L.A. Declares Homework Racist

LAUSD Declares Homework Racist, Classist

How to deal with the rude K-12 achievement gap in Los Angeles? District officials have a new solution that should be pretty popular all-around.
Based on the theory that homework is more likely to be completed by kids with a secure home life and involved parents -- aka, the white middle class -- LAUSD is forcing teachers to cap homework at 10 percent of a student's grade, beginning next month.
"The policy is intended to account for the myriad urban problems facing the district's mostly low-income, minority population," writes the Los Angeles Times today. The LAUSD memo is more cryptic:

"Varying degrees of access to academic support at home, for whatever reason, should not penalize a student so severely that it prevents the student from passing a class, nor should it inflate the grade. ... While some students do not have the opportunity to do homework while away from school thus failing to return assignments, for others, it is difficult to be sure that it was the student who actually did the work."

In other news, California has the most failing schools in the nation, and we're in the top 5 as a percentage of schools. Yay!

We could probably come up with a law here, so I'm claiming it as Mangan's Law of Minority Underachievement (unless someone else has already formulated it): the more minorities in America underachieve, the more achievement itself will be denigrated. The more white and Asian kids do homework and get good grades, the more this achievement will be denigrated or discounted.

Are the Wealthiest Countries the Smartest Countries?

From the Department of Duh: Are the Wealthiest Countries the Smartest Countries? (Link thanks to Malcolm Pollack.)

[...] The researchers collected information on 90 countries, including far-off lands from the U.S. to New Zealand and Colombia to Kazakhstan. They also collected data on the country’s excellence in science and technology—the number of patents granted per person and how many Nobel Prizes the country’s people had won in science, for example.

They found that intelligence made a difference in gross domestic product. For each one-point increase in a country’s average IQ, the per capita GDP was $229 higher. It made an even bigger difference if the smartest 5 percent of the population got smarter; for every additional IQ point in that group, a country’s per capita GDP was $468 higher.

“Within a society, the level of the most intelligent people is important for economic productivity,” Rindermann says. He thinks that’s because “they are relevant for technological progress, for innovation, for leading a nation, for leading organizations, as entrepreneurs, and so on.” Since Adam Smith, many economists have assumed that the main thing you need for a strong economy is a government that stays out of the way. “I think in the modern economy, human capital and cognitive ability are more important than economic freedom,” Rindermann says.

Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen's study IQ and the Wealth of Nations (deemed "controversial" by Wikipedia) has been disputed, so this study provides some confirmatory evidence. Furthermore, the fact that higher IQ had an even greater effect on GDP when considering only the smartest 5% gives credence to La Griffe du Lion's smart fraction theory.

Schizophrenia

Steve Sailer writes on a new study that shows that city dwellers are twice as likely to develop schizophrenia as those born and raised in the country. The linked article discusses the notion that "stress" may be at work, and Steve is rightly skeptical of the subjectivity of the concept of stress.

Schizophrenia varies greatly by climate and latitude, season of birth, country vs. city, skin color, and other factors. For instance:

Not to keep you in suspense, but much evidence points to a deficiency of vitamin D as having a causal role in the development of schizophrenia. Here's the abstract to a recent review paper out of Harvard, Relation of Schizophrenia Prevalence to Latitude, Climate, Fish Consumption, Infant Mortality, and Skin Color: A Role for Prenatal Vitamin D Deficiency and Infections?

Previous surveys found a large (>10-fold) variation in schizophrenia prevalence at different geographic sites and a tendency for prevalence to increase with latitude. We conducted meta-analyses of prevalence studies to investigate whether these findings pointed to underlying etiologic factors in schizophrenia or were the result of methodological artifacts or the confounding of sites’ latitude with level of healthcare at those sites. We found that these patterns were still present after controlling for an index of healthcare—infant mortality—and focusing on 49 studies that used similar diagnostic and ascertainment methods. The tendencies for schizophrenia prevalence to increase with both latitude and colder climate were still large and significant and present on several continents. The increase in prevalence with latitude was greater for groups with low fish consumption, darker skin, and higher infant mortality—consistent with a role of prenatal vitamin D deficiency in schizophrenia. Previous research indicates that poor prenatal healthcare and nutrition increase risk for schizophrenia within the same region. These adverse conditions are more prevalent in developing countries concentrated near the equator, but schizophrenia prevalence is lowest at sites near the equator. This suggests that schizophrenia-producing environmental factors associated with higher latitude may be so powerful they overwhelm protective effects of better healthcare in industrialized countries. The observed patterns of correlations of risk factors with prevalence are consistent with an etiologic role for prenatal vitamin D deficiency and exposure to certain infectious diseases. Research to elucidate environmental factors that underlie variations in schizophrenia prevalence deserves high priority.

Links

In a hurry this morning, so here's some food for thought.

Effects of chewing gum on cognitive function, mood and physiology in stressed and non-stressed volunteers.

RESULTS:

Chewing gum was associated with greater alertness and a more positive mood. Reaction times were quicker in the gum condition, and this effect became bigger as the task became more difficult. Chewing gum also improved selective and sustained attention. Heart rate and cortisol levels were higher when chewing which confirms the alerting effect of chewing gum.
CONCLUSIONS:

Overall, the results suggest that chewing gum produces a number of benefits that are generally observed and not context-dependent. In contrast to some previous research, chewing gum failed to improve memory

I recently took up the dreaded chewing gum habit, and have noticed an instant mood change - to something like insouciance - when I chew.

Evolution machine: Genetic engineering on fast forward:

If all this sounds wildly implausible, bear in mind that the idea of sequencing an entire human genome in days seemed nigh on impossible just a few years ago. Now it's fast becoming routine. Most biologists would probably agree that it is just a matter of time before we develop the technology needed to rewrite the DNA of living creatures at will. If Church succeeds, this future will happen faster than any imagined.

Why is the world getting older? The influence of happiness on mortality (pdf). Is life expectancy increasing because people are happier?

Regarding a discussion in a previous post on how the ancients viewed different ethnicities, I give the example of the Roman emperor Philip the Arab.

Black Mobs and Carter Strange

An 18-year-old white man named Carter Strange was nearly beaten to death by a gang of blacks in Columbia, South Carolina. For the story, see Occidental Dissent, OneSTDV, VFR, and others.

Meanwhile, mobs of black mostly teenagers have been terrorizing Chicago, Peoria, Miami, and elsewhere. See Unamusement Park (throughout) for good coverage.

First of all, OneSTDV communicates the requisite degree of outrage, especially at the Carter Strange story. A good white kid gets nearly killed and probably permanently brain-damaged solely for the crime of being white. While in a nation of over 300 million people horrible crime stories can always be dredged up, the Strange and the other stories certainly suggest a pattern. The real outrage, other than that which we ought to feel at any story of innocents victimized by violent crime, is that the elites in media and the government are actively covering up this pattern of black-on-white violence, and furthermore accuse whites who notice it of racism.

In an imaginary world where these things were honestly reported, what would the consequences be? Surely not renewed calls for anti-black discrimination; but it would be a first step toward acknowledging the anti-white attitudes of many, perhaps a majority, of blacks, and the violent tendencies of young, black men. And that might lead to the beginning of the end of the widespread accusation that whites are inherently racist and that virtually all of the blame for the social pathologies and underachievement of black Americans can be laid at the feet of white Americans.

We can't have that. The charge of racism is the biggest and most effective weapon in the arsenal of the elites and their media lackeys. Honestly reporting these incidents would the first step in disarming the anti-white establishment. This may account for the reluctance, nay refusal, to do some honest reporting.

Another thing here is that the media and elites themselves bear some responsibility for these incidents. When mobs of blacks scream "kill all the white people" - as they did in Peoria - one can't help but think that on some level the young savages who did these crimes believe in the depths of their alleged minds that they are justified in feeling the way they do. Why would that be? Anyone, even the least cognizant among us, must be aware that whites are constantly blamed for black social pathology, including poverty. Therefore much black-on-white crime is merely the result of playing out the media/elite script.

American Ambassador to Finland Criticizes True Finns

We've noted before, in American Diversity Outreach, how the U.S. State Department preaches the joys of multiculturalism and diversity to various European nations, basically propagandizing countries to vote their national identities out of existence. This is the way of the future, you see, and since there's nothing you can do to stop it, might as well hop on the train, or lay back and enjoy the ride, or something. Now, the U.S. ambassador to Finland, who apparently got his post by donating large wads of cash to the Obama campaign, has been lecturing Finland about returning to the past by voting for the nationalist True Finn party. The following is a translation:

IltaSanomat: U.S. ambassador Bruce Oreck warns Finland of turning inwards, says Hufvudstadsbladet-Journal.

U.S. Ambassador to Finland, Bruce Oreck estimates in an interview with the Hufvudstadsbladet about the Finnish parliamentary election results.

Oreck sees some worrying features in the rise of the True Finns. He estimates that the True Finns have basic similarities with the conservative Tea Party which opposes the United States President Barack Obama.

- I believe that the True Finns as well as the U.S. Tea Party represent people who have anxiety about changes. They are looking back to the past, when everything was simpler. It is understandable, but one can not return to the past. Isolation from the rest of the world and the closure of borders would be a bad thing to Finland as well as for the world at large, Oreck said to the Hufvudstadsbladet.

According to Oreck, turning inward would hinder the spreading of on new ideas to Finland, and hinder trade.

If I were a Finn, my response would be a great big "f--- you" to Ambassador Oreck, but still, he's only doing his job, viz. spreading the propaganda of the neo-Bolshevist state, the U.S.A.

Hopefully this will have an (unintended) effect: the True Finns will increase their share of the vote.

Rotating Polyandry and Its Enforcers

F. Roger Devlin has written a two-part review that is must reading for anyone concerned about the modern state of marriage, declining birthrates, and the feminist regime: Rotating Polyandry - and Its Enforcers, Part 1, Part 2. The result of reading these will be, I'm afraid, thoroughly depressing, for all men as well as women who care about the fate of the West, but knowing just how bad things are might prompt some people to action.

If you don't have time for both parts, read the Cliff Notes.

Devlin ends on a note of both hope and warning:

Men, I fear, will have to demand nothing less than the full reestablish­ment of what feminists call patriarchy—the male-headed family as the normal social unit. This may be a “radical” idea, given how far our society has gone off-track, but it is hardly revolutionary. It is really just the radical restoration of the natural and traditional order of the human family. Baskerville doubts whether a return to father custody can “find acceptance beyond the fringe of political debate.” I think he is mistaken about this. There is no such thing as a fixed “fringe” to political debate. One of the most important forms of political activity consists precisely in moving the fringe. It took much more determina­tion on the part of homosexuals to get us to where “gay marriage” is discussed with a straight face than it would for normal men to restore the presumption of father custody. Indeed, I suspect that men, once politically united, could dictate almost any terms they wished to women.

There are interesting times ahead for men. The course we must embark on is dangerous, but it is less dangerous than continuing to do nothing.

No Genocide - Yet

Not long ago I noticed some commentators here and elsewhere referring to the dismantling of European, North American, and Antipodean white nations through immigration of cultural and racial aliens as "genocide", or as "genocidal levels of immigration". At first I thought this overblown if not downright false, the sort of hyperbolic rhetoric that gives our side a bad name - as if most people didn't think it bad enough already - but I've had second thoughts.

The definition and acceptance of the word "genocide" comes from the efforts of a Polish Jew, Raphael Lemkin, and the convention of genocide was adopted by the U.N. Briefly, genocide is:

...any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

– Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article II

Arguably, none of these are happening or being done to whites or their nations, yet. But, what if the above actions are intended in the future and the massive levels of immigration being imposed on white - and only white - countries are a mere preparation for them? Probably no one or at least very few among the promoters of national destruction has anything like genocide in mind. To quote Whiskey, who commented here on the Swedish situation, there are no "Gestapo, Stasi, or Gulags there. No people fed into industrial shredders, no gas attacks, no mass shootings and graves."

And yet, groups that become the victims of genocide have one thing in common: they are ethnic/cultural minorities on whom a larger group goes to work. We are on our way to minority status, and when we've lost control of our nation, including its police and armed forces, one of the conditions of genocide will exist. Another condition, the demonization of the group through propaganda, is already occurring: the media is filled with daily denunciations of whites and their history as racist, and as we know, "racist" now fills the place formerly held by "parasite" or "Kulak".

Although Zionism began well before the events of the Second World War, the most common popular reason given for the continued existence of the Jewish state is to ensure that "it never happens again", and even before that it was thought by the early Zionists that Jews would never prosper or be safe without their own nation, and they surely had good grounds for believing this. South Africa and the former Rhodesia show what could happen when whites become a minority: while not exactly a genocide, they are victims of high levels of ordinary and state-sponsored crime, including murder, and the state does little to protect them when not actively fomenting violence against them through propaganda.

So, while it is surely an exaggeration to speak of genocide against whites in Europe, North America, and Australasia occurring now, the expression "genocidal levels of immigration" may not be inappropriate. For the first thing necessary for a genocide is for a people to lose control of its collective destiny, and we are on our way there.

Open Thread

I'm pressed for time, and since I know that you guys (and gals) can do OK without me, here's an open thread. First time ever!

Shrinking and Expanding Humans

We're all getting smaller and our brains are shrinking... is farming to blame? This article is a bit confusing, since it says that humans have become smaller, but switches back and forth between farming and evolution as the causes. It could be both of course, and farming could have caused selection pressure.

Cambridge University experts say humans are past their peak and that modern-day people are 10 per cent smaller and shorter than their hunter-gatherer ancestors.

And if that’s not depressing enough, our brains are also smaller.
The findings reverse perceived wisdom that humans have grown taller and larger, a belief which has grown from data on more recent physical development.

The decline, say scientists, has happened over the past 10,000 years. They blame agriculture, with restricted diets and urbanisation compromising health and leading to the spread of disease. [...]

‘We can see that humans have continually evolved but in body size it is not until the last 10,000 years that they have changed substantially, so the question is why this should have happened.’

The timing points to the switch from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to agriculture, which began 9,000 years ago. While farming would have made food plentiful, focussing on a smaller number of foodstuffs could have caused vitamin and mineral deficiencies that stunted growth.

As far as I can see, this is nothing new. It's been known that the transition from the paleolithic to the neolithic, i.e. from hunting-gathering to agriculture, was accompanied by a decrease in height and worsening health. According to this chart, average male height went from almost 5'10" around 10,000 B.C., to just over 5'3", 5,000 years later.

Today, the Dutch are the world's tallest people, and they've grown dramatically over the past century.

In 1848, one man out of four was rejected by the Dutch military because he was shorter than 5-foot-2. Today, fewer than one in 1,000 is that short.

Better nutrition, along with less infectious disease, seem to be the causes, and these also probably account for the Flynn Effect.

Maybe the French have benefited from some of the same trends.

National Suicide

NYC Mayor Bloomberg thinks that U.S. immigration policy means national suicide.

He's right, of course, but for the wrong reasons.

In a major speech to the Council on Foreign Relations on Wednesday, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the United States risks “national suicide” if it doesn’t adopt a more welcoming immigration policy.

“We will not remain a global superpower if we continue to close our doors to people who want to come here to work hard, start businesses, and pursue the American dream,” Bloomberg said. [...]

“Every day that we fail to fix our broken immigration laws is a day that we inflict a wound on our economy,” Bloomberg says in his speech. “Today, we may have turned away the next Albert Einstein or Sergey Brin. Tomorrow, we may turn away the next Levi Strauss or Jerry Yang.”

The immigrants we're getting are not the kind of immigrants that Bloomberg extols; mostly we're getting landscape workers and potential terrorists. Even if more of them were those kind of immigrants, the U.S has entered an era of a permanent Ph.D. glut, precisely because we've imported so many of those smart people, and Americans - the kind that were born here - are now avoiding graduate work in science like the plague. Also, as I've pointed out before, two of Bloomberg's examples above, Brin and Yang, came to the U.S. as children, so unless we're going to start admitting millions of children on the off chance that a few of them might start successful companies, his point is moot.

(Chart source.)


Bloomberg is altogether typical of our elite class. At a time when unemployment and inflation are at a 28-year high, does he (or they) show any concern for the people who already live here? It's to laugh. The only thing they're concerned with is replacing us. And like others have done, as they're trying to kill the nation, they accuse us of suicide.

It's become impossible to find any redeeming value in those who rule us.

Porn as an Explanation for Falling Crime Rates

Violent crime rates have reached a 40-year low, and many have tried to explain it, but there haven't been any universally acceptable answers. Decreasing lead exposure, higher incarceration rates, less crack cocaine use, closed-circuit cameras, increased video game use, and better detective methods leading to increased risk of getting caught are among the explanations. Recently in the WSJ, prominent criminologist James Q. Wilson had a go at explanations.

Since violent crime, indeed all crime, is mainly the province of young men, how about this for an explanation: pornography. Porn has become widespread over the last several decades, but even more so with the internet. Virtually any young man who wants to view pornography can.

Porn fools the brain: while consciously a man knows that he is not having sex with a variety of willing women, unconsciously the brain - and the rest of his body - responds as if he were. Therefore in a sense porn is a real substitute for sex.

Now consider: when men get married and/or have children, their propensity for crime drops precipitously, since they are no longer competing with other men for access to women. (And this competition explains why most criminals are men.) Most violent crimes (assaults and murders) result from perceived slights to one's reputation, hence status, which is a man's most powerful means of attracting women.

So, as pornography can now be pumped into everyone's home, the primitive part of the brain that believes it is really having sex also prompts the porn user to be less violent, just as if he had gotten married.

What Is the USA?

Michele Bachmann: America ‘cursed’ by God ‘if we reject Israel’:

I am convinced in my heart and in my mind that if the United States fails to stand with Israel, that is the end of the United States . . . [W]e have to show that we are inextricably entwined, that as a nation we have been blessed because of our relationship with Israel, and if we reject Israel, then there is a curse that comes into play. And my husband and I are both Christians, and we believe very strongly the verse from Genesis [Genesis 12:3], we believe very strongly that nations also receive blessings as they bless Israel. It is a strong and beautiful principle.

Right now in my own private Bible time, I am working through Isaiah . . . and there is continually a coming back to what God gave to Israel initially, which was the Torah and the Ten Commandments, and I have a wonderful quote from John Adams that if you will indulge me [while I find it] . . . [from his February 16, 1809 letter to François Adriaan van der Kemp]:

I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations. If I were an atheist of the other sect, who believe or pretend to believe that all is ordered by chance, I should believe that chance had ordered the Jews to preserve and propagate to all mankind the doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty sovereign of the universe, which I believe to be the great essential principle of all morality, and consequently of all civilization.

. . . So that is a very long way to answer your question, but I believe that an explicit statement from us about our support for Israel as tied to American security, we would do well to do that.

OK, so she was speaking to a Republican Jewish group - which, by the way, might represent about 10% of American Jews - so one could expect her to emphasize support for Israel. But America's very existence depends on our support for Israel? Because of a curse?

A correspondent of mine who pointed me to this story asked me whether it had really come to this, that the U.S is subordinate to a foreign power? It looks that way. I'm like Pauline Kael and the Nixon voters: I don't know anyone who thinks like Michele Bachmann, but I'm told that this country is full of them.

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" (Source.)

The General Factor of Personality

J. P. Rushton and Paul Irwing have a paper, The General Factor of Personality: Normal and Abnormal (pdf), which discusses and affirms the existence of an overarching factor that correlates with the OCEAN Big Five, and other, personality factors. The existence of this factor appears to be much like that of IQ, and in which g can explain the correlations among various tests of mental ability.

Much of the paper is devoted to detailing the robust and varied evidence for the existence of a GFP, and I won't pretend to understand a great deal of that. However, some excerpts will give the flavor of what the GFP means and implies:

Several cross-national twin studies have found that 50 percent of the GFP variance is due to genetic influence and 50 percent to non-shared environmental influence. [...]

The GFP is largely a genetic factor, that is, individuals who are genetically disposed to have high scores on agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability are genetically disposed to have high scores on openness, sociability, self-esteem, and so on. This conclusion derives from the observation that cross-twin–cross-trait correlations for monozygotic (MZ) twins are considerably higher than those for dizygotic (DZ) twins. [...]

In conclusion, the theory and evidence presented here agrees with and extends the viewpoint of Darwin (1871), Wilson (1975), and others, that social competition and reproductive dynamics have helped direct human evolution. In particular, the evidence confirms a theoretical suggestion made by Rushton (1985, 1990) to the effect that much of the field of individual differences can be organized under a hierarchy of broad, heritable dimensions that, taken together, comprise a fast–slow (r–K) life history. This perspective provides increased coherence to the study of human behavior and makes unique predictions, not easily derivable from other approaches.

An obvious question arises as to whether and how much the GFP varies systematically between groups. Rushton has already suggested that the r-K life history, which refers to the the varying degree to which a species produces a great number of offspring and low parental investment, or the opposite, varies among human groups. So the GFP ought to as well.

Elsewhere in the paper, Rushton and Irwing state that the GFP would have been selected for because a higher GFP signifies greater cooperation and sociability within a group, and people want to mate with those who display these traits, and additionally groups that have these traits are more likely to win "competitions and wars".

Analogous to IQ, it seems that we could expect different environmental conditions to select for differing degrees of the GFP, so that geographical variations would arise. In particular, it seems to me that Cochran and Harpending's thesis that agricultural societies have seen sped-up evolution in the form of selection for more cooperation and less interpersonal violence could be a major cause of variations in the GFP. People in societies that have been agricultural longer may have higher GFPs. Perhaps the GFP could be invoked for events like the expansion of the Roman Empire, the Romans perhaps having evolved higher GFPs.

All this (my stuff) is just rank speculation. Maybe someone else has thought this through more thoroughly, or maybe my understanding of this is flawed.

Counter-Attack: Evolutionary Psychologists and Academics Defend Kanazawa (updated)

Well, this ought to leave a little egg on the faces of Kanazawa's critics: a who's who of evolutionary psychologists and psychometric scientists has written a letter to Times Higher Education. The letter has not been either accepted or published yet, but a commenter at Times Higher Education has posted it.

Here are the names among the signatories that jumped out at me: Bruce Charlton; Paul Gottfried - not a psychologist but a historian and prominent paleoconservative; Henry Harpending; Richard Lynn; Kevin MacDonald (sic!); Helmuth Nyborg; J. Philippe Rushton; and Tatu Vanhanen. Here's the letter:

Sir - We believe the criticisms of Satoshi Kanazawa's work by Alex Alvergne and others (letter, 2 June) cannot be justified. Contrary to the assertion that Kanazawa does poor work, he has published 70 articles in peer-reviewed journals in the fields of psychology, sociology, political science, biology and medicine. These are listed on his website and many of them are in high impact top journals.

The critics assert that many of these papers are bad science and have only been published as a result of a faulty peer-review system. This cannot be accepted. Editors of journals send papers submitted to them to reviewers with expertise in the field and only publish papers that reviewers recommend as sound. Thus, all of Kanazawa's papers have been judged as sound by competent reviewers. Others may disagree, and in the case of innovative papers of the kind Kanazawa writes, frequently do. Time eventually tells whether the authors of the papers or the critics are right.

The critics complain that when Kanazawa has a paper rejected by a journal, he sends it to another journal and publishes it there. Who among those in academia has not done this? Reviewers frequently misjudge a paper and editors accept their recommendations. The author then sends it elsewhere and it is accepted. If there was anything wrong with this, then, as the first commentator ("Liston") on John Gill's article in Times Higher Education notes, "A few Nobel prizes will have to be returned."

The critics assert that Kanazawa rarely responds to his critics. Contrary to this accusation, we believe that, while he sometimes has not responded immediately, he has frequently dealt with criticisms in subsequent work. For example, with respect to the criticisms made by Gelman of his paper reporting that physically more attractive parents are more likely to have daughters, Kanazawa replicated his earlier finding with a different data set from a different nation, and published the replication in the journal Reproductive Sciences in 2011.

Kanazawa even sought Gelman's comments on the draft and Gelman's contribution is acknowledged in the published paper. Kanazawa's 2010 American Psychologist article also responds to many of the criticisms that were levelled against his 2004 Psychological Review article.

Finally, we believe that the proper place to make criticisms of academic papers is in the journals in which the papers are published, and not in letters to the press, where they cannot be adequately answered.

Professor Alex Beaujean, Department of Psychology, Baylor University, Texas, USA.

Christopher Brand, Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, 1970-1997, UK.

Professor Bruce Charlton, Department of Psychology, University of Buckingham, UK.

Dr Eric Crampton, Department of Economics, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, NZ.

Professor Aurelio José Figueredo, Department of Psychology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA.

Professor Gordon G. Gallup, Jr, Department of Psychology, State University of New York, Albany, NY, USA.

Professor Paul Gottfried, Department of History, Elizabethtown College, Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, USA.

Professor Henry Harpending, Department of Anthropology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.

Professor emeritus Richard Lynn, Department of Psychology,
University of Ulster, Coleraine, Northern Ireland, UK.

Professor Kevin MacDonald, Department of Psychology, California State University, Long Beach, California, USA.

Professor Gerhard Meisenberg, Department of Biochemistry, Ross University Medical School, Dominica, West Indies.

Professor Michael E. Mills, Department of Psychology, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, California, USA.

Professor emeritus Helmuth Nyborg, Department of Psychology, Aarhus University, Denmark.

Professor Byron Roth, Department of Psychology, Dowling College, Long Island, New York, USA.

Professor J. Philippe Rushton, Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada.

Professor Stephen Rushton, College of Education, University of South Florida, Sarasota, Florida, USA.

Professor Donald Templer, Department of Psychology, Alliant International University (retired), Fresno, California, USA.

Dr James Thompson, Department of Psychology, University College, London, UK.

Professor Birgitta Tullberg, Department of Evolutionary Ecology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden.

Professor Fredrik Ullén, Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden.

Professor emeritus Tatu Vanhanen, Department of Political Science, University of Tampere, Finland.

Professor emeritus Erich Weede, Department of Sociology, University of Bonn, Germany.

Professor Predrag Zarevski, Department of Psychology, University of Zagreb, Croatia.

Naturally, I don't disagree with a word here. It was disingenuous in the extreme for the authors of the original letter criticizing Kanazawa to complain that he sent some of his papers to other journals after their rejection, a common practice. Since all of Kanazawa's papers have been peer-reviewed, the complainants should perhaps have directed their ire at the reviewers, who are normally anonymous and who recommended each one of the papers as worthy of being published in a scientific journal and therefore can be considered examples of proper science.

Whether this letter, which one imagines Times Higher Education will have to publish officially, will make a difference remains to be seen, but I'm guessing that the LSE would have a hard time canning Kanazawa or applying "sanctions" after this letter. According to the author's bio in Miller and Kanazawa's Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, Kanazawa is tenured, so it could be that the campaign to fire him from anything other than Psychology Today was doomed from the start.

The signatories of this letter are to be commended for their courage here. Though a glance through their affiliations reveals that many are retired or well into the latter part of their careers, many are not, and thus could be subject to the same kind of pressure that they are protesting against. However, some of them have published even more politically incorrect articles and papers than Kanazawa has - though usually farther out of the limelight than a popular magazine - so many of them have already amply shown their courage - that or their devil-may-care attitude. At least one of the signatories himself fell victim to a campaign similar to that recently unleashed.

Update: Times Higher Ed has officially published the letter, which has been slightly revised. In particular, the line "Critics complain that Kanazawa rarely responds to critics" has been changed to "The detractors assert that Kanazawa rarely responds to brickbats." Good one.

Salt, Mortality, and Anti-Hedonistic Bias

A study recently published in JAMA found that those who were in the highest category of salt intake had much lower mortality than those in the lowest. The hazard ratio after adjustment was 1.56 in the lowest tertile of consumption, i.e. they were 56% more likely to die.

Seth Roberts remarks, "It is hard to interpret this finding in a way that makes mainstream health care look good." And commenting on a doctor at the CDC, he says, "That someone at the CDC is so clueless is remarkable." In the NYT article on the study, we get this:

“It’s a problematic study,” Dr. Sacks said. “We shouldn’t be guiding any kind of public health decisions on it.”

Too late. We've been told for years to watch our salt intake, so it appears that public health officials have already made recommendations on flawed science. This likely occurred because of what I'll call anti-hedonistic bias (or ascetic bias?), which has been rampant in medical research over the past 30 years or so. Anti-hedonistic bias first showed up in Ancel Keys's recommendations to eat a low-fat diet, which was echoed and amplified in both research and popular media, and which now looks seriously wrong. Other examples of anti-hedonistic bias might be in exercise (distance running) or the recommendation to eat more fiber (also likely to be either unnecessary or positively harmful).

Another tenet of mainstream health advice goes down.

Piling on Kanazawa

Bruce Charlton pointed to a statement signed by no less than 68 college professors: Kanazawa's bad science does not represent evolutionary psychology (pdf). Charlton suggests that the message of this statement is "I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient."

The statement drones on about Kanazawa's allegedly bad science, but to my mind the key passage is this:

We have therefore taken the unusual step of making this statement to counteract the damage we believe he is doing to the perception of our discipline in the media and among the public. The principle of applying evolutionary theory to the study of human psychology and behaviour is sound, and there is a great deal of high-quality, nuanced, culturally-sensitive evolutionary research ongoing in the UK and elsewhere today (see for example the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association, which actively aims to promote rigour within the field). [Emphasis added.]

In other words, a great deal of research in evolutionary psychology has been cut to fit today's fashions, that is, it is done with an eye toward not offending any groups who have a tendency to get so upset at results that they don't like that they demand the heads of the researchers who produced those results.

The statement lists 24 papers that have critiqued Kanazawa's research, a couple of which I've read. For someone who supposedly does bad science, it seems strange that he would require so much refutation. Among his ideas that are criticized are: that IQ is positively correlated to cold climate and distance from Africa; that beauty and intelligence are related; that big and tall parents have more sons; IQ as an explanation for global disparities in health; that intelligence is a domain-specific adaptation, specifically for the domain of evolutionary novelty; and more. While it's certainly possible that Kanazawa got every one of these wrong, the extraordinary fecundity of ideas, taken together with the large number of papers attempting to refute them, suggest to me that Kanazawa has at the least been a catalyst for a great deal of original thinking in evolutionary psychology.

Perhaps more to the point, aside from pointing and sputtering, no one has really explained the nature of Kanazawa's sin in alleging that races differ in attractiveness. Is anyone saying that it is impossible for them to differ in that way? If so, why? The zeitgeist has it that race is only skin deep and, supposing that is true, that at least means that races differ in appearance from each other, and attractiveness is based on appearance. Do the denouncers believe that sexual selection effects have been uniformly the same everywhere on earth during the era of evolutionary adaptedness? And if not, isn't at least possible that sexual selection produced results in one location that would be considered objectively more attractive in today's globalized world, in which we can compare with ease? As far as I can see, on all this, the critics are silent.

However, it's not difficult to see what the uproar is about: Kanazawa wrote something seen as critical of black people. The entire liberal project, from mass immigration to democratizing the Middle East to improving the lot of blacks and others in the West, is all based on the intrinsic equality of peoples. Any deviation from a perfectly equal outcome is blamed on the racism of whites. As such, the dogma of equality, while it can be criticized in obscure scientific journals only read by scientists and nerds, cannot be questioned too much in the open, and that is what Kanazawa did.

Stephen Jay Gould: The Misrepresentation of Science

From Dienekes, Stephen Jay Gould: Incompetent or Biased?, and Razib, A Mismeasured Mismeasurement of Man. It appears that Gould, whether deliberately or inadvertently (my money is on "deliberately") misrepresented important research on skull measurement, in his attempt to show that systematic racial differences in cranial capacity do not exist. Why is this important? Razib notes that Gould's book is a touchstone for those who argue against human biodiversity, due to Gould's "authority and eminence".

Gould's book is still constantly cited by liberal creationists who believe, on very little evidence, that evolution both stopped at the neck and that it stopped 50,000 years ago. Razib quotes Paul Krugman (sic, a quote I've used here before) to the effect that actual evolutionary biologists don't think so highly of Gould. As I recall, a good deal of The Mismeasurement of Man argues against the reality of intelligence and the validity of IQ tests, this by a man who had no authority in that area, since he was neither a psychologist not psychometrician. Given his misrepresentation of science where it concerns skull measurement, one can imagine how much of his polemic against IQ testing was deliberate obfuscation.

Update, 6/10/11: Both hbd chick and Ortu Kan brought to my attention the post by John Hawks on this topic. Hawks doesn't hesitate to accuse Gould of, at the least, arguing in very bad faith:

Anyway, you can see why I find this outrageous. Gould used the well-documented work of a long-dead man to make an argument that unconscious bias is widespread in science. He posed as a concerned critic, but thereby cast doubt on the validity of the scientific enterprise. He picked volume measurement and tabulation of averages as his target, making it seem as if the simplest and most objective observations -- the Junior High-level science methods -- were themselves subject to all-encompassing cultural biases. His paper and book are very widely read and cited by people who will never examine the primary evidence. Gould owed us a responsible reading and trustworthy reporting on that evidence. In its place, he made up fictional stories, never directly examined the evidence himself, and misreported Morton's numbers.

This stuff really ticks me off. I don't think that Gould's errors can be written off as "unconscious bias". Reading back over his 1978 article, I cannot believe that Science published it.

A Different Attempt to Explain Weiner

Lawrence Auster attempts to explain Anthony Weiner's behavior, and says,

As we know, the polymorphously perverse nature of the human sex drive means that people are capable of sexualizing anything. Such sexualization of things that should not be sexualized ranges from the abnormal (sexualizing a shoe) to the criminal (sexualizing a child). Somewhere along the spectrum of abnormal sexual behavior is self-exposure. My theory is that the reason Weiner sent that photo was not that he thought it would attract the young woman, but that he got a sexual charge from exposing himself. What he did was strange and perverted, but it was not incomprehensible.

Obviously we can't know what was going on in Weiner's head, but I propose a simpler explanation, one that involves a mistake that seems all too common these days. That is, Weiner - along with lots of other men - knew that he would like to receive a comparable photo from a woman and, not understanding the basic laws of sexual attraction, thought that a woman would be turned on sexually by his photo.

In the same way, in this feminist age, many women appear to think that an extensive education or high income should make them attractive to men, when most of the time it does not. Men are interested in looks, first and foremost. Men make a similar mistake when they spend excessive time and effort on their appearance, when what women want is alpha status and/or social dominance. It all comes from an inability or a refusal to see that women and men think differently and an inability or refusal to see the laws of sexual attraction for what they really are.

As for why Weiner thought that this was a plausible action to take, Auster writes:

We live in a culture in which more and more kinds of sexual conduct are more and more licensed. A man in a highly prominent place in life, admired by many people, with many women available to him, will have his sex drive—including his perversions, if he has them—goaded to a high pitch, even as his exalted position gives him the feeling that he can get away with anything.

With that, I agree, as the cases of DSK and Arnold attest.

On Sweden's National Day, Celebrate Its Dissolution

Multiculti defence sparks debate:

Today is Sweden's national day, a public holiday since 2005, and an occasion seized by many to wave the Swedish flag, and perhaps enjoy a plate or two of pickled herring.

Unfortunately, however, the day has also become synonymous with right-wing extremists, as these groups have chosen June 6th to convene in anti-immigrant marches.

In light of this, newspaper Aftonbladet today published an opinion piece penned by journalist Anders Lindblad, defending the multicultural society.

The piece, headlined "Today we celebrate diversity, not stupidity" (Vi firar mångfald idag - inte enfald), criticizes right-wing parties in Sweden for changing the tone of the immigration debate since extreme-right party Sweden Democrats (SD) entered the Riksdag.

Lindblad suggests that these parties are trying to lure SD's voters with a harsher debate of immigration and multiculturalism.

Lindblad is also critical of those promoting assimilation instead of integration, among others conservative think tank Timbro.

"Development and openness are the sources of our success. Not isolation and insularity. In the Sweden of the future, people can celebrate any holidays they like. Including the national day," he writes.

This opinion piece has sparked a great deal of controversy on the newspaper's website, and just hours after publication the site has been flooded with hundreds of comments from readers who accuse Lindblad and Aftonbladet of trying to rob Sweden of its own identity.

The photograph accompanying the article - a photo montage of a mosque with a Swedish flag waving from the minaret - has been a particular source of aggravation.

According to this report, which is itself merely an account of another newspaper article, only "right-wing extremists" could possibly be against the dissolution of Sweden through immigration of cultural aliens. In that, the report could be correct, since a huge number of people, not just in Sweden but elsewhere in Europe as well as the U.S., don't seem to care enough to say anything about it. Meanwhile, leftist journalists like the one who wrote the above assert that a national day is really a day to celebrate diversity, not a day to celebrate one's country.

Back here in the U.S., unemployment rates have just increased, and except to denounce anyone who questions it, no one ever mentions immigration, which brings 1.5 million legal immigrants a year to the U.S.

From Sweden to the U.S., a war is being waged against the peoples of Europe and of European extraction, a war to deprive them of identity and the means to make a living.

America's Wars and Conservatives

The other day commenter Bobby left the following comment on a post of mine which garnered some strongly disagreeing opinions:

It seems to me that this blog entry [on America's wars and the men that have died in them] has highlighted one of the most decisive splits between the general HBD-aware "conservative" crowd, and the extreme reactionary AltRight types.

The biggest division is probably The JQ. But this is a close second.

I think the reaction conservative types have to this blog entry reveals what Bob Whitaker calls Wordism. Conservatives are more loyal to words and ideas rather than PEOPLE.

And its indeed an interesting observation that the most reviled wars in America's history were the ones that benefited the American PEOPLE the most.

While the most celebrated and remembered ones are those that glorify the IDEA of America and the IDEAS of "democracy" and "human rights".

I agree that this represents a "decisive split" between New Right or Alt Right and conventional conservatism. While I'm not familiar with either Whitaker or the concept of "wordism", let's see if there's some way to do justice to both sides.

Naturally, since I'm on the Alt Right / reactionary side, I believe that I'm right that most of America's wars have not been in our national interest and that therefore most of America's war dead have been in vain, the men sent to their deaths by a government that has its own interests in mind. This is a fairly obvious example of the principal-agent problem: the government is in some sense appointed by the people to act in its interest, but once in place the government's own interests come into play.

Conservatives, on the other hand, glorify nationalism, especially the part of it that consists of one nation being better than another, e.g. it wins wars. Since the U.S. until recently won all of its wars, and technically has not been defeated, it's not hard to see the motivation there. One gets the distinct feeling that the modern-day attitude in Germany or Japan or Italy towards their nations' past wars is not nearly so celebratory as our own. In Russia, on the other hand, even though its casualties in the Second World War numbered in the tens of millions, technically she won the war, thus the casualties are not considered to be in vain, and a pacifistic attitude doesn't seem to hold sway.

A reactionary perhaps looks past the fact that the U.S. has technically won all its wars, and looks at how these wars inexorably expanded the government, and especially at the human cost. Notably, liberals threw us into a majority of our wars, from the Civil War (Lincoln) - arguably even the Revolutionary War, though that seems a special case - to World War I (Wilson) to World War II (FDR) to Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. These alone should make any thoughtful conservative doubtful, but again it seems that the fact that we won for the most part makes doubts cease.

The Mexican War - about which I made a brief argument that it was the single war most beneficial to the U.S. - was imperialistic or at least had that result, since it resulted in the acquisition of huge amounts of territory.

In sum, I think the fact that the U.S. has been generally successful in its wars is what makes conservatives so supportive of them, and causes them to criticize reactionary sentiments toward our wars as unpatriotic or defeatist or maybe unrealistic - this last again because winning would seem to show that the critics were wrong. But if we had gone into WW2, for example, and lost a million men to a victorious Germany, they wouldn't be singing the same tune.

Hollywood's Propaganda Machine

The right-wing blogosphere is abuzz with "TV Executives Admit in Taped Interviews That Hollywood Pushes a Liberal Agenda". The video above I especially liked, because it shows the anti-white agenda of at least one Hollywood producer who, on the face of it, might be thought a non-liberal, because of his show, Cops. Most of the anecdotes recorded in interviews have to do with blatant Hollywood discrimination against conservatives, for instance:

One example is Dwight Schultz, best known for his roles as Murdock in The A-Team and Barclay in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
The late Bruce Paltrow knew that Schultz was a fan of President Ronald Reagan. When Schultz showed up to audition for St. Elsewhere, a show Paltrow produced, to read for the part of Fiscus, Paltrow told him: "There's not going to be a Reagan asshole on this show!" The part went to Howie Mandel.

But as the clip above demonstrates, an open anti-white agenda is part of the scheme, and the video would be more honest if it used that expression - "anti-white" - instead of the more politically correct "politically correct".

In any case, don't expect these revelations to change anything. The leftists are in charge in Hollywood and don't plan on relinquishing power any time soon. The American sheeple swallow this stuff whole and most of them couldn't even be bothered to change the channel even if they knew this stuff.

What Happened to Satoshi Kanazawa's Blog?

Satoshi Kanazawa with Kaja Perina, the woman who apparently fired him from Psychology Today. (Photo thanks to eh.)

When you go there, you get "Page not found". When you search the pages of Psychology Today for "Kanazawa", you get a page of blog posts criticizing Kanazawa. But wait - the home page of Psych Today has this: An Apology from Psychology Today:

Last week, a blog post about race and appearance by Satoshi Kanazawa was published--and promptly removed--from this site. We deeply apologize for the pain and offense that this post caused. Psychology Today's mission is to inform the public, not to provide a platform for inflammatory and offensive material. Psychology Today does not tolerate racism or prejudice of any sort. The post was not approved by Psychology Today, but we take full responsibility for its publication on our site. We have taken measures to ensure that such an incident does not occur again. Again, we are deeply sorry for the hurt that this post caused.
~Kaja Perina, Editor in Chief

One can agree with the editor that Kanazawa's post was "inflammatory and offensive", but as for the "racism" charge, the post was either true or false, right or wrong, or some combination.

Anyway, "measures" have been taken, i.e. Kanazawa's blog has been removed.

Update, 6/3/11: As noted by several commenters, Dr. Kanazawa's blog is now back up at Psychology Today, although whether that publication will still allow him to write for it is unknown. The campaign to get him sacked from the LSE is still on.