Juggalos

James Edwards has posted a video, "American Juggalo", which he terms an instance of "decadence so advanced that one can only conclude and hope that we are living in a terminal stage of Western civilization."

After watching this video, one can only agree. Juggalos are hardcore fans of Insane Clown Posse, a rap group that appears to be comprised, as far as I can tell, of white men - or should I say "white" "men", because the little music that I've been able to stand to listen to sounds no different than the usual black rap. According to the Wiki page, ICP has made a small fortune with their "music".

The video on the Juggalos shows us a motley, highly unappealing collection of the most idiotic, most pierced morons that one could imagine. None of them seem to be able to use any other adjective but f**kin' or m*****f**kin', nor to say anything that makes much sense. All of them appear to be on massive quantities of drugs and/or alcohol. (One scene shows a bunch of them sniffing whipped cream propellant. (I forget what that's called.)) Virtually all them are fat and don't mind displaying their mounds of flesh. One of the most repellant aspects of the Juggalos is the way they have themselves convinced that they comprise some sort of brotherhood, that they receive a form of acceptance from each other that "normal" society has somehow denied them, when in reality, if push came to shove, they look like they'd be running for the hills to save their sorry asses.

In short, they appear to be among the most worthless human beings on the planet. Unfortunately, almost all of them are white.

If these clowns represent anything close to the future of the white race, we're doomed.

US ambassador urges Serbia to secure gay pride

September 28, 2011 — BELGRADE, Serbia (AP)

— The U.S. ambassador to Serbia has urged authorities to provide security for an upcoming gay pride march that has faced threats from extremists.

Mary Warlick said in a statement Wednesday that pride marches present an "important and widely-accepted vehicle" for the gay community to advocate their rights. Serbia's pride march is set for Sunday, but there are fears it could erupt in violence similar to last year's when more than 100 people were injured. A right-wing group has scheduled its own gathering on the same day.

Warlick praised the Serbian authorities for securing last year's event despite the attacks, and urged them "to do everything possible to facilitate a successful and safe event this year as well."

The U.S. government is relentlessly enforcing its mission of multiculting the world. In the case of Serbia, we actually went to war with them in order to make their neck of the woods safe for Muslims, so now the Serbians must be wondering what we'll do if they don't bow down before our latest mandate.

One might think that our government has bigger fish to fry than "encouraging" a European country to have a gay pride parade, but apparently not.

(Thanks to Matra.)

Perry Says "Sorry"

Perry apologizes for 'heartless' comment on immigration question

Rick Perry said Wednesday that he was sorry for saying at last week's Republican debate that those opposed to providing an in-state tuition break to the children of illegal immigrants "did not have a heart."

“I was probably a bit over-passionate by using that word and it was inappropriate,” Perry said in a interview with Newsmax. “In Texas in 2001 we had 181 members of the legislature — only four voted against this piece of legislation — because it wasn’t about immigration it was about education.”

But Perry stood by his argument that building a fence along the entire Mexican border was unwise. The Texas governor said that the fence would likely be expensive, ineffective and violate the property rights of those who owned land on the border.

"...violate the property rights of those who owned land on the border." Ha! Good one. Perry seems never to have heard of eminent domain, nor with his Chamber of Commerce mentality does he believe that securing the border is more important than protecting private landowners - likely including many wealthy people, oil companies, and so on - on the border.

He also excuses his support for in-state tuition for children of illegal immigrants by the fact that quite a few of his fellow Texas legislators are all for open borders too.

“In the metropolitan areas where the fencing actually can play a positive role, absolutely,” he said. “But you have to have boots on the ground … having an obstacle without observation is no obstacle at all. So just the idea of building a fence and saying, ‘That will take care of it, let’s just build a fence,’ has never worked in the history of mankind.”

Plus, he's a defeatist who believes that those he's speaking to are morons.

Perry is toast, which is just as well, because Texas politicians can't be trusted.

Another Evolutionary Psychologist Attacked

Race intelligence professor accused of dishonesty (thanks to kiwiguy):

Controversial former Aarhus University developmental psychologist and “intelligence researcher” Helmuth Nyborg is once again being charged with scientific dishonesty. This time for claiming that immigrants are lowering Denmark’s IQ average.

The article, published in April in the British journal 'Personality and Individual Differences', presents a statistical model for how average IQ levels in Denmark will fall steadily over the years as a direct result of immigration from what Nyborg called “low IQ countries”.

Nyborg's article on immigration and declining average IQ in Denmark was discussed here.

But three researchers from Aarhus University and Aalborg University have argued that Nyborg’s annuity model is unscientific and twists the facts. They claim, moreover, that he plagiarised it from the work of an economist with connections to the nationalist, anti-immigration organisation Den Danske Forening, reports Information newspaper.

“It’s a model where you have a completely hypothetical idea that certain [immigrant] population groups have the same birth rates as people in the country they came from. But it doesn’t take into account what is known about demographic changes,” Jens Mammen, a professor emeritus from Aarhus University, one of the three researchers who filed the complaint against Nyborg, told Information.

Besides sloppy science, Mammen and the others have accused Nyborg of outright plagiarism.

They claim that the annuity model in Nyborg’s article was actually created by Jørn Ebbe Vig, who they claim is an economist and statistician for Den Danske Forening.

Den Danske Forening does not publish the names of its members or leadership, but its website claims, in English, that its objective is “to safeguard Danish culture, language and traditional lifestyle” and “to warn against the dissolution of our cultural identity which is now under threat of being swamped by an enormous influx of immigrants from countries plagued by overpopulation”.

The plagiarism charge appears to me without merit, at least according to the present article. The critics claim that he got his idea, "the annuity model", from elsewhere; plagiarism is the wholesale copying, without attribution, of another's work, usually considered word for word. Again, as far as I can see, Nyborg didn't do that.

Then there's this statement: “It’s a model where you have a completely hypothetical idea that certain [immigrant] population groups have the same birth rates as people in the country they came from. But it doesn’t take into account what is known about demographic changes”. It could be that changes to the model need to be made regarding immigrant birthrates, but this hardly amounts to "scientific dishonesty", especially since the critic who asserts this doesn't know what birthrates will be. Either way, conjecture is involved.

But Nyborg's real crime is that he used data from an organization whose mission is “to safeguard Danish culture, language and traditional lifestyle” and “to warn against the dissolution of our cultural identity which is now under threat of being swamped by an enormous influx of immigrants from countries plagued by overpopulation”. According to the article, this is the main point of contention; it's not that the data is wrong, it's not how it is used, it is the data's source.

The critics aren't interested in matters of scientific honesty, and if they believed that Nyborg's analysis was mistaken, then they need merely publish their criticism in an academic journal. No, they clearly want to shut him up and encourager les autres. Anyone who dares to believe in one's native culture and desires to protect it must be silenced.

Be Prepared (updated)

Update: Daily Mail: Was the BBC's trader from hell one big hoax? Claims greedy dealer praying for a recession in which to get rich was a FAKE

Dennis here: I doubt that he was a "FAKE", but even if he were, he spoke a lot of truth. A quote from the article put it best: "One user said: 'It doesn't matter if it was Alessio Rastani or The Yes Men. What he said reflects how traders really think.'"

A few readers have asked me in comments and via email what I think about the current markets, what will happen, and what one should do. As for trading advice, it would be foolish for me to give any, and as for which way markets will go, who knows? I do, however, firmly believe that the level of debt in the U.S. and the Eurozone is unsustainable, that central banks worldwide will "solve" problems by printing money to recapitalize bank and buy government debt, all at the expense of ordinary people, savers and investors, everywhere. Therefore the best advice was that given by the trader: you have to protect your assets. Protect them from government money printing, aka stealth confiscation. There are a number of ways to do that, which the interested reader will need to learn about.

Update 2: BBC Releases Official Statement On Alessio "The Trader" Rastani: He Is Perfectly Legit And The Interview Was Not A Hoax

How the West Lost by Being in the Lead

Warning: highly speculative.

The West used to make war in the firm and true belief that most of the rest of the world didn't matter much. Before the Age of Exploration, this almost must have been the case, since travel was severely limited. (Glaring exception: the Crusades.) After the AoE started, most Western confrontations with other-than-European forces were easy victories. John Derbyshire wrote:

The Hitler-Stalin duel was the end of an era in which white Europeans made major war against each other. It was the end of an era in which we could do so, secure in the belief—the true belief, at that time—that the rest of the world didn’t really matter much. With the exception of Japan at the very end of that era, the non-white non-European world was too backward and/or too underpopulated to matter. That is no longer the case. [...]

That white, European, Christian Germans made ferocious total war against white, European, Christian Russians will seem as preposterous to my children as it seems to me that English people once fought English people, that Britons fought Americans, that Americans fought each other. What on earth were they thinking of?

Good question. So, first thesis: by being so far in the lead economically and militarily, the West could duke it out, notably in World Wars I and II, while the rest of the world sat. We thus weakened ourselves considerably.

Second thesis: the west industrialized first. One important consequence of the rising standard of living was lower birthrates. For a long time, this didn't matter, because of higher death rates in the rest of the world. But after the invention of vaccinations and the discovery of the importance of sanitation, population growth in China, India, and Africa as well as elsewhere meant that in terms of population, the West fell behind. China, India, etc., were able to experience high population growth without industrialization because of Western technology and expertise.

Third thesis: the relative unimportance of ethnic consciousness in the West came about precisely because those other countries didn't matter for so long. (As opposed to, say, the consciousness of being English vs. that of being French.) While there were many other factors involved in this, the fact that Western (white) ways were so superior led to a near abandonment of ethnic/ racial consciousness. People are closer to the racial roots of their being when they lack other, compensatory factors, such as wealth and power (as in the case of the elites), or even just a secure, middle-class job. This in turn led, eventually, to the idea that race doesn't matter, a peculiar position that is only held by whites, all other races thinking that it matters very much. And in turn, this led to mass immigration from a now virtually unlimited Third World population, one that was directly caused by the West.

Genocide Watch "Upgrades" South Africa

Genocide Watch Upgrades South Africa to Stage 6 "Preparation" on Countries at Risk Chart

Genocide Watch believes that the whites of South Africa are being "prepared" for genocide, basing this on the rise of Julius Malema, characterized as "one of the most important leaders of the new South Africa". Malema wants to expropriate all white farms and at rallies sings "Kill the Boer". Genocide Watch also characterizes him as "a racist Marxist-Leninist", which seems apt. Marxist-Leninists do not shy from mass murder.

Genocide Watch: "South Africa has not yet reached actual genocide, which is Stage 7, but the preparations for it are ominous."

Don't expect the world to lift a finger to help South African whites. The ANC leaders are heroes to the globalist/media complex, so they won't deign to notice. Malema's alleged plans make apartheid look like simple shoplifting.

Sorry for the downbeat post, but someone has to say it.

Putin to Reclaim Russian Presidency

The NYT reports that Vladimir Putin will likely return to the Russian presidency next year.

Maybe he's a dictator, I couldn't say. There seems little doubt that Russia is a fairly corrupt place and that murder is among the sanctions against anyone who gets in the way of the ruling class. Murder, but significantly, not mass murder, unlike under the former rulers of Russia.

That aside, can there be any doubt that Putin will do what is in the interests of the Russian nation? Unlike Western leaders, who disdain their own people and shout down or arrest anyone (such as Wilders) who too vocally questions the immigration and diversity mandate, Putin isn't beholden to any PC nonsense about the strength of diversity or the peacefulness of Islam.

Furthermore, Putin is personally quite the alpha, and it wouldn't be too much to say that with him, the personal is the political. His masculine style - and I say that without irony - carries over into his politics. Or maybe it's his politics carrying over into his style. Whatever, Putin eschews the feminine, emotionally laden politics of the West. While he seems to care deeply about the Russian people, you'll never hear him say, "But what about the children."

In a sane world, we would forgo the absurd, thankless, and impossible tasks of trying to turn Afghanistan and Iraq into Western doppelgangers, and revert to the older, great power form of foreign affairs. And we'd see Russia for what it is: a potential ally.

Social Engineering on an Unprecedented Scale

hbd chick has her own post replying to Ron Unz's open-borders propaganda, assimilation is a two-way street (or why endogamy means mexicans will find it hard to become middle-class anglos). In a nutshell, higher levels of inbreeding - cousin marriage - produce lower levels of trust due to the resulting clan-based culture. hbd chick has produced many posts of late on the topic of cousin marriage, and has shown that those societies that banned cousin marriage earlier were precisely those that produced stable, prosperous democracies later.

So far, so good. Bryan Caplan likes ethnic diversity precisely because it undermines ethnic solidarity, which has a way of hindering his pet projects, mainly the free market.

The claim isn't that open borders will "destroy" solidarity or the welfare state, but merely that open borders will undermine both.  And while free-marketers may well agree that some degree of solidarity is good, it's also hard for free-marketers to deny that current levels of solidarity are excessive.  Solidarity stands in the way of free-market reforms in pensions, education, health care, taxation, agricultural policy, and much more.

By juxtaposing the posts of these two bloggers here, we can see that the link between racial/ethnic makeup and the sort of society produced as a result, is barely understood. Caplan would destroy arguably the most successful society ever seen in the history of the world because it isn't "free" enough for his taste. Of course, he would deny that he wants any such thing, but my point is that we can't possibly know enough to monkey around with large-scale changes like mass immigration, and not believe that it will unleash massive changes that will override anything that Caplan and his kind wish for.

It's often been asserted by reactionary types that Western civilization is inextricably linked with the white race. But what sort of mechanism could provide the link? Gregory Clark has demonstrated one, namely that greater reproductive success among the wealthy ended up filling an entire nation with people who had the values of the rich: productivity, deferred gratification, non-violence, and so on. hbd chick has extensively documented another mechanism: outmarriage, which in turn leads to lower levels of clannishness, higher trust and cooperativeness, and so on. No doubt there are plenty of other considerations both racial and otherwise, such as geography, the latter being hugely important in the case of the U.S., precisely because it shielded the country from invasion and... immigration.

Enthusiasts of mass immigration are engaging in social engineering on an unprecedented scale, and Western civilization itself could hang in the balance. The problem is that the engineers don't have so much as a slide rule. A better analogy would be that they're more like surgeons who have zero training, cutting into an unimaginably complex product of millions of years of evolution without so much as knowing what a pancreas is.

As Ron Unz said, "The racial transformation in America’s national population may be without precedent in human history." The civilizational transformation will also be without precedent, and the odds are that they won't be good.

Ron Unz's Magnum Opus on Immigration

Ron Unz, the editor of The American Conservative, has written a long - and apparently long-awaited - article on immigration, the Sailer Strategy (Republicans should seek white votes), and the racial transformation of America. As I said, the article is long, which seems necessary given the counter-intuitive logic of his argument; following are what I think are representative quotes that get to the heart of his reasoning.

The racial transformation in America’s national population may be without precedent in human history.

Now I think a strong case can be made that such a process of deliberate racial polarization in American politics might have numerous adverse consequences for the future well-being of our country, sharply divided as it would become between hostile white and non-white political blocs of roughly equal size. But given the extremely utilitarian mentality of those who practice electoral politics for a living, the more important question we should explore is whether it would actually work, purely on the political level. Might this strategy of racial polarization be applicable across the country as a whole?

These examples lead to the suspicion that the history of bitter racial politics across most of the Deep South may represent less a conflict of white vs. non-white than one of white vs. black, and this seems quite plausible. [...] The history of black/white racial relations is arguably the single most significant element in American political history, so we should hardly be surprised if it continues to heavily influence the politics of numerous states and cities, including those outside the South.

By contrast, although relations between whites and various other groups—Asians, Hispanics, and American Indians—have sometimes been hostile or even violent, these conflicts have never been nearly as long nor intense and are more like the often contentious relationships between various white ethnic groups. As our schoolbooks endlessly emphasize, black/white relations do indeed constitute a unique aspect of American history.

The results seem conclusive. The correlations between the Hispanic percentage of each state and white voter preferences are approximately zero for all presidential elections, implying that the presence of large Hispanic populations appears to have virtually no impact upon white political alignment, either one way or the other.

By contrast, the evidence for apparent black/white racial conflict being the driving force that prompts whites to vote Republican seems very strong: the correlations between the size of the black population and the degree of white GOP support range from 0.43 to 0.70, with a mean of 0.55, being both quite substantial and very consistent over time.

Meanwhile, harsh Republican rhetoric or policies that target these groups would naturally tend to drive them into the arms of the Democrats. Under such a scenario, the GOP loses millions of non-white votes without gaining any white votes in exchange, resulting in political disaster.

Many of the leading factors driving populist opposition to immigration, such as perceptions of high crime rates or anti-white ethnic hostility, seem completely incorrect. As I demonstrated in a 2010 article, all available evidence indicates that most immigrant groups tend to have approximately the same crime rates as white Americans of a similar age, or perhaps even a bit lower. Similarly, there is overwhelming evidence that today’s immigrants want to learn English, gain productive employment, assimilate into our society, and generally become “good Americans” at least as much as did their European counterparts of a century ago.

The notion that masses of non-white immigrants, legal or not, will turn our cities into violent battlefields or support ethnic separatist movements which shatter national unity are total absurdities, and the people who believe such claims are fools. And as we have seen above from the accumulated voting data of the last couple of decades, after a brief transition period, whites and non-white immigrant groups seem to coexist perfectly well, or at least as well as did the various white ethnic groups on the East Coast 50 or 60 years ago.

Unz ends his piece with a long peroration on his preferred solution. Are you ready? Raise the minimum wage. This will effortlessly turn America into the polyglot English-only, multiracial society of the future.

Executive Summary: The real racial divide in America is black/white, not non-white/white. Most Americans like and get along with the new immigrants and their children, and those nasty people who want to restrict immigration and who argue that the fact that 30% of Mexico has moved here isn't a good thing, and that overall, immigration means that whites are doomed to minority status, are not only wrong and misguided, but are helping to prevent the country from realizing its glorious, post-white future, along with the welcoming rule of our new alien overlords. The Republican Party must embrace immigration or be doomed. By raising the minimum wage, we can end class warfare, save the middle class and Social Security, and keep the US from becoming the next Brazil.

In essence, Unz seems to argue from the opposite premise of many diversity promoters, who believe that all "people of color" have a common, anti-white interest. Unz argues that, because the new immigrants are not black, they and the white natives can and will unite in a kumbayah circle of renewed American exceptionalism.

However right or wrong Unz may be - and I believe his relatively sanguine attitude toward the Hispanicization of the US is completely misplaced - one thing is clear: he in no way can claim to be a conservative, ironic considering the magazine of which he's editor. He has no interest in the preservation of white, American civilization - you know, the one that virtually ruled the world and produced the highest standard of living for its citizens for a good part of the 20th century. For him, there is no turning back the tide, and in fact we shouldn't even try, because it just makes our new alien overlords angry at us, and some other whites think it's mean and nasty. He should rename his magazine The Latin American Conservative.

Unz gives people who are too clever by half a bad name.

The Anti-White Left in Wisconsin

Linda Chavez - about whom I agree with a commenter that she's not to be trusted - writes about what happened in the wake of the Center for Equal Opportunities report about the massive extent of affirmative action (red: anti-white pogrom) in Wisconsin.

CEO has published studies of racial double standards in admissions at scores of public colleges and universities across the country with similar findings, but none has caused such a violent reaction.

Instead of addressing the findings of the study, the university's vice provost for diversity, Damon A. Williams, dishonestly told students that "CEO has one mission and one mission only: dismantle the gains that were achieved by the civil rights movement." In fact, CEO's only mission is to promote color-blind equal opportunity so that, in Martin Luther King's vision, no one will be judged by the color of his or her skin.

Here's Damon A. Williams, an employee of the state of Wisconsin, whose mission and job depend on anti-white discrimination.

Egged on by inflammatory comments by university officials, student groups organized a flashmob via a Facebook page that was filled with propaganda and outright lies about CEO wanting to dismantle their student groups. More than a hundred angry students stormed the press conference at the Doubletree Hotel in Madison, where CEO president Roger Clegg was releasing the study.

The hotel management described what took place in a press statement afterward: "Unfortunately, when escorting meeting attendees out of the hotel through a private entrance, staff were then rushed by a mob of protestors, throwing employees to the ground. The mob became increasingly physically violent when forcing themselves into the meeting room where the press conference had already ended, filling it over fire-code capacity. Madison police arrived on the scene after the protestors had stormed the hotel."

Gee, what happened to all that civility in debate that the progressives have been so worked up about? Rather than debate the issue, a debate which would publicize the blatant anti-white discrimination at the University of Wisconsin, the liberals resort to violence. They're the shock troops of liberalism: mainstream liberals love what they do, and will never denounce them, since they keep whites, conservatives, and reactionaries in line.

Students take offense to study claiming UW-Madison discriminates

"We believe deeply in what we are doing at the university and every student has the potential and the academic profile to be successful at UW-Madison," Damon Williams, UW-Madison's chief diversity officer and vice provost for diversity and climate said.

"The commentary offered by CEO fails to recognize this point and that the presence of social diversity enhances the excellence of our institution in so many ways."

Overall, minority students made up only a small fraction of the admitted students in 2008. More than 85% of accepted students were white.

"Students of color and students of lower socio-economic status are being told that basically, we're not supposed to be here," said UW student Blaire White of the CEO study.

The university informed students Monday night of the study's impending release. Students responded by storming the group's press conference Tuesday morning.

About a hundred students locked out of the Doubletree hotel in Madison rushed through the doors and into the meeting room chanting, "Power to the people. People, power."

Several students gathered around Clegg chanting, "[We are] more than our scores."

Clegg packed up his brief case and left.

New employee to help implement anti-white pogrom diversity strategy

Eric G. Williams has joined the Office of the Vice Provost for Diversity and Climate, where he is expected to play a critical role in helping the university drive a cohesive, integrated diversity agenda.

He will work with such programs as the Pre-College Enrichment Opportunity Program for Learning Excellence (PEOPLE), Posse, the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives and the Center for Educational Opportunity, says Damon Williams, UW–Madison’s chief diversity officer and vice provost for diversity and climate. [...]

Eric Williams comes to UW–Madison from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), where he has been director of the university’s Multicultural Academic Opportunities Program.

Mr. Williams is eminently qualified to be hetman of his band of Cossacks enrich UW.

Eric Williams has a doctoral degree in educational leadership and policy studies from Virginia Tech, as well as a master’s degree in higher education and college student personnel from Kent State University and a bachelor’s degree in African-American community and cultural studies from Virginia Commonwealth University.

The other Mr. Williams:

Pale and Male

Daily Mail:

Speaking at the conference earleir [sic], Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg told delegates that he wanted the party to shake off its 'too male, too pale' image.

'Increasing the diversity of our elected representatives is an absolute priority for me and the Liberal Democrats,' the Deputy Prime Minister said.

'To best represent Britain, we need to have candidates from all walks of life and all backgrounds.'

Here's the freakazoid that Clegg got: still male, but no longer very pale.

Somehow I don't think that a psychotic monstrosity was the sort of diversity Clegg had in mind.

Hormetics

Awhile ago I noted a study that found that epicatechin, a component of chocolate and likely the most important to its health effects, "enhances fatigue resistance and oxidative capacity in mouse muscle". Now that I've had a chance to read the full paper, I'd say that the results seem astounding.

The investigation found that giving mice a relatively small dose of epicatechin twice daily for 15 days, with and without exercise, dramatically increased exercise capacity and mitochondrial volume in muscle. What this means essentially is that epicatechin functions as an exercise mimetic, conferring many of the benefits of exercise without actually exercising. Exercise combined with epicatechin boosted the effects even further.

Lower mitochondrial volume and decreased exercise capacity are hallmarks of aging, so epicatechin from chocolate could be an anti-aging substance. Dark chocolate contains about 50 mg/100 g catechins (i.e. in one full bar); however, only (-)-epicatechin is the active substance.

Most researchers in this field, including those in the present paper, insist on the antioxidant capacity of health-promoting substances, but this is almost certainly not the case. The results are more likely to be due to hormesis, i.e. the ingestion of low amounts of a toxic substance that then improves the body's defensive capabilities. Without sugar, chocolate is bitter, which gives a clue as to its toxic status. Since epicatechin appears to function as an exercise mimetic, it's worth noting that exercise also improves health through hormesis.

Taylor on White Identity

White Identity: What It Is and Why It Is Necessary from American Renaissance on Vimeo.

Jared Taylor here gives an excellent discussion of white identity and why it's needed. Little or nothing in the video will be unfamiliar to readers here, but preaching to the choir is obviously not Taylor's intention. Ordinary white Americans need to see this video - though I'm not sure how that would come about.

Taylor says at one point that the doctrine that diversity is a strength is so wrong that only highly intelligent people could convince themselves that it's true. He also states that no journalist will ask politicians the tough questions about immigration and diversity. What this means is that our public arena lives in a fantasy life, no different from the USSR, in which questioning the benefits and truth of communism was unthinkable, at least for anyone who wanted to live a decent life. (Or earlier, to keep it.) Even for the academics, scholars, writers, and politicians who may genuinely believe the diversity nonsense they spout, the fact that either they themselves nor anyone else is allowed to question it on pain of ostracism, marks them as knaves and poltroons.

Pushing the Multicult on the World

Why Are We Pushing Multiculturalism On France, Russia, The World?

By Henry McCulloch on September 14, 2011

A "Festival of the Cultures of Islam" is now (September 7-17) in full swing in Paris. You're paying for it. Why?

This bit of multiculti showbiz was ginned up by the City of Paris and the U.S. Embassy—which has gone so far as to lend the Stars And Stripes (see right) to the islamopropaganda—along with (what a surprise) Harvard University.

The Institut's website says the Festival has been "organized through a partnership (réalisé en partenariat )between the City of Paris, the United States Embassy in France and Harvard University." Such réalisations always cost you money.

Since Barack Hussein Obama sent former Muppets CEO Charles Rivkin to be the U.S. Ambassador to France (what did his bijou post cost him, I wonder?), Rivkin has pursued a "Minority Engagement Strategy " designed to endear himself to, while increasing the political power of, those residents of France who are not, well, French. [In Smart-Power Shift, U.S. Now Actively Cultivating Muslim Minorities In The EU, By Garret Martin, European Affairs, April 2011] [...]

Charles Rivkin, who is billed as a French-speaking lifelong Francophile, evidently has decided to thank the country that has brought him such joy over so many years by doing what he can to destroy it. A graduate of Yale and Harvard and son of a Kennedy-administration ambassador, Rivkin may also serve as yet another example of how our most "elite" institutions are busily breeding an elite that is bent, for whatever reasons, on ruining the country that has offered them so much. Is it coincidental that New York had to endure the spectacle of a "Festival of the Cultures of Islam" in the very week that marks the 10th anniversary of the Muslim jihad-strikes against New York and Washington?

Mr. McCulloch goes on to say that while the U.S. has meddled constantly in the internal affairs of other nations, this was always done in the interests of great power politics, i.e. in the perceived interests of the USA. However, I don't see that as being any different from the current situation, in which the American ambassador to Finland openly criticizes Finnish nationalism, or the American embassy in France engages in diversity outreach.

The reason its no different is that the multicult has captured FedGov, and FedGov is acting in the interests of those who run it. The globalists, the Davos Men, the mass immigrationists, Wall Street and the hedge funds - in short, the usual suspects - these are the people and groups running the show, and they feel that it's in their interest to diversify - I almost wrote "diversify the world", but that is clearly not their aim, which is to diversify the white world only. (However, the Duke of Qin has made the case that the Chinese elite are no less willing to sell out their countrymen than the Western elite. If so, this isn't necessarily a phenomenon confined to white elites, but elites almost everywhere.)

That the U.S. engages in the promotion of Islam in France is just another example of the neo-Bolshevist state doing what it's designed to do.

Kanazawa apologizes (updated)

Sort of. LSE scholar admits race analysis was 'flawed' (HT: Diversity Is Chaos.)

Evolutionary psychologist issues mea culpa in wake of critical LSE inquiry. Jack Grove writes

A scholar who sparked an international row with his claim that data analysis showed that black women were uglier than those of other races has apologised for bringing his institution into disrepute.

Satoshi Kanazawa, reader in the department of management at the London School of Economics, caused uproar in May when he wrote a blog posting on the US-based website Psychology Today titled: "Why are black women less physically attractive than other women?"

The Japanese evolutionary psychologist based his findings on a survey in which white, Asian, black and Native American men and women were asked to rate each other's attractiveness based on photographs. Black women scored lowest, Asian women highest.

Dr Kanazawa, who has worked at the LSE since 2003, said this was because black women had higher testosterone levels than others and therefore more masculine features.

As I recall, Kanazawa speculated that higher testosterone levels might be one of the causes, not said, a crucial difference.

However, serious concerns were raised about his work. In a letter to Times Higher Education, 68 of his peers in the field of evolution and human behaviour accused him of poor-quality work and of failing to engage in scientific dialogue.

THE also published a letter from a number of evolutionary psychologists defending Kanazawa, but that apparently doesn't bear mentioning.

The LSE has now published the findings of an internal investigation into the affair, ruling that Dr Kanazawa had "brought the school into disrepute" and barring him from publishing in non-peer-reviewed outlets for a year.

The inquiry, details of which were released to staff on 15 September, also concludes that he had "ignored the basic responsibility of a scientific communicator to qualify claims made in proportion to the certainty of the evidence".

It found that "some of the arguments used...were flawed and not supported by evidence, that an error was made in publishing the blog post" and that Dr Kanazawa had not given "due consideration to his approach or audience".

If this article is an accurate and reasonably complete account of the LSE's report, then note that the main complaint is that Kanazawa embarrassed LSE by publishing a politically incorrect blog post, and by wording it in a way that was deemed insensitive.

In addition to the 12-month ban, he will not teach any compulsory courses this academic year.

In a letter to Judith Rees, director of the LSE, Dr Kanazawa says he "deeply regrets" the "unintended consequences" of the blog and accepts it was an "error" to publish it.

"In retrospect, I should have been more careful in selecting the title and the language that I used to express my ideas," he writes.

"In the aftermath of its publication, and from all the criticisms that I have received, I have learned that some of my arguments may have been flawed and not supported by the available evidence."

He adds: "In my blog post, I did not give due consideration to my approach to the interpretation of the data and my use of language."

Imagine, using flawed arguments in a blog post! One doubts that even Becker and Posner and similar bloggers have never used a flawed argument, and virtually the entire blogosphere would be out of business if anyone who had ever used a flawed argument were banned from blogging. Or threatened with the sack.

The LSE reprimanded Kanazawa for one reason only, and that's the uproar created when he implicitly criticized a protected minority group, besides implying that standards of beauty are relatively fixed.

Addendum: Just want to emphasize that this post wasn't meant to cast any blame on Satoshi Kanazawa for doing what he did in order, presumably, to keep his job. I assume - but don't know - that he has a family to support, and academic jobs in evolutionary psychology aren't exactly growing on trees these days. In fact, I'd guess that were he to be fired from LSE, he might be all but unemployable. Furthermore, he admitted to nothing stronger than giving offense and perhaps using a mistaken argument.

On the other hand, LSE wouldn't look too good if they fired him because outside, non-academic forces were offended with something he wrote for the popular media. LSE is, after all, supposed to be dedicated to scholarly pursuit of truth, not Stalinist show trials or Maoist reeducation camps.

Minorities Up to 1500 Times More Favored in Wisconsin University Admissions

New Studies Show Severe Racial Discrimination at University of Wisconsin (thanks to a reader):

(Madison, WI) Two studies released today by the Center for Equal Opportunity reveal severe discrimination based on race and ethnicity in undergraduate and law school admissions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with African Americans and Latinos given preference over whites and Asians.
[...]

The odds ratio favoring African Americans and Hispanics over whites was 576-to-1 and 504-to-1, respectively, using the SAT and class rank while controlling for other factors. Thus, the median composite SAT score for black admittees was 150 points lower than for whites and Asians, and the Latino median SAT score was 100 points lower. Using the ACT, the odds ratios climbed to 1330-to-1 and 1494-to-1, respectively, for African Americans and Hispanics over whites.

For law school admissions, the racial discrimination found was also severe, with the weight given to ethnicity much greater than given to, for example, Wisconsin residency. Thus, an out-of-state black applicant with grades and LSAT scores at the median for that group would have had a 7 out 10 chance of admission and an out-of-state Hispanic a 1 out of 3 chance—but an in-state Asian with those grades and scores had a 1 out of 6 chance and an in-state white only a 1 out of 10 chance.

This study uses the "odds ratio", which is "the ratio of the odds of an event occurring in one group to the odds of it occurring in another group". The odds ratio depends of course on what one decides is the significant variable, but in the case of using the ACT, Hispanics were almost 1500 times more likely to be admitted to UW Madison than a comparable white, with blacks not far behind.

Is it any wonder that, as Ronald Brownstein says, that there's a "sharp move to the right among older whites resistant to activist government and uneasy about the rapid demographic change transforming the United States"; the goods, like universities, that Americans established for the good of their states are being co-opted by the diversity left. But, as Brownstein also explains:

Those striking changes capture the other major demographic force reshaping American politics: the rise of a huge, heavily nonwhite generation of youths that needs public investments in education and health care to ascend to the middle class. The contrast between their needs and the hardening antigovernment attitudes of the aging baby boom could sentence the nation to sustained conflict between the brown and the gray, unless the United States forges a new social consensus between them.

Basically, Brownstein, who's probably quite representative of "common-sense" liberalism, wants whites to soften up their "sharp move to the right" for the common good, i.e. the younger, heavily non-white, generations.

But, as the Wisconsin study shows, non-whites are already being heavily favored in the University admissions area, and whites are being penalized. Hopefully, the white move to the right will become even sharper; the common good here appears to be what's good for minorities.

Meanwhile, in a recent post on whites getting more merit-based scholarships, Malcolm Pollack quotes the late Eric Hoffer:

A nation is on its way out when it devotes much of its wealth and energies to the care and welfare of the least-endowed segment of its population and puts a low ceiling on those who ceaselessly strive and achieve.

Yup, by that criterion I'd say that we're on our way out.

Journalistic Priority: Pro-Diversity Spin

There's only one reason why the 9/11 commemorations were portrayed as a celebration of diversity and tolerance: journalists themselves wanted it that way. The Society of Professional Journalists, an organization that dates back to 1909, handed down a ukase that decrees how any journalist with any conscience whatsoever should cover the news, namely by spinning it. Following are some excerpts from the Guidelines for Countering Racial, Ethnic and Religious Profiling.

— Portray Muslims, Arabs and Middle Eastern and South Asian Americans in the richness of their diverse experiences;

— Seek out people from a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds when photographing Americans mourning those lost in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

— Seek out people from a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds when photographing rescue and other public service workers and military personnel.

— Do not represent Arab Americans and Muslims as monolithic groups. Avoid conveying the impression that all Arab Americans and Muslims wear traditional clothing.

— Use photos and features to demystify veils, turbans and other cultural articles and customs.

— Make an extra effort to include olive-complexioned and darker men and women, Sikhs, Muslims and devout religious people of all types in arts, business, society columns and all other news and feature coverage, not just stories about the crisis.

— Seek out experts on military strategies, public safety, diplomacy, economics and other pertinent topics who run the spectrum of race, class, gender and geography.

— When writing about terrorism, remember to include white supremacist, radical anti-abortionists and other groups with a history of such activity.

— Do not imply that kneeling on the floor praying, listening to Arabic music or reciting from the Quran are peculiar activities.

You can read more at the link, but I think this gives a representative flavor of the progressive minds at the SPJ.

Note that these the journalist wrote these guidelines specifically to counter alleged bigotry on the part of white Americans. They just assume that we're all a bunch of bigots, and that "racial profiling" constitutes a significant enough problem that the need to counter it overrides the need for journalism, i.e. the reporting of facts.

One can't help but notice that the SPJ Board of Directors hasn't exactly embraced diversity among its own membership. By my calculation, it's over 95% white.

Patriotism and Estrangement

OneSTDV writes:

Of course, as with all nations, this comes to down race. In essence, is American patriotism now just the empty slogan of a disjointed collective? The cry of an enervated people who have little to unite them besides sterile propositions and philosophical ideas? [...]

So where does this leave the race-conscious reactionary? Does he give up on the country he founded, the country inexplicably linked to his genetic lineage? Perhaps the previous discussion would have one presume otherwise, but I say no. All too often amongst the alt-rightosphere, commenters seek to criticize and lament the current situation. And since much of this despair is entirely reflexive, they repudiate mainstream patriotism as well. Further, they argue that America has been lost to inimical political and cultural forces that stigmatize whites (men).

Much as I would like to agree with One as to keeping alive a sense of red-white-and-blue patriotism, I'm finding it difficult. the 9/11 commemorations - seen through print media only, since I don't watch television - left me cold. (And no disrespect intended to anyone who lost family or friends that day.) It all looked to me like another excuse to celebrate diversity, as well as our feel-good tolerance of Islam in America. We've done very little to achieve real security from more terrorism, and what we have done has infringed mightily on American freedoms, not to mention killing a good number of young American men. (And tens of thousands of Iraqis.) And the maudlin sentimentality on display is unworthy of any people that consider themselves part of a great nation.

The point, as evinced by the commemorations, is the estrangement from what is supposed to be our own country. On 9/11/2001, many of us were as patriotic, or more so, than the average American. But since then, with ever more mass immigration, with the government and the media waging a sub rosa struggle against the notion that the descendants of those who populated the country and made it what it was have any claim to hold onto it, patriotism comes to look like foolishness, an expression of loyalty to an entity that has no intention of returning the favor.

Speaking Out

This morning I had a brief conversation with an older woman who lives at the senior apartment complex that I previously wrote about. (The complex is undergoing extensive renovation, most of which appears to be carried out by illegals, or at the least, very few white Americans were working there.) She asked me if I heard the noise from the project, and I replied that while I did, what bothered me more was the lack of Americans working there. I told her, delicately skirting the racial issue, that it looked like they couldn't find any Americans to work there. Not at all to my surprise, she agreed with me that it was a bad situation, asked me what could be done about it, and so on.

This isn't the first time that I've spoken to people about immigration or the decline of white America, though I don't know this women well and normally I would be talking to good acquaintances or friends. In this particular case, since it bothers me every morning I walk past the complex, and since I wrote about it here, I felt it would be cowardly not to mention it. Anyway, what prompted this post was Unamused's post on talking about race:

Talking face to face with ordinary (i.e., liberal) white folk (I’ll get around to the non-white folk eventually, I promise), looking them in the eye, telling them about race riots or lynch mobs or media bias (or flat-out censorship) or crime stats or intelligence research or human genetics or African atrocities or white racial consciousness (or all of the above), was an incredibly encouraging experience.

Talking about illegal immigration, as I did, is a bit easier than Unamused's subject matter, since the vast majority of Americans favor immigration enforcement. Nevertheless, I have spoken to others about racial matters, and like Unamused, I've generally had encouraging experiences.

We need to get over the anti-racist (read: anti-white) media fog that surrounds us, and which convinces some of us that everyone else thinks like the media, and talk to our friends and family about these matters. The internet is great for bringing us together and encouraging each other, but we should take some more concrete action as well.

Why We Get Fat

There's been a recent internet debate on the causes of obesity, conducted by, among others, Stephan Guyenet, Paul Jaminet, and Gary Taubes. Taubes is the author of Good Calories, Bad Calories, a tour de force that had everything to do with changing my own mind as to the lipid hypothesis and the wisdom of low-fat diets. Taubes' latest book is Why We Get Fat, which I just finished reading. WWGF is much like GCBC, but shorter and friendlier to the layman, ommitting much of the history of nutritional research that comprised the latter book.

In WWGF, Taubes reaffirms the carbohydrate theory of obesity, discusses where nutritional research went wrong, and why the calories in, calories out notion of obesity is mistaken. It's a compelling read.

Nevertheless, in my opinion there are some important aspects of obesity not covered. Taubes asserts that the idea that the obese become that way due to personal failings is untenable, which is a corollary of the untenability of calories in, calories out. For instance, he explains the greater prevalence of obesity among the poor as due to higher carb intake. No doubt that is a factor, but the poor are different not only in the food they eat, but in psychological aspects as well. The poor - on average, if it needs saying - will have lower IQs, higher impulsiveness and lower future time orientation. This can be seen in the fact that they smoke more and drink more. As such, they will probably be less likely to take steps toward losing weight. I'd say that there's much more to the notion of personal responsibility than Taubes allows.

Furthermore, among the not-so-poor, say your average office worker, plenty of them frequent fast food outlets daily and can often be seen with those 32-ounce cups of soda pop. Presumably, most of these people are in a position to know that the stuff causes weight gain, but most of them appear to care more about their soda fix than about their guts or butts. Anecdotally, I know that when people are told about paleo or low-carb eating, a very common response is, "I could never give up bread." Personal responsibility again.

People with anorexia nervosa appear to lose weight by sheer willpower. Now, that's a pathological condition, but it says to me that the idea that people can't permanently lose weight by willing it is wrong. Plenty of non-pathological people must have done so as well.

These considerations don't explain the obesity epidemic, since it wouldn't seem that impulsivity or other genetic/psychological factors have increased over the past 30 years. However, elsewhere in the book, Taubes notes - and dismisses - the notion of a "toxic environment", i.e. one in which bad food choices surround us. If the toxic environment idea has any merit, and I think it does, since those 32-ounce beverages didn't exist in any quantity until relatively recently, then the non-obese would simply be the ones that have either the knowledge or the conscientiousness and will to resist the siren calls of toxic food.

Obesity existed before the epidemic, of course, and much of it may very well be due to the eating of excessive carbohydrate, perhaps along with a genetic predisposition to overweight. In the main, I believe that Taubes has got it right, but I can't go as far as he does in dismissing the notion of personal responsibility for one's weight and one's health.

PS: Something else occurred to me. Taubes writes at some length about the failure of traditional, calorie-restricted diets to cause any great number of people to lose weight permanently. But, the problem is sample selection; the subjects were all overweight/obese and therefore following the logic of what I wrote above, they were known to be heavily weighted (so to speak) toward people with lower willpower (or lower future time orientation, or greater impulsivity, etc.) So of course the (calorie-restricted) diets didn't work - for them. People who maintain a lean body weight may be consciously following a low-calorie diet constantly, and it works for them.

Modernity and the Lynn-Flynn Effect

A paper by Michael A. Woodley attempts to explain the Flynn (or Lynn-Flynn) effect in terms of life history, or "the fundamental pattern of bioenergetic resource allocation and tradeoffs". A life history model of the Lynn–Flynn effect

A new life history model of the Lynn–Flynn effect is presented based on the idea that life history speed is primarily associated with a trade-off between positive manifold strength (fast life history) and differentiation with respect to abilities (slow life history) rather than individual differences in levels of g (which instead function as a fitness indicator and are associated with pleiotropic mutation load). Given that the Lynn–Flynn effect concerns only the non-g variance in test scores it is proposed that it is associated with ability differentiation resulting from recent population-level shifts towards slower life history speed as a consequence of the mitigation of sources of environmental unpredictability and harshness, such as pathogen stress and malnourishment. Smaller family sizes are also significant as not only do they result from slower life history speed, but they might also potentiate further life history slowing. Education may also slow life history, furthermore it is involved in the cultivation of specialized patterns of cognitive abilities. Empirical predictions are made in the discussion, which if tested, could present definitive evidence either confirming or refuting the life history model. [Full paper in pdf here.]

According to the paper, the Lynn-Flynn effect mainly concerns variations in subtest scores and "is not g-associated". The author goes on to develop a life-history theory of the effect, according to which modern conditions of lower disease load, better nutrition, and more education causes people to have "slower" life histories. That is, people now put more energy into having fewer children but allocating greater parental resources to raising them; to having fewer sexual partners but for a longer period of time; and to invest more of their own and their children's resources and time into education. Since, according to the paper, life history has a heritability of about .65, this leaves plenty of scope for environmental influence.

So, the idea is that modernity itself is responsible for the Lynn-Flynn effect, by raising living standards, lowering infant mortality, and lowering disease loads. If this is the case, this would account for the fact that the greatest effects have been seen in countries that are now going through the transition to modernity - as seen in the attendant drop in fertility rates - and that the effect seems to have stopped or even reversed in already developed countries.

One might imagine that if there were no real upward bound to the slowing of life history, the gains could remain in process. Suppose radical life extension were to become a possibility; this might imply that people's life histories would be further altered in the direction of slowness.

By the way, the author notes that Richard Lynn was the first to publish on "the phenomenon of massive gains on standardized intelligence tests", and believes that the phenomenon should be known as "the Lynn-Flynn effect".

One more thing: this was a densely packed, highly abstract paper. The interpretation is my own. According to a correspondent of mine who's in a position to know, the paper's author, Michael A. Woodley, is "the brightest rising star" in the area of human biodiversity.

Intelligence and Disease Load

From SciAm, Why Is Average IQ Higher in Some Places? The article states that the authors of a recent paper found that average national IQs were more associated - negatively, that is - with disease levels, more so than with cold climates, latitude, distance from the ancestral environment. As Steve Sailer points out, higher IQ societies are more likely to have used their intelligence to reduce the infectious disease load, so the paper's authors may very well have the causality backward here.

Like so many other things in the modern world, the infectious disease load, or more precisely the lack of it, is taken for granted, when in fact it's the work of advanced societies that has eradicated much of it. Well into the 20th century, malaria and yellow fever were prevalent in the southern U.S., and during the American Civil War, over 10,000 deaths were attributed to malaria, with over 1.3 million total cases of malaria. H.L. Mencken christened the American South as the "Hookworm Belt" (he later decided that he liked "Bible Belt" better) - and while this sounds amusing today, hookworm can be massively debilitating, cause anemia among other things, and likely has a profoundly negative effect on childhood brain development, since living off the host's nutrients is its mode of operation.

Furthermore, colder climates also have their own characteristic diseases, such as tuberculosis and influenza, both of which are promoted by contact in close quarters, especially in winter. TB was the scourge of Europe for hundreds of years. The fish tapeworm is native to northern Europe. The black plague devastated Europe. The list could go on.

Hookworm was wiped out by the provision of indoor toilets or latrines, and shoes. (It's spread basically by people defecating on the ground and then other people walking barefoot through it.) Thus a little prosperity and attention to detail overcomes it, and the same could be said of many of the others.

So, the scientists who did this study didn't account for the decline of many and outright disappearance of some diseases in the Western world.

One might speculate that the declining disease load could be responsible for some of the Flynn Effect, which seems only to raise IQs from the left side of the bell curve.

Ten Years After 9/11

The photo above comes from a NYT article, Small Leaps of Faith, about groups of women in NY state who "reached out" to Muslim women.

When Betsy Wiggins opened her front door and saw the woman in a full black face veil coming up her flower-lined walkway, she wondered if she had done the right thing.

It was 11 days after 9/11, and Mrs. Wiggins, a speech pathologist and the wife of a Methodist minister in Syracuse, had called the local mosque and invited a Muslim woman she did not know over for coffee.

She and the Muslim woman, Danya Wellmon, a medical lab technician, sat in the Wigginses’ breakfast nook for hours and talked about their faith, their careers, their children — and their mutual despair over the terrorist attacks. They bonded that day, and decided that they should start a broader discussion. As a next step, Ms. Wellmon invited nine Muslim women, and Ms. Wiggins invited nine others (Christians, Jews, one Buddhist and an Ismaili Muslim) to join them for a potluck dinner by the big stone fireplace in the living room.

Hope nobody brought any pork.

The NYT respectfully uses the word "faith" only when discussing people who aren't really serious about their own, or when they have the correct liberal and ecumenical opinions. Otherwise, they're "committed Christians", "fundamentalists", "creationists" (ironically), etc. Muslims of course get to have a "faith", as does Obama.

On the other hand, the fact that so many Christians, like the wife of a Methodist minister, welcome the multicult and want to see more Muslims, Somalis, and so on imported into the U.S., would seem to be definitive evidence against those who believe that only a return to religion can save the country. While most Christians didn't use to feel this way, many do now.

Beyond that, the photo and accompanying article encapsulate for me what our commemorations of 9/11 have become: politically correct exercises in showing that we welcome even our enemies. In the ten years since 9/11, we've done little to enhance genuine security, instead cowering under the PC umbrella that says that we cannot make eminently logical discriminations among the people we want here. Instead, we go off starting wars that do not benefit the American people, in fact that positively harm them, most especially including the men who have died in them, all to make America safe for the multicult, and the world a client of the neo-Bolshevist state.

Like the Bourbons, our leaders have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

Lies in Public Life

A few stories I've been reading this morning have jumped out for not only the pervasive bias of the mainstream media, but also because public lies are so prevalent. It seems that it's extremely difficult to have an honest discussion of nearly any issue. All is spin.

For instance, in the story London is no longer an English city and that's how it got the Olympics, says John Cleese (thanks to eh, and he's right: The Mail is a must read, one of the few media outlets that approaches something like honesty), Cleese says that London is no longer an English city. About which the article has the following to say:

Far-Right group the English Defence League seized on Cleese's comments yesterday, posting a link to them on its Twitter page. A spokesman for London mayor Boris Johnson said: 'If the King's Road is jam-packed with foreign tourists then that is something we should celebrate.'

And former mayor Ken Livingstone – currently standing for the post again – said: 'To stay competitive, London must be what New York is to the U.S., a global centre of business, culture and innovation, none of which can be achieved without people of all nations working and living here.'

The only possible reason the reference to the EDL could be there is to associate Cleese's statements with allegedly unsavory characters. Boris Johnson's statement takes the cake as a complete non sequitur: Cleese wasn't talking about tourists, and to suggest that he was insults the intelligence of anyone listening to him. Red Ken Livingstone pretends to believe that the presence of thousands of Muslims and Caribbeans is necessary for London to be a center of global innovation.

But maybe it's too much to expect anyone to come out and honestly say that they like the presence of millions of foreigners so that the British people can be destroyed.

In another article submitted by eh, Journal editor resigns over 'problematic' climate paper, we find the following caption, placed under a photo of Dr. Roy Spencer, the author of a paper detrimental to the AGW crowd:

Dr Spencer is a committed Christian as well as a professional scientist

Why would that description be thought necessary? I can just see it: "Dr. Isaac Newton is a committed Christian as well as a professional scientist." Or, "Albert Einstein is committed Jew and Zionist as well as..." Why does it seem that the government grants that enable all the careers of the global warming researchers never mentioned? Or that many or most are committed to more government intervention?

Finally, an article in The American Thinker, A Violent Racist Game Claims More Victims, says:

While schools, politicians, and activists produce a steady drumbeat of criticism about white racism or "hate," there is much happening right in front of us that cancels out that narrative.

The media not only takes sides - and one side consistently - but it hardly even pretends to present even-handed accounts of the news. (Not exactly an original thought, I grant you.) And prominent public figures are more interested in spouting lies or pure spin than engaging intelligently with critics. Fortunately, the egregious stupidity of their presentations are increasingly seen for what they are, largely thanks to the internet.

The War Against Responsibility

The mountain of debt issued by the U.S. government, as well as the mountain of bad assets held by U.S. and European banks, has called forth the so-called Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) from the Federal Reserve. Always a one-trick pony, the Fed wants low interest rates to save the banks and the government from debt deflation and an economic collapse.

The problem here is that, while low interest rates are beneficial for debtors, for savers and creditors, not so much. People who have counted on the interest from low-risk investments like bonds or CDs are getting stiffed. Many retirees must be having a hard time getting by on the meager returns from these investments. Thus those responsible and prudent enough to have saved money and invest it wisely are getting the shaft, courtesy of the government.

Likewise, people who have been prudent with their savings and mortgages often find themselves ineligible for financial aid for the education of their children. Meanwhile, those irresponsible enough to have more children than they can support or have them out of wedlock are eligible for plenty of free goodies. At a time of ever-worsening unemployment, not a soul on the national stage (that I've seen) will so much as mention mass immigration, which undercuts the ability of people to get employment and make a living. Diversity must not be questioned.

None of this is entirely new, but the government has now taken it to the next level. There's a war against responsibility. It isn't too hard to figure out why: responsibility makes for fewer government clients.

Responsibility has become passe, which bodes ill for the future.

World's Lowest Fertility Rate in Taiwan

Taiwan Birth Rate Falls to World’s Lowest

Taiwan announced this week that its fertility rate had fallen below one baby per woman, worrying the government about its future supply of manpower and brain power. Taiwan’s rate of 0.9 is now the world’s lowest, but other developed Asian economies are close behind.

Taiwan’s fertility rate of 0.9 puts the island in the same league with other Asian territories that have industrialized and urbanized. The Chinese territory of Macau recorded a fertility rate of 0.92, and the next lowest rate belongs to Hong Kong at 1.07. Singapore, Japan and South Korea also have some of the world's lowest birthrates.

Officials in Taipei partly blame the Chinese zodiac calendar for the drop. 2010 was the Year of the Tiger, considered inauspicious for births.

But the drop is also part of a broader regional trend. A shift away from traditional rural lifestyles has allowed women easier access to university education and the time-consuming jobs that follow. Pricey childcare and later education in already-expensive Asian cities strain family budgets. Chinese people have traditionally preferred large families, but some say that, in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, career advancement has overtaken that goal.

In his book, The Empty Cradle, Phillip Longman states that in Brazil, "studies of the phenomenon [the falling birthrate] show that births have declined from one region to the next coincident with the introduction of television. [p. 32]" Television here is probably just a surrogate for the modern world in general, although there's almost certainly an element of propaganda involved as well.

As for Taiwan and the rest of East Asia, much as one would like, it would be simplistic to cast all blame on feminism. The fact is that costs to raise children, while many of the benefits accrue to others. After all, who is decrying low birthrates? It's governments and businessmen and economists; the parents - and the non-parents - have chosen, and most of them are not, at least at the moment, regretting their choices.

Taiwan and other East Asian countries have not only a relatively high IQ population, but also one with lower levels of social pathologies. This means that a greater percentage of the population will have joined the modern world and thus have fewer children. Taiwan doesn't appear to have religious or other minority subcultures which continue to have large families, unlike in the U.S.

All of this is just a continuation of the trend in which the smart and educated have fewer children than the, uh, not-so-smart and uneducated; this leads to the phenomenon of falling global IQ.