Courtesy of the burning Brand

Chris Brand has just done a new lot of posts.  Among his news is that the masterly essay by philosopher Neven Sesardic on fraudulent argument among philosophers is now available online.  As Sesardic says, there is no topic on which philosophers of science go so conspicuously off the rails as the issue of racial differences in IQ.  The philosophers concerned are positively Stalinist in the way they lie about the subject.  But I guess there are other ways in which they like Stalin too.  They essentially claim that the psychometricians ignore differences in environment, whereas psychometricians have always gone to great trouble to account for the role of the environment!  Even my 1972 paper on the subject addressed that issue from the outset.  The most surprising thing is that Sesardic did actually get his article published in an academic journal of philosophy.  I guess truth still interests some philosophers.

Chris also notes that the book Affirmative Action Hoax now has a companion site here.  Both book and site use impeccable science to expose the lie that blacks and whites have the same genetic potential.  As the book shows, affirmative action is a huge fraud on whites.

Posted by jonjayray on Wednesday, February 1, 2006 at 11:27 PM in Race realism
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Putin, a rock and the human rights industry

Back on News Years Day 2005 at, I see, the civilised hour of 11.33 am I posted a short piece on the political future of Russia.  The core of the article was an interesting prognostication by Telegraph journalist, Niall Ferguson.

His argument was intriguing, and provided several striking parallels between Weimar Germany and present-day Russia.  He concluded like this:-

We must all hope that events in Georgia and Ukraine will inspire a democratic revolution in Russia itself. But the Weimar parallel is not encouraging. Germany’s descent into dictatorship went in stages: there were three more or less authoritarian chancellors before Hitler, each of whom sought to rule Germany by decree.

The question that remains open is whether Putin is just a more successful version of one of these authoritarian warm-up acts, or a fully-fledged Russian führer. Either way, he is fast becoming as big a threat to Western security as he is to Russian democracy.

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Wednesday, February 1, 2006 at 08:12 PM in World Affairs
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Can this be true?

Bring back segregation!.  “District 10 supervisor candidate Charlie Walker yesterday called for creation of a separate San Francisco school system for African Americans.  Separating blacks from whites is necessary because current education of African Americans is not working, Walker told the Sentinel.  “I am hoping seriously that we consider separating blacks from whites because it’s not working,” Walker reflected.  “What good did it do us to demonstrate to get our freedom when we didn’t get nothing out of it.  “The women, the gays, the Asians, the Latinos - they got it and we’re still sitting around here. In San Francisco alone, 42% of our people are unemployed.”

Posted by jonjayray on Wednesday, February 1, 2006 at 07:29 AM in Education
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The first piece of good news

From The Times:-

Tony Blair suffered a humiliating blow to his authority tonight as the Government slumped to a shock double defeat over its plans to combat religious hatred.

And, in further embarrassment for the Prime Minister, it emerged later that he did not vote in the second division - which the Government lost by just one vote.

The results, after a sizeable Labour backbench revolt, were greeted by loud cheers from the Tory benches and cries of “resign!”.

Home Secretary Charles Clarke quickly announced the Government was bowing to the Commons’ will and the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill would go for Royal Assent to become law as it stood.

“The Government accepts the decision of the House this evening. We are
delighted the Bill is going to its Royal Assent and delighted we have a Bill which deals with incitement against religious hatred,” he said, to Tory jeers.

Mr Blair suffered his first ever Commons defeat only two months ago when MPs voted down plans for a 90-day detention period under the Terrorism Bill and opted for 28 days instead.

Peers inflicted a series of defeats on the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill in a bid to safeguard freedom of speech with an amendment restricting the new offence of inciting religious hatred
to threatening words and behaviour rather than a wider definition also covering insults and abuse.

They also required the offence to be intentional and specified that criticism,
insult, abuse and ridicule of religion, belief or religious practice would not be an offence.

Ministers urged the Commons today to reject the Lords’ amendments and back instead a Government compromise. Home Office Minister Paul Goggins insisted only those intending to “stir up hatred” would be caught under the Government’s plans.

But in the first test of strength, MPs voted by 288 to 278, majority 10, to back the Lords. Mr Blair was recorded as voting with the Government line in this division, while 27 Labour backbenchers rebelled and at least two dozen others did not vote.

In the second vote, MPs voted by 283 votes to 282, majority one, to back the Lords.

Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, January 31, 2006 at 08:03 PM in Islam & Islamification
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Republicans are racists—But

The latest “Republicans are racists” screech is here.  This version of the screech is dressed up in the language of social psychology, however.  I know that language very well.  I have myself written many academic publications in it and have come to similar conclusions.  When the screech ends ““We have 50 years of evidence that racial prejudice predicts voting”, the article is quite right.  The correlation between expressions of conservative attitudes and expressions of racially negative attitudes does not always emerge but mostly it does.

For an intelligent person, WHY that happens is the interesting question, however.  That the finding might arise because conservatives are more honest in saying what they really think or that it might arise because Leftists are more deluded (including self-deluded) is never to my knowledge examined.  Instead,  complicated Freudian explanations for the correlation are offered that fall apart when closely examined.

Continued...

Posted by jonjayray on Monday, January 30, 2006 at 06:42 PM in Liberalism & the Left
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Mexican army invades the United States

In the last 10 years, the Mexican army has carried out armed incursions into the United States almost twice a month on average. Yet rather than defending the American homeland and upholding the Constitution as his inauguration oath would have it, President Bush prefers that Americans shed blood in the Middle East to enforce UN disarmament decrees.

Continued...

Posted by Steve Edwards on Monday, January 30, 2006 at 03:33 PM in U.S. Politics
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Baron-Cohen’s Assortive Mating vs Bowery’s Indian Immigration Hypothesis of Autism

An hypothesis by a guy named “Baron-Cohen” of autism’s etiology has been getting a lot of press recently.  He blames the increase in autism diagnoses on an increase in assortive mating among people with analytic minds—aka “nerds”.  Recently, the most read techie website on the net, Slashdot (calling itself, “News for Nerds”) carried an article which trumpted Baron-Cohen’s research.  My response is that not only are nerds not reproducing enough to create an explosion of anything but that the data provided by Baron-Cohen is virtually non-existent and is weaker than the data supporting the hypothesis that immigrants from India are causing the explosion of autism.

Continued...

Posted by James Bowery on Monday, January 30, 2006 at 01:58 PM in Health
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TOD Redux

I try not to cudgel MR with this stuff, really I do. But today’s post on The Oil Drum is as close to a must-read as you could ask for. Stuart Staniford really likes graphs. Where is the carbon? Find out here.

Posted by Søren Renner on Monday, January 30, 2006 at 01:25 PM in Economics & Finance
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Getting it straight

If you’ve noticed inconsistencies in feminist politics there’s a reason. It’s not that feminists are irrational or hypocritical or unintelligent. There is a deeper problem: the first principles on which feminism is based generate contradictory aims.

Poor feminists! They are locked into a belief system which can never pass the test of consistency because the starting point of their theory calls for opposing outcomes.

Homeward Bound

A good way to illustrate the tensions within feminist theory is to look at the article Homeward Bound. This was published late last year and was written by feminist Linda Hirshman, a retired professor of women’s studies.

Homeward Bound begins with the question of why women are not entering executive positions in larger numbers. Some feminists blame the “glass ceiling”: they believe that women are held back in their careers by male employers or by unfriendly work practices.

Linda Hirshman disagrees. In 2003 she undertook some interesting research. She contacted the women who had announced their weddings in the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times in 1996. These were women who belonged to a well-educated elite and who had prestigious jobs.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Monday, January 30, 2006 at 06:12 AM in Feminism
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Those pesky race-based genes again

More scientific evidence of deep-lying racial differences:  “A common genetic mutation may explain why Asian heart patients are less likely than others to get relief from chest pain when they take nitroglycerin, a new Chinese study finds.  Fudan University researchers examined 111 coronary heart disease patients who were self-administering nitroglycerin under the tongue whenever they experienced an acute angina attacks. Eighty (72 percent) of the patients reported that they had pain relief within 10 minutes of taking the nitroglycerin, while the remainder of the patients experienced no pain relief.  The researchers found that many of the patients who didn’t respond to nitroglycerin had an inactive mutant form of the ALDH2 gene. This mutant version is called ALDH2*2.  In order for nitroglycerin to be effective, a patient’s body has to be able to convert the nitroglycerin into nitric oxide. This process requires ALDH2.  It’s estimated that 30 percent to 50 percent of the Asian population has the ALDH2*2 mutation. This information needs to be considered when doctors recommend nitroglycerin for Asian patients, the study authors said”.

There are even big genetic racial differences in earwax!  “It is not a subject scientists generally wax about. But a seven-page scientific paper published today is solely devoted to the genetics of earwax.  Human earwax comes in two varieties—wet and dry. According to the journal Nature Genetics, dry earwax is seen in up to 95 per cent of East Asians, but no more than 3 per cent of Europeans and Africans.  The reason for the difference is a gene called ABCC11 which controls earwax-altering molecules.  A 39-strong international team did the research. The role of earwax was unclear, said the scientists. “Insect trapping, self-cleaning and prevention of dryness of the external auditory canal are its plausible functions,” they wrote. Armpit (axillary) odour was associated with wet-type earwax, raising the possibility that earwax might be involved in sexual attraction.”

Posted by jonjayray on Monday, January 30, 2006 at 03:26 AM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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An Aboriginal Sunday

This post will encourage Leftists to shriek “racist” and “Nazi” at me but they regularly shriek that at GWB and heaps of other conservatives so I am going to disregard such shrieks as devalued currency. 

I grew up with Aborigines (Australian native blacks) in my class at school and I have seen plenty of them since—particularly as a landlord (Yes.  I HAVE let rooms and houses to them.  Racists do that, you know)—so I think I know a bit about them.  And if you are looking for “cultural” differences, Aborigines must be as different from people of Northern European ancestry as you can get.  And the reason why is that they were isolated in Australia from other populations for up to 60,000 years (on some estimates).  So they evolved separately.  And they evolved to suit Australia as it originally was.  And the abilities they evolved —particularly a remarkable capacity for observing and remembering minute details of the landscape—do in some ways leave the rest of us for dead.  In other ways, however, they are badly lacking in what is needed to fit into modern Western society—a strikingly poor ability to plan ahead being their most obvious handicap.  They very much “live for the day”. 

One thing I have always envied them is their ability to relax.  They can sit around under a tree all day happily doing exactly nothing. I, however, am one of those instinctively hard-driving people who is genetically from the far North of the world.  And the fact that,

in my retirement

, I post daily to seven blogs of my own and contribute frequently to four group blogs is, I think, some testimony to that.  It is as hard for me to sit back and do nothing as it is easy for Aborigines.  But yesterday I managed it.  Just as Aborigines often do, I spent the whole day sitting around and doing practically nothing other than some intermittent chatting.  Anne accompanied me in this experience, of course.  She is probably more full of beans than I am these days, however, so she caved in first and shot off to do something at about 7pm.  She spent many years as a remote-area nurse working with (and getting on with) Aborigines so knows them even better than I do.  So she knew all about the model I had in mind when I said we were having an Aborigine day.  She enjoyed it but she couldn’t keep it up!  Genetics will out.

Posted by jonjayray on Sunday, January 29, 2006 at 09:02 PM in No particular place to go
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The Psychology of Bizzarro World

Australia: state of fear

So what about the so-called “race riots” in Cronulla recently? Don’t they prove the failure of multiculturalism? On the contrary, they are a measure of its success, demonstrating that violence will occur in an area that is homogeneous, dominated by one ethnic group and resistant to outsiders coming in. Given my own Celtic heritage, I was embarrassed to see that the majority of youths arrested for assault and affray bore names that were Irish.

LOL!  Okay, whoever it was that predicted this belly up to the bar, I owe you a drink!  I remember a MRnik predicting this some time back (the idea that the solution was MORE! MORE! MORE! Multiculturalism.  Was it you Scroob?).

Look for Bell’s suggestion of “bigger gangs” and “more gasoline” as solutions to gang rape and arson, respectively, coming to a rag sheet near you.

What is it with Micks, anyways?

Update: jumpin’ Jesus Christ on a pogo stick!  F***ing unbeLIEVEable!

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on Sunday, January 29, 2006 at 12:04 AM in Liberalism & the Left,  Marxism & Culture War
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The Failure of Democratic Nation Building.

The Failure of Democratic Nation Building: Ideology Meets Evolution (2005) is the second book on this subject by Albert Somit & Steven A. Peterson. Their first book, Darwinism, Dominance, and Democracy: The Biological Basis of Authoritarianism (1997),  contends that democracy is very difficult to establish and maintain. This recent book looks at the subject again, with new warnings with regard to Iraq and Afghanistan.

They submit that “[O]ur basic thesis was that, contrary to the prevailing ideology, humans were genetically predisposed to authoritarian and hierarchical, rather than democratic and egalitarian, social and political structures. Even in a so-called Age of Democracy, we noted, democracies still constituted a definite minority among governments, as has been the case throughout the ages.”

Continued...

Posted by Matt Nuenke on Saturday, January 28, 2006 at 06:51 PM in The Proposition Nation
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Anti-white police chief

The world’s most politically-correct police chief has done it again:  Sir Ian Blair wondered out loud why the murder of two little girls by a sex-maniac and his girlfriend became such big news in Britain.  Could it be that the sex-murder of two little girls was intrinsically newsworthy or that it took a lot of public assistance before the culprits were tracked down?  Could it be the horror of a woman assisting with the crime? No way!  It was “racism” according to Blair.  So the victims were black?  No.  They were white.  It was the fact that they were white that made it big news, according to Blair.  If they were black, people would have ignored it, apparently.  So the murder of whites is unusual and blacks get murdered all the time?  No.  There are nearly five times as many whites as blacks murdered in Britain every year. 

In other words, Blair is looking for racism under every bed.  He sees it everywhere and uses it to explain things that are more obviously explained in other ways.  Just on the law of averages alone, it would have been more likely that the most publicly noted kiling would be of a white, because there are so many more whites killed.  And in any case, it is not true that only the killing of whites gets a lot of publicity.  The killing of Damilola Taylor by her relatives also got a lot of publicity and that little girl was black.  Clearly, it is the police chief himself who is race-obsessed, not ordinary Britons.  He is not anti-racist.  He is anti-white.

More details here

Correction

The reference above to Damilola Taylor should have been to Victoria Climbie

Posted by jonjayray on Saturday, January 28, 2006 at 05:47 PM in Marxism & Culture War
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The new Lacey Peterson Case? Probably not so much.

Des Moines police have captured a man accused of sexually assaulting a woman and trying to kill her by setting her Fort Dodge home on fire.

He succeeded.

Continued...

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on Saturday, January 28, 2006 at 05:44 PM in Marxism & Culture War,  Media
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Cowbird—‘Nuff Said

From a fascinating writeup about the cowbird:

“The interior of a bluebird nestlings’ mouth is yellow. A cowbird nestling has a deep pink or cherry red mouth. Apparently an indicator that a nestling has not been fed recently is blood collected around the mouth. After the baby is fed, blood is drawn to the digestive area, and the color of the mouth fades. Thus having a bright red mouth, and the ability (due to earlier hatching and larger size) to reach higher when gaping results in Cowbird nestlings receiving priority for feeding. Also, Cowbird’s eyes open around Day 2 (about 4 days earlier than a bluebird nestling), so they are better equipped to detect the presence of their adopted parents and position and beg more effectively to receive priority for feeding.”

Posted by James Bowery on Saturday, January 28, 2006 at 04:59 PM in Media
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Latino and Jewish Leaders Team Up for Joint Lobbying Effort in Richmond

Latino and Jewish Leaders Team Up for Joint Lobbying Effort in Richmond

Leaders of the Latino and Jewish community will join together in Richmond on February 1 to lobby Virginia Legislators on behalf of Immigrants Rights and Access to Education. Sponsored by VACOLAO (Virginia Coalition of Latino Organizations) and the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the initiative is part of a broader program of outreach between the two communities who have a history of joint advocacy.

Continued...

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on Saturday, January 28, 2006 at 03:44 PM in Ethnicity and Ethnic Genetic Interests,  That Question Again
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More on NSW government and police inaction in response to Muslim crime

... Malcolm Kerr, a Liberal MP whose seat is Cronulla, says he’s had a stream of constituents come into his office complaining of inaction by the police on revenge attacks despite what they said was clear evidence.

Some locals may have believed [police chief] Moroney when he said the lack of video evidence was the problem. “When the video turned up with that guy being attacked, it blew that out of the water,” Kerr says. And, says Kerr, the fact that Iemma announced a huge increase in officers for Enoggera shows he did not take the issue seriously enough at the outset. “If the Government now says the task needs much greater resources, they should have put them in at the start five weeks earlier, when the clues were still hot,” Kerr says.

Iemma and Moroney still say the police have not been soft on Middle Eastern crime. But the evidence suggests otherwise. A notorious police document outlines how, the night after the Sunday riots, “numerous vehicles were sighted congregated in the vicinity of Punchbowl Park [in Sydney’s inner southwest]”.  “These vehicles and the crowd that had been gathered were suspected to be Middle Eastern criminals who have been involved in malicious damage and civil disobedience offences throughout the Sutherland Shire and St George areas,” the document says. “A direction was given to police around midnight not to enter the area and antagonise these persons.”

Continued...

Posted by jonjayray on Saturday, January 28, 2006 at 09:29 AM in Law & Order
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True Liberalism Is Conservative

The question has been asked, “What the hell is a right-wing liberal?”

There is an answer to that question.

Continued...

Posted by James Bowery on Friday, January 27, 2006 at 12:40 PM in
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The latest statistics on race in Britain

The number of people in ethnic-minority groups is growing significantly as the white British population continues to decrease, government figures show. England’s non-white population rose by more than half a million between 2001 and 2003 to 7.1 million, with the Chinese community growing at the fastest rate. Over the same period the white British population fell by 100,300 to 42.8 million, according to a report by the Office for National Statistics. The figures suggest an overall decline in ethnic segregation as non-white groups move into almost every area of the country.

Continued...

Posted by jonjayray on Friday, January 27, 2006 at 12:14 AM in Immigration
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More on ethanol for the peak-oil freaks

Below is a plain-English summary from “Science” magazine followed by the abstract of one of the two papers mentioned.  It is impressive that even using the moronic corn-sugar route, ethanol production has a positive energy balance.  With half a dozen co-authors of the paper, however, it is pretty amazing that none of them seem to be aware of the enormously cheaper and more environmentally friendly method of producing ethanol directly from sugarcane.

Continued...

Posted by jonjayray on Thursday, January 26, 2006 at 09:18 PM in Economics & Finance
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Rational Treatment of Ethno Secessionism vs Multicultural Accessionism?

The idea that ethnostates are the root of all evil is so embedded in political theory that it is considered axiomatic.  A case in point is Stanford University’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Secession which blithely dismisses “Ascriptivist Theories” of secession as a “Primary Right” with the statement introducing such theories: This approach to unilateral secession has a long pedigree, reaching back at least to Nineteenth Century nationalists such as Mazzini, who proclaimed that every nation should have its own state… this appears to be not only unfeasible, but a recipe for increasing ethno-national conflict… given the historical record of ethno-nationalist conflict, the worry remains that institutionalizing the principle that every nation is entitled to its own state would exacerbate ethno-national violence, along with the human rights violations it inevitably entails.

So I have a question: Has anyone bothered to check—objectively and rationally—to assure themselves that accessionism has a history less tarnished by “human rights abuses”, violence/coersion (state directed violence/coersion/bias on behalf of politically enfranchized ethnicities) and other “inevitable” consequences of accessionism? 

Certainly the origin of the word “racism” as an epithet was with Trostky aka Braunstein during the dawn of the less-than-exemplary Soviet State—with its very accessionist and open anti-nationalism.

Posted by James Bowery on Thursday, January 26, 2006 at 12:33 PM in Immigration
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A cartoonist’s guff

It was Australia Day today. The Melbourne Age marked the occasion with a special front page item: a message to the nation by cartoonist Michael Leunig.

The message was a contemplation on “our precious diversity”. According to Leunig, tolerance is not enough and “the richer possibility is that Australia can actually embrace and enjoy its glorious detail and diversity”.

“Perhaps,” continues Leunig “more than tolerance we need openness, which is a type of innocence and a type of strength. And beyond xenophobia, fear of strangers, we might contemplate the wisdom and pleasure that could flow from another Greek word, filoxenos – love of stranger.”

“Innocent friendliness is a sentimental concept to some, yet surely it refers to a rare quality of openness that we sometimes dreamed had curiously emerged in this land. Surely the real living treasure of this country could be simple friendliness.”

And on and on it goes. I expect we’ve all heard this type of thing before. I have a word I use to refer to such platitudinous speeches, marked by politically correct pieties divorced from reality: guff. And Leunig is a first rate “guffer”.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Thursday, January 26, 2006 at 09:18 AM in Australian Politics
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Athens plague was typhoid fever.

The plague which struck Athens during the Peloponnesian War was not smallpox after all. It was typhoid fever.

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20060123/typhoid_his.html

Anyone who mentions Thucidydes in public is probably a Straussian.

Posted by Søren Renner on Wednesday, January 25, 2006 at 12:47 PM in History
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A mysterious carriage of the body adopted to cover up a defect of the mind.

MOND has a rival. For those of you who were always attracted to alternative theories of gravitation (besides the standard one which uses “dark matter” to explain gravity rotation curves) but were disappointed that MOND seemed not to explain the Pioneer anomaly, this story is for you. STVG!

Is it possible to post and receive a negative number of comments?

Posted by Søren Renner on Wednesday, January 25, 2006 at 12:22 PM in Science & Technology
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