by JW Holliday

Guessedworker has expressed interest in the paper An association between the kinship and fertility of human couples, Helgason et al., Science 319:813-816, 2008, from the deCODE Genetics research group.  Therefore, a few comments are appropriate.

This paper demonstrates that, in an analysis of Icelandic couples born between 1800 and 1965, there is a “significant positive association” between kinship and fertility; maximal reproductive success was observed for couples with kinship relatedness at the level of third or fourth cousins.

The authors conclude that these differences in reproductive success (i.e. fitness*) have a “biological basis” - that is, a genetic basis.

I’d first like to reproduce several comments from the paper (blockquote) with some of my own (plain text) comments included.  I will then briefly cite some reviews of this paper, and then, finally, will reintroduce the concept of outbreeding depression which was previously discussed at “Majority Rights” with respect to the pro-miscegenation propaganda of Alon Ziv.

First deCODE:

Although Icelanders have experienced a socioeconomic transformation from 1800 to the present (14, 15), accompanied by a reduction in family size and decreasing kinship between couples (Table 1), essentially the same relationship between kinship and fertility was observed at the beginning and end of this 200-year period (fig. S2). By estimating kinship between spouses at a genealogical depth of up to 10 generations, it was possible to examine the association with fertility and reproductive success at a very fine scale. Thus, for example, there is a statistically significant difference in the number of children produced by couples related at the level of sixth versus seventh cousins (P = 1.4 x 10–7). Relationships at this genealogical distance are rarely known to the couples or their families and acquaintances in their social environment and are unlikely to influence factors such as age at the commencement of reproduction or the practice of consanguineous unions to preserve family property (4, 16).

READ MORE...

Recently on an MR thread the question arose as to whether Latinos and blacks were really at the root of the sub-prime crisis.  Here’s Stan Liebowitz, who is the Ashbel Smith professor of Economics in the Business School at the University of Texas at Dallas, with a definitive “yes”.  Thanks to “The Fellist” for the link.

THE REAL SCANDAL

How feds invited the mortgage mess

PERHAPS the greatest scandal of the mortgage crisis is that it is a direct result of an intentional loosening of underwriting standards - done in the name of ending discrimination, despite warnings that it could lead to wide-scale defaults.

At the crisis’ core are loans that were made with virtually nonexistent underwriting standards - no verification of income or assets; little consideration of the applicant’s ability to make payments; no down payment.

Most people instinctively understand that such loans are likely to be unsound. But how did the heavily-regulated banking industry end up able to engage in such foolishness?

From the current hand-wringing, you’d think that the banks came up with the idea of looser underwriting standards on their own, with regulators just asleep on the job. In fact, it was the regulators who relaxed these standards - at the behest of community groups and “progressive” political forces.

READ MORE...

As Ron Paul today said he will continue his campaign for the Presidency with a reduced staff, it may be appropriate to recognize one of the most important votes he cast during his political career when Ron Paul was the only Congressman to vote against a resolution saluting the 40th Anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Here is the text of his speech.

READ MORE...

Having passed up the opportunity to acquire an education at the proper time and, anyway, never having been very willing to submit to the tyranny of other men’s minds, I’ve been glad of the theoretical minimalism that inhabits Conservatism.  It is a visceral politics, and might even be a politics of Nature, or as close to it as any politics addressing a complex society is likely to get.  It is certainly a politics of practical men only too inclined to draw a veil across the philosophical obscura of this, our Postmodern Age.

For example, just the other day I happened across a short passage authored in 1999 by the post-Marxist agony aunt Chantal Mouffe.  She was agonising over the crisis in liberalism.  Liberal intellectuals, you should know, are an anxious lot.  They have been tearing their rational hair out over crises in the Enlightenment Project for well over a century (you would think that would tell them something, but no).

Mouffe, while not a neon-light left intellectual like Michael Walzer, Slavo Zizek or Chomsky, has about her the quality of a weather-vane.  She points not so much to her own body of thought as to the theoretical horizon.  Theoretically, Pomo is the undoing of Everything, even rationalism, in the belief that Something must succeed it.  Well, in 1999 Mouffe sensed that it already had, but saw signs of danger everywhere.  “New antagonisms have emerged,” she wrote, “not only in advanced societies but in the Eastern bloc and in the Third World.”

This was certainly true.  Neither the British Multicultural nor French Integrationist models were uniting the rainbow peeps that were the “new West”.  Russia was about to plunge into an ice-pool of seriously anti-liberal New Kremlinism.  And in the Dar al Islam, a dangerously aggressive and expansionist Wahabbism was rising.

The Project, which in its broadest terms is the bringing together of humanity (otherwise known as peeps) in freedom and justice, was heading nowhere but into the history file.  The future would hold no reverential memories of the ironic Fathers of the present.  There would be no la-la land of liberal values.  And probably, caught dancing too soon in the charnel house, the Jewish value of nihilism, Enlightenment’s one enduring gift, would stand naked and shivering, awaiting the inevitable, messy denouement.

READ MORE...

I know it’s vanity:  Tinkering around the edges of an electoral system that is in essence broken, not to mention the mendacity of any system of so-called “self-determination” that doesn’t let you vote with your feet.  But here goes:

READ MORE...

From the Telegraph, a perfect and equable example of preserving genetic interests:-

Mixed-race babies ‘were sent to the US’

Thousands of illegitimate mixed-race children fathered by American GIs were given up by their British mothers and shipped across the Atlantic, according to newly released papers.

The issue of how to deal with the unwanted offspring of the illicit affairs divided the country towards the end of the Second World War and exposed the racial prejudices of the time.

The problem began to emerge in 1944, when increasing numbers of US servicemen were stationed around Britain.  Many of the women they fathered children with were wives of British soldiers fighting abroad.  The documents suggest that where the baby was white it was often possible for husband and wife to be reconciled and keep the child. However, this was rarely possible when the child was mixed race.

... The files, released today by the Public Records Office in Kew, include a letter from a Miss O. Clarke to her MP suggesting the babies be placed in West Indies mission schools.  However, a Whitehall official wrote to the MP in July 1944: “The proposed solution is high-handed and - if confined to coloured illegitimates - has a Herrenrasse (master race) flavour not now popular.”

By the end of the war pressure was mounting on the Government to take action.  In letters to the Ministry of Health in December 1945 and March 1946 Harold Moody, founder of the League of Coloured Peoples, said Britain and the US must treat each baby as a “war casualty” and warned: “Our anxiety is to forestall a social problem which might not only affect the life of this country but which might also affect Anglo-American relations.”

In response Aneurin Bevan, health minister, said his policy was to encourage mothers to keep their children, or failing that to tackle the shortage of places in homes.

The Home Office, however, differed and one official wrote: “Provided it is clear that the mother does not want the child and there is a reasonably satisfactory home in the US the child will have a far better chance if sent at an early age to the US than if it brought up in this country.”

Well, let’s be clear.  For my parents’ generation illegitimacy carried a stigma scarcely conceivable among the dozy and reproductive today.  Lives were completely ruined by it.  But ... for tens of thousands of girls the American military man was just too glamorous and exciting, and too much fun in some very grey times, to ignore.  It wasn’t as if there were thousands of English boys around anyway.

Even so, giving oneself to a negro - American or otherwise, soldier or not - brought into focus a swathe of other, painful moral issues.  Irrespective of the elitist sensibilities of the Whitehall official with his Herrenrasse fears, the public had what might be termed a “direct” understanding of negroes.  As understandings go, it was a rather better and more honest one than the so vibrant, so-so enriching official bilge that gets pumped at people today.

It was also too implacable to be blown away by a few cries of “racism”.  For the family to rally round a daughter who produced an illegitimate white baby was one thing.  It was completely another if that baby was black.  No tales of a loved father lost at sea or in battle far away could be spun to the curious and to the growing child.  A black father meant one type of relationship only, with no thought in the moment the deed was done for self-respect or responsibility.  It was simply too great a burden to bear through life if there was any half-acceptable alternative - and, it transpires, there was.

In fact, the alternative was a very good one from a perspective of English genetic interests.  In so far as was possible, thousands of carriers of African genes were distanced from the English genepool, while English genes travelled back to the segregated negro population of America.

I am, though, intrigued by the Home Office statement that runs: “Provided it is clear that ... there is a reasonably satisfactory home in the US ...”  Did the British government fund orphanages in America?  Did they pay American couples to adopt the children?  How were these reasonably satisfactory homes secured?

We are not told.  But it is interesting to reflect on what can be achieved when the political will exists, as one suspects it must exist again some day.

by David Hamilton

Robin Page,  former presenter of television’s “One Man and His Dog”, a farmer, columnist for The Daily Telegraph, and the chairman of the Countryside Restoration Trust, has set us an example by fighting the new Totalitarian state and winning £2,000 compensation for being wrongly arrested on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred.

He allegedly made a racist remark at a country fair in 2002, which led to him being held in a police cell, and he fought a five-year, one-man campaign to clear his name. He used the Data Protection Act and obtained official documents which showed that there had been no grounds for prosecution. “I believe I have scored a significant victory over the ludicrous and sinister politically-correct ‘hate crime’ culture that is currently doing so much to prevent free speech in this country,” he said.

It was his humorous comments at a country fair in September 2002 that led to his persecution by the police. To gain the attention of the audience at Frampton-upon-Severn, Gloucestershire, he began in a “light-hearted fashion”. “If you are a black, vegetarian, Muslim, asylum-seeking, one-legged lesbian lorry driver, I want the same rights as you.” A complaint was later received by police, and another person wrote to say he disagreed with Mr.Page’s remarks. He was arrested the following month, and then five months later was contacted at his farm in Cambridgeshire and asked by two officers from Gloucestershire to attend an interview at a police station. At the station he declined to answer questions without a lawyer and was arrested. He was put in a cell and told that he would have to stay overnight if he wished to wait for his solicitor, but after 40 minutes agreed to be interviewed without legal representation.

Mr Page said: “I was told I had committed a ‘hate crime’, interviewed under caution and given police bail.” The BBC claimed that he had been arrested for a “race speech” and he felt the incident was potentially damaging to him professionally and as a district councillor for 30 years. He was neither charged nor given an explanation. Under Freedom of Information disclosures he discovered that the Attorney General had given the opinion “no crime committed”. His name was secretly put on a “Homo-phobic Incidents Register”. He was due to go to on a journalistic trip to Kenya and requested a change of bail renewal date, and in an internal email from the arresting officer the sergeant wrote: “Let’s hope he gets eaten by a crocodile.”

READ MORE...

Although not on “Oprah’s book club” list, Ron Paul’s new book “Revolution: A Manifesto” still managed the #3 Amazon best seller position. 

The contents of this book could become quite important as the corrupt Old Media further demonstrates its strangle hold on self-determination over the course of this election cycle.  Ron Paul’s commitment to nonviolent civil disobedience notwithstanding, the use of the word “revolution”, particularly in conjunction with the word “manifesto”, does have real meaning and consequences.