Thanks to Rob for letting me know that the latest edition of the IE browser brings up MR with Google’s new warning flag (on which John posted last month).  It’s purpose is said by Google to be a warning of “dangerous” content.  In effect, and used against a site like ours, it could take away our reputation as people of honest intent - at least with visitors who do not already know us.

My IE, which I don’t use much these days, is too ancient to replicate this delightfully thoughtful piece of larceny.  So I haven’t seen it.  Still, I am sure Rob has it right and some unscrupulous individual is trying to damage us.

It would be interesting to know from readers using the new IE browser which other political sites have acquired this badge of honour.  Not many on the left, I bet.

Thanks to Fred for pointing out this poster, issued by some governmental body in Germany - that brown-skinned and by no means brown-shirted land of happy Panmixia of respectful equals (except in boxing, running and penis size, obviously).

The inference seems clear enough.  But I wonder whether any kind and eagle-eyed German speakers among the MR readership could translate the copy for us.  Basically, is the model family in the poster being held up as a generic German family, or is it the purpose of the advertiser to reach out specifically to mixed-race families - perhaps for some vaguely defensible administrative reason?

AIDS hasn’t been much in domestic news in Britain for many years.  So you could be forgiven for being a bit surprised by the British government’s new advertising campaign warning of a heterosexual AIDS epidemic?

Celebrities including LL Cool J, Christina Aguilera and Ashley Judd are photographed with their hands clasped over their ears or with their mouths sealed with masking tape.  Below, the relevant bit of the age-old adage is spelt out - Hear no evil, See no evil, Speak no evil - and a reminder about Aids.

The message is clear: when it comes to sex and HIV, we are not listening.  It is the first sally in what will become the most high-profile sex education campaign seen in Britain for many years, including a £50m advertising blitz

Of course, this isn’t the first such campaign.  Back in the 1980’s when the awful shock of AIDs burst upon public consciousness we were treated to a particularly graphic and memorable one.  Falling tombstones, if you recall.  You might also recall that the Tory government of the day was bullied by the homosexual lobby into targeting the campaign at heterosexuals when they all knew who the high-risk minority really was.  It was a spectacularly wrong decision which could have cost many homosexual men their lives.

At least the Tories had to be forced to do the progressive thing.  Labour needs no such encouragment, no bullying to prevent knowledge of the high-risk minority being passed to the population at large.

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The post below, concerning Mr Lahn’s new thesis, is a first offering by Søren Renner.  Alas, I logged him on our members list complete with the Danish slashed “o”, which our software couldn’t accomodate (in blue type, not black!).  All efforts to correct it have so far proved fruitless.

So would you please bear in mind that Søren’s first post, made inglorious by EE’s non-mastery of Danish and my non-mastery of EE, is indeed this one.

Apologies to Søren.  From here on it will have to be slashless o’s in blue.

So the cat that Gregory Cochran hinted at on Monday has been debagged (see here and here).

Cochran says that “genomics will do to leftism what Darwinism did to Christianity”.  These papers have already provoked a response from the race-deniers.  Professors are quoted as pointing out that the ASPM and microcephalin haplotypes at issue may have been targets of selection because of fitness effects having nothing to do with IQ, or even the brain.  Which is possible.  It has been said that even though these haplotypes are common outside sub-Saharan Africa and rare inside it, that black Africans might have other genes exerting other effects which could compensate for the missing haplotypes.  This argument is valid and if, in fact, there were no differences in IQ between populations, but an allele influencing IQ was more common in one population, it would even be a relevant argument.  It is all casuistry, of course, designed to refute (without explicitly raising) the plausible interpretation - namely that these haplotypes do influence cognition, that they do raise IQ, that one of them may have been hybridized in from a non-African-origin population (the other arose too recently) and, worst of all, that their scarcity in modern Africa may result from weaker selective pressure for higher IQ in Africa than in the diaspora.

Let them try to refute that idea: but let it be explicitly raised.  That will be enough.

Few MR readers will argue with the proposition that there is a seemingly irreparable fissure running through the politics of the right.  As I see it, it is demarcated by the lack of sympathy which those who answer to their intellects feel towards those who answer to their sense of kin.  Of course, I am leaving out all those whose attitudes and opinions are merely received.  Unless or until they free themselves they are just the prisoners of liberal thinking.  But the others –  those capable of independent thought and those who have “woken up” -  are all people of interest to me.  I want to understand them better than I do.

In particular, I want to understand the thinkers and why it is they can obviously see issues of race, demography, difference, culture war etc ... yet they hold firmly to the conviction that primacy rests with the individual over the group and with ideas over the ties of blood.  Why?  Is it intellectual pride that causes them to spurn the principle of kinship?  But then I firmly believe that mainstream Conservative thinkers in past times did not spurn kinship but, on the contrary, respected it and even strove to serve – or conserve - it.

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The English climate, being what it is, commends the written word to all but the hardiest or most square-eyed holidaymaker.  Being neither I hope, and having spent a few days footloose with my family in the folds of the North Devon countryside, I, too, have been reading a good deal of late.

Of course, we had travelled west well equipped for the conditions.  Three weighty tomes, in my case - two historical, one political.  But in the event I was charmed instead by the double row of titles supplied for his rained-in clientele by the owner of the farmhouse we had rented.

For anyone remotely interested in ideas another person’s choice of reading has the potential for some fascination.  I am not a voracious reader myself but I respect those that are … at least, the ones who read something of substance.  Without fail, when I go into a home where books are important I will find a chance to survey the titles.  A picture speaks a thousand words, they say, and a bathroom cabinet probably ten thousand.  But a bookshelf is much, much more illuminating.

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We don’t get to hear much about New Zealand, so I was interested to read a newspaper report today on the general situation there (not online).

The news, as you might expect, isn’t good. The European population under the age of 40 is actually falling in number, due partly to low fertility but also because of migration to other countries, particularly Australia. If trends continue, the remnant European population will join Maoris, Pacific Islanders and Asians as a minority group.

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