The Dutch government agreed today on:-

a total ban on the wearing of burqas and other Muslim face veils in public, justifying the move on security grounds.

Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk will now draw up legislation which will result in the Netherlands, once one of Europe’s most easy-going nations, imposing some of the continent’s toughest laws against concealing the face.

“The cabinet finds it undesirable that garments covering the face—including the burqa—should be worn in public in view of public order, (and) the security and protection of fellow citizens,” the Dutch Justice Ministry said in a statement.

Well, is this a step towards saving Holland or sealing its fate?

The answer varies according to which you place uppermost: Dutch national interest or Dutch ethnic interest.  Those who like the novelty of forcing Moslems to stay on Dutch terms or go wear their burqas someplace else should listen closely to the Mayor of Amsterdam:-

Job Cohen, the Labour mayor of Amsterdam, said he opposed burqas in schools and public buildings, and said women wearing one who failed to get a job should not expect welfare benefits.

“From the perspective of integration and communication, it is obviously very bad because you can’t see each other so the fewer the better,” he told foreign journalists.  “But actually hardly anybody wears one ...  The fuss is much bigger than the number of people concerned.”

It’s easy to be tough about a palliative.  Dutch national interest is the interest of the polital and cultural elite.  They want a successful integration.  They do NOT want - and will not get - a tented city of defeated burqa-wearers at the Algerian Airlines check-in.  But they will get the support of all those Dutch indigenes who believe Geert Wilders to be a “far-right politician”, and wouldn’t know their ethnic interest from a well fattened goat.

A burqa ban is a politically shrewd strategy from a mainstream liberal perspective.

None-too-bright but seemingly unstoppable lip-flapper and scourge of English survivalism ... “The Man” when it comes to equality ... the one and only Trevor Phillips, Tony’s Georgetown bro, has been laying those smooth, smooth moves on the BNP.  Again.

Church should expel racists and BNP supporters, says CRE chief

Churches should expel racists and supporters of the British National Party from their pews, the head of the Government’s race watchdog said today.

Trevor Phillips called on bishop and priests to refuse communion to racists and turn them into “pariahs and outsiders”.

“Will the churches support any priest or minister who says I will not administer the sacrament to someone who blatantly rejects Christ’s teachings?”

... The CRE chief said at a conference run by the Evangelical Alliance, a grouping that includes many of the country’s black churches, that the churches should have condemned the BNP leader.

“If ever there was a moment for hellfire and damnation, this was it,” Mr Phillips said. “At the very least, every pulpit this Sunday should have been ringing with denunciation, ministers and priests crying ‘not in our name’.

“The far right should not be able to claim Christ to their cause. But they will do if we let them.”

He added: “I feel rage that my church might expect me to be in communion with such as Nick Griffin.  This is where Christ puts us to the test.

“In the end it is Christians who decide who shares their fellowship, and who is excluded.”

Mr Phillips asked: “Are we ready to use weapons of faith to turn these people into pariahs and outsiders?”

READ MORE...

Well, if we were to start an on-line broadcast operation (and we are) I don’t think I would associate it with human waste.  Not intentionally!  I suppose it takes all sorts.  Anyhow, the programme list for The Political Cesspool looks more interesting than the name would suggest.

Early this evening (UK time) Dr Tom Sunic circularised me with the link to his TPC interview, which was recorded in Croatia and is scheduled for broadcast at 7.00pm CST.  MR readers who catch the broadcast are definitely invited to post their impressions to the thread below.

If not quite with TPC’s effluent-chic we, too, are venturing into the exciting world of sound.  Next week, in fact.  Again, the MO will be in-depth political interviews, conducted for us by the inimitable and ingenious Søren Renner.  He will begin with MR folk but, we hope, spread his wings far and wide from there.  I’ve drawn the short straw for Interview 1, which will doubtless make everybody who comes after look very good indeed.

Reuters reports that:

Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Richard Fisher said on Monday that U.S. employers were witnessing a clear shortage of certain types of workers, and he warned that this was pushing up some wages.

Oh, no! Not higher wages! Anything but that!

“Fisher is former vice chairman of Kissinger McLarty Associates, a strategic advisory firm chaired by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.”

You know it must be painful for these guys to see the rising sentiment against immigration since it will actually reduce the flow of fetus tissue into the dumpsters behind abortion clinics as people become more capable of supporting children.  I’m sure they much prefer “pro-life” activists who want to import more of their Christian Brethren to work the plantations of their Lords.

Leo McKinstry, a Belfast-born Protestant, has written a fair and honest article which you can read here.  Do include the thread, which is perhaps the most illuminating part.  Gratitude overflows, although of course it contains a quantity of wrong thinking (UKIP the only hope of the white working class!!).

The Daily 49er reports that:

A representative from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a civil rights firm based in Alabama that tracks hate groups, will visit the campus starting today [Nov 13—JAB] to investigate the writings of Cal State Long Beach psychology professor Kevin MacDonald and to write a report for its publication, Intelligence Report.

His heresy?

“MacDonald is producing work, especially his trilogy on the Jews, that’s being used as propaganda by Neo-Nazis and other extremists to prove their point that Jews are a cancer on America society,” said Heidi Beirich, deputy director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Report and the representative who will be on campus investigating MacDonald through Wednesday. “His work is finding a home with the Neo-Nazis.”

Note, they aren’t even challenging MacDonald’s work (A People that Shall Dwell Alone, Separation and Its Discontents, The Culture of Critique and Understanding Jewish Influence) here—they are impugning the morality of the use to which it is being put by some groups.  Nor is this failure to challenge MacDonald’s work unique to this passage—it is characteristic of those attacking his work.  Rather they attack the fact that some groups find it useful for their propaganda.

The SPLC seems to operate under the presumption that the truth is irrelevant.

Addendum:  Dr. MacDonald has now posted a VDARE article responding to this attack on academic freedom.

Tonight Channel 4 broadcast their dishonest and/or technically ignorant DNAPrint stratagem, 100% English.  I am in no doubt that the purpose of the programme was to soften us up for what will be a sustained assault on our Englishness.  It is culture war of the most blatant kind.

Anyone wishing to post a response to the programme can do so by joining the Channel 4 Forum here.  It would be as well to read JW’s post on (willful) misunderstandings of DNAPrint technology.  It dates from 1st August last year and it’s here.

JW’s snapshot of the argument, which I have lifted with his consent from correspondence between us, runs as follows:-

... the tests are statistical estimates of affililiation/similarity to different ancestral pools, and cannot be directly interpreted to mean that any person actually has X % ancestry from source Y.

One could point out that “English” was not a category of the test, and if the English ethny is in fact an ancient ancestral mix of different genepools this does not in any way invalidate the concept of Englishness, English genetic interests, or someone being of unmixed English stock.  Or the obvious distinctions between an Englishman and a Negro….

By analog, the Bullmastiff is a mix of Mastiff and Bulldog; it is now an established, stable breed, and one can speak of a dog being a “purebred Bullmastiff.”

The fact that a Bullmastiff is composed of two other breeds no more means that a Pekingnese can be a Bullmastiff than the fact that the English may be a blend means that a Negro is somehow “English.”

If Orange is a mix of Yellow and Red, this does not logically imply that Orange does not exist, or that Purple can somehow be a shade of Orange.

Earlier today the BBC was already working on a softening-up process of its own.  The subject matter was English patriotism.  But lurking clumsily in the background was a non-prescriptive and, therefore, non-English English identity:-

... now the England football team is a key part of a new “progressive patriotism”, helping to reclaim the St George’s Cross from racists and provide the English people, regardless of their colour, with something to unite behind.

That is the view of musician and author Billy Bragg, whose book, The Progressive Patriot - A Search for Belonging, looks at what it means to be English, British or patriotic in modern society.

“The English people, regardless of colour,” they say.  So that’s it, then, for the genuine English.  They no longer have any right to their own name (a gripe I recognise has no meaning to the liberal mind since it considers all identity to be descriptive - without which consideration liberalism’s great lodestar of the unfettered will has no meaning).

READ MORE...

For over 10 years (actually more like 20) I’ve been saying some of my best friends are Neanderthals.  For a much shorter time I’ve been saying that there should be more attention paid to the fragility of humans evolved to push the frontiers of the ecological range of humanity (although I had the seeds of this idea 8 years earlier).  For an even shorter time I’ve been saying that the recent explosion of autism may be exhibiting that fragility in the form of higher incidence among people related to those at the frontiers of humanity in Europe, specifically the Finns or possibly the Saami, as technologically amplified mixing of human ecologies put them in contact with other human ecologies, specifically, that of Asian Indians.

It has been known for some time that both Neanderthals and autists (at least in their early development) have approximately 10% larger brains than neurotypical humans.  What hasn’t been known in the published literature until just this last month is not only (as previously reported here in MR) that Neanderthals may have contributed substantially to human macrocephaly (larger brains) but the macrocephaly of autists may not be a sign of pathology—rather part of their genetic heritage.

This is particularly poignant for me because when I posted back in 1994 “some of my best friends are Neanderthal” I had in mind specifically a friend who was working in Palo Alto, CA at a startup of about 100 employees where 4 families would have children diagnosed with autism within the next few years (one of those diagnoses was downgraded to Aspergers).  One of those children was the first born son of the “Neanderthal” friend of mine.  That boy remains profoundly autistic—unable to talk at all. (I also have a blood relative with Aspergers born to an Rh- mother whose brother suffered from autism—which anecdotally reinforces the “frontiers of the ecological range” susceptibility hypothesis but I admit these anecdotes are more poignant than necessarily relevant.)

I should close by referencing the website of an “aspie” (person with Asperger’s syndrome) Swede who has gathered a lot of data over the years supporting his own Neanderthal theory of autism.  He doesn’t do much in the way of providing any explanations for why there should be a dramatic increase in autism but he does do a good job of compiling generally relevant studies for arguing how Neanderthal lineages may be susceptible.

PS: There is only one published study I know of that supposedly “debunks” the above-mentioned ethnic correlate with autism—and that study (conducted by neighbors of the Berkeley “autism epidemiologist” who refused to look into the microcluster in Palo Alto I reported above) lists a number of predictors of “autism”—one of which is a black mother.  The problem is other predictors, such as high education of the mother, advanced age of the mother, negatively correlate with being a black mother.  This could mean that black mothers are particularly prone to bear “autists” if they are educated and/or delay motherhood but it could also quite easily point to a pre-existing different developmental pathway leading to similar symptomatology, but which has not been contributing substantially to the increased incidence of autism.  Certainly there are no accepted biological tests to discriminate “autists” from other pathologies and much of the difficulty we see in statistical analyses of autism may simply be the confusion of these various developmental pathways leading to similar syndromes.