Wired reports that two companies, Cephos Corporation and No Lie MRI (catchy) are launching commercial services using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect whether you (think you are) telling the truth or not.  If you intend to deceive, the fMRI image of your brain shows your amygdala, rostral cingulate, caudate, and thalamus light up in a characteristic “lying” pattern. No Lie MRI is even setting up a network of convenient “VeraCenters” across the country to serve your truth-telling needs.  Let us bid a not-so-fond farewell to those dark days of yore when Information Retrieval Charges could mount up even if you were trying to help fight the terrorists.

There is data on IQ by State for the United States from 1965.  Supporting the belief of many, the correlation is indeed negative between IQ and rural population (1990 census), r=-.24 N=47, and is almost significant at p=1/21.  However, if one excludes the States with the highest number of blacks per capita, (basically the Confederacy), the correlation reverses to r=.25 N=36, and isn’t quite as significant at p=1/14 (which is to be expected when you reduce N).  As might be expected, the correlation between IQ and blacks per capita is very and significantly negative, r=-.58, N=47 and p=1/85,844.  The 5 highest IQ States as of 1965 were, in order, Montana, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Idaho, Nevada.  Nevada would have been significantly more rural in 1965 as Las Vegas is among the fastest growing areas of the US, so I suspect 1965 census data would yield a more significant and higher correlation between rural white population and IQ.

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Sir Iqbal Sacranie, Blair’s favourite “moderate Muslim” is only to be pitied for saying during an interview for BBC Radio Four’s PM programme on Jan 3rd:-

“If you look into the scientific evidence that has been available in terms of the various forms of other illnesses and diseases that are there, surely it points out that, where homosexuality is practised, there is a greater concern in that area.”

Asked if homosexuality was harmful to society, he said: “Certainly it is a practice that doesn’t, in terms of health, in terms of the moral issues that comes along in a society - it is. It is not acceptable.”

Inevitably, a complaint was received by police from some homosexual activist, and now Sacranie is under investigation for his role in “a homophobic incident”.

There are three messy little ways this unnecessary timebomb can explode, and each has something interesting in it.  The first way, of course, is very much the more likely to predict reality.

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Around the spring of 2004 I found my way to Political Compass, and took the test.  I guess it is well known enough for me not to need to explain it in detail.  The intention is to capture the entire world of political orientation in one square grid, with the north-south pole representing the progression from authoritarianism to libertarianism and the east-west, left to right.  The test involves six pages of often frustrating statements, with each of which one must agree or disagree, and with only the variant of strongly agreeing/disagreeing available if required.

I found that it was required quite often.

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The left loves to create the illusion of a wide-ranging and popular debate on topics about which, actually, the public has a deeply fixed view and no interest in change.  “Debate”, you see, is code for the preliminaries to change.  It worries away at things, sowing doubt where none doubted and, eventually, offering “solutions” none desired.  Without “debate” there can be no general impression of legitimacy, no sense in which consent attaches to the vandalisms of progressive politics.

So when Mike Greenwood of the hopelessly superficial but no doubt expensive government agency, Culture Online, is quoted by BBC News as saying …

“Englishness has always been problematic because we are a ragbag of influences from all over the world,” says Mike Greenwood, commissioning executive of Culture Online, which came up with the idea.

“What a site like this needs to do is reflect that and not impose an orthodoxy about what Englishness is.

“It needs to be inclusive, not just mother’s apple pie and a Turner landscape, so there is a debate about what Englishness is, and the answer will be different depending on your background.”

… you know that Englishness cannot be allowed to remain itself.  It must be digested whole, along with as much alien seasoning as possible, and regurgitated in some new, vibrantly inclusive form.

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First to get a bugaboo out of the way: Cultural determinism is the view that significant variation between human cultures is not significantly influenced by genetic differences.  It is a dogma of the present theocracy.  Second, the scientific bombshell that got dropped on that dogma just may turn out to be a nuke.  It discovered huge numbers of genes that have been under recent evolutionary pressure.  However, the method used cannot detect genes that have been under selective pressure for long enough that the selected genes have become fixed and this means many genes such as lactose tolerance that are as young as agriculture.

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One of the most obvious of human instincts is the desire to propagate our genes. We want to reproduce ourselves, which helps to explain not only our desire to have children, but also our instinct to live in continuity amongst our own racial kin.

At one level, the political class recognises this instinct to propagate genes. It is, after all, an aspect of the Darwinism to which the political class strongly adheres. For instance, when discussing human evolution, the Australian leftist John Bradford is happy to explain that,

“Both men and women are driven by the unconscious imperative to transfer as many of their individual genes, and in as great a number as possible, into succeeding generations.”

So what we have is a strong human instinct urging us to have children and to preserve communities based on kinship, with the liberal intelligentsia giving this instinct a strong recognition in terms of human evolution.

And yet, despite this, the Western intelligentsia acts directly against this instinct by advocating unrestricted immigration and racial diversity (John Bradford, for instance, later in his article mocks white men for their “nationalist resentment” in seeking to exclude a world of “others”.)

But perhaps this should not be so surprising. What if the problem that liberals have with the propagation instinct is exactly its importance to individual life? If you are seeking to create a “free” man, who authors his own self as he chooses, then it is exactly the strongest and most deeply felt instincts which will seem most limiting or oppressive and which the “liberated” individual will most want to prove his distance from.

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Racial discrimination is not supposed to happen in a modern, progressive, liberal society, is it?

So what happens when it is discovered that Scotland Yard deliberately promoted a black bodyguard to a prestigious job because of his race? Are the white bodyguards who missed out given compensation? Well, no. In fact, the black bodyguard has been awarded $70,000 in compensation for being discriminated against because he was “over-promoted”!

Strange times we live in, don’t we? Strange enough for a refugee council in Norway to propose buying camels so that nomadic refugees might feel more at home.