The lead story in today’s Times may prove the last Labour straw for the middle-class.

Secondary students will be offered cheap school transport under plans to open up popular schools in wealthy areas to pupils from poorer neighbourhoods, as well as to promote eco-friendly travel.

Pupils will be charged a maximum of 50p a journey for travelling on school buses or chartered coaches, or for passes for public buses or trains, the Department for Education will announce today. The subsidised travel will be available from September 2008 to all secondary school pupils in 20 pilot local authorities, regardless of ability to pay. Poor children will not have to pay at all.

The plan is part of a move to end the middle-class stranglehold on popular schools in expensive areas and to encourage sustainable travel for pupils by reducing the number of cars on the school run.

READ MORE...

For posterity, I’m posting a 1998 article from the IEEE USA titled IEEE-USA/HARRIS POLL: U.S. PUBLIC OVERWHELMINGLY OPPOSED TO H-1B VISA EXPANSION, subsequent to which the dot-con bubble imported hoards of “engineers” from Asia who then, with their strong sense of ethnic nepotism, held on to their jobs in the US as the tech industry contracted, thereby throwing the European American boomer men, who built the tech industry, out on the street, wholesale, leaving them to fight for minimum wage jobs with illegal immigrants from Mexico.

READ MORE...

The headline reads “National Vanguard Closes Shop”, and the explanation:-

We regret to inform you that National Vanguard (the organization) has been shut down by the Commonwealth of Virginia.

We thank you for your loyal patronage over the years and hope our hard work has kept you informed and entertained while making a positive difference for our people.

If you are interested in pro-European-American news, we respectfully suggest the following sites:

Western Voices World News
Stormfront
VDare

If you are interested in pro-European-American activism, we respectfully suggest the following organizations:

European Americans United
European Unity and Rights Organization
Council of Conservative Citizens

Again, we thank you for your loyal patronage and wish you and your loved ones all the best.

Details of the murder of former England medium-fast bowler and Pakistani cricket coach Bob Woolmer, in his hotel room in Jamaica on 18th March, continue to appear in the international press.  Since there are no reports at this stage of money or valuables missing from Woolmer’s possessions, the killer or killers seem unlikely to have come from Jamaica’s hyper-active criminal class.  The speculation, therefore, is firmly centred on two possibilities:-

1) Woolmer was murdered because he was about to blow the lid on the insanely profitable phenomen of match-fixing in the game, possibly in a book he was working on.

2) Woolmer was murdered by a fanatical Pakistan supporter who did not take too kindly to the team, ranked third among playing nations, exiting the World Cup so early.

Not many people think it is the second possibility.  But if it is the first, it will have profound ramifications for the future of the international game.

Until 1977, when the late Kerry Packer launched his circus with lucrative contracts to the cream of international talent, cricketers were the poorest of sporting professionals.  The county player is still not rich.  But international players earn several time average salary.  The wealthiest of them are Indians, and on top of the heap is Sachin Tendulkar who clears 5 million US dollars a year, almost all from endorsements.

This, though, pales into insignificance beside the billion dollars per game it is thought possible for bookies to make by illegal betting in India.  While the rewards are so high it could not be expected that players’ hands would remain clean.  When found, corruption has been vigorously prosecuted.  But it has almost certainly been more widespread than the ICC wants to admit.  Murder, however, changes everything.  It is far beyond any illegalities of the past, and marks a deeply sinister turn for a once gentlemanly pastime.  Is cricket ready to be taken down some South Asian moral sewer?

At the end of this affair, the ICC will likely have to ban Pakistan from internationals for a period of years.  It is not beyond the realms of possibility that India, where the nidus exists, will pay a heavy price too.  The bookies, no doubt, will survive no matter what.

In Postcivil Society: Empty the Cities I outlined a vision of the kind of world that might result from the destruction of Western Civilization—a postcivil society in which the panmictic vectorism of so-called “globalization” is replaced by much more localized economies and social experiments.  The driver for that coming postcivil society wasn’t exactly specified, but one potential was a pandemic with virulence driven higher by vectorism.  An alternative source of pandemics is bioengineering.

A recent article by Robert Carleson, titled “The Pace and Proliferation of Biological Technologies” essentially predicts that personal bioweapons labs capable of producing deadly pandemics will be widespread in about a decade.  This means that the kinds of people who now develop computer viruses may turn their talents to real viruses—and not all of these people will be “playful” about it.  As I see it the primary potentials here are:

1. A team of reproductively disenfranchized East Asian and/or Israeli men building a pathogen that kills men in high population areas except those with a selected group of Y-Chromosomes.  This selectivity requires some careful engineering.
2. A reproductively disenfranchized “loner”—most probably northern European/Russian heritage—concocting a much less selective pathogen that kills anyone unfortunate enough to be in a high population density area.  Its easier to kill indiscriminately.

Not an overly “majoritarian” issue this week.  But Martin Hutchinson’s mini-tour of the global investment hotspots makes a good read, even if you’re poor like me.

Breaking the BRICs

Over the last few years, emerging market investment has been overwhelmingly centered around the concept of the “BRIC” group of emerging economies – Brazil, Russia, India and China. These countries were supposed to be the giants of 2050 and the only emerging markets that a truly Important institutional investor should consider, because of their liquidity. Like most ideas spawned by investment banks (truly original minds are weeded out by the banks’ Darwinian appraisal systems pretty rapidly) this idea was vapid and silly at the time. More interestingly, it is now a recipe for gigantic investment losses. There are economies in the world with excellent medium term prospects, but none of the BRICs qualify.

READ MORE...

The following is a brief but interesting commentary from JW on a David Sloan Wilson paper (pdf) that, not surprisingly, was criticized by Razib on Gene Expression.

A few excerpts from the paper:-

Group selection provides the fitness differences that were lacking within groups. In the case of a no-cost public good, any variation among groups is sufficient for the A-type to evolve to fixation in the total population, because positive among-group selection is unopposed by within-group selection.  If providing a public good requires a private cost, then positive selection at the group level is opposed by negative selection at the individual level and the outcome depends upon the relative strength of the two processes.  More generally, groups can evolve into adaptive units that are designed to maximize their contribution to the total gene pool to the extent that selection among groups prevails against selection within groups.  This is also part of the consensus that emerged in the middle of the 20th century; it remains theoretically valid today …

That sound thinking can be compared to Richard Dawkins’ absurd strawman argument against group selection, as quoted in OGI by Salter, in which he asks why lions don’t refrain from eating antelope, “for the good of the mammals” (or something to that idiotic effect).  I mean, hello, where is the selective pressure to result in such behavior?  Is “the good of the mammals” a selective pressure to out-compete the strong selective pressure on lions to be efficient predators on antelope (never mind that lions, as a group, can cooperate in hunting, but that’s another story)?

Robert Boyd, who has championed cultural group selection for as long as I have championed group selection in general, has stated that the received wisdom about genetic group selection is correct and that culture is required to make group selection a significant evolutionary force…

Here is where the biopolitical Salterians can find some common ground with the culturalist Yockeyians because Western High Culture may assist in forming the cultural input needed for making white group selection a “significant evolutionary force”.

Human cognition is usually assumed to be an individual-level process, even if the outcome of the cognition is adaptive at the group level (eg, an individual deciding to provide a public good at private expense).  Another possibility is that the group becomes the cognitive unit, with social interactions comparable to neuronal interactions.  The concept of a group-mind might sound like science fiction but its likelihood follows directly from multilevel selection theory, has been well documented in social insects, and is fully plausible for human groups…

Does MacDonald’s work describe such a human group-mind?

In closing, let’s note that there is some irony in Razib’s complaint that Wilson uses an unrealistic “pipe-dream” model to explain group selection (actually, on a small part of the overall paper).  Tame white GNXP blogger David B based his “Salter Intermarriage Fallacy” upon the wildly unrealistic scenario of exactly equal migration and intermarriage between all peoples and all nations – something that has never happened and will never happen.  Not that that bothered Razib.  Then again, David B’s “work” supports South Asian Diaspora interests.  Wilson’s work, if it catches the attention of the “wrong” people, may be understood to oppose those interests.  By the way, group selection is not necessary for the pursuit of EGI, it is a “why”, not a “what”.  But nevertheless, a study of group selection can inform as to methods to be used to rationally pursue genetic interest objectives.

Actually, the reverse may be true; incorporating concepts of EGI may bolster the significance of Wilson’s ideas, and may better explain the actions of those who provide public goods for their group even at some degree of private cost.

There are a variety of ways in which interpersonal relations map onto interethnic relations.  Indeed, the ethnic becomes personal most often through interpersonal relations even if they are abstracted to the level of some television producer making a series of degrading images to project into your home, hence into your eyes.  So, with that in mind, I’d like you to read over Wikipedia’s “checklist” of indicators of when you are being subjected to “emotional abuse” and see if they match your experience, as a white, of your relationship to one or more other ethnicities:

READ MORE...