Besides, the other “stupidities”, stereotypes you may call, are:
Fat mac-Americans,
Unfashionable nike-Americans,
Stuck-up and lousy Americans,
and yes “not that worldly” Americans.

Helmets are EXTREMELY useful. Let me specify.

In 1999 I was riding my cycle in Torkkelinmäki when a woman opened her car door right into my path. I flipped over the handle bar and landed on my neck. Without my helmet I would probably have suffered a very serious injury. The helmet was shattered.

A couple of weeks later, before I had managed to buy a new helmet, I had a collision with another cyclist, who came around a corner on a pedestrian lane. I don’t remember anything about the accident, but when I woke up, I was lying in a pool of my blood. I lost 4 teeth and had 24 stitches put in my mouth in the ER. The two front teeth in my lower jaw went through my lip and damaged it pretty badly. I lost all feeling in the left side of my mouth for over a year. I also had an internal tear from my upper jaw to the nasal cavity.

Now, 7 years later, I’m finishing up my tooth implant treatments. It has cost my insurance company a LOT more than a new helmet would have, not to mention all the pain and suffering I have experienced.

So don’t tell me helmets should be voluntary. You could buy hundreds of helmets with the money caused by just one accident. I still see people riding bikes without helmets and can only guess what rationalizations they use for that. Maybe I should publish my injury photos for them to illustrate their (and my) stupidity.

Interestingly, in 1819, as the US got Florida from Spain, the Adams-Onís treaty also included a provision that the US would keep hands off Texas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adams-On%C3%ADs_Treaty

Puerto Rico was invaded by the US in the Spanish-American war of 1898.

Of these George P. Bush, a Dallas lawyer (with a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Texas) is expected to become a politician. Noelle has been in trouble with the law several times, in and out of rehab due to her substance abuse problem. Jebby was caught in 2000 having public sex at a mall parking lot and arrested in 2005 and charged for public intoxication and resisting arrest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_P._Bush
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noelle_Bush
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeb_Bush%2C_Jr.

I guess their fates are interesting as they are grappling with both their Bush heritage and with their half-immigrant identity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_P._Huntington

Prof. Huntington of “Clash of Civilizations” fame has written a book called “Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity” (2004) that celebrates the Anglo-Protestant identity of the US and is generally a pamphlet against Hispanic immigration.

There is this quiz game show “The Weakest Link” (Heikoin lenkki). Levitt refers to a study where somebody looked through all episodes and then made some calculations. It turned out that (American) players “eliminated” black co-players less often than other players, whatever their statistical level of knowledge was. Apparently fear of “looking like racist” in front of cameras is deeply rooted. On the other hand, “Hispanic” players were treated the other way around; they were likely to be eliminated whether they did well or not (more often and so on). Obviously some kind of racist or ethnocentric mechanism which the players didn’t consciously notice was at work there.

Anyway, it’s not true that Americans would welcome “Hispanics” with open arms. “Mexifornia: A State of Becoming” is an interesting book on the subject. “Are Illegal Mexican immigrants turning California into the kind of “cleptocracy” Mexico is?”

Fortunately the days when new immigrants could be persecuted pretty freely are over, I think. They don’t need to fear the same kind of fate the Chinese had, for example, or even Finns in some cases.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Salazar

My point was that ancestry is usually traced to the Mayflower. New Mexicans are also known for their ancestry and their ability to keep the Spanish language alive, despite the rest of America opting for English.

If you think of a Spanish speaker in Florida, the sterotype is a Cuban immigrant in Miami. If you think of a Spanish speaker in New York, the stereotype is a Puerto Rican immigrant. If you think of a Spanish speaker in California or Texas, the stereotype may very well be a Mexican immigrant.

But in New Mexico the stereotype of a Spanish speaker is someone with ancestry who descends from Spaniards, not Mexicans. I simply wanted to point out that there are old Spanish American families and one US state where Spanish has never been seen as a foreign language or as the language of immigrants who have come first after the Anglos.

I find the correspondence of the Spanish speakers of New Mexico to the WASPs in New England a fascinating question. The Mayflower is a legend above all and in the same way the founding of New Mexico is not significant for what it itself was but for the epic poem that it inspired. That epic was published ten years before The Mayflower even arrived.

Well, yes, many Americans themselves wish to trace their “ancestry” to those Puritans but it has very little to do with historical facts. Englishmen beat Finns with eigth years, though.

By the way, does anybody understand what Finnpundit is saying? Everything he writes seems to make little or no sense …

http://www.unmpress.com/Book.php?id=10122435137945

In 1610 a travel journal called “Historia de Nueva México” was published. It’s an epic poem about the founding of Nuevo México.

The Mayflower arrived in the New World in 1620. I wonder if some of the Spanish-speakers of New Mexico could trace their ancestry to the founding of their great state (former Spanish colony of Nuevo México). At least many of the Spanish-speakers of New Mexico have lived there before the Anglos arrived and have kept the Spanish language alive for centuries. New Mexico has no official language.

Oh, Hispanics have been speaking Spanish for several decades in the US, as have the Chinese, the Koreans, the Finns, and whoevernot. If Europeans think this is a scary scenario for Americans, then it only points out their own fears, because loss of cultural identity through loss of language is more of a threat to Europe than for the US.

In the end, English survives because it is the language of business. If Spanish all of a sudden became the language of the business world, then Americans would rush to adapt to that change; – Europe would not, and, – of course – lag behind in development as a result, as always.