gain a congressional seat in the latest census count. Los Angeles experienced its lowest numeric increase since the 1890-1900 Census, growing 2.6% to 3.8 million. The state's slower growth reflected tough economic times but also an exodus of Californians to less crowded Western states

"The big story for California is it's now becoming an anchor rather than a magnet in the West," said William Frey, demographer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. "It is still able to disperse its population and culture throughout the West."

Some of the demographic changes could reshape politics in the Golden State.

In the conservative bastion of Orange County, for example, minorities for the first time passed whites to become the majority of the population, according to the census figures. Because many minorities are Democrats, political observers say that trend could dilute the historic strength of the Republican Party there over time.

Yeah. Tell me about it. Now if we could just get a good lot of these folks speaking English.

RELATED: At the Center for Immigration Studies, "A Day in the Life of an Arizona Rancher: Border Fences, Illegal Aliens, and One Man’s Watchtower":

Hating Scott Eric Kaufman — Closing Out 2010 With Some Epic Schadenfreude

Look, when SEK's compelled to write a post that shows how much he's loathed by someone, most likely a former student, that's newsworthy. It's especially good since SEK's always bleating about how "great" a teacher he is, blah, blah.

And since SEK's recently sent death wishes my way, I can't resist a little schadenfreude in re-posting this stuff:

Because I have someone—likely a former student using a pseudonym or a random troll—by the name of "Eric Oden" signing me for mailing lists (Military.com and American Intercontinental University Online in the past hour) and creating an alternative email address that looks like mine and then doing generally untoward things (like making false promises to people on Craigslist). To that end, I thought I'd at least put this information out there for anyone who searches for my name:

My email address is scotterickaufman@gmail. If someone claiming to be me contacts you from any other address—no matter how similar it is to that one—it is not me and you can either ignore it or forward it to my actual email address so I can keep it for my records.

More at the link (those bogus Craigslist postings are killer).

SEK's Facebook page is here and Twitter page here.

Here's to a Happy New Year of hatin' on SEK.

Keep those cards and letters (and fake Craigslist listings) flowing!

Scott Eric Kaufman — An English Professor Who Doesn't Know Sh*t About English

One of the most interesting things about Scott Eric Kaufman is that he doesn't seem to know anything about the things in which he writes. Oh sure, the prick's good at laying down the demonic snark while surfing the conservative 'sphere for tidbits of attack material, but when it actually comes to writing quality content ... well, the guy's pure fail. I was already thinking about this when I noticed SEK's stuffy mini-"review" of Leo DiCaprio's Inception — the most noteworthy thing of which is that SEK and his wife actually walked out on the film. I'm planning to see the movie this weekend, so I wasn't going to offer my comments on whether it merited that kind of antipathy, although I was tempted to just post a snarky piece hammering Scott Erik Kaufman for his hopelessly effete left-wing university-ish elitism.



But now I'm glad I held off. It turns out SEK's initial review didn't go over so well with some like-minded effete types, and he's written an update, "Bit more on Inception." And while I might be persuaded that one of SEK's critics is on the money when he implies that Scott's an unsympathetic childless asshole, I'm content to simply indicate SEK's non-typo completely FUBAR ignorance of the word "flak."



As you can see at the first sentence of the post: "I’ve taken a lot of interesting flack for my non-review of Inception ..."

Actually, SEK means to say, "flak." It's a word that leftists apparently have a hard time using, which is easy to explain, given the left's ideological hostility to the military. In context, you might say I'm "giving him a lot of flak" for his stupidity — and boomerang smears, since he likes to attack opponents as "functionally illiterate." It's too good, really, for nearly every time SEK's trolled my site for some jollies, he's ended up making himself look lame with massive errors at the original post. And like clockwork he always comes back with some lame excuse for why an English professor shouldn't actually be required to write proper English, but in the case of "flack" I imagine he'll just have to take his lumps. And since Ann Althouse is a frequent target of SEK's idiotic trolling, I'll let her take him to the woodshed.



See, "Flak" (where Ann hammers Josh Marshall, another Ph.D. know-it-all, who misused "flack" in 2007):

From me, you're going to first catch flak for writing "catch flack."

“Flak” is WW II airman’s slang for shells being fired at you in the air, so to catch a lot of flak is to feel in danger of being shot down. However, most civilians these days have never heard of “flak,” so they use “flack” instead, which originally meant “salesman” or “huckster.” You need to worry about this only if you’re among old-time veterans.

When you're showing off your expertise about fighting a war, you ought to get your war imagery right. A flack is a press agent. Hacks -- "writer[s] hired to produce routine or commercial writing" -- know more about flacks and not so much about flak, but they need to try not to let it show.

Gotta love it. A law professor schooling a history Ph.D.



But even better is schooling an alleged professor of English on English language usage. Can you say epic fail? And the references to teaching "English" are quite loose, since SEK's apparently teaching courses on "Manga" and the literary origins of films like The Last Airbender. My kids could probably lecture on that stuff, although they aren't stuffy Ph.D.s who write half-baked movie reviews on films on which they've walked out on.

Well, at least SEK's no longer claiming to have a "Doctorate of Philosophy of English."

RELATED: "Scott Eric Kaufman, Self-Hating Skankwad, Does It Again!"